While I was practising myself in the Martial language my host turned our experimental conversations chiefly, if not exclusively, upon Terrestrial subjects; endeavouring to learn all that I could convey to him of the physical peculiarities of the Earth, of geology, geography, vegetation, animal life in all its forms, human existence, laws, manners, social and domestic order. Afterwards, when, at the end of some fifty days, he found that we could converse, if not with ease yet without fear of serious misapprehension, he took an early opportunity of explaining to me the causes and circumstances of my unfriendly reception among his people.
"Your size and form," he said, "startled and surprised them. I gather from what you have told me that on Earth there are many nations very imperfectly known to one another, with different dress, language, and manners. This planet is now inhabited by a single race, all speaking the same tongue, using much the same customs, and differing from one another in form and size much less widely than (I understand) do men upon your Earth. There you might have been taken for a visitor from some strange and unexplored country. Here it was clear that you were not one of our race, and yet it was inconceivable what else you could be. We have no giants; the tallest skeleton preserved in our museums is scarcely a hand's breadth taller than myself, and does not, of course, approach to your stature. Then, as you have pointed out, your limbs are longer and your chest smaller in proportion to the rest of the body; probably because, as you seem to say, your atmosphere is denser than ours, and we require ampler lungs to inhale the quantity of air necessary at each breath for the oxidation of the blood. Then you were not dumb, and yet affected not to understand our language and to speak a different one. No such creature could have existed in this planet without having been seen, described, and canvassed. You did not, therefore, belong to us. The story you told by signs was quickly apprehended, and as quickly rejected as an audacious impossibility. It was an insult to the intelligence of your hearers, and a sufficient ground for suspecting a being of such size and physical strength of some evil or dangerous design. The mob who first attacked you were probably only perplexed and irritated; those who subsequently interfered may have been animated also by scientific curiosity. You would have been well worth anatomisation and chemical analysis. Your mail-shirt protected you from the shock of the dragon, which was meant to paralyse and place you at the mercy of your assailants; the metal distributing the current, and the silken lining resisting its passage. Still, at the moment when I interposed, you would certainly have been destroyed but for your manoeuvre of laying hold of two of your immediate escort. Our destructive weapons are far superior to any you possess or have described. That levelled at you by my neighbour would have sent to ten times your distance a small ball, which, bursting, would have asphyxiated every living thing for several yards around. But our laws regarding the use of such weapons are very stringent, and your enemy dared not imperil the lives of those you held. Those laws would not, he evidently thought, apply to yourself, who, as he would have affirmed, could not be regarded as a man and an object of legal protection."
He explained the motives and conduct of his countrymen with such perfect coolness, such absence of surprise or indignation, that I felt slightly nettled, and answered sarcastically, "If the slaughter of strangers whose account of themselves appears improbable be so completely a matter of course among you, I am at a loss to understand your own interference, and the treatment I have received from yourself and your family, so utterly opposite in spirit as well as in form to that I met from everybody else."
"I do not," he answered, "always act from the motives in vogue among my fellow-creatures of this planet; but why and how I differ from them it might not be well to explain. It is for the moment of more consequence to tell you why you have been kept in some sense a prisoner here. My neighbours, independently of general laws, are for certain reasons afraid to do me serious wrong. While in my company or in my dwelling they could hardly attempt your life without endangering mine or those of my family. If you were seen alone outside my premises, another attempt, whether by the asphyxiator or by a destructive animal, would probably be made, and might this time prove successful. Till, therefore, the question of your humanity and right to the protection of our law is decided by those to whom it has been submitted, I will beg you not to venture alone beyond the bounds that afford you security; and to believe that in this request, as in detaining you perforce heretofore, I am acting simply for your own welfare, and not," he added, smiling, "with a view to secure the first opportunity of putting your relation to our race to the tests of the dissecting table and the laboratory."
"But my story explained everything that seemed inexplicable; why was it not believed? It was assumed that I could not belong to Mars; yet I was a living creature in the flesh, and must therefore have come from some other planet, as I could hardly be supposed to be an inhabitant of space."
"We don't reason on impossibilities," replied my friend. "We have a maxim that it is more probable that any number of witnesses should lie, that the senses of any number of persons should be deluded, than that a miracle should be true; and by a miracle we mean an interruption or violation of the known laws of nature."
"One eminent terrestrial sceptic," I rejoined, "has said the same thing, and masters of the science of probabilities have supported his assertion. But a miracle should be a violation not merely of the known but of all the laws of nature, and until you know all those laws, how can you tell what is a miracle? The lifting of iron by a magnet—I suppose you have iron and loadstones here as we have on Earth—was, to the first man who witnessed it, just as complete a violation of the law of gravity as now appears my voyage through space, accomplished by a force bearing some relation to that which acts through the magnet."
"Our philosophers," he answered, "are probably satisfied that they know nearly all that is to be known of natural laws and forces; and to delusion or illusion human sense is undeniably liable."
"If," I said, "you cannot trust your senses, you may as well disbelieve in your own existence and in everything around you, for you know nothing save through those senses which are liable to illusion. But we know practically that there are limits to illusion. At any rate, your maxim leads directly and practically to the inference that, since I do not belong to Mars and cannot have come from any other world, I am not here, and in fact do not exist. Surely it was somewhat illogical to shoot an illusion and intend to dissect a spectre! Is not a fact the complete and unanswerable refutation of its impossibility?"
"A good many facts to which I could testify," he replied, "are in this world confessed impossibilities, and if my neighbours witnessed them they would pronounce them to be either impostures or illusions."