"My son," it began, "I am indeed in the red orb of light we have so
often looked up to when we were together on the earth, and about which
our wondering minds hazarded so many fruitless guesses. I have been here
a short time, and now am able to return to you, by that cipher we so
fortunately printed upon the tablet of memory, word of my existence.
"I can hardly describe to you my occurrence on this planet. I found
myself here without any recollection of whence I had come, without a
traceable thought of anything I had ever heard before.
"I was suddenly sitting in a high room, brilliantly lighted by a soft,
tranquillizing radiance, listening to a chorus of most delicately
attuned voices, indescribably sweet, penetrating and moving. Around me
upon white ivory chairs arranged in an amphitheatre sat beings like
myself, all looking outward upon a sloping lawn where were gathered
beneath blossoming fruit trees an army, it seemed, of half shining
creatures, unlike myself, singing these wonderful choruses.
"I have since learned that I did not reach Mars in that identical moment
when I found myself sitting in the hall. I had come to it, as all
disembodied spirits from the earth come to it at one receiving point, a
high hill not far from the tropic of Mars. This hill, crowned and
covered with glass buildings, is known as the hill of the Phosphori.
Here, for nearly one of our months, the incoming souls, which are little
more than a sort of ethereal fluid, presenting a form only observable by
refracted light, or I should say polarized light, are bathed in a
marvellously phosphorescent beam procured by absorption from the sun.
These souls are intermingled in a chaotic stream that I may liken to the
streaming currents of heated air in convection from a source of heat
upon our earth, and this continuous tide is caught in a great spherical
chamber or a series of chambers extending over five miles around the
bald summit of this eminence.
"In these colossal chambers the phosphorescent light from enormous
radiators beats incessantly through and through the slowly, oscillating,
vibrating, revolving soul matter. And here the process of
individualization is achieved. A soul, or many souls, are separated
from the great tide, by flashing, under the bombardment of the
phosphorescent blaze into shining forms. They assume a shape outlined by
light, and just slightly subject to gravity from the atomic compression
necessary to maintain their illumination, they fall lightly out from the
domes of the spheres, touch the floors beneath, and are led away.
"In this way I found later I had arrived at Mars. When the spirits, thus
shaped in light and otherwise almost immaterial and unclothed, emerge
from the Hill of the Phosphori, they are taken along wide, white roads
to some of the many chorus halls which fill the City of Light, where I
am now, and from which I am sending this magnetic message. They remain
for hours, even days and weeks in these halls listening in a sort of
stupor or trance to beautiful music; for music is the one great
recreation of the Martians, and is spontaneous, appearing as a vocal
gift in beings who have never enjoyed its exercise on earth.
"Gradually under the influence of this musical immersion, as under the
bombardment of the phosphorescent rays, a mentality seems developed;
voice and language come, and the soul moves out of the concourse of
listening souls, moved by a desire to do something, into the streets of
the city. This is called, as we might say, the Act Impulse. From that
time on the soul rushes, as it were, to its natural occupation. Its
mentality, aroused by music, becomes full of some sort of aptitude, and
it enters the avenues of its congruous activity as easily, as quickly,
as justly as the growing flower turns toward the Sun wherever it may be.
"Let me present to you the curious scene my eyes encountered as I sat in
the great Chorus Hall. I say my eyes. It is hard perhaps for you to
realize what an organ can be in a creature, so apparently, as we are,
little more than gaseous condensations. The physiology and morphology of
a spirit is not an easy thing to grasp or define. I am yet ignorant upon
many points. But dimly, at least, I may make your natural senses
cognizant of it.
"You have seen faces and forms in clouds. How often you and I from Mount
Cook on the earth have watched their changing and confluent lineaments
in the clouds above the New Zealand Alps. It is the same way with
Martian spirits. They are tenuous fluids, but the individual pervades
them and a material response is evoked, and the light from their
surfaces is so halated, intensified, or reduced as to form a figure with
a head and arms and legs.
