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Title: Limanora: the island of progress
Author: Godfrey Sweven
Release date: July 20, 2025 [eBook #76533]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1903
Credits: Tim Lindell, Laura Natal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIMANORA: THE ISLAND OF PROGRESS ***
BY GODFREY SWEVEN
RIALLARO: THE ARCHIPELAGO OF EXILES
12°. $1.50
LIMANORA: THE ISLAND OF PROGRESS
12°. $1.50
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
New York and London
LIMANORA
THE ISLAND OF PROGRESS
BY
GODFREY SWEVEN
Author of “Riallaro, The Archipelago of Exiles”
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Published, June, 1903
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
PREFACE
IT was long before our strange guest could be induced to continue his
narrative. He had seemed to hesitate as he approached the close of
his sojourn in the outer islets of the archipelago. He several times
postponed the story of his exit from it in the projectile. And for
months he left his history hanging in air, and the strange coffin in
which he had been confined executing its parabola from his yacht.
There was some excuse for his delay, for the winter had fled, and the
birds and the flowering trees around us gloried again in song and
colour. He grew restless as the days lengthened, and could not bear to
settle in our shelter by the fiord. All that we saw of him for months
was his occasional flight from precipice to precipice above the sombre
green of the bush. It was as easy for him to flit from knoll to knoll
as it was for us to leap a ditch. He had regained his old bird-like
gait, that to us was noiseless. What he fed on came to be a puzzle, for
he seldom joined us now in our meals; and the old semi-transparency
came into his face.
Weeks and weeks together none of us would see him. Where he went we
knew not, nor had we the heart to follow him and trace his whereabouts.
Now and again he would join one or another of us at our work, and
indicate the direction in which we should tunnel or dig for the richer
layers of wash-dirt. His instinctive sense of the presence of gold
beneath the surface of the earth seemed to us in our blind groping
miraculous. We never found him mistaken in his indications. But we felt
it a kind of desecration to ask him to condescend to such base and
trivial pursuits as the research for wealth. At times his absence was
so prolonged that we thought he had vanished back to the ring of mist,
whence he had come. But a great storm always brought him to our huts
again.
The summer waned into autumn, and the days began to narrow down.
Blasts from the south grew keener; and his flight from us was more
circumscribed. We saw him almost daily. When the winter nights began,
he gave himself up again to memory. He drew towards us in sympathy,
and there were in his narrative fewer and fewer reserves. His English
became fuller and more exact, though time and again he stumbled over
thoughts too subtle to transfuse into so rough and materialistic a
language. Our own interpretations of his descriptions must often have
been mistaken, we are certain, and many passages we have had to omit
because of manifest ambiguity or mistiness of expression.
GODFREY SWEVEN.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE iii
GLOSSARY vii
I.--MY AWAKENING 1
II.--MY EDUCATION 15
III.--SLEEP, REST, AND FLIGHT 25
IV.--HERMITRY 35
V.--JOURNEY TO THE VALLEY OF MEMORIES 51
VI.--FIALUME 63
VII.--LEOMARIE 88
VIII.--RIMLA 99
IX.--OOMALEFA 112
X.--THE FIRLA, OR ELECTRIC SENSE 133
XI.--A CATASTROPHE 149
XII.--OOLOREFA 162
XIII.--THE LILARAN 174
XIV.--CHOKTROO 192
XV.--THE DUOMOVAMOLAN OR COSMOPHONE 219
XVI.--THEIR HEAVEN AND THEIR HELL 230
XVII.--MY EDUCATION CONTINUED 244
POSTSCRIPT 283
BOOK II 287
GLOSSARY
AILOMO--The astrobiological families.
AIROLAN--A sensometer, or instrument for finding the personal
equation of a man.
ALCLIROLAN--Radiographic cinematograph; an instrument
combining microscope, camera in vacuo, and electric power.
ALFARENE--Oxygen shrub.
AMMERLIN--Historoscope.
CIRALAISON--Museum of terrors.
CLEVAMOLAN--Combination of telescope and makrakoust, or
distance-hearer.
CLIMOLAN--Earth-sensor.
CLIROLAN--Instrument that combines electro-microscopy and
photography.
CLIROLANIC--Infinitesimally microscopic.
CORFALEENA--Vacuum-engine car.
DOOMALONA--The hill of farewells.
DUOMOVAMOLAN--Instrument that interprets the music of the
cosmos.
ERFALEENA--Anti-gravitation flight-car.
FALEENA--Ship of the air.
FARFALEENA--Electric faleena.
FAROSAN--Aroma-recorder.
FIALUME--The valley of memories.
FILAMMU--The will-telegraph.
FIRLA--The electric sense.
FIRLALAIN--The firlamaic department of Oomalefa.
FIRLAMAI--The arts of the electric sense.
FIRLAMAIC--Belonging to the arts of the firla.
FIRLAMAN--A musical instrument that appeals to the firla.
FLORAMO--The botanical families.
FLORONAL--The tree of life.
FRALOOMIAMO--The families of pioneers that imagine and
represent the distant future.
GERMABELL--A tree with fruit that makes the muscles and
cartilage more elastic.
IDLUMIAN--Electric steriliser.
IDROLAN--Observer and magnifier of electric impulses.
IDROLINASAN--Machine-reporter of the thoughts and feelings
and words of an assembly.
IDROSAN--Recorder of electric impulses and sensations.
IDROVAMOLAN--Instrument for at once seeing and hearing at
great distances.
ILARIME--Edifice devoted to the arts of smell, taste, and
sound combined.
IMANORA--Centennial review of the civilisation and its
progress.
IMATARAN--The focusser of history.
INAMAR--Instrument for splitting up light into its
constituents.
INASAN--Recorder of luminous impressions.
INOLAN--Measurer of light.
IRELIUM--Iridescent metal applicable to all manner of
purposes by the Limanorans.
LABRAMOR--Alloy of irelium that sponges up and retains
electricity.
LABROLAN--Instrument for drawing electricity from the air and
the clouds.
LAVIDROLAN--Camera-telescope.
LAVOLAN--Revealer of the inner tissues and mechanism.
LEOMARIE--The science and art of earth-seeing.
LEOMO--The families of earth-seers.
LEOMORAN--The earth-perforator.
LENTA--The minutest division of time in Limanora.
LILAMO--The families that watch the security of the island.
LILARAN--The storm-cone.
LILARIE--The science and art of island-security.
LINAMAR--The analyst of sounds.
LINASAN--Recorder and reproducer of sounds.
LINOKLAR--Spectroscopic analyst and recorder of vapours.
LOOMIAMO--Families of pioneers who imagine and represent the
links that connect the present with the distant future.
LOOMIEFA--The theatre of futurition.
MANORA--Decennial review of the progress made by the people.
MARGOL--Electric instrument for blending or reducing the
strength of perfumes, flavours, and sounds.
MINELLA--Edifice for formula-machines.
MIRLAN--Life-lamp for revealing and recording internal
processes for the use of the eye, the ear, and the electric sense.
MOLTA--The Limanoran measure of infinitesimal length.
MONALAN--Electrical distance-analyst.
MORNALAN--Time-telescope.
NAROLLA--Dream-stimulants.
OOARAN--Psychometer.
OOAROMO--Psycho-physiological families.
OOLORAN--The sonarchitect.
OOLOREFA--The hall of sonarchitecture.
OOMALEFA--Halls of nutrition and medication.
OOROLAN--Instrument for transforming form and colour into
melody.
PIRAKNO--Machine for drawing electricity from space.
PIRAMO--The meteorological families.
RIMLA--The centre of force.
SALOSAN--The gustagraph.
SARIFOLAN--Instrument that interprets for sight, hearing, and
the electric sense the graphic records of the mirlan.
SARMOLAN--Cosmic barometer.
SIDRALAN--Biometer.
SIDRALMO--Bio-chemical families.
SIDRAMO--The chemical families.
TERRALONA--The edifice of outlook into heaven and hell.
THINAMAR--Visualiser of sound.
TIRLEOMORAN--Electric earth-perforator.
TREMOLAN--Electric clock indicating the changes of
electricity in various parts of the island.
TREVAMOLAN--Graduated modifier of sound.
VAMOLAN--Makro-mikrakoust.
VIMOLAN--Photo-electric analyser.
ERRATA
Page 31, line 6. _For_ “resistent” _read_ “resistant.”
Page 93, line 16. _For_ “maintained” _read_ “maimed.”
Page 155, line 2. _For_ “I that felt” _read_ “I had felt.”
Page 211, lines 13 and 17. _For_ “somnifractive” _read_
“somnifactive.”
Page 230, line 3. _For_ “onwonted” _read_ “unwonted.”
Page 348, last line. _For_ “rareity” _read_ “rarity.”
Page 369, line 12. _For_ “amosphere” _read_ “atmosphere.”
Page 377, line 5. _For_ “its” _read_ “it.”
Page 440, line 17. _For_ “we the saw” _read_ “we saw the.”
Page 465, line 8 from bottom. _For_ “thought” _read_
“through.”
LIMANORA
BOOK I
The Outer or Material Civilisation
CHAPTER I
MY AWAKENING
I OPENED my eyes in a world no feature of which I could recognise.
Everything around me was of the most dazzling beauty. The walls and
vaulted roof of the room where I lay gleamed like mosaic-work of lit
jewellery. The floors were duller, and yet shone with a coloured
radiance like that in a dew-belled meadow under the light of the
slant-rayed forenoon sun. The light broke up in innumerable points
and corners of the roof into a magnificent display of prismatic
colours, moving and changing every minute. Yet, with all the marvellous
iridescence, there was sufficient shade in the vault and walls to check
the fiery oppression of the sun. I had dreamt of such fairy palaces;
but the dream had ever been abortive or glanced off into something
hideous or appalling. Here was architecture as unlike anything I had
seen upon earth as a dream, and yet it had a grace that no dream had
ever caught.
Nor did I know the material of which this room was formed. It seemed
like ice, yet was never changed by the fire of the sun. It was capable
of being moulded into the most delicate lace-work, and yet could be
made as massive as marble walls of Eastern palaces that were built for
both pleasure and siege. It was in portions as transparent as glass,
and in others frosted with wondrous pictures. And how were those
countless domes and arches and arborescent columns produced with such
ease? How were those airy galleries hung? How were those fragrant
fountains poised so nicely that an infant’s finger seemed capable
of overturning them? Even the gently moving curtains had the same
crystalline character as the walls, now frosted as by the artist of our
winter-mornings, again goldenly dim, or rainbow-hued.
There was a spaciousness that reminded me of the colonnaded aisles
of our great cathedrals. Was I resting in one of the temples of the
island? Was I being consecrated for sacrifice? And yet the dainty
warm nooks, the close-hung curtains, and graceful tapestries so broke
the awe and loneliness of the place as to make me feel that it was
a chamber for a solitary. And I could look out upon the fields and
forests and the far-stretching sea; for every foot of wall had in it
some transparency that with its landscape stood like a picture framed
in the frosted tracery around it. I seemed never to reach the limit of
these varied perspectives and distances. I sank back exhausted on my
perfumed couch, then slowly recovered by aid of the sweetness that
met my every sense. The fragrance that filled the room was like that
of finest garden flowers, and kept changing from one lovely variety to
another, never cloying the sense. Around, too, from unseen sources,
floated sweet music, that now swelled into a chorus, and again fell
into angelic softness. Then a new sensation came to me; with every
breath I seemed to draw in a subtle nourishment and stimulation to
my senses; every minute added to the renewal of my strength. And,
to increase my delighted bewilderment, I gradually felt a new sense
appealed to; every nerve in my body seemed exhilarated, and I felt
capable of heroic actions. Some magnetic influence was raying towards
me through the atmosphere, and a dormant electric faculty seemed
to be awakened in my mind and in my body, producing the effect of
intoxication without its stupor or the numbing of the moral powers. It
was like a beautiful dream without the helplessness of the dreamer.
I felt no delirium or voluptuous languor from the excitement of the
senses. It all led to spiritual vigour, that would have made the body
its prompt ally.
My renewed energies turned my mind to my strange surroundings. I
wondered where the beings were who had built this wondrous palace,
and were now doubtless playing upon my senses. Was it all a dream?
And had I never been shot into the sea with Noola? It seemed as if
my inmost thoughts were at once communicated to my watchers; for
from some direction, out of some niche or doorway I had not noticed,
moved softly a figure, that, in its muscular breadth, large head, and
springy gait, reminded me of Noola. Upon the face a smile shone out
of unfathomed depths of thought and sympathy, and yet the lips were
close as if to forbid speech. It was enough to rest and gaze at the
beautiful expression of the face with its intensity of love and pity in
the eyes. But the features had not that symmetry of outline which we
call beauty in Europe; and the form was not “divinely tall.” The whole
of the attraction lay in the upraying of the soul into the face. It was
like gazing into the limpid waters of a lake; I tried to give speech
to my emotions, but the hand rose gently to the lips in a gesture that
commanded silence, then waved over me, and, as I looked, I fell into a
deep and dreamless sleep.
I knew not how long I had been unconscious; for when I woke I seemed
to be a new man; every faculty tingled with energy; health glowed
through my tissues; I wandered from niche to niche, from arcade to
recess; I climbed the lofty galleries and raised the curtains, shaking
the sweet perfumes from them as they swung in the air; I ran from
transparency to transparency with the delight of a child, and gazed
through each at the ever-varying landscapes that stretched outwards to
the sea. Music, distant and entrancing, floated around me in the air,
with variations and cooling bars of silence, so that it made a subtle
ether circumambient rather than a definite impression on the senses.
Under such conditions what could not I do in life? I remembered the
old weariness and despair that used to cling around me like a shirt of
Nessus even in the morning when I was refreshed with sleep, and the
clogging humours that used to retard my most generous or most energetic
action. In my former life I had moved in a clammy viscous medium that
dragged back my most eager faculties. Now I was built of air, and
stirred lightly as air.
What was it that had accomplished this strange transformation? I had
not felt so in the other islands of the archipelago or even on its
seas. I had not been so exhilarated at my first awaking. How had this
great change come about? Or was it but momentary, to pass away like
other intoxications and leave exhaustion and ache? I began to be
puzzled and to feel the return of the thought that it was perhaps only
a dream after all. How was I to test the matter?
Surely I could not have thought aloud. Yet here from somewhere or other
was moving across the floor the figure that had appeared after my first
trance. I was so awestruck by the noiseless flash of the approach that
I could make no sign of welcome. What could I say to a being who came
so near to what we consider in the old world the supernatural? As soon
as my thoughts touched upon the state of my mind and the circumstances
that surrounded me, my host (should I call him so?) appeared. And,
though my senses, I thought, had acquired preternatural acuteness, not
a sound had I heard of his entrance or of his footsteps across the
chamber.
He seemed to know the perplexity of my thoughts again, for he advanced
with so airy a grace that my eyes were fascinated by the ease of the
motion. And his words came almost like music; I scarcely considered
what he was saying, so beautiful were the tones and manner in which it
was said. “Come, and I shall tell you what has occurred,” was what I
understood. It was in the primary or simplest vocabulary of Limanora,
the vocabulary that Noola had taught me.
He led me by a covered but transparent way into a vaulted chamber, that
seemed to the other as a cathedral to a chapel; for it was pillared
and galleried and aisled with the most transcendent art. But I was
too interested in the story he had to tell to give way to my passive
enjoyment of the scene. He motioned me to ascend with him a platform
that rose above us in a lofty recess at one brightly sunlit corner of
the building. I saw him lean back, and feared that he would fall to
the floor; but with his motion the rich mosaic of the platform opened,
and a rest rose to meet his body which was of the same alabaster-like
texture as the curtains and seemed to shape itself to every curve and
bend of his figure. He stretched out his hand towards me, and before I
knew what he had done I was resting, in an attitude not far from the
upright, on a soft machine like his own. He showed me how to control
this by a knob under my right hand, and then together we flew to the
ceiling and back, wheeled round, swung gently in the air, or remained
still. It moved like a thing of life in sympathy with every desire; a
slight change of the position would relieve any part of the body and
yet leave all the rest supported; any kind of motion was accomplished
on changing the screw that lay in the knob. I afterwards investigated
the mechanism, and was amazed at its simplicity; a few levers,
cunningly mastering all the various combinations of motion, turned on
or off the force needed for the necessary changes. After a few hours’
experience of it, I could find no comparison in nature but the couch
of air on which the albatross seems to rest as it moves. I afterwards
found that a nice management of compressed air was the secret of this
wonderful rest that was neither couch nor chair. As soon as we ceased
to use it, it disappeared as suddenly as it had risen. This accounted
for the complete absence of the furniture that impedes free motion in
our European houses and made me think as I awoke in my chamber of our
great cathedrals with their free floor space.
There in mid-air we lightly hung as if resting on wings; he seemed to
know my anatomy and the points of greatest pressure in any attitude,
and controlled both machine-rests with such adroitness that we swung
hither and thither, changing slowly from the recumbent to the erect
attitude or back again, finding every few minutes a different point of
view of the chamber or of the landscapes that could be seen through
the walls. But I soon grew oblivious to the beauty that stole through
every sense; my whole consciousness was absorbed in watching the
play of the intelligence on his face and listening to his narrative.
I missed many of the links in his story, even though he contrived
to put most of it into the primary and secondary vocabularies, and,
where he was compelled to go beyond them, put so much of his thoughts
into his features that I could almost have gathered it from them.
But I saw the drift of the story, and, when it was over, pieced the
fragments together and found, when afterwards I knew the language and
the civilisation better, I had missed little of the real meaning. I
give it, then, as if it were in his own words, although my intelligence
seemed to stumble at every step in it.
“You wonder at your hospitable reception. But you will not wonder when
you know the change in the condition of our knowledge since Noola was
exiled. He was unhurt by the ricochet of the missiles on the beach. In
the darkness they were ill-aimed, and, though they struck in sand, they
were shattered by the impact and recoiled from the shingle underneath.
He disentangled himself from the wreck and rescued you. But soon the
watchers by the storm-cone were down on the beach and carried you to
our house, whilst they led your comrade to another. You were each
examined by the wise men and the medical families. Your faculties and
emotions and tendencies were all tested, and their various strengths
measured by means of the different kinds of cerebrometers whilst you
slept. Since Noola was exiled a hundred years ago, our knowledge of
the brain and the nerves and their various functions has been applied
in the most practical way to the art of living. Every curve and
convolution of the controlling instrument of the body has its value
and meaning tabulated. Every action, thought, and emotion has had its
physical symbol and locality fixed; and the minutest change in the
strength of any one of these points in the brain or in the nervous
system can be discovered by applying one of the cerebrometers. You will
know what these are some day; but it is enough to say that they can
measure, by means of a delicate apparatus controlled by electricity,
the amount of force that exists in any living tissue; there is a
separate kind for each portion of the brain and each nerve section of
the trunk, and it will move only when near that portion or any living
tissue that has similar properties and powers. Our own magnetic sense,
which has greatly developed since Noola’s banishment, can roughly
gauge the relative strengths of the various faculties and emotions
in any man; and it is deeply thrilled when any thought or passion
is energising in his nature. But it cannot accurately measure the
strength, as these instruments can. We can absolutely trust them, in
testing the character of any human being.
“Noola fully expected to be thrust back, unless he came across his own
relations and friends, to whose pity and sympathy he might appeal.
He trembled in alarm when he was led to the chamber in which he was
to be tested. But it was found that, though his humanity had not
progressed in the lines or with the rapidity that the Limanorans have
developed since his departure, all the atavistic taint had disappeared
from his nature, and the weak elements of his system, love, pity,
tenderness, sympathy, had greatly strengthened. He could no longer by
any possibility side with the warlike and revengeful in human nature.
“But even if he had only kept the evil qualities in abeyance, in the
state they showed before his exile, we should have let him return; for
with his strong desire to keep pace with our advance and his regret
for his retrogression, he would have gladly submitted himself to our
new creative surgery. Our increased knowledge of the functions and
constitution of the brain and nervous system enables us to reduce
or excise any portion that interferes with the development of the
individual. And we can also stimulate or retard the activity of any
part by placing the patient in any of our medicated atmospheres
specially adapted to his circumstances, and making him breathe in the
element required by his system.
“Noola is now supremely happy in the confidence that he is to be
allowed to remain. Every defect in his system has been tested and
measured, and he knows how far he has fallen behind our race. He would
have accepted any conditions, and in order to overtake us is willing to
enter upon a new education,--the abbreviation of the slow and painful
advance of many ages into the hurried pace of a few years. He wishes,
though three hundred years of age, to become a child again and return
to his first century. But his long and painful self-discipline in
Broolyi has shortened the process; and he will soon be able to keep
step with his old comrades. He will be aided in every way by the wise
men, some of whom will give their best wisdom and energies to him.
All the physical arts we have will be brought into play to shorten
his term of probation, our creative surgery and medicine, our arts
for the development of tissue and nerve, our magnetic arts for the
development of the senses, and our ethical arts for the development of
the spiritual sensitiveness.
“For yourself he has pleaded, and, though our wise men have recognised
that you are thousands of years in the rear of our civilisation, and
have confirmed their recognition by scientific measurement of the
forces and elements in you, they have consented to let you remain and
to take your education in hand. It seems an almost impossible task to
contract thousands of years into tens; but they do not despair; for our
system of education has already accomplished this for children born
amongst us, and you have a nature peculiarly open to our educational
influences. You have first of all the passion for progress as strongly
in you as in any of ourselves; and this is the prime essential of our
ethics and civilisation; to it all other passions must yield; from it
flows all that subdues the material world and gives dominance to the
spirit, and makes for righteousness. But with it often go pride and
arrogance. In you was found strongly developed the desire to treat
all good men as equals, whatever difference of capacity or position
or possessions might seem to separate them from you. Had you had even
the slightest tinge of contemptuousness or hauteur in you, you would
have been sternly repelled. To contemn is the mark of an incurably
savage nature, a nature incapable of true knowledge of itself and
of its relations to life. From these two desires come purity of
thought and life, the love of peace, respect for the rights of others
and reverence for what is fine in their personality, and absolute
transparency of nature. This last we ever take to be the shortest
and truest test of a progressive character, the love of truth and
simplicity, complete harmony of word and act with the inmost thought.
As long as a man or a nation lacks this, there can be no real advance;
what seems advance is but a mirage of fame or glory. Accuracy of vision
and of prevision is the first condition of true progress. It was one of
the first things that Noola saw in you, and the first reason he urged
for your retention; you had no desire to conceal your thoughts, so
closely did they tally with your life; you had an overwhelming passion
for truth and for the truthful.
“There was no need to distrust his assertions for we all felt how
genuine he had become; and even sick and unconscious as you were, our
magnetic sense told us that his description of you was correct. But
it has become the custom to test scientifically the nature of every
inhabitant of our island every week, and also at every crisis in his
nature or in the history of the community, in order that any incipient
defect may be at once remedied, and that drastic applications may
never be needed. A complete survey of your character and faculties and
corporeal system was the first step towards your admission into the
community. Everything had to be known, in order that your education
should be mapped out. And the cerebrometers gave us a favourable
report of you. Your body and your working faculties are far in the
rear of ours; you lack transparency of tissue, ethereality of motion;
the material side of you is earthy and ponderous. These elements of
retrogression we shall never be able to eject wholly from your system;
but we shall be able to modify them, and in your children and your
children’s children the body will keep pace with the spirit. The
forwardness of your emotions, of your soul, is what has drawn us to
you; you love the ideal and imaginative more than any but one section
of our community; and you have an intermixture of the finer spiritual
elements such as we have either lost or never had amongst us. We hope
to graft your nature upon one of the divisions or castes of our race
and so produce in the next generation a variety that we need. Your
retention has thus been justified by the highest morality of our
civilisation. We never take any step without reference to the ultimate
aims of our progress: so to improve the breed that our posterity may
feel nearer to the highest life in the universe.
“Your education has indeed already begun. We have assumed from your
highly disciplined and progressive spirit that you would be willing to
submit to those medical methods that shorten the already abbreviative
process of education. It is true that these make an enormous drain upon
the physical strength for a time; and we prefer the ordinary spiritual
methods of training. But you have gained from the open-air employments
in which you have passed your life great stores of bodily health and
vigour. You are still but a child. The period of childhood and tutelage
extends with us to the thirtieth, sometimes to the fiftieth, year,
that of youth to beyond the hundredth. At the time that other men are
preparing to die the natural death of old age, we are just beginning to
feel what it is to live.
“And from some ancestral cause you are developed beyond your years
in some of our ethical lines. You have reached a humility before the
living forces of the universe which is the primary mark of the true
governor of the world. How you have attained so rare a virtue amidst
the pretentious barbarity of civilisation it is not easy to conceive.
There worldliness and arrogance inherit the earth, though there are not
signs wanting that they feel the approaching triumph of its true heirs
and mask as the meeker virtues. In older times they were not ashamed
to show themselves as they really were; for those were the days of
glorified highwaymen who seized the throne of the world. Conquest is
nothing but successful brigandage on a large scale, veneer it over with
diplomacy and historical fame as you will. But for centuries there has
been an uneasy feeling abroad that the humble must come to their rights
some day; and so the gilded brigands have allied themselves with a
religion of the meek and despised, that they may hoodwink mankind into
acquiescence in their ancient dishonesty.
“We banished all the makings of monarchs, aristocracies, and great
men at the purifications of our people. We could see no difference
between these and the worst criminals except one of degree. We measured
their skulls and brains by the rough, unscientific methods we used to
have, and found in them almost no difference from those of murderers
and thieves; and comparing them with the skulls of savages and of
our own far-back ancestry, we found that in the case of both heroes
and criminals the cause of their likeness to each other was their
recoil upon the footsteps of the past, and away from the line of human
progress which leads towards harmony with the higher laws of the
universe.
“Happily for you every trace of such arrogance and contempt and
ambition is absent from your system. You have nothing merely mimetic
in you; you live unashamed and truthful in presence of all that the
world is capable of being. It is one of the surest signs of fear of
threatening annihilation that a species has to simulate the appearance
or the modes of life of another. Hypocrisy in the human race, like
mimicry in the kinds of animals and plants, is the brand of feebleness
and the omen of coming decay and subjugation. We use truth and
sincerity as one of the most inward of tests of a strong and healthy
nature. In the olden days, as in all large and mixed civilisations,
it was difficult to distinguish the imitation virtue from the real,
and when it was discovered it was easy to pardon it and even accept
it as a virtue amid the universal effort at simulation. But when we
had swept out the survivals of primitive and savage times and the
atavistic returns to them, we found that every need of mimetic virtue
had disappeared. The slightest taint of unreality or falsehood in any
of our community is as offensive as carrion; we rise in a body and
have it removed. And we have as keen an enjoyment of sincerity and
truthfulness. Your loyal character at once attracted us to you; we felt
that all germs of moral disease would lose their virulence within its
influence, as germs of physical disease lose theirs in sunshine.”
CHAPTER II
MY EDUCATION
THE strain on my attention had been extreme as I tried to follow his
explanations. It was not merely the words that were unfamiliar, but the
very manner of the thoughts. I had not felt how exhausted my tissues
were growing, or how soothing was the influence of the perfumes and
soft music. I had been deeply moved by the joy of my acceptance by this
strange community and by the profound truths woven into the fabric of
its civilisation. Imperceptibly the mist of dreams stole over me. I was
not even conscious of the gesture of his hand. I thought that I had
fallen back again into the darkness of Western civilisation, and yet
that my Limanoran guardian was silently hovering round me, protecting
me amid the horrors of the reality. I seemed to be present at a court
scene, where the monarch and his ablest statesmen and soldiers were
welcoming a hero back from a victorious campaign that had added a great
province to the kingdom. There were shoutings and huzzas without,
whilst within strains of triumphant music alternated with bowings and
ceremonies from the gorgeously robed officials. In some strange way
I thought that it was I who was being lauded. Conscious of the tens
of thousands left dead upon my battle-fields, I loathed it all; for
by some soul-magic, perchance my Limanoran influence, the hearts of
eulogists and courtiers were laid bare before my eyes, all (there was
not an exception) black with envy and designings; the king himself
was sick of me and my honours, even as he showered them on me. I knew
the pitfalls and intrigues prepared for me; I saw the whole mass of
humanity, both lacquered and tattered, that was now cheering, hiss and
groan at me as I fell; and I turned away from the applauding crowd and
looked into the homes of my dead soldiers, and I heard the weeping and
despair of the widow with her orphans and the mother bereft of her
children in their prime. Here the depths of sorrow were its surface
too. What was there to my credit in the book of time?
Then with sudden transformation I saw the crowd swaying like billows
before the wind; every inch of space on the floor of the vast cathedral
was filled with an adoring multitude, tears falling from the eyes of
every up-turned face. What could not be done with a mass of humanity so
filled with passion for the highest! None too large were the vaulted
aisles and nave for the tremulous thunder of the anthem. It seemed as
if the dome of the sanctuary would open and the Deity would reveal
Himself to His rapt suppliants. Then the music died away and silence
magnetised the people and drew down the influence of heaven upon them.
And it was I that was in the pulpit, seeming a feeble and sinful thing
beside this divinely inspired multitude. Could I do aught but still
their quivering hearts?
With sudden impulse my voice rang out in the cadences of the great
organ as I raised their thoughts to the cross over the altar where hung
the One who was rejected and despised of men. I painted the poverty
and neglect and scorn of the life of the Man of Sorrows. They wept
as I bent their thoughts to the weary mission of this lofty spirit
amongst men, and His despair as He saw them turn in contempt from Him.
The death of torture that marked the close of His sojourn here was as
nothing to the crucifixion of the spirit that He bore each day from the
cold neglect or the supercilious sneer with which His message was met.
None but lowly fishermen would accept His divine teachings. And never
a murmur issued from His lips. Heart-broken and martyred in soul, the
crown of thorns was a fit close to His career. I seemed to hold the
great assemblage in the hollow of my hand. The sound of weeping rose,
while with love and adoration they gazed on the crowned agony as it
hung on the cross.
Then I blessed the people and left the pulpit, my heart hard and dry
within me, when an alien sound broke upon my ear from the farther end
of the great aisle. A commotion arose, and before many minutes the
whole mass of worshippers had joined in the passionate discord. There
was a conflict about some centre that was moving upwards from the door.
Before I could regain the pulpit, a bruised and bleeding body had been
raised above the sea of heads upon a cross against one of the huge
pillars. A cry of execration rose from the whole church. It was useless
to attempt interference, for my voice could not be heard in the tumult.
In a few minutes the insults and buffetings had accomplished their
work; the wounded, bleeding head sank upon the breast of the figure
on the cross; his spirit had fled. It was a preaching reformer of the
town, who was accounted a madman for his enthusiasm. He had fallen into
some controversy and had shown his opponents the gross and material
nature of their worship, insulting to a Deity who was pure spirit;
he had prophesied the downfall of all their gorgeous churches and
ceremonials, and the substitution of silent reverence within the temple
of the heart. They had taken his prophesy as an insult to the Christ
and His church. Fleeing to the sanctuary to be safe from the furious
attack of the crowd, they had followed him and with a few hurried words
had enlisted the worshippers within against the blasphemer. And this
had been the result.
As I looked at the blood-stained features, there seemed to gather round
the head a halo of light as of a crown of thorns. I was struck with a
strange resemblance and glancing back at the altar, saw the faces were
the same. This passionate devotion to a dead Christ had found Him in
living form and had crucified Him again.
I was appalled at the thought of all the centuries having passed for
naught. Not one step upward had been made. No nearer were the multitude
to recognising their Saviour when He came in the form of living man.
There seemed to be nothing to live for, if this were the end of the
agonising toil of the ages.
How sweet it was when I awoke to find it was but a dream, and that I
was not in Christendom but in Limanora! I was alone, but there was
the sense of comradeship around me. I found afterwards that the wise
men of the medical caste had been electrising portions of my brain as
I lay asleep. It was the beginning of my education, which was to go
on even in sleep, moulding dreams that should modify my whole nature.
Perhaps the most important part of the growth of the spirit is during
the hours of rest, when the past or future may enter the vacant mind.
My imagination had been sent out on its travels into my past and had
found its way into the heart of Western ambitions and hypocrisies. Thus
the wise men had perceived by their electric sense the dreams that had
oppressed me, and they drew from them the master-sorrows of my past.
Half of the success of education depends upon the most intimate
knowledge of the history of the soul to be educated, a knowledge more
intimate than the soul itself can have; else the educator will be
alarmed and defeated by the surprises of survivals or resurrections.
It is not the history of the mere incidents of life, of even spiritual
life, from birth that is needed, but the unrecorded history of the
mental and emotional tissues of a countless ancestry. And no annals
could reveal this so well as the dream-flashes of the night. They are
brief as the tremors of lightning, but they illuminate a midnight
world, a glimpse of which is as great as an inspiration. “Night is
the confessional of the unknown”; “Sleep unburies the dead”; “Dreams
kaleidoscope the vanished past.” These are three of their world-old
sayings, which were striking at first, but after I knew their exact
science of somnology, became as commonplace to me as they were to the
Limanorans.
This science, like all their sciences, was practical and but the
other side of an art; it was one of the most helpful auxiliaries of
education. It had classified all types of dreams, and found the inner
test of truth in them. Though seemingly capricious, to these medical
wise men not a dream occurred but had its significance in the life of
the individual. They could touch any section of the brain tissue into
dream-activity during sleep by means of their magnetic and electric
probes and stimulators; they could feel by their own electric sense
all that was flashing through the corridors of sleep; and, with their
electrographs could take an exact image of every portion of the dream.
Dreams, they held, made men children again, with their souls upon
their skins, so absolutely transparent did they render the nature, so
free from convention and the mask of policy. And what was best of all,
the shadows of the past, at times of the primeval past, answered to
their call and played upon the mind during sleep. “We are such stuff
as dreams are made of” was a saying of our own far-seeing dramatist’s
which often came into my mind as I looked into their somnology. Into
the making of our bodies and our brain-tissues go elements from all
the ages of our human and animal past, ages buried beyond the reach
of history or speculation. They enter subtly into the tissue of our
life, though we are all unconscious of the process. And these elements
are the stuff that goes to the making of dreams as well. But in the
dream-world there is no central personality, no will to control or
transform, no mask to wear, no power to conceal. We are ofttimes
ashamed of our dreams because they are so unconsciously naked in their
savagery or even animality.
Nor is it an uncommon or unnatural thing that dreams foreshadow
incidents in the after-life of the individual; for they bring into play
elements in his nature that he has never been conscious of and whose
existence he would stoutly deny. Then, when the favouring circumstance
or set of conditions brings these elements into action, he is startled
to remember how close the long-forgotten dream had come to the
unimagined reality. If only he had known how much it had meant, as it
entered on the theatre of sleep and then vanished, he might have been
forewarned and have avoided the opportunity for its reappearance on the
stage of life.
And the Limanoran medical sages had taken advantage of this prophetic
provision of nature. They systematically tested every fibre and cell
of the brain of each individual they had to educate and develop, and
without hesitation or error found out every possibility of his nature.
They tested and tabulated the results of every electric stimulus and
every dream that followed it, and by this means had a complete natural
history of all his ancestral past. No revolution could happen in the
state of any Limanoran, nothing of what we mean by conversion. It has
sometimes been said in the science of the West that there are two
brains or physical organs of soul in every man, and this explains the
strange actions and reactions, conversions and recoils that so often
occur in life. But it is far truer that there are a hundred brains
in every man, and that his brain is composed of elements out of all
his ancestry, even his far-back animal ancestry; and it all depends
on the stimulus which of those brains or ancestral brain-elements
will come uppermost. The Limanorans had millions of sun pictures
of their own exiles and of the various peoples of the rest of the
world in innumerable attitudes and situations, and with expressions
on their faces unconsciously worn; and they could point out in each
the predominating animal. In going over the memories of the men and
women I had known I could recall times when the look of some animal
had come out strongly on their faces. I had had, to my misfortune,
much acquaintance with the serpent nature, the most predominant in an
unwisely progressive civilisation like that of Western Europe where
convention and custom and law become the opportunity and the mask of
characters fallen far into the rear of progress. When laggard natures
are not monasticised and prevented from breeding, a progressive people
get overrun with hypocrisy; under convention and custom and law they
take shelter and there is no power that can drive them out; the finer
phases of civilisation, industry, art, learning, speculation, morality,
religion, become their nesting-ground. At last the serpent nature is
accepted as the type, provided there is not too fatal a sting in it.
The religious legends mirror this serpent-like development. The serpent
is the spirit of evil which caused their degeneration from the godlike.
The serpent they see everywhere, even when it has disappeared from
their own land. Their greatest successes in any sphere are by means of
serpent-like subtlety, whilst they still profess to worship the ideal
of truth and candour abandoned by them in the far past. In practice it
is the qualities of the serpent they embody and develop; in theory they
worship its foe and conqueror.
The Limanoran sages explain this reappearance of animal natures in
human civilisations and individuals by showing how the elements of all
exist in infinitesimal germ in the most primitive form of animal life;
as this crept up the scale, certain elements grew stronger and led
to new species still retaining the others in subordination; at each
higher and higher division of the vital way the elements became more
vigorous and more distinct in their characteristics; it is therefore
traces of the higher animals that are most apt to appear in man. And
the only means of ridding these of their retrogressive influence is to
make the newer and higher spiritual qualities more dominant. The first
rule of a civilisation that means to advance in reality and not in mere
appearance is to monasticise all atavistic natures and prevent them
from handing on their retrogression to a posterity; the second is to
encourage only the higher and more spiritual features of those that
remain.
It took many months to examine and catalogue my powers and tendencies.
I often awoke unconscious or with a confused recollection of the dreams
they had stimulated and recorded. The first few were most distinct,
and seemed to follow me when I waked with the reality and perspective
of life. But I could not interpret them; they seemed fanciful and
capricious, and when I puzzled over them, yielded nothing. And yet,
when I saw my dream-confession and autobiography, I was startled with
the truth of its great features; thoughts that I had never uttered to
mortal ear were there; words that had been spoken in the secrecy of
confidence far off in my village home were recorded; actions light and
insignificant had their due place, and seemed to have new and infinite
meaning in their new setting. So circumstantial were the details of
much of my past life and character that I could not but accept the rest
as absolute truth. And what a strange array of facts it was! Parts of
my immediate ancestral history I knew, more I had conjectured, some I
could never have guessed at; but here it was spread out as on a map,
with every new advance or retrogression any progenitor had accomplished
or suffered. I seemed to see my inner nature photographed and by the
light of a magic-lantern.
At first, when I saw it stand out detail after detail in lifelike
truthfulness, I felt in the presence of some supernatural power. But
when I came to know the methods they had employed, it seemed as simple
as a child’s puzzle. Every conclusion had been reached in the most
scientific way. All the minutiæ of every dream had been faithfully
recorded and microscopically examined. Then they were tabulated and
compared with the most untiring industry. And out of the shapeless
mass had come by the aid of their logical methods or dream-tests the
clear, unquestionable truth. Their brilliant, but by no means reckless,
imaginations did the rest, evolving order and lifelikeness out of
seemingly barren and confused facts. It is true, they did not make
any attempt at the chronology of the past; they had been able only
to group the facts in great spaces of time, and in a certain order
of development. Their minute knowledge of the evolution of life, and
especially of human life, gave them the framework for this grouping. I
was astonished at the quickness of their work, when I considered the
fulness of the natural history of my mind and character; it seemed as
if they should have taken years and not months to investigate with such
care every atom and cell of the tissue of my brain.
CHAPTER III
SLEEP, REST, AND FLIGHT
I COULD not but surrender myself into the hands of men whose wisdom
seemed to me to approach omniscience; and this I was the more inclined
to do that I felt, instead of exhaustion from their operations on my
brain during sleep, the greatest sense of exhilaration I had ever
experienced in my life. They acted on the principle of giving complete
rest to one set of nerves and tissues by stimulating the others. They
could produce the deepest sleep in all the brain- and nerve-centres by
gathering the life-energy that remains during sleep into one minute
point, which they stimulated by magnetism.
They smiled at the clumsy methods of resting that Western civilisation
had adopted, the awkward, unyielding beds and chairs and sofas, and
the wasteful and futile attempts at exercise that were meant to give
rest. Ages ago they had banished dancing and all corybantic amusements
as extravagant waste of tissue, destroying a hundred cells or nerves
for every one that they saved or invigorated. All frantic and violent
exercise encouraged the animal part at the expense of the progressive:
it mangled and rent the delicate tissues of the brain and heart, and
sent the currents of sustenance into the muscles and bones of the legs
and arms. The riding and hunting and athletics of the aristocracies
only helped the animal to persist, and clearly identified their
ancestry with the conquering nomad hordes that swept down on the
peaceful plains and destroyed primitive civilisations. Exercise, they
held, should help, on the one hand, to increase the store of energy to
be transformed into the higher elements, and on the other to rest the
spiritual forces and faculties.
Rational rest was one of the great secrets of the prolongation of
life. There was a latent passion in living things for rest: and this
rose to its highest in man. To balk it was to shorten the career of
all the powers. And they had set themselves to understand this passion
and the methods for its satisfaction as one of the first duties of an
advancing people. They knew that there never could be any complete rest
for a living system short of death. Even in the soundest sleep the
functions proceeded, though feebly, and there was a misty consciousness
of existence; else it would lapse into annihilation. They realised that
they must provide for many gradations of rest between the edge of death
and the borderland of full activity. Nor should any portion or element
of the human system go long without its period of rest and its period
of exercise.
On these principles they built their methods of alternating rest and
activity, all duly subordinated to their great aim,--the advance of
the higher nature. The only reason for muscular pursuits was that
the intellect and the imagination might be relaxed and the higher
energy reinforced. Even the loftiest thought resulted in certain waste
products, that, if left to accumulate, would soon clog and stifle it.
This waste must be carried off by reposeful exercise of the lower
and more physical organs. All the lower elements which remain to
mingle with those of a higher plane after they cease to be needed as
regenerators of energy grow at once poisonous and must be removed by
exercise.
For many months I occupied one of their beds, half hammock, half
framework, made of soft, flexible stuff that looked like metal, yet
yielded like down. These beds were hung not only at the four corners,
but along the two sides, so that the body lay in a kind of groove; yet,
by a second series of rests, the material was kept from contact with
the sides of the body or from any pressure upon it. Within this groove
was laid an air-cushion of still softer and more elastic material,
which fitted itself to every irregularity of the body and to its
various changes of position. The pillow was of the same soft network,
and so shaped as to fit the head. I afterwards found that through
the whole fabric of the pillow passed a mild current of positive
electricity, that drew the energy from the nerve-centres of the head,
and soothed every tissue to rest. The framework of the lower portion of
the bed was charged with the mildest currents of negative electricity,
and thus the circulation and the life were kept up, however deep might
be the sleep. The sense of exhilaration and replenished stores of
energy with which I rose each morning was enough to make me enamoured
of life. Day by day I grew lighter in step, and seemed to walk and
rest on air. It was the grosser particles of my system that were being
withdrawn from it by this nightly process of rest. I gained energy and
lost weight till I felt that I could soon rise on wings. I noticed
before long that I had acquired the tripping, elastic gait that I had
remarked in Noola. My movements and footfall came to leave almost
no impression on my senses, and I could have played the ghost with
appalling effect in the superstitious atmospheres of my native land. I
did not seem to grow much smaller in bulk; yet in a year or more I must
have weighed one half what I did when I arrived. Whether they applied
some other degravitating process to my bones and tissues besides the
magnetic sleep I never ascertained. But they had the power of reducing
their own weight considerably in a few moments. It seemed as if their
bones were hollow like those of birds; for I could lift even the
largest of them with my one hand; and they had some reserve store of
an element lighter than air in their bodies, which they could increase
and distribute over their system at will. When they were asleep I found
I could raise them as lightly as a feather, but when awake they could,
whether by muscular effort or by some other process of their bodies,
prevent me lifting them even the fraction of an inch from the ground.
They seemed able at a thought to increase their weight tenfold, and
though they had wonderful strength of muscle, I am certain that was not
all, for I observed they made little use of it on such occasions.
It can be easily imagined then how little friction of the body there
was during sleep; indeed, they never moved whilst resting, for there
was no need of relieving the tension of any part. I enjoyed still
more another kind of rest they had; it was half chair, half bed, and
consisted of an incline of the softest netting made out of their usual
metal and in such a way that the body could not collapse when loosed
in sleep. Even pleasanter was the swing-sleep; here a huge magnet kept
the supple incline gently swaying whilst at the same time it drew the
blood from the head. The float-rest was as pleasing; in this the head
rested on a floating pillow whilst two air-cushions stretched along
one side of the body and supported it on a network held between them.
But the most complete of all rests was that in which the Limanorans
were supported in the air by a cloud of sweet-scented and wholesome gas
blown from innumerable jets with steady power; electric fences kept it
from spreading into the atmosphere around. I never reached that power
of reducing myself in weight so that I could enjoy this rest. It needed
fine skill of poise to climb to this bed and remain there, and I was
ever afraid of falling.
The same physical incapacity prevented me from reaching the most
graceful and soothing of all their combinations of exercise and
repose. This was the wing-rest. I had often seen the albatross, as it
followed in the wake of our yacht, swoop down and float up the curves
of the wind without apparent effort, its broad wings motionless but
for occasional adaptation, like sails, to the changes in the strength
or direction of the breeze. I had never expected to see human beings
master this bird-power over the air; but it became the commonest sight
in the breezes of the dawn and the sunset to see old and young of both
sexes in Limanora fasten great wings to their arms and feet, and,
charging their small wing-engines with new stores of energy, sail up
underneath the chameleon clouds, and float hither and thither like
spirits of the storm. This was part of their night’s rest and their
morning’s exercise; and they used to descend from it with heightened
colour in their cheeks and the look of profound repose in their eyes.
The long training they had had from youth in the management of their
wings and in gauging the force and current of the winds had made their
skill and knowledge habitual, if not instinctive. They could shut their
eyes and rest their intelligence as they floated up and down the
levels of the breeze; their wings seemed to be at peace. I can find no
analogy in my own experience for their delight in the swift-curving
movement but my youthful enjoyment of skating before the wind for miles
over clear ice. It was a gladness merely to watch them sport amid the
rays of the growing or lessening sun. Often would they time their
movements to some rhythm, and flash through intricate evolutions like
rooks in the evening air. Again half of them would fold their wings and
be borne by the other half with a speed and lightness almost as great
as when flight was unburdened. All mere earthly amusements and exercise
had ceased when the secret of flight had been mastered.
For generations their biologists, anatomists, and physicists had
studied the wing-power of animals with a view to the practical mastery
of it for the Limanorans themselves. Their chief guide towards the
analysis was the study, not of birds or insects, but of the bat. They
measured the force of the strong chest muscles that enabled it to
move its wings with such rapidity; this could be done to a nicety by
means of their refined instruments for gauging latent power, whether
in tissue or nerve or muscle. They calculated the number of beats it
could make in a minute. They measured the spread of the wings and the
weight of the body. Thus they came to an almost constant equation of
wing-power to size and weight. The physicist and mechanic were then
called in; but they would have been helpless without the new metal,
irelium, and their power of concentrating great power into small space.
This metal was extracted by a process from common earth, but could
also be found pure some miles down in the earth. It was perhaps the
first essential to the rapid advance of their civilisation because
of its extreme lightness and strength, and still more its wonderful
flexibility and elasticity when mixed with certain proportions of other
substances. It could be made into the most delicate membrane, fine as
gauze and yet tough and resistant as leather. It formed the material of
their most massive engineering works, and of their lightest draperies
and garments. Nothing could surpass its adaptability to all purposes of
civilisation.
It was out of this that they were able to make their wings which seemed
so fragile and yet could bear the force of the wildest storms. It
would stand stiffly on its framework against the strongest pressure,
and yet could be expanded balloon-wise from within. The only means of
disabling these wings was perforation by a hard, sharp point. This
could never occur in the air except from the beak of a bird; and
then they could still use their spread as a parachute to break their
descent. Another quality this metal had was its transparency, and their
flight was somewhat concealed from the sight of gazers below by the
colour they took from their atmospheric surroundings; it was difficult
to distinguish them from a floating cloud or a darker patch of grey or
blue sky. The wings could be easily folded or expanded, so flexible
was the material; and, when the Limanorans landed from their flight,
scarcely a minute elapsed before the huge sails, framework and all, had
been furled and had disappeared in the ordinary outline of their bodies.
And these bodies differed as much as their natures from those I had
been accustomed to see. They were short and squat; and this, with their
broad chests, great heads, and long arms, would have led Europeans to
call the Limanorans gnomes. Muscles and bones that in other men had
been of little importance had grown into what we should have called
abnormal size and strength. But after I had met the power of their eyes
and felt the beauty of the natures that shone in their faces, their
bodies seemed to me the normal garment of the highest human spirits;
and I came to understand the high purpose of every change they had
brought about in their forms and features. Without their broad chests
they could never have had such expansible lungs or such powerful
heart-action essential to easy flight, as well as to the lightning
sweep of their thoughts and energies and the rapid advance of their
civilisation. The pulse could be seen in many parts of the body, it was
so strong; and its beats were twice as frequent as in my own. The great
heat of summer was to them little inconvenience; they could thrust
their arms into what seemed to be boiling water without shrinking;
and they could bear a degree of cold far below the lowest temperature
I had ever felt, for the high temperature of their bodies made them
capable of enduring far greater extremes of climate than any race I
had ever known or heard of. But their breathing was much less frequent
than mine; they seemed to take in enormous draughts of air at each
inspiration and to retain stores of it in their system. They continued
at their ease in difficult atmospheres and exertions long after I had
begun to pant and gasp for breath. The spaces within their bodies that
had once been wholly filled with the organs of digestion and discharge
had evidently been largely utilised for their marvellous expansion of
lungs and heart.
Another purpose that their huge chests served was to bear the strain
of the great muscles that controlled their arms, and of the powerful
engines that, strapped on to them, gave the strong and swift beat to
their wings. Their arms were moulded on lines of similar strength; for
they had to bear the strain of the forward stroke of the wing, whilst
also having to manipulate by means of the long and sinewy fingers its
great folds in the backward sweep; and, when more expanse was needed
during calmer weather or when resting in the sky, the arms had to
thrust out and to bear long rods that in their turn bore expansions of
the wings like the studding-sails of a ship. The thumb of each hand
was kept free for the management of their breast and shoulder-engines;
and it had become by exercise more vigorous and more flexible than
the ordinary human thumb. In each armpit was carried a small engine
that could be used either as subsidiary to the great breast-engine
or for the partial or complete furling of the wings. Beside it was a
storage-battery, in which could be generated by the movements of the
arm more electricity to supply the central power, thus enabling them
to extend their flight through long periods. If they became tired they
could expand and inflate their wings with a gas made much warmer by the
heat of their bodies than the surrounding atmosphere; then throwing
themselves on their backs they could rest or rise in the air as on a
balloon.
In slow or ordinary flight, or when the wind was not high, they could
steer themselves rudely by manipulating the outer folds of their
wings with their fingers. But if they wished to fly swiftly, or in
some other direction than the wind would bear them, they could push
out a tail-like membrane of irelium from between the feet and move it
hither and thither by the sinewy power of the heels. The great toe
of each foot was also much developed by long use for stretching out
and managing the wings; it had become more like a thumb, capable of
seizing and manipulating cords or membranes. It was this, added to the
lightness of their bodies, that gave them their springy gait, and made
them seem when they walked as if they scarcely touched the ground; they
could skim like a bird close to the earth by using only the outer folds
of their wings and the tip of the great toe for propulsion.
Much though my weight was reduced, and ardent though I was in my
attempts to come up with their mastery over the air, I was seldom
able to do more than quicken my pace in running and rise in short,
clumsy, laboured flights on their wings like a callow nestling
fallen from its nest. I was soon exhausted by my efforts, even when
aided by my ultimately deft management of the breast-engine and the
shoulder-engines; for my lungs were short of compass, my heart soon
beat too rapidly for the strength of its tissue, and my arms and
fingers and great toe soon grew weary of the work they had to do.
Nothing but the selection and adaptation of my ancestry could have made
me capable of progressing physically to their level. Their past had
been a rapid and deliberate process of adjustment to new and higher
ideas of life, one of the main aims being this new mode of locomotion
in order to give them command of a sphere that other men had abandoned
to the birds and insects; for it was but one of the corollaries of the
great purpose of their existence, which was to master or eject the
grosser elements of their system, that they might rise into a more
ethereal or spiritual life. By the power of flight they seemed to gain
independence of the earth, greater freedom of movement, and an approach
to that frictionless, untrammelled motion through limitless space which
thought gives a foretaste of.
CHAPTER IV
HERMITRY
FLIGHT was one of their best methods too of achieving complete
solitude. One of the early discoveries of this people in the art of
progress was that, where men are too much or too long together, they
confirm each other’s faults and clog advance; the weaker and more
superficial ambitions get the mastery and force energy into mistaken
directions. The risk of this grew less as the individual grew older;
for he receded farther and farther from the ancestral stages of life
through which he must pass in youth and early manhood; and he came
to have less desire and less need for intercourse with his fellows.
Complete love of solitude and capacity for solitude were two of the
signs of the perfecting of the individual life; thereafter death, the
rending of the veil that divides the seen from the unseen, was the
most natural step in development, and scarcely needed effort. They
held solitude as much one of the essentials of noble life as society;
and the latter needed no stimulus; by nature and beginnings man was a
social animal, but only some strong impulse would make him seek the
companionship of his own thoughts. The final triumph of life was to be
able to be confidently alone, to stand with the highest man can think
and feel against the herded universe. Under the stimulus of the more
physical and primary passions it is the universal instinct to flock
together. The baser, the more destructive feelings are gregarious.
To ensure periods of solitude for each member of the community, every
man and every woman had a separate house, as soon as the powers were
mature. One of the horrors of the past out of which they had come was
the intrusion of friends and relatives every hour of the day, and
the irritating sense of the continually watchful eyes of servants
or slaves. Only by seeking the wilds could one find real solitude.
In all human communities there are endless opportunities for social
intercourse; opportunities for solitude are artificial. Life was
arranged in Limanora with a view to allowing and securing as frequent
and as long solitudes as were consonant with the progress of the race.
On the most prominent point of every house there was the representation
of two climbing flowers; and if these hung drooping, colourless, and
apart, everyone knew that the occupant desired seclusion; if they
flushed with rose, stood up to the sun, and twined round each other,
then was it known that human converse was permissible, if not desired.
There was indeed sufficient magnetic communion of spirit among all
the people to touch into life at intervals the love of that definite
and open intercourse so native to the human system. This inborn
social faculty might be trusted to prevent the love of loneliness
from severing all ties. There were daily public duties that brought
everyone into the knowledge and sight of his fellow-men, the rota of
physical exercise at the centre of force, the flight-drill, the general
meeting of the community, and the medical review. And every day and
almost every hour of the day communion of spirit could go on in the
magnificent baths, in the halls of recuperation, and in the valley of
memories. There was no lack of occasion to draw the Limanorans together.
But the other duty to the higher self was sacredly guarded and
fostered, especially in the earlier stages of life. One of the greatest
blunders they had to correct in their former civilisation had been
gregarious education. Large families had been one of the consequences
of a half-developed humanity, more kin to the animal world than to
the spiritual. The lower a living thing is in the scale of life the
more prolific it is, the more devoted to the mere function of keeping
its species alive. Unicellular organisms perpetuate their existence
by continual fission. Microbes become massive in their effects by
the countless myriads each is capable of producing. The higher the
organisation, the less is the energy that can be spared for generation,
and the more capable is the offspring when matured of ensuring its own
survival, of rising above and managing the laws of nature. Civilisation
has not advanced far when it acts by masses and needs masses to keep it
going. Then mere subsistence and procreation are the only purposes and
functions of most life. To feed, to reproduce, to die, that is their
history.
The Limanorans looked back to that stage of their development with a
shudder, so far in the mists and darkness of animalism did it seem.
Now one man of them was more able to do battle with nature and her
fecundity and her catastrophes than a hundred thousand of that olden
time, and not one hundred-thousandth of the generative power was
needed. Then but a poor fraction of the life-energy could be given up
to education. The offspring had to be trained in masses or have no
training at all. The parents were too busy earning the means of life
to mould their families, and had too many children to give heed to the
character of the individual. All the offspring were handed over to
professional trainers, who managed them in the mass, and who had to
work by the methods of nature with its myriad children through the law
of the survival of the fittest. They had to be handled like armies, and
the stricter the discipline, the better the result was supposed to be;
and where the people were counted in masses and moved in masses the
better it undoubtedly was for the survival of the state. Schools and
universities were a necessity of that far-back stage of civilisation;
they were the drill-sergeants of civil life, dragooning the young and
their ideas into accordance with the prevailing and accepted type. Too
much independence of character or thought or manner would have broken
the ranks and endangered the existence of the commonweal. But the chief
purpose of life on the world, the progress of the species, was ignored
in this devotion to mere persistence of the species. All variant germs
and elements that nature supplies in every individual it brings forth
were smoothed down or annihilated into uniformity. The type persisted
from century to century unchanged. Only by stealth or by audacity did
any new or alien element succeed in modifying the species; and when it
did succeed the modification was as often retrograde as progressive.
Therefore, in order to be secure from variation, public opinion
punished all habits that would lead to independence of character or
thought or feeling.
As soon as the great exilings had been completed, the Limanorans
recognised that the best chance of swift progress was the selection and
preservation of the finest variants in their character and thoughts.
They therefore abolished the profession of teacher, that manufacturer
of uniformity, and all schools and universities, hot-beds of
convention, worship of antiquity, and retrogression. They by no means
abolished education; they recreated it, intensified it, and made it the
chief function of the community. The whole time and energies of the
parents, or, as the case might be, of the proparents, were given up for
a period of from fifty to seventy years to the training and moulding
of each child. Nothing was left to nature or haphazard. And every new
tendency or faculty that was discovered in the pupil was recorded and
reported to the council of sages. It was discussed by them, and, if
judged to be hostile to the progress of the race, the parents were
assisted in eradicating it; if manifestly progressive, every means was
taken to make it grow; if doubtful in its results, it was submitted to
the community, and their instincts soon brought them to a decision.
Thus it was that their world was being continually renovated. Never was
an idea or method of action rejected simply because it was new. Every
opportunity of advance was seized and tested. Every suggestion of a new
direction of progress was investigated and followed out till it was
seen to be impracticable.
And, to prevent emphasising the old and outworn or reviving the past,
the young were isolated from one another; for, as the embryo records
in its growth the stages of animalism through which terrestrial life
passed upwards from the unicellular to the complex human organisation,
so the immature periods that come between infancy and full manhood
record human development, prehistoric as well as historic. The long
ages of primitive futility in presence of the powers of nature are
abbreviated into the helpless years of infancy. Prehistoric savagery
shows itself in various traces in the rebellious, adventure-loving,
omnivorous phase of boyhood. The first stages of civilisation appear in
the early years of puberty; its later stages in the approach to full
manhood. The imperfect past ever springs up like weeds amid the growth
of the new life, and will choke it if encouraged. And nothing, they
held, gave such persistence to the evils and imperfections of the past,
thus appearing in early life, as the gregariousness of youth. Nothing
had done so great a wrong to the race, or had so hindered its progress,
as their former education system with its schools and universities. To
throw men in the immature stages of their life into close intercourse
was to confirm their immaturities, to encourage atavism, to make the
past tyrannise over the future. As long as their old system continued,
their civilisation was enslaved to the times that were gone, and
imagination deified the world as it had been.
Next to their exiling policy, their educational reform was one of the
most important starting-points of their new and swiftly progressive
civilisation. I was astonished at the length and frequency of my
isolations during the period of my training. For years I saw few or
none but the two proparents to whose care I had been handed over,
even after I had been introduced to other sections of the community.
In the process of my advance towards Limanoran habits and powers, I
was often left for days together to my own thoughts, and yet in the
presence of some supervising power that seldom made itself definite
to any of my senses or even to my mind. Throughout these intervals of
solitude, I felt continual suggestion of noble thought and emotion
come to me from my surroundings, the divine music that rang so softly
and variedly amid the silences, the deep meaning of the arts that
filled every corner of my life, the magnetic energy that rayed forth
from unknown centres upon my spirit. The finest impulses of my nature
became dominant in me at these times and grew in strength. I came to
recognise the power that such solitude gave to character. Without it I
should have inclined to become the echo of my tutors, even though they
were ever impressing upon me the necessity of thinking and acting for
myself. They were so noble, so far above the men and women I had met
or heard of or read of that it was a hard task not to fall down and
worship them.
Once I had the misfortune to question the benefits of prolonged
seclusion. I urged the praises of friendship so common in the
literature of my country, and spoke with great fervour of the pleasures
of social intercourse, the keen emulation on the path of development
it stirred, and the wide influence which the finest characters had. I
painted in glowing colours all that refined society might become,--the
witty Parisian salons of the eighteenth century, the artistic circles
in the fifteenth-century Italian republics, the brilliant association
of thoughtful men in some of the London literary sets of the nineteenth
century. What could be nobler than such intellectual brilliancy of
intercourse as is recorded in the biographies of the great men and
beautiful and refined women of the West! Then I turned to the happiness
of children and youth together in the gardens or woods or on the
shores of the ocean, and their sadness when they moped alone in their
rooms or at their books. Companionship was the very life of childhood
and youth. Did not solitary musings even in maturity produce morbid
self-introspection? The intercourse, even with superiors and elders,
was somewhat unwholesome for the young spirit,--it crushed spontaneity
and naturalness and confidence in one’s inner self.
I worked myself up to a climax of eloquence, and thought that I had
demolished all possibility of defence of their system. But I had
succeeded only by ignoring the vices and weaknesses of society. These
wise men quietly and almost unconcernedly took me behind the gaudy
theatrical curtain of the world, and smiled to think how like their old
social ideals had been to those I had described, and to see the same
vanity and posturing in European refinement as in their own evil past.
They mourned over my blindness of mind in failing to look through the
gorgeous transparency at the tawdry vulgarities behind. Following it
through many forms and stages of life, animal and human, they showed me
the law of social intercourse; not the highest but the lowest emotional
and moral level of a herd or circle do the natures and minds of its
members ultimately reach, however lofty the aspirations of some of them
may be. A company in which free utterance is the rule is soon mastered
by base interpretation of the noblest lives, and it is to guard against
the effects of this hydrostatic law of ethics that churches and temples
have been erected. There the awe of a higher power and the conventions
of worship conceal the inevitability of the law, and save the shyer
natures for brief periods from the evil influence of the bold. The most
masterful religions have always provided permanent refuges for the
finer spirits who dread conflict with the unscrupulous wit or power of
the world, and who know how in a struggle of speech or action or even
pure thought the wielder of the fouler weapons wins. It has been the
rule throughout civilised history that the greatest characters, if
they cling to moral principle, at last withdraw into solitude partial
or complete, and become the sages of the world; if they remain in
action and succeed, the necessity for further success drives them to
accept the moral level of the lowest they have to struggle with; for if
immoral men of less intellectual power overcome them, defeat means to
them ultimate exhaustion of the soul; nothing bleaches the faculties
and reduces them to the common level like failure after failure.
However great a hero may be to begin with, success in action closes his
moral career, whilst failure closes his intellectual. To die in his
first great victory is the truest happiness that can befall him.
In fact the Limanorans came ages before to see that all public life
with its competitions and ambitions, social, artistic, political,
military, meant the triumph of cunning or force; it meant the
retrogression to the nakedest savagery hidden underneath the gewgaws
of civilisation. No real advance could be made by any form of humanity
so long as its ablest spirits were drawn into the furious struggle for
glory, in which the cruellest and most audacious cunning was bound
to win. The founders of new religions and new philosophies have been
strong spirits who saw the foul imbroglio before them in public life
and shrank back from it. The first aim of the Limanorans, when once
they had rid themselves of their more degenerate brethren, was to
abolish this contest of might and cunning, and turn their stronger
spirits to the true progress of themselves and their race. And little
difficulty was experienced in accomplishing this most fundamental
reform; the island had been purged of the furiously ambitious, of all
who longed for the naked palæstra of civilised savagery. They knew
better than most men how much of the essence of life was competition,
how necessary to all progress was the struggle for existence, how
fundamental was the law of the survival of the fittest. But they
realised vividly that nature unguided often chose false directions,
that the struggle may be in a myriad various arenas that differ greatly
from one another in nobleness or baseness, that the law if left to
itself might lead to the survival of the fiercest or cunningest or
basest according to the conditions that were to be fitted. The will
of man could work on the conditions, so elevating the struggle and
leading the law to a nobler issue. They did not, they could not, put
an end to the struggle. What they did was to withdraw it from false
grounds and false aims, and guard it from any appearance of the lower
nature, sensuality, cunning, or force. The competitive energy in every
Limanoran’s nature was bent towards his own future and the future of
his race, and strove to surpass the past, if it were great and noble,
and to cast it out, if it were base and threatened to reappear. To
strive upwards, to help the whole people to progress, these were the
aims that transformed the everlasting struggle and the ever-working law.
This revolution in existence accomplished, and public life having in
consequence vanished, there ceased all need of social display, of
conversational fireworks, and of tact in managing men either singly
or in masses. The object of gregarious education disappeared at once.
As long as the coarse and selfish struggle called public life was the
highest sphere, they knew the youth had to be trained for it, its
methods and aims had to be adopted, and schools and universities were a
necessity, as miniature reflections of the greater world. In order to
succeed in life they had to be rolled together and tumbled against one
another like pebbles in a stream till they had taken the conventional
smoothness of outline and similarity of sheen; they had to learn to
keep the wild beast in their hearts and the silken courtier in their
manners, to cloak untruth and hypocrisy in an appearance of brilliancy
or wisdom, to make grasping selfishness seem almost divine love, and
brutal cruelty and arrogance the most dazzling refinement. It was
painful to read the flashy lies and stabs in the dark that went for
wit, and the cruel intrigue and showy falsehood that went to the making
of history, in those old times. Even the friendship of the foremost was
but a piece of acting; little trust could be put in it; it served its
purpose and was abandoned as soon as it failed to impress the dupes.
And solitaries then seemed useless, moping self-analysers; they made
no history and they were soon forgotten. No parents could afford to
let any one of their children thus lose his life; and, however gentle
and meditative he might be by nature, he must be thrust into the cruel
struggle of school and university in order to acquire hardness and
brilliancy; however virtuous and noble in purpose, he had to prepare
for the arena of polished scoundrelism.
As soon as these conditions of competition ceased, education in masses
had to cease too; it must be a miniature of the general life and a
preparation for it. At a distance and in a haze it seems as if the
immature in their sports were leading a life of primitive and happy
innocence; but innocence often accompanies untamed passion and fierce
emulation. The appearance of simplicity comes from their ignorance of
the advance of the world. Nothing did the Limanorans so shudder at
as the chance of perpetuating the methods and habits of this early
and undeveloped stage throughout later life. What their associative
education in former times had done for them was to confirm the vices
of savagery under the gloved conventions that civilised life demanded,
and to destroy the simplicity for ever. Solitary training under
the supervision of sages, they soon found, had the reverse effect;
it confirmed the naturalness and spontaneity, and swept out the
inclination to intrigue and arrogance and cruelty.
There was a childlikeness in their natures that gave great beauty to
their faces; and this they retained through the longest life and the
most absorbing work. If there was one quality more than others which
marked them as a race, it was their gentle and trustful outlook upon
life, their naïve candour and transparency of character, their simple
wonder and delight over any new discovery or invention. They never
grudged the quiet admiration any word or action deserved. They never
assumed that tone of superiority or sophistication, which, coming as
it does from envy, jealousy, or malice, mars all praise or blame. They
were children to one another in the limpidity of their life. And so
their features, which had not often the attractions of regularity, had
come to be transfigured by this single-heartedness; however old and
experienced and wise they might be, all possessed this divine beauty of
childhood. Sailors and backwoodsmen, men who have to spend long periods
of their lives in comparative solitude, away from the sophistications
of crowded life, often reveal traces of this childlike beauty of
nature and expression. And it was this peculiar educational system and
its long intervals of solitary meditation that kept the Limanorans
children, simple and ingenuous, till the day each vanished in the ether.
What deprived these isolations of bitterness was that one never felt
lonely nor abandoned by his fellows during them. In a moment, there
could be communication in thought or magnetic sympathy with his dearest
friends, and within a brief space they would be at his side. They often
resisted the associative impulse, through fear that it might be but the
return of the old immaturity in disguise; and they knew that friendship
was ever at call, and that all true solitudes deepened the current of
life.
As I came to feel the spirit of their existence, these arguments grew
self-evident; I saw how all-important to progress were these intervals
of isolation. They had studied with the minutest care and ultimate
shuddering the features of their old civilisation, and they had found
that the worst of them came from the associative principle in the
training of youth. Atavism became their greatest horror; in the breast
of every child born into civilised life an embryo savage is born, and
this had been vitalised and fostered by sympathy with what was savage
in companions and schoolmates. Under their old school and university
systems the age of training was that which corresponded to the military
stage in the development of man; and boys were for ever fighting, girls
ever encouraging to fight; emulation became fierce rivalry and hatred.
A crude stage of the past was confirmed and perpetuated through life
by constant association in the time of life that stood for it. That
was why their leisured classes had so devoted themselves during peace
to the wilder sports of the hunting stage of mankind, whilst they were
ever itching for war that their sons might distinguish themselves.
That was why they had indulged so often in breaches of the marriage
bond, and outraged the monogamy that they professed to revere; the
minds of the youth had been inflamed by the free proximity of the
sexes before the passions had been mastered, before the polygamous and
unmoral stage of their career had been passed through. And education,
instead of checking the perpetuation of these immaturities, encouraged
it. Teachers had come to pride themselves in the development of these
savage stages of boyhood and girlhood, and called the weaknesses
by euphemistic names, pluck, pride, grace. The young men and women
were taught to glory in them. And thus evil became eternal. In more
primitive life, there had been of necessity a wiser method of training.
There were no large centres of population where their youth was massed
in schools and universities. Families wandered or rested by themselves;
and the hardships of existence ensured the survival of the few that
were fittest. These few had from their earliest years to join their
elders in their pursuits, and they learned in such society to pass
rapidly through the primitive stages of man’s development, emulating
the skill of their betters and following them with modesty and
reverence. In the later industrial and centralistic ages the youth had
to be massed educationally, and by the mutual encouragement of sympathy
came to glory in their immaturities as perfections, and desired to
prolong the savage stage of their life into later years. They judged
their elders by false and atavistic standards and so lost their
modesty and reverence. It was only an occasional wave of lofty feeling
issuing from some inspired poet or prophet that raised one generation
above the preceding. For centuries and centuries they stood still or
retrograded. Crimes were sanctified in war and politics; the evil past
became a fetich; impetuosity, anger, hatred, revenge, falsehood, lust,
were tricked out in the apparel of virtues, and made the aims and the
glories of the leisured. It was the associative method of education
that produced such results. And, after the great purgation of the race,
they were amazed to see how blind they had been. Would any civilised
parents agree to send out their child into the wilderness there to
spend the educable period of life amongst savages, primitive in their
instincts and habits, even if the savages had the most persuasive and
influential missionaries amongst them who would change them in a few
years into civilised beings? Yet this was what their ancestors had been
doing when they concentrated youth in schools and universities.
Never before the age of twenty-five were the Limanoran youth allowed
any freedom of social intercourse, and then only for brief periods and
under the supervision of sages. And if there was any sign of atavism
apparent in them at their first draught of social life, back they were
sent into isolation, that their character might be strengthened, and
the stage of peril passed. Even when socially enfranchised, their first
companions had lived beyond their fiftieth year. By that boundary-line,
it was held, all the risk of atavism had passed, and all the chances
and possibilities of the character had been discovered and provided
for. It was not till the seventy-fifth year that anyone was supposed
to be fit for parenthood; for then, though the faculties and powers
still went on improving even till death, most of them had reached the
maturity of self-control and intersubordination; then reason had begun
to be master, and all the stages of the development of man before the
final purgation of the race had been traversed.
Only a few years before this epoch in their lives were they permitted
to look into the deeper mysteries of existence. They thought it one
of the strangest pieces of inversion, if not desecration, to place
religious ideas, as we did, before the youngest. Nothing but evil
could come of such an attempt. With the Limanorans it was the final
initiation into life to acquaint their grown men and women with the
sublimest thoughts and doubts and emotions on the purpose of existence;
it was the copestone of their education; after all the field of
knowledge had been traversed by them and all the reverences had been
instilled into them, the last reverence was revealed to them. Then and
not till then were they capable of realising its fulness. Communicated
in childhood or early youth, before the powers were mature, before
the animal and savage stages of development had been gone through, it
could end only in gross familiarity or gross superstition; the noblest
and most inward of thoughts and emotions would be misunderstood. What
was it that had made their old religions so stagnant, so obstructive
to all advance, but this mistaken principle of attempting to teach the
holiest and deepest ideas to the young! It made their ancestors cleave
to crude superstitions as if divine and refuse to give up any item of
their childish ideas of them. So thoroughly are the sources of our
youthful impressions lost in the mists of the past that any connected
with reverence seem to come from the divine eternity beyond birth.
CHAPTER V
JOURNEY TO THE VALLEY OF MEMORIES
ONE of the things this people feared most was enslavement to the past;
and I was encouraged to strip my mind of all sentiment connected with
the life I had led before my arrival and all superstitious devotion to
the historic. Bury the dead past, was one of their primary maxims. Nor
would they permit religion or any other conservative element to hallow
tradition. The world is well quit of what it has been, was another of
their sayings. They seemed to look upon the past as a fierce pursuer
ever ready to overtake and strangle them. Out and away from it were
they ever hurrying. It was the dark shadow over existence. And into the
future, into the future and the sunshine, they cut their way through
the thick tangle of life.
I was much surprised, then, after I had been admitted to the full
confidence of my proparents, to hear them refer with pleasure, if not
joy, to what seemed nothing but a glorification of the past. The name
Fialume came repeatedly into their conversations with each other till
at last it roused my curiosity. There was something imaginative in the
ideas connected with it; it never rose to their lips without bringing
into their eyes a beautifully piteous expression that bordered almost
on the ecstasy of joy. They saw that they had piqued my curiosity; and
before I had asked them they gave me the information I desired. The
word, Fialume, translated, meant “the valley of memories.” It was the
great library and university of the island. There the second stage of
education was largely passed. If by the age of fifty all superstitious
veneration of the past had been eradicated from the nature of the new
citizen, he was led to this valley day after day, month after month,
until he had seen the career of the race, and had grown familiar with
the steps of its development; he learned to shudder at the darkness
out of which it had come, and to watch with joy the growing light and
the fleeing shadows as it neared the present. Thus did he learn true
gratitude for what he was, and true reverence for the future towards
which they were all striving. I was not yet fit to enter the precincts
of the valley. I had still too much of that anguished yet exquisite
homesickness for my own past to be trusted with insight into a past
that might seem great to me. And yet my probation would be shorter,
as my buried world was so different from theirs; there would be less
danger of superstitious reverence awaking in me for any of their old
stages or antiquated institutions, and no danger of Ayala stirring
my idolatrous devotion. This new word puzzled me, they saw. And they
explained that it was but the older name for the same valley; it meant
“the resting-place of the untrammelled.” In fact, their great library
and university was their graveyard too.
Years passed in happy renovation of my whole being, body and soul. As I
looked back I began to shudder at the past out of which I had come, its
low ideals, and its still lower planes of living; it seemed centuries
behind me and not mere years; it had grown into a murky cloud on the
far horizon. I could see how often I had been on the verge of despair
or disease and began to know the blindness and ignorance that had been
almost the air I breathed. I shrank in horror from all I had been; for
I could examine the poor fabric of it almost microscopically now. There
was little fear indeed of my ever longing for what I had left behind me.
Thus at last there came the supreme moment that I had laboured for. I
was to be permitted to visit Fialume. I shall never forget the day.
I had swept out of my mind analogies for their great graveyard from
the doleful surroundings of death to which I had been accustomed in
my native land, the long train of mourners, the ghastly hearse with
its burden of mortality, the unkempt grass of the place of tombs, the
dreary wait beneath the unsympathetic sky; and then the rattle of the
clods upon the coffin-lid, and the frantic effort to drive from the
soul the thought of the gradual corruption of the body and the final
residue of skull and bones. Years though I had been in Limanora, I had
never heard of a funeral. Indeed deaths were as rare as births in a
community that had striven to avoid the lavish waste of nature, and
had so studied the human frame as to know how to arrest decay of its
powers and to give every individual full possibility of developing
himself and through himself his race. The reckless and indiscriminate
bearings and dyings of the old world were no advance on the course of
the animal or even the vegetable sphere; the higher the organisation
the fewer the young and the greater the care of them. But man in other
lands had still, with all his thought and foresight, the extravagant
method of nature, and had increased and multiplied without stint in
order that an occasional exception might help by favouring conditions
to lead the race onwards and perhaps upwards. Thousands of Alexanders
and Cromwells, of Mahomets and Socrates, of Homers and Dantes and
Shakespeares had lived and died unknown, because they had not been
born into the circumstances which fitted their peculiar faculties.
This people had seen that the method of nature was haphazard, if not
heartless, that the rate of progress could be indefinitely accelerated
if every child that was born were born with a definite purpose, and his
life were guarded and extended till that purpose was fulfilled. They
meant every act of generation for a definite advance. Birth and death
were in the hands of the race and not of chance, and thus it was that
I had never seen or heard of obsequies during the many years of my
probation.
So my difficulties were solved by my guardians before we set out for
the national place of tombs. Yet my curiosity was as active as before.
This was the beginning of a new epoch in my new life. How could its
wonders surpass those of the past years! And I was all eagerness to
study the past history of this noble race, to study the gradual ascent
to the height they had now reached.
The whole atmosphere was jubilant as we rose into its upper levels
and thrilled with light and electricity; even unseen living forms
from other stars mingled with the sunlight that supplied so much for
the support of our being. There was not a cloud to mar the purity of
the ether, inspired with wandering breaths of wind. We rose joyous
and bright under the gleam of the sun, I alone having my exhilaration
somewhat dashed by the consciousness of my laggard gait; for my limbs
were not yet light enough, my arm and leg muscles not strong enough,
to accomplish any but the briefest journey upon wings, and that in the
most awkward and shambling way. I was borne in one of their faleenas or
weight-transference flies; it was one of the smallest, yet I had room
to move about freely in the car in spite of the baggage of the troop.
It was not unlike a huge tropical butterfly that I had admired in a
case in one of our museums; the car was long and narrow and pointed
like a boat at either end; from each side stretched out wings that were
enormous beside the body they carried; and these, rainbow-hued, seemed
to fill the whole air through which we passed with a solid gleam,
so quickly did they shuttle up and down; aft extended slantwise two
great antennae-like shafts that moved hither and thither to defeat the
baffling puffs of wind and so direct our flight; along the keel lay the
engine that produced the beat of the wings, silent and motionless as
if it were but a shaft that strengthened the framework. There was no
vibration, in spite of the great speed of the faleena. A huge awning,
so high above us as to be out of reach of the wings at their fullest
stretch, seemed to hold us easily aloft at whatever level we desired,
and to let us gently down whenever the wings beat slowly enough to be
seen as they moved up and down. It was in one of these slow movements
that I discovered the principle of these sails; they were made of
the wonderful metal, irelium, and had its properties of lightness,
tenuity, and strength; I had noticed as they flashed solidly through
the air that there was an alternation in the flash of greater or less
sheen; I now saw that each wing consisted of two fine plates of open
scroll-work sliding over one another back and forth; in the upward
stroke the holes were open so that the air passed easily through,
and the whole expanse looked like a delicately reticulated fan; in
the downward stroke the upper plate so slid over the lower that the
apertures of both were completely closed, and the wing formed a solid
sheet of metal. I afterwards saw how simply this was accomplished.
The under irelium network had but one motion, that on the hinges
attached to the side of the car, but it had grooves on its fore and
aft edges; into these, corresponding projections on the upper network
fitted, moving in them easily by means of small half-hidden wheels;
this upper plate was attached to independent hinges on a long rod that
was drawn back and forth about half an inch by a connection with the
driving engine; its motion, however, was completely controlled by the
ligatures that drew the wing upwards and downwards, so that they should
ever be in harmony, and the closing of the pores should occur only
at the beginning of the downward beat, and their opening only at the
beginning of the upward beat. The effect to the eye was very beautiful;
the transparency of the metal let the coloured light of the sky shine
through it even when solid; but when reticulated the azure seemed to
form into a flashing loom of the finest lace. I could not cease gazing
at the ever-shifting lights that played through the embroidery of the
wings. It was pleasing to the ear as well: for the whirr and creak
that usually accompany the flight of great birds and the movement of
machinery were used up as undertones to a grand but simple musical
march that seemed the very spirit of the beat of the wings.
For a time these sights and sounds held me entranced, so that I was
scarcely conscious of our ascent. When the power of the charm had
freed my senses, I looked down, and my heart leapt into my mouth;
eagles being swept from the island by the blast of the storm-cone
appeared to me as flies crawling over the sun-glitter of the houses
below or on the snows of Lilaroma. I shrank back breathless at the
sight, and imagined myself falling down this heart-sickening distance.
Then the almost irresistible desire to throw myself into this abyss
came over me, and I clutched at the framework of the car that I might
not yield to this feeling.
I had forgotten my companion for the time: one glance at her drove the
terror from my mind. I saw the beauty of the benignance that shone
upon her face, and my spirit nestled in her protecting smile that
had interpreted aright the horrors of my thoughts. I was not merely
thankful that I had not been alone with my terrible longing: I could
almost give my life up to this being who swept out my fear by the
loving-kindness of her glance. My guardians had been unwilling to trust
me alone in the faleena, even though the engine and the machinery were
simple enough to have been managed by a child. So they sent with me
Thyriel, who, I long afterwards found, had been selected by the sages
as my spiritual twin as soon as they had tested my past history, my
faculties, and my possibilities. None other in the whole community was
so fitted to stimulate my best qualities, to be preferred by me as
intimate friend and comrade or, if passionate emotions followed the
same direction as friendship, to mate with me as parent or proparent,
when full maturity had been reached. This I came to know only when
all had fallen out as they had anticipated and desired. We were both
allowed our full option and free will in our spiritual approaches and
agreements: we were not forced into each other’s company, only when
opportunity for mutual protection or confidence came were we paired for
the venture. Everything issued as they had planned just as if we had
had no free choice in the matter, and yet our impulses felt as free as
if we had been the only living organisms in the universe. We chose with
a passion that would not be denied; we were willing in our freedom of
attraction to surrender life and all to each other.
This flight was one of the first great adventures on which we were
together, and it is graven upon my very heart. Thyriel, O Thyriel,
I await thee with soul weary of waiting! What are the years now but
centuries without thee? I am alone but for God and thee. It is the only
consolation of my soul that thou risest ever towards God and livest in
God, and that I rise and live with thee.
It is exquisite pain (and delight too) for me to tell of that flight
into the ether; for then I first realised how incomplete was the sum of
my existence without this being. She was so gentle and yet so strong,
so full of eager sympathy and yet so vigorous of character. She knew
every weak point in my system, and bent herself to correct its weakness
or protect me from its effects without making me conscious of her
sacrifice. With power that I could not but acknowledge as the superior
of mine, she played the companion and equal. I could have worshipped
her almost as a divinity; but she modestly bent herself to my level,
and veiled her superiority in her childlike playfulness. I shrank
in fear from the implied familiarity, and could not bring myself to
recognise except intellectually the common humanity and the difference
of sex. For years I felt too much adoration to pass into love. It was
indeed long before I could admit myself capable of her friendship.
But gradually she led me to put more confidence in my powers, and to
recognise the superiority of some of them. My intellectual admiration
took a warmer glow that soon fused our intercourse into the most
devoted friendship. So braced were we by our mutual help in our common
pursuits that we seemed helpless, the one without the other. Yet the
sense of sex was not stirred for years after the bond between us had
grown inseverable.
It was this flight that first awakened me to the wealth of her nature
and her immeasurable power and desire of self-sacrifice. Like her
people, she had none of the statuesque beauty or moulded regularity of
feature that has swayed the thoughts and passions of European sex; but
the spirit that shone through made the face divine. I rested almost as
in a dream, as I felt the benignance of her soul; and before long I was
able to look calmly over with her at the increasing depths of light
through which we had come. Below us we saw valley and hill pearled with
the gleam of wide-scattered houses; we could see the flash of streams
and rivers as they broke through the darkness of forests or fell in
snowy cascades; and around the coast the sea spun for the black fringe
of rock a moving thread of surf. Around us rose the carolling of many
voices to the gates of heaven. Song after song, anthem after anthem,
burst forth from the various groups of our comrades. Buoyant were they
as thistledown, revelling in the pure serenity of the upper air. For
very joy I could have thrown myself among them and joined the harmony
of their flight; but her glance was upon me, and I returned to thoughts
of prudence.
She showed me why we had risen so high into upper air far above most of
the Limanorans who were flying with us. These faleenas could not adapt
themselves to the varying winds as the human figure and arms could when
managing wings. They had to rise into the regions of calms or of steady
winds, in order that they might float by power of sail down to their
destination. What seemed a mere awning acted in two ways; it served as
aëroplane to steady the whole structure in the air and as parachute
when it began to descend; and could be inflated with heated air, to
help the wings in raising the faleena upwards. She pointed out in the
far distance below us a gleaming line that marked the valley towards
which we were voyaging, and then looking at a height-gauge that hung
beside her steering-seat and at a wind-gauge that stretched over the
side of the car, she decided by a brief calculation that we had reached
the proper key-place of the arch we were making in our journey, and
that we should by changing our course wing our way with ease down to
the desired goal. She touched a notch in the side of the car and above
there sounded a flute-like note, that, varying in strength and pitch,
made no disharmony with the music of the wings. I looked up and there I
could see the awning gradually collapse; it had bulged downwards, I had
noticed, in a strange way; the tenseness of its curves disappeared, and
as we began to fall, it became concave, and broke the velocity of our
descent.
The wings still plied with bewildering swiftness of beat, and forced
us onwards as we shortened our distance from the earth. We still could
hear the music of our comrades, but so softened by the long space
between that I could have imagined it the spheral harmony of orbs
which circle round the throne of God. But I could see them, dim flakes
of light in the azure as they outdistanced us, the few laggards that
had skimmed above us for a short time still showing the outlines of
their forms, yet rapidly lessening into star-specks. I was gazing out
at them with the exhilaration of the outlook and of the ether in my
blood, when the wings suddenly began to labour with short, irregular
beat. I glanced at Thyriel. She kept her face unmoved, as she examined
the engine beside her and the various keys and wheels and hinges of
the machinery. I took courage, for she looked quite unconcerned, yet I
could see that she had not discovered the cause for the uneasy motion
of the wings. She told me that she would have to examine the outside,
but that I might keep my mind at peace, for there was no danger. She
adjusted her wings and dived from the side, then rose to our swiftly
descending faleena, and by the strength of her muscles seemed to stay
the descent, while she looked at all the gearing of the sails from
below. Then she climbed into the car, and began to work at a small pump
in the forepart. I ran to help her, and in a few minutes I felt the
faleena buoyant again and holding its own against gravitation; we had
refilled the balloon of the awning enough to keep her afloat. Thyriel
stopped the engines and let the sails lie lazily out on the same plane
as the car, then she fastened a cord to the bow and, having adjusted
her wings again, seized the cord and leapt over. I saw her purpose:
she was towing the maimed faleena through the air, still at a great
height from the earth. We were near enough, however, for me to see as I
looked over the danger we had escaped. We had been falling upon a group
of pinnacled and serrated rocks that would have gored our vehicle and
endangered my life. Moreover, we were still a long way from Fialume.
Thanks to the cessation of our music, the attention of the distant
aëronauts was drawn to our laboured flight. It was not half an
hour before we saw them hastening back to meet us like a swarm of
butterflies; and in a few minutes more they were beside us. I watched
their evolutions in the air with absorbed delight; and ere I knew what
they were about, they each held a cord from the bow of our faleena,
and Thyriel was on board with me directing our flight. How loud their
chorus sounded now that they were near! They timed the beat of their
wings and the straining of their cords to it, and we sped on our
downward way even more quickly than before. I did not know till long
after how great was the danger out of which I had escaped. Yet I was
conscious of my comrade’s courage and that to her I owed much. It
brought us closer together in spiritual friendship, and we seemed to
feel ourselves singled out of mankind for mutual confidence.
CHAPTER VI
FIALUME
I WAS revelling in the thought of our comradeship and in the
exhilaration of the motion through the air, when the chorus began to
soften. It sounded far off, like the echo of an echo, and out of the
distance rang notes of welcome. Our company burst out of their low
tones of pleading into loud triumph and joy. Then came the whispered
softness of their former song; answered softly as if from the hollows
of the earth. This swelled again into welcome, and the air rang with
notes of joy.
My eyes followed our route; and beneath us I saw a huge valley forested
to the ridge on either side and spanned with a glittering roof that
turned the light of the sun into myriads of many-coloured gems. Over
the cliffs or in through the olive-green or blossoming trees swept
streams with rainbowed cascades, covering the vast dome with spray
till it seemed an arch of ice that melted in the sun. We made for the
entrance of the gorge, out of which fumed and fretted through gates
of pinnacled rock a milky torrent. Borne on mighty pillars of limpid
metal rose a great archway; and this enclosed lesser semicircles
spanning the various roads that led into the wild tropical scenery
of the dale. I never saw such an impressive spectacle beneath human
roof. Cataract rose above cataract in the centre. On all sides fell
miniature cascades, or rose fountains that sent in wayward clouds their
breaking water-spears and flags. The flowers and shrubs and trees of
every climate under heaven seemed to be collected here, and to blend
in marvellous harmony of colour. Cool winds blew from hidden sources
wafting the fountain-spray or the odours of the flowers about us. The
beating rays of the sun were softened by the stream-cooled dome; and
out of some cave or hollow in the far distance came the murmur of
entrancing music.
We had descended and passed far within the wondrous structure before I
could recall my senses from their bewildered enjoyment of the scene.
Then I saw that our company had parted in various directions, vanishing
in groups or pairs, round a verdant cliff or into some overarching
bower. I was left alone with Thyriel. The sudden loneliness of the vast
valley-hall made me feel the delight of having her spirit to lean upon.
In spite of the companionship of the flowers and the close ranks of the
forest, I felt the great spaces of the valley solitary because of the
loftiness of the roof, like the arch of night making space seem more
vast than under the warm, indefinite sky of noonday. Bewildered and
alone, my thoughts sought the shelter of friendship.
Not long had I felt this consolation when both of us were in the shadow
of a nobler and more mature personality. He came I knew not whence,
and the suddenness of his appearance added to the awe I felt at once
for his character. He was, I was certain, one of the sages of the
community, so deeply had the centuries engraved their experience upon
his face and spirit. There seemed to come from him even before he
spoke or recognised our presence a benign and godlike influence, and I
knew at once the greatness of his soul. There were the lines of long
struggle and complete self-mastery upon the countenance like the curved
stratification and cleavage of the older rocks. He had not to speak
before I had surrendered myself entirely to his guidance. He who had
seen so many hundreds of years pass over the earth and learned all the
lessons they had to teach was the natural master of two such novices
in life as we were. For I now felt that, however superior Thyriel was
to myself in instincts and development and beauty of soul, she was
completely overshadowed by this spirit of centuries.
Yet when he spoke to us we felt that he had still the elasticity of
youth about him; he had in his words and actions the rapid recoil
of healthy tissues that have a long career before them yet, and in
his faculties and ideas there was still the unlimited capacity of
development. After explaining that he was to be the interpreter of
this house beautiful for us, he led us by a maze of paths through the
blossom and the verdure to an open space, from the centre of which rose
a noble flight of steps flanked by porticoes and colonnades. These we
ascended, resting at times on broad platforms, and looking out on the
fairy scene that more and more unfolded itself to our eyes.
At last we stood on the highest platform, not many hundred feet from
the gleaming roof. He touched a spring here and there, and out of
the tessellated floor came rests that moved automatically with the
movements of the head and eyes; wherever I gazed as I reclined thither
my rest wheeled round. This I afterwards discovered was managed by
hidden springs in the groove in which the head rested. These were
rests of observation, and the purpose was to allow of the whole energy
and consciousness being directed into one channel, that of vision. The
numberless easy methods of rest and motion that this people used would
have certainly induced sloth and luxury but for their inherent energy
of nature. To them these methods were but economisers of the time and
power which might be spent on less routine work.
I soon saw that the valley ran more than a score of miles into the
heart of the mountains, its deepest hollows rising now by easy
gradations, again by bold platforms of rock far above the level on
which we rested. For the dome, I could now see, consisted not of one
span whose top ran horizontally along the ridges of the valley, but
of hundreds of spans that rose arch above arch up the slope of the
mountain. There was something in the terracing of the valley, too, that
suggested the hand of man. Nature’s work had been supplemented and
rounded by noble art. There was regularity in irregularity, statuesque
beauty amid wild grandeur. Human thought had utilised the massive
ideas of nature. The scene would have overawed the spirit and made it
solitary, but for the familiarity of minor features moulded by human
imagination that had not geological ages and forces at its disposal.
In amongst the greenery of the forest stood on lofty pedestals what
I took for memorial statues of the dead, with features so like to
life in every minute line and curve and even graining of the skin,
that I marvelled at such waste of human energy and imagination. My
guide soon saw my mental question, and showed me that they were the
dead themselves. The moment after every trace of life had gone from
the body it was ireliumised by an ingenious process; for every atom
of tissue and cell there was substituted one of irelium, and thus no
decay could approach it; it would retain for untold centuries the form
and expression of the vanished man down to the minutest detail. As
we passed farther back into the valley I noticed a difference in the
appearance of the statuesque dead; they had not the hues and expression
of the living, but were leprous white, as if hewn out of marble with
infinite care. I appealed to Oolmo, my guide, and he told me that these
were their dead as they had been preserved before the age of irelium
and the discovery of the process that rapidly changed living tissue
into this metal. At that period the body used to be buried for years in
stalactitic caves, where the percolation of the liquid gypsum turned it
after a time into a calcareous statue.
These caves ran into the mountain at the head of Fialume, and were now
used for converting traceries and forms too delicate to work in marble
into white stone. They made a beautiful contrast in ornamentation to
the rainbow-hued limpidity of irelium. The process had been too long
and slow for the petrifaction of the dead. And about the same time as
the method of extracting irelium from the rocks had been discovered,
the careful study of the petrifactive methods of nature had led to the
new and rapid process of immortalising the form and features of those
who had passed from life.
From our movable rests I could never have seen what all these statues
were. I would have said that this was the island’s great gallery of
sculpture. But there were other things that Oolmo pointed out to us
before he led us round this vast hall of his ancestry. He showed us
far back in the recesses of the valley up the slope of the mountain
what looked in the distance like a great settlement of some burrowing
animal. This was the oldest burying-place of the island, where had
been laid in apertures in the rock the urns that contained the ashes
of the dead; for they had brought the practice of cremation with them
in their primitive migration from the south. Then followed a period of
superstition and recession, in which the priests taught the sacredness
of the human form and its final resurrection and when they buried the
bodies deep in the earth beneath the urned rock recesses. A period of
reaction against religion followed, and sanitation became one of the
first essentials of the new scientific era. It was feared that plagues
would come from this old burying-place on the side of the mountain, if
the percolating waters brought the corruption of the rotting corpses
down into the valley. It was resolved that the remains of their
ancestors should be dug up and removed to a mound made for them on a
level with the sea. Then it was found that almost all the bodies had
become stone white as snow, for the calcareous percolations that came
along the surface of the rock down the hill had done their work, and
an accident in digging up one of the lower row of graves revealed the
marvellous stalactitic caves underneath. There had been a movement
towards a return to the practice of cremation, but it was stopped at
once by this discovery. The caves became the natural burying-place, and
out of them the dead were brought and erected in the valley when they
had turned into stone.
After we had viewed the whole scene from our platform under Oolmo’s
direction, he bade us enter a car that had sprung up at his touch. It
seemed made of gossamer, and I was afraid to enter it, till I felt
the toughness and strength of its material. It floated rather than
ran round the valley above the tops of the tall trees. I could see
no wheels, and there were no rails for them to travel on if it had
had them, nor had it any wings or sails like our faleena. At last I
saw that it was hung by a transparent cord of metal from some moving
force in the dome that to me was invisible. It was an electric car,
and electric currents bore it aloft and swept it along with lightning
rapidity. But a touch of Oolmo’s finger broke the circuit and stopped
it in a moment.
I was not long held by this new wonder, for beneath and around
stretched the great graveyard, that seemed a harmony of forest,
wild, and garden. We rested at intervals of a few miles on the lofty
platforms, descending the flights of steps at times to view the
statuesque dead and their surroundings. Here and there we came across
groups of young men and young women intently listening to strange
voices that seemed to issue from some hidden being within the statued
dead. These were students, and the sounds were the voices of the dead,
treasured up on fine tablets of irelium, which could either be read or
made to re-utter their recorded words. To me the silent bowed figures
of the living seemed the lifeless, the whispering dead seemed the
living. It was a piece of necromancy, I felt at first; and, but for my
questioning intellect, I should have shrunk back in fear. It is true, I
could not see the lips of the erect figure move, and when I gazed long
enough some tremor of the eyelid would betray the life of the listener;
but for the first few minutes the illusion was complete, and all the
surroundings, the stillness, the far echo of wailing music, the sombre
trees, seemed to confirm it. Every new group we encountered produced
the same eerie feeling.
But we passed on; and the joy which filled the spaces of the great
valley buried the sense of death. It was the least funereal scene I had
ever witnessed; for along the paths and wide tree-arched avenues went
bands of carollers singing songs of triumph and gladness, the air was
sweet with the perfume of flowers, and masses of varied colour broke
the olive darkness of the groves. The world was at once jubilant and
harmonious.
Farther and farther into the valley we flashed in our lightning car,
and even my inexperienced eye could see the change in the erect dead.
Many of the figures were taller; the attitude was often overbearing and
arrogant, and the expression was generally mean or cunning or truculent
like so many European faces when surprised in unconscious repose. The
farther we receded, the more familiar the forms and features seemed to
become, so like were they to the normal human beings of our Western
world. Animalism, sensuousness, rapacity, vindictiveness, cruelty,
fanaticism grew more and more frequent, the nearer to the primitive
graveyard we approached. At last on the faces of the dead that had
been dug out of their old tombs there was the manifest touch of the
ape, the tiger, the wolf, or the snake. I shuddered to see withal the
regularity of the features and the stature and grace of the figures.
They came nearest of all to the ideal beauty and the haughty bearing
of aristocratic Europe. It scarcely needed the explanation of Oolmo
to see that the body had then been developed at the expense of the
soul. Underneath the handsome and generous outlines lurked the beast
that had entered into the making of ancestry. Splendid animals they
had been; and, as our interpreter explained, given up to war and field
sports and at intervals debauchery, or to the over-reaching of trade
and money-making, or to the subtleties and falsehoods of political
life. They belonged to the age just before the great emigrations. As
we took our way back on the other side of the valley, I could notice
how rapidly these lordly animal forms disappeared, and yielded to the
compact little figures, irregular features, and divine expression of
face I had grown accustomed to in the Limanorans.
The dead were grouped in families and in order of time after the epoch
of exiling, and a student could trace the growth of a talent or virtue.
But many of the family groups were small; the line had suddenly ceased.
In these I could see after a time an occasional evidence of atavism in
the size or the sensuousness of the form, and the interpreter explained
how on the appearance of this recession the right of having posterity
had ceased, or expatriation had occurred. The general sense of the
unfitness of an individual for fatherhood or motherhood was too strong
in the community to need any expression in public resolve. Those who
felt this great misfortune fall upon them knew that their race must
be cut off; and they set themselves to eradicate the desire of family
life. If they could not eradicate it and at the same time make effort
to subdue their retrogressive tendency, they had to go into exile. At
first action on the part of the community had been needed. Now this
expurgative policy worked almost automatically and without friction.
When we had taken a comprehensive view of Fialume, we entered another
faleena, which had been substituted for our disabled car. We shot
farewell glances at Oolmo and were off in the air before I had well
disentangled my thoughts from the last sight. Below us receded the
massive archways of the door and the foaming streams at the entrance of
the valley. The jubilant music began to grow dim, and the dome shone
softly in the colours of the sunset. I thought we were to be alone
on our return journey, and began to question Thyriel on some of the
mysteries of the day. She had not much light to throw on them, for she
was herself a novice in life. But of a sudden like a flock of homing
pigeons a band of our comrades broke out into the level sunlight from
the mouth of Fialume; and along with them other bands that streamed
east and north and south. Before long the western train had overtaken
us, and their voices rang like carolling at heaven’s gate. They saw our
faleena land in safety at the house of my proparents, and then, joined
by Thyriel, they streamed away through the twilight sky, ever breaking
off into more and more widely separated groups till they were lost
across the horizon, or in the darkness of some distant valley.
Week after week, and at last day after day, we took our path through
the azure to Fialume. For several years under the direction of Oolmo
we became acquainted with the history of Limanora, and saw the gradual
development of the civilisation and of the human form and faculty. We
came to feel how naturally ends followed means chosen in the mind and
frame of man, as in the plant creation and in the other animals. We saw
how creative had been this community, not in the arts merely, but in
that art of all arts, human nature. They had moulded generation after
generation to higher and ever higher purpose. How poor and subsidiary
seemed all the sciences when compared with this great practical
science, the knowledge to mould man into any required form, to bend his
energies ever upwards! Every week there grew upon us the consciousness
that there was no more plastic material in the whole world than the
human soul, when it had reached a certain stage of development.
Oolmo traced for us each new faculty and power and virtue to its
starting-point, and showed us how feeble it was to begin with, and
how rapidly it grew when once artificial effort was turned upon it.
At first it was the physical powers that he drew our attention to; in
family after family, for example, he showed us how the capacity of
flight had been acquired, and how the human frame had gradually become
adapted to it; the body grew lighter, the shoulder and breast muscles
stronger, the bones hollower, the arms longer, and the legs shorter,
with greater strength at the heels.
He acknowledged that there was something peculiar in Limanora that
made this adaptation easier; a magnetism seemed to come from the earth
that made the force of gravitation less; there was also something more
exhilarating in the atmosphere and climate that differentiated it from
all other lands. This explained why I had so rapidly acquired the
tripping, noiseless gait I had so admired when first I saw Noola. There
had been a time in the history of the earth when the human body was so
light and agile in proportion to its size that a few coincidences in
nature, as, for example, the increase of swift land and tree enemies,
would have made it ultimately winged. That was the geological epoch,
when, after a period of great contraction and increase of density
(the period of the huge saurians and other monsters of the prime),
the orb had, through volcanic explosions within it and the impact of
myriads of aërolites on its crust, expanded its texture and partially
volatilised its internal elements. Since then it has been cooling down
within, and thus growing less in size, though losing none of its mass;
this can be seen in the twistings and foldings of the rocks and the
enormous wrinkles on its surface. The result has been that animals,
and men with them, have been growing heavier for their size. The
possibility of man becoming a flying race has passed away. Land and sea
animals have no longer the chance of developing into birds of the air;
and even some of the tribes of winged things have almost surrendered
their prerogative of flight; nothing but embryo and unused wings
remain to them. It is only in exceptional spots like Limanora, where
the magnetic conditions and the spongy nature of the interior of the
earth lessen the force of gravitation, that men could ever acquire the
power of artificial flight with any ease. By dint of the application
of enormous force, and of inventive mechanical power, men in other
lands may master the art of aërial voyaging; but it will never become
an accomplishment of the individual; there will be too much strain and
stress for it ever to grow a pleasant mode of travel.
Thus Oolmo flashed light upon the past and the future as we traversed
the groves of Fialume. We grew familiar with the great forces of the
universe, and their bearing upon the problems of mankind, and gained
the true perspective of existence. I felt that Europe was but standing
still, reform herself and advance in science and art and civilisation
as quickly as she might. European man himself was not progressing, but
only the external results of his individual efforts. It would take ten
thousand years for the huge nations of Europe to make the step upwards
that these islanders made in a day. Material progress meant nothing to
the Limanorans unless it meant also the progress of the men themselves
in capacity, in power of attaining higher and higher goals.
Year by year I came nearer to the special purpose of my education.
As we passed over the family groups of the island, and learned their
sciences and arts, both Thyriel and myself began to feel drawn to one
branch of investigation above all others. Every family had a special
department of the civilisation assigned to it, and for generations it
had cultivated this. To prevent narrowness of view in its members,
and to enable all to understand the value and purpose of the work of
each, a long tract of their youth was devoted to a bird’s-eye view of
the departments of human knowledge and progress. And, that no section
of life might be left at the mercy of accident, there worked with the
representatives of every family one or two supernumeraries. Thus new
blood was introduced, for the alien was generally chosen from a family
not even distantly connected, and had such a nature and temperament
as would be likely to lead to marriage and to the best results in
posterity.
There was one family grove to which I was specially drawn. The faces
of the dead seemed to me exquisitely beautiful; the natures that shone
through their petrified bodies attracted me with tenfold power. Every
day as I entered Fialume I felt inclined to bend my steps thither, and
the close of the day generally found me amongst them. Oolmo tried with
some amusement to himself to break me of the habit, which yet grew
stronger and stronger. And Thyriel showed the same tendency. Perhaps
one feature which gave great attraction to the place was its seclusion;
it was almost the only family grove that had not two or three studying
the records. Here we were generally left to our own companionship;
for Oolmo had often to go when we arrived there; and, with our common
tastes, we found the time far too short.
At last I came upon the explanation. We were studying the growth of
some feature through the generations, and I had remarked to Thyriel
how like she was to this family in character and appearance, when
suddenly the foliage parted near where we stood and disclosed three
figures, two of whom seemed to my undiscriminative eyes facsimiles
of the last of the group which had been ireliumised. The feeling of
worship was aroused in me, for I felt in them the beautiful nature
of Thyriel, and besides this the atmosphere of years and experience
mellowing it and making it seem loftier and more divine. The third was
different and yet as noble, and when I gazed into her face I found the
solution of a problem that had begun to perplex me, the source of those
characteristics of Thyriel which made her different from the two others
and from the family group. The last was her mother; the other two were
her father and aunt. This was the treasure-house and sleeping place of
her ancestry. Her own relationship had instinctively drawn her to it,
and my natural kinship with her had attracted me there.
We were now to begin the special study which was to make us useful
working members of the community, filling our own places in it, and
serving its great and final purpose with our own labour and thought.
Many years would we have to spend in this secluded grove mastering
the knowledge and achievements of this family. Its distinctive name
was Leomo, which meant earth-seers, and its department was the study
of the crust and inner movements of our orb. It was one of the
peculiarities of all Limanoran science that it was art too; nothing
was lost; every investigation or discovery or law had practical
issue; and it was the duty of the investigator to find out how his
work bore upon the progress of the race to its final aim. As I saw
farther and got deeper into this study I discovered that much which
had seemed purely speculative was most practical and relevant to the
purpose of the race. A shallow view would have rejected nine tenths
of it as useless application of the energies, as mere fancy thinking.
The wider my knowledge, the more my admiration of the far-sight of
these investigators grew. They seemed to me to have almost the gift
of prophecy as they looked at the facts they accumulated and the
conclusions they tried to draw.
It was easy to follow them for every generation had reduced the
ancestral writings and thoughts and achievements to the briefest
available form, and indexed all that previous generations had done. It
was the duty of every new student of a family, after he had finished
his general education and seen the advances made in other branches,
to bring all his ancestors’ researches and suggestions into relation
to these, and to place a brief account of them on record in the
latest phraseology and scientific light, so that any alien student
might read or hear with understanding. There was thus in every family
grove a summary of all that was known or achieved in its department
of science or life. And this great graveyard was also the library of
the race, so classified and summarised and indexed that any man could
take a complete survey of its contents in a few years. There was the
living index, too, available in every grove. Anything that was obscure
could be at once explained by the representatives of the family.
Besides these there were families whose duty it was to supervise the
relationships of the various sciences and branches; they could point
out to the investigators how far their work tended to overlap or
interfere, what was futile in their efforts, what directions had still
to be taken and what paths to be traversed. They permitted no piece of
work to be wasted; everything was correlated by them to the purpose of
the race and to its contemporary efforts. The boundary-lines of the
various departments were defined and mapped by them. They were the
organisers of research, the dividers and economisers of intellectual
labour.
But they themselves had their separate functions and duties. Some
had the faculty of order exceptionally developed; and they were the
classifiers of the community and of the work of the community. Others
had the logical powers in especial vigour; and they followed out
the philosophy of the race, the correlation of the ideas and of the
lines of reasoning. A third group consisted of those with a dominant
imagination; these looked into the future; they performed some of the
functions of imaginative writers in Europe, sketching out imaginary
routes for the race and for each family into the unknown; but they also
covered a much wider field; they put into form and expression schemes
and projects such as European men of action of the most romantic
careers have often attempted to carry out, but have seldom been able to
put into words; these were not allowed to interfere with action, but
the ideas, plans, and romances they invented and put into shape were
tested and accepted or rejected by the practical men whose sphere they
touched. Imagination, it was held by the Limanorans, was apt to be a
futile, if not mischievous, faculty through want of its being ranged on
the side of utility; and yet, if trammelled and yoked to the necessity
of practice in the individual, it came to be stifled. They specially
cultivated it in these families in order that it should have full scope
and development, but took care, by ranging these families with those
that superintend the purpose and progress of the race, that their
romances should have full relevancy to the goal of all their efforts.
Many of the projects and ideas which seemed at first the most fantastic
were found after many generations to be sound and most possible of
realisation.
One of the striking features of the civilisation was the complete
absence of a literary class or profession or group of families. They
smiled at the “pure frippery” of European literature, which used
imagination as a mere means of entertainment. It seemed a complete
inversion of the natural order of things to make that faculty which
was the prerogative of everyone who could speak, and the servant of
the highest purpose of life, into a special art to suit the pleasure
of the idler hours. They held that the man who had thought a thing out
could express it best. So they trained up every citizen to the fullest
power of lucid and final expression. In their language, so perfect was
it, there was one best way of saying a thing; and everyone who knew
the language aright and understood the thing could find this best way.
Style as a matter of mere expression they laughed at as linguistic
trickery; the force and life of everything lay in the idea, and the
expression grew out of that and was a part of it, as the colour was a
part of the flower. It was only a clumsy and inchoate language that
could admit of style or literature as a special art; and it was
trifling with one of the most divine faculties to prostitute it to the
entertainment of leisure hours; it was to class imagination with the
arts of the mimic, the buffoon, and the juggler.
Art for art’s sake, one of the latest creeds of the writers of Europe,
was to them almost blasphemy. It made the garment of ideas, the garb of
human progress, into a separate entity, and the servants of God into
the tailors of human folly, the dress more than the figure it clothed
and the body more than the soul. Literature without the intensity of
the loftiest purpose of the race was but a tinkling cymbal. Expression
was the gift of nature to every civilised man, and woe to the race that
neglected it in any of its individuals, the race that should divorce it
from its ideas, that let the men who write filch the glory of those who
think!
Like strong beliefs had they about the profession of teaching as
separate from parenthood and investigation. It meant disloyalty on
the part of most citizens to their most immediate duties. Who could
develop the instincts of youth and be so deeply interested in his
future welfare as those who were bound to him by the ties of nature?
And then, when he had matured and needed the wider education, who
could give it him so well as those who were most familiar with its
special objects and themes? If he was to follow the art and knowledge
of some other family, the sooner he went under the tutelage of its
representatives after his intellectual life began the better. The only
portion of their youth that the young men and women could spend with
profit under others than their parents or proparents was the period of
general knowledge, of summarising the results of the whole past. The
representative of one of the supervising families alone could give
with ease a survey of the whole field of knowledge and art and action.
They and they alone were in any way an approach to the profession of
teaching, and they were saved from the petrifying influence of pedagogy
by their wider duties in correlating the sciences and arts, the fields
of knowledge and action. Thus reason and the emotions were kept from
getting benumbed by the vanity of a too easy superiority. The beings
they pitied most in the world were the despot and the professional
teacher; for these get buried in unreality before the life is out
of them, and are so unquestionably supreme that nothing but what is
pleasing to their minds dare approach them. They fall out of relation
to truth, and it is difficult for them ever to regain that wholesome
fear of contradiction and that shyness before destiny which constitute
the essence of sanity; they have to become intolerant. The schoolmaster
soon becomes intellectually barren; the despot soon falls the victim
of luxury and of illusion. For the sake of the grown men and women who
might be sacrificed to it, as well as of the children and youth, they
abolished the profession of teacher. Individual training was the only
true foundation of a sound progress. Two might be permitted to form
a companionship in education and study, just as two might form the
friendship of marriage; but that was only when the periods of possible
atavism had been safely traversed. Nor must they be wholly given up to
their comradeship; the parental influence and solitude must continue to
govern their lives.
Thyriel and I had become educational companions and friends; but every
item of our education was supervised without our noticing or feeling
galled by it. There was no prying into details; but every change
in our character and every stage in our training was tested at the
periodical investigation of the citizens. Our parents or proparents
took the keenest interest in all that we did and all that we tended to
become.
Now, that our specialisation had begun, we were put wholly under the
care of Thyriel’s parents and family. I still returned to the home of
my proparents, but spent the hours of training with the Leomo. There
had evidently been discovered in the preliminary investigation of my
faculties some especially suited to the pursuit of earth-seeing. From
the beginning of my journeys to Fialume I had been attached to this
family of earth-seers, and the result confirmed the decision; my tastes
all developed in this same direction, and the more I penetrated into
the mysteries of the science and craft, the more deeply interested
in it I became. Every day, under the guidance of my new friends, I
listened to the voices of their ancestors stored up on irelium tablets;
for these tablets, when placed in a voice instrument, reproduced the
exact sounds which had engraved the letters upon them. Their written
alphabet was in fact a natural one; the letters were the forms produced
by the sounds themselves when uttered by an instrument that blew upon
loose particles of irelium arranged on a vibrating disc of the same
metal. By a simple process the particles, when they took their form,
were permanently fixed to the disc, which then became an everlasting
record, easily read by any Limanoran; or, when placed in the voice
instrument, speaking the words into his ear. This voice instrument was
a kind of organ, whose minute keys and stops were easily controlled by
the ridge of letters.
