The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars Part 8

CHAPTER V.

"It was afternoon when Chapman and I, fully equipped and provisioned, moved off from the long granite pier at the Registeries, after an affectionate parting from my guide and friend, who returned sorrowfully to resume his watch for his son, whose coming to Mars seemed to him so a.s.sured.

"How wonderfully strange and exciting it all seemed! Down the crowded ca.n.a.l we slowly moved, amidst the calling crews, the pleasant cheers, and beckonings of sightseers; and back of us rose on its hills the City of Light, that, as we pa.s.sed still further away, and watched it in the fading sunset, began to glow, and finally, to shine like some t.i.tanic opal in the velvet shadows of the night.

"These numerous arms of the ca.n.a.l some miles from the City coalesce and merge into the enormous trunk ca.n.a.l that pa.s.ses on to Scandor through hills and mountains and the plain country, excavated by the wonderful Toto powder. This trunk ca.n.a.l is doubled; upon one member, the boats pa.s.s outward to Scandor, and on the other the boats return. Branches pa.s.s north and south at centers of population, and of some of these which pa.s.s actually into the frozen depths of the polar countries, I may tell you later.

"As we slowly progressed into the undulating plain country, with its villages and farm lands, diversified by woods, and sometimes solitary projections of rock, as the stars stole urgently into the sky, as the phosphori lamps began their soft illumination of the decks, and while murmurs of songs from merrymakers on the land came to us in s.n.a.t.c.hes bewitchingly, though incongruously mingled with the delicious odors of the Napi gra.s.s, I turned to Chapman, and felt that now, throughout the hours of the genial night, I would pour out unchecked the flood of inquiry that had risen again and again to my lips in this strange new life.

"'Chapman,' I began, 'you must feel that I have a great deal to ask you.

This new life, with its surprises and the strange incidents of the two or three days I have already lived here have suggested so many questions, can we not now talk about these marvels?'

"'Certainly,' replied Chapman, as he lifted a gla.s.s of delicate pearl pink, filled with the pungent and keenly stimulating _Ridinda_, to his lips. 'Put on your thinking cap, and perforate me with all the puzzles you can think of. I am a trifle rattled myself in this new ranch--have not been here long--but I tell you, Dodd, Mars is first cla.s.s. It suits me. Never enjoyed living so much, never found it so much a matter of course, and as to livelihood, when I think of those freezing nights on the earth in Rutherford's cheesebox shooting at the moon with wet plates, I can tell you this sort of thing isn't a long call from all I ever hoped to find in Heaven. Open your batteries. To-morrow will be full of sight-seeing, and I guess you will forget all you want to know to-day in trying to remember what you will see then.' He took another sip of the snapping liquid, drew his chair closer to my own, and while a sort of musical echo lingered in the air, I began:

"'Chapman, where on Mars are we? I seem to feel neither heat nor cold. I see these flowers, the palms in the Garden of the Fountains, day pa.s.ses into night, and there is no very apparent change of temperature, so far as feeling goes. What are we made of? Is this new body we carry insensible to heat or cold? I feel indeed my pulse beat. I am conscious of warmth in the sun, and of coolness in the shade. I feel the wind blow on my cheeks, but all these sensations are so much less keen than on the earth, and yet again I realize that sensations are in some ways as vivid as on the earth. The pleasure of my ears and eyes is wonderfully deep and exhaustive, the sense of taste rapid and delightful. I am happy, supremely happy, and affection, even the hidden fires of love, burn in my veins as on the earth.' Chapman looked at me with that bright smile he wore on earth, and his gestures of expostulation were amusing. 'Wait, Dodd, don't talk so fast. You remember I had a slow way on the earth. I have no reason to think it will prove any less pleasant to stay slow on Mars. One thing at a time. My own sense of position is not so secure that I can tell exactly all you want to know, and there are a good many things that the heavyweights up here don't pretend yet to explain. Now, where are we? Well, the City of Light is about 40 degrees south of the Martian equator, not so far from what on earth would be the position of Christ Church, where you "shuffled off the mortal coil." Don't frown.

