"'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.