Nothing so greatly astonished the Limanorans as the concomitant

disappearance of detraction and vanity from their midst. One of their

earliest crusades was that against evil speaking; it was easier than

they had thought, for already the principle of generosity to others

had begun to work and reputation was counted more valuable than any

property. When magnanimity had eradicated the habit of disparagement,

the training in impartial use of the judgment prevented the nature

swinging into the opposite extreme of shouting hosannas over the

nothings of daily life. As they gained clear-sightedness in estimating

human actions and character, they found that the cues of vanity had

disappeared. They had no need of crusading against the vice; it had

been vanquished.

Another defect that seemed to have vanished without effort was

immodesty. The lustful had been exiled and it was easy to eradicate

from the natures of those that remained all trace of sexual passion,

and with it all pruriency. The chief purpose of sex in nature, that

of propagation of the family, became its sole purpose; and this, by

the control which the elders exercised over posterity, grew as rare

as death. Its other ends, the development of self-sacrifice and the

growth of love and friendship, had been completely detached from it

and rationalised. Procreation with the extension of the race into the

future was counted so tremendous a responsibility that most preferred

to postpone it as far in life as the instinct of the people would

allow. The sexual passion thus died out of their minds as out of

their natures, just as the mere appetites of eating and drinking had

died out. They had become parts of the rational nature when they were

thought of at all.

There was, therefore, nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to conceal.

Immodesty vanished with the cue and motive for modesty. They wore

irelium draperies more to temper the power of heat and cold and the

rigours of the upper atmosphere, and to aid them in flight, than to

hide their bodies from the eyes of others. For the draperies were

gossamer-like and semi-diaphanous and emphasised the beauty and grace

of the body as an expression of soul. It was not the face alone that

interpreted the mind, or attracted by its radiance. Magnetism rayed

from every limb; and none of the surface of the body was lost under

masses of garments; it all came into play as expressive of the life

within. They shrank at first from the unhealthy pallidity of my body

as it appeared when I first donned their raiment, but under the

transparency of my new garments it soon lost its ghastly whiteness and

acquired the ruddy, healthy tints of the face. For a time I shrank from

the eyes of my comrades, but as I grew accustomed to their absolute

purity of thought, I lost all consciousness of my body. There can be

no modesty or immodesty where there is nothing to conceal. It was one

of their subordinate aims to simplify and purify the functions of the

human system, so that none of them should be offensive to any of the

senses, new or old.

By this semi-diaphanous exposure of most of the surface of the body

there was far more space of skin for the development of sensations and

new types of senses. In their pre-purgation ages, when the greater part

of the corporeal system had to be muffled in opaque garments for the

sake of what was called decency, the finer modes of perception came to

be concentrated in the head and the hand; one sense crowded another

and blunted its observations. Now every inch of the corporeal surface

was open to the influences of sunlight and magnetism and the other

energies that so freely permeated space, and new forms of perception

began to develop over the body, chiefly refined modifications of touch.

The region of the shoulders became especially sensitive to magnetic

indications. The arms and chest monopolised the finer sensations of

muscular force, and especially of strain and push. Their feet came to

gauge with great subtleness the strength and direction of currents of

the wind as they flew through the atmosphere. The spinal region tested

the temperature of the surrounding space better than any other part of

the body, reacting at once to the slightest change in heat or cold.

Another advantage of the half-transparent raiment was the ease with

which the slightest change of emotion or thought could be seen, making

concealment and hypocrisy an impossibility. A third was the aid it

gave the medical elders in their periodical inspections of the health

of each member of the community; with unstrengthened senses they could

detect the smallest obstruction in any of the organs or tissues, so

that a mere passing notice might be enough to report on the health of

the people.

But if the sex-problem had retained its old obtrusiveness, this

seemingly superficial but really important reform in dress would have

been impracticable. Amongst the earliest questions that the Limanoran

scientists faced was the place of sex in the universe. After minute and

wide research they came to the conclusion that it was but an accident

of existence on some worlds. It was not an essential of the propagation

of life; for some species, like bacteria, multiply by mere fission, so

that part of the individual is immortal, and others, like the medusæ,

and ferns, and mosses, alternate asexual with sexual reproduction.

It was manifestly no characteristic of the first and lowliest forms

of life that settled on the earth; in fact large sections of vegetal

life retain the older habit parallel with the new or sexual habit; any

piece of many plants and trees cut off and thrust into the earth will

become a new plant or tree of the same kind without the intervention

of a seed or germinative stage. But the change in habit must have been

introduced into the world not long after the appearance of animal

life upon it; for it is only in the least-highly organised animals

that parthenogenesis appears in any form. Their conjecture was that

sexuality originated from the meeting of the germs of two worlds on

which life had not gone far on the path of evolution. The newcomers

would be unable to adapt themselves and their mode of generation to

the new conditions they had to meet; and where members of the two

types settled side by side in a position isolated from their kind,

the instinct of propagation would evolve out of their proximity a new

mode of generation, that would, from the cross-fertilisation of two

worlds and the combination of the vital energy of both, make a progeny

more vigorous and a development easier and more rapid. The species

that remained faithful to parthenogenetic propagation, and those that

adopted the new mode only partially, fell behind in the evolutionary

race. Sexual generation, uniting in itself the vital principles of two

universes, swiftly improved the qualities of the species that adopted

it and made them dominant upon the earth. Asexual propagation, the

easier and more primitive, gave the advantage in numbers of individuals

to the vegetal and lowly animal species that clung to it, but left them

almost incapable of evolution. On and upwards have passed the dominant

species through the invertebrates and the mammals up to man, guided by

that bi-sexual principle which has in it the stimulus of two types of

life and two universes. Nor did it seem to them contrary to the analogy

that some worlds should have in the life upon them a tri-sexual or

even a quadri-sexual mode of propagation, according to the types of

vital principle which have settled and continued upon them. Wherever

multi-sexual generation holds sway, there life is rarer but swifter,

and evolution carries it into those higher reaches where localisation

of it upon an orb is unnecessary.

It was out of sexuality, they acknowledged, that all the higher phases

of existence upon earth had come, love, friendship, self-sacrifice;

this, too, had given to humanity in its nobler developments the

irrepressible yearning for another and extra-terrene sphere and

another life. A vital principle issuing from a different universe

seemed to have kept within it the memory of its first home if not of

the free existence of space. And in man, at least, this had come to

consciousness of itself and led him to religious reverence and devotion

and the expectation of immortality.

They considered none the less that sex had almost finished its task in

many worlds, and would, in no very distant age, have accomplished all

it could do for the Limanoran race. When a principle of life has done

its task it must retire and give place to something better; else it

would become retrogressive and wholly evil, a mere despot selfishly

stopping all progress. Every race that meant to quicken the pace of

its evolution had to take command of it and guide it to its own higher

ends. It is the prerogative of the nobler types of man to raise nature

above her lower needs; the Limanoran ideal was to develop the creative

power of the human system so far that it might master all the secrets

of life and be able to mould human beings and breathe the breath of

life into them, and thus they would be able to supersede the sexual

mode of propagation.

As it was, they had gone far towards the complete mastery of the sexual

principle, and could mould and guide it to any purpose that the future

of the race demanded. They knew the conditions that would govern any

new human variety they needed in the state just as well as they could

produce new modifications of trees and plants and flowers. They read

the nature of each individual on the island as easily as they could

read a book. But besides this they had in the pedigree-annals in the

valley of memory a complete account of all the possibilities of any

family or any branch of it. From the developments of recent years and

the outlook that they ever kept up far into the future they judged when

some new type of nature would be needed for some post in the community

and gauged exactly the qualities that would have to be blended in order

to produce it. Then turning to the valley of memories, they studied

the characters and possibilities of the various families that had one

or more of those qualities exceptionally developed. By the aid of the

physiological and biological experts they were able to fix the two out

of which the individual parents would have to be chosen; and from their

knowledge of the character and history of every member, the elders of

these two families along with the medical elders were able to indicate

the man and the woman who would exactly fulfil the purpose of the

state. Years were spent on maturing the pair in the directions required

and in entangling their imaginations and affections mutually. None

were allowed to assume the responsibilities of parenthood till they

were matured to their fullest possibility; for they held that all the

essential characteristics of the two natures had to be developed before

the embryo could be produced in its fullest and most virile form.

One of the most singular features of this moulding of posterity was

that they did not always choose the most highly developed to become

the parents of the commonweal. For it had often been found in the

past that the individual who had brought his peculiar faculties or

qualities to the highest state of refinement in his own life had

exhausted the natural wellspring of them, and that he handed them on

in most diminished degree to his children. They often preferred in

their selection of possible parents a member of a family who exhibited

no exceptional energy in the use of its special talent; sometimes

the least active and the least conspicuous were selected. In them

individual work had never overstrained their faculty; it lay fallow for

a generation and was likely to spring forth with exceptional vigour the

next. To this I attributed their acceptance of my own imperfect nature

in their midst and my selection for mating with Thyriel.

When a pair had bred the child that was required, if they were not

conspicuous for wisdom or self-control, it was taken from them and

given to a new pair who became its true parents and trained it in the

direction it ought to take. These proparents were generally more

successful than parents in educating and moulding a character; they

never allowed the bias of natural affinity to affect the future of the

child; the parents, besides being swayed by the pride of parenthood and

the vigour of their affection for it, were too closely akin to it in

qualities and character to view it from an impartial and independent

standpoint; and the proparents were as a rule selected on account of

their contrastive qualities, qualities which would form the complement

to its own.

Though so much care was spent on the choice of the stock, they

considered it far more important to have the citizens of the future

properly trained, and were quite unbending in their insistence that

every child should have the most suitable natures in the community to

educate it, whether these should be its own parents or proparents. Nor

for ages had more than one child been permitted in a household at one

time. If a pair had proved themselves exceptionally successful in the

production and moulding of the two children they owed to the community,

they were allowed to adopt for a lengthened period the profession of

parent, by far the most important, if not really the only, profession

in the island. But they must bring one child up to maturity before they

undertook another. For, they held, there was no problem so complicated,

no duty so responsible, no task so exhausting for every faculty, as the

training of a human being in its earlier stages; to sculpture a new and

noble nature was considered the greatest creative work that a Limanoran

could achieve for the state; the greatest talents that ever appeared

on earth could not be better spent than on the parental profession.

Another and as important reason for the unitary basis of the household

was the moral contagion imperfect natures bring to bear on each

other. Children were never allowed together except under the strictest

supervision; for they soon undid all the work of their guardians, and

confirmed in each other the retrogressive savagery through which they

were passing. Before the Limanorans had come to their full heritage of

scientific knowledge and wise experience, they had allowed for a few

generations households of three or more children together, in order

to keep up the breed. But they soon discovered this feature of their

domestic life to be at the bottom of the slowness of their development,

and abandoned it. After long experience they decided that it was better

worth the while for the race to devote half a century of the life of

the wisest and ablest to the training of one nature than to do any

other work to be found in the universe. The greatest book, the most

illuminating discovery or invention, was as nothing compared with a

living centre of development and progress. Parenthood and proparenthood

well done were considered the greatest claims to gratitude and love,

and to everlasting memory if there were such a thing. For a man and

a woman to have given to the state by fifty years’ work a better

trained, more nobly moulded character, with larger possibilities than

they themselves had was to have done more than if they had discovered

and mapped out a new sphere for science and thought. It was one of

the greatest honours therefore that the community could bestow upon

any pair, to select them a third or fourth time for parenthood or

proparenthood.