I ever preferred to listen to the records of the past instead of
reading them; for I never attained great facility in deciphering the
letters because of my own long familiarity with the English alphabet
and writing. But Thyriel could read the tablets with great ease; I came
to prefer her reading to the sound of her ancestors’ voices although
these gave fuller meaning to the ideas they communicated, and it was
pleasant to feel that she was listening with me and not tiring her
throat. Our minds seemed to become one, as we sat silent and motionless
with ears intent on the statue of some one of her forefathers. There
was a strong magnetism from the dead minds gradually welding our souls
together.
Yet there was nothing personal or emotional in our studies. For years
they were chiefly historical, watching the growth of earth-science
through the generations, seeing the share that each member had in its
development. How little they knew of it even up to the time of the
exilings! The earliest ancestors groped amongst barren facts and their
classifications. They named the rocks and the elements of the rocks,
and speculated on the order of their formation; they told the story of
the growth of glaciers in the original Antarctic land from which their
ancestors had migrated, and tried to explain the origin and development
of the strange archipelago in which they lived. But they saw no
practical application of the resulting theories: even when they knew
the stratum and its trend, they often failed in their directions as to
where certain minerals would be found in it.
Still the strides made by the family both in the knowledge and its
application were marvellous, since the island had been purified and
the true purpose of their civilisation was known. An instrument that
I had grown accustomed to during the previous or general stage of my
education enabled me now to see at a glance the improvements of each
age or generation. It was the ammerlin, which might be translated
historoscope. It focussed for the eye and ear any periods of the past.
The whole pageant of some section of the history of any man, science,
or object could be flashed stereoscopically in a few minutes on a dark
surface, whilst all the sounds that accompanied the scenes would be
reproduced in any required pitch and tone. It was one of the duties of
the students and representatives to take numberless sun pictures and
sound pictures of all the important scenes in the life of the family
and in the development of their science and art and instruments. In
order to reproduce any scene, the two long strips of irelium that
contained the series of momentary pictures of it were made to rotate
as swiftly as they had rotated when receiving the impressions, and the
sun pictures being transparent, light and magnifying glasses threw them
life-size on a wall opposite the spectator; the lightning movement
produced the full effect of action in life; and, as all the tints of
the scene had also been impressed on the strips, there was nothing
wanting to produce the illusion of life but the voices and the sounds.
These, too, had been taken on an irelium strip and this, when placed in
a voice instrument, added all that was needed to make the whole scene
live. It was the duty of the students in each generation to single out
the most striking and representative series and have them ready mounted
in the instruments, that any new scholar might in a few days take a
bird’s-eye view of the whole development of the family. Thus was I
enabled to sit and study the past as if I had been a contemporary and
eye-witness of it. The very music that accompanied and harmonised each
act and scene was faithfully reproduced as loud or as low as I desired.
I had but to touch a certain spring in the historoscope, and raise or
lower the tone.
It was little wonder that we so rapidly covered the history of the
family and its achievements. By means of the work of former students
we were able to avoid all the mistakes and unessential details of the
route they had traversed; and Thyriel’s friends pointed out every
pitfall that edged the road, every by-path that led only into the
darkness or into some inextricable labyrinth. Our steps were watched
with infinite care; for, with all the knowledge and skill we had
already acquired, we were but infants on the threshold of a universe
of darkness. What was twilight in the future to our guides was to us
midnight blackness. That was no science, they held, which did not flash
light upon the gloom before us; and their whole efforts were bent on
turning every fact and law into a prophecy and every student into a
foreseer as well as a seer in his own science. The limited faculties of
man fenced in by narrow bounds the future into which it was possible
for them to see; but they were ever extending these bounds and creeping
towards the infinite.
It took but a few years to master the recorded lore of the Leomo, the
work of our predecessors had made it so easy, and it was an epoch in
our existence when we began the practical part of our training. We
were by no means done with Fialume, but less time was now devoted to
its historical and theoretical studies. I well remember the morning
when our guardians and guides informed us we were fit to see the
practical applications of the science throughout the island. Taking
some new apparatus, they embarked me in a kind of faleena which had
been invented since I came to the island. The families of imagination
had long ago suggested it, and one of the families engaged in the
development of methods of flight had just succeeded in perfecting
its mechanism and making it easy to manage. This aërial car had no
wings, but rose by means of the many vacuum tubes which were the most
important part of its impelling machinery. A powerful electric engine
created and destroyed the vacuums many hundred times a minute. Each
tube sucked in the air ahead and expelled it with great violence at the
stern of the car. Both actions aided in propelling the faleena. The
result was that, though not so graceful as the old winged car, it went
with much greater swiftness. Indeed, laden though we were, we kept pace
easily with the flight of my companions and guides through the air;
and its parachute attachments obviated any risk, even if all the tubes
should by accident become ineffective. Its chief disadvantage was that
it could not rise out of the denser air of the lower atmosphere, and
at the same time keep up its great speed. The old style of faleena, or
farfaleena, as it was called, to distinguish it from its new rival,
the corfaleena, was still kept in use for higher journeys, and the
flight-families set themselves the problem of inventing a means of
propulsion through space without the aid of air. One dealt with the
possibilities of electric currents, and experimented on the method
of alternating attraction and repulsion, using the repulsion in the
rear of the car and the attraction in front. Another dealt with the
possibilities of the rays of light that were ever traversing space,
experimenting on their power of starting machinery _in vacuo_ and
keeping it in rotation. A third made effort to test the capacities
of the ether, which was the basis and medium of all things, a more
difficult and problematical path of investigation, yet one not to
be abandoned without certain proof of its impossibility; for many
apparently insoluble problems had been solved in a manner that made
incredulity hide its head.
CHAPTER VII
LEOMARIE
AS I was attached to Leomarie or the science of earth-seeing, I did not
follow up their experiments in the building of air-cars; I only saw
the results when at last they came out perfect from their hands, and
greatly admired the easy and swift action of their corfaleena. Over the
hills and valleys and plains we flew close enough to see what was going
on upon the earth below. Again and again we passed over long wisps of
steam or columns of dense smoke. I conjectured that the steam indicated
the heat wells like that which penetrated the rock near the house of my
proparents, and supplied every chamber with heat or power as required.
It went down some miles into the crust of the earth, and could be
closed or opened at will by a huge lever worked by the steam it emitted
itself. The denser brooms of smoke I took to indicate the sinking of
their artesian power wells by the leomoran.
For I had seen ours being mined; I had seen the entrance of the great
irelium tube into the earth, ring within ring, and its slow but
inevitable work from day to day and week to week. The principle of
this leomoran or earth perforator had been found by investigation of
the anatomy and method of work of the pholas or rock-boring shell,
partly chemical, partly mechanical. The edge of the lowest ring was
like a sharp-toothed file that, as it rotated by means of power applied
from the centre of force, wore its way gradually into the rock, the
ridges of the file being as hard as the diamond. An inner ring-file
was attached to it on the inside, and between the two was let down a
certain chemical compound, which by the friction of the files produced
little explosions in the rock below and thus quickened the process.
Other ring-files followed in the same way. Another chemical compound,
differing according to the character of the rock to be attacked, was
let down in the space within the concentric rings, and rapidly decayed
the rock so that it ascended like a column of thick black smoke. After
all the ring-files were at work, the leomoran needed little guidance;
for by an application of the principle of the spectroscope, its use of
the chemicals according to the nature of the rock became automatic. As
soon as the volatilised mineral that ascended out of the rings changed
its character, the beams of light that passed through it changed the
spectrum; and the new spectrum influenced a certain solution that
controlled a thread, and this thread set free a stream of the proper
chemical compound down the leomoran.
A still more striking use of the spectrum was the linoklar or
spectroscope analyst and recorder. It analysed the vapours that
ascended from the tubes, and recorded their spectra on a moving strip
of irelium that was guided by the descent of the leomoran into the
earth. Thus anyone could see what strata were passed through in any
given time and the extent of the strata. But the linoklar did much
more than this; whenever it struck any vein that had the much-desired
irelium in it in any quantity, its spectrum released a spring which
opened a small tube; through this streamed the irelium vapour into a
cavity of the earth, where by means of a purifier it deposited only the
pure metal. There was less demand for the other metals, gold, silver,
platinum, tin, copper, iron. But there was also an arrangement for
separating and depositing their volatilised forms in other cavities.
Thus they were able to have more than they required of the metals, and
especially of irelium, the most precious because the most adaptable of
all.
I was now to see a further development of these mining instruments.
We winged our way to a part of the coast which was farthest from the
surrounding islands and most easily protected from invaders by the
storm-cone. I noticed the exceptional lowness of the sandy beach, as
shelving as that on which I had originally landed; there were none of
the great bastions of rock which, moulded with such symmetry of terrace
and escarpment, barred off all landing on the island. We directed our
course far up the mountain and alighted on a rocky platform overlooking
the sea. The new apparatus had been sent after us in a faleena and
was now placed in position. A cylinder was erected on the ground and
attached by machinery to wires and pipes that had been laid from the
centre of force. But this was unlike the old leomoran in having the
mouth tightly closed, and I soon saw the principle on which the new
perforator was to work. The air was exhausted in the cylinder, and then
a powerful stream of electricity was made to pass through a piston
constructed of innumerable wires which kept moving with lightning
rapidity over the surface of the rock at the bottom. The success of
the experiment soon manifested itself; for, as soon as a spring was
touched, a valve that separated the end of a projecting tube from the
air-tight cylinder was opened, and out streamed a dense column into
the atmosphere above. The spring was afterwards managed automatically
so that as soon as the red-hot electric piston had eroded enough of
the rock and volatilised it, the valve sprang open, and the moment
the vapour and smoke had all escaped, it was shut, and the air was
immediately exhausted.
We returned day after day to the place and found that the new
perforator, or tirleomoran as it was called, worked with ten times
the swiftness of the old instrument. The chief objections to it
were that the metal vapours were denser and more offensive, and
that the irelium cylinders had to be oftener renewed because of the
great friction and the intensity of the electric heat. The one was
obviated by a longer smoke-tube and an application of a vent of wind
from the storm-cone; the other was obviated by longer cylinders and
refrigerative packing between two of their layers of irelium. But
the strangest result--strangest for me at least--was to come. The
tirleomoran descended miles beyond the usual force well into the crust
of the earth, at a great rate of speed, and I soon saw preparations for
some change. Great channels of their usual metal were laid down to the
beach, and irelium barriers erected in the sea along the shelving shore
from bastion to bastion. By the greater rapidity of the descent, the
increase of the proportion of their favourite metal, and the ease with
which the electric current volatilised the material below, our guides
judged that they had reached rock that was already molten. Before long
there began to ooze out of the smoke-tube a red-hot stream, that
trickled its way down the slope. Then the air-tight lid was burst off
the cylinder, out of it came the electric piston on a wave of red-hot
lava, and down the channels the thick stream of molten rock flowed till
it reached the barriers in the sea. There with vast columns of steam it
cooled and solidified, forming a new and stronger rampart to check the
inflowing fire. Day after day we found that the beach was disappearing,
and in its place, when the steam cleared, we could see that the great
gap in the bastion-works of the island was filled up.
This was the first of their lava wells I had seen. Its operations
explained to me the massive symmetry of the rocky shores and the
cyclopean terraces and shoots down the mountain-sides, that had, I
thought, been either chiselled by tens of thousands of years of slavish
labour, or laid by the hands of a race of giants now vanished from the
earth. This little people was itself the Vulcan that turned the bowels
of the world into smelting-works and used the mighty forces lying
underneath the crust of our orb with the ease of a smith at his forge.
What had the Limanorans to fear from invaders with even the mightiest
war-engines that had ever been invented? They had made themselves
fortifications which would outlast the attacks of any human invention.
When the beetling circle of precipices was complete around their island
who could land troops, even if they evaded the blast of the storm-cone?
To the Limanorans themselves the height of their shores was no
disadvantage; in fact it gave them easy starting-points for their wing
expeditions; they could plunge from the jutting cliffs into the air and
so gain impetus for their flight.
Thus had they been able to destroy that spirit of militarism which,
after a certain stage, is the implacable foe of true progress. It is
based on two of the most childish and most primitive of forces in the
human breast, combativeness and the passion for display. Hence the
impossibility of stamping out the contagion. Ever and anon in the
former history of the island the age of peace seemed to have begun; but
marauders from abroad would land and stir the instinct of brigandage
and make an army and a military leader necessary. Thenceforward
again all the arrangements of the community were made subordinate
to the ambition of the soldier. An intrusion of savagery and brute
force, however veiled in glory and the panoplies of civilisation, is
irresistible by the powers of peace. Only slow and silent conquest of
the armed power brought back progress in peaceful arts again, again to
be maimed and thrown back from some external accident. Not that they
ever pretended that they could eject struggle out of their life, but
they did aim to raise the plane of conflict and competition. Never
could this people have entered on the rapid development of their powers
without their lava ramparts and their storm-cone to keep off all
occasions of militarism.
These lava wells had still other uses. Out of their flow were made
the rock foundations on which the houses of this people were built.
It puzzled me for years to know how they succeeded in making their
immense platforms and terraces out of the hardest trap. Their mansions
stood out from the precipices and cliffy sides of the mountain on
isolated plateaus that gave the inmates free view on every side and
free circulation of air around. They rose picturesque and romantic from
the top of lonely rocks, like the castles of the Rhine, dominating the
whole locality. Down the rocky foundations poured at times torrents
of water from the sluice-gates of the mountain, cleansing or cooling
the surroundings; yet never was there any danger for these everlasting
ramparts.
Another use to which these lava wells were put was to modify the
temperature. They were generally opened and let flow in the coolest
months of winter, and the red-hot cascades falling into the sea heated
it to such an extent that the climate of the whole island was mellowed
and tempered. From the wells far up the slope of the mountain the lava
flow had been so guided and moulded that immense channels had been made
down to the edge of the cliffs, with sides as lofty as the precipitous
shores themselves. Down these were shot in summer great avalanches of
mountain snow right into the ocean, so tempering the strength of the
summer heat.
But these were only subsidiary uses of the tappings of the central
earth fires. Their main and original purpose was to relieve the
perturbations of Lilaroma. It was one of the chief duties of the Leomo
to watch over the destiny of their island, which was volcanic in its
origin, though it had been greatly added to in former ages by the coral
insect. Lava-streams had overspread the coral, and then the myriads of
minute architects had thrust out their structures farther and farther
into the sea and thus the lowlands had been broadly extended, while the
red-hot layers of lava added massiveness to the body of the island. Yet
it was continually shaken by earthquakes and threatened with partial
if not complete disaster. It was the function of Leomarie to watch the
approach of these earthquakes and guard against them. The Leomo had the
most delicate instruments for recording every tremor of the earth’s
crust. They had also thermometers and electrometers down their heat
wells and lava wells, and these automatically recorded at the surface
every variation of the heat and magnetism of the earth. They had
classified through many centuries all the preliminary and concomitant
circumstances of earthquakes, and had found and formulated certain
causal relations amongst them. Thus the minutest symptom of change in
the records made by their instruments roused them to watchfulness. They
were soon able to tell in what direction the explosive materials were
accumulating and how far below the surface of the earth; then, when
they had fixed with more or less definiteness the time they had to
spare, they began sinking lava wells right into the perturbed lake of
fire. The vent acted as safety-valve; the shakings of the island ceased
as the steam roared forth, and the molten rock began to yeast down the
side of the mountain. All danger was past for another period of time.
Again and again throughout the past ages the Leomo had saved the island
from the ravages of earthquake and uncontrolled lava-streams from the
crater of Lilaroma. Never did they intermit their vigilance or cease to
advance their knowledge of the earth and its habits and laws. It seemed
to me at first that nothing could occur in the crust of our planet
which they would not foresee. I came afterwards to know the limits of
Leomarie, and the reasons why they pushed almost feverishly forward
to further knowledge. They were ever afraid that something unforeseen
might occur and threaten the stability of their land and the progress
towards the nobler life.
Once in the dark ages before the great exilings an appalling disaster
had occurred which ploughed deep into the consciousness of the people
the necessity for the development of this earth science. Their central
city stood upon a great plateau up the slope of Lilaroma. Within
recorded memory there had been no great outburst from the mountain; and
the inhabitants travelled fearlessly up to its rim and down the bowl of
its crater. At times there had been slight spittings of ashes and once
or twice a new fumarole or hot spring or even lava fountain had opened
at some point on the mountain slope; but these were all at a distance
from the bustling, luxurious city; and most of them had awakened slight
notice. The volcano indeed had been practically quiescent since the
great migration from the Antarctic regions and the sealing of the
archipelago by the circle of fog. The citizens were keeping one of
their annual feasts, and were lapped in luxurious ease and pleasure.
They had been exhilarated by a long period of prosperity and a recent
victory over the savage clan that inhabited one of the adjacent
islands. The country people and a number of hermits living in lonely
parts of Limanora had been alarmed by various premonitory symptoms,
sultry clouds turbaning the head of Lilaroma, tremors in the earth more
and more threateningly repeated, great and unaccountable disturbances
in the sea, and a hot, heavy, brooding atmosphere around the whole
island. Some of them came to the city and warned the revellers to be
prepared for some catastrophe; but they were waved aside as dreamers,
mere superstitious disturbers of life and its traffic. Half the city
was gathered together in the central market-place to see a great
spectacle, when the earth shook beneath them. They fell on their faces
and cried to their gods; but it was in vain. The market stood upon a
plateau high above the rest of the city, overlooking the ocean. Like a
cap this platform was blown into the air, and all the pleasure-seekers
vanished like smoke. Out on the sea and here and there on the land a
rain of dust fell mingled with minute pieces of human flesh; but never
was any one of the gathered thousands found; and as if to obliterate
the traces of her ghastly work, the mountain sent down a broad stream
of lava, which filled up the gulf where the market-place had been, and
sealed up the dust-buried city, preserving it for after-ages like a fly
in amber. Those who escaped destruction fled, some to distant parts
of Limanora, some to other islands; but all were buried for centuries
in grovelling superstition. It was out of the hermits and the country
people that a new nation was built up, which set itself as a first
duty to establish Leomarie, that it should not be taken unawares by
any repetition of this great catastrophe. Nor has it ever recurred,
although there have been many premonitory symptoms. The lava wells or
vents eased the labours of the internal fires and saved the island.
Their new and deeper wells, driven by the tirleomoran, and reaching the
internal fires, gave them greater sense of security. Irelium floats
were let down which would not be injured by the great heat, and these,
communicating with an indicator at the mouth, told of every disturbance
in the surface of the lake of fire. All the indicators were connected
with the centre of force, and automatically recorded there all they
had to tell. The same system of centralised record placed the various
indications of the climolans or earth-sensors at every moment ready to
the hand of the Leomo. These climolans were down every force-well and
told every variation in the heat, the density of the air, the kind of
vapour, the magnetism, and the movement of the crust of the earth.
No change in the earth below the island down to a distance of thirty
or forty miles (the latter the greatest depth they had reached) was
neglected. Every indication was properly tabulated and classified, and
year was compared with year and month with month, till the meaning and
importance of every change were exactly known. The furthest records of
the past, as well as those more recent, were daily consulted in order
to find the generalisation that would fit any new symptom. The Leomo
felt daily the pulse of Lilaroma as a doctor would that of his most
valued fever patient. They knew that they had the fate of the race in
their hands, and no indication was of too little importance for them to
consider. What would all the strivings and labours of the nation come
to if any laxity on their part should allow such a volcanic catastrophe
to recur as had destroyed the capital of old?
CHAPTER VIII
RIMLA
IN studying the practical aims and issues of earth science, I was
taught to manage their apparatus, and to interpret every tremor in the
earth’s crust and every indication of the instruments. I had already
been taught to make their apparatus, for my physical discipline had
begun several years before I was admitted to Fialume. It was in fact
one of their primary maxims that muscular exercises should go on
contemporaneously with intellectual and spiritual pursuits, that no
citizen should be allowed to neglect for even a day the development of
the body, intimately as the soul was interwoven with it. As soon as
I was thoroughly tested and put through my course of probation, the
training of my muscles was begun, and along with the magnetic moulding
of my brain-tissues went the development of the force-tissues of the
body and the powers of my senses. But no one was permitted to enter
their great practical university or workshop till he had become a
certain devotee of the race. The mysteries and arts and crafts which
gave the nation its peculiar powers could not be communicated to anyone
who might by some change become an alien. It was thus that many years
of residence in Limanora passed before I was admitted to one of the
marvels of the island, the great valley of Rimla.
I well remember the evening of my initiation. The night work was as a
rule done by the younger men and women of the community; the elders
took their turn at the machinery by day, as they had to husband sleep
during the hours of darkness and silence. I had often wondered whither
went my proparents at a fixed hour every day; they vanished in the
distance as the sun began to wester, and they returned at evening with
high colour in their cheeks and the look of having used their muscles
with a will. Their physical life seemed to take new impetus from these
expeditions.
One day on their return they told me that I was to be admitted to
Rimla, which they explained to mean the centre of force. The mature
judgment of the community had decided that I could now be fully
trusted. My practical and muscular education was to begin. I was to set
out that evening with a band of young workmen who kept the first watch
of the night.
The sun had scarcely set when my escort arrived; and, as with my slow
powers of locomotion I could not be expected to keep up with them,
I was placed in one of their flight-cars. I had no companion, for
the whole band flew in front and drew the car by some magnetic power
unseen; and it was so light-hung and so balanced by wings and domes and
parachutes that it seemed capable of being the sport of every wind.
Over the central ridge of the island we swept towards a distant slope
of Lilaroma. Suddenly underneath me in the growing darkness there shone
out in a deep broad valley a vast dome of light, transparent enough to
reveal the flitting shadows underneath it. It seemed the laboratory of
a world. Innumerable streams flashed under its upper edge; they sped
from the summits of the surrounding hills, or across the gorges from
other and more distant ranges. I had seen as we flew hundreds of noble
aqueducts spanning the valleys with their arches and columns, some of
them thousands of feet up the slopes of Lilaroma. All the waters which
the great mountain gathered from the clouds of heaven made their way
towards this marvellous domed valley. At its mouth there was a deep
gorge, whether artificial or natural was not clear to me then; and
through the chasm leaped a river mightier than any I had ever seen; it
seemed to be on its way to the sea, but I could not trace its course
farther than its massive gateway out of the valley. Underneath the dome
I could see vast wheels of irelium move at all levels; they seemed so
fragile that a pebble thrown at them would break them; yet each turned
spindles of enormous power, which moved swifter than lightning. I soon
saw that all the intricate machinery was sheathed in casings of their
translucent metal, along which flowed a slow, glutinous stream of some
liquid that dripped through perforations on all points of friction.
As we alighted, night fell, and the titanic crystal workshop gleamed
with a soft radiance that seemed to come from no centres, but was
diffused everywhere in the manner of the sunlight or the atmosphere. It
was like a vast ice cave of the Arctic circle lit by brief and splendid
summer. Fairy-like yet vast, it seemed a fabric of some dream-world;
but the splash and hiss of the forceful waters and the unresting motion
of the machinery made it all real enough. The noises were by no means
deafening; they were subdued and musical with a halo of mysterious
whisper like the sounds of nature on a bright day of summer. Nor was
the sight bewildering to the eyes; there was too much symmetry in it
to perplex and dazzle.
My guides and companions tripped lightly and fearlessly through the
labyrinth of movement till they reached an edifice underneath the dome
more elaborate and majestic in its beauty than the noblest of Gothic
cathedrals; its towers and spires and pinnacles seemed to aspire to
the very stars as we looked up, and yet the loftiest of them failed to
reach the zenith of the vast diaphanous roof. Towards this building
radiated the moving network of spindles and axles that the flashing
water-wheels turned, and out from it passed great transparent tubes of
metal, woven together fantastically into a forest of gigantic trees
and flowers. Nothing of this arabesque of movement marred the colossal
symmetry of all beneath the crystal canopy. The church-like building
was the shrine of force. In it we found one of the wise men of the
elders seated on a high throne; and beside him stood muscular forms
ready to do his behests. He laid his hand on a key-board of innumerable
keys, each of which was marked with some hieroglyphic. The attendants
scattered to various points along the mosaic floor, and watched the
working of the labyrinth of wires and tubes. At the touch of the
master the whole edifice vibrated, and a sound as of the most sublime
orchestration filled the vault. We saw countless wheels and pistons
move and flash beneath their transparent metal sheaths, and along each
tube, now lit as with starlight, we could watch the rush of vapours or
liquids towards their destination in the various factories and houses
in the valley and along the mountain-side.
It was one of the masters of physical force who manipulated the
keys. He was controlling and harmonising the vast power that was
concentrated in Rimla, and, instead of the demoniac jarring of the
engines and machinery which I had been accustomed to in the industrial
centres of other lands, the sounds of the marvellous vault made sweet
concord that ever varied with the transference of power from purpose to
purpose. He was the pointsman of the numberless railroads of energy,
and at the same time the musician of the titanic workshop. His will
disciplined and guided both the generation and the distribution of all
the force of the island. Our troop took the place of that which had
been on guard through the sunset and twilight, and separated in pairs
throughout the valley, each pair taking under its charge one section of
the labyrinthine movement. My comrade, Ooriel, the cousin of Thyriel,
was a youth of splendid build, the strength of his upper limbs seeming
almost bovine, his shoulders and arms not too large for his size, yet
giving the impression of gigantic power. I soon saw how much he could
do. We were to inspect the generators of force underneath the dome. He
first led me to the various streams which came leaping down the slopes
and cliffs. One of them from some cause only to be ascertained at the
cone of Lilaroma was swollen into a yellow torrent that threatened
to overflow its lava banks and flood the valley. In a moment he saw
the danger, and rushed to the wing-dam dividing the upper course and
controlling the amount of water which should flow down to its various
wheels and the amount which unused should find its way to the great
exit. He found that the separating barrier had lost its automatic
motion through the sudden increase of the overflow and the intrusion
of a huge boulder that had come down like a battering-ram upon it. He
set me to guide the machinery and power that moved the dam to suit
the strength of the current, and then, fixing a narrow irelium shield
in the bottom of the channel, he leapt into the torrent. The shield, I
could see, keeping erect just above him, shed the stones and boulders
to this side and that. Thus protected he raised a huge hammer which he
had taken with him and by three or four well-directed blows split the
obstacle into half a dozen pieces; he then bent down and removed them
out of the way, and suddenly I felt the steering-gear begin to work,
and saw the dam swing round into the channel leading to the centre of
force, whilst the bulk of the torrent found its way into the exit,
which was deeper and broader. The danger was past; but a moment’s
hesitation, either in order to bring up the heavier tools or to call
other assistance, would have ruined many of the great works upon the
levels below and stopped the whole of the operations of Rimla for
several days.
Ooriel shook the water from his garments as he leapt out, and in a
few minutes he was on his way with me to the other brooks, cascades,
and conduits which gathered the aqueous forces of Lilaroma into this
valley of power. Not a drop that fell from the tributary clouds about
the head of the mountain but did its work for this singular people; the
moisture-lifting power of the sun, and the force of gravitation that
fought with it were alike made the servants and yoke-fellows of the
Limanorans.
They refused to waste the energy that nature gave them so freely. This
I saw more fully illustrated as I followed Ooriel. Having inspected
all the forms of stream-power, he sped round to the side of the valley
nearest to the western shore of the island; there in a great cave
or hollow in the rock, brilliantly lit, I saw myriads of wires and
cables concentrating from all westward directions on an immense block
of labramor or irelium alloy. This, he explained to me, was the great
electric storage-battery of the waves. From the north-west and the
south-west came the chief storms and currents that broke on the shores
of the island; and underneath the beetling cliffs of lava erected on
the western shores they had a line of long, lofty caves running some
hundreds of feet underneath into the land; in these huge vanes and
water-wheels were hung from the roofs and the higher portions of the
sides; and the waves as they ran in and out beat their paddles and
made them whirl with lightning swiftness. The motion thus communicated
was turned by their electro-generators into currents of electric force
which found its way by the network of wires and cables that I saw
into this enormous storage-battery. In another series of caves they
cooped up the water of the full tides by means of gigantic dams and
sluice-gates, and this during ebb drove huge wheels and turbines and
thus sent the power of the moon into their treasure-house of power.
Every storm that ruffled the surface of the ocean, every current that
swept past their shores, every ebb or flow of their tides added its
quota to the energy accumulated in their electric treasury, a far
more wonderful concentration of wealth than any Sindbad’s valley or
Golconda. Here was ready to the hand of man power greater than all that
the nations and the generations had ever been capable of.
And the winds had been made as much the slaves of this people as the
waves; for another great cavern that we visited was the storehouse of
the energy of the winds. In every gorge and pass and gully around
Lilaroma up almost to its crater had been erected immense windmills,
which as they revolved generated electricity; this found its way from
all points by massive cables buried in the earth to the conservator of
energy in this second cave. Ooriel tested the wires to see that they
were not leaking anywhere and tested the batteries for faults, and
finding everything in good order, we passed into a third power treasury
in the rock. This was vastest of all; for into it there poured the
energy of the power-wells which was not needed by the private houses
spread over the face of the island. As soon as the head of steam was
shut off from the machinery or the tubes of any mansion, its whole
force was turned upon an engine near the mouth of the well, which kept
generating electric force day and night. The accumulation of energy in
this cave of the wells would have been enough to supply ten times the
power that Europe had ever used in her industries.
In order to round off our tour of inspection, Ooriel led me to another
but smaller cave which had just been fitted up with storage-batteries.
This was the cave of the sun. For generations it had been contended
that most of the power from the sun’s rays was lost, even when they
reached the earth; and the inventors had at last worked out the
problem of its utilisation. I had noticed as I flew over the country
in a faleena vast gleaming spaces sparkling like gigantic diamonds in
the sunlight. These were the reflectors which collected the sunbeams
and concentrated their heat and light into power. Upon the slope of
Lilaroma they utilised the miles of snow surface and gathered their
gleam into a few heat-engines that sent the generated electricity into
Rimla.
Vast as the force was which in these various ways was bent into the
service of this people, there seemed still to be the need of increasing
it. Never a week passed without some facilitation of the collection and
distribution of energy by an improvement in the machinery. The mechanic
families were ever busy competing with one another in invention and
practical application of some principle or idea, and the pioneering
families who rode imagination to the verge of practicability marched
ahead of them, mapping tracks and highways into the unknown future.
One proposal was to utilise the magnetism of the earth as a new source
of energy, and already one of the mechanical families was far on the
way to its realisation. Another that was near at hand was the use of
the expansion of their liquefied and solidified air for purposes of
power. One plan somewhat farther off from the realm of practicability
was the utilisation of the primal ether by means of its compression
and expansion. Yet they were working at it in full hope of finding a
solution of the problem at some unexpected turn of their imaginative
road into the darkness. They had achieved so much that they had almost
boundless faith in their ultimate power to solve all problems presented
to their minds. They would face the death of the whole race sooner than
the thought of ceasing to push forward into the night that encircled
life.
My mind was almost paralysed at the thought of the vastness of the
power controlled in this centre of force; but it explained to me the
ease with which they could drive their leomorans miles and miles
through the solid crust of the earth, the power they had over the
volcanic fires of Lilaroma, the strength of the blast they could send
far out to sea from their storm-cone, and the general facility with
which they could control and use even the most titanic forces of
nature. I did not wonder now that they were the masters rather than
the servants of nature, especially when I saw that by the strength and
nicety of their machines they could concentrate all this tremendous
force upon any single point or distribute it over a wide area at the
striking of a key on the great key-board of forces. I have seen one
of the masters of energy turn the whole current from the ten thousand
services it was doing throughout the island upon the making of a
diamond; so enormous was the temperature it generated in a few moments
that a piece of carbon, submitted to the heat and pressure, came forth
a magnificent jewel, gleaming and sheening in the light. But this was
for no silly purpose of personal ornamentation; it was meant for the
friction edge of a leomoran down where it bit into the rock. It was the
easiest thing in the world for this people with all the concentration
of power they had at their call to follow nature in her most occult or
tremendous processes. There was not a metal they could not produce with
their high temperatures and enormous pressures. It is true that all
other operations had to be stopped in order to transmute rapidly common
materials into gold, irelium, or diamonds; but it could be done, and
they had no need to dig into the bowels of the earth like other men for
the more precious metals and crystals which had accumulated there in
the volcanic or chemical past.
It was one of their commonest sayings that no science which was not
creative was worthy of the name. True, there were often long tracts
of scientific investigation that seemed entirely barren; and many of
their researches seemed to lead nowhither. But when I inquired more
minutely I found that the investigators had realised many of the
practical applications of the discovery when once they should reach
it. They regarded as futile all abstract inquiries which had only a
distant and unforeseen chance of ending in something useful. Even their
astronomy had a keen eye to the possibilities of their future; it led
not only to a deeper knowledge of the living heart of creation, and to
a wider enjoyment of the pleasures of imagination and faith, but to the
purposes of the immediate life; it gave them immortal forms for their
art and especially their architecture; it moulded or suggested their
divinest music; it brought into even their physical life influences
unlike those of the earth, and they hoped with full faith that through
this they might catch the wandering thoughts or voices of the beings
of other worlds and at last reach the power of emigration from star to
star.
Their most creative science was chemistry; for this had reached the
secrets of nature’s most mysterious processes, and had imitated and
generally abbreviated the workings of her great laboratory. The
Limanorans did not need to grow the plants and trees that used to
produce their food. Agriculture had ceased to be necessary for them
except as a part of landscape-gardening. The elements and combinations
that used to be extracted from their harvests in order to support and
exhilarate life could be created directly in the chemical laboratories.
Everything needed as diet was drawn straight from the earth without the
long process of growth and culmination. They had the prime factors of
sustenance in unlimited quantity and purest form with the minimum of
labour, and they could give to these the exact quality and refinement
which would bear them straight to the various tissues or cells of
the body without the need of its offensive chemical processes. Most
of the chemistry of life-sustenance was accomplished before the food
entered the human system, and the space and energy of the body that
had before gone to the alimentary processes of life were now free for
other and higher functions. Pharmacy and chemical science combined to
create all that the constitution required not only for its support and
frictionless continuance, but for its progress towards longer life and
more ethereal texture. Their medicine had ages before passed the crude
stage of mere cure of disease. They laughed at the idea of the science
as merely therapeutic: it must be creative. The inter-relations of the
higher and lower elements of the nature were unremittingly studied in
the case of every member of the community, and every means of change
in them that would lead to the ennobling of Limanoran humanity was
carefully prescribed.
I was led through their food factories and grew deeply interested in
their processes of analysis and combination. They seemed never to
have any hesitation about the exact quantity of each element and the
exact temperature and pressure needed to produce any given kind of
sustenance. One of the most singular departments of these factories
was that in which they had yoked the infinitesimal plant and animal
life of the universe to the chemicalisation of their food and medicine.
They knew how to utilise all the life they could come across, however
microscopic, and here under their marvellously powerful magnifying
instruments I could see the minutest of all life enslaved to their
purposes. Nothing could surpass the exactitude with which they had
defined the functions and spheres of these mysterious beings invisible
to the naked eye. Each had its own department of industry. No one of
them interfered with the other. It was life put to its best purpose of
sustaining the noblest life. When I saw the huge irelium tubes bearing
out the results in aërial or vaporous form, I grew anxious to test
the effects at the other end of them. At my own request I was taken
one day to Oomalefa, the great series of public halls and baths which
formed the chief centre of associative life in the island. I had not
known of the institution before; for I was still too little advanced in
physical nature to be clear of the inner chemical processes needed for
nutrition, and it had not been thought necessary to show me a section
of their public life in which I could have no special share. But,
now that my own eagerness for knowledge had brought me to the stage
of education which demanded insight into this institution, they were
willing that I should inspect it and see all its peculiar features.
CHAPTER IX
OOMALEFA
THESE halls of nutrition and medication were situated on a great
promontory extending miles into the sea. It had been ledged and
bastioned with lava walls, and round the gleaming edifice ran a balcony
or rocky platform, which broke the fury of any ambitious billows that
might threaten the crystal translucence of the walls. Here, overlooking
the sea, the Limanorans could drink in its medicating breath; here in
the vast hall could they take that restful exercise which is the first
essential of all life; here they could commune with their own souls
or with the stars and listen to the ever-changing rhythm of the waves
as they broke into spray or climbed to the rocky wall beneath. They
considered this chamber of the ocean and the stars as more medicant
and alimentary than any they could make with human hands; hence it was
that they had thrown out this great projection into the sea, where they
could spend most of their hours of nutrition.
Along its highest ridge ran a series of the noblest buildings that
ever met my eye, unlike all other edifices I had ever heard of in
style of architecture and method of grouping, but resembling in their
bewildering variety and inherent symmetry the gleaming clusters of
night. Countless points of fire aimed at the heavens from spires and
towers which shone with rainbow fluctuation in the sun. There was a
milky way of jewelled pinnacles; and around were strewn fire-flashing
constellations of jewel minarets and domes. Innumerable centres of
varied roof and aspiring form led the eye by their incompleteness
to some great centre; and soon it rested calmly on the vast yet
ever-broken and changing dome that like a snow-clad mountain-ridge
mastered every spirit that was drawn to it. Alone this galaxy of
clustered starry forms stood out above the sea, undwarfed by any
neighbouring land and masterful over the billows below it. A true
temple was it even in the presence of the universe of suns that
stretched out into endless night. Within it surely might the spirit of
man feel no unholy doubts of its immortal destiny or of its kinship
with the divine. Pure and noble orison might here be raised to the
Maker of the makers of this shrine; all trivial and mean thoughts would
here be sacrilege. When night fell, the stars in the heavens held
spirit communion with this their brother. This was Oomalefa, or the
jewel of immortal longings.
My first visit to Oomalefa is engraved upon the record of my past, for
it was one of my first expeditions under the guidance of Thyriel. The
beauty of her spirit dawned upon me as the day passed; afterwards I
came to see that it was everything that my own needed, but at the time
I could not reason out the nature of my feelings. She grew upon me as
the day upon the night, and when we parted it was as if my sun had set;
helpless and stumbling, my spirit groped for the guiding dawn again; I
was forlorn, reaching out for my other half in a lonely universe.
Her presence doubtless coloured all the scenes through which I passed,
yet they were enough of themselves to impress my mind. We alighted on
the mainland and made our way out towards the archway which spanned
the root of the promontory. The weight of our bodies as we stood upon
a certain spot swung up the transparent portcullis, and we found
ourselves in a spacious entrance hall, its roof a moving orrery of the
sky of night, its walls lit pictures of the ocean around framed in
living sections of the sea alive with sea-denizens, its floor a tidal
beach of sand, soft yet firm, whereon the sea ever seemed to cream and
retreat. It had all the beauty and the freshness of the shore beneath
the starred night when the tide is making.
The next chamber we entered was as vast, and was as many-coloured as
the rainbow. It was the index hall; for here were marked the name and
number and situation of every chamber in Oomalefa, and underneath
each name was shown in graphic experiment the effect of the different
medicated atmospheres upon the various tissues of the human body.
Complete reproductions of the bones and muscles, the flesh and
blood, the cells and nerves and coatings were here enclosed and the
transformations pictured in the transparent sections of the walls. An
expert from the family having the manufacture of each atmosphere under
its charge stood by and guided and explained the process. It was a
physiological laboratory, in which every Limanoran might see with his
own eyes and hear explained by one who knew, every modification in
the tissues that a longer or shorter time spent in any chamber would
produce.
Twin with this hall was that of measurement and consultation.
Here every entrant had all his important organs and tissues tested
scientifically, and was then told the atmospheres which would best suit
the development of any or all of his parts and faculties. He stated
the chief purpose of his existence, and consulted the experts on the
directions that would best lead to it. He was told of any defect in
his organic functions and advised how it could be remedied. After this
consultation he could return to the hall of experiment and see with his
own eyes the effect of the various atmospheres upon the unseen portions
of his system. Then he was permitted to enter the halls of nutrition
and medication, and choosing those which he specially needed that day
spent the time required in each. He found exit again by the hall of
measurement, and there another testing revealed whether he had been
successful in his alimentary sojourn in Oomalefa, and whether he would
have to remain longer or have a certain atmosphere introduced into his
sleeping-chamber in his own mansion.
Every Limanoran except the young and undeveloped had as the result
of attention to health in past ages what they called the conscience
of the health. This put them on the alert the moment any function
was disordered, and off they went to Oomalefa to consult the medical
families on the exact nature of the derangement, its locality, and the
diet or treatment that would restore to complete health. Few or none
of full maturity but would feel this sanitary sense within them like a
whip or goad which would not let them rest till the evil element was
swept out. It was a daily occurrence to meet some islander hurrying
post-haste for consultation and medication, and I came at last to be
ashamed of the lethargy which would let me remain inert under some
decay of nerve or tissue in its primary stages until it had resulted in
ache or pain. The feeling of lassitude or the absence of the sense of
the full tide of life made me rush in fear and trembling to the hall
of consultation. In my former existence I had had the embryo of this
sanitary conscience in the pains or prostration accompanying disease,
but then the warning generally came too late. Now I was sensitive
to the slightest derangement of any tissue or part of my system and
without the goad of ache flew to Oomalefa to find the remedy; otherwise
I felt that I was doing wrong to my future and my posterity and to the
future of the whole race. Even the actual present of the people was
affected; the slightest disorder of my constitution seemed to weigh
upon the spirits of my companions and friends, for they believed there
was contagion in every disease. As strongly did they hold that there
was a contagion of health, and would not allow any member of their
medical families or council to approach a citizen even in consultation
unless the healer was himself whole in every atom of his constitution.
To be sound in body and spirit was as sanative of the derangements of
others as any active remedy.
Every citizen was taught enough of the medical science of the island
to know what was wrong in himself or his neighbour; for every citizen
was a possible father or mother; and for parenthood a thorough and
practical acquaintance with the laws of health and the causes and
cures of the commonest diseases was a first essential. The Limanorans
laughed at the absurdity of Western civilisation in allowing men and
women to generate and bring up children with no more knowledge of
their constitution than if they were mere animals. Still oftener they
mourned that so much human generation in the world was left to the
chance dictates of caprice, and that most medicine and education were
only blind groping in the dark. That nothing should be done on mere
authority was one of the first principles of their civilisation.
The medical councillor knew that he had a keen critic in every citizen;
and he had to justify and make clear every process he recommended, in
order that faith in him might remain clear. His sole advantage was his
fuller and deeper knowledge and the faculty he had acquired from long
familiarity with the questions and problems he had to deal with. Each
member of the medical families and council had a special section of the
human system to explore, besides having a mastery of the whole. It was
this division of labour that caused their science of the human tissues
to advance so swiftly. Not a moment of their work was lost.
I had thought at first that a people so healthy and vigorous and
devoted to such wholesome ways of life had no need of medical science;
but I soon saw that their general sanativeness demanded a more advanced
science and art than the rude quackery of Western medicine. All the
worst diseases of maturity in Europe, fevers, consumption, diphtheria,
rheumatism, indigestion, and the rest, were relegated in Limanora to
childhood, and were then as mild and innocuous as scarlatina or measles
or whooping-cough; they had become the enemies of unformed tissues,
and found little to batten upon even in them. Generally they were
checked in their first stage by the medical knowledge of the parents or
proparents, and it was the rarest occurrence to have to resort to the
deeper knowledge of the medical council, rarest of all where childhood
was concerned.
I rushed to the conclusion that the medical families would have nothing
to investigate but the development of the tissues and organs and
faculties as they existed in Limanora; but I was disabused of this idea
by the occurrence of an epidemic in the island not long after I arrived
there. It took the form of dream-disturbed sleep, which held the
faculties in its grasp beyond the usual number of hours of rest. The
patients tossed and moaned and imagined horrors of the past of humanity
and animalhood as still occurring in their lives. It abridged the hours
of consciousness, and left the sufferers spent and unexhilarated.
It was no fever, but only a languor that attacked the imaginative
faculties and made them morbid and secretive in their activities.
My brain-tissues were perhaps not fine enough to be attacked by it,
and I escaped; but I was greatly distressed to find that Thyriel had
been touched by the epidemic. My anxiety led me to know all that the
specialists discovered concerning it. It could not be fatal, they
assured me; for no epidemic had been fatal to Limanorans for many
centuries. It only meant the loss of a valuable portion of the time
of working. In the other islands, the winged scouts brought the news,
it had swept half the populations into the grave; but so vigorous and
healthy were the various tissues of our people that no disease could
produce anything but a temporary derangement.
By means of their skilful surgery they soon isolated under the
microscope some specimens of the living organisms that produced the
disease; they experimented with all the elements and their combinations
and saw what encouraged them, what attenuated them, and what killed
them. It was not long before every trace of the microscopic creature
had vanished from the island; there remained only the knowledge and
the antidote that would enable their outposts or messengers through
the sky to resist its attacks, should they ever encounter it again.
Limanorans who were sent on missions out of the country had to be made
epidemic-proof by inoculation against known diseases before setting
out. But it sometimes happened, especially to scouts into the higher
regions on the outskirts of the earth’s atmosphere, that they brought
back with them symptoms that were new, and a new disease and a new
microbe had to be added to their medical lists. It was explained to
me that our solar system was travelling every moment of its existence
into new regions of space; and as it moved it passed from time to
time through swarms of minute and attenuated life which had been left
myriads of ages before in its tracks by some diseased member of another
system. This microscopic life was in its own special way immortal,
and could subsist on the scattered material life that floated though
the ether unclaimed by any planetary centre. It was out of such waifs
of life peopling space that a new world made a new beginning in vital
history; as soon as it cooled down sufficiently, after creative
collision and separation, to allow of individual existence upon it,
myriads of these microscopic inhabitants of space took possession of
it, and began again the struggle of life which was the universal law
of infinity, and meant the ascension of all energy through higher and
higher circles.
Disease was but a form of this eternal struggle for existence; it
was the attempt of invisible lower forms to master the higher human
tissues and make them their feeding-ground. The original enemies of
man, the wild beasts, were subdued or tamed or driven forth into the
deserts as soon as savage life was passed. Then began the fiercer
contest for the possession of his own cells and tissues and organs.
Enemies that he could not see migrated out of the surrounding elements
into his system as soon as it became delicate enough to stir their
appetite, and for ages there were no weapons against them; chance now
and again offered one; but generally he groped about in his frantic
ignorance for anything that would ease the pain from these gnawing
foes within him. Out of this rose by slow steps a kind of quackery
they called the science of medicine; but the conflict still remained
unequal; the invisible enemies had the best of it, and they were ever
being recruited by new enemies out of space, which bred new and more
appalling plagues. Not till it was found that the newer these settlers
were the more virulent were their ravages was there any chance of a
real science of medicine arising from this everlasting agonism.
The first beginnings of a true science appeared in the attempts to
deplete the soil by setting tamed and exhausted specimens of their
foes to feed on it. A soil once reft of the elements that invited and
fitted any disease germs seldom suffered in any serious degree from
them again. Soon by their new electro-microscopes or clirolans they
were able to classify the infinitely minute foods of these infinitely
minute pasturers on the human tissue. Their microscopes, enormously
though they had added to the power of human vision into the atomic
world, had been unable to advance beyond the discovery and complete
classification of the invisible organisms. Their clirolans combined
photography with electro-microscopy in such a way that every change in
the systems of their minute foes was recorded; they were able to see
the elements taken from the human system absorbed and sifted of their
nutritive powers, and the débris or manure ejected and left to poison
the human tissues; it was not the presence of the organisms themselves,
or even their destruction of essential elements that generally produced
the disease, but the accumulation of the exhausted excreta, clogging
the various functions. At first medical science satisfied itself with
cultivating feeble and underbred germs, and turning them loose on the
human body in order to make them exhaust the elements which attracted
their kin. Next they discovered the chemical combination that,
introduced into the body, would neutralise the poisonous qualities of
the bacterial débris. Last of all by their vimolans or photo-electric
analysers they found the exact food which attracted each form of
microbe to the tissue and nourished them there; and they experimented
electro-chemically till they knew the element that, combining with this
bacterial food, would neutralise its attraction and yet leave the body
as efficient and healthy as before; in short, they could prescribe the
antidote to every disease that had ever enfeebled any portion of their
system. Diseases were nothing else than the infinitesimal life of space
fixing itself, after an eternity of detachment and attenuation, upon
a living soil fat with the elements of attraction and nourishment and
yet too feeble to hold out against its ravages. They drew an analogy
from their old agriculture; weeds were nothing but plants finding at
last the conditions which would give them the victory in the struggle
for existence and would enable them to grow so rapidly and luxuriantly
as to choke all neighbours; and their old science of earth culture set
them on the way to a true medical science. They had watched with their
clirolans the selective processes of the roots of each weed, and by
various analysers had found the combination of elements in the soil and
air by which it overcame its rivals; they then discovered the special
component which, uniting with its food, would deprive the weed of its
nutritive powers. Thus were they able to encourage or discourage on any
soil any growth they might select. But agriculture had been completely
superseded by their later chemistry. The best thing it had left to
their civilisation was the cue it gave by analogy to their true science
of therapeutics.
How minute and detailed was their study of the infinitesimal life of
the universe, I could not have imagined without having seen it in
practice. They had advanced so far with their clirolans and vimolans
that they were now discovering a still more infinitesimal world which
was parasitic on microscopic life. There had been elements and effects
at times discoverable in their therapeutic problems that disturbed the
certainty of their conclusions and solutions. Again and again their
foresights had been mistaken, their calculations thrown out. Most often
was this the case on the borderland of the moral world. They had known
in their own far past history, and in the more recent history of the
other islands of the archipelago, the demoralising effect of epidemics
and plagues, especially of a new and vigorous type. For a time the
people who came within the influence of the disease seemed to return
almost to savagery. And yet every plague differed slightly from every
other in its moral results. One made the whole population thieves;
another made them liars; a third stirred up a fury of lust; a fourth
delivered over the soul to despair of life, and a fifth to disloyalty
and intrigue. When once their attention was called to this widespread
demoralisation after an epidemic, they began to watch the effect of
individual illnesses on the mind; and in every case there were results,
emotional, moral, or intellectual, that were not to be accounted for
by mere weakness of the body or irritation of the nerves, or by the
poisonous débris that the minute organisms threw off.
They invented still more powerful clirolans, which revealed an
intensity of life they had not imagined. The disease germs brought into
the human system still more minute parasites that at once attacked the
brain and the nerve-centres. In one disease these invisible vermin
preferred one set of brain-cells, in another they preferred another.
The therapeutic families engaged in the investigations were only just
coming to classify these moral and intellectual parasites of the
disease germs. Nor had they yet been able to discover any cure for
these but the sympathetic proximity of strong and noble minds. The
look from the eyes of some of their greatest doctors, even the touch
of their hands, seemed to drive the living evil forth, or at least to
attenuate and enfeeble it. The mind of the patient rose triumphant in
the presence of one of these wise and healing personalities. It had
been for ages the traditional maxim of polity that only the loftiest
and most advanced, as well as most sympathetic natures should be
allowed to specialise for the medical castes, or marry into the medical
families. None were allowed to nurse the sick but the beautiful souls
of the community; their mere presence seemed to strengthen the fainting
heart in the struggle for life. As the mind grew strong, the ravages
of the disease lessened. For now with their more powerful clirolans
they found that, as the brain or nerve-centres acquired strength, the
parasitic, invisible life took its way back to its original hosts and
preyed on them. It was indeed one of the maxims of their community to
keep the system of every individual at its highest point of vitality.
A loss of exhilaration in any citizen was marked at once by his
neighbours, just like a lapse into criminality in Western civilisation.
It was the symptom of possible disease with all its power of contagion.
The sense of active vitalisation (what we call the spirits) was the
barometer of the sanitary, moral, and intellectual atmosphere, and
every Limanoran was keenly sensitive to all its changes.
In Oomalefa it was impossible to conceal the source of the
degeneration. The specialised families of the medical council knew
where to apply their investigatory instruments. Even with their own
eyes and ears and electric sense they could often detect the exact
nesting-place of the intrusive microbes; for though to my muddy senses
their bodies were as opaque as my own, except for a certain pellucid
light which illuminated the skin and made the complexion so beautiful,
the processes of life seemed an open book to their acute observation.
Their hearing could detect any change in the normal beat of the heart
and even the passage of the blood in the veins, which, Thyriel has
told me, sounded like the liquid rhythm of mountain-rills. Their
eyes could see through the skin the delicate veinings underneath and
detect every nervous or muscular effort. Their magnetic sense could
tell them whether thought or emotion was developing in the centres
or passing along the nerves. The very casing of the brain seemed to
them to be semi-transparent, and they were conscious, though dimly,
of the movements of even the finer tissues, non-existent to my senses
except under the microscope. Hence it was that each Limanoran had an
isolated dwelling-place for himself. It would have been impossible for
him to find rest or sleep close to the living and unresting functions
of another human system; and it was only the rhythm of the movements
and sounds of all the organs and processes which made proximity to
one another tolerable. I have often seen Thyriel in raptures over the
noble harmony of a healthy and virtuous personality; to her ear the
pulsations and other sounds were like a majestic piece of music; to
her eye the rush and hurry of the vital processes were not unlike the
motions of the starry system of night; whilst the exhilaration through
the electric sense from the speeding thoughts and emotions of a sound
mind in a sound body was at times ecstatic. The nobler the soul that
she was conscious of in her neighbour, the keener was her enjoyment of
proximity. It was this that made only the purest and greatest minds in
the healthiest bodies admissible to the medical families or council.
There was a curative power in their very presence.
With their clirolans and vimolans and other aids to the senses the
medical sages could detect the slightest jar in the rhythm of the
system and locate it with the greatest ease. Having located it, they
knew the parasite that had begun to multiply and clog the organ or
tissue or function, and the treatment that it required. Every moral
fault had its corresponding disease and infinitesimal parasite they
held; and so rapidly could the minute organisms increase and so
impalpably and easily could they migrate from human being to human
being that the contagion of vice was a thousand times more appalling
in its ravages than that of mere physical disease. There was great
trepidation when any ailment attacked the body of a Limanoran,
and he was heartily ashamed of its appearance and alarmed lest it
should spread, or lead to its natural consequence, moral degeneracy;
but, if the parasitic attack was found to be on one of the higher
centres of life, the alarm was great and wide, for it was far more
subtle in its insidiousness and omnipotence. The patient was at once
quarantined and only the noblest of medical sages could break his
isolation. All the powers of his mind and of the minds of his nurses
and medical attendants were concentrated on the offending tissue,
and strong thermoelectric aids were applied to it, so that it should
soon regain its old vitality and drive the intruders out. In the
chamber was kept up an atmosphere of the special elements which would
nourish the degenerate cells and also of those that would destroy
the microbes; only as a last resort was surgery used and the part
laid open to the local application of re-agents against the hostile
organisms. The ruder and older forms of evil--passion, envy, malice,
hatred, jealousy, contempt, vanity--rarely appeared in grown men and
women at that advanced stage of their civilisation. They had become
diseases of the immature periods of life, when the soul was passing
through the primitive phases of the development of mankind. They were
the ailments of childhood and youth; and hundreds of the Limanorans
now grew up without once experiencing any one of them. When they did
appear, isolation was the first step; and the parents or proparents
could generally cope with the moral disease without having recourse to
a medical family or to Oomalefa. Every traditional method of cure was
applied most vigorously, for they shrank from the thought of leaving
any seed of the contagion in the system to germinate at some later and
more dangerous period of life.
When the home circle was unable to detect the exact character of the
disturbing influence, the young patient was brought under the gaze and
the tests of the medical families. If their clirolans and vimolans
failed to identify the parasitic evil, they tried their magnetometers,
which were so delicate as to indicate the first beginnings of mental
or moral disorder. By means of another magnetic instrument they were
able to extract portions of the microbic débris, and then with their
photo-electric analysers or vimolans they separated its various
elements and saw what moral evils had entered into the system. They
had the physical equivalents and results of every form of guilt and
crime, and thus in its very inception a moral taint could be detected
and cured before it had time to appear in the words or conduct
of the patient. Most often this taint was due to some ancestral
weakness of tissue inviting the swarms of parasitic microbes through
which the earth is for ever passing. On the first signs of lowering
vitality the pedigree of the patient was consulted for the record of
the retrogressive tendencies of his forefathers, and not till the
possibilities of atavism were exhausted were the other tests resorted
to.
It was on the basis of these two coincident causes, degeneration of
tissue and microbic life in the atmosphere, that they were able to
explain the strange contemporaneity of revolutions, panics, wars,
religious revivals, and widespread outbreaks of crime or immorality in
various parts of the earth. The planetary system as it sweeps through
space cannot help passing through vast oceans of living microscopic
matter which have drifted from other universes geological ages before
in their unresting migration from infinity to infinity, and which lead
a feeble death-in-life till they meet with fit atmospheres, such as
will make them strong and teeming. For new-born worlds, just ready for
the settlement of life upon them, this is a blessing; but for those
having upon them highly developed organised life it is too often a
curse. Every nation or tribe where civilisation has become enfeebled
by luxury or immoral systems of polity or domestic manners becomes the
prey of the new swarm, which multiplies and spreads itself on a fat
and unexhausted soil with the swiftness of a long unsated appetite.
The people rise in epidemic fury, and every institution suffers from
the madness. In different ages the frenzy takes different forms, but
there is a striking simultaneity in these outbreaks all over history;
and only this intrusion of cosmic infinitesimal life on the weakened
higher centres of the human system can explain it fully. None but the
peoples who have ordered their existence on the moral laws of the
universe and thus kept the tissues strong, solid, and unyielding can
resist the plague-like mania. The result of these epidemics was in the
end, they held, a benefit to humanity; for they swept away most of the
tainted life from the earth and left the healthier constitutions able
for another advance in intellectual power or in morality. The Limanoran
medicists were ever testing and analysing the atmosphere of the earth
for these intrusive emigrants from other worlds; vigorous and healthy
though their systems were, some chance minute stranger might find a
lodgment in them, and cause much derangement before he could be got rid
of. Ethics, psychology, history, and ethnology were as important to
their medical investigations as physiology, anatomy, and chemistry.
With all this extension of medicine into regions that seemed to me, a
man of Western civilisation, the most remote from it, there had been a
gradual contraction of the sphere of surgery. The hacking and hewing
of the human frame to get rid of some intrusive organism seemed to
them as barbarous as the butchering of animals for food. Brilliant
operations they thought the confession of failure in previsional and
preventive medicine. They would have considered it a disaster, if not
a crime, to let any disease proceed so far unobserved as to need the
excision of the part affected. Even when, by an accident, a bone was
fractured, they could light up the whole sphere of the accident and
see exactly how to get the sections or fragments to meet again. Then,
keeping the limb or organ at rest, they concentrated all the energy
of the patient’s body and mind and the curative influence of their
own presence upon it. They sent the nutritive powers of circulation
and nerve-energy into it by application of their various electric
instruments, some of which combined the effect of exercise and the
effect of heat. In a few days, sometimes in a few hours, the junction
was complete, and only rest and a medicated and nutritive atmosphere
were needed to make the tissue as sound as before.
One of their newest instruments and the most effective for the
avoidance of surgical operations was the alclirolan, a combination of
microscope, camera in vacuo, and electric power. It could by means of
a swiftly moving film, on which fell electric light through a vacuum,
take a picture of the life-processes within the living body, however
minute. Then by means of magnifiers and brilliant light they could
throw from this film a moving picture on a screen, so enormously
enlarging the process of any part of the body that even a novice could
see at a glance what was healthy and what was diseased or obstructed.
It was this alclirolan that made the study of physiology in the living
body simple enough for the very youngest. It was by this that they were
able to supplement the experimental hall at the entrance to Oomalefa,
and to show in process the effect in actual human bodies of disease,
microbes, and remedies. Every minute process of the various organs
and tissues of the body and of the brain was reproduced marvellously
magnified on the walls. There was no new medicine but was tested and
had its effects on the various parts of the body revealed by this new
method. There was no new disease or microbe but gave up its secrets to
this instrument.
The only surgery they had was creative, like all their other sciences
and arts. It had to do chiefly with the capacity of the skull. The
appearance of epilepsy in some of their ablest men and families ages
before had pointed the way. Their knowledge of the localities and
tissues of the brain, along with the semi-transparency of their skulls
and the advantages their alclirolan had introduced, gave them complete
command of everything that was proceeding within the head. They could
by their electric apparatus light up the tissues and see what part was
growing and pressing upon the containing bone. They therefore learned
to trephine the epileptic sufferers and thus relieve the oppressed
locality of the brain. From this practice and the growing knowledge
of the great purpose of life they passed into the stage of creative
surgery. For imperfect tissue perfect was substituted. Man-grafting
had become the most important branch of surgery. They could modify
and even create new faculty or organ or tissue by grafting what they
had made on to the part of the infantile system which needed it. A
child to be devoted to a special pursuit which needed some faculty
exceptionally developed had his skull enlarged in its early and plastic
stage over the portion of the brain that was the material equivalent
and instrument of the faculty; and when most of the energies of life
began to pour into his pursuit the tissue had room to grow. If a
combination of exceptional faculties were needed in any profession
or pursuit, protuberances in various parts under the hair or even
on the brow could be perceived on looking closely. So nice had this
creative art become that the most delicate and minute trephining
could be accomplished without the patient knowing much about it; the
operation was generally finished and the wound healed whilst he slept.
Their bodies had great recuperative powers, and the means applied were
wonderful in their rapidity of working. The hand of the operator, too,
manipulated the part under a huge microscope that magnified the tissues
ten thousand-fold. In fact they had all kinds of modifications of the
microscope that would fit even internal investigations; one reflected
the part in the manner of the reflecting telescope, and turned
microscopes of great power on the reflected image. They had surgical
modifications of their clirolans and vimolans so that they could
examine permanent moving pictures or analyses of the tissues to be
investigated. Nothing could escape their methods of finding out defects
in the human system. However deep the organ or tissue to be examined
might be in the body, it flashed out its forms and processes upon their
irelium sheets as they moved. By moving these photographic records
rapidly underneath their microscopes the physiological processes of
life could be reproduced and examined; stationary, each moment of
the processes could be slowly investigated. Their photo-electric
instruments could light up and make transparent any stratum of tissue
desired, whilst keeping the rest in shadow or dark outline.
CHAPTER X
THE FIRLA, OR ELECTRIC SENSE
THEIR physiology had no longer any need of anatomy or vivisection as
its foundation and starting-point. Besides the alclirolans, they had
their mirlans or life-lamps, as they called them; and these enabled
them to watch any process of the human body and see how it changed
under the treatment they applied. These life-lamps appealed not only
to their eyes and ears, but to their electric sense. They isolated the
magnetic force as well as the sounds and appearance of any section
of tissue, and took graphic and permanent record of it, as they did
of the changes in form or texture or sound. Every kind of tissue in
any organ or limb had its normal magnetic equivalent measured in
terms of the personal equation of force and beat of the heart. The
slightest deviation from this at any time of the day or month would
at once challenge attention and lead to microscopic investigation.
They enlarged the electrograph, the phonograph, and the photograph of
the point indicated and were thus able to examine under the sarifolan
every infinitesimal atom of it in all the aspects which appealed to
their sight, hearing, and electric sense. Their sarifolan magnified
and interpreted for these investigative senses the graphic record of
their mirlans, as the microscope magnifies for the sight. I could see
and hear the movements and processes in the tissue, but the electric
effect was to me as general as a shock from a galvanic battery; I
could not detect anything definite or measurable. But the Limanorans,
though they had something of our diffusion of electric sense, had also
in the back of their necks a localised sense that responded to the
faintest magnetic influence and measured roughly its amount and its
changes in kind and degree. The delicate nerve-centre there, which
might have been the remains of a backward-looking eye, had developed
with them into a most sensitive collector of electric vibration in the
air or in any section of matter; and in every atom, whether organic
or inorganic, they declared there was ever some electric wave motion;
in some it was too faint to affect their firla or electric sense, but
then their delicate instruments for magnifying it, like their mirlans,
made it manifest to their senses and definable. It was to my general
feeling of magnetism what the muscular sense in my fingers was to my
diffused sense of touch. It had taken many generations to develop, and
in their children it never appeared till they had reached the close
of youth; but part of their education was directed towards making it
more sensitive and useful as a power for measuring force. A former
generation of their medical investigators had long noticed and studied
the effect of the concentration of will-power through the eye upon the
back of the neck of one who sat in front of them; although the patient
could tell nothing by means of his five senses of such an effort being
made behind him, he generally turned round. Experiment after experiment
proved that there was a force communicated through the intervening
space to some sensitive spot on the back of the head or neck, and they
knew that relics existed of what seemed once to have been an eye in
that region. They came to the conclusion that this must have a closer
connection with the higher brain-centres than any part of the body
except the eye, and bent their whole attention upon its nature. They
soon defined it as a localised electric sense and by practice made it
as keen at least as the sense of touch in the fingers. They were at
last able to define the direction of an electric influence and to note
its changes of force, and, after several generations, their firla, as
they called it, came to rank next to sight and equal to hearing in the
analysis and investigation of the phenomena of the universe.
Corresponding to this electro-receptive sense, they had also cultivated
the magnetic force of the eye. They had long known and investigated
the exact relationship of light and electricity, and they could at
any moment and place transform the one into the other. They had also
observed ages before that even the commonest and weakest human eye had
a faint luminosity in absolute darkness, and that any exertion of the
will or passing wave of passion greatly increased it. Beside this fact
they put the open secret that men of strong will and character differed
from their fellows in the power of the eye, not only over human beings
but over animals, and also the fact that the long-known plaything,
mesmerism, had the eye as its chief organ. They came to the conclusion
that the will was on its physical side a magnetic force, and that
though most of its play was through the sense of touch, the muscular
energies, and the voice, the eye was its highest and best channel.
This inference was strengthened by noticing that amongst animals the
fiercest-willed and most predatory could paralyse their victims by
the exercise of some optic power, and as they prowled through the
night, they had a perceptible glitter in their eyes that shone in the
dark like lamps. They applied themselves to a minute and systematic
investigation of the subject, and soon had instruments which would
respond to the faintest ocular exercise of the will. They could measure
any increase in the magnetic power of the eye; and before long it was
observed that the subjects they experimented on grew rapidly in optic
magnetism as they practised, and came to have a perceptible sheen in
their eyes when they stood in the darkness. These men and women were
found to have rapidly increasing power of sending anyone to sleep by
gazing at him. At last all doubt vanished as to the new latent faculty
which lay in the eye.
They set themselves vigorously to turn this new knowledge into art, and
trained themselves, and still more their children, in eye-power till
it became an instinctive habit to use it. After a time they came to
see that the power was not one but manifold; the sleep-inducing effect
was only an elementary application of it. A further development was a
soothing influence upon the nerves that never went as far as sleep.
Then the medicative powers of the eye were raised in the families of
medicists into capacities which seemed to me almost preternatural.
A more widely diffused specialisation of the new function was
eye-language. Long-continued emotional dialogues would proceed in
companies where I could not hear a sound, and at the end Thyriel would
tell me the intricacies of the interplay of thought and emotion. It is
true they could not easily communicate any unspiritual fact, needing
some concrete image, unless they employed the code of eye-signals which
every Limanoran learned; this combined the motions of either eye and
magnetic impulses of various kinds and degrees, and contained several
thousand words and phrases. I had so much to learn in the island that I
had not time to master more than a few of the simpler combinations, so
that I was often bewildered in their silent assemblies. But for a long
time what seemed to me most marvellous was that intimate and facile
converse went on when the two friends were at considerable distances
from each other; when occupied in this they kept alternately turning
the back and the face. This was due to the receptive magnetic faculty
being in the back of the neck and the active one being in the eye. The
eye was receptive in only a secondary degree, so that when the magnetic
impulse was weakened by distance, the eye could not interpret it, and
the back had to be turned in order to catch its full force. To see
two men or women standing a mile or two apart and wheeling back and
front every minute, and that, too, in alternating harmony as if they
had been two sympathetic toys, at first would have made me laugh but
for my wonder; and when the intercourse was rapid they looked like
two whirling dervishes; but I grew accustomed to the sight, and soon
began to feel with the people themselves that it was a most dignified
feature of their life. For a time it seemed almost beyond nature that
they could communicate even emotions and impulses at such a distance;
for it was only emotions and impulses, and not facts, that passed, as
the motions of the eye were not apparent except within comparatively
short spaces. Yet there were electro-magnifiers which, affixed
to their firla on the back of the neck, enabled them to feel the
faintest impulse from a distance and interpret it, and a modification
of the vimolan, used like spectacles, reduced the sense-numbing
power of distance a thousand-fold; they could see by means of these
electro-optical instruments the minutest movement many miles off.
The most striking manifestation of their active electric faculty was to
be seen only in a few Limanorans, who would have been in the primitive
ages leaders of masses either as orators or as warriors. These had such
power of eye that they could bend others to their purpose without the
utterance of a word. It was not greater genius or nobility of thought
or strength of character that made them so much more influential than
their fellows, but sheer magnetic force of will. With evil motives or
depraved minds, they would have been dangerous to the whole community:
as mere war leaders or beasts of prey they would have been exiled; but
with beneficent purpose and a deep-ingrained sense of the ultimate aim
of their whole civilisation, they were of great power on the side of
progress. They were the organisers of the community, the captains of
industry. They managed and directed the various services in which all
the citizens had to take part so that there should be no superfluous
issue of commands, no friction, or even consciousness of direction.
They were in complete sympathy with all the people, binding them into a
unity of discipline; and their magnetism of will, applied through the
eye, served but to stir the love of service and duty to enthusiasm. In
an age of semi-savagery, or of revised savagery such as the military
ages of Europe were, some of them would have been great conquerors,
combining many peoples and vast territories for a few years in
order to sate their ambition or love of glory. As it was, the equal
development of their other powers and the universal dominance of the
moral aim of the race made their wills innocuous.
It was the same with the other manifestations of human magnetism, which
in defective or half-developed civilisations played so maleficent a
part. That power of voice and speech which could sway mobs to evil
in such communities was in Limanora the endowment of every citizen.
The electric tone quivered and rang in every voice I heard; it was
like the sweetest music, drawing the soul to it. The fascination of
personality, which so often in Western women, even where they have no
beauty or grace, proves the ruin of dozens of men, belonged to both
sexes in Limanora and to every citizen. It was a powerful, diffused
magnetism ever attracting its opposite without revealing its secret
even to its possessor. There was to me something very winsome in most
of them, even when saying and doing nothing; and in Thyriel, although
my intellect told me she was not what Europeans call beautiful, this
became ravishing. Her personal magnetism was overpowering, even when
she was silent and stood at a distance, and in rude times of ignorance
would have been set down to witchcraft.
All these investigations and results I learned as clearly as if I saw
them with the eye, in the firlamai or division of the electric sense,
one of the vast halls of Oomalefa. Here were all the instruments needed
to develop the firla or aid it, and all those by which it sought deeper
into the secrets of nature. Off the hall ran corridors and arcades,
which were to the firla what picture and sculpture galleries are to
the ocular imagination, supplying it with noble and pleasurable
excitation, as the music domes touched the aural imagination. They
had their passive firlamaic arts of beauty as well as their active.
In one vast arcade they could sit and feel with their firlas the
electric harmonies of any given tract of air or earth or ocean, the
harmonies that play as it were on the surface; this was equivalent
to gazing at landscapes, real or pictured, with the eye. In another
there was firlamaic sculpture; in this were gathered the noblest
achievements of their electric artists, who strove to concentrate
into some definite form varied magnetic materials so as to stir the
imagination through the firla to thoughts of the titanic harmonies of
the universe. They gave this form beauty for the eye as well; but that
was not the primary aim; the gazers, as they sat, preferred to turn
their backs to the work; for then through the firla their imagination
was thrown into an attitude of placid meditation which seemed to have
before it some great spheral harmony of the stars. In a third series of
lofty corridors there was continually proceeding what might be called
firlamaic music. In two or three it was entirely instrumental. Great
firlamans or electric organs, at each end of one corridor I entered,
flashed out what was to me the most appalling medley of lightnings;
the gleams crossed and interwove and changed mass and form as if it
were a dance of meteors, now slow and stately like a minuet, again
swift and brilliant and dazzling as if the stars of heaven had joined
the lightnings in a bewildering yet harmonious ballet. At first I
was stunned and blinded; but soon I felt dimly the ecstasy apparent
in my neighbours. Their eyes gleamed with joy; to me some of them
seemed almost in a delirium; they were unconscious of their immediate
surroundings, for I spoke to Thyriel and received no answer, and her
motion through the hall as we started to leave it was somnambulous.
She told me afterwards that, though her firla was only in its infancy,
she felt drawn up into the heavens as in a trance; she seemed to feel
the worlds move around her and attract her into their spheral chant;
her imagination dealt with interastral forces as with playmates from
eternity; she leapt vast ages every moment, and spanned in a stride
spaces which seemed to her common powers infinite. She would not rest
till she could enjoy this macrocosmic orchestra to the full as her
parents did; she would not let a day pass without such practice as
would develop her firla to the utmost. I felt solitary and forlorn as
I heard her ecstatic descriptions and resolves, and thought upon my
incapacity to understand them. In a moment she knew my dejection, and
realised how forgetful she had been of me and of her surroundings. She
at once threw off her imaginative trance of magnetic enjoyment, and
determined to keep pace with my advance. It was a slow and weary path
I had to travel; but her cheerful encouragement prevented despair.
Through the years between I was able by dint of constant and vigorous
practice to concentrate into my eyes and into the back of my head much
of the magnetic power and receptiveness that had existed before in my
body, but in a diffused condition. I was at last able to go with her
and appreciate the stellar imaginings which the flashing firlamans
excited.
There was another majestic arcade, in which Limanoran artists
themselves joined in sublime firlamaic music. On my first visit to
it, many years after my introduction to Oomalefa, I was appalled to
see human beings stand like Joves flashing long tongues of lightning
or flame from their eyes or fingers; they seemed to stand unscathed
in a fiery furnace, or rather to weave and plait and mould the flames
as if they had been threads of some plastic material. Had I come here
during my early novitiate in the island, I should have fled in terror
as from dreams of hell realised. There in the midst passed the artist
like a dark shuttle through a loom of lightnings as he wove them into
an ever-changing web of living colour. For a time I could not control
my terror, as I looked to see him shrivelled to ashes. At last through
my reason I managed to calm myself into feeling that he was the master
and creator of this display and that the dreadful tongues of flame and
swift meteors which rose and vanished around him were unstinged and
innocuous. Then began to creep into me a sweet sense of some magnetic
harmony, stirring my mind to contemplation of the mighty forces of
the world. I seemed to know the voiceless majesty of time, as if vast
ages were crushed into moments; I followed our orb as it swept away
from the immense concentric circles of flame wheeling round the core
of whirling fire; I saw it mass into an eye of passion fixed in gaze
upon the mother star it had left; alone it travelled into space tied
like an infant still by magnetic threads to the parent sun; out into
the infinite it yearned to rush seeking life and souls to nestle in
its bosom; yet never would the unseen mother cord give way. Out and
out flamed the earth into immeasurable space and the wild longing was
calmed; the tempests of fire lulled and fell; the luminous billows
ceased to rear their crests or toss their fiery spindrift; a dull,
still-glimmering crust imprisoned her torrid heart; the conflagrations
burst forth in wider and wider intervals. At last she wooed the germs
of life from the wandering infinities to rest for brief spaces on her
bosom. Night brought peace to her, and the stars with their cool and
unimpassioned rays bred within her through the ages gentle thoughts
and a love of teeming life; they quenched her superficial fires, and,
binding chains of magnetic power around her, drew her out into spaces
of infinity beyond the scorching flame tongues of her fervid mother.
Life born and nursed in the cold interstellar tracts teemed on her
breast. Back she sprang again into the warmer rays of the mother orb,
breaking the stellar bonds, and life leapt from sea to air and crawled
upon the new-won lands in monstrous forms. Last came the strangest
monster of all, erect like a bird, yet wingless, first swinging from
tree to tree, then skimming the plains upon the backs of fellow-beasts
he had mastered: man, the portent of God, had come. Slowly he grew and
slowly sloughed off his beast habits. Prehistoric time focussed into a
moment. First came tyranny and war as moulders of his spirit; then they
became monsters, barring his way to the divine. Great monarchies and
empires flew by like a lightning flash; thousands of years with their
events or somnolences passed swift as a dream. Stronger grew reason in
man’s brain, the love in his heart; divine influences surrounded him,
watching the dawn of the new power of thought and nursing the growth
of the spirit in him. Then out of the darkness came the historic ages
of this island’s progress towards diviner light, and rushed in a flash
across my brain.
Then I awoke from this ennobling dream, swift and beautiful as a trance
made up of moments, each of which contained an eternity. The electric
song of the history of our world had ceased, and my spirit fell like
a meteor from heaven, out of the exhilaration and the ecstasy. Never
before had I felt as if my life was that of a god watching from above
the flight of time. I scarcely knew that the darkness around me had
suddenly turned into daylight and the web of lightning flashes had
vanished; I was led from the arcade by Thyriel as in a dream. When we
reached the gallery which overlooked the ocean and I turned my eyes to
the dome of heaven, I was conscious that a new glory had come into my
life. Dim though my conception of the electric song of creation had
been, I realised with joy what a vast universe had been added to the
possibilities of my life by the discovery of this new sense and of
the sublime things I might perceive through it. I would not be behind
Thyriel in the cultivation of the magnetism in my system, but would
enter with redoubled ardour on the practice of my firla.
It was thus too I came to understand the passion they had for
Firlalain, as this section of Oomalefa was called. The young were not
allowed to enter it, lest it should act as a narcotic on their sense
of duty to the ultimate aim of their civilisation. Not till they had
gained full mastery of themselves, and especially of their appetites
and passions, were they admitted, and even then it was with a caution
which showed the greatness of the risk they incurred. The delights of
the new sense were apt to grow intoxicating, and there had been at one
time a fear of some becoming magnetic drunkards, who would spend their
days in Firlalain besotted with indolent enjoyment of the exhilarating
flight through the realms of fancy, and heedless of the health and
interests of their other tissues. Once they had reached maturity, there
was no such fear; and no curb was then set upon their liberty to enter
these halls of electric harmony.
After they had come to that stage of life when the walls of their
blood-vessels began to lose flexibility, it became almost a duty to
frequent Firlalain. The stimulus given to the currents of life by the
mere physical influence of the electricity was enough to overcome
the growing rigidity of cell and tissue; but the rush of thought and
fancy gave the whole nature such impetus that the torrent of the
blood through its channels induced the plasticity of youth again.
They had other methods of postponing the approach of old age; they
could withdraw from the walls of the various vessels of the body the
accumulation of lime and other hardening elements; there were several
chambers of diet the atmosphere of which neutralised the increase of
salts and carbons in the body, and other medicinal chambers which could
bring off by the pores any deleterious or obstructive matters forming
in any of the tissues; but Firlalain was the most effective postponer
of that stage of life when yearnings come into the heart for final and
complete rest, for it flooded the whole being with new impulse and new
energy. Most of all was the great stellar arcade frequented by the old
in order to drive off the ennui of existence; a feeling which indicated
the gradual calcarescence or induration of the brain and heart-tissues.
Here any region of the starry night they chose could be made to
concentrate its magnetic influence upon their firla. A man might take a
new tract and new blending of imaginative impulse every day of life for
centuries and yet not exhaust the limit of variety; for the stars moved
through infinite space as the earth moved, but in different directions,
and ever new universes or worlds were coming within the range of the
Limanoran electric sense.
I shall not easily forget my first experience of this astral gallery.
Along it at intervals were placed great electroscopes and magnetic
magnifiers, that gathered in electric influences from various portions
of the heavens. Almost every seat was occupied by one of the older
inhabitants of the island, and as they sat with the focus of the huge
instrument resting on their neck their faces seemed almost to have a
halo round them, so brightly did they beam with ecstasy. Their eyes
were closed, and I would have said that each was dreaming some dream
of glory which inundated his being, had I not seen their eyes open
for a moment as we passed, in consciousness of the world around; the
vision came to their waking imagination. Then I looked up through the
great magnifying domes and saw the stars and constellations mass upon
the face of heaven, and huge spheres concentrating upon themselves the
sheen of some starry circle.
Thyriel led me to one vacant seat, and before I turned my back to the
magnetic lens, I gazed upwards and saw the Southern Cross pouring down
its silver arrows. I had not sat there long before a thrill came upon
me which spread throughout my system; my pulse fluttered like a bird
in contending storms; every nerve began to throb with expectation and
delight; I could have created worlds in my ardour; sublime thoughts
swam in from eternity upon my soul; I had the mother passion within
me which would have moulded nobler spirits than my own. At last I
felt the currents of my existence centre upon one realm of space and
was conscious of countless life around me which struggled and mounted
upwards. I felt my nature drawn to higher levels than any terrene
existence I had ever known. I seemed to breathe with difficulty the
diviner airs of greater purpose, and yet there were strains of discord
from lower types of being revealing gradations in the new universe.
Some orbs were already on the path of decay; and on them the higher
life was succumbing to the weakened vitality. Others had just attained
to life; and on them had settled migrants from other spheres, whose
elevating powers they had exhausted. Some were flitting like ghosts
about their mother suns with but a thin ethereal life now darting
between atmosphere and solid crust. Only one planet in each system
was passing through the climax in its history, and near it my rapture
became too great to bear; my veins seemed on the point of bursting
with the fulness of life; my soul was dragged above my natural level,
till the physical bonds which fettered me were about to break, and I
was glad to be attracted to other circling orbs that with coarser but
stronger magnetism drew me to them. The median point of balanced joy
was reached when, resting between two spheres, I felt their magnetic
currents neutralise each other, and yet the higher influence of the
new system raise the pulsing of my spirit. As full bliss was it when,
darting from system to system, I experienced the power of life that
dwelt in each, and felt the varied types of existence mingling their
magnetic thought with mine; I could feel the struggling of worlds up to
their goal thrill through my spirit; on the underside it was like the
wail of one who has abandoned the upward conflict and plunged into the
waters of oblivion; on its upper side it was like the fervour of souls
who see through mists of life the elysium they have yearned for. I was
conscious of the infinite tragedy being enacted upon each orb, and yet
not near enough to see what destiny awaited it. I was drawn within the
eddy of a new and loftier ambition; my spirit perceived stages of being
within its reach, yet beyond all it had known; and it throbbed with
new eagerness to rise above itself. Nothing could be more rapturous
than the consciousness of this system beyond system, each with its own
type of life and stage of spiritual aim, each with its peculiar medley
of magnetic influence, each drawn into its own vortex of emotion and
energy.
A touch on my hand broke the spell, and I was down on earth again,
exalted, yet knowing the contrast. It was Thyriel, who would remind
me of my duty to my own being and to the state. I arose and moved out
with her but she knew the ecstasy too well to break in on my dream,
and led me out to the sea arcade, where I could hear the low rippling
melody of the waves beneath and the faint music of the world of air. I
turned my eyes up to the azure, and seemed to tread amongst the orbs
that veiled their silver radiance in the blaze of noon. Out of my life,
I am sure, the exaltation never wholly vanished. I had been among the
living fountains of eternity. I had moved conscious of the birth of
worlds, and known the throb that is a myriad of ages. Was this not
to be kin with God, to know the all-grasping passion of a moment of
divine life? Ever and again the greatness of the memory flamed out into
conflagration within me, and I was then in the mood to make or conquer
worlds; and never wholly out of my blood died the exaltation I had
felt.
CHAPTER XI
A CATASTROPHE
BUT long years divided my first visit to Oomalefa and my admission to
Firlalain. I saw that there were certain vast sections of Oomalefa that
I was led past; massive portals showed their rank, but the number on
them defining the age at which entrance was possible warned us off,
and allegorical pictures adorning their arches figured the decay of
tissue and cell that would result in the youthful body from too early
admittance. Any curiosity Thyriel or I could have felt was repressed by
these ominous symbols; for this people never relied on mere authority.
Their strongest prohibitions were in the form of graphic appeals to
the reason, and only where these could not impress youthful natures
sufficiently were the emotions involved; the influences of any special
indulgence upon the human system were represented in living form,
which, looked at through a medium magnifying them ten thousand-fold,
stirred the heart of all the more deeply.
We saw in a moment that we were unfit to enter Firlalain, and we
passed on into the vast series of baths wherein the Limanorans could
rid their bodies of obstructive or noxious elements. Here was every
grade of temperature endurable by their tissues: for every grade there
was a separate swimming-pool in which they could exercise themselves;
and every hour automatic machinery driven by force from Rimla sent
the contents of each pool into one of the lava wells, where in a few
moments the water and all the débris thrown off from the bathers’
bodies vanished in fire. These baths were so arranged that not more
than two should be empty together, and at the general entrance were
seated two medical counsellors, who measured and tested the state and
temperature of the body, and showed graphically what would be the
effect of entering each bath of the series to which the state of the
bather restricted him.
Far more important than these water baths were the baths of ether,
baths of magnetism, and solar baths, in which any portion of the body
or the whole of it could be submitted to the purified forces of the
world. From the ethereal baths all terrene elements were exhausted,
and there remained the pure medium of life beyond our atmosphere, the
divine air which spiritual beings breathe. Nothing so raised the power
of the mind over the body or the part of the body immersed in this. It
partially and for the time being dematerialised the part, withdrawing
its earthy tendencies, and giving it an exhilarant atmosphere in which
it acquired new life and energy, and resisted the encroachments of
lower parasitic life. The two other kinds of baths had somewhat the
same effect, but were less powerful than this. Magnetism allowed the
ether a more direct influence than either water or air; it concentrated
the force of the purer medium on any point. The solar baths had been
used from time immemorial. It had been one of the earliest discoveries
of their science that the lower organisations and microscopic forms of
life that battened on the human frame lost vitality in the full beams
of the sun. Later their investigators had found that solar radiance
dispelled the vapours and terrene elements which floated in the air,
clinging invisibly to bodies and forming the feeding-ground of quickly
generative microbes. It purified by its energy all that it came into
contact with, and in short allowed the ether which was its medium freer
play. For generations sunshine had been one of their most successful
curative agencies and was now used to reinforce and stimulate human
life and energy. The rays of the sun, blanched to some extent of their
heat and excessive force, were concentrated in rooms made wholly of
transparent irelium, or upon irelium glasses of various shapes and
forms to suit the part of the body to be subjected to their influence.
These were their solar baths; but their whole system of life was one
continuous solar bath: for every corner of their houses both public and
private was laid open to the sun’s influence from dawn to twilight, and
this stored up in the atmosphere of the rooms and halls forms of energy
which during the night gave ease and exhilaration to those who slept.
They fully realised that it was not merely heat and light they got from
the sun, but subtle energies, a fine aroma from the diviner medium that
filled the interstellar spaces.
Every Limanoran of an age to be admitted to Oomalefa resorted several
times a day to each of these three kinds of baths. First came a
magnetic bath, in which every organ and tissue was stimulated to throw
off its débris towards the pores. Then came the swim in one or more of
the pools, in order that all this rejected part might be washed off.
After this came the solar bath, which penetrated into the superficial
channels of the body and swept away all bacterial life that might be
nocuous. The last stage was the ethereal bath, which was enjoyed in
solitude and could be endured by any but the mature for only a few
minutes; the exhilaration and tenuity of atmosphere were too great for
unaccustomed lungs, and I could see the heads of the bathers thrust
out at short intervals to take a breath. But long practice made the
older Limanorans enjoy the buoyancy of the pure medium for hours. It
was indeed one of the hopes of the race that they would be able at
last to breathe the interstellar ether with greater ease than the air
surrounding their own earth.
It was in these baths I first came to see the marvellous grace and
plasticity of their garments. They were outside of all my previous
experiences and conceptions, and seemed so natural that I took them for
a part of their material outfit like their hair. It had never entered
into my mind to question whether they laid them aside in sleep or not.
Perhaps it was owing to the beauty and animation of the countenance,
when they spoke or even looked, that I had not paid any attention to
their dress except to see how it never impeded their movements either
in flight or in work, and how it varied with the individual, and
never with the sex or age or profession; it belonged to the childhood
of the world to regiment men in the minor details of life. Now I
saw in the baths that the vesture did not need to be laid aside in
other elements than air. It was made of some fine and flexible stuff
woven out of irelium threads, plastic to the shape, yet capable of
stiffening out when the wearer sent an electric wave through it from
the electro-generator he always bore under his right arm. This process
at once shook out every drop of water from it, when he issued from
the bath or the sea. It was so porous that it seemed fragile, and yet
it could bear great strains. Through its pores passed with ease the
water or air or ether that was to influence the body underneath; and
along its threads passed with ease any magnetism the wearer wished to
feel. In certain lights it was almost transparent, yet with such a
play of rainbow colors that it seemed a living fence against lights
and shadows. In the darkness it shone with dazzling radiance as soon
as the electric current flowed into it. At the will of the wearer it
could be, like a magic garment of invisibility, black as midnight, yet
in daylight could reveal every grace and tint of the limbs it covered,
clinging closely like an outer epidermis to the body. Nor was it ever
laid aside except to be replaced by a new vesture, and that was every
few days; for all germs and débris that adhered to it or obstructed
its pores could be destroyed and got rid of by the electric current
the wearer had control of. It was on my first visit to Oomalefa that I
came to know these things, as it was then that I first donned a like
vesture, and was taught its properties and the ways of managing it and
the minute electro-generator that went with it.
There were alternative garments, that they wore under different
conditions. One, almost as plastic as the ordinary vesture, but
armoured by electricity against the inroads of excessive cold, was worn
when they ventured up into the higher regions of the air or beyond; for
it enabled them to keep up the natural temperature of the body as they
flew. Another was as well suited for protection against extreme heat.
It consisted of an asbestine double wall of irelium, within which was
kept up a constant current of cold air by means of a minute apparatus
worked by their wings and arms; and, if they could get moisture
from the atmosphere to run between the two textile folds, it was at
once frozen. Such an arrangement was necessary in their adventurous
experiments in the bowels of the earth or under the blazing eye of the
sun. The most beautiful and most convenient of all their vestures was
one which looked and felt like a film of white cloud; I would have said
that it was woven of the misty fleeces that caught and rent themselves
on the lesser peaks of Lilaroma. It was indeed no distant mimicry of
this; for though it could be thrown loosely round the figure in the
most graceful forms like a toga, and seemed as thin and fragile as
gossamer, it consisted of a treble fabric: between two transparent
films, fairly delicate as if woven by a spider on a windless dawn,
moved in cloud-like purity and dimness the airy vapour of some liquid
that shone as silvery and warm as moonlight. Its purpose was to conceal
and yet to reveal the general contour and movements of the body; to
sift the strength of the sun’s rays as they fell in their purity from
heaven, and yet to pass as much of their curative power through it as
the skin needed; to cling to the limbs, and yet to impede them no more
than a fleece of cloud would.
It was as I was studying the texture and the beauty of these garments
that there happened the first approach to panic I had yet witnessed
among this calm-eyed people. There had been a stillness as of
ill-bridled tumult in the atmosphere all day. My proparents had moved
restlessly abroad from daybreak, and all the Leomo were on the wing
husbanding every minute with feverish clutch. We were sent in squadrons
to different parts of the island, and many new leomorans were set
to work in unaccustomed corners of the mountain, yet there was a
look of baffled intelligence in every face. I had felt there was an
undeciphered portent overshadowing their life. Thyriel and I had worked
at two new leomorans and watched them till they wielded their brush of
smoke across the sky. We had done all that we could and were sent out
to Oomalefa to uncloud our troubled minds.
The excitement of this new sphere had removed from our thoughts all
ominous shadows and we were as innocently absorbed as primitive men
of the woodlands in the wonders now opened to us; but silence had
fallen upon the gambolling swimmers, and the hush awakened us from
our new dream. We felt the foundations of the building tremble and
quiver like a panic-stricken beast. Up the translucent walls clicked
a huge rent, and slowly the liquid in the baths hissed and vanished.
A tumultuous muffled cannonade rolled beneath us. The crystal roof
crackled and snapped like ice-rafts that groan and toss before a sudden
flood. The chink widened into a chasm, and through it we could see the
ocean seethe in turbulence and revolution. Up through the roof whizzed
the wings of the alarmed bathers, and as the jarring and detonation
grew, I stood knowing not whither to turn. All I could do was to bid
Thyriel follow her mates. More awful came back the reverberations from
the domes, and Thyriel’s face was pale and her lips set, but she did
not move. Finally she bade me follow her to that end of the gallery
farthest from the chasm in the walls, a raised platform whence the
swimmers dived. There she placed me with my back to hers, and ran a
rope under my arms. Before I knew what she was about, I was off my
feet; she was running at full speed up the rising platform and with a
sudden jerk we were in the air. I heard the beating of her wings, and
lay still lest I should baffle her purpose. I lay on my back between
her wings, and shuddered as I saw their points broken against the lips
of the chasm. A deep-mouthed clangour filled my ears; and for a moment
my eyelids fell in palsied terror. When I raised them and looked down,
the vast crystal of Oomalefa had vanished and the great promontory
stood gaping, with the surf hissing and baying as it leapt over the
upper surface.
I felt that Thyriel was almost exhausted, and thought of detaching
myself from the rope which bound me and leaping into the ocean; but
the idea had not quite grown into resolve when I saw her wings beat
slower and knew that we were hovering over the solid land. In a moment
we were standing side by side, she exhausted, I supporting her with my
arms. It was not long before she recovered herself, for her attention
had been awakened by a startling appearance out in mid-ocean. A high
peak rose beyond the cleft and scarred promontory where there had been
only waves before, its head turbaned with steam and smoke. It was still
shouldering the sea to right and left with hiss of lava tongue and
splash of cinder shower. We could not speak for alarmed wonder, and
mingling with mine there was deep sorrow over Oomalefa vanished. What
had become of it I could not tell. Thyriel roused herself and, divining
my thoughts, led me to the steps which had once given entrance to the
starry portal. She stooped and lifted in her hand some of what seemed
to me fine-sprinkled snow, that covered every inch of rock. It was
irelium dust. Once the cohesion of the great edifice had been overcome
by the shocks of the earthquake, it fell not into fragments or huge
blocks, but into its constituent atoms. Nothing, I thought, could ever
replace the wondrous palace of delights that I had only begun to know.
I felt saddened beyond recovery, as we turned homewards, over the
ruin of such magnificence and so great hopes. Thyriel’s dejection,
I discovered, was retrospective. She mourned over the failure of
Leomarie, the earthquake art of her family and friends. They had
thought that they could anticipate and prevent all the grumblings and
revolutions of Lilaroma, and this outbreak had shown the imperfection
of their knowledge and the limits of their art. Though but a novice,
I could see that something was yet wanting to make them masters of
the crust of the earth. For the first time for many generations their
foresight had failed. They had known that there was disturbance beneath
the mountain, but they had been unable to fix its centre, which was far
out at sea. The inflow of the waters had baffled the power of their
mountain-cupping instruments, and the rapidly generated steam had rent
the crust in the line of Oomalefa; and until the slow-trickling lavas
and the swift-belched ashes had sealed the lips of the chasm again,
there was danger, they knew, of the whole island exploding. How they
were to prevent or even anticipate such cataclysms was a problem that
weighed upon every member of the family and saddened every leisure
moment.
For some days the Leomo were busy with the wreckage of the outbreak. I
was attached to the section that had to inspect the lava wells, gauge
the amount of molten matter which had oozed from each, repair every
clirolan or other instrument that had been deranged, and replace those
submerged. The urgency of the occasion excused us from the regular
duties and pleasures of the day. All our ablutions and essential
exercises were performed in the private mansions. Most of the hours
not spent in sleep were devoted to the tasks made for us by the new
exigency. The excitement removed the monotony and burden of the work,
and almost before we knew that there was so much to do it was done.
New wells were sunk and new clirolans fixed wherever the overflow had
choked or sealed the old. The instruments of even the most distant
section of the island were put into their best working order.
Then we were free to scatter to the winds and to follow our old
delights. Thyriel set herself with renewed eagerness to teach me the
art of flight, and I attained the power of describing an easy curve
from a shoulder of Lilaroma down to the plain. Again and again in her
new desire to master flight with me seated between her wings, she
carried me up to some jutting platform of the mountain: and then she
showed me how to work the wing-engine with ease. I could keep level
with my starting-point for a few minutes, but after that I had to let
myself glide down the parabola of the air. I was too heavily weighted
by gravity and the inertia of my muscles to rise as she did.
There were many secrets of their flight that I soon understood. The
curious construction of the wings, formed as they were of two sliding
membranes, I have already described. What I had taken for a mere rudder
was a large series of small screws that gave forward motion to the
flight. The engine that whirled them round as they churned the air was
of great power, and without them the flight would have been but slow
and clumsy. It was through inability to manage this engine that I was
so long in mastering even the rudiments of the art.
I progressed greatly that day, and would have progressed more but
that the lesson was abruptly broken off. In each new air voyage to
a higher sally-point she bore me farther round the mountain towards
the great plain that stretched to the south. When we reached our last
flight platform, and I had descended, my glance shot over the countless
centres of industry and investigation that stippled the rolling downs.
It was a noble sight, and I could have long rested in the gaze: but an
unwonted gleam drew my eyes to the precipitous coast. There on a vast
new promontory which ran out miles into the sea was gathered such a
galaxy of jewelled domes rainbow-lit by the sun as I could not have
conceived even from my remembrance of Oomalefa and its marvellous
architecture. Thyriel’s eyes had also been riveted by the spectacle.
“It is a new Oomalefa,” she burst forth. I could not believe it; how
could such a palace of wonders be reconstructed in so short a time?
There were only a few thousand mature Limanorans; and if they had been
all engaged on such a structure night and day it would have taken many
busy years to rear it. I took it for a mere illusion. The position
of the sun and some unusual commotion in the sea had produced it by
reflection and refraction. It was but a bubble of the imagination bred
by some abnormality in our eyes upon our memory of Oomalefa and the
grief of our minds at its evanishment.
So I argued. But Thyriel was silently decided in her dissent. We could
take no more interest in our aëronautics, nothing could keep our gaze
from that radiant orb resting, gigantic, on the beach. As the sun
declined the facets of the new jewel shimmered with living sheen: now
it was a city of burnished gold, again it was a myriad of lambent
flames aspiring to the centre of fire: now a thousand rainbows weaving
and unweaving themselves, again uncounted stars clustered and heaped
in restless silver, or wintry thistledown of swarming snow. Surely it
was but an army of will-o’-the-wisps lit in the marsh fumes that the
gaping sea had sent forth. Yet as I gazed it grew in my mind that this
sparkling halo had a fixed centre; there was symmetry in the refulgence
and in the recurrence of colour and sheen. It could not be illusion; we
were both transfixed like sculptures in eternal gaze.
The flash of wings broke the completeness of the glory and our spell.
Above the transplendent spectacle fluttered a snow-storm of ariels;
the sun shot a fiery gleam through a rent cloud, and across his
silvery beams danced and played these winged motes. The beauty of
the sight moved us almost to tears. We knew that this was no phantom
joy; our fellows were aloft in the air hymning the glory of a new
creation. Soon Thyriel had persuaded me to start with her towards the
new palace of wonders. We had not got half-way when I felt my arms
weary and my flight dragging towards the plain. She would not leave
me to trudge across the uneven earth; before I could argue she had me
safely nestling between her wings as they beat the air upwards from
the low knoll on which we had alighted. She no longer laboured under
her burden, as she had done in her first attempt some days before; yet
I felt that she grew tired, and made her land upon a hill a few miles
from the new Oomalefa. After a rest I was able on my own wings to curve
down towards its flight of new-rocked steps and its scintillant portal.
We entered, and all was joy and music. Up underneath the new domes
flitted the happy artists putting the final touches on the tinted
translucence of the irelium walls. The plan was more elaborate
and yet simpler than the old Oomalefa. The beauty of it was more
overwhelming to the imagination of the eyes. I could not have conceived
two structures more unlike from their larger architecture down to
their minutest detail of ornament, and yet so adapted to the one
purpose. The halls of medication and sustenance, the galleries of the
magnetic sense, the baths, the arcades, and the sea balconies were all
complete, yet as different from those that had gone to dust as Western
architecture from Oriental. New instruments and apparatus, new indexes
and tests were there at work. Not a detail had been neglected; but
the rocky platforms over the sea were broader, and when we flew into
the air and looked at it from above we could see that the promontory
stretched farther into the sea and was broader both on its surface and
at its base; and strange to say, it had as its outermost point the new
peak that the eruption had thrown up in the ocean. It was conjectured
by the Leomo, I soon knew, that this line, now sealed up as it was and
with its lava vent at its outer extremity, would be freer from terrene
paroxysms than any other portion of the island marge. This was where
my proparents and the rest of the earth artisans had been engaged so
busily during these days; they had been guiding the lava flow along the
line of rent out through the sea to the great beacon which the outburst
had raised; and the dash of the waves had cooled and congealed each
layer as it flowed and curdled from the new peak to the shore of the
island.
CHAPTER XII
OOLOREFA
BUT by what magic had this wondrous jewel group of domes and spires and
minarets grown upon the platform within these few alternations of sun
and dark? From my own experience of bastioning the shore I was able
to understand the rapidity with which the foundations had been laid.
My wonder grew all the more at the marvellous piece of art that now
stood upon them; every detail was so complete and so beautiful. The
giant forest aisle of Cologne Cathedral, the mosaic splendour that had
overawed me within St. Peter’s, the statued frost-work of Milan, seemed
to me tawdry beside the colossal domes with their jewelled magnificence
and the infinite variety in simplicity of the labyrinth of arcades and
galleries and arches. Yet those were the fruits of a thousand years’
faith and work; this was the product of a few days. The more I thought
of it, the more bewildered I was.
Thyriel divined my thoughts and saved me from my perplexity. “You
have never seen the Ooloran,” she exclaimed. I asked her what it
was. I could see that the word might be translated sonarchitect. Her
description of it, though lucid as usual, did not convey to my slow
thoughts a full idea of the instrument; and we got permission to visit
Oolorefa, or the hall of architecture, the following day.
In the multiplicity of wonders throughout Limanora I had failed to
notice this great edifice, although it stood on a level, symmetrically
cut plateau, commanding all the region in which were gathered most of
the exceptionally great and magnificent structures of the island, and
was but one of a series of gleaming palaces which crowned the points
of the rocky spurs of Lilaroma. In each palace was concentrated some
one of the services that the new civilisation had to offer to the
progress of the race. I had visited a few of them, and it was part of
the programme of my education to make me spend such space and time
in each as the desire or the necessity arose in my life; but it had
never struck me to inquire how the marvellous buildings had arisen.
Nor, though I had noticed the frequent change of outward shape and
ornamentation of parts of the mansion of my proparents, had I ever
had leisure or curiosity to find out the reason or source of the
transformations. It was delightful to see the growth of the building
and to remove into the new parts; and as silently and invisibly the
sections we had left vanished. I had never time to grow tired of one
chamber or set of chambers before another was ready for me. It was like
the growth of a palace of dreams; but I soon accepted it as one of the
magic habits of the island, a natural feature of my life, never rousing
query and seldom awakening even thought. So much of new and striking
was crowded into the days and months and years that large portions of
the civilisation had to pass uncommented on and ultimately unnoticed.
With the same wonder with which in later life we begin to watch the
marvellous workings of the functions of our bodies I entered on my
new investigation. As we approached Oolorefa it seemed to me that we
had made a mistake and come to the wrong building; for it rang with
the most entrancing music and I thought that it must be the cathedral
of the island. It had one vast central dome surrounded by countless
cupolas, and as we skirted the edifice I heard underneath each of these
smaller roofs sweet melodies sounding too low to be heard beyond its
partition walls and almost drowned in the thunderous diapason of the
central dome. These I took for chapels and fanes subsidiary to the
great temple, round which they clustered.
We entered and I was amazed to find under what I had thought to be the
temple of the island a great mansion, but dwarfed by the height and
size of the temple roof. The fence enclosing it had just been shaken
to dust by their new electric process for the atomising of irelium.
What was to be done with the new structure? It was walled in by the
giant cupola, and could not possibly be removed. The thought was
beating about in my mind, but ceased before a sudden crash; I looked
up and there, one complete and evenly cut quadrant of the dome had
vanished, and the bright sun shone in undimmed by any medium. I again
noticed something going on around us. Great flanks like the sides of
a ship were fitted to the bottom of the new building, and along them
underneath were adjusted huge floats. Wings were then attached to
either side, and a strong wing-engine was placed in the body and two
rudder-engines in the after-part of the raft. They were rapidly charged
with electricity, the floats were exhausted of their heavier air, and
up rose the whole structure through the huge aperture in the dome; and
I could see its pilots guide it this way and that through the air to
fit the unequal and varying wind that blew, till at last it disappeared
round a shoulder of Lilaroma. I had run out of Oolorefa to watch the
flight of the great mansion on its aërial raft, and when it went out of
sight I returned, reflecting with a sigh of relief that this explained
the magic growth of the house in which I lived; the additions had
arrived and been fixed and adapted to the purposes of human habitation
while I was sleeping or absent on my daily pursuits.
I was startled when I got back to find the dome complete again and
preparation being made for constructing some other irelium shell.
The fence-work had been raised. By its wall stood the key-board of a
gigantic organ-like musical instrument, the other half of which was
so arranged within the new framework that the whole volume of its
sound should bear upon whatever the fence enclosed. A huge bell mouth
opened out into the chamber; and I soon saw that out of this issued a
snow-storm of irelium particles which floated lightly in the air. A
peal of music rang out from the instrument, and I saw the dust motes
settle rapidly into a symmetrical figure, that minute by minute grew
into a gigantic nautilus shell. The musician who sat at the key-board
watched the snow-whirl within and the magical rise of the walls. I
perceived that the bar of music was repeated again and again, with
gradual ingrafting of variation as the shell-like walls bent over. At
a certain point where the whorl began to incurve backwards the strain
completely changed and reminded me of a fugue. Back and forth it shot
its monotonous shuttle of sound. I was spellbound by the cradling
melody and the sinuous flexure of the vast conch. The completion of the
process and the cessation of the music broke the spell, and I pressed
near to ask explanations and to see the result. Some enchanter’s power
must surely have drawn in the floating particles to the thin curves of
the structure and held them there; for the motes continued to float
unattracted, but in sparse and sparser cloud; and at last they ceased
to move, and settled on the fence, dimming its translucence. I felt the
metal floor grow first hotter and hotter, and then cooler and cooler
till it was ice-cold. Within a fraction of an hour the whole process
was complete; the fencing walls were shaken to dust, and there stood
the gigantic nautilus perfect in its grace, clear as crystal but for
the frostwork of nautilus patterns all over its surface. It was a new
experiment in form for a winged ship of the air, and as I stood the
wings were added and the engines put on board. The navigators embarked;
a smaller quadrant of the dome crashed aside; and out by the aperture
floated this huge air-bubble rainbow-lustrous in the sun.
Thyriel led me to the vacant space whence the airship had been
launched; and there I was shown how powerful magnets made the
snow-storm sweep so rapidly downwards and held the irelium dust in
position, once it had taken shape. Then the alternate floors were
exhibited to me, one emanating heat which melted the new structure
into a permanency, and another that reduced the temperature below
freezing-point and completed the architectural process by chilling
the metal. There were other floors easy of substitution by means of
leverage and the application of great force; as one was withdrawn,
another was run into its place. One was suited for one chemical
process, another for another. A second set were for applying to the
walls of the new structure different forms or grades of electricity.
A third set could infuse into them various kinds of concreting fluids
to make them cohere when the heating and chilling process was likely
to fail. This was the great Ooloran that I had come to see, and only
the most skilled musician and architect was allowed to sit down at the
key-board.
In order to show me the part that music took in this swift
architecture, I was led round the circle of sub-chapels, that I had
seen surrounding the great dome. In these were employed the various
draughtsmen of Oolorefa. In the first we entered the experimenter was
engaged in seeking the most beautiful form for a new mansion which
was to be placed up amongst the snows of Lilaroma; it would have to
withstand great gusts of wind and at times heavy drifts of snow; it
would also have to bear a variety of high temperatures within in order
to protect the dwellers from the bitterness of the night. The building
was meant for those who had to watch the storm-cone and keep it in
perfect working order. The draughtsman was using a miniature Ooloran,
and deftly sounding various musical notes, and sometimes songs into
its irelium dust whirlwind; but there was always one predominating
note, meant to introduce into each experiment a feature that had been
before tested and found suitable. He fixed his experiments by means
of his small movable floors, and then placed the resulting forms in
order along a shelf, attaching to each the score of music which had
produced it. It was like a collection of toy observatories. Within a
neighbouring compartment of like transparent walls another artisan
submitted each of the models to the influences of stress and strain,
of heat and cold, of snow pressure and tornado violence that the
ultimate and full-sized mansion would have to undergo. One succumbed
to the heat, another to the severe cold, a third to an avalanche from
above, a fourth to a gust of wind. He marked the flaw in each and the
influence that had brought it out, and handed the model back to the
draughtsman, who at once corrected the note or notes in the score of
music which symbolised the flaw. When the result of the experimentation
was complete, the score of the music and the miniature fabric were sent
to the central dome; and in less than an hour the huge mansion was
on its winged raft speeding towards its destination far up the great
mountain-slope.
I was led through the whole series of experimenting chapels; in each
was there a miniature sonarchitect producing test forms for special
purposes under the skilled hands of creative workmen and their pupils.
In most of them new designs were being produced for private houses;
for of these was needed the greatest variety, as each islander had
his home renewed so frequently. I could not have conceived that so
many different forms could be created for the same purpose; indeed
the number seemed to be limited only by the possible combination of
notes of music and the need of adapting each design to habitation
and the habits of the dwellers. The skill of the artist lay in the
selection of the proper forms out of the multitude he daily evolved,
and in their adaptation to the necessities of Limanoran life. It was
in these designs that the younger members of the architect families
were engaged; thus they learned their art and developed their creative
instincts.
Under some cupolas which we visited we found experiments on new designs
for the large public buildings, and to these the wisest members of the
families were applying their century-tried skill. As we approached any
such chapel, we could hear the most elaborate and entrancing music,
for the design in such cases was labyrinthine, and needed the noblest
artistic faculties to select and develop it. The executive musical
talent displayed and the talent of extemporaneous composition and
modification would have been called genius in European communities; but
this people had no word corresponding to the quicksand of meaning this
word covers in Christendom. They knew the origin and growth of each
faculty, even when exceptionally developed, too well to attribute it
to an indefinable something which nature had somehow conferred upon a
chance-chosen individual. They knew as exactly the causes that produced
given effects in the human system as they could calculate the forces
of the inanimate world, and had no belief in the power of nature to
give to human work by some caprice more value than it deserved and
that deranged all calculation. This criticism I brought down on me
from my guide when I expressed amazement at the beauty of the music
and the resulting design in one chapel, and attempted to translate
the word “genius” into Limanoran. Such expressions, he persuaded me,
are but the half-articulate escape-valves of wide-mouthed ignorance;
they mean no more than a confession of blindness and incapacity, and
should be rapidly rejected by every progressive civilisation. The
musical and designing power of this particular Limanoran belonged to
most in his family of his own age, and was merely the stage the art of
sonarchitecture had reached in its development on the island. Wherever
a nature especially adapted to the double art was found it was imported
into the family to reinforce it.
In spite of the dissertation, I could not but listen, entranced by the
intricate splendour of the music; and my eyes were riveted on the
growing design within the receiver of the Ooloran. Yet when finished
and tested it was found inadequate to the artist’s new conception of
the utilities of the ultimate edifice. It was shaken again into dust
before I left the workman, and its faults were noted and corrected in
the score of music which he had before him. He had been years on this
single design, which he had been moulding and improving every day; and
he hoped soon to find a form that would be strikingly new and in every
feature adapted to the purpose of the building.
I could well understand now that the new Oomalefa was no work of magic;
but I was still unable to see how its vast proportions could have been
shifted from its place of fabrication to its ultimate site. Thyriel
led me to a new structure which had just issued from the central
sonarchitect; and the master-workman bade me lean upon it; huge though
it was, it shifted before my weight and I fell. It was as light as if
made of silk, and we two could lift it from the floor. This explained
the ease of rafting the great edifices through the air; but how did
they resist the winds that blew, or the impact of wave and storm? I
was led to a wall of Oolorefa itself; and I was bidden to raise one
low parapet of it; not the application of my greatest strength could
move it. My guide then waved what seemed to be a magnet above it, and
bade me try again; it rose in my hands and my muscular effort landed me
on my back. He showed me how the foundations of their buildings were
powerful magnets, and how the fabric would be torn to pieces before
it could be hoisted off them unless an equally powerful magnet was
applied in another direction. I now understood the strength of their
structures before winds and the rapid disappearance of Oomalefa after
the earthquake.
But I had seen only one department of Oolorefa, that which consummated
the work of the rest. One branch of the sonarchitect families was
specially charged with experimentation on the materials for building.
Irelium was the general name for the metallic combination of elements
best suited to the state of civilisation they had reached; but there
were innumerable modifications and grades of it, and there were more
being discovered every day. We entered one magnificent building, and
there found a dozen or more workmen, each isolated in a transparent
chamber and busy with some combination of irelium and one or other
of the stellar metals. Every star or series of stars had its own
predominant and characteristic element or amalgam of elements; and
it was a main duty of one of the chemical families of the island
to examine every star for its new element and to find something
corresponding to it in terrene matter. This section of the people
studied with the most anxious care the products and the results of the
leomorans; they visited almost hourly the mouths of the lava wells and
watched the spectroscopic recorders of the fumes that rose out of them;
for they seldom failed to find at one time or another some constituent
of the interior of the earth corresponding to any new stellar element
or metal recently discovered. Whenever it was found in any leomoran
a chamber for its deposition was constructed and the clirolan was
specially adapted to the preservation of all of it that issued out of
the bowels of the earth. These new metallic constituents were called
by the name of the stars in which they predominated, and were at
once put into the hands of the sonarchitect families to be tested
for structural utilities. It was thus irelium had been discovered,
and thus they hoped to find materials still more plastic to their
purposes. Already they had so modified their new metal by amalgamation
with other stellar metals that they had fitted it to functions no
metal had served before; it could be made flexible or tough, light or
heavy, transparent or opaque, malleable or brittle, soluble before
heat or water or electricity, or resistent to any or all of them; it
was difficult to say what quality they could not impart to it; and
here I could see the workmen testing new combinations in order to find
new qualities or new grades of a quality already found. I stood and
watched one who was trying an amalgam of a new stellar metal called
vanelium with gold; he had already attempted to combine it with iron,
silver, copper, irelium, and found it in each case either impossible or
useless; but the reactions had pointed him to gold as its natural ally;
and now, having found the two combine with ease, he was exhausting
the various possibilities of combination in different proportions,
and after submitting the new amalgam to his tests, was recording the
results. It gave a marvellous toughness and elasticity to gold, so
that, when beaten thin enough for a breath to raise it in the air, it
could not be torn except by sudden and great mechanical force. Another
workman near him was testing the effect of electricity on the various
grades of the new amalgam and recording the results minutely. In each
of the crystal chambers there were at hand supplies of all the forms of
energy that might be needed, such as heat, cold, pressure, electricity.
