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Updated: June 12, 2025
See the violet tinge that has come into that sea of orange, and the purple haze touching the snow-caps of the mountains. And now the flaming red, the deep yellow, the slate blue; and now that gauzy veil of lilac, rose, and amethyst, fading and dulling as the darker shadows rise from the valleys!" Her flashing eyes sought Ferguson's. Twilight had suddenly come.
Rolling hills with distant mountain peaks, the highest of them far-away, glittering white with the sunlight on their snow-caps. A land of warmth and beauty. Dazzling green, with a luxuriant vegetation, tropical yet strange. As we dropped lower, I sat alone, gazing downward. We were passing over the land now, at an altitude of no more than twenty thousand feet. A vivid land.
The most obvious peculiarity of this planet its polar snow-caps were seen about 250 years ago, but they were first proved to increase and decrease alternately, in the summer and winter of each hemisphere, by Sir William Herschell in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
Lowell's observations, and provisionally accepting all his chief conclusions as to the climate, the nature of the snow-caps, the vegetation, and the animal life of Mars, yet his interpretation of the lines on its surface as being veritably 'canals, constructed by intelligent beings for the special purpose of carrying water to the more arid regions, is wholly erroneous and rationally inconceivable.
All these sources of supply are admittedly absent from Mars, which has no permanent bodies of water, no rain, and tropical regions which are almost entirely desert. Many writers have therefore doubted the existence of water in any form upon this planet, supposing that the snow-caps are not formed of frozen water but of carbon-dioxide, or some other heavy gas, in a frozen state; and Mr.
Gruithuisen's "snow-caps," however it is safe to say do not exist as such; although shining regions near the poles form a well-attested trait of the strange Cytherean landscape.
The keen breath of the snow-caps was summer-warm in comparison with the chilling iciness of her manner; but the secretary went on unmoved: "Success is the only thing worth while in this world. Winton will fail, but I shan't. And when I do succeed, I shall marry a woman who can wear the purple most becomingly." "I hope you may, I'm sure," she answered wearily.
It may be noted that Mr. Lowell objects to the carbon-dioxide theory of the formation of the snow-caps, that this gas at low pressures does not liquefy, but passes at once from the solid to the gaseous state, and that only water remains liquid sufficiently long to produce the blue colour' which plays so large a part in his argument for the mild climate essential for an inhabited planet.
The maximum of the northern snow-caps is reached at a period of the Martian winter corresponding to the end of February with us.
There were moments, to be sure, when a line of gleaming snow-caps visible through the interstices of a tract of starveling trees would arrest his attention; yet the more moving and dramatic interest of some chance utterance in his immediate vicinity, was sure to recall him to a delighted contemplation of a rakish sombrero or of a doubtfully "diamond" scarf-pin.
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