This book of Human Sculpture made clear to me the meaning and purpose

of another publication that I soon witnessed. It was the book of

Asexuality, which showed us dramatically how sex and its results

belonged to a lower and more physical stage of personal development.

It revealed to us the nature of the beings that flit through sidereal

space just outside the ken of our senses, centres of energy less inert

and more ethereal than any terrestrial creatures. Into them flows

more freely than it flows into us the divine energy that is above

all. Out of themselves they give as freely to their fellows as they

receive. They need no such inequality and unstable equilibrium as

sex to teach them such bounteous benignity. Living in the precincts

of the fountain of life as they do, not imprisoned within local and

temporal limits, but free to move whither they will and to drink

unstintingly of supernal existence, they know how essentially all

nobler life consists in free bounty; the more of themselves and their

energy they give, the higher the energy they receive in its place.

Sex is only the rude beginning of this higher law, the principle of

antagonism to stagnation, of giving lavishly in order to have room for

receiving from higher sources. It supersedes and antagonises the law of

parasitism, which governs the crude beginnings of life on a new world.

The lower microscopic creatures that live a famished jejune life in

space ready to pounce upon any orb their shoals encounter, propagate

by mere self-division; they have nothing to give. A new star cooling

down on its surface sufficiently for life to settle on is their great

opportunity. There they may parasite and feed to their heart’s content,

propagating by the myriad every infinitesimal fraction of time. And,

as long as they live in such primeval luxury, they never move one

step higher in life. Over-supply of food, indeed all luxury, damns

a being to stagnancy. The full-fed parasite is unprogressive, and,

though multiplying teemingly, is practically sterile; his generations

are on a level with himself; he is immortal by mere fission; the only

function of his life is to grab, till his gettings make him too big for

his microscopic unity, and he has to break up. In the higher stages

of life, even in human life, this infecundity attaches in the same

way to luxurious living, whilst the sycophant is sterile of purpose

and existence. All take and no give is a monstrosity above the lowest

bacterial life. The more of dependence or flattery there is in a

people, the lower their natures; a tyranny is the lowest political

organism; and of tyrannies the worst is the socialistic; for there,

there is no inequality to antagonise and overcome the lethargy of

parasitism.

Even when bacteria begin to feel the pinch of scanty nutrition or

malnutrition, they start on a new career, and show the first traces of

an advance in life. They incline to give as well as receive, and here

are the primeval beginnings of sex. Ill-fed bacteria tend to propagate

by means of special cells or spores. Instead of steeping themselves

in food till they burst, they now begin to nurse within their systems

a germ, to which they give of their best till it is able to launch

out for itself; they cease to reproduce by fission, and reproduce

by spore-formation. This is the first step upwards on the long road

to human morality. The beginnings of sex are the beginnings of

unlikeness of individuals, and the beginnings of unstable equilibrium

and of overflow of energy from one being into another. This is the

organisation of the policy of give in a new star, ultimately meant to

drive out, after a world-long struggle, the antagonistic policy of mere

get. Sex first introduced into our world the eagerness of one being to

give of its best for the good of another being. Conjugal love in the

human era is the first noble form of sexuality; and parental love is

its still nobler offshoot.

The development of parenthood is the knell of sexuality. For it is

a new and higher phase of the policy of give, and antiquates the

mere mutuality of sexual love. It gives of its all expecting nought

in return. And into the place of the energy that has gone out of it

flows an energy that is nearer the divine and raises towards the

divine. It is at this point that sex becomes a lower stage, seeming

almost to mingle with brute life. Out of it must humanity struggle

in order to progress. “In the spirit there is no sex.” This I had

heard as a meaningless echo from wise lips in the West. Now I saw its

significance. The higher, the more spiritual we become, the less we

permit sex to dominate, and the less difference there is between the

sexes. It was in the world of imagination and intellect that the first

idea of equality of the sexes arose. And the more intellectual a people

became, the less it insisted on the difference between man and woman.

Emphasis on sex in a civilised people was a sure sign of approaching

decay.

For the goal towards which the human race is advancing is asexual; not

that that will be the main characteristic; but it is the most striking

compared with our present phase of being. The more highly organised

existences that fill space and hover just outside the range of our

grosser senses have reached the stage in which the stimulus of sex or

even of parenthood is no longer needed in order to save the benignant

instincts from dying out. And the higher a centre of energy climbs in

the scale of existence, the more eager does it become to overflow into

other centres, to give of its highest and best. What we call life, or

the spontaneous rejection of stagnancy, begins on its lowest fringe

with a tendency to take all and give none, with appetite. Below this

are inert centres of energy, that resist all receiving as well as all

giving, that exist only in persisting, in keeping what they have and

what they are; this stage is usually called dead matter in contrast to

energy, although it consists of nuclei of energy as truly as any living

creature. Between the two stages of mere keep and mere take seems to

lie a great gulf fixed; but there are minute evidences of transition

to be found all through nature. We ourselves, the human race, form

the transition from the stage of take all to the stage of give all.

And sex is the chief impetus to progress in the earlier history of

human evolution. Parenthood takes its place in the upper levels,

where the human is rapidly approaching the supersensuous. The very

fact of our nature being so heterogeneous and complex reveals that we

are making for something higher; and, as our appetites imply a stage

behind us, in which our systems were fitted for nothing but taking,

so our loves, our benevolences, our self-sacrifices, point forward

to a stage in which the whole of existence will consist in giving. I

remember, whenever an average man in Europe quoted the phrase, “It is

more blessed to give than to receive,” he meant it as a jest, or in a

sinister sense; even the priest, when he had to preach the doctrine

as one of the foundations of his religion, had incredulity in his

heart if not in the smile on his lips, as he spoke the words. Amongst

the Limanorans it was a truism that was implied in all conduct and

need never be explicitly stated. And the book of Asexuality revealed

the inner and scientific significance to me. The highest state of

any centre of energy in the cosmos was to be eagerly, lavishly, and

perpetually giving out of its best. For thus was it ever kept in

unstable equilibrium, towards which flowed higher and higher energies

from centres above it; thus it kept its life unstagnant and immortal.

That which only received, and was eager only to receive, suffered

the maladies of the luxurious, soon reached its utmost capacity, and

fell into stagnancy and decay. Above the human rose the hierarchy of

sexless, supersensuous beings, who peopled infinite space; but into

their ranks rose the human by means of struggle, by means of the

effluence of their energy into others, by means of sex, and still more

of parenthood. The purpose of sex is to attain to the higher asexuality.

Not that monasticism is good for the human race. It is on the contrary

the greatest of evils in the sexual stage of progress. It counts as

wicked and harmful that which alone prevents self-absorption and the

beginning of decay and death. Sex is the provision of nature for

drawing the animal outside of itself so that it may introduce into its

generations the seeds of development. It makes it as a centre of energy

feel the need of other centres, to which it may give, from which it may

receive. It is her chief means of keeping any vital centre from falling

back into stagnancy and the desire of stagnancy. And, as long as man is

still animal, sex and its resultant parenthood must continue to play

the main part in development. To attempt to reach asexuality before

the animal is ejected from his system is to balk progress and invite

stagnancy and decay.

The book of Asexuality showed how the family must remain the unit and

lever of advance till sex should be superseded by individual creation.

Then friendship or the bond of contrast in community will take the

place of the bond of heredity, or of that bond which is based upon

sexual passion. The mutual choice will be completely rational and in

the will of the choosers. There will be nothing instinctive or mediate

or unconscious about it. It is indeed one of the indignities of this

present sexual stage of evolution that we are thrust on in spite of

ourselves, that we have little command over the stimulus that is urging

us on the road of progress.

The Limanorans had got rid of some of this indignity inasmuch as the

elders and wise men took command of the instinct of sex, and bent it

in the direction of their own line of advance. In other peoples, and

especially in the West, it stumbled blindly on, led sometimes by the

love of youthful beauty, sometimes by the love of money, sometimes

by the necessities of position and diplomacy, most frequently by

ambition and the love of power or social influence, seldom or never by

the deliberate intent of producing noble posterity. As a consequence

retrogression in health, physique, morality, or intellectual power

was seen in all ranks far oftener than progress. Over the whole

there might be a slight advance in centuries; but in most families

it was one generation forward and the next back. This people had by

their purgations become the assistants of nature; and since the era

of the exilings they had wisely piloted sex to serve the highest

purposes of evolution. The young were still driven half-blindly by

the sting of sex, and might by chance accelerate progress; but the

elders without revealing their art wisely controlled the instinct,

and by the governance of proximity and opportunity, companionship and

circumstances, amongst the immature made it the guardian and keeper of

past advance and the prompter of still renewed advance. The final step

was pictured by this new imaginative book, the supersession of sex and

the deliberate creation of posterity. This would relieve the elders

of their anxious task of match-making, and put into the hands of the

pairs themselves the control of the parental instinct and the power of

improving their posterity.

Even as it was, I could see, from the axioms and postulates of this

book of Asexuality, and the impression it made on my friends and

companions, that the sex-instinct was already to a large extent under

the control of those whom it impelled. It had become, like their

appetite for food, saturated with intellect and deliberation. It was

no mere goad that drove them on in the dark stumbling towards some

object that would gratify the passion. They knew its physiological and

psychological working, and understood how the destinies of the race

waited upon the wisdom or folly of its guidance. Not even the youngest

of them would allow it the caprice and perverse whimsicality that was

considered its native prerogative in the West. The passionate whim of

the moment for “a grey eye or so” was no more to them than toothache

or the pangs of indigestion, an aberrancy from healthy nature, to be

checked and healed as soon as possible. I found that I was far in

the rear of their advance in respect to love. My Western heroics and

amorous transports were discounted and yet curiously watched as the

antiquated manners of an age long gone by. Nothing gave so keen a

shock to my self-approval as the smile that played upon the face of

Thyriel when I first broke into the raptures of adoration for her which

are the natural expression of passionate love in my native Europe.

Romeo-and-Julietism had been consecrated by centuries of the traditions

of Christendom as the true attitude and conduct of lovers. And here

was I, only fulfilling the instinct and bursting into the appropriate

transports of passion, reined in by what I thought at first the

cynicism of my Juliet. The smile would have been cynical on the lips of

a young European inamorata. In Thyriel it was no more than the amused

recognition of manners which she had laughed at in studying the ancient

history and literature of the island, as if I had seen a comrade in the

commonness of European daily life adopting the language and attitude of

Homeric or Ossianic heroes.

I grew ashamed of the amorous ardours of the West, and, when I felt

the tendency to erotic idolatry come upon me, I kept it to myself.

Even then I knew that I was centuries behind my Limanoran coevals in

the rational guidance of the sexual instinct. Nothing brought this so

clearly to my mind as the reception of the book of Asexuality. During

its dramatic publication I looked round to see the shock of unnatural

innovation on the faces of the audience, or the shrinking of modesty,

or the sense of outraged religious or traditional instincts. But there

was none of these to be found there. The ideal was accepted at once as

the proper and possible goal of the race, and the book was treasured

amongst the sacred literature of the time.

