We also found clothing that had been abandoned by the previous occupants, and we wore the drab garments over our own clothes. Naturally enough they were rather large for us, but the loose fit over our clothes made our bodies appear larger, and so we were able to pass more readily as Martians.
Amelia tied her hair back in a tight bun—approximating the style favoured by the Martian women—and I allowed my new beard to grow; every few days Amelia trimmed it with her nail-scissors to give it the wispy appearance of the Martians’.
At the time all this seemed to us a matter of priority; we were very aware that we looked different from the Martians. To this extent, our two days sojourn in the desert had been to our unwitting advantage: our sunburned faces, uncomfortable as they were, were a credible approximation of the Martians’ skin-hue. As the days passed, and our complexions began to fade, we returned one day to the desert beyond the city, and a few hours in that bitter radiant heat restored the colour temporarily.
But this is taking my narrative ahead of itself, for to convey how we, survived in that city I must first describe the place itself.
ii
Within a few days, of our arrival, Amelia had dubbed our new home Desolation City, for reasons which should already be clear.
Desolation City was situated at the junction of two canals. One of these, the one by whose banks we had first landed, ran directly from north to south. The second approached from the north-west, and after the junction—where there was a complicated arrangements of locks—continued to the south-east. The city had been built in the obtuse angle formed by the two canals, and along its southern and western edges were several docking accesses to the waterways.
As near as we could estimate it the city covered about twelve square miles, but a comparison on this basis with Earth cities is misleading, for Desolation City was almost exactly circular. Moreover, the Martians had lighted on the ingenious notion of entirely separating the industrial life of the city from the residential, for the buildings were designed for the everyday needs of the people, while the manufacturing work was carried out in the industrial areas beyond the city’s periphery.
There were two such industrial concentrations: the large one we had seen from the train, which lay to the north, and a smaller one built beside the canal to the south-east.
In terms of resident population, Desolation City was very small indeed, and it was this aspect which had most prompted Amelia to give it its unprepossessing name.
That the city had been built to accommodate many thousands of people was quite obvious, for buildings there were many and open spaces there were few; that only a fraction of the city was presently occupied was equally apparent, and large areas were laid to waste. In these parts many of the buildings were derelict, and the streets were littered with masonry and rusting girders.
We discovered that only the occupied parts of the city were lighted at night, for as we explored the city by day we frequently found areas of decay where none of the towers was present. We never ventured into these regions at night, for quite apart from being dark and threatening in their loneliness, such areas were patrolled by fast-moving vehicles which drove through the streets with a banshee howling and an ever-probing beam of light.
This sinister policing of the city was the first indication that the Martian people had inflicted on themselves a régime of Draconian suppression.
We often speculated as to the causes of the under-population. At first we surmised that the shortage of manpower was only apparent, created by the quite prodigious amount of effort poured into the industrial processes. By day we could see the industrial areas beyond the city’s perimeter, belching dense smoke from hundreds of chimneys, and by night we saw the same areas brightly lit as the work continued; thus it was that we assumed most of the city’s people were at work, labouring around the clock through work-shifts. However, as we grew more used to living in the city, we saw that not many of the ruling-class Martians ever left its confines, and that therefore most of the industrial workers would be of the slave class.
I have mentioned that the city was circular in shape. We discovered this by accident and over a period of several days, and were able to confirm it later by ascending one of the taller buildings in the city.
Our first realization came as follows. On our second or third full day in Desolation City, Amelia and I were walking northwards through the city, intending to see if we could cross the mile or so of desert between us and the larger of the two industrial concentrations.
We came to a street which led directly northwards, seeming to open eventually on to the desert. This was in one of the populated areas of the city, and watch-towers abounded. I noticed, as we approached, that the tower nearest to the desert had stopped rotating to and fro, and I pointed this out to Amelia. We considered for a few moments whether or not to continue, but Amelia said she saw no harm.
However, as we passed the tower it was quite obvious that the man or men inside were rotating the observation-platform to watch us, and the dark, oval window at the front mutely followed our progress past it. No action was taken against us, so we continued, but with a distinct feeling of apprehension.
So taken were we with this silent monitoring that we fetched up unexpectedly and shockingly against the true perimeter of the city; this took the form of an invisible, or nearly invisible, wall, stretching from one side of the roadway to the other. Naturally enough, we thought at first that the substance was glass, but this could not be the case. Nor was it, indeed, any other form of material that we knew. Our best notion was that it was some kind of energetic field, induced by electrical means. It was, though, completely inert, and under the gaze of the watch-tower we made a few rudimentary attempts to fathom it. All we could feel was the impermeable, invisible barrier, cold to the touch.
Chastened, we walked back the way we had come.
On a later occasion, we walked through one of the empty quarters of the city, and found that there too the wall existed. Before long we had established that the wall extended all around the city, crossing not just streets but behind buildings too.
Later, from the aspect of the roof, we saw that few if any of the buildings lay beyond this circle.
It was Amelia who first posited a solution, linking this phenomenon with the undoubted one that air-density and overall temperature in the city were higher than outside. She suggested that the invisible barrier was not merely a wall, but in fact a hemisphere which covered the entire city. Beneath this, she said, air-pressure could be maintained at an acceptable level, and the effect of the sun through it would be closely akin to that of a glasshouse.
iii
Desolation City was not, however, a prison. To leave it was as easy as it had been for us to enter it initially. On our journeys of exploration we came across several places where it was possible merely to walk through some specially maintained fault in the wall and enter the rarefied atmosphere of the desert.
One such fault was the series of doors and corridors at the railway terminus; there were similar ones at the wharves built by the canals, and some of these were immense structures by which imported materials could be taken into the city. Several of the major streets, which ran towards the industrial areas, had transit buildings through which people could pass freely.
What was most interesting of all, though, was that the vehicles of the city were able to pass directly through the wall without either hesitation or detectable leakage of the pressurized atmosphere. We saw this occur many times.
I must now turn the attention of this narrative towards the nature of these vehicles, for among the many marvels Amelia and I saw on Mars these numbered among the most amazing.