“Here were their settlements, from which the workmen of the quarries had been brought.  Beyond this again lay the margins of the polar sea.  The Superintendent—­his name was Alca—­had visited this region, and probably made the pictures I wondered at.  The Superintendent said we should visit the great quarry in the morning before we started again for Scandor.  And he showed us, as the darkness descended about us, a marvellous phenomenon.  Standing on the roof of his house, we looked up the mountain side to the immense opening forced in its flank, and it had become a great surface of palpitating, rising and falling light.  The waves of glorious soft radiance bathed the village about us, the waters of the canal, and the arid crusts of rock beyond, the circle of encompassing darkness straining like a great black wall, on its spent edges.

“Song and music closed the day, and after eating the wine-soaked cakes of Pintu, we made our way to the white and simple bedchamber and waited for the morning.

“It came, fresh and splendid.  The air of this latitude of Mars is so pure, vivid and dustless!  My strength and power and vitality seemed boundless.  And as in the broad mirror of my bedchamber I viewed my reflection, I leaped with wonder to see the youth I had been, formed anew in lineaments, fairer than Earth’s.  My son, I have become younger than yourself, age has vanished, and all the restraint of differing years between has vanished with it.

“Alca, Chapman and myself, as is the Martian habit, walked to the quarry mouth, up a winding and hard stone road.  This dreary and desolate region seemed to have a charm.  Its expanse of rigid waves of stone, pimpled with sharp excrescences, and as deeply pitted with cavernous grottoes, where no life seemed able to survive, save a stunted herbage, sparsely assembled in vagrant groups, or gathered in thirsty lines around the lip of the still pools, was full of scenic interest, but more deeply eloquent of great geological convulsions.

“Chapman and Alca were in front of me, speaking the Martian tongue, while I stood looking backward every few steps, delighted to trace the broad river of the canal winding through the desolation for miles beyond.  Then I noticed how rapid and effortless is motion in Mars.  Volition is so easy and penetrating, the body becomes a mere plaything for the mind.  Every function, every part is swayed into vitality by the mind.  There is the apparent motion of the limbs, but really the whole frame sweeps on as by an intangible process of translation, and the body is transferred to the point the mind desires it to reach almost without fatigue.  This gives strength exactly proportioned to Will, and the shorn powers of disease and Time proceed from the creative faculty of thought.  The disabling of the body in Mars by weakness or disease, or accident or age, sprang front a mental discord, an emotional dissonance.  Here was the explanation of those disorders that still cling to the Martian life.  In this lay also the secret of crime.