The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars Part 12

"She was breathing fast, her bosom rising and falling with quick respirations, and her cheeks flushed with color, made a delicious foil to the pearly tone of her face, concealed on her neck and forehead by the escaping tresses of her dark hair.

"I drew back, trembling with antic.i.p.ation, my heart beating, and my clasped hands folded on my breast in an agony of restraint. She was talking, talking to herself in the low musical voice of the Martians.

The wind had ceased, a dark shadow from a crossing cloud moved toward us from the river over the blue sprinkled field, a haze stole upward from the farther view, and, bending at the margin of the water the figure of Alca bathed in light, seemed to watch us like some calm incarnate response to my own hopes and prayers.

"'How beautiful, how wonderful it is!' her arms dropped from her head, the body bent forward to the earth, she knelt; 'but must it always be as it is! Shall not the companion of my days come to this dear place? The light of sun and moon and stars seems as it always seemed on Earth, but there does not come to me the divine touch of affection, that intimate feeling of oneness and self-surrender that was mine with Randolph on the Earth. A strength unknown to me before, a power of enjoyment, a motion that is ecstacy, thought, feeling, language, all strong, radiant, supreme, but yet loneliness! Memory of the things of Earth hardly remains, except where love prints its firm expression. Randolph, my husband, and Bradford, my boy, to me are deathless. Why can it not be that they should be here also? Can the purposes of divine love be fulfilled by this separation? Shall all the powers of this new life, this beautiful and sinless Nature be wasted for the want of love which holds both Nature and the soul in place, in harmony, in adoration of the One enduring Thought?

"'How the long years have rolled by since I have left the Earth, and how, amid all the pleasurable things of this serene and hopeful life, the hidden loneliness has denied it the last completing touch of joy!

Only as I still dare to believe, that the flight of years must end his aging days on Earth, and that the eternal destiny of married souls is an eternal union, and that his reincarnation here shall bring us into a new and better, richer, deeper harmony of mind and tastes and thoughts; only as the belief grows stronger with pa.s.sing time, can I, so surrounded with peace and happiness, in this countryside of quiet work and gentle cares, bear longer this awful isolation, the nights of prayerful hope, the days of still enduring hope.

"'How beautiful it is to live, to watch the changing seasons in this strange new world untouched by sickness or death or sin. And yet,' she convulsively clasped her face, 'what beauty, what peace, what sinlessness can replace the only life--the Life of Love?

"'And then my boy! Can it be possible that I may see him! Why, now he will seem only a brother in this new youth in which I have been born, and yet--and yet--the mother feeling is unchanged; the old yearning, just as when I left him a boy upon the Earth seems as great as ever.

"'Oh! when shall this waiting all end in our reunion--father, mother, son--and all strong and glad in youth and hope?'

"She rose and stretched out her arms toward some phantasy of thought or fancy in the air above her, and then a song of recall from a distance floated along the meadow and the river's banks, a sweet, joyous, beckoning melody, that compelled the ear to listen, and the feet to follow.

"Martha half turned--I was dazed with wonder--I did not wish to speak. I could not then have revealed myself. It was all too marvellous, too hard to comprehend. The old doubts of my reality, of the realness of everything I had seen, surged up again, and swept over me in a tide of disillusion.

"Was I dreaming; in the death from Earth had I pa.s.sed into a wild phantasmagoria of mental pictures, some endless dream where the lulled soul encountered again, as visions, all it may have hoped for, all its unconscious cerebration had limned on the interior canvases of the mind, to be reviewed, as in a sleep, where every detail met the test of curiosity--except that last test--waking? Should I awake?

"I sprang forward and beat myself, in a sort of fury of doubt against the trees about me. The resistance was secure and certain. Pain--it seemed a kind of bliss, as the guarantee of my flesh and blood existence--came to me and in my paroxysms the torn skin of my body bled.

I looked at the red stains with exultation. I felt the aches of physical concussion, with a real rapture.

"This life was real, was dual--body and mind--as on Earth, and the woman hastening before me along the marge of the rippling stream--I listened in a kind of feverish antic.i.p.ation of its silence, for the low cadence of water pa.s.sing over pebbles--was Martha! It must be true! What agency of superhuman cruelty could thus deceive me? No! my eyes were faithful, and the air, thrilling with the distant song, brought nearer to my ears the answering call of my wife!

"She was far distant. I ran from tree to tree in the wooded back ground and traced her to a little hamlet where a group of Martians awaited her.

They turned up a narrow lane singing, and I lost them.

"I returned to Alca, pensively standing on the hill we had first descended, and said nothing of the strange revelation. I contrived to learn from him the name of the little village, and the nature of its inhabitants. He called it Nitansi, and said it had been one of the old spots where migrating souls from other worlds once entered Mars.

"'A few,' he added, 'come there now, though rarely, and the people cultivate flowers in great farms, and formerly sent them to Scandor. I think I saw them moving now along the fields at the riverside. We must go back. I shall go down the ca.n.a.l to Sinsi. I know the Council of Scandor will resolve to rebuild the city.'"

