St. Louis March 1903
I must break from my narrative for a moment to reflect on the book I am writing, here in my quiet and sunny room. You more than anyone will understand the joy I get from simply imagining this world of Mars. I get so lost in its construction I often forget to write it all down! Yet I must write because my time is short, and I have so many of our little secrets and delights to sneak into this manuscript. Inspired by you, today I am inventing fantastic animals to populate my journeys to the red planet:
-
A
snuffling, grunting, boar-like monster weighingover a hundred pounds , subsisting ona truffle-like fungus so rare its own existence is imperiled. -
The Entoan
draft mule ,pure white with acomically tall black mane , now seldom found sincepeople have mastered electric power. -
The
silken-haired Algoû , noted for itsshoulders being higher than its haunches.
(For my own amusement, I decide that my fictional self is invisible to the people of Ento, but can be perceived by a caged anthropoid, a sullen tree-climber with a poor temper but natural clairvoyant talent and who hoots at me.)
When it comes to the flowers of Ento—the Plimosa diafa̤ avina̤—I find myself returning to Earthly forms. During these sessions I often sneak plant specimens into my room to sketch. Adolphe cannot tell flowers apart and will never notice the resemblance between the blue columbine and the Isoina, nor that a bouquet of white phlox enters my study only to emerge as a sketch of the Erinca micana. I give them the names my mother and I assigned to the wild plants of the Plains, any of them save the Rodel, the dread water-lily, the flower of death.
Perhaps it is a limit of my imagination that I cannot invent the botany of Mars, or perhaps nothing is more transcendent than the flowers I hold in my hand.