That the two sexes were both needed for the training of a young nature

to maturity was one of the most unhesitating conclusions from their

experience. In spite of the obliteration of all demarcating lines

between the sexes as to privileges and duties in the state, there was

nothing more clear to them than the permanence of the distinction in

their natures, as far as life upon earth was concerned; it had grown

less and less marked as the ages went on, and as maternity came to be a

mere episode in the long life of a woman, yet it remained as real as it

ever had been, passing into every phase of the nature, imaginative and

intellectual as well as emotional and physical, and becoming salient

and striking in the procreative era of life. As the animal part of the

nature fell into greater subordination, it needed keener powers of

observation to note the difference; yet it had left its permanent mark

upon the spirit.

To women was assigned work which required slow continuous effort;

for although they are more emotional, they are also by nature more

passive. The temperature of the female in all species is lower than

that of the male, and in human beings this means less energy and less

explosiveness; the woman is ever building up her system by storing

sources of energy, the man is ever using up his stores of energy in

impetuous outbursts of work. The generations of active employment in

which Limanoran women had been engaged, and the complete cessation of

the warlike pursuits that used to fill the lives of the men, had not

obliterated these distinctions. The women were still best at sedentary

occupations; whatsoever needed continuity and singleness of purpose

was given to them; for they have more unity of nature, and can settle

down for long periods to an investigation that would be monotonous to a

man, and are on the whole longer lived. So any investigation that was

uninvolved, but needed intensity of application on the part of one mind

for more than an average lifetime, was handed over to a woman; and

where the work of several was required for a generation or two, a woman

was always one of the workers in order to preserve the continuity.

In the imaginative families it was generally the men who did the most

striking work. Their bursts of energy enabled them to go by leaps.

They pioneered best into the future; they found the new principles for

advance in invention and discovery. The women gathered the material

for the sciences; the men invented and applied the great hypotheses

leading to new laws and new advances; they also showed the way in

progress, and tended rather to revolution than to rest. Whatsoever

needed artistic talent was theirs to do. In physical work, wherever

rapidity of movement and fitful application of torrents of energy were

required, the men took the lead; for they were small and active, having

now no distinctively muscular employments, like war and hunting, to

develop their muscle and bone exceptionally. The women, as naturally

accumulative instead of prodigal of energy, were larger and more

passive, and took up departments of labour that needed long and gentle

persistence. In counsel they were the conservative element, and in

all the assemblies but those that superintended investigation into

the future, invention, and discovery, that is, in all councils of

judgment, they slightly predominated in numbers. If they had wholly

guided the community, it would have stood still or moved at a rate that

would not have been noticeable in the generations of men. Happily the

masculine imagination dominated the civilisation, and hence it was ever

quickening its pace. But the women were no less useful in preventing

revolutionary progress, and in making the men wait and meditate over

the leaps they thought of taking.

It was not so much sex-function itself, as the impress it had left

upon the natures of the people that supplied a rough-and-ready

classification of types. A few of the women who were especially fitted

to be mothers were assigned to the maternal profession; their natures

seemed moulded to bring forth strong, healthy, unexhausted offspring,

fit for the duties of a new advance. There were other women who because

of their nervous vigour and inclination to exhaust their best energies

in work were not the most suitable for the production of children,

and yet by their sympathy and wisdom and love of the young seemed

especially created to bring up children as citizens; these adopted the

proparental profession. A third type of women were, on account of their

quick, irritable vigour and their super-emotional temperament and lack

of self-control, considered incapable of either function except on rare

occasions; and they formed the largest class, the worker-women, rarely

generative and always uneducative; they were engaged in the sedentary,

acquisitive, and continuous employments that demanded no great strain

on the imagination or the creative powers or the muscular vigour. But

none in the community were wholly freed from daily active work both

of body and of mind, not even those whose lives were given up to the

profession of maternity. Amongst men all were eligible as fathers; for

though there were always a special diet and training for prospective

paternity, these might be enforced simultaneously with the usual work.

Not all, however, were called on to exercise paternity; it was a rare

and little-noticed duty, and left small impress on the community. But

there were some who on account of their great wisdom and self-control

and lofty character were specially fitted for the rearing of youth,

and these formed the male proparental profession. These had their other

duties to perform in the family and to the state as well as to attend

to their individual households, but they were dedicated to the guidance

of posterity; their eyes were more on the future than even those of

the imaginative families. The rest of the men formed the class of male

workers at creative and imaginative work, and at muscular work that

required agility and concentration of force.

Of the numbers in these different classes the elders had full control.

They knew all the physiological laws governing the proportions of

the sexes and types, and by their dietary and training and medical

precautions they could fill the exact number of vacancies to be

anticipated in any class. For instance, if one was needed for the

profession of maternity, almost all the energy of both parents was

spent for a time in nutrition; they were isolated from most activities,

surrounded with what in other civilisations would be called luxuries,

and encouraged to spend their time in resting. So, if a male worker

were required, the man and woman selected for parenthood were active

workers themselves; and during their generative period their nutrition

was reduced to the minimum for sustaining their energies, whilst they

were encouraged to put all the activity they were capable of into their

daily work. Their manuals of guidance in the difficult work of filling

prospective vacancies in the community were full of minute detail which

was based upon long experience carefully recorded and classified, and

still more upon scientific experimentation in human embryology and

physiology.

It was one of the earliest conquests of the future that they made

after the great purgation, this guidance of the sexual and other

characteristics of embryos. They knew the exact stage at which any

new organ or function appeared, for they had first of all studied the

moulding of embryos in animals; and afterwards, by the aid of their

new photographic and microscopic apparatus that revealed the minutest

detail of any part or movement within the living human body, they were

able to study the effect of changes in exercise or diet or mode of

life upon the development of the human embryo. Nothing was neglected

to make the knowledge complete and scientific, nothing that might help

to turn the science of embryology into a creative art. The invention

of instruments which could take the senses of the investigators close

to any internal item of the living system had made an era in the

history of physiology, and cancelled the necessity of anatomy as its

handmaid. The most microscopic change in the structure of any tissue in

the innermost part of the body became patent to the eye or the ear or

the electric sense of research. Embryology had thus become almost an

exact science; even the physiological side of it had attained to such

exactitude as to make it practically an art. The medical elders could

investigate the health of the embryo and guide its development as well

as in the case of the full-grown child.

They were thus able to formulate a complete art for the moulding of the

unborn to the purpose the elders indicated as best for the future of

the race. Training and education in the truest sense of the words began

long before birth. Of course it had begun with the father and mother,

if not with the ancestry; but the directly plastic art of fashioning

the character began with the first appearance of life. The elders would

have blamed themselves if any sign of gross atavism had shown itself

in a youth, now that they had full command of his prenatal history, and

for generations retrogression had become an impossibility in the race.

In former ages it had been one of the most difficult moral problems to

fix the responsibility of a man’s crimes; somewhat was due to his own

choice; but part, they saw, was due to his ancestry, and still more to

his parents, not only in their training of him, but in their prenatal

preparation if they were not careful to exclude gross or criminal ideas

and emotions from their systems whilst he was in process of formation.

Now they were able to apportion the blame with ease if anything went

astray in the character of the child. They were therefore minutely

careful in the precautions they took not only in the half-century of

education, but in the choice of ancestry and in the guidance of the

prenatal development. To prospective parents the character of the

future offspring was as a conscience to their daily conduct and method

of life. Every thought, emotion, act, was guided by a sense that it

would affect the embryo of the coming citizen.

The newest addition to their list of sciences, the physiology of

ethics, put into their hands one of the most effective aids to

this plasmic art of character, prenatal and postnatal. With their

instruments of investigation into the human tissue ever advancing in

refinement and power, they were able at last to localise the physical

centre and equivalent of each emotion; and thus having mapped out

the brain and the nerve-centres, they were able to watch with their

new modifications of the lavolan the palpitating life and movement

in each part with the strong manifestations of its special feeling.

Step by step they found their way towards the nosology of these

centres, and classified every disease that turned an emotion from

right to wrong. Whenever a Limanoran child became afflicted with an

evil or retrogressive passion, he was hurried off to the ethical

laboratory, and the nerve-centres of his emotional and moral nature

were microscopically photographed as they worked; a complete history

of his tissues was recorded on irelium-slips, and, after he had gone,

the investigators could run these through the recording instrument

and study the phases of the feeling or passion at leisure. The bursts

of mistaken emotion were livingly photographed with the greatest

care, and afterwards the records were watched through their most

powerful clirolans. Then experiments were made in finding remedies

which would check the growth of the disease in the tissue. At first

the therapeutics of morality were merely empirical; they tried the

remedies which had been successful with the common physical ailments

of humanity, and found most fail, a few succeed. By degrees they

discovered that the most powerful antidote against the moral poison lay

in the character of the operator; wherever the ethical investigator

had led a nobler life, the cure was more rapid and effective; wherever

the attendant had more development of intellect than of lofty moral

principle, the patient lingered and often relapsed. Yet there were

other prophylactics of a more material kind that greatly aided in the

recovery of the patient. Hygienic measures and courses were prescribed

for preventing the recurrence of the disorder; and at last something

not unlike a science of the art of moral healing seemed to emerge out

of the empiricism and chaos.

This culminated in the establishment of an ethical sanatorium, which

was in reality a children’s hospital for obstinate moral diseases.

No mature or half-mature Limanoran had for ages shown symptoms of a

relapse upon any ancestral or barbaric ethical code, and the mild moral

ailments lasting for only a few hours or days were easily managed

by the parents or proparents. Gentle influence, or at most gentle

discipline, was all that was needed to dislodge the evil spirit, or if

that did not succeed, magnetic remedies were applied to the part of the

nervous centres affected.

Should the moral defect still hold out obstinately against all

remedies, the patient was removed to the hospital for treatment. There

were collected together as moral physicians and nurses the wisest and

noblest personalities of the race, who applied all their therapeutic

power to the centre that was supposed to be the source of the disease.

But the centre had been scientifically examined and fixed by the

ethical investigators, who reproduced the parts affected and their

symptoms in greatly magnified forms, and suggested the various physical

remedies that would aid the sanative influences of the physicians

and nurses. The child was isolated from circumstances and conditions

tending to reinforce the moral poison; and his better nature was

invigorated and encouraged, so that it might be able to throw off the

germs of the malady.

Within recent times the ethical investigators had made great advances

in their science. The immediate stimulus of the progress was

accidental, as so often had been the case, or in other words it had

come from outside their recognised spheres of causation. An epidemic

of deceit had almost simultaneously seized upon the children of the

community, in spite of the solitary method of training adopted. Boys

and girls who had not seen each other for months were on the same day

impelled to habits of concealment, even when they were in the stage of

development that corresponded to the ravening fury and open warfare of

the barbaric past. Nothing in their ordinary methods of research could

furnish a cause for the outbreak. They searched the general condition

of the previous moral health of the children, and found it excellent.

