"Alas, no," replied Aina, her eyes filling with tears, "I alone am left."
For a few minutes she was unable to speak. Then she continued:
"What fury possessed them I do not know, but not long ago an expedition departed from the planet, the purpose of which, as it was noised about over Mars, was the conquest of a distant world. After a time a few survivors of that expedition returned. The story they told caused great excitement among our masters. They had been successful in their battles with the inhabitants of the world they had invaded, but as in the days of our forefathers, in the Land of Sand, a pestilence smote them, and but few survivors escaped.
"Not long after that, you, with your mysterious ships, appeared in the sky of Mars. Our masters studied you with their telescopes, and those who had returned from the unfortunate expedition declared that you were inhabitants of the world which they had invaded, come, doubtless, to take vengeance upon them.
"Some of my people who were permitted to look through the telescopes of the Martians, saw you also, and recognized you as members of their own race. There were several thousand of us all together, and we were kept by the Martians to serve them as slaves, and particularly to delight their ears with music, for our people have always been especially skillful in the playing of musical instruments, and in songs, and while the Martians have but little musical skill themselves, they are exceedingly fond of these things.
"Although Mars had completed not less than five thousand circuits about the sun since our ancestors were brought as prisoners to its surface, yet the memory of our distant home had never perished from the hearts of our race, and when we recognized you, as we believed, our own brothers, come to rescue us from long imprisonment, there was great rejoicing. The news spread from mouth to mouth, wherever we were in houses and families of our masters. We seemed to be powerless to aid you or to communicate with you in any manner. Yet our hearts went out to you, as in your ships you hung above the planet, and preparations were secretly made by all the members of our race for your reception when, as we believed, would occur, you should effect a landing upon the planet and destroy our enemies.
"But in some manner the fact that we had recognized you, and were preparing to welcome you, came to the ears of the Martians."
At this point the girl suddenly covered her eyes with her hands, shuddering and falling back in her seat.
"Oh, you do not know them as I do!" at length she exclaimed. "The monsters! Their vengeance was too terrible! Instantly the order went forth that we should all be butchered, and that awful command was executed!"
"How, then, did you escape?" asked the Heidelberg professor.
Aina seemed unable to speak for a while. Finally mastering her emotion, she replied:
"One of the chief officers of the Martians wished me to remain alive.
He, with his aides, carried me to one of the military depots of supplies, where I was found and rescued," and as she said this she turned toward Colonel Smith with a smile that reflected on his ruddy face and made it glow like a Chinese lantern.
"By G.o.d!" muttered Colonel Smith, "that was the fellow we blew into nothing! Blast him, he got off too easy!"
The remainder of Aina"s story may be briefly told.
When Colonel Smith and I entered the mysterious building which, as it now proved, was not a storehouse belonging to a village, as we had supposed, but one of the military depots of the Martians, the girl, on catching sight of us, immediately recognized us as belonging to the strange squadron in the sky. As such she felt that we must be her friends, and saw in us her only possible hope of escape. For that reason she had instantly thrown herself under our protection. This accounted for the singular confidence which she had manifested in us from the beginning.
Her wonderful story had so captivated our imaginations that for a long time after it was finished we could not recover from the spell. It was told over and over again, from mouth to mouth, and repeated from ship to ship, everywhere exciting the utmost astonishment.
Destiny seemed to have sent us on this expedition into s.p.a.ce for the purpose of clearing off mysteries that had long puzzled the minds of men. When on the moon we had unexpectedly to ourselves settled the question that had been debated from the beginning of astronomical history of the former habitability of that globe.
Now, on Mars, we had put to rest no less mysterious questions relating to the past history of our own planet. Adelung, as the Heidelberg professor a.s.serted, had named the Vale of Cashmere, as the probable site of the Garden of Eden, and the place of origin of the human race, but later investigators had taken issue with this opinion and the question where the Aryans originated on the earth had long been one of the most puzzling that science presented.
This question seemed now to have been settled.
Aina had said that Mars had completed 5,000 circuits about the sun since her people were brought to it as captives. One circuit of Mars occupies 687 days. More than 9000 years had therefore elapsed since the first invasion of the earth by the Martians.
Another great mystery--that of the origin of those gigantic and inexplicable monuments, the great pyramids and the Sphinx, on the banks of the Nile, had also apparently been solved by us, although these Egyptian wonders had been the furthest things from our thoughts when we set out for the planet Mars.
We had traveled more than thirty millions of miles in order to get answers to questions which could not be solved at home.
But from these speculations and retrospects we were recalled by the commander of the expedition.