"In some way I imagine the organs are optical effects, ruled by mind,
which is located in this luminous matter. Later I will describe the
process of _solidification, the resumption of matter_, for these spirit
forms slowly concrete into beings like terrestrial men and women. There
is, therefore, a dual population here, the extreme newly transplanted
souls, and the flesh and blood people, and between them the transitions
from spirit to corpuscular bodies. But all this takes place in the City
of Light. Elsewhere over the whole planet the spirits are seldom seen,
but only the vigorous and beautiful race of material beings into which,
they--the spirits--have _consolidated_.
"To return to my first experience in the Chorus Hall in the City of
Light. I seemed to be in a great alabaster cage enormously large and
very beautiful. Its shining walls rose from the ground and at a great
height arched together. The front was a network of sculpture, it held
the rising rows of what seemed like ivory chairs on which the motionless
white and radiant assemblage were seated. The whole place glowed, and
this phosphorescent prevails throughout the City of Light, just as it
does in the Hill of the Phosphori, when we first landed in this strange
existence.
"The music came from a field in front of the Chorus Hall, which held a
wonderful array of beings who, while not radiant as we were, had a
_lustrous_ look over their smooth and lovely bodies, which were tightly
clad in the palest blue tunics and leggings. These creatures were
consolidated spirits. They are constantly augmented by new arrivals,
and, as the number remains almost unchanged, as new arrivals appear,
others leave and then move off from the City of Light into the vast
regions of Mars outside and beyond the city.
"A word of explanation would make this all clear. The Hill of the
Phosphori begins the transmutation of the psychic fluid which makes up
the souls as they flow into Mars from space. At the Hill the very
moderate condensation begins, just enough to bring them to the ground by
gravity. The psychic fluid is susceptible to the light, absorbs and
emits it, and so the spirit forms are shining like great _ignes fatui_
on our old earth. The spirits thus individualize, pass in companies to
the City of Light, and come to the huge chorus halls which surround the
city on its outskirts, in the country margin.
"They reach these chorus halls by a sort of suasion produced apparently
by their sympathy with music. Music and Light are the energies, which at
first and measurably throughout all the latter days of Martian life,
direct work and thought and being. The music is quite audible for long
distances, especially in the direction of the Hill of the Phosphori
where the spirits land. Drawn by it they move unconsciously toward the
singing centers. Now there are perhaps a hundred of these chorus halls
about the City of Light grouped in the direction of the Hill of the
Phosphori, and the music is quite different in them. There are four
principal sorts, the grave, the gay, the romantic and the harmonic. By
their interior sympathy the kinds of spirits move to the choruses which
afford the music they respond to and it is wonderful how infallibly this
attraction acts.
"The bands separate and strings and lines of the phosphorized spirits
train away without direction to the choruses that attract them, although
only a sort of subdued and confused murmur reaches them from the halls.
"Throughout the first stages of life here, the spirits are somnambulous.
They move and act unconsciously and in obedience to their imbedded
instincts and tastes. Only, as under the influence of music and light
and afterwards occupation, they are transmuted by consolidation into the
fair material race, which outside of the City of Light controls the
planet, does consciousness and curiosity and language arise. I sat a
long, long time in the chorus hall, to which I was drawn, which
produced _grave_ music. I knew nothing, felt nothing, was but dimly
cognizant of what was about me, but I thrilled with the music.
"I felt the process of condensation going on, and it was a process
exquisitely blissful. Now and then, a spirit form would arise and step
down the rising forms and go out, another and another, while as silently
spirits from the Hill of the Phosphori would enter and take their seat
and bathe in the almost unbroken surges of music that come from the
field outside, from the multitude beneath the almond blossom laden
trees. Movement is without volition in the spirit stage; attraction that
follows a hidden impulse, that seems indescribable at first, directs
them. It is only as the process of consolidation in the City of Light
individualizes, that the spirits become, as you would say, human. But it
is a humanity of great beauty. Material particles invade or transfuse
them, replacing the diaphanous phosphorescent spirit fluid, and they
grade into supple white and rosy figures, strong, strenuous and
splendid.
"After remaining a long time, perhaps, in the chorus hall, I felt the
restlessness that causes one after the other of the spirits to go out. I
followed the solitary line out into the city, the solemn, swaying music
still heard as I stepped out upon the broad steps which face the city.