None of the patients had come near each other for long periods; none

of them had shown any symptoms of the disorder before the epidemic had

appeared.

They were driven to some hypothesis quite outside the limits of their

usual sphere, for they saw that there was something uncommon in the

occurrence. Beginning to suspect that the germs of the disease had

come from other regions, as had so often happened, they increased the

powers of their magnifying apparatus by means of photography, and

invented more delicate aids to the investigation of the nerve-centres

than they had ever used before. On watching the part in which they had

localised the physical equivalent of deceit, they found signs that the

presence of the minutest foreign life was disturbing the nerve-tissues.

In the moving microscopic photographs and electrographs of the centre

they could detect the growth of a new type of microbe, inflaming

and interfering with the nerves of the part. Afterwards they found

some specimens of the disturbers in the atmosphere, and were able to

cultivate them for investigation and experiment. Soon they accumulated

a large enough quantity of the débris to apply to the cultures

themselves, and in every case it seemed to prove a steriliser; what the

minute life had used up and thrown off acted as a poison and destroyer.

By means of the medicine that they manufactured from it they were able

to annihilate or eject the disturbers of the nerve-centre of truth in

the patients. But in curing the part affected the moral equilibrium of

the children was upset. The bio-chemical families applied themselves to

the problem, and soon succeeded in isolating the medicative elements

from the injurious.

Thus a new and efficient method of treatment was introduced into the

ethical sanatorium. Chambers were reserved for sublimating the drug,

and thither children were sent if any obstinate form of deceit appeared

in them. And by means of the sterilised form of it they fumigated the

child’s quarters in any household, whenever signs of a return of the

epidemic appeared. The ethical investigators proceeded on the new path

thus opened up to them and were in time able to describe and classify

the microbes of moral epidemics and their antidotes. After some years’

toil they supplied the ethical sanatorium with a complete scientific

pharmacopœia, for at least all the grosser forms of vice, all the

offences against the moral codes that had been atavised or thrown into

the ancestral past.

The nerve-centres concerned with these offences were easy to find and

localise; so the minute life that interfered with such centres was

studied till it yielded its secrets to science. But it was a more

difficult task for the new scientific art of therapeutic ethics to

trace out the physiology of the newer moral codes and to discover a

cure for the maladies which hindered their complete adoption into the

Limanoran human system. The moral offences they had now to deal with

were sluggishness of the higher faculties of man, acts that dragged

the thoughts downwards, dominance of a physical need, concessions to

mere nature as against the highest knowledge of nature, excesses of

emotion or disturbances of the mental equilibrium by passion, devotion

to the past, superstition, stagnancy of belief, efforts to base belief

on unreason or ignorance, faith in a moral code as the terminus of

human ethics, or in a state of human scientific knowledge that was

omniscient. Step by step the ethical investigators found their way

to the nerve-centre that was disturbed when any one of these faults

appeared in a man; and after long years of research and experiment they

were able to add to their pharmacopœia the antidotes to these maladies

or weaknesses.

They would have thought the basis of existence irrational, if they had

persuaded themselves that ethics was unprogressive, whilst all other

things in the universe were subject to the law of evolution. A moral

code could be as easily superseded as a polity or a type of society. At

one time no race could see beyond the moral codes of barbaric life that

recognised no evil in treachery or revenge. Some at last advanced to

the moral code of the warrior, which based every rule of life upon the

idea of honour. Later still the civilised races of the world adopted

the moral ideal of the priest, which could find nothing good beyond

the limits of its special ecclesiastical forms. One by one these had

been antiquated and Limanoran civilisation had now found as the basis

for its moral code the principle of the cosmos, that of evolution. To

advance, to raise his system higher, to evolve its possibilities, was

the first duty of man as understood by the Limanorans of this later

age. To see beyond their present horizon was their ideal. They would

rather march forward into the darkness than stand still or retrograde

in light. To know clearly and definitely the possibilities that

lay before them, and to be able to choose the best of them was the

primary and fundamental maxim of their ethical code. All others were

corollaries of it.

If they had any unreasoned, unreasoning, and authoritative monitor

within them making for all that was right, in short any conscience,

it was now the prophetic voice of the ideals that they were still

to reach. Ages before it had ceased to be a voice out of the past.

Before the great purgation of the island half of their education

and literature had been based upon the literatures of two ancient

peoples, to whose conquests and legacies of energy and thought they

had fallen heir. They now shuddered at the pollution that these used

to communicate to the minds of their youth. The ethics running through

them belonged to a stage of civilisation that had been long antiquated,

and embodied ideals now far beneath them. The heroes and wisest men

were recorded in them as having done deeds with applause that the most

atavistic of their children would be ashamed to mention. Whatever

wisdom or nobleness they might otherwise teach, it would be completely

neutralised by the taint of vices which were approved or counted as

venial peccadilloes. To submit their youth to such pollution for the

sake of the problematic refinement they might gain from the books was

to do the greatest wrong a civilisation could commit, to prostrate its

own ideals before those of a vanished and barbaric past. Out with the

exiles went every trace of those old literatures; and the isle of liars

and the isle of lechers had taken them to their bosoms, with the result

that they had to adopt lying and impurity as their standards of life.

To return upon any past was to reject with recklessness the advantages

that it had gained and handed on to the centuries between. But to

adopt with deliberateness a past steeped in the grossest impurities,

and honouring intrigue and hypocrisy, was to commit moral suicide.

It was only in the immature that conscience, or the future invisibly

shepherding the present, was either needed or existent. They had

pitfalls and dangers out of the savage past to avoid, and an unreasoned

instinct was an essential to their development as an ever-present

guide, authoritatively bending their steps this way and that. This

moral and instinctive anticipation of the future, though mysterious

in its origin to the young whose conduct it moulded, was in reality

no mystery; it came from the magnetism of the wisest and best of the

elders; the ideal these saw in front of them and held out as the

immediate goal of the race, passed sympathetically and magnetically

into the moral and intellectual atmosphere of the island. The mature

knew whence the influence came, and grasped it rationally. But it was

round the young as a subtle inspiration and halo that came they knew

not whence; nor dared they question it or disobey its injunctions,

lest some evil should entrap them. When they came to maturity, they

learned the origin of the mysterious voice within, not to disregard its

monitions, but to reason them out and revise them by the light of the

advancing ideals of the race and to know that it changes and grows like

everything in the cosmos.

One of the first aims and maxims of their polity was to let their

citizens on reaching maturity think all through their lives for

themselves. The first guaranty of this freedom was rationality, the

power of tracing back every act and feeling and thought to the primary

principles of existence, combined with the sense of responsibility

for the future of the race. There was no repression, no prohibition;

the prerogative and duty of every man was to make himself fit to be

a law to himself. In former ages their ancestors used to talk of the

innocence of childhood; all that they meant was unconsciousness of

conventional emotions, ideas, phrases, and habits, and superiority

to them. They smiled at it as a temporary stage from which they

would soon pass into the restrictions of manhood and womanhood; and

only the greatest sages were able to work themselves free again from

conventions so far as to be moral and noble and yet to have the

innocence, the unperturbed vision and candour of the earliest years.

But now all men and women retained the naïve openness of childhood

and its artless simplicity; for they had no conventions to trammel

the freedom of spiritual movement, no prohibitions to make the will

shrink from origination or action. Even when childhood or youth was

checked in some mistaken career, the check was veiled in persuasion

and reasoning and a vision of the truth. The atmosphere of freedom

was an absolute essential for the full development of individuality;

and the guaranty that this freedom would never pass into license was

the fact that every mature man and woman had a noble aim, and that

the magnetism of the race was around everyone. None had to obtrude

the claims of his personality upon others; and none was abashed by a

sense of despair, or the feeling of insignificance. Humility was a

virtue needing no conscious cultivation; there was no occasion for its

appearance, for the place and merits of everyone were accurately gauged

and acknowledged by all. It was only the insignificance of all humanity

against the infinite, of the life of this world against cosmic periods,

that deeply impressed them, and rendered them weary of efforts so

feeble as those of human life. But the mood was brief in such sanguine

temperaments and agile natures. Action they knew to be exhilaration and

health and the building up of tissue and faculty.

All they wished to be sure of was that the action was to lead forward.

The test of its morality was this: did it make the human system

progress? How far did it tend to make the future better than the

present? Whether a thing was pleasant or not for the moment, had no

influence upon their choice of courses of action. That had been the

motive and guide of the barbarous past, the artist of its conduct, the

creator of its character. The civilisation of other periods and races

had meant only the development of needs. And the pure savage is ever

superior to civilised man in this sense; with his minimum of needs and

the wherewithal to satisfy them wherever he may find himself, he is not

so localised as even the wealthiest and most cultured man of the most

luxurious civilisations who is tied to his property and investments,

and is miserable unless in the one or two cities where he can indulge

his taste for luxury to the full. There was no such thing as luxury

in Limanora; everything that was brought into being was essential

for advance, for the final aim of the life. Not needs but ultimate

ends gave them their point of view, not desires but means, not rights

but duties. If there was anything that could stir them to greater

eagerness, it was the prospect of more work for the good of others;

if anything could be looked upon as a luxury amongst them, it was a

surfeit of work that contemplated a widening of the racial horizon. To

serve the future of all was their deepest longing. Far into the savage

past had faded the idea of servitude; and, as they looked into history,

there was nothing they were more thankful for than the disappearance

of such a necessity; for they considered the servant, especially if

slave, the despot of his master in moulding and pandering to his needs

and whims, and an evil despot too, as less advanced and less cultivated.

Among the things they most deeply abhorred was despotism. And the

worst despotism of all, they held, was the social, that which is

exercised daily and hourly, and from the vantage-ground of proximity;

the narrow scope and limited horizon make it all the more intense.

The most accursed of despotisms is the system of espionage; it wrecks

every chance of freedom and crushes originality, turning the race

back into crawling venomous things. It is a vain attempt at complete

spiritual repression and feebly assumes omniscience and omnipresence

on the part of the despots. Its only chance of success is a spiritual

society disciplined like an army and ruled by nothing but loyalty to

its superiors who base their authority on the assumption of intercourse

with supernatural omniscience and omnipresence; and its only chance of

continuance is grovelling prostration of all its subjects and possible

critics, in abject fear of unknown terror and of spies in the very

precincts of the heart, who can hear and interpret its every beat.

That was one of their hells, which they occasionally brought before

their imaginations in order to warn them against minute supervision and

interference. It was this that urged them on to complete transparency

of nature, so that their inmost thoughts and feelings might be open to

all. Ever since the liars had been thrust forth, one of the immediate

goals of their civilisation had become absolute truthfulness. Now that

this had been attained, a further goal was complete limpidity of the

human system. The wise elders had already been able to interpret what

passed in the heart or brain of a Limanoran; now the aim was to make

the sensuous garment of the soul diaphanous to the magnetic sense, if

not to the eyes of all. Of nothing in his whole system must a man be

ashamed, before he could endure such continuous confessional to his

fellows, and it was towards this goal that every Limanoran was now

consciously working.

