Written descriptions of scenery and of human activities
necessarily fall short of the reality, especially when an attempt
is made to record a series of events or a point of view outside
the realm of our experience.
The first picture realized by the writer, and for that matter the
most important one, was the view given him of Urid the Beautiful,
one of the most Important centers of population on the planet
Mars.
It was while lying in bed one morning the writer was
contemplating the many messages being received from the Martian,
who is the dictator of the subject matter of this book, that he
found himself at a strange place, suspended as it were in the air
over a beautiful lake of blue water, whose surface was broken by
gentle ripples, due to the soft, balmy breeze blowing over the
surface of the water. The writer was facing what seemed to be a
westerly direction; and at a distance of about five miles there
arose a series of small mountains about 2,500 feet in altitude.
These mountains skirted the shores of the lake. The sky was a
beautiful blue, bluer than the sapphire-tinted skies of our own
desert lands. The mountains were tinted red from base to top,
except where the moisture near the shores of the lake had
stimulated a vegetal growth, whose green contrasted most
harmoniously with the red of the soil.
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