And now, as these manuscripts already exceed in bulk and weight the measure that has been allowed them by Doctor Hermann in his calculations when making the machine that is to attempt to bear them to Earth, but few words are we permitted to say.
The result of our enterprise has been one unqualified triumph. Many perils, many hardships, many dangers have been encountered and have been overcome, as the reader of this stirring story, which is but a fragment of what we have to tell, already knows. We have piles upon piles of manuscripts dealing with scientific, social, and religious subjects; folios upon folios of sketches portraying objects upon which the eyes of earthly man have never rested, and of which he has not the faintest conception. A few of these we send with this.
Not only are we enriched with the knowledge we have gained for ourselves, but we are heavy-laden with the results of unnumbered centuries of scientific research, conducted by accomplished philosophers here.
Their discoveries in the science of astronomy are marvellous, and make us look upon our own attainments in this direction with supreme pity. The conditions of life upon this planet are exceptionally favourable to the advancement of this science, the grand age of the astronomers permitting them to perfect experiments and calculations, and observe phenomena which on our own world have to be left to posterity.
Many wondrous things have they told us of the movements of our own Earth, not the least remarkable being a sudden change in the inclination of her axis, four thousand two hundred and twenty-five years ago—that awful catastrophe, as we read in our own Holy Records, that flooded parts of the world even to the summit of her mountains, and so changed the conditions of life upon her surface that all creatures that dwell thereon have not recovered, and never will recover, from its direful results. Never can we forget the feelings of awe that crept over us as we read the record of our own tribulation and woe of our own fall from physical mightiness to nothingness, as observed—actually observed—by those men of Gathma, who scrutinised the heavens with such wondrous skill in days when the science of the firmament, with us, still lay unquickened in the womb of Time's futurity!
There in those stirring records, too, we read of the changing aspect of our own polar regions, as viewed from Gathma, more than thirty millions of miles away—of how the polar crescents of snow spread themselves lower and lower, higher and higher, devastating and depopulating continents!
The attainments of zoologists are none the less grand. Evolution, a theory that only dawned on earthly minds with the teaching of Pythagoras, about two thousand four hundred years ago, and was only elaborated towards the close of the nineteenth century of the Christian era, has here passed from speculation into fact, through the uninterrupted researches of ten thousand times ten thousand years! Here has the human animal confessed his glorious unbroken descent from lower types, for the proofs of his ancestry are complete, and his wondrous descent doth only magnify his Creator's glory in his sight. He has no bigoted past to wrestle with, and to shake his reason; no Genesis to warp his judgment, or to stay the march of his intellect by saying:
"Things are so since Time began; Man's wisdom and his knowledge are false!"
Even to summarise our impressions of this beautiful planet-world of Mars, or Gathma, would require the space already taken by this narrative. But what appealed most forcibly to us, after a long sojourn upon its fair surface, was the vastness and stability of everything—its freedom from crime and from strife; the crusted age of all its institutions and customs; the superiority of its uniform religious dogma over our own divers beliefs; the calm dignity of its civilised inhabitants; and the arrangement of all things to harmonise with the extraordinary longevity of its people. In fine, it is a world at the very zenith of its long and gradually accumulated splendour—an ideal world at the summit of its glorious course, which can only be described as the bright and comely Heir of Time itself!
Having witnessed the splendours of this sister-world, and knowing the indescribable benefits which may accrue to the men of Earth through intercourse with its people, we are anxious that our fellows shall partake, and that speedily, of the riches with which this world is blessed. We have therefore written this narrative partly as a message of hope, as tidings of humanity's great coming joy, trusting that it may reach Earth, and be found, and published to all men.