k mightn't have
higher buildings, or Chicago cover more ground, but for sheer mass,
those structures were in a class by themselves. Gargantuan!

"There was a queer look about the place, though. You know how a
terrestrial city sprawls out, a nimbus of suburbs, a ring of residential
sections, factory districts, parks, highways. There was none of that
here; the city rose out of the desert as abruptly as a cliff. Only a few
little sand mounds marked the division, and then the walls of those
gigantic structures.

"The architecture was strange, too. There were lots of devices that are
impossible back home, such as set-backs in reverse, so that a building
with a small base could spread out as it rose. That would be a valuable
trick in New York, where land is almost priceless, but to do it, you'd
have to transfer Martian gravitation there!

"Well, since you can't very well land a rocket in a city street, we put
down right next to the canal side of the city, took our small cameras
and revolvers, and started for a gap in the wall of masonry. We weren't
ten feet from the rocket when we both saw the explanation for a lot of
the queerness.

"The city was in ruin! Abandoned, deserted, dead as Babylon! Or at
least, so it looked to us then, with its empty streets which, if they
had been paved, were now deep under sand."

"A ruin, eh?" commented Harrison. "How old?"

"How could we tell?" countered Jarvis. "The next expedition to this golf
ball ought to carry an archeologist--and a philologist, too, as we
found out later. But it's a devil of a job to estimate the age of
anything here; things weather so slowly that most of the buildings might
have been put up yesterday. No rainfall, no earthquakes, no vegetation
is here to spread cracks with its roots--nothing. The only aging factors
here are the erosion of the wind--and that's negligible in this
atmosphere--and the cracks caused by changing temperature. And one other
agent--meteorites. They must crash down occasionally on the city,
judging from the thinness of the air, and the fact that we've seen four
strike ground right here near the _Ares_."

"Seven," corrected the captain. "Three dropped while you were gone."

"Well, damage by meteorites must be slow, anyway. Big ones would be as
rare here as on earth, because big ones get through in spite of the
atmosphere, and those buildings could sustain a lot of little ones. My
guess at the city's age--and it may be wrong by a big perce