developed the Martian mind in a direction very different from ours,
since no inner life apart from the rest, no privacy, no concealment
is possible except at a distance involving absolute isolation; not
even thought is free; yet in some incomprehensible way there is, as
a matter of fact, a really greater freedom of thought than is
conceivable among ourselves: absolute liberty in absolute obedience
to law, a paradox beyond our comprehension.

Their habits are as simple as those we attribute to the
cave-dwellers during the prehistoric periods of the earth's
existence. But their moral sense is so far in advance of ours that
we haven't even a terminology by which to express it.

In comparison, the highest and best of us are monsters of iniquity
and egoism, cruelty and corruption; and our planet (a very heaven
for warmth and brilliancy and beauty, in spite of earthquakes and
cyclones and tornadoes) is a very hell through the creatures that
people it--a shambles, a place of torture, a grotesque and impure
pandemonium.

These exemplary Martians wear no clothes but the exquisite fur with
which nature has endowed them, and which constitutes a part of their
immense beauty, according to Martia.

They feed exclusively on edible moss and roots and submarine
seaweed, which they know how to grow and prepare and preserve.
Except for heavy-winged bat-like birds, and big fish, which they
have domesticated and use for their own purposes in an incredible
manner (incarnating a portion of themselves and their consciousness
at will in their bodies), they have cleared Mars of all useless and
harmful and mutually destructive forms of animal life. A sorry
fauna, the Martian--even at its best--and a flora beneath contempt,
compared to ours.

They are great engineers and excavators, great irrigators, great
workers in delicate metal, stone, marble, and precious gems (there
is no wood to speak of); great sculptors and decorators of the
beautiful caves, so fancifully and so intricately connected, in
which they live, and which have taken thousands of years to design
and excavate and ventilate and adorn, and which they warm and light
up at will in a beautiful manner by means of the tremendous magnetic
current.

This richly parti-colored light is part of their mental and moral
life in a way it is not in us to apprehend, and has its exact
equivalent in sound--and vice versa.

They have no language of words, and do not need it, since they can