Thus, in short flashes, a pictorial account of the planet and its history was presented to the earthlings. They were dumbfounded by such revelations; and their amazement grew with every scene. The unearthliness of the things and events, of the alien peoples and epochs shadowed forth, was beyond the most extravagant vagaries of imagination.
The long display of images came to an end; and the lens-apparatus was removed from the brow of its user, who then vacated his chair. Volmar was motioned to come forward and seat himself on the tripod. Then, by a contraction of its circlet, which was formed in a series of regulable segments, the machine was fitted to his forehead.
Volmar concentrated on various ideas which he wished to express; but the results were unsatisfactory. The pictures that formed on the wall were too dim and shapeless and chaotic to be intelligible. Obviously his brain was not powerful enough in its thought-vibrations to effect the desired visualization. And when the apparatus was tried by Roverton, Jasper, and the others, the resultant images were equally negligible and disappointing.
IV
The being with the vast moon-like head made a gesture of dismissal; and the earth-men were now conducted by their guides along another hall which led to the exterior of the building.
The scene outside was overwhelmingly strange, and offered little resemblance in any detail to earthly landscapes or to those of other planets which the Alcyone’s crew had visited. Around the looming edifice with its innumerable stories and terrace-like balconies, there stretched a winding space of open pavement bordered with a park of vegetable growths that were no less variegated than extraordinary. Most of them, it was probable, were the synthetic creations of the metal-bodied beings; for they presented only a vague and distant likeness to the simpler flora that Volmar and his men had seen shadowed forth in the earlier historical tableau. They testified to a limitless horticultural ingenuity, with an inclination toward the grotesque, the ornate, and the recherché. Some of them seemed to imitate in their stems, foliage, and blossoms the forms of novel animals, birds, and insects; others had apparently derived their inspiration from the crystallizations of unthinkably elaborate minerals; others resembled structures of coral flowering with many-chaliced shells; and some were suggestive of outlandish sculptures and arabesques, of the mad and demon-wrought vagaries of unimaginable art. There were titan fungi which bore an architectural resemblance in their cinnabar or malachite or azurite tiers, to pagodas and ziggurats. There were cacti that offered the appearance of immense and complicated machines. Most of the plants were not associable even in a superficial degree to any mundane genus. Some were rooted in an ashen-blue soil; but others were rootless, and wherever allowed, they had spread to the pavements and were sprawling or standing about as if they might creep or stalk away at any moment. They gleamed with unearthly textures, and colors denotive of a transidereal spectrum, in the sultry and shadowless effulgence that flamed upon them from horizon to zenith on all sides.
The senses of the earthlings reeled in this blaze of inundating torrential light, this delirious riot of ultramundane form and supersolar iridescence. Their nerves were exasperated and then stunned by the continual impact of sensations which the human system was never meant to sustain. The vegetation seemed to dance like a sabbat of demons and witches; and the building they had left, and the further edifices that overtowered the plain, all staggered in drunken unison before their eyes as the metal guides conducted them along the pavement; and they heard as in a doubtful nightmare the voices of these beings, who were pointing out and apparently naming one object after another, in an effort to begin some sort of linguistic tuition. It was difficult to reduce their tones to a phonetic basis and to approximate them with the human vocal chords, but, by careful attention and tireless experiment, Volmar and the others were able to achieve a partial articulation and a remote likeness to some of the words and syllables. In pointing to themselves the beings uttered many times a vocable which sounded like tloong, which was plainly the generic name of their species. And they repeatedly called the earthlings ongar, which doubtless meant something like “alien” or “outsider.” In this way, a few words were approximately mastered, and the rudiments of a sort of communication were established. But, under the nervous tax that the earth-men suffered, the attempt to hear, comprehend, and reproduce the sounds correctly was a further addition to the nightmare tension and feeling of unbearable delirium.
Many of the metal people were passing to and fro; the scene was one of perpetual activity; and certain air-vessels of novel types were continually embarking or disembarking their passengers on the pavement about the edifice, or upon the roof of its atlantean balconies. These vehicles were flat discs or oblong platforms of varying size, some of them large as the decks of ocean liners, which sailed through the air at any required speed with no visible enginery or ascertainable mode of levitation or locomotion.
After a large portion of the park had been inspected, one of the air-vessels was chartered by the guides, who motioned Volmar and his crew to accompany them. A lever was pressed, and the huge machine arose with unbelievable buoyancy, and floated through the cloudless, glaring atmosphere toward a horizon remotely dentilated with prodigious towers. The platform flew at no great elevation, apparently in order that the earth-men might view the topographical details of the landscapes above which they were journeying. But the speed which the air-vessel attained, and the ease, comfort, and lack of atmospheric resistance, was most amazing.
The scene below shifted and changed with a kaleidoscopic rapidity. Everything, even to the wide spaces of uncultivated and wholly barren soil or stone, was marked by a perfectly symmetrical arrangement of squares, diamonds, ovals, triangles, and other geometric forms, like tessellations in a mosaic floor of transtellar giants. There were canals that ran in straight lines or systematic meanderings, from lakes and seas of an artificial regularity. And even certain jungles in which the primitive plant forms of the red world were recognized by the earthlings as they passed, were laid out within metes and bounds like vast botanical gardens.
They were skimming the very top branches of one of these jungles, when a singular incident occurred. Though the air was utterly still and windless, a small area of the foliage below was oddly agitated as the platform neared it. Trees crashed down, there was a wild tossing of leaves and branches; and then, with fearful expedition, the foliage began to disappear and was interspersed with formless crawling masses of a loathsome livid grey mottled with black and red. Soon, in a spreading tract of devastation, these masses had devoured and supplanted all the vegetation, and were steadily increasing in size and number.
Volmar and his men were astounded by the living masses, and also by the actions of their conductors, who had brought the platform to a full halt in mid-air as soon as they sighted the area of tossing foliage. Then, as the monstrous crawling creatures began to replace the obliterated jungle with their swelling and multiplying bulks, the earth-men heard a clangorous gong-like sound of intolerable acuity which was being emitted from the concave disks on the cerebral antennae of their guides. The sound was connotive of alarm and warning, and doubtless had a vibratory range like that of radio; for a few minutes later, as if in response, a score of air-vessels appeared from all sides and gathered above the spreading patch of devastation. All of them were crowded with Tloongs, and carried weapons emitting visible or invisible rays of deadly potency, which were turned upon the growing masses, causing them to dissolve one by one like vapor.