The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (29 page)

I am not the physical
type; I felt hot and uncomfortable, my suit of English wool restrictive and
heavy, and my lungs seemed to labour at the humidity-laden air. By contrast
Ardan was vibrant, evidently animated by our journey.

“When we returned to
Earth — we fell back into the Pacific Ocean — our exuberance was unbounded. We
imagined new and greater
Columbiads.
We imagined fleets of projectiles,
threading between Earth, Moon and planets. We expected adulation!”

“As depicted by M.
Verne.”

“But Verne lied! — in
that as in other matters. Oh, there was some celebrity — some little notoriety.
But we had returned with nothing: not so much as a bag of Lunar soil; nothing
save our descriptions of a dead and airless Moon.

“The building of the
Columbiad
was financed by public subscription. Not long after our return, the
pressure from those investors began to be felt:
Where is our profit? —
that
was the question.”

“It is not unreasonable.”

“Some influential leader-writers
argued that perhaps
we had not travelled to the Moon at all.
Perhaps it
was all a deception, devised by Barbicane and his companions.”

“It might be the truth,”
—I said severely. “After all the Gun Club were weapons manufacturers who, after
the conclusion of the War between the States, sought by devising this new
project only to maintain investment and employment . . .”

“It was not the truth!
We had circled the Moon! But we were baffled by such reactions. Oh, Barbicane
refused to concede defeat. He tried to raise subscriptions for a new company
which would build on his achievements. But the company soon foundered, and the
commissioner and magistrate pursued him on behalf of enraged debtors.

“If only the Moon had
not turned out to be dead! If only we could succeed in finding a world which
might draw up the dreams of man once more!

“And so Barbicane
determined to commit all to one throw of the die. He took the last of his
money, and used it to bore out the
Columbiad,
and to repair his
projectile . . .”

My temper deteriorated;
I had little interest in Ardan’s rambling reminiscences.

But then Ardan
digressed, and he began to describe how it was — or so he claimed — to fall
towards the Moon. His voice became remote, his eyes oddly vacant.

Two Hundred and Forty
Fifth Day. Twelve Million, One Hundred and Twenty- Five Leagues.

The projectile
approaches the planet at an angle to the sunlight, so Mars is gibbous, with a
slice of the night hemisphere turned
towards
me. The ochre shading seems to deepen at the planet’s limb, giving the globe a
marked roundness: Mars is a little orange, the only object apart from the Sun
visible as other than a point of light in all my 360° sky.

To one side, at a
distance a little greater than the diameter of the Martian disk, is a softly
glowing starlet. If I trouble to observe for a few minutes, its relation to
Mars changes visibly. Thus I have discerned that Mars has a companion: a moon,
smaller than our own. And I suspect that a little further from that central
globe there may be a second satellite, but my observations are not unambiguous.

I can as yet discern few
details on the disk itself, save what is known from observation through the
larger telescopes on Earth. However I can easily distinguish the white spot of
the southern polar cap, which is melting in the frugal warmth of a Martian
summer, following the pattern of seasons identified by Wm. Herschel.

The air appears dear,
and I can but trust that its thickness will prove sufficient to cushion my fall
from space!

“I imagined I saw
streams of oil descending across the glass of the scuttle.

“I thought perhaps the
projectile had developed some fault, and I made to alert Barbicane. But then my
eyes found their depth, and I realized I was looking at
mountains.
They
slid slowly past the glass, trailing long black shadows. They were the
mountains of the Moon.

“Our approach was very
rapid. The Moon was growing visibly larger by the minute.

“The satellite was no
longer the flat yellow disc I had known from Earth: now, tinged pale white, its
centre seemed to loom out at us, given three-dimensional substance by
Earthlight. The landscape was fractured and complex, and utterly still and
silent. The Moon is a small world, my friend. Its curve is so tight my eye
could encompass its spherical shape, even so close; I could
see that
I
was flying around a ball of rock, suspended in space, with emptiness stretching
to infinity in all directions.

“We passed around the
limb of the Moon, and entered total darkness: no sunlight, no Earthlight
touched the hidden landscape rushing below.”

I asked, “And of the
Lunar egg shape which Hansen hypothesises, the layer of atmosphere drawn to the
far side by its greater mass —”

“We saw none of it! But
—”

“Yes?”

“But . . . When the Sun
was hidden behind the Lunar orb, there was light all around the Moon, as if the
rim was on fire.” Ardan turned to me, and his rheumy eyes were shining. “It was
wonderful! Oh, it was wonderful!”

We crossed extensive
plains, broken only by isolated thickets of pine trees. At last we came upon a
rocky plateau, baked hard by the Sun, and considerably elevated.

Two Hundred and Fifty
Seventh Day. One Million, Three Hundred and Thirty Five Thousand Leagues.

The nature of Mars has
become clear to me. All too clear!

There is a sharp visible
difference between northern and southern hemispheres. The darker lands to the
south of an equatorial line of dichotomy are punctuated by craters as densely
clustered as those of the Moon; while the northern plains — which perhaps are
analogous to the dusty maria of the Moon — are generally smoother and, perhaps,
younger.

A huge canyon system
lies along the equator, a planetary wound visible even from a hundred thousand
leagues. To the west of this gouge are clustered four immense volcanoes: great
black calderas, as dead as any on the Moon. And in the southern hemisphere I
have espied a mighty crater, deep and choked with frost. Mars is clearly a
small world: some of these features sprawl around the globe, outsized,
overwhelming the curvature.

