But the discoveries that flowed from this were still more important.

By further experimentation they found another type of radiant energy

that behaved in a similar way towards gravitation. In a vacuum formed

within a vessel of an alloy of irelium it ceased to obey the force

of gravity; but as soon as it had passed through the side of the

vessel, it gave full heed to the force. Within a few months after

this had been discovered, there had been invented a faleena that

fell or rose according as the new rays were intercepted by a film of

the irelium-alloy or were allowed free passage _in vacuo_. The

energy in mass drove the car on indifferent to the earth’s influence,

or at the will of the guide brought the erfaleena, as they called

it, gently sloping downwards at any angle required to the surface of

the globe. A pioneering book at once developed the results of this

discovery and invention. It showed how a way was now opened to other

stars. For this new radiant energy was found to stream in and past the

earth’s atmosphere in vast currents. The denser the medium, the more

was it absorbed and lost, so that in the earth and the atmosphere it

seldom or never manifested itself. Hence the long ages of scientific

investigation before it was discovered. By means of these currents,

which evidently set through space in definite directions, they would be

able to guide their new anti-gravitation faleena to any point in the

interstellar ether, and be able to keep up the supply of force that

would drive it. And when they approached a new world they could by

means of their new machinery bring its force of gravitation to bear on

the car and so hasten its flight; and they would be able to hover over

the atmosphere by means of the alternating movements of their engine,

till they could find out its conditions, and see whether it would be

safe to land on it or not. What they wanted yet was the evolution of

their physical system in the direction of living in ether or in various

atmospheres indifferently. It pointed out to the physiological families

the way that would lead in this direction; and it showed how, though

it would take countless ages, it was yet within the scope of their

humanity.

For their knowledge of the constitution of the universe the discovery

of these two forms of radiant energy proved to be of great importance.

They were able to find out the relationships of gravitation,

electricity, the dark rays of the inamar, the negative rays of the

lavolan, light, heat, and the two new types of energy. And by means

of the similarities and differences found to exist between any two

of them they were enabled to resolve the molecules of any element

into their constituent atoms, and thus to reveal the characteristics

of the fundamental ether. They felt that they were at last in the

immediate presence of the medium which filled space, and they invented

an apparatus isolating the ether from all the forms it enters into, so

that it became manifest under their magnifiers to several of their

senses. In it they were able to make any one of the forms of energy

move and play. From it they were able to mould many of the terrene

forms of latent energy, and they hoped to mould most of the others with

which they were familiar.

One of the most immediately practical results that came from the

discovery of these two modes of energy was another kind of engine,

which almost doubled their store of force in Rimla. The main form of

it took advantage of the radiant energy that showed indifference or

obedience to gravitation according as it played in a vacuum or through

an alloy of irelium into the air. The new rays lifted a piston _in

vacuo_, and by an automatic arrangement they passed through a film

of the alloy and then allowed gravitation to pull them and the piston

with them back into its first position; the rapid alternations drove

magnetic machinery which produced and stored up electricity. Another

form of the new engine used the difference between the conduct the

other newly discovered radiant energy displayed towards magnets when it

played in a vacuum vessel of irelium, and when it had issued through

the vessel’s filmy side.

The increase and concentration of force in their island was one of

the great subordinate aims of their civilisation. For they knew

that the greater the power they had command of the more rapidly

could they advance towards higher and higher goals. Greater force

meant greater dominion over nature and her secrets and laws; and

this implied accelerated speed in progress. It had been one of the

primitive blunders of their civilisation, as it still was of all other

civilisations, to imagine that extended empire over men meant a true

development of humanity; wide sovereignty was mere artificial change

of the locality and application of the forces of mankind, without

increasing them; it was but a reshuffling of the cards (to use your

similes), with all the honours in one hand instead of being distributed

over all; it was merely political and not real. Any gain that might

come from the concentration of power and wealth was wasted on increased

war-material and military expeditions for retaining or subduing

territories and peoples, on futile and routine administration, and on

growth of court splendour and luxury. The pursuit of the sanguinary

phantom of power over other men had to be for ever abandoned before any

real human advance could be made. Empire over the powers of nature was

the primary condition of full development of human possibilities, and

every tissue of their wonderful brains was strained to its utmost for

the rapid extension of this sway. A new addition to the stores of the

centre of force, a new source of energy, was therefore ever hailed by

them as the warranty of a leap upward and onward into the future.

The invention of these new engines, then, had no slight significance

as events in their history. And the assurance of more and more rapid

progress was increased by a discovery of the chemic families in the

same direction. They had used coal for the generation of heat before

they had left their primeval home around the south pole. But in their

more tropical archipelago they found no coal-beds, the islands having

originated in volcanic and coral formation; and the climate made the

use of such a concentrated fuel unnecessary; it was warm even in

winter, and it supplied fruits and cereals which needed little cooking.

The forests of the islands had furnished whatever fuel had been

required for hundreds of generations, and outside of Limanora they

were still sufficient for all purposes. But the centre of force had

recalled the great heat they used to have from coal, and the Leomo, in

their probings of the earth, had ever been on the outlook for beds of

the old fuel. Recently they had found thin strata of it, but so deep in

the earth that it was of little value to them.

But a discovery by the Sidramo, or chemic families, made them

reconsider this decision and try to invent some form of the leomoran,

which would cut and send with ease to the surface of the earth the

coal they had found. The Sidramo had experimented with it in various

lines. They had made the steam from it give power as they had seen it

give power to the _Daydream_ and her Broolyian imitations. But

so large a proportion of the latent energy in it had been lost in the

process that they turned their researches in other directions. Before

long they found that, when the coal was placed in a chemical solution

containing comparatively common and cheap elements, electric power was

largely generated. And following up their discovery the Sidramo were

soon able to draw electricity from any of the rocks of the island.

Once having had their attention applied to such problems, they made a

number of them surrender their secret; by surrounding one common rock,

_e. g._, with a certain solution they brought from it heat alone.

But the discovery most important for the development of the race was

that which brought electric power directly from the rocks and even from

the earth. For this increased the possible store of force in Rimla

enormously. And there was no limit to what they might use there for the

advancement of civilisation.

Within a few days of this discovery the Piramo or meteorological

families had applied the lavolan to one of their long-unsolved

problems, the extraction of magnetic power in large quantities from

the air. They had been already able to draw from the thunder-clouds

their electricity, and make them pass harmless. And by means of

personal effort and the magnetism of the body they were able when high

up in the rarer regions of the atmosphere to recharge their little

shoulder-engines for driving their wings. But in the lower air they

had failed to draw electricity from any but thunder-clouds in any

quantity. They based a new apparatus called pirakno on the lavolan and

its discoveries, and with this they were able to draw magnetism from

even the gentlest breeze. They increased its size and capacity, and

soon could give a daily supply of new power to the centre of force. Nor

did this deprive the air of the island of its exhilarant quality; for

the more they took from it, the more seemed to flow in from surrounding

space. But, when the east wind blew, they found the inflow of magnetism

too much for their smaller piraknos; only the larger could cope with

it; and then the store of power in Rimla received enormous additions.

For ages they had been testing the amount of magnetism in the air at

various heights and temperatures and various times of day, month,

and year, and recording the results of their investigations. They

were now able to decide from these and from their experiences of the

pirakno that irregular changes in the weather were due chiefly to

magnetic influence. They saw that the tremendous storms which every

few years swept the earth had their origin in exceptional inflows

of cosmic magnetism. During the history of man since he had come to

self-consciousness and to the habit of recording his own movements,

there had been many sudden and temporary climatic changes, that

had led to vast displacements of the inhabitants of the earth. A

series of severe winters in the north and in the temperate zone

would strip the trees and fields of all frugiferous qualities, and

drive the animals of the chase away to the south in search of food.

And the races of man had to follow them. So in the tropics a series

of droughts would destroy half the chances of life, and exterminate

one-third of the dwellers inland. As a rule the agony there led to

no displacement of nations, so passive and fatalistic are they by

nature near the equator; but in times when some new religious idea

had broken the spell of fatalism, the first goad of starvation drove

hordes to search for food in other zones. Oftentimes there has been a

simultaneity in the meteorological severity, partly due to a universal

influx of interstellar magnetism, but still more to the fact that the

earth and the planetary system to which it belongs have swung into

a region of space that is exceptionally barren of all life-impetus.

At such periods came those wide-spread migrations of the dwellers on

the globe that made new eras in history. It was one of those cosmic

disturbances of climate that sent the Arabs out of their deserts, a

flaming portent along the shores of the Mediterranean with their newly

reformed religion, the creed of Mahomet, and at the same moment flung

the Saxons against the northern frontier of Charlemagne’s empire, and

the Danes on the coast of Britain. So, earlier, in the fourth and

fifth centuries of the Christian era, the Huns burst from the east

like a torrent, and again and again swept all before them in the west,

whilst simultaneously the Goths broke in from the north across the

boundaries of the Roman empire. Later, in the ninth century, the Danes

and Normans broke away from the north again and again, and plagued

Europe with their piratical energy in the very period when the Magyars

were migrating from the east to the west. And it was only the closer

packing of the continents, and the consequent military organisation of

European nations that checked these displacements in later centuries,

though there were refluxes towards the east, as in the crusades. But

the cosmic meteorology of the earth took different effect in the same

direction, when plagues mowed down their millions of victims from east

to west; where wide-spread displacements are impossible, there must

be decimation by some cosmic means in order to let the light into the

overpopulated regions. Another escape-valve was found for the pressure

of those periods of temporary climatic change, when the western peoples

were driven over the oceans to find a home. Emigration then came to

mean transference of masses across the sea, at first to America, where

there were other but weaker civilisations to be overcome, afterwards to

lands and islands that were either empty or occupied by a few scattered

savages. It was their circle of mist that saved the archipelago of

Riallaro from the effect of these vast displacements of population.

When every acre of land on the earth shall have been filled with its

complement, and human forethought and ingenuity are still unequal to

the sudden changes of cosmic meteorology, then famine and plague will

be the only means of relieving the pressure.

The Limanorans had no fear of such effects in their own island, except

indirectly. For they had complete command of their own birth-rate and

death-rate, and kept the numbers commensurate with all the purposes

of their existence. Climate was to them as plastic as any material

or force of nature, and the unexpected in meteorology was gradually

becoming unknown. But they had a strong indirect interest in all

inbursts of the cosmic. For the peoples of the other islands, the

descendants of their ancient exiles, were as ready victims as ever

to what seemed the caprices of the seasons and the years. And the

frustration of the consequent movements involving the interests of

the Limanorans absorbed more of their time and reserve energy than

they desired. A violent tornado would obliterate the products of a

year over the whole archipelago, and the fear of starvation would goad

the inhabitants into expeditions in search of food, sometimes even

towards the isle of devils. Again, hungry microbes, the spawn of some

plague-stricken world, would float into the earth’s atmosphere and find

new soil on the islands; and the dwellers would die so quickly that

there was no time or room on their circles of earth for sepulture.