Mars is a serene, sweet place, but I am not yet so intimidated by the lofty life here as to drop my jokes. Some Martians strike me as a trifle heavy in style, just a suggestion of a kind of sublimated Bostonese about them, don't you know. Curious! However, the ordinary Martian is gamy, good company, full of happiness, with a considerable fancy for jokes, absurdly addicted to music, and as credulous as a child. Somehow, Dodd, a good deal of my earthly nature has stuck to me, and I revel in a dual life. I have my Martian side, but I can't, and this life can't, knock the old foibles of the world you left, out of me yet. I may get the proper sort of exultation in time, but just now I've imported considerable human horse sense.'

"He looked at me whimsically; I walked away, and watched the receding city.

"The motion of our white boat was so smoothly rapid, that soon, and almost unnoticed we had threaded all the many lanes, windings, and locks that led to the broad ca.n.a.ls some twenty miles from the city. We had pa.s.sed laden barges, flat and storied boats carrying excursions or freight, and trains of smaller craft crowded with fruit brought in from distant farms for the great population of the City of Light. The scene a.s.sumed a fairy-like unreality as night settled down, and the boats swarming with light, or else carrying a few red lanterns, pa.s.sed us while their occupants or owners chanted the lonely lullaby of the Martians, which begins: 'Ana cal tantil to ti.'

"It was yet to me all a wonderful dream, from which each moment I dreaded awakening. It was all so beautiful!

"I sat again with Chapman under the canopy, talking of the earth.

Strange Mystery! Here we were with our earth memories yet vivid, recalling incidents of life in New York City, and summoning amid all the appealing charm of this strange new life, the little, sordid variances and trials, vexations and minor sufferings that had marred his own life on earth. We turned to these things, not because they were grateful or pleasing to remember, but because it seemed to _establish_ us, or rather me, to give me ident.i.ty, and build up the growing certainty that I had come from the earth, and was re-embodied in this new sphere of active feeling and experience.

"I told him of you, of the death of your mother, of our flight to New Zealand, our experiments, the Dodans, and then turning to him, as we saw the Martian moon rise in ruddy fullness far away over the hill of _Tiniti_, I said, searchingly: 'Chapman, you remember Martha? How beautiful and good she was! I have kept one long, sad, and still deathless hope in my repining heart. I shall see her again! It must be!

I have felt so certain of this that no argument, no appeal to reason, can drive away the keen sense of its realization. Have you seen her on Mars amongst the thousands you have met, and is there on this entrancing orb any other place than the Hill of the Phosphori, for the disembodied of other worlds to enter this new world?

"Chapman smiled. 'Yes,' he answered, 'I remember your wife very well. I could pick her out from ten thousand, but I have never seen her yet in the City of Light. You may, my dear friend, cherish only an illusion, and yet I am half willing to agree with you; such intuitive feelings have a deeper philosophy of truth than we can fathom, and no laughing skepticism, no mere frivolous doubt can expel them. Wait, my friend; it may yet be meant for you to meet her. And now I do recall some accounts told me of occasional visitants to Mars entering its life at different points; many indeed have been received near Scandor, and on one or two occasions the prehistoric peoples, the little strong men of the mountains and the northern ice have brought in such a chance waif that has become body amongst them. How wild and frightened they become! And quite naturally! Ghosts dropping out of the air becoming flesh and blood might startle a rational being into a rigid course of religious practices, not to say superst.i.tion. But look, how fair the night has become.'

"The landscape about us was wonderfully illuminated by the two satellites, Deimos and Phobos, which, as you well know, were made known to astronomers on the earth by Prof. Asaph Hall in 1877. What a marvellous spectacle they presented, moving almost sensibly at their differing rates of revolution through a sky sown with stellar lights.

The combined lights of these singular bodies surpa.s.sed the light of our terrestrial moon, by reason of their closeness to the surface of Mars, while the more rapid motion of the inner satellite causes the most weird and beautiful changes of effect in the nocturnal glory they both lend to the Martian life.

"We were sailing in a broad river-like ca.n.a.l, perhaps one mile or more wide. On all sides the undulating ground, covered with cultivation, varied with thick patches of trees, with here and there shining lights from villages and isolated homes, carried the eye onward to a rising hill country, beyond which, again, silhouetted against the shining sky where Phobos began to rise mountain tops were just discernible.

