"Beautiful—yes. You've been here before, Wolfgar?"
He nodded. "Oh yes. Soon we will reach the Great City. That too is strange and beautiful."
Elza saw us together and joined us. The Great City presently came into distant view. Wolfgar, with that gentle voice and smile characteristic of him began to describe to us what we should see. Abruptly Elza said:
"I have never really thanked you, Wolfgar. You saved my life—there when Tara attacked me."
He gestured. "Your thanks are more than such a service deserves."
As though the subject had suggested Georg and Maida to him, he added, "I am wondering where Georg Brende and the Princess Maida may be."
I fancied then that I saw a quality of wistfulness in his eyes. A gentle little fellow, this Mars man. Queer and brooding, with strange thoughts not to be fathomed. He added as though to himself: "I have often wondered—" Then stopped.
Elza and I had discussed it. We felt sure that Georg and Maida had been taken to Venus. They could have had only a few hours' start of ourselves. Yet this vessel we were in was unusually slow. We felt convinced that they had already arrived on Venus—had been there perhaps already for a day.
We discussed it now with Wolfgar as the Great City came under us; but soon we fell silent, gazing down into this beautiful capital of the Central State.
It lay in a broad hollow, a large, irregular circular bowl surrounded by gently sloping hillsides. The bowl was entirely filled by water—a broad flat lake of silver which from this height showed us its pearly bottom. On the water—seen from above—the houses seemed floating—clusters of lily pads on a placid shining pool. They were, in reality, flat cubical buildings solidly built of rectangular blocks of stone, standing just above the water level on solid stone foundations. Always green and white—stones like blocks of smooth, polished marble, set in green and white patterns. Balconies and cornices of what might have been gleaming, beaten copper. Flat roofs, edged with scarlet flowers.