“We were sailing in a broad river-like canal, perhaps one mile or more wide.  On all sides the undulating ground, covered with cultivation, varied with thick patches of trees, with here and there shining lights from villages and isolated homes, carried the eye onward to a rising hill country, beyond which, again, silhouetted against the shining sky where Phobos began to rise mountain tops were just discernible.

“Deimos, the outer moon, was already shining, and its pale, sick light imparted a peculiar blueness impossible to describe upon all surfaces it touched.  Here was the phenomenon we witnessed with increasing pleasure.  Phobos was emerging from a cloud and its yellow rays possessing a greater illuminating power, mingled suddenly with the blue and spectral beams of Deimos and the land thus visited by the complimentary flood of light from these twin luminaries seemed suddenly dipped in silver.  A beautiful white light, most unreal, as you mortals might say, fell on tree and water, cliff, hill, and villages.  The effect was not unlike that instant in photography when a developing plate shows the outlines of its objects in dazzling silver before the half tints are added, and the image fades away into indistinguishable shadow.

“It was a print in silver, and while we gazed in mute astonishment the sharp shadows changed their position as Phobos, racing through the zenith, changed the inclination of its incident beams.  The effect was indescribable.  I walked the deck in an agitation of wonder and delight.  Chapman, to whom the novelties of this Martian life were still wonderful, followed me, and was the first to speak.

“’Dodd, you know that the strangest thing about this whole place is your body.  It’s body all right enough, but I can’t quite understand what sort of a body it is.  It hurts in a way, and is pleased in a way, but it seems a better made affair in texture and parts than anything we possessed on earth.  Exertion is so easy.’

“‘Well, Chapman,’ I answered, while my eyes rested on the water, through which an approaching barge rose like a vessel of frosted or burnished white metal, ’we were taught on the earth that, with gravitation reduced one-half, the same weight on Mars would seem only half as heavy as on the earth, and that the effort which there carried us eight feet would here send us sixteen.’

“‘It is true,’ returned Chapman, ’but that doesn’t explain everything.  We sleep less here, we scarcely touch meat, and yet exertion, prolonged by hours, scarcely accelerates the blood or vexes the nerves, and generally we don’t grow old.  Our bodies are light; the texture, apparently firm and resisting, is somehow diaphanous.  I’ve seen the light through the palm of my hand.  And then again I haven’t.  Somehow mind works in the body here and changes it, and changes it different at different times.  Why, Dodd, the other day at the Patenta, a student jumped up with a cry of delight at something, and stumbled and fell from a window to the ground, but he stood up without a bruise or hurt of any kind.  His exultation, his emotional excitement made him buoyant, I think, and he fell to the earth like a thistledown.  There was no concussion.’