I was now more observant, something like sight and feeling and memory
were slowly generated within me, and I noticed that whereas the arriving
spirits moved like apathetic ghosts, those with whom I now was, turned
with interest this way and that, seemed apprehending and alive.
"The spirits from the Hill of the Phosphori came on the broad avenues
leading to the chorus halls like waifs of cloud driven by a zephyr, with
no visible distention of parts, no leg, or arm, or head or body motion.
Now they moved with some anatomical suggestions.
"I stood amid a colonnade of arches, the white shining columns rose
around me to the high, shining roof, before me a long descent of steps,
and beyond me and around on a softly swelling eminence was spread the
City of Light. It was a marvellous picture.
"The City of Light is simple and monotonous in architecture, but its
composition and its radiance quite surpass any earthly conception. The
buildings are all domed and stand in squares which are filled with fruit
trees, low bush-like spreading plants, bearing white pendant lily-like
flowers or pink button-shaped florets like almonds. Each building is
square, with a portico of columns, placed on rising steps, a pair of
columns to each step. Vines wind around the columns, cross from one
line of columns to another and form above a tracery of green fronds
bearing, as it was then, red flowers, a sort of trumpet honeysuckle.
"The walls of the buildings are pierced on all sides with broad windows
or embrasures, filled, it seemed, with an opalescent glass. Avenues
opened in all directions, lined on both sides with these wonderful
houses, which are made of a peculiar stone, veined intermittently with
yellow, which has the property of absorbing and emitting light.
"It is indeed a phosphori as, if I recall it aright, the sulphides of
barium, strontium, and calcium were upon our earth. Later I shall see
the great quarries of this stone in the Martian mountains. Another
strange feature in these Martian houses was the hollow sphere of glass
upheld above each house. It is a sphere some six feet in diameter made
up of lenses. It encloses a space in the center of which is a ball of
the phosphorescent stone. During the day the rays of the sun are
concentrated upon this ball of stone, and at night the stored-up
sunlight is radiated into lambent phosphorescent light.
"It was the close of a Martian day that I felt the returning impact of
volition and left the chorus hall. I emerged, as I said before, upon the
broad platform with its colonnade of columns and arches and saw the
city as the night drew on. It is difficult to put in words, my son, the
wonderful effect.
"Each house built of this strange substance, which throughout the day
had been storing up the energies of light, now, as the fading day waned,
became a center of light itself. At first a glow covered the sides of
the houses, the colonnade and dome, while the glass prisms above them
sent out rays from their imprisoned balls of phosphori. The glow spread,
rising from the outskirts of the city in the lower grounds to the
summits of the hills where the sun's last rays lingered. It became
intensified. The green beds of trees were black squares and the houses,
pulsating fabrics of light between them. A slight variety of
architecture in places was accentuated by diverse and varying lines or
surface light.
"The whole finally blended and a sea of radiance was before me in which
the beautiful houses were descried, the illuminated groves, and like
enormous scintillations the glassy spheres--the Martians call them the
_Plenitudes_ above them. Many other developing beings were around me,
and voiceless, mute, impassioned, with an admiration which we had as yet
no adequate organs to express we gazed upon the throbbing metropolis,
ourselves luminous spectres in the vast eruption of glorious light
before, above, around us.
"As the night settled down the light grew more intense, more beautiful.
I could discern the opalescent glasses in the houses sending out their
parti-colored rays, patching the trees with quilts of changing colors,
and far away there came, still unsubdued by the night, the continuous
elation of music.
"All night, all day, the choruses kept on with intermissions, but the
singers change. This musical facility is the mental or emotional
characteristic of the Martian. There is more in music than you
earthlings know or dream of. It is a part of the immortal fiber of men,
and in Mars it _creates_ matter, for the slow assumption of material
parts, as I have said, is propagated and accomplished by music, and the
parts thus made are the most perfect expression of matter the divine
form of man or woman can know, I think. They are tuned to health, to
beauty, to inspiration, but all of this you shall know.
