h were tightly
clad in the palest blue tunics and leggings. These creatures were
consolidated spirits. They are constantly augmented by new arrivals,
and, as the number remains almost unchanged, as new arrivals appear,
others leave and then move off from the City of Light into the vast
regions of Mars outside and beyond the city.

"A word of explanation would make this all clear. The Hill of the
Phosphori begins the transmutation of the psychic fluid which makes up
the souls as they flow into Mars from space. At the Hill the very
moderate condensation begins, just enough to bring them to the ground by
gravity. The psychic fluid is susceptible to the light, absorbs and
emits it, and so the spirit forms are shining like great _ignes fatui_
on our old earth. The spirits thus individualize, pass in companies to
the City of Light, and come to the huge chorus halls which surround the
city on its outskirts, in the country margin.

"They reach these chorus halls by a sort of suasion produced apparently
by their sympathy with music. Music and Light are the energies, which at
first and measurably throughout all the latter days of Martian life,
direct work and thought and being. The music is quite audible for long
distances, especially in the direction of the Hill of the Phosphori
where the spirits land. Drawn by it they move unconsciously toward the
singing centers. Now there are perhaps a hundred of these chorus halls
about the City of Light grouped in the direction of the Hill of the
Phosphori, and the music is quite different in them. There are four
principal sorts, the grave, the gay, the romantic and the harmonic. By
their interior sympathy the kinds of spirits move to the choruses which
afford the music they respond to and it is wonderful how infallibly this
attraction acts.

"The bands separate and strings and lines of the phosphorized spirits
train away without direction to the choruses that attract them, although
only a sort of subdued and confused murmur reaches them from the halls.

"Throughout the first stages of life here, the spirits are somnambulous.
They move and act unconsciously and in obedience to their imbedded
instincts and tastes. Only, as under the influence of music and light
and afterwards occupation, they are transmuted by consolidation into the
fair material race, which outside of the City of Light controls the
planet, does consciousness and curiosity and language arise. I sat a
long, long time in t