The constant inspections and examinations by the elders might seem

to conflict with this horror of espionage and spiritual despotism.

But these were voluntary on the part of mature Limanorans; it was

one of their recurring pleasures to be able to submit their tissues

and faculties to the wise observation of the elders, and to gain the

advantage of their experience. Had it been felt as a despotism, it

would have been abandoned at once. With children and the immature it

was a matter of discipline; they were in the pre-purgation stages of

Limanoran history, and had to be in pupillage and under authority. As

soon as they were able to keep step with the advancing civilisation,

or in other words to be a law to themselves, they were allowed to

walk alone and without the trammels of guidance. It was the strenuous

aim of the elders and guides of the community to keep the atmosphere

of thought free. They were constantly reviewing and revising the end

and aim of existence in the light of the new developments of thought

and science; hence its form never became a hard dogma. They believed

in ultimate truth, but knew that nothing short of omniscience could

attain it. They were now and again getting glimpses of it, but fought

shy of expressing it in words, for everyone would know it to be only

a provisional expression. Language itself was a shifting mirage of

the mind, dependent on the point of view for its meaning and even

existence; and one of the most constant duties of the community was to

define and clarify it, and to free it from its ever-growing opaqueness

or nebulosity, and the fallacies that haunted it. One thing they never

hesitated about, but grasped with unerring instinct; and that was the

goal that they kept before them, or in other words the advance they

were eager to make. They hated all jesuitry, knowing that it meant

the suppression of spiritual freedom by what merely professed to be

progressive and good, and the obscuration of spiritual truth in clouds

of subtlety. Nothing that was evil, they held firmly, could lead

ultimately to good; nothing that was retrograde could in the end be

progress.

They had learned from the revolutions of their past how snaky and

tortuous are the ways of deceit; and the first sure sign of its

triumphant success is the bold adoption of the doctrine that good men

may do evil, provided their aim is good. Under this the liars sheltered

themselves for ages before they were exiled. The era of the history of

the island that filled them most with shrinking and loathing was that

of the struggle with the various forms of deceit. The first lesson in

the valley of memories was drawn from this division of their annals;

they filled their youth with hatred and scorn of untruth and hypocrisy;

no firm step could be taken in education till this had become a deeply

rooted feeling in their natures, and nothing awakened it so well as

the study of this struggle with the liars. But they never taught any

subject merely from books or records; everything, even history and its

lessons, was made practical and living. Deceit, for instance, was

traced back to its sources in nature, and the difficulty of getting

rid of it was revealed by finding it so wide spread in the lower ranks

of life. Mimicry or involuntary deceit was investigated all through

plant and animal life, and it was found to be more prevalent the lower

the investigators went in vital organisms. Their loathing of it as a

deliberate adoption amongst human beings grew deeper as they saw that

in the animal world it belonged either to incompetence or rapacity.

The prey mimicked the form and colour of another species that was

loathsome to its enemy in order to avoid his grasp; unconsciously the

mimicry spread, for only those members of the attractive species which

were like the repellent species escaped and propagated. Or the spoiler

mimicked the form and colour of a species that was friendly or neutral

to its victim, and only those members of the species similar to the

unfeared kind succeeded in catching enough of their favourite food to

survive and hand on their nature to a posterity.

It was the same in the higher life of human self-consciousness and

will; only here intention and deliberateness entered in and turned

mimicry into deceit. Wherever hypocrisy existed it was a sure sign of

a vast number of incompetent and feeble, who made an easy quarry to

the villain, and of the vigour of a cunning minority, who often found

it difficult to entrap. Diplomacy and convention are the deliberate

mimicry of the predatory section of a race or of its gullible section.

When once the Limanorans had purged the island of the liars, they had

to prevent the propagation of the feeble and incompetent; for they knew

that, as long as these existed in a community, there would persist the

more futile forms of deceit. After that first purgation, the weak,

though retained in the island, had to abandon family life; they were

provided with the means that made existence easy and pleasant in order

that they might not resort to their only method of survival; and in a

generation the problem of hypocrisy had disappeared.

It was then that the idrovamolan was invented and came into use in

education. Having driven out the hated vice, they found that there was

still the need of impressing its evil results upon the minds of the

maturing youth, just as it was necessary even yet to study the diseases

that had disappeared for generations from their midst in order to be

able to cope with them, should they ever be reintroduced through their

communication with other atmospheres. But they knew the unreality of

teaching anything in a merely theoretical way; they felt that lecturing

and sermonising and the mere reading of history would give them no such

grasp of the vice and its evils as would living, acting things. The

idrovamolan with its telescopic, telacoustic, and telemagnetic powers

came to their assistance in this difficulty. By its help parents and

proparents were able to bring the youths into the very presence of the

loathed deceit without submitting them to the chance of contagion.

They turned the object-tubes of the wonderful instrument upon Aleofane

and its society; and through them they saw and heard and felt men like

insects mimic and like stinging worms crawl and diplomatise, lie and

cheat, still with the worship of reality and sincerity and truth upon

their lips. There they noted the growth of the most offensive form of

the vice. The weak learned it for protection, flattering the great and

grovelling in the dust before them whilst they cursed them in their

hearts, and all in order that some favour might perhaps be flung

like a bone to a dog. Having learned the vicious art in this cringing

fashion, the feeble were seen to march off with the proud gait and

the conceit of adepts and use it like brigands on the still feebler.

This combination of incompetence and unscrupulousness was the final

curse of a civilisation that had taken deceit to its bosom. The whole

of the energy of the race was spent in simulation and dissimulation.

Every vice simulated its antagonistic virtue; even virtue simulated

the vigour and arrogance of vice. The Limanoran youth needed no more

teaching on the evils of hypocrisy. They rose from the idrovamolan

with an intense loathing for all forms of deceit, so impressive was

the drama they saw enacted in Aleofane. Even what seemed innocent

mimicry they shrank from, seeing it universally employed as the means

of cheating in that island of liars; mimicry they were encouraged to

eschew; for as surely as the art was mastered, it was used for mean

or foul purposes at some time or other, either for envy and jealousy

and scorn, or in order to lay traps, sometimes for the strong, but

chiefly for the weak. Even in art all mimicry was avoided, for there it

betrayed feebleness or lack of individuality. The existence of mimicry

in the animal world was the mark of degeneracy upon terrestrial life.

It argued the wide domain of feebleness and rapacity, and the dominance

of the passion for mere existence. Wherever it was wide-spread, it

meant the abeyance of progress and of eagerness for progress. Mimicry

is the sterilising process of faculty and power. Origination is the

principle of fertility, of stimulus to progress.

Whatsoever dallied with an outgrown principle or element was immoral.

Mere copying of what had been already attained and was about to be left

behind or used as a stepping-stone to something better was neighbour

to evil. Morality is the effort to adapt conduct and ideals to the new

vistas opened up into the future by an advance already achieved; and it

is ever being bribed or throttled by what is outworn. Evil is the past

which has become so obsolete and is yet so living as to be obstructive.

What has been outgrown has ever its allies among living elements, and

its advocates in every mixed and unpurified race. Especially is this

the case where there are fixed codes or creeds, and along with them

professions organised to preserve and continue their sway. The world

is constantly seeing the spectacle of a nation or race or species

coming to a standstill after centuries of brilliant progress, and

getting fossilised in a certain stage of its advance; there it remains

for generation after generation as if alive, yet practically dead for

all purposes of development, like a fly in amber. This dead stop is

due to the dominance of some code or creed that seemed to embody the

spirit of its greatest success; the nation or race sought to secure

for ever to itself the advantages of the ethical or spiritual methods

that had achieved for it its most brilliant results, by fixing them

unalterably for all time, with their official guardians to protect them

from change; so that which had given such vigorous life and development

for a time became a prison-house and grave. Only the most tremendous

revolution and cataclysm could burst the walls of the tomb, tear off

its grave-clothes, and release its spirit for new conquests. Sometimes

a nation seems to fossilise the creed or polity that first gave energy

to its life, yet at the same time grows and develops spasmodically.

It has only made pretence of having fixed this code for all time,

whilst the living spirit of it escapes and follows its own course in

freedom; it has periodically to return to its pretended prison and

tomb, and to reconcile by jesuitry and in makeshift way the two methods

of life which have come to differ so widely. Then it flees again into

the struggle of existence and gradually ignores even the new versions

of the old code, till the divorce becomes too obtrusive to escape

attention, and the process of reinterpretation of the antiquated creed

begins again. This has been a common enough mode of advance in the

history of the world. But it is fraught with incalculable risks. It

induces a habit of self-deceit and hypocrisy, and the nation or race

ultimately makes a tomb and prison-house for its spirit out of its own

falsities and self-delusions.

Advance like this, the Limanorans held, was no true advance. They

would have no part or lot in fixity of methods or codes, for whatever

became fixed grew thereby evil and obstructed development and advance

to higher points of view. They had only to look into their history to

see how every new step antiquated some universally accepted belief

or maxim. Not so many ages ago a crudely philanthropic spirit was

considered one of the surest signs of advancing virtue, in fact one

of the noblest of the virtues. Now it was considered distinctly

immoral to philanthropise without taking care to foresee the results

of the philanthropy. Limanorans used to go out into the archipelagos

and try to convert the barbarians to the special code or creed then

in vogue. Instead of helping on the human race, it actually stopped

the development of a section of it; for the adoption of a creed and

its symbols and rites and phrases far in advance of any possible

civilisation they could reach only made the savages--whose virtues had

hitherto been at least genuine--conventional, false, and hypocritical;

whilst the apostles left thousands of their own countrymen at home

stagnant or retrogressive. It soon came to be acknowledged that

intercourse with inferior civilisations, even for the purpose of

raising them, lowered the moral standard of the missionaries, whilst

failing in its original motive. Much of the philanthropy that began

at home was found to be no less obstructive and immoral. It fed and

clothed the poor and improvident, and thus helped to slay and bury

the only habit that could save them out of their slough, the habit

of measuring every step they took, and seeing whither it led; and it

helped to perpetuate the evil; for the ready yet limited supplies

combined with the improvidence to make them breed like the lower

animals, and the race of paupers and unprogressive was inordinately

multiplied. The same feeble and immoral philanthropy opposed all

attempts to stop the multiplication of the diseased and semi-criminal,

and had to increase the armies of doctors and guardians of the peace

every generation. It did well to nurse the feeble in mind and body, and

to reduce the penalties under which heredity had placed them; but it

failed to see that it was doing endless evil by letting them penalise

an increasing posterity with their own punishment. Not till it was

branded as the worst of immoralities was such philanthropy ended. This

had been a distinct advance and a true virtue, when it had taken the

place of cruelty and neglect, and when there was unmeasured space on

the earth for the expansion of population; but, once this stage had

been passed, and the purgation crusade was proceeding, it became a real

plague and vice.

