Off on a Comet: Explorers Lead Horse Through Underground Cavern

This engraving illustrates a scene from Jules Verne's Hector Servadac (Off on a Comet), in which the comet-stranded travelers explore subterranean passages and caverns on the fragment of Earth now orbiting as a comet. Figures in military dress coax a rearing white horse through a torch-lit rocky tunnel, its walls rough-hewn and looming. The dramatic cross-hatched engraving conveys the strange peril of navigating the altered, fragmented world left behind by the comet's collision with Earth.