They who watched did learn,
About the nature of this beast,
And sank below the waves eternal.
For as they watched and learned,
They saw that Prometheus erred.

Anybody have any suggestions for giving that better rhyme and rythm?

This will be the first page of a sci-fi book I'm writing. And the first chapter:

Chapter 1

     The surface of Mars was a barren and desolate land, strewn with rocks as though assaulted by the god of war himself. The sun was rising, the eastern sky ablaze with gold and red and pink and purple. Stars in the west were fading, Jupiter slipping below the close horizon. The breeze, though brisk, was only slightly stirring the fine Martian dust, creating an almost shimmering effect in the cold Martian morning.
     The cool morning stillness was broken only by the arrival of a rover from the first permanent human settlement on Mars, in Nirgal Vallis.
     The rover was more or less a tube with rounded ends mounted on six oversized wheels. The front end was a giant window, with two seats behind it. The middle section of the tube was an airlock, and the section behind that was an unpressurized cargo compartment.
     "Nirgal Outpost, this is Rover One. Do you copy?"
     "Rover One, this is Nirgal. What is your present status?"
     "We are coming up to the rise south of Eos Chasma. It gets pretty rocky from here on up, we may have to walk to get to the overlook."
     "Very well. Proceed with caution."
     "Roger. Rover One out." Harry Chung switched off the transmitter and glanced over at his companion.
     "Told you they'd let us walk," Jim Robinson said with a chuckle. "It is a glorious morning for a walk. Good thing we 'forgot' the remotes."
     Harry laughed. "Looks like we get out here."
     They both donned their helmets and turned their pressure tanks on. The p-suits were a new variety designed by NASA just a few months before they left for Mars. They were designed to take advantage of the thin atmosphere and allowed far greater movement than the full pressure suits used in the vacuum of space. These were more like the thermal underwear worn under a normal p-suit, but tighter, with a helmet attached to the top. They had a metallic outer skin designed to block some of the radiation that gets through Mars's week atmosphere. They were a real pain to get on, but far easier to get around in, and no person on Mars would trade them for a full p-suit.
     "Ready?" Harry was waiting by the inner door of the airlock.
     Jim followed him into the airlock. After a final equipment check, Harry cycled the lock, and they stepped out into the Martian morning. They walked over to the sliding door of the cargo compartment, opened it, and grabbed the survey equipment.
     "Look at all the extra sand up here. That dust storm really dumped a lot didn't it?"
     "Should be interesting to see what it did in the narrow canyon," Harry replied. "There was a huge dune piled up in there the last time I was here."
     As the walked up the hill, carefully avoiding the sharp rocks, Jim gazed out over the valley toward the east. The sand nearly covered the rocks in places, and was creeping slowly down the slope. He thought it was funny how in the thin Martian atmosphere a wind that would blow leaves off of trees on earth barely even moved the red sand.
     "I love the way the breeze makes it shimmer in this light. Sometimes it gets hard to tell whether it's the dust or the rocks that are moving."
     That comment elicited a laugh from Harry. "Having hallucinations?"
     "I wonder sometimes."
     "I'm going to set up the repeater here, a little bit back from the cliff. You go on up if you'd like."
     As Harry set his equipment down and began unpacking the communications equipment, Jim continued up the rise.
     When he got to the top, he took a long look across the canyon. He could see for what seemed like fifty kilometers over the other side of the shorter north wall, a very rare view on Mars. Its smaller size made the horizon seem much closer than back home on Earth.
     "This view is truly mesmerizing. I could just stare at this for-Holy shit!"
     "What?"
     "Get the camera!"
     "Why? What did-"
     "Just bring the damn camera! Hurry!"
     Harry cam scrambling up the hill and barely avoided tripping on a rock by leaping over it and almost lost the camera when he landed on the other side. He had forgotten how much farther you can jump in the weak Martian gravity.
     "Zoom in on the opposite cliff-face and tell me I'm not hallucinating again."
     Harry searched for a few seconds, then said "Where, I don't see anything but red rock?"
     "Right over there, in the shadow!"
     Harry brought the image in focus and turned on the digital vidcam's light enhancing feature. An enormous construct popped into focus, embedded into the shadowed cliff, revealed in all its stunning alien glory by the removal of the sand dune by the recent storm. "Oh my God! Oh w-w-wow!" He started laughing so hard it nearly hurt. "No, man, that is not a hallucination. Definitely all too real. Wow! Just wait till they see this!"
     The structure looked like a cross between an old Texas oil refinery, with its maze of pipes, and an Egyptian temple. The Egyptian style sections looked like they were carved right out of the red rock. They were surrounded by areas cut further back into the cliff and jammed with pipes, cylinders and spheres, all manner of mechanical devices. The entire thing looked like a giant machine.
     The centerpiece of the whole structure was a vertical section that extended all the way to the top of the structure. It was flanked by two obelisks, with much sharper points than anything in Egypt. It appeared to have a giant ovoid door set between two angled buttresses.
     "I think we'd better go report this right away." Harry finally managed to speak again. "I've got the whole thing in visible and infrared."

