"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.'