Each workman was isolated in order that the elements he used might not
interfere with the experiments of his neighbour; but his workshop was
transparent, that he might beckon for help at any moment, or exhibit
to his fellows the result of any experiment without modifying the
conditions or breaking the continuity.
A third branch of these families dealt with the adaptation of the new
amalgams to the various structural necessities of the community; they
found out which form or grade would resist the disintegrating influence
or the power of water or of electric force; they tested what shape
would best suit each grade, solid or hollow, cylindrical or spheral,
cubic or rectangular, thin or thick, curved or rectilinear. Another
branch devoted itself to the means of making the various metals or
amalgams cohere either temporarily or permanently. A fifth studied the
adaptation of the new discoveries to tools and machines and to the
invention of new mechanical forms that would bring out their greatest
utilities. To go through all the departments of this vast architectural
workshop would need a week’s rehearsal. To my first view it seemed
bewildering in its complexity of specialisation; but after closer
acquaintance it became simplicity itself, in fact the only plan that
nature itself could have pointed out.
CHAPTER XIII
THE LILARAN
HAVING finished our survey of Oolorefa, my mind returned to the
observatory for Lilaroma, which I had seen growing in miniature under
the modeller’s hand and music. It seemed to me a strange romance that
citizens of this beautiful island lived amid everlasting snow and
ice tens of thousands of feet above their fellows. How could those
who were accustomed to the conditions and privileges I saw around me
bring themselves to surrender it all and live the lives of hermits
amid antarctic rigours? Thyriel reminded me of the glacial cold of the
southern land from which their ancestry had come; but this did not
wholly satisfy me. The long centuries of life in a new zone had changed
their powers and tastes, and it must be a great sacrifice to live in
a climate so different as was the glacier region of a mountain. My
curiosity was roused, and I resolved to observe and know for myself
at the earliest opportunity. I could see the observatory now perched
on the gleaming shoulder of the mountain above the circle of the
storm-cone, and every day I turned my eyes upwards I grew more eager to
inquire into the conditions of life in so different a temperature.
It happened that the next department of the civilisation of the island
that had to be studied by me in our educational development was
Lilarie, or the science of island-security. We were handed over to one
who belonged to the Lilamo, or families specially absorbed in this
section of practical knowledge, and were told to choose our mode of
ascent, car flight or wing flight, or either of the two instantaneous
methods of transit. We preferred one of the two last, so he decided on
the wire-line or aërial method for our first ascent. We were enclosed
in a casing, shaped like a shuttle and rounded and sharpened to a point
at each end; it lay slightly inclined on a close web of wires, which
sloped up to the mountain-top. The door was closed and made secure,
but, as our shuttle car was made of transparent irelium, we could
see on all sides. It was then drawn slightly upwards into a complete
enclosure of wires, each of which touched it at some point. When our
guide saw that we were all ready, he pressed a button, and we shot
up at incredible speed. The whole sky and earth and sea fell from us
in an instant. I closed my eyes in alarm. No sooner had I done so
than the whizzing sound which accompanied our flight ceased and in a
moment we were at our destination, close to the peak of Lilaroma. Our
shuttle car slid into another groove and rested; the door opened, and
I stood amid the eternal snows. I could see the great buildings of
Rimla and Oomalefa and Oolorefa like minute soap-bubbles gleaming in
the sun far below. We had travelled these tens of thousands of feet
with the ease and swiftness of lightning; for it had indeed been the
lightning that had borne us up. Along this cylinder of wires so great
an electric power could be sent that it seemed to undo the force of
gravitation. Distance was almost annihilated by this mode of transit.
It outdistanced sound, if not light too, in its magic motion.
As soon as I began to reflect, I was astounded to find the cold not
merely bearable, but deprived of its bitter penetrativeness. My heart
bounded with exhilaration; every tissue of my body seemed elastic and
full of spring. I could account for these sensations by the atmosphere
of these heights, but how was I to explain the mild temperature of
this snow region? When puzzling over the problem, I began to notice a
haze of half-glowing light like the shimmer of heat over the surface
of the earth at blazing noon. It seemed at first to be an optical
illusion coming, I thought, from the suddenness of my transference from
the plain to such a height, but its unsteady gleam moved so uniformly
that I soon saw it was outside of me. Yet it did not intercept my view
of the snow and ice around. They fascinated me by their splendour of
whiteness, but there was a warmth, a pallid glow over them that was
quite unwonted. Our guide felt my mental interrogation, and pointed
out that we had stepped from the shuttle car on to a movable platform,
which would soon bring us to the observatory; over this platform was an
electric covering, that protected us from the outer air and radiated
heat in all directions. He showed us the snow melting on all sides of
our platform in form corresponding to it, and, as it moved along the
steep, the dark honeycombed square of snow moved with us. There was
above and on every side of us an electric field produced by unseen
circuits of wires; and these fields gave out heat falling short of
light.
This was how they modified the climate up in these glacial regions
and made it even sweeter and healthier than the purified atmosphere of
the Limanoran plateaux below. They had done much for the climate of
the lower levels; by daily casting their electric shuttles through the
atmosphere they brought its impurities to the earth, its particles of
dust and minute living organisms; but as more of these crowded in again
from the outlying regions of air, the electric shuttles would have to
ply ceaselessly in all directions in order to keep the lower strata
pure. In those mountain altitudes the air was naturally sterilised to a
large extent; few organisms could persist in so keen a medium; and the
constant use of electric walls and roof for modifying the bitterness of
the cold swept every trace of bacterial life into the snow. Hence the
purity of the air we breathed up there and the buoyancy of the soul.
The body seemed no clog upon the spiritual functions, and the magnetism
that came from the heavenly bodies uniting with that of the earth had
free play upon our minds, stimulating them to lofty flight. I no longer
wondered why the Lilamo had no aversion to life at this altitude.
They passionately loved it. It was, indeed, being drunk without wine,
without self-abandonment, without waste of tissue.
They kept strict rein on this intoxication, ethereal though it was;
for, like all their race, they had severe practical issues before them.
Daily each of them returned to the less volatile and less pure air of
the lower levels in order to check excess of buoyancy and to reinforce
the graver purposes of life by consultation with the elders and wise
men. They had in their hands an important phase of the well-being and
continuance of their race. They had all the foes of human life, as it
existed amongst the Limanorans, to fight off, whether seen or unseen.
The tornadoes that swept across these subtropical regions, the climatic
strata that drifted from other lands or realms of space, the bacterial
swarms bringing plague in their train, the lower-planed human life
which might swoop down on their shores from the archipelago around
them,--all these had to be watched and directed past Limanora. Any one
of these evils might in a few hours or days sweep out the civilisation
that had taken long centuries to develop and leave them all their steps
to retrace. Eye-tense vigilance was needed to watch for any sign of
their approach, and the keenest invention to prevent their advance when
observed.
I had not long to wait for evidences of the great services the Lilamo
did to their country. Thyriel and I were led by our guide into the
various divisions of the observatory. We inspected the innumerable
testing and controlling machines without fully understanding their
intricate and often subtle arrangements. Had we not been acquainted
with Rimla and Oomalefa and Oolorefa, we should have been bewildered or
even awestruck. As it was we were amazed at the refinement of purpose
in the apparatus, approaching almost to human intelligence; but we saw
that a mere novice would have deranged most of it, so nice were the
adjustments.
Our attention had been especially arrested by the electric indicator or
tremolan. It contained a complete chart of the electric variations of
every point of the island throughout every day in the year. This had
been compiled and drawn up from the observations of several centuries,
and marked the differences between periodical and temporary, regional
and narrowly local, terrestrial and planetary variations. Every day the
instrument was set like a clock to all the electric changes which they
expected to occur periodically on that day. Each of these, indicated at
every point of the map, represented an electrically uniform locality
of the island with which it was connected. The superintendent of
the tremolan for any section of the day specially studied all the
unclassified variations which had occurred at the corresponding hour of
the same day and period of time. He knew every change in the position
of the earth or in the movements of the stars that might affect the
electricity of the atmosphere at any moment during his watch. Along
with him there was a sky-watcher, who used one of their marvellous
reducers of distance and magnifiers to scan the sky and the whole
horizon, and reported every new appearance which broke the uniformity
of the sky-line. In an adjoining chamber with transparent partitions
a third observer was stationed with his ear at a makro-mikrakoust or
vamolan, that gathered in the slightest sounds at the distance of even
hundreds of miles and magnified them for the listening sense applied
to it; it also indicated approximately the distance of the source of
the sound by an automatic calculator. This was a kind of eavesdropper
that could pick up whispers on the orb of the earth, just as their
astronomical instruments could catch the faintest gleam in space
myriads of miles beyond the scope of the eye. In another crystal-walled
apartment stood a fourth watcher, who used an instrument that was to
his electric sense what the telescope is to the eye and their vamolan
was to their ear. With this idrolan he swept the sky for new and
unclassified electric impulses; and the faintest and most distant
indication, quite unrecognisable by his unaided sense, was magnified
ten thousand-fold; at the same time the distance of the source was
roughly measured and indicated.
This was by far the most attractive group of chambers for us. Not only
could we test the wonderful instruments for ourselves; but we could
examine by aid of magnifiers the graphic results of their observations
automatically recorded as if by photography. We could minutely study
the flight of sea birds not visible to the naked eye. The babel of
sounds that went on in the cities of the archipelago quite beneath the
horizon we could hear like a great roar beside us when we placed the
sonoscripts in the sound-magnifier; and with the aid of its analyst
we could unravel the sounds by repeating them slowly. Though I had
not my electric sense sufficiently developed to feel the differences
in the starry impulses when the electrographs were placed in the
electro-magnifier, I could distinguish their differing degrees of
force, and I could see how much Thyriel appreciated the fine shades of
variety in the impulses.
We were engaged in testing the electric records, when we could see the
observer of the tremolan bustling from table to table and map to map,
whilst his pupil watched the indicator. His excitement spread into the
adjoining chambers, and their occupants, leaving their instruments
to assistants, came to his aid. There was an inexplicable electric
disturbance on the north-east shore of the island; the field in that
direction was agitated. They ran to the idrolan and turned it to the
north-east; at once they knew that some seven or eight hundred miles
off there was advancing at a rapid rate a great wave of electric
disturbance. We all recognised a growing sultriness of heat in the
profound calm of the atmosphere even at those icy heights. No time was
to be lost. All the members of the Lilamo were called up, and in a few
minutes were assembled in the observatory.
It was resolved to turn the whole force available in the island into
the storm-cone, and especially into that part of it which could shoot
masses and streamers of electric energy out to great distances in
the atmosphere. Other indications of an approaching tornado soon
appeared. The great telescope discovered a vast cloud of birds on
the horizon, and the sea greatly agitated by shoals of fish beneath
them. The vamolan analysed the sounds made by the birds and revealed
that they were not all of one species; sea birds small and great
were predominant; but there was no lack of land birds, insect-eaters
chiefly, and a few great flesh-eaters, vultures, hawks, and falcons.
The Lilamo knew in a moment what this meant. Myriads of microbes were
afloat in the air in front of the storm, and the sky in the van of the
cloud of birds was obscured by the mass of insect life battening on
the unseen plague. The fish had gathered to eat the clotted life that
dropped into the ocean, and the sea birds had assembled in pursuit
of the fish. It was a striking sight, this great moving internecine
slaughter and feast. Seated at a clevamolan, or combination of
telescope and makrakoust, we were present at the scene, though hundreds
of miles off. We could see the swoop of the vultures down on the land
birds, too busy with their banquet of insects to foresee their own
fate, the water boiling with the leap of the fish and the dive of the
sea birds, and the air turbid with the flash and glimmer of wings; at
the same time we could hear the war of jubilance and dismay, the wild
cry of foretasting appetite, and the still wilder death-shriek; and
round and through the clangour like an atmosphere moved the dull hum of
happy glutted insect life. It sickened us and we had to cover our eyes
and ears to shut out the carnage. We had forgotten that we had been
using the clevamolan, and were glad to find that we could leave it and
return to the ordinary powers of our senses; there was a speck on the
horizon, which might be a boat at sea for anything our eyes could make
out; whilst to our hearing there was the profoundest calm.
Everything was ready for the concentration of our millions of
horse-power in the direction of the north-east, when a new but by no
means unexpected phase of the phenomenon occurred. Word came up from
the north-east shore that a plague had broken out amongst the dwellers
in the district, and that the medical wise men had been summoned to
their help. The Lilamo had already given warning that something of this
kind might be expected in that quarter, and the physicians were by
this time removing all the Limanorans in the north-east to Oomalefa.
So dense a cloud of insects was not there without the attraction of
superfluous bacterial life. Not always was a tornado thus heralded and
vanguarded by a winged army, but when it was, it meant the migration
under magnetic impulse of clirolanic plague-swarms from some favourite
breeding area.
As soon as it was thus known that the bacterial couriers of the storm
had reached the shores of Limanora, the electric forces of the lilaran
were brought into play, and we could see lightnings belch forth which
seemed to make the north-east atmosphere and ocean glow. Swiftly the
shoals of fish were gathered close to the bastions of the coast, for
masses of insects were falling every moment into the water. Soon we
could see our lightnings reach as far as the insect darkness and the
bird cloud. The air cleared and the surface of the sea was covered
with death. Away to the west screamed and shrieked the survivors of
the winged army. Then could we see the pitchy midnight of the coming
tempest moving stealthily towards us; and its heralds howled and
shrieked through every crevice of our mansion. It was bearing right on
Lilaroma.
How could that battering-ram of heaven’s fury be turned aside or
evaded? It seemed to me that nothing but death and destruction were
before us. I had already seen a tropical cyclone level a gigantic
forest clean as a mower would clear his swath in his breast-high corn.
What could man do in presence of so terrific a force but hide in holes
of the rocks? The thought of those noble buildings levelled with the
dust mingled sadness with my fear and shook all cowardice from it.
What was the immolation of animal existence which I had just witnessed
compared to the destruction of all this people had done? I felt as if
the torch of the world’s salvation were about to be extinguished.
There was no sadness or languid inaction of despair about the other
inmates of the observatory. All was bustle and joyous effort for a
time as in veterans quivering with the passion of battle. Every man
had his duty and place; and every woman was there, too, in the ranks
of champions. We could now see the nucleus of the storm just above the
horizon, a mass raven-black. At once the whole power of the island was
concentrated in the electric charge of the lilaran; and a long tongue
of flame shot straight for the dense cloud. As if by magic the whole
atmosphere was in a moment ablaze with lightnings. The sea was cloven
into billows of raging foam, and seemed itself to aid in the hellish
pyrotechny. It shot forth great tongues of purple flame, yet fled with
reared crest from the strokes of the storm-flail. Slowly the lilaran
moved its lightning-thrust away to the east. Then half the island power
was put into the blast of the storm-cone; and we could see the war
of elements and the thunderous scowl of the tempest shift round the
circle of the horizon, instead of bearing down on us. For hours the
roar of the lilaran went on. The edge of the tornado struck us, and
the building shook and swayed. Hail pelted its sides; rain and snow
blinded our outlook; we could see not one inch outside for the gloom.
Yet within, all was radiant and calm. They knew that the centre of
the tornado had passed many miles to the east, and that its trailing
skirts could do no harm to anything in the island. Even if it had
come straight on Lilaroma, they had given a vent to its fury so many
leagues out to sea that its force would have been largely spent before
it reached the shore. It was a yearly occurrence, this throttling of a
tornado from the tropics; for these great electric disturbances made
straight for the loftiest peak within their reach, drawn by their polar
complement, the masses of electric energy which played within the heart
of Lilaroma.
One of the ordinary duties of the Lilamo was to milk the great mountain
of its electricity, in order that it should offer less attraction to
cloud and storm. Every night, especially during the season of tempests,
I could hear the roar of the energy out of the earth, and, if I
looked up to the shoulders of the mountain, I could see at a hundred
points the purple streamers flicker in the wind like living, moving
flame-flowers growing out of the soil. When needed, this escaping
energy was collected and sent down to Rimla for storage and was another
of the numerous sources of power that that treasury of force drew upon.
When the tornado had passed and left its huge contribution to the snows
of the peak, the lilaran was stopped, and the electric energy used in
it was rapidly run over the white slopes that now obliterated every
trace of the great groove and railway on which the storm-cone moved.
In a few minutes the outline appeared, and soon the whole circlet was
cleared of its encumbering snows. So the weight that pressed on the
roofs of the observatory and the drifts that kept the light from its
walls melted before the electric snowplough. The storm had not vanished
an hour before all on the peak of Lilaroma was as it had been when we
arrived, except for the greater purity of the snow on its shoulders.
Beneath, the brush of the tempest had swept out all traces of the
plague that the physicians had not got rid of, and the atmosphere was
clearer and more exhilarating.
So calmly and fearlessly had the whole danger been met that there had
even been leisure in the midst of the turmoil to discuss this great
waste of natural power. It took them as many days as the tornado lasted
hours to generate and store in Rimla all this energy which was now
falling useless, or rather mischievous, upon the face of the ocean.
Could they not yoke the cyclone as they had yoked the billows and the
winds, the rivers and the snows, the lightnings and the central fires
of the earth? There was nothing impossible to a people who had tamed
the raging of the volcano and the earthquake. The difficulty was the
very greatness of the force. Any machinery they might erect would be
trampled to pieces by the brute power of the giant they yoked. Here was
a problem worthy of their most imaginative men, of their most inventive
faculties.
Not a year had passed before a trial was made, and within a decade
the machinery was complete for storing the energy of the tempests. An
immense cave was hollowed out in the rocks of Lilaroma, and its mouth
was extended out into the ocean for miles by means of lava bastions.
In it was placed enough of the alloy called labramor, or electricity
sponge, to take in trillions of horse-power of electric force. At first
cables containing millions of wires were floated out towards the coming
tornado and electric fields were raised in the air to tap the energy of
the blackness. This was continued afterwards to some extent; but it was
found that, if only the clouds were electrically tapped, most of the
current transmitted itself to the receivers in the cave by means of the
water of the ocean. It was thus unnecessary to float out towards the
storm more than one cable, so binding to the shore a great raft which
held up many labrolans or electricity milkers towards the blackening
sky. They acknowledged that they lost by this water-transmission much
of the energy emitted from the clouds; for the ocean bore it away in
all directions; but they got as much of it as they needed to fill their
storehouse, and they killed the cloud monster; at least it floated away
across the horizon blowing a mere gale that could do no havoc except
upon the careless and unforethinking.
One of the most singular effects of this new contrivance was to rid
the sea in the neighbourhood of the island of its teeming life and to
precipitate to the bottom the matter that floated in the water. For
weeks after, we could see the rocks or streaming weeds in the depths
as clearly as if it were an ocean of air. Its emerald or azure had
vanished, and white light poured down into the hitherto unfathomed
hollows and valleys. There could we see the dead denizens sway idly
with the forests of marine vegetation and here and there the bulk of
some monster lay tangled in the herbage. Only by degrees and after some
months did the colour and opacity return to the waves and the myriad
life stream from other regions into the void. The currents that swept
past the coasts bore down the suspended particles from other seas; and
with them came new fish and their parasites.
Until these came a new danger to the health of Limanora threatened.
A few days after the tornado, the precipitated organisms began to
rise to the surface of the water and underneath the hot sun to form
breeding-grounds for the dangerous microbes of the air. Up against
the bastions of rock beat the stench of the living death. A plague
threatened for a brief time; but they were not a people to remain
passive in presence of such a danger, even though they could easily
prevent its worst results by remedial measures. They sank the dead
organic masses again by means of a charge of electricity, and then the
deeper currents that brushed their shores swept the corruption into the
great valleys of the ocean-bed, there to be embalmed for geological
ages hence.
They regretted that they should be the instruments of this great
waste of life before it had fulfilled the purpose of its stage of
development; but their regret was tempered by the thought that it was
a low and feeble stage, that an infinity of such existence would not
weigh in the balance with one day’s advance of a single Limanoran, and
that the energy set free by this wholesale dissolution of organisms
was still ready for other embodiments in the universe. The worst effect
they feared was upon their own natures; to destroy life or deal with it
frivolously was one of the worst offences against their humanity, for
it introduced into the mind a brutalising element. Respect for life in
all its forms was one of the truest tests of a civilisation, they held.
And the Lilamo were, almost as much as the physicians, imbued with
reverence for human life and with the sense of the importance of
preserving it and giving it the longest opportunity in the individual
to gain its highest possibility. They had to protect their race from
all external foes. They had therefore to study climatic changes
and watch the sanitary conditions of the island. Sanitation meant
primarily the expulsion of all hostile clirolanic life and the
prevention of all conditions that would attract it or form its
breeding-ground. They were especially interested in the magnetic and
electric peculiarities of Limanora and of the section of the globe in
which they lived; for these affected not only the health and spirits
of the people, but the amount of minute life that harboured in the
earth or floated in the atmosphere. They could by an increase of these
elements rid an unwholesome district of its unhealthy conditions;
and yet the inhabitants of it could not remain whilst the process of
purification was going on. Too much magnetism or electricity in the
earth or air would endanger the nervous balance of the human frame.
The test instruments in the lava wells were frequently examined to
find the electric state of any section of the island; and one central
electrometer was constantly recording the electric state of the
atmosphere in all parts of it. Thus were they able to recharge by
means of their apparatus whatever localities were found defective,
and tap those that had a superfluity; and over the country at night
the flame-like streamers lit up the darkness here and there. But this
occurred at rare intervals, for it was only in certain conditions of
the sun that the earth sponged up more electricity than was good for
the highest life upon its surface.
The storm-cone as a rule was enough for sanitation. By its wind force
it could drift all dangerous clouds of moisture or of bacterial life
past Limanora. By its electric-darting powers the heart could be
squeezed out of storms before they struck the shores. It regulated the
rainfall, depositing the contents of clouds by day far out upon the sea
and by night upon the thirsting land. Sultry blacknesses that would
otherwise float past with only stifling effect were tapped, first for
their electricity and then for their rain. Storms of dust that now and
again darkened over the circle of fog could be precipitated into the
ocean partly by electricity, partly by the blasts of the storm-cone.
The atmosphere was kept singularly pure and free from deleterious
germs or particles, and few nights passed without a drenching shower
cleansing the whole lower portion of the island. The peak of Lilaroma
drew to it like a magnet all the masses of moisture that collected
within many hundred miles of it; and a little manipulation would break
these up into refreshing night showers that swept its slopes and the
plateaux and levels below; and, in order to prevent the destructive
floods that this might produce in the rivers, the shoulders of the
mountain and its deep valleys bristled with great forests which sponged
up the falling moisture and let it down gently from hour to hour into
the bastioned channels.
Climate was to this people as much a matter of management as food
and its production. They could modify it to fit any change in the
conditions or necessities or purposes of life. To be at the mercy
of the forces of nature was a state of existence in what they now
considered their barbarous past. It was only the unforeseen that had
them at a disadvantage; and the unforeseen was to them now only the
cosmic. As the planetary system shifted through space, it had to
encounter conditions and modes and degrees of energy and life that
nothing short of omniscience could anticipate; but they were beginning
to master the secret of many of those unexpected changes of condition.
The astro-sciential families had been classifying for centuries the
symptoms that accompanied these in the appearance of the sun or of one
or other of the planets. With their innumerable delicate instruments
for recording and analysing the electric, magnetic, luminous, and
heat-vaporous state of distant space, they could see afar off the
beginnings of cosmic disturbances and anticipate their ultimate
direction; and in many cases they could guard Limanora against the more
patent and destructive effects of magnetic and electric storms and of
great waves of heat or light.
Yet there was much to master in the new cosmic conditions that from
time to time beset the earth or the planetary system. Some seemed to
arise so suddenly that no observation could have anticipated them.
Especially was this the case with living drift, into shoals of which
the universe struck, the spawn of undeveloped worlds. Hence came new
diseases so widespread as to be plagues. These generally evaded the
fine instruments of the astro-scientist, till they had reached the very
atmosphere of the earth; for in the interstellar spaces they led so
meagre a life and were spread so thinly and widely that they scarcely
intercepted the light or other forms of energy from the sun or other
systems. Yet the imaginative families and the inventors were struggling
towards some more delicate instrument, which would observe and record
the presence of interstellar material life.
CHAPTER XIV
CHOKTROO
THE Lilamo were usually occupied in these sanitary duties, but at
times the other section of their defence of Limanora claimed their
attention. I had had good reason to know the force of the lilaran, or
storm-cone, in my attempt to arrive in the island. Had it not been
decided to permit our entrance, our perseverance would have failed of
the attainment of our object.
I was soon to witness a marvellous display of the defensive and
repulsive powers of the storm-cone. For some years after the first
period of my novitiate and my partial admission to privileges as
a citizen with which this period ended, there had been observed
throughout the archipelago a movement which spread with considerable
rapidity. It was one of the amusements of the Limanorans to watch
the comedy of life upon the other islands through the idrovamolan,
or instrument for distance seeing and hearing, which they had fixed
high up the mountain. On a floating strip of irelium, that could
be projected far into the sky, scenes beneath the horizon could
be mirrored and watched through this instrument and through other
instruments for reducing distance. The sounds, too, that rose from
the scene re-echoed from the under-surface of the floating mirror,
and could be magnified by the makrakoustic part of the idrovamolan
into their original volume. A rarer and more difficult instrument was
one which combined with this power of seeing and hearing at a great
distance that of noting the magnetism working in a community even under
the horizon.
Recently they had found that they could dispense with the floating
mirror and reflector. The ether was their transmitter of all they
wished to see or hear at a distance. Through it passed electric waves
from even immeasurable distances, whilst the sky itself formed a
sufficiently complete mirror for reflecting whatever was occurring
under the horizon. By recent discoveries and inventions they were
enabled to transform electric impulses into the scene or sound that
gave them out into the surrounding air. Their new instruments would
tap the occurrences at any point on any given line or in any given
direction. They were now independent of any artificial medium for their
knowledge of the outside world. The receivers of their new idrovamolan
were every moment recording and analysing whatsoever occurred along the
line in which it was directed; and its transformers were constantly
translating the electric records into the forms or sounds which
originally sent out the impulses; it was so constructed as to prevent
the confusion of waves that came from different points on the route,
for it moved with the swiftness of light or, if required, with that of
electricity. These new modifications gave them hope that they would
soon be able to see and hear much of what goes on in universes which,
though invisible, yet transmit luminous and electric waves sufficiently
strong to affect their telescopic instruments, and that the straggling
rays of light or electricity might be transformed into the scenes and
sounds which gave them birth.
As it was, the Limanorans were able to watch all that was going on in
the islands around them. During their leisure hours, when it was their
duty as well as their pleasure to relax the mind, they would sit and
observe the life of what they called their menagerie. To them, indeed,
the whirling eddy of existence with its ambitions and crimes, its
luxury and misery, in the archipelago around seemed little more than
the antics of monkeys or the internecine appetites of wild beasts. The
scenes were generally amusing in the ape-like vanities and mimicries
they exhibited. Sometimes they were offensive and even repulsive in
their filth or brutalities. How beings formed like themselves could
endure the grossness of their luxuries and the falsity and hollowness
of their most admired social displays was to them a bewildering
problem. Even the best of these islanders were as far behind the
Limanorans in true human qualities as they thought themselves in
advance of apes. The daily observation of these creatures so humanly
endowed and yet so foul and blind in act was often too much to bear
for any length of time; the most repulsive scenes were those of what
was considered high life, of courts and courtly circles, of rulers
and leaders of act and thought. “Who can bear the horror of their
intrigues and hypocrisies, their cruel trampling of the fallen, their
hideous fawning on the successful, their insolent pride and intolerance
of the weak!” I often heard exclamations like this from the lips of
the watchers as they turned away from the idrovamolan with a shudder.
The combination of ape and bully, of reptile and vapourer was, in the
thoughts of this people, the lowest depth to which human nature could
fall; and it was the usual and most envied form in the high social
life of most of these islands. The barbarism and ignorance of the poor
and downtrodden marked a less retrograde phase of humanity. The sight
of the posturings and scrapings, the insolence and spaniel manners of
the higher classes served every day to deepen the horror of exile and
to frighten every Limanoran from anything that would lead even to the
slightest retrogression. Had it not been for this wholesome effect upon
their minds, they would have long ago abandoned the custom of watching
this beast spectacle of retrograde and showy civilisation, so much pain
mingled with their amusement at it. They knew that their pity was vain;
for it would take unremitting effort for thousands of years to raise
these peoples to the Limanoran level, if the Limanoran missionaries had
not in the meantime been dragged down to the lower level; and these
thousands of years could be better spent in attaining higher and higher
ideals in their own life. The task, they knew, was as hopeless as if
these descendants of their degenerate exiles should attempt to drag
the lower animals up to their stage of human development, and this
irremediable nature of their state added to the pain of the observers.
Had the habit of watching the comedy of their menagerie been given up,
the Lilamo would have still had to observe the enactment of history
in the surrounding islands. It was part of their duty of defence to
anticipate all armaments against Limanora; and they had discovered
that there was unusual excitement amongst the various peoples since
the arrival of the _Daydream_ in their waters. It was evident
that this formed an epoch in the history of the archipelago. The
Lilamo reported the movements of the portentous smoke-pennoned ship
which sailed in the teeth of all winds like their own ships of the
air. What was to prevent it approaching Limanora in spite of the
force of the storm-cone? The thought brought the first trace of fear
into the breasts of this people; for, once a foreign element had been
able to force its way into their midst, how could they prevent moral
contamination and swift retrogression? Their advance would crumble away
in a few centuries, nothing but their material progress being likely to
survive the incursion of barbarism.
It was imperative that new measures of defence be adopted. It was then
that the forces of Rimla had been enormously increased, thus making
it possible for most of its energy to take the electric form in the
storm-cone. With this they would be able to repel the new monster with
so much metal in its bosom; they would play with it as with a toy on
the water. All my wanderings had been narrowly watched, my landing
in Aleofane, my escape from it, my sojourn in Tirralaria and ascent
of Klimarol, my companionship with Sneekape and my scorn of him, my
sympathy with the refugees in Nookoo, and my friendship with Noola.
Nothing escaped their attention, and my character was analysed in the
most minute way by deductions from the details of my conduct. It was
decided that, if I showed eagerness and persistence enough, I should be
allowed to land with Noola; but that my fire-ship and my men should be
blown off from the coast.
Since then the affairs of the archipelago had been observed as
narrowly as before, and especially the wanderings and history of the
_Daydream_. As I expected, it passed finally into the possession
of Broolyi, and the new ideas and methods it brought into the warfare
of this isolated zone of the world made an era in its history. A great
military organiser had arisen; and he had by the potency of his will
moulded Broolyi into a unity which with the help of new fire-ships
built on the model of my yacht had brought the other islands into
subjection. Even the aristocratic and refined Aleofane with its subtle
government and all-powerful central institutions had to bow its neck
to the yoke. This strange romance had been enacting for more than
a decade; and the Limanorans had been watching it, at first with
amusement, and afterwards with resolution and clear purpose. They
knew the whole of this subjugative process was based on hypocrisy and
injustice and bloodshed, but it was not worse than the methods of
political existence it displaced; it only meant the substitution of one
vicious ideal for others as vicious. There would be more movement and
activity for a time, but as soon as the masterful will had vanished,
there would be a quick return to the old lazy luxury in the few and
lazy misery in the many. It had cost multitudes of lives, and would
cost many more before the military mania had burned itself out; but
of what worth were most of those lives to themselves or to the world?
They succeeded, where they did succeed, only in sustaining themselves
wretchedly and perpetuating a strain of existence that was, if changed
at all, tending downwards. The new spectacle was more sanguinary, but
not one whit more dismal than the ones the Limanorans had witnessed
for many generations. The misery was irremediable, the standard of
existence was so low. To fence it off like a plague was all that could
be done.
When I sat down to the idrovamolan I soon discovered the master of
this transformation scene. I heard in Broolyi from all the entrenched
camps and the towns loud huzzas and cries of “Long live Choktroo!”
Turning the line of sight to the capital, the conflagration of cries
which swept the crowded streets soon led my eye to the centre of the
far-reaching magnetic thrill, the square of the imperial palace. There
I saw step out on a balcony and bow to the enthusiastic populace
a little firm-set figure that seemed to awaken memories in me. I
strengthened the power of vision in order to examine the face more
keenly, and, as a great burst of “Long live our emperor! Long live
Choktroo!” kindled and blazed athwart the city, the identity of the
little conqueror broke upon my consciousness.
It was my cabin-boy, Jock Drew, whom I had rescued from a life of
degradation, if not ultimate infamy, in his native village. His father,
the local chimney-sweep, a man of vigorous but small physique, had
succumbed to the fate of so many of his trade, and swept his throat
hourly with the fiercest of whiskey. His mother, a brave, strong little
peasant girl, had died early of the effort to master this thirsty
piece of humanity that had been tied to her, and his vice. The boy
had the maternal lines in his nature, strong will, great courage,
and fiery passion. It stirred my pity to see him struggle with such
a mean destiny, doubtless to sink hopelessly into the ditch. He had
been shielding himself from the temptation that his drunken father
set before him by living in a world of penny romance. His imagination
was strung to its highest pitch by the gory pages of his hard-won
treasures. When he heard of my proposed expedition to the other side of
the world, he came and pleaded for even the most menial position on
board the _Daydream_. I was only too eager to rescue him from the
hideous fate before him, and engaged him as cabin-boy.
After he came on board, some of the men were inclined to patronise
him, and, when he resisted their approaches and grew sulky, to apply
a rope’s end to him. I had to stand between him and them, even though
I saw that in the end he would have the best of the quarrel; for
he was strong of build and violent in temper, and only controlled
himself, I could see, that he might have the surer and more complete
revenge. He was a solitary, musing boy, and I thought to draw him
from his solitude by interesting him in scientific and philosophical
books; but he returned with the greater gusto to his penny series of
lives of the great pirates, robbers, warriors, and conquerors. The
only section of the _Daydream’s_ library which could seduce him
from his loved studies was that containing history and adventures.
The crew, as was natural, held the studious little recluse too cheap;
and occasionally felt the sting of his tongue when they bantered him;
but his melodramatic manners and attitude, copied from the coloured
representations of his heroes in his favourite series, laid him open
again to their laughter and scorn. His mind was unwholesome with
brooding over gory achievements and tremendous ambitions. He often
uttered absurd boasts and gave himself airs that were incongruous
with his minute figure and menial position, and Jock Drew ceased to
be the butt of the ship only when I was present; but he never ceased
to read and meditate. The laughter of his shipmates drove him more
and more into his books and into himself. Later on in the voyage he
extended his reading to books on naval architecture and the management
of the steam-engine, and at last would spend hours assisting the
engineer below. He came to know every part of the machinery and every
secret of its construction and management. Indeed, the chief engineer
acknowledged that in case of his illness he had an able successor on
board. The guns and all the ironwork of the ship drew his attention
next, and he came to be respected for his practical knowledge of every
part; when anything needed mending, it was he who was ultimately called
in to give advice or aid. Slowly he rose to be the real master of the
_Daydream_, even though he continued to be laughed at for his
heromimic airs and his occasional boasts. He had by his reading and
studies made himself essential to every man on board, and his strong
will exacted outward respect, if not obedience to him, in return. It
was strange to see the revolution in the ship’s crew during their
voyaging about the archipelago. When I came on board again, I saw that,
though they continued a semblance of their old bantering, they had in
their hearts begun to bow before the boy of twenty. The very gall of
their scorn and of his menial position had driven him into this slow
but striking revolt.
And here I saw the result. His boyhood, neglected and beaten, had
given the cunning and worldly wisdom and concentration of power that
belong in most to late maturity. The strength that had lain dormant
for so many centuries in his mother’s peasant race had gathered in him
like a torrent. The hard conditions of his youth had reined in the
wildness and animality which had run riot in his father’s debauchery.
Hundreds of such masterful natures, finding no sphere in their native
locality to give scope to the long-dammed-up powers of their race,
waste themselves in chafing against their petty surroundings and die
with the reputation of miniature devils. The focussed energy of two
long-suppressed races had in this case found its career and scope, and
a diabolic conflagration was the consequence in this isolated region of
the world. The race of Jock Drew had never before blossomed; now that
it had found the fit soil, it had flowered portentously.
The misfortune was that his ill-moulded youth and his favourite
reading had left him naked of morality. He was not in this respect
much worse than the people whom he misled into war or than those whom
he subjugated. He had only more concentrated will and energy and a
keener appreciation of the means that would best satisfy his appetite
for power. The complete suppression of the desire through thousands
of years of his peasant ancestry made its ultimate manifestation on
finding freedom of action all the more tremendous. It grew with growing
self-confidence; and confidence grew with success. His bearing wholly
altered during the wanderings of the _Daydream_ before I had
abandoned her. He had grown erect and threw his great chest out and
held his large head up till he overawed his persecutors. Seeing him
only in a sitting position or looking only at his bust one would have
guessed him to be of lofty stature. Yet like his father and mother
he never rose above five feet in height; and as his face filled up
with good fare and the knowledge of his own powers it grew handsome
and calm, seldom showing the fierce brute slumbering underneath. His
wonderful self-control and reserve held him silent in circumstances
where speech or action would have revealed his innate folly or
animality, and he learned the power of such reserve, allied with
sudden and decisive action, over the wills of others; he saw that it
throws an air of mystery round the individuality. So he refrained
from action till he had complete control of the circumstances and had
gathered such resources into his hands as would astonish his rivals or
enemies; silently, unscrupulously, he got to know the cards they held
in their hands, whilst he concealed his own under seeming inaction;
then with a sudden and unnerving move he threw all his forces upon them
and demoralised them. I had watched the method in the little intrigues
and conspiracies on shipboard, and I knew when I observed him through
the idrovamolan that he was the same Jock Drew, only more developed by
his astonishing successes.
He had found his opportunity when the _Daydream_ finally anchored
in the chief harbour of Broolyi. There was much need of government
after the plague; the monarch and his family had fled and finally
perished; and the two rivals for the position were almost equally
matched. There was prospect of a long civil war. The wiser and stronger
counsellors set up a republic, but this was only a feeble stop-gap. The
flames of civil war burst out in spite of it.
Jock arrived at this stage of their history, and joined the staff of
the competitor for the throne who held the capital and the key of the
public treasury. He rapidly became prime adviser in the camp, and as
soon as he had attracted confidence in himself and his character he
set his method to work. He led an army out to attack the enemy, and
completely routed them by the suddenness of his action; he had led one
half of his troops straight out to meet the forces opposed to him, but
he had sent the others round by a secret path into their rear, and they
burst simultaneously upon the enemy. The surprise broke the spirit of
the attacked and they fled in rout.
With wily stratagem he incited other officers to rival him, and took
care that they went out under disadvantageous conditions. They failed,
and their failures led to loud demands for Choktroo, as he came to be
called. He now got command of the whole of the resources of the state,
and used them for the making of guns and other surprises for the enemy.
Meanwhile he allowed the enemy to think that his party was wholly
demoralised by defeats, and they crept up towards the walls of the
city in their excess of confidence. He knew by his spies in their camp
how vainglorious they had become; but he allowed their bravado to rise
to the pitch of foolhardiness, and then, his preparations being made,
he opened fire upon them, from all sides. So complete was the rout,
that the enemy disappeared from the country around and took refuge in
distant castles and forts.
His name grew into a power of itself, rousing enthusiasm wherever
he appeared and greatly terrifying his opponents. It was then that
there began the most striking part of his career. All the brave and
able generals who during the civil war had come up from the ranks
were completely in his power. He sent them out to master castles or
detachments of the enemy, but with such imperfect forces or supplies
as would render them inactive. Their individual talents snatched
occasional small victories, but as a rule they only prepared for
ultimate victory by raising entrenchments and scouring the country
around. Whenever he discovered that in any part a general was about to
be successful in spite of his disadvantages, he hurried thither and led
the troops to victory. If the feebleness of an officer anywhere seemed
about to ensure defeat he marched reinforcements to his aid and turned
it into success. Whenever he suffered defeat himself, he always managed
to represent it as a brilliant success marred by the incompetence of
some other general. At last he grew weary of the guerrilla warfare and
resolved that it should end. So he withdrew his troops from siege-work
and allowed the rebels to gather confidence and to mass again. He sent
several generals against them with small armies. Their defeats gave
the enemy still greater boldness. They ventured nearer to the capital;
and when they were defiling through a pass he appeared on the heights
with his guns. The two sections of his army closed the mouths of the
pass, and the finest array the rebels had ever shown was shattered.
The castles and forts soon surrendered. With one acclaim Choktroo was
elected emperor, and the candidate whom he was supposed to be helping
vanished from the scene.
His boyish reading had made him as much of an actor as he was by nature
an organiser. Before long the whole people of Broolyi were adoring
him as a god. Their passion was glory; and in him they had found the
incarnation of glory. No piece of work in the state so minute but, if
successful, he claimed as his own, even should it have been centuries
old. No act of his own but, if unsuccessful, he found a scapegoat for.
He was mean enough to steal and eavesdrop in his own household; he was
bold enough to outlie the foulest of his minions, to outface the most
manifest exposure of his crimes. He even dared to assume the rôle of
divinity. He ringed himself round with mystery and ceremonial, and when
he did appear in public made the appearance impressive by its display.
He knew the effect of silence, and cheapened neither himself nor his
words. He organised the state on military lines and made it centre in
his personality.
He soon had exhausted the treasury and the resources of the country
in the civil war and in his public displays. Nor could he keep up his
glory long in inaction, even though it was an inaction of mystery. He
must soon go to war beyond the bounds of the island. There he could
shine, there he could get all the supplies he needed; but he had to
keep up the farce the nation had played for centuries of professing to
keep the peace, for he had adopted the title of the Prince of Peace.
He had to make it appear that his wars were forced on him by his
neighbours, and for this invented an elaborate system of diplomacies
which enabled him to pick a quarrel and yet seem to have it thrust upon
him.
His first quarry was Aleofane; for it was the wealthiest island in the
archipelago. For years he kept up a show of alliance with it, till he
had his fire-ships ready, built under his direction on the model of
the _Daydream_. He racked his dominion to make guns and all kinds
of firearms. When the expedition was complete, he made a demand of
Aleofane that had show of reason and yet could not be complied with.
It was refused, and his fleet was outside the capital before it could
make preparation. He sent some of his ships to the other side of the
island to land troops, and as these marched up by land he disembarked
the rest under protection of his guns. The first battle decided the
war. He dethroned the monarch of Aleofane and annexed the island to his
dominions, setting up a viceroy, with a strong force to support him.
He drew new troops from the ranks of the people for service in other
islands. He impoverished those nobles who refused to join his court or
his staff. He broke the spirit of all who would not adore him, and he
drained by taxation the resources of the country.
With still larger armies and larger fleets he swept conquering over
the whole archipelago, till every people bowed before him. Those who
distinguished themselves in his wars or in his service he elevated to
new distinctions and titles. Those who died in his wars he beatified.
With great ceremony he would raise all the dead on one of his
battle-fields to the rank of sub-divinities, till his heaven was as
crowded as his court. He did not obliterate the old religions; but he
overshadowed them, and his policy kept subject to him the passion for
glory in life and deification after death that lurks in every human
bosom. The active and the romantic were strung up to enthusiasm by
the magnetism of his name. Most thought it was his personality which
set their blood throbbing, but it was only that his deeds and his
histrionic power of magnifying them worked on their imaginations. How
wild their fervour I could scarcely have realised had I not observed it
with my own senses.
He had to keep moving and victoriously moving if his magnetism were not
to vanish. When his empire included all the islands in the archipelago
but the Isle of Devils in the centre, there was nothing for it but to
attempt its conquest. We heard him bluster out his favourite bombastic
phrases, learned from his penny romances and biographies. “Heaven is
our ally, and who on earth can stand against us? Is it not our mission,
the mission of a god, to chase all devils from the earth? Our last
conquest shall be hell, and its denizens shall die by fire and sword.”
Utterances and proclamations like this fired the imaginations of his
soldiers, and they would have laid their lives down at the moment for
this fire-eater. What he had boasted or threatened before, he had done,
or had by astute fiction persuaded his followers that he had done;
and what limit was there to his deeds? If he said that he would scale
the heavens, they were certain he would do it. The thought fused them
into a unity and chased out of their breasts the panic which the mere
mention of the central isle produced.
He had not the traditional and hereditary ague-fit to overcome in
his blood, yet there was a new sinking of the heart when he thought
of his task. He had to reassure himself by wild rhodomontade, as he
superintended the building and armament of an enormous fleet and the
concentration of the largest army the archipelago had ever seen. He
could not pick a diplomatic quarrel with his new victim; yet he must
have at least the semblance of a cause in order to put heart into his
followers. He announced that he had sent envoys to the Isle of Devils
to open intercourse with it, but they were not allowed to approach.
Again and again had he tried this pacific measure, but no heed had been
given to him. Let vengeance be upon the heads of so churlish and unjust
a people! How could such poltroons and men-haters be allowed to cumber
the earth?
I watched the great fleet put out from Broolyi with its streamers of
smoke. We could have heard the acclamations almost with the unaided
ear; they rent the sky when Choktroo went on board his own fire-ship,
which was thrice the size of the largest of the others, and thrice
more brilliantly caparisoned. He passed with his favourite silent and
self-absorbed look on his face through the applauding crowds on to a
raised platform in the stern, reserved for him and his staff. Arrived
there he paced silently with his chin resting on his folded arms. He
knew what an impression of godlikeness this made on the crowd. Small
though he was in stature, he doubtless seemed to his followers and the
people on the shore to take gigantic proportions.
I was amazed to see so little perturbation amongst the Limanorans.
They seemed to watch the whole scene as if it were a comedy. On the
fleet steamed, and yet there was perfect calm in the community; only
the Lilamo were at their posts on the peak of Lilaroma. The rest
were peacefully seated at the idrovamolans or busy with their usual
avocations. I knew the destructiveness of the great cannon that
Choktroo had prepared, and the distance they would carry. On this point
indeed I had been consulted some months before. I knew, too, how this
people shrank from every act that would involve the loss of a human
life. How were they to repel this great armament without whelming it
in the ocean and drowning a large proportion of those in the ships?
Thyriel could throw no light on the problem; we were both too young to
be taken into the confidence of the wise men or to know their designs.
I could do nothing but watch the fleet and then pass to my daily duties.
A night passed, and at dawn we could see the islands of smoke lie
black on the horizon; the ships themselves had not appeared. Choktroo
evidently knew that it was useless to conceal the expedition or its
object from this far-seeing people under the darkness of night. It
was too well known throughout the archipelago how penetrative was
their gaze. He meant to make his attack by day. Soon the funnels
and the masts broke the sky-line. Yet there was not a sound from
the storm-cone. The slight wind had fallen; everything favoured the
invader. He could see through the translucent air every feature of
our island and almost every movement of its inhabitants as soon as we
could discern the human beings on board his ships with the naked eye.
Were they getting drawn into some gigantic trap? This thought evidently
occurred to the leader of the armament, as it occurred to me, for the
fleet lessened speed. I could see Choktroo, at a loss what to do, on
his poop consulting with his officers, who could help him little. Still
the storm-cone stood silent on the mountain-peak.
The bold step had to be taken; the order was given for advance. The
smoke again streamed in the rear of the fleet, and I could see the
gunners prepare for action and the sailors and soldiers set the boats
ready for launching. What had happened to the Lilamo? Were they all
asleep? Was the progress of the island at last to be trampled under the
feet of this brutal soldier and his forces? The fire-ships were almost
within cannon-shot of the shore; there puffed out the preliminary whiff
from the side of Choktroo’s steamer and the ball fell with a roar into
the ocean between. Another five minutes and matters would be past
remedy. Yet there was perfect calm among the Limanorans. I controlled
my excitement and watched the fleet. Everything was bustle on board,
and when I sat down to the idrovamolan all sounds were jubilant and
boasting. This Isle of Devils was at last to have her master. This
proud isolation was at last to be broken. Such exclamations I could
hear from the gunners as they loaded and ran out their guns.
All was silence, for all was ready for the word of command. Choktroo
paced his poop in scarce-controllable glee. His thoughts were doubtless
stretching out beyond the fog circle to the countries he had left
behind him with his boyhood, other worlds for him to conquer. His
arms were folded and his eye was turned inward; he knew that the
whole expedition was awaiting his nod. Soon he stopped stone-silent
and stiff, as if to give the decisive word. I waited the action, but
he still stood moveless. I looked over the ship; there was his staff
awaiting his beck as if petrified. Every man was at his post, but not
a muscle moved; the eyes stared as if they belonged to the dead. My
glance took in the other ships; all were as silent and still as the
grave. The whole armament seemed turned to stone.
Then there fluttered down upon the vessels human figures that I
recognised as of the Lilamo. In a moment a Limanoran pilot stood at
the helm of each fire-ship; and as if by nature the whole fleet turned
majestically round and made for the shelving beach of a low uninhabited
island underneath the horizon. On and on they sped straight for the
shore, round whose margin not the least fringe of surf whitened.
Through the idrovamolan I could hear the grating keels as they struck
the sand and pebbles at full speed. The crash seemed to awaken the
crews and the soldiers, who rubbed their eyes as if roused from a
dream. Before them the bows of their ships were burrowing themselves in
the blown sand of the beach; but already I could see the pilots winging
their way through the sky back to Limanora.
There was a silent power in the lilaran which I had not investigated:
its power of magnetism. This it could exercise several miles off;
but it grew feebler with the distance. In this aspect, then, the
lilaran could not be used as a weapon of defence far from the shore of
Limanora. If, however, there was a mass of iron or like magnetisable
metal in the ship that contained its victims, its power had been
discovered to be as great far as near. It was only recently that
they had so far developed their personal power of arresting the
consciousness by sudden sleep-petrifaction as to be able to exercise
it at a distance. This they accomplished by material aids to the
magnetic faculty. The sudden flashing of brilliant objects before the
eyes and the use of powerful magnets had been found to intensify the
somnifactive power of the eye and the magnetic sense. This led them to
make experiments with the concentrated power of magnets all brilliant
with irelium jewels. The result was that they found the somnifactive
power to reside even more in things than in persons. They tried it
through the lilaran on Limanorans of the most powerful will at the
farthest corner of the island, and found it to be the more effective
the more power they concentrated and the more iron or metals of similar
quality were near the patient.
This result had been reached about the time they had come to see that
the invasion of their island by Choktroo was inevitable without some
other than the mere wind-power of the lilaran. Step by step the Lilamo
brought their new weapon to perfection; at any moment they could
concentrate the forces of Rimla into this faculty of the lilaran. They
experimented on Limanorans in boats out at sea, and finally could
tabulate the magnetic powers at various distances. This explained to
me the flashings I had often seen on the horizon and had taken for
an effect of the idrovamolan; but they were too near the surface of
the sea for that. This explained the perfect calm with which the
Limanorans watched the approach of Choktroo’s expedition and the
thrilling keenness of the flashes that swept over his fire-ships.
I watched for many days the effect of this great blow upon the nature
and fortunes of my old cabin-boy. Over his immediate staff and army he
was able to regain his full sway as soon as they recovered from the
shock; but his power over the other islanders was completely shaken.
Bodies of them launched the boats from the steamers and made off for
their own islands before the leaders were aware of their intentions.
The moment Choktroo realised the position he turned his still uninjured
guns in the direction of the sea and commanded all issue from the beach
where his ships were buried. For wholesome example he sank several
boats which had almost got out of his reach. Then he set his army to
dig canals around one of his fire-ships; but no sooner was she ready
for floating than the whole force of the lilaran was turned in her
direction; the waves rose and a single night’s surf completely undid
the labour of days. The ship was as deeply embedded as ever; and her
sisters had almost disappeared beneath the sand-dunes. The weight of
metal in them shortened the process of burial.
It was clear that nothing could be done to save the expedition or bring
its material back to Broolyi. Before many days we saw the soldiers
embark somewhat sadly in the boats and find their way across the ocean
to the adjacent islands. Piecemeal the whole army retraced its steps to
Broolyi.
It was not likely that Choktroo would allow this slur to rest on his
fame and eat into his power like rust, for there was clear evidence
that his influence over even the Broolyians had greatly suffered. By
means of his advertising and his histrionic abilities he had brought
them to believe that he was invincible; they now began to feel that
he had the same limitations as themselves: he was powerless against
the magic of the Isle of Devils. All his wiles were needed to check
the spread of panic and distrust. He first of all minimised the defeat
in his proclamations, and before many months were over he had come to
speak of it as a victory marred by the invincible powers of nature. He
had been quick to recognise the similarity of the phenomenon to that
we had experienced in the _Daydream_ when running the gauntlet
of the fog circle, and he sent out party after party to explore the
ring of mystery and to come back with tales of its magical powers of
inducing sleep. Thus was he soon able to convince the archipelago that
the failure of his great expedition was due, not to the inhabitants
of the Isle of Devils, but to the forces of nature. He had in his
own eye and will great mesmeric power, and by practice was able to
develop it into something that he could exercise at pleasure. Then
he made public exhibition of his capacity in the various islands. He
threw numbers into mesmeric sleep, nor would he or could he release
them from its thrall. They became his willing slaves and lived only to
please him. A milder form of mesmeric fascination he used in order to
rivet his despotism on his armies. He would address sections of them
with bombastic self-glorification of his deeds and powers and with
flatteries of them and their glorious courage. His personal magnetism
worked upon them as they gazed at him, and by the close of his speech
he had them enthralled to his will.
It was not long before he was feared as a magician by all who did
not mesmerically worship him; and tens of thousands were eager to
do the most wicked and shameful deeds, if only he bade them. Yet he
dared not shrink from another fall with the inhabitants of the Isle
of Devils; else even this preternatural fascination that he exercised
might vanish. For years he racked the wealth of the islands and built
an enormous fleet of still more powerful fire-ships, and armed it with
still more powerful guns. To supply the funds for the expedition,
those who were not trained fighting men became slaves, who toiled for
him all but their few hours of sleep. Rebellion against this galling
and impoverishing despotism was slowly forming in the breasts of the
people. Many of them were disappearing mysteriously. They had betaken
themselves to unapproachable caverns like Nookoo, and my dreamer of
Swoonarie was arming them with his plague-pellets. A few more months
and revolution would have broken out against the despot, and he at
least would have perished; but the expedition sailed in all its pomp,
again deeply impressing the imaginations of the islanders. This time
he had taken precautions against the somnifaction of his army by
means of a sleep-expelling drug. Every man was furnished with a dose
of it to take as soon as they came near the dreaded isle. The Lilamo
had been busy for some time, I had seen; but the Limanorans were as
unconcerned at this approach as at the former one. What new defence
had they? I could see no more preparation than there had been on the
previous occasion. The calm which prevailed reassured me; yet soon I
grew restless with the fear that this fire-eating cabin-boy with the
mystery in his eyes would sully the shores of Limanora with his vulgar
ambitions.
My fear became alarm as I saw on the horizon the smoke of the fleet
and heard through the idrovamolan the shout of triumph rise from the
army when the peak of Lilaroma had burst on their view. I could see
each man drink his drug; and I thought that all was lost. Suddenly
there came a roar from every ship; and I could see that it accompanied
a plume of steam that escaped from the sides. The boiler of every
fire-ship had evidently been punctured; and soon I could see that it
cost those on board unceasing effort to keep afloat. The soldiers were
about to take to the boats when a deeper-mouthed roar numbed every
other sound. It was the lilaran at work, and the whole fleet soon
vanished over the horizon before its compulsive blast.
The puncturing had been accomplished by submarine action. The Lilamo
had sent through the waters their floating batteries, which by nicely
adjusted weights lay beneath the surface right on the track of the
fleet. The electric cables by which they were secured could shift them
hither and thither; and through them immense force could be applied,
sending a volley of keen darts up towards whatever iron there was above
them. These darts had entered the hulls of the ships just beneath the
water-line and made their way into the iron of the engines; one or
other told on the boilers and disabled the ships. The electric floats
were unseen by the expedition, and the wounding of the fleet was as
mysterious and magical as the sleep had been on the previous attempt.
Panic seized on every soldier and sailor, and they thanked their gods
when the blast of the lilaran hurried them to the shelving beach of a
low island and they heard the keels grate on shingle and sand. They
scrambled on shore through the surf and found shelter from the wind
behind the mounds that covered the former fleet or under their gaunt
ribs or sides.
But a new panic overcame them when they discovered that their leader
was gone and could nowhere be found. Then it was remembered that in the
worst of the storm which blew from Lilaroma a giant bird had swooped
down towards his ship and rested for a moment on the platform, where
he stood in solitary meditation, and as suddenly soared up again. It
was two messengers of the Lilamo who had been sent in one of their
bird-shaped airships to make an end of these warlike expeditions. They
had alighted beside Choktroo, and by the powerful means they commanded
had sent him into a deep sleep in spite of his drug; they tossed him
into their airship and in a few moments were high in the azure rushing
before the blast of the lilaran. Away they fled with him all day and
all night across the belt of fog, and having reached the outer world
they let him down still tranced on the shore of a lonely coral islet of
the Pacific close to a group inhabited by a savage and warlike tribe.
Choktroo had their instincts and ambitions; let him master the savages
when he awakened. A wild beast could do no harm amongst wild beasts.
His memory and example haunted the archipelago like an evil dream
for generations. Some thought that he had been borne aloft to heaven
by a messenger of the gods, and worshipped him as divine; his cruel
tyranny and wars goaded on his worshippers to wild fury of injustice
and slaughter. Others who were keener of brain and had perceived the
earthly character of their leader and his purposes were incited to like
ambitions. The romance of his life was glorified in verse and prose by
every new school of literature and fired the imaginations of boyhood
to warlike exploits. War, piracy, plunder came to be the favourite
forms of dishonesty in the archipelago. It was marvellous how much the
peaceful and obscure suffered from the romance of this cabin-boy’s
adventures.
But no man of the islands dared again to approach the Isle of Devils.
Even he whom so many of them reputed a god had been unable to break
in; and the mishap to the last fleet had been more bewildering than
that to the first. Magical powers were possessed by the inhabitants
of this island without a doubt; there seemed to be no limit to their
transcendence of the order of nature. Evil they were, and the fear
of them the Broolyians had to endure in patience. Nor did it grow
less from generation to generation. Fancy never let the stories of
the defeat of the great Choktroo rest; they gathered to them features
more and more terrible to contemplate. A halo of dread and mystery is
far more effective as a fence against human intrusion than a halo of
sanctity or even divinity. It cows the miscreant and the brute in the
human breast. The duties of the Lilamo in repelling the attacks of men
would vanish for hundreds of generations.
For Choktroo, his fate was a romantic contrast to that of his fame.
Reports were brought in by the idrovamolan or by flying messengers who
had ventured over the belt of fog. He was rescued by the neighbouring
tribe before he starved on the barren islet, only to be threatened with
sacrifice to one of their gods. A missionary who had some influence
over the heathen arrived at the moment of sacrifice and saved him.
After learning their language he worked his way by intrigues and
assassinations and what they thought magic up to the headship of the
tribe. When he had made himself secure in his power over them, he
built a great fleet of war-canoes, and, after mastering the groups of
islands within range and enlisting their warriors and canoes in his
service, he set sail southward for some land they knew not of. South
and then east the fleet made way, his followers still unalarmed. At
last appeared the circle of mystery on the horizon. He gave the word to
row forward into it; but, before the command had reached the outermost
of the canoes, he was hurled from his platform into the sea, and, as
he rose to the surface, he was promptly speared by his own immediate
staff. Round swung the heads of the canoes by one simultaneous impulse.
Their chief had become a madman to think of entering that belt of
mystery; and away they paddled for very life; nor did they cease their
frantic efforts till the dark cloud had sunk beneath the horizon.
CHAPTER XV
THE DUOMOVAMOLAN OR COSMOPHONE
THOUGH the Limanorans calmly pursued their regular employments during
these attempts at invasion, I had myself felt the uneasy spiritual
atmosphere that precedes and presages turmoil. None but the Lilamo
were engaged in preparation for defence; yet during all the years
every spirit was tense and giving out its energy in sympathy to this
section of the people. There was a palpable loss of nervous power
in the community, for they knew that by accident some joint in the
arrangements might fail to work and all the defence miscarry. Not till
the bold disturber of their progress was finally disposed of did the
tension or the leakage of nerve-energy cease. To be absorbed in mere
war was to them the hades of human society, and to have again sealed up
their island from the intrusion of degenerate souls was a happy epoch
in their history.
While the whole community quivered with inward jubilance, two momentary
dangers threatened it: it might take some time to recover its
equilibrium; and its thoughts and interests, narrowed by the necessity
of defence against this threat from below, might be long in rising to
the true cosmic level. Some exceptional stimulus was needed to raise
their lives and aims, some appeal to the spirit, which would set them
free from the trammels of earth and all deteriorative excitement. Such
liberation had been by no means uncommon in their past, but no occasion
for it had occurred since I had entered on my novitiate, except in the
case of individuals and families; then I had been too busy with my
training or too distant from the household concerned to notice it.
Now it was to be a national purification of the nature, and I was to
share in it. Would this be a religious ceremony, a day of humiliation
and prayer, such as I had often witnessed in my old home after great
national disasters or during plague or famine? I had seen no churches
or temples, no signs of religious service, no acts of private worship.
I had never heard anyone speak of gods or priests or expiations. Was
this at last to be the revelation of the inner shrine, into which I had
never been able to penetrate?
I had not long to wait for the solution of my problems. Purposes here
moved to conclusions with lightning swiftness, and when one impulse
stirred the people, there was needed no heralding to mass them in the
desired place. I found myself drawn with my proparents and Thyriel and
her household towards a massive building that stood upon a peak far
up the slopes of Lilaroma. There was no need of road or steps to it;
wings made the wide air the highway. Yet were there great terraces
ramparting the sides of the peak, and from the highest seawards there
was a marvellous flight of steps which, when the clouds hid Lilaroma,
seemed to lead up into heaven. I had often seen the edifice gleam high
in the setting sun, yet there were so many temple-like structures on
the shoulders and peaks of the giant mountain that it had ceased to
excite inquiry. Now as we flew towards it its titanic proportions
and jewelled beauty seemed to dominate all the lower world. The
building, the most striking that I had ever seen, raised an enormous
circular dome of crystal to the sky, and around this were innumerable
smaller structures, which elsewhere would have bulked huge to the
eye. As we drew nearer, I saw that each crystal cupola, instead of
crouching low upon the terrace as I had thought at first, rose upon
a lofty and massive tower of great strength. What I had taken for
smaller and higher terraces and bastions were the walls of towers
and square citadels that seemed built to outlast the wars of Titans.
Solid lava they were of extraordinary thickness. There was nothing
here of that slenderness and delicacy which had made me compare their
other buildings to lace-work. The terraces and flight of steps I had
seen from below were but the outer flanks of the layer on layer of
foundations laid upon the plateau to save the structure from all but
the deepest-sourced tremors.
As we entered the mighty portal, I felt that no storm or earthquake
could move it. It seemed a city sculptured out of the solid rock; but,
as soon as we were in, the sense of this massiveness vanished and the
whole appeared as we looked up fairy-like and gossamer. In any one of
the vast temples nothing but a film seemed to separate us from the
azure sky. In the smaller towers we gazed up a dark shaft roofed by a
circle of sky, and the very stars shone out upon our vision by day, so
palpable was the column of darkness above us.
We soon settled in our hanging rests under the great central dome.
Around us were thousands hung in mid-air in different attitudes of
rest. Yet the building sounded empty, so vast was it and so silent
were all. The slightest whisper rang across its great untrammelled
spaces with the sharpness of a word beside us. Not a column or beam or
ornament broke the harmonious simplicity of the spacious circle from
vault to floor, from side to side. Everyone by instinct kept still; for
the mere rustle of a wing appalled by its far-reaching effect. We even
held our breath lest the sound should break the colossal stillness. To
me it seemed for a time frozen silence.
I soon perceived that there was no effort in the self-repression of
my neighbours’ movements. They were entranced, their heads erect as
if catching the echo of some far-off music. To me there was as deep
stillness as before. I listened intently, but felt no change except a
slight exhilaration; an electric influence was pulsing around. To the
electric sense in them some great harmony was appealing. Yet there
was more than this; for their eyes were fixed intently on the dome. I
looked up and felt awestruck. There on a scale that seemed to match
the sky of night I saw enacting the evolution of a universe. In the
blue vault a great sphere of glowing vapour was whirling round; from it
sprang off huge concentric rings, that one after the other, themselves
became whirling spheres ablaze with the intensity of white heat. Step
by step a system of earths revolving round a central sun was developed.
On one as it cooled we could see life appear and grow varied, then
fade away and finally vanish. Before the last tragedy had closed,
another had taken up the strain of existence, had run its course upon
the globe, and a third had stepped into the ranks of life-bearers. The
torch of generation was passed on from orbit to orbit, the central
luminary ever dimming its fires, till at last the system wheeled on
through darkness, seeming to have no purpose in the universe; but just
as the last light flickered and began to vanish from the surface of the
sun, out of the darkness seemed to rush another dead universe; through
the eternities the two had been approaching nearer and nearer, drawn by
their common doom. In a moment they had crashed together and out of the
collision came a mist of fire, that soon by whirling in space became
again another and a larger sphere of glowing vapour.
How impressive was this reincarnation of worlds! Deeper and deeper the
scene sank into the spirit, as the electric thrill which accompanied
the earlier steps of the process passed into dim-echoing music,
translating all we saw into sounds. A singular feature of their music
was that it was never produced in the same room in which it was to be
listened to. The machinery and the orchestra drown by their clack and
clamour the soft footfalls of harmony that are the only true spirit
of music; this was their reason. They had a contrivance in every
large room, a huge-mouthed tube by which inflowing music was softened
or strengthened and which could if need be raise a whisper into a
thunder-peal; in this was a series of keys or stops, by which any sound
coming through it could be modulated. One key could make the apparatus
soundproof by filling its throat with a pledget of a peculiar fibrous
metal they had. One series could wring out the harshness of any sound
till it became soft as a much-reverberated echo. A second magnified any
sound, however soft, to the required loudness and volume, and the whole
was controlled by a minute key-board which could be held in the hand
and moved to any part of the room.
In this vast auditorium I could not see where the key-board was
managed; but he must have been a poet-musician who manipulated it, so
delicately did the volume of sound adapt itself to the mood of those
who watched the growth and decay of worlds. Now it swelled with the
collision into thunderous harmony; again as a crisis approached in the
tragedy it fell to the low music of far-echoing nature-sounds. At times
this marvellous opera of universes died away to my hearing; yet my
neighbours lay in trance as if still catching harmonies that mastered
the soul. I knew nothing but the vague electric thrill that passes
through the nature at some great thought. Harmonies as colossal touched
their electric sense as those which before had come through their
hearing. I longed to follow them into those spheres of melodious being
that were still beyond me.
I came afterwards to know the astronomic family that had arranged these
wonderful effects upon the soul through the various senses, and I saw
the mechanism by which they were contrived. Its simplicity was what
struck me most, when I remembered how complicated were the sensuous
modes of appeal to the spirit. Out of innumerable sonoscripts and
electrographs impressed by the world of stars upon their records, they
had selected those that would fit together and raise the souls of the
listeners to the sublimity of seeing the infinite cosmos.
This daylight representation of the music of the spheres was but a
prelude to a more impressive effect as night fell. By some ingenious
mechanism the immense dome was changed; instead of a semi-opaque
crystal, on which could be enacted a mimic evolution of systems,
there slid into its place an enormous lens, which gathered the sky
ten thousand thousand times magnified into the focus of a smaller
lens; and upon this was turned another magnifier, which threw upon
some light-bearing film in front of us a picture of the sky a million
million times the size of what appeared to the unaided eye. Here we saw
enacting the infinite tragedy of the cosmos. We could turn aside and
view the azure above us strewn with its silver eyes, and the contrast
raised the soul to unknown heights of sublimity. In the picture the
worlds lived and moved, and the number of those that filled the spaces
behind was past all counting; we seemed to have drawn as near to some
of the golden centres of systems as lightning flight from the beginning
of our earth would have brought us.
And what gave transcendent sublimity to the scene was the strange
music that accompanied it. By means of the duomovamolan, a marvellous
instrument which reversed the processes of Oolorefa, we heard the
harmony that the worlds made in their motions. As they moved across
our lens and round and across one another, their movements, enormously
magnified, awakened such harmony of sounds as never embodied soul
had heard. Their flight and their magnetism affected an irelium film
in such a way that the complicated lines and curves and figures
produced upon it translated themselves into the music which would have
produced these figures in the ooloran. This people had long practised
architecture by music in Oolorefa before they thought of attempting the
reverse process and converting form and colour into melody; but once
thought of, it was soon accomplished, and the oorolan was the result.
The shadowy figures which any melody produced could be made themselves
to reproduce it.
From the use of this little instrument it came to be seen that their
telescopes could by a little modification and addition be made to tell
out in music the scenes they witnessed and recorded. Step by step the
astronomic families advanced till at last they reached the wonderful
duomovamolan, or cosmophone, which, facing the heavens unbrokenly
for generations, stored up the music of the spheres in their various
changes. It was this instrument we heard as we gazed into the hitherto
unfathomed depths of night. The worlds themselves in their motion
played upon it, and through it upon our souls. No human thought could
have conceived the marvels of harmony that rang through the great
auditorium. We felt as if we had been present at the creation of the
universe and our thoughts ranged through infinite space. A dream of
the most tremendous kind was being enacted before our waking senses.
How poor seemed the whole long history of life upon our earth! Thought
was the only element in us akin with infinity or like to last through
eternity, the thought that could thus span the abysses between the
systems of worlds and comprehend these cosmic melodies still ringing in
our ears.
When the treasured-up music of the spheric movements of the past
ceased, the night itself, the very sky we were contemplating began to
stir fresh harmonies through the lenses of the subsidiary towers. We
gazed, and the stars in their silver motions, motions unnoticed by
the naked eye, told their tale in sweet harmony. These new symphonies
were simpler than the operas of creation and decadence that we had
been listening to and, after those titanic effects, seemed almost
monotonous, so few complications had they. They soothed the souls lost
in the sublimities of infinite space and time and we came gentlier
down to the earth on which our life was cast. We still trod on air,
our heads were still amongst the stars, but the earth was near us and
counted as one of the myriad worlds.
As night swung towards the mid-vault, the music faded and seemed to
sound from far valleys. At last it sank into a lullaby, the lullaby
of slow-moving constellations. Sleep came on me by unconscious,
scarce-heard footfalls, and through its magic portal the universe of
dreams appeared. Amongst the stars I flew, never-resting, eager to
visit and know all. Here I communed with beings so like me and yet so
far above me that I yearned to remain with them; but on I had to speed.
Then I rested on a world still dominated by the rudimentary stages of
life-energy, and so repulsive were the sights and sounds there that I
fled shrieking from it. Next came a sphere so filmy and translucent I
scarcely knew how it persisted in tiding the storms of space; yet here,
too, was life, life so noble, so immaterial, that I felt ashamed of my
body and its sensuous methods of knowledge; so ethereal were the beings
there that the common forces of gravitation and attraction seemed to
have no power over them; so far below them did I feel myself to be in
the process of evolution that I had not the heart to remain. Away into
space I winged, till a dark orb drew me towards it, shone on by suns of
the most fantastic and ill-omened colours. Here, too, was a manhood not
unlike that of earth, yet so sinister that it seemed an orb of devils;
the forms were graceful; the faces had a beauty of their own, but
shone with such evil meaning that they fascinated like snakes; amongst
them I could recognise the great conquerors and monarchs and warriors
and colossal criminals whose faces or the representations of whose
faces I had seen upon earth; war and pillage were their occupations;
cunning and force, hypocrisy and arrogance, were their weapons. In
horror I fled from the sight of their internecine passions and into
the depths of the night I sped on. So varied was the constitution of
the orbs that I approached, so marvellous the range of the kinds of
beings inhabiting them, that my mind seemed to sink under the task of
imagining them. Everything was in transition, there was no rest for
any form of energy in the cosmos. On it must sweep towards a higher
transformation or a lower. I saw beings that seemed to be the very
acme of creation, so beautiful and noble were they, so purged of all
grossness and materiality; yet ever beyond them I found some form they
looked up to and yearned to reach. Below me I could see on endless orbs
lower and lower kinds of energy receding into darker night, yet ever
pressing upwards, step by step. What an eternity of ascent was before
them! Looking up, my soul was drawn to some great centre my eyes could
not discern; the exhilarant force seemed to give me wings finer and
nobler than those of my body. With infinite longing I left my material
part behind floating slowly in space. A trance came upon me as I flew
upwards with lightning speed and I swooned with the ecstasy of final
achievement.
Then I awoke, still lying in my pendulous rest. Morning had broken and
the cosmic strains had died away. This dream-flight had been but the
climax of the purification. Such music, such electric impulse had been
poured about us as we slept, that our spirits could not but accomplish
these imaginary voyages through space and time. Without this sublime
uplifting into the diviner realms of ether our souls might have fallen
back to the mean purposes and ambitions of earth induced by the fears
of the invasion and the necessities of its repulse. Now we walked like
angels amongst men, a wall of eternity separating us from the gross
needs of war and defence. We were again on the upward path that leads
towards the highest, and, purified and ennobled, were eager again for
the immediate duties of life.
Such purifications of the soul occurred amongst the community as a
whole whenever any influence tended to drag it down to a lower plane.
Their eyes were drawn downwards; they had again to be turned to the
goal of all energy. Victory over such a conqueror as Choktroo had to be
given its due insignificant proportion in the results and aims of life,
else it might atavise some of their spirits and bring to life ambitions
buried for long ages. One night’s voyage amongst the infinities was
enough to throw human conquests, however great they might seem, into
pettiness and oblivion. Thus the evil spirit such events might raise
was exorcised, and yet the sensuous power of the music by which the
exorcism was achieved was evaded. Mere music, such as I had been
accustomed to hear with luxurious passion in my old home, would have
let our spirits, after raising them to the heights of ecstasy, fall
crashing into the world of commonplace as soon as it ceased; but this
cosmophonic harmony permanently soothed and elevated the embruted soul.
It implanted thoughts so high that it seemed sacrilege to return to any
lower plane.
CHAPTER XVI
THEIR HEAVEN AND THEIR HELL
THE race returned to its daily life, purified and elevated. The danger
of intrusion upon their upward struggle had called out unwonted
vigour; and the expulsion of the grosser elements and ambitions which
threatened to accompany this had resulted in clear gain for their
progress. The pace at which they developed greatly quickened; and we
felt the pulses of the race beat with the eagerness of prevision. Every
new age had accelerated its advance till it seemed to have breasted all
possibility, yet as the step grew swifter and swifter the lightning
swiftness of a far past seemed to them but a snail’s pace. Back the
darkness of the future was pushed, and new vistas opened where the
black wall of fate had seemed to face them.
One of the most striking proofs of their advancement was to them the
rapidly developing love and power of foreseeing. They seemed to live
in the future, and that future was an ever-receding circle like the
horizon ahead of them, widening and widening as they rose above mere
earth necessities. A considerable section of their community was
devoted to pioneering for the race, exploring the possibilities of the
future; and whenever there was a danger that the energy of development
would slacken the imaginations of the youth were fired by a sight of
all that they might be.
One of the chief duties of the imaginative pioneers of the race was to
prepare a vision of the time to come that would at once appeal to the
youthful fancy and fire it to renewed effort; for often in a generation
a family or individual would become so absorbed in a special pursuit
that the idea of the whole was obscured; and to prevent or obviate this
false perspective imaginative prevision was ever and again needed. An
easy bird’s-eye view of all that the race might become was the best
means of attaining this.
Another magnificent edifice was set apart for this purpose, again on
the slopes of Lilaroma, not to give outlook, but merely to draw all
eyes. It was perhaps the most impressive of the great buildings of
Limanora; so vast were its proportions that it seemed almost a city in
itself; for in huge subsidiary halls every phase of the possibilities
of their civilisation was represented. These were dwarfed by the
central hall, which seemed large enough to contain the whole of them.
In it all the phases of the future were focussed in what they called
the mornalan, or time-telescope. This made the pictures of what they
might become live and move before the eyes of the gazers, who as they
gazed through one of the many thousand eye-pieces seemed to look upon
life itself in its noblest ideals.
My first visit to the great building, which they called Terralona, or
millenarium, was not long after the final repulse of Choktroo. Into
the younger and less purified hearts of the community the idea of
warlike glory had returned with some force, even though we realised
intellectually how shallow and false and retrograde it was. The
introduction to what I might call the heaven of the race ought to have
come naturally later in life, when we had passed completely out of
pupilage and assumed the full duties and privileges of maturity; but it
seemed necessary to erase from our emotions this atavistic taint that
the appearance of Choktroo and his expeditions had begotten in us. The
national purification had succeeded in making earthly ambitions seem
insignificant, but as we settled down again to our pursuits the awe
that the cosmophone had bred in us grew fainter. The world narrowed
into a prison-house, and our daily duties forced a recoil to a wider
sphere of ambitions, such as we had seen out in the archipelago in the
masterful wars so lately witnessed. It was time, indeed, that some of
us were brought into the presence of the immediate ideals of the race
towards which they were as a whole struggling.
We were now to enter upon a new epoch of our existence and to know the
wider heaven in which our own special pursuits took their orbit. We
were thereafter to drink at the purer fountains of inspiration, to know
the rewards of all our struggles, the possibilities that lay within the
reach of a measurable number of years.
Up through the morning air we flew, exhilarate with the wine of
healthy life, joyous in anticipation. My proparents were with us, and
explained in answer to our inquiries the character of the building
we were to visit. It absorbed the best energies of some of the most
imaginative and artistic families of the island. They were ever forging
ahead of their own work. Like life, their art never rested. What they
imagined to-day grew familiar or even tame to-morrow. The consequence
was that the inside of the edifice was never two days alike, and the
most frequent visitor never found it monotonous. There was no such
thing as a fixed paradise for any race; it varied, it must vary, with
every development or retrogression of its members. Heaven was merely
the brightest ideal that a people could imagine for itself; and the
heaven of a highly progressive race was rapidly antiquated, and in the
long flight of ages came to neighbour their hell. It is like climbing
a mountain; the shining peak we long to attain as we start from the
plains at dawn is found to be but a lower ridge of plateau which
conceals the gleam of higher snows; these again when reached are found
to be overtopped by still higher peaks. The difference is that in truly
advancing human life the process seems unending. There is no spiritual
ambition, no ideal, no creed, no ethical code, but when realised in
practice is found to reveal something higher still to long for and
realise. A stationary heaven means a stagnant civilisation.
Onwards we sped as we discussed or listened, ever nearer to the vast
pile of buildings that was our goal. We who had never been inside or
known its purpose tingled with expectation. Even our elders, we could
see, were eager and alert with anticipated pleasure. They were sure to
see some new and striking features in the fore-picture.
It was with great awe that we found ourselves within Terralona; for
we had entered the great central hall at once, without any attempt to
study the separate sections of the experiments in progress depicted in
the subsidiary halls. It was more impressive in its proportions and
size than any I had yet seen, and was dimly lit with that strange,
diffusive, centreless light of which they had command. In no one part
was the light brightest, so that it was impossible to say whence it
came or how it was produced. The roof rose so high and the walls were
so far apart that we found flight easy inside; and there were platforms
all round for leaping into the air and taking flight. Along the farther
wall we could see many Limanorans hovering, like butterflies that
alight for a moment and then flit to another flower. There were also
rising to the roof hundreds of tiers of different kinds of rests.
What these were for I could not conjecture, unless they were placed
for easy flight. At length we reached that end of the building and saw
that every rest was placed so as to bring the eyes level with a large
lens set in the wall. We each mounted into one of them, and I set my
face against the smooth transparency. The sight that met me I cannot
even at this distance describe. There seemed to be miles and miles of
space beyond filled with a representation of an island which I soon
recognised as Limanora; but it seemed to be afloat in the azure of
the sky, and from it a pathway of silken threads of light led upwards
to the stars, which floated within neighbourly distance of it. Busy
travellers sped up and down the climbing flightway with a swiftness
that almost obscured their form and size. It was only when they rested
at either goal that I could see their features or study their nature.
They were Limanorans, yet completely transformed. The tissue of their
bodies seemed like light itself, so transparent and filmy was it.
Their wings seemed a part of themselves, and their flight was as easy
as a swallow’s. They moved through the air like shreds of sunlight or
animated snowflakes, with power to fly up or down, often at lightning
speed. In their faces were none of the deep shadows of baffled
thought or blind emotion, but they seemed supremely happy in their
enfranchisement from earth. Yet they were but human, only a few steps
removed from the humanity I saw around me. They had still upon their
faces the look of pity so frequent amongst the Limanorans when they
gazed out on the men and life of other lands; but it was only when they
gazed or travelled downwards that this took the place of the serene
calm which marked them out as sages. At times an agitation marked their
gait as they set out on the gauzy pathway of the stars. I could feel
that there was still a world beyond that which they had reached, and
that towards this they must progress with eager thought and effort.
It was the inhabitants of other stars that they were trying to emulate
or gain as friends. They could live in the intervening ether and
found movement through it rapid as thought. Their highest wishes, the
subjects of their imagination, encountered little obstacle or friction
in the accomplishment. They were evidently nearer omnipotence over the
forces around them than they had ever been. Their bodies were so much
dematerialised that they were not far from the state and texture of
their souls. Thought was not clogged with an earthy matter so different
from itself as to hold it down till freed by death. Yet I could see
that there were limits to their actions. The forces of other worlds
and the conditions of interstellar space narrowed and checked their
activity. They could not yet create; they could only transform what
already existed, for there I saw one pair, moulding a creature perfect
according to their ideals and trying to breathe life into it, and not
yet could they know the centre of all being. The path was still upwards
and onwards.
Their activity was no longer restricted to the immediate confines
of the earth. Beyond and above it they soared till it became an
insignificant speck of light in the azure, busily exploring the
universes that strewed infinity and finding out the higher and ever
higher life that inhabited them. I could see them marking on their
itineraries of the sky the orbs to be avoided for their degenerate or
degraded forms of life or energy. Every grade of existence was found
and indicated by brighter light or deeper shadow. They loved to linger
over those orbs whose dwellers were but a step above them, watching
their actions and thoughts and learning their higher ambitions. At a
distance they hovered over the worlds of beings many stages beyond
them in the evolution of energy, afraid lest they might be repulsed
as degenerate. As they watched, their longing study helped them to
rise more rapidly in the scale of being, and back they would come to
Limanora with new thoughts and methods and set themselves thus equipped
to work out with increasing pace their own evolution.
This vast widening of their horizon was evidently an era in their
history, it added such lightning swiftness to their rise in the scale
of existence, it gave them such power of fulfilling whatever they
designed or even imagined. Nobler and nobler ideals remained to be
discovered in every corner of the cosmos. They had only to sail out and
investigate, and then, returning with higher thoughts and ways of life,
mould their being to them. And to die,--what was it now but to slough
off a trammelling form? Death was to them an ecstasy. Every moment of
advance was to them a death, a death of the old, a realisation of the
nobler and higher.
Such was the representation I watched through my optic glass; for my
proparents interpreted what I saw, and showed me the spiritual meaning
of this cosmorama of the future. The details of the living picture I
had not time to mark; nor were my guardians willing that these should
distract my attention from the central ideas; they emphasised the
guiding principles of the new life we might perhaps soon lead, and the
glory of it overcame my earth-born ambitions. What a pitiful figure did
Choktroo and his armies and fleets seem in comparison with such a life!
All the great conquerors and heroes of earth were pigmies seen in a
light like this, slaves to brute longings and ambitions. I grew ashamed
of ever having harboured anything but contempt for even the greatest
career of mortal upon earth.
Nor yet were we done with our cure. The imaginative artists had filled
another and complementary edifice with living pictures of all that by
means of horror could drive us forward on the path of progress. It was
called Ciralaison, or the museum of terrors. I had often heard of it
and had imagined it as a place of unending torture, a Limanoran and
rationalised version of the hell of Christendom, and looked forward
with much loathing and curiosity to the sight of it. We were taught
that this was no imaginary place, but the too real result of all
retrogression and encouragement of atavism, and that there was nothing
supernatural in it, but that it was the natural outcome of all lapses
from the existing ethical path of advance. It was the contrivance of
nature herself to prevent degeneration.
As I had read Dante’s _Inferno_, it was easy for me to map out the
features of Ciralaison. I knew the vices and faults they most shrank
from, and these would define their own natural punishments. As we
winged our way towards the sombre edifice, perched, strangely enough,
upon one of the most prominent spurs of Lilaroma that beetled over the
sea, I let my mind wander over what was soon to meet my eyes; pictured
a place of intense woe, full of the horrors of a mediæval place of
torture: I could almost imagine I heard the weeping and wailing and
gnashing of teeth.
We entered the gloomy porch and passed into the central hall; it was
almost the exact counterpart of Terralona, except that there was no
brilliant suggestion of all that was beautiful and noble. There was the
same dim suffusion of light, the same lofty wall of lenses with rests,
the same series of flight platforms round the other walls. With some
precipitancy I made for one of the optic rounds in the wall, and the
first sight I saw struck me as the most commonplace and familiar. It
was a representation of one of the foul lanes of our Western cities.
There were the gutter children, the reeling drunkards issuing from
the gin palaces, the cursing drabs behind them, the tatters, the
filth, the dilapidated buildings. It was but an unending series of
instantaneous photographs moving with great speed under stereoscopic
glasses, whilst the sounds accompanying the scene, having impressed
themselves similarly on long strips of irelium, were in one of their
sound machines reproducing themselves. It was indeed the commonest
and most repulsive of sights in the east end of any of our large
towns. What astonished me was that it should have been taken from
European life; and yet, when I gazed more attentively at it and put the
sound-magnifier to my ears, I knew that it was not European. The words
spoken were in a language I did not know, and the rags of the men and
women were the rags of a national costume I did not recognise.
I shifted my rest and lens, and I saw a rustic village, such as I had
known in my boyhood, with the toilers busy at their work. At a distance
it was a happy scene; for the men and women were absorbed in occupation
and seemed to have forgotten the evils of mankind. They were much in
the open air, which was bright with the colours of the sunlight; and
the children’s voices sounded merry at play or humming like bees from
the window of the schoolhouse. It was a picture such as city poets had
often painted as ideal and primitive happiness, yet some contrivance
seemed to analyse it all for my mind and reveal to me that it was even
more repulsive than that of the foul city lane. Not to my hearing or my
eyes did this come; but to my magnetic sense, ill-developed though it
was. I felt a deadly stupor over the whole pressing out the higher life
of every rustic. Not the diseases which often overtook them unprovided,
not the poverty leaving no outlook for their old age except reluctant
and hated charity, not the constant slavery of toil, or the meagre
assuagement of its woes by a weekly booze in the tavern, weighed upon
my spirit and made me sad to look at the scene. It was the stagnant
spiritual level on which they and their children to the thousandth
generation must live, without power of perceiving the nobleness that
was above them and around them, without the chance of ever developing
the spiritual energy that was in them, without one approach to the line
of infinite progress going on throughout the universe. To stand still
or recede was the true inferno of the Limanorans.
Again I changed my optic glass and a greater sadness came to me through
my magnetic sense. I saw men and women such as I used to envy for
their respectable life, their serene comfort, and their sure grasp of
both worlds trooping into buildings for religious worship. They bowed
and sang, they genuflected and prayed, they raised their eyes to the
ceiling, they groaned and professed to pity themselves as miserable
sinners; yet I could feel they had an inner consciousness that these
performances were superfluous on their part, so comfortably worldly,
so charitably godly were they. As they rose to leave the temple, they
seemed to purr and pat their sleek stomachs in supreme self-content.
Yet through the magnetic magnifier I knew that they were in a lower
circle of the inferno than the rustic slaves. Their past stood out
through many generations of ancestors exactly the same as their present
or better. Never a chance had they of progressing; they thought they
had reached perfection as far as earthly conditions would allow. They
prayed that they might be made better; but that was only as they
prayed that their sins might be forgiven when they were certain that
they had committed none, or as they prayed for guidance in their daily
duties when they knew that no one could manage them better than they.
Stagnancy was written on every feature of their faces and of their
lives, fatty degeneration of every faculty and organ necessary to
development. Their ethics, their religion, their business, their habits
of life had all reached a stage that made criticism superfluous and
that knew no higher outlook.
The next scene that came through the lens was one of the most envied
of Christendom. Men and women of the highest birth and best breeding
were moving to and fro in brilliantly lit and decorated rooms, in the
largest of which the dance was proceeding. In another room a luxurious
supper was laid, varied and fine enough to tempt the eye and palate
of the most fastidious gourmand. Voluptuous music and scents filled
the air; witty conversation was stirring even the most languid faces
to smiles. What could be more perfect on earth than the enjoyment of
such a scene? Yet this was a deeper slough of hell than any I had yet
viewed. The whole of life was concentrated in the senses, the least
progressive of all the organs of human nature, the organs soonest sated
with what they desire. And what a horror of life was revealed beneath
all this brilliancy! A crescendo of such pleasures was needed to drive
off ennui; and such a crescendo was not to be found. The young still
lived in hopeful mirage. The middle-aged were sick of it all. The old
sneered cynically over everything or babbled the senility of second
childhood. The vulgar consequences of vice or the entanglements of
crime, the surfeit of pleasure or the tedium of life kept most of them
within one step of suicide. Their course was ever downwards. I pitied
these magnificent voluptuaries, in all their ephemeral pursuits and
aims. The brilliancy was only an attempt to hide the ghastly grinning
of death and corruption in the reality underneath.
Another change of the point of view, and the world of fame revealed
itself in its gilded horrors. I watched the struggling poet trampled
beneath the foot of luxury and contempt, happy if only he died early
in the hateful wrestle for glory. I saw the drowning agonies of the
novices in the sea of literature, appealing in vain for help to the
wealthy as they passed in barges lulled by the rich music of flattery;
here and there a frantic swimmer clutched at help, and out again he was
thrust into the depths by the minions of literary fame. How little the
rejected knew of the reality that they strove after! I looked into
the hearts of the famous and saw corrupt masses of jealousy and hate,
or hollow shells echoing the misery of life. The most appalling sight
was, not the failures in art and learning, science and commerce, but
the successes. Behind a mask of smiling prosperity and conventional
enjoyment of the world there was but a handful of dust that bore the
weary load of existence in agony.
Generation after generation came and passed through this torturing
fire, knowing not why they bore the pangs for threescore years and
ten, or whither they were borne. They seemed to improve, but only sank
deeper into the original barbarism. Here and there they picked out a
name of one long dead and worshipped it; but the shrine was empty; it
was only a name, and not the personality for which it had once stood.
Behind I could hear the spirit wailing and cursing its fate and the
falsehood and hypocrisy of his adorers. He knew the hollowness and
pretence of the whole performance; he knew that the name had become
a weapon for offending and maiming those who in their innocence were
struggling for fame, as he had done, in vain.
The deepest circle of hell was still to meet my eyes. I thought, as
I was guided to it, that it must be that of murderers and furious
criminals. My amazement grew, as I looked into the lens and saw that
the actors, or I should more truly say the sufferers, were the great of
the earth, the monarchs and statesmen and warriors, who drew all men’s
eyes to them as the masters of life. A movement on the part of my guide
touched some key, and a strange gleam of unearthly light threw out into
relief the hidden mechanism of their existence. Round everyone was a
network of threads like a spider’s web, and the controlling ends of
the threads led up obscurely into the hands of a crowd of miscreants,
who lay out of sight of the applauding mobs; when a limb or a lip or
an eye seemed to move of its own accord to the music of huzzas, it was
jerked by a thread in the control of some scowling villain who worked
the movement for his own murderous purpose. These gorgeous figures were
but puppets playing a marionette-play upon the stage of life. One or
two of the strongest seemed instinct with the breath of originality,
but a still stronger light revealed adamantine chains woven around
them, and attached to these one master-chain which disappeared into
infinity; they were in the spider-web of fate. Still more awful was the
sight of their own hearts; each had a crimson-taloned vulture gnawing
the vitals, and each saw every detail of the agonising sight; nor could
he move to the right or left except to clutch at the bared heart of his
rival and torture him. Who could imagine hell more appalling than this?
Yet up the giddy approach to the seats of the mighty climbed eager
competitors for any place in this torture-chamber death or defeat might
empty.
Then behind all stretched the curtain of infinity; and as it rose the
ranks of worlds and universes appeared, dwarfing into pettiness the
sights that had racked my eyes. Life and the ideals of life rose higher
and higher up through the regimented worlds, and the little inferno I
had watched became a microscopic speck on the round of existence. The
shadow of their heaven fell over their heads. The agony I had seen
became but an atom in infinity.
CHAPTER XVII
MY EDUCATION CONTINUED
THE gaze into the probabilities of the future and into the realities
of the past ejected from my system whatever of dangerous admiration
I might have felt for the career of such a military adventurer as
Choktroo. In spite of my self-control and rapidly developing reasoning
faculty, there lurked in me the same longing for power that had been so
evident in my cabin-boy. Though he had fallen so wretchedly there was
a romance about his career which appealed to something deep-seated in
my spirit. I knew what a hypocrite and scoundrel he had become in order
to make his success, yet the success seemed to condone his offences
against the progress of humanity. The lust of rule that lies in the
hearts of all men had not yet been eradicated from mine. I had advanced
so far as to be ashamed of it; and I tried to reason it down or to
conceal even from myself the fact of its existence; but my guardians
knew that it was there, and they took the necessary precautions against
its growth. Thus did I pass with the whole people through the national
purification ending with a glimpse of their heaven and their hell.
And now I was ready to re-enter on my process of education. The more
spiritual portions of my nature had been remoulded or confirmed to
follow in the true path of Limanoran development. The last purificatory
process had revealed in me the virtuous or progressive balance that
ensured success in the island. The minds of my guardians were now at
rest with regard to my spiritual future, and I was on the fair way to
become one of the community.
Still my physical constitution lagged far behind the race. Nor had I
any hope of ever making up this lost time, so much had the education
of generations and the accumulations of heredity done for them. My
senses were but feebly developed compared with those of the Limanorans;
and though they gave sensuous faculties a far lower place than the
most advanced thinkers I had ever known of in Europe, they by no means
neglected them, but considered them important instruments of progress
in the material conditions of their life.
My proparents thought it necessary that I should be brought in the
development of my sensuous perceptions nearer to their own level, now
that my love of reason was so strong as to preclude the possibility
of being overwhelmed by sensuous energy. They began with the most
intellectual of the senses, the eyesight, and by the help of magnetism,
hypnotic suggestion, and constant practice under their tuition,
they soon brought me to see farther afield and more keenly into the
structure of things around me than I had in Europe thought it possible
for the human eye to accomplish. I could perceive with the naked eye
stars that I had been able to see before only through the telescope.
I began to note the changes of tissue underneath the skull of my
neighbours when any great thought or emotion stirred in them, and
could use their wonderful instruments of far and near research with
appreciation. Through these instruments faint stars appeared moons,
and the nearer planets revealed many of the secrets of their surface;
whilst the elements resolved themselves into even simpler constituents.
What still lay beyond I could not imagine, yet there were manifestly
worlds, intensive and extensive, still to be explored beyond the limits
of these aids to sight.
In the life of an individual I could not expect to approach the
development of optic faculty attained by this people. This impressed
itself more deeply upon me when my guardians tried to evolve in me the
magnetic power of eye which every Limanoran had by nature. When any
one of them turned his full glance upon me, it was like encountering
the direct beams of the sun; I had to drop my eyelids in self-defence.
It was this that gave them such hypnotic power over Choktroo and his
followers. Their eye was an active exponent of the soul within as well
as a passive recipient of messages from the world without, and could
concentrate into its glance the energy of their powerful wills. Any
one of these Limanorans amongst the feebler-eyed millions of the rest
of the world would have proved himself a master-spirit. He would, with
his unhesitating will and the magnetism of his eye, have kept masses of
men in check and moulded them into a unity, and the great commanders of
history would have blenched before his gaze.
From the first I had felt uneasy under the full glance of my island
friends, in spite of its kindliness and benevolence. Before I left
England, I had been supposed to have the mesmeric faculty to an
exceptional degree. Now I found it pale before those marvellous
Limanoran eyes, and all the training and physical aid my proparents
could give me in this direction, though they added greatly to my energy
of will and eye, only brought out my hopeless inferiority. I was able
at last to bear their glances with ease, and even to raise my eyes to
theirs for a few seconds; but I ceased to hope for the attainment of
their ocular command or their magnetic power.
Even their passive electric sense was far beyond my possibility in
many of its ramifications. For years I had wondered why their couriers
into far regions of the sky could without any chart or landmarks find
their way back to their island home with such ease. It could not be by
means of vision; for they often went flying above the clouds to the
antipodes; nor could it be by smell; for that sense was not nearly so
much developed as the others. In some of my now more distant flights
with Thyriel I discovered that they homed by the electric sense. It had
become keen in the measurements of amounts of electricity; and every
locality had its own electric possibilities, not to speak of a certain
peculiar quality in its electricity which differentiated it from all
others. One of the most important branches of their education was the
magnetography of the earth and sky. Although I never got beyond a
vague perception of differences in the degrees of electricity, it was
of some use to me in my flights to have learned the elements of this
great descriptive science. I could tell with fair accuracy how high
I was above the earth and whether I was drifting away from Limanora
or towards it; for the amount of electricity in any region varied
within certain definite limits and the conditions governing it were
constant for long periods of time; these were, roughly, the metals
beneath the surface of the earth, the differences in temperature of
the strata of air above, the evaporation and chemical changes on the
earth below, and the periodicity of the influence of the sun and the
stars. Their electric charts of the sky and air were ever in process
of correction, but so slightly and gradually in each region that it
was only after long periods that the Limanoran couriers had to revise
their magnetographic knowledge; indeed it was their reports after long
flights which generally led to the minute corrections of their charts.
It was the work of a few minutes only to learn the new modifications,
for their charts were exact miniature models of that which they were
intended to represent; the learner had only to touch a spring and by
the inner mechanism of the globe out would ray to each point of it
the electricities that in degree and quality belonged to the region
indicated; the member of the electric family who guided him would
explain the changes that had occurred since he last consulted the
instrument, and his own electric sense would tell him the rest.
Nor was this magnetographic training useful merely for the purpose of
pilotage through the heavenly vault. It enabled any courier to seek the
region where he would most easily recharge the little engines which he
bore with him under his arms to aid in his wing journey. Although he
could prevent the complete exhaustion of these power auxiliaries by
supplying them with some of the magnetism in his own body, it was only
in emergencies that he did this; for his own system needed electric
recuperation as well. Whenever this was required, he made for some
region of the air that he knew to be highly electric; and there he
floated, whilst with his receptive sense he drew in new stores for his
own system and for his little armpit engines. Then he went on his way
rejoicing, exhilarated by his new energy. One of the purposes of their
frequent flight into atmospheric spheres other than their own was to
drink in new magnetism from one of the great sky fountains.
When a Limanoran returned from an aërial flight there was renewed life
in him. His eyes glowed with a heightened radiancy; I could see a soft
light play about them in the dark, and this, if needed, he could make
even piercing in its brilliancy. He required no light to guide him in
the deepest night. His electric sense gathered in from the atmosphere
the scattered radiance that was hidden from my sight; and from his
eyes he could emit this electricity in the form of light. For me, who,
under all their training, was never able to develop such power over
the unseen forces of the air, the eyes of Thyriel were a guide in
our flight through the night sky; and by day so gentle a brilliance
played around them it was little wonder they fascinated and drew me
ever to them. After experiencing their power, I was not surprised at
the hypnotic influence Limanoran eyes had had over the leaders of the
hostile expedition.
It did not astonish me to find that by means of their electric energy
they could move vast masses which no mere muscular force could have
touched. I had a constitution that seemed to be physically far stronger
than Thyriel’s; yet, if she had time to reinforce her store of
magnetism, she could accomplish feats of strength I could not approach.
In her fragile system there seemed to reside a giant’s energy; but this
was only at times, and especially after she had made some long journey
into the regions of the air. The tissues and fibres of her body seemed
to grow tenfold stronger when the new electric energy tingled along
her nerves. In only the faintest way was I ever able to develop my
electric-receptive sense so far as to realise what a new store meant to
their physical powers.
Yet my guardians set themselves to bring out my latent electric sense
or firla. After much practice and the application of many stimuli I
began to feel impulses more keenly even when they came from a distance:
the back of my neck grew more and more sensitive, so that I would
wheel round instinctively when anyone looked at me from behind. There
was almost hope that I should, after many years’ practice, come to
distinguish the different kinds of emotion with which anyone, though
unseen, might look at me; and I could produce by a concentration of
will-force in the eyes a certain luminosity, noticeable when I stood in
deep darkness.
My power of sight was greatly strengthened by this new electric
faculty that the eyes acquired. I began to raise my eyelids before the
penetrative glance of a Limanoran, or even the full majesty of the
sun; but never could I hope to reach their analytic power of vision.
Their senses were distinguished from those of the rest of mankind by
intellectuality, and were, I thought, not merely the observers and
reporters of the mind, but its outlying parts or functions. The eye
especially seemed to do what through its means reason and experiment
might have done. At a glance a Limanoran would tell to an inch the
distance of any object, and was not far wrong in his estimate of
the space between the earth and any star when its rays reached his
eye. He could distinguish one ray from another by its colour or
colour-constituents and by its magnetic affinities. What he had learned
in the use of the inamar or spectroscope in the lava wells and in
the fusion of metals in Rimla had come to be a visual instinct. With
scarcely a minute’s hesitation he would tell the predominant elements
in any one of the heavenly bodies. Doubtless the firla had something to
do with this analytic power. One of their imaginative pioneering books
held out the by no means remote possibility of catching symptoms of the
life which, they knew well, filled the dim worlds above.
Their auditory powers had been far less developed than their visual,
and gave but faint hope of transcending interstellar space, and
my training soon brought me within easy distance of their hearing
capacity. The range of this faculty both at its upper and its lower
limit had been considerably extended. Sounds dangerous on account of
their loudness to the inner mechanism of ordinary ears were by means
partly of strengthening the protective cartilages and partly of a
trevamolan or graduated modifier of sound, which they constantly wore,
made harmless and even gentle and enjoyable. Those that were too faint
to reach any human ear became audible to me after some training in the
use of their vamolans or makro-mikrakousts. So greatly had these been
improved along with the power of hearing that they could discriminate
the different noises of microscopic life. These vamolans in their
application of electricity to hearing could make the buzzing of an
insect sound like the roar of thunder. By modifications of them any of
the sounds heard through them could be recorded for ever.
Thus had been formed a library and museum of the phonology of animal
life. They had been able to study the records of sounds emitted by
the various species of animals and had come to know the meaning of
each sound before they had driven all but microscopic life from the
island; thus they had learned by means of the recording vamolans the
language of animals. The birds of the air I have seen follow the cries
of Thyriel, gathering around her in clouds, as she flew, until by a
sudden change of tone she would scatter the fluttering masses to the
four winds. Even the fish of the sea would rise and leap above the
waves to her notes; ferocious, devouring monsters would leave their
prey and follow gently in her train. Most of this power over the
undeveloped creation was due to the record and study of their cries;
but not all. The magnetism of her personality had a strange effect upon
the wildest birds of prey: it seemed to bear with it tacitly the lesson
of Limanoran civilisation that no life was to be destroyed by those who
meant to make the best of life; there was a gentle, merciful spirit
in the glow of the eyes. I have seen her take a wounded bird to her
bosom as she flew, and, putting new life into it by the stroke of her
fingers, set it free, strong and happy.
There was a life-giving power in the tips of Limanoran fingers that
puzzled me at first. Why the mere touch should so soothe the lower
creation that the agony of their wounds would soon vanish and their
cries cease bewildered me for a time. My own pains rapidly disappeared
under the touch of my proparents. I afterwards knew that part of the
active magnetism of their system came through their fingers and they
helped me to develop this channel of influence in myself. I could at
last by passing my fingers over Thyriel’s hair or face relieve any
tension of her nerves which might have produced pain; nay, I could
hear her hair crackle under my touch when I had charged my system with
much electricity. Once or twice I was able to draw a wounded bird to
me, and change by my stroke on the feathers its cries of pain into low
notes of content; but I could never draw the winged creation to me in
clouds as Thyriel did.
It was all the more surprising to me that they fenced off animal life
from their island. What might they not have done with such powers over
the lower creation? When I put my question into words, the answer was
unhesitating and unanswerable. All failures in development had to be
thrust from the path of progress; they could do nothing but clog it.
If the Limanorans had little hesitation in the case of their own flesh
and blood, they had still less when they had to deal with animals. It
was quite true that many of the more highly developed of the servants
of man had nobler natures than most of their masters, deeper loyalty,
greater sincerity, truer and more lasting courage; much might and did
come from companionship with their primitive and guilt-proof natures;
but the fact that when associated with man they were destined to serve,
made such good impracticable and rather brought out the mean and brutal
tyranny of man than helped to implant in his nature their own virtues.
Even with such noble qualities as they had it was impossible for them
to overleap the many ages their systems had lagged behind in other
respects, the open offensiveness of their grosser animal appetites and
needs, their lack of that great instrument and teacher of the brain, a
fully developed hand, and the inability to foresee beyond a few hours,
days, or months. Nor could any human process prolong their period of
life and postpone their day of dissolution. It was not a good thing for
these pioneers of the human race to see the approach of death and its
agonies in a being that could not assuage or postpone it. Still less
beneficial was it to touch the carcases and reduce them to harmless
atoms. The presence of animals meant the daily obtrusion of offensive
sights that would either shock or degrade their natures. All that
animals could do for them was already done by their science or their
machinery. Nothing that had fallen so far behind in the race of life
was worth the trouble of missionaryism; for the energy that was in it
had a better chance of rising swiftly in the scale of existence by
dissolution and entrance into some other form.
None the less had they studied the language of animals when they
had had the opportunity. It belonged to the orchestration of the
world, and all the sounds of nature were of interest to them. They
were in the habit of visualising what they heard by a refined and
complicated instrument which they called a thinamar, and had long been
able to translate into its appropriate form and colour every sound,
inarticulate as well as articulate. Through long use of this instrument
the tones of nature bore with them something that appealed to their
eye. I never grew expert enough in its use to make the visualisation
of sound an instinct; still less could I reverse the process. A
modification of their thinamar had enabled them to translate sights
into the symbols of sound, and by skill in using it they had come to
attach certain notes to certain sights. Thus a noble landscape would
appeal to their imagination not only through the eye, but in the
form of music, and they spoke of hearing the beauty of a star or a
flower. A section of this instrument did for complicated sounds what
the spectroscope, or inamar as they called it, did for light. Every
substance, every individual living thing, had its natural and peculiar
note; and the linamar analysed what seemed to me the simplest sound
into its constituent primary notes, each of which revealed its source.
Aided by their mikrakousts and makrakousts, it enabled the Limanorans
to analyse the chemical elements of any object, whether at a great
distance from them or too minute to appeal to their senses.
Their makrakousts were instruments which by means of electric currents
and magnetism could make a beam of light transmit any sound to its
source, or make the ear gather in the same way whatsoever sounds were
filling the air at any point on its course. I knew when I saw a steady
flash in any direction that the sound of some point was getting tapped
by one of these instruments. Each had an apparatus for laying and
keeping fixed its luminous telegraph-wire along which it received and
transmitted. An application of this in the gossip-telegraph enabled
them to listen to the comedy of life as it went on in any one of the
adjacent islands of the archipelago. Their mikrakousts used the same
means for gathering the faint sounds which echoed from the clouds or
through the upper regions of the atmosphere and turning them into
loud notes, which might be recorded, analysed, and interpreted. Their
magnifying power was quite equal to that of the clirolan. Faint
buzzings of insects at vast distances could be collected and made as
loud as thunder. It was even applied to cosmic sounds that impinged
on the atmospheric envelope of the earth. Mikrakoustic balloons rose
into the upper air, and after gathering whatever faint sounds wandered
thither from outside the world, were drawn back again to divulge their
secrets; eavesdroppers of the cosmos they were, and perchance in some
future age they would enable the Limanoran to listen to voices from
other worlds or even to communicate with the dwellers there. A more
immediate and practical advantage of these instruments was found in
medicine. They told in clear accents the unexpected or dangerous
changes in the tissues or organs of any man’s system. They were used in
the weekly medical inspection, which every member of the commonwealth
underwent. When the keen eye, aided by the camera-microscope, could
detect nothing abnormal in the body, the mikrakoust would tell the
examiner’s ear of some obstruction or deleterious change; he knew the
normal sounds of healthy action in every part when they were magnified
thousands of times by this instrument, and every departure from them
readily caught the ear. All the citizens were trained to use it as an
aid in diagnosis, so that they might be able to locate in the system
any beginning of disease. It was part of the training of my ear to use
the mikrakoust and to interpret its physiological revelations.
But these instruments were getting antiquated by the rapid
development of the electric sense that could, by the aid of their
various electro-magnifiers and analysers, gather in cosmic news
from distances which the sense of hearing and its aids would count
infinite. Magnetic kites and balloons rose to the uttermost fringe
of our atmosphere, whither common terrestrial influences could reach
only in such faint waves as to be neutralised; there they gathered
the electric impressions and impulses coming from other planets and
even other systems. On them were recorded the varying strengths of
the waves and their direction. From these records the astronomical
families could tell what was happening of a cosmic character
in universes far out of the reach of even their lavidrolans or
camera-telescopes,--perturbations in the atmospheres of great unseen
suns, collisions between worlds that circled round them, births of
new universes from these lost systems, periodic disturbances of the
routine revolutions through the approach of some meteoric wanderer,
the settlement of life on worlds grown ripe for it, and the death
of outworn stars. For many generations had they kept and classified
these reports of cosmic history and were beginning to recognise a wide
periodicity in many of them and to draw conclusions as to the path
of our universe through infinite space. It seemed to them that there
was some point far distant in the cosmos, round which our sun and its
satellites with innumerable other systems of stars revolved, and that
this point, with its satellites, had its own independent movement. Age
by age, with the aid of their idrolans or electric telescopes, and
other electric instruments, they felt that they were getting nearer and
nearer to the centre of this interwoven epicycloidal movement and were
almost convinced that it did not proceed infinitely, but that there
was some ultimate centre which had no movement round another. Their
instincts told them that this was the divine consciousness towards
which all things rose in the scale of being. They never remitted their
ardour and diligence in the development of their electric sense and of
the instruments that aided it to become a receiver of cosmic news and a
recorder of cosmic history, for they were confident that this was one
of the tracks that led up through the intricacy of the cosmos to God.
One of my greatest regrets was that my electric sense could not follow
the footsteps of these pioneers in the infinite; it had but a dim
consciousness of the reports of their instruments, and train it as
eagerly and diligently as I would, it lagged behind my power of vision
and even my sense of hearing. On this account I preferred to learn the
results of their researches through these two senses, for the electric
reports were carefully translated into appeals to the eye and the ear.
I could see their wonderful discoveries in the unknown, as they worked
them into picture and mechanism, and I could listen from day to day to
the orchestration of their newly discovered spaces and movements. What
seemed at the moment an intolerable discord chimed in with the notes
which preceded or followed and formed marvellous harmony. Not the least
part of my education lay in this cosmic stimulus to my imagination.
Out of my terrestrial conditions and limits I daily rose into spheres
which seemed to me more and more divine. Sight and hearing became noble
channels of the influences of infinity, instead of gross senses. I
struggled to bring my firla up to the enjoyment of their labours, but
ever fell back hopeless.
This was especially the case when I was brought to examine and test
their monalan or electrical distance-analyst, for a fully developed
electric sense was needed to appreciate its refined analysis of
impulses from far distances. It was an ingenious application of
an alloy called by them labramor, or electricity sponge, and had
the power of splitting up any electric wave or impulse into its
constituent movements. Each of these had its own clear and distinct
effect upon the firla and varied with the substance from which the
impulse came or through which it passed. All substances and elements
in the terrestrial system were classified according to their electric
impulses. Even before the Limanorans brought the firla to its high
state of sensitiveness and efficiency, they had been able to examine
the stars and other distant bodies and analyse their elements by means
of this classification and the application of their alloy, labramor.
Every substance or element had its place in their tables according
as it was positive or negative in its electric impulse towards some
other substance or element; and all its affinities, strong or weak,
were tabulated. Thus when they turned their monalan upon any distant
body like a star they were able to analyse its elements by means of
these tables. Even now that their firla interpreted the analysis of the
monalan without the intervention of classifications and tables, they
had another electrically analystic instrument which appealed to the
eye; this turned the electric impulse into a flash or glow, which at
once revealed in the inamar or spectroscope the substances or elements
whence it had come.
Their lower or more material senses I was more nearly able to approach,
even though they too were highly intellectualised and were more the
servants of the spirit than of the animal part. In developing mine I
had more hope of raising myself to the Limanoran level, and yet there
was less stimulus; for I felt that they looked down upon these senses
of smell, taste, and touch because of their need of close contact with
their objects; they were the primitive senses; they were narrow and
bound down to immediate matter, and seemed poor gropers in the finite
and the dark compared with those rangers of infinity, the ear, the eye,
and the electric sense. It was then with a feeling of humiliation that
I saw those lower and more finite senses in me develop so quickly,
proving me a being of a more primitive and material type.
Yet there was no neglect of these in their education and no contempt
for them and their uses; in fact contempt was one of the vices that
they had with most pains weeded out of their systems and civilisation.
They had not merely considered that nothing in creation, if looked
into scientifically, was worthy of contempt, but that contempt was the
truest symptom of crudity of character and ignorance of reality and
nature. Even if they had had any remains of this primal savagery, they
would not have felt it towards those finite-seeking senses. They only
set themselves to make them more and more the servants of the soul, the
instruments of the imagination. They rejected the idea that the arts
belonged only to sight and hearing. Their arts of the firla were far
more important and striking than any sculpture or painting or music
could be. Not merely as a variation on these and a relief from them did
they have arts that brought in the senses of smell and taste and touch;
these had their own special uses in their civilisation. All of them,
but especially smell and taste, were closely linked with memory, and
through memory with imagination. A special perfume and even a special
taste would flash before the mind a scene or fact with more vividness
than even a piece of music would.
