The Angry Planet (9 page)

“It’s the dawn,” I repeated
softly. “We’re on Mars, and it’s the dawn!
 . . .
”

JACQUELINE ADAM ON
“A
MARTIAN LANDSCAPE—FIRST IMPRESSIONS”

(
Editor’s Note:
This contribution was
originally written as a free-subject school essay by J.A. when she returned to
normal life on earth. It was later, as an interesting curiosity, printed in the
annual school magazine.

It is inserted here in the
present volume because this seems the natural place for it—it fills very
appropriately a gap in the various papers that Stephen MacFarlane left for me
to edit (I should say, incidentally, that there are several such gaps in
MacFarlane’s collection; the papers were passed to me before they were properly
completed and annotated, though the children’s contributions had all been
corrected for spelling and punctuation).

The essay, may I add, is
reprinted from “The Wellingborough Magazine,” No. 23, Vol. 5, by kind
permission of the Headmistress of the Wellingborough Hill High School for
Girls, Dorset.—J.K.C.)

MY COMPANIONS and I effected
our landing on the planet Mars in the early morning. It was, indeed, dawn when
we first set eyes on our “brave new world,” to quote the Immortal Bard of Avon.

There were five of us: myself,
my brother P—, our cousin M—, Mr. McF—, and the leader of the party, Dr. McG—.

We were naturally curious to
see what our new home looked like, but from our position in the doorway of our space-ship,
we could at first see little. We were, as far as we could judge in the dim
morning twilight, lying in a small depression, or saucer, surrounded by a high
ridge. (I hesitate to call it a hill—it was only slightly taller than our
rocket).

Our first impulse was to lower
the ladder and rush to explore, but Dr. McG
—
gave it as his opinion that
it would be better to wait till full daylight before venturing out. We had no
idea of what we might find on Mars, and he felt it safer for us to be able at
least to see any danger that might assail us.

We were constrained, therefore,
to remain in the rocket till, if I may quote the late Poet of Empire, “the dawn
came up like thunder.” I must confess that the simile in this instance is not a
very suitable one. The dawn, as it came, was somewhat mild and gentle. There
was a deep pinkening of the sky first, which presently spread all round our
small horizon. This changed soon to a deep orange color, and then, to our joy,
we saw the thin smoky edge of the disc of the sun rise slowly above the ridge
confronting us. The twilight dispersed, and in about half-an-hour the sun—a
smaller sun than any I have ever seen on earth—was riding in a clear blue sky.

Our first Martian day had
begun!

We perceived now, on examining
the ground beneath us, that we were in a dry hollow, the floor and sides of
which seemed to consist of a dark brown, reddish earth, or sand. There was no
sign of any vegetation—the ground seemed curiously barren and dead to our eyes.
Dr. McG
—
ventured
the opinion that it was probably volcanic.

We prepared to leave the
rocket. Dr. McG
—
opened a locker and took out some firearms. He handed Mr. McF
—
a large rifle and took another such for himself. He also
strapped a pistol round his own wrist and handed a second small pistol to my
brother. P—, I may say, greeted this gesture with no small pleasure.

The flexible steel ladder was
now lowered, and one by one we descended it. Our joy at standing once more on
terra
firma
can better be imagined than described. The terra in question was, we
could perceive on closer examination, a reddish, coarse-grained species of
sand, very dry and loose; it was on the question of its being
firma
that
we received our first Martian surprise.

We were standing in a group at
the foot of the ladder. I may say, that in descending, I had experienced a
strange lightness—a sensation of buoyancy. I attributed this at the time to
excitement and pleasure combining to fill me with elation. It seemed, however,
that the cause was altogether more physical.

M
—
was the first of the party to
move. He gave a cry and jumped forward, intending to rush to the top of the
declivity facing us. In a moment, however, and after one step, he was rolling
on the ground a good ten feet away from us, his face a perfect study of dismay
and bewilderment!

P
—
rushed to his aid, and he,
too, seemed to stumble, and go rolling and bouncing over the sand. Before
either of them could rise, Dr. McG— burst into hearty laughter.

“Of course,” he cried, “I
forgot! The force of gravity—it is not so powerful on Mars as it is on earth. I
should have warned you!”

And he went on to explain
something of the mechanics of our situation. I regret I cannot reproduce his
statement with any real technical exactitude. But as far as I understood
things, this was the position. (I am able to quote some actual figures since I
made notes of them in my diary):

The planet Mars is considerably
smaller than our own earth—its diameter, indeed, is very little more than half
that of our mother planet. Nor is it so dense—if the density of earth be
represented by the unit 1, then the density of Mars is about .72. For these
reasons, the gravitational pull on the surface of Mars is not so strong as the
gravitational pull on the surface of the earth—the actual ratio is something
like .38. This means that a man weighing say 150 lb. on earth would, on Mars,
weigh only 57 lb.