I have seen no evidence
of the channels, or canals, observed by Cardinal Secchi, nor of the other
mighty works of Mind which many claim to have observed. Nor, indeed, have I
espied evidence of life: no herds move across these rusty plains, and not even
the presence of vegetation is evident to me. Such colourings as I have
discerned appear to owe more to geologic features than to the processes of
life. Even Syrtis Major — Huygens’ Hourglass Sea — is revealed as a cratered
upland, no more moist than the bleakest desert of Earth.

Thus I have been forced to confront the truth:

Mars is a dead world. As dead as the Moon!

We
got out of our phaeton and embarked by foot across that high
plain, which Ardan called Stones Hill. I saw how several well-made roads
converged on this desolate spot, free of traffic, enigmatic. There was even a
rail track, rusting and long disused, snaking off in the direction of Tampa
Town.

All over the plain I
found the ruins of magazines, workshops, furnaces and workmen’s huts. Whether
or not Ardan spoke the truth, it was evident that some great enterprise had
taken place here.

At the heart of the
plain was a low mound. This little hill was surrounded by a ring of low
constructions of stone, regularly built, and set at a radius of perhaps six
hundred yards from the summit itself. Each construction was topped by an
elliptical arch, some of which remained intact.

I walked into this ring,
two thirds of a mile across, and looked around. “My word, Ardan!” I cried,
impressed despite my scepticism. “This has the feel of some immense prehistoric
site — a Stonehenge, perhaps, transported to the Americas. Why, there must be
several hundred of these squat monoliths.”

“More than a thousand,”
he said. “They are reverberating ovens, to fuse the many millions of tons of
cast iron which plated the mighty
Columbiad.
See here.” He traced out a
shallow trench in the soil. “Here are the channels by which the iron was
directed into the central mould — from all twelve hundred ovens,
simultaneously!”

At the summit of the
hill — the convergence of the thousand trenches — there was a circular pit,
perhaps sixty feet in diameter. Ardan and I approached this cavity cautiously.
I found that it opened into a cylindrical shaft, dug vertically into that rocky
landscape.

Ardan took a coin from
his pocket and flicked it into the mouth of the great well. I heard it clatter
several times against metal walls, but I could not hear it fall to rest.

Taking my courage in my
hands — all my life I have suffered a certain dread of subterranean places — I
stepped towards the lip of the well. I saw that its sides were sheer: evidently
finely manufactured, and constructed of what appeared to be cast iron. But the
iron was extensively flaked and rusted.

Looking around from this
summit, I saw now a pattern to the damaged landscape: the ovens, the flimsier
huts, were smashed and scattered outwards from this central spot, as if some
great explosion had once occurred here. And I saw how disturbed soil streaked
across the land, radially away from the hill; from a balloon, I speculated,
these stripes of discoloration might have resembled the rays around the great
craters of the Moon.

This Ozymandian scene
was terrifically poignant: great things had been wrought here, and yet now
these immense devices lay ruined, broken — forgotten.

Ardan paced about by the
lip of the abandoned cannon; he exuded an extraordinary restlessness, as if the
whole of the Earth had become a cage insufficient for him. “It was magnificent!”
he cried. “When the electrical spark ignited the guncotton, and the ground
shook, and the pillar of flame hurled aside the air, throwing over the
spectators and their horses like matchstalks! . . . And there was the barest
glimpse of the projectile itself, ascending like a soul in that fiery light . .
.”

I gazed up at the hot,
blank sky, and imagined this Barbicane climbing into his cannon-shell, to the
applause of his ageing friends. He would have called it bravery, I suppose. But
how easy it must have been, to sail away into the infinite aether — forever! —
and to leave behind the Earthbound complexities of debtors and broken promises.
Was Barbicane exploring, I wondered — or escaping?

As I plunge towards the
glowing pool of Martian air — as that russet, cratered barrenness opens out
beneath me — I descend into

despair. Is all of the
Solar System to prove as bleak as the worlds I have visited?

This must be my last
transmission. I wish my final words to be an utterance of deepest gratitude to
my loyal friends, notably Col. J. T Maston and my partners in the National
Company of Interstellar Communication, who have followed my fruitless journey
across space for so many months.

I am sure this new
defeat will be trumpeted by those jackals who hounded my National Company into
bankruptcy; with nothing but dead landscapes as his destination, it may be many
decades before man leaves the air of Earth again!

“Sir, it seems I must
credit your veracity. But what is it you want of me? Why have you brought me
here?”

After his Gallic
fashion, he grabbed at my arm. “I have read your books. I know you are a man of
imagination. You must publish Maston’s account — tell the story of this place .
. .”

“But why? What would be
the purpose? If Common Man is unimpressed by such exploits — if he regards
these feats as a hoax, or a cynical exploitation by gun-manufacturers — who am
I to argue against him? We have entered a new century, M. Ardan: the century of
Socialism. We must concentrate on the needs of Earth — on poverty, injustice,
disease — and turn our faces to new worlds only when we have reached our
manhood on this one . . .”

But Ardan heard none of
this. He still gripped my arm, and again I saw that wildness in his old eyes —
eyes that had, perhaps, seen too much. “I would go back! That is all. I am
embedded in gravity. It clings, it clings! Oh, Mr Wells, let me go back!”