The perfumes and tastes had been classified according to their affinity
to certain virtues and ideas and to the great deeds and scenes which
best represented them. The island was one vast flower-garden at all
seasons of the year, arranged not alone to please the eye, but to bring
by the suggestion of their perfumes the noblest virtues and deeds
constantly into the mind. For example, wherever a child or youth was
being trained, the flowers possessing certain well-known scents which
were closely connected with the finest qualities and ideas of the
race shone profusely yet with striking art. The art of the gardening
family did not consist merely in arrangement of the landscape and the
varied coloration of it. The scent of every flower had to be taken
into consideration and the faint flavour or taste the seed or fruit
might produce in the air when sent adrift or bruised. The problem
of no science or art was so complicated as that of gardening in
this island, it had to take account of so many senses, seasons, and
conditions of growth. They were never done with creating and selecting
new variations of flowers and plants, and colour, scent, and taste in
the vegetable world were as adaptable in their hands as tones in the
hands of their musical composers. Their task was made comparatively
easy by the great development of methods and appliances for rapid
growth and decay. They had not only complete command of the weather and
clouds and sunshine; but they could bring up and perfect flowers in a
few nights over vast areas by the use of their streams and watering
platforms and of artificial light. When the Limanorans slept, wonders
were being accomplished in colouring the landscape; for first some of
their great rivers would pour refreshing rain all over the plains; and
then the electric glow, brought close over the plants, would develop
their bloom-producing capacity. As careful were the gardeners that
no withering or dead vegetable matter should ever taint the air of
the island; the moment one set of blossoms had perfected and shown
traces of decay, an electric pruner ran in a few minutes over the
whole area, and not merely cut them off, but burnt them to dust that
fell on the roots to stimulate the new growth of the plants. As soon
as the plants had passed their bloom-productive point, an electric
life-destroyer ploughed lightly through the soil in all directions;
and by the morning what had been profusely flower-coloured the day
before was brown earth, ready for the new plant-growth of next day.
The slow-growing perennials and bushes and trees occupied separate and
fixed quarters at a distance from the residences and the great centres
of intercourse, and all rampant vegetation and rotting boughs and
leaves were daily turned into good soil by the electric weed-destroyer.
No decay was ever allowed to approach the senses. Their knowledge of
the secrets of the soil made them independent of rotting or offensive
manures. The particular elements of which any kind of plant or flower
robbed the soil were accurately ascertained, and their chemistry
enabled them with ease to supply the deficiency after a crop had been
removed.
The gardening family had to be familiar on the one hand with the
innermost secrets of psychology, and on the other with the last
discoveries of the more material sciences; for no one could avoid the
effects of the flowers and trees, as he could painting and sculpture,
music and firlamai. Gardening, in short, was the most public of all the
arts and the most pervasive in its results. A garden (and in Limanora
there was only one vast garden) was a great mnemonic instrument, which
could play upon the souls of the whole community at once. That it
should not be in the hands of novices, or of unwise or wrong-thoughted
men and women, was one of the prime cares of the people. Of all
families those that managed the garden of the island had to be most
simple-hearted and true, most sure in their knowledge of the human
heart, and most eager to stir to what is great and noble and humane.
They were the lords of the sense of smell, one of the most immediate
portals to memory and to imagination. To have the complete command
of one out of the six dominant sense-entrances to the soul was, they
considered, the greatest of responsibilities, and no care was neglected
in selecting, purifying, and training the families of gardeners.
They, too, had the superintendence of Ilarime, a structure devoted to
the arts of smell, taste, and sound combined. Aided by the musicians
and the chemists, they produced symphonies which appealed to all
three senses and roused the imagination to exceptional flights. The
imaginative or pioneering families frequented the halls of this great
building daily in pursuit of new stimulus to their faculty. Every
chamber in it had special emotions to rouse. A garden could have only
a mingled effect upon the memory and mnemonic imagination; Ilarime
separated the effects and classified the emotions and imaginative
ideas which were to be stimulated. Anyone entering could find out at
the porch, either by looking in the index-chamber or by consulting
one of the superintendents, what hall or halls he ought to rest in. I
had often during my education to take refuge in Ilarime, when clogged
in my endeavours to advance by dulness of memory or imagination or by
the weakness of some emotion. After a time I did not need to consult a
guide; I knew what element in my soul was deficient and what emotion or
memory would stir it to activity, and by aid of the index-hall and its
graphic representation of the effect of every chamber upon the spirit I
could choose what symphony I needed. As soon as I had entered the hall
that I had chosen, I lay down on one of their hanging rests and shut
my eyes. At once the medicated atmosphere began to affect my palate,
whilst the delicate perfume entered my nostrils and my ears drank in
the sweet-sounding music. Before many minutes had passed memories of
striking scents I had witnessed or heard of or seen represented in the
island began to rise in my mind, and the emotion I needed thrilled me
through; if it was heroism or courage, I felt myself urged to deeds of
valour; if it was benevolence, I was soon inclined to rush to the help
of the suffering and the poor; if it was hope, I saw bright visions of
the future.
But this exercise was too passive to be allowed for any length of
time. The imagination and emotions were apt to gain at the expense of
the will and the nervous energy by too frequent resort to Ilarime.
Strenuous endeavour was held to be one of the prime essentials of
progress, not only in the race, but even more in the individual. And,
though all the prevailing odours and tastes and sounds of the island
were agreeable, the Limanorans carried with them a small instrument,
called margol, that by an adaptation of electricity could blunt at
will the acuteness of smelling and tasting and hearing, and, on the
other hand, reduce the powers of perfumes and flavours and sounds; it
acted by drying the air around the head and drawing the moisture and
heat from the nostrils, the tongue, and the ears. It was partly to
mitigate the force of smells and tastes and sounds that they always
kept the atmosphere dry and cool by day. In the margol, too, there
was a combination of chemicals and electricity which would modify any
odour or flavour to suit the taste; but if they wished to increase the
strength of any perfume or taste, they applied electric heat to the
source of it, and moistened the nostrils and the mouth. It was one of
the new peculiarities of the race that the mucous and salivary flow was
under the command of the will, and they could smell and taste with
satisfaction to themselves without the aid of moisture on the organs.
Their senses of smell and taste had become by means of their acuteness
what they were originally meant to be, the guardians of the throat and
the digestion. They told with accuracy the nature of the substances
brought to the mouth; whatsoever would be deleterious to the system was
offensive. In most civilised peoples what is grateful to the palate and
the olfactory nerves is often pernicious to some tissue of the body or
some faculty of the mind. Here the two senses were the true friends and
protectors of both body and soul; there was no seducing them or bribing
them into evil or irrational reports, so completely had they been
saturated with reason.
In the medical, chemical, and alimentary families these senses were
trained to a pitch that seemed to me marvellous. By either smell or
taste a member of these families could tell the constituent elements
of any compound. A medical sage, if a man, could distinguish by the
faint odour that marked each human body whether it was losing energy
or expending it, making progress or decaying; if a woman, the sage,
in order to make this decision, had as a rule to bring in the help of
taste; for it had remained from the primitive animal stage of man’s
development one of the differentiating marks of sex that the male
had more energy of smell, the female more energy of taste; now that
they had so spiritualised their senses, perfumes formed the quickest
stimulus of the masculine imagination and flavours of the feminine. At
the food vats it was always the Limanoran women who superintended the
flavouring of any compound; whilst it was the men who had most to do
with medicating the atmospheres of the chambers, and men presided in
the chemical laboratories. The historical origin of this distinction,
they thought, was on the one hand the development of the acuteness of
smell in male animals at rutting time, and on the other the power in
dams of recognising their own offspring by licking it with the tongue.
And it was a well-known maxim in their medical families that every
individual had a distinctive odour and taste. They could tell one man
from another in the dark, and even at a considerable distance; and
to touch him with the tongue was to make assurance doubly sure. The
kissing that was so common in the West as a symbol of friendship and
love, like the rubbing of noses amongst less civilised peoples, had as
its origin and basis the recognition of the individual by the taste
or smell. They did not need so close or material an investigation of
the individual to have pleasant memories of friendship aroused. Their
methods and symbols of companionship and love had become more and more
spiritual with the passion itself.
But, preternaturally acute though their senses seemed to me to be, they
would rely upon their decisions no more than the modern scientist of
the West would rely upon his. Error, they held, was ever maiming the
conclusions from reports of the senses, and they took every precaution
in recording or using their own perceptions. Accurate though their
sense-memory was, they had instruments which kept a permanent record
of any report of the senses they meant to use again. Not merely sounds
and sights did they automatically record, but perfumes, and flavours,
and electric impressions. Ages before, the inasan or recorder of
light and the linasan or recorder of sound had been brought to a
high pitch of perfection; all the colours and forms seen in nature,
at whatever distance, could be kept in permanence on irelium-plates
and reproduced to the eye by the insertion of the plates in the
inasan and the reversal of the instrument. So was it with sounds,
however loud or faint; the linasan would tell out to the ear music
or speeches recorded hundreds of years before down to the minutest
tone. By a modification of these two instruments they took record
of the inner structure of things even at cosmic distances, and of
sounds which seemed to be intercepted by vast material obstructions.
The development of the recorders of the other senses had been more
recent; not till perfumes and tastes and electricity had begun to enter
largely into education and the stimulance of memory did the necessity
for such instruments arise. In the earlier times before the purgation
of the race these instruments would have been a temptation to new and
epicurean vices. Now they were nothing if not educational aids. The
farosan or aromagraph enabled the gardeners to arrange the mnemonic
harmonies of flowers as mere sense-memory could never have done; it
could reproduce any subtle perfume or mixture of perfumes that had
ever been experienced in the island. The salosan or gustagraph gave
incalculable aid to the chemical and alimentary families; without its
permanencies of flavour they would have fallen into daily errors in
mingling the atmospheres of the halls of sustenance and medication and
those of Ilarime. By its aid they could recall any of the tastes which
had made substances or compounds pleasing to the palate. But it was the
idrosan or electrograph that was most needed; for the firla or electric
sense had been so recently developed that its reports as to the amount
and quality of any electric impulse were most untrustworthy. Without
the aid of this recorder they could never have compared the electric
impulses of the past with those of the present, nor could they have
been so accurate in measuring the electric powers of various substances.
They knew that the basis of all scientific advance was accurate
measurement. Their old measuring instruments had gradually been
overtaken by their own senses, and had to be replaced by others more
and more refined. In order to make sure that their senses introduced no
personal element into the reports and representations of their various
delicate measurers, they had invented an instrument which for fine
adjustment surpassed all of these. It was the airolan or sensometer,
and by it the medical families in their weekly review of every system
in the community were enabled to find the exact personal equation of
each. It recorded the upper and lower limit of the various sensations,
the limit of endurance, and the vanishing point. Although there was
a great evenness in the development of the senses in the community,
there was yet considerable variation in the delicacy of perception. One
man was keenest in sight, another in hearing, a third in the electric
sense, yet there was a certain constancy or proportion in all the
senses of every man, a proportion varying according to well-ascertained
laws with the hour and the season, the man’s age, and the temperature
and health of his body. The airolan tested, measured, and recorded the
regular variations of each Limanoran’s senses, and thus he was able to
know how far he judged accurately anything he perceived. By its aid
he was able to know the exact point at which he would need to call in
any one of the various mechanical aids to the senses, the magnifiers,
or modifiers, or distance-reducers. By its means they were able to
gauge the proper mixture of colours and proper size in architecture
that would please at certain distances. By its means, too, they could
accurately measure the distance from which any electric or luminous or
somniferous impulse had come, when it struck on the senses.
It was one of the commonplaces of their policy that whatever could
be done by machinery it was waste of skill and energy to do by human
labour and thought; and instruments were generally more exact and
reliable than the senses and active powers of man, however delicately
developed and refined. Of course man’s brain and hand must still guide
and superintend all instruments and machinery, but his interference
with their automatic working was reduced to a minimum, in order that
the discount for personal equation should be as little as possible.
It was not, however, so much for the sake of accuracy of result that
mechanism was substituted for human work, as for the sake of progress.
Every operation and function which could be performed mechanically it
was a slur upon human dignity to do; and at once Limanoran humanity was
relieved from the necessity, and the freed energy was applied to other
and nobler efforts towards progress.
During my education I had noticed again and again with surprise that
mathematics took no part in it. Not once had I heard the subject
mentioned by any of my guides or companions. I remembered the
important place it held in Western curriculums, and wondered how the
various scientific families could manage their abstruse formulæ and
calculations without that science. A people that laid so much stress on
exactitude of research as an essential of all scientific progress were
surely lax to a degree in failing to train their youth in the various
branches of mathematics.
On having my senses tested by the airolan, the thought came uppermost
in my mind again; and my proparents at last took notice of it, perhaps
as the time had arrived for enlightening me on the subject. They led
me to a vast museum-like building, crammed with all kinds of small
and intricate machines, not unlike a kind of patent office, where the
models of new inventions are deposited for examination and comparison.
There was evident in the arrangement a careful classification according
to elaboration and delicacy. In the first section we entered there
were the simplest of machines, having a few levers and cog-wheels, and
a few keys set in a key-board; these were meant for the easier rules
of calculation,--addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
We tested most of them and I saw that they were infallibly accurate;
never once even in the longest and most intricate calculation was there
any error. In fact, these machines had been first invented to avoid
the constant errors that vitiated important results when novices were
set to work them out. It was then found that not only did they rid
calculations of fallibility and the youth of heartless drudgery, but
they enabled the race to advance more rapidly. They set free years
of life, especially in the formative stage, that had been wasted on
mere routine and mechanical work; and, best of all, they allowed the
tissues of young brains to be less rigid. It was noted that, after
the calculating machines were set to work, the youth grew in mental
and especially in imaginative power at twice the old rate. The elders
of the state were amazed at the result, prizing as they had done the
effect of arithmetic in the discipline and education of the young;
indeed, it had been with great regret that they saw the youth relieved
of so disciplinary an exercise; and they even thought of making an
exception to their usual utilitarian state-principle, and training the
boys and girls in rapid calculation, although it would be of so little
use to them in their after-lives. But a few years convinced them of the
serious mistake they had made. The pace of development so suddenly and
greatly quickened in the new generation that the result could be set
down to nothing else than the new freedom from calculations. Their own
faculties and imagination seemed stiff and almost ossified compared
to the ease and flexibility of those of their sons and daughters.
Invention and discovery struck out with unprecedented energy, and the
ethical and emotional phase of imagination grew at a marvellous pace;
new ideal realms were opened out for morality and practical thought.
The experience threw a remarkable light upon a phenomenon which had
puzzled them for generations. After the period of youth the members of
the community had to specialise; and for some undiscoverable reason
those who devoted themselves to mathematics and the working of abstruse
formulæ had been found, able though most of them were, to be the most
rigidly unreasonable in the community; they refused to admit that
they could be mistaken in any of their judgments or even opinions;
nothing would move them,--neither logical argument nor emotional
appeal; they assumed that they had found absolute truth, and refused
to have compromise. In one generation in the far past the mathematical
families had to be exiled, so serious an obstruction had they become to
progress. Again they had been completely renewed, children of the most
noble-minded, freest, and most imaginative families being substituted
for the old members, and trained to fulfil their functions; within a
generation the result was the same; these scions of the finest of the
race became as narrow-minded and obstructive as their predecessors
had been. It seemed to be useless to change the stock, and for some
generations the community accepted their conservatism and obstinacy
as inevitable; they grew accustomed to smiling at the mathematical
families as “the omniscients.”
Why the true cause of this degeneracy had not occurred to such a shrewd
and logical people it is hard to say; probably because they were so
wedded by long tradition and practice to the idea that mathematics
was one of the loftiest of sciences and one of the most essential
elements in education. They doubtless refused to reconsider its claims
or to abandon their inherited reverence for it. But the discovery
of the effect of the calculative habit on the tissues of the brain
at last forced them to face the true cause of the infallibility of
the mathematical families. It was their occupation that caused their
degeneracy. Men began to pity them for the slavery in which they had
been so long held and to devise means for their liberating. The old
habitual smile at the mention of their name became sadness at the
thought of what these members of the race might have accomplished for
its civilisation had they not been so frozen in their tissues by the
perpetual use of formulæ. They were amazed at their own dulness in
failing to see that men who dealt in such mechanical methods and exact
results could not but be mechanical themselves and easily fall into
the fixed mental attitude of the omniscient, and dealing with a world
so unreal in its stiff, skeleton-like outlines could not but fail in a
world of conditions and compromises.
At first the prevailing idea was that all the studies and sciences
needing exactitude of formulæ and result should be neglected by the
community. On consideration it was felt that some of the most valuable
stepping-stones to the loftier ideals of the future would be sacrificed
if this were done. The other alternative was chosen. The inventors
who had made the calculating machines were set on to find instruments
which would accomplish what the mathematicians had had to do for the
community. And, one after the other, the years had produced them. Even
differential and integral calculus had been superseded by a series of
machines that with little guidance worked out all the applications
of their intricate formulæ to the sciences. As we advanced from
department to department we watched these machines at work confirming
the imaginative results of the physicists, the chemists, and the
astronomers. The mathematical families were relieved of their duties
and distributed, and every member of the scientific families was taught
to use all these formulating instruments. Their brain-energy was not
monopolised by calculations; the use of the machines was but a routine
detail in their wider intellectual life, and absorbed so little of
their energy that it seemed to have no effect on their faculties.
I was not many days in mastering the details of the formula-machines;
for I had paid some attention to mathematics in my buried life and the
memory of the subject rapidly revived. I soon came to see the wisdom of
the Limanorans in eliminating the study from their scheme of education.
It would have been the height of extravagance to waste long periods
of their lives in studying and doing what a machine could do better.
It was exactly the kind of work best done by a machine, for it had to
do with a world rid of all conditions and, mathematically speaking,
perfect. The inventors were still busy making new and simpler machines
for the use of the scientists; and, though they had to know the new
mathematical formulæ needed, they busied their brains rather with their
practical application and with the machinery that would use them. It
was imagination in the practice of mechanics rather than the mechanical
use of methods and formulæ that they were engaged on. Hence it was
that they avoided the old unpracticality of the mathematical families,
and stood in no danger of thinking themselves infallible and the only
treasuries of absolute truth.
One of the most interesting departments of Minella, as this great
building was called, was that which contained the measurers of time.
I was somewhat surprised that this department should exist, for I had
admired every day the power the Limanorans had of telling to a minute
fraction the passage of time. Their sense of time seemed to me to make
watches and clocks superfluous. Even when the sky was clouded over
and no heavenly body or light to be perceived, they could tell the
exact fraction of the day or night that had passed, as I tested again
and again by the watch I had brought with me. Their knowledge of the
natural signs of the time of day or year had become instinctive and
automatic through long centuries of daily use. The position and state
of the petals of flowers would at any moment by day or night, by shine
or cloud, reveal to them the time. So would the temperature of anything
they touched, or, if it were highly contractile, its size. But these
external signs were quite unnecessary. They had not to go beyond the
sensations of their own bodies to tell the time or season. They knew
by the intensity of the magnetism in them, by the acuteness of their
senses, by the amount of energy they could command.
But their experiments needed far more exactness than even their senses
could afford. Time had to be counted in their science not by mere
seconds, but by the hundred-thousandth, or even the millionth, part of
a second. One old-fashioned measurer of time was based on the length of
a wave of sound as it passed through a vessel of water. The length of
the vessel contained a round number of moltas (their smallest measure
of length, perhaps about the millionth part of an inch); the vibration
in the water reflected a bright light through a microscope and camera
combined; and a photograph of the pulsations imprinted itself on a
strip of irelium that kept moving with lightning swiftness across
the focus; this strip was divided into minute sections, each of them
corresponding to a lenta or millionth part of a second and numbered in
order up to a million. A newer clock had its principle based on the
length of a wave of light in a vacuum. Another and more convenient
clock, or rather watch, consisted of an electric battery that kept a
light irelium tongue vibrating; this latter controlled a graduated
mechanism which pointed out on a face the exact lenta in the time of
day that it was. It was small enough to be carried about on the person
like a watch.
A similar microscopic minuteness of division appeared in all their
weights and measures. They could weigh in their balances down to the
million-millionth part of an ounce. So with their measurement of heat
and cold; their thermometers could test ten thousand times the range
of temperature that their senses could bear, although their power of
endurance of fire and frost was to me something miraculous; their
furnaces were able to volatilise the most refractory of metals and
earths; they could reproduce the conditions of the most glowing suns,
and also the temperature of the coldest interstellar space, which, age
by age, they were bringing their frames gradually to bear with the
aid of certain foods and combinations of elements. Thus did they hope
in some future age to subsist, even when they ventured outside of the
atmosphere of the earth.
All their measures were based on the decimal system, the fundamental
unit for microscopic measurements being the amount of energy in an
atom of one of their elements, and that for cosmic measurements the
energy that would bring a beam of light from the sun’s surface to
the earth’s. They were able to see at a glance the exact amount of
energy in any phenomenon, to whatever sense it might appeal, and in
their minds there was ever a common measure for all types of force.
Their electrometers and magnetometers told not merely the amount of
electricity or magnetism in any machine, material, or phenomenon, but
the motive-power it would have when applied to any purpose. They could
compare at a glance, without any elaborate calculations, the advantages
to be obtained from any substance when using it as a force, whether
through the electricity or the heat or the gravitational power to be
obtained from it.
Especially useful was this common measure in dealing with the power
of light as separate from that of heat. It was of great importance to
them to know the exact amount of energy even in a beam of light which
their eyes could not perceive. For they used sunshine as one of their
great curative agencies, and the medical families were constantly
experimenting on the effect of more or less light upon the microscopic
life existing in and around the human body. One of their own new
developments had been the consciousness of light all over their skin;
they could tell with eyes shut whether it was the light of sun, stars,
or moon, or an artificial light which was falling on any part of their
body; the effect, even on the mind, differed completely in the four;
the sunlight, or at least a certain amount of it, gave exhilaration or
even joy; the starshine brought contemplative melancholy; the moonbeam
mildly stirred the passions; whilst artificial light varied in its
power of exhausting brain and nerve energy with the material or element
that produced it.
Sunlight deprived of the intensity of its heat was to them one of the
essentials of life. Its bactericidal power had been scientifically
proved ages before, and a family had been set apart for testing its
effects both qualitatively and quantitatively. It was not merely a
loose knowledge that they had acquired of the antiseptic influence of
sunshine. They had measured exactly its power of depriving microbes
of their deadliness in the case of every disease; and they knew to a
nicety how strong or weak it would be needed in order to check their
ravages in any constitution, whether concentrated on a spot or diluted
and spread as in a bath, how long daily its application would be
required, and how many days. It was this family that superintended the
sunbaths in their halls of medication, and assisted the medical sages
in advising as to their use. It was true that daylight, and especially
that of a sunny day, swept one third of the noxious life out of all
water open to its influence, whilst the rays of the sun bleached most
bacteria of their pestiferous tendency. Yet used indiscriminately
sunshine became itself unwholesome, because of the other forms of
energy besides light that it brought with it from the sun and the
intervening spaces. If not used with caution, it would destroy the
microscopic allies of human life in the body, rendering feeble the
phagocytes that devour the virulent microbes; it would by its great
heat injure the delicate tissues of the brain, and by its magnetism
and weight press heavily on the nerves and the circulation. It was the
duty of the solometric family to rid it of its unwholesome elements,
and to indicate the exact amount and use of it that would be beneficial
in every state of the body. Another of the duties of this family was
to cultivate colonies of microbes of the various diseases and make
them harmless by means of sunlight for use in inoculations against
their own unmodified bacterial kin. One of their greatest aids in this
process was the use of the water of the sea; wherever it did not kill
the bacteria completely, it emphasised the bleaching power of sunlight
over them and rendered them the allies of the human system in its
struggle against all disease and decay. This sterilisation of disease
was one of the most important functions of the family. It was they
who led the flight-gambols of the Limanorans into the outer fringe of
the atmosphere, where they might drink in the elixir of unadulterated
sunshine; their guidance and contrivances were needed even there, in
order to prevent the action of the other energies in the light growing
deleterious. Even moonlight and starshine had their uses in the hands
of this skilled family. They could separate the deadly or poisonous
elements of moonbeams to help them in destroying bacterial life, and
leave only their healthy and inspiring tendencies; thus dealt with,
the rays of the moon gave a stimulus to the brain-tissues which worked
up imaginative materials. And every star had, in their science, its own
peculiar influence, sometimes malign, more commonly beneficial, when
treated according to their wise discoveries.
Little of all this would have been possible without the inolan or
measurer of light, one of the most delicate instruments they possessed.
This was but a modification of the human eye as it had been developed
in their bodies. It magnified the impression made on the lens so that
it should move a small mirror delicately hung _in vacuo_; the
reflection of this mirror ran along a graduated scale on which it
recorded by bleaching a point of colour, the energy of light in the
beam producing the movement. This recorded not merely the strength of
the rays of which their eyes were conscious, but that of many octaves
of light outside of the range of all human eyes. A more modern and
delicate form of the inolan used a microscopic camera as the medium of
measurement; this had accomplished new wonders in the way of measuring
the power of rays from stars out of reach of the human eye. A third
photometer, recently invented and still untested when I visited the
collection of measurers, had made use of electricity in collecting and
testing the quality and energy of beams of light.
In all of these forms of the inolan there was an arrangement for
ridding each ray of its heat and of other forms of energy before it
entered the lens; a thermometer measured the heat; and the other
elements were absorbed and analysed by a subsidiary apparatus as the
beam approached the inolan. Another modification of the apparatus had
a prismatic arrangement attached to it, not unlike their inamar,
and this broke up the beam of light into its colour components; the
inolan measured each separate component, the length of its wave,
and the energy required to produce it, its camera also recording in
photographic form the metallic elements through which the beam had
passed. A more recent modification, promising great results, was one
which by means of a vacuum-lens recorded the dark beams that shone from
unseen stellar bodies through the corona of our own or other suns. When
fully developed they expected this to reveal the secrets of the darker
depths of the heavens; the systems revolving round the stars would
stand out clearly with all their elements for the investigation of the
astronomic families.
Nor did the extraordinary refinement of these instruments, that were
constantly being discovered, interfere in any way with the development
of Limanoran senses. On the contrary they stimulated advance. Every new
aid to any sense pointed the way to its improvement; and in a few years
or generations this aid was rendered almost superfluous and a new and
more delicate machine must be invented; for the combination of so many
functions in the living body rendered the observations of any one sense
less exact and trustworthy than those of a machine which had but one
purpose.
Thus the evolution of the senses kept up an unending race with the
evolution of fine machinery to aid them. Even the roughest, most
material, and least specialised of all the senses, touch, had grown
into something that was most delicate in its manipulation; and one of
the most important parts of the education of my senses was to refine
and develop it. They had specialised it to an astonishing degree. The
lips, especially the outer edges of them, were able to distinguish
the latent energy in any substance applied to them; whilst a delicate
fringe of hair upon the upper lip, too minute to be seen by ordinary
eyes, revealed to them the movements and character of gases and vapours
that were so faint in their impulse as to be unrecognisable by the
other senses. The measurement of force had been raised to a high point
of exactness in their huge chests and shoulders. Their hands, within
certain limits, felt temperature with the accuracy and minuteness of a
thermometer. And the prehensile and manipulative skill of their fingers
far surpassed that of the ablest European conjuror I had ever seen.
Without any intention to outwit my senses, they would do things with
their hands so swiftly that I could not follow the movements. It seemed
to me at first as if they had more joints in their fingers than other
human beings, so nimble were they; but this was not the case, although
the arm had greater scope of movement than mine; in fact it seemed to
move in the shoulder socket as in a universal joint, so freely could it
revolve in all directions. Their joints were really more padded with
cartilage than mine, so that there was more flexibility in the limbs
along with greater firmness and strength.
Their nerves were also more magnetic than those of other men, conveying
the messages to and from the brain and will-centres with far more
swiftness and certitude. Indeed, if I were to find any one point in
their systems which most differentiated them from European humanity, it
was this increased and accelerated nerve-energy. For a long time their
rapidity and ease of movement and action bewildered me; whilst I was
deliberating what was to be done, they had done all that was needed.
They had instruments for measuring the flash of thought from brain to
hand and of sensation from hand to brain, and when tested at first, the
swiftness of the message along my nerves was not one tithe of theirs,
but when my education had somewhat advanced, this disparity was reduced
by half. This advance was accomplished, not merely by practice, but
by variety of diet and medication, and by living in a more magnetic
atmosphere. I was often borne aloft into the purer air that fringes the
envelope of our earth, and there, half-asleep, I drew into my system
the electric elements which went to the quickening of my nerves. Down
in the island everything that would excite me was avoided; the muscles
and the other tissues of the body were exercised, whilst the nerves
completely rested. Then they would be given gentle exercise of their
own, to strengthen and make them supple, without unduly stimulating
them. I soon began to feel the difference in the increasing nimbleness
of my limbs and could move with more celerity and ease. The fingers
were quicker to follow the eye. I grew what my old companions would
have thought unerring in my aim and would have made a deadly shot
with bullet or arrow in the wars of my native country. What was still
better, the tips of my fingers came to be powerfully magnetic both in
their appreciation of the electricity in any body they touched, and in
actively producing magnetic currents. I was even able to cause a faint
flash in the darkness by concentrating my will-power in my fingers, and
waving them in the air.
POSTSCRIPT TO LIMANORA
When he had reached this point in his narrative, a striking instance
of the result of his education occurred. It was getting towards the
end of winter, and we who had our rules of thumb for the changes in
the weather were looking for the equinoctial gales that harbinger the
approach of spring. The days were lengthening, and the light of the sun
was growing clear and strong upon our high-perched huts.
We had noticed a certain distraction in his manner, an absence of
thought or of consciousness, when he was describing the development of
his magnetic sense. And when he ceased for the night he could not rest
but paced uneasily along our platform of cliff which overlooked the
waters of the sound. The moon had begun to wane, and our weather lore
bade us look out for storms at the beginning of her next phase. I could
not go myself to rest for thinking of his strange narrative and the
wonderful people he had sojourned amongst. I sat up many hours writing
out what I could remember of his conversations and descriptions while
it was still clear in my mind.
Some time after midnight I looked out and saw the silver moonshine on
the still waters below and was attracted by the beauty of the scene. I
had thought that he had retired, but I had scarcely seated myself on a
projecting boss of rock that took in one of our widest views, when his
musical voice startled me out of my reverie.
We fell into such sympathetic intercourse as the beauty of night often
stimulates in two sleepless spirits meeting under the moon. He told me
that the earth was then tremulous with suppressed passion, and that
far off in his old home in the Pacific her heart was about to break.
He felt waves of magnetic feeling pass through him, and they drew
his soul back to Limanora. He knew that the spirits he loved there
were yearning for him. For his heart quivered and throbbed with full
memories of all he had known and experienced. There was anguish in the
magnetic undulance vibrating across his being. It was not merely that
a great storm was approaching; that he had known for some days. There
were human pulsations in the ether which beat like an ocean upon his
brain. That was why he could not rest. If only he could have his wings
again, he would try to respond to the call. But it was useless with the
recrudescence of his muddier humanity to attempt return by such aërial
means. I offered to go with him on the morrow to the nearest city and
charter a ship to carry us to his former home. But he would not listen
to my proposal, and bade me seek rest and sleep.
I began to feel that I was intruding on the privacy of an agonised
soul, and I bade him good-night and left him to his own thoughts.
The exhaustion of overcharged emotion soon let me drift into troubled
unconsciousness. Dream followed dream like hurrying clouds over the
moon. At dawn I woke in nightmare. The hut was shaking. I thought that
I was still dreaming. But the swish of the rain and the lashing of
the tree-branches on the roof soon made me understand. The calm of the
night before had given way to tempest; and the earth was suffering
rupture.
I remembered the prediction of our guest, and rushed to his hut. He
was not there; nor could I conjecture whither he had gone. I thought
he had taken shelter in the bush from the storm. Three days it lasted,
and then we were able to go out and search the drenched forest. We
followed up every track that he had been accustomed to take. We went
to all his favourite haunts. But no trace could we find of him, though
days were spent on the search. Then we forced our way through the dense
undergrowth in several directions we had never seen him take; and at
last we came upon a yawning chasm, which had every appearance of being
newly opened. The precipitous side of the mountain had split, and a
vast landslip had swept down it and filled the bottom of the gulf.
We could not resist the natural conclusion; this was the tomb of our
guest. After all his wanderings he had found appropriate resting-place.
The earth he knew so well had taken him to her bosom.
BOOK II
The Limanorans
The Inner Life of a Self-Selected People
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE 291
GLOSSARY 295
I.--DISCOVERIES 299
II.--AN ACCIDENT 339
III.--DEATH 354
IV.--AN EPIDEMIC 392
V.--LITERATURE 407
VI.--INSPIRATION 419
VII.--PIONEERING 436
VIII.--ANOTHER THREAT 487
IX.--POLITY 507
X.--THE MANORA AND THE IMANORA 538
XI.--ETHICS 554
XII.--A WARNING 629
XIII.--RELIGION 654
XIV.--THE LAST FLIGHT 694
EPILOGUE 707
PREFACE
LATE in the autumn, when the memory of the stranger who had told us so
many wonderful things had begun to lose its sharpness and we had almost
ceased to talk of him, we were startled by his reappearance.
We were in our tunnels, taking advantage of the dry weather to get
piles of our wash dirt out ready for sluicing in the wet season, and
were working till nightfall. On a still, fair evening, which reminded
me of the night he vanished, we were returning jaded from our long work
and had just issued from the belt of bush that fringed our clearing
when the moon rose above the peaks on the other side of the fiord and
flashed a shuttle of gold across the waters. Raising our eyes to our
huts, we stopped thunderstruck. Was that but a lunar effect on the
throne-like cliff in front of them? It could not be a spirit; we had
never heard of ghosts in these new lands, nor could the belief in
them seize hold of minds so accustomed as ours were to deal with the
rougher and more material elements of nature. We shook off our trance,
and stepped forward. The sound of our footsteps made the figure move
and as he turned in the moonlight we recognised our lost friend (his
apparition, we first supposed). But he rose with his old quiet and
dignified salute of welcome, and joining us as we sat at our evening
meal, we talked as if he had parted with us only that morning. We had
not the hardihood to ask him what had become of him these long months.
But I noticed that he had more of his old semi-transparency of tissue
and ethereality of hue, and in his eyes, as he ceased from talking,
there was a baffled look I had never seen before in them. He would
lapse more frequently into deep reverie. He seemed to have gone through
a lifetime of effort and suffering, and his spirit was, I could see,
weary and sore within him.
He shrank at first from all reference to his life within the circle of
mist out on the Pacific. It seemed now to be a painful memory. There
was a pathos in his tone as he spoke far keener than I had noted in
it before. But gradually I drew him into reminiscence of it when we
were alone in the bush, and he seemed after a time to find consolation
in thinking and speaking about it, especially when he talked of the
spiritual side of the civilisation in the midst of which he had lived
for so many years.
In the long nights of that last winter he resumed his narrative again.
He seemed to have difficulty in finding English expression for what he
had to tell, but I encouraged him in our wanderings around the fiord
to repeat and interpret and explain what he had told us. Gradually
the narrative found a more intelligible language, and I was able to
jot down notes that I understood. I have done my best to throw them
together into the form that they ultimately found in his story as he
told it to us sitting together in our hut. But I am still puzzled and
sometimes confused by many of the ideas and feel that they have baffled
my best skill to put them into our tongue. Some of his descriptions
awakened in us a sense of incredulity, and others shook our old
world of beliefs to its foundations. But we were drawn to him by the
noble and ingenuous way in which he told us all; indeed, were often
fascinated and blinded as we listened. We could not but accept his
story as the highest truth we could hear in this world, and yet we were
struck dumb by its strangeness. Much of our bewilderment we attributed
to the difficulty of understanding his strange speech, and more to our
own ignorance of the intricate problems that have troubled sages. We
have kept back this latter part of his story for a time in order that
by study and care we might make it more intelligible and more suited to
the thoughts of Christendom. But we have to acknowledge ourselves still
baffled by the impossible task of making this road through difficult
regions plain and easy, and so have resolved to issue the narrative
with all its faults upon it.
GODFREY SWEVEN.
GLOSSARY
AILOMO--The astrobiological families.
AIROLAN--A sensometer, or instrument for finding the personal
equation of a man.
ALCLIROLAN--Radiographic cinematograph; an instrument
combining microscope, camera _in vacuo_, and electric power.
ALFARENE--Oxygen shrub.
AMMERLIN--Historoscope.
CIRALAISON--Museum of terrors.
CLEVAMOLAN--Combination of telescope and makrakoust, or
distance-hearer.
CLIMOLAN--Earth-sensor.
CLIROLAN--Instrument that combines electro-microscopy and
photography.
CLIROLANIC--Infinitesimally microscopic.
CORFALEENA--Vacuum-engine car.
DOOMALONA--The hill of farewells.
DUOMOVAMOLAN--Instrument that interprets the music of the
cosmos.
ERFALEENA--Anti-gravitation flight-car.
FALEENA--Ship of the air.
FARFALEENA--Electric faleena.
FAROSAN--Aroma-recorder.
FIALUME--The valley of memories.
FILAMMU--The will-telegraph.
FIRLA--The electric sense.
FIRLALAIN--The firlamaic department of Oomalefa.
FIRLAMAI--The arts of the electric sense.
FIRLAMAIC--Belonging to the arts of the firla.
FIRLAMAN--A musical instrument that appeals to the firla.
FLORAMO--The botanical families.
FLORONAL--The tree of life.
FRALOOMIAMO--The families of pioneers that imagine and
represent the distant future.
GERMABELL--A tree with fruit that makes the muscles and
cartilage more elastic.
IDLUMIAN--Electric steriliser.
IDROLAN--Observer and magnifier of electric impulses.
IDROLINASAN--Machine-reporter of the thoughts and feelings
and words of a council.
IDROSAN--Recorder of electric impulses and sensations.
IDROVAMOLAN--Instrument for at once seeing and hearing at
great distances.
ILARIME--Edifice devoted to the arts of smell, taste, and
sound combined.
IMANORA--Centennial review of the civilisation and its
progress.
IMATARAN--The focusser of history.
INAMAR--Instrument for splitting up light into its
constituents.
INASAN--Recorder of luminous impressions.
INOLAN--Measurer of light.
IRELIUM--Iridescent metal applicable to all manner of
purposes by the Limanorans.
LABRAMOR--Alloy of irelium that sponges up and retains
electricity.
LABROLAN--Instrument for drawing electricity from the air and
the clouds.
LAVIDROLAN--Camera-telescope.
LAVOLAN--Revealer of the inner tissues and mechanism.
LENTA--The minutest division of time in Limanora.
LEOMARIE--The science and art of earth-seeing.
LEOMO--The families of earth-seers.
LEOMORAN--The earth-perforator.
LILAMO--The families that watch the security of the island.
LILARAN--The storm-cone.
LILARIE--The science and art of island-security.
LINAMAR--The analyst of sounds.
LINASAN--Recorder and reproducer of sounds.
LINOKLAR--Spectroscopic analyst and recorder of vapours.
LOOMIAMO--Families of pioneers who imagine and represent the
links that connect the present with the distant future.
LOOMIEFA--The theatre of futurition.
MANORA--Decennial review of the progress made by the people.
MARGOL--Electric instrument for blending or reducing the
strength of perfumes, flavours, and sounds.
MINELLA--Edifice for formula-machines.
MIRLAN--Life-lamp for revealing and recording internal
processes for the use of the eye, the ear, and the electric sense.
MOLTA--The Limanoran measure of infinitesimal length.
MONALAN--Electrical distance-analyst.
MORNALAN--Time-telescope.
NAROLLA--Dream-stimulants.
OOARAN--Psychometer.
OOAROMO--Psycho-physiological families.
OOLORAN--The sonarchitect.
OOLOREFA--The hall of sonarchitecture.
OOMALEFA--Halls of nutrition and medication.
OOROLAN--Instrument for transforming form and colour into
melody.
PIRAKNO--Machine for drawing electricity from space.
PIRAMO--The meteorological families.
RIMLA--The centre of force.
SALOSAN--The gustagraph.
SARIFOLAN--Instrument that interprets for sight, hearing, and
the electric sense the graphic records of the mirlan.
SARMOLAN--Cosmic barometer.
SIDRALAN--Biometer.
SIDRALMO--Bio-chemical families.
SIDRAMO--The chemical families.
TERRALONA--The edifice of outlook into heaven and hell.
THINAMAR--Visualiser of sound.
TIRLEOMORAN--Electric earth-perforator.
TREMOLAN--Electric clock indicating the changes of
electricity in various parts of the island.
TREVAMOLAN--Graduated modifier of sound.
VAMOLAN--Makro-mikrakoust.
VIMOLAN--Photo-electric analyser.
CHAPTER I
DISCOVERIES
WHAT I rejoiced over most of all was the growth of my sympathetic
magnetism. Not merely was my firla or electric sense developing more
satisfactorily; but I was becoming rapidly conscious of the impulses
of the race. I no longer walked amongst this refined people like a
blind man amongst men who see. I began to feel the enthusiasms that
stirred them as a body, like a wind across a cornfield. I seemed to
know whatsoever of public concern was occurring without having it
directly communicated to me. I remembered in the buried life of my
boyhood and youth, the lightning-spread of a new impulse through an
assembly or a crowd; the most rational members of the mass were unable
to resist it, even though it might be irrational or vile. How like a
tornado the war-impulse bursts through a nation is one of the commonest
observations in the study of history; statesmen and kings and heroes
have to bow before it, and are swept along with it in spite of their
better judgments. And as swift and widespread is the coward-impulse
that sends a defeated people cowering to their homes. It is this
unspoken magnetism, giving vent as it too often does to the evil in the
human heart, that makes the cause of progress in even civilised races
so hopeless. Through its all-leavening power success inspires and often
consecrates the diabolic, and failure damns the noblest and most divine.
And this it was that made progress so easy amongst the Limanorans; it
became the instrument of the highest elements and thoughts in them. The
whole weight of their humanity was on the side of advance, and it was
to the better future that they ever gravitated. Everything that made
for a higher plane was an inspiration to this people.
This personal magnetism had been developed in them into a definite
faculty of their souls. They had recognised for many ages the
close affinity of mass-inspiration and the power of the individual
will. It was the same energy working along the nerves, and even,
though with some dissipation, through the space intervening between
individualities. They had investigated its nature, conditions, and
methods of action in their exact scientific way, and had identified it,
as far at least as its form of energy was concerned, with electricity.
It was even less dependent on material contact than that universal
force. As they developed it in their frames, they were able to send
more and more definite impulses through considerable distances. This
was their filammu or will-telegraph, one of their most remarkable
faculties, drawn with deliberate purpose by the elders of the race out
of the chaos of mere vague influence and tendency.
Though making use of the active electric sense as channel, it was not
the same as the firla, for it implied a greater effort and outwelling
of the whole spirit. Only exceptional impulses and enthusiasms set it
into full efficiency, such impulses as entangled the whole soul in
their issue. It was no mere toy to be used for the amusement of the
passing moment; dormant it lay, if ever summoned to such a purpose.
It was the faculty that in other races and periods of history had set
up men as heroes and leaders; not that these had even been conscious
of its existence in them when they began their career; success and
gathering enthusiasm in their followers gave it strength and issue,
till their mere glance seemed to command. But when failure came, and
the glamour or magnetic atmosphere rarefied about them, their faculty
vanished; for it had no means of communicating its meaning or power.
In certain periods of exaltation every Limanoran was conscious of
the filammu or will-telegraph; he could not only receive but send
emotional impulses through long distances. The intervening air was
magnetised by their great enthusiasm or sympathy, and became a medium
for transmitting emotional or imaginative thought from mind to mind.
Not yet had they been able to send a definite piece of information by
this means, unless it represented the spiritual crisis through which
the sender was passing. But in movements that shook the whole race to
its core, like Choktroo’s threat of invasion, even those who were still
in pupillage seemed to feel the beginnings of the faculty, at least on
its receptive side; secluded though they were far from the scene of
deliberation, they knew the magnitude of the danger that threatened the
life of the commonweal; the air seemed to tingle with it, and their
embryonic filammu could not help responding to the vibration. Once
awakened they were eager to bring out its latent power, that they might
feel and know the impulses which sped the race onwards as a whole.
They soon discovered that it ceased to grow or even work except under
certain conditions; they must keep step with the people, and fix their
eyes steadily on the future: they must never swerve from uprightness or
candour, never let the perfect transparency of their lives be clouded.
Such had been the conditions of the development of the filammu in
the race. In fact its indications had become unmistakable as soon as
candour and truth had become the primary virtues, and progress the
watchword. And it grew as the ideal of the nation became clearer and
more imperative, and their character more uniformly strong and noble.
They also found that something depended on the physical conditions;
the atmosphere must be free from all impurity, and the body must be
supremely healthy, whilst the magnetism of the will must have free
course along the nerves. As my nature clarified under their training
and my spirit grew more at one with the purpose of the race, I grew
more sure of the stirrings of the filammu within me. At first its
indications might be explained by other and more patent causes; I had
been in an attitude of expectancy, or my reason had been following
up certain trains of thought from previous events. But after a time
there came to me thrills of emotion that were out of the range of my
immediate surroundings and thoughts. I followed them out and found that
they originated far from the locality in which I was working at the
time.
Once a sudden tremor passed through my system as of some great fear;
I had not been thinking of anything but the work before me; no cloud
had come over my sky; no danger that I knew of threatened. As I was
trying to explain the emotion, it suddenly passed into longing to see
Thyriel. I knew where she had gone that day and my work had almost
reached a finish, so I adjusted a faleena, and flew quickly over the
country in her direction. I soon knew why I had come. She was pinioned
by a huge rock that had just tumbled from Lilaroma. Happily only her
wings had been caught, but they had been caught in such a way that she
was wedged tightly between them and could not free her arms and legs
nor move her hands; and the boulder was too large for her to heave up
by the strength of her body, even when magnetised by her will. When she
saw this, she withdrew the magnetism from the effort, and turned it in
its full power into her filammu as she thought of me. I was not long in
disentangling her wings from their prison. But, before I was done, her
family were beside us; they too had experienced the thrill, though more
feebly than I had and at a greater distance.
Another time I had not seen Thyriel for some days; we were both busy at
our own pursuits in different parts of the island. She, as I learned
afterwards, had been set to account for a new and somewhat peculiar
odour that had recently begun to accompany the issue of vapour from
a distant lava-well. I was engaged in timing a new and intermittent
disturbance on the surface of the sea off the eastern shore, and trying
to find whether it had any relationship to an intermittent fumarole
which had recently broken out on the eastern slope of Lilaroma. I had
kept watch for several days, and could find no synchronism in their
periods, although I was convinced that there was a close connection
between them, if there was not a common cause. I was feeling baffled
and somewhat downcast; when suddenly there sprang up in me a sense of
elation, if not of triumph, which continued for the rest of the day,
although I still failed to discover the connection between the two
phenomena. When I set out next day for the scene of my observations,
I was joined by Thyriel, who explained that she had finished her task
the day before and had now been detailed to assist me in mine. I then
knew the cause of my thrill of joy, and told her of it. She had at that
very hour not only discovered the source of the fumes in a new mineral
that the leomoran had touched, but found that this new deposit was
extraordinarily generative of electricity. It was this that had made
her heart leap for joy and go out towards me. She had longed for my
sympathy in her rejoicing, and unconsciously her filammu had energised
in my direction. Between us we soon saw that there was a complicated
periodicity in the alternations of my two phenomena; it needed several
days’ observation to catch the rhythm, and for that reason I had been
baffled at first. Before long I discovered the cause; as soon as a
lava-well farther north had ceased to flow, they also ceased; it was
the viscous intermittance of its stream opening and then closing
two apertures below tide-line into the subterraneous fires that had
regulated the rhythm of these new vents; the break in the lava-current,
the rise and fall of the tide, and the rush of the breakers had made it
complex. And the lava had finally closed both before it had ceased to
flow.
It was at the same period that the whole race breasted back the
darkness. There came at times in their history an age of exceptional
advance, that made the preceding era seem almost stationary. Nor had
they yet been able to explain its appearance satisfactorily. It was
easy enough to say that such and such exceptional men lived then,
and that they produced the phenomenon. But that was only reasoning in
a circle; they were as much a product of the time as their fellows;
whence did they get the inspiration which spurred them on, or the
plastic material in which they could work? They would have been nothing
without their conditions and circumstances. They surprised themselves
with their powers and successes, as they strode forth into the primeval
darkness and illuminated it. It all appeared very simple when once
accomplished. They had been gazing for generations into the darkness,
where now there was a blaze of light.
An imaginative pioneering book had long ago suggested that the impulse
came from outside the round of the earth. And one of the most brilliant
discoveries of this newest period of advance was a scientific proof of
this hypothesis. The great development of the filammu or will-telegraph
had made it easy, by localising the new thrill of expectation, and
revealing that it came from no terrene source. Out of what seemed
the profound inane such inspirations issued, and if they found a
soil prepared for them by long self-denial and patient outlook and
industrious collection of materials, they fertilised the period into
exceptional efflorescence and fruition. Many an impulse comes out of
the blue and falls unavailing in that no nation or race or period is
fit to receive it. The profound inane, they came to see, was one of the
falsest of ideas; because no matter patent to the human sight fills
it, the interstellar space was believed to be the wilderness of the
universe, cold, bleak, inhospitable, lifeless. Now it was felt to be
the home of all supersensuous life, crowded with an energy that needed
no stellar matter or atmosphere to support it, that never appealed to
any but the highest and latest-developed senses of man. The Limanoran
couriers out on the verge of the earth’s atmosphere had been the first
to feel this new flash that lit up such a vast region of the infinite
darkness; they came back inspired with new resolution and made the
first of the discoveries; they gave a magnetism to their fellow-workers
in the same line, and soon the leaven spread through the whole people.
The fervour of originality became the order of the day. To decipher
the unknown handwritings on the wall of life, to solve its hardest
problems, to make new inventions and discoveries, to push out into the
darkness that surrounds the world,--these became the ambitions of all.
Nor did the filammu of any in the island fail to thrill to the
influence. Thyriel felt before I did that there was something
exceptional in the atmosphere. But even my will-telegraph seemed to
respond. I longed to go out and conquer the unknown, to outpace the
slow movements of human discovery. At first I thought the impulse
had come from Thyriel, and then from my proparents or my teachers.
And so it was with every Limanoran; his first thought ran to his
closest friend as the source of the magnetic thrill. But after much
consultation and report, the conclusion appeared that no one in the
island had originated the impulse, that all in the air had felt it
simultaneously in their filammus, and after them all down in the island
had felt it simultaneously. The truth gradually forced itself home on
the investigating families that the magnetic vibration had had its
source far beyond the limits of the earth; for they knew that from no
other country or race upon the surface of the globe could it have come.
Ages before, they had abandoned the belief in what seemed supra-terrene
influence as unscientific and leading to superstition. Faith had been
in the past so often the cue and basis of the worst of tyrannies, the
inspiration of the grossest immoralities and irrationalities, the
impulse to most retrogression. It had also, it is true, been the nurse
of gentle and just spirits. But it made them so timid that they were
afraid to go forward; it wound round the soul such a network of fears
and observances that its life was useless to the race. As soon as the
final purgation of the people had been accomplished, it was found that
every citizen ceased to speak of faith, or to use it as the basis of
any work or practical step. They did not thrust it out by any public
act, nor consciously reject it, they only left off giving weight to any
of its commands or suggestions; not that they might not be true or on
the side of all that was best; but that it had so often discredited its
authority by prompting, or allowing itself to be used as the pretext
for, retrogression or baseness. They preferred to take every step in
life on ground made sure by investigation and proof that appealed to
reason.
And here they were again on the limits of the unknown and vague. This
sense that was closest to the portal of the soul, their filammu, had
brought them to face an intelligence that came they knew not whence,
and to stand in the presence of an infinite darkness that flashed
out at times the lightning of noble impulse. They were by no means
unwilling to listen to its report, but gladly received it as a sure
and trustworthy revelation; however dim the region into which it
was about to lead them, they were eager to follow, if only they set
each step upon solid fact. If there was anything unverifiable in
this new leading, they would soon be done with it. It now became one
of the duties of the astrobiological families to watch for these
extra-terrene vibrations of the will-telegraph, and to investigate the
circumstances and conditions.
These families had been the first to feel the new impetus to discovery,
for they were the couriers who went out to the borders of the
atmosphere and watched for signs of energy and life in the infinite
beyond. Again and again had they brought back specimens of microscopic
and attenuated life, which seemed to float in interstellar space.
Again and again had they analysed the beams of light shooting through
it, but without much result. Now they were to be rewarded for their
patience. They had taken out with them one of the new faleenas made of
transparent and colourless irelium like glass; and as an experiment
they sent it up by means of electricity far above themselves. As it
rose above the limit of the earth’s atmosphere, they saw all over its
surface a strange fluorescence, which grew unearthly in its beauty and
brilliance. Rainbow colours played through its texture as if they were
threads thrown by the shuttle of some hand out of heaven. Its wings
moved at lightning pace, and yet soon it began to fall towards the
earth. Again it struck upwards, and again the prismatic weavings gave
it more brilliant life. They watched it as it rose and fell between
the denser and the rarer medium. And when finally they caught it and
brought it down to earth, upon its wings both within and without there
was imprinted, not the iridescent web that had been weaving over it,
but a hieroglyph of faint, half-distinguishable forms, some familiar,
some strange, inextricably mingled.
They investigated the phenomenon, and came to the conclusion that the
faleena, in the comparative vacuum which lies on the borders of our
atmosphere, had acted with its electric motors like the lavolan, one
of their medical instruments for the inspection of the inner tissues,
whilst the wings acted like the films of a photographic apparatus,
and retained a shadowed impress of the inner structure of all the
beings or forms coming between them and the body of the car. A new
world was opened up to them beyond even their electric sense. Outside
of the denser envelope of our orb the rarefaction of space meant no
longer lifeless desolation traversed only by beams of light, electric
impulses from other worlds, and the flight of occasional meteors. Now
they knew that there were ethereal beings living in infinite space, and
that their inner structure differed in density from their enveloping
material. Some of this life was manifestly minute and attenuated,
unsuited to the medium in which it floated, waiting for some fit orb to
land on. But under their powerful clirolans it was as clear that there
were highly developed organisms fitted to this element in which they
swam, organisms probably higher than any to be found on the earth, yet
too ethereal and shadowy to touch any of even the latest-evolved senses
of the Limanorans.
What possibilities this glimpse into the vast unknown opened up for
them they shrank for a time from imagining, lest they should again
enslave themselves to superstition and absurd fancy. For astrobiology
they saw at a glance there was begun a new and lofty career. Soon
would they modify and improve the lavolan to fit the conditions of
interstellar space, and the faleena, if not their own organs, for
venturing far into the rarest ether. And then what reports, what
pictures of the invisible universes would they bring before the eyes
and the firlas of their fellow-islanders! How would they ever have time
to investigate and classify the genera and species that inhabited the
ether? What limit was there to the ambitions and ideals they would be
able to set before the race?
Another investigation that followed from this discovery had as its
object the nature of the new forms of energy that evidently filled
interstellar space. This was the province of the families devoted
to astrophysics. They produced apparatus for isolating each type of
energy which seemed to have full action only in a vacuum, and they
experimented with it in an innumerable variety of ways so as to find
out its characteristics. The force of gravitation had been familiar to
them even in primitive ages, and had long been investigated so as to
reveal many of the qualities of its action that were unperceived by
ordinary senses. Electricity had been one of the commonest of their
phenomena, and recently a vast unknown region had been opened up by
them, lying between the verge of eye-awakening light and the verge of
firla-awakening electricity which their machines had made plain even to
untrained senses. For generations they had passed with ease in their
inamars or spectroscopes beyond the bands of colour that affected
their eye, and the unseen rays had yielded most of their secrets to
them. In their lavolans or vacuum-energy mirrors they had traced the
characteristics of the torrents of energy which tore away from the
negative pole of their batteries. And now they had to face a new form
of radiant energy, the product of these negative streams and of the
irelium which they struck. Experimenting with it in their lavolans
they found it different from its parent energy; by passing through
the irelium it had grown indifferent to the power of magnetism. This
peculiarity enabled them to investigate the inner nature of magnetism;
for on the two sides of an irelium sheet they had the same electric
rays acting differently towards a magnet; on the one side they could be
deflected by it, on the other they went on their way as if it were not
there. The difference was also used in producing a new kind of electric
motor, governed by an irelium film which closed or opened a channel
of magnetic influence. A third useful application of the discovery
was a new irelium-covering for the head and the body, that milked the
east wind of its deleterious qualities. And a fourth was an apparatus
for finding by the aid of a magnet the stuff of irelium with greater
certainty in their lava-wells.
But the discoveries that flowed from this were still more important.
By further experimentation they found another type of radiant energy
that behaved in a similar way towards gravitation. In a vacuum formed
within a vessel of an alloy of irelium it ceased to obey the force
of gravity; but as soon as it had passed through the side of the
vessel, it gave full heed to the force. Within a few months after
this had been discovered, there had been invented a faleena that
fell or rose according as the new rays were intercepted by a film of
the irelium-alloy or were allowed free passage _in vacuo_. The
energy in mass drove the car on indifferent to the earth’s influence,
or at the will of the guide brought the erfaleena, as they called
it, gently sloping downwards at any angle required to the surface of
the globe. A pioneering book at once developed the results of this
discovery and invention. It showed how a way was now opened to other
stars. For this new radiant energy was found to stream in and past the
earth’s atmosphere in vast currents. The denser the medium, the more
was it absorbed and lost, so that in the earth and the atmosphere it
seldom or never manifested itself. Hence the long ages of scientific
investigation before it was discovered. By means of these currents,
which evidently set through space in definite directions, they would be
able to guide their new anti-gravitation faleena to any point in the
interstellar ether, and be able to keep up the supply of force that
would drive it. And when they approached a new world they could by
means of their new machinery bring its force of gravitation to bear on
the car and so hasten its flight; and they would be able to hover over
the atmosphere by means of the alternating movements of their engine,
till they could find out its conditions, and see whether it would be
safe to land on it or not. What they wanted yet was the evolution of
their physical system in the direction of living in ether or in various
atmospheres indifferently. It pointed out to the physiological families
the way that would lead in this direction; and it showed how, though
it would take countless ages, it was yet within the scope of their
humanity.
For their knowledge of the constitution of the universe the discovery
of these two forms of radiant energy proved to be of great importance.
They were able to find out the relationships of gravitation,
electricity, the dark rays of the inamar, the negative rays of the
lavolan, light, heat, and the two new types of energy. And by means
of the similarities and differences found to exist between any two
of them they were enabled to resolve the molecules of any element
into their constituent atoms, and thus to reveal the characteristics
of the fundamental ether. They felt that they were at last in the
immediate presence of the medium which filled space, and they invented
an apparatus isolating the ether from all the forms it enters into, so
that it became manifest under their magnifiers to several of their
senses. In it they were able to make any one of the forms of energy
move and play. From it they were able to mould many of the terrene
forms of latent energy, and they hoped to mould most of the others with
which they were familiar.
One of the most immediately practical results that came from the
discovery of these two modes of energy was another kind of engine,
which almost doubled their store of force in Rimla. The main form of
it took advantage of the radiant energy that showed indifference or
obedience to gravitation according as it played in a vacuum or through
an alloy of irelium into the air. The new rays lifted a piston _in
vacuo_, and by an automatic arrangement they passed through a film
of the alloy and then allowed gravitation to pull them and the piston
with them back into its first position; the rapid alternations drove
magnetic machinery which produced and stored up electricity. Another
form of the new engine used the difference between the conduct the
other newly discovered radiant energy displayed towards magnets when it
played in a vacuum vessel of irelium, and when it had issued through
the vessel’s filmy side.
The increase and concentration of force in their island was one of
the great subordinate aims of their civilisation. For they knew
that the greater the power they had command of the more rapidly
could they advance towards higher and higher goals. Greater force
meant greater dominion over nature and her secrets and laws; and
this implied accelerated speed in progress. It had been one of the
primitive blunders of their civilisation, as it still was of all other
civilisations, to imagine that extended empire over men meant a true
development of humanity; wide sovereignty was mere artificial change
of the locality and application of the forces of mankind, without
increasing them; it was but a reshuffling of the cards (to use your
similes), with all the honours in one hand instead of being distributed
over all; it was merely political and not real. Any gain that might
come from the concentration of power and wealth was wasted on increased
war-material and military expeditions for retaining or subduing
territories and peoples, on futile and routine administration, and on
growth of court splendour and luxury. The pursuit of the sanguinary
phantom of power over other men had to be for ever abandoned before any
real human advance could be made. Empire over the powers of nature was
the primary condition of full development of human possibilities, and
every tissue of their wonderful brains was strained to its utmost for
the rapid extension of this sway. A new addition to the stores of the
centre of force, a new source of energy, was therefore ever hailed by
them as the warranty of a leap upward and onward into the future.
The invention of these new engines, then, had no slight significance
as events in their history. And the assurance of more and more rapid
progress was increased by a discovery of the chemic families in the
same direction. They had used coal for the generation of heat before
they had left their primeval home around the south pole. But in their
more tropical archipelago they found no coal-beds, the islands having
originated in volcanic and coral formation; and the climate made the
use of such a concentrated fuel unnecessary; it was warm even in
winter, and it supplied fruits and cereals which needed little cooking.
The forests of the islands had furnished whatever fuel had been
required for hundreds of generations, and outside of Limanora they
were still sufficient for all purposes. But the centre of force had
recalled the great heat they used to have from coal, and the Leomo, in
their probings of the earth, had ever been on the outlook for beds of
the old fuel. Recently they had found thin strata of it, but so deep in
the earth that it was of little value to them.
But a discovery by the Sidramo, or chemic families, made them
reconsider this decision and try to invent some form of the leomoran,
which would cut and send with ease to the surface of the earth the
coal they had found. The Sidramo had experimented with it in various
lines. They had made the steam from it give power as they had seen it
give power to the _Daydream_ and her Broolyian imitations. But
so large a proportion of the latent energy in it had been lost in the
process that they turned their researches in other directions. Before
long they found that, when the coal was placed in a chemical solution
containing comparatively common and cheap elements, electric power was
largely generated. And following up their discovery the Sidramo were
soon able to draw electricity from any of the rocks of the island.
Once having had their attention applied to such problems, they made a
number of them surrender their secret; by surrounding one common rock,
_e. g._, with a certain solution they brought from it heat alone.
But the discovery most important for the development of the race was
that which brought electric power directly from the rocks and even from
the earth. For this increased the possible store of force in Rimla
enormously. And there was no limit to what they might use there for the
advancement of civilisation.
Within a few days of this discovery the Piramo or meteorological
families had applied the lavolan to one of their long-unsolved
problems, the extraction of magnetic power in large quantities from
the air. They had been already able to draw from the thunder-clouds
their electricity, and make them pass harmless. And by means of
personal effort and the magnetism of the body they were able when high
up in the rarer regions of the atmosphere to recharge their little
shoulder-engines for driving their wings. But in the lower air they
had failed to draw electricity from any but thunder-clouds in any
quantity. They based a new apparatus called pirakno on the lavolan and
its discoveries, and with this they were able to draw magnetism from
even the gentlest breeze. They increased its size and capacity, and
soon could give a daily supply of new power to the centre of force. Nor
did this deprive the air of the island of its exhilarant quality; for
the more they took from it, the more seemed to flow in from surrounding
space. But, when the east wind blew, they found the inflow of magnetism
too much for their smaller piraknos; only the larger could cope with
it; and then the store of power in Rimla received enormous additions.
For ages they had been testing the amount of magnetism in the air at
various heights and temperatures and various times of day, month,
and year, and recording the results of their investigations. They
were now able to decide from these and from their experiences of the
pirakno that irregular changes in the weather were due chiefly to
magnetic influence. They saw that the tremendous storms which every
few years swept the earth had their origin in exceptional inflows
of cosmic magnetism. During the history of man since he had come to
self-consciousness and to the habit of recording his own movements,
there had been many sudden and temporary climatic changes, that
had led to vast displacements of the inhabitants of the earth. A
series of severe winters in the north and in the temperate zone
would strip the trees and fields of all frugiferous qualities, and
drive the animals of the chase away to the south in search of food.
And the races of man had to follow them. So in the tropics a series
of droughts would destroy half the chances of life, and exterminate
one-third of the dwellers inland. As a rule the agony there led to
no displacement of nations, so passive and fatalistic are they by
nature near the equator; but in times when some new religious idea
had broken the spell of fatalism, the first goad of starvation drove
hordes to search for food in other zones. Oftentimes there has been a
simultaneity in the meteorological severity, partly due to a universal
influx of interstellar magnetism, but still more to the fact that the
earth and the planetary system to which it belongs have swung into
a region of space that is exceptionally barren of all life-impetus.
At such periods came those wide-spread migrations of the dwellers on
the globe that made new eras in history. It was one of those cosmic
disturbances of climate that sent the Arabs out of their deserts, a
flaming portent along the shores of the Mediterranean with their newly
reformed religion, the creed of Mahomet, and at the same moment flung
the Saxons against the northern frontier of Charlemagne’s empire, and
the Danes on the coast of Britain. So, earlier, in the fourth and
fifth centuries of the Christian era, the Huns burst from the east
like a torrent, and again and again swept all before them in the west,
whilst simultaneously the Goths broke in from the north across the
boundaries of the Roman empire. Later, in the ninth century, the Danes
and Normans broke away from the north again and again, and plagued
Europe with their piratical energy in the very period when the Magyars
were migrating from the east to the west. And it was only the closer
packing of the continents, and the consequent military organisation of
European nations that checked these displacements in later centuries,
though there were refluxes towards the east, as in the crusades. But
the cosmic meteorology of the earth took different effect in the same
direction, when plagues mowed down their millions of victims from east
to west; where wide-spread displacements are impossible, there must
be decimation by some cosmic means in order to let the light into the
overpopulated regions. Another escape-valve was found for the pressure
of those periods of temporary climatic change, when the western peoples
were driven over the oceans to find a home. Emigration then came to
mean transference of masses across the sea, at first to America, where
there were other but weaker civilisations to be overcome, afterwards to
lands and islands that were either empty or occupied by a few scattered
savages. It was their circle of mist that saved the archipelago of
Riallaro from the effect of these vast displacements of population.
When every acre of land on the earth shall have been filled with its
complement, and human forethought and ingenuity are still unequal to
the sudden changes of cosmic meteorology, then famine and plague will
be the only means of relieving the pressure.
The Limanorans had no fear of such effects in their own island, except
indirectly. For they had complete command of their own birth-rate and
death-rate, and kept the numbers commensurate with all the purposes
of their existence. Climate was to them as plastic as any material
or force of nature, and the unexpected in meteorology was gradually
becoming unknown. But they had a strong indirect interest in all
inbursts of the cosmic. For the peoples of the other islands, the
descendants of their ancient exiles, were as ready victims as ever
to what seemed the caprices of the seasons and the years. And the
frustration of the consequent movements involving the interests of
the Limanorans absorbed more of their time and reserve energy than
they desired. A violent tornado would obliterate the products of a
year over the whole archipelago, and the fear of starvation would goad
the inhabitants into expeditions in search of food, sometimes even
towards the isle of devils. Again, hungry microbes, the spawn of some
plague-stricken world, would float into the earth’s atmosphere and find
new soil on the islands; and the dwellers would die so quickly that
there was no time or room on their circles of earth for sepulture.
Into the sea the festering dead would be thrown by the thousand, each
bearing its myriad germs of contagion; the very fish that fed on
them would die of the plague and bear its microbes to every shore;
the currents and the winds, if left to their own bent, would sweep
down the foul nests of contagion on the Limanorans; and it would take
them weeks of superhuman effort to prevent the bacterial spawn from
settling in their systems, and to cleanse the adjacent seas of all
taint. The effort to prevent these disasters often wasted their store
of force and checked their advance. It seemed to them therefore more
economical of their energy to help in dispelling the original evil or
making it swerve towards other oceans. For a time they considered it
to the interests of their progress to save the whole archipelago from
the irruptions of interstellar magnetism or bacterial life. But even
this was found to have serious disadvantages. Unbroken prosperity
surcharged the leaders of the other islands with conceit, and made them
lose their fear of the central isle and resume their projects for its
conquest; or it deluged them with population, which, whenever nature
grew economical again, was driven to foreign means for its sustenance,
and, at times, goaded by hunger, made in military wise for the isle of
devils.
Yet these alarms and dangers were more infrequent and more easily
repelled than when the more ambitious of the archipelago were driven
by the spur of famine and disaster to incursion. And, though for a
brief period the Limanorans allowed an occasional tornado or plague
to devastate the islands of hostile neighbours, they came to the
conclusion that it needed less of their energy to repel an occasional
hive of enemies impelled by narrowing limits or the lessening
generosity of nature than to beat off vast bodies of embattled peoples
frantic with hunger and reckless of life, led by the keenest skill
and fieriest ambition of the archipelago. They could better avoid all
destruction of life in the one case than in the other,--one of the
duties of their civilisation, even though a subsidiary one.
The Piramo were thus essential to the progress of the race; their
growing knowledge of the conditions that governed the climate as well
as the passing weather saved in a day as much power as the use of such
an instrument as the pirakno at first could add to Rimla in a year. And
the scene of the labours of the Piramo was every year more and more
extended to the extra-terrene; meteorology became in its investigatory
and experimental department more and more cosmic, and often overlapped
astronomy, astrobiology, and astrophysics, and aided them; more
and more did they find their problems questions of magnetism or
electricity. In the interstellar spaces must be sought the sources of
the greater disturbances of season and climate and the pirakno grew
every year of more and more importance, as they traced the magnetic
influences around the earth back into the infinite fields of space.
About this very time they invented an instrument of great delicacy,
which foretold the vaster tracts of magnetism into which the earth was
swinging, and measured the increase. It depended for its principle
and basis on the intimate relationship between electricity and light,
on the effect of magnetism upon light and upon electric radiation
from the negative pole in a vacuum. They had noticed for some time
that the light from any meteor or luminous body outside the sphere of
influence of the earth never reached the instruments of the observers
on the edge of the atmosphere quite true, and that the aberration
differed at different times. By means of various experiments they
came to the conclusion that the aberration was due to magnetism in
the extra-terrene spaces. Their new instrument, which they called a
sarmolan, they sent out into the ether beyond the earth’s atmosphere
and beyond the influence of terrestrial magnetism; and, as it received
beams of light from any one heavenly body towards which it had been
directed, it recorded the amount of this body’s deflection from the
straight course. They preferred to turn it to the moon or to Venus or
Mars; for then they were sure that the deflecting masses of magnetism
lay within immediate range of the earth. This sarmolan turned out to be
for cosmic changes of climate what the barometer is for daily or hourly
changes of weather. Whenever it recorded violent deflection, it meant
that the earth was approaching an exceptionally vast tract of magnetic
influence, and that there would be great and frequent disturbances for
months, if not for years, in the regularity of the earth’s seasons and
climates, or at least of those of one zone. It warned the Limanorans to
get ready their piraknos and all other instruments they had for drawing
and imprisoning for their own use the electricity from the atmosphere
and the spaces above it. It was in short their cosmic barometer
foretelling changes in climate years ahead. It eased the minds of the
Piramo and set free half their energies for other investigations, as
soon as it had proved itself a true prophet. Later improvements in it
measured the distance of the supermagnetised region of space from the
earth, and thus indicated the exact year and sometimes even the month
and the day when the series of climatic perturbations were likely to
begin. What had been guesswork before, made just before meeting the
phenomenon itself, was now reduced to predictive law; and they looked
forward to the time when by recording, classifying, and mapping the
variations and regions of cosmic magnetism they would be able to get
at the cause of its unequal distribution in interstellar space. Nay,
when they had charted the great drifts and currents of varied energy
that the earth encountered as its universe swung through space, they
might have ready for their future voyagers to other worlds a full
cosmography, which would instruct them in the kind of oceans and
torrents they would have to breast, the types of energy they would
have to accustom their systems to, and all the risks and dangers they
would have to meet. And, when their knowledge of the conditions and
regions and tracks in the boundless space they might have to traverse
was fairly rounded and complete, then some slight adaptation of their
sarmolan would be to them their cosmic compass.
There was evidence in other discoveries too that this hope was not so
utopian as it seemed at first, that at least not countless centuries
would pass before they might be able to fulfil it. One especially,
that of the Floramo or botanical families, quickened their expectation
far beyond the mere flight of fancy. It was a new sublimation of a
vegetable extract, which seemed to give their lungs free play when
there was little or no air to breathe. They had used for ages the
fruit of what they called the floronal or tree of life for giving new
vigour to the organs and especially to the nerve-tissues; they still
continued to use it, even though the chemical families had analysed it
and found all its constituents, and then reproduced a mixture that had
most of the revivifying qualities of the fruit. The tree grew only in
marshy districts, and they had reserved an obscure and rarely visited
corner of the island for its culture and for the culture of plants
and trees like it. There was another tree growing only in the cooler
zone half-way up the mountain, and preferring shallow and poor soil to
root in, whose fruit gave extreme flexibility to the more muscular and
cartilaginous tissues, and especially to those in the chest; if taken
inwardly or through the pores, muscular exercise became more easy, and
breathing became deeper and slower or quicker as the will directed.
A third low plant or shrub, which grew only on the highest altitudes
of Lilaroma, and had its roots generally in the soil underneath a
layer of snow, had been found recently to have in its tissues, and
in a concentrated form in its nuts, great stores of oxygen. For ages
it had been considered a poisonous plant, and avoided; for within a
considerable radius of it breathing had always been more difficult
than at a distance from it; it had therefore been eradicated from all
parts of the cone frequented by the Limanorans. It had no beauty of
form, often grew low like a lichen or moss, and could remain under the
snow for years without perishing. It had thus been neglected and in
fact seldom observed in its growth; whilst its nuts had been thought
to be as poisonous as the plant itself. But recently an avalanche from
one of the little-visited slopes of Lilaroma had uncovered a hollow, in
which one of the Floramo had found a bird, emaciated and unable to fly,
yet still alive; and beside it were the remains of a number of these
poison plants and particles of many of their nuts. It had evidently
been imprisoned many weeks, if not months, and its only food had been
the obscure and offensive snow-bush, stunted, scabrous, and without
green or leaf.
The Floramo became deeply interested in the phenomenon, and gathered
many specimens of the shrub from the top of the mountain. They fed the
bird till it became plump, and then shut it up in one of their irelium
vacuum-chambers with only the nuts to peck. There they watched it from
day to day, and saw that as long as it fed on the nuts it continued
vigorous and lively, even though it began to lose its rounded outlines
again. They soon closed their experiment, and set the winged creature
free to fly whither it would, satisfied that there could be only one
logical conclusion with regard to the plant. They saw that its nature
was to lay up stores of oxygen in all its tissues, and they called it
alfarene or the oxygen-shrub. It was this treasure in it that enabled
it to live so long beneath vast accumulations of snow and ice; it
was this feature of its life that made it when open to the air so
exhaust the oxygen for yards around it that men found it difficult
to breathe beside it; it was this that, when it became the food of
the bird, enabled it to live and breathe so long away from the air.
It was the outcome of long ages of selection up in those difficult
altitudes, where nothing could live under the snow without this power
of storing up oxygen. And its nuts, too hard and innutritious except
for hunger-driven birds to attack, concentrated round the seeds an
extraordinary amount of this oxygen-stuff; and by means of this, when
underneath the pressure of the snows the husk broke, the seeds were
able to support themselves and develop into plants away from the vital
air.
It was evident that these alfarene nuts were treasure-houses of oxygen;
and soon they were tried by the Limanorans themselves when they flew
into the upper regions of the air. At first they broke the nuts into
powder, which was made into a hard but soluble paste: a small piece of
this held in the mouth till it melted enabled them in their flights to
breathe freely in rarer altitudes than they had ever reached before.
The Floramo afterwards brought out the oxygen-storing power of the
shrub more strongly by careful cultivation and selection. Within a few
years they made of it a vigorous, large, and comparatively handsome
tree, and its nuts grew larger and more oxygenated, so that they became
a necessity for all flight into higher atmospheres. More attention
was also paid to the floronal or tree of life and to the germabell or
tree whose fruit produced elasticity of the muscles and cartilage.
The development of all three in the direction in which they might be
useful to the race quickened; the energy stored up in their fruits
came to be more and more concentrated; selection of the plants,
cross-fertilisation of them, special soil and feed for their roots, and
special surroundings, were all-powerful in the hands of the Floramo for
changing plants and trees to any purpose they had in view. They studied
the tissues and habits of the species that they wished to adapt, not
as an abstract and merely scientific investigation, but as one of the
practical problems of their own life; they turned the clirolan on its
inner and outer tissues, as they anatomised it; they watched its inner
processes with the lavolan as it grew or decayed; they chemically
analysed its sap in all its stages, and the various soils at its roots;
then they experimented with new elements in the soil in the direction
of the qualities they wished to encourage; they tried it with various
degrees and hours of sunshine by day, and various amounts of moisture
by night, at different stages in its growth; if they found some of the
qualities that they desired in its fruit or tissues more vigorous in
some other species, they fertilised its blossom with the pollen of this
second plant, and from the seed raised a new species, which would fully
realise their purpose. The whole of vegetal nature was plastic in their
hands. And every year saw hundreds of new species.
The Floramo were the forerunners of the Sidramo or chemical families,
and experimented in materials and juices and essences, which would
be useful to the race in its ever-quickening advance. Often would
vegetal nature reveal a compound that shortened some route through the
future, and the Sidramo would then analyse the product, and find the
secret of its special efficiency. The Floramo were indefatigable in
that department of their work which experimented with the application
of plants and their fruits and tissues to useful purposes, and every
day saw some process accelerated by the results of their labours. In
fact they classified the vegetal world not merely according to the
structure and methods of growth and propagation, but mainly according
to the particular utility of the products. The one classification was
more essential to their creation of new species, the other to their
discovery of purposes for which new species might be created. Like all
their sciences, botany was nothing if it was not creative.
Having discovered the oxygen-storing shrub, the Floramo gave a new
bent to it, applying their energies to strengthening its vitality and
its vitalising powers, and to finding out the most convenient form in
which to use its treasured energy. Aided by the Sidramo they were able
to combine the juice of the fruits of the floronal and the germabell
with the paste of the nut of alfarene into minute, to my eyes almost
microscopic, globules, each of which would support one of their
couriers in the ether outside of our atmosphere for several hours. At
first they lost one of the vitalising elements in securing another;
and even after they had been able to bind the three essences together
in one form, it gave air and sustenance for only a few minutes when
they tried it in a complete vacuum. But after experimenting for many
months, they were able to concentrate these essences under enormous
pressure and by the aid of electric stimulus into a form which would
not volatilise except in the saliva of the mouth and under electric
stimulus. They were also able to give their globules such electric
power as would utilise the streams of magnetic energy that filled the
ether. Thus the ether-couriers found them far more strengthening and
sustaining just above the earth’s atmosphere than in it. One globule
lasted several hours longer in a vacuum, and made breathing and the
other vital functions more easy and enjoyable. Thus was opened up to
them by this discovery a long vista of investigation. The new type of
sustenance and oxygenation was so concentrated that the couriers into
the sky could carry with them enough to serve through months.
During the next great period of discovery the Sidramo superseded
this use of alfarene by a more rapid method of concentrating air. As
usual they followed up the steps of the Floramo, and created what the
botanical families had found in nature. The use of great pressure in
the manufacture of the sustenant globules in their final form suggested
the track they should take; and the immense accumulation of energy in
Rimla and the rapidly increasing faculty of concentrating it on any
point or purpose gave them the requisite power. They came to reduce air
to liquid, and finally to solid and permanent, form. And, following up
the lead of this discovery, they applied greater and greater pressures,
and were at last able to transform with ease and without danger any
element into gaseous, liquid, or solid form. They contracted the slow
processes, that in terrestrial nature covered myriads of ages, into a
few minutes or hours, and thus again multiplied indefinitely their vast
treasures of power in Rimla.
A pioneering production, the book of elemental transformations,
foreshadowed the discoveries to which this would lead. Ether, it was
shown, would be transformed into any desired substance, as soon as its
constituents and formation were found out. Even modes of motion, like
sound and light and electricity, would, with this vast expansion of
the possibility of compression, and the growing power of amalgamating
and concentrating forms of energy, come to be bottled up in liquid or
solid form for any required period. A block of latent sound or latent
light or latent electricity would be as common as a block of ice.
Another pioneer, the book of abbreviation of geological time, opened
up a second vista of power that the discovery pointed out. Nature
took geological ages to perform most of her processes; but in great
passions she accomplished as much in a few minutes. The safe imitation
of these creative and destructive paroxysms was certain to be one of
the conquests of Limanoran posterity. For the actual concentration of
power in Rimla was as nothing compared with what it would be in the
future. Now they were able to contract the work of years into minutes;
then would they be able to leap in one moment across geological ages.
Time was the inertia of realisation and creative power. The whole drift
of their civilisation was towards the mastery of finite periods of
time. Years were to them what minutes had been to their ancestry; to
their far posterity geological ages would be as brief as years were to
them. Swifter and more swiftly would they eliminate from their creative
processes the reluctant element of time, and feel that they were pacing
in the footsteps of eternity.
As it was, they soon put the liquefaction and solidification of
the elements to countless uses. A few of these were the cooling of
their buildings by concentrated air, the use in the arts of its
corrosive power and of its power of rendering most metals easily
plastic, its amalgamation with other elements into an explosive
matter so destructive as to supersede the use of the leomoran in
earth-perforation, and the storage of their faleenas with supplies for
expeditions that would take years in interstellar space.
A minor use to which they put alfarene was the production of vacuums.
They had long had mechanical air-pumps, that gave them the vacuums
they needed for their experiments. But they now found it much easier
to enclose one of these snow-stunted shrubs in an air-tight vessel of
transparent irelium, and watch it absorb the air within the walls. The
energy formerly spent on the making of air-pumps was saved, and devoted
to some other useful purpose.
What was still better was the continual experimentation on the human
system carried on by means of these so easily accessible vacuums.
The alfarene vacuum became the daily plaything of the Limanoran, and
he took pleasure in finding out the needs of his body in it, and
the length of time he could endure the pure ether. It was not long
before they knew every difficulty they would be likely to encounter
in crossing from star to star. The minor defects of the body were
easily met after a few years’ study of them by the various scientific
families. But two gave them long pause.
One was the intense cold they were sure to experience. Where there was
no terrene matter or moisture or air to retain the solar or astral heat
that travelled through space, the diffusion of the streams of thermal
energy would render any far voyaging from the earth impracticable. The
experiments to meet this difficulty took three directions. One was
physiological,--to make the body capable of resisting as great a degree
of cold as they would be likely to encounter; this attempt was only
partially successful, and that by slow steps. They brought themselves
to live with pleasure in any cold that could be found in or around
the earth; but it would take many centuries, perhaps geological ages,
to bring endurance up to the pitch of interstellar cold; it would
in fact mean such a sublimation of their bodies as would make them
like spirits. Another direction was chemical,--to produce a regular
atmosphere round the body as it flew, so that it might retain some of
the streams of heat that swept past it; the use of the essence of the
oxygen-plant helped them in this direction to some extent; but the
amount of it that would be needed to keep up such an atmosphere for
years, concentrate it as much as they liked, meant so huge a cargo that
none of their winged cars would be able to bear it above the earth.
The third direction was physical,--to produce as much heat around the
body as would act as a shield against the cold of the ether; this was
the most successful; for there were such torrents of energy ever moving
through interstellar space that it merely needed its utilisation to
solve the problem. One plan, that, when carefully developed, would
ensure success, was a magnetic garment which would cover the whole of
the body and draw to it all the electric energy within a large radius
of it, to be transformed into heat by minute engines distributed all
over the envelope. Another was, to combine the mechanical collection
of electricity from the ether and the full development of the magnetic
powers of the body. Already they had been able to flash lightnings
around them as they flew through the night; and it would need but small
mechanical manipulation to increase this display and to turn it into
heat. Like meteors, they would blaze across space, wrapped in a mantle
of flame.
But this difficulty in the way of flight through the ether was but
slight as against the other defect that their systems had in common
with all terrene bodies. They could develop heat easily enough; but
how were they to keep intact and consistent in a vacuum constitutions
which had been developed under the pressure of an atmosphere? How
would the tissues and the organs of their bodies adjust themselves to
the absence of atmospheric conditions? As they rose above the clouds,
they had long felt as if their limbs and even the molecules of their
bodies were without due subordination and apt to assume individual
independence, even when the spirit grew boldest and most concentrated
in its energy. Their own wings and faleenas that were intended for
upper and rarer altitudes had to be made tougher and more elastic than
for common flight close to the earth. They had to make them at last in
a vacuum, and subject them to all the conditions that met them in the
ether. But it would take myriads of generations, if not of geological
ages, to bring their own bodies into such a state as to bear vacuum
around them for years; and then in their terrene life with such a new
constitution they would be unable to endure so great a pressure as that
of the atmosphere near the earth. The only contrivance that seemed
feasible was a farfaleena enclosing the traveller round, large enough
to hold alfarene supplies for the long voyage, and strong enough to
stand the pressure of an atmosphere within it. This they might manage
after some years of experimentation.
But enclosure within such a narrow space for so long a period, without
the possibility of free movement into the ether, did not attract
them; and any little accident in their machinery or to their supplies
might make their faleena their tomb. Some other line must be taken
by investigation and invention, if stellar migration was to become a
possible and desirable thing.
This line was indicated by discoveries of the Sidralmo or bio-chemical
families, and the Ooaromo or psycho-physiological families. The
Sidralmo had long been investigating the ultimate constituents of
living matter; and again and again, when seeming to be on their track,
they were baffled by the escape of some element, and left with only the
_caput mortuum_ to analyse. Under their clirolans too, powerful
though they were, the principle of life showed itself in many ways to
their senses, and yet evaded all attempt to isolate it. The lavolan,
which showed the inner structure of living bodies as they lived and
moved, brought them nearest of all to the veil that hung over the
secret of vitality. Plants and stationary animal organisms allowed
them full scope for their investigations. In them they could see the
life ebb and flow, as death approached or receded; in them they could
find every material element entering into their composition, and test
with their varied and minute meteorological apparatus all the forms
of energy which moved them; they checked the current of life, and
watched in the plant or animal the elements and energies that remained
comparatively stable and those that deteriorated; they let it die out,
and watched the throb and struggle of the various constituents and
forces as they collapsed; then, when it seemed to have surrendered
all life or hope of life, they brought it back, by their knowledge
of its existence, to the upward struggle again and no feature of the
return escaped their notice; most watchful of all were they on that
dim borderland between life and death, where dawn is sunset and sunset
dawn. In every stage were they able to isolate each strand of the
thread of life; yet the essential secret of all escaped them. Once
the organism had shrivelled into a bundle of dead fibres or fallen to
dust, no effort of theirs could give it the throb of life again. They
could reproduce every element and tissue and fibre, and under their
clirolans place them together in the forms of life with marvellous art.
One thing was still wanting to make it all it had been. They could even
mimic the flow of life through it by means of their command over the
sources of energy; but the result was only mechanical; they had not
supplied it with the never-failing spring of vitality.
At last, during the period of this great illumination there was thrown
a beam of light on the right path for solving this problem. One of
the Sidralmo was experimenting on certain substances to see how they
behaved under the rays issuing from a lavolan or revealer of inner
mechanism. They were chiefly new vegetable substances the properties of
which it was his duty to discover and tabulate. He was also mingling
one or two new minerals with the plant-products in order to see what
modification the blending would cause. One metal had lately been found
issuing from the deepest of their lava-wells in the form of vapour;
when cooled, it had assumed a crystalline character, and acted to
some extent like a magnet; yet it was sensitive to energies that an
ordinary magnet ignored, as, for instance, the passage of exceptional
nerve-force through the human body. Lightly hung, it quivered when
near anyone who happened to be greatly excited. But it paid no heed
to the normal currents of energy along the nerves. There was also a
species of plant recently evolved that had shown itself singularly
sensitive on the approach of any living thing; it shrank not merely
from the touch of a hand or of any animal, but from the proximity of
life, whilst it remained unmoved when touched by any falling leaf or
stone. The experimenter had taken a number of these plants and made of
them a basketwork, in which he hung a piece of the new magnetic metal
by a slender thread. This he placed above his lavolan to see how the
rays from it would affect, or be affected by, the new combination of
influences. There seemed to be little or no effect, but he continued
his experiment to make sure. Through some imperfection in its walls his
vacuum failed; he tried to pump the air out again, but, this failing
too, he substituted an alfarene-vacuum which happened to be near him.
The result was most striking. The metal, lightly hung in the basket,
became agitated at once, and its movements grew more or less active as
it approached or was drawn off from the vacuum. After a time it began
to show less sensitiveness, and at last became almost quiescent, even
though the vacuum remained efficient. On examining the alfarene plant
under a magnifier, he found a minute slug, that had evidently escaped
the notice of the maker of the vacuum; this had been the source of
the agitation of the metal in the basket during its last spasmodic
efforts to hold on to life; and, when death, through the lack of air,
had overcome it, the agitation had ceased. The plant itself had by the
presence of its life kept the test from becoming completely quiescent.
The influence of the life of the experimenter himself seemed to be
largely neutralised by the surrounding air; it was only when he came
very close to the test that it indicated his presence.
Here was revealed to the Sidralmo the path they had to follow; a wide
vista into the darkness had been suddenly opened. It was not long
before they had taken full advantage of the discovery. They invented
the most helpful of all their instruments, the sidralan or biometer;
they hung the combination of life-sensitive plant and nerve-sensitive
metal itself in a vacuum, directly in the path of an electric current;
the details of its mechanism they rapidly improved till it measured
with accuracy the degree of vitality in any plant or animal. But they
soon found that it was differently affected by vegetable and animal
life. The energy of the former moved it but slightly, and only in
certain directions; the latter seemed to surround it and agitate it
from all sides; it quivered as if with subdued excitement. Yet there
were degrees in both; some plants moved it more than the most primitive
unicellular animals, although the movement was less pervasive. Thus
were they well on the way towards the isolation of the life-principle
from its constant concomitants.
The biometer came to be of as much importance to the medical
superintendents as to the Sidralmo; it abridged the labour of their
weekly inspection; for it told in a moment whether the vitality in
any member of the community had fallen or risen in degree, whether
it was below the proper average, in short whether all his organs and
tissues would have to be minutely examined for the cause, and whether
his dietary scheme would have to be revised. The psycho-physiological
families found it of some use in their investigations into the
faculties of man and their basis in his bodily constitution. They found
that the wiser and more intellectual a personality was, the more gently
he moved the sidralan; the more of animal vitality he had, the more
violently he agitated it by his presence.
But the instrument was too rough and undiscriminating for their
purposes. It could not distinguish between the purely spiritual and the
purely animal except in this loose way. They tried modifications of it,
but without success. It was the Ailomo or astrobiological families that
helped them to take the right direction. They were constantly bringing
down out of the stratum above the atmosphere vessels full of the
seeming nothingness that existed there, in order to investigate it and
see whether it was mere vacuum or not; and though the contents appealed
to none of their senses but the electric, their various instruments
of research revealed different energies and a large amount of life,
besides minute forms of matter without life. On several occasions
they had noticed that the contents affected their tests differently
when the experimenter was near and when he stood at a distance. Step
by step they separated the element that acted thus from its various
concomitants. And soon they were able to concentrate a considerable
quantity of it in a receiver exhausted of air, and to precipitate it in
powdery metallic form.
The substance was handed over to the Ooaromo, who saw that it would
supply the test they wanted; for it was but slightly sensitive to the
presence of animals, and its sensitiveness gradually vanished as they
tried it with lower and lower species of animals; whilst it quivered
near men, less near young men and women, only slightly near infants,
but with quick tremors when near the older and wiser Umanorans, who
had suffered and thought through long centuries. They came to the
conclusion that this residuum was the essence of some element in the
ether that responded to the energy of the higher faculties, as the
magnet responded to electricity. They had in fact found at last a true
test of soul, that refinement of the higher animal energies which has
assumed a new grade in life, the consciousness of itself, and the power
of keeping its own form and essence as an entity for ever separate from
all other beings and things.
It was not long before the Ooaromo had made from it an apparatus which
would test the presence of soul and measure its force. In this ooaran
or psychometer they were at last furnished with an instrument that
would give organic unity and new purpose to their science. They would
now be able to watch and measure the growth of soul in the child, and
the ebb and flow of its strength in youth; and thus would they give new
vigour and life to the creative function of their science. They had now
an exact basis for education; as guides of parents and proparents in
tuition they would walk in the full day, where before they had groped
in dim twilight; in every case would they be able to advise with the
same certainty as the medical elders advised on the health of the body.
For the mature men and women would they act as true father-confessors,
and do what the priests of so many religions pretended to do, but
did not do; they would be able to tell everyone, who desired it,
whether his soul had advanced or receded in power after any series of
sufferings and deeds, or any line of conduct, and thus to give advice
as to what should be done or omitted in the future. And when the
elders had come near what had before seemed the utmost limit of life,
they would be able to tell them whether their nausea of existence was
only fleeting and subjective, or whether the roots of their soul were
loosening themselves from the soil of the body.
CHAPTER II
AN ACCIDENT
BUT so vast an expansion of science and the unveiling of so many
outlooks into the future left no room for the thought of death. The
pace of life quickened perceptibly, and the energy of every dweller
on the island was strained to its utmost to meet the requirements
of the new additions to the force of the country and of all the new
inventions. It was impossible to think of anything but the tasks in
hand. None had an idle thought, none a leisure moment to waste on mere
introspection or dreams.
In fact it became quite clear that the old dream-factory might be
closed for a time at least. For several generations it had been the
custom of the Limanorans to stimulate invention and discovery by
the use of magnetism. When anyone felt his problem insoluble, or an
insuperable obstacle in the way of his advance towards some practical
goal, he had his dream-consciousness awakened and quickened as he
slept. A member of the medical families would attend by his bedside,
and apply a magnetic current to the particular point of his brain that
controlled the powers concerned in his pursuit, and especially to the
parts which were the physical expression of the imaginative faculties.
And by day he would instruct the thinker as to what nutritive or
medicated chambers he should enter in order to draw the main strength
of his system towards the faculties he needed. Day after day the
patient nurtured the parts of the brain and of the nervous system
that would help him to the solution; night after night he dreamt out
the terms of the problem. At last either in day-dream or night-fancy
the curtain would be raised, and he would see the path to take; light
flashed in on him as if from another world. What in my buried life
used to be called inspiration was cultivated, moulded, and directed
with as deliberate foresight and care as any feature of the body or
the character. Nor were these dream-stimulants ever abused; when the
purpose had been served, the goal reached, at once the other faculties
and physical parts had equal attention; the strain was unbent, and
the symmetry and balance of the whole system restored. Never was the
stimulation of dream-consciousness permitted for a mere pleasure or
whim; the importance of the aim to the progress of the race had to be
proved before it was granted; nay it was only problems the solution
of which would lead to extraordinary advances, that were dealt with
by narolla or dream-consciousness stimulants. Now the narolla were
entirely abandoned; for imagination was preternaturally excited, and
discovery and invention seemed to come to investigators almost without
effort.
It was indeed a period of accelerated progress, if not of precipitance,
in the work of all families. The darkness around existence lifted over
the whole horizon, and demanded redoubled exertion, in order that the
new regions should be mapped before it fell. The tissues and nerves
of every Limanoran felt the stimulus; each worked with a will. Still
the necessities of the situation almost ran ahead of their powers.
One thing became clear, that they must have more workers; the new
generation would have to be more numerous than the last. For the young
had to be drawn upon for active nerve- and head-work before their usual
time; and these would need more leisure in the next stage of their life
to compensate for the loss of it in the period of growth.
It grew evident that parents who had been exceptionally successful
in the two children they had brought forth, reared, and launched
full-fledged on the career of life should be permitted and stimulated
to resume parentage. It was considered one of the highest privileges
and honours to be selected as parents again by the magnetic
consciousness of the nation. There was needed no formal agreement
or resolution; the mind of the race was known without consulting it
openly; and every pair felt in a moment that they were selected for
reparentage; they required no stimulation, no permission to enter on
the patriotic duty. And all considered it a duty of the loftiest kind.
Passion in the race burned low; no longer was it a sting or goad that
had to be mastered; it was in short no more a passion, such as the use
of imagination, the love of the race, or the yearning after advance had
become. The animal element in it had grown insignificant, and left it
at the bidding of intellect and will. These tried parents had thus no
sensuous pleasure to seek in the new task assigned to them. They took
it upon them as a duty, and their chief pleasure lay in the honour they
had been paid, and in the service they were doing to the race and to
the progress of their humanity.
A second necessity of the new position was earlier marriage on the
part of the men and women of the community. As soon as bare maturity
had been reached, pairing now began. First it had to be scientifically
ascertained that all the merely primitive stages of mankind had been
passed through, not only the prehistoric, but the historical. It would
be one of the greatest of evils to allow the privilege of parenting
for the community to any who might have yet to go through a stage of
individual life that represented centuries of the past of mankind.
Little better would this be than stocking their island with children
from their exiles. It was a question of testing every individual;
for some passed more rapidly through the life of their ancestry than
others; and these were not always the best as parents or even as
citizens. Every tissue and faculty had to be tested, after careful
study of the records of the childhood and youth. No possible prospect
or chance of atavistic taint was overlooked.
The next duty was to review the needs of the race. The tasks and
abilities of every family were measured, and the possible expansions of
these were estimated; then new sciences, or new divisions of sciences,
or new duties that would need the services of a family or families
specially selected and moulded for the purpose, were taken into the
account. From this elaborate review of the resources and needs of
the population conclusions were carefully drawn as to the number and
quality of the children that were required. The problem was easy enough
as far as mere extensions of the existing families were concerned. But
the creation of new types was a question that tasked the abilities of
the wisest to the utmost. The special faculties needed for the new
science or art or duty had to be discussed and decided; and especially
how far existing faculties would have to be modified or newly
combined. Then out of the various families those two had to be chosen,
a cross which would produce the required modification or combination.
But, as this was still largely of the nature of experiment, more than
one effort was made towards each new type, in order that, if one child
failed, the others might be available. But the wise creators of new
types were rapidly getting surer of their ground; their experiments
were growing less of experiments; they could almost foretell to a
faculty or tissue the result of the crossing of any two families. And
where any quality was unequal to the new duty, first creative surgery
was called in to modify or add to the tissue of that part of the brain
which was the physical equivalent of the faculty, and afterwards
education with its various magnetic and dietary aids was brought to
bear on its development. Yet there might be some chance of their new
type falling short of its purpose and, to guard against this, several
individuals of it were brought forth and trained. It was generally
found that all of them were needed to carry out the duties of the new
position.
After everything had been settled in the programme of the next
generation, the task of matching began. Time after time the two who
were to be the parents of the new type were thrown together as if by
accident in circumstances and surroundings which would touch their
imaginations and rouse their enthusiasm for each other. They were put
into difficult positions together, so that one might help to extricate
the other from them. Alternate debt and service wove mutual bonds
around them, till at last neither desired to issue from the network of
obligation and love in which they were caught. The magnetism of one was
complementary to that of the other; and when separated they longed to
see each other. With none in the community was the filammu of either
in such communion as with the loved mate. Thus partly wise choice,
and partly spontaneity, produced the match. The lifelong bond could
never become enslaving for either; for the material of it had been
selected not by mere youthful caprice, but by the maturest wisdom of
the race, whilst it was spun by the impulse and will of the two friends
themselves. Neither the state nor either of the partners could possibly
regret the friendship, or wish it dissolved. It passed as naturally
into marriage as flower into fruit.
But, whilst the future was thus being safeguarded, the new duties or
expanded duties had to be looked after. Seventy-five years of work
had to be provided for before the new citizens could be made fit for
their duties. Part of this was covered by drawing earlier on the powers
of the new generation; the youth must come out of their seclusion a
few years sooner than usual. But that was not sufficient. What way
was there out of the difficulty? It was a tacit rule of the community
that none were to overstrain their energies; overwork was considered
as great a vice as indolence; for it cheated the race of some of its
advance by demoralising the faculties and tissues, and bringing on the
nausea of life earlier than it should come by nature. The biometer
was carefully applied to every citizen in order to test how far he
could go in work without wasting his energies. And after all had been
assigned additional work to their utmost limit, there was still so much
unassigned. The only chance of meeting it was the extension of life.
The elders must live longer. Happily every condition was now present
for managing this. They had new foods and agents for revitalising the
tissues; they had new apparatus for discovering internal defects in the
human system, and new methods of remedying them; the far vistas opened
up into the future gave a new purpose to the life even of the most
aged; they longed to see what would come of all the expanded invention
and discovery; the enthusiasm of the new age fired the imagination of
the oldest. Limanoran life had another century added to it.
In the midst of the bustle of these preparations for the future (if
anything the Limanorans did could be called bustle), there occurred an
accident that smote them almost with dismay, and brought them as near
as I had ever seen them approach to melancholy. The additions to the
sources of the energy available in Rimla had entailed more muscular
work as well as more superintendence, and it was necessary to assign
more physical toil to the now-earlier mature than had been customary.
Two scions of the meteorological families, who had been selected for
marriage and parentage, were sent to manage a large pirakno, which had
been constructed for drawing the magnetism from the air and the spaces
just beyond the atmosphere. The great machine had been placed on an
isolated spur of Lilaroma, so that if ever through the sudden sweeping
of the earth into a supermagnetised area it should become dangerous, it
could easily be detached from Rimla and insulated. And there were never
less than two beside it to help in its management.
The younger men and women took the night watches in all the physical
labour that had to be undertaken. And Tamarna and Omirlo, as one of
the youngest and least experienced of the pairs that had to manage
this huge pirakno, kept the last watch of the night, the watch that
included sunrise and was followed by that of two of the most mature
workers. It was thought that, as every Limanoran would be awake and on
the alert at dawn, help in any emergency could easily be procured. As
it was well known that during that period there was a great increase
of magnetism in the atmosphere, provision was made in the machine
itself for so regular a change; it was so arranged that, when the sun’s
rays first touched it, it should automatically increase its capacity
for magnetism. But so recent had been the development of cosmic
magnetography that the times and seasons of the irregular increase of
magnetism had not been tabulated and classified. Had the observations
been made for a long enough time to allow of inferring a uniformity
or law, then it would have been seen that these supermagnetised
spaces, though they may have been entered by the earth during the
night, have little effect upon her atmosphere till day dawns; the
excess of magnetism seems to lie dormant in the dark; the first rays
of the sun act like a fuse to a mine and complete the circuit between
extra-terrene space and the surface of the earth. Sunrise, in fact,
as they came afterwards to see, was the most critical time for such a
machine as the pirakno.
It happened, too, that on this particular night the sarmolan or cosmic
barometer had been getting out of order; but its watchers did not think
it called for immediate attention; the morning would be time enough
to put it right. Its indicator thus lay tongue-tied and misleading,
when it should have been violently agitated. Tamarna and Omirlo had no
warning of the approaching magnetic tornado. The hour before dawn the
pirakno moved as regularly and quietly as at that point of the night
when the magnetic tide is at its lowest ebb, the point when sleep is
deepest and death is most frequent. They had just seen that every part
was moving without friction and fully coping with its work; and Omirlo
felt that he could leave his mate for a brief space and consult the
sarmolan-watchers. He had been gone but a few minutes when he heard a
loud crash behind him, and at the same moment he noticed that the first
beams of the sun had struck across the levels of the sea. He turned
and saw a flash from the place where, he thought, the pirakno stood.
Flying back in trepidation, he found the machine as he had left it, but
it had stopped. At first he could not see Tamarna; but on searching he
saw her form lying on the ground close to the pirakno, hidden by one of
its cranks. He touched her temples and left side, and saw that life had
fled. The crank had come upon her as she lay, and bruised her body; the
sight of this completed his despair; he felt that the last hope of her
recall had vanished.
Yet he knew how much the medical elders could do, and there arose in
his mind a flicker of hope. He wasted no time on lamentation, for
there moved in him the carefully trained consciousness that all such
abandonment to emotion was an offence against the progress of the
race. They considered that every occurrence of life demanded as much
concentration of energy and thought as a shipwreck, or the incidents
of a battle, or anything that we in the West would call an alarming
emergency. As grief or despair or fear used up the power that should be
spent on action, emotion was strictly reined in at such a moment; the
instinct was to call the whole resources of the nature to action.
Omirlo braced himself to the emergency, and sent the whole of the
magnetism he was capable of into his will-telegraph. After a few
minutes’ exercise of it, it seemed to relax, and he knew that he had
roused his parents to the danger. Recalling his energies to Tamarna,
he followed the few simple rules that he had been taught for the
recovery of the seeming dead. He made her lungs and heart imitate
the play of life; he switched the magnetism of his own system on to
hers. But after all his efforts she lay still inert when his parents
arrived. They decided to carry her at once to the medical elders, for
they saw that something exceptional had occurred; it was not a swoon,
or even death from the bruise dealt by the pirakno. So they took her
wings, and making them by means of soft leafage into a couch for her,
they bore her through the air swiftly, but just as she had lain when
found. Tamarna’s own parents met them on the way, and helped them to
accelerate their pace with her; and within less than ten minutes after
the accident she was in the hands of the sages in the mountain hospital.
The general medical house was Oomalefa. But there were two houses
of cure which approached more nearly to what our hospitals are. One
was far up the slopes of Lilaroma, not much beneath the winter-line
of snow. The other was aërial and movable, and was, whenever it
was needed, floated upwards to the margin of our atmosphere, where
parasitic and microscopic life was reduced to unaggressive feebleness.
In it were all the necessities of life at hand; the temperature was
kept close to summer heat; and there were lines of communication, so
thin as to be almost invisible in the air, connecting it with the halls
of sustenance and medication. This hospital was meant for the invalid
who was strong enough to be moved up from solid earth; and, as soon as
one had been brought back far enough from the grasp of death to bear
the rarity of the upper air where it merged into the ether, he was
taken up in it. But Tamarna was first borne to the mountain hospital,
where the instruments of investigation and cure were ready. When she
should have had all the ruptures of her bones and organs and tissues
set for mending, and all the tissues that were crushed beyond mending
replaced by freshly manufactured tissues, and when she was seen to hold
on to life with a tenacious grasp again, then would she be borne into
the hospital of accelerative healing high above the clouds.
The biometer recorded the faint presence of life; the spirit had
not yet escaped, and before long it grew manifest to ordinary eyes.
They had apparatus for stirring any organ of the body into activity;
and with the lavolan they soon saw which of Tamarna’s functions
had been deranged and had suffered syncope. It was her heart that
had ceased action; the inrush of magnetism from space drawn by the
pirakno, without provision for storing it or letting it pass harmless,
had paralysed some of the more important cardiac tissues and the
circulation was in many places clogged, whilst a large proportion of
the superficial blood-vessels had been ruptured by the fall of the
crank upon the body. A European medical council would have abandoned
the bruised and discoloured corpse as fit only to be “food for worms.”
But no member of the community could be spared in such a period of
enthusiasm and expansion. The newly discovered agents and methods
were brought to bear. Delicate instruments made the heart first mimic
and then produce the true cardiac action. Currents of magnetism
swept the veins, and cleared the routes for the circulation of the
blood, at the same time stimulating the life-fluid. The livid hue
gradually disappeared from the face. Another instrument gave action
to the lungs, first in mimic and then in vital way. Concentrated
sustenance was injected into the veins and soon the breathing grew
regular. Yet it needed hours of this recreative work to bring the
spirit to consciousness of itself. Out of the depths the soul seemed
to be dragged by slow steps back into the reluctant body again. The
psychometer was far more slow to give signs than the biometer. But, as
soon as it revealed the approach of the soul, the friends of Tamarna
were brought near her, all who had magnetic affinities with her, and
especially her betrothed Omirlo. From that point the recovery was
astonishingly rapid. The magnetism of friendship seemed to draw back
the spirit from its desire to escape. The eyes opened, and a look of
intelligence and love shone through their vitreous dulness like dawn in
a misty sky; recognition quickly irradiated her whole being, then faded
out, then came again, till at last the curtain which hid the soul rose,
and the very body seemed to become diaphanous to the light of reason.
The spirit dwelt again in its old habitation.
The rest was a matter of the commonest medical science. Every tissue
was restored to its previous healthy state. Every fracture and bruise
and scar was obliterated. Every item of her system which had suffered
beyond the possibility of repair was remade and grafted into her body
again. Nursing and medicated atmospheres under the wisest medical
guidance restored Tamarna to her duties and to Omirlo as efficient and
graceful and healthy as before the accident.
In spite of this triumphant success of their medical science, I
could see that depression prevailed in the community. Not even what
appeared to me to be the almost supernatural power of drawing the
life back seemed to console them. For they had often seen still more
wonderful displays of medical skill. Men who had been for months to
all appearance dead were restored to full vital power, even when the
microscopic transformers of dead matter had begun to batten on their
tissues. No body that still retained the human form was beyond their
skill; the soul could be enticed back after it had accomplished its
flight from earth, for it still kept its affinities to its terrene
companions, though cosmic distances should separate them. That was
the most difficult task, not the recrudescence of life, but the
re-enticement of the spirit that had grown happy in its release.
When I observed that the meteorological families were the nearest
of all to dejection, even though they had recovered their loved
member, I came to the right conclusion. It was the accident that had
unmanned them. That they should be taken unawares in a sphere they had
mastered preyed on their minds. For one of the immediate objects of
their science was to take command of their future, to eliminate the
unexpected from life. What was the value of their progress, if they
did not see more clearly and farther into the sphere of darkness that
bounded life like a horizon? True, the cosmic was still infinite in its
night for them, and in the cosmic lay ambushed countless alarms. But
they had driven their outposts far into the twilight. The age they were
in had seen such an expansion of science that the veil seemed lifted
from the face of boundless night. Their sarmolan pioneered before them
into space, and foretold them the dire catastrophes that might lie in
wait for them. And yet they were at the mercy of accident. What was the
use of such an influx of suggestion from the unknown? What was their
power over nature, if thus they allowed the fortuitous to drift in upon
them? They had not suffered such discomfiture for ages. They abhorred
the thought that they should again be the slaves of mere hazard.
But they rebelled against even the appearance of impotence, and would
not allow any mood approaching despair to settle on their spirits.
At once the Piramo set about the repair of their defences against
accident. The pirakno was found to be fused into one mass of metal
by the force of magnetism which had gathered into it from the space
around. Another, larger and more effective, was produced and in it
there was a new arrangement by which the storage was automatically
governed; any increase in the magnetism it received was at once
provided for; and if at any time the inflow should surpass the capacity
for storage, there was a governor which automatically switched the
surplusage into the sea, or back again into the air.
A sarmolan too was invented which had greater strength, and at the
same time greater nicety of adjustment. It could be left in the space
beyond the atmosphere, untended for nights together; for it was
self-recording, and as long as its parts were kept clear of extraneous
matter or force, it was incapable of derangement. Not that it was
to be left to itself for a moment; even though it now regularly
telegraphed all its changes to Rimla and to the locality of the
pirakno, meteorological observers were near it night and day to watch
and interpret its signals. To guard against any possible assault of
accident, other sarmolans were ballooned into space whose indications
were mutually corrective; where one went astray, the others would be
right.
When Tamarna was completely restored to health and it was made certain
by the medical tests that every organ and tissue of her system was
fit for its task, her marriage with Omirlo was accorded; and the two
entered on their career of parentage. Their duties were made lighter,
in order that their energy might pass unimpaired into posterity. They
still had their round of work, that their tissues might not grow
flaccid, or their life tend to excessive solitude. But Omirlo did for
both all that needed great exertion of mental or physical faculty.
CHAPTER III
DEATH
THE accident drew the two together, strengthening their affinities into
irrevocable bonds. And now that all was well with them, their sense of
the joy of life welled through their whole nature. Those who came near
them felt its contagion. Yet there was one in their family who felt it
only to smile at it. The aged Amiralno had seen so many centuries fleet
past him that the passage of time with its triumphs had grown stale.
He was battling with this nausea of life when the new age of discovery
and invention had come upon them. And it so far renewed his energy that
he was willing to live through it and take his share in the additional
duties which it laid upon his generation. He had seen the infancy
of the science over which he now presided pass into lusty youth and
thence into manhood; and was he to cut his terrene roots before he had
seen its greatest triumphs? Meteorology seemed about to take as wide
regions of space within its scope as astronomy had; it seemed about to
master secrets that would drive mere chance out of its calculations.
The curiosity and wonder of youth were again stirred within him. He
longed to advance with the new age into spheres that had so long lain
under the horizon, only half-guessed at. Before he closed his eyes
on Limanora what wonders might not yet be revealed to them? His blood
had tingled with the thought, and his organs were filled with the old
energy. He would resume the direction of his science for many a year to
come.
But the intrusion of accident into his own sphere had palsied his
renewed enthusiasms. For a time, whilst he was restoring Tamarna to
her old self, and barring out the chance of accident again, he was not
conscious of the check given to the vigour of his functions. But, when
all was well and the families of the Piramo were busy again at the
expansion of meteorology, he knew that the old nausea had returned with
redoubled force. The impetus of the new age was beginning to fail; its
pace had perceptibly slackened; its best triumphs had been won; and
it needed the ignorance of eyes newly opened upon the green earth and
the azure vault of sky to peer into the darkness with thrilling hope;
it needed the elasticity of youthful muscles and tissues to withstand
the weariness and despair that come with the truer perspective of a
gigantic future become a pigmy past. What had he to do with human
prospects, when a thousand times he had seen them loom large on the
horizon, and then fade into commonplace when realised? Here had he
outlasted a dozen generations of ordinary men, and shared the triumphs
of a people whose progress compared with that of the rest of the earth
was as lightning to the pace of a snail; and yet, when he looked at
all that they had done in these thousand years, it was as nothing in
the shadow of what had yet to be done, a poor hand’s breadth beside
the voyage of light from a distant star. Where lay the advantage in
extending a life that had seen such humiliation before the everlasting
future? He might spin the thread of his life out for another thousand
years without great effort. But what would that do for his race,
or himself who had seen his past, with all the achievements that
had each seemed as it came within the range of possibility a marvel
surpassing the human, fade into a microscopic speck underneath the
sumless stars? The voices of his friends, as they poured consolation
and eulogy, persuasion and prayer, into his ears, sounded now like the
undistinguishable hum of insects as sleep comes upon a man in the open.
