the depth of three feet with water
destined to support a water-tight wooden disc, which easily worked
within the walls of the projectile. It was upon this raft that the
travellers were to take their place. As to the liquid mass, it was
divided by horizontal partitions which the departing shock would
successively break; then each sheet of water, from the lowest to the
highest, escaping by valves in the upper part of the projectile, thus
making a spring, and the disc, itself furnished with extremely powerful
buffers, could not strike the bottom until it had successively broken
the different partitions. The travellers would doubtless feel a violent
recoil after the complete escape of the liquid mass, but the first shock
would be almost entirely deadened by so powerful a spring.

It is true that three feet on a surface of 541 square feet would weigh
nearly 11,500 lbs; but the escape of gas accumulated in the Columbiad
would suffice, Barbicane thought to conquer that increase of weight;
besides, the shock would send out all that water in less than a second,
and the projectile would soon regain its normal weight.

This is what the president of the Gun Club had imagined, and how he
thought he had solved the great question of the recoil. This work,
intelligently comprehended by the engineers of the Breadwill firm, was
marvellously executed; the effect once produced and the water gone, the
travellers could easily get rid of the broken partitions and take away
the mobile disc that bore them at the moment of departure.

As to the upper sides of the projectile, they were lined with a thick
wadding of leather, put upon the best steel springs as supple as
watch-springs. The escape-pipes hidden under this wadding were not even
seen.

All imaginable precautions for deadening the first shock having been
taken, Michel Ardan said they must be made of "very bad stuff" to be
crushed.

The projectile outside was nine feet wide and twelve feet high. In order
not to pass the weight assigned the sides had been made a little less
thick and the bottom thicker, as it would have to support all the
violence of the gases developed by the deflagration of the pyroxyle.
Bombs and cylindro-conical howitzers are always made with thicker
bottoms.

The entrance to this tower of metal was a narrow opening in the wall of
the cone, like the "man-hole" of steam boilers. It closed hermetically
by means of an aluminium plate fastened inside by powerful scr