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.