Reflect now that our muscular
development is such as to provide us with the means of moving ourselves on
earth in what is to us a normal way. On Mars, where we weighed little more than
one third of what we did on earth, our muscles seemed abnormally developed.

While Dr. McG
—
was engaged in this
explanation, the two boys had succeeded in raising themselves to their feet.
M—, full of excitement, now exclaimed that he proposed doing a “high jump.” We
knew him, on earth, for a reasonably good jumper. Judge now of our surprise
when we saw him soar into the air, high above our heads! P
—
immediately also indulged in a short “flight,” and soon we
were all at it— yes, even the two more sedate members of the party! The
sensation was quite indescribable. I myself, at the school sports last year,
cleared the four foot bar; with the same effort here on Mars, I found myself
soaring into the empyrean a good ten feet! It was like pole vaulting without
the pole—and the landing was soft and pleasant. There was no heavy jolt—a
gentle bump on the yielding red sand and that was all.

It was exhilarating in the
extreme. After the long period of confinement in the cabin of our space-ship,
the exercise in the rare thin atmosphere did us all the good in the world. Even
running was an excitement—an ordinary earth-pace covered eight or nine feet. It
was like walking in seven-league boots, as Tom Thumb did in the fairy tale. We
hopped about in our little hollow like kangaroos, shouting merrily in the
sunshine and generally behaving like lunatics.

Presently, however, the first
novelty wore off. We set about trying to control our muscular movements so that
we might be able to walk as we were accustomed. And we found that, just as we
had been able to adjust ourselves in space, when we had no weight at all, so we
could, after a little practice, adjust ourselves to moving about comfortably on
Mars. We could still, of course, if we wanted to, make prodigious leaps, but
for the most part we contented ourselves with the more ordinary mode of
progression to which we were used.

The time had now come for us to
widen our field of exploration. The sun was high and the air was clear. So Dr.
McG
—
assembled
us at the foot of the ridge and we set about mounting to the top of it (an easy
task this, because of our reduced weight, although the slope was quite
steep—indeed, almost vertical).

We reached the summit. And now,
indeed, we felt like “stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes,” etc. (Keats). Only
our peak was on Mars, and not in Darien. However, what we saw was just as
awe-inspiring and strange to us as the glimpse of the far Pacific was to the
intrepid Spaniard.

What we saw
was awe-inspiring and strange

Before us, bright and silent in
the sun, was a huge plain. It stretched, as far as we could immediately judge,
some eight or ten miles before it was terminated by a line of high bare
mountains. They—as indeed was the whole plain—were of the same reddish color as
the soil in our hollow. Every now and again, in the surface of the plain, as we
could see from the incline on which we stood, there were similar deep hollows
to the one in which our spaceship lay, behind us.

But what gave the scene its
character, what caused us the real wonder, was the vegetation. Dotted all over
the plain were immense clumps of huge, dark green, leathery plants. It is
impossible to describe them other than very generally, since each individual
plant varied in shape from its neighbor. Some of them were tall—as tall as good-sized
church steeples—others were small and squat, mere bulbous masses clinging to
the ground.

The nearest large clump of
these plants was about five hundred yards away in front of us, and since it was
quite clear to Dr. McG
—
that there was no immediate danger threatening, we set off at
once to conduct a closer examination, using our leaping ability to cover the
ground quickly.

I have said that the plants
were dark green in color. That is the effect a clump of them created at a
distance. But seeing them at close hand, we observed that many of the
individual plants—particularly the smaller ones—were mottled with large
irregular patches of yellow, and even (in some of the very small bulbous ones)
dark red—a somewhat evil coloration, this, without brilliance; somber and
heavy, like coagulating blood.

I have said that the shape of
the plants varied individually, and this was indeed so. But one feature they
all had in common: they were composed of short squat stalks with huge finger-like
leaves on them. These leaves were convoluted into fantastic shapes—like twisted
vast fingers sometimes, with rheumatic joints, seeming to grope up into the air
as if stretching and grasping after the sun.

The nearest I have seen on
earth to these strange and evil-looking Martian plants are the
cacti
in
the Botanical Gardens at Kew. But the Martian species was smooth and more
leathery—and presented, moreover, a much richer variety of shapes, besides a
wider range of color.