Into the sea the festering dead would be thrown by the thousand, each

bearing its myriad germs of contagion; the very fish that fed on

them would die of the plague and bear its microbes to every shore;

the currents and the winds, if left to their own bent, would sweep

down the foul nests of contagion on the Limanorans; and it would take

them weeks of superhuman effort to prevent the bacterial spawn from

settling in their systems, and to cleanse the adjacent seas of all

taint. The effort to prevent these disasters often wasted their store

of force and checked their advance. It seemed to them therefore more

economical of their energy to help in dispelling the original evil or

making it swerve towards other oceans. For a time they considered it

to the interests of their progress to save the whole archipelago from

the irruptions of interstellar magnetism or bacterial life. But even

this was found to have serious disadvantages. Unbroken prosperity

surcharged the leaders of the other islands with conceit, and made them

lose their fear of the central isle and resume their projects for its

conquest; or it deluged them with population, which, whenever nature

grew economical again, was driven to foreign means for its sustenance,

and, at times, goaded by hunger, made in military wise for the isle of

devils.

Yet these alarms and dangers were more infrequent and more easily

repelled than when the more ambitious of the archipelago were driven

by the spur of famine and disaster to incursion. And, though for a

brief period the Limanorans allowed an occasional tornado or plague

to devastate the islands of hostile neighbours, they came to the

conclusion that it needed less of their energy to repel an occasional

hive of enemies impelled by narrowing limits or the lessening

generosity of nature than to beat off vast bodies of embattled peoples

frantic with hunger and reckless of life, led by the keenest skill

and fieriest ambition of the archipelago. They could better avoid all

destruction of life in the one case than in the other,--one of the

duties of their civilisation, even though a subsidiary one.

The Piramo were thus essential to the progress of the race; their

growing knowledge of the conditions that governed the climate as well

as the passing weather saved in a day as much power as the use of such

an instrument as the pirakno at first could add to Rimla in a year. And

the scene of the labours of the Piramo was every year more and more

extended to the extra-terrene; meteorology became in its investigatory

and experimental department more and more cosmic, and often overlapped

astronomy, astrobiology, and astrophysics, and aided them; more

and more did they find their problems questions of magnetism or

electricity. In the interstellar spaces must be sought the sources of

the greater disturbances of season and climate and the pirakno grew

every year of more and more importance, as they traced the magnetic

influences around the earth back into the infinite fields of space.

About this very time they invented an instrument of great delicacy,

which foretold the vaster tracts of magnetism into which the earth was

swinging, and measured the increase. It depended for its principle

and basis on the intimate relationship between electricity and light,

on the effect of magnetism upon light and upon electric radiation

from the negative pole in a vacuum. They had noticed for some time

that the light from any meteor or luminous body outside the sphere of

influence of the earth never reached the instruments of the observers

on the edge of the atmosphere quite true, and that the aberration

differed at different times. By means of various experiments they

came to the conclusion that the aberration was due to magnetism in

the extra-terrene spaces. Their new instrument, which they called a

sarmolan, they sent out into the ether beyond the earth’s atmosphere

and beyond the influence of terrestrial magnetism; and, as it received

beams of light from any one heavenly body towards which it had been

directed, it recorded the amount of this body’s deflection from the

straight course. They preferred to turn it to the moon or to Venus or

Mars; for then they were sure that the deflecting masses of magnetism

lay within immediate range of the earth. This sarmolan turned out to be

for cosmic changes of climate what the barometer is for daily or hourly

changes of weather. Whenever it recorded violent deflection, it meant

that the earth was approaching an exceptionally vast tract of magnetic

influence, and that there would be great and frequent disturbances for

months, if not for years, in the regularity of the earth’s seasons and

climates, or at least of those of one zone. It warned the Limanorans to

get ready their piraknos and all other instruments they had for drawing

and imprisoning for their own use the electricity from the atmosphere

and the spaces above it. It was in short their cosmic barometer

foretelling changes in climate years ahead. It eased the minds of the

Piramo and set free half their energies for other investigations, as

soon as it had proved itself a true prophet. Later improvements in it

measured the distance of the supermagnetised region of space from the

earth, and thus indicated the exact year and sometimes even the month

and the day when the series of climatic perturbations were likely to

begin. What had been guesswork before, made just before meeting the

phenomenon itself, was now reduced to predictive law; and they looked

forward to the time when by recording, classifying, and mapping the

variations and regions of cosmic magnetism they would be able to get

at the cause of its unequal distribution in interstellar space. Nay,

when they had charted the great drifts and currents of varied energy

that the earth encountered as its universe swung through space, they

might have ready for their future voyagers to other worlds a full

cosmography, which would instruct them in the kind of oceans and

torrents they would have to breast, the types of energy they would

have to accustom their systems to, and all the risks and dangers they

would have to meet. And, when their knowledge of the conditions and

regions and tracks in the boundless space they might have to traverse

was fairly rounded and complete, then some slight adaptation of their

sarmolan would be to them their cosmic compass.

There was evidence in other discoveries too that this hope was not so

utopian as it seemed at first, that at least not countless centuries

would pass before they might be able to fulfil it. One especially,

that of the Floramo or botanical families, quickened their expectation

far beyond the mere flight of fancy. It was a new sublimation of a

vegetable extract, which seemed to give their lungs free play when

there was little or no air to breathe. They had used for ages the

fruit of what they called the floronal or tree of life for giving new

vigour to the organs and especially to the nerve-tissues; they still

continued to use it, even though the chemical families had analysed it

and found all its constituents, and then reproduced a mixture that had

most of the revivifying qualities of the fruit. The tree grew only in

marshy districts, and they had reserved an obscure and rarely visited

corner of the island for its culture and for the culture of plants

and trees like it. There was another tree growing only in the cooler

zone half-way up the mountain, and preferring shallow and poor soil to

root in, whose fruit gave extreme flexibility to the more muscular and

cartilaginous tissues, and especially to those in the chest; if taken

inwardly or through the pores, muscular exercise became more easy, and

breathing became deeper and slower or quicker as the will directed.

A third low plant or shrub, which grew only on the highest altitudes

of Lilaroma, and had its roots generally in the soil underneath a

layer of snow, had been found recently to have in its tissues, and

in a concentrated form in its nuts, great stores of oxygen. For ages

it had been considered a poisonous plant, and avoided; for within a

considerable radius of it breathing had always been more difficult

than at a distance from it; it had therefore been eradicated from all

parts of the cone frequented by the Limanorans. It had no beauty of

form, often grew low like a lichen or moss, and could remain under the

snow for years without perishing. It had thus been neglected and in

fact seldom observed in its growth; whilst its nuts had been thought

to be as poisonous as the plant itself. But recently an avalanche from

one of the little-visited slopes of Lilaroma had uncovered a hollow, in

which one of the Floramo had found a bird, emaciated and unable to fly,

yet still alive; and beside it were the remains of a number of these

poison plants and particles of many of their nuts. It had evidently

been imprisoned many weeks, if not months, and its only food had been

the obscure and offensive snow-bush, stunted, scabrous, and without

green or leaf.

The Floramo became deeply interested in the phenomenon, and gathered

many specimens of the shrub from the top of the mountain. They fed the

bird till it became plump, and then shut it up in one of their irelium

vacuum-chambers with only the nuts to peck. There they watched it from

day to day, and saw that as long as it fed on the nuts it continued

vigorous and lively, even though it began to lose its rounded outlines

again. They soon closed their experiment, and set the winged creature

free to fly whither it would, satisfied that there could be only one

logical conclusion with regard to the plant. They saw that its nature

was to lay up stores of oxygen in all its tissues, and they called it

alfarene or the oxygen-shrub. It was this treasure in it that enabled

it to live so long beneath vast accumulations of snow and ice; it

was this feature of its life that made it when open to the air so

exhaust the oxygen for yards around it that men found it difficult

to breathe beside it; it was this that, when it became the food of

the bird, enabled it to live and breathe so long away from the air.

It was the outcome of long ages of selection up in those difficult

altitudes, where nothing could live under the snow without this power

of storing up oxygen. And its nuts, too hard and innutritious except

for hunger-driven birds to attack, concentrated round the seeds an

extraordinary amount of this oxygen-stuff; and by means of this, when

underneath the pressure of the snows the husk broke, the seeds were

able to support themselves and develop into plants away from the vital

air.

It was evident that these alfarene nuts were treasure-houses of oxygen;

and soon they were tried by the Limanorans themselves when they flew

into the upper regions of the air. At first they broke the nuts into

powder, which was made into a hard but soluble paste: a small piece of

this held in the mouth till it melted enabled them in their flights to

breathe freely in rarer altitudes than they had ever reached before.

The Floramo afterwards brought out the oxygen-storing power of the

shrub more strongly by careful cultivation and selection. Within a few

years they made of it a vigorous, large, and comparatively handsome

tree, and its nuts grew larger and more oxygenated, so that they became

a necessity for all flight into higher atmospheres. More attention

was also paid to the floronal or tree of life and to the germabell or

tree whose fruit produced elasticity of the muscles and cartilage.

The development of all three in the direction in which they might be

useful to the race quickened; the energy stored up in their fruits

came to be more and more concentrated; selection of the plants,

cross-fertilisation of them, special soil and feed for their roots, and

special surroundings, were all-powerful in the hands of the Floramo for

changing plants and trees to any purpose they had in view. They studied

the tissues and habits of the species that they wished to adapt, not

as an abstract and merely scientific investigation, but as one of the

practical problems of their own life; they turned the clirolan on its

inner and outer tissues, as they anatomised it; they watched its inner

processes with the lavolan as it grew or decayed; they chemically

analysed its sap in all its stages, and the various soils at its roots;

then they experimented with new elements in the soil in the direction

of the qualities they wished to encourage; they tried it with various

degrees and hours of sunshine by day, and various amounts of moisture

by night, at different stages in its growth; if they found some of the

qualities that they desired in its fruit or tissues more vigorous in

some other species, they fertilised its blossom with the pollen of this

second plant, and from the seed raised a new species, which would fully

realise their purpose. The whole of vegetal nature was plastic in their

hands. And every year saw hundreds of new species.

The Floramo were the forerunners of the Sidramo or chemical families,

and experimented in materials and juices and essences, which would

be useful to the race in its ever-quickening advance. Often would

vegetal nature reveal a compound that shortened some route through the

future, and the Sidramo would then analyse the product, and find the

secret of its special efficiency. The Floramo were indefatigable in

that department of their work which experimented with the application

of plants and their fruits and tissues to useful purposes, and every

day saw some process accelerated by the results of their labours. In

fact they classified the vegetal world not merely according to the

structure and methods of growth and propagation, but mainly according

to the particular utility of the products. The one classification was

more essential to their creation of new species, the other to their

discovery of purposes for which new species might be created. Like all

their sciences, botany was nothing if it was not creative.

