Mars Hill

“ The sky was so constantly overcast as to preclude all astronomical observations, and the atmosphere so thick as to prevent a view to the north which would permit new stations to be established with sufficient accuracy in that direction. Unwilling to quit the field while there was a prospect of the weather becoming sufficiently favorable to enable the party to reach the latitude of Mars Hill, or even proceed beyond it, it was determined that some of the party should continue in the tents, and there occupy themselves with such calculations as ought to be made before quitting the field. ”

“ The planet being devoid of hill ranges, and large oceans, the canals can run in straight lines for hundreds of miles. If it were possible to conceive by analogy a creature on Mars furnished with a telescope, he would undoubtedly correlate the irrigating regions of Arizona as similar in nature to his own canals. The irregularity of the rivers running through such regions would puzzle him quite as much as we are puzzled by the absolute straightness of the Martian canals. He would, of course, observe that in our winter the irrigating areas became invisible, to appear again as our summer advanced. ”

“ There are no mechanical modes of propulsion in the streets of the City of Light. The Martians all walk.
"I approached the top of the broad hill on which the City is built, and came suddenly out into a square filled again in its park-like center with trees. From amid these trees rose a massive building, which I instantly recognized as an observatory; the many round domes, as on earth, were unmistakable. ”

“ The trade was made, and we two boys were sold for one hundred pounds a head, lawful money,—yes, sold by a man, a minister of the gospel in Connecticut, the land of steady habits. It would seem that the parson was a worshiper with the Athenians, as Paul said unto them when he stood on Mars Hill, he saw an inscription on one of their altars; and it would seem that the parson forgot or passed over the instruction of the apostle that God made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. ”

“ Wild horses would not have put the ptarmigan on wing in face of those terrible, sliding, underrunning shadows of death—indeed, one had been lying within two yards of the Chieftain, as he slid back low to ground after stooping at the lordly stag—but this crashing avalanche of shale with the king of the forest atop was too much for them, and they went down the "hill" into the nothing and the far distance that lay, so to speak, almost at one's feet, like a spatter of shrapnel. ”

“ The red glare of the leafless and waterless wilderness, contrasting with the emerald lines that intersect it, makes a scene of overwhelming strangeness. In the remote distance our guides point out to us the metropolis of this part of Mars, placed in the broadest of the verdant spots, where our charts show the "Lake of the Sun," and surrounded by an immense system of irrigated belts, running out across the desert to the distant sea-swamps on all sides like the spokes of an enormous wheel, and so conspicuous that the Lick telescope and other telescopes have shown them from the earth. ”

“ In islands scoured by trade winds and bright with blown sea spray a man does not talk of traveling east or west, and even familiar streets are no longer given names or marked by intersections. A man talks instead of walking into the wind, of setting his course by the north star, of moving straight into the teeth of the gale or huddling for shelter beneath a high chalk cliff where all directions converge in a hollow drumming that has neither beginning nor end. It was that way on Mars. ”

“ Mars has a surface area of about 56,000,000 square miles, about 35,000,000 square miles being desert, and the remaining 21,000,000 square miles land which may be habitable, as most of it is covered with vegetation. There are no large areas of water anywhere upon Mars. This calculation, however, makes no allowance for the lines of vegetation which cross the desert, and contain canals, and, with the oases, may have a very large population. ”

“ Let us now add that this inundation is spread out to a great distance by means of a network of canals, perhaps constituting the principal mechanism (if not the only one) by which water (and with it organic life) may be diffused over the arid surface of the planet. Because on Mars it rains very rarely, or perhaps even it does not rain at all. And this is the proof.
Let us carry ourselves in imagination into celestial space, to a point so distant from the earth that we may embrace it all at a single glance. ”

“ When we first examined the surface of the planet it will be remembered that we had regarded the Lake of the Sun and its environs as being the very focus of the planet. While it might also be a strong point of defence, yet an effective blow struck there would go to the enemy's heart and be more likely to bring the Martians promptly to terms than anything else. ”

“ For that the Martian equivalents of forest and moorland, tree and grass, should grow now in the lowest parts of the planet’s surface is what might not unreasonably be expected from the very fact of their being low, since what remained of the water would tend both on the surface and in the air to drain into them. ”

“ So the Mafia put the Martians to work building a town. There are no building materials on the planet, but the Martians are adept at making gold dust hold together with diamond rivets. The result of their effort—for which they were paid in peppermint sticks and lump sugar—is named Little New York, with hotels, nightclubs, bars, haberdashers, Turkish baths and horse rooms. ”

“ If in the mind's eye we were to survey the Earth from Mars the only feature we should find at all paralleling the lines in Mars would be found in the level regions of the West, where, for thousands of miles, the land extends in vast level stretches. In these regions would be found lines of railroads running in straight courses, starting from definite places, converging to common centres, their sides, in certain seasons, conspicuous with ripening grain fields, or again the work of the United States Reclamation Bureau running its irrigating canals in various directions through that great region. ”

“ Born and raised on Mars, Tom had seen the teeming cities of Earth only once in his life ... but to him none of the splendors of the Earth cities could match the simple, quiet beauty of this Martian outpost settlement. There had been a time when people had said that Sun Lake City could never be built, that it could never survive if it were, but with each successive year it grew larger and stronger, the headquarters city for the planet that had become the new frontier of Earth. ”

