Mars

“ Nor does the thin atmosphere refract the sun's rays or diffuse its light as upon Earth. There is no twilight on Mars. When the great orb of day disappears beneath the horizon the effect is precisely as that of the extinguishing of a single lamp within a chamber. From brilliant light you are plunged without warning into utter darkness. ”

“ We rested on one of its largest rocks, and thence surveyed the dreary little world around us, and the great ruddy planet, with its green seas and its snow-clad hills, and polar ice and glaciers. It was a lovely sight! Mars is so glorious in colour—one of the loveliest, the most varied, the most gorgeous of the many worlds that roll around the mighty sun. In other worlds one colour is prevailing: on the earth blue and green; in our lovely Venus white, and the paler, or more glowing tints; but in Mars all colours save blue—the very antithesis to the earth, where blue is dominant. ”

“ Now that I have told you facts about your past, I will tell you some facts about Mars: Mars is a land of beauty—a land of love and sunshine, and music and flowers. We have two softly lighted moons, and many large, bright stars. We have no dark nights, our nights are only soft twilights. Our planet appears red from the earth, for we have more sunlight, more moonlight and electricity. We have our seasons the same as you have, but our days are longer than yours. Many of our flowers and vegetables are red in color. Our wonderful electric lights appear red from your world—they are all colors. ”

“ Nearly two days later Mars was a giant world dead ahead. Ted looked out the window with Jill and Randy and saw a close-up view of the strange land that was to be their new home. A great network of deep, straight gorges split the boundless stretches of red desert. ”

“ The sight of Earth, as it appeared through the telescope, was too beautiful to pass by with a mere glance. Half illuminated, owing to the greater distance of Mars from the sun and the position of the planets at that time, Earth appeared about the size the moon looks to the naked eye. But what a wonderful sight! Bathed in sunlight lay the eastern half of the continents of North and South America, faintly outlined by the pale blue of the western portion of the Atlantic Ocean. ”

“ Realizing what has been accomplished, not only regarding the constitution of the Sun, but of the most remote stars, we are encouraged to ask: Is Mars inhabited? Shall we ever know? To what groups of students are we to appeal for an answer? If we want to know the diameter of Mars, its weight, the form of its orbit, the inclination of its axis, the period of its revolution around the Sun, and its rotation period, its ephemeris and its albedo, we ask the astronomer, for he has the instruments with which to observe and measure, and the mathematical knowledge necessary to reduce the measurements. ”

“ Knowing the many analogies between Mars and the Earth, we are justified in asking what conditions really exist in Mars. Instead of flouting at every attempt to interpret the various and complicated markings of its surface, we should soberly consider any rational explanation of these enigmas from the postulate that the two spheres, so near together in space, cannot be so far apart physically, and from the fact that as intelligence is broadly modifying the appearance of the surface of the Earth, a similar intelligence may also be marking the face of Mars. ”

“ We are aware that in the minds of Earth's thinkers there is a lively interest relating to a world of our Solar System, astronomically known as the Planet Mars. We, too, are greatly interested in the same direction, and it is our ardent desire that we may use you as a means through whom Earth's peoples may obtain a closer acquaintance with the Planet, and through whom we may accomplish an aim very dear to our hearts. ”

“ Mars happens to be the more interesting globe to us simply because it is better placed for observing. Everybody knows that you can read your book comfortably if you sit with the light so nearly behind you that it may fall on the page at which you are looking. This is the aspect in which Mars is presented at opposition. The sun, which illuminates Mars, is then at midnight, behind the observer, but its beams are directed full on the planet, and exhibit it under the most favourable conditions. But Venus is presented to us in quite a different manner. ”

“ But Mars. For centuries men had dreamed of Mars and written of Mars with its canals and dead cities, with its ancient men and strange animals. Everyone knew there was or had been life on Mars.
The flaming rockets reached Mars, and the canals became volcanic crevices, and the dead cities became jagged peaks of red stone, and the endless sands were smooth, smooth, smooth, untouched by feet of living creatures. There was plant-life, a species of green-red lichen in the Polar regions. But nowhere was there real life. ”

“ Among the stars which shone in that quarter of the heavens where Mars appeared as the master orb, there was one, lying directly in our path, which, to our astonishment, as we continued on, altered from the aspect of a star, underwent a gradual magnification, and soon presented itself in the form of a little planet. ”

“ Thus there is on Mars, just as on earth, an atmospheric circulation, and the drop of water which the sun takes from the sea returns thither after it has fallen from the cloud which concealed it. And, although we must sternly resist any tendency to fashion imaginary worlds after the pattern of our own, still Mars presents to us, as in a mirror, such an organic likeness to earth, that it is hard for us not to carry our description a little further. ”

“ For all practical purposes Mars is our nearest neighbor in space. Of all the orbs about us, therefore, he holds out most promise of response to that question which man instinctively makes as he gazes up at the stars: What goes on upon all those distant globes? Are they worlds, or are they mere masses of matter? Are physical forces alone at work there, or has evolution begotten something more complex, something not unakin to what we know on Earth as life? ”

“ Another shift in our course rapidly carried us out of the shadow of the earth and into the all pervading sunshine. Then the great planet beneath us hung unspeakable in its beauty. The outlines of several of the continents were clearly discernible on its surface, streaked and spotted with delicate shades of varying color, and the sunlight flashed and glowed in long lanes across the convex surface of the oceans. Parallel with the Equator and along the regions of the ever blowing trade winds, were vast belts of clouds, gorgeous with crimson and purple as the sunlight fell upon them. ”

