Some of the buildings were low and small. Others of several stories, pretentious and ornate. One very large, like a palace, standing alone on its verdant island.
The houses were mostly gathered in clusters of various shapes and sizes. Yet a semblance of order prevailed. Winding streets of open water lay between the groups. There were trellised walks and arching spider bridges, sometimes over the streets, sometimes joining one house to another.
Here and there I saw lagoons of open water, dotted with small green islands like parks—islands on which the vegetation grew far higher and more luxuriant than any even in the tropics of our Earth. Vegetation always under careful training and control. Profuse with flowers, vivid and gigantic. The houses too, were roofed with gardens—sometimes with pergolas and trellises of the aerial scarlet blossoms. Occasionally—these latter details I observed as we descended close upon the city—I saw houses with a tiny swimming pool on the roof—a private pool hidden in masses of colored flowers.
A playground—the playground of Venus. It seemed very backward—uncivilized. And then Wolfgar pointed out the surrounding hillsides. On them, cleared of their vegetation, our modern civilization stood gaunt and efficient. Towers, aerials, landing stages, aerial trams, factories, tall stacks over the dynamo houses belching thick black smoke, which artificial wind-generators carefully blew away from the city.
In the midst of their hillside ring of necessary modernity, the people of the Great City had kept their playground inviolate. Work, science, industry—all necessary. But the real business of life was pleasure. Art, music, beauty.... And I am not far from thinking that unless abused, their formula is better than ours.
CHAPTER XVII
Violet Beam of Death
We landed on a stage at the summit of one of the nearer hillsides. Our coming—unheralded since we had carried no sending instruments—created a furor. The workers rested to watch us as we disembarked. It was not so different a scene, here on the hill, than might have occurred on Earth. We took a moving platform, down the hill, to the water's edge. A barge was awaiting us—a broad flat vessel with gaudy trappings. A score of attendants lined its sides, each with a pole to thrust it through the shallow water. And on its high-raised stern, beneath a canopy was a couch upon which Tarrano reclined, with us of his party at his feet.
A royal barge, queerly ancient, barbaric—reminding me of the flat, motionless pictures of Earth's early history. Yet it was a symbol here on Venus, not of barbarism, but of decadence.