"It was afternoon when Chapman and I, fully equipped and provisioned,
moved off from the long granite pier at the Registeries, after an
affectionate parting from my guide and friend, who returned sorrowfully
to resume his watch for his son, whose coming to Mars seemed to him so
assured.
"How wonderfully strange and exciting it all seemed! Down the crowded
canal we slowly moved, amidst the calling crews, the pleasant cheers,
and beckonings of sightseers; and back of us rose on its hills the City
of Light, that, as we passed still further away, and watched it in the
fading sunset, began to glow, and finally, to shine like some titanic
opal in the velvet shadows of the night.
"These numerous arms of the canal some miles from the City coalesce and
merge into the enormous trunk canal that passes on to Scandor through
hills and mountains and the plain country, excavated by the wonderful
Toto powder. This trunk canal is doubled; upon one member, the boats
pass outward to Scandor, and on the other the boats return. Branches
pass north and south at centers of population, and of some of these
which pass actually into the frozen depths of the polar countries, I may
tell you later.
"As we slowly progressed into the undulating plain country, with its
villages and farm lands, diversified by woods, and sometimes solitary
projections of rock, as the stars stole urgently into the sky, as the
phosphori lamps began their soft illumination of the decks, and while
murmurs of songs from merrymakers on the land came to us in snatches
bewitchingly, though incongruously mingled with the delicious odors of
the Napi grass, I turned to Chapman, and felt that now, throughout the
hours of the genial night, I would pour out unchecked the flood of
inquiry that had risen again and again to my lips in this strange new
life.
"'Chapman,' I began, 'you must feel that I have a great deal to ask you.
This new life, with its surprises and the strange incidents of the two
or three days I have already lived here have suggested so many
questions, can we not now talk about these marvels?'
"'Certainly,' replied Chapman, as he lifted a glass of delicate pearl
pink, filled with the pungent and keenly stimulating _Ridinda_, to his
lips. 'Put on your thinking cap, and perforate me with all the puzzles
you can think of. I am a trifle rattled myself in this new ranch--have
not been here long--but I tell you, Dodd, Mars is first class. It suits
me. Never enjoyed living so much, never found it so much a matter of
course, and as to livelihood, when I think of those freezing nights on
the earth in Rutherford's cheesebox shooting at the moon with wet
plates, I can tell you this sort of thing isn't a long call from all I
ever hoped to find in Heaven. Open your batteries. To-morrow will be
full of sight-seeing, and I guess you will forget all you want to know
to-day in trying to remember what you will see then.' He took another
sip of the snapping liquid, drew his chair closer to my own, and while a
sort of musical echo lingered in the air, I began:
"'Chapman, where on Mars are we? I seem to feel neither heat nor cold. I
see these flowers, the palms in the Garden of the Fountains, day passes
into night, and there is no very apparent change of temperature, so far
as feeling goes. What are we made of? Is this new body we carry
insensible to heat or cold? I feel indeed my pulse beat. I am conscious
of warmth in the sun, and of coolness in the shade. I feel the wind blow
on my cheeks, but all these sensations are so much less keen than on the
earth, and yet again I realize that sensations are in some ways as vivid
as on the earth. The pleasure of my ears and eyes is wonderfully deep
and exhaustive, the sense of taste rapid and delightful. I am happy,
supremely happy, and affection, even the hidden fires of love, burn in
my veins as on the earth.' Chapman looked at me with that bright smile
he wore on earth, and his gestures of expostulation were amusing. 'Wait,
Dodd, don't talk so fast. You remember I had a slow way on the earth. I
have no reason to think it will prove any less pleasant to stay slow on
Mars. One thing at a time. My own sense of position is not so secure
that I can tell exactly all you want to know, and there are a good many
things that the heavyweights up here don't pretend yet to explain. Now,
where are we? Well, the City of Light is about 40 degrees south of the
Martian equator, not so far from what on earth would be the position of
Christ Church, where you "shuffled off the mortal coil." Don't frown.
Mars is a serene, sweet place, but I am not yet so intimidated by the
lofty life here as to drop my jokes. Some Martians strike me as a trifle
heavy in style, just a suggestion of a kind of sublimated Bostonese
about them, don't you know. Curious! However, the ordinary Martian is
gamy, good company, full of happiness, with a considerable fancy for
jokes, absurdly addicted to music, and as credulous as a child. Somehow,
Dodd, a good deal of my earthly nature has stuck to me, and I revel in a
dual life. I have my Martian side, but I can't, and this life can't,
knock the old foibles of the world you left, out of me yet. I may get
the proper sort of exultation in time, but just now I've imported
considerable human horse sense.'
"He looked at me whimsically; I walked away, and watched the receding
city.
"The motion of our white boat was so smoothly rapid, that soon, and
almost unnoticed we had threaded all the many lanes, windings, and locks
that led to the broad canals some twenty miles from the city. We had
passed laden barges, flat and storied boats carrying excursions or
freight, and trains of smaller craft crowded with fruit brought in from
distant farms for the great population of the City of Light. The scene
assumed a fairy-like unreality as night settled down, and the boats
swarming with light, or else carrying a few red lanterns, passed us
while their occupants or owners chanted the lonely lullaby of the
Martians, which begins: 'Ana cal tantil to ti.'
"It was yet to me all a wonderful dream, from which each moment I
dreaded awakening. It was all so beautiful!
"I sat again with Chapman under the canopy, talking of the earth.
Strange Mystery! Here we were with our earth memories yet vivid,
recalling incidents of life in New York City, and summoning amid all the
appealing charm of this strange new life, the little, sordid variances
and trials, vexations and minor sufferings that had marred his own life
on earth. We turned to these things, not because they were grateful or
pleasing to remember, but because it seemed to _establish_ us, or rather
me, to give me identity, and build up the growing certainty that I had
come from the earth, and was re-embodied in this new sphere of active
feeling and experience.
"I told him of you, of the death of your mother, of our flight to New
Zealand, our experiments, the Dodans, and then turning to him, as we saw
the Martian moon rise in ruddy fullness far away over the hill of
_Tiniti_, I said, searchingly: 'Chapman, you remember Martha? How
beautiful and good she was! I have kept one long, sad, and still
deathless hope in my repining heart. I shall see her again! It must be!
I have felt so certain of this that no argument, no appeal to reason,
can drive away the keen sense of its realization. Have you seen her on
Mars amongst the thousands you have met, and is there on this entrancing
orb any other place than the Hill of the Phosphori, for the disembodied
of other worlds to enter this new world?
"Chapman smiled. 'Yes,' he answered, 'I remember your wife very well. I
could pick her out from ten thousand, but I have never seen her yet in
the City of Light. You may, my dear friend, cherish only an illusion,
and yet I am half willing to agree with you; such intuitive feelings
have a deeper philosophy of truth than we can fathom, and no laughing
skepticism, no mere frivolous doubt can expel them. Wait, my friend; it
may yet be meant for you to meet her. And now I do recall some accounts
told me of occasional visitants to Mars entering its life at different
points; many indeed have been received near Scandor, and on one or two
occasions the prehistoric peoples, the little strong men of the
mountains and the northern ice have brought in such a chance waif that
has become body amongst them. How wild and frightened they become! And
quite naturally! Ghosts dropping out of the air becoming flesh and blood
might startle a rational being into a rigid course of religious
practices, not to say superstition. But look, how fair the night has
become.'