It soon flashed upon me, too, as I frequented Loomiefa, that their

art had all a far higher purpose than I had conjectured from my

European experience. It was not meant merely to stir or to satisfy

the sense of beauty and harmony, but to implant in the emotions and

the imagination the love of the future and the passion for rising in

the scale of existence. I grew ashamed to think that I had attributed

to this wonderful people the frivolity and even lowness of aim that I

had so often seen in European art. Here was a drama that the West had

not even a conception of. At its best the stage of Europe professed to

educate by representing heroic scenes from the past, by evolving from

them lessons for the audience, and by stirring their enthusiasm for

great deeds of history or myth. In its commonest mood it reproduced in

mimic form some scene or action from contemporary life. At its worst

it was but a pander to the survivals of a gross and animal past. What

I now thought of as the Limanoran stage was wholly occupied with the

future, so far as it was a possible evolution from the present. The

noblest ideal that the imagination of the race could shape was brought

dramatically before the people that their thoughts and ambitions might

be fixed on something beyond themselves.

For this high purpose and not for luxury or personal enjoyment their

sculpture and painting and music had been developed, and the newest

discoveries and inventions of science had been brought to their aid.

There was no objection to what gave pleasure; but to spend the thought

and effort of the fully developed human mind on that alone was, they

held, a degradation. Strenuous endeavour towards a higher and better

future was the note that characterised their pursuits. But, if they

could add attractiveness to the prosecution of the aim, the task

was all the easier; if they could make the path ahead beautiful and

pleasant so as to decoy the reluctant senses onwards, the pace would be

all the swifter.

Even with this high aim, I could not understand how this people, who

loathed all pretence, could condescend to their dramatic art; for on

this stage of Loomiefa were members of their community representing in

their persons what they were not and could not be for many ages. And I

had heard them often decry the histrionic art as one that encouraged

in the actors a habit of delighting in mere semblance and superficial

show, a habit that is the basis of hypocrisy and deceit; whilst the

love of mimicry and pageantry, I had been led to believe, had vanished

from the island at one of the last purgations of the race.

The seeming contradiction was afterwards explained. As one of the

necessary steps in my initiation into the privileges and duties of

the mature citizen I was led behind the scenes. Through the gorge at

the upper end of the valley I passed into a great hall that seemed to

me a combination of a museum and workshop. Here were the youth of the

Loomiamo and the Fraloomiamo at work upon automata and the elaborate

machinery that would guide their motions. Had I kept at a distance

from them as they worked, I would have thought that the play of human

sculpture was being again enacted, such exact reproductions of the

human system were the figures that grew under their hands. In one

section stood thousands of what I would have called statues, which had

served in the publication of former books. In another the puppets were

going through dramatic scenes by way of experimentation, and in many

the illusion was complete; I should have said that human beings were

talking and acting. In others there was some imperfection, and there

one could see that they were all mere fantoccini galvanised into life.

In a third section the tissues and parts that were to make mimic men

and women were being manufactured; the workers and artists could draw

on Rimla for as much force as they needed, whilst the advice of the

scientific families was at their command. The machinery of the great

workshop was bewildering in its complexity and refinement. The finest

tissue or nerve of the human brain could be here imitated so that under

a microscope I would have said it was part of a living body.

After all it was only the acting of marionettes that I had seen upon

the stage in the valley. But it was greatly aided by another department

where the pioneering families cultivated the art and science of

illusions. They could imitate the human voice at any point in the

valley measured to the fraction of an inch; they could reproduce any

scene of history, of contemporary existence, or of futuritive fiction

so exactly, making it so full of the lights and shadows of life and of

the developments of all advance, that none of the senses unaided by the

reasoning and analytic faculties could assert that the men and women

were not living, and that their actions and words were not real. Even

the electric sense could be deluded by the impulses manufactured by

these machinists and illusionists; it would take the magnetic thrills

it received for genuine enthusiasm and sympathy from the mind of a

man or from a crowd. This department was even more important than the

factory of puppets; for it made the play of the marionettes look still

more human on the stage. After all it was not the puppets themselves

I had watched with such breathless excitement, but a mere illusory

picture of their proceedings; the illusion was far more lifelike than

the play of the marionettes themselves. So much stress did they lay

on stirring the imagination and emotions of the race in favour of the

ideals of the future that half the work of these two families consisted

in the dramatic publication of their books.

The next sacred book I saw produced in Loomiefa would have of itself

persuaded me that this people could have nothing to do with the

histrionic art or any art that would encourage the habit of pretence

and show in the individual nature. It was called the book of Human

Transparency and described the various methods by which the inner

working of the human brain could be made patent to Limanoran senses.

The tissues could be clarified; the significance of every fibre and

nerve could be made familiar to all as an essential part of their

education; the eye, the ear, and the firla could be made more subtle

and acute in their perceptions, till at last they were able to tell

in a moment everything that was proceeding beneath the skull and

within the heart. What was done slowly and painfully by the medical

elders with the help of their instruments, their hypnotic powers,

and the interpretation of dreams, every man would be able to do

instantaneously, and without extraneous aid, exceptional wisdom, or

occult powers. The general drift of a neighbour’s emotions was known to

everyone through his magnetic senses, but not the particular intention

or thought; this would be known only after the long course of training

and development mapped out in the book of Human Transparency.

One of the chief ethical purposes that had in recent times been fixed

in the mind of the community was to eject from the human system all

elements and processes that were offensive to the finer feelings and

senses, everything in fact that a man or woman might be ashamed of

or wish to conceal. The new book of the time aimed at extending this

to the operations of thought and emotion. To get clear of the waste

products of the mind in a way that would be inoffensive to others was

an ideal they had not yet been able to entertain. They had learned

with much pain and self-denial the habit of concealing the crude

processes of thought that lead to what is worth saying or doing. It

was one of the things they were most ashamed of in looking over the

history or the memorials of their far past to see the vast amount of

the raw digestion of thought and of the refuse of emotion that was made

public, and even put into literature meant to be permanent. Most of the

orations and magazine articles, and ultimately most of the books that

had been produced in past ages were much the same as if the stomach

and intestines of the speaker or writer had been anatomised and laid

open with all their offensive processes to the gaze of spectators.

One of the most beneficent events of their later history had been a

conflagration in their valley of memories; for it had wiped out of

existence the libraries and art accumulations of many centuries, of

which they had come to be ashamed. They could not understand the

long-past stage of their civilisation, in which men, and especially

young men, had been so proud of displaying the mere débris of their

worst and crudest processes of thought; it had actually been the case

that most of the literature and art had been produced by youths under

fifty years of age, who had not yet begun to appreciate the difference

between the processes of thinking and the results of thinking; and one

of the most extraordinary features of that period was that the most

applauded literary and artistic productions, those that were supposed

to be most distinctively the outcome of what they called genius, were

the work of boys and girls, mere children under twenty-five years of

age. Natures that should still have been in the nursery for many a

year were stimulated to address the public and seek applause with work

that was merely tentative and disciplinary. The result was that, on

the one hand, one half of the most original and promising minds racked

themselves to death years before they should have faced life, whilst on

the other a juvenile ideal was set before literature and art, and boys

and girls became their chief audience and most powerful arbiters. They

felt heartily ashamed of that singular stage in their development, and

were glad to have accidental fire come to their assistance in huddling

its products out of sight.

One of the first instincts they evolved after the series of purgations

was the desire to conceal within their minds what was crude or mere

process in thinking, and, still more, what was mere waste product and

refuse of the mind. Instead of being eager to speak out or publish

all that came into the thoughts, bad or good, they grew shy of public

exhibition of their projects and schemes till they had been shaped by

long years of thinking and experimenting, and criticised and checked

by the caution and wisdom of their fully matured nature. Publication

became the last resort of the mature and old instead of the first

ambition of the young, so afraid were they of exhibiting what might

be crude or offensive. Even in the give and take of conversation and

social intercourse they preferred long periods of silence to the

utterance of truisms and commonplaces. The trivial and conventional

in speech, as in life, was what they abhorred, as revealing an

intellectual nature on the road back to the infertility and

childishness of barbarism, the elaborate mechanism of thought whizzing

round without connection with what represents work.

But now the book of Human Transparency proposed as an ideal to eject

from the system every process of thought and feeling that they might

blush to let others see. If the nature was made transparent then would

it become a self-preserving instinct to develop their natures in this

direction. Everything crude or false or offensive, that might begin to

show itself in their minds, would be at once suppressed before it got

headway, instead of having to be slowly reasoned out of existence with

the aid of the moral instincts. This accomplished, the race would be

able to take another great leap forward. The advance of their processes

of thought and feeling to the level of the former results of them would

give them a higher point of view from which to look forth into the

future.

A mediate book, soon afterward produced by one of the Loomiamo,

supplied one of the steps towards the consummation of this ideal.

It was the book of Ethereal Nutriment. It took as basis a former

discovery, the liquefaction of air, and showed how, by similar

methods, the medium that filled interstellar space could be made

available in the halls of nutriment and medication, and how it could

be manufactured in such a concentrated form as to allow of its being

poured along conduits and imbibed by the human organs through the mouth

and nostrils, just as air was. For some time the atmosphere had been

distilled in liquid form, and supplied to the houses of the citizens

absolutely rid of all impurities. Nay, it had been made a fountain of

power, transmissible to long distances, and available in a form that

was easily carried. Compressed and liquefied, it rapidly returned to

the gaseous form as soon as the pressure began to be removed. And the

re-equilibrising of the liquid to the expansion of the surrounding

air had been made to supply vast quantities of power in the centre

of force. The new book proposed to find in the compression and

liquefication of the ether an infinite fountain of force that would

enable their civilisation to progress at an ever-accelerating pace.

But the most immediate effect proposed by the book was to enable the

Limanorans to etherealise their bodies by introducing the liquefied

ether into their dietary. The result would be that the tissues would

grow more diaphanous. They had already been able to transport some of

the universal medium in their anchored vacuum faleenas from the outer

margin of the atmosphere to their laboratories, and now they had been

able to find it in their manufactured vacuums. With the enormous power

they had in Rimla they could easily compress it into forms that would

touch the senses, and enter into the blood and the formation of the

tissues. As the medium of light and magnetism it was almost certain

to make the human body more translucent than it had ever been. All the

tissues, even the osseous, had always been pervious to light, but many

of them not apparently so to the untrained human eye. Recently their

lavolans had shown that by means of certain kinds of luminous rays the

human system gave up its most hidden secrets to the human eye. But once

they were able to chemicalise and compress the luminiferous ether into

palpable form, and to mingle it with the volatile food that could be

taken into their bodies as they breathed, there would be no need of

lavolans or other apparatus to see the inner movements of the human

system.

The sanitary effects of this advance would be no mean result. The

medical council would have much of their time set free for their

ever-pressing investigations; they would not be needed for the

diagnosis of deteriorative symptoms in the tissues; each individual

would be able, by the aid of magnifying mirrors to examine for

himself what was going on in any part of his system; and every man

had sufficient physiological and medical knowledge to understand the

beginnings of all the ordinary diseases, and, if he recognised them, to

prescribe for himself the hall in Oomalefa that he should frequent in

order to check them. Now it would be only the symptoms of obscure or

new diseases or deteriorations of the system that the medical elders

would have to diagnose. And thus they would have great tracts of their

life to devote to new discoveries, and medical science was certain to

advance more rapidly.

