“As the night settled down the light grew more intense, more beautiful.  I could discern the opalescent glasses 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 assumption 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 passed 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 aptitudes 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 association 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.