"Deimos, the outer moon, was already shining, and its pale, sick light imparted a peculiar blueness impossible to describe upon all surfaces it touched. Here was the phenomenon we witnessed with increasing pleasure.

Phobos was emerging from a cloud and its yellow rays possessing a greater illuminating power, mingled suddenly with the blue and spectral beams of Deimos and the land thus visited by the complimentary flood of light from these twin luminaries seemed suddenly dipped in silver. A beautiful white light, most unreal, as you mortals might say, fell on tree and water, cliff, hill, and villages. The effect was not unlike that instant in photography when a developing plate shows the outlines of its objects in dazzling silver before the half tints are added, and the image fades away into indistinguishable shadow.

"It was a print in silver, and while we gazed in mute astonishment the sharp shadows changed their position as Phobos, racing through the zenith, changed the inclination of its incident beams. The effect was indescribable. I walked the deck in an agitation of wonder and delight.

Chapman, to whom the novelties of this Martian life were still wonderful, followed me, and was the first to speak.

"'Dodd, you know that the strangest thing about this whole place is your body. It's body all right enough, but I can't quite understand what sort of a body it is. It hurts in a way, and is pleased in a way, but it seems a better made affair in texture and parts than anything we possessed on earth. Exertion is so easy.'

"'Well, Chapman,' I answered, while my eyes rested on the water, through which an approaching barge rose like a vessel of frosted or burnished white metal, 'we were taught on the earth that, with gravitation reduced one-half, the same weight on Mars would seem only half as heavy as on the earth, and that the effort which there carried us eight feet would here send us sixteen.'

"'It is true,' returned Chapman, 'but that doesn't explain everything.

We sleep less here, we scarcely touch meat, and yet exertion, prolonged by hours, scarcely accelerates the blood or vexes the nerves, and generally we don't grow old. Our bodies are light; the texture, apparently firm and resisting, is somehow diaphanous. I've seen the light through the palm of my hand. And then again I haven't. Somehow mind works in the body here and changes it, and changes it different at different times. Why, Dodd, the other day at the Patenta, a student jumped up with a cry of delight at something, and stumbled and fell from a window to the ground, but he stood up without a bruise or hurt of any kind. His exultation, his emotional excitement made him buoyant, I think, and he fell to the earth like a thistledown. There was no concussion.'

"'Well,' I responded, 'I cannot tell. I know very little as yet. I feel wonderfully active and vitalized. My senses are acute. I see further, hear further, smell further than I ever did on earth, and it even seems to me I can antic.i.p.ate things. The nerve currents are so rapid, the mind seems so persuasive, that coming events are registered by a prophetic feeling I can scarcely describe. For that reason, Chapman, I grow happier every minute, for now I see approaching that great joy, my reunion with Martha, the one great divine event I hunger and hope for.

"'Well,' said Chapman, as a cloud covered the scudding moons, 'I do hope you may see her, and somehow I think, too, you will. But, Dodd,' the moons emerged, and the lower one was in transit across the face of the upper, 'I must call your attention to this strange peculiarity of our bodies, that we undergo extremes of temperature with almost no noticeable sense of the great heat or cold. This region we are traversing is about the lat.i.tude of Christ Church, as I told you, and it is the period of harvests, and the heat is moderate, but in the height of summer the heat seems scarcely more felt than now, and in the clothing I am now wearing, I have sailed through the ice packs of the North, and slept thinly covered in its snows, but without undue discomfort. I tell you, matter in us, and flesh and blood in us are all differently conditioned.'

"'Why not ask these questions of the wise men of the Patenta, the doctors and chemists?' I replied. 'I can think of an a.n.a.logy that might make this Martian const.i.tution intelligible. A close, dense body conducts heat or cold; a loose, open texture or cellular ma.s.s does not.

In our curious embodiment from spirit the substance of our bodies is an etherealized matter, loosely, I might say, flocculently, disposed, and while it conveys sensations of a certain tone or key of vibratory intensity, it will not respond to any violent or coa.r.s.e shocks. They simply cannot be carried. They escape us. Are the people all alike amongst the Martians?'

