Unveiling a Parallel: A RomanceJones, Alice Ilgenfritz
Science
Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance
Jones, Alice Ilgenfritz
Feminist fiction; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Utopian fiction
They were as beautiful as Raphael's cherubs, you could not look upon
them without thrills of delight. They were two perfect buds of the
highest development humanity has ever attained to,--so far as we know.
I felt that it was a wonderful thing to know that in these lovely
forms there lurked no germs of evil, over their sweet heads there
hung no Adam's curse! They were seated in a pretty pony carriage, with
a white canopy top lined with blue silk. Freya held the lines. It
appeared that Eurydice had driven down and he was to drive back. The
father and mother were on foot. They explained that it was difficult
to drive anything but the little carriage up the steep path to their
home on the hillside, half a mile distant.
"Who would wish for any other means of locomotion than nature has
given him, in a country where the buoyant air makes walking a luxury!"
I cried, stretching my legs and filling my lungs, with an unwonted
sense of freedom and power.
I had become accustomed to the atmosphere of Paleveria, but here I had
the same sensations I had experienced when I first landed there.
"If you would rather, you may take my place, sir?" said the not much
more than knee-high Freya, ready to relinquish the lines. I felt
disposed to laugh, but not so the wise parents.
"The little ponies could not draw our friend up the hill, he is too
heavy," explained Clytia.
"Thank you, my little man, all the same!" I added.
It was midsummer in Paleveria, but here I observed everything had the
newness and delightful freshness of spring. A busy, bustling, joyous,
tuneful spring. The grass was green and succulent; the sap was in the
trees and their bark was sleek and glossy, their leaves just unrolled.
Of the wild fruit trees, every branch and twig was loaded with eager
buds crowding upon each other as the heads of children crowd at a
cottage window when one goes by. Every thicket was full of bird life
and music. I heard the roar of a waterfall in the distance, and
Calypso told me that a mighty river, the Eudosa, gathered from a
hundred mountain streams, was compressed into a deep gorge or canyon
and fell in a succession of cataracts just below the city, and finally
spread out into a lovely lake, which was a wonder in its way, being
many fathoms deep and as transparent as the atmosphere.
We paused to listen,--the children also.
"How loud it is to-day, Mamma," exclaimed Freya. His mother assented
and turned to me with a smile. "The falls of Eudosa constitute a large
part of our life up here," she said; "we note all its moods, which are
many. Sometimes it is drowsy, and purrs and murmurs; again it is
merry, and sings; or it is sublime, and rises to a thunderous roar.
Always it is sound. Do you know, my ears ached with the silence when I
was down in Paleveria!"
I have said Clytia's eyes were black; it was not an opaque blackness,
you could look through them down into her soul. I likened them in my
mind to the waters of the Eudosa which Calypso had just described.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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