"This is all very interesting and very romantic, gentlemen," he said, "but now let us get at the practical side of it. We have learned Aina"s language and heard her story. Let us next ascertain whether she can not place in our hands some key which will place Mars at our mercy. Remember what we came here for, and remember that the earth expects every man of us to do his duty."
This Nelson-like summons again changed the current of our thoughts, and we instantly set to work to learn from Aina if Mars, like Achilles, had not some vulnerable point where a blow would be mortal.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
_THE FLOOD GATES OF MARS_
It was a curious scene when the momentous interview which was to determine our fate and that of Mars began. Aina had been warned of what was coming. We in the flagship had all learned to speak her language with more or less ease, but it was deemed best that the Heidelberg professor, a.s.sisted by one of his colleagues, should act as interpreter.
The girl, flushed with excitement of the novel situation, fully appreciating the importance of what was about to occur, and looking more charming than before, stood at one side of the princ.i.p.al apartment.
Directly facing her were the interpreters, and the rest of us, all with ears intent and eyes focused upon Aina, stood in a double row behind them. As heretofore, I am setting down her words translated into our own tongue, having taken only so much liberty as to connect the sentences into a stricter sequence than they had when falling from her lips in reply to the questions which were showered upon her.
"You will never be victorious," she said, "if you attack them openly as you have been doing. They are too strong and too numerous. They are well prepared for such attacks, because they have had to resist them before.
"They have waged war with the inhabitants of the asteroid Ceres, whose people are giants greater than themselves. Their enemies from Ceres have attacked them here. Hence these fortifications, with weapons pointing skyward, and the great air fleets which you have encountered."
"But there must be some point," said Mr. Edison, "where we can."
"Yes, yes," interrupted the girl quickly, "there is one blow you can deal them which they could not withstand."
"What is that?" eagerly inquired the commander.
"You can drown them out."
"How? With the ca.n.a.ls?"
"Yes, I will explain to you. I have already told you, and, in fact, you must have seen for yourselves, that there are almost no mountains on Mars. A very learned man of my race used to say that the reason was because Mars is so very old a world that the mountains it once had have been almost completely leveled, and the entire surface of the planet had become a great plain. There are depressions, however, most of which are occupied by the seas. The greater part of the land lies below the level of the ocean. In order at the same time to irrigate the soil and make it fruitful, and to protect themselves from overflows by the ocean breaking in upon them, the Martians have constructed the immense and innumerable ca.n.a.ls which you see running in all directions over the continents.
"There is one period in the year, and that period has now arrived when there is special danger of a great deluge. Most of the oceans of Mars lie in the southern hemisphere. When it is Summer in that hemisphere, the great ma.s.ses of ice and snow collected around the south pole melt rapidly away."
"Yes, that is so," broke in one of the astronomers, who was listening attentively. "Many a time I have seen the vast snow fields around the southern pole of Mars completely disappear as the Summer sun rose high upon them."
"With the melting of these snows," continued Aina, "a rapid rise in the level of the water in the southern oceans occurs. On the side facing these oceans the continents of Mars are sufficiently elevated to prevent an overflow, but nearer the equator the level of the land sinks lower.
"With your telescopes you have no doubt noticed that there is a great bending sea connecting the oceans of the south with those of the north and running through the midst of the continents."
"Quite so," said the astronomer who had spoken before, "we call it the Syrtis Major."
"That long narrow sea," Aina went on, "forms a great channel through which the flood of waters caused by the melting of the southern polar snows flows swiftly toward the equator and then on toward the north until it reaches the sea basins which exist there. At that point it is rapidly turned into ice and snow, because, of course, while it is Summer in the southern hemisphere it is Winter in the northern.
"The Syrtis Major (I am giving our name to the channel of communication in place of that by which the girl called it) is like a great safety valve, which, by permitting the waters to flow northward, saves the continents from inundation.
"But when mid-Summer arrives, the snows around the pole, having been completely melted away, the flood ceases and the water begins to recede.
At this time, but for a device which the Martians have employed, the ca.n.a.ls connected with the oceans would run dry, and the vegetation left without moisture under the Summer sun, would quickly perish.
"To prevent this they have built a series of enormous gates extending completely across the Syrtis Major at its narrowest point (lat.i.tude 25 degrees south). These gates are all controlled by machinery collected at a single point on the sh.o.r.e of the strait. As soon as the flood in the Syrtis Major begins to recede, the gates are closed, and, the water being thus restrained, the irrigating ca.n.a.ls are kept full long enough to mature the harvests."