They began, after the most sorrowful and heart-rending look that had yet animated the miraculous Three Eyes, they began with that singular phantasmagoria of creatures which Benjamin Prévotelle proposed that we should regard as the inhabitants of Venus and which, for that matter, it was impossible that we should not so regard. I will not try to define them with greater precision nor to describe the setting in which they moved. One's confusion in the presence of those grotesque Shapes, those absurd movements and those startling landscapes was so great that one had hardly time to receive very exact impressions or to deduce the slightest theory from them. All that I can say is that we were the observers, as on the first occasion, of a manifestation of public order. There were numbers of spectators and a connected sequence of actions tending towards a clearly-defined end, which seemed to us to be of the same nature as the first execution. Everything, in fact--the grouping of certain Shapes in the middle of an empty space and around a motionless Shape, the actions performed, the cutting up of that isolated Shape--suggested that there was an execution in progress, the taking of a life. In any case, we were perfectly well aware, through the corresponding instance, that its real significance resided only in the second part of the film. Since nearly all the pictures were twofold, impressing us by antithesis or analogy, we must wait awhile to catch the general idea which directed this projection. This soon became apparent; and the mere narrative of what we saw showed how right my uncle Dorgeroux's prophecy was when he said: "Men will come here as pilgrims and will fall upon their knees and weep like children!" A winding road, rough with cobbles and cut into steps, climbs a steep, arid, shadowless hill under a burning sun. We almost seem to see the eddies rising, like a scorching breath, from the parched soil. A mob of excited people is scaling the abrupt slope. On their backs hang tattered robes; their aspect is that of the beggars or artisans of an eastern populace. The road disappears and appears again at a higher level, where we see that this mob is preceding and following a company consisting of soldiers clad like the Roman legionaires. There are sixty or eighty of them, perhaps. They are marching slowly, in a ragged body, carrying their spears over their shoulders, while some are swinging their helmets in their hands. Now and again one stops to drink.