"It was a varied, exhilarating scene. The moving throngs, the wonderful confusion of the spouting fountains in their chrysalids of glass against the sky line, the perpetually waving fronds of the palms!

"We hurried to the pier of the Registeries after Chapman had secured the sealed envelope, in which were placed the communications to the government at Scandor. The canal which enters the City of Light at this point is divided into a number of branches whose confluent arms, about a mile from the City, unite into two parallel canals whose course we were now to follow to the City of Scandor. The small boat we entered was a curious vessel of white porcelain, broad and short, with raised keel, prow, and expanded stern.

"It was moved by some motor, electric in nature. A pilot took his place at the bow, and, under a canopy of silk, in the light of a setting sun, followed by the music of the City, we passed away from the City, which, even as we left it, slowly, in the descending darkness of the night, began to kindle into light, and send upward into the velvet zenith its phosphorescent glows."



CHAPTER V.

"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.



CHAPTER VI.

Miss Dodan came more and more frequently to see me. The thought of my physical depression, the revulsion of hopelessness over my changing lineaments made the love I bore her more painful and enervating. I tried hard to conceal my fears over my condition. But Miss Dodan had been observant. Her developing affections became daily more tender and delicate, and her solicitude evinced itself in many charming, thoughtful ways that added only a more poignant sadness to my sufferings.

I was, indeed, tortured by the conflicting aims life seemed to furnish me. On the one hand was the necessity of continuing, if I could, my communications with my father; on the other, the duty I owed myself to abandon all for the woman I truly loved, and to renovate and establish my health so that I might woo and win, and marry her.

It was, in a sense, an ethical question, but it was quite as hard to determine by ordinary arguments whether I could have any permission to violate my promise to my father, as it was to estimate the exact measure of my obligations to myself and Miss Dodan. An incident occurred that dissipated this dilemma, sent Miss Dodan to England, and left me at Christ Church to receive the last message from my father before the sickness had fully developed that now has laid its searching and remorseless veto upon any further life or happiness for me in this world.

Miss Dodan and myself were seated together upon a bench drawn up in the sunshine at the foot of the Observatory, watching with delight the distinct changing sea, the plumes of smoke from diminished steamers, and the white glory of full-rigged ships. It was the autumn of the southern country, and the dreamy spell of the declining days fell softly upon the material tissues of nature, as well as on the acquiescent spirit of man.

"Father," said Miss Dodan, uncertainly, while she formed her hand into an improvised tube, and looked through it on the peaceful scene at our feet, "has been telling me of my birthplace in Devonshire. It must be very beautiful, more beautiful than it is here. But there is no sea, and it seems to me now that I should die without it; it is the very soul and voice, too, of all this picture!" She spread out her arms, and half willfully threw back the one nearest me, until it swept over my head, and I caught and kissed the opened palm.

"Yes," I replied, "the sea relieves everything about or near it, from the humiliation of commonness. The stamp of distinction rests on its printless waves. It was the first surface of the earth, and its primal regency has never been lost or forfeited;" a suspicion crossed my mind: "How was it your father spoke of Devonshire. I never knew before that you came from that pearl of the countries of England. Would you like to see it?"

My voice half sank, and the hitherto unsuspected fact that Mr. Dodan had observed my physical danger, and now was planning to interrupt his daughter's intimacy and hallucination for a poor, failing man, struggling with an impossible problem, and a mortal malady, seemed suddenly understood by me. I turned to her a face of questioning concern. Her eyes were still fixed upon the distant, pulsating sea. "No," she answered, half nonchalantly. "I suppose not, and yet—why not! I have only known this country; to cross the great ocean, to see the capital of the world, to learn the great wonders of its palaces and temples, to see its multitudes, to see the Queen. Ah! to see the Queen!"

Her hands folded tightly together across her brow, she looked the very embodiment of reverent expectation, and the blushing roses on her cheeks, the lovelight in her eyes seemed to deepen for an instant, and then pale slightly, as she turned to me only to see me bury my head in my hands, holding back the cry of stifled hope that often before had leaped to my lips, but never had before so nearly passed them.

"Oh, Bradford," she cried, "would you mind so much! I would soon be back again. And then, you know, this awful telegraphic work would be over, and we could be happy together without a thought of that cold, far-away Mars!"

We talked on together till the dusky night had begun to gather its shadows about us, and Mars, that marvellous spot of light from whose untouched continents the waves of magnetic oscillation might even then be starting on their pathless transit across the abyss of space, destined for my ear, began to shine above us.

It was clear to me now that Mr. Dodan had been carefully nursing in his daughter a desire to see England and the Queen, and her own little birthplace, and that he had formed a resolution to separate us, for his daughter's best interests, as he thought.