What would they not have meant to him in the ambitious time of youth?
How strongly they rang out to him at the beginning of the last stage of
enthusiasm, when they drove out of him the love of going for ever to
sleep! But, now, that the longing had come to him again, they sounded
idly as the exultant wail of gnats on the evening air. The life of
earth was withdrawn and distant for him.
And who could raise a word against his release? He had done more than
his share for the progress of the race. He had watched the interests
of his science and made it an essential of all advance. He had braced
his energies again and again to meet the requirements of a new age,
another march ahead into the night. He had time after time molten the
Piramo into a new unity by the magnetism of his enthusiasm. More than
once he had extended the years of his life that he might serve his
race. And now he had skilled men and women under him, who could do all
that he had done, and more. The exceptional needs of the new time had
found their attendants mechanic or human. The strain it had put on the
efforts of the race was unbent. Why should he linger in a world grown
so stale to him, a world that needed no longer his guidance or even
his help?
There was one question to answer before the mind of the community was
made up. It was the final scientific question. Was his vitality great
enough yet to bear the strain, were the impulses of another new age to
give it enthusiasm? Was the soul already too detached from the body to
allow of the two being closely reunited for another great effort? The
question was one for their medical science and psychology to answer.
The sidralan or biometer abridged the task of the medical elders. It
reported a low pitch of vital energy, too feeble to bear up through the
labours and watches of another period. But they were afraid to trust
wholly to so newly invented an instrument and fell back upon their old
elaborate methods of testing; they investigated the state of every
organ and tissue of the aged body with lavolans, the heart and brain
with especial care. And it was clear from their state that the spirit
could not long reside in them and function them with ease. It was at
this point that the Ooaromo came in to aid them with their instruments
for testing the bond between soul and body, and for measuring the
psychic power that still remained ready to use the brain and its
instruments the senses. Their older methods and their newest apparatus,
the ooaran, all agreed in confirming the conclusion that the medical
elders had come to.
For Amiralno himself there remained one serious question, which had
troubled the race from the time that mere faith had ceased to rule and
pilot their creed, and reason had been accepted as the only ultimate
guide of life, the final court of appeal in which all questions must be
decided. They could not trust to emotion or instinct; for these were
but hard-won creeds and habits of past imperfect ages grown unconscious
of their origin by transmission from generation to generation.
Authority out of the past, tradition, law of nature, had the same
taint upon them. They were but the crude conclusions of comparatively
primitive times, with the logic leading to them veiled by oblivion,
then thrust upon later ages as inspiration. All these dogmatic judges
of the present and the future were but the shadows of their own
worst and atavistic selves. It was only an illusion, a mirage in the
desert of the past, to trust these merely subjective impressions as
reflections from the ultimately real, the absolute. A people like this
was sure to abandon all such projections of their own dead selves as
steps to higher than themselves.
Every man had to settle for himself the problems that his science
had been unable to solve, and that he must find some solution of in
death. They had longed and striven for absolute certainty, yet every
new age had to fall back upon the individual consciousness and hope,
which were wholly on the side of belief in personal immortality. They
knew that the energy in them could never die, whatever form it might
take. Never had they found in the whole round of their investigations
anything like absolute death or annihilation; every change that they
observed, however far into infinity they had searched, was but a
transformation of energy, and not its final evanishment. Matter was
only a resting-place, a half-way house, of energy. And even matter was
a comparative term, depending on the sensuous point of view of the
observer. What was matter to one generation was found by a later to
be pure energy, or even a mass of life. What was matter to one sense
was to another nothing but energy. And the development of new senses,
that gave them full consciousness of some hitherto-unrecognised type
of energy, saved them from the dogmatism about the future based upon
the idea that all types of energy were known to them. Their wonderful
instruments of research revealed to them worlds of energy which might
have lain for ages undiscovered, and swept out all stupid trust in the
omniscience of the senses or the instincts. They refused to dogmatise
about the existence or non-existence of any type of energy or being.
Nay, they preferred to accept provisionally the existence of any form
that their imagination might sketch out as possible and as consistent
with the laws they had found permeating all the known universe. Belief
was for them hope waiting for realisation.
Every new discovery pointed more and more definitely to the greater
persistence of the higher forms of energy. What appeals to the more
primitive and lower set of senses holds to even its inner form for but
a comparatively brief time. Touch is the primary sense, and all that
it, unaided by the other senses, can discover is apt to keep changing
its form. Taste and smell are simple modifications of touch and they
report of things in perpetual transformation. Hearing and sight are the
highest of the first set of senses; for they respond to types of energy
that travel from vast distances. Hearing is the lower of the two,
because the lower senses are conscious unaided of the medium in which
the energy travels. Sight has as her courier an energy which bridges
infinity, and its medium no lower sense can cognise. Light approaches
nearer to indestructibility than anything the original senses know.
The last-developed of the senses, the firla, takes cognisance of
an energy, magnetism, which is farthest of all from the need of a
material medium; whilst the filammu or will-telegraph brings soul to
soul irrespective of all sense-cognisable means of communication, and
proves the existence of a medium more refined than any that either the
senses or the reason has yet come to know. This medium, doubtless that
of thought itself, as the highest and least material, must be least
destructible, least transformable, least unstable in equilibrium of
all known mediums. Their ooarans would soon be made delicate enough
to measure the faintest presence of soul, and would decide the point
whether this medium, evidently spread throughout the universe, was of
the same stuff as the soul.
Still were they far from scientific proof of the eternal unity and
individuality of the soul. They had reasoned out in accordance with
all the axioms of their science the indestructibility of energy,
and the rising untransformability of the higher types of energy;
they had also reasoned out as certainly that mediums of energy had
stability of equilibrium proportionate to the refinement of the
energy travelling through them, and that thus the soul was nearer to
everlasting persistence as a unity than any medium they scientifically
knew. But that on its escape from the body it continued for ever as an
individuality they could only assume; they could not prove it. They
shrank from the idea that it was for ever past transformation; for that
meant the eternal continuance of the last stage of life. It was indeed
contrary to all the results of their scientific investigations to think
that any type of energy or medium could at any time cease to change,
that is, to improve or degenerate. Perpetual transformation was, as far
as they had been able to search, the universal law: it might be into
a higher or more stable form, or into a lower or more material form,
but onwards must every energy move. The higher it went, the less did it
tend to fall back. The law of eternal advance was surer in its action
in the higher ranges of existence. And the whole effort of Limanoran
life was to purify and ennoble the energy that was in it. For,
reasoning on the analogy of all the nature they knew, they had little
doubt that the platform they reached by the end of their terrene life
was the platform from which their enfranchised energy or individuality,
whichever it was, started on its new career.
Whether it was mere unconscious energy or energy conscious of its own
unity that escaped from the body, when it was left to the disintegrant
power of microscopic organisms, was still a question. The recent
discoveries and investigations of the Ailomo or astrobiological
families had revealed all space filled not merely with types of
energy that were directed and did not guide themselves, but with
embodiments of energy which were clearly individualities; not alone
the poor microscopic attenuations of life that were waiting for a
world to settle on, but highly organised beings, leading a vigorous,
self-dependent life in the vast regions of infinitude. This much they
knew from the filmy impressions which their air-transcending lavolans
brought down from the heights of heaven they scaled. But whence those
inhabitants of the ether came they had not yet been able to tell; for
their presence affected no existing human sense, but only left on the
irelium films certain visible impressions. Whether they were refugees
from other stars, or everlasting occupants of interstellar space,
and whether amongst them there were any of the emancipate from human
trammels were questions they had not yet been able to answer. But they
hoped soon to have an instrument which would indicate the presence of
personality as apart from vital energy, and as apart from the thought
and thought-faculty. Then would they be able to tell in what state the
enfranchised energy fled from the body at death.
Amiralno knew not, cared not, whether he would retain consciousness
of his past, or would become but a part of the wandering energy of
space; what he did know was that he would be released from the burden
of his body and the growing weariness that dragged it down. Certain
he was that his flesh-emancipated energy would find a career at least
as noble as his past. And he believed that its development would not
end there, whatever became of it; whether it was to continue the unity
it had been conscious of for so many years, or to take another form
and individuality, was to him a matter of little concern. One thing
he knew, and that was the growing imperfection of the body as an
instrument of the energy that functioned it. It weighted to the ground
the soul, the spirit, the mind, or whatever name he might give to the
fiery stuff which kept it still aflame, and yet chafed to be free.
As long as it held this energy in leash, it would live and glow with
thought. Nor was this fiery stuff mere vitality, the mere principle
of life, though the two were yoked together. It was different in
quality from that which merely vegetated in the plant, and that which
did nothing but feed and evacuate in the mollusc. Nay, it differed in
inner character, not merely from the mind of the savage, but from that
of their own highly civilised exiles. Limanoran advance had purified
it of grosser desires and passions and made it a thing of ethereal
longings and ideals; even the body had been transformed into something
more like what the soul of their far past had been, subtle, buoyant,
sublimated. Still it dragged the spirit down, whenever the limits of
corporeal life became too apparent. Many a long generation of fiery
self-disciplined work upon their constitutions would it take even this
marvellous people to etherealise their bodies so far as to make them
fit companions of their souls.
Amiralno had not the vital energy to bear up against the conditions
that harassed their still hybrid system. He had no desire to stay and
see the slow evolution of a body that would pace with the soul through
infinity. Better to have release and a new and untrammelled career even
if the form he should take was unknown to him. It was the nature of all
energy to change, and the higher in the scale it rose, the nimbler it
became. But in order to rise it had to be yoked for a time with a lower
form, which it used as medium and leverage, leaving it as soon as it
had accomplished its due development. All things tended to rise above
themselves; and it was the greatest of disasters, the very reversal of
nature, if ever they should fall back, as they often did. What we call
death was but the unyoking of a higher energy from a lower, which it
had temporarily made its comrade and medium. It was no misfortune or
degradation, but a step higher in enfranchisement. The animate resisted
this step, because one member in the lifelong partnership refused to
descend into a grosser transformation again. In the human, the nobler
the thought-energy, the higher it strove to raise itself before the
inevitable divorce from its lower medium and yoke-fellow. But when the
time of severance approached, it mastered the reluctance of the lower,
and yearned to be set free. And little wonder that the lower resisted;
for back it had to fall in the cosmic order, and begin again its slow
progress upward from grade to grade; first into the clutches of myriads
of microscopic disintegrators of its tissues that would transform it
into food for plant-life, and then by weary stages upwards through
vegetable and animal tissue, perchance into the sustenance of thought
again.
This people, I soon found, had overcome the ancient abhorrence of
death. For they identified their life and personality with the
higher of their energies, and not with the lower and bodily forms.
They shrank, it is true, from all that would lead to the divorce of
the yoked energies of any animate being before its due time; not so
much because they thought this an evil for the victim as because the
perpetration would implant in the doer a germ of retrogression. To be
cruel, to shed blood, was the beginning of degradation of the soul;
it was one of the acts that allowed the lower to take command of the
higher in their system. But for a Limanoran himself to approach death
became, whenever he saw it to be inevitable, the keenest joy, in spite
of the farewells it entailed. He knew that thereafter, should he make
effort to live, he would only clog the wheels of progress, he would
only be a burden on the race instead of its helper. Amiralno never
showed the slightest sign of shrinking from the dissolution of his
life-bonds. He was sad to leave his lifelong mate, with whom he had
done so much for the race; but he knew that she would soon follow him;
it was a matter of but a few days or months; her thought-energy would
mingle and commune with his again, freed from the material trammels
that checked and dulled their intercourse in their terrene life;
upwards through the ether their souls would climb, ever becoming purer
and swifter in their flight.
But, as I went about my duties, my thoughts would break away to the
coming death-scene and sadness would cloud them. I remembered the last
farewells of my buried life, and most of all the watch over the fading
light in my mother’s eyes. Nothing could burn out of my memory the
bitterness of at last facing the inevitable. Slowly had I been led by
the physician to realise that nothing could save her, and still I hoped
against hope, checking my tears lest she should see them and conjecture
my alarm. Only when the lips became silent and pale did I at last admit
the thought that this was death. How could I stifle my grief longer?
Were we not all to each other, this mother, who had clung to me and
nursed me through sorrows and misfortunes, I her only child, who had
refused to leave her for the seductions of great place and fortune?
She was vanishing for ever from me, and nothing I could do would bring
her back. I was caught and crushed by the iron hand of fate and stood
in stony silence, paralysed by my grief and my impotence. There was
too much of the man and the stoic in my young blood to cry out; but
if only I could give up my own life to bring hers back! In one of her
final waking dreams she prattled and wept over me as if I were a child
again, saved once more from the clutching breakers. Raising herself
with a wild cry from her pillow, she held me in her arms with fierce
love; only for a moment; then the cords that bound her life brake;
the memory had torn her heart. There she lay, all that I cared for
on earth, rigid, uncaring. If but I could have died with her there!
Alas, the life in me was too puissant to yield, the nerves too tough
to break! The passion came on me to hurl myself into her grave as the
clods fell. It was but an insensate impulse. I made no cry or sign till
I got into the lonely chamber; and there God alone knows how I survived
my hurricane of grief and desolation. Nor could years ever root out the
sorrow. There in Limanora, with an abyss between me and my past, and
a noble new life around me, I worked and wept. The wound had opened
afresh. Was I never to commune with that loving loved spirit again?
There was a touch on my hand, and the magnetism of sympathy and
consolation flowed through my system. It was Thyriel. She had felt my
deep grief, though then at a great distance from me, and without noise
or speech she had come to my side. So absorbed had I been in my past
and my sorrow that I knew not her presence till her magnetic touch
awakened me from my dream. She had realised in a moment whither my
thoughts had gone, and reverenced the holy past. Then, when the mood
was growing despotic and paralysing the soul, she stepped into the
startled silence. I was myself again, and swept the unmanly tears away.
Yet I could not drive the sadness of farewell out of my system. Here
was this sage, who had so often counselled me and guided my faltering
footsteps, about to vanish for ever from the scene of his triumphs.
Oblivion would sweep his memory and his work into the abyss. We would
see him no more; no more hear his grave wise sayings, weighted with
the experience of centuries. All his gathered knowledge and skill
would lapse; and our civilisation would be the poorer. Up the steep of
progress it would have to climb, weaker for the absence of this strong
arm, this much-exercised and full brain and heart.
These were the thoughts at the root of my sadness, when I was startled
out of them by my companion’s voice. She had waited in reverential
silence as long as I lived my filial past over again; but, when I
returned to my starting-point, and began spending fruitless regrets
and pangs over that which neither demanded nor warranted them, her
thoughts broke out into loud protest. She could no longer endure
such futilities, such waste of tissue, and she met my wailing
reflections one by one. Amiralno was glad to leave his chrysalis stage
of existence; the energy that was in him would find a freer scope,
a nobler sphere, as soon as it had shed its earthly trammels. His
counsel and guidance would not be lost to progress; all that he was and
had would still be part of what he would become; not one thought or
faculty would be left behind; and all would then be spent not on the
progress of a little island of a small terrestrial archipelago or its
race, but on that of the universe, if not of the cosmos. All of him
that could still appeal to our lower senses would remain with us, and
would immortalise his memory, as far as immortality would go upon this
ephemeral orb. As for his sympathy and love, they were doubtless still
with us, or at least with what in us was best and nearest the cosmic.
The only thing to regret was that we could not personally feel his
presence in the universe. But even this was not for idle regrets. It
was mere palsy, if it did not stir us to still further mastery of our
conditions. Were we not in the way to feel and know the escaped spirits
of our dead? Had we not developed senses in us that were receivers of
impulses from the infinite around us, impulses that had been dormant
through the uncounted past? Had we not instruments that told us of
energies and beings unfelt even by our new-developed senses? And were
we to grope in our prison-house, and wail over what we had lost and
could not longer see? Were we to sit in the darkness, and weep and
wait, hoping for the light? Such feeble conclusions from the past, such
futile regrets over the dead, Limanoran progress could not endure.
There were new masteries for every generation. Before many years could
pass they would get into touch with the spirits and energies that
had fled; it might be by means of new instruments; it might be by
new senses; nothing but our own dulness broke the connection between
our energies and theirs; what we had still to win was consciousness,
if not mastery, of that finer type of matter which they now used as
medium for their energy. It was only the lifting of another of the
myriad veils that hung before our senses dulling their perceptions.
This was no more than what they had done a thousand times already. A
death was a stimulus to joy and new effort. It taught us the limits of
our knowledge and our power; and limits known were limits soon to be
overpassed.
Her bright activity and banter surprised me into laughter at my own
folly and obtuseness. Scarcely had I reached this consummation before I
knew that there was gladness in the air of the island. How could I have
failed to notice the jubilant strains that were fitfully wafted across
my hearing, unless through my dull absorption in my own feelings? I
felt thankful to Thyriel that I had been drawn out of my isolation,
which seemed to me now little less than disloyalty to the race that had
done so much for me.
I wondered what could be the occasion of all this exultation that I
was conscious of. Pæan after pæan rose from every part of the island,
and, as the moments passed, the many-sounding music seemed to gather
towards one centre. The radius lessened, and adjacent masses of melody
fused together. Nearer and nearer they came, ever more coalescing and
lessening in number; then the jubilance melted into grave and massive
harmony, and I recognised some of the world-music I had heard from the
cosmophone. The sense of universes creating and dissolving sprang into
my mind. It was the diapason of creation that was ringing through the
island. Loud, then low, the cosmic symphony swept the atmosphere like a
tempest. I knew that some far-reaching event or movement was occurring
amongst this people.
I turned to my comrade to confirm and define my conjectures, but
she was gone. Away on the horizon I could see the rapid beat of her
wings. I followed as swiftly as I could, and, as I rose in the air,
I saw company after company soaring like coveys of birds towards a
high isolated plateau that stretched from far up Lilaroma and beetled
cliff-like over the sea. I had often used it as a flight-platform
whence I could spring into the air, and had long known it by the name
of Doomalona. I had never thought over the meaning of the word, but
now it flashed upon me that it meant the hill of farewells. Thence
messengers who were embarking on difficult and important expeditions
set out. The elders of the people and the families of the couriers came
here to give them their love and benison, in order to make them feel,
as they journeyed, that the sympathy of their home went with them like
a fire from the hearth.
I had observed that in these farewells this simple-hearted people made
little outward sign of the depth of their emotions. Only the magnetic
look out of the eyes would have told a stranger what benignity lay
underneath. Nor was it merely to show how sympathetic they were that
they thus accompanied their foreign couriers to the outskirts of the
island. It was chiefly to give them each his contribution of magnetism,
to lessen their burden on their far journey, to make them feel how
much the spirit of the community went with them. Not one of them would
ever allow himself to indulge in so idle an evidence of emotion as
tears. There was in this people a vein of stoicism, I thought; they
seemed to repress all mere symbols of feeling. A European would have
called their farewells dull and emotionless, if not stony-hearted.
There was no kissing or embracing; there was not even the shaking of
hands or bowing of heads. Without physical contact their spirits could
work upon each other with a power that in other civilisations would
have been called witchcraft. Through their firlas, through their eyes,
rayed forth a keen soul-stirring magnetism. And each assisted the
other in preventing the approach of the old wasteful manifestations
of sorrow or despondency. Lamentation was a thing of the far, almost
prehistoric, past; a sob or sigh or even complaint they knew too well
from their physiological knowledge to be mere emotional extravagance,
a waste of the energy or the tissue, all of which was needed for the
strenuous endeavour towards a higher plane. So it was that they seemed
to me stoical in positions where the men and women I had known in my
youth would burst into weeping and wailing, or cries and gestures of
affection.
But in these scenes of farewell there was needed little energy of
repression; the real struggle had occurred many generations before
in their history. They had once had a most elaborate symbolism not
merely of feelings but of almost every human thought and spiritual
attitude. But when the great national repentance was leading to the
series of exilings that ultimately purified the race, they became
uneasy about this vast system of symbolism; it covered their whole
existence from birth to death, from toothache to the salvation of the
soul, and seemed to be nature her very self. They had long known it to
be the nesting-place of all hypocrisies and untruth. Under its shelter
mean things and falsity and even grossness and cruelty could flourish
fearless of harm. Everything could masquerade in the guise of anything
else it pleased. Of course there were painful revelations and scandals
at times; but they were soon hushed up. The system was too much the
interest of all who had power or reputation or prosperity, the best
of what was then life, to let it get into disrepute, or into risk of
revolution or reform. There were various professions which were deeply
involved in the retention of it, and they were recruited chiefly from
the highest social classes. The lawyers battened on the ambiguity of
the symbols, whether expressed in word or deed; the doctors would have
lost half their hysterical and hypochondriac patients if it had been
abolished; without it the life and pretensions of the military during
time of peace would have been a farce and a mockery; and the occupation
of the priests would have vanished altogether. Ceremony seemed the very
life-blood of an aristocratic state, and especially of its army and its
church. It kept the mere workers and plodders at a respectful distance,
it fenced off criticism, and supplied topics for the tongue of fame. To
abolish ceremony would have been to strike at the heart of all existing
institutions.
But, as the purgation proceeded, every occasion for it naturally
disappeared. Ceremonial ceased when the church lapsed and the priestly
profession went into exile. Ceremony vanished with the expulsion of
the militant elements and the professional politicians. The bureau
of fame collapsed with its accursed spawn, uncharitableness and evil
feeling, servility, adulation, and pretence. The pharisaism of the
whole system stood out in all its offensiveness, and the foulness and
injustice that were concealed by this constant masquerade in the robes
of greatness. It was meant to overawe the unthinking, to make ignorance
grovel at the feet of those in power. It had been useful in far past
times of savagery in cowing the beast in the human mind and keeping
it caged. But a form that has life and meaning and power in the ruder
stages of development becomes a curse, if continued into periods of
advanced civilisation. They now felt that their elaborate symbolism
had been an insult to their intelligence; for they had no brutality
in them to be muzzled. To keep up the pretence of greatness or virtue
or love or respect or truth, where there was none, was useful as long
as most of the community were ignorant, or superstitious, or fierce
and intolerant in disposition. But when the race had grown gentle and
humane and more and more progressive, it was not merely a farce to
retain so much deception and mummery in life, it was a gross outrage on
all that was just and noble and spiritual. Why should not the reverence
or affection of the human spirit be allowed to shine forth from the
countenance without such ridiculous trammels, such coarse humiliations?
Forms compelling a show of reverence or love where there is none,
are but the trappings of slaves, and soon ingrain the thoughts and
feelings of slaves on the one side, whilst bringing out and confirming
the nature of bullies and tyrants on the other. Every relic of a past
that had harboured and perpetuated such a system was painfully ejected
from their natures. They would have nothing in them that savoured of
such a death-in-life. All mere forms, all ceremonials and ceremonies
had to go. Ostentation and parade became abhorrent to them. Pageant and
spectacle, pomp and solemnity vanished from their lives. All formality
of manner or intercourse, even etiquette and salutation, was driven out
with contumely.
One of the most singular effects of this expulsion of mere symbolism
was the disappearance of ridicule and jest. This disappearance was
quite unexpected, and yet, when they came to reflect on the phenomenon,
they saw how natural it was. The obverse of the passion for applause
and influence is necessarily the desire to depreciate possible rivals,
to make them seem small, and even to trample them in the dust. And the
most successful and least apparently ill-natured method of fulfilling
this is to get them laughed at and so contemned. With the ignoble
itch for fame went the love of ridicule. The jesters, habitual as
well as professional, disappeared with the priests, the soldiers,
the lawyers, and the politicians. Not that the Limanorans abandoned
the use of humour; they still saw too clearly the incongruities of
existence, cosmic as well as human, to cease bringing them out in
startling flashes of vivid expression. They never indulged in that
boisterous laughter which is so often thought in the West the simplest
and most primitive guaranty of enjoyment; for that is as much a waste
of valuable tissue as uncontrollable grief. Their laughter was of that
low, gentle, tolerant, almost inward, kind, which brightens the nature
to its very heart; its only outer mark was perhaps a smile. Never
indeed was I amongst a people that looked at existence so cheerfully or
enjoyed its little ironies with so light-hearted a geniality. Buoyancy,
joyousness, was the most constant characteristic of their spirits.
Their intercourse with each other was ever sunny and pleasant-witted,
though never jocular. There was no malice or false sense of superiority
in their humour or laughter.
But jest they came to abhor as an indignity to the human spirit
which was striving to obliterate all traces of its ape-ancestry. The
jester implied or produced contempt for his topic, for his victim,
and generally for himself. He usually adopted mimicry as the easiest
method of bringing about his effect. And so he nursed the ape in him,
and pointed back to the vile type from which he had sprung. It was the
other kinship of man, his divine relationship, that the Limanorans
preferred to acknowledge and nurture. Never did they forget it in
their conduct. It moulded their ideals, it directed their purposes, it
created their instincts. And to use ridicule was to outrage it, to call
up the beast in them, the element, the ancestry that they did their
best to forget. Whenever the sense of mutual sympathy crept through the
community, the degradation of jest and ridicule, not for the victim
alone, but for the jester, became self-evident. They were felt to be
inhumane, if not inhuman, and died an easy death with all the vast
system of symbolism.
It was a surprise to me then to see so large an assemblage winging
their way to Doomalona. It seemed as if there was about to be a great
ceremonial. And I was not long in doubt as to the occasion. For with
music that rose and fell in marvellous rhythm like the waves of the
sea there came across the sky a splendid flight-car, more brilliant
in opalescent glow, more majestic in architecture, than anything I
had ever seen. Its wings flashed fire through the air and seemed to
weave the lightnings of heaven into a diaphanous web. It was a car of
victory; for around it bands of flying youth raised jubilant harmony,
and over its rear rose a canopy crowned with fire. As it floated nearer
I could see beneath this a figure resting upon an elevated couch.
The music grew more loudly triumphant as it hovered downwards to the
central plateau of the hill of farewells. And then I knew that this
was Amiralno on the couch; and all the people, except the few who were
needed for the essential services of the island, had assembled to bid
him farewell, as he sped in front of them into the land of shadows
whither no eye could penetrate.
I had without knowing it landed close to Thyriel, so absorbed had I
been in the wondrous spectacle. She had been busy with the chorus of
acclaim, her thoughts bent on this rare scene of farewell; and she had
not noticed my approach. Then a sudden silence, as Amiralno stepped
from the faleena, startled the great concourse out of their entranced
attitude; their thoughts were set free as by the touch of a magic wand.
It was at this that Thyriel became conscious of my presence. I knew in
a moment that she had recognised the criticism in my mind. Yet she did
not answer or explain the anomaly. She remained perfectly still.
A burst of jubilant music broke my reverie, as the sudden silence had
broken it before. It led me back to the symphony of the spheres to
which I had been accustomed to listen with rapt attention. I could
recognise the harmonious strain that meant the creation of a world.
I could almost see the whirling orb of fire, as it flew off from the
parent sun, and swept into its glowing round through heaven. Nothing
I had ever heard could match the rapturous melody which expressed the
approach of life to the surface of the new star. Quicker and quicker
grew the pace, and higher the pitch, as the living creation developed
and spread over the world. Then came a wild dithyramb, as man broke
from his bestial surroundings, and mastered his fellow-beasts by
cunning, and drew fire from heaven for his purposes. A nobler strain
followed, rhythmically measuring the steps by which he rose out of
himself and climbed the steep of heaven. Silver-toned harmonies told of
his masterpieces of art. Loud diapasons spoke out his marching armies
and fierce battles. Soft involved fugues and dulcet chants expressed
the struggles and conquests of thought.
I stood absorbed in the interpretation of this ravishing music, and
failed to observe the progress of events upon the lofty plateau.
Amiralno had taken up an erect position on what might have been called
an altar, had the scene been a religious one. His face was towards
heaven. He held his right hand as if waving back those whom he forbade
to follow him; for close to him stood the partner of his earthly
life, her face set as if she would depart. Around stood his lifelong
comrades and counsellors, yet at a lower level, so that every act of
the departing could be seen by the concourse. Near him were erected two
columns, on the higher of which and above his head I could distinguish
a psychometer, on the lower a biometer. Behind him had been built
into the rock an elaborate piece of machinery, which I recognised
as a manana or petrifier. Often had I seen it transfix almost in a
moment a beautiful plant, substituting irelium for its living tissues,
and making every leaf and flower of it translucent crystal. By means
of electric currents, it sent streams of the atomic constituents of
irelium along the sap-channels from rootlet to leaf-tip; it used the
living powers of the plant to turn it as it died into undecaying metal.
For hundreds of years the flower would live and be a thing of beauty,
even if no care was further spent on it; and, if cared for, it would
resist the finger of decay for thousands and thousands of years.
At last I was to see the transfiguration of a Limanoran. I had often
almost doubted the origin of those lifelike statues that stood in
Fialume, and death was so rare a thing among this long-lived people
that during my many years amongst them I had never had the opportunity
of satisfying the doubt. Curiosity overshadowed my other feelings and
made me forget the grief which would keep creeping into my heart at
this farewell scene in spite of the jubilant music. I strained every
nerve and sense to catch the features of the strange event. Thyriel, I
felt, was as eager as I to see all that would occur, and I could see
that the younger half of the concourse had their attention closely
riveted upon the scene.
The observer of the biometer raised his eyes to the indicator, which
had now begun to move in rapid oscillations. Amiralno lifted the
forefinger of his left hand as if giving a signal. He looked back a
moment with longing in his eyes at his life-partner. From the manana
there sprang out an upright groove towards the dying man, and in this
he was caught, as his vitality rose to its greatest effort before the
final collapse. The indicator of the sidralan shot upwards with great
violence, and then fell still. Almost at the same moment the guardian
who stood on the loftier column beside the psychometer raised himself
in agitation. The indicator had begun the same violent oscillations as
that of the biometer. There could be little doubt that the individual
energy or soul of the vanished Amiralno had passed near it in his
flight upwards.
Through the brief and impressive scene the note of creation rang in the
music that filled the air, and never that of dissolution. Then burst
forth the chorus of freedom, which was the national song, if anything
might be so called. It was the liberation of the energy of their friend
and comrade that they united to celebrate, his entrance on a new career
untrammelled by lower forms of inert energy. The music rose as if on
wings, higher, higher, ever more exhilarant. There were in it none of
the undertones, or deeper notes, or mystic subtleties that marked so
many of their spheral harmonies. It was a sound of pure joy, ethereal,
supernal, unalloyed by any terrene longings. Who could think of grief
or the bitterness of farewells, as long as it rang through the sky?
Courage, confidence to climb upwards was the only emotion that could
live with joy in its presence.
Suddenly the music broke away into a tempest of cosmic melody. Now
wailed forth the wild song of dissolution of worlds, again the clashing
of conflicting systems, followed by the surge of new life in orbs that
were to whirl through space and elevate the existence upon them for
thousands of thousands of ages. It was the music of mingled creation
and disintegration, of development and decay which we heard once more.
Our thoughts were recalled from the heights of heaven, whither the lost
personality of our guide and friend had fled. We were absorbed again
in the struggle of a mixed existence; we felt again the agonies of
the higher active energies bound to lower and merely latent energies.
My eyes came down to the scene of the last farewell. There stood the
almost living statue of our vanished brother, erect, eager as for
flight, as at the moment when his energy had gone forth. But now it had
the clear metallic translucence of the thousands I had seen in Fialume.
The transfiguration was complete.
But there was more on the plateau than the figure of what had been.
Beside it with rapt, pleading gaze on her face stood yet unmoved the
life-comrade of the vanished. The manana was again in position, the
observers again stood by the biometer and the psychometer. Another
scene of departure and transfiguration was to be enacted. The whole
consciousness of the community had granted without words the petition
of Amiralno’s spouse. Nothing seemed to be so fitting as that the two
should leave their trammelled life together, and within the space of a
few hundred beatings of the pulse partner had followed partner. The two
lives, joined for so many centuries, had come to a close together. Out
into infinite space had fled the two intertwined energies, only a few
heartbeats apart. Perhaps together they would find their new sphere,
their new platform for still higher flight through the diviner stages
of existence.
The Limanorans, when they had reached what they considered the limits
of their usefulness in corporeal life, gained an instinctive knowledge
of the moment when death was certain to come, or perhaps it was an
instinctive power of dying. It is a common thing to see amongst savage
or half-civilised tribes a man or woman in full health deliberately
lie down, turn the face away from friends and light, and prepare to
die. They seem to know when their destiny is coming upon them, and
nothing will persuade them to take measures for driving it off. Strong
though the currents of life may be flowing in the veins at the moment,
it is not long before they have completely ebbed, and left the body a
pulseless mass of inert matter. It was this instinct, whether prophetic
or suicidal, that the aged amongst this people seemed to resume when
they had weighed the vital powers in their systems against the duties
that new ages with their progress would bring, and found them wanting.
Destiny seemed to speak out to them, when they saw the transference of
the minus to the wrong side. Their minds were made up and it needed but
a few days or hours to set the imprisoned energy free. In these later
and more scientific ages there was some delay, and not uncommonly a
postponement of the departure. A careful examination of the system by
means of their new scientific instruments revealed some radical mistake
in the judgment of the elder as to himself, or the demands of a new age
of discovery made the need of more brains and hands imperative. The
result was the same in both cases; the reason was persuaded to give up
its resolve; life flowed on in the veins with even power again; all
the old duties were resumed; and the day of farewells was put off till
a more convenient season. But once they were convinced that they were
retarding progress instead of accelerating it, the end, they felt, was
within measurable distance; they straightway relinquished their grasp
of life; they withdrew purpose and power of will from all their vital
functions; and the moment of the final collapse was practically within
their own choice, as soon as they had the consciousness of the whole
community with them.
Here stood two solid memorials to the working of this prescient or
devitalising power. The beauty of expression on the two faces was very
striking. The attitudes were as natural and noble as life itself, that
of Amiralno bidding his partner farewell, hers full of loving petition
to follow. That the whole people approved was clear in the heartiness
with which they broke into the song of liberation. Everyone was glad
that the energies of these two, who had done their full duty by the
race, were free to enter other spheres, and follow other than the
terrene methods of advance. Reverently, but still with great rejoicing,
the family of the departed placed the two lifelike statues in the
car of victory, and guided it in triumphal flight to the valley of
memories. Then the people as reverently and joyously bent their way to
the duties they had left.
I stood in a day-dream of the strange but noble ways of life that this
people followed, and suddenly awakened to find myself alone on the hill
of farewells overlooking the ocean. Sorrow over the departures I had
witnessed welled back into my heart; I had not yet got rid of the old
attitude of Western civilisation towards death. With the sorrow mingled
still the old curiosity; questions sprang into my mind concerning the
significance of the ceremony I had seen; or was it a ceremony? I was
startled with the answer in the negative. It came from Thyriel, who,
knowing my doubts, had remained to solve them. Soon I knew the whole
meaning of the scene. It was not premeditated. There was nothing
deliberate about it except the deaths themselves. The dulness of my
own inner senses had prevented me from knowing the common impulse of
the race towards Doomalona. As soon as Amiralno had finally resolved
to die, the consciousness of his resolve spread over the island, and
stirred the people at their duties to common action. They knew that the
hill of farewells would be the scene of the departure, and in bands
singing the cosmic music of farewell they made their flight through the
air to give a last valediction to the voyager into the unknown and to
impart to him in his final effort on earth all the magnetic power they
could spare for him on his journey. Every act of what I had thought
was a ceremonial was the natural and spontaneous impulse of a people
united in spirit. Their music and the changes in it were due to no
leader or signal, but to the sympathetic inspiration of the moment.
Their creational chant was an assertion of their mood of belief that
this scene was one of advance, and not of retrogression, of development
and not of decay, that the act was as much an act of cosmic life as
the creation of a world. Certain portions of the system were about to
become manifestly inert, those which were called bodily and material,
but which were as truly forms of energy as the individual energy that
was being liberated. They were made unchanging, permanent, for a time,
and so were unable to progress or retrograde; they were to retain
their energy in latency for a period long or short; but at last they
too, when their immediate purpose of remembrance of the vanished was
served, would be set free to take other forms. Their creational music
was intended, if there was any intention in so spontaneous a thing,
to keep before their minds the progressive and evolutionary nature of
death, and to quell the old and barbarous attitude of grief which
might attempt to show itself when they were bidding the final farewell
to a comrade. It was meant to bring into prominence the joy of the
spirit freed from the bondage to lower forms of energy, and the delight
of all who remained in the progress of the cosmos, even though the
immediate act should imply a separation of a loved spirit from them.
It helped them to repress any sadness at the thought that they might
never recognise the energy of their lost comrade again as an individual
and personal thing. Enough for them that the sum of existence should be
enriched by the change which was occurring to him.
But was it not a grief to them that the parting was perhaps eternal, as
far as personal recognition went? The question rose spontaneously in
my mind; and I was answered almost before I had thought it. The doubt
was still unsolved whether as impersonal energy they developed into
something new at death and for ever ceased to bear marks and memories
of the phase of existence they had just left, or whether they sallied
forth from the bonds of a lower and inert energy into the freer scope
of infinity, an individual and complete unity. This doubt, they were
certain, would be solved some day by scientific experiment. Meantime
there were compensating advantages, whichever alternative was true.
If they continued the personality they had already developed on earth
without break in consciousness or memory, then would they recognise
their old comrades and partners in Limanoran life, and make further
progress through existence together.
If, on the other hand, there was a break in the continuity, and only as
an impersonal energy they passed forth into the interstellar spaces,
then would there be the obliteration of all the animal and barbarous
past which they abhorred, as well as of the immediate and Limanoran
past which they loved. Any being that has advanced much in its more
recent stages must naturally try to forget the lower stages through
which it has gone in a more distant past. They were by no means proud
of their relationship to their exiles or to the still older and wider
humanity existing outside of their archipelago. To remember it was to
encourage the lower and less-advancing man in them. To forget it was
one of the ethical duties which their progress demanded. It was only
as a horror, as a possible hell into which they might fall, if they
retrograded, that it was still brought before them.
A race or nation that remains long proud of its past must be but
imperceptibly progressive, if it is progressive at all. Its ethical
point of view is stationary, its morals and religion are stagnant.
The history of a people should rapidly come to seem ignoble to it, if
it does its duty to itself and its progress. What is the history of
other races but a record of wars, of wholesale slaughters, because of
the ambition of a man or a section of men? And as long as we are proud
of such a past we can never advance. To have an ancestry nobler than
ourselves is an undying disgrace, and to suggest such a thing to a man
should be considered the grossest insult. Where a people is developing
as it ought to develop in the brief period it has upon earth, oblivion
should be one of its foremost duties to all but its immediate past.
Man has forgotten his bestial ancestry so effectually that when he
comes across the manifest relics of the relationship in his system,
he is startled and wildly denies it. If he progressed as rapidly as
he ought to do, after there has been implanted in him the divine
principle of reason, then would he as surely cast into oblivion his
savage and semi-civilised ancestry. Out with the ape and all relics
and memories of it is the struggle of thinking men. To be done with
the crude undeveloped past is the duty of progressive men. The ideal
of to-day should be the commonplace of to-morrow, and the disgrace of
next week. It was useful to study the immediate past in order to get
perspective for the present, and to decide on the rate of progress for
the future. But it was becoming doubtful to this people whether they
should perpetuate in the valley of memories so much of the past after
it had faded into insignificance. They had come to think that to forget
was as necessary to the advance of man as to remember, and that a
universal rubbish-destructor for the now poverty-stricken achievements
of their far past would one day become essential. As it was they still
preserved records of them lest some historical question might grow to
be of importance to their future.
It was little wonder then that they had no great abhorrence for the
obliteration of the past from their energy at death. If the other
alternative were the true, and if, as so many religions teach, they
were to be herded with the criminal and besotted and undeveloped souls
that have passed from the earth, then might they bid farewell to
true progress beyond death. And what is the meaning of continuity of
existence and memory, unless it be the intercourse of terrene souls in
the life outside of life? To be rid of the flesh and its inert energies
is still to be enslaved to worse evils, the possibility of contact with
the foul beings that inhabit the human form, even the noblest and most
belauded human form. The Limanorans would gladly abandon the delight of
recognising and loving again the souls they knew and loved, if only to
be free from such a horror. Better almost annihilation than enslavement
to the retrogrades of earth in another sphere. Whence the terror of
discontinuity of memory, if the burden of the past were to be lifted
off us, and a new and more progressive career given to our energy?
The Limanorans believed that when unyoked from the inert forms which
had come from their animal past, their higher energy would enter on a
progress that would make all they now did seem almost stagnancy; and
the power of remembering any past would only mean shame at its having
been theirs.
It never gave them pause to think that what came after death was still
unknown. They had passed a happy bright life upon the earth, free
from the pangs and agonies as well as the fierce pleasures, the snaky
involvements as well as the passionate amours, of other civilisations.
But, when the effort to live had come to be so great as to overbalance
the compensations and utilities of their life, then was it no pang for
them to leave it; for they were scientifically sure that death would be
no break in their progressive existence; if anything, it was certain to
be an intensification of the progress which they loved most.
One of the last of their great series of exilings had been to cast out
of their midst a number of men and women who never did anything but
long for death, and advocated early suicide with religious fervour as
the true and only panacea for all ills. Their doctrines would have
done little harm to the community, if they had not been rooted in
practice, and often led to tragic results. For they came from languid,
low-strung temperaments, that felt disinclined to face the strain of
life or to help the advance of the race. The current of energy in
their ancestry had gradually run more and more feebly, till it was in
them at its lowest ebb. It was against their grain to work, and they
did their share in the tasks of the community with the most patent
reluctance. This alone would have been reason enough for their exile,
inasmuch as they gave evil example to the youth around. But they were
subtle in the use of the tongue too, and could with skilful jesuitry
show how indolence was the noblest life. And worse still, when they
were left to their own devices, they soon made a violent end to their
feeble lives, and gave a tragic and ghastly appearance to death. Out
into Thanasia or the isle of death they were one and all deported, with
enough goods and provisions to keep them and their descendants alive,
if only they were industrious, for thousands of years. But none of them
would work, or till the soil, or even cook their food; and one by one
they gave themselves up to death. The more ingenious invented a method
of leaving life which had a certain grace if not nobility. They erected
great funeral pyres and connected them by a slow fuse to a huge battery
that sent up its rod into the heavens. When a tempest threatened, they
laid themselves out on these, and when the lightning began to flash,
the electricity ran along the wires, lit their fagots, and in a few
moments swept them out of existence. It was not long before the isle
of death was again left to its silences, nothing but the ashes of its
former inhabitants upon the tops of numerous mounds being left to
tell that human life had once been there. No one from the rest of the
archipelago seemed to care for life upon it; none ever landed there.
The only things that marred the mortuary stillness of the isle were
the screaming seabirds, and the tempests which drove them thither.
It was better for the cosmos that these emasculate weaklings should
as soon as possible submit the relics of energy in them to other
conditions of being. But it was not well for Limanoran immaturity to
have the spectacle of self-slaughter before them, or the contagion
of their death-pyre romance and eloquence touch the spirit of youth.
Moreover they took some time to resolve on death; and, in the process
of forming their resolution, it was the natural habit of these tame
triflers with death to put all the energy they had into their tongues.
As long as they could talk heroics to anyone about the deed they
contemplated, they were certain not to accomplish it. And romantic
chatter is catching where youth is still unbridled by reason, and in
the young who had robuster wills, the results might be more prompt.
It was different with the death-scenes of men and women who had done
their duty by the race and by human progress, and had worked out the
best possible results from the yoking of higher and lower energies.
Theirs was a true liberation from exhausted lower forms. It was not
the languor of the loftier element in them, but the exhaustion of
the lower, that brought the nausea of their hybrid life. They could
feel, as they looked back, how far their higher or spiritual energy
had risen since their entrance into earthly existence. Every year had
seen them climb upwards; nearer and nearer had their inner energy come
towards touch with that divine medium which was in and yet above all
life and which in youth they were conscious of only in lofty moments
of inspiration. Such were the supreme ascensions of life, when they
were capable of the noblest actions and the noblest moral resolves.
These moments became more and more frequent as they grew older and more
progressive, till towards the close of life they were almost habitual.
Limanoran youth snatched at these supernal moments by the help of
imagination. Limanoran age dwelt habitually in these moral altitudes
that lay far above mere passion or instinct. It was the old amongst
them who were alone capable of great creative spiritual life. They
seemed to feel the tiding of the subtlest energy in the universe, and
gave the impulses to most spiritual advance.
Here and there in other civilisations was bred a nature that had
fitful consciousness of this divine medium, at times through great
creative imagination, but oftener through noble life. Such a nature is
spoken of as inspired; and so far is it true in that it has come into
communication with the most refined and most creative medium of the
universe, that through which what we call the divine seems to work;
but only through patient self-moulding and development has it reached
such a height of nobleness. Oftenest in past ages these natures have
found shelter in religion; for in the world ambition must make use of
the coarsest tools and the grossest energies to reach its aim; and the
growth of a loftier spirit is at once checked, and noble aspiration
stifled. Peace and the shadow of devotional thought were the only
conditions allowing such a nature any scope in a world based upon war
and guided in its search for the right by might alone.
It was different with Limanoran civilisation. There it was the rule,
and not the exception, to raise the spiritual energies to sympathy
with the diviner media of the cosmos, and every condition favoured the
pursuit. Life began with but a fitful consciousness of it, but it grew
more continuous and surer. The young could scarcely distinguish its
impulses from those of their own lower energies. But the old had seldom
any hesitation as to when they were inspired; they seemed to keep in
touch with all that is divine in the world. They needed no retreat,
no religious shelter, to nurse the magnetic sympathy with the divine.
Their affinity to it grew more and more the essence of their being,
without ever having to leave their daily routine of duties. It was this
that gave them their wisdom and character, and that made the young feel
them to be almost a type apart from the ordinarily human. They became
more distinct and striking in their personality as they grew older and
felt this affinity. It had come to be a common observation of daily
life that the nobler the aspirations and the closer the intercourse
with the ethical media of the cosmos, the stronger and more distinctive
was the character; and science was not far from the conclusion that on
this intercourse depended persistence of individuality, and that the
higher they reached in their sympathies with the more refined media of
the universe, the less need was there of change in their personality
at death, of making alliance with other lower energies when they shed
their inferior and earthly forms of energy.
There was, they felt, a noble isolation or apartness of spirit in their
old men and women which raised them above common humanity, and made the
human body seem an incongruous garment for their soul. They lived above
the demands of their corporeal energies rather than in them or by them.
In the young the two seemed blended together; it was difficult often
to distinguish in them the movements of the two types of energy. But
in the old, though the corporeal had been raised and etherealised, it
seemed to hang on the skirts of the spiritual and try to drag it down;
it bore its earthly origination more manifestly on it in comparison
with the nobler refinement of the spiritual. And the longer they lived,
the stronger the contrast became, till at last nature herself seemed
to demand their eternal divorce. Euthanasia at a certain stage in
the development of Limanoran life came to be not so much a privilege
as a holy duty. To liberate the higher energy from its alliance with
the lower, to die, was but the next and most natural stage in the
evolution of the life. Even the family, who would feel the bereavement
most in the loss of their wise help and guidance, acquiesced gladly,
feeling that the liberation must mean a nobler career for the released
spiritual energy. Thus it was that on Doomalona they used the music
of creation; they gave utterance to their feeling that death was not
dissolution but creation, that the retrogression of the body was an
advance for the higher energy, the truer self. The sense of decay or
degeneration was quite absent from their thoughts. It was a triumphal
farewell; for they were convinced that for the liberated it was the
noblest deed of all to die, the very crown of all their life.
CHAPTER IV
AN EPIDEMIC
THOUGHT by thought I ejected my old view of death from my mind. I
could not forget the scene of triumph which had been enacted on the
hill of farewells; and the chanting that rilled through it haunted
my imagination, bringing a sense of satisfaction, if not joy. I got
into the habit of winging my exercise-flights towards Doomalona. I was
there with Thyriel when dawn struck the world into gladness and music.
There were we together to see the flaming picture the set of sun drew
on Lilaroma. No platform on the island so caught the inspiration of
the coming or departing orb. None, I came to feel, was so fitted for
the hegira of earth-weary souls. No such launching-ground was there
for the voyage through infinity. As I frequented it in my leisure
moments, there grew into my system the sense that death was not so much
an end as a beginning, not a dissolution, but a birth and perhaps a
forgetting. More and more was the idea of it a nucleus of delight; and
the old melancholy and sorrow, making it a burden and a terror for the
mind, disappeared.
As a proselyte to the new feeling I was eager to talk of it and make
much of its surprises. Not with Thyriel and my proparents alone did
I discuss its varied aspects; I could listen by the hour to their
teachings. But it brought me into intercourse with many whom I had
scarcely seen before except in the course of my education as I wandered
through the various halls. I was astonished to find how often they
sought opportunity to talk to me. They drew me aside as if they had
important business with me, and confidentially imparted their views
of death which I had heard a hundred times from others, until I grew
weary of their chatter, for I wished to talk myself. But they would
not allow me to break in on their everlasting torrent of babble; even
Thyriel could not endure my interruptions. Though I never grew weary of
her talk, I could not restrain the desire to have my say, too. There
was no subject on which we could not soliloquise by the hour, but we
preferred to talk of death, the freshest and most joyous of topics.
And every other youth was just as eager to deliver his opinions to me
and to everybody else. However busy they might be with the task in
hand, off they would break from it for colloquy, which soon spun itself
into the soliloquy of the stronger lungs and the most enduring tongue.
Everyone seemed to comport himself as if his views were of the utmost
importance to the world. They all seemed bursting with the obvious;
out it must come or they would die. In every other corner I would find
two or three debating with faces all aglow, sometimes in the most
confidential whispers; approaching to listen, I would find their topic
trite and stale as last year’s gossip; the speaker was pressing home
on his hearers in a voice of portentous awe what no one would think of
disputing.
The elders interfered and tried by patient advice to stop this tempest
of loquacity. Hurrying from post to post they tried to keep the young
at their work, but it was an endless task. On would go the glib current
as soon as their attention was turned elsewhere. Matters began to
look serious, for the work of the community was being neglected. The
ordinary services of life were barely performed. Little or no progress
could be made in such a state of affairs. Indeed, it became manifest
that the main aim of the race, progress, would soon be forgotten, and
retrogression supervene. The faces of the elders became graver every
day; their advice was unheeded, their example unfollowed. Babble,
babble, babble, on rolled the fluent river of talk, as if the island
had been in the midst of Western civilisation. When I closed my eyes
so loud and empty sounded the magpie babel I could easily fancy myself
back again in my native land, and believe that I had dreamt my recent
years and wakened again in Christendom.
The ominous gravity of the elders dispelled the fancy. They looked
as if doomsday were near, and were often heard to say that something
must be done. For the talkativeness was bringing other vices in its
train,--vanity, flippancy, carelessness, and want of reason. The
torrent of eloquence was spreading wider every day and seemed to have
broken down the pales of their long centuries of civilisation. No one
was capable of stopping it either by precept or example.
At last in their despair the elders appealed to the medicants. Nothing
like the phenomenon had occurred within the memory of the oldest;
nothing in the records could be found that in the least resembled it
since the series of exilings had been completed. At the periodical
inspection, the medicants made a more minute investigation of the
systems of the youth and turned their attention especially to the left
side of the brain, which is the great originator and controller of
speech. In a few they could see evidences of inflammation and morbid
secretion in the brain-tissue of this region; in most cases nothing
out of the common revealed itself to their most recent lavolans. So
they took careful electrographs of the left side of the brain of most
of them, and when they put these under their strongest clirolans, it
became plain that all of them were in a diseased condition.
The elders were now convinced that they were on the right track
of investigation, and all the young people who had shown symptoms
of the passion for eloquence were isolated and brought hourly
under the inspection of the medicants. Moving electrographs of the
thought-processes in the diseased parts were taken daily by means of
modifications of the lavolan; and under still more powerful clirolans,
made for the purpose, these revealed a microbe of extraordinary
minuteness at work in the tissue. Having found the source of the
mischief, they set themselves to remove it. At first they put the
patient into profound sleep, and, trephining the skull, they cleansed
away under the clirolan all traces of the parasite and its débris. What
they removed they carefully preserved and analysed; then, having found
the chemical elements of the mischievous spawn and their débris, they
reproduced the mixture as a cure of the new and singular disease. For
a time this was administered as an internal medicine; but finding that
it injured other nerve-centres besides those that they intended to
affect, they resolved to apply it only locally, and soon learned how to
avoid the necessity of trephining the skull. They invented an electric
syringe and injector, which caused the mixture to penetrate through
the skull into the part of the brain affected, thus sterilising the
tissues that had to do with speech and making them unattractive as a
feeding-ground for the microbe of loquacity.
The plague soon vanished and the babel ceased. There was comparative
silence throughout the island. Only such words were spoken as were
essential and relevant to the business in hand. It was, indeed,
accepted as the surest mark of the sanity of a nature that it was never
betrayed into speech unless that which conveyed necessary information,
forceful reasoning, or fresh thought. The trite was avoided as
mephitic vapours or an exhausted atmosphere would be. The utterance
of truisms immediately led to a microscopic examination of the brain
of the speaker in expectation of finding disease there. The habit of
expression merely for its own sake and not for what it expressed, for
its beauty or wit or pungency, was considered a sure indication of a
diseased or morbid condition of the brain-tissue, and the sufferer was
at once isolated for treatment, lest he should spread the contagion.
For the whole phenomenon was scientifically investigated, and
precautions were carefully taken against a return of the plague. It
had been noticed that, after any age of exceptional progress, there
generally occurred some epidemic connected with the brain-tissues or
nerve-centres, sometimes appearing in excess of emotion, sometimes in
various forms of feebleness of thought. It was due, they found, to the
comparative exhaustion of the brain and nerves by exceptional strain
upon them. As long as the enthusiasm of the new ideas and rapid advance
inspired the people, they worked with a will, nor ever thought of
sparing any part of their system. The more mature amongst them knew
how to bridle this passion for work, and took the necessary precautions
against its evil effects; from experience they had found out that
they needed more sustenance and more sleep in such periods, and they
knew almost by instinct when to rest and how often, and what halls
of sustenance and medication they should frequent. The young had not
their instincts checked or confirmed by experience, and carried even
the best of movements and impulses to abuse. In spite of inspection and
superintendence they ignored the rules laid down for their guidance,
and took their inspiration to work as better than the wisdom of their
elders, knowing that progress was the ideal and law of their race, and
thinking that everything done for progress was right.
It was thus the young and immature who generally suffered from these
epidemics. The impulse of their enthusiasm carried them far beyond
the limits of fertility of their tissues, and the ebullience of their
delight, as they saw the work grow before their eyes, obscured from
them the gradual exhaustion of their powers. They grew oblivious to
everything but the end they had immediately in view, and thus became
short-sighted in their enthusiasm for progress; they sacrificed the
demands of the future for the sake of the present, and it was difficult
for even the elders at the medical inspection to get at the real state
of the case, such an appearance of new vigour did the impetuosity of
their passion and the tumult in their blood give to their systems.
Only when the wandering germs of emotional disease had fixed on the
exhausted tissue did the result become apparent.
The wide area and serious effects of the plague of verbosity awakened
the medical elders to the necessity of special precautions. A section
of them was organised as a medical police to guard against the invasion
of such pestilences, and to prevent such exhaustion of youthful tissues
as would invite the vagrant germs or fail to repel their attacks. A
science was specialised for this purpose,--the pathology of epidemic
emotions; and a special art grew up to correspond,--the hygiene and
therapeutics of emotional infection.
The elders who attended to this periodically made careful examination
of all the tissue of the immature that had to do with emotion or with
any crude spiritual moods inapt to the control of reason and will.
And it was astonishing how rapid was the growth of the new science
and art in their hands. Delicate instruments were invented responding
to the presence even in the air of deleterious germs that tended to
settle in the nerve-centres. Still finer instruments revealed the state
of the tissues underneath the skull. The symptoms of every disease
of the emotions were classified, and the means of checking each was
investigated scientifically. Before the next period of exceptional
florescence and harvest arrived, the hygiene of all the epidemics that
had been known to follow on ages of great exertion was completely
organised; and it was chiefly an art of prevention rather than of cure.
Precautions were taken by the new section of the medicants against the
abuse of the enthusiasm natural to such a period; they examined the
nerve-tissues of the immature almost daily, and pointed out everyone
that was getting overworked, and the remedies that should be adopted
for checking the evil. The result was that no abuse could proceed for
longer than a day, and no moral or emotional epidemic unless of the
mildest type could settle in the community.
What roused them to such a step as the foundation of a new science and
art was the seriousness with which they viewed the last plague, that
of loquacity. In the series of exilings no evil had given them such
trouble as that of oratory, and they were afraid lest it was about to
return in all its virulence. At first they feared this plague to be a
case of atavism; for those whom it attacked earliest were descendants
of ancestors, or closely related to families, that had been famous in
the far past for power of expression. But it soon spread to strains of
blood that had been marked by great reticence, if not taciturnity, and
ultimately it was completely impartial in its choice of victims. It was
manifest, however, that those who had ancestral oratory in the blood
were first open to the attacks of the plague and were most difficult to
cure; and the phenomenon sent alarm to the very heart of the community.
All the mature citizens and especially the elders looked graver than I
had ever seen them look, even at the prospect of Choktroo’s invasion;
they came nearer to the appearance of dejection than I had imagined
they could come.
The whole matter drove my thoughts to work. When I reflected on the
occasion, the attitude my mind had been accustomed to in my forgotten
life returned, and it seemed to me as if there had been a storm
over nothing. Talkativeness had been one of the commonest features
of the men and women I had known in Europe; and loquacity was as
little noticed as a red head or a pug nose. Indeed the chatterbox was
ranked among the innocents who did little harm except to their own
reputations. It became a complete puzzle to me, when I saw the horror
with which the Limanorans looked on oratory. Had it not been one of
the greatest of the arts of Christendom? Were not the great orators
of my own nation looked upon as little short of inspired, and their
statues placed in the noblest niche of our temple of fame? Did we not
rush by the thousand to hear any one of them, when he was about to
perform, and stand breathless by the hour, laying up for ourselves
fatigue and faintness and asphyxia, merely for the delight of hanging
on his lips? In life he roused hurricanes of enthusiasm; and when he
died thousands who had never known him personally followed him mourning
to the tomb, and on the most revered page of our literature was his
name written. What could be the meaning of so hearty a detestation of
so noble an art on the part of this progressive race?
As usual I had not long to wait for a solution. My bewilderment had
already stirred the curiosity of my proparents and Thyriel; and they
had been watching my thoughts for some time before I put my questions,
simple enough for my young comrade and betrothed to answer. She spent
a whole afternoon that was devoted to flight-exercise, in discussing
and solving my difficulties, and the struggle ended in strengthening my
admiration for this noble people.
Their abhorrence of the vice of oratory was not the growth of any
sudden revolution, or the unreasoning prejudice often originating
amongst a long-established nation in some great personal hatred or fear
now buried in oblivion. It was the result of ages of the most patient
scientific investigation. And it found its way into practice so slowly
that the steps up to the final one are scarcely noticeable on the pages
of their history. It had an inborn prejudice in favour of oratory to
combat, all the deeper that it could not explain itself or its origin.
The reputation of some of the ablest and most influential sections of
the community was based upon the art. The orators of the nation had
acquired a fame almost greater than that of the soldiers. They had been
its leaders and founders; they had developed and mastered its politics;
they had moulded the people at certain crises in their history into a
unity. Their art had been enrolled for ages amongst the noblest they
had. It was the only civilised force which could move great masses to
enthusiasm, or fuse their varied purposes and thoughts together to
form a single ideal and aim. It was the only means their statesmen
had had for accomplishing their schemes, the only stepping-stones by
which their lawyers and preachers and politicians could rise to fame.
It seemed for ages a hopeless task to unseat it from its place in
their civilisation, or eradicate the prejudice in its favour from the
people’s minds.
The wisest Limanorans had watched its evil influence through many ages;
although they had often themselves to make use of it for their purposes
of reform and although some of the best men had been successful in
its employment, yet they were certain that it sapped the finer sense
of truth. So easily could the orator persuade a crowd to accept all
he said as true and noble that he came to think there was little
difference between the true and the false, the noble and the ignoble;
his own aim was all that was of significance, and it was, however
selfish or mean, just as good as anybody else’s aim. He needed as
little to persuade himself of the justice of an evil cause, provided it
was his own, as to persuade an assembly. He had but to isolate certain
facts and phases, and what were antagonistic to them fell into shadow;
the unjust course began to appear just, and those who opposed it were
the enemies of justice and of the orator. It mattered not what side
he took, if only it stirred his interest; he could rouse thousands to
enthusiasm for it by touching their emotions and awakening the passions
that were connected with their own self-interest. This power of moving
great masses to whatever tune he pleased gave the orator a sense of
omnipotence; after a stirring speech he felt like a Jove who held in
his hand the destinies of the world. Happily for the welfare of the
state, the tongue-doughty was hopelessly incapable when he turned to
practice; he could not organise the crusade he had preached; everything
he did with his crowd of followers tumbled to pieces as soon as he
had to do anything further than speak; a few days or even hours of
cool action revealed the hollowness of his cause or his power; the
omnipotent Jove of yesterday appeared the skulking slave of to-day. The
only crusades that ever prospered under his influence were those which
aimed at destruction; for the work of destruction is brief and sharp;
it needs but the passion of the moment to accomplish it; and the love
of demolition is the most primitive of all savage desires, and the most
unbridled when let loose; its own action as it proceeds kindles into
a conflagration the fires that give it strength. Creation is a calm
and gradual process, the last conquest of the human mind, as it is the
highest function of the energy of the cosmos. The wrecking Omnipotence
of oratory is parted from this by the eternity of cosmic development;
it is kin with the clashing of worlds and systems that may come before
the birth of a universe; but it is as opposite in nature to the slow
building up of a world and the slow evolution of its life-energy as
hell is to heaven.
The barrenness of the art in all that would develop humanity struck
even the less mature minds of Limanora forcibly as soon as vast schemes
of reform like socialism began to be discussed. These schemes meant the
devastation or the dismantling of existing institutions and systems of
life. A plague of demagogues spread throughout the nation. Hitherto
orator had neutralised orator as in a debate. Now it was the idle and
indolent who grew most tongue-valiant. They, who had before been so
discredited, now found themselves on the way to fame. They, who had
before been able to gather only a few embeggared discontents at the
street-corners to listen, and perhaps to sniff at their eloquence,
could now stir masses to action. They had been despised even by their
out-at-elbows followers for their impotence in face of the problem of
making a bare living for themselves. Now they saw before them place and
power, fortune and fame, and all through this poor member of theirs
that had not been able to earn enough to lick. Beggarly grovellers,
none so poor as not to scorn them, they were now omnipotent, with all
the work of devastation before them that these new vast political
schemes implied. When the revolution was in full blaze, they were at
their best, they thought. But it was just at this point they found
their limit. The conflagration they had kindled their eloquence failed
to control or even guide; it swept past them through institutions
and sections of the community that they specially favoured; and
at last even they, many of them, fell themselves victims to its
undiscriminating ravage. And, when it had burned itself out, not one
of them but skulked away in fear, unable to face the task of building
up again. Then it was the man of action that stepped in, the silent,
masterful disciplinarian, moulded in war and accustomed to no other
means of solving human problems than war; he it was who reaped the
dragon’s-teeth harvest sown by tongue-bravery: he seized all the glory
and place and fortune that the mob-spaniels had thought within their
grasp. Some of their ancient folk-maxims embodied this experience: The
breath of the demagogue blows the warrior to his fortune; The mouth
of the orator is the banqueting-chamber of the soldier; Tempests of
eloquence and torrents of blood; Spout, vain tongue, you invite your
tyrant; Sow a country with the teeth of haranguers and they will come
up the swords of despots; Loquacity is eaten up by her son pugnacity.
In spite of the fear of the art indicated in such folklore, it
continued to flourish; for the upper classes, who delighted in war,
flattered themselves that they would ever be the best orators, and it
is the inevitable tendency of human nature to run to tongue. Not till
the age of unbridled freedom of speech did they begin to change their
opinions. Then were they easily outfaced and out-harangued by any
idler of the poverty-stricken districts. Even in their own assemblies
they were no match for the spouters from the slums; with all their
high-toned irony and scornful superiority, they were beaten into
silence at the public palavers; they were mere stammerers beside the
glib orators of the unwashed. This age of tongue-exploits was naturally
an age of single ideas, too. When their energy had gone into speech,
they had none left for thoughts. One-idea crusades became the order of
the day. Every tongue-quixote had his scheme wherewith he would sweep
all evils out of life. He was so enamoured of his own that he could not
bear to listen to any other. And therein lay safety.
But there came a time when the wordy bravos joined forces; one vast
socialistic scheme included all theirs. The institutions of the island
were to be wiped out, and something undefined that was to make men
equal and prosperous and happy was to be put in their place. Their
tongues now wagged in unison with wonderful velocity. Each was still
for his own special constructive scheme, but they were at one in their
scheme of demolition; they must have a clear space to build on, and
their ideal was the same, to make all equal and happy. The babel of
eloquence drowned the sounds of other industry. Another revolution was
almost within earshot.
Some of the wiser hearts of Limanora anticipated the danger, and saw
that it would be better to give the discontented all than to let
destruction ravage unmuzzled again. The whole of the property of the
island was estimated, land, houses, furniture, and luxuries; and
money equivalent to its full value was handed over to the malcontent
socialists to divide amongst themselves, provided they migrated to
another island. The offer was readily accepted; for it was clear that
nothing would then be left in Limanora worth plundering. The ships
landed the enraptured equalisers of human goods with their belongings
on the shore of their new Eden, and returned.
When the decks were cleared, and a census was taken of all that
remained, it was found that the island in purging out the socialists
was rid of the plague of orators. The price they paid for their
deliverance was small indeed, they felt. They soon recreated the wealth
they had surrendered. Everyone grew ashamed and afraid of anything
that approached to oratory. Eloquence became a word of evil omen. To
prate was now the greatest offence against the commonwealth. And for
generations there reigned comparative silence and complete peace over
the land.
In the series of purgations every remaining trace of tongue-ambition
was swept out. Much of the flattering kind was found to have migrated
with the lecherous; much of the haughty kind with the aristocratic
warriors; but most of it went with the liars. There remained a horror
of all prating and tongue-valiance, and this repressed every atavistic
tendency in that direction that appeared.
CHAPTER V
LITERATURE
ALL mere word-mongering was to this people an immoral thing, a
shameless waste of the tissue and energy that were needed by the
evolution of the race, an offence against its aim and ideal, its
progress upwards through the cosmic grades. They were persuaded that
it was a base substitution of the shows of life for the reality to
make an art of words which should absorb the imagination and the skill
of hundreds for their whole lifetime. They would have nothing to do
with attention to the appearance and ornamentation of a subject to the
neglect of its true spirit. Into the very heart and purpose of life
every worker must penetrate. His relation to the progress of the race
must be clearly shown. No work that took up any of the time or energy
of anyone of the community was to be useless or unfertile.
But this did not mean that language was allowed to take care of itself.
It was one of the most diligently tended blossoms of human capacity.
No word or phrase, whether spontaneous or invented, was allowed to
take root without the fiat of the mature community. Language was more
a public institution than even government or justice in a people whose
every member was able to be a law to himself. It was not only the
great channel of communication; it was the medium and garment of every
thought. If it became corrupt, how could the mind itself be saved from
its contagion? If it acquired a false tone, how could the falsity fail
to enter into the very spirit of the men and women? It was the guardian
of law and truth; it was the key to the human heart; it was the ether,
the medium, in which the human mind lived, moved, and had its being.
How could such a potent factor in human progress be left to the
caprices of accident, or of single persons, or even of a family?
It had more influence over the spirit than all their sciences put
together, for it was more universal in its use than any one of them;
and it subtly tinged all of them, whilst it was almost the breath of
the mind which dealt with them. It might be the life or the poison of
the whole race. He who was the sole guide of language would be the
master of Limanora, not in the shallow sense of a ruler, but in that of
the complete arbiter of its destinies. He would be the despot of the
Limanoran mind and might subtly throw it back centuries, if it pleased
him.
A people so experienced and wise as this would have ruined the whole
ideal of their existence if they had allowed the most public of the
functions of their civilisation to move at the caprice of individuals.
As soon as the purgation of the race had been completed it became
plain that their language must be purified too. Hundreds of words and
phrases and idioms had had soaked into them the infiltrations of the
evil minds which were now banished. Worse than all, language had been
the commonest and safest ambush of malignity and deceit; it had been a
perpetual trap for the innocent and unwary; it had been a labyrinth,
in which even the ablest and purest-minded often lost their way when
following the lead of some great and noble thought.
The first aim of the elders was to clear it of coarse or vulgar
suggestion. But, as they proceeded, they found their horizon widen;
and the intricacies, ambiguities, and pitfalls showed themselves the
most serious evils of all. It became absolutely necessary, if they
were to have a clear and unrefractive medium of expression, to give a
definite meaning to every word, and to have one word for every meaning
or shade of meaning. The task extended itself through years. But then
they knew that, until it was thoroughly done, their science would be
like shifting clouds, and their progress would be over quicksands. If
their language was treacherous, their civilisation was but a mirage. So
they toiled on sustained by the hope that they were making sure their
footsteps in the pursuit of truth.
When their work was done, they found it was only begun. For it took a
generation to make the new and purified language the natural medium
of the whole people, and by that time new sub-meanings had crept into
most of the common words, and new shadings had discoloured most of
the everyday phraseology. The new and less used words, and the purely
technical and scientific words stood where they were. Everything that
lived had shifted ground. Everything that was purely artificial and had
taken no root had remained as it began, had been in short petrified. It
was clear that with living language there must be perpetual vigilance
and superintendence. And the whole people had to become a council for
the preservation of its purity and translucence. Every citizen set a
watch upon his words, as he used them from day to day or as he heard
them used, and reported any drift in the sense and any new shade of
meaning; and after deliberation in council and careful consideration by
the elders a new form was moulded for each new signification. This form
had to pass the ordeal of universal use for some time, and if it stood
the test, it was finally accepted as part of the language.
Nor was it ever forgotten that the ear and the sense of harmony had
as much to do with the acceptance of a word as its fitness to express
an idea. Harsh sounds wasted valuable tissue as much as unmeaning
syllables. The verbal atrocities of Western science would have made the
Limanorans shudder. Dissonance was an offence against the spirit of
harmony which pervaded the cosmos; it was as easy to form a melodious
word or phrase as one that was grating or stridulous. Euphony, it
seemed to them, was one of the first essentials of a language; and it
was much pleasanter to be silent than to talk unmusically. There had
grown up an instinct in them that moulded their sentences into what
Europeans would have called poems. The barest statement of fact ran
with a liquid sweetness that drew the ear like a piece of beautiful
music. The strictest scientific discourse sounded to me as majestic and
melodious as some of the greatest passages in our Western poets. Their
most ordinary conversation had the liquid harmony of our finest lyrics
without the monotonous rhythm, the jingling rhyme, or the mincing
gait. It never struck them that there should be a special art of words
apart from that skill which all had by instinct whenever there was a
thought to express. If it were a perfectly new thought, a discovery
or invention that was still unnamed, then it was the duty of the
whole people to make or approve of a word which would exactly fit it.
Loose-fitting language soon meant loose, shambling thought, and it was
one of their foremost responsibilities as a race to see that no one of
them was driven into that. The appearance of a special literary art,
for which some were specially gifted, would have told them at once that
their language was disorganised and that the first great public need
was its reform.
For a time after my arrival in the island I was accustomed to speak
with admiration of the great literatures of Europe, one of the few
features of our Western civilisation which I felt it no shame to
mention. I would launch into glowing praises of the beauty and aptness
of the expression, the nobleness of the music, and the majesty and
harmony of each work. When I spoke of Homer and Æschylus, of Dante and
Milton, of Shakespeare and Goethe, I was unbounded in my admiration of
their lofty genius in the management of their material. Questioned as
to the character of their thoughts, I contended that there was no need
for these to be absolutely new; the greatest merit of such poets was
that they took the wisdom of their age or country, or the wisdom of
all ages and countries, and expressed it in a way that was inimitable.
Their material they had gathered from books or from the experience of
their time; and most of their great poems had been analysed by admiring
commentators into their original elements; the source from which
almost every idea had been taken could be pointed out. But this was
only to enhance the value of their work, to increase their greatness.
It was one of the commonest observations amongst literary men in the
West, when defending themselves against the charge of plagiarism, that
there was no such thing as absolute originality of idea or material;
the great merit in literature, the test of its lastingness, was the
originality or freshness of expression; the rest belonged to the age or
people in which it was produced, or to mankind of all ages and nations.
And young men and women were encouraged to learn foreign languages, and
especially the classical tongues, at all hazards, because translations
missed what was distinctive in the great authors; if they would enjoy
the true flavour of their originality, they must learn and study the
language of the great books for themselves.
I found my efforts to communicate my enthusiasm all in vain. I was met
by a look of pity in the eyes of my listeners, and soon came to know
the source and meaning of the emotion. They were sorry that I should
continue to admire that which was the symptom of a diseased condition,
and they commiserated the retrograde state of so many millions of the
inhabitants of the globe, who could spend some of the best moments
and feelings of their lives on what was merely superficial. They
sympathised with the effort to live in a world of thought, a spiritual
world, a nobler existence than that of eating and drinking; this was a
sign of a yearning for advance. But they grieved that it should take
such a mistaken direction, that their fellow-men in the West should
glory in what was an evidence of disease. Language was singularly
disordered, when only a few could be found throughout the ages with
the capacity to use it aptly and musically. Where was the wisdom that
guided the people, if it could let this greatest instrument and medium
of thought remain so chaotic and infirm that whosoever was skilled in
fit and melodious use of it was held to be inspired? Surely it was
the first care of the elders and governors to see that the universal
means of communication was at least unambiguous and explicit. The
highway of thought was left a jungle, primeval and inarticulate as the
intercourse of animals; and one who made a clear track through any part
of the labyrinth was lauded as divine. The literature of Europe was
evidently but the outcome of the incapacity of its people for proper
self-government. That only a few should be able to write or speak in so
clear and fitting a way was a disgrace to the civilisation. To honour
them so greatly as the people did revealed the depths of incapacity
into which all had fallen, and the corrupt state of the language.
I urged the marvellous power of suggestion that European words
had in the hands of the poets. They bore so many sub-meanings and
branches of meaning that the full depths of a poem or great prose
work were never sounded. Age after age of students could go on
studying it and still find in it new significance, new inspiration.
Commentary after commentary had been written on the _Iliad_, the
_Divine Comedy_, and Shakespeare’s plays, without exhausting
all the meaning they had in them. Vast libraries of interpretation
of them had accumulated, and yet every new age found opportunity for
additions to them. This was due to the subtle under-meanings that
touched innumerable keys in the soul, and played upon a vast variety
of emotions. An able writer could bring words together so aptly as
to affect different minds in different ways. A nebulous significance
gathered round his phrases and sentences, and out of this a hundred
scholars would make each his own discovery. Mystically lay the thoughts
in the depths of his words, ready for the profounder students to
fathom. And so every great poem inspired age after age in a thousand
different directions. Would this have been the case, if every word
had been made to serve but one purpose, if every phrase had been
unequivocal in meaning, and every sentence unshaded and perspicuous? It
was the play of meaning, the opalescent glimmer of light in language
that rendered European poetry so beautiful and undyingly suggestive.
It was the twilight of words that gave such majestic and shadowy forms
to the ideas and characters and scenes of the great poems of the past.
And what would the generations of scholars and teachers have done
without these hidden meanings to reveal in their literature, without
these intricacies to disentangle, without these dim allusions and
adumbrations of sense to make clear? Where would our youth have found
their intellectual training, if all our great literature had been
transparent and precise in meaning?
I thought I had made out a splendid case for our European tongues.
But a glance at the face of my querist served to scatter my vanity
to the winds. There was the same inscrutable look of pity in the
eyes. Everything I had pleaded, as I thought, so eloquently had only
deepened the Limanoran view of the shameful waste of talent which the
undefined and perpetually shifting sense of European words produced in
the West. There must the ablest minds of most generations wrestle all
their lives with the loose-jointed languages they had to employ, and
try to get their benediction and inspiration into form for the ages
to wrestle with. There must thousands of capable men and women waste
their best years in searching for recondite meanings in the works these
have produced. There must all the immature minds spend their youth on
the hated, barren task of trying to grasp the mirage of sense in the
books they learn. What progress would there not have been in Europe if
all this talent and energy and time had been saved for the real work
of life, if all the best thinkers she produced had been set to the
labour of true discovery? It was little wonder that her civilisation
was practically unprogressive, when so much of it was built on the
quicksands of her language. All the shades and suggestions of meaning
were but pitfalls wherein most of her men and women foundered on the
journey of life. It was with mere shadows and shows that her greatest
minds fought; they were not conquering the unknown and undiscovered
that their fellow-men might advance in their footsteps. The night
encircled them as deeply as before their preternatural efforts. How
could the blind lead the blind in a land covered with mists and full of
pitfalls?
I had still a few arrows in my quiver, I thought. No one could deny
the beauty of the literary art and the training it gave to the sense
of what was fair and noble. Where will one find anything so melodious
as our great poems? Where anything so harmonious as the prose of our
finest stylists? A beautiful lyric can hold a nation entranced. A fine
piece of prose can stir thousands to admiration. What could be more
ennobling than the effect of our greatest poems on the youth of our
nations, what more refining than the study of our great prose-writers?
Again I knew how far beside the mark I had shot. Style was but the
effort of a language to throw off its diseases, an acknowledgment
of the gross imperfections that burdened it and made it a clog on
the progress of thought. If a language were what it ought to be, a
precise means of intercourse between soul and soul, a true medium of
intellectual energy, then ought the race that uses it to be completely
unconscious of anything like style. We never know we breathe, or how we
breathe, till some stoppage makes breathing difficult; we never realise
we have a heart whose pulsations are essential to life, till it beats
irregularly, and alarms us with the prospect of disease in it. So it
is with speech, the instrument of communication among men, the ether
of thought; did it perform all its functions in a healthy and perfect
way, we should pay little or no attention to it; were words unambiguous
and precise, every man would speak and write in the best of all styles,
that natural and transpicuous method of expression which fixes the
whole mind of the listener or reader, not on the means of conveyance,
but on the energy that passes through it. Speech should be no more than
one of the unpremeditated, unguided functions of our system; as soon as
it calls for attention, it is deranged; as long as we are unconscious
of it, it is healthful and strong, acting in every way as it should,
without shadow or broken light, without indefiniteness of meaning or
mistaken suggestion.
Nor should a language even in its commonest thoroughfares be devoid
of music. How false must be the rendering of a thought, if for the
sake of melody he who is called a poet should have to reject all but
musical expressions in a language which has little music in it! How
artificial must be the labours of this professional word-monger, when
he must sit amongst the débris of his vocabulary, and pick and choose
with weary exertion the words that will fit into his poem! With most
of his language unsuited to his purpose, as being invented or moulded
by unmusical people, he is like a mosaic-worker who has to make his
work out of common stone, or out of fragments of pottery thrown into
the rubbish-heap of the ages. Most languages sound like the rasping of
a file over iron, or the shooting of débris over a precipice, or at
best the crackle and hiss of fireworks. And it is not surprising; for
their individual words are made out of anything that is ready to hand
by men who care nothing for the sound of them, whether it is harsh or
melodious. Now and again if a word or phrase becomes current out of the
range of literary products, it will get its harsh grating syllables
ground off, or rounded and polished in the torrent of common speech.
Thus are prepared the only elements of the language that are fit for
the fine mosaic-work of Western poets. They rescue these time-smoothed
pebbles from their gross or vulgar surroundings and place them in a
setting that will make them seem beautiful for a time.
It is only for a time; again the fair structure they have made falls
into ruin, and fragments are whirled into the eddies of everyday speech
and abandon their beauty of form and meaning for something their
original maker would never recognise. Then begins the old process; the
débris of forgotten works, rounded and smoothed in the current of time,
serves as the rubble to be concreted into the artistic works of a new
age. Alas for the artists who have such a task before them! Out of
the rubbish heap of the past they must mould what will please the new
times. And where is there room for true harmony in the result of such a
process? The materials depend for their form on the caprice of chance;
the artists depend for the form they give on the caprice of the age in
which they work, certain to be antiquated by the next new fashion. As
long as a literary product depends on its form for its lasting effect,
it must be comparatively ephemeral; for form is nothing if it does not
suit the fancy of the age to which it appeals, and the fancy of one age
conflicts with most others. Artificial means may seem to keep it alive,
an ecclesiastical or political movement, the aid of an extraneous art,
or the ambition of scholars and critics; but the life is only galvanic,
and not from the heart of the people. No true music can come out of
that which is essentially unmusical.
CHAPTER VI
INSPIRATION
I ABANDONED the effort to defend the literature of Christendom, and
came to the conclusion that a people that so scorned all word-mongering
could not have any literature. I was soon disabused of the idea. One
day, after my education had advanced into the final stage of its
earlier course, and my loyalty to the race had been tested in many
ways, my proparents bade me accompany them to the production of a new
book. After what I had heard in depreciation of literature such as
I had been accustomed to in Europe, I was somewhat startled at this
invitation. But they said nothing to explain the anomaly, although they
knew well the nature of the discussion I had had with Thyriel.
I had thought that, during my long residence in the island and in my
countless flights over it, I had come to know every public institution
existing on it. But I was mistaken again. In our course we chose a
direction that for a space was one I had several times taken. But
soon we bent out of the usual track up Lilaroma, and turning one of
its western spurs, made for a deep valley which was concealed from
view, except to voyagers towards the sunset. Here we found the air
filled with wings and airships streaming onwards. It was a beautiful
sight, this navy of the sky fleeting across the snows of Lilaroma, or
winnowing the depths of the azure. We had been on the adjoining coast
of the island, and had not to strike far upwards in order to reach our
destination. So the air-fleet moved far above us, most of it having to
round the heights of the gleaming mountain. Nothing could surpass the
grace with which they took their way through the heaven, now to this
point, now to that; and after a time I could hear the movement of their
wings, like the rustle of silken sails.
In gazing dreamily upwards, I had allowed myself to drop too near the
earth, and in order to reach the goal of our flight exactly I had
to take another long rise. Thereafter my gaze was bent earthwards
on a still more beautiful sight beneath me. A broad valley narrowed
coastwards to a deep gorge and mountainwards into a rift in the rocks.
The river which had sculptured this singular amphitheatre had been
deflected by an artificial channel into the centre of force, but was
allowed at times to sweep its old bed free of the débris of rocks and
vegetation. Up each side vibrated in the air tier upon tier of their
automatic rests, enough to accommodate a nation. All lay open to the
sky; yet there was a subdued light down in the hollow of the vale, that
soothed the eyes tired with the gleam of the blue and snow above; and
this twilight deepened into gloom towards the head and the exit of the
valley. Only in the afternoon, as the sun westered, it shot its level
rays through the chasm at the entrance, and mellowed the gloom even
of the ravine at the upper end with its golden light. And at sunset
the concentration of the many-coloured rays through the gorge had a
striking effect upon the whole amphiteatre; it was as if a theatrical
artist were lighting it up for some supernatural scene.
The afternoon sunlight indeed soon revealed to our eyes, as we settled
on the slopes, an immense stage that shot out of the ravine on the
mountain-side. It was, I could see, the natural theatre of the island,
cut out by other than human powers. And from side to side the gentlest
whisper would carry, yet without recoil; while the sound of the moving
stage, as it rolled forth, rose along the tiers and without break or
repercussion died away into the open sky above our heads. It must have
been here, I thought, that the architects of Limanoran buildings had
learned the acoustic secrets of nature. Never a sound was lessened or
confused in passing to the farthest corner of any of their vast halls.
Nor was it from any mechanical contrivance underneath the roof, but
simply from the shape of the enclosure. Nature had formed this valley
into a perfect theatre, in the highest tier of which not one listener
could miss the smallest sound. Yet by a singular contrivance, by means
of which a globe of irelium was kept over the stage, every sound was
tenfold magnified lest the merest whisper should escape, whilst every
hearer had at hand a margol, which would soften sounds that carried too
loudly to the ear. Another strange effect of this irelium shell was
that it magnified to the eye everything upon the stage a hundredfold;
it acted as a powerful microscope, so that each spectator was far
nearer to the inner structure of any object than mere human eye-power
could bring him.
We had not to wait long for the purpose of these preparations. There
entered upon the stage two figures that underneath the globe seemed
gigantic beside the bodies of Limanoran men and women. They had
Limanoran outlines, but transmuted into something more ethereal than
aught I had seen. There was a grace of form and a beauty of face
beyond any of those around me on the slope of the hill. And even to
my eyes, untrained and limited as they were in their powers, there
was a transparency in the tissue of their bodies which revealed the
movements of their organs; I saw their hearts pulsate, and the currents
of the blood move quicker or slower along their veins as they walked
or stood still. We could even watch the effect of their emotions in
their systems, and the excited or tranquil movement of thoughts in the
tissues of their brains. The impulses that travelled along their nerves
from brain to hand or foot, and the reports that kept journeying from
the various senses to the nerve-centres, seemed all to be made plain
to us; and seemed the work of a magician, so marvellous was it, so far
above mere human achievement.
But still greater marvels were to follow. These two beings or automata
or moving shadows of beings, or whatever they might be, enacted a
scene, the significance of which I comprehended only after many days’
thought. My immediate impressions and my subsequent conclusions and
knowledge have so amalgamated that it is difficult to separate the two
elements. These two beings were chosen friends, the complements of
each other, with tendencies and tastes and loves all in unison. Such
perfect fitting of nature to nature was not as yet to be found even
in Limanora. Thought sprang to thought, and emotion to emotion, and
yet there was a spontaneity and origination in both that made each a
separate fountain of life and action. How independent the characters
and powers, and yet how mutually adapted! The scene was meant to
picture a friendship that was a true and perfect marriage.
The two had grown year by year closer in harmony till at last the
mutual sympathy had culminated in a yearning to see an individuality
that would combine the best peculiarities of each and perpetuate the
combination. We could see the thought flame into a passion in the two
systems, and then we could hear the friends talk around the longing
till it grew definite, into a common project. We saw them gather the
materials needed for the formation of the body. With intricacies of
furnace and crucible and machinery they moulded these into the skeleton
of a man, flawless and strong in every part. They tried every bone
with numberless tests, till they found it all to their satisfaction.
Then they started on the cartilages that kept the bones in place or
moved them, giving permanence and life to each, as they made it, by
the magnetism they communicated to it. Tissue by tissue they built up
the internal organs, modelling them with loving care on those they
saw at play beneath their own eyes, and testing them to see that they
performed their functions perfectly. What delicate artistic energy they
spent upon the upper tissues of the body, upon the brain and ear and
eye! Each created and developed the quality loved and admired in the
other. There was nothing they omitted to make the new being complete
and happy in all his functions. On the minute nerves and tissues they
worked under powerful microscopes, and the minutiæ of every sense and
organ and function were examined and tested again and again with the
same magnifying power turned on them. The figure they made most noble
and symmetrical in proportions and outlines, the face they made as
beautiful as human face could look. The stuff in which they worked was
ethereal in its texture and constituents. It was difficult to discern
it with our senses even under the great magnifying globe. It seemed
to be of air or some product of the ether; for it flowed underneath
their guiding fingers almost invisible. And the result was a body more
transparent than their own. It was a marvel of refinement and strength
combined; they experimented on every limb and sense, every nerve and
muscle and tissue, and they corrected every defect in it before they
reached the final act.
At last the work was completed to their satisfaction, and they braced
themselves for the most exhausting task of all. How were they to
make of this image a living creature? I smiled as I thought of the
impossibility of what was evidently before them. Yet they seemed
perfectly calm in their preparation for the final endeavour. Only there
was a subdued volcanic energy in their systems that seemed to show
that they considered it a task almost superhuman. They encouraged each
other, and we could see them infuse new magnetism into their bodies by
means of machinery of great power. Their faces were filled with the
glow of a rapturous appeal to heaven. They were putting themselves
into connection with some being they adored invisible to us, some
impalpable fountain of life. They took the hands of the image they had
formed, and raised it; they placed it between them, so that it should
be in the path of all energy that passed from one to the other. They
laid their hands upon its head and nerve-centres, and at the same
time the pleading rapture on their faces rose almost to trance. Their
spirits seemed to go out from them. They looked like two in dream. A
faint flush came upon the cheeks of the image between them, and died
out. Again their souls seemed to return to full consciousness, and the
rapture grew upon their faces. Again the signal of life dawned on the
countenance of the image. Throb by throb they gave of their own souls
to his, meantime drawing from some fountain of life and spirit unseen
by us. Slowly the eyelids rose, and the lips moved. There was true
life in the image. The three walked as in trance, yet with the joy of
creation pulsing through them. The child of their imagination was like
both, yet independent, and more beautiful to look upon. Love broke
through the new being and theirs in wild pulsations. The three awoke
to a new life. And then the scene vanished, and I seemed to have but
dreamed.
Yet there was the deep valley with the sunset rays shooting through
it; and up the slopes rested thousands of flesh-and-blood Limanorans
beside me. A few thoughts, and I knew that it was no dream. Was it
magic? I could not believe that such a people would indulge in mere
trifling with life and the powers above life. My spirit of enquiry
stirred my guardians, and I soon knew from them that this was the first
publication of a new book, called Human Sculpture. The deep valley with
its apparatus was the theatre of futurition, where every imaginative
foresight was first put into a form that would appeal to the whole
people. It was called Loomiefa or the display of pioneering.
Their literature was all science, and that the science of the future.
Romancing about the past or the present seemed to this utilitarian
people waste of the noblest faculty of man, shameful squandering of
imaginative wealth on that which is naught. Mere retrospection for
its own sake without reference to subsequent advance was thought by
them the most pernicious of madnesses; they diagnosed it as a kind
of ethical blindness, that could neither see the right nor do it. The
state of peoples who looked at nothing but the past with admiration
was one of the lowest circles of their inferno; another was that of
nations that saw nothing good outside of themselves and their immediate
surroundings. In such unprogressive national or racial attitudes they
saw all the evils of inbreeding; the weaknesses and intellectual and
moral diseases of the past grew despotic in their power over the human
system, till they came to seem the only virtues; even what had been
once virtues grew inveterate and routine, or monstrous and overpowering
in their excess. The past served only as the soil for the better
growths of the future. And an exhausted soil became barren, if not
poisonous, for all but weeds, or growths that needed and deserved no
attention or cultivation.
To spend imagination on the past, therefore, was to them a crime
against the future. What was dead and needed invention to bring before
the mind again was better in its grave. A literature that turned back
to the past for its progress clogged the wheels of progress, unless it
belonged to a race that had fallen back centuries behind the natural
advance of the world. For a progressive nation to give of its best for
the resurrection of a dead past was to confess a strain of barbarism
in it, and to prophesy its own rapid decay. The imagination was the
faculty of the future; it had its eyes set in front, and not behind
like memory; it was meant to investigate the horizon before us, and to
interpret the lights and shadows thrown from below the rim of vision,
and not to look back, whether with regret or adoration, over the region
that humanity had beaten hard with its weary footing. The future is
infinite; the human past covers but a few centuries, and a narrow
track through them. It is not for want of scope that the faculty of
futurition is driven back on the ground already trodden; it is through
a grievous and incurable malady, the malady of preterpluperfection,
that twists the face round to the back of the neck, and rots or
petrifies the tissues of the brain and the heart. They counted it the
saddest of all spectacles on earth to see a race, that by its nature
could be rapidly progressive, waste its highest energies in retracing
again and again the footsteps of its own ancestry or of the ancestry
of some other race. Nothing would persuade them to permit any study of
the past that was not meant to be wholly relevant to the future. They
tended to be, I thought, almost negligent of the value of history and
historical study; for, as our Western commonplace goes, history repeats
itself; and however new and ameliorative an age may be, it may obtain
lessons, and still more warnings, from ages past.
Their literature was all of the future. There were two of the largest
families of the race devoted to it, and their numbers were ever being
recruited by adoption into them of scions of others, who revealed
exceptional imaginative faculty. They had the generalised training
of the island; but their particular training was more completely
specialised than that of any other family. Nothing was omitted that
would tend to make them of imagination all compact, or to give them
such ease in their command of language as would bring them the exact
word without effort. Next to these points in their education stood
tutelage in all that pertained to scenic art and music. For they had to
give their ideas a staging that would at once appeal to the imagination
of the whole people. Loomiefa was in their province. And the literary
form into which they were to put their communications as to the
future had to be as perfect as it could be in their language, exactly
expressing all they had to convey, and at the same time appealing
to the ear by its melody and harmony. As far as histrionic art was
allowable in the island they were the artists, whilst in the linguistic
conventions of the people they were the leaders and suggesters in the
making of words, and in the choice of words made. They had, I could
see, the finest heads in the community; the brow was broad, full, and
shapely; the eyes were large and yet deeply set under the brows; the
base of the skull was of great width; every section of the brain that
had to do with imaginative and poetic power was well developed. Yet
their faces and features showed no difference from the common Limanoran
type; they had no more beauty or regularity of outline. It was clear
that all children of a certain shape of skull and development of brain
were selected for training and adoption by these two families, whenever
they needed recruits.
From the first the youth of these two families were educated in
the sciences of the day in order that they might know what gaps in
knowledge had to be filled, and what laws should guide and limit their
imaginative prospecting. For the literature they produce is science
in embryo. Science lays the foundations of literature, and literature
prepares the way for science. These families by their imaginative
productions based on all that is already known pioneer the scientific
investigators into the new regions of the future. They keep in touch
with the leaders of science, and act as allies to them, finding out the
track of what these are trying to discover or invent, and suggesting
methods of supplying their wants or reaching their aims. They provide
working hypotheses for the scientists to apply and test and they map
out roads for the whole race into the darkness of the unknown or the
twilight of the half-conjectured.
Thus their literature is fiction; for tentative fiction, they hold,
is the only unstagnant truth. The productions of the pioneering
families have all to be submitted to the national test. What the race
disapproves of is promptly cancelled and forgotten. What meets with the
approval of the elders or of the leaders of any one of the sciences
is handed over to them for experimentation, even though it should not
attract the rest of the people. What strikes the fancy of the nation as
a whole is adopted as the map and guide of the future; it is the sacred
book of the time, and the citizens study it daily for the purpose of
reaching the goal it sets before their life.
But every new age antiquates one or more of these sacred books. For
the region they have mapped out in the future is reached and travelled
over, the advance they anticipate is made, the ideal they paint is
realised and rapidly becoming commonplace. It puzzled me for a time
to guess what they did with their superseded books, knowing as I did
how superfluous they counted all researches into the past and all
imaginative pictures of the present. My question as usual was not long
unanswered. I was shown the library of antiquated fiction in the valley
of memories. It was used in the very earliest stages of education.
The children read the books or heard them in order to see, when they
reached years of maturity, what the race had come from and how much
it might yet advance, to gather enthusiasm from the spectacle of the
progress made, and to learn lessons for their own future. Beyond
childhood and early youth every minute was counted lost that was not
spent on the future and its possibilities; and for a man or woman of
mature years all forms of antiquarianism were counted idleness.
They never permitted themselves to lay too much stress on any sacred
book, or to adore it too passionately, however much they might be
guided by it for a time; for they knew from experience that it would
soon be worked into the nature of the race and the system of the
individual, and another would take its place. The sacred book of to-day
was bound to be transcended to-morrow. The foresights and ideals of
this year would be the truisms of next. The real desecration, they
thought, was to rest too many ages over a sacred book, its precepts
unworked into the life, its pictures and ideals unrealised; to adore
its words and deny its spirit by failing to advance beyond its point
of view. A book too long held sacred is a charge of stagnancy and
barbarism against a race and an insult to its intelligence. It proves
that the civilisation has become stereotyped, or worse, retrospective;
to eat, to sleep, to fall prostrate before a dead ideal, to propagate
and die, sum up the ultimate duties of existence at its highest level.
Every book was sacred to the Limanorans which threw light upon the
track ahead into the darkness; and so long as it still gave light
where light was needed, it remained sacred. Whenever its light became
the common daylight around the race, and especially if they had to
look backwards in order to see its waymarks, then was it promptly
committed to the valley of memories. Not a moment was wasted on its
precepts after they had become the laws of everyday existence. They
had known from their own history what a terrible engine of oppression
a book might be when once it had become antiquated without losing the
adoration of the people; its prophecies, which had become mere tales
of the past, had to be projected again into the future by mystic
interpretation; its precepts, embodying the spirit of a generation long
dead, had to be galvanised into life by casuistry; and innumerable
methods had to be extorted from its overstrained text to prevent the
human mind moving on past its own stage of morality and civilisation.
How many ages in their own history did their ancestors live with their
dead! Into the warmest feelings of their hearts had the grave-clothes
of the past intertwined; and what torture to love and the noblest
feelings, what bloodshed and horrors it cost them to be able to stand
off from their dead authority, and look at it with unprejudiced mind!
It had become a part of their best selves, and it seemed like suicide
to cast it from them, and relegate it to its true home, the graveyard
of the past.
That long experience was burned into their natures; and to lay too much
stress on any new book or idea gave them an instinctive pang. They
could not bear to linger over it, once the light had died out of it
and its leading had become a highway-mark for the passerby. To utter
or admire the obvious or commonplace was counted one of the gravest
offences against the commonweal; it awakened a look of pity in the eyes
of the listener as for one who was smitten with an incurable disease.
A repetition of the offence would lead to drastic measures with the
victim. He was haled before the medicists, and his system was minutely
examined for the source of the malady, and for weeks was he kept under
medical supervision; no labour or watching or remedial pain was spared
till the source of offending was scourged out of the constitution of
the sufferer.
As a rule it was found on investigation that the infection had come
from some book, whose spirit and precepts had become incorporated
in the past of the race and could give no more vitality to it. It
was good enough for children and youth, who were passing through the
primitive stages of development; to them it was fresh and new for a
time, and was even the source of life and vigour. But once out of
the valley of memories the men and women who could read it with any
pleasure were considered unhealthy and atavistic, and were sent to
hospital for treatment. The symptoms of the malady of the commonplace
were well known and most patent,--loquacity, fondness for confidential
communications and mysterious suggestions under solemn conditionings,
or even oaths of silence, bustling idleness, feeble smiles of impotent
superiority, jocular dogmatism, assumption of wisdom, and excessive
vanity. If the disease had not been so infectious and stealthy in its
spread, it would never have been treated so seriously and so promptly;
for it was seldom malignant, in its earlier appearances at least;
only when it became morbid, and took the shape of injured feeling at
unrecognised genius, resulting at times in jealousy and slander, or
conspiracy and rebellion, or when it grew masterful and acquired a
sense of its own infallibility and omnipotence, resulting generally in
petty spite and persecution, was there any deadly virus in it. It was
its epidemic character that made it most formidable, and necessitated
a system of moral quarantine. Special precautions were taken in
permitting the use of the sacred books of the past, and of antiquated
or superseded ideas. They were only useful for teaching the young
reverence for great thoughts and great thinkers, and for leading the
mature to estimate their own achievements modestly, when they saw the
rapid antiquation of even the most striking books.
One evil that arose from the study of past literature, the
over-valuation of literary work, they tried to obviate. They placed
noble deeds on the same footing with noble words and thoughts, and saw
that they were as carefully recorded and described. It was the duty of
the young to report, and give permanent form to, anything that was done
greatly. With their enthusiasm made more glowing by their ignorance
and inexperience, they acted as the historiographers of the race. The
youth of a family went with the elders whenever any difficulty offered
itself, and with their recording instruments, inasans and linasans and
idrosans, they took flying pictures, electrographs, and reports of the
scene for deposit in the valley of memories. If any emergency arose
and was nobly met when the youthful remembrancers were not present,
they wrote the annals of it none the less, and reproduced its scenes in
moving representations after interviewing all who witnessed the deed.
There was as much inspiration, this people held, in a great action as
in a great book, provided it illumined the darkness of the road ahead
of them.
For to them the true test of greatness and inspiration was the power
of fore-illumination or of stimulus to progress. Whatsoever flashed
light over the unknown in front must have come from a higher point of
view than their own immediate surroundings. Word or deed, it was to
them all the same, if it had this divine characteristic; the one was as
worthy of chronicling and preserving as the other. But they ceased to
look upon it as a source of stimulus to action as soon as it failed
to throw light upon their future, or to hold up an ideal that they had
not yet attained. Inspiration, like all other things and beings in the
universe, was progressive. No idea or deed, no word or book could be
permanently inspired. And the quicker a race progressed, the sooner it
sterilised its sacred thoughts and deeds. All noble human advance was a
process of deinspiration; a step upwards makes the climber capable of
looking down upon the previous point of vision, and of looking up for
a still higher, and to gaze downwards is to encourage retrogression.
Whosoever or whatsoever caught the first gleam of a peak above them was
to them inspired. But it was the duty to reach that peak in their march
upwards as soon as possible; and once it was reached, where was the
inspiration? It was itself far below with the age that supplied it.
Some new deed or thought or book was certain to take the place of that
which had for a time been considered sacred. And, if that did not come,
then woe to the race! Progress must stop and darkness must close in on
their purblind leaders, who, in order to retain their dominance, must
elevate the past, immediate or distant, into a divinity, and its best
book into an oracle. After a time so obscured do the pages of this
book become with cobwebs of interpretation that at last they must spin
new cobwebs out of their intestines. The dread of light from without
becomes a horror. If a new teacher or prophet should come, down with
him into the dust; his teachings are false, for they agree not with
the devotion-cobwebbed book. If a reformer sees light above and ahead,
he is banned as a messenger of hell; and what he sees is nothing but a
diabolic marshlight. All through the race spread the awful diseases of
spiritual inbreeding, inability to distinguish the true from the false,
love of delusion, unwholesome and insane pursuits and ends, and the
madness of cruelty and intolerance. Nothing but fierce revolution could
save a race from such a plight. And the germs of revolution must come
from without themselves and without the world.
CHAPTER VII
PIONEERING
IMAGINATION, corrected by racial instinct in the assemblies of all,
was the seeker for foregleams of what was to be. And a people that had
organised its civilisation into a disciplined advance was not likely to
leave its scouts and vanguard unorganised. Its destiny was largely in
the hands of those who went before it into the night, or who ascended
the heights above it, and told of the region to be traversed next, and
the best routes through it. There was no service that needed so much
the best powers of the race and its best organisation.
Into the pioneering families were gathered their most powerful
imaginations. For imagination is the only clairvoyant of the faculties;
it can see what lies below the horizon of knowledge; it can forecast
the world as it might be and as it is to be; and it can draw the human
mind onwards by the splendours of this forecast. This people had early
realised the sibylline character of the faculty, and the great part it
might play in their devotion to progress. And they resolved to save
it from all waste. They refused to have it become the mere slave of
luxury or of popular amusement, such as they saw it was in most other
civilised nations. Even where it conjured up the past in magnificent
literary pictures, what else was it than the pander to tastes and
habits that were overworn, the encomiast of deeds that had better be
buried in oblivion? It frequented the palaces of kings and licked the
dust off their feet, or it played the buffoon to the indolent, sensuous
crowd. At rare times it isolated itself, and, heedless of the babbling
world that offered it so many prizes, it wrestled with the powers of
darkness and ignorance. But what could a poor recluse do against the
infinite night? If it were to help the forward march of humanity, it
must be disciplined and organised to a definite aim.
All other peoples have left imagination to struggle for itself. This
people recognised it as the most unschooled and shiftless of the human
faculties, whilst they felt it to be the most divine and fullest of
promise. They determined that amongst them it should lose its reeling
gait and wandering, aimless eye, and become the pioneer of their march
onwards; instead of fixing its eye on the past or on the favours of the
great, it should skirmish before the main army into the region of the
unknown; it should report on the difficulties and the enemies to be
met, and map out the world as it was to be. What would be thought of
the shipmaster who let the keenest-eyed of his crew lounge round the
ship looking into the pockets of his comrades and making them laugh,
or lean over the stern watching the track left behind, if darkness and
cloud and a broken sea ever lay on the horizon ahead? What else were
the nations doing with their lookout faculty, imagination, but allowing
it to waste itself on providing amusement for the luxurious, or on
figuring the problem of the past?
It was one of the first duties of the Limanoran elders, after the
great series of purgations of the race, to organise and develop the
imagination they had in their midst. They had observed that there were
two great types and uses of the faculty; one was short of vision,
and could see with great distinctness the regions that were hidden
in twilight immediately in front of them; the other was far-sighted,
and could descry the features of wide regions that lay in darkness
under the horizon. There happened to be amongst them two families
distinguished from all others by their great imaginativeness, and from
each other by pre-eminence in one of these two kinds of imagination.
The task therefore was easy. It only needed care in disciplining
the members of these to the main purpose of the race, in developing
the faculty of each, and in recruiting their numbers from the most
imaginative children of other families. The Loomiamo or pioneers of
the immediate were recruited chiefly from the scientific and technical
families; for their duties lay most of all in supplying hypotheses for
experimentation, in suggesting methods of solving difficult problems,
and in tracing out paths that invention should take; invention in fact
was what they were oftenest engaged in. But there was a subordinate
function, that was, however, of equal importance for the forward
movements of the race; it was to take the far-reaching conceptions
of the other imaginative family, and show how they could be attained
by the civilisation and means they already had. They accepted the
scientific ideas and apparatus of the time as they were and out of them
and their development they engineered a highway through the intervening
twilight to the ideal that the Fraloomiamo or pioneers of the distant
had pictured and set up ahead of the race.
I had not known of this division of pioneering work when I flew back
from the marvellous spectacle in the valley of futuritions. As I
thought over it, I became more and more sceptical of the realisability
of the scene. It had the inconsecution and absurdity of a dream. I said
to Thyriel, where was the possibility of ever substituting artificial
for natural propagation of the race? It was completely out of the line
of evolution, and could lead to nothing but what was unnatural and
evil. They could modify nature to an indefinite extent, I knew; but
what was the use of attempting to supersede nature? And suppose it were
possible to supersede it in this respect, where would be the advantage?
They could already modify and guide nature so as to produce the type
of children they desired for the progress of the race; what more was
needed?
Thyriel gave no answer, partly because she thought that the elders
were more capable of answering, partly because she knew that the
publication of the book on human sculpture was by no means finished.
Next day my sense of community with the immediate yearning and aim of
the Limanorans drew me unconsciously to Loomiefa again; and on my way
the streaming wings through the sky showed me that my impulse was not
purposeless; there was a general movement towards the same goal. Soon
the whole amphitheatre was filled from height to hollow with spectators
enriched in colour by the rays of the afternoon sun.
I had scarcely settled in my rest and surveyed the scene when I knew
that all eyes were fixed on the hollow of the valley. The platform
had again run out with the globular magnifier covering it. But the
succession of scenes upon it was almost too swift for my observation,
untrained as I still was in my senses, and a certain confusion still
rests over the spectacle in my memory. Many of the links in the chain
were so amazing as to bewilder me, and yet the general purpose and
effect of the scene as a whole rise above the confusion in my mind.
I knew before it was done that it was a complete answer to my questions
and scepticism. The Loomiamo were enacting the various stages in the
evolution of the race which would connect its actual state with the
possibility of artificial human propagation. One scene enacted what
they had long been able to do, the production of animal tissue of all
kinds; even the most subtle nerve was spun, and under their microscopes
they could examine it like a rope. Another showed animal creation
at work on the combination of tissue into one of the lower types of
animal. One after another in a long series we saw the creative power
rise in its ambitions and efforts through the animal creation up to the
human. But the most striking scene was to come. It was the application
of the newly discovered biometer to the search for the principle of
life. We saw the creative artists investigate with the instrument plant
after plant and animal after animal, and fail in their attempts to
isolate it or produce it. They modified the biometer in innumerable
ways. Then we saw them fly though the atmosphere, and set the new
life-measuring apparatus afloat in space. After repeated attempts, ever
pulling the faleena back empty, they at last showed by the joy on their
faces that they had attained the goal of their quest. In the delicate
test-tubes of their new biometers was found something that kept
agitating their indicators. Soon they had it in their laboratories,
and were experimenting with it. Again and again they gathered it from
the vacuum above the atmosphere. At last by means of it they were
enabled to find it in the plants around them, and in the animals of the
surrounding islands. A series of scenes as amazing showed how they came
at the discovery of the principle of soul by means of the psychometer.
Step by step (and each step, I came afterwards to feel, represented a
Limanoran generation) they traced it back to its secret. Most of all
were they aided in their researches by investigations outside of the
atmosphere; there they captured in the tubes of their psychometers the
form of energy that constituted human soul. And in their laboratories
they were able to study it at leisure.
For long I felt that these pictures of the future were unlikely to be
realised. Yet the steps in the process were so gradual, and the scene
representing each so vivid that I came in after years to accept it as
well within the range of Limanoran possibilities; for I realised at
last how far into the future imagination could pioneer, and what a vast
number of ages one of these predictive dramas would cover. My sense of
time was crude and weak during my earlier years in the island, and it
was difficult for me to appreciate the passage of cosmic periods, such
as were often implied in the scenes representing the publication of a
book by the Fraloomiamo.
I afterwards listened to the book of Human Sculpture itself, as it
uttered itself from a loud-sounding linasan or reproducer of speech.
This automaton-reader had the long strip of irelium constituting a
Limanoran book fed into it off the cylinder on which the book was
kept rolled. It gave the sound and every intonation of the author’s
voice, so that there was no difficulty in following his every thought
as it found expression. I never came to be able to read those books
on the irelium rolls themselves under a microscope, as the Limanorans
could, and preferred to use my hearing instead of my eyes. There was no
possibility of ambiguity if I listened to the words as they came hot
from the thinker’s own lips.
A new and more esoteric kind of book tended to supersede this at a
later period. It consisted of an electrogram of the author’s thoughts,
as they developed and shaped themselves, flashed on to long moving
strips of labramor or electricity-sponge by his active magnetic sense;
this placed in an idrosan or electrograph affected the firla of the
receiver so that he followed the whole process of thinking. Such a
permanent record of creative thought in its process of creating was of
measureless value to such a people as this, for every economy of time
and intelligence meant a quickening of their march into the nobler
future. But for many ages the effort of electrographing the thought was
too much except for the most powerful of mature creative minds; and
that of receiving the flash of the electrogram through the firla was
within the capacity of none but those who had developed their magnetic
faculty to great refinement of power.
The book of Human Sculpture was the first of the recent imaginative
productions that I became acquainted with. Thyriel and I joined a
party of youth who, under the guidance of our proparents, were to
listen to it, as it sounded through the linasan in the valley of
Loomiefa. Hour after hour we followed the melodious periods, as they
echoed up the slopes; at brief intervals on the rocky curtain at the
head of the gorge there would flame out for several minutes a moving
picture of the scenes we had witnessed the enaction of on the stage;
and a still more striking illustration of the text of the book was a
magnetic communication to our minds of the originating impulse which
moulded each thought and scene in the imagination of the author, and
the creative enthusiasm he felt as each idea burst in all its light
upon his soul. By the time we had finished the book we knew its whole
conception and history, its purpose, and its probable effect upon the
civilisation.
It answered all my questions, and rooted out all my scepticism. The
whole object of their unending labours was to take command of nature by
finding out her secrets and abridging her processes, so as to make them
serviceable to their advance. I felt how absurd had been my objections;
for where would this people have been, if they had left nature to
herself? What else was barbarism but leaving nature to herself, so that
the more cruel animal part of her became dominant? Nature included
an infinite range of gradations of energy and life from what we call
dead matter to the subtle and elevated organisations that fill space
and evade the finest perception of our senses. Within our own systems
are to be found many of those, from the débris of our bodily tissues
and organs to the noblest thought we can conceive; the precept to let
nature alone is fraught with inextricable ambiguity; and if we let the
myriad natures within us fight it out, it is not difficult to see which
would have dominance, for it is easier to level down than to level up.
Every interference with the lower nature in order to bring it under the
sway of the higher, every new mastery of our systems as a whole by our
creative thought, is a step upwards in the scale of existences. Three
fourths of the process of human propagation belonged to the sphere of
our lower nature, so that civilised men and women were ashamed to
speak of it, and tended to become gross and coarse if they did freely
speak of it. Every act seemed to drag them back again to the level of
the animals, and it took them years of effort to drive the thoughts
and traces of it into oblivion. They had as a people painfully fought
their way up out of the slough of passion, and mastered the emotions
that tended to overbalance them by their excess, and to plunge them
back again into it. Guard themselves as they might by all kinds of
precautions, and spiritualise the act as they ever tried to do, its
necessary recurrence never failed to embrute the nature for a moment,
whilst it still kept open a path for retrogression. To shut out this
possibility of re-descent into the beast would be one of the greatest
services to their race.
As useful for their advance would the command of human propagation be
in another direction. The only fear of deterioration that still haunted
them arose from atavism. Nature had still a trick of returning on
her own footsteps. The child of the noblest pair had at times traces
of far-back ancestry resurgent in evil or retrogressive traits; and
it wasted the time and the best energy of parents and proparents to
obliterate these. In every germ lay dormant the potentialities of its
whole ancestral past; and any one of them might assert itself as master
during the dim unguided life of gestation. With all their precautions
something evil might still lurk in the systems of the young to be
developed in full maturity of life. But if they moulded every tissue
and organ and faculty for themselves, this retrogressive tendency that
nature treasures up in every germ and child would disappear. There
would be nothing to watch or obliterate in the immature.
A still greater economy of time and labour would result in the
abridgment of the earlier processes of education. Education, it is
true, never ceased throughout life. But the education of the mature
was self-conducted; the citizen was his own schoolmaster, and his
surroundings were his instruments and assistants. That of the earlier
stages used up the labour and wisdom of two other personalities for
the long period of discipline; they were ever on watch and guard lest
the past that lay in the youthful nature should suddenly rise and
master it. For all education is a wrestle with the superseded past,
which becomes evil as soon as it grows superfluous or obstructs further
advance. Every form of vitality that has played its part on the stage
of existence leaves it with reluctance; it clings to the new, that it
may have a little more of life, and impedes its advance. The obsolete
most survives in the tissues of the young and immature; and to educate
is to struggle with the obsolete or obsolescent. The labour and
thought needed to make the struggle end in the success of the new and
progressive have never been understood so well by any as by the elders
of the Limanorans. No effort of their civilisation was so exhausting as
the educative. To enter on parenthood or proparenthood made them pause,
for all acknowledged that the assumption of this duty was the greatest
sacrifice a man or woman could make for the progress of the race. They
knew that for half a century their individual vigilance could never
cease, and that the strain would come on all their faculties, and not
on one or two alone, as it would in most of the other duties they owed
to the race, even invention or discovery. Whatsoever would commute or
abolish this heavy service to the nation was sure to be welcomed. So
vast an amount of the best time and wisest ability of the island would
be set free that it would be difficult to calculate the acceleration of
progress it would effect.
