The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars Part 4

"To return to my first experience in the Chorus Hall in the City of Light. I seemed to be in a great alabaster cage enormously large and very beautiful. Its shining walls rose from the ground and at a great height arched together. The front was a network of sculpture, it held the rising rows of what seemed like ivory chairs on which the motionless white and radiant a.s.semblage were seated. The whole place glowed, and this phosph.o.r.escent prevails throughout the City of Light, just as it does in the Hill of the Phosphori, when we first landed in this strange existence.

"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 _l.u.s.trous_ 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.

"A word of explanation would make this all clear. The Hill of the Phosphori begins the trans.m.u.tation of the psychic fluid which makes up the souls as they flow into Mars from s.p.a.ce. At the Hill the very moderate condensation begins, just enough to bring them to the ground by gravity. The psychic fluid is susceptible to the light, absorbs and emits it, and so the spirit forms are shining like great _ignes fatui_ on our old earth. The spirits thus individualize, pa.s.s in companies to the City of Light, and come to the huge chorus halls which surround the city on its outskirts, in the country margin.

"They reach these chorus halls by a sort of suasion produced apparently by their sympathy with music. Music and Light are the energies, which at first and measurably throughout all the latter days of Martian life, direct work and thought and being. The music is quite audible for long distances, especially in the direction of the Hill of the Phosphori where the spirits land. Drawn by it they move unconsciously toward the singing centers. Now there are perhaps a hundred of these chorus halls about the City of Light grouped in the direction of the Hill of the Phosphori, and the music is quite different in them. There are four princ.i.p.al sorts, the grave, the gay, the romantic and the harmonic. By their interior sympathy the kinds of spirits move to the choruses which afford the music they respond to and it is wonderful how infallibly this attraction acts.

"The bands separate and strings and lines of the phosphorized spirits train away without direction to the choruses that attract them, although only a sort of subdued and confused murmur reaches them from the halls.

"Throughout the first stages of life here, the spirits are somnambulous.

They move and act unconsciously and in obedience to their imbedded instincts and tastes. Only, as under the influence of music and light and afterwards occupation, they are trans.m.u.ted by consolidation into the fair material race, which outside of the City of Light controls the planet, does consciousness and curiosity and language arise. I sat a long, long time in the chorus hall, to which I was drawn, which produced _grave_ music. I knew nothing, felt nothing, was but dimly cognizant of what was about me, but I thrilled with the music.

"I felt the process of condensation going on, and it was a process exquisitely blissful. 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 mult.i.tude 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. It is only as the process of consolidation in the City of Light individualizes, that the spirits become, as you would say, human. But it is a humanity of great beauty. Material particles invade or transfuse them, replacing the diaphanous phosph.o.r.escent spirit fluid, and they grade into supple white and rosy figures, strong, strenuous and splendid.

"After remaining a long time, perhaps, in the chorus hall, I felt the restlessness that causes one after the other of the spirits to go out. I followed the solitary line out into the city, the solemn, swaying music still heard as I stepped out upon the broad steps which face the city.

I was now more observant, something like sight and feeling and memory were slowly generated within me, and I noticed that whereas the arriving spirits moved like apathetic ghosts, those with whom I now was, turned with interest this way and that, seemed apprehending and alive.

"The spirits from the Hill of the Phosphori came on the broad avenues leading to the chorus halls like waifs of cloud driven by a zephyr, with no visible distention of parts, no leg, or arm, or head or body motion.

Now they moved with some anatomical suggestions.

"I stood amid a colonnade of arches, the white shining columns rose around me to the high, shining roof, before me a long descent of steps, and beyond me and around on a softly swelling eminence was spread the City of Light. It was a marvellous picture.

"The City of Light is simple and monotonous in architecture, but its composition and its radiance quite surpa.s.s any earthly conception. The buildings are all domed and stand in squares which are filled with fruit trees, low bush-like spreading plants, bearing white pendant lily-like flowers or pink b.u.t.ton-shaped florets like almonds. Each building is square, with a portico of columns, placed on rising steps, a pair of columns to each step. Vines wind around the columns, cross from one line of columns to another and form above a tracery of green fronds bearing, as it was then, red flowers, a sort of trumpet honeysuckle.

