e
flowers or pink button-shaped florets like almonds. Each building is
square, with a portico of columns, placed on rising steps, a pair of
columns to each step. Vines wind around the columns, cross from one
line of columns to another and form above a tracery of green fronds
bearing, as it was then, red flowers, a sort of trumpet honeysuckle.

"The walls of the buildings are pierced on all sides with broad windows
or embrasures, filled, it seemed, with an opalescent glass. Avenues
opened in all directions, lined on both sides with these wonderful
houses, which are made of a peculiar stone, veined intermittently with
yellow, which has the property of absorbing and emitting light.

"It is indeed a phosphori as, if I recall it aright, the sulphides of
barium, strontium, and calcium were upon our earth. Later I shall see
the great quarries of this stone in the Martian mountains. Another
strange feature in these Martian houses was the hollow sphere of glass
upheld above each house. It is a sphere some six feet in diameter made
up of lenses. It encloses a space in the center of which is a ball of
the phosphorescent stone. During the day the rays of the sun are
concentrated upon this ball of stone, and at night the stored-up
sunlight is radiated into lambent phosphorescent light.

"It was the close of a Martian day that I felt the returning impact of
volition and left the chorus hall. I emerged, as I said before, upon the
broad platform with its colonnade of columns and arches and saw the
city as the night drew on. It is difficult to put in words, my son, the
wonderful effect.

"Each house built of this strange substance, which throughout the day
had been storing up the energies of light, now, as the fading day waned,
became a center of light itself. At first a glow covered the sides of
the houses, the colonnade and dome, while the glass prisms above them
sent out rays from their imprisoned balls of phosphori. The glow spread,
rising from the outskirts of the city in the lower grounds to the
summits of the hills where the sun's last rays lingered. It became
intensified. The green beds of trees were black squares and the houses,
pulsating fabrics of light between them. A slight variety of
architecture in places was accentuated by diverse and varying lines or
surface light.

"The whole finally blended and a sea of radiance was before me in which
the beautiful houses were descried, the illuminated groves, and like
enormous