Another immorality that had once been a virtue was the pursuit of

beauty for its own sake. Men gave up their lives to the production

of beautiful things which served no other purpose than their own

glory and the entertainment of idle and leisured people. Others made

fortunes and devoted them to the purchase of such works of art, in

order that crowds might collect and admire them, and for a time

there was something of truth in the assertion that it educated the

taste of the people. But this was only when the bulk of the race was

unenlightened and unprogressive, and anything that softened their

barbarity, anything that drew their thoughts away for even a brief time

from sordid cares or cruel projects or mechanical and conventional

habits, implied progress or a chance of progress. When the race had

been purified, and every eye was bent on the future, and every nerve

strained toward some advance in human civilisation, beautiful things

became the commonest features and necessities of life, and beauty

ceased to be noticed as anything remarkable. Then to spend energies on

producing what was artistic and beautiful without serving any other

purpose than pleasing was reckless extravagance, and by wasting what

should have been expended upon the progress of the race was condemned

as immoral. There was no virtue in doing what everyone did by instinct.

There was positive vice in making it the sole and deliberate purpose of

expenditure of energy.

Another instance of a former virtue having become a vice was

statesmanship and political patriotism. At one time half the

conspicuous talent of the race went in this direction, so greatly was

it admired. And, when there were other races and nations to diplomatise

or struggle with, and one half of the race had to provide for or keep

watch on the other half, it is no strange thing that to enter into the

domain of politics was considered the noblest thing a man could do, and

love of the welfare of the country was considered the noblest sentiment

a man could entertain. The most difficult problems, involving, some of

them, the very continuance of the race, occupied the attention of the

statesman and politician; what to do with the vast pauper class and

the still vaster fringe of the poverty-stricken and improvident, how

to deal with the criminally inclined, how to educate the half-savage

denizens of hovels in cities and even in the open country, how to

prevent the deadlocks in industry, how to regulate the labour market

and how to check the recurrent plagues and famines, were questions

that tasked the finest intellectual energies of the nation. What

complicated the answer was the fact that the themes of the discussions,

the pauper, the criminal, the improvident, the employer, the labourer,

the plague-stricken, and the starving had all a share in the government

of the country, and had to be persuaded that any scheme proposed was

to their individual interests. The virtue of political patriotism was

streaked with loquacity, conceit, self-seeking, hypocrisy, corruption,

and intrigue, long before it came to be recognised as a vice. The

statesman and politician had to make his principles as interchangeable

as his coats, had to be a master in the art of making the worse appear

the better reason, had to be skilful in lying without seeming to lie,

had to rob whilst putting on the guise of self-sacrifice, had to

cringe and fawn, bully and overbear, by turns, had to be an artist in

bribing men and in taking bribes, in short had to be the most expert

of the criminal classes. By the time the end came, none in the list of

virtues had become so like a vice as patriotism. The great purgations

swept out all occasions for politics and patriots in exiling all the

subjects of statesmanship. Where there were no paupers or criminals,

no masters or servants, no uneducated or savage except young children,

and no chance of plague or famine, the occupation of the statesman and

politician vanished. Where every man was taught to be a law to himself,

legislation had no place. The problems of most inchoate civilisations

had gone into exile with all the isms that were proposed to solve

them, and all the charlatans that proposed their solution. Patriotism

was now, like breathing, the organic and unconscious process of every

mind, and not the exception upon which anyone could plume himself. No

longer was it the safety of the country, or the continuance of the

race, or the sustenance or justice or criminality of part of the people

that demanded conscious effort, but the advance of the human system in

all. To propose and argue legislative schemes for the benefit of any

section of the race would have been accounted immorality, if it had

not been taken as a symptom of atavism or mental disease. A hospital

was the certain fate of anyone who indulged in political projects or

political eloquence; the old virtue had passed beyond the stage of

obstructiveness and vice, and had become one of the tests of insanity.

This disease of politics rarely appeared except amongst the youthful

and immature and the methods of driving out the evil spirit had

recently grown scientific and unfaltering. The old plan of exiling, it

was now felt, had become cruel and pitiless. For in recent generations

the pace of evolution in the race had so quickened that now even its

laggards and the breakers of its moral law were centuries ahead of the

most advanced citizens of the most advanced nations on the face of the

earth; and no longer could they, if expatriated, find any to consort

with. They would have to live with men who, in their eyes, were vicious

and criminal. Noola had been the last to be exiled; the system was

finally abandoned as inhumane and unscientific; and science soon found

methods of treatment that were prompt and efficient in their cure of

all such mental diseases.

My final instance of the old virtue grown vice is of a different kind.

It belonged more to the intellectual sphere than to the practical, and

seemed to me at first rather a mistake than a defect of the nature. It

was the common error of taking a verbal originality or advance for a

real, a mere change of name for a change in essence. In the old times

it had been counted as a great merit to a man, if he manufactured a

new nomenclature for any wide spread phase of civilisation, and so

gave the race the sensation of dealing with something novel. Some of

the greatest heroes of philosophy and science in the pre-purgation

ages of the island had owed their fame to the substitution of fresh

phraseology for what had grown outworn and trite, and most of the

great writers had done nothing more for their fellows than re-illumine

a linguistic world fallen dull and dark. Men grow sick of ideas that

have worn the same verbal dress for a generation or more, and hail as a

discoverer and benefactor anyone who tricks them out anew; they delight

in feeling them to be familiar old friends, whom they have to make no

mental effort to know. Even to dye the old garments in new imaginative

tints is a service they will not readily forget; whilst the great

discoverers and pioneers of the human race have had years or ages of

oblivion according to the newness and difficulty of their ideas and the

distance beyond the common horizon they have looked into the future.

The Limanorans of old, like most other men, abhorred having to think

out again their creeds and ideas, and especially having to reform them;

and so they stood out lustily against every real advance proposed, and

shouted it down as irreverence or blasphemy in overturning the old

barriers and old altars. The maker of a new nomenclature and the tinter

of the old phraseology pandered to this intellectual indolence.

One of the most striking results of the new point of view after the

great purgation was the transformation the fame of these old scientists

and philosophers and writers suffered. They began to be execrated as

dealers in illusions, as men who fed the passion of the human race

for stagnance or retrogression to monstrous proportions. They were

thrown down from their lofty pedestals, and cast into oblivion for

their sins against truth and reality. To seduce men from the pursuit

of truth by mere verbal jugglery was now counted no mere mistake, but

a heinous offence against morality. To take as a real discovery what

was but a new name or set of names revealed a vicious obliquity of

mental vision, that needed attention from the ethical physicians. This

was especially easy in the domain of ethics, and the Limanorans were

constantly on their guard against the delusion of accepting a change of

nomenclature as a moral advance. The elders carefully reviewed every

stage of progress, lest it should have been in words and phrases. This

was the main purpose of the Manora and of the Imanora, and every month

linguistic councils were held to revise the language, and to throw out

any fallacies and illusions it might harbour. Every new nomenclature

and phraseology was searched and probed, and torn off the ideas that

they were meant to express, in order to see if there was anything new

underneath them. Delusion, they had resolved, they would have nothing

to do with in any shape or form. For delusion blinded the eyes to the

route they were taking, and made them march in a circle or back over

the old roads under the belief that they were advancing to what was

new. It was the greatest foe to true progress, and any man who fell

into it revealed vicious tendencies, which needed the ministrations of

the physicians and nurses in the ethical sanatorium. To take verbal

ingenuity for true pioneering was the most grievous offence against the

future of the race.

The great standard and test of morality was progress. How far will

an act or habit aid the true development of the race? This was the

crucial question in Limanora; and in order that it might be answered

satisfactorily and easily by any member of the community, the council

of elders was careful to accommodate the ideals of the race to every

advance made. It had been a rare thing in their history to change or

add to the cardinal instincts of morality. But this they knew was by no

means impossible; and indeed they were buoyed up with the hope that the

moral cosmos was still to open up new marvels like the physical cosmos,

that in fact the two would ultimately be found to be one when looked

at from the final and divine point of view. There was the strongest

conservatism in the ethical phase of life; for it is the last, highest,

and most complex development of vitality. The lower we investigate in

the animal world, the more revolutions and transformations we see the

individual go through, the more enslaved is it to circumstances, to

locality, to season, to the moment. The higher we go, the greater we

find the conservatism, and at the same time the greater the origination

and the adaptability. In man these two conflicting powers grow stronger

side by side as he advances in civilisation. He retains features and

forms that are outworn and useless longer than most of the higher

animals; and yet he originates and adapts himself and his surroundings

with far more ease and swiftness. In ethics, his last evolution, the

conservatism dominates the origination and the advance, obscures them

or makes them simulate its own features, and produces the belief that

the final maxims and cue of morality have been reached from the first.

Ethical progress has naturally been slow, and it is only the student of

vast periods of history and of many nations and races who becomes fully

persuaded that there has been any change in the point of view. Because

there is not complete transformation, as in the case of the minuter

and lower animals, it is assumed that there is no evolution, and that

morality and conscience have remained fixed quantities, from the

beginning of historic times at least. And the close bond between ethics

and religion has assisted this dominant and delusive conservatism in

its task. Each great step in ethical evolution has been claimed by

religion as its own, and as resulting from its own special revelation

from heaven.

The Limanorans were quick to recognise that morality must be subject to

growth and development, not only in the individual, but in the race,

and that man must gain higher ethical points of view as he progresses.

They knew that many of the finest impulses and inspirations towards

progress, and especially ethical progress, had come from beyond the

earth and the earth’s atmosphere. But that any age or race could have

caught the ultimate ethical light from the central sun of the cosmos

seemed to them after their experience the height of absurdity. There

could be no spiritual eye trained and developed enough to receive it.

As the bodily eye of man is capable of taking in only a limited range

of rays of light, whilst an immense range of them above and below its

faculty either blind it or pass unnoticed, so his spirit at any given

stage of its development can understand and accept ethical ideas only

within certain limits; but, as it progresses, it is able to see beyond,

and appreciate ideas that were non-existent to it before. There is

as much difference between the ethical comprehension of the modern

Limanoran and that of the most highly civilised European as between

that of the latter and the savage’s, or as between the savage’s and the

pig’s; and if they could have brought themselves to believe that they

had attained the fullest and the final light upon morality, the thought

would have struck their very hearts to stone.

It was this that kept them from formulating their morality or ethics in

any definite code. They knew that a code would soon petrify morality

and itself become a fetich ignorantly worshipped, and, gathering to it

through the ages the self-interest of its officials and the irrational

devotion of its worshippers, attain a despotism that could never be

broken or controlled. A code issues in a series of prohibitions which

become a boundless slavery, and prohibitions develop the sense of

rights which dominates and obscures all sense of duties; this keeps men

hanging between savagery and true civilisation. The growing dominance

of duty with its complementary obscuration of rights is the first

symptom of the approach of rapid ethical progress. To insist on one’s

rights imprisons the soul in the living sepulture of selfishness. To

think of one’s duty is to admit the self-revealing and future unmisting

light of self-sacrifice. Once prohibitions become the order of the day,

especially in a limited community, the spirit of intolerance is abroad;

every man yearns to confine his neighbour and put him in moral and

intellectual leading strings. The origin and meaning of the “Thou shalt

nots” are forgotten; the spirit of them dies rapidly, and the letter

binds and petrifies the souls that must obey them. Progress in ethics

is finally stopped, and it is accepted as a law of nature that there

never was any development of conscience and never can be any other

ethical point of view. Moral stagnance is taken as the rule of human

life, and nothing short of a new impulse from spheres outside the world

can liberate the race, thus blinded, from its vicious circle of thought.

