“In these colossal chambers the phosphorescent light from enormous radiators beats incessantly through and through the slowly, oscillating, vibrating, revolving soul matter.  And here the process of individualization is achieved.  A soul, or many souls, are separated from the great tide, by flashing, under the bombardment of the phosphorescent blaze into shining forms.  They assume a shape outlined by light, and just slightly subject to gravity from the atomic compression necessary to maintain their illumination, they fall lightly out from the domes of the spheres, touch the floors beneath, and are led away.

“In this way I found later I had arrived at Mars.  When the spirits, thus shaped in light and otherwise almost immaterial and unclothed, emerge from the Hill of the Phosphori, they are taken along wide, white roads to some of the many chorus halls which fill the City of Light, where I am now, and from which I am sending this magnetic message.  They remain for hours, even days and weeks in these halls listening in a sort of stupor or trance to beautiful music; for music is the one great recreation of the Martians, and is spontaneous, appearing as a vocal gift in beings who have never enjoyed its exercise on earth.

“Gradually under the influence of this musical immersion, as under the bombardment of the phosphorescent rays, a mentality seems developed; voice and language come, and the soul moves out of the concourse of listening souls, moved by a desire to do something, into the streets of the city.  This is called, as we might say, the Act Impulse.  From that time on the soul rushes, as it were, to its natural occupation.  Its mentality, aroused by music, becomes full of some sort of aptitude, and it enters the avenues of its congruous activity as easily, as quickly, as justly as the growing flower turns toward the Sun wherever it may be.

“Let me present to you the curious scene my eyes encountered as I sat in the great Chorus Hall.  I say my eyes.  It is hard perhaps for you to realize what an organ can be in a creature, so apparently, as we are, little more than gaseous condensations.  The physiology and morphology of a spirit is not an easy thing to grasp or define.  I am yet ignorant upon many points.  But dimly, at least, I may make your natural senses cognizant of it.

“You have seen faces and forms in clouds.  How often you and I from Mount Cook on the earth have watched their changing and confluent lineaments in the clouds above the New Zealand Alps.  It is the same way with Martian spirits.  They are tenuous fluids, but the individual pervades them and a material response is evoked, and the light from their surfaces is so halated, intensified, or reduced as to form a figure with a head and arms and legs.