Mars Memoirs 6 - Canal Considerations
Aug. 15th, 2008 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pyat"Without the Grand Canal, there would be no people on Mars, leastways not anyone worth shipping a battalion across eighty-million miles of void to visit. Mars would be all Kraags and nomads clustered about salty sloughs and great howling stretches of nothing that make Antarctica look like Picadilly.
The canal, to suit its name, is a grand edifice. A mile wide, thirty-yards deep, and thirteen-thousand miles long, in a great blue garter belt around the equator, coming round again to meet itself like the serpent, Addyheesa, of Hindoo tales.
It goes all this way without benefits of locks or lakes or pumps or falls, cutting through hills and valleys and across canyons and spilling over plains, in a way that none of our engineers or inventors have been able to figure. It makes the Suez look like a wretched ditch, and no one can guess how it was made, nor even when. Nor can the scholars amongst the Marsfolk. The simpler people just consider it part of the landscape, or an Act of God, and I confess I can easily imagine a great, brawny, forearm reaching down from the orange sky and dragging a furrow across the dust with a Divine Forefinger.
Like Addyheesha, the serpent I mentioned earlier, the Grand Canal flows into itself and makes itself. In the opinion of some Marsfolk, it made itself by bein’ itself, if you follow. I don’t know that I can explain the idea. It’s what my old vicar (a wordy, bookish, puckerer) would call “ineffable.” Looking upon it, stretching and steaming in the cold air, mile after long mile, even a hard-headed fellow can’t help but think on how his life depends on it, and get to thinking on deeper thoughts than “When’s tiffin?” and “Where are the bloody cartridge tins?”
In any case, the Grand Canal is indubitably there, and without it, all the water on Mars would be locked up in the ice caps or the frost under the soil, and everyone would die gasping. Who built it, and when, and how it gets the water into itself, and how it pumps that water into a thousand tributaries, and stays clear of ice, and a hundred other mysteries, will have to wait for the attention of brainier chaps than I.
I stood on pier of black stone, and inspected the little fleet of steamers that awaited, and the native punts and barges that moved amongst them. Save for the presence of Johnny Martian, it could have been the Holy Ganges in the Mutiny, and me twelve years younger and carrying a Brown Bess and waiting to ride northwest to Banaras with a company of Gurkhas.
I recall I was feelin’ rather small and homesick then, and no wonder, being a Yorkshireman born in the shadow of The Mill, plucked up and dropped 5000 miles away with a gang of Hindoos, en route to a city as old as Egypt. How much more, then, should I feel small and homesick a thousand times further from home, sailing a canal older than Adam?"
- from the memoirs of Brigadier Franklin Begg, HM Own Martian Rifles (Ret.)
The canal, to suit its name, is a grand edifice. A mile wide, thirty-yards deep, and thirteen-thousand miles long, in a great blue garter belt around the equator, coming round again to meet itself like the serpent, Addyheesa, of Hindoo tales.
It goes all this way without benefits of locks or lakes or pumps or falls, cutting through hills and valleys and across canyons and spilling over plains, in a way that none of our engineers or inventors have been able to figure. It makes the Suez look like a wretched ditch, and no one can guess how it was made, nor even when. Nor can the scholars amongst the Marsfolk. The simpler people just consider it part of the landscape, or an Act of God, and I confess I can easily imagine a great, brawny, forearm reaching down from the orange sky and dragging a furrow across the dust with a Divine Forefinger.
Like Addyheesha, the serpent I mentioned earlier, the Grand Canal flows into itself and makes itself. In the opinion of some Marsfolk, it made itself by bein’ itself, if you follow. I don’t know that I can explain the idea. It’s what my old vicar (a wordy, bookish, puckerer) would call “ineffable.” Looking upon it, stretching and steaming in the cold air, mile after long mile, even a hard-headed fellow can’t help but think on how his life depends on it, and get to thinking on deeper thoughts than “When’s tiffin?” and “Where are the bloody cartridge tins?”
In any case, the Grand Canal is indubitably there, and without it, all the water on Mars would be locked up in the ice caps or the frost under the soil, and everyone would die gasping. Who built it, and when, and how it gets the water into itself, and how it pumps that water into a thousand tributaries, and stays clear of ice, and a hundred other mysteries, will have to wait for the attention of brainier chaps than I.
I stood on pier of black stone, and inspected the little fleet of steamers that awaited, and the native punts and barges that moved amongst them. Save for the presence of Johnny Martian, it could have been the Holy Ganges in the Mutiny, and me twelve years younger and carrying a Brown Bess and waiting to ride northwest to Banaras with a company of Gurkhas.
I recall I was feelin’ rather small and homesick then, and no wonder, being a Yorkshireman born in the shadow of The Mill, plucked up and dropped 5000 miles away with a gang of Hindoos, en route to a city as old as Egypt. How much more, then, should I feel small and homesick a thousand times further from home, sailing a canal older than Adam?"
- from the memoirs of Brigadier Franklin Begg, HM Own Martian Rifles (Ret.)