"The landscape about us was wonderfully illuminated by the two
satellites, Deimos and Phobos, which, as you well know, were made known
to astronomers on the earth by Prof. Asaph Hall in 1877. What a
marvellous spectacle they presented, moving almost sensibly at their
differing rates of revolution through a sky sown with stellar lights.
The combined lights of these singular bodies surpassed the light of our
terrestrial moon, by reason of their closeness to the surface of Mars,
while the more rapid motion of the inner satellite causes the most weird
and beautiful changes of effect in the nocturnal glory they both lend to
the Martian life.
"We were sailing in a broad river-like canal, perhaps one mile or more
wide. On all sides the undulating ground, covered with cultivation,
varied with thick patches of trees, with here and there shining lights
from villages and isolated homes, carried the eye onward to a rising
hill country, beyond which, again, silhouetted against the shining sky
where Phobos began to rise mountain tops were just discernible.
"Deimos, the outer moon, was already shining, and its pale, sick light
imparted a peculiar blueness impossible to describe upon all surfaces it
touched. Here was the phenomenon we witnessed with increasing pleasure.
Phobos was emerging from a cloud and its yellow rays possessing a
greater illuminating power, mingled suddenly with the blue and spectral
beams of Deimos and the land thus visited by the complimentary flood of
light from these twin luminaries seemed suddenly dipped in silver. A
beautiful white light, most unreal, as you mortals might say, fell on
tree and water, cliff, hill, and villages. The effect was not unlike
that instant in photography when a developing plate shows the outlines
of its objects in dazzling silver before the half tints are added, and
the image fades away into indistinguishable shadow.
"It was a print in silver, and while we gazed in mute astonishment the
sharp shadows changed their position as Phobos, racing through the
zenith, changed the inclination of its incident beams. The effect was
indescribable. I walked the deck in an agitation of wonder and delight.
Chapman, to whom the novelties of this Martian life were still
wonderful, followed me, and was the first to speak.
"'Dodd, you know that the strangest thing about this whole place is your
body. It's body all right enough, but I can't quite understand what sort
of a body it is. It hurts in a way, and is pleased in a way, but it
seems a better made affair in texture and parts than anything we
possessed on earth. Exertion is so easy.'
"'Well, Chapman,' I answered, while my eyes rested on the water, through
which an approaching barge rose like a vessel of frosted or burnished
white metal, 'we were taught on the earth that, with gravitation reduced
one-half, the same weight on Mars would seem only half as heavy as on
the earth, and that the effort which there carried us eight feet would
here send us sixteen.'
"'It is true,' returned Chapman, 'but that doesn't explain everything.
We sleep less here, we scarcely touch meat, and yet exertion, prolonged
by hours, scarcely accelerates the blood or vexes the nerves, and
generally we don't grow old. Our bodies are light; the texture,
apparently firm and resisting, is somehow diaphanous. I've seen the
light through the palm of my hand. And then again I haven't. Somehow
mind works in the body here and changes it, and changes it different at
different times. Why, Dodd, the other day at the Patenta, a student
jumped up with a cry of delight at something, and stumbled and fell from
a window to the ground, but he stood up without a bruise or hurt of any
kind. His exultation, his emotional excitement made him buoyant, I
think, and he fell to the earth like a thistledown. There was no
concussion.'
"'Well,' I responded, 'I cannot tell. I know very little as yet. I feel
wonderfully active and vitalized. My senses are acute. I see further,
hear further, smell further than I ever did on earth, and it even seems
to me I can anticipate things. The nerve currents are so rapid, the mind
seems so persuasive, that coming events are registered by a prophetic
feeling I can scarcely describe. For that reason, Chapman, I grow
happier every minute, for now I see approaching that great joy, my
reunion with Martha, the one great divine event I hunger and hope for.
"'Well,' said Chapman, as a cloud covered the scudding moons, 'I do hope
you may see her, and somehow I think, too, you will. But, Dodd,' the
moons emerged, and the lower one was in transit across the face of the
upper, 'I must call your attention to this strange peculiarity of our
bodies, that we undergo extremes of temperature with almost no
noticeable sense of the great heat or cold. This region we are
traversing is about the latitude of Christ Church, as I told you, and it
is the period of harvests, and the heat is moderate, but in the height
of summer the heat seems scarcely more felt than now, and in the
clothing I am now wearing, I have sailed through the ice packs of the
North, and slept thinly covered in its snows, but without undue
discomfort. I tell you, matter in us, and flesh and blood in us are all
differently conditioned.'
"'Why not ask these questions of the wise men of the Patenta, the
doctors and chemists?' I replied. 'I can think of an analogy that might
make this Martian constitution intelligible. A close, dense body
conducts heat or cold; a loose, open texture or cellular mass does not.
In our curious embodiment from spirit the substance of our bodies is an
etherealized matter, loosely, I might say, flocculently, disposed, and
while it conveys sensations of a certain tone or key of vibratory
intensity, it will not respond to any violent or coarse shocks. They
simply cannot be carried. They escape us. Are the people all alike
amongst the Martians?'
"'Oh, no,' returned Chapman, who pointed to the widening spaces in the
beams between the slow Deimos and the fleeter flying Phobos, 'there are
great differences. I have seen that. In materialization some seem badly
put together, and these resemble our former terrestrial bodies. They
grow old, they succumb to disease, they feel changes of weather and they
have less vitality. Yes,' and he drew nearer, 'it is these unhappy
misbirths in this spirit land who retain the sin of earth and cannot
survive and get the _Kinkotantitomi_ or irreverently, as the earthling
would say, the grand bounce. They are fired off the planet.'
"He paused and laughed. How strange this almost human laugh sounded, and
yet how pleasant! I looked at him with a deep affection. He noticed the
impression, and quickly drawing me to him, said half timidly:
"'Dodd, that sort of laugh and those words of mine just used, are not
Martian, they don't belong to these rarefied beings here. They have a
human or earthly taint, and they frighten me. I seem so lonely
sometimes. My stray fun which I once enjoyed on earth must somehow be
forgotten here. I feel so irreverent at times, so full of horse play,
but I must keep up the high key and act like the rest. Indeed for the
most of the time I feel as they do, I suppose, but sometimes that sort
of ribaldry and feelings of the ludicrous that made us joke, and prank,
and cut up in genial companionships come over me, and I am suffocating
with a glee out of place to this exalted society. Ah! it's good to feel
you, my friend, so fresh and new from earth. It's promised here in the
learned talk I have heard, that those who disappear from Mars become
reincorporated upon earth again, if they belong there. Well, I wouldn't
mind if I got returned, wonderful and sweet and happy as all this seems.
The dear, dear old Earth!'
