“Again the evening fell.  We arrived at the entrance of a gloomy and stupendous gorge.  It was the wonderful passage driven through the first area of igneous rocks before we reached the quarry country of the Tiniti.  It pierced the dark and stubborn dike that rose in sheer walls like the Palisades on the Hudson, 1,000 and 1,200 feet above our heads, and it seemed that the darkening tide was carrying us into the bowels of the sphere.  As the precipitous walls rose on either side, a loud report, followed by another more muffled, startled us.  Looking upward, Chapman, shouting ‘Golki, tanto,’ with outstretched hand pointed to a flaming missile passing over our heads, and apparently in the direction we were heading.

“It was a meteor.  It was just such a phenomenon as we know of on the Earth.  I felt certain that it was a bolide from space, one of those fiery visitors of stone and iron that collide occasionally with our Earth, and that somewhere before us, in the country we were approaching, it would be found.

“Later a few straggling shooting stars appeared.  The languor of fatigue overcame me, and I slept prostrate on the cushions of the deck as the murmurous reverberations from the walls of the rock-bound canal rose and fell, with the cadence of the waves, splashing softly against their feet.

“I dreamt of the Earth, the pictures naturally recalled, by these surroundings, of my life on the Hudson River in New York, and it seemed so real, that I should find myself with you working away in the old laboratory at Yonkers near the Albany Road.  Suddenly I was shaken, and opening my eyes I beheld the firmament of heaven falling in coruscating cascades about us.  Starting up, I found myself clutching Chapman, who had called to the pilot to stop the boat.  A few of the attendants were grouped near us, and the loudly suppressed exclamations made me realize that these visitations were perhaps infrequent upon Mars.

“It was a meteoric shower, like our leonids in November.  It rained pellets or balls of fire, these phosphorescent trains gleaming spectrally, while a kind of half audible crackling accompanied the fall.  Shooting in irregular shoals or volleys, they would increase and diminish, and recurrent explosions announced the arrival at the ground of some meteoric mass.

“It was a marvellous and splendid scene.  It lasted till the dawn.  We remained almost unchanged in position, while the tiny comets crowded the sky with their uninterrupted march, and the air was shot through with intermingled lanes of light.

“As the morning broke, we had passed the great gorge in the canal, and had entered a wild, savage, almost treeless country.  Great weathered columns of rock stood alone in the debris of their own dismemberment, the bare gray or rusty and jagged expanses sloping up steeply from the edge of the canal, sparingly dotted over with gray bushes, and covered with an ashen colored lichen.