Having discovered the oxygen-storing shrub, the Floramo gave a new

bent to it, applying their energies to strengthening its vitality and

its vitalising powers, and to finding out the most convenient form in

which to use its treasured energy. Aided by the Sidramo they were able

to combine the juice of the fruits of the floronal and the germabell

with the paste of the nut of alfarene into minute, to my eyes almost

microscopic, globules, each of which would support one of their

couriers in the ether outside of our atmosphere for several hours. At

first they lost one of the vitalising elements in securing another;

and even after they had been able to bind the three essences together

in one form, it gave air and sustenance for only a few minutes when

they tried it in a complete vacuum. But after experimenting for many

months, they were able to concentrate these essences under enormous

pressure and by the aid of electric stimulus into a form which would

not volatilise except in the saliva of the mouth and under electric

stimulus. They were also able to give their globules such electric

power as would utilise the streams of magnetic energy that filled the

ether. Thus the ether-couriers found them far more strengthening and

sustaining just above the earth’s atmosphere than in it. One globule

lasted several hours longer in a vacuum, and made breathing and the

other vital functions more easy and enjoyable. Thus was opened up to

them by this discovery a long vista of investigation. The new type of

sustenance and oxygenation was so concentrated that the couriers into

the sky could carry with them enough to serve through months.

During the next great period of discovery the Sidramo superseded

this use of alfarene by a more rapid method of concentrating air. As

usual they followed up the steps of the Floramo, and created what the

botanical families had found in nature. The use of great pressure in

the manufacture of the sustenant globules in their final form suggested

the track they should take; and the immense accumulation of energy in

Rimla and the rapidly increasing faculty of concentrating it on any

point or purpose gave them the requisite power. They came to reduce air

to liquid, and finally to solid and permanent, form. And, following up

the lead of this discovery, they applied greater and greater pressures,

and were at last able to transform with ease and without danger any

element into gaseous, liquid, or solid form. They contracted the slow

processes, that in terrestrial nature covered myriads of ages, into a

few minutes or hours, and thus again multiplied indefinitely their vast

treasures of power in Rimla.

A pioneering production, the book of elemental transformations,

foreshadowed the discoveries to which this would lead. Ether, it was

shown, would be transformed into any desired substance, as soon as its

constituents and formation were found out. Even modes of motion, like

sound and light and electricity, would, with this vast expansion of

the possibility of compression, and the growing power of amalgamating

and concentrating forms of energy, come to be bottled up in liquid or

solid form for any required period. A block of latent sound or latent

light or latent electricity would be as common as a block of ice.

Another pioneer, the book of abbreviation of geological time, opened

up a second vista of power that the discovery pointed out. Nature

took geological ages to perform most of her processes; but in great

passions she accomplished as much in a few minutes. The safe imitation

of these creative and destructive paroxysms was certain to be one of

the conquests of Limanoran posterity. For the actual concentration of

power in Rimla was as nothing compared with what it would be in the

future. Now they were able to contract the work of years into minutes;

then would they be able to leap in one moment across geological ages.

Time was the inertia of realisation and creative power. The whole drift

of their civilisation was towards the mastery of finite periods of

time. Years were to them what minutes had been to their ancestry; to

their far posterity geological ages would be as brief as years were to

them. Swifter and more swiftly would they eliminate from their creative

processes the reluctant element of time, and feel that they were pacing

in the footsteps of eternity.

As it was, they soon put the liquefaction and solidification of

the elements to countless uses. A few of these were the cooling of

their buildings by concentrated air, the use in the arts of its

corrosive power and of its power of rendering most metals easily

plastic, its amalgamation with other elements into an explosive

matter so destructive as to supersede the use of the leomoran in

earth-perforation, and the storage of their faleenas with supplies for

expeditions that would take years in interstellar space.

A minor use to which they put alfarene was the production of vacuums.

They had long had mechanical air-pumps, that gave them the vacuums

they needed for their experiments. But they now found it much easier

to enclose one of these snow-stunted shrubs in an air-tight vessel of

transparent irelium, and watch it absorb the air within the walls. The

energy formerly spent on the making of air-pumps was saved, and devoted

to some other useful purpose.

What was still better was the continual experimentation on the human

system carried on by means of these so easily accessible vacuums.

The alfarene vacuum became the daily plaything of the Limanoran, and

he took pleasure in finding out the needs of his body in it, and

the length of time he could endure the pure ether. It was not long

before they knew every difficulty they would be likely to encounter

in crossing from star to star. The minor defects of the body were

easily met after a few years’ study of them by the various scientific

families. But two gave them long pause.

One was the intense cold they were sure to experience. Where there was

no terrene matter or moisture or air to retain the solar or astral heat

that travelled through space, the diffusion of the streams of thermal

energy would render any far voyaging from the earth impracticable. The

experiments to meet this difficulty took three directions. One was

physiological,--to make the body capable of resisting as great a degree

of cold as they would be likely to encounter; this attempt was only

partially successful, and that by slow steps. They brought themselves

to live with pleasure in any cold that could be found in or around

the earth; but it would take many centuries, perhaps geological ages,

to bring endurance up to the pitch of interstellar cold; it would

in fact mean such a sublimation of their bodies as would make them

like spirits. Another direction was chemical,--to produce a regular

atmosphere round the body as it flew, so that it might retain some of

the streams of heat that swept past it; the use of the essence of the

oxygen-plant helped them in this direction to some extent; but the

amount of it that would be needed to keep up such an atmosphere for

years, concentrate it as much as they liked, meant so huge a cargo that

none of their winged cars would be able to bear it above the earth.

The third direction was physical,--to produce as much heat around the

body as would act as a shield against the cold of the ether; this was

the most successful; for there were such torrents of energy ever moving

through interstellar space that it merely needed its utilisation to

solve the problem. One plan, that, when carefully developed, would

ensure success, was a magnetic garment which would cover the whole of

the body and draw to it all the electric energy within a large radius

of it, to be transformed into heat by minute engines distributed all

over the envelope. Another was, to combine the mechanical collection

of electricity from the ether and the full development of the magnetic

powers of the body. Already they had been able to flash lightnings

around them as they flew through the night; and it would need but small

mechanical manipulation to increase this display and to turn it into

heat. Like meteors, they would blaze across space, wrapped in a mantle

of flame.

But this difficulty in the way of flight through the ether was but

slight as against the other defect that their systems had in common

with all terrene bodies. They could develop heat easily enough; but

how were they to keep intact and consistent in a vacuum constitutions

which had been developed under the pressure of an atmosphere? How

would the tissues and the organs of their bodies adjust themselves to

the absence of atmospheric conditions? As they rose above the clouds,

they had long felt as if their limbs and even the molecules of their

bodies were without due subordination and apt to assume individual

independence, even when the spirit grew boldest and most concentrated

in its energy. Their own wings and faleenas that were intended for

upper and rarer altitudes had to be made tougher and more elastic than

for common flight close to the earth. They had to make them at last in

a vacuum, and subject them to all the conditions that met them in the

ether. But it would take myriads of generations, if not of geological

ages, to bring their own bodies into such a state as to bear vacuum

around them for years; and then in their terrene life with such a new

constitution they would be unable to endure so great a pressure as that

of the atmosphere near the earth. The only contrivance that seemed

feasible was a farfaleena enclosing the traveller round, large enough

to hold alfarene supplies for the long voyage, and strong enough to

stand the pressure of an atmosphere within it. This they might manage

after some years of experimentation.

But enclosure within such a narrow space for so long a period, without

the possibility of free movement into the ether, did not attract

them; and any little accident in their machinery or to their supplies

might make their faleena their tomb. Some other line must be taken

by investigation and invention, if stellar migration was to become a

possible and desirable thing.

This line was indicated by discoveries of the Sidralmo or bio-chemical

families, and the Ooaromo or psycho-physiological families. The

Sidralmo had long been investigating the ultimate constituents of

living matter; and again and again, when seeming to be on their track,

they were baffled by the escape of some element, and left with only the

_caput mortuum_ to analyse. Under their clirolans too, powerful

though they were, the principle of life showed itself in many ways to

their senses, and yet evaded all attempt to isolate it. The lavolan,

which showed the inner structure of living bodies as they lived and

moved, brought them nearest of all to the veil that hung over the

secret of vitality. Plants and stationary animal organisms allowed

them full scope for their investigations. In them they could see the

life ebb and flow, as death approached or receded; in them they could

find every material element entering into their composition, and test

with their varied and minute meteorological apparatus all the forms

of energy which moved them; they checked the current of life, and

watched in the plant or animal the elements and energies that remained

comparatively stable and those that deteriorated; they let it die out,

and watched the throb and struggle of the various constituents and

forces as they collapsed; then, when it seemed to have surrendered

all life or hope of life, they brought it back, by their knowledge

of its existence, to the upward struggle again and no feature of the

return escaped their notice; most watchful of all were they on that

dim borderland between life and death, where dawn is sunset and sunset

dawn. In every stage were they able to isolate each strand of the

thread of life; yet the essential secret of all escaped them. Once

the organism had shrivelled into a bundle of dead fibres or fallen to

dust, no effort of theirs could give it the throb of life again. They

could reproduce every element and tissue and fibre, and under their

clirolans place them together in the forms of life with marvellous art.

One thing was still wanting to make it all it had been. They could even

mimic the flow of life through it by means of their command over the

sources of energy; but the result was only mechanical; they had not

supplied it with the never-failing spring of vitality.

At last, during the period of this great illumination there was thrown

a beam of light on the right path for solving this problem. One of

the Sidralmo was experimenting on certain substances to see how they

behaved under the rays issuing from a lavolan or revealer of inner

mechanism. They were chiefly new vegetable substances the properties of

which it was his duty to discover and tabulate. He was also mingling

one or two new minerals with the plant-products in order to see what

modification the blending would cause. One metal had lately been found

issuing from the deepest of their lava-wells in the form of vapour;

when cooled, it had assumed a crystalline character, and acted to

some extent like a magnet; yet it was sensitive to energies that an

ordinary magnet ignored, as, for instance, the passage of exceptional

nerve-force through the human body. Lightly hung, it quivered when

near anyone who happened to be greatly excited. But it paid no heed

to the normal currents of energy along the nerves. There was also a

species of plant recently evolved that had shown itself singularly

sensitive on the approach of any living thing; it shrank not merely

from the touch of a hand or of any animal, but from the proximity of

life, whilst it remained unmoved when touched by any falling leaf or

stone. The experimenter had taken a number of these plants and made of

them a basketwork, in which he hung a piece of the new magnetic metal

by a slender thread. This he placed above his lavolan to see how the

rays from it would affect, or be affected by, the new combination of

influences. There seemed to be little or no effect, but he continued

his experiment to make sure. Through some imperfection in its walls his

vacuum failed; he tried to pump the air out again, but, this failing

too, he substituted an alfarene-vacuum which happened to be near him.

The result was most striking. The metal, lightly hung in the basket,

became agitated at once, and its movements grew more or less active as

it approached or was drawn off from the vacuum. After a time it began

to show less sensitiveness, and at last became almost quiescent, even

though the vacuum remained efficient. On examining the alfarene plant

under a magnifier, he found a minute slug, that had evidently escaped

the notice of the maker of the vacuum; this had been the source of

the agitation of the metal in the basket during its last spasmodic

efforts to hold on to life; and, when death, through the lack of air,

had overcome it, the agitation had ceased. The plant itself had by the

presence of its life kept the test from becoming completely quiescent.

The influence of the life of the experimenter himself seemed to be

largely neutralised by the surrounding air; it was only when he came

very close to the test that it indicated his presence.