"He flung his arms around me, and our faces met, as if we had been lost
brothers. A sort of terrifying melancholy invaded me. I was so distant
from all I had known and loved, so distant from the surges we had
watched from our observatory at Christ Church, so distant from the life
of heat and clothing and genial domesticities; the life even, it might
be called, of the daily paper, the novel, the new book, the life of
politics and human history, and conventionality, the life of ups and
downs, of sickness and health, of individual enterprise, of routine and
mechanical fatigue, the life of exertion, contrast and social
inequality, with its picturesqueness, its incessant interest, all this
was now utterly removed by all the measureless leagues of icy space
between me and the floating planet--the old sin-stricken Earth--that was
shining in the Martian skies, so inconspicuous and tiny--so
inaccessible.
"But my heart was pulsating audibly. If I could recover Martha, if, in
this serene atmosphere of good will and fairness and kindness, in the
midst of unknown possibilities of knowledge, in the company of
enthusiastic and high-minded men and women, in this arena of scientific
wonders, and in the joy and beauty of universal happiness and thrift and
peace and well doing and intuition, I could find a human companionship
in the woman whose face and nature have summed up for me the whole of
life, if I could find her! then, indeed, this new world would be all my
earthly home could be, and the endless future with her for guide and
friend would lose its terror and lonely isolation, and--I dared to think
it--even the presence of God himself become bearable.
"Chapman had stolen away from me. He had stolen to the little, dainty
rooms that were sunk in the cockpit or cabin of our boat, and I was
standing alone in the light of the midnight moons in Mars, a waif from
the far earth, incomprehensibly born after death into this human
presentiment and renewal in youth, and again instinct with revivified
passion and desire; and breathing the atmosphere of a planet that for
years I had watched through the tube of a telescope, as a floating flake
of celestial fire. A delicious drowsiness overcame me, and while I
noticed the pilot was changed, his place being taken by another, and
that we were approaching a ridgy or disturbed country, I found my way to
the white couch prepared for me, and sank into a deep and dreamless
sleep.
"The morning of the next day was clear and beautiful. Shall I ever
forget that first approach to the mountains of Tiniti, where Mit and
Sinsi, the villages of the quarries, are located. All day long the boat
propelled through a diversified country, covered with morainal
heaps--great hills of drift matter, heaps of worn pebbles and rolling
plains of estuarine sediment. Much of this land seemed untouched with
cultivation, and sublime forests of the loftiest trees covered it. The
canal passed through solitudes, where the silence was only broken by the
cackling laugh of a crane-like bird, marching in lines along the banks,
or perched like sleepy sentinels amid the outstretched branches of the
trees.
"These wild and fascinating regions were often alternated by miles of
bright plantations radiant with the yellow leaves of the Rint, bearing
its deep red pods, while avenues of palms, not unlike the royal palm of
the Earth, led in long vistas to clustering groups of houses, and we,
too, caught glimpses of basking lakes on which, even as in the Earth,
the patient fisherman in basket-like circular boats, waited for his
flashing captives.
"Then, again, there were prairie-like stretches of a sort of pampas
waving in cloudy lines, the glistening pappus of the wild Nitoti, a
peculiar, low composite, that grows in abundance and furnishes food to
the strange gazelle of this latitude in Mars.
"This animal, the Rimondi, could be seen in scampering herds over these
plains, its horns making an hour glass form above its head, as they bent
to each other, touched, and then curved outward again to reunite a
second time.
"We were rapidly moving northward, and just as it would be on the earth,
the changing vegetation gave visible notice of our advance.
"But more interesting than nature were the scenes of life along our way,
and the custom of public worship filled me with wonder. Amphitheatres
of stone built high above the ground, and approached by encircling
terraces of steps dotted the country at long intervals. These, Chapman
explained, were the churches of the people. Here they gathered from long
distances around, and, even as he described their meaning, the
congregations were seen assembling, while later we heard the music flung
in waves of sound from these houses of song and worship.
"Chapman did not understand the Martian faith. There seemed little to
understand about it. It was one national expression of the love of
goodness and of beauty, but it was all directed to a source of
infallible wisdom, power and justice.
"Thus considering the country and its customs we fell again into a long
colloquy:
"'Dodd,' said Chapman, musingly, 'we should all become as these people
about us, and do the same things, and believe and act as they do. You
will, but I think I remain a little strange. I seem a spectator that a
caprice has cast upon this globe, and though I live here, I must succumb
to a certain alienation, a lack of mediation between their life and my
former existence, and because of this subtle estrangement, I shall
contract disease, or meet with accident, or waste in age, while you
shall stay young, and living, sink into the Martian life and yield to
it a spiritual, a mental acquiescence. You will become absorbed, and,
with your love realized, the whole rhapsodic life of this world will
mingle you forever in its tide of song and science and labor.'
"'Yes,' I answered, 'I am sure I shall. For whatever period of time I
stay here, I am one with this beautiful and strange life. I respond
naturally to all this serenity and joy, this precision of power over
inanimate things; this flooded being and the dawning sense that through
the stepping stone of Mars, I approach yet higher beatitudes of living.
At least in Mars the sordid taint of suffering, of ignominious physical
torture and privation, which spoiled the Earth, is almost unknown.'
"Chapman laughed, and an echo gave back from some hillside its musical
response. 'Ah, it may be, I know it is true, and yet--and yet--the Earth
possessed a pictorial, a dramatic power in its contrasts of happiness
and suffering, of goodness and sin. It had literary material. Its
consecutive growth in the ages of social and national and economic
history were so wonderful, so thrilling in interest, in the details of
character and adventure, in the incessant panoramic display it gave of
light and shade. And on it rested the shadow of a strange, pathetic
doubt, the mystery of creation. Its romance, its fiction, its fable, and
the animating picture it furnished, with its sceptics and its
believers, its haters and its lovers, its tyrants and its heroes. Its
wide, verbal immensity! I miss all that, or almost all. This life is
evenly celestial, and glowing, and carelessly happy. And here knowledge
is extreme and pervasive and omnipotent. The dear commonplaces of the
Earth life are unknown too, the ludicrous is absent, and the sublimity
of sacrifice impossible.'
"He laughed again, and I felt for one brief, incredible instant a pang,
too, that the blossoming, full, sensual Earth has passed from beneath my
feet forever.
"But it was past. For me nothing was left behind when Martha had gone
before. The future for me was the pilgrimage through worlds for her lost
face. The sum and substance of a world's growth, of the unintermittent
and heraldic progress of the soul was union with her. And deeper in my
convictions than science or faith or desire, lay the consciousness of my
sure approach.
"Again the evening fell. We arrived at the entrance of a gloomy and
stupendous gorge. It was the wonderful passage driven through the first
area of igneous rocks before we reached the quarry country of the
Tiniti. It pierced the dark and stubborn dike that rose in sheer walls
like the Palisades on the Hudson, 1,000 and 1,200 feet above our heads,
and it seemed that the darkening tide was carrying us into the bowels of
the sphere. As the precipitous walls rose on either side, a loud report,
followed by another more muffled, startled us. Looking upward, Chapman,
shouting '_Golki, tanto_,' with outstretched hand pointed to a flaming
missile passing over our heads, and apparently in the direction we were
heading.