"The walls of the buildings are pierced on all sides with broad windows or embrasures, filled, it seemed, with an opalescent gla.s.s. Avenues opened in all directions, lined on both sides with these wonderful houses, which are made of a peculiar stone, veined intermittently with yellow, which has the property of absorbing and emitting light.

"It is indeed a phosphori as, if I recall it aright, the sulphides of barium, strontium, and calcium were upon our earth. Later I shall see the great quarries of this stone in the Martian mountains. Another strange feature in these Martian houses was the hollow sphere of gla.s.s upheld above each house. It is a sphere some six feet in diameter made up of lenses. It encloses a s.p.a.ce in the center of which is a ball of the phosph.o.r.escent stone. During the day the rays of the sun are concentrated upon this ball of stone, and at night the stored-up sunlight is radiated into lambent phosph.o.r.escent light.

"It was the close of a Martian day that I felt the returning impact of volition and left the chorus hall. I emerged, as I said before, upon the broad platform with its colonnade of columns and arches and saw the city as the night drew on. It is difficult to put in words, my son, the wonderful effect.

"Each house built of this strange substance, which throughout the day had been storing up the energies of light, now, as the fading day waned, became a center of light itself. At first a glow covered the sides of the houses, the colonnade and dome, while the gla.s.s prisms above them sent out rays from their imprisoned b.a.l.l.s of phosphori. The glow spread, rising from the outskirts of the city in the lower grounds to the summits of the hills where the sun's last rays lingered. It became intensified. The green beds of trees were black squares and the houses, pulsating fabrics of light between them. A slight variety of architecture in places was accentuated by diverse and varying lines or surface light.

"The whole finally blended and a sea of radiance was before me in which the beautiful houses were descried, the illuminated groves, and like enormous scintillations the gla.s.sy spheres--the Martians call them the _Plenitudes_ above them. Many other developing beings were around me, and voiceless, mute, impa.s.sioned, with an admiration which we had as yet no adequate organs to express we gazed upon the throbbing metropolis, ourselves luminous spectres in the vast eruption of glorious light before, above, around us.

"As the night settled down the light grew more intense, more beautiful.

I could discern the opalescent gla.s.ses in the houses sending out their parti-colored rays, patching the trees with quilts of changing colors, and far away there came, still unsubdued by the night, the continuous elation of music.

"All night, all day, the choruses kept on with intermissions, but the singers change. This musical facility is the mental or emotional characteristic of the Martian. There is more in music than you earthlings know or dream of. It is a part of the immortal fiber of men, and in Mars it _creates_ matter, for the slow a.s.sumption of material parts, as I have said, is propagated and accomplished by music, and the parts thus made are the most perfect expression of matter the divine form of man or woman can know, I think. They are tuned to health, to beauty, to inspiration, but all of this you shall know.

"So I went down the steps into the city. 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 pa.s.sed our shining lips, and we moved on in silence.

"The City of Light is often called in the Martian language also the City of Occupation, for here the forming spirits work. I have told you that as _consolidation_, through Music and Light, goes on, the apt.i.tudes or tastes are awakened, and this first birth of desire in Mars carries the spirits off from their ivory seats in the Chorus Halls to the City, where like an animal ferreting its purpose by intuition, they seem impelled whither their needs are best satisfied.

"I now know that the City of Light is generally divided,--not exactly, but as a.s.sociation would naturally impel, into four quarters, the quarter of art, the quarter of science, the quarter of invention, the quarter of thought. This is simply that the artists, the scientific minds, the designers, and the philosophers are somewhat by themselves.

The population of the City of Light is made up of a fair, white race of Martians, and of the forming spirits. As the forming spirits attain materialization through occupation, they may remain in the City or go out into the other cities, and into the country to work and live.

"Besides the quarters I have mentioned, there is the business section and the offices of the government.

"In the light of all I have learned since I came, I may at once explain something about the actual life and social organization of this strange world.

