The Martials have two forms of writing: the one I have described, which is simply a mechanical rendering of spoken words into artificially simplified visible signs; the other, written by hand, with a fine pencil of some chemical material on a prepared surface, textile or metallic.

The characters of the latter are, like ours wholly arbitrary; but the contractions and abbreviations are so numerous that the mastery of the mere alphabet, the forty or fifty single letters employed, is but a single step in the first stage of the hard task of learning to read.
In no country on Earth, except China, is this task half so severe as in Mars.

On the other hand, when it is once mastered, a far superior instrument has been gained; the Martial writing being a most terse but perfectly legible shorthand.

Every Martial can write at least as quickly as he can speak, and can read the written character more rapidly than the quickest eye can peruse the best Terrestrial print.
Copies, whether of the phonographic or stylographic writing, are multiplied with extreme facility and perfection.

The original, once inscribed in either manner upon the above-mentioned _tafroo_ or gold-leaf, is placed upon a sheet of a species of linen, smoother than paper, called _difra_.