t glow like a Chinese lantern.

"By God!" muttered Colonel Smith, "that was the fellow we blew into
nothing! Blast him, he got off too easy!"

The remainder of Aina's story may be briefly told.

When Colonel Smith and I entered the mysterious building which, as it
now proved, was not a storehouse belonging to a village, as we had
supposed, but one of the military depots of the Martians, the girl, on
catching sight of us, immediately recognized us as belonging to the
strange squadron in the sky. As such she felt that we must be her
friends, and saw in us her only possible hope of escape. For that reason
she had instantly thrown herself under our protection. This accounted
for the singular confidence which she had manifested in us from the
beginning.

Her wonderful story had so captivated our imaginations that for a long
time after it was finished we could not recover from the spell. It was
told over and over again, from mouth to mouth, and repeated from ship to
ship, everywhere exciting the utmost astonishment.

Destiny seemed to have sent us on this expedition into space for the
purpose of clearing off mysteries that had long puzzled the minds of
men. When on the moon we had unexpectedly to ourselves settled the
question that had been debated from the beginning of astronomical
history of the former habitability of that globe.

Now, on Mars, we had put to rest no less mysterious questions relating
to the past history of our own planet. Adelung, as the Heidelberg
professor asserted, had named the Vale of Cashmere, as the probable site
of the Garden of Eden, and the place of origin of the human race, but
later investigators had taken issue with this opinion and the question
where the Aryans originated on the earth had long been one of the most
puzzling that science presented.

This question seemed now to have been settled.

Aina had said that Mars had completed 5,000 circuits about the sun since
her people were brought to it as captives. One circuit of Mars occupies
687 days. More than 9000 years had therefore elapsed since the first
invasion of the earth by the Martians.

Another great mystery--that of the origin of those gigantic and
inexplicable monuments, the great pyramids and the Sphinx, on the banks
of the Nile, had also apparently been solved by us, although these
Egyptian wonders had been the furthest things from our thoughts when we
set out for the planet Mars.

We had traveled more than thirty millio