Looking at them intently from this vantage-point I saw without at first understanding that along them horizontally, tier above tier, were rows of objects, like--like--why, good Heavens, they were like men and women in all sorts of strange postures and positions! Rubbing my eyes and looking again I perceived with a start and a strange creepy feeling down my back that they WERE men and women!--hundreds of them, thousands, all in rows as cormorants stand upon sea-side cliffs, myriads and myriads now I looked about, in every conceivable pose and attitude but never a sound, never a movement amongst the vast concourse.
Then I turned back to the cliffs behind me.

Yes! they ere there too, dimmer by reason of the shadows, but there for certain, from the snowfields far above down, down--good Heavens! to the very level where I stood.

There was one of them not ten yards away half in and half out of the ice wall, and setting my teeth I walked over and examined him.
And there was another further in behind as I peered into the clear blue depth, another behind that one, another behind him--just like cherries in a jelly.
It was startling and almost incredible, yet so many wonderful things had happened of late that wonders were losing their sharpness, and I was soon examining the cliff almost as coolly as though it were only some trivial geological "section," some new kind of petrified sea-urchins which had caught my attention and not a whole nation in ice, a huge amphitheatre of fossilised humanity which stared down on me.
The matter was simple enough when you came to look at it with philosophy.

The Martians had sent their dead down here for many thousand years and as they came they were frozen in, the bands and zones in which they sat indicating perhaps alternating seasons.

Then after Nature had been storing them like that for long ages some upheaval happened, and this cleft and lake opened through the heart of the preserve.