For several visits we could find no human body, though we came across

one or two carcasses of emaciated animals that had evidently lived

amongst the ruins till the last vestige of fodder had disappeared under

the volcanic layer or the accumulating ice. But at last in a back lane,

probably inhabited by slaves, we penetrated into a low house whose

roof had crashed in under the weight of the falling dust, and there

we saw a scene that moved us to tears. The mummied body of a little

child prepared for burial lay upon a bier and over it was stretched

the corpse of the mother; she could not tear herself away from the

last relics of her dead baby, and in returning to rescue it, or to

weep over it, had been overwhelmed by the falling roof; the frost of

centuries had kept off the finger of decay, and this Niobe and her

child had remained like sculptured stone. We covered the bodies gently

with the volcanic mud there as they lay, and left the frost to work its

petrifaction again, for we had not the heart to disturb the scene. Here

amongst the proletariate of this luxurious people there was evidence

of that maternal transport which had showed the path of ethical

development and exaltation to the Limanorans, and was destined to raise

the energies of our world into higher and higher forms. This, we knew,

was but the terrestrial type of an altruistic law which was working

throughout the cosmos, and making every centre of energy that had more

than the average give of its more to those centres that had less.

All in our power was now done to relieve the pressure of the

subterranean fires that were threatening to burst the ancient fissure;

and all too that could be done to ward off the batteries of the ocean.

Then were we sent in different directions to inspect and report on the

state of the ice-cliffs that beetled over the waves. We hovered for

days about the rocks and their glaciers and the universal observation

was that the coast was rapidly subsiding; since the last visit of the

Limanoran messengers its line had sunk many yards; marks that had been

made far above the reach of the waters were now washed by the break of

the higher billows. Thyriel and I were sent to a loftier bluff which

extended for almost a mile between shelving beach and shelving beach

just underneath the site of the buried city.

After inspecting the higher parts of it for days and measuring the

height of the old marks above the farthest reach of the waves, a

windless day, on which the ocean lay as if frozen, gave us opportunity

of following the cliff at its lowest sea-margin. For half a mile or

more nothing exceptional met our eyes. Then suddenly we came upon a

great chasm in the rock where a soft intermediate stratum had mouldered

away into sand before the everlasting battery of the waves. Over it

a great dome of ice was stretched, which was ever being thickened by

the climbing spray of the billows as they broke into it. The entrance

into this cave was somewhat low and narrow, and a jagged rock in the

centre of it churned the angry waters into milky foam. We saw that this

feature would make the opening invisible under its veil of spray on all

but days of perfect calm.

We were afraid to enter lest the sea should rise and imprison us, so we

called some comrades to our aid, and they brought a light faleena that

was made to serve the double purpose of air-boat and water-boat. Then

Thyriel took flight from above, and with the impetus we bore ourselves

and the boat through one of the passages past the jagged tooth of rock.

As we settled upon our faleena and looked up, the sight that met our

eyes took our breath away. The sun was shining brilliantly, lighting

up the dome of ice with such power as to make its whole thickness

transparent. Through it in every direction thick as motes in a sunbeam

were strewn human bodies, wrapped and mummied as in death. Some lay

on their sides with the head pillowed on the arm; and as the face was

uncovered, we could see the features as clearly as if we stood in the

chamber where they lay. The frost had kept the flesh and the tints of

it uncorrupted. We could almost have sworn that they breathed as they

slept, yet in the case of most it must have been the sleep of thousands

of years.

This was the cemetery of that ancient people which had built the city

lately found. Doubtless this ice-crust in which their graves had been

cut had once stood securely miles away from the coast; and in it they

thought that their dead would be safe for all time. But, as the shore

sank, the glacial crust ceased to be a plain and slid downwards along

the increasing slope to the ocean; and, before many years could pass,

this hyaline resting-place of the dead would be launched into the sea

and be swept by the storms and tides into warmer airs and currents,

which would release the bodies from their beautiful petrifaction,

and give their elements to the ravening powers of the waters, or the

microscopic corruption of invisible life. In fact on our return voyage

we flew over several icebergs that were floating catacombs. On the

surface of one we discerned the pallor of a mummied face, just released

by the strong rays of the sun from its ancient rigidity, and the still

stony garments shining through their pellucid covering.