“ What, in our sunsets, would appear a deep golden colour appears on Mars as a delicate pale gold, merging into bright silver. What with us is a carmine or deep rose, in Martian skies becomes a beautiful rose-pink; whilst the darker, or Indian, red seen for some time at the latter period of our sunsets is carmine in the Martian sky, and Indian red only appears just at the last. ”

“ How thrilled and awe-struck I became as I gazed around me, and looking over the surging mob beheld their multitudinous lineaments, the faces of the races of our earth, its many nations, the faces of men or women who had lived in Venus, in Mercury, in the fixed stars, perhaps, as we call those globes from whose lambent surface light reached the earth after the expiration of a century of years. ”

“ It is worth one’s while, even at some inconvenience, to see Mars at whatever time he is in opposition, for he is a delight to the observer, and always notable in the part of the skies through which he is then passing. There are some aspects of the planet that are so charming at a winter opposition that it is a positive loss not to have seen him at such times. ”

“ At length we passed the earth's orbit, but at many millions of miles from the earth, and then went on, further and further, into space, till the ruddy orb of Mars grew larger, and then we severed ourselves from the meteors and restored gravitation and dashed at immense velocity to that gorgeous world. ”

“ But let us hope that the astronomer has seen true, that Mars is not a cold grave, but the abode of happy intelligent creatures, from whom we may learn. In the light of this glorious possibility, signalling to that planet presents itself as a preeminently practical proposition which, to carry out, no human sacrifice could be too great. ”

“ To all who may be concerned in an endeavor to acquire information relating to affairs beyond the range of physical vision we offer for consideration what may be regarded as an incredible narrative of journeys to, and explorations of the Planet known as Mars, and we entreat that you shall not pass unfriendly judgment upon that which may impress you as a merely imaginative composition, but which, in all sincerity, is a statement of facts. ”

“ Like Ento, our Earth World also has divisions of day and night, which in their duration very nearly correspond with your own, and the Sun, the same glorious Orb that blesses Ento with light and heat, shines on our World as well. During a certain period of our year, which is a little more than half the length of yours, when darkness falls and the sky is unclouded, afar we behold a beautiful ruddy Star, known to us as the planet Mars, and of all the Worlds in space none so attracts our attention as this Star, which truly is this, your Ento World. ”

“ The world of Mars is like our own. There are continents and seas and islands there—it is not a dead, dry surface like the moon—and it has clouds and rains and snows and seasons, just as we have, and of the same intensity as ours. ”

“ Only—not one man or woman in fifty thousand would see with their own eyes the rust-red plains of Mars, and the play of light and shadow on a world covered over much of its surface with wide zones of abundant vegetation. Not one in fifty thousand would have a new world to rejoice in, after the long journey through interplanetary space. ”

“ On Mars the heads are so exquisitely formed and so harmonious in the external, and so perfectly symmetrical, that you observe and note it at first glance, and following this high and beautiful development is discovered a degree of wisdom and learning perfectly astonishing to a visitor from a foreign, though neighboring planet. ”

“ Look at the map of Mars, in which the surface appears to be cut up into land and water, continents and oceans. The men who first observed Mars with accuracy saw that some parts were of a reddish colour and others greenish, and arguing from our own world, they called the greenish parts seas and the reddish land. For a long while no one doubted that we actually looked on a world like our own, more especially as there was supposed to be a covering of atmosphere. The so-called land and water are much more cut up and mixed together than ours, it is true. ”

“ The world of Mars is the first station of the solar system, the first planet we meet on leaving the Earth to visit the remote regions of the heavens. The farther we move away from the Earth, the smaller grows the apparent size of our own world. Seen from the Moon, our planet hangs in the sky like an enormous moon, four times the size of our own satellite, and sixteen times as luminous, for it is isolated in space and reflects the light received from the Sun, as is done by the Moon and the various planets of the solar system. ”

“ No one can look at his globe of Mars without a feeling of profound astonishment, if not awe. These markings, still imperfectly discerned and incomprehensible, but evidently intended for a useful purpose, may they not contain a record of deep meaning left by a superior race, perhaps extinct, to tell its young brethren in other worlds of secrets discovered, of life and struggle, of their own terrible fate? ”

“ To sum up, now, what we know about the atmosphere of Mars: we have proof positive that Mars has an atmosphere; we have reason to believe this atmosphere to be very thin,​—​thinner at least by half than the air upon the summit of the Himalayas,​—​and in constitution, not to differ greatly from our own. ”

“ But has life appeared in Mars? Tyndall, in graphic words, pictures the rounding of worlds from nebulous haze, and then says, "For eons, the immensity of which overwhelms man's conception, the Earth was unfit to maintain what we call life. It is now covered with visible living things. They are not formed of matter different from that around them. They are, on the contrary, bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh." Mars must come in the same category. ”

“ Indeed, the imagination can conjure up an infinite number of parallels. If Mars is an older sphere, we trust it has long outgrown the superstitions which still hamper man in his interpretation of the inexorable phenomena of Nature on this little planet. ”

“ If the moon, even at its equator, has not its temperature raised above the freezing-point of water, how can the more distant Mars, with its oblique noon-day sun falling upon the snow-caps, receive heat enough, first to raise their temperature to 32°F., and then to melt with marked rapidity the vast frozen plains of its polar regions? ”

“ And great novelists have written about the Martians and their wonderful civilization, and—"
"And they all know as much about that little planet as you do yourself," interrupted the Demon, impatiently. "The trouble with you Earth people is that you delight in guessing about what you can not know. Now I happen to know all about Mars, because I can traverse all space and have had ample leisure to investigate the different planets. Mars is not peopled at all, nor is any other of the planets you recognize in the heavens. ”