It was a marvellous picture.
"The City of Light is simple and monotonous in architecture, but its
composition and its radiance quite surpass any earthly conception. The
buildings are all domed and stand in squares which are filled with fruit
trees, low bush-like spreading plants, bearing white pendant lily-like
flowers or pink button-shaped florets like almonds. Each building is
square, with a portico of columns, placed on rising steps, a pair of
columns to each step. Vines wind around the columns, cross from one
line of columns to another and form above a tracery of green fronds
bearing, as it was then, red flowers, a sort of trumpet honeysuckle.
"The walls of the buildings are pierced on all sides with broad windows
or embrasures, filled, it seemed, with an opalescent glass. Avenues
opened in all directions, lined on both sides with these wonderful
houses, which are made of a peculiar stone, veined intermittently with
yellow, which has the property of absorbing and emitting light.
"It is indeed a phosphori as, if I recall it aright, the sulphides of
barium, strontium, and calcium were upon our earth. Later I shall see
the great quarries of this stone in the Martian mountains. Another
strange feature in these Martian houses was the hollow sphere of glass
upheld above each house. It is a sphere some six feet in diameter made
up of lenses. It encloses a space in the center of which is a ball of
the phosphorescent stone.
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