"It was a meteor. It was just such a phenomenon as we know of on the
Earth. I felt certain that it was a bolide from space, one of those
fiery visitors of stone and iron that collide occasionally with our
Earth, and that somewhere before us, in the country we were approaching,
it would be found.
"Later a few straggling shooting stars appeared. The languor of fatigue
overcame me, and I slept prostrate on the cushions of the deck as the
murmurous reverberations from the walls of the rock-bound canal rose and
fell, with the cadence of the waves, splashing softly against their
feet.
"I dreamt of the Earth, the pictures naturally recalled, by these
surroundings, of my life on the Hudson River in New York, and it seemed
so real, that I should find myself with you working away in the old
laboratory at Yonkers near the Albany Road. Suddenly I was shaken, and
opening my eyes I beheld the firmament of heaven falling in coruscating
cascades about us. Starting up, I found myself clutching Chapman, who
had called to the pilot to stop the boat. A few of the attendants were
grouped near us, and the loudly suppressed exclamations made me realize
that these visitations were perhaps infrequent upon Mars.
"It was a meteoric shower, like our leonids in November. It rained
pellets or balls of fire, these phosphorescent trains gleaming
spectrally, while a kind of half audible crackling accompanied the fall.
Shooting in irregular shoals or volleys, they would increase and
diminish, and recurrent explosions announced the arrival at the ground
of some meteoric mass.
"It was a marvellous and splendid scene. It lasted till the dawn. We
remained almost unchanged in position, while the tiny comets crowded the
sky with their uninterrupted march, and the air was shot through with
intermingled lanes of light.
"As the morning broke, we had passed the great gorge in the canal, and
had entered a wild, savage, almost treeless country. Great weathered
columns of rock stood alone in the debris of their own dismemberment,
the bare gray or rusty and jagged expanses sloping up steeply from the
edge of the canal, sparingly dotted over with gray bushes, and covered
with an ashen colored lichen.
"The scene was here forbidding and desolate. We moved for miles through
the waste of a ruined world. The whole region had been the stage of
great volcanic activity, and the monticules of scoriaceous rock, the
broad plains excavated with deep pools that reflected their dismal,
untenanted borders in the black depths of unruffled water, spoke of
meteorological conditions long prolonged and intense. It was a weird,
strange place, silent and dead. But amongst these vast ejections, these
truncated fossil craters were embedded masses of the rare self-luminous
stone that made the City of Light. Chapman told me how in pockets or
huge amygdaloidal cavities, this white phosphorescent substance was
quarried, brought up bodily perhaps in the slow upheaval of the region
from the deep-seated sources of this mineral flood.
"The canal passed along for miles in the depression between two folds of
the surface. Finally, gazing ahead, there slowly came into view a huge
_rictus_, a gaping rent in the side of the black and gray and red walls
to our right, and a minute movement of living forms, scarcely
discernible, revealed the first quarry near the little town of Sinsi.
"As we drew nearer I descried a slant incline from the open excavation
down which the blocks of stone were slid. They were brought to the
surface by hoisting cranes, and just as our little porcelain
cockle-shell glided to the dock, an enormous fragment rudely shaped into
a cubical form, was moving down the metal road bed to the edge of the
canal.
"Here we landed, and a crowd of people hailed us, and amongst them were
many of the prehistoric people, the short, sturdy brown or copper
colored northerners who work in the quarries and mines. It was
nightfall. Their day's work was over, and they crowded around us with
interest. They were good-natured, but quiet, and dressed in a kind of
overalls that was made in one garment from head to feet.
"Chapman pushed amongst them, followed by me. We made our way to a
pleasant house, built of the quarried volcanic rock, alternating with
the white stone of the quarry, and covered with an almost flat roof of
the blue metal. In this house we were received by the Superintendent of
Quarries, a supernatural, who still retained a mechanical aptitude,
brought with him from the earth. The greetings were pleasant, and as the
Superintendent spoke his former earth language, which had been French,
we got along intelligibly.
"The rooms of this house were large, square apartments, simply furnished
with the white chairs, tables and couches I had seen in the City of
Light, but on its walls were drawings and photographs of the quarry, the
country, and groups of the workmen. Amongst the pictures were some
wonderful large scenes of an ice country, and the lustrous high wall of
a gigantic glacier. I pointed these out to Chapman. He told me that to
the north of the mountains lay the great northern sea, in winter a sea
of ice, and that from continental elevations within it glacial masses
pushed outward, invading the southern country. A road led over the
mountain from Sinsi to regions beyond, where there were fertile
intervals and plains inhabited by populations of the small, early people
we had met.
"Here were their settlements, from which the workmen of the quarries had
been brought. Beyond this again lay the margins of the polar sea. The
Superintendent--his name was Alca--had visited this region, and probably
made the pictures I wondered at. The Superintendent said we should visit
the great quarry in the morning before we started again for Scandor. And
he showed us, as the darkness descended about us, a marvellous
phenomenon. Standing on the roof of his house, we looked up the mountain
side to the immense opening forced in its flank, and it had become a
great surface of palpitating, rising and falling light. The waves of
glorious soft radiance bathed the village about us, the waters of the
canal, and the arid crusts of rock beyond, the circle of encompassing
darkness straining like a great black wall, on its spent edges.
"Song and music closed the day, and after eating the wine-soaked cakes
of Pintu, we made our way to the white and simple bedchamber and waited
for the morning.
"It came, fresh and splendid. The air of this latitude of Mars is so
pure, vivid and dustless! My strength and power and vitality seemed
boundless. And as in the broad mirror of my bedchamber I viewed my
reflection, I leaped with wonder to see the youth I had been, formed
anew in lineaments, fairer than Earth's. My son, I have become younger
than yourself, age has vanished, and all the restraint of differing
years between has vanished with it.
"Alca, Chapman and myself, as is the Martian habit, walked to the quarry
mouth, up a winding and hard stone road. This dreary and desolate region
seemed to have a charm. Its expanse of rigid waves of stone, pimpled
with sharp excrescences, and as deeply pitted with cavernous grottoes,
where no life seemed able to survive, save a stunted herbage, sparsely
assembled in vagrant groups, or gathered in thirsty lines around the lip
of the still pools, was full of scenic interest, but more deeply
eloquent of great geological convulsions.
"Chapman and Alca were in front of me, speaking the Martian tongue,
while I stood looking backward every few steps, delighted to trace the
broad river of the canal winding through the desolation for miles
beyond. Then I noticed how rapid and effortless is motion in Mars.
Volition is so easy and penetrating, the body becomes a mere plaything
for the mind. Every function, every part is swayed into vitality by the
mind. There is the apparent motion of the limbs, but really the whole
frame sweeps on as by an intangible process of translation, and the body
is transferred to the point the mind desires it to reach almost without
fatigue. This gives strength exactly proportioned to Will, and the shorn
powers of disease and Time proceed from the creative faculty of thought.
The disabling of the body in Mars by weakness or disease, or accident or
age, sprang front a mental discord, an emotional dissonance. Here was
the explanation of those disorders that still cling to the Martian life.
In this lay also the secret of crime.