Advance of the human system to higher points of view is in Limanora

the moral test and standard of actions and conduct. In all that is,

nothing has ever died, nothing is dead; what seems dead and fixed for

ever in permanent form is suffering change as truly as the flitting

aurora of the north; the rock, that seems the same in our old age as

when we saw it in infancy, is in process of transformation no less

than we ourselves are; it is made up of particles that are groups of

molecules; and these molecules, moving with varying degrees of rapidity

round and across each other’s orbits, consist themselves of still more

minute atoms that are but points of living energy. Send another form of

energy, like heat, through this apparently torpid mass, and it stirs

palpably to our senses; what was dormant to us before has awakened,

and, as the supply of the foreign energy increases, the rock moves

and changes beneath our gaze; not that the long-torpid mass has not an

energy of its own; it is a store of energy, every atom of it waiting

but for the touch of another kind to awaken from its age-long sleep,

and to send most of it free and a step higher into the wandering sphere

again. The difference between solid and liquid and between liquid

and gas is only a question of time. In the solids the molecules take

longer to move through the same space than those of the liquid, which

in their turn take longer than those of the gas; for solids flow under

the influence of gravitation or other force just as truly as liquids or

gases flow.

It is the same with energies; one differs from another in pace; time is

the only essential difference between them. The pace of vital energy is

so distinctive in its swiftness that it forms a new order of existence.

Thought is the swiftest of the vital energies that we know, and to

rise in the scale is to quicken the pace. The civilised man thinks as

much more rapidly than the savage as the savage thinks more rapidly

than the mollusc, if the last may be said to think or feel at all. And

there are heights above existing human thought for man to climb. Higher

and ever higher the scale of energies in the cosmos must go, till time

becomes what would seem to us but a vanishing point; immediately above

us lies the vital energy to which a thousand years are but as a moment.

To the microbe, if it could think, human life would seem an eternity.

To creative thought, which is the Limanoran ideal, eternity, future as

well as past, is focussed into a moment.

Up through the scale of energy the whole cosmos is ever climbing,

with occasional lapses and falls, time being the only differentiating

quality. To quicken the pace of development is the one immediate aim

of Limanoran civilisation, and the morality of an action is measured by

its contribution to this aim. The higher they climb, the nobler, the

more ethereal, becomes their energy; the less governed and clogged by

animal conditions, the more easy to quicken the pace of development.

For the cosmic law of influence is that the closer in quality and

degree the spheres of energy, the more likely is the higher to mould

the lower and raise it near to its level. The source of the everlasting

movement and life in the cosmos is the unstable equilibrium of all

nuclei and stores of energy. Every world differs from every other world

in its capacity for various forms of energy; and so does everything in

it differ from everything else in the amount of any particular form

of energy it can contain. Comparative proximity sets up a current

between any two nuclei of energy that thus differ. Whenever the two

reach stable equilibrium, that is, whenever they come to have equal

shares of the energy, the current of influence ceases, and they are

dead to each other. The socialistic ideal is political and social

death; when all the members of a community are equal and alike in their

share of its privileges and products and capacities, its rights and

duties, it ceases to grow or develop; stagnation is the law of its

being, especially if there are no neighbouring communities differing

from it on which it can react. The Limanorans deliberately strove to

keep up and strengthen the differences between not only families, but

individuals, in rights, duties, capacities, aims. The differences were

an everlasting fountain of renewing life. The law of political and

social life is exactly the same as that of gravitation and of all the

other cosmic forces. Two sources of energy will continue to influence

each other, till they reach equality, the greater giving of its share

of energy a larger proportion than the less. What keeps the cosmos

eternally alive is the complexity of the mutual influences. There

are no two bodies or centres of an energy so isolated or so simply

constituted as to remain for ever dead or unchanging, once they have

reached stable equilibrium towards each other in respect to their

special form of energy. And so it is with men; the socialistic ideal is

an impossibility in this universe.

In the human sphere this cosmic law has farther-reaching issues than

the merely political. The Limanorans were willing to do much for

the advance of mankind, but they had come to see that apostolism is

a case of this law of mutuality of influence as truly as any other

phenomenon; the higher must not only give voluntarily of his influence

and character to the lower, but the lower must give of his to the

apostle; and if the proximity continues long enough, this mutual

give-and-take will end in the missionary coming nearer to the original

moral standard of the convert than the convert comes to his patron’s

original standard. Where the grades of the two civilisations are widely

separated, though the process of assimilation may be long, extended

over even many generations, it will be most disastrous to human

progress. It is better, they concluded from their long experience, to

isolate an advancing race that is far ahead of all other races, and

thus to give it the chance of coming within the sphere of still higher

intelligences.

Most advanced religions have begun with the impulse towards this,

yearning for a loftier sphere than that in which they are hedged. They

try to isolate their followers from the lowering influences of the

world around, in order that they may reach the ideal and influence

that are just above them. But, as they apostolise and expand, the

worshippers become mere parasites of their God; they try to batten upon

Him with their lower natures, and thus drag Him down to their level.

After the first noble impulse and inspiration, it is seldom that a

religion does not become as truly an instance of parasitism as the

meanest bacterial life. The lower all through the universe is eager to

parasite on the higher; minute organisms try to lodge in the tissues of

those that are larger and more developed. As long as host and parasite

can pursue their functions unhindered by their intimate relationships,

little harm is done; but as soon as the débris of the lower clogs the

organs of the host, what we call disease results and the minute guest

becomes a hurtful parasite. As long as the religious impulse sends the

nature higher on the path of development, so long does it give of its

best to the Deity, so long does it fail to clog the advance of the

cosmos. But when it extends its conquest to mean and unprogressive

natures, the common, unenthusiastic natures that are saturated with

envy and jealousy, then does it become mere parasitism; the religion

has grown into a disease. The warm, humane, and generous natures

which are touched by a new inspiration, rise to an exceptional pitch

of fervour under its influence, and develop at a pace that stirs the

alarm and envy of their neighbours; whilst the resultant persecution

continues unabated, there can be no degeneration, the worship can never

be parasitic. But as soon as the persistence and progress of the early

worshippers and their propagandist enthusiasm begin to invite the

commonplace, cowardly spirits of the mass, who can never appreciate

what is above them except to envy it and drag it down to their level,

its era of development is past. The cosmic law of reciprocity never

fails to act, and the united influence of the meaner majority is

greater in its power over the whole than the fervour of the noble few;

down falls the worship to the level of the many.

It was on this cosmic law that the Limanorans based their refusal to

go out and attempt to convert and raise the rest of mankind to their

standard. They knew from the nature of the universe that the attempt

would end in corrupting themselves and dragging them down farther than

they could drag up their converts. They preferred to give of their

best to the unorbed existence which filled space outside of the world,

and to make their best still better. Thus they knew they were serving

most truly the great end of all being, the development of the cosmos,

the elevation of the energy in it towards more and more spiritual and

progressive grades. They strove to perpetuate and strengthen their

consciousness of what was above them, and to break the yoke of the

lower self, the self that at death amalgamates with what is material

and stagnant, although the latter was needed as a stepping-stone as

long as they remained upon the face of the earth. In seeking the

proximity and influence of the higher energies and existences that

seldom touched the earth, they anxiously guarded themselves from all

parasitism which might drag these down in the scale of being; and

this led them to abandon attempts to personalise the relationship to

them. They would have no part in worshipping or prostrating themselves

before these beings in order to obtain their protection and patronage;

for this, they knew, becomes merely sectarian, the outcome of envy

and jealousy, the cause of bigotry and intolerance, persecution and

revenge. They did not desire the exclusive influence of a higher being,

nor to become obstructions to its further development; to rise to its

level was their active spiritual ambition in striving to gain proximity

to it.

As their senses, especially their inner senses, developed, they were

getting more and more certain of a vast universe of being just outside

the merely terrestrial, and new inspirations and senses were ever

awakening in them; nobler ideas and impulses pressed in upon them,

they scarcely knew whence. They were afraid to define the source,

lest they should humanise the idea of it and pollute it. What they

were sure of was that infinite space was filled with unorbed life and

energy, rising in higher and higher grades, as it receded from the

terrene. The energy of the worlds and of the other nuclei of force was

gradually rising through the grades of being, thanks chiefly to the

measureless existence which hovered round them, yet settled upon no

centre of fixed energy. Out of this unorbed life came the impulses and

inspirations that made such epochs in the history of a world. Their

magnetic sympathy with this they were strengthening and elevating

every generation, as they strove to rise higher and higher amongst

these existences in order that into their spirits might come nobler

and nobler influences. As long as they were conscious of qualities and

degrees of existence above them, so long would they be stimulated on

their upward development. They had no fear that they would ever reach

a point from which they could not see heights beyond. That, they knew,

would be complete spiritual death. But they knew too that there was no

such thing as death, or entire annihilation, in the whole cosmos. What

seemed to us death was but the final parting of two grades of being

or energy, the lower to coalesce with some fixed form of energy and

attach itself again to some more rapidly developing form, the higher

to range itself with the unnucleated energies of space, still to rise

by proximity to some higher life. They were scientifically certain

that there could be no end to this process of development upwards.

Aspiration was the duty and true function of all existence. To quicken

the pace of the evolution, to range themselves more and more swiftly

with the higher life of the cosmos, this was the prerogative of vital

energy that had gained consciousness of itself and its purpose.

Their conscience and morality were based upon this quickening

ascension. The test of an action was this: does it help in raising

the humanity higher in the scale of being? Nothing could be good that

stopped their ascent; nothing could be bad that compelled them to rise

more quickly. The elders generally saw at a glance all the bearings

of an act and knew whether it contributed to this general aim or not.

Where they hesitated on account of the complexity of the problem, they

met and discussed it, calling in all the accurate science they had to

their aid; if after all they had to lay the question aside unanswered,

then was the act left in that neutral zone of conduct which the

Limanorans might or might not enter as they saw fit. Such acts carried

no moral discount or credit with them for the time. But often the

advance of an age, or even a few years, would remove the act from the

neutral zone into the bad or the good; a higher point of view generally

solved their doubt. From the opinion of the elders there rayed out

magnetically into the young and immature the sense of what was right,

to act as conscience where they were incapable of reasoning out the

position.

There was thus no feature of their lives but came within the range of

morality. Even the habitual and automatic movements and actions, which

form so large a proportion of the life of the other terrestrial races

had been reduced to an almost inappreciable proportion in theirs and

were ever being questioned and tested to see if they harmonised with

the newer points of view that had been reached. There was nothing in

their whole existence that had not its moral relationships. Their

sciences and arts, their experiments and inventions, were as much a

part of their moral life as their character and their conduct towards

each other. Morality was the relationship to the ever-developing,

ever-advancing, aim of the race, and nothing in the whole range of

their life was indifferent to that.

