The beginning of the fourteenth “day” found them within a few hundred thousand miles of Mars. The Sphere’s course had now mechanically corrected itself as anticipated by the professor, and they were “falling” directly toward the planet. All eyes were now kept eagerly trained upon it through the observation well. Its spreading disk almost entirely filled the glass-enclosed tube. The professor watched it with boyish excitement, as feature after feature developed with their swift approach.
Indeed, the planet presented an awe-inspiring and wonderful sight.
Its great, snow-white polar caps, and vast, rose, rich ocher and purplish-bronze expanses between these caps surpassed in grandeur anything their eyes had ever beheld. Crossing and recrossing these expanses or plains was a curious network of straight and some slightly curved, dark-hued lines. All of these lines appeared to originate at the edges of the polar caps, or to connect indirectly with them by means of juncture with other lines. The northern or smaller cap was surrounded by a border of deep, bluish tint. This cap had shrunken noticeably even during their recent observation. Professor Palmer attributed this phenomenon to the advanced summer in the northern hemisphere, accompanied by a melting of that polar cap and an accumulation of water around it from which the “canals” were fed.
At numerous junctures dark spots occurred. The whole presented much the appearance of a crude map, upon a globe, of some gigantic railroad system, the dots representing the terminals or large cities. Several of the lines were double, running parallel with startling regularity and joining together again at the terminals. The northern extremities of the “canals” were now plainly darker than elsewhere, and strengthened the professor’s well-known theories regarding the purpose of the “canals.”
Another outstanding feature was certain large, bluish-green blotches interrupting the general rose-and-ocher hue of the plains. Some of the lines ended in these blotches. Wherever this occurred there was a caret-shaped junction, the line connecting directly at the point of the caret. At this point the color was deepest; from there it faded, gradually changing in color, the blotch blending into the ocher plain.
All of these features stood out in increasing vividness as the strange planet drew nearer, proving that the Martian atmosphere contained little or no moisture in the form of clouds. With the further expansion of the surface beneath them, new and fainter lines were discovered. The great disk had by this time grown so large that its outer edges could be viewed readily from the sloping ports.
The professor compared painstakingly the actual features of the planet before him with his own maps of it, the result of years of faithful observation and study at the lonely California observatory, that an ever-skeptical world might be further enlightened. The sight of him poring intently over his maps and notes, oblivious for the while of all else, was not without a certain pathos. At last, he stood at the threshold of vindication.
“Gosh,” ejaculated the redhead, breaking a long silence with startling abruptness, “I hope we don’t drop into that snow on the north pole there.”
“We can land at any point we prefer, old man,” Robert assured him.
“That happens to be the south pole, my friends,” said the professor, referring to the large polar cap over the edge of which the Sphere then hung. “See, the planet has been turning this way—toward what we shall call the east, which makes this pole the south.”