to the gully through which we had come and open country beyond. But
after a couple of hundred yards this hope ended as abruptly as the spit
itself in deep water, and there I was, as far as the darkness would
allow me to ascertain, as utterly trapped as any mortal could be.

I will not dwell on the next few minutes, for no one likes to
acknowledge that he has been unmanned even for a space. When those
minutes were over calmness and consideration returned, and I was able
to look about.

All the opposite cliffs, rising sheer from the water, were in light,
their cold blue and white surfaces rising far up into the black
starfields overhead. Looking at them intently from this vantage-point
I saw without at first understanding that along them horizontally, tier
above tier, were rows of objects, like--like--why, good Heavens, they
were like men and women in all sorts of strange postures and positions!
Rubbing my eyes and looking again I perceived with a start and a
strange creepy feeling down my back that they WERE men and
women!--hundreds of them, thousands, all in rows as cormorants stand
upon sea-side cliffs, myriads and myriads now I looked about, in every
conceivable pose and attitude but never a sound, never a movement
amongst the vast concourse.

Then I turned back to the cliffs behind me. Yes! they ere there too,
dimmer by reason of the shadows, but there for certain, from the
snowfields far above down, down--good Heavens! to the very level where
I stood. There was one of them not ten yards away half in and half out
of the ice wall, and setting my teeth I walked over and examined him.
And there was another further in behind as I peered into the clear blue
depth, another behind that one, another behind him--just like cherries
in a jelly.

It was startling and almost incredible, yet so many wonderful things
had happened of late that wonders were losing their sharpness, and I
was soon examining the cliff almost as coolly as though it were only
some trivial geological "section," some new kind of petrified
sea-urchins which had caught my attention and not a whole nation in
ice, a huge amphitheatre of fossilised humanity which stared down on me.

The matter was simple enough when you came to look at it with
philosophy. The Martians had sent their dead down here for many
thousand years and as they came they were frozen in, the bands and
zones in which they sat indicating perhaps alternating seasons. Then
after Natu