Could my ears have deceived me?  No!  It was running, running, running, intelligible, strong, definite; it seemed to me of almost piercing loudness, although just audible.  I bent over, seized my pad and wrote.  The Abyss of Death was bridged!  From behind the veil of that inexorable silence which lies beyond the grave came a voice—­and what a voice!  The clicking of a telegraphic register in signals, that the whole world knew and used.  I was quiet, preternaturally so, I think, as I took down the message.  I became almost aged in the intense rigidity of my absorption.

I was told the Dodans came up and saw me, heard the telltale clicks of the register, and unnoticed left me.  Still I wrote on, unheeding the time.  My assistants, pale with wonder, stood around me.  The measured tappings were the ghostly voices of another world.  This message began at 10 a.m., Sept. 25, 1893.  It ended at 10 p.m. on the same day.  It came quite evenly, though slowly, and was unmistakably intended to be inerrantly recorded, as indeed it was.

CHAPTER III.

“My son,” it began, “I am indeed in the red orb of light we have so often looked up to when we were together on the earth, and about which our wondering minds hazarded so many fruitless guesses.  I have been here a short time, and now am able to return to you, by that cipher we so fortunately printed upon the tablet of memory, word of my existence.

“I can hardly describe to you my occurrence on this planet.  I found myself here without any recollection of whence I had come, without a traceable thought of anything I had ever heard before.

“I was suddenly sitting in a high room, brilliantly lighted by a soft, tranquillizing radiance, listening to a chorus of most delicately attuned voices, indescribably sweet, penetrating and moving.  Around me upon white ivory chairs arranged in an amphitheatre sat beings like myself, all looking outward upon a sloping lawn where were gathered beneath blossoming fruit trees an army, it seemed, of half shining creatures, unlike myself, singing these wonderful choruses.

“I have since learned that I did not reach Mars in that identical moment when I found myself sitting in the hall.  I had come to it, as all disembodied spirits from the earth come to it at one receiving point, a high hill not far from the tropic of Mars.  This hill, crowned and covered with glass buildings, is known as the hill of the Phosphori.  Here, for nearly one of our months, the incoming souls, which are little more than a sort of ethereal fluid, presenting a form only observable by refracted light, or I should say polarized light, are bathed in a marvellously phosphorescent beam procured by absorption from the sun.  These souls are intermingled in a chaotic stream that I may liken to the streaming currents of heated air in convection from a source of heat upon our earth, and this continuous tide is caught in a great spherical chamber or a series of chambers extending over five miles around the bald summit of this eminence.