The message closed. I rose and staggered backward into the arms of Jobson. A severe hemorrhage ensued, and slowly thereafter the darkening doors of life began to close upon me. Disease had won its way against all the force of life.

It has been my task during these last weeks of life to write this account of these wonderful experiences, and to leave them to the world as an a.s.surance--to how many will it give a new delight in living, to how many will it remove the bitterness of living, to how many may it bring resignation and hope--that the blight of Death is only an incident in a continuous renewal of Life.

(End of Mr. Dodd's MS.)

Note by Mr. August Bixby Dodan.

Mr. Dodd died January 20, 1895. He never recovered from the severe shock caused by hemorrhage, after receiving the second message from his father and recorded above. He appreciated the imminence of death acutely, and struggled to complete, as he has, the narrative of his life. My daughter was not again seen by Mr. Dodd, though he received several letters from her, which were found beneath his pillow after his demise.

I was with Mr. Dodd constantly during the latter days of his illness, and then promised him that I should secure the publication of his remarkable story.

I am not willing to hazard any conjecture as to the more extraordinary features of this narrative. I can very positively, however, affirm my complete confidence in Mr. Dodd's honesty. I knew both his father and himself very well, and through a long intimacy found them both consistently conforming to a very high type of character, courage, and intellectual integrity.

The MS. of Mr. Dodd was handed to me by himself, and I recall with a pathetic interest his smile of appreciative grat.i.tude as I received it, and gave him my earnest a.s.surance that it should be printed, and that the world would be made acquainted with his experiments and their results.

Mr. Dodd was the residuary legatee of his father, and his own will made during his last sickness, appointed me as his executor. My daughter was made his sole heir, with two exceptions; small amounts in favor of his a.s.sistants--Jeb Jobson and Andrew Clarke were mentioned in his will--and these sums have been paid by myself to each.

A series of extraordinary misfortunes, for which I am myself measurably to blame, resulted in the complete disappearance of the fortune inherited by my daughter. Her own death and that of my wife, following upon this disaster, though in no way connected with it, obliterated--and here again I admit a very grievous culpability--the remembrance of the MS. of Mr. Dodd and my own promises as to its publication.

I found the MS. of Mr. Dodd carefully wrapped up at the bottom of a trunk of papers, and confess that I opened the package it formed with a bitter sense of self-reproach. Mr. Dodd had expected to publish this paper in New York, and had requested that it should be forwarded to that city. I have at last complied with his wishes, and the MS. leaves my hands, absolutely unchanged, consigned through the kind intervention of a friend, to a publis.h.i.+ng house in that western metropolis. I am unable to add anything more to this statement, which, in itself, I fear conveys considerable censure to the undersigned.

August Bixby Dodan.

Note by the Editor.

The MS. alluded to by Mr. Dodan in the preceding paragraphs was safely brought to New York in 1900, and after a very careful examination, repeatedly rejected by the prominent publishers to whom it was submitted.

Through a peculiar accident connected with some negotiations pertaining to a scientific work, contemplated by the writer, the MS. came into his hands, and he has been encouraged to publish it, influenced by the favorable comments of friends upon its intrinsic interest. He also has added to the work as an appendix, which cannot fail to attract the attention of many, the views of the great astronomer Schiaparelli upon the present physical condition of Mars, being the reproduction of an article by that distinguished observer translated from _Nature et Arte_ for February, 1893, by Prof. William H. Pickering and published in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution for 1894, published here by permission of "Astronomy and Astro-Physics,"

in which journal it first appeared in Vol. XIII., numbers 8 and 9, for October and November, 1894. In this report also appeared Schiaparelli's Map of Mars in 1888, which the Editor has not reproduced in this connection.

The introduction to-day of the wireless telegraphy, a.s.suming a daily increasing importance, furnishes some reasonable hope that the marvellous statements given in Mr. Dodd's narrative may be more widely verified in the future, and point the way to a realization of the daring and thrilling conception of interplanetary communication.

THE PLANET MARS.

BY GIOVANNI SCHIAPARELLI.

THE PLANET MARS.

BY GIOVANNI SCHIAPARELLI.

Many of the first astronomers who studied Mars with the telescope had noted on the outline of its disk two brilliant white spots of rounded form and of variable size. In process of time it was observed that while the ordinary spots upon Mars were displaced rapidly in consequence of its daily rotation, changing in a few hours both their position and their perspective, the two white spots remained sensibly motionless at their posts. It was concluded rightly from this that they must occupy the poles of rotation of the planet, or at least must be found very near to them. Consequently they were given the name of polar caps or spots.

And not without reason is it conjectured that these represent upon Mars that immense ma.s.s of snow and ice which still to-day prevents navigators from reaching the poles of the earth. We are led to this conclusion not only by the a.n.a.logy of aspect and of place, but also by another important observation....