CHAPTER XII

A WARNING

EVER and again there overshadowed the spirit of the race a cloud, a

foreboding, that contrasted deeply with their usual exhilaration. The

intervals between its appearances were often long, occasionally brief.

At first I could not understand the cause of it; for I was still in

pupillage and had not yet developed the sympathetic magnetism that

ultimately made me a member of the race. But, when it recurred once

or twice, I began to see that it followed the passions of Lilaroma,

and that the families of the Leomo were least affected by it and most

active whilst it lasted. Another concomitance was the subsequent

importance of the questions connected with interstellar migration.

The discovery of the infinite and invisible life of unorbed space, not

only infinitesimal but highly organised, lessened the gloom of these

beclouded periods, and made the Limanorans less feverish in their

astronomic and volitational researches. They felt that the divorce

of the higher and lower energies of their human system, commonly

called death, was no annihilation of their entity, no closure of

their career of development, but only an incident in it, that took

the further history of their higher energies out of the reach of the

grosser terrestrial senses. They had no need, they felt, to reach out

frantically towards some other world. They had lost all fear of death,

and all thought of it as the end of their evolution. Still upwards

would they climb through higher stages of existence, in spite of the

loss of that grosser stepping-stone which we call the body. Knowing how

full the interstellar infinities are of vital energies and organisms,

and knowing too how the body began a new, though perhaps lower, career

at death, they were certain that the vitality and spiritual energy

that left it on dissolution, a far loftier and more highly organised

entity than the divorced terrene elements, would still exist and still

develop. The whole encyclopædia of their scientific knowledge was

opposed to its annihilation, and the discovery of the vital fulness of

space left no other alternative than that it was thither the spiritual

energy of the human personality escaped at death.

Yet there lingered a tinge of gloom at the time of any overwhelming

spasm in the heart of the great mountain; and the Leomo bated not a

jot of their activity at such periods in combating the once-dreaded

catastrophe. For they had no definite knowledge of the future pace

of their evolution, once the two types of energy in them should be

divorced; and they had as a firmly grasped fact their development

as they existed upon their island, and the increasing swiftness of

its pace as the years went on. They had ever been a people readier

to accept a bird in the hand than two in the bush, although they

might be fairly confident of their skill in bird-catching. This very

preference for facts had helped them to abandon the promises of faith

that their old religion had so lavishly held out to them, and to accept

the attitude of patiently waiting for light. So now, when their

science had found the light and they had every prospect of opening

communication with the intelligences that lived just outside of their

unaided ken, they would rather wait upon the solid earth till they saw

as solid fact to rest on in their flight from the earth.

They were eager, therefore, to postpone for some generations or ages

yet the catastrophe they feared. They had had far back in their history

a dim sense of the wrecking power of Lilaroma and its connection

with the volcanoes in their old antarctic home. Their more recent

earth-science had made the twilight prophecy into a clear fact. In

an early geological age of the earth the continent round the south

pole had sent a broad outlier far north through the southern ocean;

it had indeed stretched close up to the equator. This they knew as

soon as they began to study the natural history of Limanora and of

the archipelago around it. Not merely were the birds of the same or

kindred species with those of their old home, but many of them had

long preserved the memory of the former bridge between the two; as the

ancient expedition that brought the ancestry of the Limanorans sailed

across the intervening ocean, flights of the birds they were familiar

with were seen making for their new home, and some of them fell on the

decks or settled occasionally on the rigging of their ships. Their

unscientific and superstitious ancestors took this as an omen of

success; they thought that these birds had been sent from heaven to

direct their course, and they steered straight in the line of their

flight. The successful result confirmed them in their superstition for

many ages after they had landed on their tropical isles.

But the careful observation and the science of later times cleared

up the mystery. For a period they had taken it as a proof of the

similarity of nature all over the world, when they found so much of

the fauna and flora like those of their old home. But at last it began

to strike cautious observers that certain birds disappeared during

their summer season and reappeared in their winter. Classification soon

separated the migratory from the localised, and the modifications of

the species that they had been accustomed to in their old home from

those that were quite new to them. This passed from the birds to the

other animals, and thence to the flora. After the observer had done his

work of classifying all the animal and plant life, scientific thought

entered in and found the causes of both the similarities and the

dissimilarities between the new or tropical and the old or antarctic.

After many ages the migration of birds lessened; for few returned

in the winter, and as the climate became cooler through process of

time, most species preferred to remain the summer long. Then, when an

expedition went back to the ancient home of the race in the south, all

trace of cultivation and cities had vanished underneath the everlasting

snows, and the southern summer was found to be as severe as their

ancient winter had been. The increasing rigours of the new climate to

the south had reduced the mass of the bird-migrations.

The expedition followed the long-charted route of the feathered

travellers, and on its return sounded the depths and tested the seas

and their fauna the whole way. When the investigators had reached the

close of their labours, it became patent to them that their voyage

had been along the coast of a buried continent that had had its

northernmost point not far to the north of Lilaroma. Their soundings

along the line of bird-route were ever the shallowest, and at points

on it, if they left its direction, they suddenly dropped into the

deepest of oceans. A mountain-range, sometimes broken into immense

precipices and forested along its slopes, had evidently margined the

lost continent on its west and had stood the siege of the encroaching

ocean through geological ages, till the slow catastrophe of subsidence

had sent it under the victorious march of its enemy. Here and there it

left a barren rock or a volcanoed isle like a buoy to mark where its

wreckage had been submerged. Everywhere on the bird-line they found

a shallow-ocean flora and fauna; if ever they sounded or dredged or

fished or dived at any distance from it, they passed into a deeply

pelagic belt of life, or rather belt of death.

It dawned upon them that their old home and their new formed the

extremities of the vanished continent, and that their height was one

of the consequences of the submergence; the deeper the great submarine

range sank, the higher Lilaroma and the lofty torch-mountains of their

ancient home rose. But repeated visits to their old snow-coffined

land, and the expansion of their earth science into an art, gave them

farther-reaching views of the causes of this vast subsidence. The old

bird-route was one of the most ancient fissure-lines in the crust of

the earth. Out of it along its whole length had flowed in the earliest

geological ages the oozes of lava that formed the backbone of the old

continent as it rose from the sea, its most lasting bastion against

the encroachments of the watery element. Here and there along the

great chain of mountains, as they rose denuded of their softer rocks

and stood wrinkled into cañons and gorges by the rivers that swept

them clean, blazed at long intervals of time huge vents for the

smouldering fires underneath. As the mountain-barrier sank and the

ocean flowed over its forests that had graved into the winged species

the memory of their ancestral feeding-grounds, and finally closed all

the breathing-spaces of the fiery Titan beneath, his passion sought

vent more and more through the torch-cones of the snow-buried southern

land and through the lofty crater of Lilaroma. Expedition after

expedition to their ancient home revealed the simultaneity of volcanic

action in the two regions; but the greater the titanic paroxysms in

the one, the less they were in the other. They were the two pulses and

breathing-vents of the buried giant.

For many ages after some unknown submarine catastrophe had hedged them

into their archipelago by the untraversible mill-race and the dark belt

of mist, they had been unable to test the connection between their

own fire-mountain and those in their old home. But they could easily

imagine during the paroxysms of Lilaroma what was occurring far off

in the southern snows; and when they had mastered the art of aërial

flight, they resumed their expeditions to the glacial regions of the

south. Every few years might have been seen, had there been mariners

there to see them, the strangest of all flying things, beings in human

form, winging their way through the air southwards or northwards. At

first the bands were large and well equipped in order to guard against

all risks. But in time they grew bolder, and companies of half a dozen,

or even three or four, ventured on the long flight to the south. At

last the families of earth-scientists were entrusted with the task,

and sent their messengers to report on the conduct of the antarctic

volcanoes.

These reported that, if ever those southern vents should close, no

application of the art of Leomarie could save Limanora, or indeed the

archipelago around, from disastrous explosion. The circular current

with its belt of mist had shown that this was the thinnest crust and

the weakest point on the whole line of fissure; and if the sea broke

into the volcanoes of the other extremity, the steam generated from

the percolating water would make for the archipelago and blow it to

dust. Recent messengers to the south had found dangerous developments

in the regions of snow and ice. Where it lay in the line of the ancient

fissure, the land was rapidly subsiding; and that was exactly the

locality of the southern volcanoes. If the walls of their craters

should sink so low that the waters of the ocean could make breaches in

them, then would the final catastrophe occur to Limanora.

Whilst the last decennial review was proceeding, and high hopes were

rising in the breasts of all that a few generations would see the race

independent of the fear of terrestrial cataclysms, their minds were

jerked from the future into the present. Our torch-cone suddenly broke

into a great column of steam, and a fine dust fell upon the island.

There had been no preliminary warning and little had been put in

readiness, although the Leomo had been uneasy for weeks as they noticed

the spasmodic action of their earth-sensors. The heat and the magnetism

in their lava-wells had been rapidly changing their degree every few

hours. But this had occurred in previous periods without any recorded

effect above the surface of the earth. They had therefore only kept

more zealous watch without resorting to more than the usual relieving

action.

Now the whole people were called to their assistance, and the

concentrated power of Rimla was turned on to the boring of vents. On

every side of Lilaroma leomorans were busy, and soon the imprisoned

lava and steam escaped by a thousand exits. But a new method was

adopted by the Leomo. They shipped in huge faleenas of the newest

and most powerful type a number of earth-perforators, and along with

them a large quantity of machinery that would enable them to use the

wasting energies of the southern elements. Amongst others Thyriel and

myself had to manage and steer one of the great aërial cars, for it was

chiefly members of the Leomo that manned the expedition.

High we rose above the archipelago, before we attempted to cross the

mist-ring. Below us we could see the Limanoran houses and buildings

gleam rainbow-hued like bubbles on the beach of an ocean. Higher still,

and the various isles of the archipelago crept closer together in the

perspective, a handful of emeralds cast upon a plain of azure. Our eyes

wandered over the scene and saw how it was set in its dull-white milky

ring, a narrow and impenetrable hedge that cut this little world off

from the sight of its fellows upon earth.

Through a cloud we shot that drenched and freshened our gleaming car,

then followed the fleet southwards across the circular thread drawn

round the nest of islets. We were out in the wider spaces of the world

again, and our home receded into a speck on the horizon. Over the waste

of waters we sped, a great grey plain flecked with white. At first I

lost my cool confidence in this trackless wilderness; but fearlessness

returned to me as I saw the face of Thyriel bent now on the Limanoran

modifications of the compass, and again on the rest of the fleet to

the right and left of us. The lumona or sun-compass and the ularema or

sun-chart were our trusty guides by day, even if we had lost sight

of our companions at any time; our track had been marked out for us

on our sun-chart of the heavens and we could not fail to know where

we were, even if clouds should obscure the face of the great orb. If

only a few straggling rays managed to reach the face of the instrument,

indistinguishable though they might be to our sense of warmth or of

light, they affected its delicate apparatus; it told us their exact

direction and angle, whilst another face told us the exact point of the

day, and of the north and south line. There was needed no calculation

to find the region where we were, the lumona did it for us; and it kept

tracing our course, as we accomplished it, by means of an indicator on

our ularema or day-chart.