Here was revealed to the Sidralmo the path they had to follow; a wide

vista into the darkness had been suddenly opened. It was not long

before they had taken full advantage of the discovery. They invented

the most helpful of all their instruments, the sidralan or biometer;

they hung the combination of life-sensitive plant and nerve-sensitive

metal itself in a vacuum, directly in the path of an electric current;

the details of its mechanism they rapidly improved till it measured

with accuracy the degree of vitality in any plant or animal. But they

soon found that it was differently affected by vegetable and animal

life. The energy of the former moved it but slightly, and only in

certain directions; the latter seemed to surround it and agitate it

from all sides; it quivered as if with subdued excitement. Yet there

were degrees in both; some plants moved it more than the most primitive

unicellular animals, although the movement was less pervasive. Thus

were they well on the way towards the isolation of the life-principle

from its constant concomitants.

The biometer came to be of as much importance to the medical

superintendents as to the Sidralmo; it abridged the labour of their

weekly inspection; for it told in a moment whether the vitality in

any member of the community had fallen or risen in degree, whether

it was below the proper average, in short whether all his organs and

tissues would have to be minutely examined for the cause, and whether

his dietary scheme would have to be revised. The psycho-physiological

families found it of some use in their investigations into the

faculties of man and their basis in his bodily constitution. They found

that the wiser and more intellectual a personality was, the more gently

he moved the sidralan; the more of animal vitality he had, the more

violently he agitated it by his presence.

But the instrument was too rough and undiscriminating for their

purposes. It could not distinguish between the purely spiritual and the

purely animal except in this loose way. They tried modifications of it,

but without success. It was the Ailomo or astrobiological families that

helped them to take the right direction. They were constantly bringing

down out of the stratum above the atmosphere vessels full of the

seeming nothingness that existed there, in order to investigate it and

see whether it was mere vacuum or not; and though the contents appealed

to none of their senses but the electric, their various instruments

of research revealed different energies and a large amount of life,

besides minute forms of matter without life. On several occasions

they had noticed that the contents affected their tests differently

when the experimenter was near and when he stood at a distance. Step

by step they separated the element that acted thus from its various

concomitants. And soon they were able to concentrate a considerable

quantity of it in a receiver exhausted of air, and to precipitate it in

powdery metallic form.

The substance was handed over to the Ooaromo, who saw that it would

supply the test they wanted; for it was but slightly sensitive to the

presence of animals, and its sensitiveness gradually vanished as they

tried it with lower and lower species of animals; whilst it quivered

near men, less near young men and women, only slightly near infants,

but with quick tremors when near the older and wiser Umanorans, who

had suffered and thought through long centuries. They came to the

conclusion that this residuum was the essence of some element in the

ether that responded to the energy of the higher faculties, as the

magnet responded to electricity. They had in fact found at last a true

test of soul, that refinement of the higher animal energies which has

assumed a new grade in life, the consciousness of itself, and the power

of keeping its own form and essence as an entity for ever separate from

all other beings and things.

It was not long before the Ooaromo had made from it an apparatus which

would test the presence of soul and measure its force. In this ooaran

or psychometer they were at last furnished with an instrument that

would give organic unity and new purpose to their science. They would

now be able to watch and measure the growth of soul in the child, and

the ebb and flow of its strength in youth; and thus would they give new

vigour and life to the creative function of their science. They had now

an exact basis for education; as guides of parents and proparents in

tuition they would walk in the full day, where before they had groped

in dim twilight; in every case would they be able to advise with the

same certainty as the medical elders advised on the health of the body.

For the mature men and women would they act as true father-confessors,

and do what the priests of so many religions pretended to do, but

did not do; they would be able to tell everyone, who desired it,

whether his soul had advanced or receded in power after any series of

sufferings and deeds, or any line of conduct, and thus to give advice

as to what should be done or omitted in the future. And when the

elders had come near what had before seemed the utmost limit of life,

they would be able to tell them whether their nausea of existence was

only fleeting and subjective, or whether the roots of their soul were

loosening themselves from the soil of the body.

CHAPTER II

AN ACCIDENT

BUT so vast an expansion of science and the unveiling of so many

outlooks into the future left no room for the thought of death. The

pace of life quickened perceptibly, and the energy of every dweller

on the island was strained to its utmost to meet the requirements

of the new additions to the force of the country and of all the new

inventions. It was impossible to think of anything but the tasks in

hand. None had an idle thought, none a leisure moment to waste on mere

introspection or dreams.

In fact it became quite clear that the old dream-factory might be

closed for a time at least. For several generations it had been the

custom of the Limanorans to stimulate invention and discovery by

the use of magnetism. When anyone felt his problem insoluble, or an

insuperable obstacle in the way of his advance towards some practical

goal, he had his dream-consciousness awakened and quickened as he

slept. A member of the medical families would attend by his bedside,

and apply a magnetic current to the particular point of his brain that

controlled the powers concerned in his pursuit, and especially to the

parts which were the physical expression of the imaginative faculties.

And by day he would instruct the thinker as to what nutritive or

medicated chambers he should enter in order to draw the main strength

of his system towards the faculties he needed. Day after day the

patient nurtured the parts of the brain and of the nervous system

that would help him to the solution; night after night he dreamt out

the terms of the problem. At last either in day-dream or night-fancy

the curtain would be raised, and he would see the path to take; light

flashed in on him as if from another world. What in my buried life

used to be called inspiration was cultivated, moulded, and directed

with as deliberate foresight and care as any feature of the body or

the character. Nor were these dream-stimulants ever abused; when the

purpose had been served, the goal reached, at once the other faculties

and physical parts had equal attention; the strain was unbent, and

the symmetry and balance of the whole system restored. Never was the

stimulation of dream-consciousness permitted for a mere pleasure or

whim; the importance of the aim to the progress of the race had to be

proved before it was granted; nay it was only problems the solution

of which would lead to extraordinary advances, that were dealt with

by narolla or dream-consciousness stimulants. Now the narolla were

entirely abandoned; for imagination was preternaturally excited, and

discovery and invention seemed to come to investigators almost without

effort.

It was indeed a period of accelerated progress, if not of precipitance,

in the work of all families. The darkness around existence lifted over

the whole horizon, and demanded redoubled exertion, in order that the

new regions should be mapped before it fell. The tissues and nerves

of every Limanoran felt the stimulus; each worked with a will. Still

the necessities of the situation almost ran ahead of their powers.

One thing became clear, that they must have more workers; the new

generation would have to be more numerous than the last. For the young

had to be drawn upon for active nerve- and head-work before their usual

time; and these would need more leisure in the next stage of their life

to compensate for the loss of it in the period of growth.

It grew evident that parents who had been exceptionally successful

in the two children they had brought forth, reared, and launched

full-fledged on the career of life should be permitted and stimulated

to resume parentage. It was considered one of the highest privileges

and honours to be selected as parents again by the magnetic

consciousness of the nation. There was needed no formal agreement

or resolution; the mind of the race was known without consulting it

openly; and every pair felt in a moment that they were selected for

reparentage; they required no stimulation, no permission to enter on

the patriotic duty. And all considered it a duty of the loftiest kind.

Passion in the race burned low; no longer was it a sting or goad that

had to be mastered; it was in short no more a passion, such as the use

of imagination, the love of the race, or the yearning after advance had

become. The animal element in it had grown insignificant, and left it

at the bidding of intellect and will. These tried parents had thus no

sensuous pleasure to seek in the new task assigned to them. They took

it upon them as a duty, and their chief pleasure lay in the honour they

had been paid, and in the service they were doing to the race and to

the progress of their humanity.

A second necessity of the new position was earlier marriage on the

part of the men and women of the community. As soon as bare maturity

had been reached, pairing now began. First it had to be scientifically

ascertained that all the merely primitive stages of mankind had been

passed through, not only the prehistoric, but the historical. It would

be one of the greatest of evils to allow the privilege of parenting

for the community to any who might have yet to go through a stage of

individual life that represented centuries of the past of mankind.

Little better would this be than stocking their island with children

from their exiles. It was a question of testing every individual;

for some passed more rapidly through the life of their ancestry than

others; and these were not always the best as parents or even as

citizens. Every tissue and faculty had to be tested, after careful

study of the records of the childhood and youth. No possible prospect

or chance of atavistic taint was overlooked.

The next duty was to review the needs of the race. The tasks and

abilities of every family were measured, and the possible expansions of

these were estimated; then new sciences, or new divisions of sciences,

or new duties that would need the services of a family or families

specially selected and moulded for the purpose, were taken into the

account. From this elaborate review of the resources and needs of

the population conclusions were carefully drawn as to the number and

quality of the children that were required. The problem was easy enough

as far as mere extensions of the existing families were concerned. But

the creation of new types was a question that tasked the abilities of

the wisest to the utmost. The special faculties needed for the new

science or art or duty had to be discussed and decided; and especially

how far existing faculties would have to be modified or newly

combined. Then out of the various families those two had to be chosen,

a cross which would produce the required modification or combination.

But, as this was still largely of the nature of experiment, more than

one effort was made towards each new type, in order that, if one child

failed, the others might be available. But the wise creators of new

types were rapidly getting surer of their ground; their experiments

were growing less of experiments; they could almost foretell to a

faculty or tissue the result of the crossing of any two families. And

where any quality was unequal to the new duty, first creative surgery

was called in to modify or add to the tissue of that part of the brain

which was the physical equivalent of the faculty, and afterwards

education with its various magnetic and dietary aids was brought to

bear on its development. Yet there might be some chance of their new

type falling short of its purpose and, to guard against this, several

individuals of it were brought forth and trained. It was generally

found that all of them were needed to carry out the duties of the new

position.

After everything had been settled in the programme of the next

generation, the task of matching began. Time after time the two who

were to be the parents of the new type were thrown together as if by

accident in circumstances and surroundings which would touch their

imaginations and rouse their enthusiasm for each other. They were put

into difficult positions together, so that one might help to extricate

the other from them. Alternate debt and service wove mutual bonds

around them, till at last neither desired to issue from the network of

obligation and love in which they were caught. The magnetism of one was

complementary to that of the other; and when separated they longed to

see each other. With none in the community was the filammu of either

in such communion as with the loved mate. Thus partly wise choice,

and partly spontaneity, produced the match. The lifelong bond could

never become enslaving for either; for the material of it had been

selected not by mere youthful caprice, but by the maturest wisdom of

the race, whilst it was spun by the impulse and will of the two friends

themselves. Neither the state nor either of the partners could possibly

regret the friendship, or wish it dissolved. It passed as naturally

into marriage as flower into fruit.

But, whilst the future was thus being safeguarded, the new duties or

expanded duties had to be looked after. Seventy-five years of work

had to be provided for before the new citizens could be made fit for

their duties. Part of this was covered by drawing earlier on the powers

of the new generation; the youth must come out of their seclusion a

few years sooner than usual. But that was not sufficient. What way

was there out of the difficulty? It was a tacit rule of the community

that none were to overstrain their energies; overwork was considered

as great a vice as indolence; for it cheated the race of some of its

advance by demoralising the faculties and tissues, and bringing on the

nausea of life earlier than it should come by nature. The biometer

was carefully applied to every citizen in order to test how far he

could go in work without wasting his energies. And after all had been

assigned additional work to their utmost limit, there was still so much

unassigned. The only chance of meeting it was the extension of life.

