ines appeared to be double, yet
when he looked at them again they had grown single. It was like a
conjuring trick. Great excitement was aroused by this, for if the canals
were altered so greatly it really did look as if there were intelligent
beings on Mars capable of working at them. In any case, if these are
really canals, to make them would be a stupendous feat, and if they are
artificial--that is, made by beings and not natural--they show a very
high power of engineering. Imagine anyone on earth making a canal many
miles wide and two thousand miles long! It is inconceivable, but that is
the feat attributed to the Martians. The supposed doubling of the
canals, as I say, caused a great deal of talk, and very few people could
see that they were double at all. Even now the fact is doubted, yet
there seems every reason to believe it is true. They do not all appear
to be double, and those that do are always the same ones, while others
undoubtedly remain single all the time. But the canals do not exhaust
the wonders of Mars. At each pole there is an ice-cap resembling those
found at our own poles, and this tells us pretty plainly something about
the climate of Mars, and that there is water there.

This ice-cap melts when the pole which it surrounds is directed toward
the sun, and sometimes in a hot summer it dwindles down almost to
nothing, in a way that the ice-caps at the poles of the earth never do.
A curious appearance has been noticed when it is melting: a dark shadow
seems to grow underneath the edge of it and extends gradually, and as it
extends the canals near it appear much darker and clearer than they did
before, and then the canals further south undergo the same change. This
looks as if the melting of the snow filled up the canals with water, and
was a means of watering the planet by a system totally different from
anything we know here, where our poles are surrounded by oceans, and the
ice-caps do not in the least affect our water-supply. But, then, another
strange fact had to be taken into consideration. These straight lines
called canals ran out over the seas occasionally, and it was impossible
to believe that if they were canals they could do that. Other things
began to be discussed, such as the fact that the green parts of Mars did
not always remain green. In what is the springtime of Mars they are so,
but afterwards they become yellow, and still later in the season parts
near the pole turn brown. Thus the i