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.