Another sanitary effect of the new permeability to light would be to

render the human body less open to diseases either known or unknown.

For it had long been a commonplace of medical science that sunlight

reduced the vitality, and therefore the virulence, of all noxious

microbes; after nightfall their power increased tenfold. Wherever

the sun’s rays could not reach by day, there diseases multiplied and

festered. And one of the chief reasons why, in their far past history,

incurable maladies were generally internal, was that sunshine could

not get to the parts affected except in a feeble and straggling way.

The fact that they had fixed themselves deeply in the tissues before

they could be observed, and that it was difficult to get at their roots

without cutting a passage in to them had been generally accepted as

the explanation of their frequency and deadliness. But it had been one

of the most important discoveries of the new era after the purgation

period, that pure oxygen and pure sunlight were the most medicative

of all things, and that the nearer any affected part could get to

them the sooner it healed. The new book of Ethereal Nutrition pointed

out that one of the results of rendering the human system easily

pervious to light would be to rid its internal parts of all trace of

immedicability; sunlight, permeating the inner organs and tissues,

would make any noxious microbes that might lodge in them innocuous.

The reciprocity of suggestion and discovery was never more saliently

exemplified than by one of the less immediate results pointed out by

this book as likely to flow from the attainment of its ideal. Volatile

ether-food, gradually introduced into the halls of nutrition and

gradually increased, would, step by step, bring the human organs to

adapt themselves to existence outside of the atmosphere of the earth.

For a long time they would be amphibious, with organs adapted to both

aërial and ethereal life. Even as it was, the human body revealed in

it traces of having already passed through an amphibious stage. There

were in the neck glands that were the remains of gills, which must have

once belonged to an aquatic habit; besides, there was the last vestige

of an eye in the back of the neck still extant in the pineal gland, and

this could have been of use only when the ancestor of man was passing

through the stage of a water-animal which must watch his enemies from

the surface, his body being submerged and out of sight. Step by step he

abandoned the water for a littoral, and even at first arboreal, habit;

the result was that the gills came to be unused and closed up, and the

upward-looking eye was useless in a head that was held upright and

could be turned swiftly in all directions; still man retains the memory

of the aquatic stage of his ancestry in the ease with which he learns

to swim, and in his love of a life on the sea; whilst an occasional

birth in more barbarous tribes with the webbed toes of a water-animal

still showing reveals his ancestry atavistically.

What was to hinder him, now he had the mastery of himself and his

destiny, becoming again amphibious in a new way? Without guidance of

his own, driven only by the forces of nature, he had risen out of the

waters that once covered the earth, and taken to dry land; for a long

period he had been able to live at will in either of two elements, air

and water. Where lay the difficulty in making himself again capable

of living in two elements, in air and in the luminiferous ether? In

prehistoric times nature had worked her evolution in his system by long

and slow stages. But in Limanora progress had become lightning-swift,

and would again and again increase its pace. For there man had taken

command of nature, and made her accommodate her step to his stride. She

was his willing servant, nimble as her own electric flash. He could

now compress the work of centuries into hours by his concentration of

power in Rimla, and by his countless ingenious contrivances. Thought

was the lord of time as of space, and thought was now his essence and

characteristic. He could, if he wished, contract the process that used

to cover geological ages into a generation. There was no reason why he

should not become amphibious again in a less grovelling sense than of

old within the few centuries of a lifetime. This was the purport of

another production of this time, the book of Amphibious Existence.

It was a mediate book, one bridging the gulf between things as they

were and the far ideals held out to the race by the Fraloomiamo. It

helped to point out the steps towards the realisation of one of the

most cherished productions of the age, the Book of Emigration. It had

been many years in the maturer minds of the community before I was

introduced to Loomiefa and its wonders, and it had recently been much

modified by the discoveries of the new outburst of energy that followed

Choktroo’s attempt at invasion. Its ideal was to enable the Limanorans

of that or some future generation to travel throught space and reach

other stars.

Long ago a publication that had prepared for, and demanded this, was

the book of the Destiny of the Earth. It had made a profound impression

on the people when first produced; for it dramatically painted the

horror of death that would settle on this globe. It had been proved

by both astronomers and physicists that our orb was gradually losing

its heat by the same process which had brought its originally glowing

surface to a state that would allow of life settling upon it. First,

vegetation and animal life were found at the poles, where the lessened

heat of the sun made the terrestrial heat endurable; then they crept

their slow way onwards to the equator, till the whole surface of the

earth teemed with vitality, at first developing towards vastitude in

the warm vapours, in later periods towards concentration of energy in

special points of the animal body, and especially in the head. Round

the poles at last settled the ice-sheet, advancing at long intervals

towards the tropics, now in one hemisphere and again in the other,

according as the one or the other was farthest in winter from the sun

during an extensive period. The hyperborean powers shepherded the

growing life of the earth down into her central belt. But the brumal

shepherds of the one side of the world receded as those of the other

advanced with their arctic winds and fleecy drifts. Within measurable

time this alternation would cease, and the glacial fences would move

forward together north and south, and pen the overcrowded human life

and energy with all its enemies into the narrow equatorial belt.

It was the drama of these boreal limitations that the book of

Terrestrial Destiny pictured. The teeming life weltered over sea and

land alike in search of foothold and nutrition. No inch of tropical

earth was sacred from brute appetite. Animal and man fought with

venomous passion for dear life. Not animalculæ alone but beasts, and

even man, became parasitic. Creatures that had loved a free existence

in vast prairies or forests learned to nest and hibernate in the folds

and hollows of larger animals. Life swarmed over life till for lack

of food it began to fail. Man crept with loathsome beasts of prey into

caves of the earth, and grew as loathsome in his troglodytic habits.

On moved the brumal prison walls. The sun shrivelled in the sky and

withdrew his heat. Nothing lived that was not arctic not even amongst

the still-free birds of the air. Man finally ceased to have faculty

enough to notice the shrinking of the already narrow enclosure that

was soon to be his grave. Feebly the last remnants of the race stole

forth into the struggling rays of daylight and killed everything of

life they could find. Only in the sea still lived their possible prey

and food, and thither they dared not go beneath the gloom of the thick

ice. The cannibal habit came upon man again and no relationship or love

restrained his appetite. The last scene of the drama was the death of

the last man, the grave of the remnants of his race; where he fell,

there he lay embalmed; and his tomb was the earth’s own winding-sheet.

The meagre relics of terrestrial life soon followed him into silence

and darkness, and through the sunless night the dead orb wheeled round

the extinguished cinder which had for so many geological ages given it

light and life.

The publication of the book would have frozen the hearts within them,

had not the Limanorans known that that was not the end of all. They

saw that the alternations of death and life were not confined to the

vegetal and animal species around them. The same pendulum swung through

the whole cosmos. The universe which was dead now would live again in

blazing rounds of vapour that would solidify and cool till life could

settle on the new orbs again. Dead it only seemed. For it never rested

but revolved round some centre revolving also, and too distant for man

to see or feel. Out of these motions would come resuscitation. After

millions of ages, that are but as moments in the history of the cosmos,

it would encounter another exhausted universe, and from the collision

would a new system of glowing worlds arise, ready for another series of

vital colonisations from the limitless life of sidereal space.

It was this knowledge that took the sting out of their sadness over

the new book. Yet the fate of man, age by age more closely penned

in by the walls of his glacial-coffin, and drawn back by the eddy

of time into his primeval savagery, left a loophole for despair and

palsy to enter into their lives. Were they to let their descendants

fall back again into the beast, whence their ancestors had come? Was

this glacial prison and tomb to remain a possibility and a shadow on

even the distant horizon of their race? Once before had their ancestry

evaded such a fate, penned between the invasive glaciers and the sea;

once before had the race committed their fates to an element they

feared and hated, lest the encroaching ice-sheet should smother their

civilisation and reduce their vitality to the level of barbarism and

at last annihilation. Better to let the race die out at its noblest

than leave it to go down into such an inferno. Nothing now so made

them shudder as the prospect of retrogression, however slight. But to

think of their civilisation ebbing away from their posterity before the

waning power of the sun and the earth, to think of the lapse of their

own intellectual mastery of nature into decrepitude and putrescence,

was to turn their hearts to stone.

Under such a prospect they could not sit in intellectual paralysis.

For years the imagination of the race worked feverishly towards its

rescue from such an appalling destiny, and every new scientific advance

brought forth a new book of Emigration. Their one thought of escape was

taken from their old migration out of the reach of antarctic glacial

advance. To sail out from the earth and commit themselves to the

strange conditions and uncertainties of a new element seemed no more

hazardous to them now than in their primeval stage of land-civilisation

to launch out with their lives in their hands upon the unknown and

terrifying ocean. It was urged that there was precedent and basis for

their marine adventure in that their ancestry had been amphibious, and

that one of the primeval species out of which they had come had been

aquatic. The reply was that the case was parallel and not antagonistic.

The original vital germs that settled on the cooling surface of the

globe must have come out of sidereal space, and must have lived in

the element that they would have to cross in emigrating from the

glacial orb again; and from these vital germs they, and all living

terrestrial things, had evolved. It was only one stage farther back in

the history of life; the precedent was the same, though the training

and modification of the system would have to be more strenuous and

drastic than they had been before the former leap was taken from land

to sea. Preparation had already been made; for they had learned aërial

navigation far more thoroughly than they had ever known the mastery of

the sea. Their airships had ventured right up into the ether, whilst on

wings they had themselves coasted the earth’s atmosphere. Nothing was

impossible to intellect which had mastered the art of evolution.

Recent discovery had led them far on the difficult ascent towards

safe departure from the surface of the world. It only needed ingenuity

and development to give them a concentration of aërated sustenance,

which would enable them to journey for ages outside of an atmosphere

such as they had been accustomed to inhabit; they had the germ of this

in the nuts of the alfarene or oxygen-shrub; recently their chemists

had been able to reproduce the essence of them, and to compress it

into microscopic globules. Not till a later age of discovery did they

supersede this by the liquefaction and solidification of air. They

were rapidly adapting their own systems to the vacuums they could

produce and to the rarefied atmosphere high above the clouds. They

were introducing the quintessence of the ether into their halls of

sustenance and medication, and thus accustoming their organs and

tissues to conditions which they would meet continually on their

voyage through sidereal space. The next generation would practically

be amphibious, able to live in the luminiferous ether with occasional

return to an atmosphere such as surrounds the earth. Every new age

would enable them to make longer and longer excursions away from the

bosom of mother-earth out towards the influence of other planets.

Every new generation would have more elastic and adaptable tissues and

organs, which would fit varied pressure and varied mediums of vitality.

And with all this the Limanoran body would grow lighter at the same

time as it would grow more consolidated, coherent, and indissoluble.

But most important of all was the new command of gravitation given

them by the discovery of the varying sensitiveness or nonsensitiveness

of certain rays to magnetism and gravity according to conditions that

were in human hands. There were limitless possibilities in this for

sidereal migration. And already out of it had come the lavolamma or

gravitation power-machine.

