Before space probes started returning images of the Mars we now know, a beautiful but desolate desert wasteland, our hopes for the Martian surface were shaped by the work of Percival Lowell, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was hoped, and even in the realm of possibility of scientific imagination, that Mars was indeed a desert, but a meticulously cultivated one, with great waterworks and a slowly dying agriculture lovingly tended by a fading civilization. A Pharaonic world alongside an artificial Nile. Martian maps of this era showed the canals crossing the planet in great circles, in a generally North-South direction, the irrigated lands alongside them expanding with the spring thaws as water rushed from the melting polar icecaps to the parched equatorial regions.

Mars was imagined as a vast, flat desert of fine dust, a land of violet skies, Barchan dunes and red sand seas, lifeless but for an occasional sandstorm or dust devil, with scattered oases of low vegetatiion surrounding fantastic cities where the canals intersected. Sometimes the canals were arranged in pairs, parallel lines crossiing vast distances. Their very geometry, great circle geodesics, was the evidence that argued eloquently for their artificial nature: the last great engineering work of a great but declining civilization.

Many maps of Mars were published during this era, which extended well past the mid-twentieth century. They were everywhere, both popular works and detailed Mercator wall maps, scientific charts, magazine covers and article illustrations in Sky and Telescope. There was even a Martian globe, the canals dutifully named and catalogued, far too expensive for the meager allowance of this aspiring young astronomer/astronaut. I remember fantasizing over those graceful, ghostly images with their elegant names from Classical mythology: Syrtis Major, Nubia, Solis Lacus. In the 1950s, when Collier's published the von Braun/Ley articles on the coming conquest of the red planet, this was the vision from space which the illustrators painted, fleets of businesslike and unstreamlined spacecraft, floating oil refineries in orbit above a beautiful world, their graceful winged landers alongside preparing for the final descent.

Do any of those old maps still exist? Are they collected in a website somewhere, Bonestelled images, now obsolete but representing the best available science of their time? Are any for sale, or downloadable? The Mars we know now is a strange and fascinating place, and it no doubt holds many surprises for us. But I miss the old Mars terribly. It was a beautiful and mysterious place.