two o'clock in the morning
In the evening the aeronef passed over Moscow without saluting the flag on the Kremlin . In ten hours she had covered the twelve hundred miles which separate Astrakhan from the ancient capital of all the Russias . From Moscow to St. Petersburg the railway line measures about seven hundred and fifty miles . This was but a half-day 's journey , and the `` Albatross , '' as punctual as the mail , reached St. Petersburg and the banks of the Neva at two o'clock in the morning . Then came the Gulf of Finland , the Archipelago of Abo , the Baltic , Sweden in the latitude of Stockholm , and Norway in the latitude of Christiania . Ten hours only for these twelve hundred miles ! Verily it might be thought that no human power would henceforth be able to check the speed of the `` Albatross , '' and as if the resultant of her force of projection and the attraction of the earth would maintain her in an unvarying trajectory round the globe .