Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Martians -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space travelers -- Fiction
It seemed to some of us almost heartless to deprive the Martians who
still remained alive of any of the provisions which they themselves
would require to tide them over the long period which must elapse before
the recession of the flood should enable them to discover the sites of
their ruined homes, and to find the means of sustenance. But necessity
was now our only law. We learned from Aina that there must be stores
of provisions in the neighborhood of the palace, because it was the
custom of the Martians to lay up such stores during the harvest time
in each Martian year in order to provide against the contingency of an
extraordinary drought.
It was not with very good grace that the Martian Emperor acceded to our
demands that one of the storehouses should be opened, but resistance
was useless, and of course we had our way.
The supplies of water which we brought from the earth, owing to a peculiar
process invented by Monsieur Moissan, had been kept in exceedingly good
condition, but they were now running low and it became necessary to
replenish them also. This was easily done from the Southern Ocean, for
on Mars, since the levelling of the continental elevations, brought about
many years ago, there is comparatively little salinity in the sea waters.
While these preparations were going on Lord Kelvin and the other men
of science entered with the utmost eagerness upon those studies, the
prosecution of which had been the principal inducement leading them
to embark on the expedition. But, almost all of the face of the planet
being covered with the flood, there was comparatively little that they
could do. Much, however, could be learned with the aid of Aina from the
Martians, now crowded on the land about the palace.
The results of these discoveries will in due time appear, fully
elaborated in learned and authoritative treatises prepared by these
savants themselves. I shall only call attention to one, which seemed
to me very remarkable. I have already said that there were astonishing
differences in the personal appearance of the Martians, evidently
arising from differences of character and education, which had impressed
themselves in the physical aspect of the individuals.
We now learned that these differences were more completely the result
of education than we had at first supposed.
Looking about among the Martians by whom we were surrounded, it soon
became easy for us to tell who were the soldiers and who were the
civilians, simply by the appearance of their bodies, and particularly of
their heads. All members of the military class resembled, to a greater
or less extent, the monarch himself, in that those parts of their skulls
which our phrenologists had designated as the bumps of destructiveness,
combativeness and so on were enormously and disproportionately developed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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