The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars | Page 9

which the great and good unceasingly labor to secure for us here and unceasingly fail to secure. O my child, if we could learn somehow to get tidings from that distant sphere, if only the viewless abyss of space between our world and Mars might be bridged by the noiseless and unseen waves of a magnetic current."
We reached Christ Church in June, in 1883, and for one year were most busy in completing the station we had selected, in receiving apparatus, getting our observatory built and a useful, but not large telescope mounted.
The position taken by us was attractive. It was upon a high hill, a glacial mound which had been smoothed upon its upper surface into a long and broad plain. The prospects from this position were exceedingly beautiful. Christ Church was some ten miles distant and the irregular shores northward outlined by ribbons of breaking waves lay upon the seaward margin of our vision, while the broken intermediate landscape, with interrupted agricultural domains and forests was in front of us and far above us rose the grander peaks of the New Zealand Alps, a constant charm through the changing atmosphere, now brought near to us through the optical refraction of the clear air, and again veiled and shadowed and removed into spectral evanescent forms. The picture was intensely interesting and like all commanding views where the most expressive elements of scenery are combined, the remote sea, reflecting every mood of light and color, and the snowy peaks carrying to us the opaline glories of rising or setting sun was a comparison that stimulated and controlled the spectator with its wonderful charm and strength and poetic changes.
To me whose emotional nature, inherited from a mother gifted with delicate tastes and a refined enthusiasm for the beautiful had been curiously discouraged by association with my father's scientific pursuits, this lively panorama constantly fed my dreams with pleasing pictures.
My life has been an isolated and repressed one, except for the one incident I am about to bequeath to posterity. I had not enjoyed the play of youthful companions except in a fugitive way, I had not gone to school nor passed three years of muscular and buoyant activity in the usual pastimes and pleasures of childhood. I had a precocious nature and it had been unfolded in an atmosphere of strictly intellectual ideas. My mother had been a constant joy to me during the short years of her life on earth, but somehow by reason of sickness I had not enjoyed even her endearment as I might have.
So in my father and his aspirations, and the later hopes of his excited and passionate longing to regain some trace of my mother, my life from four years of age was actually and potentially concentrated. My father cherished me with a great consuming love. He saw in me the representation in face and partially in temperament of his wife. He lavished on me every care. Yet because of his eager affection, and his complete suspense from social connections I was made too largely dependent on him alone. I lived in his companionship only. My conversation became prematurely advanced in terms and principles, and my childish confidence was nurtured by nothing less wonderful than books and theories, experiments and dissertations.
The wonderful beauty of our new surroundings, the strangeness of our sudden removal from America, the long distances travelled, awoke in me new thoughts and I readily surrendered myself at times to the incoherent struggles of my nature, to find someone, something, more responsive to my young feelings than essays on magnetism, and a man, father though he was, immersed in demonstrations and problems. It was then that this distant picture in the days of the fragrant and reviving springtime, filled me with unutterable and touching ecstacy.
My father, as I had said, fully intended to arrive at some definite conclusions as to the possibilities of wireless telegraphy. At one end of the grassy plain I have alluded to, our chief stations were erected and, at the distance of two miles, almost at the other extremity, we placed a smaller station. Our whole work was to achieve telegraphic communication between these points without wires. At night my father bent his telescopic gaze upon the heavens, and as the earth approached opposition to Mars in 1884 I remember his eagerness and his repeated adjurations that if we failed in the task in his lifetime I should devote my life, separated from all other occupations and indulgences, to carrying on his designs.
At first he only dimly intimated his great ambition, the union of our world with others by magnetic waves, but as it slowly assumed a theoretical certainty he talked more and more boldly of this portentous and transforming possibility.
I cannot refrain from noticing another important scientific activity