Imagine Planet Mars from the surface of Earth: a bright, reddish star that sometimes appears in the early evening. Think next about the various reports that I had heard growing up: no liquid water, an entire surface bare of any plant or animal life, rocky soil composed mostly of iron oxide, also known as rust. Why bother?

Well, said my friends and loved ones, maybe you should take a closer look, because the closer you get to something the more details will emerge, and you might be surprised at what you see. With this sage advice under my belt, I cashed in my 401K and booked a flight from Earth’s new commercial spaceport. After several months of dodging asteroids, I found myself on the surface of the Red Planet. And as I looked around at the austere, blood-colored scape before me, I could not help thinking about that other Mars, also known as Ares, the warrior deity of the ancient Greek/Roman pantheon. Perhaps, I thought, he carries a sword and shield of much the same color.

Ares, I further thought, is one cool dude, but this–this is just a bunch of rocks.

But later, while trundling along the lip of the deepest canyon known to exist in all the worlds, a valley five miles from floor the ceiling that has, apparently, been trying to conceal a vast trove of water ice, I noticed a new kind of wonderment. Terrifyingly cold, startlingly light on gravity, and utterly abandoned, Mars none the less began to grow on me. I learned that these enormous valleys, and the correspondingly highest mountain ever known to exist (17-mile-high Olympus Mons) were in part created by the lack of tectonic movement on Mars. This planet, with a surface scarred by the traces of long-ago rivers, is truly sleeping, offering mere glimpses of past and perhaps future glories. Olympus Mons, named for the home of Mars’ immortal namesake, was once a thundering volcano. As I stood gazing at its quiet slopes, I could almost hear the roar.

A great dragonfly of a flying machine took me over the Martian polar regions. My guide explained to me that both poles sport caps of permanent water ice, which is overlaid during each respective winter by a layer of frozen carbon dioxide, brought low by the fearsome cold. The northern cap, being somewhat warmer, surrenders most of its layer of dry ice in summer, while the southern pole retains its own layer throughout the Martian year. Imagine that northern pole in spring, with a great cloud of carbon dioxide vapor roiling up from the deep freeze of a surface. The word for this process, that of transitioning directly from solid to vapor, is known as sublimation, and it’s not much of a stretch to trace the word’s roots back to a common ancestry with the adjective “sublime.”

I’m really quite pleased with myself for taking this trip.