by this disappearance of its president and secretary. And at first
the assembly voted urgency to a measure which suspended the work on
the "Go-Ahead." How, in the absence of the principal promoters of the
affair, of those who had devoted to the enterprise a certain part of
their fortune in time and money--how could they finish the work when
these were not present? It were better, then, to wait.

And just then came the first news of the strange phenomenon which had
exercised people's minds some weeks before. The mysterious object
had been again seen at different times in the higher regions of the
atmosphere. But nobody dreamt of establishing a connection between
this singular reappearance and the no less singular disappearance of
the members of the Weldon Institute. In fact, it would have required
a very strong dose of imagination to connect one of these facts with
the other.

Whatever it might be, asteroid or aerolite or aerial monster, it had
reappeared in such a way that its dimensions and shape could be much
better appreciated, first in Canada, over the country between Ottawa
and Quebec, on the very morning after the disappearance of the
colleagues, and later over the plains of the Far West, where it had
tried its speed against an express train on the Union Pacific.

At the end of this day the doubts of the learned world were at an
end. The body was not a product of nature, it was a flying machine,
the practical application of the theory of "heavier than air." And if
the inventor of the aeronef had wished to keep himself unknown he
could evidently have done better than to try it over the Far West. As
to the mechanical force he required, or the engines by which it was
communicated, nothing was known, but there could be no doubt the
aeronef was gifted with an extraordinary faculty of locomotion. In
fact, a few days afterwards it was reported from the Celestial
Empire, then from the southern part of India, then from the Russian
steppes.

Who was then this bold mechanician that possessed such powers of
locomotion, for whom States had no frontiers and oceans no limits,
who disposed of the terrestrial atmosphere as if it were his domain?
Could it be this Robur whose theories had been so brutally thrown in
the face of the Weldon Institute the day he led the attack against
the utopia of guidable balloons? Perhaps such a notion occurred to
some of the wide-awake people, but none dreamt that the said Robur
had anything to