"So I went down the steps into the city. I was with a group of spirits
who noticed me, and whom I noticed, but as yet the listless, strange,
doomed expression was on our faces, and though memory was beginning to
light its fires within us, though the transmission of viewless particles
of matter into our fluent bodies of spirit had begun, though mind and
desire were awakened, not a word passed our shining lips, and we moved
on in silence.
"The City of Light is often called in the Martian language also the City
of Occupation, for here the forming spirits work. I have told you that
as _consolidation_, through Music and Light, goes on, the aptitudes or
tastes are awakened, and this first birth of desire in Mars carries the
spirits off from their ivory seats in the Chorus Halls to the City,
where like an animal ferreting its purpose by intuition, they seem
impelled whither their needs are best satisfied.
"I now know that the City of Light is generally divided,--not exactly,
but as association would naturally impel, into four quarters, the
quarter of art, the quarter of science, the quarter of invention, the
quarter of thought. This is simply that the artists, the scientific
minds, the designers, and the philosophers are somewhat by themselves.
The population of the City of Light is made up of a fair, white race of
Martians, and of the forming spirits. As the forming spirits attain
materialization through occupation, they may remain in the City or go
out into the other cities, and into the country to work and live.
"Besides the quarters I have mentioned, there is the business section
and the offices of the government.
"In the light of all I have learned since I came, I may at once explain
something about the actual life and social organization of this strange
world.
"The Martian world is one country. There are here no nationalities. The
center of the country is in the City of Scandor, quite removed from the
City of Light. Business is carried on as with you on the earth, but its
nature and its physical elements vary, as you will see. There is a
circulating medium, banks and business enterprises, but it is more
veiled, more hidden, less, far less, insistent than with you. A great
socialistic republic is represented in Mars, and the limits of
individual initiative are very narrow. Still they exist.
"One prime element of difference is in the nourishment and the area of
population. The Martian lives only on fruit, and he lives only a few
degrees on either side of the Equator. All the businesses that in your
earth arise from the preparation and sale of meat and all the various
confections, disappear there, and also all the mechanism of house
heating and lighting. Also there are no railroads, but innumerable
canals, which form a labyrinth of waterways, and are fed from the tides
of the great northern and southern seas.
"The business is largely agricultural, but in the cities the pursuit of
knowledge still continues. There is, however, on Mars a much lessened
intellectual activity than on the earth. It is a sphere of simplified
needs and primal feelings exalted by acutely developed love of Music.
Mars is the music planet. There are not on Mars newspapers, journals,
magazines, books. The tireless production of these things on the earth
has but one analogy in Mars, the publication of music scores, the
recitation of poetry and symposia, and the great illustrated journal,
Dia. But these things I will explain later.
"I wandered on that night through the city with other spirits. We went
through the city streets in the radiance of the _Plenitudes_ above the
houses. The night air was blowing through the trees, and the city was
filled with people. They were the Martians. We were scarcely noticed. In
the City of Light the new arrivals are not questioned until they begin
to "take shape," as they say here, and then they are closely examined,
and their origin, if it can be traced, is written down and kept in great
registers.
"The groups were moving in streams toward the higher ground, and as my
companions were gradually separated from me and were lost like wisps of
moving light here and there, I went on alone. I came up long, wonderful
avenues between walls of light, regularly punctuated by the dark squares
of trees, and the spherical radiations of the Plenitudes above the
houses.
"The people about me seemed all young, or scarcely more than, as we say,
in middle life. They speak less than the earth folk, and when they speak
they utter very simple sentences, and seem very sincere. I often stood
by little groups gathered at the corners of cross streets, and listened
to their musical intonations. The language is vocalic and monosyllabic.
It sometimes suggests a Mongolian tongue, but without the guttural
clicks and coughs. The Martians are all gifted in music. It fills their
lives.
"From point to point crowds were assembled about platforms where singing
was in progress, and every now and then a man or woman in the street
would sing loudly and passionately with such power and beauty that the
impressionable Martians would follow the refrain of the song and the
whole street for blocks and blocks would resound in waves of delightful
melody. There are no mechanical modes of propulsion in the streets of
the City of Light. _The Martians all walk_.
"I approached the top of the broad hill on which the City is built, and
came suddenly out into a square filled again in its park-like center
with trees. From amid these trees rose a massive building, which I
instantly recognized as an observatory; the many round domes, as on
earth, were unmistakable.