Once I had been instructed by Thyriel in the management and guidance

of the airship, she lay down to rest; and I was alone beneath the

oppressive paleness of the vault. I dared not look over the side lest

the sight of the grey wilderness far below me should make my head swim.

Only once did I look up; and the sense of limitlessness numbed me.

Now and again I glanced quickly at the rest of the fleet. But I was

too fearful lest something should go wrong to turn my eyes away from

the tracer of the lumona as it moved upon the sun-chart, or to take

my nerve-power from my hands as they grasped, the right the governor

of our flight-power and the left the rod of the steering-gear. As the

hours flew and nothing untoward occurred, I relaxed the tension of my

system and enjoyed the glide of the ship and sang to the beat of its

wings. The sense of solitude passed as I felt the magnetic sympathy of

my comrades in the other cars thrill me and my spirits rose with the

exhilaration of the heights through which we travelled.

The sun had reached the western round of the sea, and swelled into a

vast ball of fire. Thyriel awoke as his rim dipped into the ocean and

at once prepared for a change of methods. She taught me how to turn on

the power of the engine into the rows of huge lamps that were meant

to search the darkness of the night. Then she brought out the alumare

or star-compass and substituted it for the lumona; she removed the

day-chart and put in its place the manularema or night-chart, adjusting

the indicator of the star-compass to its tracing.

Night fell and brought out the lamp-jewelled sides of the other

airships. They looked like a fleet of gigantic glow-worms sweeping

through the air. What we showed like to any wandering ship on the ocean

beneath us it is difficult to imagine. I myself had traversed those

solitary levels in the _Daydream_, and I tried to think how I

could have explained the strange phenomenon had I seen it from my deck.

The superstitious amongst my sailors might have taken it for a portent,

some as one from heaven, others as one from hell. The scientific would

have concluded it to be a series of fireballs travelling before an

upper current of the winds. I should have recorded it in my note-book

among the observations of meteors and other similar phenomena, and

have waited further illumination. By day we were too high to attract

the attention of anyone but the investigator of cloud-changes and

weather-signs, and we saw no sign of human life during our long

aërial voyage to the south. But away beneath us we could just descry

floating brown specks swiftly tracing their zigzag course over the grey

plain and knew them for the broad-winged albatrosses, whose flight

the Limanorans had so carefully studied for the construction and

navigation of their faleenas. For by an automatic arrangement which

brought the currents of the wind to bear upon the steering-gear, our

car now gracefully rose, and again as gracefully fell when the wind was

against it, now swept to this side, now glided to that. All that I had

to think of was the main course. On a later voyage even the steersman

was superfluous, except in a storm or violent change of winds; for a

chart was invented on which the course of the voyage was traced in the

shape of a metal groove, and in this the end of the steering-rod was

made to move. The two automatic movements governed the manipulation of

the winds and the course of the car. It was the same with the engines

that achieved the beat of the wings; the slightest change in the

opposing medium communicated itself to the electric power and modified

it. All that was needed from the occupants of the faleena was a little

attention now and again to see that the machinery was working smoothly

and solidly, and to ensure that the steering-rod adjusted itself to the

caprices of the wind.

On this, our first long aërial expedition, one of us had always to

be at the helm, although I found after a few watches that there was

needed but little tension either of muscle or nerve to keep the ship to

her course. Thyriel took the first half of the night and of the day,

and I took the other two sections. When I awoke in the middle of the

first night and took my place at the helm, the sight bewildered and

dazed me; I felt as if I had gone back again into the region of dream.

The stars seemed to throb close in upon me; I felt as if in a cosmic

confessional with myriads of world-eyes wide open to see into my heart.

I was not afraid; yet my veins throbbed in awe before this palpitation

of the cosmos. But I settled down to my task and grew conscious of

the surrounding fleet of fireflies, that even at their great distance

from me numbed my eyes with the flash of their lamps and paled the

light of the stars. Beneath me, as I looked over the bulwark, there

was nothing but the solid blackness of midnight; never had I felt so

isolated. Thoughts wove as unceasingly in my brain as the wing-beats

wove upon the loom of night. Now and again was I stirred from my

meditation by the swoop of our faleena as it breasted some great billow

of wind. So precipitous were some of those waves that my heart leapt

in my bosom, as we rose before them or slid down them. I never passed

a night of such intensity of exhilaration and thought. There was my

lifelong comrade peacefully sleeping as I watched; the infinities above

magnetised me with their sympathies, as their eyes searched me to the

heart; below me the midnight brooded silently over what I knew to be

the untracked ocean.

Day after day, night after night, we sped on, the air growing rapidly

colder, till, for the sake of my unadaptable system, we drew the

transparent oval roof over the faleena and fixed the radiator which

kept the temperature at an even level. Thereafter the stars were not so

omnipresent in their gaze; there was more of a limit to the space in

which we dwelt; and the movements of the faleena impressed themselves

less upon my senses.

At last as my watch was ending one moonless night I could see a dim

flare in the southern sky which I took for the aurora australis. But

when Thyriel gazed at it and then at the agitation of the fireflies

abreast of us, she knew it was the reflection of the great antarctic

torch-mountains. I rose at dawn and could see below us the white

glacial cliffs of the polar continent. Thyriel seemed stirred by some

emotion that I was ignorant of, but soon knew to be the recognition

of the original home of her race; there seemed to move in her blood

the ancestral yearning for the land from which they had come. She did

not shrivel up in the excessive cold as I did, but looked forward with

ecstasy to moving amid the snow and the ice, though she had seen little

of them in her own short life except around the crater of Lilaroma.

Bred though I had been in the rigorous winters of Scotland, I could not

bear the bite of the wind and had to put on one of their cold-repelling

garments. This consisted of two layers of flexible irelium-woven cloth,

one of which was a conductor of electricity and the other a resister

of it. The outer or conducting layer was connected with some labramor

which carried a store of electricity and this combination produced

a warm, healthful glow all round the body. I had gloves and cap and

mask of the same construction and, when fully equipped, I could defy

the most bitter cold that the upper atmosphere of the earth ever

experienced.

With this armour on I looked forward with delight to our sojourn in

the region of snow and ice as I watched our approach to the rough

ocean-like surface of the new country. For Thyriel took the helm,

now that there was needed more delicate manipulation of the faleena,

and I stood in the bow and gazed at the rest of the fleet rising and

falling on the wind-waves. Now and again I interpreted a signal from

the faleena of the guiding elder, whilst my comrade was busy adapting

the course to the caprices of the wind. But as a rule her own magnetic

sense was alert enough to know what were the intentions of the other

airships.

Round the group of great fire-cones we coasted, keeping clear of

their smoke-brush and dust-vomit; for the wind was off the land and

bore their ejections miles out to sea and high into the air. Across

the icy plains, ridged and hummocked by pressure from the higher land

beyond, we flew, once rising high enough to get a glance over the

passes of the great mountain-barrier, whence the torrents of ice slowly

found their way to the coast. Beyond I could discern, even with my

undeveloped eye-power, level plains stretching to the horizon, plains

which indicated water underneath; and upon them the direction of the

furrows and hummocks revealed whither the mass of the sea beneath

flowed towards some narrow exit, overlapping and playing leapfrog in

its eagerness to escape the pressure from behind.

But the habits of this almost land-locked sea had no immediate interest

for us, and we soon turned and made before the wind for a valley that

lay sheltered between the mountain-chain and the group of torch-cones.

Within a brief time we had all our faleenas secured, and the

multitudinous rings of the leomorans they carried deposited in caves

ready for the coming operations. Then the elder who led the expedition

took his airship, and with it we saw him circle round the individual

volcanoes and reconnoitre the inroads of the sea. He had, we knew,

already seen the dangerous proximity of one new crater to the low coast

that divided the group of fire-hills from the galloping waves.

Manifestly expedition was demanded. For he returned with great

swiftness; and all was soon bustle and preparation in the camp,

although it had settled down for a rest. The word was passed round

that, if the wind changed and whipped the racing billows to their raid,

a high tide might find its way into the new crater and undo the local

work of Limanoran civilisation. The fleet was at once in the air with

the engines ready to be placed; and within two hours the winds and the

waves, the magnetism of the earth, and the electricity of the air had

been yoked to the great power-machines. Then the rings of the leomorans

were attached, and the stores of energy brought to bear on them; before

long we could see at a dozen different points high up the side of the

cone brushes of black smoke bending before the wind. Between the new

low crater and the old lofty one a score of new vents for the explosive

energy of the fires underneath had been worked into the crust of the

earth ere the wind had changed round into alliance with the waters. The

molten rock which had oozed from the dangerous cone at the edge of the

sea had sealed its mouth before the ocean leapt into it. In order to

make the seal more secure a sluggish river of lava was directed down

the slope from several leomorans, and sent over the lips of the exposed

crater. After every sign of the offending cone but a low hummock had

disappeared under the molten invasion, bastions were drawn all along

the coast beneath it in the manner familiar to Limanora.

When this fortification of the mountain was finished and the strain

upon our muscles and nerves, and especially upon our eyes, was

relieved, we had leisure to look about us. The sight that met our view,

as we looked down the slopes of the mountain, was deeply impressive.

The flow of the red-hot rock from the mouths of our lava-wells had

melted the glacial concretions for hundreds of yards beyond the margins

of the molten currents, and laid bare the ruins of a great city that

had evidently been buried in ice and snow since the lowering of the

temperature had made the climate unbearable by men of civilised

nurture and habits. The steam rising from the neighbourhood of ice

and fire had covered the disentombed secret from our vision whilst we

were working, and as the wind fell that had swept the veil aside for a

moment, the marvellous sight was again curtained over, and we began to

think that it had been but a waking dream.

Some days after, when the lava had sufficiently cooled to leave

portions of the defrosted slope open to the light of heaven, we

revisited the scene. Several broad streets and great squares had been

unburied; and the architecture revealed how artistic and how advanced

in mechanical contrivances the people that built them had been. A thick

covering of volcanic dust and ash had plastered them over, so that it

was difficult to move on foot amongst the ruins now that the moisture

of the melting ice had mingled with it. After clearing the débris from

the doors we entered some of the houses that had not lost their roofs,

and there was evidence of hasty flight; on the floors and couches were

strewn pellmell the contents of boxes and cupboards and wardrobes, half

of them still stiff with the ice that the adjacent streams of lava

had been unable to melt. The evacuation of this luxurious city had

evidently occurred during some great outburst of the volcano which had

threatened its existence. But the climate had grown rigorous before the

catastrophe; for in every house and every room there were elaborate

apparatus for heating, and most of the clothing lying about was of

fur or of thick, warm stuffs, and when we dug beneath the coating of

volcanic ash, we found in places accumulations of ice which must have

taken years to freeze. Layer after layer of dirt and rubbish had been

embedded by the preservative frost; and, had we cared to cut through

the stratified ice, we might have counted the years, or perhaps

centuries, through which this heap had accumulated.