The elders must live longer. Happily every condition was now present

for managing this. They had new foods and agents for revitalising the

tissues; they had new apparatus for discovering internal defects in the

human system, and new methods of remedying them; the far vistas opened

up into the future gave a new purpose to the life even of the most

aged; they longed to see what would come of all the expanded invention

and discovery; the enthusiasm of the new age fired the imagination of

the oldest. Limanoran life had another century added to it.

In the midst of the bustle of these preparations for the future (if

anything the Limanorans did could be called bustle), there occurred an

accident that smote them almost with dismay, and brought them as near

as I had ever seen them approach to melancholy. The additions to the

sources of the energy available in Rimla had entailed more muscular

work as well as more superintendence, and it was necessary to assign

more physical toil to the now-earlier mature than had been customary.

Two scions of the meteorological families, who had been selected for

marriage and parentage, were sent to manage a large pirakno, which had

been constructed for drawing the magnetism from the air and the spaces

just beyond the atmosphere. The great machine had been placed on an

isolated spur of Lilaroma, so that if ever through the sudden sweeping

of the earth into a supermagnetised area it should become dangerous, it

could easily be detached from Rimla and insulated. And there were never

less than two beside it to help in its management.

The younger men and women took the night watches in all the physical

labour that had to be undertaken. And Tamarna and Omirlo, as one of

the youngest and least experienced of the pairs that had to manage

this huge pirakno, kept the last watch of the night, the watch that

included sunrise and was followed by that of two of the most mature

workers. It was thought that, as every Limanoran would be awake and on

the alert at dawn, help in any emergency could easily be procured. As

it was well known that during that period there was a great increase

of magnetism in the atmosphere, provision was made in the machine

itself for so regular a change; it was so arranged that, when the sun’s

rays first touched it, it should automatically increase its capacity

for magnetism. But so recent had been the development of cosmic

magnetography that the times and seasons of the irregular increase of

magnetism had not been tabulated and classified. Had the observations

been made for a long enough time to allow of inferring a uniformity

or law, then it would have been seen that these supermagnetised

spaces, though they may have been entered by the earth during the

night, have little effect upon her atmosphere till day dawns; the

excess of magnetism seems to lie dormant in the dark; the first rays

of the sun act like a fuse to a mine and complete the circuit between

extra-terrene space and the surface of the earth. Sunrise, in fact,

as they came afterwards to see, was the most critical time for such a

machine as the pirakno.

It happened, too, that on this particular night the sarmolan or cosmic

barometer had been getting out of order; but its watchers did not think

it called for immediate attention; the morning would be time enough

to put it right. Its indicator thus lay tongue-tied and misleading,

when it should have been violently agitated. Tamarna and Omirlo had no

warning of the approaching magnetic tornado. The hour before dawn the

pirakno moved as regularly and quietly as at that point of the night

when the magnetic tide is at its lowest ebb, the point when sleep is

deepest and death is most frequent. They had just seen that every part

was moving without friction and fully coping with its work; and Omirlo

felt that he could leave his mate for a brief space and consult the

sarmolan-watchers. He had been gone but a few minutes when he heard a

loud crash behind him, and at the same moment he noticed that the first

beams of the sun had struck across the levels of the sea. He turned

and saw a flash from the place where, he thought, the pirakno stood.

Flying back in trepidation, he found the machine as he had left it, but

it had stopped. At first he could not see Tamarna; but on searching he

saw her form lying on the ground close to the pirakno, hidden by one of

its cranks. He touched her temples and left side, and saw that life had

fled. The crank had come upon her as she lay, and bruised her body; the

sight of this completed his despair; he felt that the last hope of her

recall had vanished.

Yet he knew how much the medical elders could do, and there arose in

his mind a flicker of hope. He wasted no time on lamentation, for

there moved in him the carefully trained consciousness that all such

abandonment to emotion was an offence against the progress of the

race. They considered that every occurrence of life demanded as much

concentration of energy and thought as a shipwreck, or the incidents

of a battle, or anything that we in the West would call an alarming

emergency. As grief or despair or fear used up the power that should be

spent on action, emotion was strictly reined in at such a moment; the

instinct was to call the whole resources of the nature to action.

Omirlo braced himself to the emergency, and sent the whole of the

magnetism he was capable of into his will-telegraph. After a few

minutes’ exercise of it, it seemed to relax, and he knew that he had

roused his parents to the danger. Recalling his energies to Tamarna,

he followed the few simple rules that he had been taught for the

recovery of the seeming dead. He made her lungs and heart imitate

the play of life; he switched the magnetism of his own system on to

hers. But after all his efforts she lay still inert when his parents

arrived. They decided to carry her at once to the medical elders, for

they saw that something exceptional had occurred; it was not a swoon,

or even death from the bruise dealt by the pirakno. So they took her

wings, and making them by means of soft leafage into a couch for her,

they bore her through the air swiftly, but just as she had lain when

found. Tamarna’s own parents met them on the way, and helped them to

accelerate their pace with her; and within less than ten minutes after

the accident she was in the hands of the sages in the mountain hospital.

The general medical house was Oomalefa. But there were two houses

of cure which approached more nearly to what our hospitals are. One

was far up the slopes of Lilaroma, not much beneath the winter-line

of snow. The other was aërial and movable, and was, whenever it

was needed, floated upwards to the margin of our atmosphere, where

parasitic and microscopic life was reduced to unaggressive feebleness.

In it were all the necessities of life at hand; the temperature was

kept close to summer heat; and there were lines of communication, so

thin as to be almost invisible in the air, connecting it with the halls

of sustenance and medication. This hospital was meant for the invalid

who was strong enough to be moved up from solid earth; and, as soon as

one had been brought back far enough from the grasp of death to bear

the rarity of the upper air where it merged into the ether, he was

taken up in it. But Tamarna was first borne to the mountain hospital,

where the instruments of investigation and cure were ready. When she

should have had all the ruptures of her bones and organs and tissues

set for mending, and all the tissues that were crushed beyond mending

replaced by freshly manufactured tissues, and when she was seen to hold

on to life with a tenacious grasp again, then would she be borne into

the hospital of accelerative healing high above the clouds.

The biometer recorded the faint presence of life; the spirit had

not yet escaped, and before long it grew manifest to ordinary eyes.

They had apparatus for stirring any organ of the body into activity;

and with the lavolan they soon saw which of Tamarna’s functions

had been deranged and had suffered syncope. It was her heart that

had ceased action; the inrush of magnetism from space drawn by the

pirakno, without provision for storing it or letting it pass harmless,

had paralysed some of the more important cardiac tissues and the

circulation was in many places clogged, whilst a large proportion of

the superficial blood-vessels had been ruptured by the fall of the

crank upon the body. A European medical council would have abandoned

the bruised and discoloured corpse as fit only to be “food for worms.”

But no member of the community could be spared in such a period of

enthusiasm and expansion. The newly discovered agents and methods

were brought to bear. Delicate instruments made the heart first mimic

and then produce the true cardiac action. Currents of magnetism

swept the veins, and cleared the routes for the circulation of the

blood, at the same time stimulating the life-fluid. The livid hue

gradually disappeared from the face. Another instrument gave action

to the lungs, first in mimic and then in vital way. Concentrated

sustenance was injected into the veins and soon the breathing grew

regular. Yet it needed hours of this recreative work to bring the

spirit to consciousness of itself. Out of the depths the soul seemed

to be dragged by slow steps back into the reluctant body again. The

psychometer was far more slow to give signs than the biometer. But, as

soon as it revealed the approach of the soul, the friends of Tamarna

were brought near her, all who had magnetic affinities with her, and

especially her betrothed Omirlo. From that point the recovery was

astonishingly rapid. The magnetism of friendship seemed to draw back

the spirit from its desire to escape. The eyes opened, and a look of

intelligence and love shone through their vitreous dulness like dawn in

a misty sky; recognition quickly irradiated her whole being, then faded

out, then came again, till at last the curtain which hid the soul rose,

and the very body seemed to become diaphanous to the light of reason.

The spirit dwelt again in its old habitation.

The rest was a matter of the commonest medical science. Every tissue

was restored to its previous healthy state. Every fracture and bruise

and scar was obliterated. Every item of her system which had suffered

beyond the possibility of repair was remade and grafted into her body

again. Nursing and medicated atmospheres under the wisest medical

guidance restored Tamarna to her duties and to Omirlo as efficient and

graceful and healthy as before the accident.

In spite of this triumphant success of their medical science, I

could see that depression prevailed in the community. Not even what

appeared to me to be the almost supernatural power of drawing the

life back seemed to console them. For they had often seen still more

wonderful displays of medical skill. Men who had been for months to

all appearance dead were restored to full vital power, even when the

microscopic transformers of dead matter had begun to batten on their

tissues. No body that still retained the human form was beyond their

skill; the soul could be enticed back after it had accomplished its

flight from earth, for it still kept its affinities to its terrene

companions, though cosmic distances should separate them. That was

the most difficult task, not the recrudescence of life, but the

re-enticement of the spirit that had grown happy in its release.

When I observed that the meteorological families were the nearest

of all to dejection, even though they had recovered their loved

member, I came to the right conclusion. It was the accident that had

unmanned them. That they should be taken unawares in a sphere they had

mastered preyed on their minds. For one of the immediate objects of

their science was to take command of their future, to eliminate the

unexpected from life. What was the value of their progress, if they

did not see more clearly and farther into the sphere of darkness that

bounded life like a horizon? True, the cosmic was still infinite in its

night for them, and in the cosmic lay ambushed countless alarms. But

they had driven their outposts far into the twilight. The age they were

in had seen such an expansion of science that the veil seemed lifted

from the face of boundless night. Their sarmolan pioneered before them

into space, and foretold them the dire catastrophes that might lie in

wait for them. And yet they were at the mercy of accident. What was the

use of such an influx of suggestion from the unknown? What was their

power over nature, if thus they allowed the fortuitous to drift in upon

them? They had not suffered such discomfiture for ages. They abhorred

the thought that they should again be the slaves of mere hazard.

But they rebelled against even the appearance of impotence, and would

not allow any mood approaching despair to settle on their spirits.

At once the Piramo set about the repair of their defences against

accident. The pirakno was found to be fused into one mass of metal

by the force of magnetism which had gathered into it from the space

around. Another, larger and more effective, was produced and in it

there was a new arrangement by which the storage was automatically

governed; any increase in the magnetism it received was at once

provided for; and if at any time the inflow should surpass the capacity

for storage, there was a governor which automatically switched the

surplusage into the sea, or back again into the air.

A sarmolan too was invented which had greater strength, and at the

same time greater nicety of adjustment. It could be left in the space

beyond the atmosphere, untended for nights together; for it was

self-recording, and as long as its parts were kept clear of extraneous

matter or force, it was incapable of derangement. Not that it was

to be left to itself for a moment; even though it now regularly

telegraphed all its changes to Rimla and to the locality of the

pirakno, meteorological observers were near it night and day to watch

and interpret its signals. To guard against any possible assault of

accident, other sarmolans were ballooned into space whose indications

were mutually corrective; where one went astray, the others would be

right.

