"I was sure of my aim: it was accurate enough according to my calculations, the last I saw of Mars: I was pretty sure of arriving: but I soon began to doubt my capacity to hold out for a month of it. Days and nights can go by pretty slowly sometimes even on Earth, but this was one interminable day.

"The compressed air worked all right: of course I had practiced it on Earth. But the machinery for letting out continually the exactly right quantities into a kind of metal helmet, from which I breathed it, was so complicated, that I could never sleep for more than two hours on end, without having to wake and attend to it. For this purpose I had to have an alarm clock quite close to my ear. My discomforts would, I think, be no more interesting than a record of a long and tedious illness. But, to put it briefly, a little after half-way they got the better of me and I was going to give up and die; when suddenly I saw Mars. In the broad glare of the daylight I saw a pale white circle, like the very littlest of moons, nearly ahead of me and a bit to the right. It was this that saved me. I gazed at it and forgot my great discomforts.

"It was no more visible than a small bird's feather, high in the air, in sunlight. But it was Mars unmistakably, and just where it ought to be if I was to reach it. With nothing else to look at through that endless day, I gazed too much at Mars. That brought it no nearer; and I found that if I was to get any comfort from it in my weariness I must look away from it for a bit. That wasn't easy with nothing else to look at, but when I did look away from it for an hour or so, and looked again, I could see a change. I noticed now that it was not entirely lit, being dark on the right hand side, and illuminated about as much as the moon on its eleventh day, three days from full. I looked away again and then looked back at it, and so I passed about two hundred hours of that long weary day. Gradually the canals, as we call them, came in view, gradually the seas. It grew to the size of our moon, and then grew larger, exhibiting a spectacle the like of which no human eye had even seen before. From then on I forgot my discomforts. Now I saw mountains clearly, and presently rivers, and the flashing panorama widened before me, giving up secrets at which our astronomers have guessed for over a century. There came the time when after a spell of sleep I looked at Mars again, and found that it had lost the look of a planet, or any celestial body, and appeared now like a landscape. Soon after that I got the feeling that, though my course was quite unchanged, Mars was no longer ahead of me but underneath. And then I began to feel the pull of the planet. Things rocked in my 'plane: kegs, tins and such; and began to shift, as far as their lashings would let them. I felt the pull too where I sat. Then I got ready for entering the atmosphere of Mars."

"What did you have to do?" said Jorkens.

"Had to be very careful," said Terner. "Or I'd have burned up like a meteorite. Of course I was overtaking it, not meeting it, so that our two speeds largely neutralized each other; and luckily the atmosphere is only thin at first, like ours, so you don't strike it bang. But the 'plane took some handling for all that. Once I'd steadied her, flying is much the same there as it is here. Of course I'd turned on my engines as soon as I struck Mars' atmosphere. I came down pretty straight, not wishing to show over too wide an area, so as not to excite too much curiosity amongst whatever might be there. I may say that I expected to find men there, not through any knowledge I had or researches I'd made, but because most people do. I don't mean that I was persuaded by that, but what vaguely persuaded them had persuaded me. I came down over a country that was considerably covered with forests, though with plenty of clearings for a landing. The spot I chose was a clearing down in a valley, as it gave the best cover for my aëroplane, and I didn't want to show too much. I expected human beings, but thought it just as well to keep out of sight if I could: they're not always as friendly as all that even here. In a little over ten minutes from the time I turned on my engines I landed in this valley. I had been away from Earth a month, just as I'd calculated. It wasn't so very unlike Earth when I stepped out. All the trees were different, and of course twigs of these were the first things I had meant to bring back. I actually picked a bunch from five different ones and laid them down in my aëroplane. But the very first thing I did was to replenish my water-supply, and to have a good drink, at a stream that I had spotted before I came down, running out of the forest and down that valley. The water was all right. I had had some fear that it might be full of salt, or some wholly unknown chemical; but it was all right. And the next thing I did was to take off those infernal bandages and my breathing-helmet, and to have a bath in the stream, the first I had had for a month. I didn't put them on again, but left them in the 'plane, and dressed decently, as I wanted to show the inhabitants something human. After all, I would be the first one they had seen from here, and I didn't want them to think we were like caterpillars in a cocoon. I took a .450 revolver with me too. Well, you have to do that here sometimes. Then I started off to look for these remote neighbors of ours. I passed wonderful flowers but did not stop to pick one: I was only looking for man. I had seen no sign of buildings as I came down. Yet I had not walked a mile through the wood when I came to open land, and there by the very edge of the trees, quite close to me, I saw what was clearly a building made by some intelligent being: and a very odd building it was.

"It was a long rectangle, barely fifteen feet high, and about ten yards wide. At one end of it four windowless walls and a flat roof shut out all light for about twenty yards, but the rest of it was a stretch of quite fifty yards guarded by roof and walls of open metal-work, a stout mesh of the same material of which the whole building was made.

"And at once I saw that our scientists' dreams were true, for walking in that enclosure so carefully protected by metal I saw a large party of the human race."