"I looked upward to Chapman, who was then peering with hand raised to
his eyes at some object before him which the Superintendent had pointed
out, and I felt sorrowful that he should be in disagreement with this
life. It boded ill. I had begun to love Chapman, and the first sense of
suffering I had felt seemed now awakened at the thought of harm coming
to him.
"But there was no time for meditation. Chapman and Alca were looking
backward and shouting. They beckoned with their arms, and as I gazed I
saw between them, and ahead of them a great black object, about which a
number of the little workmen were running excitedly like a swarm of
ants. I leaped to their position. Chapman exclaimed: 'You remember the
meteor we saw. Well, there it is.'
"Extended like a gigantic and deformed missile lay an iron meteorite
before us, the same thing as the Siderites that appear in your Museums
on Earth. It was yet warm, a crevice spread down into its interior, and
it had apparently rolled from the spot of its first impact, since a
hammered side, abraded and worn on the hard rock, lay uppermost. It bore
the significant pits, thumb-marks and depressions of the terrestrial
objects, while streaming striations spread from its front breast where
the iron in melting had run like tears over its surface. It measured
some four feet in length, and must have weighed many tons.
"Then a curious thing happened, or seemed to happen. Alca, the
Superintendent, advanced to it, and bending against it with
outstretched arm, muttered a few words, frowned as if in concentrated
thought, and--was it credible--the iron object moved. I looked aghast at
Chapman, who turned away with what I dismally interpreted was an
expression of disgust. I pressed up close to him, and he murmured, 'Was
that a miracle? If it was I should like to get back to common sense and
jack-screws.'
"We continued upward, and now the terrific gulf piercing the ground for
over two terrestrial miles yawned at our feet. The steep precipice, lost
in a twilight dusk below, was disconcerting. The blocks of stone were
hoisted from the gigantic pit by hoists worked by hand. Here is one of
the anomalies of this existence in Mars. Electrical science and its
application is understood, great stores of mechanical experience and
wisdom can be drawn on, and yet in most of the mechanical work, hand
work, the toilsome method of the Pharaohs of Egypt prevails. There are
no railroads or trolleys or steam vehicles. The boats are driven by
explosive engines, and there are electric carriages of velocity and
power. But the latter are infrequent. The canals are numerous,
especially about Scandor, and the great trunk canals are broad avenues
of traffic.
"The intense swift motion of the Martians meets their needs in most
cases. Where hard labor on a mammoth scale is necessary, the little race
of _prehistorics_ serves all their purposes. The canals are their great
engineering feats, and the wonderful telescopes, their triumphs in
applied science, their knowledge of the transmutation of the
elements,--their greatest intellectual victory,--and Scandor, the City
of Glass, their architectural gem and miracle.
"We stood in a line gazing upon the receding roof of the great cavern,
the heavy walls left like buttresses to hold up the overlying mountain
ridge, and the tiny figures dimly swarming on the distant floor.
"The quarry extends far in under the ridge. Much barren rock is taken
out, for the Phosphori rock occurs variously in masses, layers,
lenticles, and almond shaped inclusions in the igneous matrix.
"We were to descend, but before we did so the Superintendent led us to
the summit of the ridge. From here, with a superb hand telescope, we
gazed up a distant land beyond the volcanic area we had surmounted,
occupied by farms and villages. It was the North country where the
prehistorics dwelt. It seemed peaceful and attractive. Beyond this again
we just discerned the shimmering surface of the Great Glacier, the
superb train of ice, that comes southward in the winter, and encroaches
even upon some of the exposed margins of the land of the prehistorics.
Its retreat is rapid in the warm season, and its broad tract is broken
by emergent backs of rocks and land, that are seamed with wild flowers.
The Martians travel to these oases in the Ocean of Ice, and it is from
these flowers that an entrancing perfume is extracted, of which the
Martians are extremely fond.
"We lingered on this pinnacle of rock and surveyed a prospect on either
side of contrasted and great interest. The land of the Zinipi north of
us resembled the fertile hill and valley country of the Genesee River in
western New York, the great region south of us a combination of the
Snake River country in Idaho, and the fissured ranges of the Silverton
Quadrangle in Colorado.
"Between these rose this high partition of castellated rock.
"We descended again to the mouth of the quarry, and, led by the
Superintendent, were swung far out from its dizzy sides into the lake of
air between them upon a platform, used for an aerial elevator. Chapman
clung nervously to me, and complained of a light nausea and dread. I
felt only a tonic exhilaration, and as we slowly sank through the shaft
of air, crossed by sunlight for some distance, and then passed into the
cooler shadows of its deeper parts, where the yet level sun failed to
penetrate, I cried aloud with delight, and the abyss around us shouted
its salutation back.
"Still we descended, and soon saw back in the deep prolongations of the
tunnel the shining walls of this phosphorescent cave. The light glowed
so effulgently that it seemed a soft radiant haze, through which came
the sound of voices, and in it black figures moved incessantly.
"The method of quarrying is not unlike that of the marble quarries on
the earth. Drilling long holes in and under the stone, which from
pressure has assumed a rudely cubical cleavage, separates the rock into
heavy pieces. These holes are wedged, and the rocks forced off into
useful blocks. All is done by hand, and the picture of activity, with
workers constantly engaged at their various duties made a singular
scene. We walked far into the ever deepening womb of the mountain, while
on either hand lateral tunnels, or rather avenues had been pushed,
penetrating rich segregations wherever they had been traced, and where
also glowed the welcome glow of this lithic lamp.
"The Superintendent explained that the stone was quite unequal in
quality, and he told us how the illuminating power of the stone was
actually tested in what on the Earth we would call candle powers, but
is known on Mars as Ki-kans, or a unit of light derived from a platinum
wire one millimetre thick, carrying 100 volts current. We could see the
varying radiations, and came upon rayless sections, which from admixture
of impurities or imperfect chemical perfection, were deprived of all
luminousness.
"Returning, it seemed as if in the sharp convulsions of the crust a
flood of light had been somehow absorbed by the rock, and then this
light-saturated rock had been overwhelmed and buried out of sight, only
to be painfully restored to its first home, in the open skies, by the
labor of men.
"But time was pressing. Chapman must reach Scandor, his envoy's errand
was important, and bidding the kind Alca good-bye, which the Martians
execute by a kiss and an embrace, we came out again into the deep well,
and gazed upward past the glistening precipices, irregular with little
ledges, and over-reaching cavities, to the distant sky.
"And now a terrible calamity befell us. The Superintendent pointed out a
narrow path that led circuitously around the great crags of rock to the
top. It was a narrow winding ledge, rising by a mild incline, and
circling the pit before it finally reached its brim. In parts it was
quite unprotected, but the extraordinary nerves of the men made the
achievement of passing out or in the quarry by this means a very simple
test of endurance. Even as the Superintendent alluded to its use, a file
of dark figures was just above us, with soldierlike precision marching
down to the level we occupied. Chapman banteringly asked me to try it,
and I accepted the challenge, urging him to follow.
