him at his
unconscious work, careful not to wake or disturb him in any way.

Roughly epitomized, Martia's story was this:

For an immense time she had gone through countless incarnations,
from the lowest form to the highest, in the cold and dreary planet
we call Mars, the outermost of the four inhabited worlds of our
system, where the sun seems no bigger than an orange, and which but
for its moist, thin, rich atmosphere and peculiar magnetic
conditions that differ from ours would be too cold above ground for
human or animal or vegetable life. As it is, it is only inhabited
now in the neighborhood of its equator, and even there during its
long winter it is colder and more desolate than Cape Horn or
Spitzbergen--except that the shallow, fresh-water sea does not
freeze except for a few months at either pole.

All these incarnations were forgotten by her but the last; nothing
remained of them all but a vague consciousness that they had once
been, until their culmination in what would be in Mars the
equivalent of a woman on our earth.

Man in Mars is, it appears, a very different being from what he is
here. He is amphibious, and descends from no monkey, but from a
small animal that seems to be something between our seal and our
sea-lion.

According to Martia, his beauty is to that of the seal as that of
the Theseus or Antinous to that of an orangoutang. His five senses
are extraordinarily acute, even the sense of touch in his webbed
fingers and toes; and in addition to these he possesses a sixth,
that comes from his keen and unintermittent sense of the magnetic
current, which is far stronger in Mars than on the earth, and far
more complicated, and more thoroughly understood.

When any object is too delicate and minute to be examined by the
sense of touch and sight, the Martian shuts his eyes and puts it
against the pit of his stomach, and knows all about it, even its
inside.

In the absolute dark, or with his eyes shut, and when he stops his
ears, he is more intensely conscious of what immediately surrounds
him than at any other time, except that all color-perception ceases;
conscious not only of material objects, but of what is passing in
his fellow-Martian's mind--and this for an area of many hundreds of
cubic yards.

In the course of its evolutions this extraordinary faculty--which
exists on earth in a rudimentary state, but only among some birds
and fish and insects and in the lower forms of animal life--has