You can
see for yourself that we are held here much more firmly than when we were
disporting ourselves in the air yesterday, and the earth is now too far
away for us to throw ourselves and our balloon within its attraction."
I knew by the feeling of increasing weight that what my companion said
must be true, but we could not then appreciate the dreadful nature of our
condition, so wrapped up were we in the grandeur of the object before our
eyes. To those who have never been on the moon in such circumstances it
will be impossible to adequately describe our feelings as we gazed upon
our late home and knew that we were fast drifting away from it.
There the round globe hung, as I had often pictured it in my imagination--
oceans and continents, mountains, lakes, and rivers, all spread out before
us--the greatest object lesson ever seen by the eye of man. As we studied
it, recognizing feature after feature, lands and waters that we knew by
their familiar shape, the doctor broke our reverie with these words,
evidently with the endeavor to keep up my spirits:
"That looks as natural as a map, doesn't it? You have seen globes with
those divisions pictured on them, but there is the globe itself.
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