The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars

Excerpt: ...It was rectangular, elevated and attained to by stairs on every side. It resembles a huge Grecian temple, but the interior treatment was quite contrasted. Externally it was made of the white phosphorescent marble with colonnades of columns of the blue metal supporting its projecting roofs. I was carried as by a cataract of waters up its stairways. Already its bronze gates were swung wide open, and through them the Martian army passed with impetuous stride. Learned men, the leaders and great physicists, many of those I had seen in the morning had reached the Hall. These were constantly augmented by new arrivals from the more distant Schools of Philosophy, Design and Art, while streaming in at every door came the joyous multitude, and the great vault of the Hall of Attention resounded with the rolling chorus. "It was a moving, an impossible spectacle. The balconies swept upward to a wall of polished granite. They were supported by columns of mosaic marble; the floor of roughened glass was concealed with benches of a gray stone, whose backs were carved in a tracery of branches, over which were thrown pale yellow rugs or shawls; the broad ceiling was divided into deep, rectangular recesses plafonded with opalescent glass, and these recesses were made by the intersection of huge girders of the blue metal, while provisions were made throughout for electric lighting by tall glass cylinders, which glow like pillars of lambent flame, and stood upright, affixed to the walls at regular intervals, or concealed in cavities along the ceiling, or grouped like the fasces of the Roman lictors, at the railings of the balconies. "A wide platform occupied the center of this vast auditorium, and upon this I was carried as by a wave of the sea. Here I touched the floor; the accompanying crowds dispersed through the hall, which became filled, and as it filled some unnoticed signal ushered the glow of the electric ether in the cylinders, until a glory of radiance mingled...