eat stone gate, barred and locked
to confine all others within the city. The fact that it was fastened on
the inside proved that the doctor's captors were not outside, or, at
least, did not expect to return till after daylight. With a brisk jump I
cleared the wall easily, and walked rapidly to the plateau. There was no
sign of life there. I mounted the only unsealed Gnomon and shouted down
into its cavernous depths. Of course there was no answer. I was now so
wide awake it seemed to me quite silly to follow the promptings of a
dream, so I began to return in a leisurely walk.

The night scene all about me, how different it was from those to which I
had been accustomed on Earth! Out of a pink sky flakes of frozen dew
were gently falling, starching the arid, verdureless soil with a
glistening coat of evanescent white. Along the river bank, tall,
slender, lightly-rooted trees reached far up into the breathless air,
but there was never the movement of a bough or the rustle of a leaf,
except from the flutter of birds. Jungles of spindling reeds also
towered from waste marshes, in testimony to the easy struggle which
vegetable sap had been able to accomplish over a weak gravity.
Everything was eloquent with the reminder that I was on a different
world; but yet, when I looked up at the starry heavens, they were the
same. All the familiar constellations, changing their positions through
the night with the same stately dignity, were there. The Pleiades,
Orion, the Great Bear, with his nose constantly pointed at the Pole
Star, made me feel that, at least in the heavens, I was at home! Only
the colour of the night, the two little moons, and the planets looked
different. Great Jupiter, king of the Martian night, whose brilliancy,
if not his size, outrivalled the pale moons; Saturn, with his tilted
ring, was visible to the naked eye; and yon pearly blue star, just
rising to announce the morning, was Earth. Earth, which I had so
unwillingly left, would I ever see her again as anything but a
Sun-attending star? Would I ever walk her familiar paths, and know my
brother creatures there again?

With this thought came over me an unspeakable sense of loneliness, a
depressing home-sickness, an aching yearning for that life, tempestuous
as it had been. And how I despised the monotony and lowness of the
Martian life; how I loathed the spreading misery of the famine, and the
vile and dreadful pestilences which it was begetting! How could I eve