When Tamarna was completely restored to health and it was made certain

by the medical tests that every organ and tissue of her system was

fit for its task, her marriage with Omirlo was accorded; and the two

entered on their career of parentage. Their duties were made lighter,

in order that their energy might pass unimpaired into posterity. They

still had their round of work, that their tissues might not grow

flaccid, or their life tend to excessive solitude. But Omirlo did for

both all that needed great exertion of mental or physical faculty.

CHAPTER III

DEATH

THE accident drew the two together, strengthening their affinities into

irrevocable bonds. And now that all was well with them, their sense of

the joy of life welled through their whole nature. Those who came near

them felt its contagion. Yet there was one in their family who felt it

only to smile at it. The aged Amiralno had seen so many centuries fleet

past him that the passage of time with its triumphs had grown stale.

He was battling with this nausea of life when the new age of discovery

and invention had come upon them. And it so far renewed his energy that

he was willing to live through it and take his share in the additional

duties which it laid upon his generation. He had seen the infancy

of the science over which he now presided pass into lusty youth and

thence into manhood; and was he to cut his terrene roots before he had

seen its greatest triumphs? Meteorology seemed about to take as wide

regions of space within its scope as astronomy had; it seemed about to

master secrets that would drive mere chance out of its calculations.

The curiosity and wonder of youth were again stirred within him. He

longed to advance with the new age into spheres that had so long lain

under the horizon, only half-guessed at. Before he closed his eyes

on Limanora what wonders might not yet be revealed to them? His blood

had tingled with the thought, and his organs were filled with the old

energy. He would resume the direction of his science for many a year to

come.

But the intrusion of accident into his own sphere had palsied his

renewed enthusiasms. For a time, whilst he was restoring Tamarna to

her old self, and barring out the chance of accident again, he was not

conscious of the check given to the vigour of his functions. But, when

all was well and the families of the Piramo were busy again at the

expansion of meteorology, he knew that the old nausea had returned with

redoubled force. The impetus of the new age was beginning to fail; its

pace had perceptibly slackened; its best triumphs had been won; and

it needed the ignorance of eyes newly opened upon the green earth and

the azure vault of sky to peer into the darkness with thrilling hope;

it needed the elasticity of youthful muscles and tissues to withstand

the weariness and despair that come with the truer perspective of a

gigantic future become a pigmy past. What had he to do with human

prospects, when a thousand times he had seen them loom large on the

horizon, and then fade into commonplace when realised? Here had he

outlasted a dozen generations of ordinary men, and shared the triumphs

of a people whose progress compared with that of the rest of the earth

was as lightning to the pace of a snail; and yet, when he looked at

all that they had done in these thousand years, it was as nothing in

the shadow of what had yet to be done, a poor hand’s breadth beside

the voyage of light from a distant star. Where lay the advantage in

extending a life that had seen such humiliation before the everlasting

future? He might spin the thread of his life out for another thousand

years without great effort. But what would that do for his race,

or himself who had seen his past, with all the achievements that

had each seemed as it came within the range of possibility a marvel

surpassing the human, fade into a microscopic speck underneath the

sumless stars? The voices of his friends, as they poured consolation

and eulogy, persuasion and prayer, into his ears, sounded now like the

undistinguishable hum of insects as sleep comes upon a man in the open.

What would they not have meant to him in the ambitious time of youth?

How strongly they rang out to him at the beginning of the last stage of

enthusiasm, when they drove out of him the love of going for ever to

sleep! But, now, that the longing had come to him again, they sounded

idly as the exultant wail of gnats on the evening air. The life of

earth was withdrawn and distant for him.

And who could raise a word against his release? He had done more than

his share for the progress of the race. He had watched the interests

of his science and made it an essential of all advance. He had braced

his energies again and again to meet the requirements of a new age,

another march ahead into the night. He had time after time molten the

Piramo into a new unity by the magnetism of his enthusiasm. More than

once he had extended the years of his life that he might serve his

race. And now he had skilled men and women under him, who could do all

that he had done, and more. The exceptional needs of the new time had

found their attendants mechanic or human. The strain it had put on the

efforts of the race was unbent. Why should he linger in a world grown

so stale to him, a world that needed no longer his guidance or even

his help?

There was one question to answer before the mind of the community was

made up. It was the final scientific question. Was his vitality great

enough yet to bear the strain, were the impulses of another new age to

give it enthusiasm? Was the soul already too detached from the body to

allow of the two being closely reunited for another great effort? The

question was one for their medical science and psychology to answer.

The sidralan or biometer abridged the task of the medical elders. It

reported a low pitch of vital energy, too feeble to bear up through the

labours and watches of another period. But they were afraid to trust

wholly to so newly invented an instrument and fell back upon their old

elaborate methods of testing; they investigated the state of every

organ and tissue of the aged body with lavolans, the heart and brain

with especial care. And it was clear from their state that the spirit

could not long reside in them and function them with ease. It was at

this point that the Ooaromo came in to aid them with their instruments

for testing the bond between soul and body, and for measuring the

psychic power that still remained ready to use the brain and its

instruments the senses. Their older methods and their newest apparatus,

the ooaran, all agreed in confirming the conclusion that the medical

elders had come to.

For Amiralno himself there remained one serious question, which had

troubled the race from the time that mere faith had ceased to rule and

pilot their creed, and reason had been accepted as the only ultimate

guide of life, the final court of appeal in which all questions must be

decided. They could not trust to emotion or instinct; for these were

but hard-won creeds and habits of past imperfect ages grown unconscious

of their origin by transmission from generation to generation.

Authority out of the past, tradition, law of nature, had the same

taint upon them. They were but the crude conclusions of comparatively

primitive times, with the logic leading to them veiled by oblivion,

then thrust upon later ages as inspiration. All these dogmatic judges

of the present and the future were but the shadows of their own

worst and atavistic selves. It was only an illusion, a mirage in the

desert of the past, to trust these merely subjective impressions as

reflections from the ultimately real, the absolute. A people like this

was sure to abandon all such projections of their own dead selves as

steps to higher than themselves.

Every man had to settle for himself the problems that his science

had been unable to solve, and that he must find some solution of in

death. They had longed and striven for absolute certainty, yet every

new age had to fall back upon the individual consciousness and hope,

which were wholly on the side of belief in personal immortality. They

knew that the energy in them could never die, whatever form it might

take. Never had they found in the whole round of their investigations

anything like absolute death or annihilation; every change that they

observed, however far into infinity they had searched, was but a

transformation of energy, and not its final evanishment. Matter was

only a resting-place, a half-way house, of energy. And even matter was

a comparative term, depending on the sensuous point of view of the

observer. What was matter to one generation was found by a later to

be pure energy, or even a mass of life. What was matter to one sense

was to another nothing but energy. And the development of new senses,

that gave them full consciousness of some hitherto-unrecognised type

of energy, saved them from the dogmatism about the future based upon

the idea that all types of energy were known to them. Their wonderful

instruments of research revealed to them worlds of energy which might

have lain for ages undiscovered, and swept out all stupid trust in the

omniscience of the senses or the instincts. They refused to dogmatise

about the existence or non-existence of any type of energy or being.

Nay, they preferred to accept provisionally the existence of any form

that their imagination might sketch out as possible and as consistent

with the laws they had found permeating all the known universe. Belief

was for them hope waiting for realisation.

Every new discovery pointed more and more definitely to the greater

persistence of the higher forms of energy. What appeals to the more

primitive and lower set of senses holds to even its inner form for but

a comparatively brief time. Touch is the primary sense, and all that

it, unaided by the other senses, can discover is apt to keep changing

its form. Taste and smell are simple modifications of touch and they

report of things in perpetual transformation. Hearing and sight are the

highest of the first set of senses; for they respond to types of energy

that travel from vast distances. Hearing is the lower of the two,

because the lower senses are conscious unaided of the medium in which

the energy travels. Sight has as her courier an energy which bridges

infinity, and its medium no lower sense can cognise. Light approaches

nearer to indestructibility than anything the original senses know.

The last-developed of the senses, the firla, takes cognisance of

an energy, magnetism, which is farthest of all from the need of a

material medium; whilst the filammu or will-telegraph brings soul to

soul irrespective of all sense-cognisable means of communication, and

proves the existence of a medium more refined than any that either the

senses or the reason has yet come to know. This medium, doubtless that

of thought itself, as the highest and least material, must be least

destructible, least transformable, least unstable in equilibrium of

all known mediums. Their ooarans would soon be made delicate enough

to measure the faintest presence of soul, and would decide the point

whether this medium, evidently spread throughout the universe, was of

the same stuff as the soul.

Still were they far from scientific proof of the eternal unity and

individuality of the soul. They had reasoned out in accordance with

all the axioms of their science the indestructibility of energy,

and the rising untransformability of the higher types of energy;

they had also reasoned out as certainly that mediums of energy had

stability of equilibrium proportionate to the refinement of the

energy travelling through them, and that thus the soul was nearer to

everlasting persistence as a unity than any medium they scientifically

knew. But that on its escape from the body it continued for ever as an

individuality they could only assume; they could not prove it. They

shrank from the idea that it was for ever past transformation; for that

meant the eternal continuance of the last stage of life. It was indeed

contrary to all the results of their scientific investigations to think

that any type of energy or medium could at any time cease to change,

that is, to improve or degenerate. Perpetual transformation was, as far

as they had been able to search, the universal law: it might be into

a higher or more stable form, or into a lower or more material form,

but onwards must every energy move. The higher it went, the less did it

tend to fall back. The law of eternal advance was surer in its action

in the higher ranges of existence. And the whole effort of Limanoran

life was to purify and ennoble the energy that was in it. For,

reasoning on the analogy of all the nature they knew, they had little

doubt that the platform they reached by the end of their terrene life

was the platform from which their enfranchised energy or individuality,

whichever it was, started on its new career.

Whether it was mere unconscious energy or energy conscious of its own

unity that escaped from the body, when it was left to the disintegrant

power of microscopic organisms, was still a question. The recent

discoveries and investigations of the Ailomo or astrobiological

families had revealed all space filled not merely with types of

energy that were directed and did not guide themselves, but with

embodiments of energy which were clearly individualities; not alone

the poor microscopic attenuations of life that were waiting for a

world to settle on, but highly organised beings, leading a vigorous,

self-dependent life in the vast regions of infinitude. This much they

knew from the filmy impressions which their air-transcending lavolans

brought down from the heights of heaven they scaled. But whence those

inhabitants of the ether came they had not yet been able to tell; for

their presence affected no existing human sense, but only left on the

irelium films certain visible impressions. Whether they were refugees

from other stars, or everlasting occupants of interstellar space,

and whether amongst them there were any of the emancipate from human

trammels were questions they had not yet been able to answer. But they

hoped soon to have an instrument which would indicate the presence of

personality as apart from vital energy, and as apart from the thought

and thought-faculty. Then would they be able to tell in what state the

enfranchised energy fled from the body at death.

