Marsland

“ Crewe cordially thanked Inspector Murchison for the information he had supplied, and set out with Marsland for Mr. Grange’s shop in Curzon Street.
“A good man, Murchison; he has given us a lot of information,” he said to his companion as they drove along.
“It seemed very scrappy and incomplete to me,” was Marsland’s reply.
“Gossipy is the right word—not scrappy. And there is nothing more valuable than gossipy information; it enables you to fill in so many blanks in your theory—if you have one.”
“You have formed your theory of how this tragedy occurred?” said Marsland interrogatively. ”

“ She walked down the platform, however, to the station-master.
"The gentleman has gone to inquire at the inn. Will you kindly tell him when he comes back that I have made up my mind after all to walk to Marsland? He can catch me up on the sands."
"Very good, Miss. But the sands aren't very safe for those that don't know 'em. If you're a stranger you'd better not risk it." ”

“ He pointed to a mark on the sash which indicated that a knife had been used to force back the catch.
This was the room in which Miss Maynard had been sitting when Marsland had arrived to obtain shelter from the storm. Marsland noticed the chair beside which she had stood while they were in the room together before going upstairs to investigate the cause of the crash they had heard. He gave a start as he saw behind the chair a small tortoiseshell comb such as ladies sometimes wear to keep their hair up. ”

“ But in a vehicle he might be met along the road by some one who knew him.”
“Have you any idea who it is?” asked Marsland.
“Some one who has solved the cryptogram or got it solved for him,” said Crewe. “By making a tour of the second-hand bookshops in London he probably got in touch with some one who has made a study of cryptograms, and in that way got it solved. There are some strange human types in these big second-hand bookshops in London—strange old men full of unexpected information in all sorts of subjects.” ”

“ It is not even necessary to have a word. A prearranged code of letters will do, known only to the composer of the cryptogram. If he wanted anybody else to decipher his cryptogram, he would have to divulge to him not only the form of table he worked on but the code of letters forming the keyword.”
“Well, I do not see we are much further forward,” said Marsland despondently. “Of course, it’s very clever of you to have found out what you have, but we are helpless without the keyword. The old man is not likely to have divulged it to anybody.”
“You are wrong,” said Crewe. ”

“ What he said was:
“He wanted to make some inquiries there.”
“Inquiries?” She looked at him steadily, but as he did not offer further information she had to put her anxiety into words. “About this comb?”
“As a matter of fact, I am not fully in his confidence,” said Marsland with a constrained smile. “Crewe is a man who keeps his own counsel. He has to, in his line of business.”
She was not quite sure that a rebuke was contained in this reply, but she gave herself the benefit of the doubt.
“Does Mr. Crewe know that I was at Cliff Farm that night?” she asked. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have imagined ourselves watching on Mars the progress of the life-giving water spreading from the south pole during the spring and early summer of that hemisphere of the planet. But we have noticed its effects only in the great depressed regions that may once have been actual seas. How about the still greater regions which nobody has ever supposed to be seas, and which appear on the charts of Schiaparelli and others under the name of continents? If Mars has not water enough to keep its sea-beds permanently covered, its dry lands must thirst indeed! ”

“ It was a young kid, standing upon a point or ledge imperceptible below—by its action, browsing upon some vegetation which could not be seen so far-off.
“Mars Plaisir! Mars Plaisir!” cried Toussaint. “Spring is come! The world is alive again, even here. Mars Plaisir!” There was no answer.
“He has slept deeply and long, like myself,” said he, going, however, into the darker corner of the cell where Mars Plaisir’s bed was laid. The straw was there, but no one was on it. The stove was warm, but there was no fire in the fireplace. ”

“ It is here in this old quarter that one finds the true type of the Marseillais as he was in other days, if one knows where to look for him, and what he looks like when he meets him, for Marseilles is so full of strange men and women that the bird of passage is likely enough to confound Greek with Jew and Lascar with Arab, to say nothing of the difficulty of putting the Maltese and Portuguese in their proper places in the medley. ”

“ A large private yacht was slowly descending. She was bedecked with the green and gold bunting of the terrestrial government, the green and orange of Mars. Her hull glittered goldenly. [88]
"Back!" shouted the captain of a Martian guard detail, the soldiers running with pennant-decked ropes looping after them. The crowd surged against the barrier, but more guards were sent out as reinforcements, until they had cleared a space for the ship and a lane to the hall entrance.
"Mars greets the distinguished guests from our sister planet!" boomed the giant loudspeaker in the tower. ”

