This time we ventured a little beyond the pink mountains of Tula, the oasis of crystal, and for days on end we passed between innumerable dunes. The Martian sky was always like itself, very pure, a very dark blue with an occasional hint of grey, and with admirable pink efflorescences at sunrise and sunset.

Our tractors performed quite satisfactorily. We were venturing into regions that had hardly been explored thus far, at least by land, and we were reasonably sure of being the first to negotiate these desolate passes. The first men, at any rate; for what we were more or less vaguely searching for was some trace of an ancient civilization. It has never been admitted on Earth that Mars is not only a dead world, but a world eternally deserted. It has long been hoped that we would discover some remains of defunct empires, or perhaps the fallen descendants of the mythical masters of the red planet. Too many stories have been told about Mars for ten years of scientific and fruitless exploration on this point to undo all the legends.

But neither Ferrier nor La Salle nor I particularly believed in the possibility of so fantastic an encounter. We were mature and slightly disillusioned men, and we had left the Earth some years before to escape the wind of insanity which at that time was sweeping our native planet. This was something that we did not like to talk about, as it pained us. We sometimes thought it was due to the immense solitude of a species that had just achieved self-awareness, that confronted the universe, that hoped to receive a response, even a fatal one, to its challenge. But space remained silent and the planets deserted.

We were descending, then, toward the south, in the direction of the Martian equator. The maps were still imprecise at this time, and we had been assigned to make certain geological reports which could not be done from an airplane. As a psychologist, I was only moderately qualified for this task, but I also knew how to drive a tractor and how the instruments worked, and men were scarce on Mars.

The worst thing was the monotony that prevailed throughout these days.