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