“ Yet, we think we have X-rayed the dizziest—and this may amaze you—the dirtiest planet in the solar system. Beside it, the Earth is as white as the Moon, and Chicago is as peaceful as the Milky Way.
By the time we went through Mars—its canals, its caves, its satellites and its catacombs—we knew more about it than anyone who lives there.
We make no attempt to be comprehensive. We have no hope or aim to make Mars a better place in which to live; in fact, we don't give a damn what kind of a place it is to live in. ”

“ On level areas such as Iowa, Texas, and other states, the railroads run for hundreds of miles in straight lines, at times converging towards large centres of population. Their occasional parallelism and radiation from centres, all present a certain cachet in angles of approach and alignment that reminds one strongly of similar features in the markings of Mars. If each railroad were bordered by a wide growth of trees with sterile desert between, these broad bands as seen from Mars would be identical with the appearance of similar lines in Mars as seen from the Earth. ”

“ A boy of ten, as well as the philosopher would simply say a snow-storm had139 taken place in Mars. Is it, then, unreasonable to picture whirling snowflakes, snow-drifts, and dazzling whiteness from the Sun's rays, and in the rapid melting of the snow, broad rivers and turbulent brooks with water areas frozen at night? But why should we be compelled to imagine as naked the surface through which these waters find their way? Soil there must be from the continual erosion of running water. ”

“ The regions not marked by the dark shading, from their reddish and yellowish tinge, have always been regarded as land, probably desert land, as they remain fixed from year to year, dead and unchangeable as deserts are.
The question naturally arises, if the water of Mars is piled up at the poles as snow, how does it find its way back on its melting? A discovery made by Schiaparelli in 1877 revealed the existence of various lines marking the surface which he called canali, or channels.3 These lines cover the face of the planet like a net, they are laid out with geodetic precision. ”

“ One prime element of difference is in the nourishment and the area of population. The Martian lives only on fruit, and he lives only a few degrees on either side of the Equator. All the businesses that in your earth arise from the preparation and sale of meat and all the various confections, disappear there, and also all the mechanism of house heating and lighting. Also there are no railroads, but innumerable canals, which form a labyrinth of waterways, and are fed from the tides of the great northern and southern seas. ”

“ It is admitted by the champions of the theory that the difficulty is a formidable one; but they call attention to the singular fact that on Mars there can be found no chains of mountains, and it is even doubtful if ranges of hills exist there. The entire surface of the planet appears to be almost “as smooth as a billiard ball,” and even the broad regions which were once supposed to be seas apparently lie at practically the same level as the other parts, since the “canals” in many cases run uninterruptedly across them. ”

“ The Martian world is one country. There are here no nationalities. The center of the country is in the City of Scandor, quite removed from the City of Light. Business is carried on as with you on the earth, but its nature and its physical elements vary, as you will see. There is a circulating medium, banks and business enterprises, but it is more veiled, more hidden, less, far less, insistent than with you. A great socialistic republic is represented in Mars, and the limits of individual initiative are very narrow. ”

“ When we put all these phenomena together,—the presence of the spots at the junctions of the canals, their strangely systematic shapes, their seasonal darkening, and, last but not least, the resemblance of the great continental regions of Mars to the deserts of the earth,—a solution of their character suggests itself at once; to wit, that they are oases in the midst of that desert, and oases not wholly innocent of design, for, in number, position, shape, and behavior, the oases turn out as typical and peculiar a feature of Mars as the canals themselves. ”

“ Consider any other possible tracing of lines on the face of the Earth as the result of Nature's forces, such as river beds, cañons, chasms, fissures, faults, rifts, precipitous valleys, fiords, the results of sharp folds in the strata, parallel chains of mountains, and none of these lines would be straight, none of them would be of uniform width, and few of them would have the enormous breadth of the Martian lines, they would begin nowhere and, with the exception of the rivers, end nowhere. ”

“ South, north, west and east, the curtain of blackness rapidly spread, until the whole face of the planet as far as our eyes could reach, and the airships thronging under us, were all concealed from sight!
Mars had played the game of the cuttlefish, which when pursued by its enemies darkens the water behind it by a sudden outgush of inky fluid and thus escapes the eye of its foe.
The eyes of man had never beheld such a spectacle! ”

“ The planet, barely half the diameter of Earth and a tenth of Earth's mass, was a minerologist's paradise. The rusty red sands of the Martian desert were almost pure ferrous oxide, a source of both iron for the profitable refineries and oxygen for the inhabitants of Marsport.
Going Los Angeles one ridge better, Marsport was completely circumscribed by high crimson hills, and this natural bowl formation, plus oxygen's heavier-than-air-density, allowed the city to be filled with breathable atmosphere, much as tobacco smoke can lie surging gently within an ashtray if the air in a room is still. ”

“ It will interest you to know that about the equatorial regions of Mars is found its highest civilization and densest settlement. Your torrid zone, and the corresponding section of our planet, are widely different. In ours, the climate is delightfully and evenly temperate. The extent of our surface, as you know, is very much less than yours, but the uniform quality of our land for cultivation, and the smaller water surface, compared with yours, supports a population whose numbers would astonish you. ”

“ The old sea-beds upon Mars are now the most fertile areas upon that planet.
As the desertism increases conditions similar to those of Mars will arise; the earth will become more level, polar glaciation will cease, the atmosphere become thinner, and water vapour, instead of falling as rain, will be carried by circulatory currents to the poles, and there be deposited as snow. What the Martians have accomplished has shown us how to stave off the water difficulty, and also how a highly [Pg 300] civilised and intelligent people can bravely and calmly face the end which they clearly foresee! ”