We could almost decipher through the milky blueness of the ice-dome,

when the sun shone most brightly, the inscriptions on the tablets

lying beside these forgotten dead. But the winds began to dirge within

this strange diaphanous mausoleum; and even the waters seemed to move

around the cave with suppressed sob. We thought the sounds ominous,

and, rising high up into the roof of the cave, close to the dead that

had slept there so like life for so many centuries, we poised ourselves

and, taking aim, dashed through the narrow entrance, while our comrades

without drew the faleena out by the cord with which they had held it

securely. Later in the day, as the calm continued, the guiding elder

sent others into the cave and they secured one of the most elaborately

hieroglyphed tablets. Those of us who had most recently studied in the

valley of memories were able to trace much resemblance between the

language of the inscription and the ancient Limanoran tongue; and when

we returned to our island, it afforded one of the clues by which we

were able to unravel the history of this ancient antarctic people. They

were the descendants of those whom the northwards migration had left

to their fate amid the growing rigours of the southern winter. After

the departure of these who founded the colonies of Riallaro and became

the ancestry of the Limanorans, the wealthier classes had evidently

abandoned themselves to pleasure and luxury within their splendid and

superheated dwellings, whilst the proletariate, though growing more

vigorous, and venturing far out upon the ice and the ocean on fishing

and furring expeditions, fell deeper and deeper into the contempt

of semi-slavery. Loyalty to their masters and ignorance still kept

them unrebellious in their growing embrutement, till the volcanic

catastrophe solved the problem of their future relationships. Whither

the survivors had gone, when the outburst of the subterranean fires

drove them forth, no one could say; doubtless the peasant fishermen

and hunters took the effeminate caste in their rough boats over the

sea to some warmer climate; probably, if the expeditions survived

the storms and billows of the broad ocean, they landed on the coasts

of South Africa or on those of South America and introduced an alien

civilisation and more complicated problems amongst the primitive

peoples of those isolated regions.

Before we left, we had to investigate the shores of the inland sea

for evidence of subsidence, resting on them for a period whilst we

punctured the slopes of the mountains, in order to give a new direction

to the pressure of the fires upspringing from below. When all the

leomorans that were needed had been placed in position and got into

working order, not more than half of the expedition were required

to attend to them. The others, and amongst them Thyriel and myself,

were allowed to wander over the shores of the gulf or sea, everywhere

finding abundant evidence that the whole neck of land which divided it

from the ocean, high though it still was in the lofty mountain-barrier,

was rapidly subsiding, and would ultimately succumb to the batteries

of the besieging elements. This might take many centuries, but that

the huge volcanic range would be submarine within measurable time

was obvious. Had the rate for even a decade of years been constant,

we could easily have calculated the number of centuries that would

elapse before the great catastrophe; but the amount of subsidence

varied from period to period, increasing and then decreasing. The most

alarming change had occurred since the last visit of the Leomo to their

old home. Square miles that had been low-lying land some few years

before were now encrusted with marine ice; and lofty precipices were

perceptibly lower.

The most striking proof of the rapid subsidence was not observed

till the day before our return. The shoulder of an outlier of the

range pushed its way as a lofty promontory right into the gulf, its

whole length and breadth being covered with glacial concretion. Some

recent tempest had broken off the end of its river of ice, and at the

same time a sudden subsidence of the land had left the face of its

cliff a complete new section, as if shorn by a microtome. The sight

that revealed itself to us as we flew round it was most impressive.

