Percival Lowell

“ Lost in the brilliance of the dazzling sky, the planet lies hid from the senses’ search. The quest were hopeless did not the mind guide the telescope to its goal. To theory alone is it visible still, and so to its predicted place the observer sets his circles, and punctual to the prophecy the planet swings into the field of view. One must be dulled by long routine to such mastery of mind not to have the act itself clothe with a sense of charmed withdrawal the object of his quest. ”

“ To observe Mars is to embark upon this enterprise; not in body but in mind. Though parted by a gulf more impassable than any sea, the telescope lets us traverse what otherwise had been barred and lands us at last above the shores we went forth to seek. Real the journey is, though incorporeal in kind. Since the seeing strange sights is the essence of all far wanderings, it is as truly travel so the eye arrive as if the body kept it company. Indeed, sight is our only far viatic sense. ”

“ The very marvel of the sight has been its own stumbling-block to recognition, joined to the difficulty of its detection. For not only is the average observatory not equipped by nature for the task, but what is not good air often masquerades as such. Trains of air waves exist at times so fine as to confuse this detail, or even to obliterate it entirely; while at the same time they leave the disk seemingly sharp-cut, with the result that one not well versed in such vagaries thinks to see well when in truth he is debarred from seeing at all. ”

“ It was in an autumn early twilight, through air almost perfectly still, as the light went out of the sky and the markings on the planet began to come forth that the Phison of a sudden showed in duplicate to me, clear-cut upon the disk, its twin lines like the rails of a railway track traversing Aeria. Not more vivid do those of our transcontinental tracks appear as one sees them stretching off into the distance upon our Western plains. ”

“ Science which has caused the world to shrink and dwindle has been no less busy bringing near what in the past seemed inaccessibly remote. Beyond our earth man’s penetration has found it possible to pierce, and in its widening circle of research has latterly been made aware of another world of strange enticement across the depths of space. Planetary distances, not mundane ones, are here concerned, and the globe to be explored, though akin to, is yet very different from, our own. This other world is the planet Mars. ”

“ Hand in hand the fauna and flora climb to more intricate perfecting, life rising as temperature lowers.
We perceive then that, considered a priori, the possibility of life on a planet is merely a question of the planet’s size; and then pursuantly that the character of that life is a matter of the planet’s age. But age again is a question of size. For the smaller its mass the quicker the body cools, and with a planet, growing cold means growing old. Within the bounds that make life possible, the smaller the body the quicker it ages and the more advanced its denizens must be. ”

“ From the standpoint of another planet, through any such direct showing animal existence would still remain unknown.
Not until the creatures had reached a certain phase in evolution would their presence become perceptible; and not then directly, but by the results such presence brought to pass. Occupancy would be first evidenced by its imprint on the land; discernible thus initially not so much by the bodily as by the mind’s eye. For not till the animal had learnt to dominate nature and fashion it to his needs and ends would his existence betray itself. ”

“ Another, more abstract but no less alluring, appeals to that desire innate in man to know about the cosmos of which he forms a part and which we call by the name of science. Study of Mars responds to this craving both directly by revelation of the secrets of another world and indirectly by the bearing of what we thus learn upon our understanding of the laws of the universe. For the facts thus acquired broaden our conceptions in every branch of science. Some day our own geology, meteorology, and the rest will stand indebted to study of the planet Mars for advance along their respective lines. ”

“ The non-balancing of the areas of shading in their shift from one part of the disk to another, no longer becomes a circumstance impossible to explain, but a necessary consequence of their new-found character, denoting the time necessary for vegetation to sprout. The change of hue of vast areas from blue-green to ochre no longer presupposes the bodily transference of thousands of tons of substance, but the quiet turning of the leaf under autumnal frosts. Even the fact that they occupy those regions most fitted by figure to contain oceans fits in with the same conception. ”

“ One had said the sky lay dreaming of the sun in pale imagery at first that gathers force and feeling till the dreamer turns thus rosy red in slumbering supposition of reality. Then the blush dies out. The crimson fades to pink, the pink to ashes. The stars have disappeared and yet it is not day. It is the supreme moment of the dawn, the hush with which the Earth awaits its full awakening. ”

“ This latter-day revelation is the discovery of the canals.
Quite unlike in look to the main features of the planet’s face is this second set of markings which traverse its disk, and which the genius of Schiaparelli disclosed. Unnatural they may well be deemed; for they are not in the least what one would expect to see. They differ from the first class, not in degree, but in kind; and the kind is of a wholly unparalleled sort. While the former bear a family resemblance to those of the 174 earth; the latter are peculiar to Mars, finding no counterpart upon the earth at all. ”

“ In an aging world where the conditions of life have grown more difficult, mentality must characterize more and more its beings in order for them to survive, and would in consequence tend to be evolved. To find, therefore, upon Mars highly intelligent life is what the planet’s state would lead one to expect.
To some people it may seem that the very strangeness of Martian life precludes for it an appeal to human interest. To me this is but a near-sighted view. The less the life there proves a counterpart of our earthly state of things, the more it fires fancy and piques inquiry as to what it be. ”

“ That the sight should be regarded as illusory speaks for its surpassing strangeness; and so far as oddity goes the encomium is certainly deserved. Of the bizarre features of this curiously marked disk, the double canals were at the time of their discovery the culmination, and though things stranger still if possible have since been seen there, it is not wonderful that doubt should still incredulously stare. If the mere account of them reads like romance, to see them is an experience. ”