"We started up. At first the ascent was simple, and the view backward
just a little exciting. We continued, and I noticed that the path
contracted, and nervously looking on ahead, was startled to find it
broken with short gaps, which must be crossed by jumping. I had felt the
vague premonitions about Chapman increasing, and somehow, by that
intuition which becomes prophetic, in this semi-etherealized
constitution of our bodies and minds, in Mars, I knew an impending blow
hung over us.
"I looked back and saw Chapman gravely following me. The cheer and
laughter had disappeared from his face, the jesting gayety had fled, and
he seemed enfeebled. I hastened to him, and he raised his face with a
reassuring smile.
"'Dodd,' he said, 'I am dizzy. I feel strangely here,' and he felt his
forehead. 'I wonder that it is so. But come! Don't be frightened. It
will pass over.' He pushed me from him. For an instant we stood and
gazed around us. Far up we saw the outer sunlight beating on the barren
exposures of the mountain, around us was black excavated rock, and below
the shining walls, faintly blue and pink.
"'Chapman,' I said, 'let us go back. The hoists will take us out.'
'Folly,' was the answer. 'I shall be all right. Why, a Martian has no
physical weakness or dread. Come, Dodd, you have not yet acquired the
Martian defiance of accident, disease, or death. You are sneaking back
under the cover of fear for me.'
"His voice seemed peevish. I looked at him with wonder. He leaped past
me, with a forced agility, and sprang on upward. I followed with
lightness born of thought, with which the true Martians move.
"On, on, we sped. The narrowing path carried us up until one of those
gaps I had noticed came in view. Chapman stopped, and then hearing my
approaching steps, ran forward and jumped. His calculation and strength
were yet secure and adequate. He safely passed the first break in the
pathway, and, as I crossed it with a wide leap, we both still sped on
upon an even narrower shelf, which also was more steeply inclined
about the jutting prominences of the rocky cliff.
"The next gap was reached, and now the edge of the succeeding length of
pathway was not only farther away, but higher up. Chapman, I could see
imperfectly, because of a slim projection in my way, had reached the
lower side, and, hesitatingly, drew backward. It was his preparation for
the leap. He launched forward. I rushed precipitately upward, feeling
the air about me vibrating, it seemed, with an impending disaster.
Chapman had landed on the further side of the break, but the cruel,
treacherous rock crumbled beneath his impact, and I saw his staggering
form turning backward. Another instant and his descending body was below
me, plunging to the floor of the abyss. I turned, and then, my son, I
felt the marvel of the mind's creative power over matter. I wished
myself at the bottom of the quarry where Chapman had fallen, and
although the movement of the translation down the pathway seemed
apparent, yet I was scarcely parted from him an instant before I was
standing and leaning over him in a group of astonished workmen, at the
very spot where he lay. He was conscious, but gravely injured. I knelt
beside him, and as I raised his head upon my knee, he looked up, and his
lips moved; at first he was inarticulate, but soon his words became
audible and intelligent.
"'Dodd,' he said, 'this ends me for Mars. Take the papers to the Council
at Scandor. They are in the cabin in my desk. They are sealed. I know
there is a celestial runaway that is going to strike this planet. I
overheard that much at the Patenta. And its direct path, the point of
impingement, will be at Scandor. The fires ascending from Scandor are
signals that they, too, have divined the disaster. I think so at least!
Hurry on! You may see the strangest phenomenon eyes have ever seen. But,
Dodd, enough of that. I am turned down for this world. I was not in
agreement, as the philosophers call it, and the true mental Martian
immunity from accident was not in me. I am injured mortally.'
"He groaned and tried to rise, but his crushed body was incapable. The
Superintendent, Alca, had hurried to the spot where the crowding men
stood around us ejaculating their amazement. Alca tore open the garment
about Chapman, and placing his forehead on the body, poured out as it
were, the full tide of his mental sympathy and power.
"I could see the struggle between the mortality of Chapman, born of
doubt, and his unfittedness and apathy, and the spiritual power of the
brave Superintendent. The flame of life in Chapman would be stimulated
or excited, and then flicker and die down. These alterations lasted but
a short time. Soon Chapman passed into stupor, and then death
supervened, and the strange and seldom known circumstance of death among
the supernaturals in Mars was realized.
"Alca kept the body of Chapman, which would be sent back to the City of
Light, and cremated in the Temple of Glorification--which I have not
seen. He intended to accompany it. He sent me on to Scandor. I had now
learned enough of the Martian language to speak, imperfectly. That
mental facility, which is the amazing and most wonderful thing in Mars,
was perhaps more slowly roused in me. But daily I became known, and more
alert and inflamed with thought and the eager intuition of the Martians.
"We started from the great Quarry of Sinsi, and I was alone with the
Martians on the porcelain boat, now made by this tragic fate the
ambassador from the City of Light to the Council in Scandor.
"The sterile, sinister and yet marvellous region of lava beds, dikes and
conic craters suddenly was passed, and the canal moved into the huge
forest lands of the Ribi wood.
"This is a beautiful land. Mountain ranges rising from four to six
thousand feet cross it, holding broad valleys and plains, or elevated
plateaus between them; lakes and rivers pass through it, and villages
and towns with a mixed population of the supernaturals and the
prehistorics are frequent. The canals cross the great region in many
directions. The trunk line I followed was carried up and down by systems
of locks of astounding magnitude and perfection. Great lakes were made
convenient feeders, and rivers were also tapped to keep the water levels
constant in the canals. The weather was that of a semi-tropical
paradise, and the late flowers of the Ribi filled the air with
fragrance.
"Quickly we approached Scandor. It was a clear, calm day when we emerged
from the Ribi country, and the pilot pointed out to me the distant
hills, almost purple in a twilight haze, which encircled the Valley of
the City of Scandor. The country we had entered was a fertile farm
country, where great plantations of the Rint, and vineyards of the Oma
grapes were established, and where great flocks of the Imilta dove,
almost the only meat eaten by the Martians, are raised. The enormous
flocks of this snow-white bird were strangely beautiful. They made
clouds in the air, and their purring notes when they settled in white
blankets over the fields, were heard pulsating over long distances.
"Finally we came to the last tier of locks at the summit of which my
curiosity was to be satisfied by a view of the great City of Scandor,
the City of Glass.
"It was night when our china boat floated upon the waters of the last
lock that completed the ascent, and immediately below the observatory
Station or Settlement of Scandor. I was standing on the deck of the
boat, watching impatiently the slowly rising tide upon which we were
borne upward. I could at first see as we ascended the towers of the
observatory station. Above me, looking at us with interest, on the walls
of the lock, was a company of Martians. The night was cloudy, and the
lights of the hastening satellites were but intermittently evident.
Gradually my head passed upward beyond the obstructing interference of
wall and gate and fence, and the glorious and unimaginable splendor of
the City of Scandor, like some monstrous continental opal, lay before me
in the immediate valley.