I suffered from a very proud, sensitive nature, perhaps unwholesomely intensified by the lonely life I had led, and a peculiar sense of my difference from other people.

This revelation, so unwelcome, so fraught with painful anticipations, roused my pride to a sharp climax of revolt, disdain and defiance. Miss Dodan should go,—I should urge it. I would applaud and hasten it, there would be no weakness, no supplication, no obstacles on my part. Let death write his inerrant claim to me, let it be recognized; Mr. Dodan need not be disturbed as to my absolute self-control.

The very acerbity of my coming misery, through Miss Dodan's absence, fully realized by me, seemed now only to add a desperation of assumed indifference and gayety to all my actions. I argued against delay, and dwelt with excellent effect upon the charms of the visit. I assumed that Miss Dodan needed the change, that the educational value of such an experience would be incalculable.

Mr. Dodan was frankly surprised and pleased. This unexpected support and enthusiastic commendation of his plan was something he gratefully accepted, and he assumed a new manner toward me. He ascribed to me a power of self-renunciation which won his ardent approval and admiration.

The day was at last fixed. Miss Dodan, young, appreciative, and curious, was elated at the prospect of the voyage, and, momentarily, at least, forgot her first reluctance to desert me. The preparations were all completed. I need not dwell upon all the detail of that last week. It was a cruel ordeal for me, but no one would have suspected my real anguish. I seemed the most thoughtful of all, the most naturally buoyant and hopeful for the success of the trip. I forgot nothing. The telegraph station was not, however, neglected. I watched at night, and during the hours of my absence my assistant was persistently present in the tower.

At last the steamer sailed away from the wharf at Port Littelton. The last moments I passed alone with Miss Dodan were sacred, sweet memories; all that I have now.

Mr. and Mrs. Dodan and Miss Dodan were waving their handkerchiefs from the deck as I turned sorrowfully back to Christ Church. I realized that I had seen Miss Dodan for the last time, and that when she returned to New Zealand, she would only find me gone. There was but one duty now. To resume, if possible, the communications with my father, and prepare the story of my experience and discoveries, and leave it to the world.

I went back to the Observatory. I was again alone. A reaction of despondency overwhelmed me, and it was coincident with a hemorrhage, which left me weak and nervous. I resumed my watching at the station. I seemed to anticipate a new message. I endured peculiar and excruciating excitement, a tense suspense of desire and prevision that deprived me of appetite and sleep, and accelerated the ravages of the disease, that now, victorious over my weakened, nervous force, began the last stages of its devastating advance.

It was a clear, cold night of exquisite severity and beauty—May 20, 1894, that the third message came from my father. It was announced, as had been all the others, by the sudden response of the Morse receiver. A few nights before, grasping at a vague hope that I might again reach him with the magnetic waves at my command, I had launched into space the single sentence: "Await me! Death is very near." The message that now startled my ears began with an exact answer to that trans-abysmal despatch:

"My son, the thought of your death fills me with happiness. Surely you will come to this wonderful and unspeakable world, you will see me again, and I you, but under such new circumstances! My heart yearns for you immeasurably. Come! Come quickly! To press you to my heart, to speak with you, to teach you the new things, and Oh! more than all, to bring you to your mother. For, Tony, she is found; my search is ended. I have discovered her whom the cruel mystery of Death on earth so sharply removed from us, in youth and radiance. I have not yet revealed myself. The joy of anticipation surpasses thought or words. I have hastened back from seeing her, whom to leave in this paradise imparts the one pang I have known in this new life, hastened again to the Hill of Observation that now looks on the cruel ruin, the emptiness of desolation, where once was the City of Scandor. Let me tell you all:

"When I sent you my last message I was at the Tower of Observation. As the last wave was emitted from the transmitter, the hand of Superintendent Alca, whom I met at the mines, was laid upon my shoulder. I looked up in surprise. He answered my questioning glance: 'I did not return with Chapman. There was no need of it. A barge going to the City of Light took the body. I explained everything in a letter to the Council. I was distressed over the news I had received of the approach of the cometary mass, which I have detected myself, and I hurried after you in my own kil-chow (the name of the little porcelain steamers), anxious to see this terrible thing. Let us go out and watch the wonder. Whatever happens we shall remain together. I am from Scandor myself, and though I might have been safer at the mines, I could not stay there in the crisis.'

