“The City of Light is simple and monotonous in architecture, but its composition and its radiance quite surpass 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 button-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 glass.  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 glass upheld above each house.  It is a sphere some six feet in diameter made up of lenses.  It encloses a space in the center of which is a ball of the phosphorescent 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 phosphorescent 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 glass prisms above them sent out rays from their imprisoned balls 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 glassy spheres—­the Martians call them the Plenitudes above them.  Many other developing beings were around me, and voiceless, mute, impassioned, 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.