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.
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