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It was true. They looked downward past the straight edge of the platform and gathered a sense of a perpendicular wall below it. The ground showed, lightly covered with green as with a lawn, and feathery shrubs or bushes grew in clumps here and there. Among these clumps moved dark shapes. They seemed like distant bulbs of darkness, furnished with spidery limbs.

"It is as though we are above the closely set roofs of a city," said Holmes. "I would hazard that our point of view is the top of the mast at the end of this row we have seen. And down there on the ground are what must be the residents. I wish we could see them closer at hand."

"Perhaps we can." Again Challenger shifted the crystal. "Now, observe the rooftop immediately below. I can discern others."

At the foot of one of the nearer masts moved several of the creatures. Seen nearer at hand, they displayed oval bodies, dark and softly shining, holding themselves erect on tussocklike arrangements of slender tentacles.

"They strongly resemble octopoid mollusca," said Challenger. "But see, Holmes, some of them can fly."

One of the shapes on the roof suddenly rose into the air. It soared, or skimmed, on what appeared to be ribbed wings. Higher it rose, growing larger to their view.

"It does not move its wings," said Holmes.

"They seem to be simple structures."

The flying creature changed direction and swooped toward the top of the mast nearest the point from which Holmes and Challenger seemed to watch. Its two sprays of tentacles twined around, the mast and the body drew close to the shining object at the apex.

"It has brilliant eyes, there at its lower part," Challenger half-whispered, his voice strangely touched by awe. "Those eyes, when I have seen them, have stared with a marked intensity. Now it is looking into that shining object, it gazes fixedly."

The creature clung there for long moments. Silently the two observers studied it. At last it relaxed its hold and came floating toward them in the crystal, growing in size, growing in detail. Close at hand they saw its gleaming eyes, and suddenly those eyes came as though against the opposite side of the crystal, the substance of the creature blotting out all the rest of the scene. Then, abruptly, the mist came stealing back, obscuring everything.

Challenger flung aside the cloth. He gazed at Holmes.

"We are in communication with Mars," he said dramatically.

"Communication?"

Challenger's hand scrambled for a pad of paper. He jabbed a pen into the inkwell. "Before another moment passes, we must both record what we have seen," he pronounced. "There are materials for you."

Silence, while both of them wrote. At last they finished and looked at each other again.

"A city, a Martian city, has been revealed to us," burst out Challenger. "And we have seen living Martians. I have written here," and he drummed his notes, "that they seem to be of a vastly different species from ours. Perhaps something to be referred, for comparison's sake, to the arthropods—the insects."

"Why the insects?" asked Holmes.

"Their form, for one aspect. Many thin appendages and soft muscular bodies. And you have seen that some have wings and some have not."

"From my limited observation, I would not be surprised to establish that some of them at least can fly. But they may all have that capacity."

"No, manifestly the power of flight is far from universal," Challenger flung back impatiently. "Indeed, the presence or absence of wings may well be a difference of the sexes—the females may be winged, and the males not."

"I have no basis of argument as yet, but I wonder if the Martians have not evolved to the point of sexlessness," said Holmes, studying what he himself had written. "The wings may be artificial."

"Nonsense!" exploded Challenger. "If they are artificial, would they not be attached with a harness? I saw nothing like that, nor, I suggest, did you."

"They may well have other ways of assuming their flying apparatus than with a visible harness," said Holmes quietly. "Reflect, Challenger, that this is another world on which they live, apparently with a tremendously complicated culture of their own."

Challenger subsided, locking his shaggy brows in thought. "You may be right, Holmes," he said at last. "It is not often that I feel obliged to retreat from a position."

"You are generous to give way," replied Holmes smiling. "Earlier today, you spoke disparagingly of other scientists who cannot do that. But let us consider another point for the moment. Our view seems to be from the top of a mast, and twice we have seen one of those creatures coming near and seeming to look into our very faces, as it were. We have also noted the glints of light on the other masts. Might it not follow that on top of our mast is some device similar to this very crystal we have here? And that a view through that crystal gives them a look through this one at us, as a view from this one gives us a look at them?"

"Indeed, what else?" demanded Challenger triumphantly, as though he himself had come up with the theory. "It is no more than sound logic, Holmes. On top of that mast on Mars is a contrivance which in some way is powered to observe across space to the area where this crystal is located on our own planet—to this very study."

"As one telegraphic instrument communicates with another, although the procedure is far more subtle than that," said Holmes. "And these creatures on Mars may be far ahead of humanity, in more than mechanics."

Challenger grimaced in his beard. "Next you will be suggesting that they are a biological advance on the human race, an evolutionary development."

"What I have seen suggests that something of the sort has happened on Mars, over a long period of time. You saw them, Challenger. Those oval bodies must house massive brains. And their limbs, two tufts of tentacles. Might these not be a latter-day development of two hands?"

"That is brilliant, Holmes!" Challenger's fist smote the table so heavily that the crystal rocked. "You may well have the right of it," and he began to scribble again as he talked. "Specialized development of the head and the hands, Nature's two triumphs of the superior intellect. Yes, and a corresponding diminution of other organs, less necessary to their way of life—atrophy of the lower limbs, for instance, as has occurred with the whale." He looked up again. "Truly, Holmes, I begin to think that you would have done well to devote yourself to the pure sciences."

Holmes smiled. "Instead of devoting myself to life and its complexities? I have trained myself to the science of deduction, which develops an ability to observe and to organize observations."

Challenger cocked his great head. "I must repeat, Holmes, we must keep these matters to ourselves for the present. If you will let me develop my reasons for insisting—"

"No, permit me to offer one of my deductions," put in Holmes. "You hesitate to confront your fellow-scientists lest they jeer at you, charge you with reckless judgments, even with charlatanism."

