do save the yellow folk who flitted to and fro fostering the others,
and doing the city work as though it were their only thought in life.
There were no shops in that strange city, for there were no needs;
some booths I saw indeed, and temple-like places, but hollow, and used
for birds and beasts--things these lazy Martians love. There was no
tramp of busy feet, for no one was busy; no clank of swords or armour
in those peaceful streets, for no one was warlike; no hustle, for no
one hurried; no wide-packed asses nodding down the lanes, for there
was nothing to fill their packs with, and though a cart sometimes came
by with a load of lolling men and maids, or a small horse, for horses
they had, paced along, itself nearly as lazy as the master he bore,
with trappings sewed over bits of coloured shell and coral, yet somehow
it was all extraordinarily unreal. It was a city full of the ghosts of
the life which once pulsed through its ways. The streets were peopled,
the chatter of voices everywhere, the singing boys and laughing girls
wandering, arms linked together, down the ways filled every echo with
their merriment, yet somehow it was all so shallow that again and again
I rubbed my eyes, wondering if I were indeed awake, or whether it were
not a prolonged sleep of which the tomorrow were still to come.

"What strikes me as strangest of all, good comrade," I observed pleasantly
to the tripping presence at my elbow, "is that these countrymen of yours
who shirk to climb a flight of steps, and have palms as soft as rose
petals, these wide ways paved with stones as hard as a usurer's heart."

An laughed. "The stones were still in their native quarries had it
been left to us to seek them; we are like the conies in the ruins, sir,
the inheritors of what other hands have done."

"Ay, and undone, I think, as well, for coming along I have noted axe