"The next day as I awoke I found my friend and Chapman waiting for me. I
felt wonderfully refreshed, and the exultant mood of the Martians
possessed me. I sang with an interior tumult of excitement. I drew
before my mind the beauty of your mother reincorporated in this gay,
lovely world of Mars, so full of power and light and youthful impulse.
Again I sang, and it was the very air your mother so often played to me,
'Der Gr?ne Lauterband,' of Schubert. A few passers by, below my window,
caught the refrain, my voice rose higher and higher, and their
disappearing figures seemed to carry the merry, hopping notes far away.
How fair and glorious it all was!
"And I was to visit Scandor, to visit the beautiful Martian country, the
mines, the huge fossil ivory deposits, to sail on those canals, whose
resplendent lines we had detected from the earth.
"My door was shaken, and almost as if yet living on the earth, I cried
out 'Come in.' Chapman and my friend entered with laughter and
congratulation. Chapman spoke first: 'Dodd, you are summoned to the
Council of the Patenta. All are anxious to see you. At present it is
hoped you will not push further the matter of the telegraphy with the
Earth. The disturbances in Pike increase daily--flashing stars seem to
emerge from nothing, meteoric showers, like a rain of sparks rush across
the fields of the telescopes, gaseous disengagements from what seem like
shining nuclei, shoot upward for thousands of miles from their surfaces;
all is chaos, and these disturbances have been noticed in other regions
of the heavens.
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