Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/336

 already, indeed, the general aspects of their world, and even of their own personal appearance, because our duplicative photography had long ago given us, by its marvellous perfection, every particular, so far as pertained to the physical Marsian landscape. But beyond all this, and whatever we might infer from the expression of their faces and the works of their hands, we knew nothing of the Marsian people. Nor could we doubt that they, for their part, knew still less about us, and would be inconceivably amazed by our intended visit. We had good reason to infer from all our observation of the photographic transfers of the Marsian surface, that a certain very considerable progress had been made there in art and science. Amongst other signs of progress, we knew that they had telescopes, apparently of a fair power, for we actually saw their astronomers looking through them, and often at our gibbous earth, as we approached the nearest conjunction. We saw also the busy life of their larger towns, and their mode of navigating their seas, which, in the thin cold air of the planet, were usually frozen far down towards the equator. But the thinness and clearness of the air saved Mars from much snow-fall, so that his poles, relatively, were hardly so extensively white as our own, or rather as ours used to be until we had latterly mopped up so much of our old aqueous surface.

The story of the first landing on Mars has inexhaustible freshness for all time. Our party, of course, steered for his equatorial region; and cold enough they