Fearing to disturb the steady course and velocity of the _Sphere_, and content so long as they were still nearing the planet, they made no effort to utilize the disk’s power yet. Professor Palmer estimated that they were approaching Mars at a rate of 100,000 miles an hour. Already they were within some 3,000,000 miles of it, compared with the original distance of roughly 35,000,000 miles. Brighter and brighter shone the mysterious planet with the passage of each watch. With the rapid reduction of the intervening distance, a faint restoration of gravitation began to be felt. Even in this extremely weak form it proved a very welcome relief to the weary Spherites. No longer did they float about like gas-filled balloons, though walking was still a difficult feat. The beginning of the fourteenth “day” found them within a few hundred thousand miles of Mars. The _Sphere’s_ course had now mechanically corrected itself as anticipated by the professor, and they were “falling” directly toward the planet. All eyes were now kept eagerly trained upon it through the observation well. Its spreading disk almost entirely filled the glass-enclosed tube. The professor watched it with boyish excitement, as feature after feature developed with their swift approach. Indeed, the planet presented an awe-inspiring and wonderful sight. Its great, snow-white polar caps, and vast, rose, rich ocher and purplish-bronze expanses between these caps surpassed in grandeur anything their eyes had ever beheld. Crossing and recrossing these expanses or plains was a curious network of straight and some slightly curved, dark-hued lines. All of these lines appeared to originate at the edges of the polar caps, or to connect indirectly with them by means of juncture with other lines. The northern or smaller cap was surrounded by a border of deep, bluish tint. This cap had shrunken noticeably even during their recent observation. Professor Palmer attributed this phenomenon to the advanced summer in the northern hemisphere, accompanied by a melting of that polar cap and an accumulation of water around it from which the “canals” were fed. At numerous junctures dark spots occurred. The whole presented much the appearance of a crude map, upon a globe, of some gigantic railroad system, the dots representing the terminals or large cities. Several of the lines were double, running parallel with startling regularity and joining together again at the terminals. The northern extremities of the “canals” were now plainly darker than elsewhere, and strengthened the professor’s well-known theories regarding the purpose of the “canals.”