All this and a thousand other considerations passed through my
mind, as I listened to the book of Human Sculpture and drank in its
inspirations. The doubts that its dramatic publication had left in me
were all laid. I now knew that this would be a new sacred book, which
would hold up for ages an ideal for Limanora to struggle towards.
This book of Human Sculpture made clear to me the meaning and purpose
of another publication that I soon witnessed. It was the book of
Asexuality, which showed us dramatically how sex and its results
belonged to a lower and more physical stage of personal development.
It revealed to us the nature of the beings that flit through sidereal
space just outside the ken of our senses, centres of energy less inert
and more ethereal than any terrestrial creatures. Into them flows
more freely than it flows into us the divine energy that is above
all. Out of themselves they give as freely to their fellows as they
receive. They need no such inequality and unstable equilibrium as
sex to teach them such bounteous benignity. Living in the precincts
of the fountain of life as they do, not imprisoned within local and
temporal limits, but free to move whither they will and to drink
unstintingly of supernal existence, they know how essentially all
nobler life consists in free bounty; the more of themselves and their
energy they give, the higher the energy they receive in its place.
Sex is only the rude beginning of this higher law, the principle of
antagonism to stagnation, of giving lavishly in order to have room for
receiving from higher sources. It supersedes and antagonises the law of
parasitism, which governs the crude beginnings of life on a new world.
The lower microscopic creatures that live a famished jejune life in
space ready to pounce upon any orb their shoals encounter, propagate
by mere self-division; they have nothing to give. A new star cooling
down on its surface sufficiently for life to settle on is their great
opportunity. There they may parasite and feed to their heart’s content,
propagating by the myriad every infinitesimal fraction of time. And,
as long as they live in such primeval luxury, they never move one
step higher in life. Over-supply of food, indeed all luxury, damns
a being to stagnancy. The full-fed parasite is unprogressive, and,
though multiplying teemingly, is practically sterile; his generations
are on a level with himself; he is immortal by mere fission; the only
function of his life is to grab, till his gettings make him too big for
his microscopic unity, and he has to break up. In the higher stages
of life, even in human life, this infecundity attaches in the same
way to luxurious living, whilst the sycophant is sterile of purpose
and existence. All take and no give is a monstrosity above the lowest
bacterial life. The more of dependence or flattery there is in a
people, the lower their natures; a tyranny is the lowest political
organism; and of tyrannies the worst is the socialistic; for there,
there is no inequality to antagonise and overcome the lethargy of
parasitism.
Even when bacteria begin to feel the pinch of scanty nutrition or
malnutrition, they start on a new career, and show the first traces of
an advance in life. They incline to give as well as receive, and here
are the primeval beginnings of sex. Ill-fed bacteria tend to propagate
by means of special cells or spores. Instead of steeping themselves
in food till they burst, they now begin to nurse within their systems
a germ, to which they give of their best till it is able to launch
out for itself; they cease to reproduce by fission, and reproduce
by spore-formation. This is the first step upwards on the long road
to human morality. The beginnings of sex are the beginnings of
unlikeness of individuals, and the beginnings of unstable equilibrium
and of overflow of energy from one being into another. This is the
organisation of the policy of give in a new star, ultimately meant to
drive out, after a world-long struggle, the antagonistic policy of mere
get. Sex first introduced into our world the eagerness of one being to
give of its best for the good of another being. Conjugal love in the
human era is the first noble form of sexuality; and parental love is
its still nobler offshoot.
The development of parenthood is the knell of sexuality. For it is
a new and higher phase of the policy of give, and antiquates the
mere mutuality of sexual love. It gives of its all expecting nought
in return. And into the place of the energy that has gone out of it
flows an energy that is nearer the divine and raises towards the
divine. It is at this point that sex becomes a lower stage, seeming
almost to mingle with brute life. Out of it must humanity struggle
in order to progress. “In the spirit there is no sex.” This I had
heard as a meaningless echo from wise lips in the West. Now I saw its
significance. The higher, the more spiritual we become, the less we
permit sex to dominate, and the less difference there is between the
sexes. It was in the world of imagination and intellect that the first
idea of equality of the sexes arose. And the more intellectual a people
became, the less it insisted on the difference between man and woman.
Emphasis on sex in a civilised people was a sure sign of approaching
decay.
For the goal towards which the human race is advancing is asexual; not
that that will be the main characteristic; but it is the most striking
compared with our present phase of being. The more highly organised
existences that fill space and hover just outside the range of our
grosser senses have reached the stage in which the stimulus of sex or
even of parenthood is no longer needed in order to save the benignant
instincts from dying out. And the higher a centre of energy climbs in
the scale of existence, the more eager does it become to overflow into
other centres, to give of its highest and best. What we call life, or
the spontaneous rejection of stagnancy, begins on its lowest fringe
with a tendency to take all and give none, with appetite. Below this
are inert centres of energy, that resist all receiving as well as all
giving, that exist only in persisting, in keeping what they have and
what they are; this stage is usually called dead matter in contrast to
energy, although it consists of nuclei of energy as truly as any living
creature. Between the two stages of mere keep and mere take seems to
lie a great gulf fixed; but there are minute evidences of transition
to be found all through nature. We ourselves, the human race, form
the transition from the stage of take all to the stage of give all.
And sex is the chief impetus to progress in the earlier history of
human evolution. Parenthood takes its place in the upper levels,
where the human is rapidly approaching the supersensuous. The very
fact of our nature being so heterogeneous and complex reveals that we
are making for something higher; and, as our appetites imply a stage
behind us, in which our systems were fitted for nothing but taking,
so our loves, our benevolences, our self-sacrifices, point forward
to a stage in which the whole of existence will consist in giving. I
remember, whenever an average man in Europe quoted the phrase, “It is
more blessed to give than to receive,” he meant it as a jest, or in a
sinister sense; even the priest, when he had to preach the doctrine
as one of the foundations of his religion, had incredulity in his
heart if not in the smile on his lips, as he spoke the words. Amongst
the Limanorans it was a truism that was implied in all conduct and
need never be explicitly stated. And the book of Asexuality revealed
the inner and scientific significance to me. The highest state of
any centre of energy in the cosmos was to be eagerly, lavishly, and
perpetually giving out of its best. For thus was it ever kept in
unstable equilibrium, towards which flowed higher and higher energies
from centres above it; thus it kept its life unstagnant and immortal.
That which only received, and was eager only to receive, suffered
the maladies of the luxurious, soon reached its utmost capacity, and
fell into stagnancy and decay. Above the human rose the hierarchy of
sexless, supersensuous beings, who peopled infinite space; but into
their ranks rose the human by means of struggle, by means of the
effluence of their energy into others, by means of sex, and still more
of parenthood. The purpose of sex is to attain to the higher asexuality.
Not that monasticism is good for the human race. It is on the contrary
the greatest of evils in the sexual stage of progress. It counts as
wicked and harmful that which alone prevents self-absorption and the
beginning of decay and death. Sex is the provision of nature for
drawing the animal outside of itself so that it may introduce into its
generations the seeds of development. It makes it as a centre of energy
feel the need of other centres, to which it may give, from which it may
receive. It is her chief means of keeping any vital centre from falling
back into stagnancy and the desire of stagnancy. And, as long as man is
still animal, sex and its resultant parenthood must continue to play
the main part in development. To attempt to reach asexuality before
the animal is ejected from his system is to balk progress and invite
stagnancy and decay.
The book of Asexuality showed how the family must remain the unit and
lever of advance till sex should be superseded by individual creation.
Then friendship or the bond of contrast in community will take the
place of the bond of heredity, or of that bond which is based upon
sexual passion. The mutual choice will be completely rational and in
the will of the choosers. There will be nothing instinctive or mediate
or unconscious about it. It is indeed one of the indignities of this
present sexual stage of evolution that we are thrust on in spite of
ourselves, that we have little command over the stimulus that is urging
us on the road of progress.
The Limanorans had got rid of some of this indignity inasmuch as the
elders and wise men took command of the instinct of sex, and bent it
in the direction of their own line of advance. In other peoples, and
especially in the West, it stumbled blindly on, led sometimes by the
love of youthful beauty, sometimes by the love of money, sometimes
by the necessities of position and diplomacy, most frequently by
ambition and the love of power or social influence, seldom or never by
the deliberate intent of producing noble posterity. As a consequence
retrogression in health, physique, morality, or intellectual power
was seen in all ranks far oftener than progress. Over the whole
there might be a slight advance in centuries; but in most families
it was one generation forward and the next back. This people had by
their purgations become the assistants of nature; and since the era
of the exilings they had wisely piloted sex to serve the highest
purposes of evolution. The young were still driven half-blindly by
the sting of sex, and might by chance accelerate progress; but the
elders without revealing their art wisely controlled the instinct,
and by the governance of proximity and opportunity, companionship and
circumstances, amongst the immature made it the guardian and keeper of
past advance and the prompter of still renewed advance. The final step
was pictured by this new imaginative book, the supersession of sex and
the deliberate creation of posterity. This would relieve the elders
of their anxious task of match-making, and put into the hands of the
pairs themselves the control of the parental instinct and the power of
improving their posterity.
Even as it was, I could see, from the axioms and postulates of this
book of Asexuality, and the impression it made on my friends and
companions, that the sex-instinct was already to a large extent under
the control of those whom it impelled. It had become, like their
appetite for food, saturated with intellect and deliberation. It was
no mere goad that drove them on in the dark stumbling towards some
object that would gratify the passion. They knew its physiological and
psychological working, and understood how the destinies of the race
waited upon the wisdom or folly of its guidance. Not even the youngest
of them would allow it the caprice and perverse whimsicality that was
considered its native prerogative in the West. The passionate whim of
the moment for “a grey eye or so” was no more to them than toothache
or the pangs of indigestion, an aberrancy from healthy nature, to be
checked and healed as soon as possible. I found that I was far in
the rear of their advance in respect to love. My Western heroics and
amorous transports were discounted and yet curiously watched as the
antiquated manners of an age long gone by. Nothing gave so keen a
shock to my self-approval as the smile that played upon the face of
Thyriel when I first broke into the raptures of adoration for her which
are the natural expression of passionate love in my native Europe.
Romeo-and-Julietism had been consecrated by centuries of the traditions
of Christendom as the true attitude and conduct of lovers. And here
was I, only fulfilling the instinct and bursting into the appropriate
transports of passion, reined in by what I thought at first the
cynicism of my Juliet. The smile would have been cynical on the lips of
a young European inamorata. In Thyriel it was no more than the amused
recognition of manners which she had laughed at in studying the ancient
history and literature of the island, as if I had seen a comrade in the
commonness of European daily life adopting the language and attitude of
Homeric or Ossianic heroes.
I grew ashamed of the amorous ardours of the West, and, when I felt
the tendency to erotic idolatry come upon me, I kept it to myself.
Even then I knew that I was centuries behind my Limanoran coevals in
the rational guidance of the sexual instinct. Nothing brought this so
clearly to my mind as the reception of the book of Asexuality. During
its dramatic publication I looked round to see the shock of unnatural
innovation on the faces of the audience, or the shrinking of modesty,
or the sense of outraged religious or traditional instincts. But there
was none of these to be found there. The ideal was accepted at once as
the proper and possible goal of the race, and the book was treasured
amongst the sacred literature of the time.
It soon flashed upon me, too, as I frequented Loomiefa, that their
art had all a far higher purpose than I had conjectured from my
European experience. It was not meant merely to stir or to satisfy
the sense of beauty and harmony, but to implant in the emotions and
the imagination the love of the future and the passion for rising in
the scale of existence. I grew ashamed to think that I had attributed
to this wonderful people the frivolity and even lowness of aim that I
had so often seen in European art. Here was a drama that the West had
not even a conception of. At its best the stage of Europe professed to
educate by representing heroic scenes from the past, by evolving from
them lessons for the audience, and by stirring their enthusiasm for
great deeds of history or myth. In its commonest mood it reproduced in
mimic form some scene or action from contemporary life. At its worst
it was but a pander to the survivals of a gross and animal past. What
I now thought of as the Limanoran stage was wholly occupied with the
future, so far as it was a possible evolution from the present. The
noblest ideal that the imagination of the race could shape was brought
dramatically before the people that their thoughts and ambitions might
be fixed on something beyond themselves.
For this high purpose and not for luxury or personal enjoyment their
sculpture and painting and music had been developed, and the newest
discoveries and inventions of science had been brought to their aid.
There was no objection to what gave pleasure; but to spend the thought
and effort of the fully developed human mind on that alone was, they
held, a degradation. Strenuous endeavour towards a higher and better
future was the note that characterised their pursuits. But, if they
could add attractiveness to the prosecution of the aim, the task
was all the easier; if they could make the path ahead beautiful and
pleasant so as to decoy the reluctant senses onwards, the pace would be
all the swifter.
Even with this high aim, I could not understand how this people, who
loathed all pretence, could condescend to their dramatic art; for on
this stage of Loomiefa were members of their community representing in
their persons what they were not and could not be for many ages. And I
had heard them often decry the histrionic art as one that encouraged
in the actors a habit of delighting in mere semblance and superficial
show, a habit that is the basis of hypocrisy and deceit; whilst the
love of mimicry and pageantry, I had been led to believe, had vanished
from the island at one of the last purgations of the race.
The seeming contradiction was afterwards explained. As one of the
necessary steps in my initiation into the privileges and duties of
the mature citizen I was led behind the scenes. Through the gorge at
the upper end of the valley I passed into a great hall that seemed to
me a combination of a museum and workshop. Here were the youth of the
Loomiamo and the Fraloomiamo at work upon automata and the elaborate
machinery that would guide their motions. Had I kept at a distance
from them as they worked, I would have thought that the play of human
sculpture was being again enacted, such exact reproductions of the
human system were the figures that grew under their hands. In one
section stood thousands of what I would have called statues, which had
served in the publication of former books. In another the puppets were
going through dramatic scenes by way of experimentation, and in many
the illusion was complete; I should have said that human beings were
talking and acting. In others there was some imperfection, and there
one could see that they were all mere fantoccini galvanised into life.
In a third section the tissues and parts that were to make mimic men
and women were being manufactured; the workers and artists could draw
on Rimla for as much force as they needed, whilst the advice of the
scientific families was at their command. The machinery of the great
workshop was bewildering in its complexity and refinement. The finest
tissue or nerve of the human brain could be here imitated so that under
a microscope I would have said it was part of a living body.
After all it was only the acting of marionettes that I had seen upon
the stage in the valley. But it was greatly aided by another department
where the pioneering families cultivated the art and science of
illusions. They could imitate the human voice at any point in the
valley measured to the fraction of an inch; they could reproduce any
scene of history, of contemporary existence, or of futuritive fiction
so exactly, making it so full of the lights and shadows of life and of
the developments of all advance, that none of the senses unaided by the
reasoning and analytic faculties could assert that the men and women
were not living, and that their actions and words were not real. Even
the electric sense could be deluded by the impulses manufactured by
these machinists and illusionists; it would take the magnetic thrills
it received for genuine enthusiasm and sympathy from the mind of a
man or from a crowd. This department was even more important than the
factory of puppets; for it made the play of the marionettes look still
more human on the stage. After all it was not the puppets themselves
I had watched with such breathless excitement, but a mere illusory
picture of their proceedings; the illusion was far more lifelike than
the play of the marionettes themselves. So much stress did they lay
on stirring the imagination and emotions of the race in favour of the
ideals of the future that half the work of these two families consisted
in the dramatic publication of their books.
The next sacred book I saw produced in Loomiefa would have of itself
persuaded me that this people could have nothing to do with the
histrionic art or any art that would encourage the habit of pretence
and show in the individual nature. It was called the book of Human
Transparency and described the various methods by which the inner
working of the human brain could be made patent to Limanoran senses.
The tissues could be clarified; the significance of every fibre and
nerve could be made familiar to all as an essential part of their
education; the eye, the ear, and the firla could be made more subtle
and acute in their perceptions, till at last they were able to tell
in a moment everything that was proceeding beneath the skull and
within the heart. What was done slowly and painfully by the medical
elders with the help of their instruments, their hypnotic powers,
and the interpretation of dreams, every man would be able to do
instantaneously, and without extraneous aid, exceptional wisdom, or
occult powers. The general drift of a neighbour’s emotions was known to
everyone through his magnetic senses, but not the particular intention
or thought; this would be known only after the long course of training
and development mapped out in the book of Human Transparency.
One of the chief ethical purposes that had in recent times been fixed
in the mind of the community was to eject from the human system all
elements and processes that were offensive to the finer feelings and
senses, everything in fact that a man or woman might be ashamed of
or wish to conceal. The new book of the time aimed at extending this
to the operations of thought and emotion. To get clear of the waste
products of the mind in a way that would be inoffensive to others was
an ideal they had not yet been able to entertain. They had learned
with much pain and self-denial the habit of concealing the crude
processes of thought that lead to what is worth saying or doing. It
was one of the things they were most ashamed of in looking over the
history or the memorials of their far past to see the vast amount of
the raw digestion of thought and of the refuse of emotion that was made
public, and even put into literature meant to be permanent. Most of the
orations and magazine articles, and ultimately most of the books that
had been produced in past ages were much the same as if the stomach
and intestines of the speaker or writer had been anatomised and laid
open with all their offensive processes to the gaze of spectators.
One of the most beneficent events of their later history had been a
conflagration in their valley of memories; for it had wiped out of
existence the libraries and art accumulations of many centuries, of
which they had come to be ashamed. They could not understand the
long-past stage of their civilisation, in which men, and especially
young men, had been so proud of displaying the mere débris of their
worst and crudest processes of thought; it had actually been the case
that most of the literature and art had been produced by youths under
fifty years of age, who had not yet begun to appreciate the difference
between the processes of thinking and the results of thinking; and one
of the most extraordinary features of that period was that the most
applauded literary and artistic productions, those that were supposed
to be most distinctively the outcome of what they called genius, were
the work of boys and girls, mere children under twenty-five years of
age. Natures that should still have been in the nursery for many a
year were stimulated to address the public and seek applause with work
that was merely tentative and disciplinary. The result was that, on
the one hand, one half of the most original and promising minds racked
themselves to death years before they should have faced life, whilst on
the other a juvenile ideal was set before literature and art, and boys
and girls became their chief audience and most powerful arbiters. They
felt heartily ashamed of that singular stage in their development, and
were glad to have accidental fire come to their assistance in huddling
its products out of sight.
One of the first instincts they evolved after the series of purgations
was the desire to conceal within their minds what was crude or mere
process in thinking, and, still more, what was mere waste product and
refuse of the mind. Instead of being eager to speak out or publish
all that came into the thoughts, bad or good, they grew shy of public
exhibition of their projects and schemes till they had been shaped by
long years of thinking and experimenting, and criticised and checked
by the caution and wisdom of their fully matured nature. Publication
became the last resort of the mature and old instead of the first
ambition of the young, so afraid were they of exhibiting what might
be crude or offensive. Even in the give and take of conversation and
social intercourse they preferred long periods of silence to the
utterance of truisms and commonplaces. The trivial and conventional
in speech, as in life, was what they abhorred, as revealing an
intellectual nature on the road back to the infertility and
childishness of barbarism, the elaborate mechanism of thought whizzing
round without connection with what represents work.
But now the book of Human Transparency proposed as an ideal to eject
from the system every process of thought and feeling that they might
blush to let others see. If the nature was made transparent then would
it become a self-preserving instinct to develop their natures in this
direction. Everything crude or false or offensive, that might begin to
show itself in their minds, would be at once suppressed before it got
headway, instead of having to be slowly reasoned out of existence with
the aid of the moral instincts. This accomplished, the race would be
able to take another great leap forward. The advance of their processes
of thought and feeling to the level of the former results of them would
give them a higher point of view from which to look forth into the
future.
A mediate book, soon afterward produced by one of the Loomiamo,
supplied one of the steps towards the consummation of this ideal.
It was the book of Ethereal Nutriment. It took as basis a former
discovery, the liquefaction of air, and showed how, by similar
methods, the medium that filled interstellar space could be made
available in the halls of nutriment and medication, and how it could
be manufactured in such a concentrated form as to allow of its being
poured along conduits and imbibed by the human organs through the mouth
and nostrils, just as air was. For some time the atmosphere had been
distilled in liquid form, and supplied to the houses of the citizens
absolutely rid of all impurities. Nay, it had been made a fountain of
power, transmissible to long distances, and available in a form that
was easily carried. Compressed and liquefied, it rapidly returned to
the gaseous form as soon as the pressure began to be removed. And the
re-equilibrising of the liquid to the expansion of the surrounding
air had been made to supply vast quantities of power in the centre
of force. The new book proposed to find in the compression and
liquefication of the ether an infinite fountain of force that would
enable their civilisation to progress at an ever-accelerating pace.
But the most immediate effect proposed by the book was to enable the
Limanorans to etherealise their bodies by introducing the liquefied
ether into their dietary. The result would be that the tissues would
grow more diaphanous. They had already been able to transport some of
the universal medium in their anchored vacuum faleenas from the outer
margin of the atmosphere to their laboratories, and now they had been
able to find it in their manufactured vacuums. With the enormous power
they had in Rimla they could easily compress it into forms that would
touch the senses, and enter into the blood and the formation of the
tissues. As the medium of light and magnetism it was almost certain
to make the human body more translucent than it had ever been. All the
tissues, even the osseous, had always been pervious to light, but many
of them not apparently so to the untrained human eye. Recently their
lavolans had shown that by means of certain kinds of luminous rays the
human system gave up its most hidden secrets to the human eye. But once
they were able to chemicalise and compress the luminiferous ether into
palpable form, and to mingle it with the volatile food that could be
taken into their bodies as they breathed, there would be no need of
lavolans or other apparatus to see the inner movements of the human
system.
The sanitary effects of this advance would be no mean result. The
medical council would have much of their time set free for their
ever-pressing investigations; they would not be needed for the
diagnosis of deteriorative symptoms in the tissues; each individual
would be able, by the aid of magnifying mirrors to examine for
himself what was going on in any part of his system; and every man
had sufficient physiological and medical knowledge to understand the
beginnings of all the ordinary diseases, and, if he recognised them, to
prescribe for himself the hall in Oomalefa that he should frequent in
order to check them. Now it would be only the symptoms of obscure or
new diseases or deteriorations of the system that the medical elders
would have to diagnose. And thus they would have great tracts of their
life to devote to new discoveries, and medical science was certain to
advance more rapidly.
Another sanitary effect of the new permeability to light would be to
render the human body less open to diseases either known or unknown.
For it had long been a commonplace of medical science that sunlight
reduced the vitality, and therefore the virulence, of all noxious
microbes; after nightfall their power increased tenfold. Wherever
the sun’s rays could not reach by day, there diseases multiplied and
festered. And one of the chief reasons why, in their far past history,
incurable maladies were generally internal, was that sunshine could
not get to the parts affected except in a feeble and straggling way.
The fact that they had fixed themselves deeply in the tissues before
they could be observed, and that it was difficult to get at their roots
without cutting a passage in to them had been generally accepted as
the explanation of their frequency and deadliness. But it had been one
of the most important discoveries of the new era after the purgation
period, that pure oxygen and pure sunlight were the most medicative
of all things, and that the nearer any affected part could get to
them the sooner it healed. The new book of Ethereal Nutrition pointed
out that one of the results of rendering the human system easily
pervious to light would be to rid its internal parts of all trace of
immedicability; sunlight, permeating the inner organs and tissues,
would make any noxious microbes that might lodge in them innocuous.
The reciprocity of suggestion and discovery was never more saliently
exemplified than by one of the less immediate results pointed out by
this book as likely to flow from the attainment of its ideal. Volatile
ether-food, gradually introduced into the halls of nutrition and
gradually increased, would, step by step, bring the human organs to
adapt themselves to existence outside of the atmosphere of the earth.
For a long time they would be amphibious, with organs adapted to both
aërial and ethereal life. Even as it was, the human body revealed in
it traces of having already passed through an amphibious stage. There
were in the neck glands that were the remains of gills, which must have
once belonged to an aquatic habit; besides, there was the last vestige
of an eye in the back of the neck still extant in the pineal gland, and
this could have been of use only when the ancestor of man was passing
through the stage of a water-animal which must watch his enemies from
the surface, his body being submerged and out of sight. Step by step he
abandoned the water for a littoral, and even at first arboreal, habit;
the result was that the gills came to be unused and closed up, and the
upward-looking eye was useless in a head that was held upright and
could be turned swiftly in all directions; still man retains the memory
of the aquatic stage of his ancestry in the ease with which he learns
to swim, and in his love of a life on the sea; whilst an occasional
birth in more barbarous tribes with the webbed toes of a water-animal
still showing reveals his ancestry atavistically.
What was to hinder him, now he had the mastery of himself and his
destiny, becoming again amphibious in a new way? Without guidance of
his own, driven only by the forces of nature, he had risen out of the
waters that once covered the earth, and taken to dry land; for a long
period he had been able to live at will in either of two elements, air
and water. Where lay the difficulty in making himself again capable
of living in two elements, in air and in the luminiferous ether? In
prehistoric times nature had worked her evolution in his system by long
and slow stages. But in Limanora progress had become lightning-swift,
and would again and again increase its pace. For there man had taken
command of nature, and made her accommodate her step to his stride. She
was his willing servant, nimble as her own electric flash. He could
now compress the work of centuries into hours by his concentration of
power in Rimla, and by his countless ingenious contrivances. Thought
was the lord of time as of space, and thought was now his essence and
characteristic. He could, if he wished, contract the process that used
to cover geological ages into a generation. There was no reason why he
should not become amphibious again in a less grovelling sense than of
old within the few centuries of a lifetime. This was the purport of
another production of this time, the book of Amphibious Existence.
It was a mediate book, one bridging the gulf between things as they
were and the far ideals held out to the race by the Fraloomiamo. It
helped to point out the steps towards the realisation of one of the
most cherished productions of the age, the Book of Emigration. It had
been many years in the maturer minds of the community before I was
introduced to Loomiefa and its wonders, and it had recently been much
modified by the discoveries of the new outburst of energy that followed
Choktroo’s attempt at invasion. Its ideal was to enable the Limanorans
of that or some future generation to travel throught space and reach
other stars.
Long ago a publication that had prepared for, and demanded this, was
the book of the Destiny of the Earth. It had made a profound impression
on the people when first produced; for it dramatically painted the
horror of death that would settle on this globe. It had been proved
by both astronomers and physicists that our orb was gradually losing
its heat by the same process which had brought its originally glowing
surface to a state that would allow of life settling upon it. First,
vegetation and animal life were found at the poles, where the lessened
heat of the sun made the terrestrial heat endurable; then they crept
their slow way onwards to the equator, till the whole surface of the
earth teemed with vitality, at first developing towards vastitude in
the warm vapours, in later periods towards concentration of energy in
special points of the animal body, and especially in the head. Round
the poles at last settled the ice-sheet, advancing at long intervals
towards the tropics, now in one hemisphere and again in the other,
according as the one or the other was farthest in winter from the sun
during an extensive period. The hyperborean powers shepherded the
growing life of the earth down into her central belt. But the brumal
shepherds of the one side of the world receded as those of the other
advanced with their arctic winds and fleecy drifts. Within measurable
time this alternation would cease, and the glacial fences would move
forward together north and south, and pen the overcrowded human life
and energy with all its enemies into the narrow equatorial belt.
It was the drama of these boreal limitations that the book of
Terrestrial Destiny pictured. The teeming life weltered over sea and
land alike in search of foothold and nutrition. No inch of tropical
earth was sacred from brute appetite. Animal and man fought with
venomous passion for dear life. Not animalculæ alone but beasts, and
even man, became parasitic. Creatures that had loved a free existence
in vast prairies or forests learned to nest and hibernate in the folds
and hollows of larger animals. Life swarmed over life till for lack
of food it began to fail. Man crept with loathsome beasts of prey into
caves of the earth, and grew as loathsome in his troglodytic habits.
On moved the brumal prison walls. The sun shrivelled in the sky and
withdrew his heat. Nothing lived that was not arctic not even amongst
the still-free birds of the air. Man finally ceased to have faculty
enough to notice the shrinking of the already narrow enclosure that
was soon to be his grave. Feebly the last remnants of the race stole
forth into the struggling rays of daylight and killed everything of
life they could find. Only in the sea still lived their possible prey
and food, and thither they dared not go beneath the gloom of the thick
ice. The cannibal habit came upon man again and no relationship or love
restrained his appetite. The last scene of the drama was the death of
the last man, the grave of the remnants of his race; where he fell,
there he lay embalmed; and his tomb was the earth’s own winding-sheet.
The meagre relics of terrestrial life soon followed him into silence
and darkness, and through the sunless night the dead orb wheeled round
the extinguished cinder which had for so many geological ages given it
light and life.
The publication of the book would have frozen the hearts within them,
had not the Limanorans known that that was not the end of all. They
saw that the alternations of death and life were not confined to the
vegetal and animal species around them. The same pendulum swung through
the whole cosmos. The universe which was dead now would live again in
blazing rounds of vapour that would solidify and cool till life could
settle on the new orbs again. Dead it only seemed. For it never rested
but revolved round some centre revolving also, and too distant for man
to see or feel. Out of these motions would come resuscitation. After
millions of ages, that are but as moments in the history of the cosmos,
it would encounter another exhausted universe, and from the collision
would a new system of glowing worlds arise, ready for another series of
vital colonisations from the limitless life of sidereal space.
It was this knowledge that took the sting out of their sadness over
the new book. Yet the fate of man, age by age more closely penned
in by the walls of his glacial-coffin, and drawn back by the eddy
of time into his primeval savagery, left a loophole for despair and
palsy to enter into their lives. Were they to let their descendants
fall back again into the beast, whence their ancestors had come? Was
this glacial prison and tomb to remain a possibility and a shadow on
even the distant horizon of their race? Once before had their ancestry
evaded such a fate, penned between the invasive glaciers and the sea;
once before had the race committed their fates to an element they
feared and hated, lest the encroaching ice-sheet should smother their
civilisation and reduce their vitality to the level of barbarism and
at last annihilation. Better to let the race die out at its noblest
than leave it to go down into such an inferno. Nothing now so made
them shudder as the prospect of retrogression, however slight. But to
think of their civilisation ebbing away from their posterity before the
waning power of the sun and the earth, to think of the lapse of their
own intellectual mastery of nature into decrepitude and putrescence,
was to turn their hearts to stone.
Under such a prospect they could not sit in intellectual paralysis.
For years the imagination of the race worked feverishly towards its
rescue from such an appalling destiny, and every new scientific advance
brought forth a new book of Emigration. Their one thought of escape was
taken from their old migration out of the reach of antarctic glacial
advance. To sail out from the earth and commit themselves to the
strange conditions and uncertainties of a new element seemed no more
hazardous to them now than in their primeval stage of land-civilisation
to launch out with their lives in their hands upon the unknown and
terrifying ocean. It was urged that there was precedent and basis for
their marine adventure in that their ancestry had been amphibious, and
that one of the primeval species out of which they had come had been
aquatic. The reply was that the case was parallel and not antagonistic.
The original vital germs that settled on the cooling surface of the
globe must have come out of sidereal space, and must have lived in
the element that they would have to cross in emigrating from the
glacial orb again; and from these vital germs they, and all living
terrestrial things, had evolved. It was only one stage farther back in
the history of life; the precedent was the same, though the training
and modification of the system would have to be more strenuous and
drastic than they had been before the former leap was taken from land
to sea. Preparation had already been made; for they had learned aërial
navigation far more thoroughly than they had ever known the mastery of
the sea. Their airships had ventured right up into the ether, whilst on
wings they had themselves coasted the earth’s atmosphere. Nothing was
impossible to intellect which had mastered the art of evolution.
Recent discovery had led them far on the difficult ascent towards
safe departure from the surface of the world. It only needed ingenuity
and development to give them a concentration of aërated sustenance,
which would enable them to journey for ages outside of an atmosphere
such as they had been accustomed to inhabit; they had the germ of this
in the nuts of the alfarene or oxygen-shrub; recently their chemists
had been able to reproduce the essence of them, and to compress it
into microscopic globules. Not till a later age of discovery did they
supersede this by the liquefaction and solidification of air. They
were rapidly adapting their own systems to the vacuums they could
produce and to the rarefied atmosphere high above the clouds. They
were introducing the quintessence of the ether into their halls of
sustenance and medication, and thus accustoming their organs and
tissues to conditions which they would meet continually on their
voyage through sidereal space. The next generation would practically
be amphibious, able to live in the luminiferous ether with occasional
return to an atmosphere such as surrounds the earth. Every new age
would enable them to make longer and longer excursions away from the
bosom of mother-earth out towards the influence of other planets.
Every new generation would have more elastic and adaptable tissues and
organs, which would fit varied pressure and varied mediums of vitality.
And with all this the Limanoran body would grow lighter at the same
time as it would grow more consolidated, coherent, and indissoluble.
But most important of all was the new command of gravitation given
them by the discovery of the varying sensitiveness or nonsensitiveness
of certain rays to magnetism and gravity according to conditions that
were in human hands. There were limitless possibilities in this for
sidereal migration. And already out of it had come the lavolamma or
gravitation power-machine.
The new book of Emigration brought all these discoveries and thoughts
into bearing on its problem and harmonised them, and developed them
by means of imaginative suggestion. The drama of its publication drew
the bulk of the people to Loomiefa. There we saw a representation of
Lilaroma itself, piercing the sky in pure and lonely grandeur. Near
its top lay moored a fleet of faleenas of strikingly new form and
material; they were as light as foam-bubbles, and as opalescently
transparent; within each of them we could see stored quantities of
alfarene globules, that seemed enough to serve a people for thousands
of years; in each we saw a new anti-gravitation engine, ready to deal
with every form of attraction and repulsion in the wide ether and
turn it into available power. Men and women in Limanoran form, but as
transparent and as imponderable and buoyant as their new ships, floated
round the ethereal fleet. Now and again a flash of artificial light
would dart across the scene, and along it, as if impelled by it, ran
with lightning-swiftness one of the rainbow-flecked faleenas, bearing
its full freight. We could see the lavolamma work, and we concluded
that there was a new form of it that could take advantage of beams
of light to travel with them, as an electric impulse travels along
them. Innumerable evolutions with the ethereal fleet took place. The
sublimated Limanorans of the future seemed to have complete command of
the new ships and of the new power over light and gravitation.
Suddenly came tremors in the framework of the great mountain. It
rocked like a buoy in the uneasy surge of a reef. Its snows fell in
huge avalanches. Then the conical top was ejected into the sky like a
shot from a cannon. The air was thick with dust and stones. But when
it cleared and great flames shot forth and licked the face of heaven,
we could see far above their reach the rainbow-coloured fleet speeding
aloft, filled with their tiny diaphanous sailors.
The scene changed, and we saw universes set in the vault of heaven,
and across the space between them we could discern minute specks of
light flashing mercurial as thought. Behind them in dim eclipse sped
the noctambulant earth, still eddying round the central spot of light;
now it broke forth in ragged coruscation, only to sink back into pitchy
gloom. Yet a thread of light stretched forth to the luminous atoms that
flitted on through the night. Nearer they came and, one by one, grew
more distinct and larger. At last we could see that it was the fleet
on its way from the top of Lilaroma. Within each ether-ship we could
make out the movements of the sailors as they bent its way this side
and that. The light from a brilliant star in the new universe made
play upon the surface of their faleenas. They had caught in its rays,
and were speeding as swift as light towards the now-definite goal.
The luminiferous current bore them steadily on, their little engines
palpitating with the impulse of the new light and the new gravitation.
Again the scene changed, and we looked upon the surface of a new orb,
more advanced in vital development, more highly organised than the
earth with which we were familiar. We saw the inhabitants in crowds,
face upwards into the night, all eyes upon some distant star. The
excitement was rising like a tempest. It seemed as if the object on
which they gazed were swiftly approaching them. And in a flash there
swept within our sight the fleet of prismatic ether-ships, like
rainbows in the light of another sun. They stopped and hovered above
the atmosphere. We saw their crews breathe in the elements in which
they floated. Lower and lower they came, still sounding the atmosphere
and testing its effects upon their organs. The absence of commotion
and the steady descent showed that nothing alien to their systems had
yet been encountered. Out of their faleenas they gazed as wonderingly
down upon the new star as its sea of up-turned faces watched their slow
descent.
The scene was brought still nearer to our eyes. Instead of microscopic
foam-bells floating in the sky, and microscopic crowds resting on the
surface of the other world, we felt present at the meeting of these
creatures of different universes. They seemed to feel conscious of this
great event in the history of the cosmos. The dwellers of the new world
were almost paralysed at first with wonder at these beings so like and
yet so unlike themselves; they could recognise, we could see in their
friendly faces, the divine community of spirit; their eyes, as soon as
they recovered from their waking dream, flashed welcome in magnetic
fire; there was no need of community of words for open intercourse; the
dwellers of the new star had the same development of electric sense as
the Limanorans had; their souls could speak without a sound from the
lips.
Step by step their mutual sympathy grew more definite, more cordial,
and approximated to the communication of thought and fact. Within
a brief period they knew enough of each other’s language to tell
out their whence and whither. But in the people of the new star the
language was that of feature and not of tongue. Over their faces
flashed the signals of thought as well as of emotion, astonishing the
newcomers at the rapidity with which expression flitted over their
features. Equally astonished were their hosts to hear the countless
variety of tone and accent come from the throats of the strangers.
They covered their ears as if shielding them from the assault of some
thunderous report. Even the voyagers shrank from the voice of their own
spokesman. And, tone it down as he would, still was it too loud for any
delicate ear to endure. They were in a new atmosphere that bore sound
so quickly and clearly as to make a whisper reverberate like thunder.
So did it make the eyes of the dwellers in it as keen and far in sight
as if armed with the most powerful microscopes and telescopes. The
slightest adjustment of them and their lids changed them back and forth
from distant observation to near. And the same translucency marked
their tissues as made the inner movements of the newcomers’ heart and
brain apparent. There was needed no sound to interpret the magnetic
messages of the brain along its nerves. Hosts and guests were seen at
one, familiar as lifelong friends and thrilling each other with the
strange new experiences of their history. The voyagers from earth soon
knew why the use of the tongue and throat had been abandoned by their
hosts as means of communication; the uncontrollable volume of sound
offended their hearing, and drove them to develop the language of eye
and feature; the sight grew more powerful and adaptable as voice and
ear gave up their share of the energy and sustenance of the system;
their tissues, too, had ever been to a large extent transparent because
of the rarity and clearness of their atmosphere, and by selection and
training they had been able to make them pellucid as they now were.
The gleam of question and answer showed as clearly on the stage of
Loomiefa as the movement of the figures themselves. And, when the
colloquy had ended, and the strangers had gained all the information
they needed for their farther journey through space, we saw them enter
their faleenas and rise above the eager, penetrating gaze of their
new friends. Across the face of the heaven we followed the ethereal
fleet as it faded again into insignificance. Another scene showed us
their landing upon another planet of the universe they had entered.
The drama thus bore us with delight from system to system throughout
the cosmos, and revealed the ease with which stellar voyaging could be
accomplished, once the initial difficulties had been overcome.
A mediate book, dramatically published in Loomiefa just before,
prepared the way for this. It was the book of Sidereal Intercourse.
They had always held that the other universes in the cosmos were as
much inhabited by life as theirs was. It had ever seemed to them the
absurdest of arrogance for the dwellers on the earth to assume that
theirs was the only orb out of the countless myriads on the face of
night that had life upon it; that it monopolised the vital energy of
infinity, and the attention of its divine intelligence. The wider
they had ranged with their sidereal sciences, the more they smiled at
the primitive thought of their remote ancestors that they were the
cynosure of the cosmos. It had come to be used as the readiest and most
striking example of infatuation and conceit. That the poor earthlings
were as microscopic in their importance compared with the vastitude of
existence, as the bacterial swarms of a wayside pool compared to the
denizens of the great ocean, was assumed in every movement and act of
their minds.
And, wherever life was, there was the chance that highly developed
intelligence existed. They were not so sure that this was yet the case
on the farthest of our planets. It might be that the inner and smaller
bodies of our universe had passed the stage in which they could support
the higher life. The others, they thought, were rapidly evolving a
life of their own, most of it still in a low grade; when the earth had
passed its climax and begun to decay, they would probably, one after
the other, be attaining to a loftier type of life and intelligence.
Whilst they were running their course of progress the earth and her
inner sister planets would be waiting in their frozen silence the time
when the whole of their universe would be exhausted. Nearer and nearer
would the whole solar system be approaching some other system that
had run its course; and the encounter of the two would evolve a young
universe, full of heat and energy enough from the collision to make a
new cosmic career.
They had little hope then of stirring reply, if ever they were able to
send an embassy of thought to any star of our own system. All their
hopes of astral intercommunication were pointed to other stars and
other universes; and, as they looked up into the eyes of night, they
seemed to feel magnetic answer to the impulses of their souls, not from
Mars or Venus, from Saturn or Jupiter, but from the stars that throbbed
in far more distant depths. They had ever believed, of course, and
they had now scientifically shown, that the centres of light flashing
in the nightly sky were not the true sisters of earth but only suns,
round which the unseen universes circled. They tried to find the dim
worlds which drew their heat and light from these poignant watch-fires
of heaven; and their more recent instruments had revealed the dark
outlines of many of these twilight wanderers which hung on the radiance
of the visible stars. The magnetism that came with the rays from some
of those far distant luminous points had shown striking aberration
early in its course; and nothing could explain this but the existence
of rayless planets revolving round these lambent sources of light. Step
by step had they homed these aberrations, till they knew the courses of
the dusky satellites of many stars, and they could tell the moment when
a circular shadow would cross the face of any one of these suns.
The eyes of the astronomical families had become so accustomed to the
times and places of such obscurations that their firlas acted with them
and searched for magnetic impulses from the dark sisters of the star
they were watching; till at last they could tell by their electric
sense the place of many dim planets in the nearer universes.
It was on this that the book of Sidereal Intercourse based its forecast
of the immediate future. Since the definite discovery of varied types
of life in the spaces beyond the earth’s atmosphere, the last suspicion
of mere fancy had vanished from the belief in the existence of high
intelligence on the universes of infinity. And now their faces were set
towards communication with some of this intelligence on distant worlds.
The new book assumed that the electric sense, or something equivalent
for the perception of the great cosmic force, had been developed in the
inhabitants of some invisible worlds; and it laid down as an axiom that
there were vast stores of magnetic material in these orbs, just as
there were in the earth and in the sun.
What they must first do was to sweep the range of a universe with
an electric impulse on which the whole force of Rimla should be
concentrated, and to keep their delicate indicators all set in the
same direction. At the publication of the book in Loomiefa we saw
gigantic engines slowly moving their long arms this way and that
athwart one of the most brilliant stars of night, and scientists
eagerly scanning the numerous magnetometers that surrounded the huge
electric machine. We could see the air thrill and undulate with the
mighty impulse, and the very light of the star seemed to flicker and
wink before the penetration of the intrusive force. At last a flash
of hope came over the faces of the watchers; the pendent beam of one
sarmolan began to quiver. It was a message from the world they sought.
Again they turned the whole available power of the island--millions of
millions of horse-power--into the electric engine, the arm of which
they had at once brought to rest. Fierce lightnings again played
through the atmosphere, marking the line of the new despatch. And
again the luminous tongue of the magnetometer told of its reception by
intelligences like ours. Then came the astronomic families who marked
the exact position of the sensitive spot in the sky. And thereafter
their sentry stood with sarmolan directed thither, ready to announce
the slightest sign of astral impulse or response.
The scene changed, and we saw a new type of electric engine placed in
position on the stage. On its long arm was a singularly crooked cage of
transparent irelium, flat and sharp like the blade of a sword yet bent
into a right angle in the direction of the edge. Within it were placed
recording magnetometers. We could see the directors fix them towards
their responsive universe. Then Rimla concentrated its tremendous power
upon the machine; the arm swung right and left, and finally with a jerk
shot the crooked cage like lightning through the air. We followed its
luminous track far into the sky, till it seemed nothing but one of the
countless stars that silvered the night. Suddenly, like a rocket, it
bent back on its course, and as swiftly retraced its flight. I thought
to see it shattered into dust as it struck the earth, but there was a
deep pool ready to break its force. Its sharp edge cut the water and it
vanished, but slowly rose to the surface unhurt, and on the faces of
the observers we could see how successful had been the experiment with
the limotar, or new boomerang vehicle of electric indications. It had
shot far up into space along the true electric impulse that travelled
away beyond it towards the sensitive point of sky they had discovered.
Before it bent back from its headlong course, the response, speeding
more freely and more swiftly through the untrammelled ether, imprinted
itself upon the face of the sarmolan. It was this answer, more decided
than any they had yet received, that filled the eyes of the observers
with joyous light.
There was another change of scene. The gigantic engines had disappeared
and in their place we saw the ether-courier families floating on the
outskirts of the atmosphere with strata of clouds far below them. On
the back of their necks, where the electric sense had its special
seat, they bore a singular apparatus, not unlike a small telescope. On
their chests they had strapped a small engine of irelium, a miniature
of those we had seen in former scenes. The one was a magnifier of
electric indications, and the other was an electricity catapult. The
couriers could not only draw upon the electric resources of the spaces
around them, but upon those of the centre of force. And we could see
them converse with distant stars by means of these apparatus. Through
unobstructed space they could send with ease their electric impulses
to limitless distances, free from the atmospheric retardation which
before had demanded immense power to overcome its inertia. And with
their new electro-telescopes they could magnify ten-thousand-fold
any electric ray for their firlas to receive, although it might have
travelled a thousand times the distance between the earth and the sun.
They might have to wait days for their answer; but again and again were
they rewarded with it. With the dim stars circling round the nearer
suns they were able to hold comparatively rapid converse. But they were
going farther afield through the cosmos, and they had often to watch
and wait for weeks or months or years for any indication of response.
The book awakened little enthusiasm compared with the publication of
some of those that I had witnessed. For, though the authors had been
rapid in the composition of it, they had been somewhat forestalled by
one of the ingenious inventions of the last great age of discovery.
This was the modification of the lavolan which brought them records
of the life of extra-aërial space. Amongst the luminous impressions
that their combination of lavolan and faleena had brought down out of
the ether, they had found evidences of highly organised systems which
frequented the vacuum outside our atmosphere. They were satisfied
with the knowledge of this new-discovered teeming life, and they
believed that before many ages they would have developed, first their
apparatus, and next their senses, so far as to open intercourse with
it. And if they could come to converse with nobler intelligences near
the earth, they did not need to go so far afield in the cosmos as the
new book suggested. Their own filammus would serve to bring them into
close sympathy with the best life that was to be found in space until
they should know the conditions of such life and aim at fulfilling them.
It was one of the subsidiary studies and ideals of the book that drew
most attention and produced most result. It pictured an apparatus and
method for tapping the thoughts of men as they travelled along the
nerves, an adaptation of their huge electric engines for sidereal
intercommunication. For some ages they had been able to send emotions
and impulses through the air, or rather through the medium that
interpenetrated the air, and recently they had developed this into the
despatch of thoughts through long distances. The combination of great
magnetic power and sensitive sarmolans, this book showed, would draw
off thought at any point along its line of flight whether in the body
or in the air; and underneath an electric magnifier and interpreter the
indicator would reveal the meaning of the thoughts. Thus would they
be able to find out the intentions of men, however distant. But this
was only a minor result of the ideal. They would be able, with the aid
of the apparatus, to tap the torrents of thought speeding through the
ether, and so drink of the highest intelligence and imagination which
approached the earth. Much of it would be too intricate and abstruse
for them to follow or understand. But they already knew that most of
their greatest inspirations had come from this ocean of tremulous
energy, bordering the shores of our world; and development of their
faculties and of their sympathy with this extra-terrestrial thought
would gradually lead them to the interpretation of its more complex and
deeper elements. All their civilisation had been an attempt to know the
thoughts that lie in the structure of our universe, in its complicated
energy and minute life. By this new means they would feel the throb
of the very heart of our system, perchance of the very heart whose
beats are the life of the cosmos; at least they would get to know the
intelligence that flashes through space around our world, the wisdom
and the inspirations passing between the inhabitants of the ether
beyond our grosser senses.
Had it not been for this minor issue and ideal, the publication of
the book would have been completely overshadowed by that of the book
of Immortality. This took as basis the great expansion of life they
had been able to produce and their ideals of ethereal nutrition and
amphibious life, and pictured the posterity of the Limanorans able to
join the inhabitants of the ether without any violent transition or
death. We saw a Limanoran on the stage in Loomiefa passing through the
new transmutation from mortal to immortal. His transient elements were
atom by atom sublimed away in a new hall of medication, where magnetic
energy took the place of more material nutrition. His tissues became
diaphanous, till only the light and the magnetism he emitted marked the
place where he lay. It was what he thought and felt rather than what
he was that told us he was still there. His lower and more stagnant
centres of energy had vanished; and gravitation seemed to have little
or no influence upon him. Whithersoever his thought willed, thither
he floated, rather the luminous reflection of a man than the man
himself. To our grosser senses he seemed as impalpable and evanescent
as a perfume or a mist on the morning hills. Yet there he stood or
moved an inexpugnable centre of the highest energy, whither flowed the
sympathetic force of other centres, and whither nothing hostile could
approach. Storms passed effectless over his head; the deadliest engines
shot their darts at him in vain; poisonous fumes, lethal showers,
armies of pestilential microbes, swept round him and through him
innocuous. All the evanescent centres of energy that had laid him open
to the attacks of these, had dissolved and left him fit to be a dweller
in the infinite ether. There might be other noxious elements, to whose
assaults he was yet vulnerable; but these we could not discover. He
was immortal as far as terrestrial enemies were concerned, immortal
without the sudden collapse and dissolution of the lower centres which
we call death upon our world. By the most natural of processes he lost
the substance that awakened our grosser senses and became the mere
halo of what he had been, fit only to make himself felt by our centres
of thought and imagination. With our firlas we could feel stream from
him great currents of magnetic influence, unobstructed by any of those
terrene or aërial media that make spiritual intercourse so difficult
upon this world.
Such an ideal, when attained, would spread what is now called death
over the greater part of our terrestrial lifetime, instead of massing
it into a few moments of farewell. It would be difficult to fence
off the immortal from the mortal, so many stages would there be of
transmutation. The intercourse between the immortalising and the
immortal would then be continuous and there would be no sudden break
in existence, no great gulf fixed between the spiritual and the
material.
With the same corporeal and mental faculties which their ancestry had
had in primeval ages, and the bulk of men had in their own day, they
would have counted immortality as the gift of a friend. Even with
their existing development, noble though it was, they would never
think of longing for such a fate; for the lower centres of energy,
forming what is called the body, still demanded an amount of attention
and sustenance that was burdensome. They had great delight in their
life; they energised so purely and continually that they often forgot
the corporeal system and its claims. Yet the time came in all men’s
lives when they felt their still-mixed constitutions advance too
slowly for their spiritual ambitions; and then they longed for change,
perhaps rest, such as the dissolution we call death accomplished. If,
however, they could get rid of the inferior and clogging elements of
their systems and float free of terrene forces and conditions like
gravitation, then might immortality be an object of desire.
A publication that delighted them even more than this was one that
had a cognate theme, the dimension of time. It seemed to me the most
fanciful of all the productions I had witnessed in Loomiefa. Yet it did
not seem to strike the Limanorans as beyond the bounds of possibility.
It was called the book of Time-focussing. So fantastic and utopian
did I think it that I paid little attention when it was dramatically
published on the stage. Yet I remember some of the chief features of
the new book.
It counselled the development of the imagination on its prospicient
side till it should count æons as moments and take easy flight
through eternities. It was the real time-faculty, and had already in
the productions of Loomiefa forerun the civilisation of the race by
long periods. It had become true prophet not merely over months or
years, but over centuries. Trained to use the data of the past and
the present, it had been able to forecast the evolution of the future
with a certainty that made its art almost a science. What was to
hinder extending its range of vision beyond the immediate horizon, and
taking in at a glance the course of the future as it did the page of
history? And as it reached higher and higher points of view, it could
paint eternity as it now pictured the past. There was no limit to its
previsional powers, as there had been none to its penetration into the
prehistoric and primeval darkness. Prescience should be as organised
and exact as any science. In fact all their sciences had become
presciential, those that were merely retrospective or synchronous
having gradually fallen out of notice. And the families that had been
devoted to them were one by one absorbed into other services. No study
was counted of much value that had not one eye on the future. Their
whole intellectual system was thus becoming futuritive, and all the
faculties looked up to and centred in the greatest and most predictive
of them all--the imagination.
They had already been able in the valley of memories to focus the
past into the view of a few moments or days or months. The time
stretching behind us into the darkness was underneath one glance of the
intellectual eye. Only greater certainty in their imaginative methods
was needed for the eternity that stretches in front of us to flash
before the soul in a single picture. Only develop the prophet-faculty
as rapidly in the next few generations as it had been developed in
the past few, and we might move at will from age to age of the future,
as we now move from age to age of the past, living at any moment in
any period we pleased, or in a thousand periods at once. From past
to future would be as easy a leap as from hell to heaven for this
great time-and-space-focussing faculty. Eternity would be as focal
to imagination as infinity. It was an eye towards which radiated all
time and all space. Post-historic pictures would be as vivid to it as
prehistoric. Even now interest was fast leaking from mere recorded
history before the romance of eternity past and future. What was the
history of the race upon earth, compared with the periscope of the
cosmos? Then would their posterity be able to stand on a watch-tower
in the heights of heaven, and view the whole arena of existence as it
stretched through time and space. There is no faculty so close to the
divine as imagination.
I felt that this publication was like all their work, singularly
self-regardless. It clearly recognised that the realisation of its
proposed ideal would mean the doom of its art. Pioneering, all of
theirs which we in the West would call literature, would be superseded.
Loomiefa would then become an institution of the past, less and less
interesting as but a rapidly receding item of history. Self-effacement
for the sake of progress was the dominant note of Limanoran
civilisation. And in this book it seemed to me to rise to its highest
pitch; for it held before the race a goal, which, when attained, would
render literature and its publication unnecessary to its advance.
CHAPTER VIII
ANOTHER THREAT
WHEN the island was absorbed in the productions of this new literary
or pioneering era, its attention was suddenly called to its immediate
surroundings. Out of eternity they were jerked into the passing moment
to defend their own little plot of earth. Mere existence was endangered
if they did not at once withdraw their powers from their march through
the future. It had been the result of their humane and lenient policy
towards their exiles that every few generations rebellion and menace
rose in the archipelago against their mysterious isolation. Fear of the
isle of demons awed the imaginations of the other islands for a century
or two, and then foolhardy prosperity, or conquest, demanded a new
lesson.
Half a century had not passed since the romance of Choktroo’s rise
and fall; and unaided and unstimulated, the other inhabitants of the
archipelago would have grovelled in helpless fear and hate of the
central isle. The discipline applied in the repulsion of Choktroo’s
fleet would have sufficed for several centuries, but for a new power
which had insinuated itself within the circle of mist.
One of the days when the book of Emigration was holding the stage of
Loomiefa, the spectators were startled by realistic transference of
their drama to the sky above them. Just as the opalescent faleenas
were about to land on the new star, every eye was suddenly drawn
away from the stage to the blue spreading above the valley. Across
it was passing a strange airship of huge proportions and ungainly
structure. I recognised it as a development of the balloon, with which
I had been familiar in my European experience. There was the immense
inflated globe, or rather pear, with the car hung underneath; but
there was something new in the motions of this balloon. It seemed to
be dirigible, for it tacked this way and that across the direction of
the wind. And still more strange, the car was filled with implements of
war; I could see their great muzzles pointed over the sides.
The Limanorans were startled by this anticipation of their science, but
only for a moment; and as soon as the apparition sailed out of sight,
they bent their senses as eagerly on the spectacle before them. They
knew that their sentries were at their watch-posts on Lilaroma, and
nothing hostile to the interests of the civilisation could occur in air
or sea or upon earth without stirring their attention, and so placing
the whole island on the alert. They waited till the publication of the
book was finished and then streamed off to their various businesses
and pursuits. As we flew across the upper slopes of the mountain
we found out that the aërial stranger had settled upon one of the
lonelier heights of the island of Broolyi. No action was taken by the
Limanorans against the singular invader of the archipelago, except
to set a special watchman who should observe his movements through
the idrovamolan, and should report to the elders anything out of the
common that might occur.
The stranger had evidently been disabled away to the east of the circle
of fog; his steering-gear had ceased to act, and before a tornado he
was hurried away from the great continent over which he had hovered.
The impetus bore him helpless above and across the ring of mist, and
within its calmer sphere the steering-gear was again adjusted. It was
then that the watchers on Lilaroma saw his purpose to make for their
island, and they sent through the lilaran a blast which would carry him
away from their shores, not rude enough to harm him, yet sufficiently
strong to defeat his intention. Feeling himself borne again farther
away from his home he tacked for the nearest peak that he thought he
could reach. This was evidently Klimarol. But the blast of the lilaran
was too much for him; and to save himself from drifting still farther
west he grappled one of the heights of Broolyi as he passed over it,
and settled there.
It became one of the amusements of the younger Limanorans to observe
the behaviour and the fate of the newcomer in the isle of peace. The
crew of the airship was numerous; they were taken prisoners not long
after they had descended from their car, and their captain was hurried
off to the court of the new ruler. Before long the balloon was brought
to the capital and carefully guarded; and, anchored firmly to the
earth, it made ascents with the royal engineers under the direction of
the balloonist. His every movement was watched lest he should release
the captive by cutting the rope that bound it, and sail off with the
officers of his Broolyian majesty. But as the months and years passed
on, the newcomer with his strange new ship came to be trusted by the
king and his advisers. He saw an arena for his ambitions and talents,
and bent his whole energies to his new purpose.
We could see him from day to day and week to week add to the aërial
fleet, which he at once began to build in imitation of the balloon
he had brought with him. His original subordinates and companions
were at first his only assistants, but the Broolyian engineers and
mechanicians afterwards joined in the work in great numbers, and became
as deft at it as the strangers. Every new balloon that was made was
tested in the air. At first there were accidents, which for a time
prejudiced the court and the people against the aërial monsters. But by
carefully selecting his men from the army the director was able at last
to furnish every airship that he made with a complete and efficient
crew, able under the leadership of one of his companions to manipulate
the vehicle and every implement on board of it. It even became the
favourite pastime of the court to make voyages across the island in
these swift frigates of the sky.
Ultimately the king so thoroughly trusted the master of this new style
of transportation that he abandoned himself to his guidance and allowed
him free use of all the resources of the island. He came to see the
marvellous possibilities that lay in warfare carried on by such a navy.
Though the Broolyians had, after Choktroo’s deportation, lost one by
one all the conquests that that audacious warrior had made, and had at
last been confined again to the limits of their island, they never gave
up their ambitious dreams. And the monarch who could fulfil them would
be certain to fix his empire in their hearts. The new king looked round
for some means to gratify this passion for conquest. But their old
methods were now comparatively useless; for the other large islands,
warned by their past experience, built fleets as large and formidable
as the Broolyian, and the smaller groups confederated for the purposes
of defence. It was vain then to think of re-mastering the archipelago
in any attempt by sea.
With extreme delight then did the monarch watch a demonstration of the
warlike possibilities of the new air craft. The director had some old
hulks moored out at sea in sight of the king and his court. Then he
entered one of his new balloons, well provided with guns and explosives
and well-manned, and bade the crew let go. They sailed straight out
till they rose high over the remains of the antiquated navy. As they
approached their prey, several guns belched out their fires from the
car, and their shot struck and sank three of the ancient ships. But
two tough old hulls resisted all their attempts. So the balloon rose
straight over them, but much higher in the air. Out of the car was
seen to fall two packages, which made for the decks of the old tempest
resisters. In the twinkling of an eye, before we could realise that the
packets had reached their destinations, there was a thunderous roar,
and the air was filled with jets of water and with the flying fragments
of the shattered hulks. When the commotion settled, nothing but
floating planks and spars and shreds of the vanished ships was to be
seen on the surface of the water. And away out of reach of the fierce
convulsion rode the airship majestic and unharmed in the blue.
The monarch need no further demonstration. He gave up to the master of
the new power the use of his whole army and navy. Before many months
were over a vast aërial fleet was equipped and manned ready for the
first emergency, and this emergency arose at once. The sullen jealousy
which ever smoulders and rankles between two powerful and neighbouring
empires took substance and outward shape between Aleofane and Broolyi.
The old enemy knew nothing of the new instruments of war which had
been forged, and prepared with cheer and good hope for the struggle.
Her fleet was in excellent order, well equipped and manned, but within
a few weeks it had completely vanished before the wrecking terror of
the air. Continuous torrents of lead and iron streamed from above onto
their decks, making those of their gunners that survived helpless and
inert. And when their captains invented methods of pointing their guns
at the aërial ships and of floating fire-kites against them to set them
on fire, then the most tremendous engines of the navy in the air were
brought into train; and with appalling explosions the Aleofanian ships
and their crews vanished in atoms.
No such destruction of a nation’s war material had ever occurred in
the history of the archipelago. The Aleofanian marine force was swept
from the face of the sea. One or two other islands were bold enough to
attempt the struggle with the new power, but with the same disastrous
results to themselves. Over the whole archipelago except its central
island the air-fleet passed, inspiring terror and reducing the peoples
to servitude. It was the same all-conquering story as was told under
Choktroo’s leadership.
And now the Broolyian army and people were willing to worship the maker
and manipulator of these balloons as a god. He had plenty of ambition;
but he was by nature and acquirement only a mechanician and not a born
leader of men. He had none of the self-confidence made monstrous by
success, or of the unscrupulousness, that forges the masterful will.
He did love power, but he hesitated before those audacious measures
which give a conqueror the highest vantage-ground. He yearned to rule
widely. But he had not the self-mastery and the leavening imagination
which secure command over the minds of human aggregations. He was
but an average nature with complete mastery over the newest and most
masterful invention.
The Broolyian monarch saw the peril of his too great success, and
set the stranger and his balloons aside in time to let the popular
enthusiasm cool. Alone with his fleet and his army the king completed
the round of conquests. He knew that when the power of Aleofane and
one or two other chief islands was broken, there was nothing to fear
from the others, and his task, though brilliant, was easy. He took care
that there were several great and sanguinary battles that put heart
and pride into his soldiers and sailors. Thus by the time the war was
finished, the newcomer and his appalling fleet were almost forgotten.
But the monarch himself did not forget them. He knew that the climax of
this new era of national conquest and pride was certain to come soon.
Never had the Broolyians been continuously successful in war without
losing their traditional fear of the isle of devils, and demanding its
subjugation. He set his house in order against the day of vainglory.
He would develop his new method of warfare. He made the stranger
again his commander-in-chief, urging him on towards the increase of
the aërial fleet and of its terrorising weapons. Then, fearing from
his knowledge of the past that there was little chance of success, he
gave him complete command of the expedition, so that all the blame of
failure should be on the shoulders of another. In order to complete the
contrast, he kept rebellion smouldering in one or two of the adjacent
islands, and took care that it broke out simultaneously with the attack
upon the isle of devils.
Ignorant of the conditions he had to meet, and puffed up by his past
successes, the stranger thought that all he had to do was to add to the
number of his fleet and the deadliness of his weapons. We saw him set
out with banners flying amid the applause and enthusiasm of the people,
whilst the wily king led off his own forces, quietly to embark from
an opposite shore of the country against the rebels of neighbouring
coasts. Success seemed to follow the aërial navy, for favouring winds
bore them swiftly and majestically over the horizon out of the range of
Broolyian vision. For myself, as I sat at an idrovamolan, I feared the
strange new torrential guns and the showers of deadly explosives that
would rain down from these aërial ships, and my heart sank as I saw
them sail like great vultures nearer and nearer to their prey.
But my compatriots were tranquil and free from all anxiety. Everything
was really in readiness and they were only awaiting the exact moment
for action. It came, and the huge balloons fell suddenly away before
the blast from the lilaran, like a flock of storm-beaten birds. I could
see them struggling, many of them half disabled, to stand up to the
wind. But it was vain; they whirled like snowflakes before an arctic
tempest. Their helms became entangled in their snapped cordage, and I
could see their guns roll and pitch with fatal effect upon the crews,
till from many the suicidal weapons were tumbled overboard into the sea
below.
Yet the expedition by no means acknowledged itself defeated. Guided by
some experienced Broolyian adviser the admiral of the fleet changed its
formation. Evidently from knowledge that the blast from Lilaroma could
play upon only one point at once, he divided his air-navy into three
squadrons, and making the central face the blast, he sent the other
two in different directions round the island. He thought that these
two would be able to bring their explosives and guns to bear upon the
lilaran by this flank movement. It was as unsuccessful as his other
efforts. Both sections came almost within firing distance of the shore,
when suddenly their gaseous spheres were seen to collapse. A slight and
silent flash was all that told whence the disaster had come. Electric
rockets had issued from magnetic ejectors of great power and almost
invisibly punctured the spherical supporter of each airship.
It seemed as if the whole of the three squadrons would soon be in
the sea, and with the weight of their war material they were certain
to sink to the bottom and carry all their crews with them. But the
invaders promptly threw overboard their weighty cargoes, and with their
usual humanity the Limanorans now did their best to save their enemies.
The punctures in the balloons were so minute that it would take some
time to exhaust them. So the lilaran sent its blast underneath them and
buoyed them up like thistledown, at the same time blowing the three
sections of the navy off in different directions. It was amusing to
watch the alternate rise and fall of the various airships as it turned
its blast from one squadron to another, like a game of battledoor and
shuttlecock played by giant jugglers. The warriors in the cars kept
crouching in panic and holding onto the cordage, as they rose or fell
in the air upon the billows of wind. Their cars danced and leaped and
jerked like corks in an eddy where currents meet, and they were too
panic-stricken or too paralysed with terror to see that with all the
tumult of their movements they were gradually approaching solid earth.
We saw each squadron land on the shores of a separate island; and after
their terrible voyage the crews threw themselves upon the earth and
seemed to clutch it, in fear lest they should be torn again from its
sweet anchorage into the warring whirlpools of the upper air.
After a few days they collected their wits and the shattered fragments
of their air-fleet, and, hiring boats from the islanders, sailed
homewards. As they entered the main harbour of Broolyi crestfallen and
dispirited, the army and fleet of the king were returning from their
victories with triumphal music and with banners flying. The contrast
was striking, and set the monarch more firmly on his throne for another
generation.
Yet matters could not remain where they were. The defeat of the new
methods of warfare stirred hope in the breasts of the conquered
peoples; and muffled sounds of rebellion came from many of the islands.
The king knew that he must make some other move, and held long councils
with the defeated balloonist.
The result of the conferences soon became manifest. The stranger had
seen that his aërial fleet was useless against tempests and electric
missiles, such as the isle of demons had command of, and he willingly
handed it over to his superior to use against the threatened revolts.
With the blind obstinacy of the average mind placed in a position
greater than its powers, he ran counter to the traditions of the
archipelago, and uttered loud resolves that he was not to be beaten;
he would show them how fertile he was in resources; he had no fear of
their bag of winds.
The king again gave him free scope with all the material and forces of
the country, and the ingenious mechanician forged huge guns that would
throw their projectiles enormous distances, and built great ships to
hold them. As he launched one vessel after another, he practised his
crews on board of it, and taught them how to handle the marvellous
artillery. The people stood in awe, as they heard the thunder of their
fire dozens of leagues away, and saw their missiles fall in the sea
miles and miles from the ship whence they had issued; and they shook
their heads wisely and said to each other: “Now, we shall see at last
an end to this isle of demons.”
When the great armada was all ready after long years of work, and the
ships lay at anchor in the harbour, their magazines filled, their
guns in train, and everything prepared for the final expedition, the
people were so overjoyed at the sight that they organised a festival
to the sailors of the wonderful fleet. They had such confidence in the
destructive powers of these ships and their guns that they resolved
to pre-celebrate with magnificent pageantry and feast the triumph
they were so assured of. And as the monarch had already defeated
the incipient rebellion by his aërial fleet, and the mutterings of
the subjugated were stifled or unheard, there could be no danger in
inviting all the sailors on shore to take part in the festivities. So
the great fleet lay peacefully at anchor unmanned, whilst their crews
were being lauded to the skies for their intrepidity and the certainty
of their success.
The night was moonless and deep darkness was flecked only by the
occasional blaze of sky-daring illumination. Everything had gone
off with brilliancy, and the banquet to the sailors was nearing its
climax and close. Suddenly the hubbub of jubilance was hushed; there
was a series of appalling detonations, shaking the banqueting edifice
to its foundations; many thought that the world had come to an end so
terrifying and ear-deafening was the continuous roar. The people in the
streets at first fell on the earth and prayed to their gods. But they
soon saw what had occurred. There out on the harbour the pyrotechnic
display overshadowed anything they had ever seen or even thought of.
The great ships were all of them in flames; the magazine of each had
exploded, and sent decks and fittings and armaments sputtering in
fragments against the black of the sky. The brilliancy of the spectacle
overcame the natural alarm and regret. Such titanic catherine-wheels
they had never seen, such rending of the heavens, such flame-lit
jets of water rising in columns above the doomed ships. But the
spectacle was brief. Ship after ship rose high above the scene of its
devastation, its banners of fire all flying against the darkness, and
then plunged into the extinction and gloom of the depths. The breach in
the side close to the magazine sucked in the waters most swiftly, and
sent the bow-end of each first to the watery assuagement of her fires.
In an hour after the first deafening paroxysm all was still and dark
again on the face of the waters, but for a flaming fragment here and
there, hissing and sputtering against the night.
Then came terror again. The Broolyians, jubilant over the invincibility
of their marvellous fleet, knew not whence the disaster had come or
who had been the enemy. And they now crouched in fear, or ran for
shelter, lest the invisible foe should take advantage of their palsy
and reap his harvest of blood. But no enemy came. No carnage followed
the strange catastrophe. The morning dawned, and the waters of the bay
shone as peacefully in the level rays of the sun as if no fleet had
ever been there, as if no conflagration had occurred. Not a boat or
sign of an enemy was to be seen. Out crept the soldiers and sailors
from their shelters, the people in their rear, and soon the harbour was
alive with craft, seeking relics and explanation of the disaster.
But no explanation could be found in all the babel of theories that
chattered and echoed over the water. A council of the royal advisers
was called; they consulted and questioned every admiral and general;
but all in vain. The stranger, who had brought the fleet and its
equipment into existence, failed to account for the occurrence. He
refuted all charges of negligence, and appealed to the desire of the
people and the command of the king as his warrant for withdrawing the
crews from the ships for the night. Treachery there must have been;
there were a thousand conjectures, but no sure knowledge as to whence
it came. With the irrationality and ingratitude which mark all panic
in nations or other aggregations of men when unexplained disaster has
overtaken them, they broke out in fury against the very hero of the
night’s festivities. They had to find a scapegoat and his figure was
foremost in every man’s mind; the destructive magnetism of the crowd
gathered round the name that was on every lip, and the cry arose that
he was the traitor. The mob howled outside the council-room for his
blood. He had to be bundled off by a secret passage to the outskirts of
the city and thence into the mountains, and to appease their frantic
passions the king had to proclaim his exile, and to promise that no
such engines of war should again be forged in the royal armories. Fear
of the isle of demons again crept over the superstitious hearts of the
people. As they brooded over the mystery, they felt that somehow or
other it was connected with that inexpugnable centre which had defied
all their efforts at its invasion.
And this was right. For the Limanorans had watched the long preparation
for the assault, and made calmly ready to defeat it. They knew that, if
they ever allowed the fleet to sail, they could not well beat it off
without loss of life amongst its crews. It could lie in the shelter
of an island some miles distant from their shores and rain great
projectiles upon them. The repulse must be accomplished long before
this had been reached. They therefore waited till the ammunition was
on board each ship. Then, in order to avoid the destruction of life,
they sent into the air of Broolyi the exhilarative magnetism required,
and into the minds of the inhabitants the suggestion that the whole
fleet should be fêted. When the ships had been deserted and not a human
being was within reach of them, they launched through the air in its
direction a series of electric shocks, which, as soon as they came in
contact with the metals of the magazine, ignited the ammunition. Most
of the ships were set on fire in this way, the rest by the falling
fragments and sparks from their exploding sisters.
Thus was the new threat to Limanoran civilisation frustrated without
loss of life or breach of the mystery that sealed the central isle. But
the waste of time and progress upon such threats by the withdrawal of
so many Limanorans from their ordinary pursuits was an evil not to be
tolerated. Something must be done to prevent the recurrence of these
expeditions. It was generally from Broolyi they came, the result of
warlike ambition. It would be a service to the whole archipelago to
reduce this military people to insignificance and silence. There was
no security in their subjugation by the people of another island, for
the war-fanaticism would surge up again in a later generation. The
conversion of them to a religion of peace would mean no change in the
blood; it would only transform the method and cue of attack.
What was needed was the elimination of the ambitious and military
natures from the Broolyians. For only the aristocracy and the
descendants of the original conquering exiles had set their hearts on
military pursuits; the conquered and many of the families that came to
the island at later dates than the great purgation, were not unwilling
to keep to their own bounds, and preferred possession to dispossession.
There was no need of extermination of the people, but only decimation.
Nor would the Limanorans endure any shedding of blood in the process.
It must be gradual, peaceful, free from torture and bloodshed, and
almost unobservable.
The physiological and physicist families worked out a scheme that would
fulfil all these conditions, and yet finally eject the disturbers of
peace from the archipelago within a generation. The scare they had just
suffered and the exile of the balloonist ensured to Limanora freedom
from their attacks for some years. But they aimed at permanent immunity
and this could be secured by nothing less than the sterilisation of the
warlike element in Broolyi.
The end was accomplished in the next aggression upon a neighbouring
island. The expedition was formidable, and included all the bellicose
males of the offending people. After landing, it lay encamped in the
open air; then a band of Limanorans set out on wings by night, armed
with a new surgical instrument, called the idlumian, which could give
an electric shock to any part of the human system and paralyse it
either for a time or permanently, according to the power put into it.
They approached the whole army as it lay asleep, and by the whiff of a
soporific which they diffused through the air, they steeped the systems
of the sentinels in lethargy and by the same means ensured the depth
and continuance of the slumbers of the embattled host. Before a single
soldier had awakened from his deep sleep, the whole Broolyian army
was defertilised without being in the least conscious of any loss of
vitality or manhood or enjoyment of life. When the sentries awoke and
the troops began to move about in preparation for their struggle, the
medical embassy had winged its way back to Limanora. Not till twenty
or thirty years after did it strike the Broolyians that the fountain
of their military power was dried up, and soon they began to attribute
the strange infecundity of their aristocratic and warlike families to
the witchcraft of the isle of demons, a belief that finally sealed that
centre of the archipelago as with walls of adamant against aggression
on the part of their neighbours.
My Western instincts, in spite of all my training, would reappear at
intervals--which happily became longer and longer--and for a time
I could not repress my instinctive disapproval of the use of this
idlumian or electro steriliser. Yet my reason told me that it was the
only effective method of permanently stopping the horrors of war in the
archipelago. Heredity and circumstances would have circumvented any
other bloodless attempt at relief from the Broolyian nightmare. A few
discussions with my proparents made this rational view of the matter
dominant over the conservative instinct in me, and before many years my
instinct was quite the other way; it became the ally of the reason; and
I had no need to argue with myself on the point or confirm my faith by
arguing with others who knew better than I.
There was another Western instinct of mine which gave me frequent
though lessening trouble and came into conflict with the reason of
the community at this time and on this topic. It was my approval
of propagandism. Into my blood had grown through the centuries of
Christendom the feeling that a faith could not well prove itself unless
it spread out amongst new and alien peoples. It is the prerogative and
principle of belief to yearn for universality of acceptance amongst
human beings. And it urges on the devotees of any faith to spread it
through the world at all costs. After centuries of propagandism the
habit becomes an instinct, and it seems to be a dictate of nature to
attempt to convert the world to the tenets which have grown up in us
from infancy and been incorporated into our very life. The Christian
has ever been from its outset a great missionary religion, and it
is difficult for one brought up in Christendom to get rid of the
missionary attitude of mind which assumes every alien to it to be sunk
in wickedness and unprofitableness, and certain to lose all the future
blessings promised to true believers.
I could not obliterate this instinct wholly from my nature, and
whenever I reflected on the wisdom and nobleness of the Limanoran
civilisation, or noticed the marvellous progressiveness of some
new phase of it, I found myself longing to go back to the Western
world with my knowledge. Thus I often drifted into appeals to the
propagandist spirit which I assumed to exist in the breasts of my
friends and fellow-citizens, but I was not allowed to rest long in
such dreams. Each time I uttered or even thought over my missionary
desire, I was brought to book with the widest of knowledge and the
keenest of penetration into human nature and its history. I felt that
it was almost as useless for Europeans to go out amongst the tribes of
monkeys and spend their lives trying to bring them up to such a level
of intelligence as is implied in the appreciation of the Christian
religion, as for the Limanorans to apostolise amongst mankind, and
struggle to drag them up to the stage of progress these islanders had
reached.
But now, whenever my missionary mood returned upon me, my friends
would point with a smile to the new invention, the electro-steriliser;
and if pressed by the disapproving skepticism of my thoughts, they
would urge in words the omnipotence of this little instrument as the
apostle of progress. By this and this alone was the snail-pace advance
of mankind likely to be quickened. Without more rapid elimination of
the unfit than was afforded by natural selection, sexual selection,
and the accidents of surroundings, there was little hope of wise
propagation of the human race. The blunders and defects and maladies
of every new century were treasured up by heredity in the tissues of
mankind along with any feeble tendency to advance that might appear.
The struggle was a losing one in spite of the development of science
and wealth. And all reforming theories and efforts were but stumblings
in the dark till there had been a thorough purgation of traditional
and epidemic diseases, moral as well as physical. Nine tenths of the
race, as at present constituted, were unworthy to hand on their natures
to posterity. Under the régime of propagational license universal
among all peoples of the earth, the evil and diseased multiplied at
a much greater rate than the sound in mind and body. The progressive
element in mankind was dragged back by the dead weight of the criminal,
the diseased, the habitually pauper, and the naturally incompetent.
Some religions even set themselves to encourage the vitalisation and
propagation of the last. It was noble and good to assuage the evils
that heredity had accumulated in their systems; but it was anything
but noble and good to encourage them to perpetuate their misfortunes
throughout a wide posterity. “Multiply” should be the last word of an
advancing civilisation instead of the first, unless there be added to
it the condition “only the best.” And who cares or dares to preach
this true gospel of progress, when it touches a theme that all are
ashamed to mention? If ever there was a sacred mission upon earth it
would be that of the man who should go to the wise and good men of all
nations and put into their hands the secret of the idlumian, or who
should himself pass round the world and sterilise all the morally or
physically diseased amongst rich and poor, amongst gentle and simple.
Within two generations the races of humanity would take such a leap
into light and noble vitality and love of progress as would make the
most brilliant civilisation of the past seem barbaric. Then would they
take command of their own destiny, and look unflinchingly into the
future for the path they should take. Advance in material or in the
accumulation of force is vain, unless it goes hand in hand with such
universal moral and intellectual advance. It is progress in the human
system through all its parts that should be the aim of every race.
I gradually came to understand the importance they attached to this
new instrument as the most humane and effective of missionaries. Had
it come before their great series of purgations, there would have been
little need for the expatriation policy. If they had had to eject, they
would have taken care that the different sections of exiles should
vanish in a generation. They shrank from extinguishing the individual
life that had already been brought into being. They would have had no
scruple in giving euthanasia to an evil race or a section of a race;
for this meant only preventing a posterity coming into existence to
take up their burden of evil. And even now it was a question to be
seriously discussed and answered whether they would not sweep out the
pollution from the rest of the archipelago by the help of this humane
little doorkeeper of posterity. Would it not prevent the lifelong
evil of thousands? Where lay the humanity or love in allowing a
retrogressive and unhappy race to hand on to myriads to come the evil
they had received from their ancestors?
CHAPTER IX
POLITY
I WAS privileged to hear, or rather to be conscious of, the discussion
that the question of idlumian-missionaryism underwent. I had now
reached the age and stage of my training which gave me the entry as
audience to the councils of the race. It would not have been wise to
admit to the treatment of difficult and advanced themes natures that
were still hemmed in by the limits of long-past ages of history. They
could not have sympathised in, or even followed, the attitude taken up
by the elders of the people; and they would have gone back from the
meeting with minds perplexed and bewildered by questions too complex
and futuritive for them to fathom. Many of them would have suffered a
warping of their natures from the strain, and this would have meant
years of additional training and care to set it right. The exclusion
of the immature from the national councils was a matter of educational
policy rather than of political necessity.
It was evidently for my own benefit that I was present at the
discussion of the sterilising embassy. This was somewhat difficult
for me to follow, for my magnetic power and faculties had not been
developed enough to interpret the silences between the rare speeches.
As I sat, my mind ran back to a Quakers’ meeting to which I had been
taken by my mother; then much self-control had been necessary in order
to restrain the expression of my amusement; now I felt as if in the
presence of gods who needed none of the babble of human speech to
open a pathway from mind to mind. I had sloughed off that singular
prepossession of the Western nature in favour of verbal intercourse
and had ceased to think that silence, where two or three were gathered
together, was a mark of inanity, or incompetence, or at least
passivity. I remembered with a shudder the awkwardness that accompanied
social lockjaw, even where friends met; each grew afraid of the
thoughts of the others; none knew what the silence meant; everyone was
frantically searching for something that would break the gag without
appearing unnatural. Loquacity, instead of being a bar to ideas, was
counted an accomplishment; and freedom of speech was one of the great
political watchwords. It was only on rare occasions that reserve was
not considered a defect.
Now I felt that there was nothing so powerful as these silences in
council. The magnetism of thought and feeling was flowing from mind to
mind, all the more that there was not a word or sound to interrupt it.
Now and again, when the divergence of thoughts was dominant, one of
the oldest and wisest would call them in from their different tracks
to a common centre. Speech was rather a method of focussing thoughts
than one of chasing and criticising them. The speaker would review
all the mental discussion and concentrate its lines, so that everyone
present might have a view of the whole field from a high point. It
was marvellous how rapidly they went though the business in hand by
means of these noble silences, broken by occasional reviews. There were
no displays of mental or stylistic legerdemain, no appeals to common
feeling, no captious criticisms, such as form the staple of a debate
in a Western assembly even of the wisest men. Every fallacy that crept
into the discussion was unmasked in a gentle, fair, and kindly way.
There was no partisanship, no war-whoop of prospective victory, no
lash of sarcasm, and they abhorred above all things the sweetness of
harangue.
Yet, the absence of Western methods of beating out a subject was a
disadvantage for me, who had as yet little of the magnetic penetration
or sympathy needed for the appreciation of their meetings. But my deep
reverence for the humanity of the elders, and great sympathy for their
aims, made up in part for the lack of magnetic interpretation of their
thoughts. At the close of the council I talked the matter over with my
proparents, and eked out my own observations and reflections on its
proceedings and thus came to a just view of the whole discussion.
They were strongly impelled by their love of the human race to the
missionary course, which would now be so simple and effective.
Missionaryism before meant the hoisting of every separate alien and
barbarous nature up to a higher platform, and continuing the process
with generation after generation, a gigantic task. There was more
chance of the missionaries levelling down to the civilisation of their
converts than of accomplishing their original purpose, while the
arguing, preaching, and persuading implied a Niagara of babble for
centuries. Where would lie the compensation for such abasement of the
mind? Now there was no need of condescension; it was a mere matter of
common professional work for the physiological families. The glib
energy of the old process was evaded and in its place came the need
of wide practical knowledge and keen judgment. For tongue-force and
subtlety of reasoning were substituted physiological exactness and
selective talent. The process was now eliminative rather than directly
creative.
But such pleading ignored the true difficulty, the acquisition of so
large a knowledge of local and temporal conditions as would enable
them to foresee the full effects of the step. How were they to be
certain that only the nobler natures would hand themselves on in each
race? Streams from the barbarous and evil past might flow through the
mothers. Who could guarantee that the reduced numbers of the next
generation would be able to accumulate energy quickly enough to keep
the mastery of the earth against its unreasoning and unmoral powers? As
it was, the peoples were able to fight with the seasons and the forces
of climate and weather, and with the exuberance of the plant and animal
kingdoms. If their numbers were greatly lessened by the elimination
of the coarser natures, would not the balance be destroyed, and the
natural enemies of man have the best of it?
Questions like these made them pause. To be able to answer them would
need prolonged and minute investigation of the human race and its
conditions, perhaps consuming centuries in the task. Meantime their
own forward march would have to be abandoned. Omniscience alone could
deal with the problem of missionaryism, and as things were, the
omniscience of nature was dealing with it. For evolution was proceeding
throughout the universe, however slowly. Those races that seemed to be
laggards on the upward path were evolving what was needed on their
part for the advance of the whole army of creation, and death was ever
opening new careers for the vital force of their individuals. It was
difficult to tell without complete knowledge of all the conditions
whether the spread of a certain faith or phase of civilisation was
going to be beneficent or maleficent for the world as a whole. And all
missionaryism that was not based on omniscience was striking out a path
through a jungle in the darkness. Even the idlumian, unless amongst
criminals and the morally and intellectually plague-stricken, might do
irremediable injury to the prospects of the human race. The problem of
propagandism was, as often before, abandoned as too complicated and too
far-reaching for limited knowledge and brain power.
But the discussion gave me an insight into what I had long been
curious about, their polity and methods of guiding the course of
their commonweal. I had not dared to inquire into the subject lest I
should meet with some rebuff, or find that I had been too inquisitive
where reverence was needed. Nor had I been able to see much evidence
of government or legislation, and had almost come to the conclusion
that there was no such thing in Limanora as sovereignty or state.
Though everything moved with the harmony and smoothness of perfect
organisation I could never find the organising hand.
At last I discovered part, at least, of the machinery of government.
There was one assembly or council to which reformers could appeal with
their schemes. The whole community often assembled; but it seemed to me
that it was more for training, for the reintegration of some faculty
or feeling, or for the purification and elevation of the life, than
for legislative purposes. The only trace of any approach to selection
and decision in these national gatherings was to be found in Loomiefa
and in the linguistic assemblies; in the one they practically accepted
or rejected some proposed revision of their ideals placed before
them in a new book; in the other they decided whether a new word, or
the adaptation or application of a word was worthy to live or die,
whether a new sense deserved to be kept alive in a form set apart for
it, or whether a new distinction was real or merely verbal. I could
see that these were the two great functions of a national assembly,
to accept or reject a new departure in life or in language, to see
that the path into the darkness of the unknown was the right path,
and that the verbal armour and weapons they bore allowed of no enemy
near. Discovery and advance had their own pitfalls and risks; but the
language they used in investigation and research was the most natural
ambush of fallacies and the scientific work of a generation might be
rendered nugatory by an ambiguous word or phrase. In past time they
could point out many ages, which had prided themselves on the marvels
of their progress in science and were now regarded as barren and
unprogressive; their advance had been apparent and not real, a mere
change of nomenclature and not a change of ideas or a discovery of
facts. It was natural then that the community, as a whole, should, from
the mere instinct of self-preservation, keep the most watchful eye on
this unguarded frontier of language, and almost as eager an eye on the
regions that lay before them, the ideals they were about to adopt.
I had now been led to see that there was a council for the decision
of foreign questions, for it was this that rejected the new idea of
the idlumian mission. I soon came to recognise its domestic functions
as more important than its policy abroad. The latter occupied its
attention only once or twice in a generation. Monthly, almost weekly,
it met to agree on questions and schemes which had no connection with
the world outside of Limanora. Now that I was inspired to attend its
meetings, I felt that it safeguarded the march forward. It never passed
a law; and yet its decisions were as clear, as valid, and as universal
in their effects as if they had been written out, proclaimed, and
printed in a statute-book. All the parents, proparents, and guardians
were members of it, and along with them were associated as silent,
inactive members the young men and women who had matured and had shown
sufficient of the wisdom and virtues of the race to warrant such a
privilege. These latter were in training for full and active membership
many years before their spirit and influence were felt to have bearing
on any decision. On this basis I had been admitted to the meetings.
The scheme of every new book came before this assembly prior to its
publication in Loomiefa. Every new departure on the part of any family
was brought up by its heads to be tested by the feeling of the council.
But it rarely happened that any scheme was rejected; it was, as a
rule, only revised and modified. In fact, every parent or guardian
was so keenly in sympathy with the spirit and genius of the race that
it was almost impossible for any proposal or idea to come from a
family in antagonism to the general welfare and feeling. One feature
that struck me as marking their meetings was the absence of those
searching, flaw-finding criticisms we would have considered absolutely
necessary to progress in the West; every modification suggested was an
improvement or addition readily welcomed by the author and his family.
The council was there to help and develop, and not to be hypercritical
or censorious. Every thinker or inventor was eager to bring his work
before it; instead of fearing its criticism as an ordeal he knew that
his creation would have its true spirit appreciated, and if there was
genuine and original work in it, it would meet with its due; whatever
was likely to aid the race in its forward march would be welcomed and
aided.
Another branch of its duties was the preparation of practical problems
and difficulties which were likely to obstruct the national progress
till they were solved. The council thought over these as they came
up in their minds, and tried to get at their fundamental form or
principle. After having ruminated over them for months, or perhaps
years, it indicated the family in whose province they lay, and handed
them over to it as part of its duty thereafter. In fact, the debatable
borderland between family and family was evidently one of its most
important spheres. Not that any family ever desired to evade what
might be included in its functions or offices, but, on the contrary,
was eager to do all that in it lay for the benefit of the race.
Often, however, spheres overlapped, so that two different families or
individuals were doing the same thing; and it was necessary to define
and apportion the duty of each.
In all the meetings and discussions I came gradually to feel that there
was a dominating spirit that influenced from behind the scenes. I could
see no overt mastery or guidance of the proceedings, yet there was
manifest an organising power within its organism. Schemes and problems
came before it in lucid order and a definite shape leaving no room for
mere idle conjectures. As the treatment of any one proceeded, I could
feel the magnetism of strong, harmonious spirits moulding and bending
the thoughts. I knew that I was in tutelage, although there was no open
dictation or even guidance.
After a time I began to trace the vigorous currents of influence
that swept us on with such force, to the oldest men and women in
the council, those who in Europe would have been thrust aside as
incapable of good advice and as on the borders of second childhood.
I could see a tendency on the part of most members to look to them
for the cue, when thoughts had begun to wander and part company. They
did not claim superior authority, but the deference to their opinion
and instincts was spontaneous and palpable, and often grew into the
deepest reverence. This would never have awakened the notice of an
unsympathetic stranger, so little was the feeling expressed in open
word or act.
In this way I learned, before many years’ experience of the council,
that there was an inner council or cabinet, consisting of all the
elders who had proved themselves able and wise by centuries of
discovery, or invention, or penetrative and far-reaching advice. I
could discover no formal election to it, everything in the shape of
definite constitution or government being manifestly avoided. Age did
not form the qualification for this senate although all the senators
were men and women who could count their years by hundreds. Many who
were older than they still remained outside the charmed circle. It was
rather weight of experience, and the fulness of development resulting
from it, that admitted. Whosoever by living long had made the most of
life in the line of greatest progress was singled out by the reverence
paid to his lofty character and expansive wisdom, for the duty of
piloting the race. It took years of massive growth in personality and
influence to make the community or the man certain that he had been
selected by the national spirit. The responsibility was so onerous that
the wisest shrank for years from it, fearing they had not developed
sufficiently. It was only with reluctance that they at last listened to
the call of their fellows and entered the noblest of all senates. None
sought the honour, but once undertaken, none attempted to shift the
burdens of it onto other shoulders till the nausea of life, indicating
the approach of their mortal liberation, came upon them. No one was
jealous of their authority or influence; for all knew that these they
would have had by virtue of their nature and advance, even if they
had no seat in this inner assembly. And every type of family had its
representative there, the ablest, the wisest, the noblest, generally
the oldest of the group, whether man or woman. For there was great
need in its councils of someone minutely familiar with the practical
functions and duties of every science and art in the island. Sex made
no distinction in the choice; sex was a mere accident in the realm of
reason and wisdom; sometimes the greater brain-power and greater moral
and intellectual development belonged to the male head of the family,
sometimes to the female; and it never entered the minds of this strange
people to discount position or influence because of sex.
In all differences of opinion their decision was final. For everyone
felt that the race could not possibly at that particular stage of
its progress attain to any clearer light upon the subject than this
areopagus had attained. The upholders of the clashing views received
the decision as coming from a tribunal, the most impartial and the
farthest-seeing that could be found on earth. But it was seldom that
any division of view came as far as a controversy which needed the
influence of the elders. Where two individuals or families began to
feel their opinions on any common topic drawing apart, they each made
eager efforts to understand the other’s point of view; and their
neighbours, recognising a discord in the mental atmosphere, came in
with reconciling magnetism and reason. Everyone was too anxious to
have the light of others’ thoughts thrown on the matters he had to
investigate or consider, to reject in haste a view that differed from
his, or to let his own view become unreasoning prejudice. I never
perceived among them any of that bickering or heat which so commonly
attends a misunderstanding in Europe. Long after arriving in the island
I still wondered where their courts of law were; and thought there
must be some secret tribunal that dealt summarily with all disputes. I
came at last to see that there was no need of courts of justice, for
there was never any approach to jarring or litigation; and, most of
all, there was no written law to appeal to. It was one of the primary
principles of their life that any law that needed committal to writing
was either artificial, and so beyond the necessities of the community,
or implied a flaw in the nature of the race demanding instant
attention. Written law, like overt authority, was an evidence of
elements in a community which were alien and had better be eliminated.
Hostile individuals or factions made a body of recorded laws, backed up
by force, a necessity throughout the nations of the world, and rendered
most of them practically unprogressive. Since the great series of
purgations the spirit of the Limanoran community, working through the
electric sense, had been the master of its unity and progress, and it
appeared idle to make or write laws. Every advance it achieved made
every individual at once debtor to it; all moved up to the new level.
The laws, if those principles which were continually being revised and
constantly progressing could be called so, were written in the hearts
and natures of the race; every new amendment of them was the natural
demand of the racial spirit and passed at once through the elders, the
parents, and the guardians into the conscience of all the families and
individuals. Every man was a law to himself, in that he knew and fully
recognised the aim of the community and the part he had to fulfil in
its advance. Those who were still in a state of pupillage had each two
elders as their guarantors and sponsors, who watched the instillation
of the common spirit into them, and any flaw or discord rapidly made
itself felt.
Reason was at the back of every word and act of the Limanorans; a
new feature or thought or discovery had to prove itself worthy and
real before it was accepted. There was no such thing as an appeal to
authority. Everyone knew that he would have to reason out and make
clear the nobleness of what he expected others to believe or agree to.
It was one of the main functions, the most urgent duty, of the two
councils, therefore, to revise the axioms and postulates in which the
national reason found its leverage and to see that they never became
mere prejudices. Every new advance antiquated some principle that had
been taken as axiomatic, or revealed the fallacy that lay in some
pivot-word. Any difference of opinion or of point of view generally set
the inner council on the alert. Not infrequently they found that one
investigator had been misled by a verbal fallacy or a mistaken axiom,
whilst the other had in searching laid his mind open to the light of
truth. They never rejected as trifling or insignificant any divergence
in the views of a common topic, but rather welcomed it as evidence of
some long-hidden flaw in the foundations of their reason.
Another striking feature of this inner council was that their meetings
were open to all but the young and immature. They would have nothing
to do with the secret conclave, which, they held, was the beginning
and principle of despotism. Away from the sunlight of truth and open
thought the most ghastly spiritual diseases of humanity sprang into
being and flourished; thoughts and feelings, otherwise healthy and
unashamed, became sickly, morbid, and often venomous. Resolutions
passed in secrecy need have no assigned reasons, and are soon passed
without discussion and without any reason but the lower private
feelings and prejudices of individual members. A mystery is attached
to the proceedings of such conclaves that gives well-nigh omnipotence
to the terror they instil. Hence until their doom is near they are
by nature and of necessity despotism. To every meeting of the inner
council all active councillors of the larger assembly were welcomed.
But, when present, they kept silence, and preferred to keep silence.
Nay, it was considered a special privilege for one of the senate
to withhold his thoughts from the discussions; silence for a year
or two was the hard-earned reward for years of painfully guarded
responsibility in debate. Not one of them but looked forward to such a
breathing-time for relaxation, so heavy was the care of the future of
the race. To speak was the burden; for speech must be weighty, and the
recording linasans automatically treasured it up for future years to
shed light and criticism on it.
In fact their senate-house was arranged so as to be a vast linasan
itself. Nothing was needed at the end of a meeting but to touch
a spring, and the moving irelium-strip, on which the proceedings
imprinted themselves, was securely fixed on its roll and transferred to
the valley of memories there to be laid past in the archives for future
reference, and a fresh strip took its place ready for the next debate.
Knowing this each senator weighed his every word with the utmost care.
Whatever building was used as a meeting-place for discussion by either
the whole of the people or any section of it had its dome constructed
in such a way as to serve as a collector and magnifier of sound, so
arranged that the sound should not echo back but pass instead into the
receiver of a great linasan and at once indelibly record itself, thus
making every member of the community set a watch upon his lips and
allow only the maturest wisdom to pass them.
The memories of the Limanorans were marvellous in their precision and
tenacity. They could ransack the records of any man’s brain in sleep
with the greatest minuteness, though they did not care to use this
process on anyone beyond the stage of probation and pupillage; it
implied something not unlike prying into the secrets of the nature.
They knew, too, how inexact the senses are in their reports of what
takes place in the world without. Refined and trained as they were,
there was always a liability to error. Whenever exactitude of record
was required they used machine-reporters which never made mistake
except when their gearing was out of order. At all important assemblies
and gatherings they had an instrument called an idrolinasan which
recorded in permanence not merely all that was said or done, but the
electric currents which passed from man to man. Whenever they needed
to verify a memory of the past, the irelium-strip of the particular
occurrence was brought out of the historical archives and placed
in the reversible idrolinasan, and the whole scene flashed vividly
before the senses. Doubtless this custom of machine-recording made
the Limanorans so watchful of all they said and did and thought; and
it was perhaps this as much as any of the wonderful features of their
civilisation that quickened the pace of their personal development in
more recent years. They made every effort their natures were capable
of to think and say and do what was worthy of themselves and their
people. Nothing retards the progress of Western civilisation so much
as the relaxed habit of life that even the best men and women fall
into, when others are not likely to see or hear them. Religion invented
the all-watchfulness of God in order to provide a substitute for the
consciousness of the eyes and ears of others. But it is too distant and
incorporeal to strike a highly materialised civilisation as real; and
the belief acts only for a brief period after it has been impressed
upon the mind. The economy of breath in churches and of evidence in law
courts would be so great if some of those instruments were introduced
into the West, that Europe would not know itself within a few years,
it would develop and progress intellectually and morally with such
rapidity. But the most striking result would appear in politics and
legislation. The machine would influence the speech and action of the
legislators as powerfully as if they believed every moment that the
omni-watchfulness of the deity were as real as the presence of the
Speaker in the chamber. There could be no revisal of its hansardisings;
every politician would be as true, as reverential, as weighed down
with the responsibility of his duties as if he were before the final
judgment-seat.
These machines had had a wonderful effect even upon the advanced
Limanoran polity. Not even a gesture was wasted in their assemblies.
Everything done and said was relevant and weighty. The result was
they acted as if they were one man and their meetings were brief and
effective; where a Western legislature would discuss a scheme or
proposal for years, a few minutes would suffice a Limanoran assembly
to get at the heart of it, and accept or reject it. They seldom
had to retrace their steps; if they did, the error was due to some
mistaken principle accepted in past ages as an axiom, or to some
undetected fallacy in a pivot-word. The proposer of the scheme had the
responsibility of making every feature and consequence of it clear; he
must not, and would not, conceal anything that might militate against
its acceptance; he had discussed it fully with his family, and seen
in their criticisms and suggestions everything that might be amended.
There was, therefore, not a minute lost on defective arrangement or
statement.
It was astonishing how rarely the councils had to meet, and how brief
their meetings were. And this was the reason why I had been so long
in discovering any trace of constitution or polity in their midst.
One of their favourite maxims was that an organism to be healthy must
work without calling attention to itself. And this is truest of all in
politics. The government that is never seen or heard or felt, and yet
has no secrecy or need of secrecy about its proceedings, is the most
efficacious and wholesome. Those loud democracies which occupy most
of their time in discussing themselves and their systems are corrupt
already or on the road to corruption. And monarchies that have to
parade abroad in threats or expeditions are diseased at home and afraid
to become too conscious of their disease. “The minimum of government
attains the maximum of development,” was another of their favourite
sayings. To keep this sentiment living, they led their youth back to
the study of certain periods of their past that they were ashamed of,
called the stagnant ages. Some of them had been republican, others
monarchic, some religious or superstitious, others rationalistic
or sceptical, some warlike, others peaceful. Their one common
characteristic was that the state did everything for the subjects; the
island was a nursery, the citizens were infants; no one ever thought of
taking the initiative in any scheme; whenever anything was needed, the
state had to look after it; the chief duty of a citizen was to talk and
hold meetings and criticise; to act was beyond his province; the state
had to feed and clothe him at last, and to drive him to his work with
the lash. It was the lash that disciplined the army, and urged it on to
battle. The state had within it or in its service the few who retained
activity or energy; and these few knew how to fill their own coffers
better than those of the country. Then came disgrace and disaster.
Prosperity and patriotism and courage vanished in decay before the
universal corruption on the one hand and the senile helplessness on the
other. And all that remained fell an easy prey to the first ambitious
marauder who invaded the island.
There grew up in the breasts of the Limanorans an instinctive fear
of all encroachments of the state on the duties and functions of the
family and the individual; and those who formed the inner council
were as deeply imbued with this feeling as the rest of the citizens.
One of their chief duties was to draw the line with care between
what could best be done by the separate units of the state, and what
by the state as a whole. They safeguarded the independence of the
individual, and encouraged his initiative in order that every tendency
to originality should flourish, and that the capability of meeting
emergencies should grow stronger and stronger. Every man on the island
knew that he must act for himself in innumerable circumstances without
waiting for help or counsel. And the women were trained to be similarly
self-reliant. Readiness of resource, confidence, and courage were
universal characteristics of the people, and they knew from their study
of history, as well as if they had mastered it by experience, that
dependence on the action of all and interference on the part of the
state would gradually destroy these.
It was, of course, the elders who were most keenly alive to this fact.
In their councils they defined with the most exceeding care what might
be done by them without injury to the habit of presence of mind and
spontaneity of action on the part of the individual citizens. What they
had chiefly to look after was the future of the race; and everything
done by the citizen or the family that endangered this had to be
reviewed and corrected by them. But so powerful a private influence had
each elder over every individual of his family that interference in
this respect was seldom needed. The ideals held before the race sank
into the nature of every citizen and guided him in all his actions, if
not now in all his thoughts. The matters that needed most deliberation
were the revisal or expansion of those ideals, and the selection of
pairs for marriage and parenthood; they knew that a mistake in either
of these would lead to incalculable evil, and would necessitate, in
retracing the step, long years of thought and labour besides the most
drastic remedies. The guidance of the great public institutions needed
little counsel or interference, but was almost automatic; everyone
concerned knew by instinct what he had to do and had its interests so
completely at heart that he required no reminder of the details of his
duty. The inspection and review of the various departments were rather
the task of the expert families, and chiefly of their elders, than of
the elders as a whole.
But there was one department for which the inner council or senate was
wholly responsible. This was Rimla, or the centre of force. Mechanical
power was the one thing, they had all along felt, that must belong
to the state and be controlled by the state. All other possessions
(wealth, property, reputation) were mere symbols of it. To let it drift
into the hands of individuals, who might grasp more than was good for
them or even monopolise it, was to endanger the future of the race.
Only the wisest and best and the most imbued with Limanoran ideals were
ever allowed to control the concentrated force of the island. In fact
no one but a member of the inner council could be the master of force,
and his term of control was limited to a few hours at a time, for which
period he was chosen from day to day from amongst the oldest and most
experienced of the nobler-natured. It was the greatest honour the race
could bestow. To be trusted by the whole people with the management
and distribution of that which was the fulcrum of all progress was to
be marked out as one worthy to be divine. When I came to understand
this, I saw the meaning of the reverence, almost awe, with which the
master of force was pointed out to me on my first visit to Rimla. I had
not measured the greatness of his power, or seen that it was far more
real and comprehensive than that of any monarch or despot that had ever
ruled.
Where would their civilisation or their ideals or great future be
without this marvellous concentration of naked energy? What would have
become of the race, had a base ambition or an insane caprice entered
into the thoughts of anyone of their masters of force while he held
the reins of dominion in his hands? It was the duty, therefore, of
everyone who was elected to the office, however often he had held it,
however noble he had proved himself, however trusted he might be by
all, to submit himself the hour before he entered Rimla to the tests of
the inner nature and thoughts that the race knew, and this in presence
of the oldest of the senate. The workings of his brain and heart were
stringently investigated, and after that he was sent to sleep, in
order to have his dreams read and interpreted. If any of the tests
gave dubious answer, he resigned his office and another was chosen in
his place. For almost a generation this had never occurred, yet the
precautions were as rigidly enforced as if the tests had often revealed
defects. For the master of force held in his hands the key of their
civilisation and progress. To the elders all private ends and honours
seemed trivial beside the aim of the race, the only divine thing,
they thought, that they held in their hearts. To have been able to
substitute anything on earth for it even for a moment was to them so
absurd and insane as to appear impossible for any Limanoran. All this
safeguarding of the probity and the sanity of the masters of force was
therefore counted rather as a tribute to the importance of the office
than a slur upon the individual.
It was not that private motive or stimulus had been annihilated. On
the contrary they considered that the chief spur to progress was the
struggle of the individual in competition with his fellows. He who
could attain most rapidly to the ideal set immediately before the race
was a marked and striking personality. To level all means of advance
so as to make them the same for all was to destroy this stimulus to
development. To be respected and at last reverenced by his neighbours
was longed for by every man in the community, and everyone had his own
special faculty and means for gaining such respect and reverence. At
the great purgation of the island’s socialists and thieves, private
property had not been abolished, but only disgraded. The socialists had
been willing to erase all other methods of civilisation and progress
for the sake of the impossible dream, the equalisation of property;
the thieves had been willing to do the same for the sake of the swift
acquisition of their share of it. They kept up an abnormal and morbid
appetite for property which raised it completely out of scale and
proportion, compared with the other symbols of power and means of
advance. It became a disease that perverted their whole view of life,
and nothing wholesome could be done till they were expelled. After
their expulsion it was found that property lost its importance, and the
word “fortune” ceased to be identified with its acquisition. It fell
to its natural and true position in the scale of means of development.
The motive that the socialists had most prominently put forward for
their schemes, the benefit of their poverty-stricken and starving
brethren, had long become too artificial to hoodwink the wiser
patriots. Not since the barbarous stage of their past had bare
subsistence been a struggle and aim in the race. They had become too
provident to allow population to outrun means or demand. There never
had been for centuries anyone who needed his neighbour or the state to
aid him with food or clothing or other of the vital necessaries. If
there had, he would have been too deeply ashamed of his mismanagement
of his life, or his improvidence, to allow anyone to know of it. The
arrangements of the state and the carefully proportioned size of the
population left no room for him to throw the blame on others. The body
of the people laughed at the socialists for the patent absurdity of
their pretext, and helped the wise leaders to drive them out. Even if
this motive had been the real one, to disorganise the whole political
and social system, and to throw overboard the aim of the race for the
sake of securing a beggarly pittance for feebler folk who ought not
to have been brought into the world, and ought not to be allowed to
perpetuate their kind, was a monstrous waste of vital power. There had
become deeply implanted in them a racial instinct that no step should
ever be taken which could in any way weaken or endanger the sense of
individual responsibility. They knew that no amount of self-sacrifice,
no kind of guaranty of certain subsistence on the part of the workers
in the state, would ever make true and good citizens of those who had
lost this.
Even when they had come to have a far more comprehensive and
scientific command of the problem of population, and when the
communising of property would have led to no evil results, they refused
to think of such a measure. Every man was allowed to accumulate as
much wealth as he desired. But none had now the ambition to accumulate
it. And as soon as communication with the neighbouring islands was cut
off, commerce ceased, and with it all opportunity for growing opulent.
Everyone had enough for his needs, and these were great in a country
so rich in resources and devices and so rapid in its development. The
family safeguarded the solvency of every member of it, as it guaranteed
his capacity to do competent work for the state and for himself. The
state demanded nothing that could be called taxation from the citizens;
part of their time, ability, and work was all that it required. But
it was one of the methods of showing patriotism to give freely to the
state.
It was indeed one of the chief reasons for the retention of private
property that it allowed of an easy and ever available means of
cultivating benevolence. Personal work was a limited thing, and could
be given in aid of others only at fixed places and times and in defined
quantities. But if it could be concentrated in private possessions,
then there was ready at all times and places and in any quantity the
power of helping others. Without it generosity and self-sacrifice would
have to mourn their petty limitations. With it benignity was ever in
exercise, and remained an active and vital habit in the community. If
the state possessed all and demanded all, then the citizens were little
better than slaves; their virtues had no freedom, no exercise, and
were bound to disappear. To get as much as they could, to sate their
appetites as fully as they could, was the only competition amongst
neighbours in such a condition of affairs. The blessedness of giving
help spontaneously would never be experienced and would vanish from the
community, and in its train sympathy, beneficence, humanity.
The competition in Limanora was in giving, not in getting, though
getting was one of the conditions and bases of giving. It is true
that the advance of the race had almost superseded this palpable
method of revealing the bounty of the spirit. In former ages, when
hypocrisy was still possible, and language and smiles were too cheap
and ready a treasury to be wholly trusted as evidence of kindly intent,
private property enabled a man to give a trustworthy guaranty of his
generosity; the only other things he could sacrifice, work, liberty,
life, were too personal and too limited in opportunity to be symbols
of a bounteous heart. Now men and women needed no outer symbol to
interpret and pledge their thoughts and feelings. Everyone knew the
soul of his neighbour as he knew his own, and hypocrisy was a lost art,
having been long ago stripped of its motive.
This singular people retained the institution of private property,
fearing the apathy and languor that fall upon the energies of a
socialistic people. They had far higher stimuli to competitive vigour
in the devotion to progress and to the aim of the race, but they were
not so foolish as to abandon the more material stimuli. Everything that
would contribute to progress they retained, everything that would tend
to quicken the pace. Nor were they yet so far away from the more animal
stage of their civilisation as to be wholly rid of the fear of its
return. Should it return, the other motives, even that of patriotism,
would be so shadowy as to be impotent against the deluge of appetite
and indolence if the material competitive principle, the system of
private property, had been abolished. To avoid the risk of such a doom
as had fallen on Tirralaria, they refused to communise possessions. And
a certain sweetness of imagination, of memory, and of harmless romance
had hallowed the system in their minds; without it they would have felt
a distinct depreciation of life that would not have found compensation
in any advantage its abolition might have brought.
The evils that seemed to attach to the system in other times and
nations attached to all other symbols of power as well: birth,
position, influence, reputation, character, talent, opportunity, luck.
All that tended to differentiate one man from another and raise him
in the scale of the use of power was open to the same charge as the
institution of private property. But early in their reforming career
the Limanorans had discovered that the evils that seemed to attach to
these features of human life were not inherent in them; they arose from
the passions of envy and jealousy. As long as these had possession of
men’s hearts, the levelling process could never be final.
Communities that made the attempt to plane down human society to a
common level, and to equalise all symbols and opportunities of power
had an infinite task before them. They really began at the wrong end
and struck at the accidental consequences of what they thought an evil,
instead of getting to the root and source. The Limanorans had wisely
set themselves to bleach their natures of envy and jealousy; and once
this was accomplished they found that inequalities amongst them were,
instead of being an evil, the greatest good, the keenest stimulus of
progress. They smiled at the farce that went on in Tirralaria, a
farce that at intervals culminated in tragedy. They saw the inherent
futility of all efforts to do away with the occasions of envy and
jealousy, instead of eradicating the passions themselves. They compared
socialistic and equalising schemes to bailing out the ocean with a
sieve.
The disadvantages and abuses of private property and of all inequality
in the symbols of power vanish with the opportunity and the desire
to flaunt them in the faces of neighbours and rivals, to use them as
appeals to envy and jealousy. As a rule it is in small communities and
circles and narrow localities, where every man in almost every movement
kicks up against some neighbour, that envy and jealousy reach their
most virulent development and acquire the greatest refinement in the
use of their weapons. But that is in small communities that form parts
of wider arenas of ambition, and so learn arrogance and scorn of their
surroundings. Where a limited society lives, isolated from alien and
ambitious neighbours, a simple and unambitious life, it is generally
found to be almost free from the meaner emotions, envy, jealousy, and
their counterparts, disdain, pride, and insolence. Amongst them there
is little need of coercion or law or government; the more primitive
virtues of honesty, truth, loyalty, courage, come to them by nature;
the family eradicates or conceals all symptoms of lapse from them, all
rebellion against the interests of all. The great drawback to such
commonweals is that they are not progressive; they remain centuries
in one stage of civilisation, and seem to travellers from larger and
advancing nations mere savages buried in filth, and enslaved to the
despotism of the seasons. But this people considered such superficially
embruted communities nearer to ultimate salvation than the highly
refined nations that exhibit a medley of wealth and starvation,
militarism and religion. The maximum of government, they held, implied
the minimum of progress; for the essentials of spiritual advance are
ignored by external administration.
