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.