The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (27 page)

I have seen no evidence of the channels, or canals, observed by Cardinal Secchi, nor of the other mighty works of Mind which many claim to have observed. Nor, indeed, have I espied evidence of life: no herds move across these rusty plains, and not even the presence of vegetation is evident to me. Such colourings as I have discerned appear to owe more to geologic features than to the processes of life. Even Syrtis Major — Huygens’ Hourglass Sea — is revealed as a cratered upland, no more moist than the bleakest desert of Earth.

Thus I have been forced to confront the truth:

Mars is a dead world. As dead as the Moon!

We
got out of our phaeton and embarked by foot across that high plain, which Ardan called Stones Hill. I saw how several well-made roads converged on this desolate spot, free of traffic, enigmatic. There was even a rail track, rusting and long disused, snaking off in the direction of Tampa Town.

All over the plain I found the ruins of magazines, workshops, furnaces and workmen’s huts. Whether or not Ardan spoke the truth, it was evident that some great enterprise had taken place here.

At the heart of the plain was a low mound. This little hill was surrounded by a ring of low constructions of stone, regularly built, and set at a radius of perhaps six hundred yards from the summit itself. Each construction was topped by an elliptical arch, some of which remained intact.

I walked into this ring, two thirds of a mile across, and looked around. “My word, Ardan!” I cried, impressed despite my scepticism. “This has the feel of some immense prehistoric site — a Stonehenge, perhaps, transported to the Americas. Why, there must be several hundred of these squat monoliths.”

“More than a thousand,” he said. “They are reverberating ovens, to fuse the many millions of tons of cast iron which plated the mighty
Columbiad.
See here.” He traced out a shallow trench in the soil. “Here are the channels by which the iron was directed into the central mould — from all twelve hundred ovens, simultaneously!”

At the summit of the hill — the convergence of the thousand trenches — there was a circular pit, perhaps sixty feet in diameter. Ardan and I approached this cavity cautiously. I found that it opened into a cylindrical shaft, dug vertically into that rocky landscape.

Ardan took a coin from his pocket and flicked it into the mouth of the great well. I heard it clatter several times against metal walls, but I could not hear it fall to rest.

Taking my courage in my hands — all my life I have suffered a certain dread of subterranean places — I stepped towards the lip of the well. I saw that its sides were sheer: evidently finely manufactured, and constructed of what appeared to be cast iron. But the iron was extensively flaked and rusted.

Looking around from this summit, I saw now a pattern to the damaged landscape: the ovens, the flimsier huts, were smashed and scattered outwards from this central spot, as if some great explosion had once occurred here. And I saw how disturbed soil streaked across the land, radially away from the hill; from a balloon, I speculated, these stripes of discoloration might have resembled the rays around the great craters of the Moon.

This Ozymandian scene was terrifically poignant: great things had been wrought here, and yet now these immense devices lay ruined, broken — forgotten.

Ardan paced about by the lip of the abandoned cannon; he exuded an extraordinary restlessness, as if the whole of the Earth had become a cage insufficient for him. “It was magnificent!” he cried. “When the electrical spark ignited the guncotton, and the ground shook, and the pillar of flame hurled aside the air, throwing over the spectators and their horses like matchstalks! . . . And there was the barest glimpse of the projectile itself, ascending like a soul in that fiery light . . .”

I gazed up at the hot, blank sky, and imagined this Barbicane climbing into his cannon-shell, to the applause of his ageing friends. He would have called it bravery, I suppose. But how easy it must have been, to sail away into the infinite aether — forever! — and to leave behind the Earthbound complexities of debtors and broken promises. Was Barbicane exploring, I wondered — or escaping?

As I plunge towards the glowing pool of Martian air — as that russet, cratered barrenness opens out beneath me — I descend into

despair. Is all of the Solar System to prove as bleak as the worlds I have visited?

This must be my last transmission. I wish my final words to be an utterance of deepest gratitude to my loyal friends, notably Col. J. T Maston and my partners in the National Company of Interstellar Communication, who have followed my fruitless journey across space for so many months.

I am sure this new defeat will be trumpeted by those jackals who hounded my National Company into bankruptcy; with nothing but dead landscapes as his destination, it may be many decades before man leaves the air of Earth again!

“Sir, it seems I must credit your veracity. But what is it you want of me? Why have you brought me here?”

After his Gallic fashion, he grabbed at my arm. “I have read your books. I know you are a man of imagination. You must publish Maston’s account — tell the story of this place . . .”

“But why? What would be the purpose? If Common Man is unimpressed by such exploits — if he regards these feats as a hoax, or a cynical exploitation by gun-manufacturers — who am I to argue against him? We have entered a new century, M. Ardan: the century of Socialism. We must concentrate on the needs of Earth — on poverty, injustice, disease — and turn our faces to new worlds only when we have reached our manhood on this one . . .”

But Ardan heard none of this. He still gripped my arm, and again I saw that wildness in his old eyes — eyes that had, perhaps, seen too much. “I would go back! That is all. I am embedded in gravity. It clings, it clings! Oh, Mr Wells, let me go back!”

TABLEAUX by F. Gwynplaine Maclntyre

Despite the success and popularity of his books Verne had no time to pause. Over the next two years he strove to meet his contractual obligation of three books a year, a demanding schedule that was revised, in 1866, to two books a year. After completing the three-decker adventure novel
Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant
(1865-67), also known as
In Search of the Castaways
or
A Voyage Round the World,
Verne felt he had earned a rest. During March and April 1867 he and his brother Paul visited the United States. He only had time to spend a week in America, travelling from New York to the Niagara Falls via Albany and Buffalo. He was probably surprised to find that his work was known in America. His first official American book publication was
Five Weeks in a Balloon,
which did not appear until 1869, but his work was being pirated in magazines and newspapers. His early story “A Voyage in a Balloon” had appeared in
Sartain’s Union Magazine
as early as May 1852 and
From the Earth to the Moon
was being serialized at that moment in the
New York Weekly Magazine. F.
Gwynplaine MacIntyre has taken Verne’s visit to New York as the focus for the following story, which is based upon authentic period records.