A long experience of all types of body politic, and a minute
knowledge and study of the history of the world, had made this people
antagonistic to every form of great empire. In their own far past
they had known the ambition to incorporate other peoples, and extend
the bounds of their dominion over the world. But that was in periods
that were stagnant or retrogressive in the essentials of a noble
civilisation. Great empires are able to concentrate vast resources;
but they spend them all on pomp, administration, and war. Wherever the
world is parcelled out into huge nations, there is no chance of freeing
them from the slavery of omnivorous armaments. Each is a threat to
the freedom of the others, and none dares disarm, or spend her wealth
on the arts of peace, lest the others should take advantage of her
unwarlike attitude. The only progress continues to be in the size and
the equipment of the armies, and in the ingenuity of the instruments of
destruction. And, should two or three absorb the others, the military
vigilance has to be all the greater. Even if the impossible should
occur, and one great empire should absorb the world, the internal
militarism would be none the less; half of mankind would have to be
employed in keeping the other half from rebellion against the central
power. Huge empires, instead of being guaranties of peace, are direct
incentives to war, or at least to a permanent warlike attitude.
What has most obstructed human progress on its civilised levels is an
inevitable tendency at a certain stage to mass into large aggregates;
that is, when there has been considerable accumulation of wealth or an
exceptional development of commerce, and protection is needed by the
wealthy or the merchants. Then the military element gains the mastery
of all natural power, and whilst there occurs a rapid evolution of all
forms of aggression and defence and of all the virtues connected with
them, there is real retrogression; the spirit dwindles as the outer
integuments bloom. Militarism only perpetuates itself and protects
nothing but its own ambitions. It is in its last analysis a subtle
fusion of histrionicism and savagery; it attracts the same tastes
as the prize-ring and the theatre. Everything that encourages it or
develops it stands in the way of the true advance of the human race.
There is, they held, no hope for mankind in general, unless this
stage of imperial ambitions and aggregations can be overleaped. Back
must the world recede from vast empires if it would attain to any
nobleness of aim, or any development of the higher elements in man.
Its sole salvation lies in small communities covering its surface and
remaining free from the taint of imperial effort and militarism. Only
when the nation has complete command of the numbers within it through
the family, that is, when the nation is small, will patriotism become
commensurate with humanity, and the true goal of the human race be the
aim of the individual.
The family is the natural unit of administration in a community; and,
as long as the heads form the common council that watches the interests
and aim of all, it can never come into conflict with national unity
and progress. The house and its goods belonged to the household in
Limanora; and, although the members of it had equal rights to the
livelihood that was counted fullest and best by the community, the
individual, if mature, had freedom of action that would surprise a
Western freeman; he was the equal of all members of the state; within
the aim of the race and the path of its progress he had complete
personal initiative; his destiny, it is true, had been shaped for him
during his pupillage, but the fulfilment of it was his own; his aims
and desires had been implanted and developed and pruned whilst he was
passing through childhood and youth, so that he would not in full
manhood spontaneously change them, but when he became an independent
citizen his methods of fulfilling these were all his own. He had to
contribute to the family treasury what was needed to keep it level
with Limanoran affluence, and he was generally eager to give more; but
all the rest was at his own disposal. The family had many buildings
in common; but each full-grown member, whether male or female, had a
separate house to retire to. Originality in the family, one of the
chief methods in the race for encouraging progress, could never be
attained without cultivating originality in the individual. It had a
track laid out for it through the future, carefully related to the
march of the nation; but it might adopt what means it liked to make
that track sure, and it might explore on all sides of it for new ideas
and methods and resources. It was the same with the individual within
it; he was encouraged to find his own means, and to use his imagination
and his other faculties fully and independently, provided he kept his
eye on the goal of the family, which was involved in the goal of the
race.
All the families were equal in their relations to the state, whatever
their occupation or wealth or origin might be. This prevented the
family from passing into the rigidity of the caste. All work was alike
honoured, and personal worth was the test of the man and of the respect
paid him, irrespective of external symbols and representatives of
power. And to prevent the supersession of this by any other principle,
all the physical forms of toil that might at one time or other be
considered offensive, were gathered into the hands of the state, and
all men and women had to take their share of them. They were the duties
connected with the various public institutions, and especially with
the centre of force. It was recognised as a good thing that every man
and woman should have physical exercise every day in order to keep the
basis of the spirit in the best possible condition, by working off the
débris of the various organs and functions of the system. This fitted
in with the principle that all force should concentrate in the hands of
the government. The most severe physical toil was certain to be that
which collected, divided, and adapted the vast accumulation of energy
in Rimla. The duties in the centre of force were therefore portioned
out day by day and week by week; and every man and woman of the
community had to spend a certain portion of time each day in this vast
forge of energy. But the lighter work was given to the less muscular,
and the youthful had to bear the chief burden; whilst the older, as
their share, were occupied chiefly in superintending it. Besides this,
every citizen had to take daily part in the work of some one of the
public institutions that were not assigned to special families, or in
the mechanical and unskilled toil of one of those that were under the
care of special families. Thus two or three hours of every citizen’s
twenty-four were impounded by the state, much to his bodily and
spiritual advantage.
The only contribution in money or kind that the state made compulsory
was that which each family exchequer gave for the support of the
medical, architectural, and other public professional families. No
valid system could have estimated the value of their services either to
the state or to the individual; and it was considered impracticable to
valuate the benefits received by each family from their work. An amount
was fixed, which each had to contribute to every family that had the
care of a public institution, or the performance of a public duty. But
over and above this amount the voluntary gifts to them were very large.
The result was that the treasuries of public and professional families
were oftenest the fullest; and they were as ready and as able to give
as any. If there was any rivalry amongst the families and individuals
in Limanora, it was in the delight of giving.
CHAPTER X
THE MANORA AND THE IMANORA
WHAT would have been considered taxes in another state were looked on
by the people of this land as voluntary contributions. There had been
no formal resolution or written law fixing necessary imposts, but they
came rather from the heart of the people, and expressed themselves
in what would have been called in other nations public opinion. It
was opinion which needed no verbal communication and might be called
rather the public magnetism of the race, that unified its customs and
feelings, and made a body of written law superfluous.
One feature of their civilisation that puzzled me for many years was
the seeming immobility of their public relationships. When a man or
woman got into a certain family with its professional duties and
prospects, there was no means, it seemed to me, of changing. Once in
a certain groove, a Limanoran was in it for ever. His destiny was
irrevocable. It is true that the elders took every precaution to choose
his parents and ancestry for such a goal, and to mould his tissues and
educate his faculties to it. Yet some inspiration might reveal to him
a vista into a future better suited to his powers than that which had
been fixed for him. It is true that this feature gave great stability
and strength to the state. But a people that believed so firmly in
liberty, originality, and progress should surely have adopted some more
plastic system for their permanent relationships, some status less
rigid and immutable for the individual members. It seemed to me more
like the iron system of caste than the flexibility of an advancing
civilisation.
As usual I was mistaken in my criticism. I had not looked deeply
enough, or observed long enough to know the marvellous fabric of their
polity, a full knowledge of which meant an experience of several
centuries. The immutability was only in appearance and not in reality.
A few years after I had been admitted to some of the privileges of
mature citizenship, I began to feel that we were approaching an
exceptional time. There was evident a bustle of preparation, a rare
quickening of the pace of all work, and an expectancy that pointed
to some unusual event. The flight-exercises and the leisure-time
were somewhat curtailed, and as much work was put into four weeks as
was commonly put into five. Before the year was half over, I began
to understand what it meant. The word Manora occurred too often on
the lips and in the minds of my neighbours and friends to escape my
observation and on inquiry I found it meant the decennial review. Every
ten years, one quarter of the year was devoted to a census of the
civilisation of the period.
With all the other newly matured citizens, I had to be instructed
in the part I was to take in this census. Each day for months I had
to devote some hours to tracing out the progress I had made both in
character and in works, and in putting it into graphic and easily
observed form. I was taught to draw up comparative statistics of the
stages I had passed through from year to year for the decennial period,
though they considered this a poor and misleading mode of reviewing the
past. It was the mere skeleton of the census.
I was supplied from the valley of memory with irelium-strips, whereon
had been recorded automatically without my knowledge my thoughts and
feelings and words in the various important scenes in which I had taken
part. How surprised was I often to observe the mistakes my memory had
fallen into! As a witness of some act I had seen, or some discussion
I had heard, I would have sworn confidently to the opposite of the
truth. As to my own deeds and words and even thoughts and feelings,
I was ashamed to see how completely my subsequent life had distorted
the record of them; the likeness was often unrecognisable. And I knew
well which was wrong; for the machine-reporters were infallible as far
as their report went. After my perusal of these automatic records of
my life I came to the conclusion that common history must be a tissue
of fiction and error wherever it has had to depend on the senses and
memory of men for its details. I grew less and less inclined to add
anything from memory to my decennial biography, which I drew from these
machine-reports. It was as refreshing to study them as if I had been
examining pictures and memorials of another’s life. By the time I had
done with them, I seemed to know something real of my past; and side
by side I was able to place my review of what I had become, and the
account of my various stages of growth during this period, with the
definiteness and accuracy of one who was analysing scientifically half
a dozen different evolutionary specimens of a species. My personality
stood out at each different point of its growth as clearly as if it
had been that of another man laid under the microscope and in these
records I lived my life over again.
But I was still further aided in these researches into my development
by the accounts of the weekly inspection of my tissues and faculties
kept by the medical families. These were not merely statistical and
verbal, but pictorial. The appearance and electric state of every
part of my system had been made to impress themselves indelibly in
picture-records; and these were now submitted to me for comparison.
From the different records set side by side with the electrographs and
radiographs of all my animal economy, I was taught how to produce an
evolutionary picture of my faculties and organs and tissues.
This was one of the most striking advances in their art. They could
combine the pictorial representations of various stages in the life
of a growing being in such a way that, when placed in one of their
lightning-swift representers, the growth would flash before one’s
senses as a continuity. A child would grow as by magic into a matured
man or woman as we gazed. A seed would grow into a great tree in the
space of a few minutes. The brain or heart or lungs of a Limanoran
would pass like a flash through the stages of development that had
taken generations to achieve. For spectacular study of the history of
any living thing nothing could surpass the imataran, or focusser of
history, as the new instrument was called.
From the archives of the medical family I was able to make such a
series of pictures of my whole constitution and system as revealed
the growth of every faculty and organ and tissue. The rapidity of
my development astounded me as I looked over these graphic records
of my past. It was like a full-grown man inspecting the photographs
and annals of his infancy and childhood. I could not have believed
the story of it, had it not been engraved so indubitably on these
irelium-strips by the machine-reporters. My own memory had become
so foreshortened by the consciousness of my present, and by the
disproportionate importance of recent events and conditions that I
could have no more implicit trust in its representations of the past.
But, when I placed the various series of evolutionary pictures in the
imataran, the effect was so magical that I was half-inclined to believe
in preference my backward-looking faculty again. In the twinkling of
an eye the transparent reflection of myself had grown its ten years’
growth, and I had developed out of an alien into something not unlike a
Limanoran.
All that I had done in the period, or rather all that I had done
productively, I had similarly to picturise in series, so that every
feature that had been in any way developed might reveal itself, and
everything that showed stagnation or retrogression might be observed
without trouble.
My proparents and the elders of the family superintended and tested
my review of my past, and taught me to be unbending in criticism of
myself. No feature that seemed to count against my advance was I to
shrink from representing in all its nakedness, nor was I through
false modesty to depreciate whatsoever stood to my credit. I scarcely
needed the precautions; for I had learned during my sojourn amongst
this rigidly sincere and ingenuous people to respect the naked truth
above all things. Indeed I had come to feel that it was useless to
act otherwise than as if my whole system were open to the gaze of my
neighbours.
Every mature member of the community had this drastic valuation of his
work and strict criticism of himself to make and all were occupied
for three months in reducing the annals of their past ten years to
focus. For the young and those still under tutelage the proparents and
guardians were responsible, and they picturised for the imataran the
decennial life of their pupils as well as of themselves.
But over and above this personal work, the elders had to review the
growth of the families, institutions, sciences, and arts of which they
had the guidance. This they knew well how to do from long practice,
and had carefully prepared the records of each separate year of the
decennium, and the pictures of the new features and new growths in the
departments they superintended. During these three months all they had
to do was to focus the growth of the years and arrange the various
records in series in such a way as to reveal the development.
When all was ready, each family gathered in its public spectacular
hall and viewed the growth of every member of it in the shadows
thrown by the imataran. I thought at first that the effect would be
too monotonous to be interesting. But, as the spectacle of the Leomo
proceeded, it proved to be a marvellous revelation of the vast variety
of types in one family, and of the amount of growth that had gone on in
the tissues and faculties of every member in different directions.
The growth of the family as a whole was taken first,--its power of
coping with new problems and of suggesting difficulties to come, its
additions to the treasury of force and to the civilisation of the race,
its attitude toward the aim of the nation, its pace on the forward
march, its comprehension of the Limanoran ethics and of the general
problems of the race, its command over its individual members, and its
relationships to the other families and to the state as a whole. The
decennial development of the Leomo was graphically focussed in pictures
that told their story in a flash even to the least mature.
Massed thus, the advance was felt by all to be surprising, for each had
been watching throughout the decennium his own special work or set of
faculties, and had been unable to abstract himself sufficiently from
his own sphere to gain a just view of the whole family progress. As
we saw the science and the art develop before our eyes, the moment’s
glance intensified the ten years’ work into a marvel. From a hundred
different points of view we watched the advance of the Leomo, and we
felt proud that we belonged to such a family; we knew that taken as
a whole it had not been wanting in its duty to the race and the aim
of the race. A magnetic thrill went through us, especially when there
unrolled before us the living picture of the preceding decennium; the
contrast between the two in pace of development was striking. Here and
there of course we recognised flaws in the work accomplished during
our recent period, when seen against the design of the whole. But we
gathered from the spectacle fresh hope and energy for the future, and
renewed determination to increase the pace still more during the next
period.
We shrank a little perhaps from the next stage of the spectacle, for it
meant the decennial confession of every one of us all. The family as
a whole acted the priest, and before it we each laid the story of our
failures and successes, our deeds of virtue and our sins. The ordeal
was less trying than I had anticipated, for the critic was lenient and
sympathetic. If the lapse was slight, the source of it was tenderly
pointed out by the elders and the remedy indicated; and the stronger
members formed resolves to lend their strength to the lapser to master
his weakness; everything that was possible, he felt sure, would be
done to help the laggard faculty or tissue to recoup its powers and
bring itself even with the march of the family. If the lapse was great,
the case was sympathetically placed before the council of elders,
which investigated the question whether it was due to their mistaken
choice of a career for the youth (it was generally a youth that failed
strikingly), or whether it had come from some changed faculty or tissue
in him; if it were the former, he was aided in deciding what change in
his career would be best for him; if the latter, he was dealt with as
an invalid, and in the hospital for spiritual diseases the curative
powers of the nation were applied to his case. Sometimes his disease
originated in atavism, and then the most drastic remedies, both
physical and spiritual, were brought to bear; sometimes it was found
to come from a new microscopic parasite that had floated from some
far atmosphere into the Limanoran arena; and then all the wisdom and
science of the race had to be brought into requisition to investigate
the conditions of the new foe and the possible means of driving it out.
This indeed was the time for anyone who had made a mistake to retrace
his steps. Here it was that the seeming rigidity of the system was
tempered and rendered flexible and plastic as nature herself. Ten
years was but a point in the continuity of the force in a man, in the
great expansion of Limanoran life. But it was enough to make sure that
a mistake in the choice of a career was real, not merely apparent,
and that the longing for another was not a mere caprice. A shorter
period would not have been test enough; and the review of all careers
prevented undue proportion being given to any individual failure
or mistake. It was not infrequent for youths who thought that they
had mistaken their career, to change their minds at the Manora, and
acknowledge that, all things considered, the wisest course had been
chosen for them; they came to see that their work was not so defective
as they had imagined, and that they had contributed their due quota
to the advance of the family and the race; against the background of
the whole science or art in which they toiled, they recovered tone
and hope, and the pride they felt in the progress of all stirred them
to new exertions in their own special work. It was as much the aim of
the elders in these Manoras to give new enthusiasm in the careers that
had been chosen as to revise the scheme of careers. The primary aim
was to remove the sense of bondage that might grow up in the breasts
of any from the feeling of inevitableness and unchangeableness in the
development of their lives. It was rare indeed that a real failure
ever occurred. But none the less a sense of failure might seize
upon a timid or self-depreciative mind, and then the knowledge that
there could be no turning back would send it rankling home into the
soul. Circumscription to a course, if irrevocable, is none the less
incarceration that it is a course selected by ourselves. A Limanoran
never felt enslaved to his career. He knew he had made his choice,
and that he might make it again if he showed sufficient reason. The
result of this atmosphere of complete freedom was that not once in a
generation was any career, once deliberately selected, changed. The
elders were fully justified in the elaborate choice of ancestry and
parents, and in the still more elaborate pains taken in the choice
of surroundings and in training. Misgivings and hesitations all
disappeared in the full light of the decennial review.
It was marvellous how the magnetic sympathy of the family, as the
spectacular confessional spread life after life before the gaze of all,
eradicated timidities, and strengthened each member in the path he had
chosen. Instead of having his little defects emphasised or exaggerated,
all the merits of his work were brought out. I took new courage and
hope, as I felt the air of impartial esteem over the excellencies of
each member’s development and of sympathetic sorrow and condolence
over any evidence of failure or retrogression. Not a sign was there of
censorious or captious criticism. Nor was there anything of that barter
of laudation and panegyric which makes mutual-admiration societies so
unwholesome in their effects. All was subdued, gentle, reasonable,
wise, and sympathetic, and the most healthful and invigorating of all
tonics to everyone. From what I had looked forward to as an ordeal I
came away refreshed and strong, determined to amend everything that
could be deemed faulty in my life, and to quicken my pace in marching
towards the goal of the race.
The national review of every family’s progress was somewhat similar,
except that the larger arena and the greater volume of magnetism in
the audience stirred a deeper thrill in the natures of the individual
members. It was held in Loomiefa, and it took many days to view the
whole spectacle of the nation’s decennial work. Nothing have I ever
seen so varied, disciplinal, and impressive. It was as if ten thousand
years of the whole world’s progress had been focussed in this valley.
Science after science, art after art, graphically displayed all
that it had achieved during the period. To me it seemed a universal
education; and it strained all my faculties to follow the marvellous
array of inventions and discoveries, whilst my neighbours and comrades
drank the whole spectacle in with an ease that in other circumstances
would have made me envious. It was not the fault of the masters and
makers of the display that I followed it with difficulty, for they
had made every feature clear even to the least mature. What puzzled
me was the logical sequence or interdependence of the various parts
of the spectacle. Everything had been worked out so as to reveal its
relationship to the whole system and to the aim of the race, and to
comprehend it tested all my powers. I felt as if I had to study a great
encyclopædia in a few days, or rather its pictorial representation of
every feature of the most advanced and intricate civilisation. But even
this analogy is inadequate, for the phases of the many-sided progress
were not mechanically arranged, but grew out of the central system
by a natural and rational magic. The work of every family revealed
its central principles and their connection with the advance of the
race. It looked as if some master-mind had sat through the years, and
watching the nation’s work as it was being accomplished, kept it all in
system. We felt that there was one design in the progress of the whole
period, and that any feature that stood out in independence marred the
symmetry, and needed correction.
I remembered the waste of energy that took place in all intellectual
spheres in Europe, and felt ashamed of the contrast. I could have told
this people of the futile skirmishings and endless controversies of the
men of science and learning, of their duplications of each other’s work
with the consequent clutchings after fame, of their assumptions and
merely verbal distinctions, of their thickets of abstruse definitions
and ambiguities, of their everlasting substitutions of theory for fact.
I never felt so conscious of the shortcomings of the civilisation which
had nurtured me as during the array of Limanoran decennial progress in
sciences and arts.
After the spectacle was over, we returned to our usual employments. But
I observed that there were now more frequent meetings of the elders for
several months, and at last we had as the result of their discussion of
the review and its aspects a considerable rearrangement of our work,
and of our positions in the family and in the state. Most proceeded
on the path they had been taking during the previous period. But many
found themselves now at work more congenial to their temperaments and
destinies, and were able to put into it their whole energy rid of the
friction that the artificial application of will had meant. The changes
occurred almost naturally and spontaneously; each elder returned to his
family from the final meeting of the senate over the Manora, and it was
known without effort or command or waste of time who had to modify his
position and work, and how the modification was to be accomplished.
The impetus given to the civilisation by this loosening of any bonds
which had been begun to be felt sent it on with exhilaration and
vigour for years. There was an air of buoyant freedom and alacrity,
even of mirth amongst the younger, as they spent their best skill
and capacity upon the work they had in hand. The pace perceptibly
quickened, and at times the nation seemed to advance with the volume
and swiftness of a torrent. Discovery and invention became fuller as
well as more minute, and the outlook began to take in regions of which
they had not thought before.
I soon came to know that there was a more comprehensive and
far-reaching evaluation of the resources, the faculty, and the
personnel of the race ahead of us. Every tenth decennium there occurred
the event of the century, the Imanora or prospicient review. Ten years
made too short a period to give a bird’s-eye view of the future as
contrasted with the past. Even a century was short enough for the
perspective of past and future progress; but it was considered wise to
make the period fixed and of regular recurrence, and ten decenniums
formed a space symmetrical with the shorter Manora. The Imanora was
thus a centennial review. Tendencies that might be ambiguous in their
character under a decennial criticism would proclaim themselves evil
or good in so long a stretch as a hundred years. Faculties that would
still be but in embryo after a course of ten years would be in full
maturity when a century had passed. Young men and women, who might
still hesitate within a decade as to whether they had chosen their best
career, would have found by the Imanora what was their true bent beyond
the possibility of mistake.
But it was not meant merely as a review of the past and a rearrangement
of positions, as the Manora was above all things. It was rather a
revision of aims and destinies, a futuritive evaluation of the powers
of the race. Not merely the elders but the whole people were led up
to a mount of vision whence they could see their future for hundreds
of years spread out before them, bounded by the lines their past had
drawn. There they could view in picture the solutions of the problems
they had been working at and the final outcome of the lines of
development they had been following. They had to decide there and then
how far these agreed with the ultimate aim and destiny of the race,
and how far they had better modify them, or modify the general aim.
Then they had to choose whether their path should turn to the right or
left, or should continue onwards as it had continued for a century. The
spectacle of their future spread out in living picture and symbol must
have been a deeply impressive sight. Every family had prepared a series
of tableaux of their possible destinies and the possible developments
of their sciences and arts, of the problems they would have to solve,
and of their possible solutions, and these were passed in detail
before the whole people for criticism and appreciation. It was as if
a nation were led to the cave of some great and true prophet, and
were shown all that lay before it, whatsoever path it should choose.
The Limanorans had before them the choice of a destiny for a hundred
years. It was the care of the elders that no ambiguity or disproportion
should be admitted into the map of the possible routes that they might
take through the future, and that there should be no obscurity in the
relationships of these to the ultimate goal.
During the last decade of the century the Loomiamo and the Fraloomiamo
were the busiest of all the families in the island. Their exceptional
development of imagination made them essential to the preparation of
every map of the future. They seemed to be able to see where others
found only night and darkness. Each science and art often awoke to
perceive its way barred by some hill of difficulty, round or over
which they could discover no way; then the members of the Loomiamo who
had made special study of its path were called in to point out the
possible tracks that might lead past the obstacle. Or again a family
would find the way of its science or art untraceable; they would
grope blindly about for it and yet see no farther than the facts and
methods immediately before them. Here the help of the Fraloomiamo was
indispensable; a thousand different way-marks would soon be apparent,
and the route of future development would grow plain.
The pioneering families were the heroes of the Imanora, although most
of the hard work belonged to those who watched over the individual
sciences and arts. Nothing could be done without them, and the
exhilaration of trust in them and need of their services gave
extraordinary vigour to their special faculty. The close of a century
was one of the great autumns of their literature; their harvests at
that era were marked by fulness and wealth, and the pace of their work
gave it exceptional fervour and glow. In the West we should have called
the passionate ardour with which they threw off scheme after scheme,
inspiration of the highest order. But they knew the working of their
faculty as well as any of the inventors knew the intricacies of their
machines. There was nothing mysterious about it. Their clear knowledge
of its constitution and of the conditions that favoured its growth
made it easy for them to predict when its pace and volume would be
torrential, and every preparation was made by the pioneering families
to meet the exceptional drain on their energies at the close of every
century.
Loomiefa was then the scene of the most striking prefigurant displays
that the human mind could conceive. The resources of Limanoran skill
and ingenuity were brought to bear on it, and nothing was left
undone to impress the event upon the imaginations and memories of
the younger, for the elders expected that it would thus mould the
natures of the coming generation through the minds of the prospective
parents. The world as it might be, if certain lines of development were
followed, was pictured in the most impressive way possible; and to this
people, it seemed to me, everything was possible. The Imanora had the
sublimity and transcendent consecration of a great religious departure,
whose significance was fully foreseen.
CHAPTER XI
ETHICS
I AFTERWARDS found that Imanora necessarily differed from Imanora
as widely as age from age or man from man, it being as it was the
universal outlook of so progressive a people. What one centennial mount
of vision foresaw as a possibility the next viewed as an accomplished
fact. What one century peered into the darkness to descry, another
brought into the daylight of achievement, and a third antiquated.
But there were other and wider differences than this I have stated.
Though all phases of the civilisation were reviewed in relation to
the future, generally one phase took prominence and gave character
to each Imanora. In the earlier periods, after the purgations, the
physiological and biological sciences and arts predominated; for the
elders were most anxious then to bring the physical basis of their
life up to the level of quickening progress. Then came the periods
specially devoted to advance in chemistry and physics and the other
sciences and arts that gave them new power over the outside world. One
century was the great astronomical period, when the imagination of the
race stretched out with yearning to other stars. Another was the great
inventive era, when it seemed as easy as a dream to make new machines
which should open out wide prospects of additional conquest over nature
and humanity.
In the more recent centuries ethics had again come to the front,
new points of view having been shown by the great discoveries and
inventions of many centuries. The first Imanora after the series of
purgations was complete had been predominantly ethical. The race had
bent its attention so exclusively upon the crimes and vices which had
hindered their advance for ages, that they could think of almost no
other development than the ethical. The elders had been investigating
for years little else than the defects in the moral nature, their bases
in the physical system, and the methods of remedying them. They had
come to the conclusion after all their researches that nothing could
be done for the cure of the minor vices till the most vicious and
defective characters had been cleared out. A systematic purification
of the commonweal must precede attempts at moral reform. Most of the
purgations were managed by wise and cautious diplomacy; the bait of
more than their share of the wealth of the island in portable form,
and the chance of a new country in which to indulge their vice to
license, induced them to ship off to a distance. Only a few needed
forcible measures to make them remove. The lying and hypocritical, the
licentious, the envious and jealous, the boastful and the epicurean,
the religiously intolerant and superstitious, readily seized the
opportunity of seeking a country where they might make their own laws
and shape their customs to suit their special weakness. The warlike
and murderous and the thievish and socialistic thought they could
force a still better bargain; they had strong inner doubts whether
they would be likely to have as fine an arena for their talents in a
new country, and whether they would make the best companions for one
another. An increase of the inducement had little effect on them; they
felt that their special vices would lose half their attraction when
removed from the presence of the contrasted and shrinking virtues.
Much of the pleasure of a murder or a theft lay in the necessity for
its concealment, and the ingenuity required to evade punishment.
The occupations ceased to be fine arts as soon as they became the
occupations of the whole community. To these criminal sections of the
race force had to be applied before they left the island; it had to be
a policy of deportation.
It was little wonder that for a century after absorption in such work
the civilisation of Limanora was essentially ethical. To rid themselves
of every trace of the detestable vices of which they had just seen the
worst specimens deported over the horizon, became the one aim and ideal
of the now-expurgated people. Development seemed nothing more than
greater ease and habitualness in the virtues. To be purer, truer, more
tolerant, more generous, more gentle and modest and loving, was their
one idea of progress. The outlook from the first Imanora was towards
an ideal of such benignity and kindliness as would make all personal
relations easy and happy beyond the conception of other nations.
The first few decades of the next century gave them exhilaration in
the pursuit of this aim. They took the greatest delight in eradicating
the seedling ferocities of their savage past. Spite, rancour, disdain,
pitilessness, vanity, surliness, ingratitude, partiality, want of
candour, acerbity, meanness, and all uncharitableness were rigorously
checked, and every thought or energy that might, when abused, tend in
these directions was finally mastered. It was a delight to help one
another in the crusade against these petty defects. Nothing seemed so
noble or progressive as to spend every leisure moment on cultivating
the generous attitude towards one another.
But they soon saw the limits of such a progress. The virtues became
easy and common to all and it grew difficult to find new ethical worlds
to conquer. Most of them indulged too eagerly in introspection and some
turned morbidly self-critical, finding defects where there were none.
Imagination became a factory of petty faults and vices. The result was
new and real faults, which threatened to maim their civilisation and
bar their further progress. They were painfully self-conscious, fearing
lest the eyes of a neighbour or comrade should discover in them germs
of moral disease which had escaped their own microscopic criticism.
They shrank from beginning any enterprise; they feared to come to
decisions or make resolves, lest they should be wrong. They tolerated
and even encouraged faults and defects in their friends which they
would have drastically eradicated from their own natures; they nursed
in pity and generosity weak characters and diseased systems into length
of life, and shrank from forbidding them parenthood and posterity.
They strained at gnats and swallowed camels and indulged in constant
casuistry. In short, the whole race fell into a chronic spiritual
invalidism and many of them were afflicted with moral hypochondria.
They felt the pulses of their souls daily and hourly, and were ever
haunted with the fear of the old vices returning on them, so losing
their masculine grit and self-command. Finally they threatened to
become a race of sinewless effeminates with nothing but spiritual
collapse and palsy before them.
It was clear that this microscopic introspection and moral unrest must
cease, if there was to be any real advance. They had already recognised
that ethics developed by stages, and that any attempt on the part of
a race to force it beyond the intellectual point of view which they
had reached only ended in temporary failure and retrogression. No new
moral outlook can be attained unless reason has ascended a higher
mount of vision. Revelation can never come without new achievement. A
fixed quantity of ethical knowledge in a nation is moral death, and to
systematise ethical maxims into an absolute code for all time is to
enslave the reason of the world. For what is the almost unattainable
ideal of one stage of racial development is the antiquated truism of
a later stage. Savage man compares ill in polity and moral code with
the republics of the bee and the ant, just as his engineering and
architectural skill are infantile beside those of the beaver. How
unprotective and even cruel he is to his aged and women and children,
compared with many animals! How unadvanced even the most civilised are
in truth and loyalty compared with the dog! How weak in the reasoning
that is based on the reports of the senses are men in general compared
with the wild animals! There is evidently an infinite variety of
stages in the ethical and intellectual development and vision of man,
as there is in those of the animals. The most advanced human beings,
just like the least advanced, are, in some points, lower than the
beasts. But man can, if he will, have mastery of his circumstances and
conditions, inasmuch as he can examine himself by reflection, and tends
to examine himself through self-consciousness. The power and tendency,
however, are only fitfully taken advantage of, and it is therefore at
long intervals that even the best races accelerate the pace of their
progress beyond that which nature herself indicates.
The elders, and through them the people, were persuaded that this
absorbing pursuit of ethical improvement must be abandoned. The
development of the physical system was the first distraction that they
thought of; and their bodies grew in muscular power, in grace of form,
and in litheness of movement. It was during this athletic period that
flight through the air was achieved; then, too, physiology and medicine
grew into real sciences and began to direct the evolution of physical
man, and the struggle against the hosts of microscopic parasites that
over-populate the elements and have to seek pastures in the human body.
It was in this era, too, that they mastered the secret of prolonging
life and began the series of experiments in food and other forms of
sustenance, and in heredity, which ended in giving them centuries
instead of decades to live.
It soon came to be noticed, however, that a new but analogous
hypochondria began to seize even the youthful athletes of the race.
There was too much direct attention paid to the state and development
of the body to be wholesome. Athletic egotism became rampant, and as
a result of it a scorn of intellectual pursuits. It was as truly a
diseased state of the human system as the moral invalidism with which
they had been afflicted in the previous era. Thews and sinews were
measured and examined with scientific minuteness. Muscular development
was appraised and applauded as moral qualities had formerly been.
The spirit began to be impoverished; the brain decreased in weight
and fineness of convolution. Athletic introspection was coming to be
as painful and masterful a disease as moral introspection had been.
Diet and exercise became the absorbing topics of daily conversation
and nothing was invented but machines for training the body. Most
palpable of all the consequences was the growth of arrogant gait and
rough manners, and this was the first symptom to call attention to
the new malady. It became clear to the elders that the worst form of
atavism, return to the savagery that is just above animalism, was
about to reappear, and with it would come weakened heart and lungs and
disordered digestion; for the new training overstrained all the organs,
and threw them into disrepair.
The conclusions drawn from these two experiences were that variety of
occupation was one of the first essentials of mental and bodily health,
and that absorption in the improvement of any part or section of the
human system induced disease both of mind and body; morality and health
are better cultivated as indirect aims of individual existence; they
defeat their own ends when they become egoistic or introspective. In
order to remedy the evils which were threatening the life of the state,
its framework was completely reformed. To every family and individual
was assigned an external work that would draw the thoughts away from
self for the greater part of the twenty-four hours; every mature member
of the community was expected to achieve something unconnected with
himself every day. Exercise merely for amusement was cut down to a
minimum, and in order to keep the body in full vigour, the centre of
force was organised, where every man and woman had to do so much useful
physical work in the round of the clock. The care of the health,
both mental and bodily, was handed over to the medical elders, who
were, first of all, the healthiest and healthiest-minded of the older
men of the nation. Watching for symptoms of disease in one’s system,
whether moral or corporeal, fell into oblivion, and the great era
of external achievement began. Specialisation of work was its chief
principle and the source of its success, but no one was allowed to fall
into excessive specialism, such as would atrophy all but one set of
faculties and energies. No part of the body or mind was left without
daily or weekly exercise. The elders mapped out the various types of
intellectual and physical work from which a man or woman might select
to fill leisure time. Everyone had a large choice within a limited
number of kinds of work, generally kinds of work which were dissimilar
to his special employment. If it were left to a man to choose his own
type of distractions, he might select that which would feed high the
sides of his nature he most used, and atrophy those that most needed
development; for ease of application is an important factor in his
choice of exercise and amusement, and might become too dominant.
It was not in order to assimilate the bases of the natures of the
community that this limitation of leisure employments was adopted.
On the contrary, one of the subordinate aims of the elders was to
introduce as great a variety as possible into the talents, faculties,
and tendencies of the race. Equality, and still more similarity, of
members of a community, they well knew from the laws of nature meant
stagnation if not complete national death. Throughout the cosmos it
was the unequal degree to which various bodies and existences shared
in different types of energy that produced the unstable equilibrium we
call life. The disparate masses of the planets induced those currents
of influence we call gravitation, one of the greatest sources of power
in our world. The differences in temperature between the sun and the
planets make it of such vast importance as a source of heat and energy
to them, and it is the difference of two bodies as to electric state
that induces currents of electricity between them. As soon as there
is equilibrium of all the atoms or bodies or existences within a
certain sphere of influence there ceases to be movement in it and death
supervenes; and if all bodies and existences in the cosmos had an equal
and similar share of all its elements and forces, it would be dead.
The Deity himself, the sum and source of all life, must, as an eternal
existence, have unending variety.
The law of the universe is the law of the political and moral world.
There can be no life where there is complete stable equilibrium, that
is, where every member of a community is exactly similar to every
other member in privileges. Currents of influence cease. Impetus and
motive vanish. Desire and yearning and love disappear with passion and
ambition. The socialistic ideal is social and political death.
The everlasting flow of influence or power from point to point is the
essential condition of vigorous existence in a community or race,
therefore one of the chief subsidiary aims of the directors of Limanora
was the creation of variety and inequality of nature and position. This
made them adopt the family as the unit in the state, for in the family
there would be shelter for any new individual talent, and heredity
would cherish and increase it as it handed it on. In the Western
states the influence of the family over its children ceases not long
after boyhood or girlhood, and the world soon puts them into the same
moulds as its favourite men and women; individuality and originality
in most are planed down by the recognised conventions. A longer
continuance of family life and influence would secure and strengthen
any new variations in a talent or tendency, till the character was
strong enough to stand by them as its own and defend them against the
criticism of aliens and strangers. Diversity in unity was the ideal of
family life in Limanora. The elders of a family watched with eagerness
for any modification of the special faculties or powers, and nursed it
with the most anxious care, if they decided that it would assist the
advance of the race, and the medical elders were ever suggesting the
proper cross for producing a new variety of the old talents. Indeed,
one of the most responsible duties of the council of elders was to
decide as to the matings and parenthoods of the community; in this lay,
they felt, the guidance of their destiny, the real germ of the future.
Thus and thus alone were they able to keep up that divergence of new
species which would ensure an ever-quickening flow of life in the race.
They had cut off by their policy of complete isolation most of the
stimulus that comes from alien rivalry. Such rivalry, they thought,
would be worse than none; for it would at last drive them to adopt
the means and weapons of their rivals, which they considered wholly
retrograde and evil. It would be not unlike a competition between
man and the wild beasts. Any kind of communication with those who
were below them in civilisation and deliberately unprogressive, was
certain to taint and drag down, and the strong consciousness of this
fact checked the natural tendency of such benignity as theirs towards
missionaryism.
At the same time they knew well that no people would ever advance
without competition and the struggle that ensues on competition. They
greatly encouraged variation and inequality within their state, but
were certain that this was not enough. There must be the knowledge, if
not the immediate presence, of another type of being, similar to their
own yet higher in some features, in order to stimulate advance. To
get this was the object of their system of couriers into space, both
mechanic and human. They were never weary of gathering in all possible
indications of higher intelligences in extra-terrestrial elements and
regions. For a long period they had been satisfied with the reports
of their idrovamolans, and other recorders of events which occurred
on the earth, out of reach of their unaided senses. But it gradually
pressed itself home upon them that the comedy of terrestrial existence
gave no stimulus to progress; it stirred their laughter, or scorn, or
indignation, or disgust too often to edify. Rare, indeed, was it to
witness a deed or phase of civilisation that gave them a new model, or
inspired them to higher life. It was, as a rule, degrading to watch
beings in their own shape waste their noble faculties on the cruelties
of war, the meannesses of commerce and industrialism, the pettinesses
of social intercourse, and the gross deceits and pretences of politics,
diplomacy, and public life.
Year by year the racial energy was drawn off from the spectacle of
terrestrial history. It grew less and less attractive, and the elders
came to the decision that it had almost better pass unnoticed by all
but the most mature and experienced. Thus it became the more necessary
to open up other spheres of stimulus and inspiration. The thoughts of
the race gravitated, first to other stars, then to the exuberant life
they found in interstellar space. For a time they thought that only in
other worlds could be found intelligences like their own to stimulate
them by their competition; and their intellectual energy was set upon
opening up intercourse with the inhabitants of these. The imaginative
families published book after book on the possibilities and means
of stellar intercommunication, and afterwards of stellar migration.
Astronomy and its subsidiary and allied sciences and arts for several
centuries outpaced all others in development. The world began to seem
narrow and prison-like, so eager was Limanoran thought after stellar
flight. All the conditions of voyaging through space were investigated,
all available means experimented on, all the possible routes and their
laws discovered. It seemed as if within a few centuries the round
of the earth would be spurned, and the nearest star colonised by
terrestrial beings.
The discovery of the varied life inhabiting the ether gave pause to
all such speculations and schemes. It was manifestly possible to find
stimulus from intelligences nearer than the other planets. Infinite
space, instead of being a desert strewn with the wrecks or embryos of
stars, is as full of life, and of the elements and nuclei of life, as
any world which spins through it. They had ever counted it as unlikely
that the life and the life-energy of the cosmos should be confined to
the star-dust strewn over it, or that its vast interstellar spaces
should be given up to nothing but the passage of rays from star to
star, cold and inhospitable to every form of existence. They felt it to
be more in accordance with the lavishness of nature that these spaces
should be life-crammed instead of life-proof. Why should life be unable
to adapt itself to the conditions of space, when it has been found to
adapt itself to the bewildering variety of conditions existing on the
surface of any one world at different stages of its development, and
even to the infinite variety of conditions that govern the countless
stars?
On the first discovery of life beyond the atmosphere they were led
by the medical investigators to think that it was merely embryonic,
waiting to colonise the worlds that pushed through it. But recent
reports and researches showed that the existences of interstellar space
were far beyond the rudimental stage. Beings as intricately organised
as themselves left impressions on their supra-aerial lavolans. They
grew more and more convinced that the senses which had evolved in them,
amid the gross atmosphere of the earth and with the gross feeding that
alone would suit terrene constitutions, were fit to detect no other
creatures than those developed under similar terrestrial conditions.
Their more recent and more refined developments of sensuous perception,
and still more their latest mechanical inventions, had brought them
within range of an infinity they had not dreamt of. Daily came in from
above the atmosphere reports that confirmed their old belief in the
vast and varied population of space. Beings, so constituted as never
to impress sight or hearing such as men had, yet fit to hold their own
with the noblest spirits that earthly imagination had ever conceived,
swam close to their atmosphere, close enough to leave their impress
on the sensitive films of their courier-instruments, close enough for
their own later-developed senses to perceive, if only these were more
exquisitely trained. What a vista of new stimulus the knowledge opened
up to their imaginations!
There was no more need of projects for stellar migration. Here were
beings loftier than themselves at the very gates of their senses,
possible sources of exalted, if not divine, influence. Out of them
would flow into this little island energy that would give measureless
impetus to its inhabitants. Who could place a limit to the nobleness
of the existences they might find in the ether, once they were on
this track, and were refining and ennobling the perceptive power of
their senses? There was no conceivable end to the ethical elevation
and development they might reach, now that they had pierced the prison
walls of the earth. The sublimer amongst their old beliefs were,
indeed, coming true in the fuller fruition of scientific discovery.
These they had long laid aside, lest they should be mere fancies
based upon illusion and delusion, when they saw the evil that the
perversions of them by churches and priests worked amongst men. Till
they discovered a sounder basis for them than faithmongers asserted
for their crude superstitions, they felt they must not entertain them
seriously or found action upon them; and over they threw them till they
should find their way to them again upon the solid ground of scientific
reason.
Now that they saw so wide a horizon before them they knew that they
need no longer seek stimulus in the races of men that they had left so
far behind them, and they rejoiced. For, though there were ever noble
and wise individuals to be found here and there throughout the masses
of the nations, and though they knew that these set the standard of
morality to the world around them, the bulk of men lagged far in the
rear and often, when unnoticed, sneaked into the barbarity and vice
which they had been persuaded to abandon. The moral law of a nation, or
race, or period is voluntarily carried into practice only by the few
best of the mature men and women; in fact, their lives and characters
are the makers and arbiters of the moral law. Their fellow-countrymen
and contemporaries feel the ideal thus held out practically before them
as a mysterious influence that surrounds and shepherds them into the
path of right. Sometimes, if the age or nation has degenerated, the
mystery comes from the best men of the past through books, or still
more powerfully through tradition and instinct; this unaccountable
influence they call conscience, or the sense of duty, or the voice
of God, or some other name that indicates its mystery, its directing
power, and its superior standpoint. Priests and primitive legislators
try to formulate its commands in definite codes, and at a later
stage thinkers and philosophers attempt to reason out its maxims,
and find a unity and universality in them. But the influence defies
such codification and rationalisation; with the growth of the ages it
overflows and antiquates the primitive attempt at its petrifaction,
and the variety of codes in different races or in different periods
laughs to scorn all efforts at finding a universal basis for them. As
soon as a code is proclaimed or a philosophical system worked out, it
begins to be antiquated; the best find a better ideal in front of them
and, striving after it, reveal the flaws in the life they have hitherto
lived, or they resign themselves passively to the drift of circumstance
and degenerate into luxury and license; in the one case the influence
overflows the code or system, and makes it seldom necessary or apparent
to the view of the race; in the other it ebbs from it and leaves it
high and dry, the flouted, neglected wreck of an age gone by.
After all, moral law is nothing but the example and character of
the best of them working dimly upon their yearning and capacity for
advance; and their best are limited by the point of view of their time
and surroundings. A progressive race or age soon discovers the flaws in
its accepted codes or systems and throws doubt on their authority. It
is only in a stagnant or retrograde period that there is no scepticism
or free thought; sufficient unto it is the law that has come down out
of the past; so satisfied are its people with it that they never live
up to it, and never feel any qualms of conscience or entertain troubled
thoughts about its neglect. Developing civilisation means developing
ethics; the best of a race advance to higher points of view, and soon
come to be astonished at the narrow and primitive moral law their
forefathers have handed down to them. As they advance in ideals, the
conscience of the mass of their countrymen or contemporaries advances
too; what is the rare virtue or heroism of the noblest of one age
becomes the commonplace of the next; what was the weakness or vice of
all becomes the crime of the outcast and atavist. Injunctions not to
kill are soon superfluous to all but the criminally inclined; addressed
to a whole people, they imply an age of the greatest rudeness and
ferocity.
I realised this more and more clearly as I continued to live amongst
this wonderful people, and to see into their lives. The criminal and
grossly atavistic had been long ago swept out of the island and vicious
tendencies against the moral law of past ages had vanished before
selection, crossing, and training. They would have laughed if they had
been enjoined not to kill, or steal, or lie, or commit adultery. It
would be like telling the civilised Europeans not to eat each other,
especially when uncooked, or telling the latter-day Englishman not
to enslave his brothers. The proud tribes of wild men counted it as
one of their noblest prerogatives to banquet on their slain foes and
even on their dead relatives, and the fathers of the present race of
English and Americans, sensitive as these latter are to the crime of
enslavement, held their slaves with no feeling that they were outraging
the moral law, whilst their grandfathers winked at the horrors of the
slave trade. The best protested and gradually their opinions, and
still more their characters and lives, sank as a mysterious influence
into the hearts of the race. The next generation felt the protest as a
moral law and a conscience, stinging them to advance to the standard
of their noblest. The Greeks and Romans describe and applaud in their
finest literature vices that modern men are ashamed even to mention.
And it will be the same with acts and conduct that nineteenth century
society condones and even boasts of; if the European world advances, in
a century or two respectable men and women will be ashamed to hear them
spoken of.
The Limanorans repudiated scorn of their lowly kin, the animals;
they had long ago shed that blind and false shame which rejected
the affinity of universal nature; man was as truly kin in his lower
representatives to the mammoth as the mammoth to the mollusc, or the
mollusc to the microbe. It is true they desired close proximity to the
non-human animal as little as they did to undeveloped or degenerate
man; intercourse with a lower stage of life and intelligence, they had
long ago proved, leads ultimately to adoption of some of its features
and much of its standard, even where there is in it the aloofness
of the master to his slave, or the tamer to his beast; they desired
no masterdom over lower natures and so they exiled all animals and
all degenerate or undeveloped men from their island. They welcomed,
however, every indication of approach to human traits or human
intelligence in any section of terrestrial life; it was to them no
bewilderment that they found most species of animals more courageous
and many more provident and keen in their outlook than most men, some
of them more tender and humane to their fellows, and some infinitely
more loyal than the most advanced races. It is difficult to deny,
not merely the higher emotions, but the more difficult processes of
reasoning to many of the animals. The cunning of man is often outwitted
by them.
Facts like these, instead of driving them to find subtle methods of
explaining them away or denying them, urged them on to greater effort
in their own evolution. They saw in them evidence that the whole
creation was striving upwards, and they resolved to obey the universal
law more and more fully and to quicken their pace. Any new observation
of animal intelligence or advance only confirmed their faith in the
rational spirit that was working but half seen throughout the universe,
and gave them greater impetus on the path of development they had
chosen.
Every new age had seen them rise above the possibility of some old vice
or evil tendency, reach some new and higher mount of ethical vision,
and descry some nobler ideal ahead of them. They were far out of reach
of any return to the fierce vices or defects of a lawless or militant
past. Never since the exile of Noola had they observed any tendency
to belligerent atavism; and his return, purified and elevated, had
finally buried in oblivion that dead and degenerate preterition.
Thieving had vanished with such warlike means of destroying and
restoring the balance of political power, and its possibility ceased
with the devaluation of all property but time, talent, and character.
Once time was taken as the standard of everything of value instead of
any dull dead stuff like gold or jewels or land or houses, the whole
view of property had changed: for time is a living, moving entity that
becomes great or little, valuable or valueless with the method of using
it; the life of a man limits it in quantity as far as existence on the
earth is concerned; and as soon as a race realises this, it is the
rarest and most highly prized commodity in the world; nothing can take
away its value but the heedlessness or indolence of its possessor; no
man can steal it from us but ourselves. For many ages then it was in
terms of time that the Limanorans had expressed everything of value;
even talent and character were thus expressible, for their chief value
lay in their development; they were estimated according to the rapidity
with which they could advance a definite and measurable stage. Thus
theft became an impossible crime in this island, the true standard of
all value being inseparable from the life that possessed it.
Lying and hypocrisy and all the crawling vermin that spawn from them
had long ago been ejected from their systems; and wherever atavistic
symptoms of them had appeared in any child they were cauterised by
every known method, gentle or drastic. The task of cleansing the
community of insincerity and artifice had by no means ended with
the exiling of all known liars and dissemblers. Open untruth and
fraudulence vanished when the development of the intelligence and
observation of the people made it easy and universal to divine motives
and inner thoughts quite apart from the word or the act. Yet there was
still in some a tendency to evasion, or equivocation, or overstatement.
The rags of the old conventionality still hung about them, and unawares
there would check them in their utterances an old fear lest candour
should be ill-manners, lest their freedom should hurt the feelings
of their auditor, or rouse the sleeping tiger in him. Year by year
was all this getting eradicated; but the process was quickened by
the evolution of the magnetic sense and by the clarifying of the
tissues of the body. The more transparent the human system became to
the senses and the keener the senses grew, the less cue and the less
chance was there for concealment of emotion or thought. They were
all thoroughly trained in the anatomy and physiology of the body and
the brain, and in the science that taught the physical equivalents
and accompaniments of each type of thought and emotion. Even without
their preternaturally keen senses they could tell from their practical
knowledge of the human system the natural results of any word or act,
and their eyes and ears could detect signs of emotion or motive which
seemed to be non-existent. It was, however, their magnetic sense that
was the greatest foe to all deception or concealment. They could read
the feelings that stirred in the heart of a neighbour, and were even
conscious of the definite thoughts passing in his brain.
The physical equivalents and symptoms of certain emotions and passions,
that used to be common before the exilings and are too common in all
other races, were scarcely ever to be found in any mature Limanoran;
they had to be studied in the bodies, and especially in the faces,
of children. Jealousy, envy, hate, malice, anger, lust, had become
obsolete in the race, and only the young were afflicted with them
now; they were classified as mild spiritual diseases that might, if
neglected, risk the permanence of the child in the community; they were
the record of a stage through which the race had long ago passed, and
they were treated as no fault of the child itself but its legacy from
an ancestry it could not be made responsible for. Great pains had been
taken with these moral childish maladies in former periods with the
result that their appearance was now seldom virulent or dangerous and
never fatal, and that every household knew by heart the simple rules
and specifics for checking their development. The worst characteristic
of them was that they were infectious; but the solitary system of
education rendered this inoperative; in fact this epidemic nature of
the moral disorders of children made the adoption of the one-child
household and the one-pupil school seem an absolute necessity.
Occasionally, through some strong atavistic taint in the nature, the
appearance of one or more of these maladies in a child threatened its
whole spiritual life; then all the science and wisdom of the island
were brought to bear upon it; the nerves and tissues of the part of the
human system affected, whether in brain or heart, were isolated and
powerful electro-magnetic instruments were applied to them so as to
atrophy them and render them inactive; the most successful educators of
the island were joined to the parents or proparents in the effort to
get rid of the evil; and the child or youth was constantly brought into
intercourse with the noblest natures who exercised to the full their
morally healing powers. If the malady still tainted the nature up to
maturity and outbalanced all the good in it in spite of such continued
curative efforts, then were the elders sadly driven to the ultimate
step of deporting the diseased personality. But this had not occurred
for generations, and it was hoped that the necessity for drastic
remedies would cease in a few years. Already the virulence of these
childish ailments had almost disappeared and they had grown so mild in
their attacks that few but the guardians observed their approach. They
were generally confined to fixed periods of childhood or youth, periods
that corresponded to the ages of past history in which they severally
raged in the natures of their ancestors. But every new generation saw
these periods shortened and driven farther back towards the beginning
of life.
The sense of shame that attaches to some or all of these emotions in
the best of advanced races is a sign that they are recognised as moral
maladies and that with farther advance they will be forced back into
the earlier stages of life. But, as they are, the need to conceal envy
and jealousy, malice, anger, and lust and their symptoms, is felt,
and this induces and confirms wide-spread habits of insincerity and
deception in most civilised peoples, Western as well as Eastern. This
desire of concealment has seated the habit of dissimulation so widely
and so deeply in the breasts of all that the bolder and more roughly
practical openly avow it as a means necessary to their advancement in
life. It had been felt ages before in Limanora that as long as these
hateful emotions lurked in the hearts of men and women, there could
be no final expulsion of the still more hateful insincerity. Now that
they were relegated to childhood, concealment of the inner emotions
had vanished and the habit of petty evasion and dissimulation had
been entirely eradicated. Even the histrionic in manner and gesture
and facial expression had disappeared after having been subjected to
drastic treatment; it had been criticised and derided whenever it
showed itself in any youth; for it was only by the young and immature
that so crude an artificiality could ever be adopted.
One of the last refuges of insincerity was artificial self-abasement.
As soon as humility before the daily marvels of the universe came to be
a common attitude amongst them, its ape, spurious self-depreciation,
appeared. Young men and women would grossly understate their
achievements or claims, chiefly in order to set up a reaction in the
minds of their friends and companions, and tempt them to overstatement.
Ridicule soon put this habit of poor and common natures to rout. The
Limanorans were now proud of anything they had done well or nobly
and were not ashamed to acknowledge it. They were willing without
vaunting or mock-modesty to talk of any invention or discovery or
any good or courageous deed, but in that simple, ingenuous way which
revealed nothing but anxiety to enlighten others as to the methods of
success and to stir them to advance beyond it. They needed none of
that self-advertisement which is the bane of advanced and ambitious
civilisations; everything of merit in their conduct and labour and
its products was valuated, they knew, with an exactitude that left no
room for misacceptation by their friends and companions. Everyone was
so eager to find an advance in his neighbour’s work or system that no
effort was needed to explain or commend it. When done its merits would
be recognised to the full. The elders in their periodical reviews of
the work and the progress of the community would estimate it at its
full value, and it was one of the most important parts of the training
of the youth to appraise the value of every deed and step with a strict
impartiality of judgment. To mete out justice to everything in life was
impressed upon the young nature as one of the foremost of duties; and
to see every feature of history and existence with a dispassionate and
unerring eye was one of the chief aims of Limanoran education.
Thus it was that for a time they enjoyed the comedy of life as it
passed in other regions of the world, for they could see very clearly
the exact merits of every man and every deed, and the credulity and
infatuation which made them unrecognisable in popular estimation.
Delusion reigned supreme and the best of the comedy was the ease with
which some masters of the art of self-advertisement could swell their
puny proportions into the appearance of colossal amplitude; they
knew every stop in public opinion, and could play on its gullibility
with consummate art. The Limanoran was taught to place every human
achievement in the perspective of the future, and as he looked and
heard through the idrovamolan, the whole of life, as it went in other
nations, seemed one continued bathos, ridiculous disproportion between
what it appeared to be and what it was.
But they ever saw a darker side to the spectacles they witnessed
through this singular instrument, and their laughter was softened and
modified by indignation and sorrow. There was a counterpart to the
gullibility and applause in the deep-rooted habit of detraction and
slander. If any had the power to see conduct and men as they were,
impartially and clearly, they were not allowed to use it, so busy were
the tongues of traducers and parasites. All human deeds were either
underestimated or overestimated, generally underestimated if the doer
or possessor had no favours to bestow and no power or influence to
exhibit. Aspersion and backbiting were common habits; for the majority
were undistinguished and only in courts and the circles of the great
did that of overestimation find any headway.
A trivial, yet pathetic, phase of the comedy was the excessive
self-esteem that ran parallel with the torrent of detraction. In
Limanora the fountains of both had dried up together. For vanity is
the effort of a man’s emotions to compensate for the fraud that others
constantly commit upon reputation. Robbery of material things is
sternly repressed in most civilised communities; thus far have they
attained in their hostility to socialism; finally one or two have
begun to be uneasy about fair fame as a possession more valuable than
any wealth and have attempted to formulate the crime in some crude
law of libel that is found yearly as inadequate and as primitive as
one of the codes of ancient legislators. But the petty robberies of
good fame rather than the open brigandage of it make none feel safe.
Tongues will keep wagging, and as long as they wag, the conduct or
character of some will surely be undervalued. The consciousness of
this, that none but the great or distinguished will get their due or
more than their due, keeps self-esteem alive in the breasts of all, and
self-approbation an unceasing attitude. Men feel that they must recoup
themselves out of the unwilling feelings of others for the perpetual
fraud upon their reputation. Self-overestimation is the natural
complement of the consciousness of detraction. Commonly the sensitive
organisation refuses to rest under the unending injustice and will try
to set itself right with the world; but most sink after a time into
sullen endurance of the wrong and cease to speak of it, thinking it
irremediable.
Nothing so greatly astonished the Limanorans as the concomitant
disappearance of detraction and vanity from their midst. One of their
earliest crusades was that against evil speaking; it was easier than
they had thought, for already the principle of generosity to others
had begun to work and reputation was counted more valuable than any
property. When magnanimity had eradicated the habit of disparagement,
the training in impartial use of the judgment prevented the nature
swinging into the opposite extreme of shouting hosannas over the
nothings of daily life. As they gained clear-sightedness in estimating
human actions and character, they found that the cues of vanity had
disappeared. They had no need of crusading against the vice; it had
been vanquished.
Another defect that seemed to have vanished without effort was
immodesty. The lustful had been exiled and it was easy to eradicate
from the natures of those that remained all trace of sexual passion,
and with it all pruriency. The chief purpose of sex in nature, that
of propagation of the family, became its sole purpose; and this, by
the control which the elders exercised over posterity, grew as rare
as death. Its other ends, the development of self-sacrifice and the
growth of love and friendship, had been completely detached from it
and rationalised. Procreation with the extension of the race into the
future was counted so tremendous a responsibility that most preferred
to postpone it as far in life as the instinct of the people would
allow. The sexual passion thus died out of their minds as out of
their natures, just as the mere appetites of eating and drinking had
died out. They had become parts of the rational nature when they were
thought of at all.
There was, therefore, nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to conceal.
Immodesty vanished with the cue and motive for modesty. They wore
irelium draperies more to temper the power of heat and cold and the
rigours of the upper atmosphere, and to aid them in flight, than to
hide their bodies from the eyes of others. For the draperies were
gossamer-like and semi-diaphanous and emphasised the beauty and grace
of the body as an expression of soul. It was not the face alone that
interpreted the mind, or attracted by its radiance. Magnetism rayed
from every limb; and none of the surface of the body was lost under
masses of garments; it all came into play as expressive of the life
within. They shrank at first from the unhealthy pallidity of my body
as it appeared when I first donned their raiment, but under the
transparency of my new garments it soon lost its ghastly whiteness and
acquired the ruddy, healthy tints of the face. For a time I shrank from
the eyes of my comrades, but as I grew accustomed to their absolute
purity of thought, I lost all consciousness of my body. There can be
no modesty or immodesty where there is nothing to conceal. It was one
of their subordinate aims to simplify and purify the functions of the
human system, so that none of them should be offensive to any of the
senses, new or old.
By this semi-diaphanous exposure of most of the surface of the body
there was far more space of skin for the development of sensations and
new types of senses. In their pre-purgation ages, when the greater part
of the corporeal system had to be muffled in opaque garments for the
sake of what was called decency, the finer modes of perception came to
be concentrated in the head and the hand; one sense crowded another
and blunted its observations. Now every inch of the corporeal surface
was open to the influences of sunlight and magnetism and the other
energies that so freely permeated space, and new forms of perception
began to develop over the body, chiefly refined modifications of touch.
The region of the shoulders became especially sensitive to magnetic
indications. The arms and chest monopolised the finer sensations of
muscular force, and especially of strain and push. Their feet came to
gauge with great subtleness the strength and direction of currents of
the wind as they flew through the atmosphere. The spinal region tested
the temperature of the surrounding space better than any other part of
the body, reacting at once to the slightest change in heat or cold.
Another advantage of the half-transparent raiment was the ease with
which the slightest change of emotion or thought could be seen, making
concealment and hypocrisy an impossibility. A third was the aid it
gave the medical elders in their periodical inspections of the health
of each member of the community; with unstrengthened senses they could
detect the smallest obstruction in any of the organs or tissues, so
that a mere passing notice might be enough to report on the health of
the people.
But if the sex-problem had retained its old obtrusiveness, this
seemingly superficial but really important reform in dress would have
been impracticable. Amongst the earliest questions that the Limanoran
scientists faced was the place of sex in the universe. After minute and
wide research they came to the conclusion that it was but an accident
of existence on some worlds. It was not an essential of the propagation
of life; for some species, like bacteria, multiply by mere fission, so
that part of the individual is immortal, and others, like the medusæ,
and ferns, and mosses, alternate asexual with sexual reproduction.
It was manifestly no characteristic of the first and lowliest forms
of life that settled on the earth; in fact large sections of vegetal
life retain the older habit parallel with the new or sexual habit; any
piece of many plants and trees cut off and thrust into the earth will
become a new plant or tree of the same kind without the intervention
of a seed or germinative stage. But the change in habit must have been
introduced into the world not long after the appearance of animal
life upon it; for it is only in the least-highly organised animals
that parthenogenesis appears in any form. Their conjecture was that
sexuality originated from the meeting of the germs of two worlds on
which life had not gone far on the path of evolution. The newcomers
would be unable to adapt themselves and their mode of generation to
the new conditions they had to meet; and where members of the two
types settled side by side in a position isolated from their kind,
the instinct of propagation would evolve out of their proximity a new
mode of generation, that would, from the cross-fertilisation of two
worlds and the combination of the vital energy of both, make a progeny
more vigorous and a development easier and more rapid. The species
that remained faithful to parthenogenetic propagation, and those that
adopted the new mode only partially, fell behind in the evolutionary
race. Sexual generation, uniting in itself the vital principles of two
universes, swiftly improved the qualities of the species that adopted
it and made them dominant upon the earth. Asexual propagation, the
easier and more primitive, gave the advantage in numbers of individuals
to the vegetal and lowly animal species that clung to it, but left them
almost incapable of evolution. On and upwards have passed the dominant
species through the invertebrates and the mammals up to man, guided by
that bi-sexual principle which has in it the stimulus of two types of
life and two universes. Nor did it seem to them contrary to the analogy
that some worlds should have in the life upon them a tri-sexual or
even a quadri-sexual mode of propagation, according to the types of
vital principle which have settled and continued upon them. Wherever
multi-sexual generation holds sway, there life is rarer but swifter,
and evolution carries it into those higher reaches where localisation
of it upon an orb is unnecessary.
It was out of sexuality, they acknowledged, that all the higher phases
of existence upon earth had come, love, friendship, self-sacrifice;
this, too, had given to humanity in its nobler developments the
irrepressible yearning for another and extra-terrene sphere and
another life. A vital principle issuing from a different universe
seemed to have kept within it the memory of its first home if not of
the free existence of space. And in man, at least, this had come to
consciousness of itself and led him to religious reverence and devotion
and the expectation of immortality.
They considered none the less that sex had almost finished its task in
many worlds, and would, in no very distant age, have accomplished all
it could do for the Limanoran race. When a principle of life has done
its task it must retire and give place to something better; else it
would become retrogressive and wholly evil, a mere despot selfishly
stopping all progress. Every race that meant to quicken the pace of
its evolution had to take command of it and guide it to its own higher
ends. It is the prerogative of the nobler types of man to raise nature
above her lower needs; the Limanoran ideal was to develop the creative
power of the human system so far that it might master all the secrets
of life and be able to mould human beings and breathe the breath of
life into them, and thus they would be able to supersede the sexual
mode of propagation.
As it was, they had gone far towards the complete mastery of the sexual
principle, and could mould and guide it to any purpose that the future
of the race demanded. They knew the conditions that would govern any
new human variety they needed in the state just as well as they could
produce new modifications of trees and plants and flowers. They read
the nature of each individual on the island as easily as they could
read a book. But besides this they had in the pedigree-annals in the
valley of memory a complete account of all the possibilities of any
family or any branch of it. From the developments of recent years and
the outlook that they ever kept up far into the future they judged when
some new type of nature would be needed for some post in the community
and gauged exactly the qualities that would have to be blended in order
to produce it. Then turning to the valley of memories, they studied
the characters and possibilities of the various families that had one
or more of those qualities exceptionally developed. By the aid of the
physiological and biological experts they were able to fix the two out
of which the individual parents would have to be chosen; and from their
knowledge of the character and history of every member, the elders of
these two families along with the medical elders were able to indicate
the man and the woman who would exactly fulfil the purpose of the
state. Years were spent on maturing the pair in the directions required
and in entangling their imaginations and affections mutually. None
were allowed to assume the responsibilities of parenthood till they
were matured to their fullest possibility; for they held that all the
essential characteristics of the two natures had to be developed before
the embryo could be produced in its fullest and most virile form.
One of the most singular features of this moulding of posterity was
that they did not always choose the most highly developed to become
the parents of the commonweal. For it had often been found in the
past that the individual who had brought his peculiar faculties or
qualities to the highest state of refinement in his own life had
exhausted the natural wellspring of them, and that he handed them on
in most diminished degree to his children. They often preferred in
their selection of possible parents a member of a family who exhibited
no exceptional energy in the use of its special talent; sometimes
the least active and the least conspicuous were selected. In them
individual work had never overstrained their faculty; it lay fallow for
a generation and was likely to spring forth with exceptional vigour the
next. To this I attributed their acceptance of my own imperfect nature
in their midst and my selection for mating with Thyriel.
When a pair had bred the child that was required, if they were not
conspicuous for wisdom or self-control, it was taken from them and
given to a new pair who became its true parents and trained it in the
direction it ought to take. These proparents were generally more
successful than parents in educating and moulding a character; they
never allowed the bias of natural affinity to affect the future of the
child; the parents, besides being swayed by the pride of parenthood and
the vigour of their affection for it, were too closely akin to it in
qualities and character to view it from an impartial and independent
standpoint; and the proparents were as a rule selected on account of
their contrastive qualities, qualities which would form the complement
to its own.
Though so much care was spent on the choice of the stock, they
considered it far more important to have the citizens of the future
properly trained, and were quite unbending in their insistence that
every child should have the most suitable natures in the community to
educate it, whether these should be its own parents or proparents. Nor
for ages had more than one child been permitted in a household at one
time. If a pair had proved themselves exceptionally successful in the
production and moulding of the two children they owed to the community,
they were allowed to adopt for a lengthened period the profession of
parent, by far the most important, if not really the only, profession
in the island. But they must bring one child up to maturity before they
undertook another. For, they held, there was no problem so complicated,
no duty so responsible, no task so exhausting for every faculty, as the
training of a human being in its earlier stages; to sculpture a new and
noble nature was considered the greatest creative work that a Limanoran
could achieve for the state; the greatest talents that ever appeared
on earth could not be better spent than on the parental profession.
Another and as important reason for the unitary basis of the household
was the moral contagion imperfect natures bring to bear on each
other. Children were never allowed together except under the strictest
supervision; for they soon undid all the work of their guardians, and
confirmed in each other the retrogressive savagery through which they
were passing. Before the Limanorans had come to their full heritage of
scientific knowledge and wise experience, they had allowed for a few
generations households of three or more children together, in order
to keep up the breed. But they soon discovered this feature of their
domestic life to be at the bottom of the slowness of their development,
and abandoned it. After long experience they decided that it was better
worth the while for the race to devote half a century of the life of
the wisest and ablest to the training of one nature than to do any
other work to be found in the universe. The greatest book, the most
illuminating discovery or invention, was as nothing compared with a
living centre of development and progress. Parenthood and proparenthood
well done were considered the greatest claims to gratitude and love,
and to everlasting memory if there were such a thing. For a man and
a woman to have given to the state by fifty years’ work a better
trained, more nobly moulded character, with larger possibilities than
they themselves had was to have done more than if they had discovered
and mapped out a new sphere for science and thought. It was one of
the greatest honours therefore that the community could bestow upon
any pair, to select them a third or fourth time for parenthood or
proparenthood.
That the two sexes were both needed for the training of a young nature
to maturity was one of the most unhesitating conclusions from their
experience. In spite of the obliteration of all demarcating lines
between the sexes as to privileges and duties in the state, there was
nothing more clear to them than the permanence of the distinction in
their natures, as far as life upon earth was concerned; it had grown
less and less marked as the ages went on, and as maternity came to be a
mere episode in the long life of a woman, yet it remained as real as it
ever had been, passing into every phase of the nature, imaginative and
intellectual as well as emotional and physical, and becoming salient
and striking in the procreative era of life. As the animal part of the
nature fell into greater subordination, it needed keener powers of
observation to note the difference; yet it had left its permanent mark
upon the spirit.
To women was assigned work which required slow continuous effort;
for although they are more emotional, they are also by nature more
passive. The temperature of the female in all species is lower than
that of the male, and in human beings this means less energy and less
explosiveness; the woman is ever building up her system by storing
sources of energy, the man is ever using up his stores of energy in
impetuous outbursts of work. The generations of active employment in
which Limanoran women had been engaged, and the complete cessation of
the warlike pursuits that used to fill the lives of the men, had not
obliterated these distinctions. The women were still best at sedentary
occupations; whatsoever needed continuity and singleness of purpose
was given to them; for they have more unity of nature, and can settle
down for long periods to an investigation that would be monotonous to a
man, and are on the whole longer lived. So any investigation that was
uninvolved, but needed intensity of application on the part of one mind
for more than an average lifetime, was handed over to a woman; and
where the work of several was required for a generation or two, a woman
was always one of the workers in order to preserve the continuity.
In the imaginative families it was generally the men who did the most
striking work. Their bursts of energy enabled them to go by leaps.
They pioneered best into the future; they found the new principles for
advance in invention and discovery. The women gathered the material
for the sciences; the men invented and applied the great hypotheses
leading to new laws and new advances; they also showed the way in
progress, and tended rather to revolution than to rest. Whatsoever
needed artistic talent was theirs to do. In physical work, wherever
rapidity of movement and fitful application of torrents of energy were
required, the men took the lead; for they were small and active, having
now no distinctively muscular employments, like war and hunting, to
develop their muscle and bone exceptionally. The women, as naturally
accumulative instead of prodigal of energy, were larger and more
passive, and took up departments of labour that needed long and gentle
persistence. In counsel they were the conservative element, and in
all the assemblies but those that superintended investigation into
the future, invention, and discovery, that is, in all councils of
judgment, they slightly predominated in numbers. If they had wholly
guided the community, it would have stood still or moved at a rate that
would not have been noticeable in the generations of men. Happily the
masculine imagination dominated the civilisation, and hence it was ever
quickening its pace. But the women were no less useful in preventing
revolutionary progress, and in making the men wait and meditate over
the leaps they thought of taking.
It was not so much sex-function itself, as the impress it had left
upon the natures of the people that supplied a rough-and-ready
classification of types. A few of the women who were especially fitted
to be mothers were assigned to the maternal profession; their natures
seemed moulded to bring forth strong, healthy, unexhausted offspring,
fit for the duties of a new advance. There were other women who because
of their nervous vigour and inclination to exhaust their best energies
in work were not the most suitable for the production of children,
and yet by their sympathy and wisdom and love of the young seemed
especially created to bring up children as citizens; these adopted the
proparental profession. A third type of women were, on account of their
quick, irritable vigour and their super-emotional temperament and lack
of self-control, considered incapable of either function except on rare
occasions; and they formed the largest class, the worker-women, rarely
generative and always uneducative; they were engaged in the sedentary,
acquisitive, and continuous employments that demanded no great strain
on the imagination or the creative powers or the muscular vigour. But
none in the community were wholly freed from daily active work both
of body and of mind, not even those whose lives were given up to the
profession of maternity. Amongst men all were eligible as fathers; for
though there were always a special diet and training for prospective
paternity, these might be enforced simultaneously with the usual work.
Not all, however, were called on to exercise paternity; it was a rare
and little-noticed duty, and left small impress on the community. But
there were some who on account of their great wisdom and self-control
and lofty character were specially fitted for the rearing of youth,
and these formed the male proparental profession. These had their other
duties to perform in the family and to the state as well as to attend
to their individual households, but they were dedicated to the guidance
of posterity; their eyes were more on the future than even those of
the imaginative families. The rest of the men formed the class of male
workers at creative and imaginative work, and at muscular work that
required agility and concentration of force.
Of the numbers in these different classes the elders had full control.
They knew all the physiological laws governing the proportions of
the sexes and types, and by their dietary and training and medical
precautions they could fill the exact number of vacancies to be
anticipated in any class. For instance, if one was needed for the
profession of maternity, almost all the energy of both parents was
spent for a time in nutrition; they were isolated from most activities,
surrounded with what in other civilisations would be called luxuries,
and encouraged to spend their time in resting. So, if a male worker
were required, the man and woman selected for parenthood were active
workers themselves; and during their generative period their nutrition
was reduced to the minimum for sustaining their energies, whilst they
were encouraged to put all the activity they were capable of into their
daily work. Their manuals of guidance in the difficult work of filling
prospective vacancies in the community were full of minute detail which
was based upon long experience carefully recorded and classified, and
still more upon scientific experimentation in human embryology and
physiology.
It was one of the earliest conquests of the future that they made
after the great purgation, this guidance of the sexual and other
characteristics of embryos. They knew the exact stage at which any
new organ or function appeared, for they had first of all studied the
moulding of embryos in animals; and afterwards, by the aid of their
new photographic and microscopic apparatus that revealed the minutest
detail of any part or movement within the living human body, they were
able to study the effect of changes in exercise or diet or mode of
life upon the development of the human embryo. Nothing was neglected
to make the knowledge complete and scientific, nothing that might help
to turn the science of embryology into a creative art. The invention
of instruments which could take the senses of the investigators close
to any internal item of the living system had made an era in the
history of physiology, and cancelled the necessity of anatomy as its
handmaid. The most microscopic change in the structure of any tissue in
the innermost part of the body became patent to the eye or the ear or
the electric sense of research. Embryology had thus become almost an
exact science; even the physiological side of it had attained to such
exactitude as to make it practically an art. The medical elders could
investigate the health of the embryo and guide its development as well
as in the case of the full-grown child.
They were thus able to formulate a complete art for the moulding of the
unborn to the purpose the elders indicated as best for the future of
the race. Training and education in the truest sense of the words began
long before birth. Of course it had begun with the father and mother,
if not with the ancestry; but the directly plastic art of fashioning
the character began with the first appearance of life. The elders would
have blamed themselves if any sign of gross atavism had shown itself
in a youth, now that they had full command of his prenatal history, and
for generations retrogression had become an impossibility in the race.
In former ages it had been one of the most difficult moral problems to
fix the responsibility of a man’s crimes; somewhat was due to his own
choice; but part, they saw, was due to his ancestry, and still more to
his parents, not only in their training of him, but in their prenatal
preparation if they were not careful to exclude gross or criminal ideas
and emotions from their systems whilst he was in process of formation.
Now they were able to apportion the blame with ease if anything went
astray in the character of the child. They were therefore minutely
careful in the precautions they took not only in the half-century of
education, but in the choice of ancestry and in the guidance of the
prenatal development. To prospective parents the character of the
future offspring was as a conscience to their daily conduct and method
of life. Every thought, emotion, act, was guided by a sense that it
would affect the embryo of the coming citizen.
The newest addition to their list of sciences, the physiology of
ethics, put into their hands one of the most effective aids to
this plasmic art of character, prenatal and postnatal. With their
instruments of investigation into the human tissue ever advancing in
refinement and power, they were able at last to localise the physical
centre and equivalent of each emotion; and thus having mapped out
the brain and the nerve-centres, they were able to watch with their
new modifications of the lavolan the palpitating life and movement
in each part with the strong manifestations of its special feeling.
Step by step they found their way towards the nosology of these
centres, and classified every disease that turned an emotion from
right to wrong. Whenever a Limanoran child became afflicted with an
evil or retrogressive passion, he was hurried off to the ethical
laboratory, and the nerve-centres of his emotional and moral nature
were microscopically photographed as they worked; a complete history
of his tissues was recorded on irelium-slips, and, after he had gone,
the investigators could run these through the recording instrument
and study the phases of the feeling or passion at leisure. The bursts
of mistaken emotion were livingly photographed with the greatest
care, and afterwards the records were watched through their most
powerful clirolans. Then experiments were made in finding remedies
which would check the growth of the disease in the tissue. At first
the therapeutics of morality were merely empirical; they tried the
remedies which had been successful with the common physical ailments
of humanity, and found most fail, a few succeed. By degrees they
discovered that the most powerful antidote against the moral poison lay
in the character of the operator; wherever the ethical investigator
had led a nobler life, the cure was more rapid and effective; wherever
the attendant had more development of intellect than of lofty moral
principle, the patient lingered and often relapsed. Yet there were
other prophylactics of a more material kind that greatly aided in the
recovery of the patient. Hygienic measures and courses were prescribed
for preventing the recurrence of the disorder; and at last something
not unlike a science of the art of moral healing seemed to emerge out
of the empiricism and chaos.
This culminated in the establishment of an ethical sanatorium, which
was in reality a children’s hospital for obstinate moral diseases.
No mature or half-mature Limanoran had for ages shown symptoms of a
relapse upon any ancestral or barbaric ethical code, and the mild moral
ailments lasting for only a few hours or days were easily managed
by the parents or proparents. Gentle influence, or at most gentle
discipline, was all that was needed to dislodge the evil spirit, or if
that did not succeed, magnetic remedies were applied to the part of the
nervous centres affected.
Should the moral defect still hold out obstinately against all
remedies, the patient was removed to the hospital for treatment. There
were collected together as moral physicians and nurses the wisest and
noblest personalities of the race, who applied all their therapeutic
power to the centre that was supposed to be the source of the disease.
But the centre had been scientifically examined and fixed by the
ethical investigators, who reproduced the parts affected and their
symptoms in greatly magnified forms, and suggested the various physical
remedies that would aid the sanative influences of the physicians
and nurses. The child was isolated from circumstances and conditions
tending to reinforce the moral poison; and his better nature was
invigorated and encouraged, so that it might be able to throw off the
germs of the malady.
Within recent times the ethical investigators had made great advances
in their science. The immediate stimulus of the progress was
accidental, as so often had been the case, or in other words it had
come from outside their recognised spheres of causation. An epidemic
of deceit had almost simultaneously seized upon the children of the
community, in spite of the solitary method of training adopted. Boys
and girls who had not seen each other for months were on the same day
impelled to habits of concealment, even when they were in the stage of
development that corresponded to the ravening fury and open warfare of
the barbaric past. Nothing in their ordinary methods of research could
furnish a cause for the outbreak. They searched the general condition
of the previous moral health of the children, and found it excellent.
None of the patients had come near each other for long periods; none
of them had shown any symptoms of the disorder before the epidemic had
appeared.
They were driven to some hypothesis quite outside the limits of their
usual sphere, for they saw that there was something uncommon in the
occurrence. Beginning to suspect that the germs of the disease had
come from other regions, as had so often happened, they increased the
powers of their magnifying apparatus by means of photography, and
invented more delicate aids to the investigation of the nerve-centres
than they had ever used before. On watching the part in which they had
localised the physical equivalent of deceit, they found signs that the
presence of the minutest foreign life was disturbing the nerve-tissues.
In the moving microscopic photographs and electrographs of the centre
they could detect the growth of a new type of microbe, inflaming
and interfering with the nerves of the part. Afterwards they found
some specimens of the disturbers in the atmosphere, and were able to
cultivate them for investigation and experiment. Soon they accumulated
a large enough quantity of the débris to apply to the cultures
themselves, and in every case it seemed to prove a steriliser; what the
minute life had used up and thrown off acted as a poison and destroyer.
By means of the medicine that they manufactured from it they were able
to annihilate or eject the disturbers of the nerve-centre of truth in
the patients. But in curing the part affected the moral equilibrium of
the children was upset. The bio-chemical families applied themselves to
the problem, and soon succeeded in isolating the medicative elements
from the injurious.
Thus a new and efficient method of treatment was introduced into the
ethical sanatorium. Chambers were reserved for sublimating the drug,
and thither children were sent if any obstinate form of deceit appeared
in them. And by means of the sterilised form of it they fumigated the
child’s quarters in any household, whenever signs of a return of the
epidemic appeared. The ethical investigators proceeded on the new path
thus opened up to them and were in time able to describe and classify
the microbes of moral epidemics and their antidotes. After some years’
toil they supplied the ethical sanatorium with a complete scientific
pharmacopœia, for at least all the grosser forms of vice, all the
offences against the moral codes that had been atavised or thrown into
the ancestral past.
The nerve-centres concerned with these offences were easy to find and
localise; so the minute life that interfered with such centres was
studied till it yielded its secrets to science. But it was a more
difficult task for the new scientific art of therapeutic ethics to
trace out the physiology of the newer moral codes and to discover a
cure for the maladies which hindered their complete adoption into the
Limanoran human system. The moral offences they had now to deal with
were sluggishness of the higher faculties of man, acts that dragged
the thoughts downwards, dominance of a physical need, concessions to
mere nature as against the highest knowledge of nature, excesses of
emotion or disturbances of the mental equilibrium by passion, devotion
to the past, superstition, stagnancy of belief, efforts to base belief
on unreason or ignorance, faith in a moral code as the terminus of
human ethics, or in a state of human scientific knowledge that was
omniscient. Step by step the ethical investigators found their way
to the nerve-centre that was disturbed when any one of these faults
appeared in a man; and after long years of research and experiment they
were able to add to their pharmacopœia the antidotes to these maladies
or weaknesses.
They would have thought the basis of existence irrational, if they had
persuaded themselves that ethics was unprogressive, whilst all other
things in the universe were subject to the law of evolution. A moral
code could be as easily superseded as a polity or a type of society. At
one time no race could see beyond the moral codes of barbaric life that
recognised no evil in treachery or revenge. Some at last advanced to
the moral code of the warrior, which based every rule of life upon the
idea of honour. Later still the civilised races of the world adopted
the moral ideal of the priest, which could find nothing good beyond
the limits of its special ecclesiastical forms. One by one these had
been antiquated and Limanoran civilisation had now found as the basis
for its moral code the principle of the cosmos, that of evolution. To
advance, to raise his system higher, to evolve its possibilities, was
the first duty of man as understood by the Limanorans of this later
age. To see beyond their present horizon was their ideal. They would
rather march forward into the darkness than stand still or retrograde
in light. To know clearly and definitely the possibilities that
lay before them, and to be able to choose the best of them was the
primary and fundamental maxim of their ethical code. All others were
corollaries of it.
If they had any unreasoned, unreasoning, and authoritative monitor
within them making for all that was right, in short any conscience,
it was now the prophetic voice of the ideals that they were still
to reach. Ages before it had ceased to be a voice out of the past.
Before the great purgation of the island half of their education
and literature had been based upon the literatures of two ancient
peoples, to whose conquests and legacies of energy and thought they
had fallen heir. They now shuddered at the pollution that these used
to communicate to the minds of their youth. The ethics running through
them belonged to a stage of civilisation that had been long antiquated,
and embodied ideals now far beneath them. The heroes and wisest men
were recorded in them as having done deeds with applause that the most
atavistic of their children would be ashamed to mention. Whatever
wisdom or nobleness they might otherwise teach, it would be completely
neutralised by the taint of vices which were approved or counted as
venial peccadilloes. To submit their youth to such pollution for the
sake of the problematic refinement they might gain from the books was
to do the greatest wrong a civilisation could commit, to prostrate its
own ideals before those of a vanished and barbaric past. Out with the
exiles went every trace of those old literatures; and the isle of liars
and the isle of lechers had taken them to their bosoms, with the result
that they had to adopt lying and impurity as their standards of life.
To return upon any past was to reject with recklessness the advantages
that it had gained and handed on to the centuries between. But to
adopt with deliberateness a past steeped in the grossest impurities,
and honouring intrigue and hypocrisy, was to commit moral suicide.
It was only in the immature that conscience, or the future invisibly
shepherding the present, was either needed or existent. They had
pitfalls and dangers out of the savage past to avoid, and an unreasoned
instinct was an essential to their development as an ever-present
guide, authoritatively bending their steps this way and that. This
moral and instinctive anticipation of the future, though mysterious
in its origin to the young whose conduct it moulded, was in reality
no mystery; it came from the magnetism of the wisest and best of the
elders; the ideal these saw in front of them and held out as the
immediate goal of the race, passed sympathetically and magnetically
into the moral and intellectual atmosphere of the island. The mature
knew whence the influence came, and grasped it rationally. But it was
round the young as a subtle inspiration and halo that came they knew
not whence; nor dared they question it or disobey its injunctions,
lest some evil should entrap them. When they came to maturity, they
learned the origin of the mysterious voice within, not to disregard its
monitions, but to reason them out and revise them by the light of the
advancing ideals of the race and to know that it changes and grows like
everything in the cosmos.
One of the first aims and maxims of their polity was to let their
citizens on reaching maturity think all through their lives for
themselves. The first guaranty of this freedom was rationality, the
power of tracing back every act and feeling and thought to the primary
principles of existence, combined with the sense of responsibility
for the future of the race. There was no repression, no prohibition;
the prerogative and duty of every man was to make himself fit to be
a law to himself. In former ages their ancestors used to talk of the
innocence of childhood; all that they meant was unconsciousness of
conventional emotions, ideas, phrases, and habits, and superiority
to them. They smiled at it as a temporary stage from which they
would soon pass into the restrictions of manhood and womanhood; and
only the greatest sages were able to work themselves free again from
conventions so far as to be moral and noble and yet to have the
innocence, the unperturbed vision and candour of the earliest years.
But now all men and women retained the naïve openness of childhood
and its artless simplicity; for they had no conventions to trammel
the freedom of spiritual movement, no prohibitions to make the will
shrink from origination or action. Even when childhood or youth was
checked in some mistaken career, the check was veiled in persuasion
and reasoning and a vision of the truth. The atmosphere of freedom
was an absolute essential for the full development of individuality;
and the guaranty that this freedom would never pass into license was
the fact that every mature man and woman had a noble aim, and that
the magnetism of the race was around everyone. None had to obtrude
the claims of his personality upon others; and none was abashed by a
sense of despair, or the feeling of insignificance. Humility was a
virtue needing no conscious cultivation; there was no occasion for its
appearance, for the place and merits of everyone were accurately gauged
and acknowledged by all. It was only the insignificance of all humanity
against the infinite, of the life of this world against cosmic periods,
that deeply impressed them, and rendered them weary of efforts so
feeble as those of human life. But the mood was brief in such sanguine
temperaments and agile natures. Action they knew to be exhilaration and
health and the building up of tissue and faculty.
All they wished to be sure of was that the action was to lead forward.
The test of its morality was this: did it make the human system
progress? How far did it tend to make the future better than the
present? Whether a thing was pleasant or not for the moment, had no
influence upon their choice of courses of action. That had been the
motive and guide of the barbarous past, the artist of its conduct, the
creator of its character. The civilisation of other periods and races
had meant only the development of needs. And the pure savage is ever
superior to civilised man in this sense; with his minimum of needs and
the wherewithal to satisfy them wherever he may find himself, he is not
so localised as even the wealthiest and most cultured man of the most
luxurious civilisations who is tied to his property and investments,
and is miserable unless in the one or two cities where he can indulge
his taste for luxury to the full. There was no such thing as luxury
in Limanora; everything that was brought into being was essential
for advance, for the final aim of the life. Not needs but ultimate
ends gave them their point of view, not desires but means, not rights
but duties. If there was anything that could stir them to greater
eagerness, it was the prospect of more work for the good of others;
if anything could be looked upon as a luxury amongst them, it was a
surfeit of work that contemplated a widening of the racial horizon. To
serve the future of all was their deepest longing. Far into the savage
past had faded the idea of servitude; and, as they looked into history,
there was nothing they were more thankful for than the disappearance
of such a necessity; for they considered the servant, especially if
slave, the despot of his master in moulding and pandering to his needs
and whims, and an evil despot too, as less advanced and less cultivated.
Among the things they most deeply abhorred was despotism. And the
worst despotism of all, they held, was the social, that which is
exercised daily and hourly, and from the vantage-ground of proximity;
the narrow scope and limited horizon make it all the more intense.
The most accursed of despotisms is the system of espionage; it wrecks
every chance of freedom and crushes originality, turning the race
back into crawling venomous things. It is a vain attempt at complete
spiritual repression and feebly assumes omniscience and omnipresence
on the part of the despots. Its only chance of success is a spiritual
society disciplined like an army and ruled by nothing but loyalty to
its superiors who base their authority on the assumption of intercourse
with supernatural omniscience and omnipresence; and its only chance of
continuance is grovelling prostration of all its subjects and possible
critics, in abject fear of unknown terror and of spies in the very
precincts of the heart, who can hear and interpret its every beat.
That was one of their hells, which they occasionally brought before
their imaginations in order to warn them against minute supervision and
interference. It was this that urged them on to complete transparency
of nature, so that their inmost thoughts and feelings might be open to
all. Ever since the liars had been thrust forth, one of the immediate
goals of their civilisation had become absolute truthfulness. Now that
this had been attained, a further goal was complete limpidity of the
human system. The wise elders had already been able to interpret what
passed in the heart or brain of a Limanoran; now the aim was to make
the sensuous garment of the soul diaphanous to the magnetic sense, if
not to the eyes of all. Of nothing in his whole system must a man be
ashamed, before he could endure such continuous confessional to his
fellows, and it was towards this goal that every Limanoran was now
consciously working.
The constant inspections and examinations by the elders might seem
to conflict with this horror of espionage and spiritual despotism.
But these were voluntary on the part of mature Limanorans; it was
one of their recurring pleasures to be able to submit their tissues
and faculties to the wise observation of the elders, and to gain the
advantage of their experience. Had it been felt as a despotism, it
would have been abandoned at once. With children and the immature it
was a matter of discipline; they were in the pre-purgation stages of
Limanoran history, and had to be in pupillage and under authority. As
soon as they were able to keep step with the advancing civilisation,
or in other words to be a law to themselves, they were allowed to
walk alone and without the trammels of guidance. It was the strenuous
aim of the elders and guides of the community to keep the atmosphere
of thought free. They were constantly reviewing and revising the end
and aim of existence in the light of the new developments of thought
and science; hence its form never became a hard dogma. They believed
in ultimate truth, but knew that nothing short of omniscience could
attain it. They were now and again getting glimpses of it, but fought
shy of expressing it in words, for everyone would know it to be only
a provisional expression. Language itself was a shifting mirage of
the mind, dependent on the point of view for its meaning and even
existence; and one of the most constant duties of the community was to
define and clarify it, and to free it from its ever-growing opaqueness
or nebulosity, and the fallacies that haunted it. One thing they never
hesitated about, but grasped with unerring instinct; and that was the
goal that they kept before them, or in other words the advance they
were eager to make. They hated all jesuitry, knowing that it meant
the suppression of spiritual freedom by what merely professed to be
progressive and good, and the obscuration of spiritual truth in clouds
of subtlety. Nothing that was evil, they held firmly, could lead
ultimately to good; nothing that was retrograde could in the end be
progress.
They had learned from the revolutions of their past how snaky and
tortuous are the ways of deceit; and the first sure sign of its
triumphant success is the bold adoption of the doctrine that good men
may do evil, provided their aim is good. Under this the liars sheltered
themselves for ages before they were exiled. The era of the history of
the island that filled them most with shrinking and loathing was that
of the struggle with the various forms of deceit. The first lesson in
the valley of memories was drawn from this division of their annals;
they filled their youth with hatred and scorn of untruth and hypocrisy;
no firm step could be taken in education till this had become a deeply
rooted feeling in their natures, and nothing awakened it so well as
the study of this struggle with the liars. But they never taught any
subject merely from books or records; everything, even history and its
lessons, was made practical and living. Deceit, for instance, was
traced back to its sources in nature, and the difficulty of getting
rid of it was revealed by finding it so wide spread in the lower ranks
of life. Mimicry or involuntary deceit was investigated all through
plant and animal life, and it was found to be more prevalent the lower
the investigators went in vital organisms. Their loathing of it as a
deliberate adoption amongst human beings grew deeper as they saw that
in the animal world it belonged either to incompetence or rapacity.
The prey mimicked the form and colour of another species that was
loathsome to its enemy in order to avoid his grasp; unconsciously the
mimicry spread, for only those members of the attractive species which
were like the repellent species escaped and propagated. Or the spoiler
mimicked the form and colour of a species that was friendly or neutral
to its victim, and only those members of the species similar to the
unfeared kind succeeded in catching enough of their favourite food to
survive and hand on their nature to a posterity.
It was the same in the higher life of human self-consciousness and
will; only here intention and deliberateness entered in and turned
mimicry into deceit. Wherever hypocrisy existed it was a sure sign of
a vast number of incompetent and feeble, who made an easy quarry to
the villain, and of the vigour of a cunning minority, who often found
it difficult to entrap. Diplomacy and convention are the deliberate
mimicry of the predatory section of a race or of its gullible section.
When once the Limanorans had purged the island of the liars, they had
to prevent the propagation of the feeble and incompetent; for they knew
that, as long as these existed in a community, there would persist the
more futile forms of deceit. After that first purgation, the weak,
though retained in the island, had to abandon family life; they were
provided with the means that made existence easy and pleasant in order
that they might not resort to their only method of survival; and in a
generation the problem of hypocrisy had disappeared.
It was then that the idrovamolan was invented and came into use in
education. Having driven out the hated vice, they found that there was
still the need of impressing its evil results upon the minds of the
maturing youth, just as it was necessary even yet to study the diseases
that had disappeared for generations from their midst in order to be
able to cope with them, should they ever be reintroduced through their
communication with other atmospheres. But they knew the unreality of
teaching anything in a merely theoretical way; they felt that lecturing
and sermonising and the mere reading of history would give them no such
grasp of the vice and its evils as would living, acting things. The
idrovamolan with its telescopic, telacoustic, and telemagnetic powers
came to their assistance in this difficulty. By its help parents and
proparents were able to bring the youths into the very presence of the
loathed deceit without submitting them to the chance of contagion.
They turned the object-tubes of the wonderful instrument upon Aleofane
and its society; and through them they saw and heard and felt men like
insects mimic and like stinging worms crawl and diplomatise, lie and
cheat, still with the worship of reality and sincerity and truth upon
their lips. There they noted the growth of the most offensive form of
the vice. The weak learned it for protection, flattering the great and
grovelling in the dust before them whilst they cursed them in their
hearts, and all in order that some favour might perhaps be flung
like a bone to a dog. Having learned the vicious art in this cringing
fashion, the feeble were seen to march off with the proud gait and
the conceit of adepts and use it like brigands on the still feebler.
This combination of incompetence and unscrupulousness was the final
curse of a civilisation that had taken deceit to its bosom. The whole
of the energy of the race was spent in simulation and dissimulation.
Every vice simulated its antagonistic virtue; even virtue simulated
the vigour and arrogance of vice. The Limanoran youth needed no more
teaching on the evils of hypocrisy. They rose from the idrovamolan
with an intense loathing for all forms of deceit, so impressive was
the drama they saw enacted in Aleofane. Even what seemed innocent
mimicry they shrank from, seeing it universally employed as the means
of cheating in that island of liars; mimicry they were encouraged to
eschew; for as surely as the art was mastered, it was used for mean
or foul purposes at some time or other, either for envy and jealousy
and scorn, or in order to lay traps, sometimes for the strong, but
chiefly for the weak. Even in art all mimicry was avoided, for there it
betrayed feebleness or lack of individuality. The existence of mimicry
in the animal world was the mark of degeneracy upon terrestrial life.
It argued the wide domain of feebleness and rapacity, and the dominance
of the passion for mere existence. Wherever it was wide-spread, it
meant the abeyance of progress and of eagerness for progress. Mimicry
is the sterilising process of faculty and power. Origination is the
principle of fertility, of stimulus to progress.
Whatsoever dallied with an outgrown principle or element was immoral.
Mere copying of what had been already attained and was about to be left
behind or used as a stepping-stone to something better was neighbour
to evil. Morality is the effort to adapt conduct and ideals to the new
vistas opened up into the future by an advance already achieved; and it
is ever being bribed or throttled by what is outworn. Evil is the past
which has become so obsolete and is yet so living as to be obstructive.
What has been outgrown has ever its allies among living elements, and
its advocates in every mixed and unpurified race. Especially is this
the case where there are fixed codes or creeds, and along with them
professions organised to preserve and continue their sway. The world
is constantly seeing the spectacle of a nation or race or species
coming to a standstill after centuries of brilliant progress, and
getting fossilised in a certain stage of its advance; there it remains
for generation after generation as if alive, yet practically dead for
all purposes of development, like a fly in amber. This dead stop is
due to the dominance of some code or creed that seemed to embody the
spirit of its greatest success; the nation or race sought to secure
for ever to itself the advantages of the ethical or spiritual methods
that had achieved for it its most brilliant results, by fixing them
unalterably for all time, with their official guardians to protect them
from change; so that which had given such vigorous life and development
for a time became a prison-house and grave. Only the most tremendous
revolution and cataclysm could burst the walls of the tomb, tear off
its grave-clothes, and release its spirit for new conquests. Sometimes
a nation seems to fossilise the creed or polity that first gave energy
to its life, yet at the same time grows and develops spasmodically.
It has only made pretence of having fixed this code for all time,
whilst the living spirit of it escapes and follows its own course in
freedom; it has periodically to return to its pretended prison and
tomb, and to reconcile by jesuitry and in makeshift way the two methods
of life which have come to differ so widely. Then it flees again into
the struggle of existence and gradually ignores even the new versions
of the old code, till the divorce becomes too obtrusive to escape
attention, and the process of reinterpretation of the antiquated creed
begins again. This has been a common enough mode of advance in the
history of the world. But it is fraught with incalculable risks. It
induces a habit of self-deceit and hypocrisy, and the nation or race
ultimately makes a tomb and prison-house for its spirit out of its own
falsities and self-delusions.
Advance like this, the Limanorans held, was no true advance. They
would have no part or lot in fixity of methods or codes, for whatever
became fixed grew thereby evil and obstructed development and advance
to higher points of view. They had only to look into their history to
see how every new step antiquated some universally accepted belief
or maxim. Not so many ages ago a crudely philanthropic spirit was
considered one of the surest signs of advancing virtue, in fact one
of the noblest of the virtues. Now it was considered distinctly
immoral to philanthropise without taking care to foresee the results
of the philanthropy. Limanorans used to go out into the archipelagos
and try to convert the barbarians to the special code or creed then
in vogue. Instead of helping on the human race, it actually stopped
the development of a section of it; for the adoption of a creed and
its symbols and rites and phrases far in advance of any possible
civilisation they could reach only made the savages--whose virtues had
hitherto been at least genuine--conventional, false, and hypocritical;
whilst the apostles left thousands of their own countrymen at home
stagnant or retrogressive. It soon came to be acknowledged that
intercourse with inferior civilisations, even for the purpose of
raising them, lowered the moral standard of the missionaries, whilst
failing in its original motive. Much of the philanthropy that began
at home was found to be no less obstructive and immoral. It fed and
clothed the poor and improvident, and thus helped to slay and bury
the only habit that could save them out of their slough, the habit
of measuring every step they took, and seeing whither it led; and it
helped to perpetuate the evil; for the ready yet limited supplies
combined with the improvidence to make them breed like the lower
animals, and the race of paupers and unprogressive was inordinately
multiplied. The same feeble and immoral philanthropy opposed all
attempts to stop the multiplication of the diseased and semi-criminal,
and had to increase the armies of doctors and guardians of the peace
every generation. It did well to nurse the feeble in mind and body, and
to reduce the penalties under which heredity had placed them; but it
failed to see that it was doing endless evil by letting them penalise
an increasing posterity with their own punishment. Not till it was
branded as the worst of immoralities was such philanthropy ended. This
had been a distinct advance and a true virtue, when it had taken the
place of cruelty and neglect, and when there was unmeasured space on
the earth for the expansion of population; but, once this stage had
been passed, and the purgation crusade was proceeding, it became a real
plague and vice.
Another immorality that had once been a virtue was the pursuit of
beauty for its own sake. Men gave up their lives to the production
of beautiful things which served no other purpose than their own
glory and the entertainment of idle and leisured people. Others made
fortunes and devoted them to the purchase of such works of art, in
order that crowds might collect and admire them, and for a time
there was something of truth in the assertion that it educated the
taste of the people. But this was only when the bulk of the race was
unenlightened and unprogressive, and anything that softened their
barbarity, anything that drew their thoughts away for even a brief time
from sordid cares or cruel projects or mechanical and conventional
habits, implied progress or a chance of progress. When the race had
been purified, and every eye was bent on the future, and every nerve
strained toward some advance in human civilisation, beautiful things
became the commonest features and necessities of life, and beauty
ceased to be noticed as anything remarkable. Then to spend energies on
producing what was artistic and beautiful without serving any other
purpose than pleasing was reckless extravagance, and by wasting what
should have been expended upon the progress of the race was condemned
as immoral. There was no virtue in doing what everyone did by instinct.
There was positive vice in making it the sole and deliberate purpose of
expenditure of energy.
Another instance of a former virtue having become a vice was
statesmanship and political patriotism. At one time half the
conspicuous talent of the race went in this direction, so greatly was
it admired. And, when there were other races and nations to diplomatise
or struggle with, and one half of the race had to provide for or keep
watch on the other half, it is no strange thing that to enter into the
domain of politics was considered the noblest thing a man could do, and
love of the welfare of the country was considered the noblest sentiment
a man could entertain. The most difficult problems, involving, some of
them, the very continuance of the race, occupied the attention of the
statesman and politician; what to do with the vast pauper class and
the still vaster fringe of the poverty-stricken and improvident, how
to deal with the criminally inclined, how to educate the half-savage
denizens of hovels in cities and even in the open country, how to
prevent the deadlocks in industry, how to regulate the labour market
and how to check the recurrent plagues and famines, were questions
that tasked the finest intellectual energies of the nation. What
complicated the answer was the fact that the themes of the discussions,
the pauper, the criminal, the improvident, the employer, the labourer,
the plague-stricken, and the starving had all a share in the government
of the country, and had to be persuaded that any scheme proposed was
to their individual interests. The virtue of political patriotism was
streaked with loquacity, conceit, self-seeking, hypocrisy, corruption,
and intrigue, long before it came to be recognised as a vice. The
statesman and politician had to make his principles as interchangeable
as his coats, had to be a master in the art of making the worse appear
the better reason, had to be skilful in lying without seeming to lie,
had to rob whilst putting on the guise of self-sacrifice, had to
cringe and fawn, bully and overbear, by turns, had to be an artist in
bribing men and in taking bribes, in short had to be the most expert
of the criminal classes. By the time the end came, none in the list of
virtues had become so like a vice as patriotism. The great purgations
swept out all occasions for politics and patriots in exiling all the
subjects of statesmanship. Where there were no paupers or criminals,
no masters or servants, no uneducated or savage except young children,
and no chance of plague or famine, the occupation of the statesman and
politician vanished. Where every man was taught to be a law to himself,
legislation had no place. The problems of most inchoate civilisations
had gone into exile with all the isms that were proposed to solve
them, and all the charlatans that proposed their solution. Patriotism
was now, like breathing, the organic and unconscious process of every
mind, and not the exception upon which anyone could plume himself. No
longer was it the safety of the country, or the continuance of the
race, or the sustenance or justice or criminality of part of the people
that demanded conscious effort, but the advance of the human system in
all. To propose and argue legislative schemes for the benefit of any
section of the race would have been accounted immorality, if it had
not been taken as a symptom of atavism or mental disease. A hospital
was the certain fate of anyone who indulged in political projects or
political eloquence; the old virtue had passed beyond the stage of
obstructiveness and vice, and had become one of the tests of insanity.
This disease of politics rarely appeared except amongst the youthful
and immature and the methods of driving out the evil spirit had
recently grown scientific and unfaltering. The old plan of exiling, it
was now felt, had become cruel and pitiless. For in recent generations
the pace of evolution in the race had so quickened that now even its
laggards and the breakers of its moral law were centuries ahead of the
most advanced citizens of the most advanced nations on the face of the
earth; and no longer could they, if expatriated, find any to consort
with. They would have to live with men who, in their eyes, were vicious
and criminal. Noola had been the last to be exiled; the system was
finally abandoned as inhumane and unscientific; and science soon found
methods of treatment that were prompt and efficient in their cure of
all such mental diseases.
My final instance of the old virtue grown vice is of a different kind.
It belonged more to the intellectual sphere than to the practical, and
seemed to me at first rather a mistake than a defect of the nature. It
was the common error of taking a verbal originality or advance for a
real, a mere change of name for a change in essence. In the old times
it had been counted as a great merit to a man, if he manufactured a
new nomenclature for any wide spread phase of civilisation, and so
gave the race the sensation of dealing with something novel. Some of
the greatest heroes of philosophy and science in the pre-purgation
ages of the island had owed their fame to the substitution of fresh
phraseology for what had grown outworn and trite, and most of the
great writers had done nothing more for their fellows than re-illumine
a linguistic world fallen dull and dark. Men grow sick of ideas that
have worn the same verbal dress for a generation or more, and hail as a
discoverer and benefactor anyone who tricks them out anew; they delight
in feeling them to be familiar old friends, whom they have to make no
mental effort to know. Even to dye the old garments in new imaginative
tints is a service they will not readily forget; whilst the great
discoverers and pioneers of the human race have had years or ages of
oblivion according to the newness and difficulty of their ideas and the
distance beyond the common horizon they have looked into the future.
The Limanorans of old, like most other men, abhorred having to think
out again their creeds and ideas, and especially having to reform them;
and so they stood out lustily against every real advance proposed, and
shouted it down as irreverence or blasphemy in overturning the old
barriers and old altars. The maker of a new nomenclature and the tinter
of the old phraseology pandered to this intellectual indolence.
One of the most striking results of the new point of view after the
great purgation was the transformation the fame of these old scientists
and philosophers and writers suffered. They began to be execrated as
dealers in illusions, as men who fed the passion of the human race
for stagnance or retrogression to monstrous proportions. They were
thrown down from their lofty pedestals, and cast into oblivion for
their sins against truth and reality. To seduce men from the pursuit
of truth by mere verbal jugglery was now counted no mere mistake, but
a heinous offence against morality. To take as a real discovery what
was but a new name or set of names revealed a vicious obliquity of
mental vision, that needed attention from the ethical physicians. This
was especially easy in the domain of ethics, and the Limanorans were
constantly on their guard against the delusion of accepting a change of
nomenclature as a moral advance. The elders carefully reviewed every
stage of progress, lest it should have been in words and phrases. This
was the main purpose of the Manora and of the Imanora, and every month
linguistic councils were held to revise the language, and to throw out
any fallacies and illusions it might harbour. Every new nomenclature
and phraseology was searched and probed, and torn off the ideas that
they were meant to express, in order to see if there was anything new
underneath them. Delusion, they had resolved, they would have nothing
to do with in any shape or form. For delusion blinded the eyes to the
route they were taking, and made them march in a circle or back over
the old roads under the belief that they were advancing to what was
new. It was the greatest foe to true progress, and any man who fell
into it revealed vicious tendencies, which needed the ministrations of
the physicians and nurses in the ethical sanatorium. To take verbal
ingenuity for true pioneering was the most grievous offence against the
future of the race.
The great standard and test of morality was progress. How far will
an act or habit aid the true development of the race? This was the
crucial question in Limanora; and in order that it might be answered
satisfactorily and easily by any member of the community, the council
of elders was careful to accommodate the ideals of the race to every
advance made. It had been a rare thing in their history to change or
add to the cardinal instincts of morality. But this they knew was by no
means impossible; and indeed they were buoyed up with the hope that the
moral cosmos was still to open up new marvels like the physical cosmos,
that in fact the two would ultimately be found to be one when looked
at from the final and divine point of view. There was the strongest
conservatism in the ethical phase of life; for it is the last, highest,
and most complex development of vitality. The lower we investigate in
the animal world, the more revolutions and transformations we see the
individual go through, the more enslaved is it to circumstances, to
locality, to season, to the moment. The higher we go, the greater we
find the conservatism, and at the same time the greater the origination
and the adaptability. In man these two conflicting powers grow stronger
side by side as he advances in civilisation. He retains features and
forms that are outworn and useless longer than most of the higher
animals; and yet he originates and adapts himself and his surroundings
with far more ease and swiftness. In ethics, his last evolution, the
conservatism dominates the origination and the advance, obscures them
or makes them simulate its own features, and produces the belief that
the final maxims and cue of morality have been reached from the first.
Ethical progress has naturally been slow, and it is only the student of
vast periods of history and of many nations and races who becomes fully
persuaded that there has been any change in the point of view. Because
there is not complete transformation, as in the case of the minuter
and lower animals, it is assumed that there is no evolution, and that
morality and conscience have remained fixed quantities, from the
beginning of historic times at least. And the close bond between ethics
and religion has assisted this dominant and delusive conservatism in
its task. Each great step in ethical evolution has been claimed by
religion as its own, and as resulting from its own special revelation
from heaven.
The Limanorans were quick to recognise that morality must be subject to
growth and development, not only in the individual, but in the race,
and that man must gain higher ethical points of view as he progresses.
They knew that many of the finest impulses and inspirations towards
progress, and especially ethical progress, had come from beyond the
earth and the earth’s atmosphere. But that any age or race could have
caught the ultimate ethical light from the central sun of the cosmos
seemed to them after their experience the height of absurdity. There
could be no spiritual eye trained and developed enough to receive it.
As the bodily eye of man is capable of taking in only a limited range
of rays of light, whilst an immense range of them above and below its
faculty either blind it or pass unnoticed, so his spirit at any given
stage of its development can understand and accept ethical ideas only
within certain limits; but, as it progresses, it is able to see beyond,
and appreciate ideas that were non-existent to it before. There is
as much difference between the ethical comprehension of the modern
Limanoran and that of the most highly civilised European as between
that of the latter and the savage’s, or as between the savage’s and the
pig’s; and if they could have brought themselves to believe that they
had attained the fullest and the final light upon morality, the thought
would have struck their very hearts to stone.
It was this that kept them from formulating their morality or ethics in
any definite code. They knew that a code would soon petrify morality
and itself become a fetich ignorantly worshipped, and, gathering to it
through the ages the self-interest of its officials and the irrational
devotion of its worshippers, attain a despotism that could never be
broken or controlled. A code issues in a series of prohibitions which
become a boundless slavery, and prohibitions develop the sense of
rights which dominates and obscures all sense of duties; this keeps men
hanging between savagery and true civilisation. The growing dominance
of duty with its complementary obscuration of rights is the first
symptom of the approach of rapid ethical progress. To insist on one’s
rights imprisons the soul in the living sepulture of selfishness. To
think of one’s duty is to admit the self-revealing and future unmisting
light of self-sacrifice. Once prohibitions become the order of the day,
especially in a limited community, the spirit of intolerance is abroad;
every man yearns to confine his neighbour and put him in moral and
intellectual leading strings. The origin and meaning of the “Thou shalt
nots” are forgotten; the spirit of them dies rapidly, and the letter
binds and petrifies the souls that must obey them. Progress in ethics
is finally stopped, and it is accepted as a law of nature that there
never was any development of conscience and never can be any other
ethical point of view. Moral stagnance is taken as the rule of human
life, and nothing short of a new impulse from spheres outside the world
can liberate the race, thus blinded, from its vicious circle of thought.
Advance of the human system to higher points of view is in Limanora
the moral test and standard of actions and conduct. In all that is,
nothing has ever died, nothing is dead; what seems dead and fixed for
ever in permanent form is suffering change as truly as the flitting
aurora of the north; the rock, that seems the same in our old age as
when we saw it in infancy, is in process of transformation no less
than we ourselves are; it is made up of particles that are groups of
molecules; and these molecules, moving with varying degrees of rapidity
round and across each other’s orbits, consist themselves of still more
minute atoms that are but points of living energy. Send another form of
energy, like heat, through this apparently torpid mass, and it stirs
palpably to our senses; what was dormant to us before has awakened,
and, as the supply of the foreign energy increases, the rock moves
and changes beneath our gaze; not that the long-torpid mass has not an
energy of its own; it is a store of energy, every atom of it waiting
but for the touch of another kind to awaken from its age-long sleep,
and to send most of it free and a step higher into the wandering sphere
again. The difference between solid and liquid and between liquid
and gas is only a question of time. In the solids the molecules take
longer to move through the same space than those of the liquid, which
in their turn take longer than those of the gas; for solids flow under
the influence of gravitation or other force just as truly as liquids or
gases flow.
It is the same with energies; one differs from another in pace; time is
the only essential difference between them. The pace of vital energy is
so distinctive in its swiftness that it forms a new order of existence.
Thought is the swiftest of the vital energies that we know, and to
rise in the scale is to quicken the pace. The civilised man thinks as
much more rapidly than the savage as the savage thinks more rapidly
than the mollusc, if the last may be said to think or feel at all. And
there are heights above existing human thought for man to climb. Higher
and ever higher the scale of energies in the cosmos must go, till time
becomes what would seem to us but a vanishing point; immediately above
us lies the vital energy to which a thousand years are but as a moment.
To the microbe, if it could think, human life would seem an eternity.
To creative thought, which is the Limanoran ideal, eternity, future as
well as past, is focussed into a moment.
Up through the scale of energy the whole cosmos is ever climbing,
with occasional lapses and falls, time being the only differentiating
quality. To quicken the pace of development is the one immediate aim
of Limanoran civilisation, and the morality of an action is measured by
its contribution to this aim. The higher they climb, the nobler, the
more ethereal, becomes their energy; the less governed and clogged by
animal conditions, the more easy to quicken the pace of development.