"The Martian world is one country. There are here no nationalities. The center of the country is in the City of Scandor, quite removed from the City of Light. Business is carried on as with you on the earth, but its nature and its physical elements vary, as you will see. There is a circulating medium, banks and business enterprises, but it is more veiled, more hidden, less, far less, insistent than with you. A great socialistic republic is represented in Mars, and the limits of individual initiative are very narrow. Still they exist.

"One prime element of difference is in the nourishment and the area of population. The Martian lives only on fruit, and he lives only a few degrees on either side of the Equator. All the businesses that in your earth arise from the preparation and sale of meat and all the various confections, disappear there, and also all the mechanism of house heating and lighting. Also there are no railroads, but innumerable ca.n.a.ls, which form a labyrinth of waterways, and are fed from the tides of the great northern and southern seas.

"The business is largely agricultural, but in the cities the pursuit of knowledge still continues. There is, however, on Mars a much lessened intellectual activity than on the earth. It is a sphere of simplified needs and primal feelings exalted by acutely developed love of Music.

Mars is the music planet. There are not on Mars newspapers, journals, magazines, books. The tireless production of these things on the earth has but one a.n.a.logy in Mars, the publication of music scores, the recitation of poetry and symposia, and the great ill.u.s.trated journal, Dia. But these things I will explain later.

"I wandered on that night through the city with other spirits. We went through the city streets in the radiance of the _Plenitudes_ above the houses. The night air was blowing through the trees, and the city was filled with people. They were the Martians. We were scarcely noticed. In the City of Light the new arrivals are not questioned until they begin to "take shape," as they say here, and then they are closely examined, and their origin, if it can be traced, is written down and kept in great registers.

"The groups were moving in streams toward the higher ground, and as my companions were gradually separated from me and were lost like wisps of moving light here and there, I went on alone. I came up long, wonderful avenues between walls of light, regularly punctuated by the dark squares of trees, and the spherical radiations of the Plenitudes above the houses.

"The people about me seemed all young, or scarcely more than, as we say, in middle life. They speak less than the earth folk, and when they speak they utter very simple sentences, and seem very sincere. I often stood by little groups gathered at the corners of cross streets, and listened to their musical intonations. The language is vocalic and monosyllabic.

It sometimes suggests a Mongolian tongue, but without the guttural clicks and coughs. The Martians are all gifted in music. It fills their lives.

"From point to point crowds were a.s.sembled about platforms where singing was in progress, and every now and then a man or woman in the street would sing loudly and pa.s.sionately with such power and beauty that the impressionable Martians would follow the refrain of the song and the whole street for blocks and blocks would resound in waves of delightful melody. There are no mechanical modes of propulsion in the streets of the City of Light. _The Martians all walk_.

"I approached the top of the broad hill on which the City is built, and came suddenly out into a square filled again in its park-like center with trees. From amid these trees rose a ma.s.sive building, which I instantly recognized as an observatory; the many round domes, as on earth, were unmistakable.

"I pa.s.sed up the walks of the square to the building and entered it.

"It was illuminated by b.a.l.l.s of phosphori in gla.s.s globes, and its cool, broad halls and stairways were, in the soft light, very beautiful. But their wonderfulness consisted in the insertion upon the walls of illuminated plans and maps of the heavens. These miniature firmaments were all afire, so that each opening, carefully graded in size to represent stars of the first or second or third magnitude, was filled with a beaming point of light, and I walked in these n.o.ble corridors between reduced patterns of the universe of stars. I can hardly tell you how astonished and entranced I was.

"I had for the first time since I reached the planet the impulse of speech, and I raised my hands with that motion of snapping the fingers, which you recall was characteristic of me on earth, and _spoke_. I cried, 'Here is my home.'

"As my hands dropped to my sides I felt resistance. I looked down upon myself and could behold the changing surfaces of my body. Under this completing stroke of volition the work begun upon the Hill of the Phosphori and the Chorus Hall in reducing the intangible spirit fluid to corporeal expression was now hastening to an end. I do not stop here to consider the reflections this suggests as to the nature of matter, those abstruse speculations we indulged in so often over the pages of Muir and Helmholz and Tait and Crookes.

