Extraterrestrial beings -- Fiction; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction
Mu Tel took me to a small auditorium in his palace that reminded me
somewhat of private projection rooms on Earth. It had, I should say, a
capacity of some two hundred persons and was built like a large camera
obscura; the audience sitting within the instrument, their backs towards
the lens and in front of them, filling one entire end of the room, a
large ground glass upon which is thrown the image to be observed.
Mu Tel seated himself at a table upon which was a chart of the heavens.
Just above the chart was a movable arm carrying a pointer. This pointer
Mu Tel moved until it rested upon the planet Earth, then he switched off
the light in the room and immediately there appeared upon the ground
glass plate a view such as one might obtain from an airplane riding at
an elevation of a thousand feet. There was something strangely familiar
about the scene before me. It was of a desolate, wasted country. I saw
shattered stumps whose orderly arrangement proclaimed that here once an
orchard had blossomed and borne fruit. There were great, unsightly holes
in the earth and over and across all a tangle of barbed wire. I asked Mu
Tel how we might change the picture to another locality. He lighted a
small radio bulb between us and I saw a globe there, a globe of Earth,
and a small pointer fixed over it.
“The side of this globe now presented to you represents the face of the
Earth turned towards us,” explained Mu Tel. “You will note that the
globe is slowly revolving. Place this pointer where you will upon the
globe and that portion of Jasoom will be revealed for you.”
I moved the pointer very slowly and the picture changed. A ruined
village came into view. I saw some people moving among its ruins. They
were not soldiers. A little further on I came upon trenches and
dug-outs—there were no soldiers here, either. I moved the pointer
rapidly north and south along a vast line of trenches. Here and there in
villages there were soldiers, but they were all French soldiers and
never were they in the trenches. There were no German soldiers and no
fighting. The war was over, then! I moved the pointer to the Rhine and
across. There were soldiers in Germany—French soldiers, English
soldiers, American soldiers. We had won the war! I was glad, but it
seemed very far away and quite unreal—as though no such world existed
and no such peoples had ever fought—it was as though I were recalling
through its illustrations a novel that I had read a long time since.
“You seem much interested in that war torn country,” remarked Mu Tel.
“Yes,” I explained, “I fought in that war. Perhaps I was killed. I do
not know.”
“And you won?” he asked.
“Yes, my people won,” I replied. “We fought for a great principle and
for the peace and happiness of a world. I hope that we did not fight in
vain.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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