“I approached the top of the broad hill on which the City is built, and came suddenly out into a square filled again in its park-like center with trees.  From amid these trees rose a massive building, which I instantly recognized as an observatory; the many round domes, as on earth, were unmistakable.

“I passed up the walks of the square to the building and entered it.

“It was illuminated by balls of phosphori in glass globes, and its cool, broad halls and stairways were, in the soft light, very beautiful.  But their wonderfulness consisted in the insertion upon the walls of illuminated plans and maps of the heavens.  These miniature firmaments were all afire, so that each opening, carefully graded in size to represent stars of the first or second or third magnitude, was filled with a beaming point of light, and I walked in these noble corridors between reduced patterns of the universe of stars.  I can hardly tell you how astonished and entranced I was.

“I had for the first time since I reached the planet the impulse of speech, and I raised my hands with that motion of snapping the fingers, which you recall was characteristic of me on earth, and spoke.  I cried, ‘Here is my home.’

“As my hands dropped to my sides I felt resistance.  I looked down upon myself and could behold the changing surfaces of my body.  Under this completing stroke of volition the work begun upon the Hill of the Phosphori and the Chorus Hall in reducing the intangible spirit fluid to corporeal expression was now hastening to an end.  I do not stop here to consider the reflections this suggests as to the nature of matter, those abstruse speculations we indulged in so often over the pages of Muir and Helmholz and Tait and Crookes.

“I had reached the ascending stairway, when my hand—­for hand it now seemed to be—­was taken in a friendly pressure, and I turned and saw a tall figure with a face of extreme nobility, somewhat scarred, I thought, dressed in the usual Martian attire of a flowing tunic and closely fitting body clothing.  He said in English, ’You are from the earth as I am.’

“My son, how can I, in this dull, mechanical method of conversation with you, ignorant, indeed, whether the magnetic waves loaded with my message, are traversing or not the millions of miles of space to your ear, how can I make you realize the wonderful and blessed feelings of amazement and happiness that the stranger’s words brought me.  Here I was, a disembodied soul from Earth, which at that moment I only dimly recalled, undergoing the strange process of re-establishment in flesh and blood, and slowly appropriating those natural appetites which come with flesh and blood, a waif of spiritual being in the great voids of creation, impelled by some implanted power of affinity to this remote, strange, phantasmal and unreal place, overwhelmed in a stupor of confusion, like some awakening patient from the vertigo of a terrifying dream!