“And this was to be crushed and crumbled to the ground.  The houses and all the constructions are built of glass bricks laid in courses, as with you on the earth, a soluble glass forming the cement that holds them in contact and together.  The huge glass factories making this formed a black circle in one part of the City.

“It was now day, and the meteoric nebula was invisible.  All day the people came crowding to the hills.  At last, as we gazed in bewildered admiration at the strange multitudes about us, the sound of distant music, the organ-like swell of a titanic chorus approaching was heard.  Far away down the boulevard, on whose apex we stood, we saw a marching retinue of men and women surrounding a platform borne on the shoulders of men.  The platform held the upright figures of the Council amongst whom, distinguished by a blue chalcal tunic bound about him by yellow cords, was the noble being I had seen in the Council chamber on the night of my arrival in Scandor.

“How marvellous it all seemed.  The sense of unreality, of dreamland again overpowered me, a wild horror like some mad possession seized me.  I shook convulsively, and covered my face in my hands, stricken through and through with a nameless repining misery of doubt, of apprehension, of dismay.  It was the last struggle of readjustment between my memories of earth, my identity as a man on the earth, and this new life I had entered.  Alca caught me affectionately and placed the acrid bean I had tasted in the City of Light in my mouth.  The black suffocation passed, and as I slowly returned to realization and serenity I opened my eyes upon the city, now dead and silent, but blazing with all its lights, awaiting desolation, dressed in its sumptuous glory like some princely captive on whom the doom of immolation, before an unappeasable deity, had suddenly fallen.  It was night fall.

“Suddenly a flash, a short piercing note, a loud report, and the sky above us seemed crowded with glowing missiles.  The impact from the first arrivals of the cometary body upon the outer envelopes of the Martian atmosphere had begun.  A loud shout of attention, surprise and half extemporized terror rose from the multitudes about us.  It was a breathless moment.  The oncoming shoals shot forward in rapid jets of fire now clouded together in igneous masses, now separated in disjointed streaks and radiant clusters of snapping, shining bolts.

“As yet the material rushing in upon us failed, in most instances, to reach the ground in solid forms.  It was burned up in the air.  The spectacle was surpassingly strange.  The air before us was weaved with crossing shafts, threads, and traces of phosphorescent light.  Behind this veil still shone with responsive beauty the great city, while rising occasionally in bursts of color, we could see the alarm rockets from the opposite hills penetrate the entering flood of light with frivolous and extinguished protests.