"I passed up the walks of the square to the building and entered it.
"It was illuminated by balls of phosphori in glass globes, and its cool,
broad halls and stairways were, in the soft light, very beautiful. But
their wonderfulness consisted in the insertion upon the walls of
illuminated plans and maps of the heavens. These miniature firmaments
were all afire, so that each opening, carefully graded in size to
represent stars of the first or second or third magnitude, was filled
with a beaming point of light, and I walked in these noble corridors
between reduced patterns of the universe of stars. I can hardly tell you
how astonished and entranced I was.
"I had for the first time since I reached the planet the impulse of
speech, and I raised my hands with that motion of snapping the fingers,
which you recall was characteristic of me on earth, and _spoke_. I
cried, 'Here is my home.'
"As my hands dropped to my sides I felt resistance. I looked down upon
myself and could behold the changing surfaces of my body. Under this
completing stroke of volition the work begun upon the Hill of the
Phosphori and the Chorus Hall in reducing the intangible spirit fluid to
corporeal expression was now hastening to an end. I do not stop here to
consider the reflections this suggests as to the nature of matter, those
abstruse speculations we indulged in so often over the pages of Muir and
Helmholz and Tait and Crookes.
"I had reached the ascending stairway, when my hand--for hand it now
seemed to be--was taken in a friendly pressure, and I turned and saw a
tall figure with a face of extreme nobility, somewhat scarred, I
thought, dressed in the usual Martian attire of a flowing tunic and
closely fitting body clothing. He said in English, 'You are from the
earth as I am.'
"My son, how can I, in this dull, mechanical method of conversation with
you, ignorant, indeed, whether the magnetic waves loaded with my
message, are traversing or not the millions of miles of space to your
ear, how can I make you realize the wonderful and blessed feelings of
amazement and happiness that the stranger's words brought me. Here I
was, a disembodied soul from Earth, which at that moment I only dimly
recalled, undergoing the strange process of re-establishment in flesh
and blood, and slowly appropriating those natural appetites which come
with flesh and blood, a waif of spiritual being in the great voids of
creation, impelled by some implanted power of affinity to this remote,
strange, phantasmal and unreal place, overwhelmed in a stupor of
confusion, like some awakening patient from the vertigo of a terrifying
dream!
"I looked upon my friend, and in the rapidly rising flood of emotions
that came with the acting members of my body, flushed and throbbing with
excitement, and with a wild joy besides, I flung myself upon his neck
and pressed him with arms that seemed once more those natural physical
ties that have held upon my breast those I best loved on earth.
"The stranger led me slowly up the stairway and past great celestial
spheres which filled the higher hallways, conducting me to a room at one
corner of the great structure. The room was a singular and unique
apartment. It consisted of a large central space, furnished with the
usual ivory chairs, and a broad, massive center table, also of ivory,
curiously inlaid with particles of the omnipresent _phosphori_, which
gave out a liquid light and imparted indescribable chasteness and beauty
to the carved ornaments upon them. The floor was dark, a leaden color,
lustrous, however, like black glass, and made up in mosaic. Around the
room were alcoves lit by lamps of the phosphori, and in each alcove a
globe of a blue metal upon which were painted sketches like charts or
maps. A chandelier of this blue metal was pendant from the ceiling, and
in its cup-like extremities, arranged in vertical tiers, were round
balls of the phosphori, glowing softly.
"Wide windows, unprotected by glass or sashes, just embrasures framed in
white stone which everywhere prevails in Mars, looked out upon the
marvellous City, which thus seemed a lake of glowing fires, over which,
rising and refluent waves of light constantly chased each other to its
dark borders, where the surrounding plain country met the City's edges.
But throughout the distance I could trace lines of light marking
highways or roads leading interminably away until quite extinguished at
the optical limits of my vision.
"The walls of this beautiful room rose to an arched ceiling which was
inlaid with this wonderful blue metal, seen in the globes, designed in
scrolls and waving ribbons, and just descending upon the walls
themselves in attenuated twigs and strings. The walls were bare and
shining.