"I had reached the ascending stairway, when my hand--for hand it now seemed to be--was taken in a friendly pressure, and I turned and saw a tall figure with a face of extreme n.o.bility, somewhat scarred, I thought, dressed in the usual Martian attire of a flowing tunic and closely fitting body clothing. He said in English, 'You are from the earth as I am.'

"My son, how can I, in this dull, mechanical method of conversation with you, ignorant, indeed, whether the magnetic waves loaded with my message, are traversing or not the millions of miles of s.p.a.ce to your ear, how can I make you realize the wonderful and blessed feelings of amazement and happiness that the stranger's words brought me. 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 appet.i.tes 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!

"I looked upon my friend, and in the rapidly rising flood of emotions that came with the acting members of my body, flushed and throbbing with excitement, and with a wild joy besides, I flung myself upon his neck and pressed him with arms that seemed once more those natural physical ties that have held upon my breast those I best loved on earth.

"The stranger led me slowly up the stairway and past great celestial spheres which filled the higher hallways, conducting me to a room at one corner of the great structure. The room was a singular and unique apartment. It consisted of a large central s.p.a.ce, furnished with the usual ivory chairs, and a broad, ma.s.sive center table, also of ivory, curiously inlaid with particles of the omnipresent _phosphori_, which gave out a liquid light and imparted indescribable chasteness and beauty to the carved ornaments upon them. The floor was dark, a leaden color, l.u.s.trous, however, like black gla.s.s, and made up in mosaic. Around the room were alcoves lit by lamps of the phosphori, and in each alcove a globe of a blue metal upon which were painted sketches like charts or maps. A chandelier of this blue metal was pendant from the ceiling, and in its cup-like extremities, arranged in vertical tiers, were round b.a.l.l.s of the phosphori, glowing softly.

"Wide windows, unprotected by gla.s.s or sashes, just embrasures framed in white stone which everywhere prevails in Mars, looked out upon the marvellous City, which thus seemed a lake of glowing fires, over which, rising and refluent waves of light constantly chased each other to its dark borders, where the surrounding plain country met the City's edges.

But throughout the distance I could trace lines of light marking highways or roads leading interminably away until quite extinguished at the optical limits of my vision.

"The walls of this beautiful room rose to an arched ceiling which was inlaid with this wonderful blue metal, seen in the globes, designed in scrolls and waving ribbons, and just descending upon the walls themselves in attenuated twigs and strings. The walls were bare and shining.

"My friend led me to one of the great windows and placed me in a chair.

Drawing another beside me, placing his hand on mine, and leaning outward toward the burning splendor below us, above which in the still, clear heavens shone those stellar hosts you and I have so often watched with wonder, he said:

"'Ten Martian years ago I came to this world as you have come. As a spirit I entered the chambers on the Hill of the Phosphori. I sat in the Chorus Hall. I entered the City and slowly changed, as you are changing, into one of the Martian white people. I found my work, as you will, in this Patenta, for by that name in Mars is called this home of astronomy and physical philosophy. Here, amid telescopes and apparatus of experiment and investigation, I have spent the years, mapping with many others the skies, and above all beating the earth we left, as have many, many, whom you will meet, with magnetic waves, hoping against hope, that some response might be gained, some hint of that connection through s.p.a.ce which the physicists of this planet expect, ere long, may make all the beings of the universe one great sidereal society.'

"He stopped and leaned away from me, perusing my face with interest.

Words came to my lips, memory again a.s.serted its triumphant declaration that I was the same being as had lived upon the earth, and with it the sudden turbulence of hope that she, your mother, whom we so often expected to regain, might, as I had, have reached this planet, too, and to me, renewed in youth, might come the glory and the joy of knowing her again.

"I turned to him and spoke: 'Kind friend, I am yet dazed and stricken with the marvellousness of my being here. It seems but a short time, a lapse of even a day, that I bade good-bye to my son on the death-bed in my home on earth. I am too tormented with wonder to speak to you much. I can tell all I know of myself in a little while. But now as I grow stronger, tell me of this new world, and oh! give me, sir, food. I feel the quickening fevers of appet.i.te and desire.'