The new book of Emigration brought all these discoveries and thoughts

into bearing on its problem and harmonised them, and developed them

by means of imaginative suggestion. The drama of its publication drew

the bulk of the people to Loomiefa. There we saw a representation of

Lilaroma itself, piercing the sky in pure and lonely grandeur. Near

its top lay moored a fleet of faleenas of strikingly new form and

material; they were as light as foam-bubbles, and as opalescently

transparent; within each of them we could see stored quantities of

alfarene globules, that seemed enough to serve a people for thousands

of years; in each we saw a new anti-gravitation engine, ready to deal

with every form of attraction and repulsion in the wide ether and

turn it into available power. Men and women in Limanoran form, but as

transparent and as imponderable and buoyant as their new ships, floated

round the ethereal fleet. Now and again a flash of artificial light

would dart across the scene, and along it, as if impelled by it, ran

with lightning-swiftness one of the rainbow-flecked faleenas, bearing

its full freight. We could see the lavolamma work, and we concluded

that there was a new form of it that could take advantage of beams

of light to travel with them, as an electric impulse travels along

them. Innumerable evolutions with the ethereal fleet took place. The

sublimated Limanorans of the future seemed to have complete command of

the new ships and of the new power over light and gravitation.

Suddenly came tremors in the framework of the great mountain. It

rocked like a buoy in the uneasy surge of a reef. Its snows fell in

huge avalanches. Then the conical top was ejected into the sky like a

shot from a cannon. The air was thick with dust and stones. But when

it cleared and great flames shot forth and licked the face of heaven,

we could see far above their reach the rainbow-coloured fleet speeding

aloft, filled with their tiny diaphanous sailors.

The scene changed, and we saw universes set in the vault of heaven,

and across the space between them we could discern minute specks of

light flashing mercurial as thought. Behind them in dim eclipse sped

the noctambulant earth, still eddying round the central spot of light;

now it broke forth in ragged coruscation, only to sink back into pitchy

gloom. Yet a thread of light stretched forth to the luminous atoms that

flitted on through the night. Nearer they came and, one by one, grew

more distinct and larger. At last we could see that it was the fleet

on its way from the top of Lilaroma. Within each ether-ship we could

make out the movements of the sailors as they bent its way this side

and that. The light from a brilliant star in the new universe made

play upon the surface of their faleenas. They had caught in its rays,

and were speeding as swift as light towards the now-definite goal.

The luminiferous current bore them steadily on, their little engines

palpitating with the impulse of the new light and the new gravitation.

Again the scene changed, and we looked upon the surface of a new orb,

more advanced in vital development, more highly organised than the

earth with which we were familiar. We saw the inhabitants in crowds,

face upwards into the night, all eyes upon some distant star. The

excitement was rising like a tempest. It seemed as if the object on

which they gazed were swiftly approaching them. And in a flash there

swept within our sight the fleet of prismatic ether-ships, like

rainbows in the light of another sun. They stopped and hovered above

the atmosphere. We saw their crews breathe in the elements in which

they floated. Lower and lower they came, still sounding the atmosphere

and testing its effects upon their organs. The absence of commotion

and the steady descent showed that nothing alien to their systems had

yet been encountered. Out of their faleenas they gazed as wonderingly

down upon the new star as its sea of up-turned faces watched their slow

descent.

The scene was brought still nearer to our eyes. Instead of microscopic

foam-bells floating in the sky, and microscopic crowds resting on the

surface of the other world, we felt present at the meeting of these

creatures of different universes. They seemed to feel conscious of this

great event in the history of the cosmos. The dwellers of the new world

were almost paralysed at first with wonder at these beings so like and

yet so unlike themselves; they could recognise, we could see in their

friendly faces, the divine community of spirit; their eyes, as soon as

they recovered from their waking dream, flashed welcome in magnetic

fire; there was no need of community of words for open intercourse; the

dwellers of the new star had the same development of electric sense as

the Limanorans had; their souls could speak without a sound from the

lips.

Step by step their mutual sympathy grew more definite, more cordial,

and approximated to the communication of thought and fact. Within

a brief period they knew enough of each other’s language to tell

out their whence and whither. But in the people of the new star the

language was that of feature and not of tongue. Over their faces

flashed the signals of thought as well as of emotion, astonishing the

newcomers at the rapidity with which expression flitted over their

features. Equally astonished were their hosts to hear the countless

variety of tone and accent come from the throats of the strangers.

They covered their ears as if shielding them from the assault of some

thunderous report. Even the voyagers shrank from the voice of their own

spokesman. And, tone it down as he would, still was it too loud for any

delicate ear to endure. They were in a new atmosphere that bore sound

so quickly and clearly as to make a whisper reverberate like thunder.

So did it make the eyes of the dwellers in it as keen and far in sight

as if armed with the most powerful microscopes and telescopes. The

slightest adjustment of them and their lids changed them back and forth

from distant observation to near. And the same translucency marked

their tissues as made the inner movements of the newcomers’ heart and

brain apparent. There was needed no sound to interpret the magnetic

messages of the brain along its nerves. Hosts and guests were seen at

one, familiar as lifelong friends and thrilling each other with the

strange new experiences of their history. The voyagers from earth soon

knew why the use of the tongue and throat had been abandoned by their

hosts as means of communication; the uncontrollable volume of sound

offended their hearing, and drove them to develop the language of eye

and feature; the sight grew more powerful and adaptable as voice and

ear gave up their share of the energy and sustenance of the system;

their tissues, too, had ever been to a large extent transparent because

of the rarity and clearness of their atmosphere, and by selection and

training they had been able to make them pellucid as they now were.

The gleam of question and answer showed as clearly on the stage of

Loomiefa as the movement of the figures themselves. And, when the

colloquy had ended, and the strangers had gained all the information

they needed for their farther journey through space, we saw them enter

their faleenas and rise above the eager, penetrating gaze of their

new friends. Across the face of the heaven we followed the ethereal

fleet as it faded again into insignificance. Another scene showed us

their landing upon another planet of the universe they had entered.

The drama thus bore us with delight from system to system throughout

the cosmos, and revealed the ease with which stellar voyaging could be

accomplished, once the initial difficulties had been overcome.

A mediate book, dramatically published in Loomiefa just before,

prepared the way for this. It was the book of Sidereal Intercourse.

They had always held that the other universes in the cosmos were as

much inhabited by life as theirs was. It had ever seemed to them the

absurdest of arrogance for the dwellers on the earth to assume that

theirs was the only orb out of the countless myriads on the face of

night that had life upon it; that it monopolised the vital energy of

infinity, and the attention of its divine intelligence. The wider

they had ranged with their sidereal sciences, the more they smiled at

the primitive thought of their remote ancestors that they were the

cynosure of the cosmos. It had come to be used as the readiest and most

striking example of infatuation and conceit. That the poor earthlings

were as microscopic in their importance compared with the vastitude of

existence, as the bacterial swarms of a wayside pool compared to the

denizens of the great ocean, was assumed in every movement and act of

their minds.

And, wherever life was, there was the chance that highly developed

intelligence existed. They were not so sure that this was yet the case

on the farthest of our planets. It might be that the inner and smaller

bodies of our universe had passed the stage in which they could support

the higher life. The others, they thought, were rapidly evolving a

life of their own, most of it still in a low grade; when the earth had

passed its climax and begun to decay, they would probably, one after

the other, be attaining to a loftier type of life and intelligence.

Whilst they were running their course of progress the earth and her

inner sister planets would be waiting in their frozen silence the time

when the whole of their universe would be exhausted. Nearer and nearer

would the whole solar system be approaching some other system that

had run its course; and the encounter of the two would evolve a young

universe, full of heat and energy enough from the collision to make a

new cosmic career.

They had little hope then of stirring reply, if ever they were able to

send an embassy of thought to any star of our own system. All their

hopes of astral intercommunication were pointed to other stars and

other universes; and, as they looked up into the eyes of night, they

seemed to feel magnetic answer to the impulses of their souls, not from

Mars or Venus, from Saturn or Jupiter, but from the stars that throbbed

in far more distant depths. They had ever believed, of course, and

they had now scientifically shown, that the centres of light flashing

in the nightly sky were not the true sisters of earth but only suns,

round which the unseen universes circled. They tried to find the dim

worlds which drew their heat and light from these poignant watch-fires

of heaven; and their more recent instruments had revealed the dark

outlines of many of these twilight wanderers which hung on the radiance

of the visible stars. The magnetism that came with the rays from some

of those far distant luminous points had shown striking aberration

early in its course; and nothing could explain this but the existence

of rayless planets revolving round these lambent sources of light. Step

by step had they homed these aberrations, till they knew the courses of

the dusky satellites of many stars, and they could tell the moment when

a circular shadow would cross the face of any one of these suns.

The eyes of the astronomical families had become so accustomed to the

times and places of such obscurations that their firlas acted with them

and searched for magnetic impulses from the dark sisters of the star

they were watching; till at last they could tell by their electric

sense the place of many dim planets in the nearer universes.

It was on this that the book of Sidereal Intercourse based its forecast

of the immediate future. Since the definite discovery of varied types

of life in the spaces beyond the earth’s atmosphere, the last suspicion

of mere fancy had vanished from the belief in the existence of high

intelligence on the universes of infinity. And now their faces were set

towards communication with some of this intelligence on distant worlds.

The new book assumed that the electric sense, or something equivalent

for the perception of the great cosmic force, had been developed in the

inhabitants of some invisible worlds; and it laid down as an axiom that

there were vast stores of magnetic material in these orbs, just as

there were in the earth and in the sun.

What they must first do was to sweep the range of a universe with

an electric impulse on which the whole force of Rimla should be

concentrated, and to keep their delicate indicators all set in the

same direction. At the publication of the book in Loomiefa we saw

gigantic engines slowly moving their long arms this way and that

athwart one of the most brilliant stars of night, and scientists

eagerly scanning the numerous magnetometers that surrounded the huge

electric machine. We could see the air thrill and undulate with the

mighty impulse, and the very light of the star seemed to flicker and

wink before the penetration of the intrusive force. At last a flash

of hope came over the faces of the watchers; the pendent beam of one

sarmolan began to quiver. It was a message from the world they sought.

Again they turned the whole available power of the island--millions of

millions of horse-power--into the electric engine, the arm of which

they had at once brought to rest. Fierce lightnings again played

through the atmosphere, marking the line of the new despatch. And

again the luminous tongue of the magnetometer told of its reception by

intelligences like ours. Then came the astronomic families who marked

the exact position of the sensitive spot in the sky. And thereafter

their sentry stood with sarmolan directed thither, ready to announce

the slightest sign of astral impulse or response.