City after city had evidently been built upon the broad bluff, its

pleasant position overlooking the inland sea and its proximity to

easy harbourage ever attracting the population back again after

each cataclysm. Time after time the city had, we conjectured, been

overwhelmed by the ashes of some great volcanic outburst from the

range. There we could see in section the various strata of buildings

one above the other, each filled with ash and dust and preserved by

the power of frost. Hundreds of years must have elapsed between the

destruction of one city and the building of the next, a period long

enough in fact to obliterate the memory of panic and anguish from the

traditions of posterity. In some houses we could still discern the

signs of the stampede that had occurred one day thousands of years

ago. Articles of value were half-torn from their treasuries and then

abandoned; jewellery and dishes made of the precious metals were here

and there held in place upon the mosaicked floors by the frozen mass

of earth above them; they had evidently been seized at the first

warning of the coming catastrophe and then thrown away as alarm made

life dearer. In one chamber we saw the outline of the body of a man

across its threshold, his hand out beyond his head clutching some

receptacle of precious metals. In the space between the outer walls of

two houses the body of a woman was exposed, face downwards, and beneath

the bosom the form of an infant child.

How many long-forgotten tragedies might be unearthed we could not stay

to discover. A little labour and we could have penetrated into these

cities; the application of a leomoran would have melted the dust and

ashes and brought to view the stratified life of ages before. Had we

been interested in following out the existence of these far-distant

relatives of the Limanorans, we could have begun with the lowest layer,

and followed the evidences of civilisation up through each successive

entombment, till finally the people were driven from the site by

frost, a force more rigorous and potent against culture and luxury

than fire. But the Limanorans had enough in the records of their own

ancestry to tell them all the history that might be illuminated by such

excavations. They knew that after an advance in the two or three lower

strata, there would be found no progress except in luxury and the arts

that contribute to luxury. And they had enough of such development in

their own archipelago before their own senses, to allay any eagerness

for viewing illustrations of it in ancient and dead history.

The sight was interesting and impressive, but we all had learned its

lesson too well to desire further acquaintance with it. In Fialume we

had studied similar histories during our pupillage; and daily could

we watch through the idrovamolan the enactment of similar life in the

islands around Limanora. A little apparent advance was followed by as

much retrogression; the generations were as like in essence as two

species of the same genus, the difference being merely superficial and

unvital. It was enough to make the Limanoran heart stop in its beating

to see the dreary sameness of the ages in the history of a people, as

far as development of spiritual character and power were concerned.

The changes and revolutions were but changes of lay-figures under the

official dresses and ceremonials, or at best an expansion of the sphere

of luxury. What mattered it to men that were panting after ideals

they ever saw above and beyond them who were masters and who were

servants or subjects in those unprogressive levels of humanity, who or

how many sated their appetites or covered their skins with the rich

and ceremonious raiment of dominance? The heroisms and romances, the

striking turns of fortune, the world-renowned victories that made the

eyes of other races blaze with wonder were all histrionic to those who

knew what real development was.

This section cut through the history of ten thousand years would reveal

but the same old story that they had read so often in the annals of

their own far past. We turned away sick of heart, knowing the countless

griefs and agonies, struggles and combats, that had gone to the making

of this human stratification, and the complete futility of them all.

The best that could be thought was that oblivion had buried them,

and that the energy set free at the deaths of so many thousands of

generations had perchance a better opportunity of rising in the scale

of vitality as it wandered into other spheres than the human or the

terrestrial.

It was not then without deliberate intention that our departure from

the old home of the race occurred soon after the discovery of this

strange frozen museum of forgotten peoples. After everything was done

that could be done to divert the upward pressure of the subterranean

fires from vents close to the margin of the sea, the faleenas winged

their way back to the north as rapidly as they had come. No incident

took place to mar the return voyage, and we were soon back at our old

employments in Limanora.

CHAPTER XIII

RELIGION

AFTER a few days’ reflection and observation, I felt a change in the

spirit of the people. There was less of that serenity which had struck

me so often as one of the distinctive characteristics of themselves

and their actions. Every family seemed to hurry in its efforts at

development and the pace of their advance might almost be called

feverish now. This was especially the case with all who were engaged in

the more spiritual investigations into the nature of the cosmos. Next

to them in increase of eagerness and enthusiasm came the astronomical

families, the astrobiological, and all whose researches bore upon

stellar conditions and interstellar migration. The gaze of the whole

race was more distinctly outwards and extra-terrestrial.