"My friend led me to one of the great windows and placed me in a chair.
Drawing another beside me, placing his hand on mine, and leaning outward
toward the burning splendor below us, above which in the still, clear
heavens shone those stellar hosts you and I have so often watched with
wonder, he said:
"'Ten Martian years ago I came to this world as you have come. As a
spirit I entered the chambers on the Hill of the Phosphori. I sat in the
Chorus Hall. I entered the City and slowly changed, as you are changing,
into one of the Martian white people. I found my work, as you will, in
this Patenta, for by that name in Mars is called this home of astronomy
and physical philosophy. Here, amid telescopes and apparatus of
experiment and investigation, I have spent the years, mapping with many
others the skies, and above all beating the earth we left, as have many,
many, whom you will meet, with magnetic waves, hoping against hope, that
some response might be gained, some hint of that connection through
space which the physicists of this planet expect, ere long, may make all
the beings of the universe one great sidereal society.'
"He stopped and leaned away from me, perusing my face with interest.
Words came to my lips, memory again asserted its triumphant declaration
that I was the same being as had lived upon the earth, and with it the
sudden turbulence of hope that she, your mother, whom we so often
expected to regain, might, as I had, have reached this planet, too, and
to me, renewed in youth, might come the glory and the joy of knowing her
again.
"I turned to him and spoke: 'Kind friend, I am yet dazed and stricken
with the marvellousness of my being here. It seems but a short time, a
lapse of even a day, that I bade good-bye to my son on the death-bed in
my home on earth. I am too tormented with wonder to speak to you much. I
can tell all I know of myself in a little while. But now as I grow
stronger, tell me of this new world, and oh! give me, sir, food. I feel
the quickening fevers of appetite and desire.'
"The man arose and left the room. In a few moments he returned followed
by a boy and a young woman bearing a basket. They spread a yellow cloth
upon a small ivory table and set down two plates of the bright blue
metal; upon one they placed a pile of small round cakes and on the other
a number of red and yellow gourd shaped fruits. At a signal from my
companion I arose and sat at the table.
"He remained at the window and continued: 'While you break your long
fast, let me tell you what I know about this new world which will now be
your home for a long time. You will learn all, but I am not watching
to-night. In seeing you and hearing the familiar English speech I am
moved myself by currents of retrospection; my earth home comes back to
me. I will satisfy your curiosity, and, you in turn, must tell me what
has happened in the old home.'
"He paused; from the streets of the city rose a sacred song. It came
like a slowly increasing torrent of sound, soft and low, rising with
impetuous fervor until it seemed to engulf us in its melodic tide.
Individual tones were heard in it, but its solidity and mass were most
impressive. I shook and trembled beneath the impact of its vibrations;
in its surging glory of sound I became fully reincarnated. I awoke naked
and ashamed. The man saw my confusion. He hurried to a niche in the wall
and handed me the tunic of the Martians with its girdle of blue cord and
its cap and shoes of the blue metal exquisitely wrought and light. I put
them upon me and lifting the cakes and the mellow-soaked pears to my
lips, listened.
"'The Martians,' he continued, 'are both a natural and supernatural
race. The natural race are largely prehistoric, though many yet exist;
the supernatural race are made up of beings from other worlds and a
great majority come up from the earth. How reincarnation first began on
Mars is unknown, though the natural people, the Dendas, have traditions
about it, vague and contradictory. It must have been slow. The
supernatural people thus brought to Mars have created its civilization,
discovered the phosphori, and established Music, which is so much of
their life, and accelerated in the way you have learned the process of
materialization.
"'They built this City of Light from phosphorescent stone quarried from
the Mountains of Tiniti. Formerly the spirits came helter skelter to
Mars all over its surface and went wandering about, helped to
reincarnation by the various villagers or citizens. The great new
improvement in the last half century has been the creation of the
receiving station at the Hill of the Phosphori, the building of the
Chorus Halls, and the establishment of the City of Light. Light draws
the spirits, and though spirits reach other points of Mars, the
centralization of Light here, draws most of them to this side. The
Martians are not immortal. They vanish in time.
