The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

in, waving his bottle. Six others stayed behind.
    “Here we go!” Biggs shouted.
    The party moved out into the moonlight, silently. They made their way to the outer rim of the dreaming dead city in the light of the racing twin moons. Their shadows, under them, were double shadows. They did not breathe, or seemed not to, perhaps, for several minutes. They were waiting for something to stir in the dead city, some gray form to rise, some ancient, ancestral shape to come galloping across the vacant sea bottom on an ancient, armored steel of impossible lineage, of unbelievable derivation.
    Spender filled the streets with his eyes and his mind.             People moved like blue vapor lights on the cobbled avenues, and there were faint murmurs of sound, and odd animals scurrying across the gray-red sands. Each window was given a person who leaned from it and waved slowly, as if under a timeless water, at some moving form in the fathoms of space below the moon-silvered towers. Music was played on some inner ear, and Spender imagined the shape of such instruments to evoke such music. The land was haunted.
    “Hey!” shouted Biggs, standing tall, his hands around his open mouth. “Hey, you people in the city there, you!”
    “Biggs!” said the captain.
    Biggs quieted.
    They walked forward on a tiled avenue. They were all whispering now, for it was like entering a vast open library or a mausoleum in which the wind lived and over which the stars shone. The captain spoke quietly. He wondered where the people had gone, and what they had been, and who their kings were, and how they had died. And he wondered, quietly aloud, how they had built this city to last the ages through, and had they ever come to Earth? Were they ancestors of Earth Men ten thousand years removed? And had they loved and hated similar loves and hates, and done similar silly things when silly things were done?
    Nobody moved. The moons held and froze them; the wind beat slowly around them.
    “Lord Byron,” said Jeff Spender.
    “Lord who?” The captain turned and regarded him.
    “Lord Byron, a nineteenth-century poet. He wrote a poem a long time ago that fits this city and how the Martians must feel, if there’s anything left of them to feel. It might have been written by the last Martian poet.”
    The men stood motionless, their shadows under them.
    The captain said, “How does the poem go, Spender?”
    Spender shifted, put out his hand to remember, squinted silently a moment; then, remembering, his slow quiet voice repeated the words and the men listened to everything he said:
    “_So we’ll go no more a-roving
    So late into the night,
    Though the heart be still as loving,
    And the moon be still as bright_.”
     
    The city was gray and high and motionless. The men’s faces were turned in the light.
    “_For the sword outwears its sheath,
    And the soul wears out the breast,
    And the heart must pause to breathe,
    And love itself must rest.
     
    “Though the night was made for loving,
    And the day returns too soon,
    Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
    By the light of the moon_.”
     
    Without a word the Earth Men stood in the center of the city. It was a clear night. There was not a sound except the wind. At their feet lay a tile court worked into the shapes of ancient animals and peoples. They looked down upon it.
    Biggs made a sick noise in his throat. His eyes were dull. His hands went to his mouth; he choked, shut his eyes, bent, and a thick rush of fluid filled his mouth, spilled out, fell to splash on the tiles, covering the designs. Biggs did this twice, A sharp winy stench filled the cool air.
    No one moved to help Biggs. He went on being sick.
    Spender stared for a moment, then turned and walked off into the avenues of the city, alone in the moonlight. Never once did he pause to look back at the gathered men there.
    They turned in at four in the morning. They lay upon blankets and shut their eyes and breathed the quiet air. Captain Wilder