it drove the early voyagers into the heart of the vast wilderness, there to endure all hardship so that they might come where their kind had never stood before; and now it points man to the pole.
Something of the selfsame spirit finds a farther field today outside the confines of our traversable earth. 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. Sundered from us by the ocean of ether, a fellow-member of our own community of matter there makes its circuit of the sun upon whose face features show which stamp it as cognate to that on which we live. In spite of the millions of miles of intervening matterless void, upon it markings can be made out that distantly resemble our earth’s topography and grow increasingly suggestive as vision shapes them better; and yet among the seemingly familiar reveal aspects which are completely strange. But more than this: over the face of it sweep changes that show it to be not a dead but a living world, like ours in this, and luring curiosity by details unknown here to further exploration of its unfamiliar ground.
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. Touch and taste both hang on contact, smell stands indebted to the near and even hearing waits on ponderable matter where sound soon dissipates away; only sight soars untrammeled of the grosser adjunct of the flesh to penetrate what were otherwise unfathomable space.
What the voyager thus finds himself envisaging shares by that very fact in the expansion of the sense that brought him there. No longer tied by means of transport to seas his sails may compass or lands his feet may tread, the traveler reaches a goal removed in kind from his own habitat. He proves to have adventured, not into unknown parts of a known world, but into one new to him in its entirety. In extent alone he surveys what dwarfs the explorer’s conquests on Earth. But size is the least of the surprises there in store for him. What confronts his gaze finds commonly no counterpart on Earth. His previous knowledge stands him in scant stead. For he faces what is so removed from every day experience that analogy no longer offers itself with safety as a guide. He must build up new conceptions from fresh data and slowly proceed to deduce the meaning they may contain. Science alone can help him to interpretation of what he finds, and above all must he wean himself from human prejudice and earthbound limitation. For he deals here with ultramundane things. With just enough of cosmogony in common to make decipherment not despairable this world is yet so different from the one he personally knows as to whet curiosity at every turn. He is permitted to perceive what piques inquiry and by patient adding of point to point promises at last a rational result.
Like mundane exploration, it is arduous too; ad astra per aspera is here literally true. For it is a journey not devoid of hardship and discomfort by the way. Its starting-point preludes as much. To get conditions proper for his work the explorer must forego the haunts of men and even those terrestrial spots found by them most habitable. Astronomy now demands bodily abstraction of its devotee. Its deities are gods that veil themselves amid man-crowded marts and impose withdrawal and seclusion for the prosecution of their cult as much as any worshiped for other reason in more primeval times. To see into the beyond requires purity; in the medium now as formerly in the man. As little air as may be and that only of the best is obligatory to his enterprise, and the securing it makes him perforce a hermit from his kind. He must abandon cities and forego plains. Only in places raised above and aloof from men can he profitably pursue his search, places where nature never meant him to dwell and admonishes him of the fact by sundry hints of a more or less distressing character. To stand a mile and a half nearer the stars is not to stand immune.
Thus it comes about that today besides its temples erected in cities, monasteries in the wilds are being dedicated to astronomy as in the past to faith; monasteries made to commune with its spirit, as temples are to communicate the letter of its law. Pioneers in such profession, those already in existence are but the precursors of many yet to come as science shall more and more recognize their need. Advance in knowledge demands what they alone can give. Primitive, too, they must be as befits the still austere sincerity of a cult, in which the simplest structures are found to be the best.
Still the very wildness of the life their devotee is forced to lead has in it a certain fittingness for his post in its primeval detachment from the too earthbound, in concept as in circumstance. Withdrawn from contact with his kind, he is by that much raised above human prejudice and limitation. To sally forth into the untrod wilderness in the cold and dark of a winter’s small hours of the morning, with the snow feet deep upon the ground and the frosty stars for mute companionship, is almost to forget one’s self a man for the solemn awe of one’s surroundings. Fitting portal to communion with another world, it is through such avenue one enters on his quest where the common and familiar no longer jostle the unknown and the strange. Nor is the stillness of the stars invaded when some long unearthly howl, like the wail of a lost soul, breaks the slumber of the mesa forest, marking the prowling presence of a stray coyote. Gone as it came, it dies in the distance on the air that gave it birth; and the gloom of the pines swallows up one’s vain peering after something palpable, their tops alone decipherable in dark silhouette against the sky. From amid surroundings that for their height and their intenancy fringe the absolute silence of space the observer must set forth who purposes to cross it to another planetary world.
The Hermitage
But the isolation of his journey is not always so forbidding. His coming back is no less girt with grandeur of a different though equally detached a kind. Even before the stars begin to dim in warning to him to return, a faint suffusion as of half-suspected light creeps into the border of the eastern sky. Against it, along the far pine-clad horizon, mesa after mesa in shaggy lines of sentineling earth, stands forth dark marshaled in the gloom, informed with prescience of what is soon to come. Imperceptibly the pallor grows, blanching the face of night and one by one extinguishing the stars. Slowly then it takes on color, tingeing ever so faintly to a flush that swells and deepens as the minutes pass. 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. For now again the color gathers in the east, not with the impalpable suffusion it had before but nearer and more vivid. No longer reflectively remote, rays imminent of the sun strike the upper air, the most adventurously refrangible turning the underside of a few stray clouds into flame-hued bars of glowing metal. They burn thus in the silent east first red, then orange, and then gold, each spectral tint in prismatic revelation coming to join the next till in a sudden blinding burst of splendor the solar disk tops the horizon’s rim.