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.