The scene changed, and we saw a new type of electric engine placed in

position on the stage. On its long arm was a singularly crooked cage of

transparent irelium, flat and sharp like the blade of a sword yet bent

into a right angle in the direction of the edge. Within it were placed

recording magnetometers. We could see the directors fix them towards

their responsive universe. Then Rimla concentrated its tremendous power

upon the machine; the arm swung right and left, and finally with a jerk

shot the crooked cage like lightning through the air. We followed its

luminous track far into the sky, till it seemed nothing but one of the

countless stars that silvered the night. Suddenly, like a rocket, it

bent back on its course, and as swiftly retraced its flight. I thought

to see it shattered into dust as it struck the earth, but there was a

deep pool ready to break its force. Its sharp edge cut the water and it

vanished, but slowly rose to the surface unhurt, and on the faces of

the observers we could see how successful had been the experiment with

the limotar, or new boomerang vehicle of electric indications. It had

shot far up into space along the true electric impulse that travelled

away beyond it towards the sensitive point of sky they had discovered.

Before it bent back from its headlong course, the response, speeding

more freely and more swiftly through the untrammelled ether, imprinted

itself upon the face of the sarmolan. It was this answer, more decided

than any they had yet received, that filled the eyes of the observers

with joyous light.

There was another change of scene. The gigantic engines had disappeared

and in their place we saw the ether-courier families floating on the

outskirts of the atmosphere with strata of clouds far below them. On

the back of their necks, where the electric sense had its special

seat, they bore a singular apparatus, not unlike a small telescope. On

their chests they had strapped a small engine of irelium, a miniature

of those we had seen in former scenes. The one was a magnifier of

electric indications, and the other was an electricity catapult. The

couriers could not only draw upon the electric resources of the spaces

around them, but upon those of the centre of force. And we could see

them converse with distant stars by means of these apparatus. Through

unobstructed space they could send with ease their electric impulses

to limitless distances, free from the atmospheric retardation which

before had demanded immense power to overcome its inertia. And with

their new electro-telescopes they could magnify ten-thousand-fold

any electric ray for their firlas to receive, although it might have

travelled a thousand times the distance between the earth and the sun.

They might have to wait days for their answer; but again and again were

they rewarded with it. With the dim stars circling round the nearer

suns they were able to hold comparatively rapid converse. But they were

going farther afield through the cosmos, and they had often to watch

and wait for weeks or months or years for any indication of response.

The book awakened little enthusiasm compared with the publication of

some of those that I had witnessed. For, though the authors had been

rapid in the composition of it, they had been somewhat forestalled by

one of the ingenious inventions of the last great age of discovery.

This was the modification of the lavolan which brought them records

of the life of extra-aërial space. Amongst the luminous impressions

that their combination of lavolan and faleena had brought down out of

the ether, they had found evidences of highly organised systems which

frequented the vacuum outside our atmosphere. They were satisfied

with the knowledge of this new-discovered teeming life, and they

believed that before many ages they would have developed, first their

apparatus, and next their senses, so far as to open intercourse with

it. And if they could come to converse with nobler intelligences near

the earth, they did not need to go so far afield in the cosmos as the

new book suggested. Their own filammus would serve to bring them into

close sympathy with the best life that was to be found in space until

they should know the conditions of such life and aim at fulfilling them.

It was one of the subsidiary studies and ideals of the book that drew

most attention and produced most result. It pictured an apparatus and

method for tapping the thoughts of men as they travelled along the

nerves, an adaptation of their huge electric engines for sidereal

intercommunication. For some ages they had been able to send emotions

and impulses through the air, or rather through the medium that

interpenetrated the air, and recently they had developed this into the

despatch of thoughts through long distances. The combination of great

magnetic power and sensitive sarmolans, this book showed, would draw

off thought at any point along its line of flight whether in the body

or in the air; and underneath an electric magnifier and interpreter the

indicator would reveal the meaning of the thoughts. Thus would they

be able to find out the intentions of men, however distant. But this

was only a minor result of the ideal. They would be able, with the aid

of the apparatus, to tap the torrents of thought speeding through the

ether, and so drink of the highest intelligence and imagination which

approached the earth. Much of it would be too intricate and abstruse

for them to follow or understand. But they already knew that most of

their greatest inspirations had come from this ocean of tremulous

energy, bordering the shores of our world; and development of their

faculties and of their sympathy with this extra-terrestrial thought

would gradually lead them to the interpretation of its more complex and

deeper elements. All their civilisation had been an attempt to know the

thoughts that lie in the structure of our universe, in its complicated

energy and minute life. By this new means they would feel the throb

of the very heart of our system, perchance of the very heart whose

beats are the life of the cosmos; at least they would get to know the

intelligence that flashes through space around our world, the wisdom

and the inspirations passing between the inhabitants of the ether

beyond our grosser senses.

Had it not been for this minor issue and ideal, the publication of

the book would have been completely overshadowed by that of the book

of Immortality. This took as basis the great expansion of life they

had been able to produce and their ideals of ethereal nutrition and

amphibious life, and pictured the posterity of the Limanorans able to

join the inhabitants of the ether without any violent transition or

death. We saw a Limanoran on the stage in Loomiefa passing through the

new transmutation from mortal to immortal. His transient elements were

atom by atom sublimed away in a new hall of medication, where magnetic

energy took the place of more material nutrition. His tissues became

diaphanous, till only the light and the magnetism he emitted marked the

place where he lay. It was what he thought and felt rather than what

he was that told us he was still there. His lower and more stagnant

centres of energy had vanished; and gravitation seemed to have little

or no influence upon him. Whithersoever his thought willed, thither

he floated, rather the luminous reflection of a man than the man

himself. To our grosser senses he seemed as impalpable and evanescent

as a perfume or a mist on the morning hills. Yet there he stood or

moved an inexpugnable centre of the highest energy, whither flowed the

sympathetic force of other centres, and whither nothing hostile could

approach. Storms passed effectless over his head; the deadliest engines

shot their darts at him in vain; poisonous fumes, lethal showers,

armies of pestilential microbes, swept round him and through him

innocuous. All the evanescent centres of energy that had laid him open

to the attacks of these, had dissolved and left him fit to be a dweller

in the infinite ether. There might be other noxious elements, to whose

assaults he was yet vulnerable; but these we could not discover. He

was immortal as far as terrestrial enemies were concerned, immortal

without the sudden collapse and dissolution of the lower centres which

we call death upon our world. By the most natural of processes he lost

the substance that awakened our grosser senses and became the mere

halo of what he had been, fit only to make himself felt by our centres

of thought and imagination. With our firlas we could feel stream from

him great currents of magnetic influence, unobstructed by any of those

terrene or aërial media that make spiritual intercourse so difficult

upon this world.

Such an ideal, when attained, would spread what is now called death

over the greater part of our terrestrial lifetime, instead of massing

it into a few moments of farewell. It would be difficult to fence

off the immortal from the mortal, so many stages would there be of

transmutation. The intercourse between the immortalising and the

immortal would then be continuous and there would be no sudden break

in existence, no great gulf fixed between the spiritual and the

material.

With the same corporeal and mental faculties which their ancestry had

had in primeval ages, and the bulk of men had in their own day, they

would have counted immortality as the gift of a friend. Even with

their existing development, noble though it was, they would never

think of longing for such a fate; for the lower centres of energy,

forming what is called the body, still demanded an amount of attention

and sustenance that was burdensome. They had great delight in their

life; they energised so purely and continually that they often forgot

the corporeal system and its claims. Yet the time came in all men’s

lives when they felt their still-mixed constitutions advance too

slowly for their spiritual ambitions; and then they longed for change,

perhaps rest, such as the dissolution we call death accomplished. If,

however, they could get rid of the inferior and clogging elements of

their systems and float free of terrene forces and conditions like

gravitation, then might immortality be an object of desire.

A publication that delighted them even more than this was one that

had a cognate theme, the dimension of time. It seemed to me the most

fanciful of all the productions I had witnessed in Loomiefa. Yet it did

not seem to strike the Limanorans as beyond the bounds of possibility.

It was called the book of Time-focussing. So fantastic and utopian

did I think it that I paid little attention when it was dramatically

published on the stage. Yet I remember some of the chief features of

the new book.

It counselled the development of the imagination on its prospicient

side till it should count æons as moments and take easy flight

through eternities. It was the real time-faculty, and had already in

the productions of Loomiefa forerun the civilisation of the race by

long periods. It had become true prophet not merely over months or

years, but over centuries. Trained to use the data of the past and

the present, it had been able to forecast the evolution of the future

with a certainty that made its art almost a science. What was to

hinder extending its range of vision beyond the immediate horizon, and

taking in at a glance the course of the future as it did the page of

history? And as it reached higher and higher points of view, it could

paint eternity as it now pictured the past. There was no limit to its

previsional powers, as there had been none to its penetration into the

prehistoric and primeval darkness. Prescience should be as organised

and exact as any science. In fact all their sciences had become

presciential, those that were merely retrospective or synchronous

having gradually fallen out of notice. And the families that had been

devoted to them were one by one absorbed into other services. No study

was counted of much value that had not one eye on the future. Their

whole intellectual system was thus becoming futuritive, and all the

faculties looked up to and centred in the greatest and most predictive

of them all--the imagination.

They had already been able in the valley of memories to focus the

past into the view of a few moments or days or months. The time

stretching behind us into the darkness was underneath one glance of the

intellectual eye. Only greater certainty in their imaginative methods

was needed for the eternity that stretches in front of us to flash

before the soul in a single picture. Only develop the prophet-faculty

as rapidly in the next few generations as it had been developed in

the past few, and we might move at will from age to age of the future,

as we now move from age to age of the past, living at any moment in

any period we pleased, or in a thousand periods at once. From past

to future would be as easy a leap as from hell to heaven for this

great time-and-space-focussing faculty. Eternity would be as focal

to imagination as infinity. It was an eye towards which radiated all

time and all space. Post-historic pictures would be as vivid to it as

prehistoric. Even now interest was fast leaking from mere recorded

history before the romance of eternity past and future. What was the

history of the race upon earth, compared with the periscope of the

cosmos? Then would their posterity be able to stand on a watch-tower

in the heights of heaven, and view the whole arena of existence as it

stretched through time and space. There is no faculty so close to the

divine as imagination.

I felt that this publication was like all their work, singularly

self-regardless. It clearly recognised that the realisation of its

proposed ideal would mean the doom of its art. Pioneering, all of

theirs which we in the West would call literature, would be superseded.

Loomiefa would then become an institution of the past, less and less

interesting as but a rapidly receding item of history. Self-effacement

for the sake of progress was the dominant note of Limanoran

civilisation. And in this book it seemed to me to rise to its highest

pitch; for it held before the race a goal, which, when attained, would

render literature and its publication unnecessary to its advance.

CHAPTER VIII

ANOTHER THREAT

WHEN the island was absorbed in the productions of this new literary

or pioneering era, its attention was suddenly called to its immediate

surroundings. Out of eternity they were jerked into the passing moment

to defend their own little plot of earth. Mere existence was endangered

if they did not at once withdraw their powers from their march through

the future. It had been the result of their humane and lenient policy

towards their exiles that every few generations rebellion and menace

rose in the archipelago against their mysterious isolation. Fear of the

isle of demons awed the imaginations of the other islands for a century

or two, and then foolhardy prosperity, or conquest, demanded a new

lesson.

