Valley of Dreams | Page 4

of the Mare Chronium that bounded it. That was narrow; we crossed it in half an hour, and there was Thyle I--same orange-hued desert as its mate. We veered south, toward the Mare Australe, and followed the edge of the desert. And toward sunset we spotted it."
"Shpotted?" echoed Putz. "Vot vas shpotted?"
"The desert was spotted--with buildings! Not one of the mud cities of the canals, although a canal went through it. From the map we figured the canal was a continuation of the one Schiaparelli called Ascanius.
"We were probably too high to be visible to any inhabitants of the city, but also too high for a good look at it, even with the glasses. However, it was nearly sunset, anyway, so we didn't plan on dropping in. We circled the place; the canal went out into the Mare Australe, and there, glittering in the south, was the melting polar ice-cap! The canal drained it; we could distinguish the sparkle of water in it. Off to the southeast, just at the edge of the Mare Australe, was a valley--the first irregularity I'd seen on Mars except the cliffs that bounded Xanthus and Thyle II. We flew over the valley--" Jarvis paused suddenly and shuddered; Leroy, whose color had begun to return, seemed to pale. The chemist resumed, "Well, the valley looked all right--then! Just a gray waste, probably full of crawlers like the others.
"We circled back over the city; say, I want to tell you that place was--well, gigantic! It was colossal; at first I thought the size was due to that illusion I spoke of--you know, the nearness of the horizon--but it wasn't that. We sailed right over it, and you've never seen anything like it!
"But the sun dropped out of sight right then. I knew we were pretty far south--latitude 60--but I didn't know just how much night we'd have."
Harrison glanced at a Schiaparelli chart. "About 60--eh?" he said. "Close to what corresponds to the Antarctic circle. You'd have about four hours of night at this season. Three months from now you'd have none at all."
"Three months!" echoed Jarvis, surprised. Then he grinned. "Right! I forget the seasons here are twice as long as ours. Well, we sailed out into the desert about twenty miles, which put the city below the horizon in case we overslept, and there we spent the night.
"You're right about the length of it. We had about four hours of darkness which left us fairly rested. We ate breakfast, called our location to you, and started over to have a look at the city.
"We sailed toward it from the east and it loomed up ahead of us like a range of mountains. Lord, what a city! Not that New York mightn't have higher buildings, or Chicago cover more ground, but for sheer mass, those structures were in a class by themselves. Gargantuan!
"There was a queer look about the place, though. You know how a terrestrial city sprawls out, a nimbus of suburbs, a ring of residential sections, factory districts, parks, highways. There was none of that here; the city rose out of the desert as abruptly as a cliff. Only a few little sand mounds marked the division, and then the walls of those gigantic structures.
"The architecture was strange, too. There were lots of devices that are impossible back home, such as set-backs in reverse, so that a building with a small base could spread out as it rose. That would be a valuable trick in New York, where land is almost priceless, but to do it, you'd have to transfer Martian gravitation there!
"Well, since you can't very well land a rocket in a city street, we put down right next to the canal side of the city, took our small cameras and revolvers, and started for a gap in the wall of masonry. We weren't ten feet from the rocket when we both saw the explanation for a lot of the queerness.
"The city was in ruin! Abandoned, deserted, dead as Babylon! Or at least, so it looked to us then, with its empty streets which, if they had been paved, were now deep under sand."
"A ruin, eh?" commented Harrison. "How old?"
"How could we tell?" countered Jarvis. "The next expedition to this golf ball ought to carry an archeologist--and a philologist, too, as we found out later. But it's a devil of a job to estimate the age of anything here; things weather so slowly that most of the buildings might have been put up yesterday. No rainfall, no earthquakes, no vegetation is here to spread cracks with its roots--nothing. The only aging factors here are the erosion of the wind--and that's negligible in this atmosphere--and the cracks caused by changing temperature. And one other agent--meteorites. They must crash down occasionally on the city, judging