“ Now, it is not a little startling that the semblance of just such signs of intelligent interference with nature is what we discern on the face of Mars,—in the canals and oases. So dominant in its mien is the pencil-like directness of the canals as to be the trait that primarily strikes an unprejudiced observer who beholds this astounding system of lines under favorable definition for the first time, and its impressiveness only grows on him with study of the phenomena. ”

“ Difference of policy on the question of the all-important water supply means nothing short of death. Isolated communities cannot there be sufficient unto themselves; they must combine to solidarity or perish.
From the fact, therefore, that the reticulated canal system is an elaborate entity embracing the whole planet from one pole to the other, we have not only proof of the world-wide sagacity of its builders, but a very suggestive side-light, to the fact that only a universal necessity such as water could well be its underlying cause. ”

“ A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF PAST MARTIAN DISCOVERY With Mars discovery has from the start waited on apparent disk. To this end every optical advance has contributed from the time of Galileo’s opera-glass to the present day. For apparent distance stands determined by the size of the eye. But although it is the telescopic eye that has increased, not the distance that has diminished, the effect has been kin to being carried nearer the planet and so to a scanning of its disk with constantly increasing particularity. Mankind has to all intents and purposes been journeying Marsward through the years. ”

“ A pleasing absence of it over much of the planet distinguishes Martian conditions from our own. That we can scan the surface as we do without practical interruption day in and day out proves the weather over it to be permanently fair. In fact a clear sky, except in winter, and in many places even then, is not only the rule, but the rule almost without exceptions. In the early days of Martian study cases of obscuration were recorded from time to time by observers, in which portions of the disk were changed or hidden as if clouds were veiling them from view. ”

“ From the general look of the disk a scant covering of air is inferable. For one of the striking things about the planet’s features is their patent exposure to our sight. Except in the winter time of its hemisphere or in the spring after the greatest melting of the polar cap, nothing seems to stand in our way of an uninterrupted view of the surface, whether in the arctic, temperate, or tropic zones. From the openness of its expression, however, too much case should not be made as we really know but little of how an atmosphere-enshrouded planet would look. ”

“ Coincident with the obliteration of its contour, its dimensions seemingly enlarge. It is as if a hood had been drawn over the cap of a dull white different from the dazzling brilliance of the cap itself and covering more ground. Such is probably what occurs; with vapor for veil. The excessive melting of the cap produces an extensive evaporation which then in part condenses to be deposited afresh, in part remains 65 as a covering, shutting off from our view the outlines of the cap itself. It would seem that at this time the cap melts faster than the air can carry it off. ”

“ Luxuriance in the one is matched by abundance in the other; while a scanty flora means a poor fauna. This of which we have been aware in regions round about us from childhood grows in universality as we explore. Wherever man penetrates out of his proper sphere he finds the same dual possession of the land or the sea, and a similar curtailing or expanding of both tenantries together. No mountain top so cold but that if it grow plants, it supports insects and animals, too, after its kind; no desert so arid but that creeping things find it as possible a habitat as life that does not stir. ”

“ The Arizona desert dates from no further back than early Tertiary times, as the limestone of the Cretaceous there present shows. Water then stretched where desert now is, and the limestone beds were laid down in it. How old the Martian Saharas are we have no means of knowing. But one thing we may predicate about both: a desert is not an original, but an acquired, condition of a planet’s surface, demonstrably so in the case of a planet which has had a sedimentary epoch in its life-history. ”

“ Amenthes with Thoth-Nepenthes. July.
First among these is a truth of which I have long been convinced; to wit, that when a seeming discordance arises between the portrayals of a canal, it is commonly not a case of mistake nor of change, but one of separate identity. The canal has not shifted its place, nor has an error been committed; the fact is that one canal has been observed at one time, another at another. ”

“ When a fairly acute eyed observer sets himself to scan the telescopic disk of the planet in steady air, he will, after noting the dazzling contour of the white polar cap and the sharp outlines of the blue-green seas, of a sudden be made aware of a vision as of a thread stretched somewhere from the blue-green across the orange areas of the disk. ”

“ Study of the several planets of our solar system, notably the Earth, Moon, and Mars, reveals tolerably legibly an interesting phase of a planet’s career, which apparently must happen to all such bodies, and evidently has happened or is happening to these three: the transition of its surface from a terraqueous to a purely terrestrial condition. The terraqueous state is well exhibited by our own earth at the moment, where lands and 129 oceans share the surface between them. The terrestrial is exemplified by both the Moon and Mars, on whose surfaces no bodies of water at present exist. ”

“ Thus, both for paucity of number and from not abiding in one stay they must escape notice 361 at a distance such that as individuals they fail to show; to say nothing of the fact that the flora usually overtop the fauna, and so help to hide the latter while appearing itself distinct. Any far view of our earth gives instance of this. Seen from some panoramic height, forest and moorland lie patently outspread to view, yet imagination is taxed to believe them tenanted at all. Unless man have marred the landscape not a sign appears of any living thing. ”

“ This phenomenon might be described as a brilliant obscuration. It is a circlet of illumination that swamps the features as they near the full edge of the disk, the limb of the planet as it is called. Obliteration of the sort is evident, more or less markedly, at all times, and is not due to foreshortening, as the broadest areas are affected. The fading out of the detail at the limb suggests nothing so much as a veil drawn between us and it, lighter in tint than what it covers. Such a veil can be none other than air or the haze and cloud that air supports. ”