They lead
simple, laborious lives, digging away at their canals every morning, and
filling them up every night, for reasons best known to themselves and
certain professors at Harvard. I am attracted by their quaint
appearance. Mr. H. G. Wells, for instance, has depicted them with
cylindrical bodies of sheet iron, long legs like a tripod, heads like an
enormous diver's helmet, and arms like the tentacles of an octopus--as
odd a sight in their way as the latest woman's fashions from Paris.
Others have described the Martians as pot-bellied and hairless, with
goggle eyes, powerful arms, and curly, gelatinous legs, the result of
millions of years of universal culture and Subway congestion. A race so
unattractive could not but be virtuous. One feels instinctively that
there is no graft bound up with the digging of the Martian canals.
No, anything but graft. One of the principal reasons why I am so fond of
the canals on Mars is that they are the most cheaply built system of
public works on record. A professor of astronomy in Italy or Arizona
finds a few dim lines on the plate of his camera, and immediately Mars
is equipped with a splendid network of artificial waterways.
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