George Roux: The Chase of the Golden Meteor – Climactic Pursuit Scene

This illustration eerily anticipated asteroid-tracking science — Jules Verne imagined a race to claim a golden meteor decades before NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission retrieved actual asteroid samples. George Roux's dramatic pen-and-ink scene captures a lone figure dragging another across a rocky, wave-lashed coastline as an enormous blazing celestial body dominates the horizon. A crowd watches anxiously from the foreground shadows, their hats and silhouettes rendered in dense crosshatching. The turbulent sky radiates apocalyptic energy befitting Verne's obsessive scientific adventurism.