"The glistening panes of water below me marked the places of the
descending line of locks. Around me were the buildings of the Scandor
Observatory, and to the right and left swept the forested slopes of a
circular range which, as I later saw, ranged about in one
amphitheatrical circuit the, great vale of Scandor. But only an
instant's glance could be spared for this detail. The divine City
glowing below me seemed to magnetize attention, and control, through its
wonderfulness each wavering attitude of interest. My son, the eye of man
never beheld so astonishing a picture. Imagine a city reaching twenty
miles in all directions built of glass variously designed, interrupted
by tall towers, pyramids, minarets, steeples, light, fantastic and
beautiful structures, all aflame, or rather softly radiating a variously
colored glory of light.
"Imagine this great area of building, penetrated by broad avenues,
radiating like the spokes of a wheel from a center where rose upward to
the sky a colossal amphitheatre. Imagine these roads, delineated to the
eye by tall chimneys or tubes of glass through which played an electric
current, converting each one into a lambent pillar. Imagine between
these paths of greenish opalescence the squares of buildings of domed,
arched and castellated roofs, pierced and starred, and spread in lines
and patterns of white electric lamps. The noble proportions of the
larger buildings, the graceful outlines of turreted or campanulate
erections, and the smaller houses were all defined. I could see canals
or rivers of water winding through the City spanned by arches of flame,
and even the symmetrical disposition of the dark-leaved trees was
visible.
"But the night was still further turned to day, for above the City, high
in the velvet black empyrean were suspended thousands of glass balloons,
each emitting the Geissler-like illumination that marked the lines of
streets. So full and opulent was the flood of light, that the summit I
had reached, the encircling hills, and the farther side of the
saucer-shaped valley where Scandor lay, were bathed in an equally
diffused radiation.
"But, as if the heavenly marvel might still further startle and amaze
and charm me, from the City rose the swelling chords of choruses;
billows of sound, softened by distance, beat in melodious surges on the
high encompassing lands.
"I stood mute and transfixed. It seemed a beatific vision. If the very
air had been filled with ascending choruses of angels, if the dark
zenith had opened and revealed the throne of the Almighty, it would have
seemed but a congruous and expected climax.
"Long I gazed, and slowly, very slowly became conscious of the great
numbers of people about me, and that they were being augmented by new
arrivals. The porcelain barge I had come in from the City of Light, was
moored now to the side of the lock. I had disembarked, carrying almost
mechanically in my hand, the chest in which the communications from the
Patenta to the Council were locked.
"It was perhaps only a short interval before the pilot woke me from my
trance, saying in Martian: 'This is the Observation Hill of Scandor.
These are Scandor's Observatories. I hear there is seen by the observers
some approaching danger in the heavens. These citizens of Scandor are
crowding from the City to hear the latest reports. There is a messenger
from the Council here waiting on the observers. I will bring him to you,
and you and the messenger can at once be conveyed to the Council.'
"I looked at him speechless, yet unable to again realize I lived and
breathed in another world. It seemed as if a sudden motion, a cry, a
whisper even, would break the chrysalis of sleep about me, and plunge me
into void and nothingness.
"The pilot left me, and I saw him thread his way amongst the lines of
people, moving toward the dark walls of the observatory that covered the
hill. At long intervals rockets rose from the opposite rim of the great
circular ridge around the City, scarring the deep, inky vault about us
with lines of fire. They ascended to an enormous distance. Almost
instantly these were apparently answered by similar rockets in other
colors from the hill I stood on.
"There was a sudden movement about me. The pilot had returned. With him
came the messenger. I flung my absorption from me. I was a Martian. The
light of recognition came back again to my eyes--my tongue was loosened,
my senses accommodated themselves to the stupendous circumstances about
me. I spoke first.
"'Mindo,' (the name of the pilot), 'I am ready to accompany my guide to
the City. Will you go with us?'
"'No! Heboribimo,' (your excellency), 'I must stay at the locks. I shall
descend to the City in the boat to-morrow. This man will bring you to
the canal. I advise haste. There is great excitement and dread in
Scandor. Mars is in the path of a comet.'
"I turned to my guide, a beautiful youth, not dressed as the citizens of
the City of Light, but clothed in a tight fitting doublet of a creamy
blue, with short trunks of yellow, and on his feet were sandals. He
saluted me, and together we descended the broad boulevard between the
widely separated lustres that became more crowded as they massed like a
progressive deepening of color into the eddying splendors of the City
itself.
"Again I realized how swift is motion in Mars. We wished to reach the
City, and we glided to it by the rapid propulsion of desire. The broad
way was filled with lines and groups of peoples clustering to the
hilltop--and over the far-reaching slopes I could see the awaiting
throngs. My guide pointed to the constellation of Perseus, and I could
discern a nebulous mass of considerable diameter from which proceeded a
wisp-like exhalation, just a phantasmal fan of phosphorescence, behind
it.
"The glory of the City fell around us now; we were in its broad streets
beneath the towering pillars of light that framed them in a fence of
splendor. On we pressed, but I glanced from side to side, noting the
great glass houses and buildings, here colonnades of translucent
opalescent beauty, made up of hollow tubes of glass holding an interior
illumination, and clambered over by vines whose expanding leaves formed
a tracery of silhouettes upon their sides.
"Still on, past porticos and under arches, through open forum-like
squares, from which were elevated the great glass globes I have
described, which hung lamp-like in the sky,--past palaces and arcades,
blocks of low stores in iridescent tints, and long, straight fronts of
white opaque buildings, through occasional tunnels into which we
plunged as into a sea of radiance, and on, out, past a few squares of
black umbrageous trees that seemed like dead coals laid on the heat
quivering hearth of a furnace, past minarets of curling, entwined
filagrees of glass threads, past dull or darker areas where the huge
glass factories were built, their forges glowing like Cyclops' eyes in
the night, and from which was produced the colossal sum of manufacture,
which this great City embodied.
"It was a strange bewilderment of marvels, and from it all, as if it
were its interior motive and cause, sprang light. It was electric in
origin, conveyed in some peculiar manner from a great source of power,
in the high falls of Zenapa, near the City. But this I learned later.
"I divined that we were approaching the center of the city. Soon,
indeed, I saw before me the sparkling walls of the amphitheatre I had
descried from the hill of Observation at the locks. Here it is, that the
great plays, the gigantic concerts, the operas, and services of the
Pan-Tan are held. It was a seraphic, astounding picture. It rose in the
midst of a great square of many acres in extent, where the light,
purposely subdued, allowed its dazzling beauty subdued isolation. How
wonderful! I stopped. For one instant, before hurrying on, I gazed upon
a miracle of constructive and decorative art. One hundred columns of red
glass rose upward, and between them was a wall, in tiers of green glass
arches, and on the keystone of each a pink globe of fire. From the
pillars sprang, in an inverted terrace formation, metallic brackets,
carrying gorgeous chandeliers of a red bronze; the largest chandeliers
were at the very upper edge of the building, and the cascade of light
thus shed upon the splendid fabric was indescribably magnificent.
"But there was small time for wonder or examination. We swept on through
the shadowy gardens about it, and my guide quickly brought me to the
Hall of the Council, a low, inconspicuous building of yellow brick, one
of the few discordant architectural notes in the whole city.