Amiralno knew not, cared not, whether he would retain consciousness

of his past, or would become but a part of the wandering energy of

space; what he did know was that he would be released from the burden

of his body and the growing weariness that dragged it down. Certain

he was that his flesh-emancipated energy would find a career at least

as noble as his past. And he believed that its development would not

end there, whatever became of it; whether it was to continue the unity

it had been conscious of for so many years, or to take another form

and individuality, was to him a matter of little concern. One thing

he knew, and that was the growing imperfection of the body as an

instrument of the energy that functioned it. It weighted to the ground

the soul, the spirit, the mind, or whatever name he might give to the

fiery stuff which kept it still aflame, and yet chafed to be free.

As long as it held this energy in leash, it would live and glow with

thought. Nor was this fiery stuff mere vitality, the mere principle

of life, though the two were yoked together. It was different in

quality from that which merely vegetated in the plant, and that which

did nothing but feed and evacuate in the mollusc. Nay, it differed in

inner character, not merely from the mind of the savage, but from that

of their own highly civilised exiles. Limanoran advance had purified

it of grosser desires and passions and made it a thing of ethereal

longings and ideals; even the body had been transformed into something

more like what the soul of their far past had been, subtle, buoyant,

sublimated. Still it dragged the spirit down, whenever the limits of

corporeal life became too apparent. Many a long generation of fiery

self-disciplined work upon their constitutions would it take even this

marvellous people to etherealise their bodies so far as to make them

fit companions of their souls.

Amiralno had not the vital energy to bear up against the conditions

that harassed their still hybrid system. He had no desire to stay and

see the slow evolution of a body that would pace with the soul through

infinity. Better to have release and a new and untrammelled career even

if the form he should take was unknown to him. It was the nature of all

energy to change, and the higher in the scale it rose, the nimbler it

became. But in order to rise it had to be yoked for a time with a lower

form, which it used as medium and leverage, leaving it as soon as it

had accomplished its due development. All things tended to rise above

themselves; and it was the greatest of disasters, the very reversal of

nature, if ever they should fall back, as they often did. What we call

death was but the unyoking of a higher energy from a lower, which it

had temporarily made its comrade and medium. It was no misfortune or

degradation, but a step higher in enfranchisement. The animate resisted

this step, because one member in the lifelong partnership refused to

descend into a grosser transformation again. In the human, the nobler

the thought-energy, the higher it strove to raise itself before the

inevitable divorce from its lower medium and yoke-fellow. But when the

time of severance approached, it mastered the reluctance of the lower,

and yearned to be set free. And little wonder that the lower resisted;

for back it had to fall in the cosmic order, and begin again its slow

progress upward from grade to grade; first into the clutches of myriads

of microscopic disintegrators of its tissues that would transform it

into food for plant-life, and then by weary stages upwards through

vegetable and animal tissue, perchance into the sustenance of thought

again.

This people, I soon found, had overcome the ancient abhorrence of

death. For they identified their life and personality with the

higher of their energies, and not with the lower and bodily forms.

They shrank, it is true, from all that would lead to the divorce of

the yoked energies of any animate being before its due time; not so

much because they thought this an evil for the victim as because the

perpetration would implant in the doer a germ of retrogression. To be

cruel, to shed blood, was the beginning of degradation of the soul;

it was one of the acts that allowed the lower to take command of the

higher in their system. But for a Limanoran himself to approach death

became, whenever he saw it to be inevitable, the keenest joy, in spite

of the farewells it entailed. He knew that thereafter, should he make

effort to live, he would only clog the wheels of progress, he would

only be a burden on the race instead of its helper. Amiralno never

showed the slightest sign of shrinking from the dissolution of his

life-bonds. He was sad to leave his lifelong mate, with whom he had

done so much for the race; but he knew that she would soon follow him;

it was a matter of but a few days or months; her thought-energy would

mingle and commune with his again, freed from the material trammels

that checked and dulled their intercourse in their terrene life;

upwards through the ether their souls would climb, ever becoming purer

and swifter in their flight.

But, as I went about my duties, my thoughts would break away to the

coming death-scene and sadness would cloud them. I remembered the last

farewells of my buried life, and most of all the watch over the fading

light in my mother’s eyes. Nothing could burn out of my memory the

bitterness of at last facing the inevitable. Slowly had I been led by

the physician to realise that nothing could save her, and still I hoped

against hope, checking my tears lest she should see them and conjecture

my alarm. Only when the lips became silent and pale did I at last admit

the thought that this was death. How could I stifle my grief longer?

Were we not all to each other, this mother, who had clung to me and

nursed me through sorrows and misfortunes, I her only child, who had

refused to leave her for the seductions of great place and fortune?

She was vanishing for ever from me, and nothing I could do would bring

her back. I was caught and crushed by the iron hand of fate and stood

in stony silence, paralysed by my grief and my impotence. There was

too much of the man and the stoic in my young blood to cry out; but

if only I could give up my own life to bring hers back! In one of her

final waking dreams she prattled and wept over me as if I were a child

again, saved once more from the clutching breakers. Raising herself

with a wild cry from her pillow, she held me in her arms with fierce

love; only for a moment; then the cords that bound her life brake;

the memory had torn her heart. There she lay, all that I cared for

on earth, rigid, uncaring. If but I could have died with her there!

Alas, the life in me was too puissant to yield, the nerves too tough

to break! The passion came on me to hurl myself into her grave as the

clods fell. It was but an insensate impulse. I made no cry or sign till

I got into the lonely chamber; and there God alone knows how I survived

my hurricane of grief and desolation. Nor could years ever root out the

sorrow. There in Limanora, with an abyss between me and my past, and

a noble new life around me, I worked and wept. The wound had opened

afresh. Was I never to commune with that loving loved spirit again?

There was a touch on my hand, and the magnetism of sympathy and

consolation flowed through my system. It was Thyriel. She had felt my

deep grief, though then at a great distance from me, and without noise

or speech she had come to my side. So absorbed had I been in my past

and my sorrow that I knew not her presence till her magnetic touch

awakened me from my dream. She had realised in a moment whither my

thoughts had gone, and reverenced the holy past. Then, when the mood

was growing despotic and paralysing the soul, she stepped into the

startled silence. I was myself again, and swept the unmanly tears away.

Yet I could not drive the sadness of farewell out of my system. Here

was this sage, who had so often counselled me and guided my faltering

footsteps, about to vanish for ever from the scene of his triumphs.

Oblivion would sweep his memory and his work into the abyss. We would

see him no more; no more hear his grave wise sayings, weighted with

the experience of centuries. All his gathered knowledge and skill

would lapse; and our civilisation would be the poorer. Up the steep of

progress it would have to climb, weaker for the absence of this strong

arm, this much-exercised and full brain and heart.

These were the thoughts at the root of my sadness, when I was startled

out of them by my companion’s voice. She had waited in reverential

silence as long as I lived my filial past over again; but, when I

returned to my starting-point, and began spending fruitless regrets

and pangs over that which neither demanded nor warranted them, her

thoughts broke out into loud protest. She could no longer endure

such futilities, such waste of tissue, and she met my wailing

reflections one by one. Amiralno was glad to leave his chrysalis stage

of existence; the energy that was in him would find a freer scope,

a nobler sphere, as soon as it had shed its earthly trammels. His

counsel and guidance would not be lost to progress; all that he was and

had would still be part of what he would become; not one thought or

faculty would be left behind; and all would then be spent not on the

progress of a little island of a small terrestrial archipelago or its

race, but on that of the universe, if not of the cosmos. All of him

that could still appeal to our lower senses would remain with us, and

would immortalise his memory, as far as immortality would go upon this

ephemeral orb. As for his sympathy and love, they were doubtless still

with us, or at least with what in us was best and nearest the cosmic.

The only thing to regret was that we could not personally feel his

presence in the universe. But even this was not for idle regrets. It

was mere palsy, if it did not stir us to still further mastery of our

conditions. Were we not in the way to feel and know the escaped spirits

of our dead? Had we not developed senses in us that were receivers of

impulses from the infinite around us, impulses that had been dormant

through the uncounted past? Had we not instruments that told us of

energies and beings unfelt even by our new-developed senses? And were

we to grope in our prison-house, and wail over what we had lost and

could not longer see? Were we to sit in the darkness, and weep and

wait, hoping for the light? Such feeble conclusions from the past, such

futile regrets over the dead, Limanoran progress could not endure.

There were new masteries for every generation. Before many years could

pass they would get into touch with the spirits and energies that

had fled; it might be by means of new instruments; it might be by

new senses; nothing but our own dulness broke the connection between

our energies and theirs; what we had still to win was consciousness,

if not mastery, of that finer type of matter which they now used as

medium for their energy. It was only the lifting of another of the

myriad veils that hung before our senses dulling their perceptions.

This was no more than what they had done a thousand times already. A

death was a stimulus to joy and new effort. It taught us the limits of

our knowledge and our power; and limits known were limits soon to be

overpassed.

Her bright activity and banter surprised me into laughter at my own

folly and obtuseness. Scarcely had I reached this consummation before I

knew that there was gladness in the air of the island. How could I have

failed to notice the jubilant strains that were fitfully wafted across

my hearing, unless through my dull absorption in my own feelings? I

felt thankful to Thyriel that I had been drawn out of my isolation,

which seemed to me now little less than disloyalty to the race that had

done so much for me.

I wondered what could be the occasion of all this exultation that I

was conscious of. Pæan after pæan rose from every part of the island,

and, as the moments passed, the many-sounding music seemed to gather

towards one centre. The radius lessened, and adjacent masses of melody

fused together. Nearer and nearer they came, ever more coalescing and

lessening in number; then the jubilance melted into grave and massive

harmony, and I recognised some of the world-music I had heard from the

cosmophone. The sense of universes creating and dissolving sprang into

my mind. It was the diapason of creation that was ringing through the

island. Loud, then low, the cosmic symphony swept the atmosphere like a

tempest. I knew that some far-reaching event or movement was occurring

amongst this people.

I turned to my comrade to confirm and define my conjectures, but

she was gone. Away on the horizon I could see the rapid beat of her

wings. I followed as swiftly as I could, and, as I rose in the air,

I saw company after company soaring like coveys of birds towards a

high isolated plateau that stretched from far up Lilaroma and beetled

cliff-like over the sea. I had often used it as a flight-platform

whence I could spring into the air, and had long known it by the name

of Doomalona. I had never thought over the meaning of the word, but

now it flashed upon me that it meant the hill of farewells. Thence

messengers who were embarking on difficult and important expeditions

set out. The elders of the people and the families of the couriers came

here to give them their love and benison, in order to make them feel,

as they journeyed, that the sympathy of their home went with them like

a fire from the hearth.

I had observed that in these farewells this simple-hearted people made

little outward sign of the depth of their emotions. Only the magnetic

look out of the eyes would have told a stranger what benignity lay

underneath. Nor was it merely to show how sympathetic they were that

they thus accompanied their foreign couriers to the outskirts of the

island. It was chiefly to give them each his contribution of magnetism,

to lessen their burden on their far journey, to make them feel how

much the spirit of the community went with them. Not one of them would

ever allow himself to indulge in so idle an evidence of emotion as

tears. There was in this people a vein of stoicism, I thought; they

seemed to repress all mere symbols of feeling. A European would have

called their farewells dull and emotionless, if not stony-hearted.