The crossing was fatal. The first day out from Liverpool, the crew were hoisting the huge starboard anchor when a capstan pin snapped, throwing the anchor’s full 80-ton weight upon twelve sailors. One man was killed instantly, and four deckhands were injured. On this westward crossing, the six-masted steam liner
Great Eastern
carried one hundred and twenty-three passengers bound for New York. Captain Anderson personally asked the first-class passengers to offer a minute’s silence for the dead seaman as his corpse was consigned to the waves.

Among the mourners on the afterdeck were two Frenchmen: brothers, sharing a first-class stateroom; the older brother’s publisher having paid 1,300 francs for their passage. The sailor’s shrouded corpse was reverently carried to the rail, with no sound except the creak of the rigging overhead. just before the dead mariner disembarked for his last journey, the older of the two Frenchmen thought he saw a movement within the taut canvas shroud. The dead sailor’s hand beckoned to the passenger, and the dead sailor’s bearded face whispered:

“Monsieur Verne, in your boyhood you ran off to sea. My fate might well have been your own, if your voyage had taken a different heading?’

Then the shrouded form went overboard, as the ship’s bandmaster piped a dirge. The passenger shuddered, and banished the thought of that dead face. The imagined voice perhaps had been the screech of the gulls overhead, or the breath of his own conscience.

The crossing took eleven days . . . and the
Great Eastern
was scheduled to begin her return voyage precisely one week from arrival. Thus, when the world’s mightiest steamship reached New York City’s harbour on the ninth of April, 1867, Jules Verne and his brother Paul had only seven days and nights in which to experience all they hoped to encounter of New York and Canada.

As the ship approached the Bethune Street Pier of Manhattan, Jules Verne looked across the shore to the city of Brooklyn, and he was astonished to see an immense wooden cylinder, rising twenty-one metres above the ocean’s waves. “I marvel at such American wonders,” he said to his younger brother, pointing over the ship’s rail. “What is that tower, rising out of the sea?”

“There is no tower in the sea,” said Paul Verne to his brother. “Jules, are you imagining another novel?”

“Behold the future, monsieur,”
whispered a voice at Jules Verne’s ear, speaking French in an arcane accent.
“That cylinder is the caisson at Peck Slip, for the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. But it will not arrive until May 1870, more than three years downstream of your present moment.”

As this whisper fell silent, the tower vanished. In the excitement of his arrival in this new world, Verne chastised himself for letting his imagination take the helm of his faculties. There were enough
genuine
marvels on this American continent to propel a score of novels.

“At least we have been made welcome,” said Jules to Paul, as the brothers cleared the Customs station at quayside, summoning porters for assistance with their steamer trunks. “See, Paul? This time, I do not imagine what I behold. The streets and buildings of Manhattan are draped with buntings in homage to our French
tricoleur.
Do not tell me that this is the custom for America’s streets.”

Indeed, the lamp-posts and rooftops of Manhattan were garlanded with draperies striped in patterns of red, white and blue. Paul Verne — a former naval officer, now a stockbroker, and in consequence more practical than his brother — seemed sceptical. “It does indeed seem out of the common,
frère
Jules. Yet I scarce believe that these decorations are in honour of France . . .”

An officer of the English steamship, overhearing these words and conversant in French, touched his visor and explained:
“Messieurs
Verne, today is April ninth. By good fortune, we have arrived in New York on the very day when these Yanks are celebrating the second anniversary of the end to their long Civil War. You will find the Yankees more jubilant than usual, today at least.”

“A pity that we have only one week in which to taste their hospitality,” said Paul Verne as his brother summoned a cabriolet.

“As we have only one day and one night in New York City before journeying north to the mighty Niagara,” Jules Verne decreed, “let us billet ourselves in the finest hotel available.”

This proved to be at the northwest corner of the crossroads where 23rd Street intersected Broadway: the magnificent Fifth Avenue Hotel, a six-storey edifice of white marble. As the Verne brothers strode between the six Corinthian pillars at the hotel’s entrance, Paul remarked: “Let us take lodgings on the ground floor, so as to avoid any stairs.”

His brother waved airily. “I am a collector of wonders! Let us have berths on the topmost flight, to obtain the best view of this magnificent city!”

Inside the hotel, an astonishment awaited . . . for it was possible for both travellers to achieve their desires in tandem: a view from a height with an absence of stairs. To their delight, the Verne brothers discovered that the Fifth Avenue Hotel contained the first and only passenger-lift in New York City. As the brothers stepped into the brass-gated cage, an attendant in mauve livery touched his cap and pressed a lever . . . and rapidly they ascended.

While Paul Verne marvelled at the counterweights enabling the brass cage to rise through the building, Jules Verne expressed astonishment at the elevator’s ingenious gas-fitting. A long flexible tube of
caoutchouc
India rubber connected the elevator’s twin gas-lamps to a pipeline in the hotel’s cellar, where a spool on a revolving spindle paid out a reel of tubing as the elevator ascended, then shortened it again as the elevator came downwards . . . so that the interior of the passenger-lift was always lighted by a steady flow of coal-gas. The attendant explained that the elevator was steam-powered, and that the hotel’s management was pleased to advertise it as “the vertical railway”.