"We descended to the ground and walked out over the hillside. The encircling range of high country about Scandor is, perhaps, one thousand feet high. Its crest is a low swell, that beyond the city falls away in broken, irregular slopes to the country of the Ribi on one side, and to far outstretched plains on almost every other side. This dome was covered with the people of Scandor, fleeing from the doomed city. The long lines of moving figures were issuing from the city through its numerous boulevards, and crowding the spaces on the hilltops. The astronomers knew exactly now the nature of the approaching mass, its orbit, spacial extent and weight. Their proclamation had been prepared and pasted all over the city, announcing its certain destruction, but that the area of devastation would only embrace the city, that the cometary visitor was a narrow train or procession of meteors of stone and iron, that the force of impact would be considerable, enough to crush to the ground the glassy splendor of the beautiful city, and that beyond its limits there would be almost no falls.

"Beautiful, indeed, was Scandor in the morning light. It lay before us shining with a hundred hues. How can I tell you of its exquisite perfection! Its arrangement expressed a color scheme simple and effective. The amphitheatre rose in the center, an opalescent yellow; the boulevards spaced with trees, stretched out in radiating lines from it, defined by the blue lines of ornamental metal pillars which held the lamps; from point to point, piercing the air from the shady peaks or squares shot up also the needles of metal holding the curious electric globes, while at regular intervals blue domes like gigantic azure bubbles interrupted the streets of square and colonnaded houses, that began around the amphitheatre, with pale saffron tones, and grew in intensity until the edges of the huge populous ellipse were laid like a deep orange rim upon the green country side. The light falling upon this reflected, refracted and dispersed, seemed to convert it into a liquid and faintly throbbing lake of color, cut up into segments by the dark lanes or streets of trees.

"And this was to be crushed and crumbled to the ground. The houses and all the constructions are built of glass bricks laid in courses, as with you on the earth, a soluble glass forming the cement that holds them in contact and together. The huge glass factories making this formed a black circle in one part of the City.

"It was now day, and the meteoric nebula was invisible. All day the people came crowding to the hills. At last, as we gazed in bewildered admiration at the strange multitudes about us, the sound of distant music, the organ-like swell of a titanic chorus approaching was heard. Far away down the boulevard, on whose apex we stood, we saw a marching retinue of men and women surrounding a platform borne on the shoulders of men. The platform held the upright figures of the Council amongst whom, distinguished by a blue chalcal tunic bound about him by yellow cords, was the noble being I had seen in the Council chamber on the night of my arrival in Scandor.

"How marvellous it all seemed. The sense of unreality, of dreamland again overpowered me, a wild horror like some mad possession seized me. I shook convulsively, and covered my face in my hands, stricken through and through with a nameless repining misery of doubt, of apprehension, of dismay. It was the last struggle of readjustment between my memories of earth, my identity as a man on the earth, and this new life I had entered. Alca caught me affectionately and placed the acrid bean I had tasted in the City of Light in my mouth. The black suffocation passed, and as I slowly returned to realization and serenity I opened my eyes upon the city, now dead and silent, but blazing with all its lights, awaiting desolation, dressed in its sumptuous glory like some princely captive on whom the doom of immolation, before an unappeasable deity, had suddenly fallen. It was night fall.

"Suddenly a flash, a short piercing note, a loud report, and the sky above us seemed crowded with glowing missiles. The impact from the first arrivals of the cometary body upon the outer envelopes of the Martian atmosphere had begun. A loud shout of attention, surprise and half extemporized terror rose from the multitudes about us. It was a breathless moment. The oncoming shoals shot forward in rapid jets of fire now clouded together in igneous masses, now separated in disjointed streaks and radiant clusters of snapping, shining bolts.

"As yet the material rushing in upon us failed, in most instances, to reach the ground in solid forms. It was burned up in the air. The spectacle was surpassingly strange. The air before us was weaved with crossing shafts, threads, and traces of phosphorescent light. Behind this veil still shone with responsive beauty the great city, while rising occasionally in bursts of color, we could see the alarm rockets from the opposite hills penetrate the entering flood of light with frivolous and extinguished protests.

"About half an hour after the glory reached us, and as on all sides the country shone in spectral illumination, a great mass, decrepitating with minute explosions along its oncoming side, plunged down upon the noble amphitheatre of glass. A dreadful sound of crashing stone followed, and then, rapidly fired from the aerial batteries, came still more of the dark, half ignited bodies, bathed in hurrying streams of evanescent blades, and splinters of light.

"And now the destructive bombardment had really begun. The celestial downpour increased, the valley below us sent upward the detonations of exploding meteorites and the harsh reverberating crash and overthrow of glass fabrics. The lights of the city were brokenly extinguished and the pitiless hail of ruin continued with increasing fierceness.