"'As reincarnated all spirit becomes young but nourishment has undergone
a change. The physiological process is singular. I need not dwell upon
it. Evaporation replaces defecation. Love enters the Martian world, but
it has lost much of the earthly passion. The physiological effects are
also different. There are no children here.
"'We live in the tropical regions mostly of Mars, and the polar and
north temperate zones are empty. The natural Martian races are found
more plentifully there. They are strong and small and work under the
supervision of the supernaturals. They are like the earthlings and eat
meat. Our food is bread and fruit. Our language does not lend itself to
composition; it only sings. Literature, as we knew it on earth, does not
exist here. The natural Martians have tales and stories and plays and
some books. These things no longer interest the supernaturals. Our life
is quite simple, almost expressionless, except for the power of our
music. The souls from different parts of the earth recognize each other
and converse in human language, but, unless practiced, it is forgotten
and our euphonies take its place. I have used my earth language with a
friend and still speak English well.
"'We have art here, but it is almost wholly sculpture and architecture
and design. Color, except in glass, does not greatly please the Martians
and there are few painters. They survive from other worlds, but cannot
secure pigments, and draw only in black and white for the most part.
They are cartoonists, as we would say, on the earth. But we grow fruits
and flowers, the former in varieties and richness unknown upon the
earth and the latter in delicate tints with blues and yellows, the only
primary strong tints the Martians admire.
"'Mechanical invention is discouraged, except as it assists astronomy.
Astronomy is the great profession. Cars, railroads and conveyances, as
you say on earth, do not exist. We walk or sail and float upon our
canals. Our industry is agriculture and building. Architecture is
studied and advanced beyond all you have ever known on the earth. Mars
is filled with beautiful cities. Its whole government consists in a
council at the City of Scandor, from which representatives issue to its
various departments. One is here in the City of Light. His motives are
always just. There are no parties, for there are no policies. Life is so
simple. Beauty and knowledge only rule us. Character, as you, as I, knew
it on the earth, does not exist. There are no temptations, and we live
as children of Light, in a sort of childhood of feeling, with great
gifts of mind. But even living is noble. There is indeed rivalry. Yes,
envy is with us. We worship God in great temples in services of song.
Sermons are never heard.
"'In this city the great designers live, also the men who work at the
deep problems of life and thought and matter; and the sculptors. It is
the next largest city to Scandor. Scandor is far away. I never saw it.
Glass work is done here and throughout Mars. Making the blue metal which
you see, quarrying stone and ore and coal for the smelters and glass
factories, the fabrication of dress material and fabrics for houses,
making our boats and canal ships, cutting down the forests in the
Martian highlands, cultivating fruits and flowers and the great wheat
fields are the chief industries, and there are lesser lines of work, as
the potteries and the instrument makers.
"'There are no industries in the City of Light. It is employed as I told
you. Its population is constantly changing, for spirits like you are
reincarnated here, and these new multitudes come and go. To-morrow, the
ships on the canals will carry many away. The spirits, as you did, when
they enter the city, wander as they will; they enter the houses, the
workshops, the laboratories, everything in obedience to their
instinctive choice. The people of the City of Light are therefore
largely engaged in caring for them as they fall into bodily forms,
clothing, feeding, housing them.
"'Each householder and all citizens report to the Registeries what
spirits have come to them, and whence they came, and the great diversion
and entertainment of our people is to listen to the stories of other
worlds, which these new arrivals bring. Memory does not survive long
and they soon forget their past history. It is best so, except in
fugitive and dreamlike fragments, unless they are great.
"'According to their desire or aptitudes, the spirits are sent away when
Martianized to the different parts of Mars, and many stay here with us
in the workshops and laboratories.
"'Besides Music, the people of Mars delight in recitation, and in the
City of Scandor I hear there are great theatres or public places where
recitations and concerts and even noble operas are held. Many of these
are brought to us by great spirits from other worlds, their own works in
poetry or prose or music. In Scandor there are great orchestras with all
the instruments we had upon the earth, and the paper, Dia, is published
there, which is read everywhere in Mars. There are few books, no schools
in the common sense. The thinkers have assemblies and there are
announcements and explanations of discoveries.