"'Oh, no,' returned Chapman, who pointed to the widening s.p.a.ces in the beams between the slow Deimos and the fleeter flying Phobos, 'there are great differences. I have seen that. In materialization some seem badly put together, and these resemble our former terrestrial bodies. They grow old, they succ.u.mb to disease, they feel changes of weather and they have less vitality. Yes,' and he drew nearer, 'it is these unhappy misbirths in this spirit land who retain the sin of earth and cannot survive and get the _Kinkotant.i.tomi_ or irreverently, as the earthling would say, the grand bounce. They are fired off the planet.'

"He paused and laughed. How strange this almost human laugh sounded, and yet how pleasant! I looked at him with a deep affection. He noticed the impression, and quickly drawing me to him, said half timidly:

"'Dodd, that sort of laugh and those words of mine just used, are not Martian, they don't belong to these rarefied beings here. They have a human or earthly taint, and they frighten me. I seem so lonely sometimes. My stray fun which I once enjoyed on earth must somehow be forgotten here. I feel so irreverent at times, so full of horse play, but I must keep up the high key and act like the rest. Indeed for the most of the time I feel as they do, I suppose, but sometimes that sort of ribaldry and feelings of the ludicrous that made us joke, and prank, and cut up in genial companionships come over me, and I am suffocating with a glee out of place to this exalted society. Ah! it's good to feel you, my friend, so fresh and new from earth. It's promised here in the learned talk I have heard, that those who disappear from Mars become reincorporated upon earth again, if they belong there. Well, I wouldn't mind if I got returned, wonderful and sweet and happy as all this seems.

The dear, dear old Earth!'

"He flung his arms around me, and our faces met, as if we had been lost brothers. A sort of terrifying melancholy invaded me. I was so distant from all I had known and loved, so distant from the surges we had watched from our observatory at Christ Church, so distant from the life of heat and clothing and genial domesticities; the life even, it might be called, of the daily paper, the novel, the new book, the life of politics and human history, and conventionality, the life of ups and downs, of sickness and health, of individual enterprise, of routine and mechanical fatigue, the life of exertion, contrast and social inequality, with its picturesqueness, its incessant interest, all this was now utterly removed by all the measureless leagues of icy s.p.a.ce between me and the floating planet--the old sin-stricken Earth--that was shining in the Martian skies, so inconspicuous and tiny--so inaccessible.

"But my heart was pulsating audibly. If I could recover Martha, if, in this serene atmosphere of good will and fairness and kindness, in the midst of unknown possibilities of knowledge, in the company of enthusiastic and high-minded men and women, in this arena of scientific wonders, and in the joy and beauty of universal happiness and thrift and peace and well doing and intuition, I could find a human companionship in the woman whose face and nature have summed up for me the whole of life, if I could find her! then, indeed, this new world would be all my earthly home could be, and the endless future with her for guide and friend would lose its terror and lonely isolation, and--I dared to think it--even the presence of G.o.d himself become bearable.

"Chapman had stolen away from me. He had stolen to the little, dainty rooms that were sunk in the c.o.c.kpit or cabin of our boat, and I was standing alone in the light of the midnight moons in Mars, a waif from the far earth, incomprehensibly born after death into this human presentiment and renewal in youth, and again instinct with revivified pa.s.sion and desire; and breathing the atmosphere of a planet that for years I had watched through the tube of a telescope, as a floating flake of celestial fire. A delicious drowsiness overcame me, and while I noticed the pilot was changed, his place being taken by another, and that we were approaching a ridgy or disturbed country, I found my way to the white couch prepared for me, and sank into a deep and dreamless sleep.

"The morning of the next day was clear and beautiful. Shall I ever forget that first approach to the mountains of Tiniti, where Mit and Sinsi, the villages of the quarries, are located. All day long the boat propelled through a diversified country, covered with morainal heaps--great hills of drift matter, heaps of worn pebbles and rolling plains of estuarine sediment. Much of this land seemed untouched with cultivation, and sublime forests of the loftiest trees covered it. The ca.n.a.l pa.s.sed through solitudes, where the silence was only broken by the cackling laugh of a crane-like bird, marching in lines along the banks, or perched like sleepy sentinels amid the outstretched branches of the trees.

