The Marvelous Adventures of Serge Myrandhal on Mars by H. Gayar

Author:H. Gayar [Gayar, H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2014-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

XVII. Wedding Night

Less than forty minutes later, Serge Myrandhal saw land surge forth a quarter of a mile away: a desolate, arid land, always the uniform color of brick. Only a few scattered red tufts represented the Martian flora.

Serge would have liked his first steps in his new domain to be in a more engaging landscape. In any case, there was no urgency about going ashore; it was better, taking advantage of the marvelous means of locomotion that the Velox provided, to explore the planet a little more first.

He searched for one of the canals he had glimpsed during the descent, and soon found one. It was an arm of the sea about a hundred kilometers wide, so far as he could tell, and it headed southwards as far as the eye could see. Serge moved along it, searching for a more inviting location: a bay or a port worthy of the beautiful name of Anna, which he gave it in advance.

The Velox progressed at a good speed for two hours and the country did not vary. The right bank, which was about a cable away, unfolded flat and bleak, the color of rust, suggestive of an immense sheet of lava frozen by a gust of the wind of chaos.

Standing on the walkway, with his upper body protruding from the conning-tower, Myrandhal, more disappointed the further they advanced, contemplated the panorama, which seemed to him to be desperately monotonous.

“What solitude,” he thought aloud, “and what silence! It seems that Mars really is a dead world. Not a tree, not a bird, not a spring, not a valley, not a hill, not even a cloud…nothing to animate the landscape. The rivers have dried up, the mountains have been leveled, the valleys filled in. Time has passed this way, polishing the planet, making the ruddy surface into an immense bleak expanse of desert. It will be the same for the Earth one day.

“Even the sun—the sun that seemed so beautiful this morning—produces les light. It’s only been three hours, but one might think that the light has diminished already. It’s true that I’m twice as far from the star, whose diameter, if I could look directly at it, would seem to be reduced by half. It’s also true that we’re in the shorter days of the Martian summer in this hemisphere of the planet.

“Decidedly, Mars is a world, if not dead, at least uninhabited. I was congratulating myself a little while ago, but I’m almost grateful now. There’s something anguishing about this funereal silence. I’d have preferred, at the risk of my life, to have to confront, if not other humans, then animals—something alive.

“I would have liked, at least, to have to contend with mysterious forces, with one of those phenomena with which writers of fantastic fiction populate unknown planets: sky-piercing volcanoes, cataracts of fire…but there’s nothing! Nothing but placid deserted canals, which inevitably make one think of some sandy town in Holland or Bruges-la-Morte.”23

Then, suddenly, he said: “Hold on! One might think that life is reawakening.

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