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Leaning over the side of the flier, he saw what appeared to be a red woman being dragged across the plaza by a huge green warrior one of those fierce, cruel denizens of the dead sea-bottoms and deserted cities of dying Mars. Carthoris waited to see no more. Reaching for the control board, he sent his craft racing plummet-like toward the ground.
Where the canals cross depressions or old sea-bottoms, immense aqueducts have been constructed of solid stone and concrete in such a manner that the water, in most cases, flows to its destination by gravity. That this has been a stupendous task may be more readily imagined when it is known that the width of the main canals averages from one to twenty miles.
Now you must not suppose that I put this before you for the purpose of raising a paradoxical difficulty; the fact is, that the great mass of deposits have taken place in sea-bottoms which are gradually sinking, and have been formed under the very conditions I am here supposing. Do not run away with the notion that this subverts the principle I laid down at first.
The general opinion here among the reputed cognoscenti is, that all these gullies were formed in the process of the gradual upheaval of the island from the sea, and that the plains were originally sea-bottoms, slowly raised, and still slowly raising themselves. Doubtless, the rivers brought the stones down, but they were deposited in the sea.
If, in the ancient world, mud and sand accumulated on sea-bottoms at tenfold their present rate, it is clear that a bed of mud or sand ten feet thick would have been formed then in the same time as a stratum of similar materials one foot thick would be formed now, and 'vice versa'.
Here the flier settled slowly into the plaza of one of those mute monuments of Mars' dead and forgotten past the deserted cities that fringe the sad ochre sea-bottoms where once rolled the mighty floods upon whose bosoms moved the maritime commerce of the peoples that are gone for ever. Thuvia of Ptarth was no stranger to such places.
Upheavals or subsidences of shores or sea-bottoms, involving deviations of marine currents, remove the habitats of many species to which such currents are salutary or injurious; and further, this redistribution of currents alters the places of sedimentary deposits, and thus stops the burying of organic remains in some localities, while commencing it in others.
Whenever the sea-bottom, by some of those undulations of the earth's crust that I have referred to, becomes upheaved, and sections or borings are made, or pits are dug, then we become able to examine the contents and constituents of these ancient sea-bottoms, and find out what manner of animals lived at that period.
"When the bowmen return we shall doubtless learn all that there is to know," said Carthoris. "Let us hope that they prove friendly. What race may they be? Only in the most ancient of our legends and in the mural paintings of the deserted cities of the dead sea-bottoms are depicted such a race of auburn-haired, fair-skinned people.
As we have seen several times, there are periods when, either owing to the shrinking of the earth or the overloading of the sea-bottoms, or a combination of the two, the land regains its lost territory and emerges from the ocean. Mountain chains rise; new continental surfaces are exposed to the sun and rain.
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