Scarcely had he alighted than
the guy ropes were simultaneous released, and the great warship,
lightened by the removal of the loot, soared majestically into
the air, her decks and upper works a mass of roaring flames.
Slowly she drifted to the southeast, rising higher and higher as the
flames ate away her wooden parts and diminished the weight upon her.
Ascending to the roof of the building I watched her for hours, until
finally she was lost in the dim vistas of the distance. The sight
was awe-inspiring in the extreme as one contemplated this mighty
floating funeral pyre, drifting unguided and unmanned through
the lonely wastes of the Martian heavens; a derelict of death
and destruction, typifying the life story of these strange and
ferocious creatures into whose unfriendly hands fate had carried it.
Much depressed, and, to me, unaccountably so, I slowly descended to
the street. The scene I had witnessed seemed to mark the defeat
and annihilation of the forces of a kindred people, rather than
the routing by our green warriors of a horde of similar, though
unfriendly, creatures. I could not fathom the seeming
hallucination, nor could I free myself from it; but somewhere in
the innermost recesses of my soul I felt a strange yearning toward
these unknown foemen, and a mighty hope surged through me that the
fleet would return and demand a reckoning from the green warriors
who had so ruthlessly and wantonly attacked it.
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