The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars / Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey Dodd

by L. P. Gratacap

"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.