“One prime element of difference is in the nourishment and the area of population.  The Martian lives only on fruit, and he lives only a few degrees on either side of the Equator.  All the businesses that in your earth arise from the preparation and sale of meat and all the various confections, disappear there, and also all the mechanism of house heating and lighting.  Also there are no railroads, but innumerable canals, which form a labyrinth of waterways, and are fed from the tides of the great northern and southern seas.

“The business is largely agricultural, but in the cities the pursuit of knowledge still continues.  There is, however, on Mars a much lessened intellectual activity than on the earth.  It is a sphere of simplified needs and primal feelings exalted by acutely developed love of Music.  Mars is the music planet.  There are not on Mars newspapers, journals, magazines, books.  The tireless production of these things on the earth has but one analogy in Mars, the publication of music scores, the recitation of poetry and symposia, and the great illustrated journal, Dia.  But these things I will explain later.

“I wandered on that night through the city with other spirits.  We went through the city streets in the radiance of the Plenitudes above the houses.  The night air was blowing through the trees, and the city was filled with people.  They were the Martians.  We were scarcely noticed.  In the City of Light the new arrivals are not questioned until they begin to “take shape,” as they say here, and then they are closely examined, and their origin, if it can be traced, is written down and kept in great registers.

“The groups were moving in streams toward the higher ground, and as my companions were gradually separated from me and were lost like wisps of moving light here and there, I went on alone.  I came up long, wonderful avenues between walls of light, regularly punctuated by the dark squares of trees, and the spherical radiations of the Plenitudes above the houses.

“The people about me seemed all young, or scarcely more than, as we say, in middle life.  They speak less than the earth folk, and when they speak they utter very simple sentences, and seem very sincere.  I often stood by little groups gathered at the corners of cross streets, and listened to their musical intonations.  The language is vocalic and monosyllabic.  It sometimes suggests a Mongolian tongue, but without the guttural clicks and coughs.  The Martians are all gifted in music.  It fills their lives.

“From point to point crowds were assembled about platforms where singing was in progress, and every now and then a man or woman in the street would sing loudly and passionately with such power and beauty that the impressionable Martians would follow the refrain of the song and the whole street for blocks and blocks would resound in waves of delightful melody.  There are no mechanical modes of propulsion in the streets of the City of Light. The Martians all walk.