Challenger's stare grew wider. "I may have hinted something like that, but your interesting rationalization is perfectly correct."

"It offered me no difficulty," said Holmes. "In my ledgers at home, under the letter C, are several newspaper accounts that deal with your career. One of the most interesting of them describes your emphatic resignation in 1893 as Assistant Keeper of the Comparative Anthropology Department at the British Museum. There was considerable notice, with quotations, of your sharp differences with the museum heads."

"Oh, that." Challenger gestured ponderously. "That is water under the bridge, of a particularly noisome sort. At any rate, I have not quarreled with you. Now, suppose we ask my wife to give us some tea, and then we will return to our observations here."

Tea was a pleasant relaxation, and Mrs. Challenger proved a charming hostess. Half an hour later, the two were in the study again, their heads draped with the black cloth. They gazed at what the crystal showed them of the rooftop, the masts, the lawn below, and the strange creatures that moved here and there. Repeatedly they saw different Martians leave the ground to fly. Finally one of them discarded its wings in their sight. Challenger uttered a loud exclamation.

"You are right, Holmes!" he cried. "The wings are artificial. I am fully convinced."

"Which disposes of them as sexual characteristics," said Holmes.

"Yes, of course. And I can observe in them no physical differences such as denote sexual differences to the zoologist." He breathed deeply. "But why was this crystal sent here to earth?"

"And how?" asked Holmes in his turn.

Challenger threw back the cloth. "By some strange method we cannot understand, any more than African savages understand a railroad train."

"For what purpose?"

"Manifestly to watch us," said Challenger. "It was a triumph of extraterrestrial science, sending it thirty million miles or more across space."

"If it could cross space, might not living Martians follow suit?"

"An expedition here?" said Challenger. "For what purpose?"

"I wonder," said Holmes slowly. "I wonder."

Their observations that day, and on subsequent days throughout December and on into 1902, developed their awareness of that strange distant, shifting Martian scenery. Holmes found himself involved in several criminal investigations, two of them in connection with Scotland Yard, but when he could spare time from these duties and his personal affairs he visited Enmore Park to gaze into the crystal and make careful notes of what he saw. Challenger spent far more time in observation. He dodged his wife's inquiries and put aside the treatise which he had been writing, to sit long hours in the study, his great head draped to shut out the interfering light.

The two jointly gathered increasingly clear, consistent impressions of the top of the city, wide and long and apparently of considerable height, set upon a level expanse of reddish soil with sparse lawnlike vegetation that extended to the bluffs on the horizon. That city bore something of the aspect of a fort, with its solid construction, its few openings for entrance or exit, and its location in open country as though to make a secret approach impossible. Neither Holmes nor Challenger could estimate the number of the inhabitants, but they seemed to appear by dozens, even by scores. On the green-fluffed plain around their massive dwelling moved metal vehicles of varying sizes and complexities.

"I am baffled," confessed Challenger at one point. "We are like African savages, intelligent enough in their own culture, but unable to understand a train or a steamship."

"Yet African savages, if trained and educated can understand and operate such mechanisms," said Holmes. "Your comparison may be too optimistic."

"Then what comparison would you offer?" inquired Challenger.

"I defer answering that until I am more certain," said Holmes. He smiled inwardly. He saw no point in risking Challenger's wrath by implying that Challenger might, by comparison to the Martians, be an animal inferior in both physical and mental development.

Challenger returned to his study of the scene. "The smallest and most agile of their machines seem to be unpiloted," he said. "I would suspect that they are intelligent mechanisms, possessed of their own powers to act."

"Some of them may well be of that class," agreed Holmes. "Yet they may be operated, at a distance, by thought processes of their operators."

The scene in the crystal faded as they talked, then reappeared, with no mechanisms visible. The bulbous, tentacled beings moved here and there on roof or lawn, walking on their handlike tufts of tentacles or assuming wings and flying above the roofs. Several of the flyers observed the glittering points on the masts or soared away out of sight, on missions difficult to guess. Challenger talked more than Holmes. His manner was that of a classroom lecturer, expounding propositions to students who must pass examinations on the subject. At last he shifted the crystal very painstakingly, to get a view well to one side. He almost shouted in excitement.

"Mars is a planet with only the smallest amount of water to be detected on its surface," he burst out, almost as though Holmes had suggested the contrary. "Of course, there has been all the idle talk about canals, ever since 1877. The notion sprang up because Schiaparelli professed to have seen canali—he employed his native Italian. The word means simply channels. But various arbitrary fools, presuming to encroach on the outer fringes of scientific thought, have mistranslated and babble about 'canal,' as though they were true waterways."

"Yet there may be some truth in their mistranslation," said Holmes. "A canal, I take it, is an artificial engineering device. And just what sort of waterway is the one we now see in the crystal?"

For a stream was visible, at a point in the plain well to the left of the buildings. A curious bridge spanned it.

"I wonder about it," Challenger admitted. "Perhaps it is an artificial canal, as you seem to suggest. But it could never have been seen by even the most powerful telescope on earth, and can hardly be related to Schiaparelli's purported discoveries."

Holmes frowned. "Yet what we are seeing may well relate to the strange disturbances, possibly signs of gigantic construction, which were detected on Mars at the opposition of 1894."

"I paid little attention to that," Challenger confessed in a tone of embarrassment. "My attention was occupied with an impudent challenge to my theory of—well, no matter for that."

"If 1894 was a year of construction activity upon Mars, may that not have been the time that our crystal was somehow sent to earth?" said Holmes.

"An interesting theory," said Challenger, "but, as such, best kept within limits."

"True," said Holmes. "Theorizing, in my experience, is dangerously apt to limit the progress of logical deduction. It should be used sparingly, like poetry in a scientific discussion."