Page:Mars - Lowell.djvu/261

 Rh the definition exceptional, so soon as the sunset tremors subsided, the Euphrates and its neighbor the Phison I saw beautifully doubled, exactly like two great railroad tracks with bright ground between, each set extending down the disk for a distance of 1600 miles.

After that evening, whenever the seeing was good enough, they continued to present the same appearance. Now, with them no process of midway clarification, such as had taken place in the Ganges, had previously made itself manifest. They had, indeed, not been very well defined before duplication occurred, but apparently sufficiently so not to hide such broadening had it taken place; for, though the twin canals were not as far apart as the two Ganges, they were quite comparably distant, being, instead of six, about four and a quarter degrees from each other. Evidently, the process was, in the case of the Euphrates at least, under way in October, and even earlier, but was not well seen because the twin canals were not yet dark enough.

There seem, I may remark parenthetically, to be two other double canals in the region between the Syrtis Major and the Sabaeus Sinus, one to the east of the Phison, and another between the Phison and the Euphrates, both debouching at the same points as the Phison and the Euphrates themselves.