“He groaned and tried to rise, but his crushed body was incapable.  The Superintendent, Alca, had hurried to the spot where the crowding men stood around us ejaculating their amazement.  Alca tore open the garment about Chapman, and placing his forehead on the body, poured out as it were, the full tide of his mental sympathy and power.

“I could see the struggle between the mortality of Chapman, born of doubt, and his unfittedness and apathy, and the spiritual power of the brave Superintendent.  The flame of life in Chapman would be stimulated or excited, and then flicker and die down.  These alterations lasted but a short time.  Soon Chapman passed into stupor, and then death supervened, and the strange and seldom known circumstance of death among the supernaturals in Mars was realized.

“Alca kept the body of Chapman, which would be sent back to the City of Light, and cremated in the Temple of Glorification—­which I have not seen.  He intended to accompany it.  He sent me on to Scandor.  I had now learned enough of the Martian language to speak, imperfectly.  That mental facility, which is the amazing and most wonderful thing in Mars, was perhaps more slowly roused in me.  But daily I became known, and more alert and inflamed with thought and the eager intuition of the Martians.

“We started from the great Quarry of Sinsi, and I was alone with the Martians on the porcelain boat, now made by this tragic fate the ambassador from the City of Light to the Council in Scandor.

“The sterile, sinister and yet marvellous region of lava beds, dikes and conic craters suddenly was passed, and the canal moved into the huge forest lands of the Ribi wood.

“This is a beautiful land.  Mountain ranges rising from four to six thousand feet cross it, holding broad valleys and plains, or elevated plateaus between them; lakes and rivers pass through it, and villages and towns with a mixed population of the supernaturals and the prehistorics are frequent.  The canals cross the great region in many directions.  The trunk line I followed was carried up and down by systems of locks of astounding magnitude and perfection.  Great lakes were made convenient feeders, and rivers were also tapped to keep the water levels constant in the canals.  The weather was that of a semi-tropical paradise, and the late flowers of the Ribi filled the air with fragrance.

“Quickly we approached Scandor.  It was a clear, calm day when we emerged from the Ribi country, and the pilot pointed out to me the distant hills, almost purple in a twilight haze, which encircled the Valley of the City of Scandor.  The country we had entered was a fertile farm country, where great plantations of the Rint, and vineyards of the Oma grapes were established, and where great flocks of the Imilta dove, almost the only meat eaten by the Martians, are raised.  The enormous flocks of this snow-white bird were strangely beautiful.  They made clouds in the air, and their purring notes when they settled in white blankets over the fields, were heard pulsating over long distances.