“ The consolation is all too brief, the sleep intermittent, and I awake to fly back to the companionship of Mars.
He is such a splendid officer! Always on guard—at sea and over the desert. He seldom shows himself resplendent in crowded cities. He dislikes company and turmoil. He is always alone, now and then racing [357] with the moon and always leaving that gentleman to the left as he smilingly beckons the wary miner of the desert and the patient mariner of the sea to the right. Mars knows the road—a magnificent, reticent soldier—and I pray ere long my friend Tesla will make him better known. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Since their arrival on Mars Robert and Professor Palmer had established the existence of the canals, or ducts, thereby settling for all time—provided they succeeded in returning safely to Earth—the controversy over the most noted characteristic of Mars as seen from the Earth, the curious network of lines. Incidentally, they had seen the Martian deserts as well as both rural and city life on the planet. They were informed as to the correctness of their original conjecture as to the method of pumping the water from the poles to all sections of the globe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some who could sing, and others who only thought they could, were shouting the Marseillaise from any elevation that presented itself—an omnibus or a street refuse-box served equally well for these musicians.
"How on earth these people have ever grown to a great nation!" muttered John Turner, who sat in his carriage. A man clambered on the box beside the coachman.
"I will sing you the Marseillaise!" he shouted.
"Thank you," replied John Turner.
But already the humour of the throng was changing, and some began to reflect. ”

“ The cabin, swinging on its universal joints, stayed level. Martians watched, interested, but still obviously not quite ready to cast aside their deeper suspicions. Yet, when we blasted clear, we knew that a ship of theirs, halfway around the planet, was doing the same and would follow us back to Earth. Ambassadors, of course, and commercial attachés.
I'd lost my picture of Alice, Patty and Ron to some local souvenir hunter. But I knew that I was going to see them....
The friendly contact between Earth and Mars can still be queered by somebody's silly blunder, of course. Human or Martian. ”

“ People come from all over the world just to see me. And Marsten has been to see me every day. He chews on his big cigar and there's a smile on his face a yard wide.
I've tried to talk to my keepers but all I can manage is some crazy kind of gibberish. I also see Klar and Grat. But they're only there when Marsten is around. They're keeping very close to him. My being transformed into a Martian was just part of it. Klar and Grat were going to carry out the rest of it.
On one dark night, and very soon, Klar, Grat, and Marsten were going to disappear.
Maybe I was the greatest attraction on earth. ”

“ The Mars Colony lives on labor, and that's our first consideration. Courtesy comes about last on our list. We're in a battle here, twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes a day. We've got to fight to keep alive, and we've got to wrestle with a whole new planet if we want to unearth its secrets. Courtesy is a distinct privilege on Mars, Mr. Monk. ”

“ My own view of the inhabitants of Mars is that they are Rational Articulates. Rational they certainly are, and, although I am no naturalist, I venture to pronounce them Articulates. I do not mean anything disrespectful to these learned inhabitants of Mars in saying that their figure and movements reminded me of crickets: for I never have watched the black field-crickets in New England, standing on tiptoe to reach a blade of grass, without a feeling of admiration at their gentlemanly figure and the gracefulness of their air. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From the earth about a dozen of the principal canals crossing the continent beneath us had been perceived, but we saw hundreds, nay, thousands of them!
It was a double system, intended both for irrigation and for protection, and far more marvellous in its completeness than the boldest speculative minds among our astronomers had ever dared to imagine.
"Ha! that's what I always said," exclaimed a veteran from one of our great observatories. "Mars is red because its soil and vegetation are red." ”

“ The water of the Baltic, for example, has a light, muddy color that is not observed in the Mediterranean. And thus in the seas of Mars we see the color become darker when the sun approaches their zenith, and summer begins to rule in that region.
All of the remainder of the planet, as far as the north pole is occupied by the mass of the continents, in which, save in a few areas of relatively small extent, an orange color predominates, which sometimes reaches a dark red tint, and in others descends to yellow and white. ”

“ Marsden drove me. What exertions must have been taken to open such communications: these pastures, these fields, these harvests, these orchards, these flocks, are the work of eight years!" In his spiritual husbandry Mr. Marsden was not at first equally successful.
He returned to England in 1808, and the colony was left for some time without any clerical instructor. The Rev. Mr. Fulton, a protestant clergyman of Waterford, transported for sedition, was stationed at Norfolk Island, and Father Harold, an exile, a catholic priest, had returned [Pg 79] home. ”

“ At first it seemed to me, who stood near to the priestess of Mars, with that beaming sphere directly between us, and the newly risen world, that its smooth and flawless face was absolutely devoid of sign or colouring. Then, as the distant planet became stronger in the magnifying Martian air, or my eyes better accustomed to that sudden nucleus of brilliancy, a delicate and infinitely lovely network of colours came upon it. They were like the radiant prisms that sometimes flush the surface of a bubble more than aught else for a time. ”

“ A professor of astronomy in Italy or Arizona finds a few dim lines on the plate of his camera, and immediately Mars is equipped with a splendid network of artificial waterways. Am I wrong in thinking of the Martian canals as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind? An African savage might find an elephant's skeleton and from that reconstruct the animal in life. Only science can reconstruct an elephant from a half-inch fragment of the bone of his hind leg. Only a scientist could have reconstructed the Martian canals from a few photographic scratches. ”