Half a century had not passed since the romance of Choktroo’s rise

and fall; and unaided and unstimulated, the other inhabitants of the

archipelago would have grovelled in helpless fear and hate of the

central isle. The discipline applied in the repulsion of Choktroo’s

fleet would have sufficed for several centuries, but for a new power

which had insinuated itself within the circle of mist.

One of the days when the book of Emigration was holding the stage of

Loomiefa, the spectators were startled by realistic transference of

their drama to the sky above them. Just as the opalescent faleenas

were about to land on the new star, every eye was suddenly drawn

away from the stage to the blue spreading above the valley. Across

it was passing a strange airship of huge proportions and ungainly

structure. I recognised it as a development of the balloon, with which

I had been familiar in my European experience. There was the immense

inflated globe, or rather pear, with the car hung underneath; but

there was something new in the motions of this balloon. It seemed to

be dirigible, for it tacked this way and that across the direction of

the wind. And still more strange, the car was filled with implements of

war; I could see their great muzzles pointed over the sides.

The Limanorans were startled by this anticipation of their science, but

only for a moment; and as soon as the apparition sailed out of sight,

they bent their senses as eagerly on the spectacle before them. They

knew that their sentries were at their watch-posts on Lilaroma, and

nothing hostile to the interests of the civilisation could occur in air

or sea or upon earth without stirring their attention, and so placing

the whole island on the alert. They waited till the publication of the

book was finished and then streamed off to their various businesses

and pursuits. As we flew across the upper slopes of the mountain

we found out that the aërial stranger had settled upon one of the

lonelier heights of the island of Broolyi. No action was taken by the

Limanorans against the singular invader of the archipelago, except

to set a special watchman who should observe his movements through

the idrovamolan, and should report to the elders anything out of the

common that might occur.

The stranger had evidently been disabled away to the east of the circle

of fog; his steering-gear had ceased to act, and before a tornado he

was hurried away from the great continent over which he had hovered.

The impetus bore him helpless above and across the ring of mist, and

within its calmer sphere the steering-gear was again adjusted. It was

then that the watchers on Lilaroma saw his purpose to make for their

island, and they sent through the lilaran a blast which would carry him

away from their shores, not rude enough to harm him, yet sufficiently

strong to defeat his intention. Feeling himself borne again farther

away from his home he tacked for the nearest peak that he thought he

could reach. This was evidently Klimarol. But the blast of the lilaran

was too much for him; and to save himself from drifting still farther

west he grappled one of the heights of Broolyi as he passed over it,

and settled there.

It became one of the amusements of the younger Limanorans to observe

the behaviour and the fate of the newcomer in the isle of peace. The

crew of the airship was numerous; they were taken prisoners not long

after they had descended from their car, and their captain was hurried

off to the court of the new ruler. Before long the balloon was brought

to the capital and carefully guarded; and, anchored firmly to the

earth, it made ascents with the royal engineers under the direction of

the balloonist. His every movement was watched lest he should release

the captive by cutting the rope that bound it, and sail off with the

officers of his Broolyian majesty. But as the months and years passed

on, the newcomer with his strange new ship came to be trusted by the

king and his advisers. He saw an arena for his ambitions and talents,

and bent his whole energies to his new purpose.

We could see him from day to day and week to week add to the aërial

fleet, which he at once began to build in imitation of the balloon

he had brought with him. His original subordinates and companions

were at first his only assistants, but the Broolyian engineers and

mechanicians afterwards joined in the work in great numbers, and became

as deft at it as the strangers. Every new balloon that was made was

tested in the air. At first there were accidents, which for a time

prejudiced the court and the people against the aërial monsters. But by

carefully selecting his men from the army the director was able at last

to furnish every airship that he made with a complete and efficient

crew, able under the leadership of one of his companions to manipulate

the vehicle and every implement on board of it. It even became the

favourite pastime of the court to make voyages across the island in

these swift frigates of the sky.

Ultimately the king so thoroughly trusted the master of this new style

of transportation that he abandoned himself to his guidance and allowed

him free use of all the resources of the island. He came to see the

marvellous possibilities that lay in warfare carried on by such a navy.

Though the Broolyians had, after Choktroo’s deportation, lost one by

one all the conquests that that audacious warrior had made, and had at

last been confined again to the limits of their island, they never gave

up their ambitious dreams. And the monarch who could fulfil them would

be certain to fix his empire in their hearts. The new king looked round

for some means to gratify this passion for conquest. But their old

methods were now comparatively useless; for the other large islands,

warned by their past experience, built fleets as large and formidable

as the Broolyian, and the smaller groups confederated for the purposes

of defence. It was vain then to think of re-mastering the archipelago

in any attempt by sea.

With extreme delight then did the monarch watch a demonstration of the

warlike possibilities of the new air craft. The director had some old

hulks moored out at sea in sight of the king and his court. Then he

entered one of his new balloons, well provided with guns and explosives

and well-manned, and bade the crew let go. They sailed straight out

till they rose high over the remains of the antiquated navy. As they

approached their prey, several guns belched out their fires from the

car, and their shot struck and sank three of the ancient ships. But

two tough old hulls resisted all their attempts. So the balloon rose

straight over them, but much higher in the air. Out of the car was

seen to fall two packages, which made for the decks of the old tempest

resisters. In the twinkling of an eye, before we could realise that the

packets had reached their destinations, there was a thunderous roar,

and the air was filled with jets of water and with the flying fragments

of the shattered hulks. When the commotion settled, nothing but

floating planks and spars and shreds of the vanished ships was to be

seen on the surface of the water. And away out of reach of the fierce

convulsion rode the airship majestic and unharmed in the blue.

The monarch need no further demonstration. He gave up to the master of

the new power the use of his whole army and navy. Before many months

were over a vast aërial fleet was equipped and manned ready for the

first emergency, and this emergency arose at once. The sullen jealousy

which ever smoulders and rankles between two powerful and neighbouring

empires took substance and outward shape between Aleofane and Broolyi.

The old enemy knew nothing of the new instruments of war which had

been forged, and prepared with cheer and good hope for the struggle.

Her fleet was in excellent order, well equipped and manned, but within

a few weeks it had completely vanished before the wrecking terror of

the air. Continuous torrents of lead and iron streamed from above onto

their decks, making those of their gunners that survived helpless and

inert. And when their captains invented methods of pointing their guns

at the aërial ships and of floating fire-kites against them to set them

on fire, then the most tremendous engines of the navy in the air were

brought into train; and with appalling explosions the Aleofanian ships

and their crews vanished in atoms.

No such destruction of a nation’s war material had ever occurred in

the history of the archipelago. The Aleofanian marine force was swept

from the face of the sea. One or two other islands were bold enough to

attempt the struggle with the new power, but with the same disastrous

results to themselves. Over the whole archipelago except its central

island the air-fleet passed, inspiring terror and reducing the peoples

to servitude. It was the same all-conquering story as was told under

Choktroo’s leadership.

And now the Broolyian army and people were willing to worship the maker

and manipulator of these balloons as a god. He had plenty of ambition;

but he was by nature and acquirement only a mechanician and not a born

leader of men. He had none of the self-confidence made monstrous by

success, or of the unscrupulousness, that forges the masterful will.

He did love power, but he hesitated before those audacious measures

which give a conqueror the highest vantage-ground. He yearned to rule

widely. But he had not the self-mastery and the leavening imagination

which secure command over the minds of human aggregations. He was

but an average nature with complete mastery over the newest and most

masterful invention.

The Broolyian monarch saw the peril of his too great success, and

set the stranger and his balloons aside in time to let the popular

enthusiasm cool. Alone with his fleet and his army the king completed

the round of conquests. He knew that when the power of Aleofane and

one or two other chief islands was broken, there was nothing to fear

from the others, and his task, though brilliant, was easy. He took care

that there were several great and sanguinary battles that put heart

and pride into his soldiers and sailors. Thus by the time the war was

finished, the newcomer and his appalling fleet were almost forgotten.

But the monarch himself did not forget them. He knew that the climax of

this new era of national conquest and pride was certain to come soon.

Never had the Broolyians been continuously successful in war without

losing their traditional fear of the isle of devils, and demanding its

subjugation. He set his house in order against the day of vainglory.

He would develop his new method of warfare. He made the stranger

again his commander-in-chief, urging him on towards the increase of

the aërial fleet and of its terrorising weapons. Then, fearing from

his knowledge of the past that there was little chance of success, he

gave him complete command of the expedition, so that all the blame of

failure should be on the shoulders of another. In order to complete the

contrast, he kept rebellion smouldering in one or two of the adjacent

islands, and took care that it broke out simultaneously with the attack

upon the isle of devils.

Ignorant of the conditions he had to meet, and puffed up by his past

successes, the stranger thought that all he had to do was to add to the

number of his fleet and the deadliness of his weapons. We saw him set

out with banners flying amid the applause and enthusiasm of the people,

whilst the wily king led off his own forces, quietly to embark from

an opposite shore of the country against the rebels of neighbouring

coasts. Success seemed to follow the aërial navy, for favouring winds

bore them swiftly and majestically over the horizon out of the range of

Broolyian vision. For myself, as I sat at an idrovamolan, I feared the

strange new torrential guns and the showers of deadly explosives that

would rain down from these aërial ships, and my heart sank as I saw

them sail like great vultures nearer and nearer to their prey.

But my compatriots were tranquil and free from all anxiety. Everything

was really in readiness and they were only awaiting the exact moment

for action. It came, and the huge balloons fell suddenly away before

the blast from the lilaran, like a flock of storm-beaten birds. I could

see them struggling, many of them half disabled, to stand up to the

wind. But it was vain; they whirled like snowflakes before an arctic

tempest. Their helms became entangled in their snapped cordage, and I

could see their guns roll and pitch with fatal effect upon the crews,

till from many the suicidal weapons were tumbled overboard into the sea

below.

Yet the expedition by no means acknowledged itself defeated. Guided by

some experienced Broolyian adviser the admiral of the fleet changed its

formation. Evidently from knowledge that the blast from Lilaroma could

play upon only one point at once, he divided his air-navy into three

squadrons, and making the central face the blast, he sent the other

two in different directions round the island. He thought that these

two would be able to bring their explosives and guns to bear upon the

lilaran by this flank movement. It was as unsuccessful as his other

efforts. Both sections came almost within firing distance of the shore,

when suddenly their gaseous spheres were seen to collapse. A slight and

silent flash was all that told whence the disaster had come. Electric

rockets had issued from magnetic ejectors of great power and almost

invisibly punctured the spherical supporter of each airship.

It seemed as if the whole of the three squadrons would soon be in

the sea, and with the weight of their war material they were certain

to sink to the bottom and carry all their crews with them. But the

invaders promptly threw overboard their weighty cargoes, and with their

usual humanity the Limanorans now did their best to save their enemies.

The punctures in the balloons were so minute that it would take some

time to exhaust them. So the lilaran sent its blast underneath them and

buoyed them up like thistledown, at the same time blowing the three

sections of the navy off in different directions. It was amusing to

watch the alternate rise and fall of the various airships as it turned

its blast from one squadron to another, like a game of battledoor and

shuttlecock played by giant jugglers. The warriors in the cars kept

crouching in panic and holding onto the cordage, as they rose or fell

in the air upon the billows of wind. Their cars danced and leaped and

jerked like corks in an eddy where currents meet, and they were too

panic-stricken or too paralysed with terror to see that with all the

tumult of their movements they were gradually approaching solid earth.

