ail of luminous ether, undergoing the
strange process of materialization.

"How incredible it all was, how incomprehensible. I pinched myself until
I could have cried out with pain, and at that very instant a voice
saluted me, calling me by name and a rushing figure encountered me. I
stood transfixed. Before me was Chapman, the mechanic, workman, and
photographer for Mr. Rutherford, in New York in the seventies, a man
whom I knew well, from whom I had learned much, and whose skill helped
so largely in the production of Rutherford's negatives of the Moon. My
repulsion was over in an instant. I clasped him heartily. It seemed so
good, so human, to embrace something in this strange world. An equal
resistance met my own. We were indeed substance.

"'Mr. Dodd,' exclaimed my old acquaintance, 'are you here? This is
wonderful. Have you just become one of us? What luck! what a great
providence for me! I am in the observatory. Must sail to-morrow to
Scandor to report a sudden confusion in Perseus. They call it here
_Pike_. You shall go with me. I have a long leave of absence I will show
you many marvels. And you can tell me everything about Tony. He was a
baby when I knew you.' Turning to my smiling companion, he spoke in
Martian, of which to give you some semblance I cipher these words: 'Aru
meta voluca volu li tonti tan dondore mal per vuele vonta bidi ami.'

"I returned Chapman's hearty salutation. I yet retained the human speech
of earth and I was struck with the miraculous incident that in the
planet Mars, in a populous city, I was addressing a friend in the
English tongue.

"But the joy of it was inexpressible. Oh, the sweetness of old
acquaintanceship in strange, and as here, impossible surroundings! I
gazed on him with unspeakable curiosity. I talked to him just to hear my
own voice and his in response, to realize if words were still words with
the old meaning, if the intangible mutation I had undergone was a
reality, if I was indeed alive, if my lungs and throat, the
configuration of my mouth, the vocalic impact of the air, was a fact, a
sound, a meaning, or whether it all was some phantasmagoria, beautiful
and fair indeed, to be dispelled with a shock of annihilation.

"No! we were breathing, sensate things, were human kin and kind. The
sudden vertigo sent me throbbing, like a stricken animal, against the
high pillars of the room we had entered, and a reflex tide of emotion
swept over me in a storm that shook me w