As things stand, it is manifest that if the above-mentioned white polar spots of Mars represent snow and ice they should continue to decrease in size with the approach of summer in those places and increase during the winter. Now this very fact is observed in the most evident manner. In the second half of the year 1892 the southern polar cap was in full view; during that interval, and especially in the months of July and August, its rapid diminution from week to week was very evident even to those observing with common telescopes. This snow (for we may well call it so), which in the beginning reached as far as lat.i.tude 70 degrees and formed a cap of over 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) in diameter, progressively diminished, so that two or three months later little more of it remained than an area of perhaps 300 kilometers (180 miles) at the most, and still less was seen in the last days of 1892. In these months the southern hemisphere of Mars had its summer, the summer solstice occurring upon October 13. Correspondingly the ma.s.s of snow surrounding the northern pole should have increased; but this fact was not observable, since that pole was situated in the hemisphere of Mars which was opposite to that facing the earth. The melting of the northern snow was seen in its turn in the years 1882, 1884 and 1886.

These observations of the alternate increase and decrease of the polar snows are easily made even with telescopes of moderate power, but they become much more interesting and instructive when we can follow a.s.siduously the changes in their more minute particulars, using larger instruments. The snowy regions are then seen to be successively notched at their edges; black holes and huge fissures are formed in their interiors; great isolated pieces many miles in extent stand out from the princ.i.p.al ma.s.s and, dissolving, disappear a little later. In short, the same divisions and movements of these icy fields present themselves to us at a glance that occur during the summer of our own arctic regions, according to the descriptions of explorers.

The southern snow, however, presents this peculiarity: The center of its irregularly rounded figure does not coincide exactly with the pole, but is situated at another point, which is nearly always the same, and is distant from the pole about 300 kilometers (180 miles) in the direction of the Mare Erythraeum. From this we conclude that when the area of the snow is reduced to its smallest extent the south pole of Mars is uncovered, and therefore, perhaps, the problem of reaching it upon this planet is easier than upon the earth. The southern snow is in the midst of a huge dark spot, which with its branches occupies nearly one-third of the whole surface of Mars, and is supposed to represent its princ.i.p.al ocean. Hence the a.n.a.logy with our arctic and antarctic snows may be said to be complete, and especially so with the antarctic one.

The ma.s.s of the northern snow cap of Mars is, on the other hand, centered almost exactly upon its pole. It is located in a region of yellow color, which we are accustomed to consider as representing the continent of the planet. From this arises a singular phenomenon which has no a.n.a.logy upon the earth. At the melting of the snows acc.u.mulated at that pole during the long night of ten months and more the liquid ma.s.s produced in that operation is diffused around the circ.u.mference of the snowy region, converting a large zone of surrounding land into a temporary sea and filling all the lower regions. This produces a gigantic inundation, which has led some observers to suppose the existence of another ocean in those parts, but which does not really exist in that place, at least as a permanent sea. We see then (the last opportunity was in 1884) the white spot of the snow surrounded by a dark zone, which follows its perimeter in its progressive diminution, upon a circ.u.mference ever more and more narrow. The outer part of this zone branches out into dark lines, which occupy all the surrounding region, and seem to be distributary ca.n.a.ls by which the liquid ma.s.s may return to its natural position. This produces in these regions very extensive lakes, such as that designated upon the map by the name of Lacus Hyperboreus; the neighboring interior sea called Mare Acidalium becomes more black and more conspicuous. And it is to be remembered as a very probable thing that the flowing of this melted snow is the cause which determines princ.i.p.ally the hydrographic state of the planet and the variations that are periodically observed in its aspect. Something similar would be seen upon the earth if one of our poles came to be located suddenly in the center of Asia or of Africa. As things stand at present, we may find a miniature image of these conditions in the flooding that is observed in our streams at the melting of the Alpine snows.

Travellers in the arctic regions have frequent occasion to observe how the state of the polar ice at the beginning of the summer, and even at the beginning of July, is always very unfavorable to their progress.

The best season for exploration is in the month of August, and September is the month in which the trouble from ice is the least. Thus in September our Alps are usually more practicable than at any other season. And the reason for it is clear--the melting of the snow requires time; a high temperature is not sufficient; it is necessary that it should continue, and its effect will be so much the greater, as it is the more prolonged. Thus, if we could slow down the course of our season so that each month should last sixty days instead of thirty, in the summer, in such a lengthened condition, the melting of the ice would progress much further, and perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say that the polar cap at the end of the warm season would be entirely destroyed. But one cannot doubt, in such a case, that the fixed portion of such a cap would be reduced to a much smaller size, than we see it to-day. Now, this is exactly what happens to Mars. The long year, nearly double our own, permits the ice to acc.u.mulate during the polar night of ten or twelve months, so as to descend in the form of a continuous layer as far as parallel 70 degrees, or even farther. But in the day which follows, of twelve or ten months, the sun has time to melt all, or nearly all, of the snow of recent formation, reducing it to such a small area that it seems to us no more than a very white point. And perhaps this snow is entirely destroyed; but of this there is at present no satisfactory observation.