We saw each squadron land on the shores of a separate island; and after

their terrible voyage the crews threw themselves upon the earth and

seemed to clutch it, in fear lest they should be torn again from its

sweet anchorage into the warring whirlpools of the upper air.

After a few days they collected their wits and the shattered fragments

of their air-fleet, and, hiring boats from the islanders, sailed

homewards. As they entered the main harbour of Broolyi crestfallen and

dispirited, the army and fleet of the king were returning from their

victories with triumphal music and with banners flying. The contrast

was striking, and set the monarch more firmly on his throne for another

generation.

Yet matters could not remain where they were. The defeat of the new

methods of warfare stirred hope in the breasts of the conquered

peoples; and muffled sounds of rebellion came from many of the islands.

The king knew that he must make some other move, and held long councils

with the defeated balloonist.

The result of the conferences soon became manifest. The stranger had

seen that his aërial fleet was useless against tempests and electric

missiles, such as the isle of demons had command of, and he willingly

handed it over to his superior to use against the threatened revolts.

With the blind obstinacy of the average mind placed in a position

greater than its powers, he ran counter to the traditions of the

archipelago, and uttered loud resolves that he was not to be beaten;

he would show them how fertile he was in resources; he had no fear of

their bag of winds.

The king again gave him free scope with all the material and forces of

the country, and the ingenious mechanician forged huge guns that would

throw their projectiles enormous distances, and built great ships to

hold them. As he launched one vessel after another, he practised his

crews on board of it, and taught them how to handle the marvellous

artillery. The people stood in awe, as they heard the thunder of their

fire dozens of leagues away, and saw their missiles fall in the sea

miles and miles from the ship whence they had issued; and they shook

their heads wisely and said to each other: “Now, we shall see at last

an end to this isle of demons.”

When the great armada was all ready after long years of work, and the

ships lay at anchor in the harbour, their magazines filled, their

guns in train, and everything prepared for the final expedition, the

people were so overjoyed at the sight that they organised a festival

to the sailors of the wonderful fleet. They had such confidence in the

destructive powers of these ships and their guns that they resolved

to pre-celebrate with magnificent pageantry and feast the triumph

they were so assured of. And as the monarch had already defeated

the incipient rebellion by his aërial fleet, and the mutterings of

the subjugated were stifled or unheard, there could be no danger in

inviting all the sailors on shore to take part in the festivities. So

the great fleet lay peacefully at anchor unmanned, whilst their crews

were being lauded to the skies for their intrepidity and the certainty

of their success.

The night was moonless and deep darkness was flecked only by the

occasional blaze of sky-daring illumination. Everything had gone

off with brilliancy, and the banquet to the sailors was nearing its

climax and close. Suddenly the hubbub of jubilance was hushed; there

was a series of appalling detonations, shaking the banqueting edifice

to its foundations; many thought that the world had come to an end so

terrifying and ear-deafening was the continuous roar. The people in the

streets at first fell on the earth and prayed to their gods. But they

soon saw what had occurred. There out on the harbour the pyrotechnic

display overshadowed anything they had ever seen or even thought of.

The great ships were all of them in flames; the magazine of each had

exploded, and sent decks and fittings and armaments sputtering in

fragments against the black of the sky. The brilliancy of the spectacle

overcame the natural alarm and regret. Such titanic catherine-wheels

they had never seen, such rending of the heavens, such flame-lit

jets of water rising in columns above the doomed ships. But the

spectacle was brief. Ship after ship rose high above the scene of its

devastation, its banners of fire all flying against the darkness, and

then plunged into the extinction and gloom of the depths. The breach in

the side close to the magazine sucked in the waters most swiftly, and

sent the bow-end of each first to the watery assuagement of her fires.

In an hour after the first deafening paroxysm all was still and dark

again on the face of the waters, but for a flaming fragment here and

there, hissing and sputtering against the night.

Then came terror again. The Broolyians, jubilant over the invincibility

of their marvellous fleet, knew not whence the disaster had come or

who had been the enemy. And they now crouched in fear, or ran for

shelter, lest the invisible foe should take advantage of their palsy

and reap his harvest of blood. But no enemy came. No carnage followed

the strange catastrophe. The morning dawned, and the waters of the bay

shone as peacefully in the level rays of the sun as if no fleet had

ever been there, as if no conflagration had occurred. Not a boat or

sign of an enemy was to be seen. Out crept the soldiers and sailors

from their shelters, the people in their rear, and soon the harbour was

alive with craft, seeking relics and explanation of the disaster.

But no explanation could be found in all the babel of theories that

chattered and echoed over the water. A council of the royal advisers

was called; they consulted and questioned every admiral and general;

but all in vain. The stranger, who had brought the fleet and its

equipment into existence, failed to account for the occurrence. He

refuted all charges of negligence, and appealed to the desire of the

people and the command of the king as his warrant for withdrawing the

crews from the ships for the night. Treachery there must have been;

there were a thousand conjectures, but no sure knowledge as to whence

it came. With the irrationality and ingratitude which mark all panic

in nations or other aggregations of men when unexplained disaster has

overtaken them, they broke out in fury against the very hero of the

night’s festivities. They had to find a scapegoat and his figure was

foremost in every man’s mind; the destructive magnetism of the crowd

gathered round the name that was on every lip, and the cry arose that

he was the traitor. The mob howled outside the council-room for his

blood. He had to be bundled off by a secret passage to the outskirts of

the city and thence into the mountains, and to appease their frantic

passions the king had to proclaim his exile, and to promise that no

such engines of war should again be forged in the royal armories. Fear

of the isle of demons again crept over the superstitious hearts of the

people. As they brooded over the mystery, they felt that somehow or

other it was connected with that inexpugnable centre which had defied

all their efforts at its invasion.

And this was right. For the Limanorans had watched the long preparation

for the assault, and made calmly ready to defeat it. They knew that, if

they ever allowed the fleet to sail, they could not well beat it off

without loss of life amongst its crews. It could lie in the shelter

of an island some miles distant from their shores and rain great

projectiles upon them. The repulse must be accomplished long before

this had been reached. They therefore waited till the ammunition was

on board each ship. Then, in order to avoid the destruction of life,

they sent into the air of Broolyi the exhilarative magnetism required,

and into the minds of the inhabitants the suggestion that the whole

fleet should be fêted. When the ships had been deserted and not a human

being was within reach of them, they launched through the air in its

direction a series of electric shocks, which, as soon as they came in

contact with the metals of the magazine, ignited the ammunition. Most

of the ships were set on fire in this way, the rest by the falling

fragments and sparks from their exploding sisters.

Thus was the new threat to Limanoran civilisation frustrated without

loss of life or breach of the mystery that sealed the central isle. But

the waste of time and progress upon such threats by the withdrawal of

so many Limanorans from their ordinary pursuits was an evil not to be

tolerated. Something must be done to prevent the recurrence of these

expeditions. It was generally from Broolyi they came, the result of

warlike ambition. It would be a service to the whole archipelago to

reduce this military people to insignificance and silence. There was

no security in their subjugation by the people of another island, for

the war-fanaticism would surge up again in a later generation. The

conversion of them to a religion of peace would mean no change in the

blood; it would only transform the method and cue of attack.

What was needed was the elimination of the ambitious and military

natures from the Broolyians. For only the aristocracy and the

descendants of the original conquering exiles had set their hearts on

military pursuits; the conquered and many of the families that came to

the island at later dates than the great purgation, were not unwilling

to keep to their own bounds, and preferred possession to dispossession.

There was no need of extermination of the people, but only decimation.

Nor would the Limanorans endure any shedding of blood in the process.

It must be gradual, peaceful, free from torture and bloodshed, and

almost unobservable.

The physiological and physicist families worked out a scheme that would

fulfil all these conditions, and yet finally eject the disturbers of

peace from the archipelago within a generation. The scare they had just

suffered and the exile of the balloonist ensured to Limanora freedom

from their attacks for some years. But they aimed at permanent immunity

and this could be secured by nothing less than the sterilisation of the

warlike element in Broolyi.

The end was accomplished in the next aggression upon a neighbouring

island. The expedition was formidable, and included all the bellicose

males of the offending people. After landing, it lay encamped in the

open air; then a band of Limanorans set out on wings by night, armed

with a new surgical instrument, called the idlumian, which could give

an electric shock to any part of the human system and paralyse it

either for a time or permanently, according to the power put into it.

They approached the whole army as it lay asleep, and by the whiff of a

soporific which they diffused through the air, they steeped the systems

of the sentinels in lethargy and by the same means ensured the depth

and continuance of the slumbers of the embattled host. Before a single

soldier had awakened from his deep sleep, the whole Broolyian army

was defertilised without being in the least conscious of any loss of

vitality or manhood or enjoyment of life. When the sentries awoke and

the troops began to move about in preparation for their struggle, the

medical embassy had winged its way back to Limanora. Not till twenty

or thirty years after did it strike the Broolyians that the fountain

of their military power was dried up, and soon they began to attribute

the strange infecundity of their aristocratic and warlike families to

the witchcraft of the isle of demons, a belief that finally sealed that

centre of the archipelago as with walls of adamant against aggression

on the part of their neighbours.

My Western instincts, in spite of all my training, would reappear at

intervals--which happily became longer and longer--and for a time

I could not repress my instinctive disapproval of the use of this

idlumian or electro steriliser. Yet my reason told me that it was the

only effective method of permanently stopping the horrors of war in the

archipelago. Heredity and circumstances would have circumvented any

other bloodless attempt at relief from the Broolyian nightmare. A few

discussions with my proparents made this rational view of the matter

dominant over the conservative instinct in me, and before many years my

instinct was quite the other way; it became the ally of the reason; and

I had no need to argue with myself on the point or confirm my faith by

arguing with others who knew better than I.

There was another Western instinct of mine which gave me frequent

though lessening trouble and came into conflict with the reason of

the community at this time and on this topic. It was my approval

of propagandism. Into my blood had grown through the centuries of

Christendom the feeling that a faith could not well prove itself unless

it spread out amongst new and alien peoples. It is the prerogative and

principle of belief to yearn for universality of acceptance amongst

human beings. And it urges on the devotees of any faith to spread it

through the world at all costs. After centuries of propagandism the

habit becomes an instinct, and it seems to be a dictate of nature to

attempt to convert the world to the tenets which have grown up in us

from infancy and been incorporated into our very life. The Christian

has ever been from its outset a great missionary religion, and it

is difficult for one brought up in Christendom to get rid of the

missionary attitude of mind which assumes every alien to it to be sunk

in wickedness and unprofitableness, and certain to lose all the future

blessings promised to true believers.

