“In some way I imagine the organs are optical effects, ruled by mind, which is located in this luminous matter.  Later I will describe the process of solidification, the resumption of matter, for these spirit forms slowly concrete into beings like terrestrial men and women.  There is, therefore, a dual population here, the extreme newly transplanted souls, and the flesh and blood people, and between them the transitions from spirit to corpuscular bodies.  But all this takes place in the City of Light.  Elsewhere over the whole planet the spirits are seldom seen, but only the vigorous and beautiful race of material beings into which, they—­the spirits—­have consolidated.

“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 assemblage were seated.  The whole place glowed, and this phosphorescent 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 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.

“A word of explanation would make this all clear.  The Hill of the Phosphori begins the transmutation of the psychic fluid which makes up the souls as they flow into Mars from space.  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, pass 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 principal 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.