For the cosmic law of influence is that the closer in quality and
degree the spheres of energy, the more likely is the higher to mould
the lower and raise it near to its level. The source of the everlasting
movement and life in the cosmos is the unstable equilibrium of all
nuclei and stores of energy. Every world differs from every other world
in its capacity for various forms of energy; and so does everything in
it differ from everything else in the amount of any particular form
of energy it can contain. Comparative proximity sets up a current
between any two nuclei of energy that thus differ. Whenever the two
reach stable equilibrium, that is, whenever they come to have equal
shares of the energy, the current of influence ceases, and they are
dead to each other. The socialistic ideal is political and social
death; when all the members of a community are equal and alike in their
share of its privileges and products and capacities, its rights and
duties, it ceases to grow or develop; stagnation is the law of its
being, especially if there are no neighbouring communities differing
from it on which it can react. The Limanorans deliberately strove to
keep up and strengthen the differences between not only families, but
individuals, in rights, duties, capacities, aims. The differences were
an everlasting fountain of renewing life. The law of political and
social life is exactly the same as that of gravitation and of all the
other cosmic forces. Two sources of energy will continue to influence
each other, till they reach equality, the greater giving of its share
of energy a larger proportion than the less. What keeps the cosmos
eternally alive is the complexity of the mutual influences. There
are no two bodies or centres of an energy so isolated or so simply
constituted as to remain for ever dead or unchanging, once they have
reached stable equilibrium towards each other in respect to their
special form of energy. And so it is with men; the socialistic ideal is
an impossibility in this universe.
In the human sphere this cosmic law has farther-reaching issues than
the merely political. The Limanorans were willing to do much for
the advance of mankind, but they had come to see that apostolism is
a case of this law of mutuality of influence as truly as any other
phenomenon; the higher must not only give voluntarily of his influence
and character to the lower, but the lower must give of his to the
apostle; and if the proximity continues long enough, this mutual
give-and-take will end in the missionary coming nearer to the original
moral standard of the convert than the convert comes to his patron’s
original standard. Where the grades of the two civilisations are widely
separated, though the process of assimilation may be long, extended
over even many generations, it will be most disastrous to human
progress. It is better, they concluded from their long experience, to
isolate an advancing race that is far ahead of all other races, and
thus to give it the chance of coming within the sphere of still higher
intelligences.
Most advanced religions have begun with the impulse towards this,
yearning for a loftier sphere than that in which they are hedged. They
try to isolate their followers from the lowering influences of the
world around, in order that they may reach the ideal and influence
that are just above them. But, as they apostolise and expand, the
worshippers become mere parasites of their God; they try to batten upon
Him with their lower natures, and thus drag Him down to their level.
After the first noble impulse and inspiration, it is seldom that a
religion does not become as truly an instance of parasitism as the
meanest bacterial life. The lower all through the universe is eager to
parasite on the higher; minute organisms try to lodge in the tissues of
those that are larger and more developed. As long as host and parasite
can pursue their functions unhindered by their intimate relationships,
little harm is done; but as soon as the débris of the lower clogs the
organs of the host, what we call disease results and the minute guest
becomes a hurtful parasite. As long as the religious impulse sends the
nature higher on the path of development, so long does it give of its
best to the Deity, so long does it fail to clog the advance of the
cosmos. But when it extends its conquest to mean and unprogressive
natures, the common, unenthusiastic natures that are saturated with
envy and jealousy, then does it become mere parasitism; the religion
has grown into a disease. The warm, humane, and generous natures
which are touched by a new inspiration, rise to an exceptional pitch
of fervour under its influence, and develop at a pace that stirs the
alarm and envy of their neighbours; whilst the resultant persecution
continues unabated, there can be no degeneration, the worship can never
be parasitic. But as soon as the persistence and progress of the early
worshippers and their propagandist enthusiasm begin to invite the
commonplace, cowardly spirits of the mass, who can never appreciate
what is above them except to envy it and drag it down to their level,
its era of development is past. The cosmic law of reciprocity never
fails to act, and the united influence of the meaner majority is
greater in its power over the whole than the fervour of the noble few;
down falls the worship to the level of the many.
It was on this cosmic law that the Limanorans based their refusal to
go out and attempt to convert and raise the rest of mankind to their
standard. They knew from the nature of the universe that the attempt
would end in corrupting themselves and dragging them down farther than
they could drag up their converts. They preferred to give of their
best to the unorbed existence which filled space outside of the world,
and to make their best still better. Thus they knew they were serving
most truly the great end of all being, the development of the cosmos,
the elevation of the energy in it towards more and more spiritual and
progressive grades. They strove to perpetuate and strengthen their
consciousness of what was above them, and to break the yoke of the
lower self, the self that at death amalgamates with what is material
and stagnant, although the latter was needed as a stepping-stone as
long as they remained upon the face of the earth. In seeking the
proximity and influence of the higher energies and existences that
seldom touched the earth, they anxiously guarded themselves from all
parasitism which might drag these down in the scale of being; and
this led them to abandon attempts to personalise the relationship to
them. They would have no part in worshipping or prostrating themselves
before these beings in order to obtain their protection and patronage;
for this, they knew, becomes merely sectarian, the outcome of envy
and jealousy, the cause of bigotry and intolerance, persecution and
revenge. They did not desire the exclusive influence of a higher being,
nor to become obstructions to its further development; to rise to its
level was their active spiritual ambition in striving to gain proximity
to it.
As their senses, especially their inner senses, developed, they were
getting more and more certain of a vast universe of being just outside
the merely terrestrial, and new inspirations and senses were ever
awakening in them; nobler ideas and impulses pressed in upon them,
they scarcely knew whence. They were afraid to define the source,
lest they should humanise the idea of it and pollute it. What they
were sure of was that infinite space was filled with unorbed life and
energy, rising in higher and higher grades, as it receded from the
terrene. The energy of the worlds and of the other nuclei of force was
gradually rising through the grades of being, thanks chiefly to the
measureless existence which hovered round them, yet settled upon no
centre of fixed energy. Out of this unorbed life came the impulses and
inspirations that made such epochs in the history of a world. Their
magnetic sympathy with this they were strengthening and elevating
every generation, as they strove to rise higher and higher amongst
these existences in order that into their spirits might come nobler
and nobler influences. As long as they were conscious of qualities and
degrees of existence above them, so long would they be stimulated on
their upward development. They had no fear that they would ever reach
a point from which they could not see heights beyond. That, they knew,
would be complete spiritual death. But they knew too that there was no
such thing as death, or entire annihilation, in the whole cosmos. What
seemed to us death was but the final parting of two grades of being
or energy, the lower to coalesce with some fixed form of energy and
attach itself again to some more rapidly developing form, the higher
to range itself with the unnucleated energies of space, still to rise
by proximity to some higher life. They were scientifically certain
that there could be no end to this process of development upwards.
Aspiration was the duty and true function of all existence. To quicken
the pace of the evolution, to range themselves more and more swiftly
with the higher life of the cosmos, this was the prerogative of vital
energy that had gained consciousness of itself and its purpose.
Their conscience and morality were based upon this quickening
ascension. The test of an action was this: does it help in raising
the humanity higher in the scale of being? Nothing could be good that
stopped their ascent; nothing could be bad that compelled them to rise
more quickly. The elders generally saw at a glance all the bearings
of an act and knew whether it contributed to this general aim or not.
Where they hesitated on account of the complexity of the problem, they
met and discussed it, calling in all the accurate science they had to
their aid; if after all they had to lay the question aside unanswered,
then was the act left in that neutral zone of conduct which the
Limanorans might or might not enter as they saw fit. Such acts carried
no moral discount or credit with them for the time. But often the
advance of an age, or even a few years, would remove the act from the
neutral zone into the bad or the good; a higher point of view generally
solved their doubt. From the opinion of the elders there rayed out
magnetically into the young and immature the sense of what was right,
to act as conscience where they were incapable of reasoning out the
position.
There was thus no feature of their lives but came within the range of
morality. Even the habitual and automatic movements and actions, which
form so large a proportion of the life of the other terrestrial races
had been reduced to an almost inappreciable proportion in theirs and
were ever being questioned and tested to see if they harmonised with
the newer points of view that had been reached. There was nothing in
their whole existence that had not its moral relationships. Their
sciences and arts, their experiments and inventions, were as much a
part of their moral life as their character and their conduct towards
each other. Morality was the relationship to the ever-developing,
ever-advancing, aim of the race, and nothing in the whole range of
their life was indifferent to that.
CHAPTER XII
A WARNING
EVER and again there overshadowed the spirit of the race a cloud, a
foreboding, that contrasted deeply with their usual exhilaration. The
intervals between its appearances were often long, occasionally brief.
At first I could not understand the cause of it; for I was still in
pupillage and had not yet developed the sympathetic magnetism that
ultimately made me a member of the race. But, when it recurred once
or twice, I began to see that it followed the passions of Lilaroma,
and that the families of the Leomo were least affected by it and most
active whilst it lasted. Another concomitance was the subsequent
importance of the questions connected with interstellar migration.
The discovery of the infinite and invisible life of unorbed space, not
only infinitesimal but highly organised, lessened the gloom of these
beclouded periods, and made the Limanorans less feverish in their
astronomic and volitational researches. They felt that the divorce
of the higher and lower energies of their human system, commonly
called death, was no annihilation of their entity, no closure of
their career of development, but only an incident in it, that took
the further history of their higher energies out of the reach of the
grosser terrestrial senses. They had no need, they felt, to reach out
frantically towards some other world. They had lost all fear of death,
and all thought of it as the end of their evolution. Still upwards
would they climb through higher stages of existence, in spite of the
loss of that grosser stepping-stone which we call the body. Knowing how
full the interstellar infinities are of vital energies and organisms,
and knowing too how the body began a new, though perhaps lower, career
at death, they were certain that the vitality and spiritual energy
that left it on dissolution, a far loftier and more highly organised
entity than the divorced terrene elements, would still exist and still
develop. The whole encyclopædia of their scientific knowledge was
opposed to its annihilation, and the discovery of the vital fulness of
space left no other alternative than that it was thither the spiritual
energy of the human personality escaped at death.
Yet there lingered a tinge of gloom at the time of any overwhelming
spasm in the heart of the great mountain; and the Leomo bated not a
jot of their activity at such periods in combating the once-dreaded
catastrophe. For they had no definite knowledge of the future pace
of their evolution, once the two types of energy in them should be
divorced; and they had as a firmly grasped fact their development
as they existed upon their island, and the increasing swiftness of
its pace as the years went on. They had ever been a people readier
to accept a bird in the hand than two in the bush, although they
might be fairly confident of their skill in bird-catching. This very
preference for facts had helped them to abandon the promises of faith
that their old religion had so lavishly held out to them, and to accept
the attitude of patiently waiting for light. So now, when their
science had found the light and they had every prospect of opening
communication with the intelligences that lived just outside of their
unaided ken, they would rather wait upon the solid earth till they saw
as solid fact to rest on in their flight from the earth.
They were eager, therefore, to postpone for some generations or ages
yet the catastrophe they feared. They had had far back in their history
a dim sense of the wrecking power of Lilaroma and its connection
with the volcanoes in their old antarctic home. Their more recent
earth-science had made the twilight prophecy into a clear fact. In
an early geological age of the earth the continent round the south
pole had sent a broad outlier far north through the southern ocean;
it had indeed stretched close up to the equator. This they knew as
soon as they began to study the natural history of Limanora and of
the archipelago around it. Not merely were the birds of the same or
kindred species with those of their old home, but many of them had
long preserved the memory of the former bridge between the two; as the
ancient expedition that brought the ancestry of the Limanorans sailed
across the intervening ocean, flights of the birds they were familiar
with were seen making for their new home, and some of them fell on the
decks or settled occasionally on the rigging of their ships. Their
unscientific and superstitious ancestors took this as an omen of
success; they thought that these birds had been sent from heaven to
direct their course, and they steered straight in the line of their
flight. The successful result confirmed them in their superstition for
many ages after they had landed on their tropical isles.
But the careful observation and the science of later times cleared
up the mystery. For a period they had taken it as a proof of the
similarity of nature all over the world, when they found so much of
the fauna and flora like those of their old home. But at last it began
to strike cautious observers that certain birds disappeared during
their summer season and reappeared in their winter. Classification soon
separated the migratory from the localised, and the modifications of
the species that they had been accustomed to in their old home from
those that were quite new to them. This passed from the birds to the
other animals, and thence to the flora. After the observer had done his
work of classifying all the animal and plant life, scientific thought
entered in and found the causes of both the similarities and the
dissimilarities between the new or tropical and the old or antarctic.
After many ages the migration of birds lessened; for few returned
in the winter, and as the climate became cooler through process of
time, most species preferred to remain the summer long. Then, when an
expedition went back to the ancient home of the race in the south, all
trace of cultivation and cities had vanished underneath the everlasting
snows, and the southern summer was found to be as severe as their
ancient winter had been. The increasing rigours of the new climate to
the south had reduced the mass of the bird-migrations.
The expedition followed the long-charted route of the feathered
travellers, and on its return sounded the depths and tested the seas
and their fauna the whole way. When the investigators had reached the
close of their labours, it became patent to them that their voyage
had been along the coast of a buried continent that had had its
northernmost point not far to the north of Lilaroma. Their soundings
along the line of bird-route were ever the shallowest, and at points
on it, if they left its direction, they suddenly dropped into the
deepest of oceans. A mountain-range, sometimes broken into immense
precipices and forested along its slopes, had evidently margined the
lost continent on its west and had stood the siege of the encroaching
ocean through geological ages, till the slow catastrophe of subsidence
had sent it under the victorious march of its enemy. Here and there it
left a barren rock or a volcanoed isle like a buoy to mark where its
wreckage had been submerged. Everywhere on the bird-line they found
a shallow-ocean flora and fauna; if ever they sounded or dredged or
fished or dived at any distance from it, they passed into a deeply
pelagic belt of life, or rather belt of death.
It dawned upon them that their old home and their new formed the
extremities of the vanished continent, and that their height was one
of the consequences of the submergence; the deeper the great submarine
range sank, the higher Lilaroma and the lofty torch-mountains of their
ancient home rose. But repeated visits to their old snow-coffined
land, and the expansion of their earth science into an art, gave them
farther-reaching views of the causes of this vast subsidence. The old
bird-route was one of the most ancient fissure-lines in the crust of
the earth. Out of it along its whole length had flowed in the earliest
geological ages the oozes of lava that formed the backbone of the old
continent as it rose from the sea, its most lasting bastion against
the encroachments of the watery element. Here and there along the
great chain of mountains, as they rose denuded of their softer rocks
and stood wrinkled into cañons and gorges by the rivers that swept
them clean, blazed at long intervals of time huge vents for the
smouldering fires underneath. As the mountain-barrier sank and the
ocean flowed over its forests that had graved into the winged species
the memory of their ancestral feeding-grounds, and finally closed all
the breathing-spaces of the fiery Titan beneath, his passion sought
vent more and more through the torch-cones of the snow-buried southern
land and through the lofty crater of Lilaroma. Expedition after
expedition to their ancient home revealed the simultaneity of volcanic
action in the two regions; but the greater the titanic paroxysms in
the one, the less they were in the other. They were the two pulses and
breathing-vents of the buried giant.
For many ages after some unknown submarine catastrophe had hedged them
into their archipelago by the untraversible mill-race and the dark belt
of mist, they had been unable to test the connection between their
own fire-mountain and those in their old home. But they could easily
imagine during the paroxysms of Lilaroma what was occurring far off
in the southern snows; and when they had mastered the art of aërial
flight, they resumed their expeditions to the glacial regions of the
south. Every few years might have been seen, had there been mariners
there to see them, the strangest of all flying things, beings in human
form, winging their way through the air southwards or northwards. At
first the bands were large and well equipped in order to guard against
all risks. But in time they grew bolder, and companies of half a dozen,
or even three or four, ventured on the long flight to the south. At
last the families of earth-scientists were entrusted with the task,
and sent their messengers to report on the conduct of the antarctic
volcanoes.
These reported that, if ever those southern vents should close, no
application of the art of Leomarie could save Limanora, or indeed the
archipelago around, from disastrous explosion. The circular current
with its belt of mist had shown that this was the thinnest crust and
the weakest point on the whole line of fissure; and if the sea broke
into the volcanoes of the other extremity, the steam generated from
the percolating water would make for the archipelago and blow it to
dust. Recent messengers to the south had found dangerous developments
in the regions of snow and ice. Where it lay in the line of the ancient
fissure, the land was rapidly subsiding; and that was exactly the
locality of the southern volcanoes. If the walls of their craters
should sink so low that the waters of the ocean could make breaches in
them, then would the final catastrophe occur to Limanora.
Whilst the last decennial review was proceeding, and high hopes were
rising in the breasts of all that a few generations would see the race
independent of the fear of terrestrial cataclysms, their minds were
jerked from the future into the present. Our torch-cone suddenly broke
into a great column of steam, and a fine dust fell upon the island.
There had been no preliminary warning and little had been put in
readiness, although the Leomo had been uneasy for weeks as they noticed
the spasmodic action of their earth-sensors. The heat and the magnetism
in their lava-wells had been rapidly changing their degree every few
hours. But this had occurred in previous periods without any recorded
effect above the surface of the earth. They had therefore only kept
more zealous watch without resorting to more than the usual relieving
action.
Now the whole people were called to their assistance, and the
concentrated power of Rimla was turned on to the boring of vents. On
every side of Lilaroma leomorans were busy, and soon the imprisoned
lava and steam escaped by a thousand exits. But a new method was
adopted by the Leomo. They shipped in huge faleenas of the newest
and most powerful type a number of earth-perforators, and along with
them a large quantity of machinery that would enable them to use the
wasting energies of the southern elements. Amongst others Thyriel and
myself had to manage and steer one of the great aërial cars, for it was
chiefly members of the Leomo that manned the expedition.
High we rose above the archipelago, before we attempted to cross the
mist-ring. Below us we could see the Limanoran houses and buildings
gleam rainbow-hued like bubbles on the beach of an ocean. Higher still,
and the various isles of the archipelago crept closer together in the
perspective, a handful of emeralds cast upon a plain of azure. Our eyes
wandered over the scene and saw how it was set in its dull-white milky
ring, a narrow and impenetrable hedge that cut this little world off
from the sight of its fellows upon earth.
Through a cloud we shot that drenched and freshened our gleaming car,
then followed the fleet southwards across the circular thread drawn
round the nest of islets. We were out in the wider spaces of the world
again, and our home receded into a speck on the horizon. Over the waste
of waters we sped, a great grey plain flecked with white. At first I
lost my cool confidence in this trackless wilderness; but fearlessness
returned to me as I saw the face of Thyriel bent now on the Limanoran
modifications of the compass, and again on the rest of the fleet to
the right and left of us. The lumona or sun-compass and the ularema or
sun-chart were our trusty guides by day, even if we had lost sight
of our companions at any time; our track had been marked out for us
on our sun-chart of the heavens and we could not fail to know where
we were, even if clouds should obscure the face of the great orb. If
only a few straggling rays managed to reach the face of the instrument,
indistinguishable though they might be to our sense of warmth or of
light, they affected its delicate apparatus; it told us their exact
direction and angle, whilst another face told us the exact point of the
day, and of the north and south line. There was needed no calculation
to find the region where we were, the lumona did it for us; and it kept
tracing our course, as we accomplished it, by means of an indicator on
our ularema or day-chart.
Once I had been instructed by Thyriel in the management and guidance
of the airship, she lay down to rest; and I was alone beneath the
oppressive paleness of the vault. I dared not look over the side lest
the sight of the grey wilderness far below me should make my head swim.
Only once did I look up; and the sense of limitlessness numbed me.
Now and again I glanced quickly at the rest of the fleet. But I was
too fearful lest something should go wrong to turn my eyes away from
the tracer of the lumona as it moved upon the sun-chart, or to take
my nerve-power from my hands as they grasped, the right the governor
of our flight-power and the left the rod of the steering-gear. As the
hours flew and nothing untoward occurred, I relaxed the tension of my
system and enjoyed the glide of the ship and sang to the beat of its
wings. The sense of solitude passed as I felt the magnetic sympathy of
my comrades in the other cars thrill me and my spirits rose with the
exhilaration of the heights through which we travelled.
The sun had reached the western round of the sea, and swelled into a
vast ball of fire. Thyriel awoke as his rim dipped into the ocean and
at once prepared for a change of methods. She taught me how to turn on
the power of the engine into the rows of huge lamps that were meant
to search the darkness of the night. Then she brought out the alumare
or star-compass and substituted it for the lumona; she removed the
day-chart and put in its place the manularema or night-chart, adjusting
the indicator of the star-compass to its tracing.
Night fell and brought out the lamp-jewelled sides of the other
airships. They looked like a fleet of gigantic glow-worms sweeping
through the air. What we showed like to any wandering ship on the ocean
beneath us it is difficult to imagine. I myself had traversed those
solitary levels in the _Daydream_, and I tried to think how I
could have explained the strange phenomenon had I seen it from my deck.
The superstitious amongst my sailors might have taken it for a portent,
some as one from heaven, others as one from hell. The scientific would
have concluded it to be a series of fireballs travelling before an
upper current of the winds. I should have recorded it in my note-book
among the observations of meteors and other similar phenomena, and
have waited further illumination. By day we were too high to attract
the attention of anyone but the investigator of cloud-changes and
weather-signs, and we saw no sign of human life during our long
aërial voyage to the south. But away beneath us we could just descry
floating brown specks swiftly tracing their zigzag course over the grey
plain and knew them for the broad-winged albatrosses, whose flight
the Limanorans had so carefully studied for the construction and
navigation of their faleenas. For by an automatic arrangement which
brought the currents of the wind to bear upon the steering-gear, our
car now gracefully rose, and again as gracefully fell when the wind was
against it, now swept to this side, now glided to that. All that I had
to think of was the main course. On a later voyage even the steersman
was superfluous, except in a storm or violent change of winds; for a
chart was invented on which the course of the voyage was traced in the
shape of a metal groove, and in this the end of the steering-rod was
made to move. The two automatic movements governed the manipulation of
the winds and the course of the car. It was the same with the engines
that achieved the beat of the wings; the slightest change in the
opposing medium communicated itself to the electric power and modified
it. All that was needed from the occupants of the faleena was a little
attention now and again to see that the machinery was working smoothly
and solidly, and to ensure that the steering-rod adjusted itself to the
caprices of the wind.
On this, our first long aërial expedition, one of us had always to
be at the helm, although I found after a few watches that there was
needed but little tension either of muscle or nerve to keep the ship to
her course. Thyriel took the first half of the night and of the day,
and I took the other two sections. When I awoke in the middle of the
first night and took my place at the helm, the sight bewildered and
dazed me; I felt as if I had gone back again into the region of dream.
The stars seemed to throb close in upon me; I felt as if in a cosmic
confessional with myriads of world-eyes wide open to see into my heart.
I was not afraid; yet my veins throbbed in awe before this palpitation
of the cosmos. But I settled down to my task and grew conscious of
the surrounding fleet of fireflies, that even at their great distance
from me numbed my eyes with the flash of their lamps and paled the
light of the stars. Beneath me, as I looked over the bulwark, there
was nothing but the solid blackness of midnight; never had I felt so
isolated. Thoughts wove as unceasingly in my brain as the wing-beats
wove upon the loom of night. Now and again was I stirred from my
meditation by the swoop of our faleena as it breasted some great billow
of wind. So precipitous were some of those waves that my heart leapt
in my bosom, as we rose before them or slid down them. I never passed
a night of such intensity of exhilaration and thought. There was my
lifelong comrade peacefully sleeping as I watched; the infinities above
magnetised me with their sympathies, as their eyes searched me to the
heart; below me the midnight brooded silently over what I knew to be
the untracked ocean.
Day after day, night after night, we sped on, the air growing rapidly
colder, till, for the sake of my unadaptable system, we drew the
transparent oval roof over the faleena and fixed the radiator which
kept the temperature at an even level. Thereafter the stars were not so
omnipresent in their gaze; there was more of a limit to the space in
which we dwelt; and the movements of the faleena impressed themselves
less upon my senses.
At last as my watch was ending one moonless night I could see a dim
flare in the southern sky which I took for the aurora australis. But
when Thyriel gazed at it and then at the agitation of the fireflies
abreast of us, she knew it was the reflection of the great antarctic
torch-mountains. I rose at dawn and could see below us the white
glacial cliffs of the polar continent. Thyriel seemed stirred by some
emotion that I was ignorant of, but soon knew to be the recognition
of the original home of her race; there seemed to move in her blood
the ancestral yearning for the land from which they had come. She did
not shrivel up in the excessive cold as I did, but looked forward with
ecstasy to moving amid the snow and the ice, though she had seen little
of them in her own short life except around the crater of Lilaroma.
Bred though I had been in the rigorous winters of Scotland, I could not
bear the bite of the wind and had to put on one of their cold-repelling
garments. This consisted of two layers of flexible irelium-woven cloth,
one of which was a conductor of electricity and the other a resister
of it. The outer or conducting layer was connected with some labramor
which carried a store of electricity and this combination produced
a warm, healthful glow all round the body. I had gloves and cap and
mask of the same construction and, when fully equipped, I could defy
the most bitter cold that the upper atmosphere of the earth ever
experienced.
With this armour on I looked forward with delight to our sojourn in
the region of snow and ice as I watched our approach to the rough
ocean-like surface of the new country. For Thyriel took the helm,
now that there was needed more delicate manipulation of the faleena,
and I stood in the bow and gazed at the rest of the fleet rising and
falling on the wind-waves. Now and again I interpreted a signal from
the faleena of the guiding elder, whilst my comrade was busy adapting
the course to the caprices of the wind. But as a rule her own magnetic
sense was alert enough to know what were the intentions of the other
airships.
Round the group of great fire-cones we coasted, keeping clear of
their smoke-brush and dust-vomit; for the wind was off the land and
bore their ejections miles out to sea and high into the air. Across
the icy plains, ridged and hummocked by pressure from the higher land
beyond, we flew, once rising high enough to get a glance over the
passes of the great mountain-barrier, whence the torrents of ice slowly
found their way to the coast. Beyond I could discern, even with my
undeveloped eye-power, level plains stretching to the horizon, plains
which indicated water underneath; and upon them the direction of the
furrows and hummocks revealed whither the mass of the sea beneath
flowed towards some narrow exit, overlapping and playing leapfrog in
its eagerness to escape the pressure from behind.
But the habits of this almost land-locked sea had no immediate interest
for us, and we soon turned and made before the wind for a valley that
lay sheltered between the mountain-chain and the group of torch-cones.
Within a brief time we had all our faleenas secured, and the
multitudinous rings of the leomorans they carried deposited in caves
ready for the coming operations. Then the elder who led the expedition
took his airship, and with it we saw him circle round the individual
volcanoes and reconnoitre the inroads of the sea. He had, we knew,
already seen the dangerous proximity of one new crater to the low coast
that divided the group of fire-hills from the galloping waves.
Manifestly expedition was demanded. For he returned with great
swiftness; and all was soon bustle and preparation in the camp,
although it had settled down for a rest. The word was passed round
that, if the wind changed and whipped the racing billows to their raid,
a high tide might find its way into the new crater and undo the local
work of Limanoran civilisation. The fleet was at once in the air with
the engines ready to be placed; and within two hours the winds and the
waves, the magnetism of the earth, and the electricity of the air had
been yoked to the great power-machines. Then the rings of the leomorans
were attached, and the stores of energy brought to bear on them; before
long we could see at a dozen different points high up the side of the
cone brushes of black smoke bending before the wind. Between the new
low crater and the old lofty one a score of new vents for the explosive
energy of the fires underneath had been worked into the crust of the
earth ere the wind had changed round into alliance with the waters. The
molten rock which had oozed from the dangerous cone at the edge of the
sea had sealed its mouth before the ocean leapt into it. In order to
make the seal more secure a sluggish river of lava was directed down
the slope from several leomorans, and sent over the lips of the exposed
crater. After every sign of the offending cone but a low hummock had
disappeared under the molten invasion, bastions were drawn all along
the coast beneath it in the manner familiar to Limanora.
When this fortification of the mountain was finished and the strain
upon our muscles and nerves, and especially upon our eyes, was
relieved, we had leisure to look about us. The sight that met our view,
as we looked down the slopes of the mountain, was deeply impressive.
The flow of the red-hot rock from the mouths of our lava-wells had
melted the glacial concretions for hundreds of yards beyond the margins
of the molten currents, and laid bare the ruins of a great city that
had evidently been buried in ice and snow since the lowering of the
temperature had made the climate unbearable by men of civilised
nurture and habits. The steam rising from the neighbourhood of ice
and fire had covered the disentombed secret from our vision whilst we
were working, and as the wind fell that had swept the veil aside for a
moment, the marvellous sight was again curtained over, and we began to
think that it had been but a waking dream.
Some days after, when the lava had sufficiently cooled to leave
portions of the defrosted slope open to the light of heaven, we
revisited the scene. Several broad streets and great squares had been
unburied; and the architecture revealed how artistic and how advanced
in mechanical contrivances the people that built them had been. A thick
covering of volcanic dust and ash had plastered them over, so that it
was difficult to move on foot amongst the ruins now that the moisture
of the melting ice had mingled with it. After clearing the débris from
the doors we entered some of the houses that had not lost their roofs,
and there was evidence of hasty flight; on the floors and couches were
strewn pellmell the contents of boxes and cupboards and wardrobes, half
of them still stiff with the ice that the adjacent streams of lava
had been unable to melt. The evacuation of this luxurious city had
evidently occurred during some great outburst of the volcano which had
threatened its existence. But the climate had grown rigorous before the
catastrophe; for in every house and every room there were elaborate
apparatus for heating, and most of the clothing lying about was of
fur or of thick, warm stuffs, and when we dug beneath the coating of
volcanic ash, we found in places accumulations of ice which must have
taken years to freeze. Layer after layer of dirt and rubbish had been
embedded by the preservative frost; and, had we cared to cut through
the stratified ice, we might have counted the years, or perhaps
centuries, through which this heap had accumulated.
For several visits we could find no human body, though we came across
one or two carcasses of emaciated animals that had evidently lived
amongst the ruins till the last vestige of fodder had disappeared under
the volcanic layer or the accumulating ice. But at last in a back lane,
probably inhabited by slaves, we penetrated into a low house whose
roof had crashed in under the weight of the falling dust, and there
we saw a scene that moved us to tears. The mummied body of a little
child prepared for burial lay upon a bier and over it was stretched
the corpse of the mother; she could not tear herself away from the
last relics of her dead baby, and in returning to rescue it, or to
weep over it, had been overwhelmed by the falling roof; the frost of
centuries had kept off the finger of decay, and this Niobe and her
child had remained like sculptured stone. We covered the bodies gently
with the volcanic mud there as they lay, and left the frost to work its
petrifaction again, for we had not the heart to disturb the scene. Here
amongst the proletariate of this luxurious people there was evidence
of that maternal transport which had showed the path of ethical
development and exaltation to the Limanorans, and was destined to raise
the energies of our world into higher and higher forms. This, we knew,
was but the terrestrial type of an altruistic law which was working
throughout the cosmos, and making every centre of energy that had more
than the average give of its more to those centres that had less.
All in our power was now done to relieve the pressure of the
subterranean fires that were threatening to burst the ancient fissure;
and all too that could be done to ward off the batteries of the ocean.
Then were we sent in different directions to inspect and report on the
state of the ice-cliffs that beetled over the waves. We hovered for
days about the rocks and their glaciers and the universal observation
was that the coast was rapidly subsiding; since the last visit of the
Limanoran messengers its line had sunk many yards; marks that had been
made far above the reach of the waters were now washed by the break of
the higher billows. Thyriel and I were sent to a loftier bluff which
extended for almost a mile between shelving beach and shelving beach
just underneath the site of the buried city.
After inspecting the higher parts of it for days and measuring the
height of the old marks above the farthest reach of the waves, a
windless day, on which the ocean lay as if frozen, gave us opportunity
of following the cliff at its lowest sea-margin. For half a mile or
more nothing exceptional met our eyes. Then suddenly we came upon a
great chasm in the rock where a soft intermediate stratum had mouldered
away into sand before the everlasting battery of the waves. Over it
a great dome of ice was stretched, which was ever being thickened by
the climbing spray of the billows as they broke into it. The entrance
into this cave was somewhat low and narrow, and a jagged rock in the
centre of it churned the angry waters into milky foam. We saw that this
feature would make the opening invisible under its veil of spray on all
but days of perfect calm.
We were afraid to enter lest the sea should rise and imprison us, so we
called some comrades to our aid, and they brought a light faleena that
was made to serve the double purpose of air-boat and water-boat. Then
Thyriel took flight from above, and with the impetus we bore ourselves
and the boat through one of the passages past the jagged tooth of rock.
As we settled upon our faleena and looked up, the sight that met our
eyes took our breath away. The sun was shining brilliantly, lighting
up the dome of ice with such power as to make its whole thickness
transparent. Through it in every direction thick as motes in a sunbeam
were strewn human bodies, wrapped and mummied as in death. Some lay
on their sides with the head pillowed on the arm; and as the face was
uncovered, we could see the features as clearly as if we stood in the
chamber where they lay. The frost had kept the flesh and the tints of
it uncorrupted. We could almost have sworn that they breathed as they
slept, yet in the case of most it must have been the sleep of thousands
of years.
This was the cemetery of that ancient people which had built the city
lately found. Doubtless this ice-crust in which their graves had been
cut had once stood securely miles away from the coast; and in it they
thought that their dead would be safe for all time. But, as the shore
sank, the glacial crust ceased to be a plain and slid downwards along
the increasing slope to the ocean; and, before many years could pass,
this hyaline resting-place of the dead would be launched into the sea
and be swept by the storms and tides into warmer airs and currents,
which would release the bodies from their beautiful petrifaction,
and give their elements to the ravening powers of the waters, or the
microscopic corruption of invisible life. In fact on our return voyage
we flew over several icebergs that were floating catacombs. On the
surface of one we discerned the pallor of a mummied face, just released
by the strong rays of the sun from its ancient rigidity, and the still
stony garments shining through their pellucid covering.
We could almost decipher through the milky blueness of the ice-dome,
when the sun shone most brightly, the inscriptions on the tablets
lying beside these forgotten dead. But the winds began to dirge within
this strange diaphanous mausoleum; and even the waters seemed to move
around the cave with suppressed sob. We thought the sounds ominous,
and, rising high up into the roof of the cave, close to the dead that
had slept there so like life for so many centuries, we poised ourselves
and, taking aim, dashed through the narrow entrance, while our comrades
without drew the faleena out by the cord with which they had held it
securely. Later in the day, as the calm continued, the guiding elder
sent others into the cave and they secured one of the most elaborately
hieroglyphed tablets. Those of us who had most recently studied in the
valley of memories were able to trace much resemblance between the
language of the inscription and the ancient Limanoran tongue; and when
we returned to our island, it afforded one of the clues by which we
were able to unravel the history of this ancient antarctic people. They
were the descendants of those whom the northwards migration had left
to their fate amid the growing rigours of the southern winter. After
the departure of these who founded the colonies of Riallaro and became
the ancestry of the Limanorans, the wealthier classes had evidently
abandoned themselves to pleasure and luxury within their splendid and
superheated dwellings, whilst the proletariate, though growing more
vigorous, and venturing far out upon the ice and the ocean on fishing
and furring expeditions, fell deeper and deeper into the contempt
of semi-slavery. Loyalty to their masters and ignorance still kept
them unrebellious in their growing embrutement, till the volcanic
catastrophe solved the problem of their future relationships. Whither
the survivors had gone, when the outburst of the subterranean fires
drove them forth, no one could say; doubtless the peasant fishermen
and hunters took the effeminate caste in their rough boats over the
sea to some warmer climate; probably, if the expeditions survived
the storms and billows of the broad ocean, they landed on the coasts
of South Africa or on those of South America and introduced an alien
civilisation and more complicated problems amongst the primitive
peoples of those isolated regions.
Before we left, we had to investigate the shores of the inland sea
for evidence of subsidence, resting on them for a period whilst we
punctured the slopes of the mountains, in order to give a new direction
to the pressure of the fires upspringing from below. When all the
leomorans that were needed had been placed in position and got into
working order, not more than half of the expedition were required
to attend to them. The others, and amongst them Thyriel and myself,
were allowed to wander over the shores of the gulf or sea, everywhere
finding abundant evidence that the whole neck of land which divided it
from the ocean, high though it still was in the lofty mountain-barrier,
was rapidly subsiding, and would ultimately succumb to the batteries
of the besieging elements. This might take many centuries, but that
the huge volcanic range would be submarine within measurable time
was obvious. Had the rate for even a decade of years been constant,
we could easily have calculated the number of centuries that would
elapse before the great catastrophe; but the amount of subsidence
varied from period to period, increasing and then decreasing. The most
alarming change had occurred since the last visit of the Leomo to their
old home. Square miles that had been low-lying land some few years
before were now encrusted with marine ice; and lofty precipices were
perceptibly lower.
The most striking proof of the rapid subsidence was not observed
till the day before our return. The shoulder of an outlier of the
range pushed its way as a lofty promontory right into the gulf, its
whole length and breadth being covered with glacial concretion. Some
recent tempest had broken off the end of its river of ice, and at the
same time a sudden subsidence of the land had left the face of its
cliff a complete new section, as if shorn by a microtome. The sight
that revealed itself to us as we flew round it was most impressive.
City after city had evidently been built upon the broad bluff, its
pleasant position overlooking the inland sea and its proximity to
easy harbourage ever attracting the population back again after
each cataclysm. Time after time the city had, we conjectured, been
overwhelmed by the ashes of some great volcanic outburst from the
range. There we could see in section the various strata of buildings
one above the other, each filled with ash and dust and preserved by
the power of frost. Hundreds of years must have elapsed between the
destruction of one city and the building of the next, a period long
enough in fact to obliterate the memory of panic and anguish from the
traditions of posterity. In some houses we could still discern the
signs of the stampede that had occurred one day thousands of years
ago. Articles of value were half-torn from their treasuries and then
abandoned; jewellery and dishes made of the precious metals were here
and there held in place upon the mosaicked floors by the frozen mass
of earth above them; they had evidently been seized at the first
warning of the coming catastrophe and then thrown away as alarm made
life dearer. In one chamber we saw the outline of the body of a man
across its threshold, his hand out beyond his head clutching some
receptacle of precious metals. In the space between the outer walls of
two houses the body of a woman was exposed, face downwards, and beneath
the bosom the form of an infant child.
How many long-forgotten tragedies might be unearthed we could not stay
to discover. A little labour and we could have penetrated into these
cities; the application of a leomoran would have melted the dust and
ashes and brought to view the stratified life of ages before. Had we
been interested in following out the existence of these far-distant
relatives of the Limanorans, we could have begun with the lowest layer,
and followed the evidences of civilisation up through each successive
entombment, till finally the people were driven from the site by
frost, a force more rigorous and potent against culture and luxury
than fire. But the Limanorans had enough in the records of their own
ancestry to tell them all the history that might be illuminated by such
excavations. They knew that after an advance in the two or three lower
strata, there would be found no progress except in luxury and the arts
that contribute to luxury. And they had enough of such development in
their own archipelago before their own senses, to allay any eagerness
for viewing illustrations of it in ancient and dead history.
The sight was interesting and impressive, but we all had learned its
lesson too well to desire further acquaintance with it. In Fialume we
had studied similar histories during our pupillage; and daily could
we watch through the idrovamolan the enactment of similar life in the
islands around Limanora. A little apparent advance was followed by as
much retrogression; the generations were as like in essence as two
species of the same genus, the difference being merely superficial and
unvital. It was enough to make the Limanoran heart stop in its beating
to see the dreary sameness of the ages in the history of a people, as
far as development of spiritual character and power were concerned.
The changes and revolutions were but changes of lay-figures under the
official dresses and ceremonials, or at best an expansion of the sphere
of luxury. What mattered it to men that were panting after ideals
they ever saw above and beyond them who were masters and who were
servants or subjects in those unprogressive levels of humanity, who or
how many sated their appetites or covered their skins with the rich
and ceremonious raiment of dominance? The heroisms and romances, the
striking turns of fortune, the world-renowned victories that made the
eyes of other races blaze with wonder were all histrionic to those who
knew what real development was.
This section cut through the history of ten thousand years would reveal
but the same old story that they had read so often in the annals of
their own far past. We turned away sick of heart, knowing the countless
griefs and agonies, struggles and combats, that had gone to the making
of this human stratification, and the complete futility of them all.
The best that could be thought was that oblivion had buried them,
and that the energy set free at the deaths of so many thousands of
generations had perchance a better opportunity of rising in the scale
of vitality as it wandered into other spheres than the human or the
terrestrial.
It was not then without deliberate intention that our departure from
the old home of the race occurred soon after the discovery of this
strange frozen museum of forgotten peoples. After everything was done
that could be done to divert the upward pressure of the subterranean
fires from vents close to the margin of the sea, the faleenas winged
their way back to the north as rapidly as they had come. No incident
took place to mar the return voyage, and we were soon back at our old
employments in Limanora.
CHAPTER XIII
RELIGION
AFTER a few days’ reflection and observation, I felt a change in the
spirit of the people. There was less of that serenity which had struck
me so often as one of the distinctive characteristics of themselves
and their actions. Every family seemed to hurry in its efforts at
development and the pace of their advance might almost be called
feverish now. This was especially the case with all who were engaged in
the more spiritual investigations into the nature of the cosmos. Next
to them in increase of eagerness and enthusiasm came the astronomical
families, the astrobiological, and all whose researches bore upon
stellar conditions and interstellar migration. The gaze of the whole
race was more distinctly outwards and extra-terrestrial.
I had conjectured the cause of this acceleration and impetuosity and
soon definitely knew it to be the result of our expedition to the
south and the reports we brought back. The elders on considering them
saw that the safety of the island as a resting-place and arena for
their progress was not to be depended on for many generations more.
The increase in the rate of subsidence of their old home meant a
transference of the destructive power of the subterranean fires to
the other end of the ancient fissure within a measurable period.
The volcanic vents on the antarctic coast must be closed beneath the
ocean before many centuries were over; and the rushing waters in
quenching their fires would find their way in uncontrollable steam
towards the weakest point of the crust, which they knew to be their own
archipelago. Ere many generations could come and go this terrestrial
home of the race would be blown to dust, and new lands would appear at
some other point on the line of fissure.
Where could they settle on the round of the earth? There was no land
except their old home to the south isolated enough to admit of their
following up their ideals. All the remote islands in other oceans were
already fully occupied, and were impracticable for them unless at the
sacrifice of human life, a condition that would outrage their whole
idea of development. The globe was closed for them except the region
of everlasting ice where their remote ancestry had dwelt; and that
too might at any moment flash into dust before the explosive forces
beneath the crust. The alternative of seeking a home on another star
had seemed to them the only one for many generations, and they had been
preparing for it by inventions that would enable them to float clear
of the terrestrial atmosphere for many centuries, and by explorations
in interstellar space. But many discoveries and thoughts had thrown
a new light upon this stellar migration. They would have to exist
in their circumscribed faleenas as they travelled through the ether
for many generations of even their long lives, and these ships would
be their cradle and their tomb. They would have to resign for many
centuries the conquests of the elements and of the forces of nature,
that they had achieved in Limanora. The broad movement which these
past ages of history had given to their life, would be narrowed into
a space no larger than one chamber of their own mansions. They would
live imprisoned, and their imprisonment would lay its brand upon their
natures and still more upon the natures of their descendants. The
proximity of so many in so small a space would breed physical and,
still worse, spiritual disease, that would haunt their posterity for
generations after they should settle in their new stellar abode. Their
offspring would have the habits and ideas of the savage reared in
the wigwam of the rover or the hut of the slave. Even if they could
achieve individual flight through the ether, they would have to keep
close to their storeships and return every few minutes to the exhausted
atmosphere of their swiftwinging faleenas.
If every condition of their interstellar voyage were the same as
their life in their own Limanora, what disappointments might not they
encounter in their comparative ignorance of the biology of the heavens?
Would not most stars that were fit to be inhabited be already choked
with life and life at a different stage from that they had attained?
If they struck upon a lower grade of existence it would be useless to
attempt to raise it, and contrary to their own morality to obliterate
it. If they met with a higher type of being, they would be repulsed by
it as likely to degrade it. It would be a wretched existence to lead a
life of interstellar vagabondage, poor beggars of the cosmos, seeking
a star whereon they might rest the sole of their foot. Not more than
one world in each system could be at the stage that would fit their
life-evolution; most stars would be too young and fierily crude or too
old and exhausted to give them the conditions they sought for. In
many the life they would encounter would shock and repel them by its
monstrosity. What was to hinder some such gigantic form as, the Leomo
knew, had existed on the earth in its earlier geological ages, some
tremendous winged saurian, having the place on one or more of the stars
they visited that man held upon earth? It only meant the development
of a brain proportionate to the hugeness of the bulk, and some swiftly
moving, deft, and adaptable limb, like the human hand, to give it
complete dominance over all the forms of life around it. The elephant
needed only the mechanical faculty of the beaver or of the ant to
outstrip man in the struggle of life; he had the delicate manipulator
in his trunk, he had the long life, and he had the capacity of skull
to transform him into the dominant race of the earth. In order to the
mastery of his conditions, he had only to make the step from using
anything that came ready to his trunk as a weapon into shaping it to
his will. Circumstances, accidents, opportunities, pilot the evolution
of life upon a world, and the accidental condition of an element or an
energy or a locality might have transformed some terrific monster into
the master of the first star they visited. It was merely a matter of
more or less intricate convolutions of the brain. But perhaps the most
terrible thing of all would be to land on a world whose inhabitants
had developed the purely intellectual faculties and the section of the
brain corresponding to them, at the expense of the nervous centres that
have to do with the control of the passions and with the subordination
of the animal nature; what a horror it would be to find a star full of
Calibans with more than human cunning, and none of human emotion or
morality!
The thought of chances like these gave them pause in their migratorial
quest. They began to feel that even life amongst the ruder of their
fellow-men might be better than landing amongst monsters unstirred by
pity or compassion, reverence or tenderness for highly developed life,
to whom bloodshed was nothing. It was true that there were in most
nations men who were so constituted. But they were, except when they
got the command of huge armies and became conquerors, bridled by fear
of the punishments that the laws of the country meted out to criminals.
It was better to live in proximity to beings amongst whom this moral
and emotional neutrality is an exception, than in a world filled with
such monsters. Perchance, when their island-home was shattered to dust,
their true path lay along the surface of their own globe. They might
settle on the slope of some sky-piercing mountain, round whose feet lay
untainted tribes of primitive savages; there they might preserve their
isolation as perfectly as in Limanora by a hedge of fear around them,
which their exceptional power over the forces of nature should forge.
But they knew that before many ages could pass civilised man would
penetrate amongst the awed tribes with his potent weapons and his
unscrupulous cunning; then would they be unable to avoid bloodshed, or
hypocritical ambush, or diplomacy; ambition and hatred would enter in
and turn their paradise into a hell. On the whole, they inclined to the
other alternative that lay before them when the great catastrophe came;
that is, to let it do its worst on their physical or lower elements.
Out of their shattered bodies would rise the energy of their systems to
follow its career of development untrammelled by any slow-moving matter
that was half inert whether living or dead. Death so sudden as that,
death under any circumstances or conditions, was no stop or misfortune
to the highest that was in them; it was the swiftest way to achieve
migration into the interstellar spaces. As it was, they were narrowed
and localised in their development, thought (the higher thought) alone
finding its way unchecked to any point or sphere in the cosmos. At
death they would all be freed from the almost vegetative functions of
human existence; they would be released from the prison of locality
and their whole being would have the ease of thought in winging from
infinity to infinity, and in disregarding the limitations of time and
space. Together the whole of their race might find coalescence if not
companionship in following out their career of development, unburdened
by alliance with a lower type of energy, and in more swiftly attaining
a higher and higher goal in the scale of energies.
When this conclusion had been reached by the consciousness of the
people, the old serenity returned to them. They were ready to meet
whatever came, not caring whether their ascent through the grades of
being was trammelled by terrestrial forms of energy or set free in the
infinities of ether. But I dimly felt that there was a sublime looking
upwards in all they did or said added to their former serenity that
transformed it into what approached to the noblest forms of devotional
ecstasy I had seen amongst men. They never allowed themselves to fall
into the moulds of thought that his bodily and terrestrial needs
so freely supply to man. Though recognising the practical demands
of the physical nature, they satisfied and then dismissed them as
rapidly as was possible; and with all their marvellous machinery and
inventions and their accumulation of power, the time occupied in this
satisfaction was so abbreviated as to be scarcely noticeable in the
labyrinth of daily pursuits.
I had been greatly puzzled during my long period of training to see
no trace of religious worship in this noble race. Growing up with
the instinct in me that of all manifestations of human possibilities
religion was the most sublime, yet I had come to know before I left
Europe how degraded, gross, and foul even a lofty-minded religion
might become. But the best men and women I had known there had ever
been stirred with the spirit of religious reverence and love. I could
not account for these, the noblest and ablest beings I had seen on
earth, ignoring the claims of what is the highest of all, and I watched
eagerly for any indication of acts or moods of worship. Early in my
residence on the island I had discovered that there were no temples and
no priests; that was patent to the most casual glance of the stranger.
Amongst all their public buildings there was none that could be taken
as devoted to the worship of a deity, and there was no family or caste
or set of men whose chief functions were to superintend such a worship.
But perhaps their religious acts were private or even secret and I
was on the alert many years for any sign of such a thing in the house
of my proparents or in that of Thyriel. Finally discovering nothing
that could be construed even in the most distant way into a ceremonial
attitude or word, I gradually abandoned any expectation of such a thing.
My attention was now aroused by the new halo around their serene
acceptance of the conditions of life. There was rapture and there
was longing in their halcyon view of the world; yet the rapture
and the longing never withdrew them from immediate pursuits and
duties, never gave them the ennui of life that transport and passion
generally entrain. They seemed to have the vision and the upward
glance of the seer without his brooding and apartness. It was rather
an intensification of their usual feelings and attitude to life. This
was nearer than anything else I had experienced in Limanora to the
unperturbed faith in a higher being and the yearning for proximity to
him that I had witnessed in those whom we used in Europe to call, for
lack of a less trite term, saints. At the next Manora or decennial
review the predominating interest was the theopathic side of human
nature, and I discovered more of their views of religion in the few
years preceding it than in all the decades I had spent amongst them.
So devotional did I think the magnetism which ran through the
community, that I plucked up courage to ask about the religion. My
question was dealt with in the calmest and most rational way possible
amongst human beings. There was no immediate reply, except an elevation
of the finger to the brow and then to the wide vault of the sky, but I
was led to a part of Fialume I had not visited. It lay in a region of
the valley that I had carefully avoided as full of gloom, and damp with
the vapour of a tumbling waterfall; I had never noticed any one enter
it, and my curiosity had never been awakened about it.
Here were stored the records that illustrated the evolution of
religion, records made by light, sound, and magnetism. It was intensely
interesting for me to see so complete a museum of the natural history
of worship. Every faith in the world had its due place, fixed
according to its inner spirit and development. So graphic was the
map of the whole that in a moment I saw the common kinship of all,
and the differentiating qualities that made one worship higher and
more advanced than another. My guide flashed living pictures of the
ceremonies of each, and then let me listen to the speeches and talks of
the officiants and of many of the worshippers. The magnetographs struck
into me the feelings that pervaded the masses in the temples, and those
that filled the breast of the solitary priest or devotee during the
most solemn and enthusiastic act of worship. I could feel how much or
how little the religion introduced into the life of the people. Day
after day I returned with eagerness to the sight and the study of this
absorbing phase of human nature, and seemed to get to the very heart of
every faith and its influence. The mere accidents of its history were
felt to be non-essential; its inner development stood out as plainly as
if written in letters of fire.
My guide did not need to teach me the lesson. I knew it as well as
if I had learned it from infancy. I knew why there were no temples,
no ceremonies, no hierophantic families, no outward sign of faith,
amongst this far-seeing people. Their own early endeavours to purify
and develop the faith handed down to them from their forefathers were
there as vividly pictured as any faith from the world outside. They had
had temples as splendid as any I have ever seen or heard described;
their ceremonies were artistic, noble, and significant; their music was
as nearly sublime as earthly music can be; and the priestly profession
attracted many of the ablest and some of the best natures in the
community by its princely salaries, drawn from the gifts of former ages
of the faithful, and by its high prerogatives.
At first I wondered how it had been possible to uproot an institution
that had evidently grown out of the most intimate instincts of the
race. The higher dignitaries were so lordly and influential they might
easily control even by their private alliances and social dominance
the powers of the state; and the poorer hierophants had ingratiated
themselves with the middle classes and proletariate, from whom they
came. Reverence, fear, love, ambition, pride, self-interest, all
the commoner emotions and passions of humanity, were engaged and
intertwined with the worship. How could such a widely ramifying
profession allow itself to be overthrown?
When the exilings were over, it was found that there was not a member
of the priestly profession left on the island; nor was there anything
of the wealth of the church, except the solid walls of the temples. The
dignitaries and most of the transferable riches had found their way to
Aleofane; the bulk of the poor clergy landed in Tirralaria, and smaller
bands drifted away to smaller islands like Coxuria, establishing there
communities marked by some extreme eccentricity of faith. All the
vestments and altars and ornaments of the temples had vanished before
the last expedition left the shores of Limanora; even the huge bells
that had rung to service, and the baser metals for making the roofs
water-tight, had disappeared. Nothing but the stones and mortar were
left to indicate where the great faith of the past had housed itself.
One or two expeditions even were seen to set out from Tirralaria and
Aleofane to fetch the very temples away stone by stone. To prevent the
cupidity of the exiles from wasting itself on futile attempts against
the island, the edifices were tumbled into the sea, and helped to make
the bastions which guarded the shores.
Having thus got rid of all the outward property and signs of their
former worship, they had to count the cost and consider how they were
to meet the situation. It had been inculcated by the officiants of
the church for untold generations that all morality, and in fact all
civilisation, would vanish with faith. Religion was the foundation of
everything in life that was worth preserving, and most of the people
trembled if any change were proposed in the national worship. They
feared that the object of their devotion would withdraw the light
of his countenance from them, should the slightest feature of it be
modified. Even the scientific and cultured thought that religion acted
as an excellent watchdog or policeman, keeping the uneducated within
the bounds of the laws and traditions of the nation. Changes had crept
in unobserved by the worshippers, and had been sanctified by time; then
open proposals for change gave the shock and the alarm, and made the
whole fabric seem to shake and totter. The unperceived changes were far
greater and more revolutionary in their ultimate effect, for they were
generally changes of degeneration which ended in decay and ruin. But
everything that was deliberately intended to fit the old institution
to the new times was looked on with horror, as sacrilege never to be
forgiven.
It was therefore with a certain tremor that they demolished the ancient
temples, and put their stones to new and seemingly secular uses. But
once the transformation was accomplished and no great catastrophe
followed, even the less bold gathered courage. As time went on and the
old faith was forgotten and no definite new creed took its place, it
began to be felt that the terror of religious change and the belief
that religion alone gave the guaranty of all morality and civilisation
were alike baseless. After a decade or two, when they began to
reflect on their past and analyse their new states of mind and public
feeling, they discovered the most striking effect of this abeyance of
ecclesiasticism to be the attainment of the ideal of all true religion.
Into their very life had soaked the inner spirit of devotion. Every
act was done with a reference to something far higher than itself,
to which the doer looked up with reverence yet with the sense of its
possible attainment in the future. Every piece of conduct, every item
of character was moulded as if for all time. All their work they
laboured at with an earnestness, enthusiasm, and care that evinced
the consciousness of its everlasting issues. In short, they found
that the surest way to exclude religion from the life was to assign
to it a special section of time, a special profession, and special
edifices. These acted as a conduit that drew it from the true business
of existence. Men and women came to feel that, these once being set
apart, all was done that could be done for the object of their worship,
and that the rest of their life upon earth could be given up to
whatsoever pleased them, be it irreligious, wicked, or even vile. The
religious section of their lives threw its consecrating and protecting
shadow over the worst they might do or say or think. Thus came about
the strange paradox that the vilest of criminals were often the most
devoted to religion when they went into the temples. The specialisation
of what should belong to the whole life and conduct lessens its value.
If there is a particular channel for religion it will be confined to
that channel, except in rare seasons of enthusiasm, when it floods the
adjacent regions and does universal havoc.
Formerly the most religious had been the least trustworthy in the
ordinary business of life, and they had not been able to understand
why; for the deity they worshipped was a compound of all the noblest
virtues they could conceive, and honesty and truth and constancy were
three of these. Now they perceived that, having given a tithe of their
civilisation and energy to the object of their worship, they had shut
him and the virtues he embodied out from the rest; he had no claim
on that. It was vain for the creed or the priests to insist that the
faith should be carried into the life, as long as there was a special
part of life dedicated to it. Once the pales were down, and there was
no distinction between time and time, between place and place, and
between act and act, the nesting-place of hypocrisy disappeared. Every
day was sacred; every place was a sanctuary; every act was holy; every
moment of their life, every action was a prayer. For they were ever
looking upwards and forwards towards the ideal and believed that the
noblest reverence they could pay to the cosmos and to the presiding
spirit of the cosmos was to raise their own natures ever higher in the
cosmic scale. Everything that withdrew them from this cultivation of
the special plot assigned to them in the universe, from the development
of their better selves, was delaying the true purpose of existence;
even acts of reverence and ceremonies of faith were but waste of cosmic
energy. As long as they kept raising their struggle for existence to a
higher plane, so long were they truly reverencing the greatest being of
all, the spirit that gave and was the palpitating life of the cosmos.
They acknowledged that every religion in its origin was a recognition
of unknown elements or beings far above the plane of the worshippers.
But it rapidly degenerated into mere parasitism upon its deity. The
more spiritual faiths in their earlier stages express the yearning
for higher scales of being in true efforts to bring the life of the
worshipper nearer to that of the worshipped. But soon the curse of
religion comes upon them; they try to include races on a lower plane
than that of their first worshippers and moulders and to these they
must adapt themselves; for it is the mass, the numbers that form the
ultimate mould of a faith; the noble natures, for whom they originally
came into being, are left neglected and undeveloped, and the whole
worship goes lower and lower to fit the needs of the increasing numbers
of converts.
Insignificant though the Limanorans felt themselves to be against the
infinity of the cosmos, they refused to formulate their worship lest
it should fall into parasitism, the source of most of the evil and
retrogression in the universe. They knew that it was possible for the
lower being to try to rise to the level of existence of the higher
and worshipped, and, in advancing, to help his advance. But they had
seen too much in history and in contemporary life of the symbiosis of
worshippers becoming mere parasitism to trust themselves to anything
definite and outward in religion. In daily intercourse the lower and
weaker natures cling to the higher and stronger; and if they fail to
reciprocate the benefit they receive, and cease to attempt to elevate
themselves to the level of their hosts, then they suck the life-blood
from them and degrade them. The same holds in religion. The mean
worshippers (and the majority in mixed communities are mean) make no
effort to better themselves; the higher ideal that they are taught to
reverence as a god, they batten upon for favours; they pray to him
and yearn for him, not that they may be like him but that he may be
like them, and become their active and efficient partner in material
things and their accomplice in their mean or evil deeds. The Limanorans
conceived that all the higher beings of space struggle to keep clear
of such parasitic religionists as the majority of men are. There is
no road up the steep of being but by patient self-development through
generations and generations. Almost all religions, after their early
and enthusiastic stage, are royal roads that seem to lead to the
heights of heaven, and are but descents to hell. They only delude men
into thinking that there are other ways to divine happiness than that
likeness to the divine nature which is to be attained by nothing but
slow, gradual, inward change.
They had seen so much of the degeneration and immorality of faiths,
not only in their own history but in the history of the world, that
nothing would persuade them to formulate or define in words what they
meant by religion at any stage of their development. For, once they
had defined, there was a platform of self-opinion and self-interest to
fight for, a nucleus of petrifaction. Rites and outward worship would
follow, and a priesthood whose interest it would be to teach that what
they profess as a creed is absolute truth. Right well the Limanorans
knew how false such teaching is. No age can have a view of life that is
not moulded by contemporaneous circumstances and capacity of thought
and feeling, and the farther the people pass in time and spirit from
the primitive age of the founders of their religion, the more stoutly
will they uphold every word of the creed and every feature of the
institution. Nothing but a sanguinary revolution will avail to undo
the tragic knot with which the spirit of man has thus bound itself.
However good for progress the enthusiasm of a faith might be in its
early stage, it inevitably became the tomb of the human spirit. Occult
explanations of statements that did not tally with acknowledged facts
or laws were bound to appear, as soon as the mind of the people began
to move and develop; and the Limanorans knew that their marvellous
progress had been largely due to the early resolve to have nothing
to do with the occult or merely mysterious. Their pioneering books
dealt with what still lay under the horizon of the future; but they
started from recognised facts and principles and attempted to supply
working hypotheses for the men of science. There was nothing of magic
or superstition in them, nothing that did not appeal to the laws of
reason and ascertained scientific data, nothing that was not meant to
be tested by the methods of daily practical life.
Not that they never thought over the problems that are commonly called
religious, or yearned for communion with existences nobler than their
own. But their thoughts and feelings were kept out of the sphere of
definite expression, through fear that their temporary solutions might
crystallise and become permanent. Their faith was purely individual and
inward. Yet, when some great step was to be taken in the onward march
of the race, as for instance, when a new type of child or enterprise
was preparing to be born, the whole community yearned silently towards
the living spirit of the cosmos; all their being thrilled with one
magnetism that seemed to quiver upwards through the ether, and return
again to strengthen and console them in their work. Their ideal seemed
to pass as by an inspiration into the child or the enterprise about
to be born. The universe, they felt, echoed to their thought; but it
would have been desecration to put their seerlike longing into any form
of human expression.
This was the nearest they came to what is called worship in other
nations. It was difficult to get them to speak of it, for what they
would have called their religion was their whole life, their pressing
forward and upward in development. Their religion was what Europeans
would have defined as the discovery of God, rather than the worship
of any idea of Him. It was based on the knowledge that the world had
advanced from insignificant life to comparatively noble self-conscious
life, and it held firmly that no finality could have yet been reached,
that there was nobler life beyond still to achieve. Ever, as they
climbed upwards in development, they had descried new ideals on the far
horizon that threw into shadow what they had been aiming at. On and on
would they still climb, nearer and nearer to the ultimate ideal of the
cosmos, which is God.
Not to progress was to be irreligious; even to look back and make an
idol out of a superseded ideal, a hero out of a past saviour, was to
sin. There had been revelations of the ultimate spirit of the cosmos,
but they were ever superseded by the advance of the race; for every
advance to a new type was a revelation; all true and developing life
was a revelation. No revelation could be other than for a time; it was
sure to lose its illuminating power as the years or the generations
progressed. Many sacred books they had had, books that were no longer
sacred, only retaining the reverence for that which had once aided in
their development. As long as it continued to hold a beacon ahead of
the race, a book remained sacred, but once its ideal had been overtaken
by the national progress, light died out of it. For a dead book that
retained its sacredness became a fetich and obstructed development.
Not only did they reverence their sacred books; every noble utterance,
every noble act, that held out an ideal for men to strive after was as
sacred; but as soon as the sentiment or thought or morality was seen
to be merely of the past, it was set aside. Nothing could possibly be
final in a universe that was ever developing, with faculties and powers
of observation that were ever getting more capable of comprehending new
phases and energies of the cosmos. To accept a book or a faith or an
ideal as finally sacred was to offend against the ultimate, the free
spirit of the cosmos which was ever leading onwards to new heights
and new outlooks into the future. There was no outer worship except
life and all its works. All other worship was waste of time and effort
which might have been used to raise the worshippers in the scale of
being. Every attempt to conciliate God or imagine Him or model Him was
blasphemy against the effort to rise towards Him. But every man had his
own religious thoughts in silence, and there was welding the whole race
to a common purpose, a magnetic sympathy which was deeply religious;
it was the sympathy with every thought that tended to advance. But all
vain contemplation or self-reflection not leading to a progressive
purpose was waste of life and therefore evil. For evil, they held,
is the rebellion of the past against the future; and though a new
religion is an effort of nature to make alliance with the future, it
soon, by reason of having reached or seeming to have reached its ideal,
crystallises and becomes the ally of the past. The spirit of stagnancy
and retrogression, what we in Christendom would call the devil, laughs
at new religions and counts old religions as its best allies; so ran
a common maxim of theirs. They would have nothing to do with what
would withdraw any current of their life energy from the great work of
advance.
If there was any division of their race that could be said to approach
to a priesthood, it was the men and women of science, especially the
pioneers, or the imaginative amongst them; for they had their eyes bent
unflinchingly on the future. Theirs it was to see that the race was
ever advancing. They never suffered the present to interfere with the
development that was to be. They stirred their fellow-Limanorans to
the enthusiasm of anticipation, and watched with unfaltering jealousy
every glance turned upon the past. The moments spent upon history
and antiquarian research they counted lost, unless their aim was to
throw illumination upon the future. Mere students of the past were
backsliders, whom they had to chide for their offences against the
evolution of the cosmos. They held up to the eyes of their countrymen
the nobleness and beauty of the ideals that were to be soon attained,
or, if need were, the sublimity of those that lay just under the
horizon in the dimness of twilight.
They would have nothing to do with mere mystery, the basis of all
superstition. They never lost sight of the margin of the half-known
that was ever receding before the advance of investigation into the
dark infinitude, but they would have no dealings with it beyond the
gaze of scientific imagination as it planted itself upon the heights of
already achieved knowledge. Such dealings led to gross superstition and
charlatanry, to pretence of more intercourse with the unknown than was
warranted by the knowledge of the time; there was no standard by which
they could be measured or checked, and, if once they were allowed, they
would give unlimited scope for self-deceit and imposture. Faith was a
matter for silent meditation and for dream; speech or act would only
bring it down to the dull level of memory. The faith they spoke of was
faith in the great future of man, and the pioneers were encouraged to
sketch out and foreshadow its possibilities by way of dream; but that
dream was ever the best which traced the whole faith through practice
to complete achievement.
One of the great imaginative books of the time mapped out the route
of self abnegation; it described the denial of the lower or material
self, and the reduction of it to insignificance in the human system. It
showed how by such means and by meditation a man of lofty thought might
comprehend the whole range of the universe, and, passing from spiritual
height to spiritual height, at last be capable of gathering infinitude
within the scope of his soul. Thus could he approach to communion with
the heart and soul of the cosmos, with the sun of all things. Not in
one generation would this be accomplished. But, by the selection of
parents who had wrought such a habit of thought and life into their
constitutions, they might have in a century of generations beings who
were all spirit unhampered by physical modes of thought and feeling.
Not even this ideal man of the future would they worship. For he would
still be man, infinities short of the highest he could be in the
cosmos; and nothing short of absolute perfection should be the object
of so intense a concentration and prostration of the soul as worship.
To accept any mere embodiment of humanity as the centre of adoration
was antagonistic to their great ethical maxim that the ultimate object
of every action or desire should be higher than the highest existing
human life. To worship even the idea of humanity, were it possible for
a spirit with its feelings and imagination limited to human moulds,
would lower the aspirations of thought; apart from the difficulties
of its abstractness, it would be open to the objection of obstructing
progress by setting up a deity who was but an amalgam of all the
failings, as well as all the virtues, of mankind. The Limanorans smiled
at the ineptitude of making so imperfect creatures as ourselves the
chief elements of godhead, when there were such infinitudes around
us and above us, and such eternities before us. Even if it should be
possible to eliminate from the human idea of deity all but progress
and the noblest virtue, it would be obviously absurd to worship an
ideal that was soon, with the earth it dwelt on, to vanish in the
dust, vapour, and heat of cosmic collision. All open worship was
inevitably hampered, they held, by the limitations of human nature; and
anthropomorphic it must be, despite all efforts to bar out the human
from it, and as anthropomorphic, certain to be antiquated by any real
progress on the part of the worshippers.
These elements in religions make them the enemies of all advance except
perhaps advance in luxury. Their guardians feel that they are sure to
be superseded if the spirit of man should rise above the conditions
in which the worships were moulded. It is one of the strongest
yearnings of life to remain as it is; only there are forces material
and spiritual ever goading it on the path of advance, threatening
inferiority or defeat or death, unless it goes on. But so infinitesimal
is the progress thus made under the sting of natural law that it is
scarcely noticeable in periods short of hundreds of generations; few or
no nations or races have retained historic dominance or even historic
consciousness of their past so long.
This unconscious meliorism was considered by the Limanorans as little
better than the development of animals, when left to themselves. Only
deliberate effort on the part of a state and its members can produce
advance that is to be felt, or that acts as a stimulus to farther
advance. It is seldom that unconscious progress is other than material,
whilst it inevitably entails reaction into stagnancy or retrogression.
Nay, the whole human race at times takes a run forward, and then
stumbles and falls, only to slide back into its old footprints. Some
new impulse, sweeping through the ether, has stirred men in each race,
whose enthusiasm, or, as it is commonly called, inspiration, awakens
the spirit of progress in the era.
Conservatism is the native or fundamental attitude of every being, the
tendency to make the rest of the adjacent world give way that it may
perpetuate its existence or that of its brood. Selfishness is thus the
very texture of life, and it is difficult to see how it can engender
its opposite, self-sacrifice. The sexual and the parental instincts
are the crude material of the latter. But the fire of thought and
enthusiastic impulse is needed to refine this material into a love that
stretches beyond the immediate object of these instincts and takes in
the interests of the race and last of all those of mankind; something
higher and more alien to the instincts of man is demanded for the
comprehension of his nobler development. In the valley of memories
was shown me at one stage of my education a complete elucidation of
the prehistoric phases of evolution; first came the struggle for life
amongst the innumerable claimants for the mastery of the new earth,
those elementary forms that, coming out of space, will settle on any
world new or old that they may encounter, the advanced organisations
seeking only orbs well-fitted for their progress. Across the geological
ages I could see this competition raising the minute cells of the
primeval creatures into elaborately organised beings. I saw sex save
the new existence from the dominion of mere brute appetite. But from
outside the world came the transformation which made it the saviour of
man, the ultimately dominant animal upon the sphere. This transformed
instinct expanded by slow steps love of children into love of race,
then into philanthropy, at first bland and crude and often unreal in
the presence of the old sensual and family love, but finally strong and
noble and able to embrace the progress of man as a spirit. The last
stage overleapt the prehistoric, and came to be limited, except in rare
and isolated instances, to Limanora. Enlightened philanthropy, I could
see, held the attempt to reform all mankind as vain as to convert the
lower animals into the human form and nature. Once more I went back
into Fialume and studied the panorama of evolution, and I recognised
the full meaning of it; the great impulses upwards and forwards had
come from outside the world, and chiefest of all the longing to evolve
a human nature to which death would be but an insignificant step
from life to life, and which would recognise in itself more and more
affinity to the highest life of infinite space.
But this section of Fialume only gave a bird’s-eye view of the
elevation of life upon the earth. None were allowed to linger after
they had drawn from it the lesson and the force it could give them
for marching forward. Minuter study of the past might lead their
youth to think ignobly of life and to accept “Might is right” as its
fundamental maxim. Nature, as seen amongst the ravening beasts or
amongst the naked cruelty and injustice of primitive men, might be
taken by them as dominant through all human evolution. If any history
was to be studied minutely, it was only the more recent history of
their own race, where the old laws of nature that were opposed to
justice and charity and self-sacrifice have been sublimated and
transcended, where new senses have opened gateways for a new knowledge
which would once have been called supersensible. What could this people
learn from the study of lapsed civilisations, that had risen out of
childish savagery only to fall back again? The sole aim of these was
happiness, and this ever degenerated into the pursuit of pleasure,
ending sooner or later in brutal selfishness. It had been one of the
earlier instincts from their post-purgation life, that they have least
happiness who think most of it. Happiness, or even pleasure, might
be made at times the test of successful actions and pursuits; but it
never should be made an aim in itself. Higher civilisations were less
happy than savagery or barbarism; their advances in commerce and even
in science only added more consciousness of misery to the many, and
more eagerness for new luxury to the few. Most civilisations, as they
advance, merely add to the desires and thus more effectually enslave
human nature to locality and time. The newer types produce no greater
intellects, no greater imaginations, than those that have lived and
fallen, whilst their masses have greatly receded in happiness and in
simplicity of virtue. The changes of what is commonly called progress
only bring new evils that have to be cured, and the energetic minority
who have produced the changes and suppose themselves to benefit by
them at first refuse to see the evils, and after a time are driven to
attempt their cure by drastic remedies which bring universal ruin all
the quicker.
The Limanoran horizon was too rapidly widening to allow of more than
the most cursory survey of the degenerate past or of the contemporary
present, even had it been to their interests to study them more
minutely. Their own future was expanding in so many directions as to
demand all their energies. World after world, star after star, universe
after universe, were revealing their character and stage of development
to Limanoran science. New marvels every year impressed upon them the
wisdom of avoiding all denial and scepticism with regard to what
imagination or faith should suggest, of holding neutrality towards all
that was unprovable or even contrary to their knowledge of the laws of
nature. They ventured only in the safe track of facts, whence they shot
their flashes of conjecture into the dark. But from past experience
they learned to distrust denial or even scepticism in regions where
knowledge could not venture yet. Imagination had been found a trusty
pioneer, and one of their recent books held out the hope that before
long the suggestions of faith might be but the messages which flew
through the ether over what might be called a cosmic telegraph, and
that, where these touched the souls of the noblest, they came from the
central spirit of the cosmos.
Already they were far on the way along several lines towards such a
consummation, and modifications of their ooloran or sonarchitect had
been employed in many channels of cosmic investigation. They had long
ago conjectured that the earth’s atmosphere, acting as a gigantic
ooloran, gathered the sound-waves that travelled through space and
used them to shape the things of the earth, as they came into being;
and recent discoveries had almost turned the conjecture into fact.
Sometimes the vibrations came from an inchoate or a degenerate world;
and then, as in the earlier or saurian stage of animal life and
development, the terrene creatures took monstrous shape under the
resonator of the atmosphere. Sometimes they came from orbs that knew
only beauty and grace of form; and then, as when the plants and trees
and flowers and shells of the earth were branching into new species,
few terrestrial things but fell into graceful moulds. And now, having
struck this far-reaching and fundamental thought, they turned it to
noble use. They produced a huge modification of the ooloran which would
fix upon the shape of a flower or fern or shell, and translate it into
the music that had originally moulded it. Nothing earthly but would
yield to them through this reversed sonarchitect the sonant or other
vibrations that had at first shaped it. Step by step this new art which
interpreted the moulding influences of the universe advanced into an
organised and scientific division of the duties of the race. Step by
step it mastered the harmony of form, and gave the people the music
that rang through interstellar space at the shaping of the beautiful
things of the world.
A great book of the time showed how far the art could go in leading
their religion from the silent to the sonant form. There were
vibrations throughout the cosmos that came from no one of the worlds
or their inhabitants. They emanated from the centre of all existence,
whence they had mysteriously moulded the spirits of great reformers and
sages; they were the voice of God ringing down through the aisles of
creation. It was now not only possible, but within the limits of the
practicable, to find by the aid of one of their new sonarchitects the
cosmic harmonies that had moulded the souls of the great enthusiasts
and sages of the world. They might translate the voice of God into the
vibrations that would appeal, if not to their ear, to their higher
and more recent senses. The seemingly fantastic groupings of stars
would send into their minds the divine secret guiding their movements.
Nearer and nearer would they creep under the great dome of heaven to
the centre of energy, whose voice these vibrations were. True religion
though this might be, never would they consent to fix it in creed or
ceremonial. On and on must their art of musical sonarchitecture go,
keeping pace with their ever-advancing science, but never reaching
finality in interpreting the voice of God.
Nothing in fact could be nearer to what other men call religion than
Limanoran science; it was never weary of listening to the voice of
God in the cosmos and ever looked upwards and onwards to a wider and
loftier creation. It refused to look back, unless the retrospect was
to assist its march forward. Every discovery was the truest act of
devotion, a step nearer to the centre of being; and anything that
would obstruct such discoveries or the advance they stimulated was
retrogressive, a sin against the being who was drawing all things into
the path of development. Fixity of beliefs was the surest obstruction
to progress, and, along with all superstition, the grossest immorality.
There was no evil inherent in matter or any of the lower forms of life.
Evil lay in returning to one of these after knowing and fulfilling
something higher. It is this against which the human spirit girds
when its lower elements at death go back into the grave. For, the
Limanorans held, matter is not to be rigidly divided from spirit as
something contrastive and antagonistic. They saw none of the strict
divisions in nature that Western science and philosophy knew, arranging
terrene things into matter and spirit, man and beast, and cosmic things
into God and the world. Matter was vital and moving, as spirit was,
though not in the same degree. Animals were ever on the same path of
evolution as man was, though most species of them were far behind most
of mankind. The worlds were the speech of God, methods of manifesting
Himself and of making His lower manifestations evolve into higher.
There were gradations throughout the cosmos, and the boundaries between
them were difficult to discern.
Man is the highest grade that man knows definitely; for human
personality is the amalgam of the knowing and the known. The animal
as higher than the vegetable knows the world as separate from itself,
but it does not know or study itself as a world apart; nor can it
be conscious of the general being or purpose of the universe. Man
is the first animal on earth, so far as we know, that has gained
self-consciousness, and, through self-consciousness, a glimmering
vision of what God might be. Only by love of retrogression or sin can
this higher element in him return into the ocean of decay again. The
other parts and elements of his system have to suffer reformation like
exhausted worlds, in order that they may rise higher than they have
been.
This was one direction their science took in finding its way towards
the highest of all grades of being. But it had other lines of as truly
religious investigation. For example, it had found as it proceeded more
and more subtle mediums of energy in the universe, mediums which had
long evaded the rude cognisance of their primitive senses but which
now yielded the secret of their presence, first to their imaginations,
then to their refined apparatus, and last of all to their more recently
developed senses. The energies that came through them were impressed
upon their senses before the mediums themselves were; and not till the
senses were touched would the reason be finally persuaded of their
existence. It took long ages to refine their senses or develop new
senses up to the power of detecting new energies or the mediums through
which these travelled. Imagination led the way; but its lead could
not be trusted unless guided by scientific fact and method. Its most
trustworthy henchman was invention; for this supplied apparatus that
increased the perceptive powers of the senses a thousand-fold. And,
as their senses grew in refinement, the instruments they invented to
aid them increased in subtlety and magnifying power, so that they were
ever able to keep well in advance of their own unassisted perceptive
faculties.
Their sciences too had grown subtler and farther-reaching in their
methods every generation. To their older chemistry, for instance, the
atoms had but a speculative existence. The newer, with magnetism and
electricity as its main agents and the clirolans as chief aids, dealt
with them directly; and a still more marvellous analysis was developing
which, adding will-force to magnetism and electricity as reagents,
could find the mediums of nervous energy and classify its various kinds
and modes of action. By means of this analysis they were able to get at
the physical basis of reflex action, desire, appetite, and the various
other semi-spiritual phenomena of humanity.
A book of the time pointed out a science as far beyond this as this had
been beyond the older chemistry, for there were far subtler and higher
media of energy to be discovered and analysed than those of appetite
and desire. Subtlest of all must be that in which the energy called
soul moved. It appeared predominantly in none but the higher types of
the human race, the men and women of wise creative power. Others had
it as a faint aroma which asserted itself only in moments of great
enthusiasm over the gross powers of appetite and passion and at other
times seemed almost to vanish. In the Limanorans it had grown to be
dominant over all the faculties and powers of the human system. The
book foresaw that the medium of this noble energy would be found akin
to that of the central energy of the cosmos, the great being whose
phases and manifestations were stars and universes. And the loftier the
mind, the more of this medium did it possess, and the clearer affinity
it had with the creative power of infinitude. Not far below this was
the medium in which the energy of morality moved; and the higher the
morality the more sympathetic was its medium with that of creation.
The new science foreshadowed by the book would display to the advanced
race of the future the movements of these finer media, and the modes of
action by which moral energy and spiritual and creative energy worked
through them.
Then would they see their way to such continuance of their life as
would seem to other men practical immortality. They would be able so
to refine and sublimate the energies of their systems and the media
through which they acted, as to be free from any of the transformations
called death for almost measureless periods of time. For the subtler
the medium, the more self-existent is the energy that moves in it, the
less is it subject to change and the less it needs change in order to
fulfil the purpose of all being. The nearer to creative power an energy
comes, the less it needs alliance with grosser and more perishable
media in order to rise in the scale of existence; decay and death
become rarer and rarer incidents. As yet Limanoran science had not
discovered absolute immortality; nor did it seem likely to discover
it. Its experience of the cosmos pointed to change as the most widely
spread of all principles; whatsoever is allied with any lower media
must shed them, or in other words suffer death, if it is to continue
its march upwards; the whole history of the earth was a continual
record of these transformations. The Limanorans had taken this aim of
terrestrial existence into their own hands, and by gradually rejecting
the grosser and shorter-lived elements of their system, they had been
able to extend their life, at first to hundreds, and afterwards to
thousands of years. They now saw before them a limitless vista along
which the necessity of death or transformation would be hunted farther
and farther from birth. And the same story they saw written all over
the cosmos, energy as it becomes purer and subtler and less dependent
for evolution upon lower forms approaching nearer and nearer to what
would seem immortality from the human point of view, coming closer and
closer to the creative energy of the cosmos. To them therefore all
their life was religion, and science was its true hierophant.
If the analytic sciences like chemistry revealed a path that led the
minds of men towards God, the wide-ranged sciences like astronomy,
astrobiology, and astromagnetism might themselves be called the
highways to God. The embodied energy and life of the earth on
this side of death seem to the human mind self-explanatory and
self-involved; but the enfranchised life and energy that fill space
have no human philosophy to account for them and have generally been
denied by men. The Limanoran sciences had found space, as far as
they could investigate it with their senses and their instruments,
no less full of energy and life than the world itself, not merely
the infinitesimal and attenuated life that they thought the débris
of other worlds and systems, but the enfranchised life of highly
organised beings, most of it so subtle and noble as to evade even the
new senses of the Limanorans. It was the life of such beings that the
science of this people aimed at knowing intimately. On some stars, they
were certain, existed inhabitants subtly enough organised to cognise
this interstellar life without aid of instruments; and they seemed
themselves to be on the verge of attaining such a power. When they
gained it, they might hold intercourse with that disembodied energy
which perchance has close affinity with the soul of God. Towards this
higher, enfranchised energy they laboured and struggled incessantly.
They believed that its existence could be accounted for only on the
assumption of some perennial fountain of free energy in the cosmos;
that there must be some great centre of completely enfranchised energy;
the course of cosmic evolution pointed that way, and every so-called
death or dissolution was but the enfranchisement of some higher type of
energy from the lower forms with which it had been for a time allied.
Even the fixed nuclei of energy, what were called matter and the atoms,
were ever aiming at liberation of the energy that formed their essence.
Every dissolution, every step higher in the gradation, implied an
ultimate energy that was free from all the trammels of lower forms.
This must be the life of pure thought that sees time past and time to
be as clearly as time present, that takes in the cosmos at a glance,
that needs no sustenance from lower energies, and suffers no birth or
dissolution. Towards this the whole cosmos strives; and perhaps there
may be a time in the history of existence when all the fixed forms
of energy shall have evolved into the free form, till at last there
is nothing but space and disembodied thought which is universally
perceptive and creative without the aid of mediums of energy or senses.
Vast systems of worlds have come and gone in the infinite past only
to distil the energy that was in them through living beings up into
the final and immortal form that needs no process of dissolution or
migration to purify it.
When they turned back from these heights to view the history of the
earth, it seemed to them that creative thought was written all over
it; could there be any clearer manifestation of the vast intelligence
informing the whole than this marvellous elaboration of genus and
species raising terrestrial life step by step upwards from the microbe
to the highest type of man? Their astronomical sciences pointed still
more unmistakably upwards to the fountain of creative thought. The
evolution of stars and systems and of life upon them seemed to them
but the history of the intelligence of infinitude. They deliberately
avoided all conventional idea of the thought of the cosmos, yet were
ever tempted through desire of firm ground to use the analogy of a
living terrene thing. Just as the body of a plant or animal is ever
decaying, ever renewing itself, so is this cosmos, the material
existence, the body of the spirit we call God, ever decaying, ever
renewing itself, ever raising its energies into higher and higher
forms. The universes and systems are molecules, the stars the atoms,
of the infinite body of the cosmos, and each one of them is moving and
developing in strict relation to all the others and to the abiding
spirit that is their aim and master. There is law or thought guiding
the history of every one of them and nothing of them is lost; the
energy of everything that seems to die has but distilled elsewhere, or
transmuted into something higher and less localised. What seems to us
decay is but the liberation of an energy from the less refined forms
with which it has been allied. Every process moves in rhythm to the
pulsations of everlasting thought that is, and realises all that was
and is and is to be. Nothing falls by accident. All is transformation,
growth, development towards self-subsistent thought, which moves
through all the processes, conscious of itself and of them all. To this
final spirit of the cosmos ten thousand ages are but as a moment. The
myriads of millions of years that some stars live, and that crush our
puny thoughts with their vastness, are but one heartbeat of God. The
whirling universes are but molecules looked at from the view-point of
the final spirit; our telescopic is his microscopic.
Thitherwards all their astronomy pointed. Round our sun move our
planets without failure of harmony, and ever round some still farther
point moves our sun and his satellites, as thousands of other suns
and systems do. Nor did the epicycloidal movement cease there; great
systems of universes have still more inward centres. But all this
infinitude of concentricism points to some ultimate centre which is
again the pivot of the cosmos. Following their analogy from man, they
occasionally allowed themselves to think that this was the brain of
God, the concentration of His thought-energy. But they refused to let
the analogy master them; they threw it off as but a metaphor and waited
for clearer and farther-reaching light. To define what lay so far
beyond their horizon was to falsify; and they knew too well from their
own past history into what labyrinths of error a single untruth will
lead a race, especially if it is planted and watered by religion.
Only where science flashed its light forth into the darkness would
they dare to define any feature or form of religion. God, they felt,
was the infinite conservation of energy. Up an infinite scale it ever
climbed towards the ultimate, the purest of all energies, the divine,
the goal to which creation groaned and struggled. The grosser forms
of energy were the _caput mortuum_ of former mixed beings and
worlds, after the sublimation of their purest elements. Out of this
residue in its new period of probation were distilled again energies
that swept upwards. If such lapses from the universal progress of the
cosmos occur in self-conscious forms, as in the soul of man, then are
they breaches of morality, or, from the point of view of the all, sins.
Conversion is the entrance of consciousness of the universal law and
of willing obedience to it into the nature. Religious and moral codes
are strivings after it and, unfortunately, attempts to define it that
soon falsify its spirit. Miracles are fore-glimpses of this law of
progress half-understood, intrusions of an energy loftier than the
sect or circle or star has been accustomed to. Every new faith is a
miracle to its early believers; for it is a prevision of the universal
law which is so far beyond their natural powers that it surprises them
into enthusiasm; its miraculous quality makes them accept it as the
final revelation, and their descendants, after they have advanced to
a natural view of its truths, still uphold the tradition that it is
divine, and strain every word and feature of it in order to find the
divine in it.
A pioneering book of the time attempted to point the way of biological
psychology towards the goal of religion. It showed how the plant
has a dim sense of its being moulded from without, chiefly by the
grosser forms of energy; and how the animal though subject to them
is yet capable of moving amongst them and rebelling against their
power; whilst the human is attained when this rebellion rises into
capacity to rule them and mould them to its will. It emphasised the
Limanoran distinction between the grossly human and the wisely human,
and held that there were geological ages of development lying between
these; for the one is conscious of the self as merely allied with the
grosser forms of energy like the animal; the mark of the other is the
consciousness of self as a part of the all, as allied with the law of
the all. It conceived that the next grade was the divine, distinguished
by consciousness of the all as created and guided by the self. The wise
amongst men in its view had thus in them a share of the divine. There
was it is true in all men the possibility of this, though in most it
was latent. The loftiest kind of energy they had yet discovered had
as its distinction the sense of continuity of existence, the power to
think back through the past and forward through the future; this is
perhaps what is meant by personal identity in Western philosophy, the
capacity to keep the self from being merged in the mass of energies
that fill space. Men have attained it in but a fitful and shadowy
way. In savages and in those of the civilised who fall away from the
universal law of progress it is obscured or buried by the dominance of
the lower and transitory forms of energy. The book imagined that when
the wise die this highest energy is so strong in them that it cannot
amalgamate again with those they have been accustomed to upon earth; it
seeks higher alliance and higher spheres than it has hitherto known;
and, once having found its new and sublimer affinities, it can move
amid the grosser forms and elements untainted, unsubdued, unrecognised,
by them. Gravitation and heat and electricity have no power over it
and come into relationship to it only when it wills to use them; for
they are the mediate forms of energy that move the molecules and
atoms; and they are moved and piloted by still higher forms, that are
perchance the will-power or spirit of God; these higher forms come not
yet within the range of human senses, but are inferred by human reason
and conceived by human imagination as conscious of themselves, evident
every where by their results, the marks of intelligence throughout the
cosmos. But this book imagined that the disembodied energy of the wise
knew and felt them, and thus came nearer to the spirit and fountain of
all. Once our universe has distilled its best energies into space and
has accomplished the best it can, our swarm of firefly worlds “paling
their now ineffectual fires” encounter in their natural epicycloidal
course round unperceived centres the systems that they have encountered
myriads of geological ages before; and the collision of the two again
sends them on their career of the evolution of their lower energies
into higher.
But the Limanorans were chary of claiming anything that they discovered
or conceived as the ultimate or the absolute; so many absolutes of the
past had after a time yielded points of view into infinities beyond
them. Hundreds of their scientific highroads led manifestly towards
one centre; but they could not say that that was the final centre or
God. Just as their sun with its satellites moved round another centre,
which was itself in revolution, so might the common point to which
their various sciences seemed to converge be but on the outer rim of a
series of sciences that had a still more inward centre. Their highest
faculties might have above them faculties belonging to other beings
in the cosmos as superior to reason and imagination as reason and
imagination were to the sensuous perceptions of the animals. The savage
had no power to comprehend the results of the reasoning capacities of
the civilised man; and the soul of the sage, when disembodied, might
begin to perceive the heights of development in faculty he had still
to climb. All their recent experience bade them wait further light
and refuse to accept any revelation of being as ultimate, and in the
rejection of all dogmatism they attained the true religious attitude
for imperfect seekers of knowledge like men, the attitude of waiting
for light. The book had embodied in it an apologue that put this belief
concretely.
If the parasite of a microbe in the body of a flea were able to examine
and analyse its conditions and surroundings and had the faculty of
reverence, its first religion would have as its object the host on
which it battened, and would endow its deity with its own parasitic
faculties and desires. But as its horizon widened and it found its
host but the dependent of another vital centre, it would contemn the
mediacy of the microbe, and fix all its reverence and adoration upon
the flea, which would seem to it a miraculous and omnipotent edition of
itself. With its vision and all its powers of observation fixed upon
the host of its host, it would soon come to see how its deity was not
self-subsistent but ricochetted from spot to spot, and the human body
with its comparative infinitude would afterwards take the place of the
flea in the reverence of the microbe’s parasite, and be accepted as
the vastest and most etherealised edition of itself the parasite could
conceive, having no means of ascertaining the real limits and faculties
of its new deity. As soon as it was able to measure and define these,
it would undeify man and substitute for him that which man inhabited,
and endow it with all its own parasitic powers and limitations.
Following the analogy, the new book saw an infinitude of pitfalls
and disillusionments before the religious faculty of man, and
refused to accept man’s similes and metaphors as in any way accurate
representations of the truth. Similes and metaphors they must remain
marked by all the narrowness of human limitations. Scientific discovery
must be the only guide of religion; and the more they advanced in their
sciences, the nearer they came to the true God. For this reason it was
that they felt it to be sin to withdraw any portion of their energy or
time from scientific pursuits and investigations. To know the cosmos
better was to approach nearer to the spirit of the cosmos, to grow more
truly religious.
The last decennial review that I witnessed, occurring as it did just
before I set out over the circle of mist, impressed upon me the
provisional as well as the fundamental character of their religious
ideals. Most of the books dramatically presented in Loomiefa at that
period had the final aim of cosmic life and energy as their theme; to
me they struck far beyond all that the most idealistic of Western
religious books had ever attempted to foreshadow; and yet they were
wholly based upon the indications that recent discoveries had given.
In a still more startling way, they were taken as but temporary
satisfactions of futuritive yearnings; they bent the highest energies
of the Limanorans into paths that led beyond what they could see from
their actual standpoint in science; but they knew from past experience
that the full blaze of noon would before long fall upon these dim
regions now lit up only by presciential imagination. These books they
now reverenced for their pioneering power; but as soon as scientific
advance should wither them into the trite and commonplace, nothing
could ever make them again guides into the darkness of the unknown,
nothing in short could ever restore their sacredness.
CHAPTER XIV
THE LAST FLIGHT
THOUGH this Manora seemed to me so solemn and almost sacramental in
its spirit, there was no withdrawal of any of the families from the
duties of their daily life. They were as eager for the advance of their
special sciences as they had ever been. Nay, the progress seemed to
me more and more rapid. The faculties were whetted to their utmost
keenness; their energies were buoyant and free. I had expected at this
religious review of the whole of their life to find a relaxation of
their intellectual temper, a languor in their wills, such as I had
often noted in periods of great religious outburst in the West. I had
been accustomed to look for an aloofness from the common pursuits of
life and a prostration before the great ideals of faith, whenever a
wave of worshipful enthusiasm broke over any community in Europe.
This people would have thought a religion that thus blanched
common life of its interests and enthusiasms not merely useless
but mischievous. Prostration before the infinities and eternities
was the last attitude they would encourage; for they considered it
blasphemy against the spirit of the cosmos. If the Manora had in any
way withdrawn their energies from their forward march, they would
have abolished it. Progress was religion, or the fulfilment of the
irrepressible yearning of all things to rise in the cosmic scale of
being, and that anything religious should check or obstruct advance was
to them the grossest contradiction in terms. Religion was in Limanora
the essence of practical life, or rather practical life was the highest
religion.
Though the review was an intense pleasure to the whole nation, throwing
the thought as it did farther and farther into the future, none
neglected for a moment the severe physical labour that was their daily
portion in the centre of force. None felt their spirits relax in their
eagerness to perform the work of their life. On the contrary, the new
religious enthusiasm added a zest to all that they had to do.
To no families did so many or so urgent demands come as to those of the
Leomo; for the great mountain had been more than ordinarily perturbed.
In spite of numerous new lava-wells, the crust of the whole island had
been shaken by frequent earthquakes, and out of the mouth of the crater
had stormed far pennons of dust and ashes, showing that something
unusual was occurring in the depths below. Then had come a sudden and
ominous lull during the latter half of the Manora; the earth had grown
quiescent and the whole summit of Limanora stood vivid and clear in the
azure.
The Leomo were not deceived by this sudden cessation of subterranean
activity. It meant new issues for the volcanic energy amid the
antarctic snows, and new dangers from the possible intrusion of
southern waters. Most members of the families were needed in the island
itself for the investigation of the new phenomena and the sinking
of lava-wells, and only two could be spared for an inspection of the
volcanoes of their old home. Thyriel and I were chosen to make the
expedition. For we had lately been accorded the high privilege of
marriage, and comradeship in danger was the usual and natural welder
of the new bonds. As soon as the review was over we had to set forth
on our venture, and we were instructed to return with all the speed we
could manage.
We did not need such instructions; our own quickened enthusiasms were
incentive enough. We knew that the reports by the idrovamolan of events
occurring so far to the south could not be wholly trusted; for these
regions were too often enveloped in mist or blinding snow-storm, and it
was difficult to float the observer in the teeth of their furious winds
and impossible to send the telepathic line of light to such a distance.
Even if electric, aural, and visual records had been gathered by means
of the machine-reporters, they would not have been minute enough for
the purposes of the Leomo. There was generally needed therefore a
personal inspection of the lands away to the south, whenever there were
unusual perturbations in the great mountain and its precincts.
To have been selected for this difficult duty was honour so great as
to stir us to unwonted effort. A few hours after the duty had been
assigned us we had everything on board our faleena, and from the
hill of farewells we had started, full of eagerness to do our best
for our people. We were too happy in our new comradeship and in our
extraordinary task to allow any sense of separation or fear of disaster
to cloud our thoughts. So anxious were we to be on our way that we
scarcely looked back at our companions and guardians, as they stood
watching our flight after giving us of their magnetism.
Nothing occurred to make the voyage south especially memorable. We did
notice far below us in the night one or two dark masses that were not
identifiable with anything in our maps. But we set them down as great
icebergs, borne out of their usual course; and the cap they seemed to
bear we took for a turban of mist round their heads. From our later
observation of the southern lands, we afterwards judged that they were
temporary volcanic islands thrown up on the line of shallow water by
the renewed violence of the fires below.
A great storm met us as we approached the ice-cliffs of the Antarctic;
nothing could be seen for the drift of snow and hail through the air,
and we were forced to rise high into the atmosphere beyond the region
of winds and tempests and clouds. For days we could see no break in the
massed blackness below us. We chafed at the delay but knew that it was
inevitable; for even if we could have landed in safety, we should have
been able to see nothing for the thickness of the driving snow-storm,
and we would assuredly have imperilled our faleena in attempting to
come to earth in the baffling winds.
At last we felt the magnetism of the upper atmosphere lessen in force
and caprice, and we knew that the disturbances below would gradually
vanish. The sun seemed to gather power, and we saw the cloud-floor
rend like an ice-sheet on flooding waters. The fifth morning broke
brilliant and clear. There lay the heaving surface of the ocean blue as
the sky, and away to the south gleamed on the horizon the knife-edge of
far-stretching ice. But there was something new and strange beyond it.
Thick smoke trailed heavily above it, and a dozen new points of light
made it lurid.
We had drifted far to the north, and anxiously we turned the prow of
our airship towards the old home of the race. We seemed to wing our way
with inordinate slowness, so eager were our spirits to know the new
phenomena and to carry the report back to Limanora. Every league nearer
made us more certain that some great disturbance had occurred in the
crust of the earth. The sea was covered with the débris of a world of
ice. Huge icebergs swam lazily breasting the swell, or clashed against
each other in splintering collision; in some of them we could see the
dark motes that marked them as portions of the vast graveyard we had
once visited. Closer still to them we could see many of the long-buried
bodies emerging from their tombs of frost, like Lazaruses still bound
in their grave-clothes. It was a strange sight, this phantom-like
resurrection at the touch of sunlight.
Over the unguided procession of icy funeral-barges, bearing their
century-sheeted dead to burial in the ocean, we hurriedly winged to
land. There were still more striking sights in store for us. The
appearance of the cliffs and mountains had been completely changed.
It looked, as we approached, as if what had formerly been a great
plateau had been ridged and furrowed by some titanic plough; and where
a dozen smoke-vents had once borne witness to the living fires beneath,
hundreds belched forth ashes or sent a red tongue of molten lava oozing
and licking down their slopes.
We had to change our landing-place far to the west; for dozens of miles
had been added to the eruptive area and the cliffs where we used to
land were scarred by explosion or were tottering before the assaults
of the billows. The storm that we had encountered had evidently been
the companion, if not the result, of this vast upheaval and at the same
time had hidden from us, as we hovered above the clouds, the titanic
pyrotechny.
We flew along the cliff-line, till we reached a region that seemed
untouched by the orgasm of the earth. Our airship we piloted into a
cleft or valley which, we thought, could protect it from any showers
of ashes or torrents of lava that might approach. But to guard against
possible disaster, we adjusted our wings and took with us as much of
the minute stores of sustenance as we could carry in our garments. We
securely fastened down the faleena, so that no storm might bear it
away; and then we rose into the air on our wings above the smoke and
steam that hung over this region.
It was with great difficulty and some danger that we investigated the
state of the land where the lava-wells had been sunk. For the vents
spat out great showers of dust and ashes intermittently, and the
pall of smoke brushed this way and that as the light breeze rose and
fell. By dint of care and watchfulness we managed to see most of the
ridge-side that abutted on the ocean. Its whole appearance had been
changed. There was not a sign of our old lava-wells. The side of one
hill had been blown away, and a torrent of melted snow and ice raced
down the ravine. Vents had been broken out where there had been glacier
or precipice or rocky peak. But as yet none of the vents were low
enough to let the sea break over their lips. The worst of all had not
yet occurred.
We could not finish our investigation in the first day. So we lay down
in our faleena to sleep, as the brief darkness approached. We were
well content with our day’s work; and we would have slept easily and
well but for the tremors in the earth beneath us. Its very foundations
seemed at times to shake and threaten convulsion. Once we thought of
taking to the air again for safety, so billow-like were the movements
that tossed us as we lay.
However, morning broke without catastrophe, and we were soon busy at
our work of inspection. We flew to the other side of the range of
mountains in order to note how the shores of the inland sea had borne
the effects of the commotion in the crust of the earth. At first we
seemed to see no change, but when we had left our faleena and followed
the old line of cliffs, the magnitude of the disturbance impressed
us. New precipices stood beetling over the still waters, where we
remembered to have seen low shelving bays. We searched for the old
sections in which we had seen the stratification of civilised abode;
but the strange palimpsest of prehistoric history, a dozen times
rewritten by the toil and hope of man, had been again obliterated by
the finger of fire. A tongue of lava only just cool had licked out the
record of the dead ages. A tawny glacis of rock confronted us instead
of the panorama of thousands of years.
Everywhere we flew were marks of the recent volcanic work; and not
merely creative, but destructive. Still farther off we found vast
subsidences which had suddenly unveiled the secrets of many geological
epochs. Some of them had been titanic in the abruptness and extent of
their work; but the great ice-planes and ice-harrows had been already
smoothing and rounding or levelling the serrated or sharp edges. Only
in one new cliff did we see a repetition of the now hidden record. A
bold hill had been cut through as by a sword and here had evidently
been built and overwhelmed village after village; we could discern here
and there traces of their employments suddenly abandoned, their looms
and ploughs and anvils embalmed in rock; and once or twice the forms
of the workers, tragically surprised at their work by the showers of
ashes, showed empty and void, the living tissues having fallen to dust
leaving only the shell, like the tunnel of a huge worm in the petrified
débris. We lingered over this open volume of human history longer
than we would have done had we been older and wiser, so deeply did it
touch the fountains of romance, and the dimmer twilight of the brief
antarctic night overtook us before our task was done.
When we awoke at dawn, we resumed our investigations, only to find
countless signs of renewed subterranean energy. We hurried to the
various points of danger and discovered only too clearly that the
first storm would send the waters of the ocean breaching into many new
volcanic vents. We could have no hesitance as to the conclusion to
be drawn and the next steps to take. It would be impossible for us,
unprovided as we were with instruments and engines, to guard against
the threatening catastrophe. The best we could do would be to return
with all swiftness to Limanora and warn the elders of our family.
Perchance we should be able to anticipate the approach of any tempest;
and if temporary measures were taken, the coming winter might stop the
gaping mouths of ruin with her downward-creeping glaciers.
We hastened back to the slope on which we had left our faleena. Even
at a distance, as we swept down from aloft, we began to be troubled at
the changes in the landscape. Where there had been a great ice-cap
crowning a precipitous ridge, there was a gaping chasm; rock and
incrustation had been together blown to atoms. A new smoking cone was
brushing the azure with its cloud of dust; and, as we descended, we
found its streams of lava still licking and hissing their way through
the snow and ice that clothed its feet.
We recognised the features of the locality with difficulty, and it
was long before we fixed the valley in which we had left our airship.
Still we could see no trace of our trusty faleena; it had vanished.
After long search we came to the conclusion that it had been swept on
by a billow of molten rock and overwhelmed, and the realisation of the
calamity cast me despairing to the ground.
How different it was with Thyriel, I perceived, as soon as my dismay
allowed me to rouse my consciousness from its palsy. She was exploring
the edges of the tongue of fire; and up the side of the opposing hill
she found a section of our flight-car unmelted by the heat, broken off
by a bold jut of rock and left scarred by the fire and twisted by the
force of the sea of lava, yet recognisable in its outlines. Happily
it was the part that contained our store of sustenance and all our
equipments for a long wing-voyage, spare chest-and-shoulder engines and
the apparatus necessary for supplying them with electricity from the
air.
We did not encumber ourselves with more than we thought would be
essential for the long air-journey back to Riallaro. The minute pellets
of sustenance were easily disposed of. But it puzzled us to know what
to do with the additional apparatus for so protracted a voyage. My
powers of flight were still so crude and undeveloped and my locomotion
through the air so clumsy and slow that Thyriel had to carry both
hers and mine. I was greatly perturbed over the possible result of so
dangerous a venture. But it had to be undertaken, and she had buoyancy
and exhilaration enough for both. My sinking heart felt the influence
of her magnetism, and I gained confidence after we set out.
The first half of our voyage was marked by singular good fortune. The
breeze went with us every day, and at night, or when the muscles of
my legs and arms grew numb from fatigue, we sighted an iceberg and
rested on it; though it heaved and rocked and on occasion threatened
submersion, our minds were at rest, for we had our wings always
attached and everything in readiness to sweep upwards from our perch.
The difficulty came when we passed beyond the Antarctic Ocean, and
voyaged high above that heaving trackless desert of water which lies
between the region of icebergs and the first ring of islets that
stipple the tropical seas. How were we to find resting-places at night
or during the day, when my wing-achievements grew lame and tardy? Even
Thyriel’s heart sank, as she thought of the hundreds of leagues we had
to traverse unbroken by any sign of land.
At first she kept along the immemorial line of bird-travel from the
south on the chance of finding here and there some spot of land thrown
up by the growing disturbances beneath the sea. For some days we were
fortunate enough to find a nightly perching-place above the billows
upon the temporary vents of the submarine fires, dangerous it is true,
yet with care and watching safe. Then we came upon a zone of calm
water, so strangely still and free from the action of wind and current
that the albatrosses basked moveless upon it. Here Thyriel bound our
wings together and made a raft, on which we floated as we slept.
But that was only for two revolutions of the earth and was the
prelude to a tornado from the north-east, a wind so unusual in those
latitudes that the Limanorans never take it into the calculations of
their voyages through the air. Just when we were within three days’
wing-journey of our home the tempest began and brought us almost to a
standstill. We tried to battle against it but our efforts were vain.
Then we rose, according to Limanoran custom, into the higher atmosphere
where is usually found perfect calm and perfect freedom from cloud and
storm, but the fury of the disturbance seemed to be miles deep. The
upper air was as thick and turbulent as the lower.
Our troubles culminated in disaster to my wing-appendages. I was
never expert in their management, but in the baffling storm I grew
helpless and in my despair let them beat almost unguided. The result
was irreparable injury to the left wing and such an obstruction to the
movement of the right as made it unmanageable. I felt my heart sink;
for I saw that I must soon fall into the ocean below and be dashed to
pieces or drowned.
Thyriel looked down and saw my peril. In a flash of thought she
abandoned all she carried except her chest-and-shoulder engines, and,
swooping down towards me, caught me as I fell. An upward sweep of
the wind aided her in her efforts, and she buoyed me up till I had
recovered energy and heart. Then she told me what she meant to do. For
a time I would not be persuaded and prayed that I might be abandoned to
my fate, but she would not hear of such a thing. By the force of her
will I soon gave way and nestled, as I had often done when learning to
fly, in the hollow between her wings.
Before the storm she let herself go; and I could feel we were moving
almost as swiftly as if we had been in our own faleena. It was useless
for her, she showed me, to fight against the wind, especially after she
had thrown away the apparatus for quickly renewing the power of her
engines. After a time I saw how much she laboured under her burden, and
I sent promptly into the gulf beneath all that I had carried, my broken
wings, my engines, and my stores of sustenance. I felt that her spirit
protested; but she said nothing, and I was relieved to feel that we
were rising instead of falling. She grew more buoyant and was even able
to spare magnetism enough to put heart into me.
The course she had taken so promptly was the only one that could have
saved both of us. She might have weathered the storm alone, and then
found her way back to Limanora. But as it was she knew that the tempest
would bear us, if she could keep us both high above the earth, right
across the long narrow cloud of New Zealand.
She felt by her bodily magnetism that we were approaching it, and while
it was still daylight we came within reach of it. She, seeing that we
were evidently coasting its southern shores, but too far off to make
them with her exhausted powers, grew afraid that we would be blown far
off to the south again and thus miss our resting-place; for we could
see the coasts round northwards. Happily at this juncture the wind
suddenly veered round to the south-west, and we were swept before it in
the twilight into a deep fiord. Our hearts were glad to feel that soon
we should touch the earth and rest. I was tempestuously elated; for I
felt, by the beat of her heart and the quick short breaths she drew,
that she was near the end of her powers.
We were close to a precipice and I was eagerly preparing to leap from
her back, when she seemed suddenly to collapse. I fell through the
air, and then knew no more till I awakened in your hut. What became
of Thyriel puzzled me for long. But I am persuaded that after seeing
me drawn by you safely to land she went off before the favouring wind
towards Limanora for help. That she has been so long troubles my
thoughts deeply at times. But I believe that she will return for me,
if only I rest here long enough. I dare not leave the place long, lest
she should come in my absence. And the solitude and your gentle silence
soothe me in my weary meditation.
EPILOGUE
WE felt guiltily conscious, as he came to this close of his narrative.
But we had not the heart to hint what we thought might have become of
her.
Almost three years had passed before his narrative reached the point of
contact with our lives. He now became restless and jaded and flitted
in and out amongst us like a ghost. For days he vanished in the bush,
and again and again we thought he had finally disappeared. But he ever
returned, more restless and yet more gentle.
We could not bear to see his agony and yearning, and at last proposed
that we should hire or purchase a small steamer, and under his guidance
make for Riallaro. He was long reluctant, but after months of hope
deferred resigned himself to the enterprise.
Trowm and I made for the nearest port and brought our purchase round to
our fiord, well-provisioned and equipped for a tropical voyage. Somm
was left by our huts and our mine to guard our interests, but still
more to watch for the advent of any messenger from the strange land
within the circle of mist.
The rest of us set out with our guest in search of his home. Nothing
happened to our expedition beyond the usual mishaps of tropical seas.
A tornado made us take refuge within an uninhabited atoll; in its
harbour our craft was safe enough, but it took all our powers to hold
on to the scanty herbage that clung to the reef and prevent our being
blown into the ocean beyond. Once or twice we had an awkward incident
with sharks, and once we came too close to an island whose shore
swarmed with threatening savages. They sprang into their canoes and
made for us, but our steam enabled us to outdistance them with ease.
Our stranger knew the exact latitude and longitude of Riallaro. He
could point out its place on a map with a confidence that made us feel
we were about to enter with him into the mysterious archipelago. We
sailed straight for the western side of the ring of mist, but never did
we encounter any such feature as he had described to us. Once or twice
we thought we saw an extended haze on the horizon and made for it; but
it vanished as we approached; it was only the mirage of the ocean.
Weeks and weeks we steamed around and over the region, but not a trace
of the great archipelago or its nebulous fence did we find.
Even our guide at last fell into silent bewilderment. He could not
believe that it had all disappeared like a dream; unless, as we
fancied, the subterranean forces had blown it into space. Nor could he
mistrust his senses or his knowledge. What to think of it he did not
venture to decide. He lay in stupor and silence for days.
But we knew that within a few weeks began the season of hurricanes; and
we determined to make back for our shelter in the southern fiord. He
reluctantly consented to our persuasion, after making us promise that
we should return again to search for his lost paradise. In the meantime
he would be able to study the charts of the region, and define the
knowledge of it more exactly. He knew by heart its relations to the
sun and the stars; and with study he could tell the very place where to
follow our search. As it was, he had doubtless made some mistake; and
he would rectify it in the interval of rest.
Without mishap or obstructive weather we got back into the shadow of
our mountains; and one day of brilliant sunshine we sailed into the
fiord. Somm was on the shore to welcome us. He had no news to give. No
one had been near the place since we had left. But he had had to make
into a neighbouring sound in order to supply his empty larder, and as
the wind seemed to favour his trip, he had brought the masts and sails
of our boat out of our cave.
Our guest paced up to our hut as in a dream, seeming to hear and see
nothing around him. We let him find his way alone, whilst we beached
and dismantled our little steamer.
In our bustle of work we had forgotten him. Suddenly a strange,
scarcely human cry awakened our attention. We rushed up the steep
pathway and found him lying in trance by the mouth of the cave,
stretched upon the wings that we had cast into our lumber-hole when we
rescued him from the water. Somm had had to turn them out to get at
the sails and cordage of the boat, and had forgotten to return them to
their place. They were cobwebbed and covered with lichen and mould, yet
the transparency of them in spots gathered the rays of the sun upon the
herbage underneath.
We raised him from his resting-place and carried him into our spare
hut. There we tried to bring him back to consciousness, but our efforts
were vain. There was life in him, we were certain; yet there was
scarcely a sign of it in movement or breath, only a fragment of the
wings held to the mouth showed a trace of moisture. So we left him
for the night, remembering that it was long before he recovered from
the first trance in which we had found him. We wrapped him round with
warm clothing, and placing him comfortably on a soft bed of fern put
food and drink near him, so that, if he wakened, he should know we had
thought of him and were near.
The next morning at daybreak I rose, and the incident of the previous
evening rushed into my mind. I made for the hut, expecting to find him
recovered and asleep, but I found no human being there. The wrappings
had fallen on either side of the fern-lair. The bowls of meat and drink
were almost empty; but there were evident marks of the claws and beaks
of birds in them.
We searched for him in the bush for days, but we never found track
of him. The only sign of his movements was that the wings were gone.
Whether he had adjusted them to his body and flown into the air or
buried them in the sea we could not discover. There clings to our
thoughts the fancy that he faded away into the azure under the blow
of assurance that Thyriel was gone for ever. We kept our eyes on the
alert for years after, as we went prospecting through the forest; and
slowly the thought lurking in our minds passed into assured belief
that his ethereal texture had melted into the air at death, that the
earth received none of his material atoms when his energy fled from its
surface.
It is only now, when we are sure that he has gone from our orb, that we
venture on giving his story to the rest of mankind. We know no better
memorial to him, and no better form for our gratitude than to let
others know what he gave us, to let others feel what has passed into
our own lives as an imperishable memory.
GODFREY SWEVEN.
THE END.
=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=
The corrections in the errata on page 12 have been made.
Contents of Book II is given on page 289.
Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced
quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and
otherwise left unbalanced.
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not
changed.
Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.
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