It was a clear, cold night of exquisite severity and beauty—May 20, 1894, that the third message came from my father. It was announced, as had been all the others, by the sudden response of the Morse receiver. A few nights before, grasping at a vague hope that I might again reach him with the magnetic waves at my command, I had launched into space the single sentence: "Await me! Death is very near." The message that now startled my ears began with an exact answer to that trans-abysmal despatch:
"My son, the thought of your death fills me with happiness. Surely you will come to this wonderful and unspeakable world, you will see me again, and I you, but under such new circumstances! My heart yearns for you immeasurably. Come! Come quickly! To press you to my heart, to speak with you, to teach you the new things, and Oh! more than all, to bring you to your mother. For, Tony, she is found; my search is ended. I have discovered her whom the cruel mystery of Death on earth so sharply removed from us, in youth and radiance. I have not yet revealed myself. The joy of anticipation surpasses thought or words. I have hastened back from seeing her, whom to leave in this paradise imparts the one pang I have known in this new life, hastened again to the Hill of Observation that now looks on the cruel ruin, the emptiness of desolation, where once was the City of Scandor. Let me tell you all:
"When I sent you my last message I was at the Tower of Observation. As the last wave was emitted from the transmitter, the hand of Superintendent Alca, whom I met at the mines, was laid upon my shoulder. I looked up in surprise. He answered my questioning glance: 'I did not return with Chapman. There was no need of it. A barge going to the City of Light took the body. I explained everything in a letter to the Council. I was distressed over the news I had received of the approach of the cometary mass, which I have detected myself, and I hurried after you in my own kil-chow (the name of the little porcelain steamers), anxious to see this terrible thing. Let us go out and watch the wonder. Whatever happens we shall remain together. I am from Scandor myself, and though I might have been safer at the mines, I could not stay there in the crisis.'
"We descended to the ground and walked out over the hillside. The encircling range of high country about Scandor is, perhaps, one thousand feet high. Its crest is a low swell, that beyond the city falls away in broken, irregular slopes to the country of the Ribi on one side, and to far outstretched plains on almost every other side. This dome was covered with the people of Scandor, fleeing from the doomed city. The long lines of moving figures were issuing from the city through its numerous boulevards, and crowding the spaces on the hilltops. The astronomers knew exactly now the nature of the approaching mass, its orbit, spacial extent and weight. Their proclamation had been prepared and pasted all over the city, announcing its certain destruction, but that the area of devastation would only embrace the city, that the cometary visitor was a narrow train or procession of meteors of stone and iron, that the force of impact would be considerable, enough to crush to the ground the glassy splendor of the beautiful city, and that beyond its limits there would be almost no falls.
"Beautiful, indeed, was Scandor in the morning light. It lay before us shining with a hundred hues. How can I tell you of its exquisite perfection! Its arrangement expressed a color scheme simple and effective. The amphitheatre rose in the center, an opalescent yellow; the boulevards spaced with trees, stretched out in radiating lines from it, defined by the blue lines of ornamental metal pillars which held the lamps; from point to point, piercing the air from the shady peaks or squares shot up also the needles of metal holding the curious electric globes, while at regular intervals blue domes like gigantic azure bubbles interrupted the streets of square and colonnaded houses, that began around the amphitheatre, with pale saffron tones, and grew in intensity until the edges of the huge populous ellipse were laid like a deep orange rim upon the green country side. The light falling upon this reflected, refracted and dispersed, seemed to convert it into a liquid and faintly throbbing lake of color, cut up into segments by the dark lanes or streets of trees.
"And this was to be crushed and crumbled to the ground. The houses and all the constructions are built of glass bricks laid in courses, as with you on the earth, a soluble glass forming the cement that holds them in contact and together. The huge glass factories making this formed a black circle in one part of the City.
"It was now day, and the meteoric nebula was invisible. All day the people came crowding to the hills. At last, as we gazed in bewildered admiration at the strange multitudes about us, the sound of distant music, the organ-like swell of a titanic chorus approaching was heard. Far away down the boulevard, on whose apex we stood, we saw a marching retinue of men and women surrounding a platform borne on the shoulders of men. The platform held the upright figures of the Council amongst whom, distinguished by a blue chalcal tunic bound about him by yellow cords, was the noble being I had seen in the Council chamber on the night of my arrival in Scandor.
"How marvellous it all seemed. The sense of unreality, of dreamland again overpowered me, a wild horror like some mad possession seized me. I shook convulsively, and covered my face in my hands, stricken through and through with a nameless repining misery of doubt, of apprehension, of dismay. It was the last struggle of readjustment between my memories of earth, my identity as a man on the earth, and this new life I had entered. Alca caught me affectionately and placed the acrid bean I had tasted in the City of Light in my mouth. The black suffocation passed, and as I slowly returned to realization and serenity I opened my eyes upon the city, now dead and silent, but blazing with all its lights, awaiting desolation, dressed in its sumptuous glory like some princely captive on whom the doom of immolation, before an unappeasable deity, had suddenly fallen. It was night fall.
"Suddenly a flash, a short piercing note, a loud report, and the sky above us seemed crowded with glowing missiles. The impact from the first arrivals of the cometary body upon the outer envelopes of the Martian atmosphere had begun. A loud shout of attention, surprise and half extemporized terror rose from the multitudes about us. It was a breathless moment. The oncoming shoals shot forward in rapid jets of fire now clouded together in igneous masses, now separated in disjointed streaks and radiant clusters of snapping, shining bolts.
"As yet the material rushing in upon us failed, in most instances, to reach the ground in solid forms. It was burned up in the air. The spectacle was surpassingly strange. The air before us was weaved with crossing shafts, threads, and traces of phosphorescent light. Behind this veil still shone with responsive beauty the great city, while rising occasionally in bursts of color, we could see the alarm rockets from the opposite hills penetrate the entering flood of light with frivolous and extinguished protests.