"The doors of the single chamber, which embraced all the interior space,
swung open, and I stood on the threshold of a shallow, rectangular
depression, surrounded on all sides with benches, and holding in its
central area a long table, at which, beneath tall lamps, sat, perhaps, a
dozen men and one woman. Opposite to my point of view, in a niche upon
the further wall, was the colossal figure of the Deity I had seen in the
Patenta at the City of Light.
"The faces of the twelve men turned to us as we entered. The herald
announced my errand with the customary salutation of 'Hebori bimo.' I
was invited to descend to the central table. I advanced, and laying
Chapman's chest, with its sealed communications upon the table, spoke:
"'I am a stranger. I have come to your world from the Earth. I bring
news, celestial news, from the astronomers of the City of Light. I had a
companion to whom all this was entrusted.' He was killed in the quarries
of Tiniti. I came on, bidden so to do by Alca, the Superintendent. The
papers of the Wise Men of the Patenta are here.'
"I laid the chest upon the table. My speech was yet unformed, and
perhaps upon the delicate and intellectual faces before me, there dwelt,
with the transient influence of a passing thought, a smile of sympathy
or amusement. Then a young being at the head of the table exclaimed in
Martian:
"'Welcome, stranger. All who come to us are soon made one with
ourselves. The Martian spirit is that of salutation and friendship. We
have heard of the discoveries in the new commotions in planetary space.
Our own astronomers have announced them. This great City of Scandor, the
product of many centuries' toil and invention, is apparently doomed. It
lies in the path, certainly defined and determined by observers, of a
small cometary mass, which will plunge upon it a rain of rock and iron.
Even now this approaching body grows more and more visible in the sky.
The astronomers are working at the problem, hoping some deflection, some
interpositional mercy will carry off this disturbing incidence. But if
we are to be destroyed, if there is no escape from the singular fortune
of annihilation by an inrushing stream of meteoric bodies, then warning,
through proclamation, shall be made, and our citizens will move out of
the city to Asco, and the islands of Pinit.'
"He ceased; upon him the expectant faces of the others, assembled about
the table, were fixed, and a visible tremor of dismay and grief seemed
to convulse them. A few covered their faces with their hands, others
stood up and gazed at the benignant colossus in bronze at the end of the
room, while others, motionless, still maintained their attitude of
attention.
"The presiding officer, with a slight inclination of the body, raised
his hand, and addressing me, said: 'You shall be the guest of our City,
and if it must be that this great capital of Mars must succumb to this
mysterious invasion, if this place, so long a marvel of beauty, shall
be succeeded by a heap of burning stones, then you shall be our
companion in pilgrimage. Remain with us until the end of this strange
circumstance is known.'
"As he finished, a noise of indescribable lamentation from a multitude
of voices broke upon our ears--the sound of running feet and sharp cries
of amazement, crashed in upon the half ominous silence about us.
"I turned instinctively to my guide. He stood statue-like beside me,
with a stealing pallor crossing his face, and then, the doors of the
apartment swung open, and loud voices were heard crying, 'The Peril
comes. Stand forward. To the Hills!'
"Panic, that nameless associated mental terror of the unknown and the
impending, which on Earth spreads fever-like through multitudes, had
arisen amongst the Martians, and hurrying crowds were hastening in a
wild retreat from the City to the hills.
"All thought of the Council, of my errand, or of the new relation I had
been graciously accorded, disappeared from my mind. Frightened by the
sudden premonition of destruction, bewildered by the torrent of new
sensations, and even yet only half confident that my existence in the
new world was altogether real, I was impelled to spring forward.
Reaching the doors, hands shot out around me, and I was swept in the
tide of running forms.
"It was a living stream of manifold complexity. Only for one moment did
I lose consciousness. The next I was struggling to escape from the
spreading tentacles of this involved current. I leaped to the projection
of a low pedestal, upon which an unfinished construction or group of
statues was in progress. Holding my exposed position for an instant, I
wrenched myself clear of the pulsating throngs, and succeeded in gaining
the low summit above me. Here I was free to look around me. My guide was
gone, the Council House was lost to view; I was alone. Below passed the
surging crowd, made up of youths and girls, with few older men or women,
many beautiful, all expressing the Martian distinction, but now
strangely bewildered and uncontrolled. It was a reversed emotional
picture from that buoyant, frenzied throng that a few weeks ago carried
me into the Hall of the Patenta.
"Faces were turned toward the sky, and hands, as if in ejaculation, were
waved up and down, or thrust in significant indices toward that fatal
blurred blot of splendor in the heavens. I followed their direction. The
approaching nebula had grown sensibly since an hour ago. It glittered,
the size of a shield, and a light coruscation seemed emanating from its
edges. The faces of the multitude were justified. The mass above us was
a train of celestial missiles, hurling toward Mars. Its contact seemed
more and more imminent. I felt a nameless terror. The thought of
isolation in this new world, the unknown awfulness of this planetary
disturbance, the sudden extinction of the hopes that were feeding my
heart with a new life, and the forecasting of the impossible agonies of
universal death in this great, strange place I had so wonderfully
entered, overcame me. I fell sobbing to the glassy floor on which I was
standing. It was again a new proof of my assumption of the ecstatic
nature of these children of light and music, impulse and inspiration.
"The convulsion passed. I felt stronger, and was quickened with a keenly
prudent determination to escape from the city, find my way back to the
Hill of Observation, and if possible, send you, my son, my last
experience before all had become silence.
"I could see the regular ascent of the rockets from the distant hill. I
found the streets about me almost emptied, the white, lustrous river of
life had passed. I descended to the pavement. The way past the splendid
Amphitheatre was easily found, and then I hastened, guided by a dumb
instinct of direction, toward the still ascending rockets. I came to
the broad Boulevard which led to the Hill of Observation, and went on,
now plainly controlled by the sweeping avenue of lamps about, and in
front of me.
"I shall not pause to recount the success of my application to the
astronomers to use the transmitters of the wireless telegraphy, which
are as fully perfected here as at the City of Scandor.
"As my message ends, the dawn ascends from the wide margins of the Ribi
country. I am stunned with drowsiness. The Sun's rays have extinguished
the scintillant peril in the skies. But the order has gone forth to
leave the City, to camp upon the hills, the City of Scandor is doomed,
and the area of destruction it embraces is the diametral measure of
the----"
I heard no more. Overcome with fatigue, exposure and increasing
pulmonary weakness, of which I had had painful premonitions, I fainted
at the table, and fell to the floor of the damp and inclement room.
My assistants aver that the transmission ceased almost the next moment
upon my collapse, and the unfinished sentence of my father's message can
be readily understood as implying that the foreign body, or Swarm,
which was destined to strike Mars, had been determined as having about
the amplitude of the City of Scandor.
Days lengthened into weeks, weeks to months, but though unflinchingly
watched by night and day, no further message was received. I had become
weaker, pale and lifeless. The terrible malady made its inroads upon a
frame unable to meet its savage or insidious attacks. This weakness was
aggravated by the excitement produced by the singular experience I had
passed through. My nerves had undergone a strain quite unusual, and the
interior sense of elation, reacting its fits of extreme mental
despondency dislocated my system, and accelerated the gliding virus of
disease inundating the capillaries of circulation and breaking down the
tissues with fever and consumption.