“As we came near the buildings of the Patenta our outcry and the sonorous pulsations of the singing brought to its windows and doorways the many workers in the laboratories, lecture halls, and offices.  We were regarded with wonder.  But there seems present amongst these people a telepathic power, not perhaps what we call that in the Earth, but an intuitive construction of meaning upon the passing of a word or a hint.  Forerunners furthermore had given some account of the strange new spirit from the Earth, who had prearranged with people on the Earth itself, to return to them, if possible, messages of his experiences after a human death.  It had been the dream of the Martians, the sensation of their daily lives, the hope of returning to their former dwelling places, some token, word, salutation, indeed to somehow begin that almost apocryphal conception of binding the Universe into a conversational unit.

“No marvel that they were now excited, transported; no wonder that I, the accidental being, who falling in their world, as it were, from outside, should be the agency to lead to the eventual conquest of these great designs.

“On we swept like a tide that advances upon a coast, encompasses each salient rock, island and projection, and evading it by embracing it, rises still further into the bays and harbors, and brings the full tide at last to its most remote limits.  So columns and stairways, halls, and wings, and arms, of buildings successively were surged round, and the vast complex pushed its way to the great Hall of Attention.

“This enormous structure was built somewhat to one side of the great Observatories.  It was rectangular, elevated and attained to by stairs on every side.  It resembles a huge Grecian temple, but the interior treatment was quite contrasted.  Externally it was made of the white phosphorescent marble with colonnades of columns of the blue metal supporting its projecting roofs.  I was carried as by a cataract of waters up its stairways.  Already its bronze gates were swung wide open, and through them the Martian army passed with impetuous stride.  Learned men, the leaders and great physicists, many of those I had seen in the morning had reached the Hall.  These were constantly augmented by new arrivals from the more distant Schools of Philosophy, Design and Art, while streaming in at every door came the joyous multitude, and the great vault of the Hall of Attention resounded with the rolling chorus.

“It was a moving, an impossible spectacle.  The balconies swept upward to a wall of polished granite.  They were supported by columns of mosaic marble; the floor of roughened glass was concealed with benches of a gray stone, whose backs were carved in a tracery of branches, over which were thrown pale yellow rugs or shawls; the broad ceiling was divided into deep, rectangular recesses plafonded with opalescent glass, and these recesses were made by the intersection of huge girders of the blue metal, while provisions were made throughout for electric lighting by tall glass cylinders, which glow like pillars of lambent flame, and stood upright, affixed to the walls at regular intervals, or concealed in cavities along the ceiling, or grouped like the fasces of the Roman lictors, at the railings of the balconies.