"These wild and fascinating regions were often alternated by miles of bright plantations radiant with the yellow leaves of the Rint, bearing its deep red pods, while avenues of palms, not unlike the royal palm of the Earth, led in long vistas to cl.u.s.tering groups of houses, and we, too, caught glimpses of basking lakes on which, even as in the Earth, the patient fisherman in basket-like circular boats, waited for his flashing captives.

"Then, again, there were prairie-like stretches of a sort of pampas waving in cloudy lines, the glistening pappus of the wild Nitoti, a peculiar, low composite, that grows in abundance and furnishes food to the strange gazelle of this lat.i.tude in Mars.

"This animal, the Rimondi, could be seen in scampering herds over these plains, its horns making an hour gla.s.s form above its head, as they bent to each other, touched, and then curved outward again to reunite a second time.

"We were rapidly moving northward, and just as it would be on the earth, the changing vegetation gave visible notice of our advance.

"But more interesting than nature were the scenes of life along our way, and the custom of public worship filled me with wonder. Amphitheatres of stone built high above the ground, and approached by encircling terraces of steps dotted the country at long intervals. These, Chapman explained, were the churches of the people. Here they gathered from long distances around, and, even as he described their meaning, the congregations were seen a.s.sembling, while later we heard the music flung in waves of sound from these houses of song and worship.

"Chapman did not understand the Martian faith. There seemed little to understand about it. It was one national expression of the love of goodness and of beauty, but it was all directed to a source of infallible wisdom, power and justice.

"Thus considering the country and its customs we fell again into a long colloquy:

"'Dodd,' said Chapman, musingly, 'we should all become as these people about us, and do the same things, and believe and act as they do. You will, but I think I remain a little strange. I seem a spectator that a caprice has cast upon this globe, and though I live here, I must succ.u.mb to a certain alienation, a lack of mediation between their life and my former existence, and because of this subtle estrangement, I shall contract disease, or meet with accident, or waste in age, while you shall stay young, and living, sink into the Martian life and yield to it a spiritual, a mental acquiescence. You will become absorbed, and, with your love realized, the whole rhapsodic life of this world will mingle you forever in its tide of song and science and labor.'

"'Yes,' I answered, 'I am sure I shall. For whatever period of time I stay here, I am one with this beautiful and strange life. I respond naturally to all this serenity and joy, this precision of power over inanimate things; this flooded being and the dawning sense that through the stepping stone of Mars, I approach yet higher beat.i.tudes of living.

At least in Mars the sordid taint of suffering, of ignominious physical torture and privation, which spoiled the Earth, is almost unknown.'

"Chapman laughed, and an echo gave back from some hillside its musical response. 'Ah, it may be, I know it is true, and yet--and yet--the Earth possessed a pictorial, a dramatic power in its contrasts of happiness and suffering, of goodness and sin. It had literary material. Its consecutive growth in the ages of social and national and economic history were so wonderful, so thrilling in interest, in the details of character and adventure, in the incessant panoramic display it gave of light and shade. And on it rested the shadow of a strange, pathetic doubt, the mystery of creation. Its romance, its fiction, its fable, and the animating picture it furnished, with its sceptics and its believers, its haters and its lovers, its tyrants and its heroes. Its wide, verbal immensity! I miss all that, or almost all. This life is evenly celestial, and glowing, and carelessly happy. And here knowledge is extreme and pervasive and omnipotent. The dear commonplaces of the Earth life are unknown too, the ludicrous is absent, and the sublimity of sacrifice impossible.'

"He laughed again, and I felt for one brief, incredible instant a pang, too, that the blossoming, full, sensual Earth has pa.s.sed from beneath my feet forever.

"But it was past. For me nothing was left behind when Martha had gone before. The future for me was the pilgrimage through worlds for her lost face. The sum and substance of a world's growth, of the unintermittent and heraldic progress of the soul was union with her. And deeper in my convictions than science or faith or desire, lay the consciousness of my sure approach.