The Gods of Mars | Page 4

twigs were as
smooth and as highly polished as the newest of American-made pianos.
The wood of some of the trees was as black as ebony, while their
nearest neighbours might perhaps gleam in the subdued light of the
forest as clear and white as the finest china, or, again, they were azure,
scarlet, yellow, or deepest purple.
And in the same way was the foliage as gay and variegated as the stems,
while the blooms that clustered thick upon them may not be described
in any earthly tongue, and indeed might challenge the language of the

gods.
As I neared the confines of the forest I beheld before me and between
the grove and the open sea, a broad expanse of meadow land, and as I
was about to emerge from the shadows of the trees a sight met my eyes
that banished all romantic and poetic reflection upon the beauties of the
strange landscape.
To my left the sea extended as far as the eye could reach, before me
only a vague, dim line indicated its further shore, while at my right a
mighty river, broad, placid, and majestic, flowed between scarlet banks
to empty into the quiet sea before me.
At a little distance up the river rose mighty perpendicular bluffs, from
the very base of which the great river seemed to rise.
But it was not these inspiring and magnificent evidences of Nature's
grandeur that took my immediate attention from the beauties of the
forest. It was the sight of a score of figures moving slowly about the
meadow near the bank of the mighty river.
Odd, grotesque shapes they were; unlike anything that I had ever seen
upon Mars, and yet, at a distance, most manlike in appearance. The
larger specimens appeared to be about ten or twelve feet in height when
they stood erect, and to be proportioned as to torso and lower
extremities precisely as is earthly man.
Their arms, however, were very short, and from where I stood seemed
as though fashioned much after the manner of an elephant's trunk, in
that they moved in sinuous and snakelike undulations, as though
entirely without bony structure, or if there were bones it seemed that
they must be vertebral in nature.
As I watched them from behind the stem of a huge tree, one of the
creatures moved slowly in my direction, engaged in the occupation that
seemed to be the principal business of each of them, and which
consisted in running their oddly shaped hands over the surface of the
sward, for what purpose I could not determine.

As he approached quite close to me I obtained an excellent view of him,
and though I was later to become better acquainted with his kind, I may
say that that single cursory examination of this awful travesty on
Nature would have proved quite sufficient to my desires had I been a
free agent. The fastest flier of the Heliumetic Navy could not quickly
enough have carried me far from this hideous creature.
Its hairless body was a strange and ghoulish blue, except for a broad
band of white which encircled its protruding, single eye: an eye that
was all dead white--pupil, iris, and ball.
Its nose was a ragged, inflamed, circular hole in the centre of its blank
face; a hole that resembled more closely nothing that I could think of
other than a fresh bullet wound which has not yet commenced to bleed.
Below this repulsive orifice the face was quite blank to the chin, for the
thing had no mouth that I could discover.
The head, with the exception of the face, was covered by a tangled
mass of jet-black hair some eight or ten inches in length. Each hair was
about the bigness of a large angleworm, and as the thing moved the
muscles of its scalp this awful head-covering seemed to writhe and
wriggle and crawl about the fearsome face as though indeed each
separate hair was endowed with independent life.
The body and the legs were as symmetrically human as Nature could
have fashioned them, and the feet, too, were human in shape, but of
monstrous proportions. From heel to toe they were fully three feet long,
and very flat and very broad.
As it came quite close to me I discovered that its strange movements,
running its odd hands over the surface of the turf, were the result of its
peculiar method of feeding, which consists in cropping off the tender
vegetation with its razorlike talons and sucking it up from its two
mouths, which lie one in the palm of each hand, through its arm-like
throats.
In addition to the features which I have already described, the beast was

equipped with a massive tail about six feet in length, quite