I had conjectured the cause of this acceleration and impetuosity and

soon definitely knew it to be the result of our expedition to the

south and the reports we brought back. The elders on considering them

saw that the safety of the island as a resting-place and arena for

their progress was not to be depended on for many generations more.

The increase in the rate of subsidence of their old home meant a

transference of the destructive power of the subterranean fires to

the other end of the ancient fissure within a measurable period.

The volcanic vents on the antarctic coast must be closed beneath the

ocean before many centuries were over; and the rushing waters in

quenching their fires would find their way in uncontrollable steam

towards the weakest point of the crust, which they knew to be their own

archipelago. Ere many generations could come and go this terrestrial

home of the race would be blown to dust, and new lands would appear at

some other point on the line of fissure.

Where could they settle on the round of the earth? There was no land

except their old home to the south isolated enough to admit of their

following up their ideals. All the remote islands in other oceans were

already fully occupied, and were impracticable for them unless at the

sacrifice of human life, a condition that would outrage their whole

idea of development. The globe was closed for them except the region

of everlasting ice where their remote ancestry had dwelt; and that

too might at any moment flash into dust before the explosive forces

beneath the crust. The alternative of seeking a home on another star

had seemed to them the only one for many generations, and they had been

preparing for it by inventions that would enable them to float clear

of the terrestrial atmosphere for many centuries, and by explorations

in interstellar space. But many discoveries and thoughts had thrown

a new light upon this stellar migration. They would have to exist

in their circumscribed faleenas as they travelled through the ether

for many generations of even their long lives, and these ships would

be their cradle and their tomb. They would have to resign for many

centuries the conquests of the elements and of the forces of nature,

that they had achieved in Limanora. The broad movement which these

past ages of history had given to their life, would be narrowed into

a space no larger than one chamber of their own mansions. They would

live imprisoned, and their imprisonment would lay its brand upon their

natures and still more upon the natures of their descendants. The

proximity of so many in so small a space would breed physical and,

still worse, spiritual disease, that would haunt their posterity for

generations after they should settle in their new stellar abode. Their

offspring would have the habits and ideas of the savage reared in

the wigwam of the rover or the hut of the slave. Even if they could

achieve individual flight through the ether, they would have to keep

close to their storeships and return every few minutes to the exhausted

atmosphere of their swiftwinging faleenas.

If every condition of their interstellar voyage were the same as

their life in their own Limanora, what disappointments might not they

encounter in their comparative ignorance of the biology of the heavens?

Would not most stars that were fit to be inhabited be already choked

with life and life at a different stage from that they had attained?

If they struck upon a lower grade of existence it would be useless to

attempt to raise it, and contrary to their own morality to obliterate

it. If they met with a higher type of being, they would be repulsed by

it as likely to degrade it. It would be a wretched existence to lead a

life of interstellar vagabondage, poor beggars of the cosmos, seeking

a star whereon they might rest the sole of their foot. Not more than

one world in each system could be at the stage that would fit their

life-evolution; most stars would be too young and fierily crude or too

old and exhausted to give them the conditions they sought for. In

many the life they would encounter would shock and repel them by its

monstrosity. What was to hinder some such gigantic form as, the Leomo

knew, had existed on the earth in its earlier geological ages, some

tremendous winged saurian, having the place on one or more of the stars

they visited that man held upon earth? It only meant the development

of a brain proportionate to the hugeness of the bulk, and some swiftly

moving, deft, and adaptable limb, like the human hand, to give it

complete dominance over all the forms of life around it. The elephant

needed only the mechanical faculty of the beaver or of the ant to

outstrip man in the struggle of life; he had the delicate manipulator

in his trunk, he had the long life, and he had the capacity of skull

to transform him into the dominant race of the earth. In order to the

mastery of his conditions, he had only to make the step from using

anything that came ready to his trunk as a weapon into shaping it to

his will. Circumstances, accidents, opportunities, pilot the evolution

of life upon a world, and the accidental condition of an element or an

energy or a locality might have transformed some terrific monster into

the master of the first star they visited. It was merely a matter of

more or less intricate convolutions of the brain. But perhaps the most

terrible thing of all would be to land on a world whose inhabitants

had developed the purely intellectual faculties and the section of the

brain corresponding to them, at the expense of the nervous centres that

have to do with the control of the passions and with the subordination

of the animal nature; what a horror it would be to find a star full of

Calibans with more than human cunning, and none of human emotion or

morality!