I could not obliterate this instinct wholly from my nature, and

whenever I reflected on the wisdom and nobleness of the Limanoran

civilisation, or noticed the marvellous progressiveness of some

new phase of it, I found myself longing to go back to the Western

world with my knowledge. Thus I often drifted into appeals to the

propagandist spirit which I assumed to exist in the breasts of my

friends and fellow-citizens, but I was not allowed to rest long in

such dreams. Each time I uttered or even thought over my missionary

desire, I was brought to book with the widest of knowledge and the

keenest of penetration into human nature and its history. I felt that

it was almost as useless for Europeans to go out amongst the tribes of

monkeys and spend their lives trying to bring them up to such a level

of intelligence as is implied in the appreciation of the Christian

religion, as for the Limanorans to apostolise amongst mankind, and

struggle to drag them up to the stage of progress these islanders had

reached.

But now, whenever my missionary mood returned upon me, my friends

would point with a smile to the new invention, the electro-steriliser;

and if pressed by the disapproving skepticism of my thoughts, they

would urge in words the omnipotence of this little instrument as the

apostle of progress. By this and this alone was the snail-pace advance

of mankind likely to be quickened. Without more rapid elimination of

the unfit than was afforded by natural selection, sexual selection,

and the accidents of surroundings, there was little hope of wise

propagation of the human race. The blunders and defects and maladies

of every new century were treasured up by heredity in the tissues of

mankind along with any feeble tendency to advance that might appear.

The struggle was a losing one in spite of the development of science

and wealth. And all reforming theories and efforts were but stumblings

in the dark till there had been a thorough purgation of traditional

and epidemic diseases, moral as well as physical. Nine tenths of the

race, as at present constituted, were unworthy to hand on their natures

to posterity. Under the régime of propagational license universal

among all peoples of the earth, the evil and diseased multiplied at

a much greater rate than the sound in mind and body. The progressive

element in mankind was dragged back by the dead weight of the criminal,

the diseased, the habitually pauper, and the naturally incompetent.

Some religions even set themselves to encourage the vitalisation and

propagation of the last. It was noble and good to assuage the evils

that heredity had accumulated in their systems; but it was anything

but noble and good to encourage them to perpetuate their misfortunes

throughout a wide posterity. “Multiply” should be the last word of an

advancing civilisation instead of the first, unless there be added to

it the condition “only the best.” And who cares or dares to preach

this true gospel of progress, when it touches a theme that all are

ashamed to mention? If ever there was a sacred mission upon earth it

would be that of the man who should go to the wise and good men of all

nations and put into their hands the secret of the idlumian, or who

should himself pass round the world and sterilise all the morally or

physically diseased amongst rich and poor, amongst gentle and simple.

Within two generations the races of humanity would take such a leap

into light and noble vitality and love of progress as would make the

most brilliant civilisation of the past seem barbaric. Then would they

take command of their own destiny, and look unflinchingly into the

future for the path they should take. Advance in material or in the

accumulation of force is vain, unless it goes hand in hand with such

universal moral and intellectual advance. It is progress in the human

system through all its parts that should be the aim of every race.

I gradually came to understand the importance they attached to this

new instrument as the most humane and effective of missionaries. Had

it come before their great series of purgations, there would have been

little need for the expatriation policy. If they had had to eject, they

would have taken care that the different sections of exiles should

vanish in a generation. They shrank from extinguishing the individual

life that had already been brought into being. They would have had no

scruple in giving euthanasia to an evil race or a section of a race;

for this meant only preventing a posterity coming into existence to

take up their burden of evil. And even now it was a question to be

seriously discussed and answered whether they would not sweep out the

pollution from the rest of the archipelago by the help of this humane

little doorkeeper of posterity. Would it not prevent the lifelong

evil of thousands? Where lay the humanity or love in allowing a

retrogressive and unhappy race to hand on to myriads to come the evil

they had received from their ancestors?

CHAPTER IX

POLITY

I WAS privileged to hear, or rather to be conscious of, the discussion

that the question of idlumian-missionaryism underwent. I had now

reached the age and stage of my training which gave me the entry as

audience to the councils of the race. It would not have been wise to

admit to the treatment of difficult and advanced themes natures that

were still hemmed in by the limits of long-past ages of history. They

could not have sympathised in, or even followed, the attitude taken up

by the elders of the people; and they would have gone back from the

meeting with minds perplexed and bewildered by questions too complex

and futuritive for them to fathom. Many of them would have suffered a

warping of their natures from the strain, and this would have meant

years of additional training and care to set it right. The exclusion

of the immature from the national councils was a matter of educational

policy rather than of political necessity.

It was evidently for my own benefit that I was present at the

discussion of the sterilising embassy. This was somewhat difficult

for me to follow, for my magnetic power and faculties had not been

developed enough to interpret the silences between the rare speeches.

As I sat, my mind ran back to a Quakers’ meeting to which I had been

taken by my mother; then much self-control had been necessary in order

to restrain the expression of my amusement; now I felt as if in the

presence of gods who needed none of the babble of human speech to

open a pathway from mind to mind. I had sloughed off that singular

prepossession of the Western nature in favour of verbal intercourse

and had ceased to think that silence, where two or three were gathered

together, was a mark of inanity, or incompetence, or at least

passivity. I remembered with a shudder the awkwardness that accompanied

social lockjaw, even where friends met; each grew afraid of the

thoughts of the others; none knew what the silence meant; everyone was

frantically searching for something that would break the gag without

appearing unnatural. Loquacity, instead of being a bar to ideas, was

counted an accomplishment; and freedom of speech was one of the great

political watchwords. It was only on rare occasions that reserve was

not considered a defect.

Now I felt that there was nothing so powerful as these silences in

council. The magnetism of thought and feeling was flowing from mind to

mind, all the more that there was not a word or sound to interrupt it.

Now and again, when the divergence of thoughts was dominant, one of

the oldest and wisest would call them in from their different tracks

to a common centre. Speech was rather a method of focussing thoughts

than one of chasing and criticising them. The speaker would review

all the mental discussion and concentrate its lines, so that everyone

present might have a view of the whole field from a high point. It

was marvellous how rapidly they went though the business in hand by

means of these noble silences, broken by occasional reviews. There were

no displays of mental or stylistic legerdemain, no appeals to common

feeling, no captious criticisms, such as form the staple of a debate

in a Western assembly even of the wisest men. Every fallacy that crept

into the discussion was unmasked in a gentle, fair, and kindly way.

There was no partisanship, no war-whoop of prospective victory, no

lash of sarcasm, and they abhorred above all things the sweetness of

harangue.

Yet, the absence of Western methods of beating out a subject was a

disadvantage for me, who had as yet little of the magnetic penetration

or sympathy needed for the appreciation of their meetings. But my deep

reverence for the humanity of the elders, and great sympathy for their

aims, made up in part for the lack of magnetic interpretation of their

thoughts. At the close of the council I talked the matter over with my

proparents, and eked out my own observations and reflections on its

proceedings and thus came to a just view of the whole discussion.

They were strongly impelled by their love of the human race to the

missionary course, which would now be so simple and effective.

Missionaryism before meant the hoisting of every separate alien and

barbarous nature up to a higher platform, and continuing the process

with generation after generation, a gigantic task. There was more

chance of the missionaries levelling down to the civilisation of their

converts than of accomplishing their original purpose, while the

arguing, preaching, and persuading implied a Niagara of babble for

centuries. Where would lie the compensation for such abasement of the

mind? Now there was no need of condescension; it was a mere matter of

common professional work for the physiological families. The glib

energy of the old process was evaded and in its place came the need

of wide practical knowledge and keen judgment. For tongue-force and

subtlety of reasoning were substituted physiological exactness and

selective talent. The process was now eliminative rather than directly

creative.

But such pleading ignored the true difficulty, the acquisition of so

large a knowledge of local and temporal conditions as would enable

them to foresee the full effects of the step. How were they to be

certain that only the nobler natures would hand themselves on in each

race? Streams from the barbarous and evil past might flow through the

mothers. Who could guarantee that the reduced numbers of the next

generation would be able to accumulate energy quickly enough to keep

the mastery of the earth against its unreasoning and unmoral powers? As

it was, the peoples were able to fight with the seasons and the forces

of climate and weather, and with the exuberance of the plant and animal

kingdoms. If their numbers were greatly lessened by the elimination

of the coarser natures, would not the balance be destroyed, and the

natural enemies of man have the best of it?

Questions like these made them pause. To be able to answer them would

need prolonged and minute investigation of the human race and its

conditions, perhaps consuming centuries in the task. Meantime their

own forward march would have to be abandoned. Omniscience alone could

deal with the problem of missionaryism, and as things were, the

omniscience of nature was dealing with it. For evolution was proceeding

throughout the universe, however slowly. Those races that seemed to be

laggards on the upward path were evolving what was needed on their

part for the advance of the whole army of creation, and death was ever

opening new careers for the vital force of their individuals. It was

difficult to tell without complete knowledge of all the conditions

whether the spread of a certain faith or phase of civilisation was

going to be beneficent or maleficent for the world as a whole. And all

missionaryism that was not based on omniscience was striking out a path

through a jungle in the darkness. Even the idlumian, unless amongst

criminals and the morally and intellectually plague-stricken, might do

irremediable injury to the prospects of the human race. The problem of

propagandism was, as often before, abandoned as too complicated and too

far-reaching for limited knowledge and brain power.

But the discussion gave me an insight into what I had long been

curious about, their polity and methods of guiding the course of

their commonweal. I had not dared to inquire into the subject lest I

should meet with some rebuff, or find that I had been too inquisitive

where reverence was needed. Nor had I been able to see much evidence

of government or legislation, and had almost come to the conclusion

that there was no such thing in Limanora as sovereignty or state.

Though everything moved with the harmony and smoothness of perfect

organisation I could never find the organising hand.

At last I discovered part, at least, of the machinery of government.

There was one assembly or council to which reformers could appeal with

their schemes. The whole community often assembled; but it seemed to me

that it was more for training, for the reintegration of some faculty

or feeling, or for the purification and elevation of the life, than

for legislative purposes. The only trace of any approach to selection

and decision in these national gatherings was to be found in Loomiefa

and in the linguistic assemblies; in the one they practically accepted

or rejected some proposed revision of their ideals placed before

them in a new book; in the other they decided whether a new word, or

the adaptation or application of a word was worthy to live or die,

whether a new sense deserved to be kept alive in a form set apart for

it, or whether a new distinction was real or merely verbal. I could

see that these were the two great functions of a national assembly,

to accept or reject a new departure in life or in language, to see

that the path into the darkness of the unknown was the right path,

and that the verbal armour and weapons they bore allowed of no enemy

near. Discovery and advance had their own pitfalls and risks; but the

language they used in investigation and research was the most natural

ambush of fallacies and the scientific work of a generation might be

rendered nugatory by an ambiguous word or phrase. In past time they

could point out many ages, which had prided themselves on the marvels

of their progress in science and were now regarded as barren and

unprogressive; their advance had been apparent and not real, a mere

change of nomenclature and not a change of ideas or a discovery of

facts. It was natural then that the community, as a whole, should, from

the mere instinct of self-preservation, keep the most watchful eye on

this unguarded frontier of language, and almost as eager an eye on the

regions that lay before them, the ideals they were about to adopt.