Roverton and Jasper were side by side in the pit, behind Volmar.

“This is certainly a superior kind of elevator system,” remarked Jasper, “I’d give something to know the secret of its operation.”

“From all indications,” rejoined Roverton, “we have struck a world whose mechanical knowledge and masterdom of natural forces make our scientific accomplishments look like simple arithmetic beside algebra and trigonometry.”

After several minutes of that feather-like descent, which was accompanied by the sensation of an almost total loss of bodily weight, the earthlings reached the ground floor of the edifice. Here, in a mile-long hall with ceilings of tremendous height, the three preceding guides awaited them; and they were joined in a few moments by the others.

Now they were led along vistas of quadrangular columns more enormous than dolomites, through which there poured a saffron light of unbearable brilliance, emanating from the end of the hall. They passed many doors and intersecting halls, open or shut, and equally mysterious in what they concealed or revealed. Then, through a semi-circular portal, they entered a chamber of more moderate size, with septagonal walls. This chamber was the source of the light, which streamed from a huge globe suspended in mid-air. Beneath the globe, on a lofty tripodal chair of some electrum-like substance with alternate gleams of gold and silver, there sat a being who differed from the rest in the vaster dimensions of his bright orbicular head, which seemed to overweigh his wedge-shaped body like a full moon ensconced on a semi-lune. This entity turned his one eye, which resembled a great fiery carbuncle, on the earth-men; and addressed their guides in a voice of flute-like sweetness and modulation. One of the delegation left the room forthwith, and returned with a singular instrument, scarcely comparable in its form to anything used on earth, with many lenses of a transparent material arranged behind each other in a frame of spiral rods and arabesque filaments. This instrument was now fastened by a large circlet to the forehead of the being who sat upon the tripodal chair.

The being lifted one of his many-jointed limbs, and pointed at the bare, windowless wall of the room, which gleamed in the saffron light like a polished surface of reflecting mineral. There, as the men gazed, a picture suddenly sprang into life, as if from the slide of a magic lantern, and filled the entire opposite face of the wall. It was a picture of the red world as the voyagers had beheld it hanging in space on their first approach. Above the world there hovered a tiny glimmering speck; and as the great orb grew larger, till only a portion of its surface was depicted on the wall, it could be seen that the speck was the Alcyone, which descended till it almost touched the glowing plain. Then this picture disappeared abruptly, to be succeeded by a view of the roof of the Babel-like building on which the Alcyone had been drawn down. Here, with an optical instrument which resembled a periscope, one of the metal-sharded entities was peering at the red vault, which now seemed to become diaphanous, revealing the ether-ship beyond in space.

“Good Lord!” said Roverton in an awed voice. “That was how they saw us coming. That optical instrument must have been a sort of long-range X-ray apparatus.”

Even as he spoke, the picture faded. An enormous chamber was now disclosed, in which stood a labyrinthine mechanism of shining cubes and lozenges ramifying from a tall central cone of black, lusterless metal. The roof of the chamber became transparent, revealing the diaphanous vault of the heavens and the vessel itself once more as it still hung in outer ether. A dozen of the globe-headed people were grouped around the mechanism and were adjusting certain of its parts. Then one of them pulled a spiral lever, and a beam of some indescribable color, visible only for a moment, shot upward from the cone until it reached the space-vessel and curved around it like a grappling-hook. Then the Alcyone was seen to descend through a clear shaft in the vault, and was drawn down to the roof of the building in which the cone-mechanism was located.

“Well, that’s plain enough,” commented Volmar. “He—or it—is showing us how we were captured. The cone-machine must be the generator of some force that is infinitely more powerful than gravitation, though probably akin to it. Amazing—but the pictures themselves are even more astounding, for they must be thought-images rendered visible by the lens-apparatus attached to that creature’s forehead. Who ever dreamed of a moving-picture machine capable of using the mind itself for a film?”

Other views now succeeded the one of the space-vessel’s capture. They were plainly meant to depict the manner of hospitality which would be shown to the earthlings during their sojourn on the red planet: for the figures of Volmar and his crew were conspicuous in all of them, and were represented in the act of visiting many of the Babelian towers and viewing all sorts of mechanical wonders and marvellous plant or animal forms as they travelled throughout the world with their compulsory hosts. They were afterwards to remember and recognize many of these scenes. In one of them, a prodigious open shaft in the ground was shown, with people ascending and descending by thousands; and the impression was somehow conveyed that the shaft penetrated the entire diameter of the world, perhaps from pole to pole; and that those who sank into it at one end would arise to the surface at the other. Hundreds of titan towers, which apparently took the place of cities on the red world, were also shown; and the realm-wide agricultural fields, botanical gardens of forest-like extent, and breeding-pens of inconceivably monstrous animals, were likewise flashed on the wall together with many interior glimpses of the life led by this unique race.

Then, in rapid alternation, came another series of scenes that were plainly historical, and which seemed to unfold the chronicles of the red world from remotest time. The beings who were shown in the first of them were not sharded in metal; though they displayed forms that were recognizably similar, with all the features of the globe-headed type, they possessed a more usual integument of hairless animal skin. The world in which they lived was vaulted with a greenish sky, in which the sun Polaris burned like any other solar luminary. It was a fertile and flourishing world; and the long epochs of its evolution, and the evolution of its peoples, were rapidly hinted in brief flashes. Anon, a period of racial and planetary decadence was denoted; the seas dried up, the fertile zones were blotched with ever-spreading deserts, the atmosphere became cloudless and rarified and almost irrespirable; and the people themselves grew senescent, they no longer reproduced their kind, and were dying one by one. But among them were scientists who had attained a well-nigh supreme knowledge of natural laws and a mastery of many forces both familiar and obscure. These scientists gathered in conclave to determine some method of racial salvation; and the result of their conference, as shown in the next pictures, was beyond conception or belief. Several bodies, duplicating in every detail the physical formation of the race, were constructed of various metals. The minutest cells and nerves were somehow reproduced; and only the brain-space in the heads was left vacant. Then some of the scientists submitted to an unusual operation: their brains were removed and transferred to the metal heads, where they swam in a bath of some ruddy fluid that must have had elixir-like properties; for after an interval the artificial bodies moved and arose to their feet; and were manifestly controlled and animated by the living brains within them. Then more bodies were made; some of aberrant or whimsical types, according to the taste of their future occupants; and others of the dying race underwent the same operation; till within an incredibly short length of time all of them had discarded their perishable anatomies of flesh and were inhabiting corporeal forms that were virtually indestructible. The red fluid, which was replaced at certain intervals, preserved and nourished their brains till they grew wise with an accumulated knowledge of out-lived aeons. Invention progressed with colossal paces; and machines of many types and sizes were builded for the use and control of every cosmic or planetary power, from refracted and magnified rays to the force released by exploding atoms. Towers were reared from heaps of desert sand by some of these machines, which could integrate and organize the molecules of matter in any desired pattern; and plants and animals were artificially created by a chemical duplication of the processes of life. There was no limit to the scientific genius of this people, who, in their metal bodies, retained no needs and passions other than those which were wholly intellectual. By a series of enormous magnetic engines, situated in every longitude of their world at regular intervals, they even enclosed their entire planet with a vault of metallic atoms in a zone of super-electric force, which served to insulate it from the encroaching cold of space, and also to conserve the remnants of the atmosphere, which was now gradually enriched and renewed by the addition of the necessary elements in gaseous form.