gar pointed out the surrounding
hillsides. On them, cleared of their vegetation, our modern civilization
stood gaunt and efficient. Towers, aerials, landing stages, aerial
trams, factories, tall stacks over the dynamo houses belching thick
black smoke, which artificial wind-generators carefully blew away from
the city.

In the midst of their hillside ring of necessary modernity, the people
of the Great City had kept their playground inviolate. Work, science,
industry--all necessary. But the real business of life was pleasure.
Art, music, beauty.... And I am not far from thinking that unless
abused, their formula is better than ours.

CHAPTER XVII

_Violet Beam of Death_

We landed on a stage at the summit of one of the nearer hillsides. Our
coming--unheralded since we had carried no sending instruments--created
a furor. The workers rested to watch us as we disembarked. It was not so
different a scene, here on the hill, than might have occurred on Earth.
We took a moving platform, down the hill, to the water's edge. A barge
was awaiting us--a broad flat vessel with gaudy trappings. A score of
attendants lined its sides, each with a pole to thrust it through the
shallow water. And on its high-raised stern, beneath a canopy was a
couch upon which Tarrano reclined, with us of his party at his feet.

A royal barge, queerly ancient, barbaric--reminding me of the flat,
motionless pictures of Earth's early history. Yet it was a symbol here
on Venus, not of barbarism, but of decadence.

We started off. I may have given a false idea of the size of the Great
City. Its lake, indeed, was fully fifteen miles or more in diameter.
Half a million people lived on or close around that placid stretch of
water.

The news of Tarrano's arrival had instantly spread. Graceful boats, all
propelled by hand, thronged our course. From them, and from every
house-window, balcony and roof-top, a waving multitude cheered the
coming of the Master. The new Master, to whom so recently they had given
their allegiance--the Master who in return was to endow them with life
everlasting.

It was a gay, holiday throng--cheering us, tossing flower-petals down
upon us as we passed majestically beneath the bridges. Yet among these
gaudily dressed women and men with the luster of wealth and ease upon
them, others mingled. Others of a lower class, poorly dressed, with the
badge of servitude upon them, enthralled in a social peonage which I did
not