     After reporting the sighting to Nirgal, they were told to take a closer look, and to record everything they saw. They drove the rover down around the rise for a few kilometers looking for a point where they could drive down into the canyon. There was a ramp from a rockslide six kilometers west of the site that would do nicely.
     As they drove off the bottom of the slide and onto the canyon floor, Jim contemplated the chances of such a find. Even excluding the improbability of intelligent life having existed on Mars, the chances of being at that spot a week after the largest recorded dust storm in the Valles Marineris canyon system, with the storm pushing the sand dune out of the way, and then glancing straight at it where purely astronomical. That video footage was his only chance of staying off the cover of the International Inquirer and even that might not work. He failed to suppress a chuckle at the thought of his picture on the cover with an alien next to him, with the headline 'The REAL Face On Mars.' July 20th, 2026 was going down in the history books with his name attached. He supposed the anniversary of the lunar landing was as fitting a date as any.
     They finally arrived at the site, approaching from around the bend just to the west of the site. The effect that produced, suddenly revealing the structure as they rounded the corner, was awesome. There was a long low ramp running along the face of the structure, up towards the door at the center. It too looked as if it were carved right out of the cliff, but it was as smooth as poured concrete. The perspective from the foot of ramp gave the structure a monumental presence. It was huge, at least ten stories tall on the west edge, rising to thirty at the center, and about twenty on the eastern end. The eastern end had a huge recessed space with a flat wall on the back that Jim suspected might be the door to some kind of hangar. It easily dwarfed the Zeppelin hangars that had recently been reconstructed in Friedrichshafen, and those were monumental in scale.
     They parked at the top of the ramp and offloaded as much recording equipment as they could pile onto the two robotic autocarts. Everything from vidcams to sonic and magnetic resonance detectors to high powered spot lights. They carried smaller lights strapped to their wrists and mounted on their shoulders. They also had a computer analysis unit which was capable of not only running all of their sensor equipment, but could also be used for gaining access to other computers and decrypting data-it was designed to be able to control and reprogram damaged computers in emergencies.
     As they approached the entrance, it became clear that the aliens who built this structure were taller than humans. All of the markings around the door were at eye level and higher.
     The door itself was about three and a half meters tall. The sides were curved outward, creating an oval shape, truncated at the bottom by the floor, and at the top by a hanging semicircular piece with a round hole a few centimeters up from the bottom of the curve.
     The seam between the two halves of the door struck Jim as particularly unusual. The top half paralleled the curve of the left side of the door, curving from the center of the top to about a third of the way towards the left edge just above the center. It then diagonaled down through the center to bout the same spot just below and to the right of the center on the right side of the door. It then curved back to the center at the bottom, mirroring the opposite curve on the top half of the door, so that the whole seam looked like the stylized 'S' on one of those Sleek Perfume ads.
     Directly above the diagonal part of the seam was a black triangular panel with curved sides and a straight diagonal bottom to fit the shape of the seam that looked like some sort of inactive computer screen.
     "You think any of this still works?" Jim glanced back at Harry.
     "Might as well try it. Looks like it is going to have to if we are getting in there. Touch it with one of those telescoping probes and see what it does."
     Jim picked up the probe, stood to the side of the door, and extended the probe. When it touched the panel, two light panels framing the door turned on. The black panel flashed a strange blue symbol.
     "Looks almost like a cross between Chinese and Egyptian hieroglyphs," Harry said.
     The blue symbol stopped flashing and held stead, but nothing else happened.
     "Should I touch it again?"
     "Sure"
     He gave it another tentative poke. They felt a vibration, the door snapped open two centimeters, then opened the rest of the way smoothly, revealing a small chamber with another door on the other side.
     "Must have gotten stuck from all that time under the sand," Jim observed.
     "Probably an airlock. Set one of the transponders out here, then we'll put another inside."
     Jim did that, then they entered, their equipment following them on the autocarts. Once they were inside, the outer door closed behind then. The only light in the room was from two red strips mounted in either side wall at the floor line.
     "Reminds me of every creepy movie I've ever seen."
     Harry laughed nervously.
     They began to feel the air pressure increase around them, then the red light suddenly changed to blue and the inner door opened.
     "Looks like they used blue for 'go' instead of green."
     Jim led the way, Harry and the equipment following closely behind. Harry dropped another transponder just inside the door. A quick test confirmed that the two transponders were able to communicate, even through two massive doors.
     They stood at one end of a long hall flanked by columns, five times as long and twice as tall as it was wide. It was easily ten meters wide. It was very dimly lit, lit by what looked like skylights in the ceiling (though there were no openings on the surface above) and flicking blue floor level lights.
     Harry activated both of his personal lights. "To say this is monumental architecture is an understatement."
     Jim followed suit. "They really liked light strips at the base of the walls, didn't they? Interesting effect, especially with that shade of blue."
     The lighting almost had the effect of making them feel like they were under water.
     Harry picked up on the feeling almost instantly. "I wonder if these aliens were evolved from an aquatic species."
     "That or they had a blue sun."
     "Blue sun with a higher percentage of ocean than Earth. Are the recorders on?"
     "Yep. Turned 'em on before we entered. Aud, vid, and both resonance detectors are running."

That is all I have, thus far. What's the verdict? Should I give up writing altogether, or is it good enough to continue full speed ahead? Something in between? Any constructive comments, suggestion, ideas, etc. would be greatly appreciated. I am in need of some serious assistance with that poem.

------------------
Sean Robertson
[email protected]

http://www.webolutionary.com
http://www.mania-online.com
3D Gladiator Premier Forums Member

"Great is the glory for the strife is hard"
- Wordsworth

"Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?"
- Dr Evil

------------------
Sean Robertson
[email protected]

http://www.webolutionary.com
http://www.mania-online.com
3D Gladiator Premier Forums Member

"Great is the glory for the strife is hard"
- Wordsworth

"Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?"
- Dr Evil