"'Our life in many ways is like the life on earth, but less active, more
contemplative, and sin and money-making are almost absent. The wicked of
all sorts have one fate; they are fired off the planet. We can overcome
the attraction of gravitation by our Toto powder. These executions are
strange to earth eyes. You will see them. The Toto powder is also a
motive power.
"'We have a medium of exchange, silver, and there are rich and poor with
us, but no poverty. There can be no armies nor navies. The government
carries on extensive works of improvement and keeps the canals and pays
its laborers. The government supports this City of Light and the people
here are paid for the number of spirits they care for and assist.
Happiness reigns on Mars, but it is a pensive happiness. We never,
because of the singular physiology of our bodies, can know the
boisterous and passionate joys of earth, neither do we know many of the
ills of the flesh. We have sickness and there are accidents. We have a
death, but it is like evaporation. We decline again after a long life to
the spirit stage and vanish. So there are partings here, and the old
sadness of the end as on earth; but the gaiety of children, the ambition
of youth, the devotion of parents is unknown.'
"His voice sank, he bent his head upon his hands, and a sort of tremor
ran through him, and when again he looked upon me his eyes shone with
moisture, and the hot tears ran down his cheeks. Memory might be
fleeting on Mars, but the loved ones of the earth were yet remembered,
and the abysses of the eternal void of space could never be crossed by
the wave of speech or recognition. This was the pathos of the Martian
life.
"I was shown by him, as the slowly arising sweetness of fatigue showed
itself within me, to a bedchamber of charming simplicity. The graceful
bedstead of the blue metal was covered with snowy covers, curtains hung
at the windows also white. The furniture of the room was of a sort of
pale, red wood obtained in the great Martian forests where the trees
known as the Ribi grow, whose leaves and flowers have a pink tint, which
in seasons of fruitage is more intense, and present enormous areas of
extraordinary beauty.
"This room was at the top of one of the many branching wings of this
composite astronomical laboratory. To reach my room we walked through
hallways all illuminated with the phosphorescent glowing balls while the
radiant patterns in the walls shone also with a pale beauty. These balls
possess a wonderful lighting power and besides their self-illumination
can be stimulated into the most intense brilliancy by electric currents
with which the Martians are profoundly acquainted. The electrical
displays on Mars surpass description and the waves of magnetism I am now
utilizing to send to you these messages are ten miles in amplitude.
"I fell asleep, quickly lulled into an almost death-like slumber by the
cadence of innumerable fountains. Near the _Patenta_ is the Garden of
Fountains, which I shall tell you about in another message. It was the
plash and rivulous current of these water courts that brought on sleep.
"I awoke when the Martian dawn was coming on. Slumber had given me the
last reassurance of identity of body, and I awoke with a delightful
sense of health and youth. I stood at the wide window near my bed and
gazed out upon the yet luminous City of Occupation. The picture was of
surprising strangeness and beauty. Far off, until melting into the
encroaching edges of an outer blackness, the City extended its folds and
surfaces of light. The streets were empty, the music of the Chorus Halls
stilled. Here and there, a spirit was moving slowly through the streets,
a half-made Martian; a breeze soft and salubrious stirred the thickly
leaved trees and the firmament shone with the larger stars, beginning to
pale before the rising sun. As the sun rose higher, the effulgence of
the City died away, the light of the same great orb which brings the
dawn to you, covered with its rays the white and glorious City, the
music seemed again revived, and from the doorways of the houses I could
see forms issuing, while far off the Hill of the Phosphori raised its
glass domes in the air, where the homogeneous tide of spirit was
undergoing differentiation, as we might say, into separate cognizable,
discreet beings. An unspeakable delight filled me. I felt the power of
mind and with it the radiant energy of manhood."
No more words came. The message ended. Not a motion or sound succeeded
this wonderful trans-abysmal dispatch.
Well, here, at last, was the long expected, impossible, amazing reality.
When I had deciphered the last word, when I had it borne fully in upon
me, the significance of it all, I turned to the one natural effort to
answer this Martian communication. I sent out from the battery of our
transmitter the longest wave of magnetic oscillation I could emit. The
message was simple: "Have received all. Await more. Transmission
perfect."