L. P. Gratacap

“ Chapman and Alca were in front of me, speaking the Martian tongue, while I stood looking backward every few steps, delighted to trace the broad river of the canal winding through the desolation for miles beyond. Then I noticed how rapid and effortless is motion in Mars. Volition is so easy and penetrating, the body becomes a mere plaything for the mind. Every function, every part is swayed into vitality by the mind. ”

“ Only as I still dare to believe, that the flight of years must end his aging days on Earth, and that the eternal destiny of married souls is an eternal union, and that his reincarnation here shall bring us into a new and better, richer, deeper harmony of mind and tastes and thoughts; only as the belief grows stronger with passing time, can I, so surrounded with peace and happiness, in this countryside of quiet work and gentle cares, bear longer this awful isolation, the nights of prayerful hope, the days of still enduring hope. ”

“ We dare not crush out within us the sweet thought of reunion. Upon that earth I lost a wife, who summed up to me everything of value, virtue, and beauty human life can claim. The passionate desire to regain her, the defiant mutiny of my heart against any thought of her annihilation, made me turn to the shining hosts of heaven for reassurance. In them somewhere I believed the vanished soul of my companion had flown. This wonderful world was known to me, and what the wise men of the Earth said of its possible population. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here we are, a group of limited intelligent beings circumscribed by a boundless space, and placed upon a speck of matter which is whirled around the sun in an endless captivity, bound by this inexorable law of gravitation, like a stone in a sling. About us in this ethereal ocean floats a host of similarly made orbs, perhaps, in thousands of cases, inhabited by beings throbbing with the same curiosity as our own to reach out beyond their sphere, and learn something of the nature of the animated universe which they may dimly suspect lies about them in the other stars. ”

“ 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 thrilled and awe-struck I became as I gazed around me, and looking over the surging mob beheld their multitudinous lineaments, the faces of the races of our earth, its many nations, the faces of men or women who had lived in Venus, in Mercury, in the fixed stars, perhaps, as we call those globes from whose lambent surface light reached the earth after the expiration of a century of years. ”

“ If I could recover Martha, if, in this serene atmosphere of good will and fairness and kindness, in the midst of unknown possibilities of knowledge, in the company of enthusiastic and high-minded men and women, in this arena of scientific wonders, and in the joy and beauty of universal happiness and thrift and peace and well doing and intuition, I could find a human companionship in the woman whose face and nature have summed up for me the whole of life, if I could find her! ”

“ As the sun rose higher, the effulgence of the City died away, the light of the same great orb which brings the dawn to you, covered with its rays the white and glorious City, the music seemed again revived, and from the doorways of the houses I could see forms issuing, while far off the Hill of the Phosphori raised its glass domes in the air, where the homogeneous tide of spirit was undergoing differentiation, as we might say, into separate cognizable, discreet beings. ”

“ Our bodies are light; the texture, apparently firm and resisting, is somehow diaphanous. I've seen the light through the palm of my hand. And then again I haven't. Somehow mind works in the body here and changes it, and changes it different at different times. Why, Dodd, the other day at the Patenta, a student jumped up with a cry of delight at something, and stumbled and fell from a window to the ground, but he stood up without a bruise or hurt of any kind. His exultation, his emotional excitement made him buoyant, I think, and he fell to the earth like a thistledown. ”

“ I was with a group of spirits who noticed me, and whom I noticed, but as yet the listless, strange, doomed expression was on our faces, and though memory was beginning to light its fires within us, though the transmission of viewless particles of matter into our fluent bodies of spirit had begun, though mind and desire were awakened, not a word passed our shining lips, and we moved on in silence. ”

“ Now and then, a spirit form would arise and step down the rising forms and go out, another and another, while as silently spirits from the Hill of the Phosphori would enter and take their seat and bathe in the almost unbroken surges of music that come from the field outside, from the multitude beneath the almond blossom laden trees. Movement is without volition in the spirit stage; attraction that follows a hidden impulse, that seems indescribable at first, directs them. ”

“ I seem a spectator that a caprice has cast upon this globe, and though I live here, I must succumb to a certain alienation, a lack of mediation between their life and my former existence, and because of this subtle estrangement, I shall contract disease, or meet with accident, or waste in age, while you shall stay young, and living, sink into the Martian life and yield to it a spiritual, a mental acquiescence. ”

“ Since the sun is the first cause of life on our globe; since it is, as we have shown, the origin of life, of feeling, of thought; since it is the determining cause of all organized life on the earth—why may we not declare that the rays transmitted by the sun to the earth and the other planets are nothing more or less than the emanations of these souls? that these are the emissions of pure spirits living in the radiant star that come to us, and to dwellers in the other planets, under the visible form of rays? ”

