when I found myself sitting in the hall. I had come to it, as all
disembodied spirits from the earth come to it at one receiving point, a
high hill not far from the tropic of Mars. This hill, crowned and
covered with glass buildings, is known as the hill of the Phosphori.
Here, for nearly one of our months, the incoming souls, which are little
more than a sort of ethereal fluid, presenting a form only observable by
refracted light, or I should say polarized light, are bathed in a
marvellously phosphorescent beam procured by absorption from the sun.
These souls are intermingled in a chaotic stream that I may liken to the
streaming currents of heated air in convection from a source of heat
upon our earth, and this continuous tide is caught in a great spherical
chamber or a series of chambers extending over five miles around the
bald summit of this eminence.

"In these colossal chambers the phosphorescent light from enormous
radiators beats incessantly through and through the slowly, oscillating,
vibrating, revolving soul matter. And here the process of
individualization is achieved. A soul, or many souls, are separated
from the great tide, by flashing, under the bombardment of the
phosphorescent blaze into shining forms. They assume a shape outlined by
light, and just slightly subject to gravity from the atomic compression
necessary to maintain their illumination, they fall lightly out from the
domes of the spheres, touch the floors beneath, and are led away.

"In this way I found later I had arrived at Mars. When the spirits, thus
shaped in light and otherwise almost immaterial and unclothed, emerge
from the Hill of the Phosphori, they are taken along wide, white roads
to some of the many chorus halls which fill the City of Light, where I
am now, and from which I am sending this magnetic message. They remain
for hours, even days and weeks in these halls listening in a sort of