There was no kissing or embracing; there was not even the shaking of

hands or bowing of heads. Without physical contact their spirits could

work upon each other with a power that in other civilisations would

have been called witchcraft. Through their firlas, through their eyes,

rayed forth a keen soul-stirring magnetism. And each assisted the

other in preventing the approach of the old wasteful manifestations

of sorrow or despondency. Lamentation was a thing of the far, almost

prehistoric, past; a sob or sigh or even complaint they knew too well

from their physiological knowledge to be mere emotional extravagance,

a waste of the energy or the tissue, all of which was needed for the

strenuous endeavour towards a higher plane. So it was that they seemed

to me stoical in positions where the men and women I had known in my

youth would burst into weeping and wailing, or cries and gestures of

affection.

But in these scenes of farewell there was needed little energy of

repression; the real struggle had occurred many generations before

in their history. They had once had a most elaborate symbolism not

merely of feelings but of almost every human thought and spiritual

attitude. But when the great national repentance was leading to the

series of exilings that ultimately purified the race, they became

uneasy about this vast system of symbolism; it covered their whole

existence from birth to death, from toothache to the salvation of the

soul, and seemed to be nature her very self. They had long known it to

be the nesting-place of all hypocrisies and untruth. Under its shelter

mean things and falsity and even grossness and cruelty could flourish

fearless of harm. Everything could masquerade in the guise of anything

else it pleased. Of course there were painful revelations and scandals

at times; but they were soon hushed up. The system was too much the

interest of all who had power or reputation or prosperity, the best

of what was then life, to let it get into disrepute, or into risk of

revolution or reform. There were various professions which were deeply

involved in the retention of it, and they were recruited chiefly from

the highest social classes. The lawyers battened on the ambiguity of

the symbols, whether expressed in word or deed; the doctors would have

lost half their hysterical and hypochondriac patients if it had been

abolished; without it the life and pretensions of the military during

time of peace would have been a farce and a mockery; and the occupation

of the priests would have vanished altogether. Ceremony seemed the very

life-blood of an aristocratic state, and especially of its army and its

church. It kept the mere workers and plodders at a respectful distance,

it fenced off criticism, and supplied topics for the tongue of fame. To

abolish ceremony would have been to strike at the heart of all existing

institutions.

But, as the purgation proceeded, every occasion for it naturally

disappeared. Ceremonial ceased when the church lapsed and the priestly

profession went into exile. Ceremony vanished with the expulsion of

the militant elements and the professional politicians. The bureau

of fame collapsed with its accursed spawn, uncharitableness and evil

feeling, servility, adulation, and pretence. The pharisaism of the

whole system stood out in all its offensiveness, and the foulness and

injustice that were concealed by this constant masquerade in the robes

of greatness. It was meant to overawe the unthinking, to make ignorance

grovel at the feet of those in power. It had been useful in far past

times of savagery in cowing the beast in the human mind and keeping

it caged. But a form that has life and meaning and power in the ruder

stages of development becomes a curse, if continued into periods of

advanced civilisation. They now felt that their elaborate symbolism

had been an insult to their intelligence; for they had no brutality

in them to be muzzled. To keep up the pretence of greatness or virtue

or love or respect or truth, where there was none, was useful as long

as most of the community were ignorant, or superstitious, or fierce

and intolerant in disposition. But when the race had grown gentle and

humane and more and more progressive, it was not merely a farce to

retain so much deception and mummery in life, it was a gross outrage on

all that was just and noble and spiritual. Why should not the reverence

or affection of the human spirit be allowed to shine forth from the

countenance without such ridiculous trammels, such coarse humiliations?

Forms compelling a show of reverence or love where there is none,

are but the trappings of slaves, and soon ingrain the thoughts and

feelings of slaves on the one side, whilst bringing out and confirming

the nature of bullies and tyrants on the other. Every relic of a past

that had harboured and perpetuated such a system was painfully ejected

from their natures. They would have nothing in them that savoured of

such a death-in-life. All mere forms, all ceremonials and ceremonies

had to go. Ostentation and parade became abhorrent to them. Pageant and

spectacle, pomp and solemnity vanished from their lives. All formality

of manner or intercourse, even etiquette and salutation, was driven out

with contumely.

One of the most singular effects of this expulsion of mere symbolism

was the disappearance of ridicule and jest. This disappearance was

quite unexpected, and yet, when they came to reflect on the phenomenon,

they saw how natural it was. The obverse of the passion for applause

and influence is necessarily the desire to depreciate possible rivals,

to make them seem small, and even to trample them in the dust. And the

most successful and least apparently ill-natured method of fulfilling

this is to get them laughed at and so contemned. With the ignoble

itch for fame went the love of ridicule. The jesters, habitual as

well as professional, disappeared with the priests, the soldiers,

the lawyers, and the politicians. Not that the Limanorans abandoned

the use of humour; they still saw too clearly the incongruities of

existence, cosmic as well as human, to cease bringing them out in

startling flashes of vivid expression. They never indulged in that

boisterous laughter which is so often thought in the West the simplest

and most primitive guaranty of enjoyment; for that is as much a waste

of valuable tissue as uncontrollable grief. Their laughter was of that

low, gentle, tolerant, almost inward, kind, which brightens the nature

to its very heart; its only outer mark was perhaps a smile. Never

indeed was I amongst a people that looked at existence so cheerfully or

enjoyed its little ironies with so light-hearted a geniality. Buoyancy,

joyousness, was the most constant characteristic of their spirits.

Their intercourse with each other was ever sunny and pleasant-witted,

though never jocular. There was no malice or false sense of superiority

in their humour or laughter.

But jest they came to abhor as an indignity to the human spirit

which was striving to obliterate all traces of its ape-ancestry. The

jester implied or produced contempt for his topic, for his victim,

and generally for himself. He usually adopted mimicry as the easiest

method of bringing about his effect. And so he nursed the ape in him,

and pointed back to the vile type from which he had sprung. It was the

other kinship of man, his divine relationship, that the Limanorans

preferred to acknowledge and nurture. Never did they forget it in

their conduct. It moulded their ideals, it directed their purposes, it

created their instincts. And to use ridicule was to outrage it, to call

up the beast in them, the element, the ancestry that they did their

best to forget. Whenever the sense of mutual sympathy crept through the

community, the degradation of jest and ridicule, not for the victim

alone, but for the jester, became self-evident. They were felt to be

inhumane, if not inhuman, and died an easy death with all the vast

system of symbolism.

It was a surprise to me then to see so large an assemblage winging

their way to Doomalona. It seemed as if there was about to be a great

ceremonial. And I was not long in doubt as to the occasion. For with

music that rose and fell in marvellous rhythm like the waves of the

sea there came across the sky a splendid flight-car, more brilliant

in opalescent glow, more majestic in architecture, than anything I

had ever seen. Its wings flashed fire through the air and seemed to

weave the lightnings of heaven into a diaphanous web. It was a car of

victory; for around it bands of flying youth raised jubilant harmony,

and over its rear rose a canopy crowned with fire. As it floated nearer

I could see beneath this a figure resting upon an elevated couch.

The music grew more loudly triumphant as it hovered downwards to the

central plateau of the hill of farewells. And then I knew that this

was Amiralno on the couch; and all the people, except the few who were

needed for the essential services of the island, had assembled to bid

him farewell, as he sped in front of them into the land of shadows

whither no eye could penetrate.

I had without knowing it landed close to Thyriel, so absorbed had I

been in the wondrous spectacle. She had been busy with the chorus of

acclaim, her thoughts bent on this rare scene of farewell; and she had

not noticed my approach. Then a sudden silence, as Amiralno stepped

from the faleena, startled the great concourse out of their entranced

attitude; their thoughts were set free as by the touch of a magic wand.

It was at this that Thyriel became conscious of my presence. I knew in

a moment that she had recognised the criticism in my mind. Yet she did

not answer or explain the anomaly. She remained perfectly still.

A burst of jubilant music broke my reverie, as the sudden silence had

broken it before. It led me back to the symphony of the spheres to

which I had been accustomed to listen with rapt attention. I could

recognise the harmonious strain that meant the creation of a world.

I could almost see the whirling orb of fire, as it flew off from the

parent sun, and swept into its glowing round through heaven. Nothing

I had ever heard could match the rapturous melody which expressed the

approach of life to the surface of the new star. Quicker and quicker

grew the pace, and higher the pitch, as the living creation developed

and spread over the world. Then came a wild dithyramb, as man broke

from his bestial surroundings, and mastered his fellow-beasts by

cunning, and drew fire from heaven for his purposes. A nobler strain

followed, rhythmically measuring the steps by which he rose out of

himself and climbed the steep of heaven. Silver-toned harmonies told of

his masterpieces of art. Loud diapasons spoke out his marching armies

and fierce battles. Soft involved fugues and dulcet chants expressed

the struggles and conquests of thought.

I stood absorbed in the interpretation of this ravishing music, and

failed to observe the progress of events upon the lofty plateau.

Amiralno had taken up an erect position on what might have been called

an altar, had the scene been a religious one. His face was towards

heaven. He held his right hand as if waving back those whom he forbade

to follow him; for close to him stood the partner of his earthly

life, her face set as if she would depart. Around stood his lifelong

comrades and counsellors, yet at a lower level, so that every act of

the departing could be seen by the concourse. Near him were erected two

columns, on the higher of which and above his head I could distinguish

a psychometer, on the lower a biometer. Behind him had been built

into the rock an elaborate piece of machinery, which I recognised

as a manana or petrifier. Often had I seen it transfix almost in a

moment a beautiful plant, substituting irelium for its living tissues,

and making every leaf and flower of it translucent crystal. By means

of electric currents, it sent streams of the atomic constituents of

irelium along the sap-channels from rootlet to leaf-tip; it used the

living powers of the plant to turn it as it died into undecaying metal.

For hundreds of years the flower would live and be a thing of beauty,

even if no care was further spent on it; and, if cared for, it would

resist the finger of decay for thousands and thousands of years.

At last I was to see the transfiguration of a Limanoran. I had often

almost doubted the origin of those lifelike statues that stood in

Fialume, and death was so rare a thing among this long-lived people

that during my many years amongst them I had never had the opportunity

of satisfying the doubt. Curiosity overshadowed my other feelings and

made me forget the grief which would keep creeping into my heart at

this farewell scene in spite of the jubilant music. I strained every

nerve and sense to catch the features of the strange event. Thyriel, I

felt, was as eager as I to see all that would occur, and I could see

that the younger half of the concourse had their attention closely

riveted upon the scene.

The observer of the biometer raised his eyes to the indicator, which

had now begun to move in rapid oscillations. Amiralno lifted the

forefinger of his left hand as if giving a signal. He looked back a

moment with longing in his eyes at his life-partner. From the manana

there sprang out an upright groove towards the dying man, and in this

he was caught, as his vitality rose to its greatest effort before the

final collapse. The indicator of the sidralan shot upwards with great

violence, and then fell still. Almost at the same moment the guardian

who stood on the loftier column beside the psychometer raised himself

in agitation. The indicator had begun the same violent oscillations as

that of the biometer. There could be little doubt that the individual

energy or soul of the vanished Amiralno had passed near it in his

flight upwards.