As has been explained by the controls who have been instrumental in giving the information about Mars, the purpose of these clairvoyant pictures was to give the compiler of this book real visual evidence as to life on Mars; and in particular, real pictures setting forth its topography, which could be elucidated in no other way. Written descriptions of scenery and of human activities necessarily fall short of the reality, especially when an attempt is made to record a series of events or a point of view outside the realm of our experience. The first picture realized by the writer, and for that matter the most important one, was the view given him of Urid the Beautiful, one of the most Important centers of population on the planet Mars. It was while lying in bed one morning the writer was contemplating the many messages being received from the Martian, who is the dictator of the subject matter of this book, that he found himself at a strange place, suspended as it were in the air over a beautiful lake of blue water, whose surface was broken by gentle ripples, due to the soft, balmy breeze blowing over the surface of the water. The writer was facing what seemed to be a westerly direction; and at a distance of about five miles there arose a series of small mountains about 2,500 feet in altitude. These mountains skirted the shores of the lake. The sky was a beautiful blue, bluer than the sapphire-tinted skies of our own desert lands. The mountains were tinted red from base to top, except where the moisture near the shores of the lake had stimulated a vegetal growth, whose green contrasted most harmoniously with the red of the soil. Two white clouds floated majestically near the peaks of the highest mountains. The atmosphere was impressively clear and all objects seemed to stand out in sharp definition, a condition seldom seen by dwellers on our Earth except in extremely dry and arid regions. On top of a small plateau, forming the crown of a low-lying hill at the base of one of the highest mountains, and about 1,500 feet from the shore line, I was startled to see a large city. The thousands of closely nestling buildings seemed to be built of white stone. The writer was lost in admiration, for there in front of him the pure white of the city, contrasting so vividly with the red soil of this faraway planet, stood the habitations of an advanced race many millions of miles removed from my own world. The writer was impressed with the fact that, with but few exceptions, the buildings of gleaming white were all one story in height, and it became instantly evident that crowding is not tolerated by the inhabitants of this progressive planet. A few structures towered above the rest. These, as the writer was informed later, were the public buildings dedicated to the use of the people as lecture halls, centers for music and art, etc.