“She rose and stretched out her arms toward some phantasy of thought or fancy in the air above her, and then a song of recall from a distance floated along the meadow and the river’s banks, a sweet, joyous, beckoning melody, that compelled the ear to listen, and the feet to follow.

“Martha half turned—­I was dazed with wonder—­I did not wish to speak.  I could not then have revealed myself.  It was all too marvellous, too hard to comprehend.  The old doubts of my reality, of the realness of everything I had seen, surged up again, and swept over me in a tide of disillusion.

“Was I dreaming; in the death from Earth had I passed into a wild phantasmagoria of mental pictures, some endless dream where the lulled soul encountered again, as visions, all it may have hoped for, all its unconscious cerebration had limned on the interior canvases of the mind, to be reviewed, as in a sleep, where every detail met the test of curiosity—­except that last test—­waking?  Should I awake?

“I sprang forward and beat myself, in a sort of fury of doubt against the trees about me.  The resistance was secure and certain.  Pain—­it seemed a kind of bliss, as the guarantee of my flesh and blood existence—­came to me and in my paroxysms the torn skin of my body bled.  I looked at the red stains with exultation.  I felt the aches of physical concussion, with a real rapture.

“This life was real, was dual—­body and mind—­as on Earth, and the woman hastening before me along the marge of the rippling stream—­I listened in a kind of feverish anticipation of its silence, for the low cadence of water passing over pebbles—­was Martha!  It must be true!  What agency of superhuman cruelty could thus deceive me?  No! my eyes were faithful, and the air, thrilling with the distant song, brought nearer to my ears the answering call of my wife!

“She was far distant.  I ran from tree to tree in the wooded back ground and traced her to a little hamlet where a group of Martians awaited her.  They turned up a narrow lane singing, and I lost them.

“I returned to Alca, pensively standing on the hill we had first descended, and said nothing of the strange revelation.  I contrived to learn from him the name of the little village, and the nature of its inhabitants.  He called it Nitansi, and said it had been one of the old spots where migrating souls from other worlds once entered Mars.

“‘A few,’ he added, ’come there now, though rarely, and the people cultivate flowers in great farms, and formerly sent them to Scandor.  I think I saw them moving now along the fields at the riverside.  We must go back.  I shall go down the canal to Sinsi.  I know the Council of Scandor will resolve to rebuild the city.’”

The message closed.  I rose and staggered backward into the arms of Jobson.  A severe hemorrhage ensued, and slowly thereafter the darkening doors of life began to close upon me.  Disease had won its way against all the force of life.