“ It was a clear, calm day when we emerged from the Ribi country, and the pilot pointed out to me the distant hills, almost purple in a twilight haze, which encircled the Valley of the City of Scandor. The country we had entered was a fertile farm country, where great plantations of the Rint, and vineyards of the Oma grapes were established, and where great flocks of the Imilta dove, almost the only meat eaten by the Martians, are raised. The enormous flocks of this snow-white bird were strangely beautiful. ”

“ I divined that we were approaching the center of the city. Soon, indeed, I saw before me the sparkling walls of the amphitheatre I had descried from the hill of Observation at the locks. Here it is, that the great plays, the gigantic concerts, the operas, and services of the Pan-Tan are held. It was a seraphic, astounding picture. It rose in the midst of a great square of many acres in extent, where the light, purposely subdued, allowed its dazzling beauty subdued isolation. How wonderful! ”

“ Marriage is here as with us, and love holds its deathless sway among the white and noble Martians as on earth, while the affection of friendship seems to weave every atom of society to every other atom in a social texture over which only moves the refining powers of thought and aspiration.
"Mars does indeed seem a sort of Paradise, for it is quite certain that the best, the truest, the deeper and emphatic souls come here ”

“ Astronomy is the great profession. Cars, railroads and conveyances, as you say on earth, do not exist. We walk or sail and float upon our canals. Our industry is agriculture and building. Architecture is studied and advanced beyond all you have ever known on the earth. Mars is filled with beautiful cities. Its whole government consists in a council at the City of Scandor, from which representatives issue to its various departments. One is here in the City of Light. His motives are always just. There are no parties, for there are no policies. Life is so simple. ”

“ Let us now add that this inundation is spread out to a great distance by means of a network of canals, perhaps constituting the principal mechanism (if not the only one) by which water (and with it organic life) may be diffused over the arid surface of the planet. Because on Mars it rains very rarely, or perhaps even it does not rain at all. And this is the proof.
Let us carry ourselves in imagination into celestial space, to a point so distant from the earth that we may embrace it all at a single glance. ”

“ If this hypothesis be accepted, what magnificent, what sublime relations may we not catch a glimpse of, between the sun and the globes that roll around him; between the Sun and the planets there would be a continual exchange, a never broken circle, an unending 'come and go' of beamy emissions, which would engender and nourish in the solar world motion and activity, thought and feeling, and keep burning everywhere the torch of life. ”

“ Here I was, a disembodied soul from Earth, which at that moment I only dimly recalled, undergoing the strange process of re-establishment in flesh and blood, and slowly appropriating those natural appetites which come with flesh and blood, a waif of spiritual being in the great voids of creation, impelled by some implanted power of affinity to this remote, strange, phantasmal and unreal place, overwhelmed in a stupor of confusion, like some awakening patient from the vertigo of a terrifying dream! ”

“ To us on earth, the disappearance of those we love and cherish, the sundering of ties which a lifetime of love and companionship has established, the sharp vanishing away into nothingness and silence of the faces and spirits of the great and glorious, the good, the helpful, the true and noble, has made death an awful, hideous, to some a hopeless mystery. ”

“ I am waiting, waiting here at the City of Light, watching the spirits, if perchance my son from your earth is amongst them. Surely he will come some day, and then my happiness will be all God can make it.'
"We hurried away to the Chamber of the Council. Once more through the devious paths of the great groups of buildings which make up the Patenta, between the flowering trees and the tulip flowered vines we made our way, with feet so buoyant and so strong that we seemed almost to fly. ”

“ The plants of Mars are numerous, its rocks and animal life curious, and they are well understood. A few doctors from the earth are here, but medicine and surgery are not so much needed, yet in the study of life our philosophers have made great strides. Your thinkers and poets, artists, composers, dramatists, musicians, come here, but of all the wonderful students of Nature the earth has produced, as far as I know or have heard, Lamarck and Agassiz, Owen, and Cuvier alone have been reincarnated on our globe. ”

“ The music came from a field in front of the Chorus Hall, which held a wonderful array of beings who, while not radiant as we were, had a lustrous look over their smooth and lovely bodies, which were tightly clad in the palest blue tunics and leggings. These creatures were consolidated spirits. They are constantly augmented by new arrivals, and, as the number remains almost unchanged, as new arrivals appear, others leave and then move off from the City of Light into the vast regions of Mars outside and beyond the city. ”

“ There is indeed with those on Earth a partial confidence by reason of religious faith, but strong as that seems to be, the endless succession of centuries, each crowding the viewless habitations of the dead with the still more and deeper streams of disembodied souls, unaccompanied by any response, any utterance or return, limit or telltale apparition, has somehow filled all minds with a creeping wonder if even the assurances of Revelation can be believed. ”