"It was an awful, glorious scene. The vault of the sky emptying itself in an avalanche of flame, while from within the wide stream of projectiles, collisions caused by some accident of deflection originated interior spots of sudden blazing light. The irregular and separated shocks of sound from the falling city now ran together in a continuous roar of dislocated and broken walls, towers, parapets and citadels. Coruscations sprang out from the yet heated masses, accumulating on the ground, as they became incessantly struck by new accessions. The ground trembled with ceaseless fulminations and impingement, the atmosphere seemed saturated with sulphurous odors, and the panoramic flow of fluctuating splendor shed a day-like brightness upon the upturned faces of the startled and stupefied multitude.

"All night long the invasion continued. The area of destruction, exactly as the astronomers had defined it, was confined to the long elliptical basin in which Scandor lay. Beyond it hardly a branch upon the trees was broken, though occasional erratic bombs shot over us and fell miles away along the borders of the canals.

"As the morning dawned, the shower discontinued, a few laggards fell in scattering confusion over the prostrate city, and the sun climbing the eastern sky sent its peaceful reassuring light upon a cairn-like heap of desolation. The chilled surface of the fallen meteorites were broken up by areas of glowing cinder-like surfaces. The glittering and opaline city of glass, the City of Scandor, capital of the Martian world, was buried beneath the scorching and stony fragments of a minor comet, or some diminished and wandering meteor train which suddenly issuing from the unknown depths of space had descended with mathematical precision upon the treasure city of the planet.

"The Martian legions remained on the hilltops, sombered and silent. The awful reality, impregnable and drear, before them had changed their spirit, and they looked into each other's faces with bewilderment.

"I had stayed with Alca throughout the night, and I now turning to him said:

"'Let us go! What can we do here? Let us walk away for awhile. I am dizzy with terror.'

"'Yes,' he answered, and tears seemed filling his eyes, 'we will go. We will walk out into the hill and river country beyond the canal. Many are wandering over the country now. The farmers will harbor us and the beauty of the lanes will bring us cheerfulness.'

"And so we went away, hastening with the Martian velocity of motion until as the sun hung in the zenith, we had reached a hillside sloping upon a meadow space through which passed the clear but sluggish waters of a wide stream. A tulip-like grass was distributed in the heavy luxuriant growth of the meadow, which bore upon pendant threads a blue bell-like flower. A gentle wind, rising and falling, swept over them, lifting and blowing out the cups as it passed off to the surface of the water and printed it with plashes of ripples. A piece of wood pushed out from the hillside, the trees that formed it struggling out into the meadow in a broken succession of individuals like a line of men. Here, leaning against the last tree trunk that stood quite alone in advance of its companions, was a young woman, her arms folded above the cap—like the Grecian cassos—that imperfectly held her hair, and dressed in a yellow tunic and the half seen leggings of meshed chalcal thread—a lovely picture of meditation.

"I caught Alca's arm in a sudden wave of desire and excitement. It was the impulse of love, the first burning of its sacred fire I had known in Mars, and it was the intense certainty of recognition that made it so impetuous. My Son, your Mother was before me!

"The same glorious beauty I had known on earth covered her, and like a mystic light shone from her face and person. I was myself again, young, and she was the same. The impelling sense of a superhuman Destiny bringing us together again in this new world, forced from me an ejaculation of thankfulness. The cry was not loud, but audible to her ears, and she turned toward us. Yes! it was Martha, as I knew her in those raptured days of love on the banks of the Hudson before disease and weakness and age had stolen the bloom from her cheeks, the light from her eyes, and the fair presentiment of charm and perfection from her body. She did not see me perhaps clearly. Certainly she did not recognize me. An instant's scrutiny and her face turned again to the open exposure of hill and field, stream and cloud-flecked sky.

"Alca had observed my gestures of delight, and, perhaps reading my thoughts by that intuition of mind so wonderful in the Martians, pushed me toward her gently and moved away from us toward the brink of the river.

"I stood for a moment hesitating, overwhelmed with the marvel of this new thing. I stole on, and finally pushing aside the high grown grass, was at her side—at the side of the very form and feature of the woman who had taught me on earth the worth of living and the meaning and the glory of rectitude.

"She was breathing fast, her bosom rising and falling with quick respirations, and her cheeks flushed with color, made a delicious foil to the pearly tone of her face, concealed on her neck and forehead by the escaping tresses of her dark hair.

"I drew back, trembling with anticipation, my heart beating, and my clasped hands folded on my breast in an agony of restraint. She was talking, talking to herself in the low musical voice of the Martians. The wind had ceased, a dark shadow from a crossing cloud moved toward us from the river over the blue sprinkled field, a haze stole upward from the farther view, and, bending at the margin of the water the figure of Alca bathed in light, seemed to watch us like some calm incarnate response to my own hopes and prayers.