the heavens so much since the appearance of man on the terrestrial globe.
Now, as it happens, during the preceding night, a trumpet in the sky had sounded a brassy call through space, above that area of Canada between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Some had heard “Yankee Doodle,” others “Rule Britannia.” Hence that Anglo-Saxon quarrel which ended in a lunch on Goat Island. Perhaps, when all was said and done, it was neither one of those patriotic songs. But what nobody could doubt is that the strange sound had the peculiar quality of seeming to descend from the heavens to the earth.
Was it necessary to believe in some celestial trumpet blown by an angel or archangel? … Or was it rather some jolly group of aeronauts playing that sonorous instrument, which the goddess Fame uses so noisily?5
No! There had been no balloon, and no aeronauts. An extraordinary phenomenon was occurring in the high zones of the sky—a phenomenon unrecognizable in both nature and origin. That day it appeared above America, and forty-eight hours later above Europe, and eight days later in Asia, above the Celestial Empire. Decidedly, if the trumpet marking its passage was not that of the Last Judgment, then what was it?
As a result, in every country on the earth, royal or republican, a certain worry had to be calmed. If you heard some bizarre and inexplicable noises in your house, wouldn’t you try as quickly as possible to find the cause of those noises, and if the search led to nothing, wouldn’t you abandon your house and move to another? Yes, of course you would! But here, the house was the whole terrestrial globe. No means of quitting it for the moon, or Mars, or Venus, or Jupiter, or any other planet in the solar system. So the world had to discover what was going on, not in the infinite void, but in the atmospheric zones. No air, no noise, after all, and since there had been noise—that famous trumpet!—the phenomenon must have occurred in the middle of the bed of air,6 whose density diminishes as it goes up and which stretches only two leagues thick around our spheroid.7
Naturally, thousands of newspapers took up the question, treating it from every angle, clearing it up or confusing it further, reporting true facts or false ones, alarming or reassuring their readers—all in the interest of sales—and, in the end, inflaming the passions of the somewhat panicked masses. Politics were completely and immediately forgotten, and life went on none the worse for it. But what had the thing been?8
All the observatories around the world were consulted. If they did not respond, what good were observatories? If the astronomers, who can double or triple the size of stars at a hundred thousand million leagues’ distance, were incapable of determining the origin of a cosmic phenomenon only a few kilometers away, what good were astronomers?
Furthermore, precisely how many telescopes, spyglasses, opera glasses, binoculars, monoculars were pointed skyward during those warm summer nights, how many eyes were glued to the eyepieces of those instruments of every shape and size, nobody could possibly calculate. Hundreds of thousands, at the very least. Ten times, twenty times more than the number of stars the naked eye can count in the celestial sphere. No! Never had an eclipse, observed simultaneously from every point of the globe, become such a festival.
The observatories responded, but not well enough. Each one gave an opinion, but a different opinion. So an internal war took place in the learned world during the last weeks of April and the first ones of May.
The Paris Observatory showed itself to be very reserved. None of its sections made any pronouncements. In the department of mathematical astronomy, nothing had been considered worth noticing; in meridian operations, nothing discovered; in physical observations, nothing observed; in geodetics, nothing remarked; in meteorology, nothing encountered; and in calculations, nothing seen. At least the admission was frank. Same frankness at the Montsouris Observatory, at the magnetic station in the Parc Saint-Maur. Same respect for the truth at the Bureau des Longitudes. Decidedly, Français means “frank.”
The French countryside was slightly more affirmative. Perhaps during the night of May 6 a beam of light of electrical origin had appeared, with a duration not surpassing twenty seconds. On the Pic du Midi, this beam had appeared between nine and ten p.m. At the meteorological observatory on the Puy de Dôme, it had been glimpsed between one and two a.m.; on Mont Ventoux, in Provence, between two and three; at Nice, between three and four; and finally, on Semnoz in the Alps, between Annecy, Lac de Bourget, and Lake Geneva, at the moment dawn was lighting up the zenith.
Obviously, all these observations could not be dismissed out of hand. No doubt the beam had been observed at these various posts—successively—in the space of a few hours. Therefore, either it had been produced by several sources crossing through the terrestrial atmosphere, or, if it was all the work of a single light, it was because that light could move with a speed that must have been very close to two hundred kilometers per hour.
But, during the day, had anyone ever seen anything abnormal in the air?
Never.
Had the trumpet, at least, been heard sounding in the sky?
Not the slightest trumpet call had sounded between the rising and setting of the sun.
In the United Kingdom, people were very much perplexed. The observatories could not agree. Greenwich could not concur with Oxford, even though both of them declared that “nothing was there.”
“Optical illusion!” said the one.
“Acoustic illusion!” replied the other.
And from there, they disputed. In any case, illusion.
At the observatories in Berlin and Vienna, the discussion threatened to provoke an international incident. But Russia, in the person of the director of its Pulkovo Observatory, demonstrated that both were right. It all depended on the point of view used to determine the nature of the phenomenon: impossible in theory, possible in practice.
In Switzerland, at the Säntis Observatory, in the canton of Appenzell, on the Rigi, on the Gäbris, in the stations at St. Gotthard, St. Bernard, Julier, Simplon, Zurich, and Sonnblick in the Tyrolean Alps, people remained extremely reserved about a fact nobody had ever been able to verify—which is most reasonable.
But in Italy, at the meteorological stations in Venice, at the post at Etna installed in the former Casa Inglese,9 and at Monte Cavo, observers did not hesitate to admit the reality of the phenomenon, given that they had been able to see it, one day in the form of a little curl of vapor, and one night giving the appearance of a shooting star.10 Of what it was, in any case, they had absolutely no idea.
The truth is that the mystery began to grow tiresome to men of science, while it continued to impassion or even frighten the humble and ignorant, who have formed, now form, and will continue to form the vast majority in this world, thanks to one of the sagest laws of nature. So the astronomers and meteorologists would have given up bothering themselves with it altogether—if, on the night of the twenty-sixth, at the Kautokeino Observatory in Finnmark, Norway, and on the night of the twenty-eighth at the Isfjord Observatory in Spitsbergen, the Norwegians on one side and the Swedes on the other had not agreed on this point: in the midst of an aurora borealis there had appeared some kind of giant bird, a monster in the sky. Though it had been impossible to determine its structure, at least there was no doubt that from it came small corpuscles that detonated like bombs.
In Europe, nobody wanted to cast much doubt on the observation from the stations in Finnmark and Spitsbergen. But what seemed most phenomenal in the whole matter was that Swedes and Norwegians had been able to come to an agreement on any point at all.
People laughed about the supposed discovery in all the observatories in South America, in Brazil and Peru as at La Plata, and in those of Australia, in Sydney and Adelaide as at Melbourne. And the Australian laugh is one of the most infectious.
In short, only one head of a meteorological station spoke affirmatively on the question, despite all the sarcasms his solution might provoke. This was a Chinese astronomer, the director of the Zi-ka-wei Observatory,11 built in the middle of a vast plain fewer than ten leagues from the sea, overlooking an immense horizon bathed in pure air.
“It may be,” he said,