Part 4 (1/2)
”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 s.h.i.+ning 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 s.h.i.+ning columns rose around me to the high, s.h.i.+ning 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 s.h.i.+ning 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.