The thought of chances like these gave them pause in their migratorial

quest. They began to feel that even life amongst the ruder of their

fellow-men might be better than landing amongst monsters unstirred by

pity or compassion, reverence or tenderness for highly developed life,

to whom bloodshed was nothing. It was true that there were in most

nations men who were so constituted. But they were, except when they

got the command of huge armies and became conquerors, bridled by fear

of the punishments that the laws of the country meted out to criminals.

It was better to live in proximity to beings amongst whom this moral

and emotional neutrality is an exception, than in a world filled with

such monsters. Perchance, when their island-home was shattered to dust,

their true path lay along the surface of their own globe. They might

settle on the slope of some sky-piercing mountain, round whose feet lay

untainted tribes of primitive savages; there they might preserve their

isolation as perfectly as in Limanora by a hedge of fear around them,

which their exceptional power over the forces of nature should forge.

But they knew that before many ages could pass civilised man would

penetrate amongst the awed tribes with his potent weapons and his

unscrupulous cunning; then would they be unable to avoid bloodshed, or

hypocritical ambush, or diplomacy; ambition and hatred would enter in

and turn their paradise into a hell. On the whole, they inclined to the

other alternative that lay before them when the great catastrophe came;

that is, to let it do its worst on their physical or lower elements.

Out of their shattered bodies would rise the energy of their systems to

follow its career of development untrammelled by any slow-moving matter

that was half inert whether living or dead. Death so sudden as that,

death under any circumstances or conditions, was no stop or misfortune

to the highest that was in them; it was the swiftest way to achieve

migration into the interstellar spaces. As it was, they were narrowed

and localised in their development, thought (the higher thought) alone

finding its way unchecked to any point or sphere in the cosmos. At

death they would all be freed from the almost vegetative functions of

human existence; they would be released from the prison of locality

and their whole being would have the ease of thought in winging from

infinity to infinity, and in disregarding the limitations of time and

space. Together the whole of their race might find coalescence if not

companionship in following out their career of development, unburdened

by alliance with a lower type of energy, and in more swiftly attaining

a higher and higher goal in the scale of energies.

When this conclusion had been reached by the consciousness of the

people, the old serenity returned to them. They were ready to meet

whatever came, not caring whether their ascent through the grades of

being was trammelled by terrestrial forms of energy or set free in the

infinities of ether. But I dimly felt that there was a sublime looking

upwards in all they did or said added to their former serenity that

transformed it into what approached to the noblest forms of devotional

ecstasy I had seen amongst men. They never allowed themselves to fall

into the moulds of thought that his bodily and terrestrial needs

so freely supply to man. Though recognising the practical demands

of the physical nature, they satisfied and then dismissed them as

rapidly as was possible; and with all their marvellous machinery and

inventions and their accumulation of power, the time occupied in this

satisfaction was so abbreviated as to be scarcely noticeable in the

labyrinth of daily pursuits.

I had been greatly puzzled during my long period of training to see

no trace of religious worship in this noble race. Growing up with

the instinct in me that of all manifestations of human possibilities

religion was the most sublime, yet I had come to know before I left

Europe how degraded, gross, and foul even a lofty-minded religion

might become. But the best men and women I had known there had ever

been stirred with the spirit of religious reverence and love. I could

not account for these, the noblest and ablest beings I had seen on

earth, ignoring the claims of what is the highest of all, and I watched

eagerly for any indication of acts or moods of worship. Early in my

residence on the island I had discovered that there were no temples and

no priests; that was patent to the most casual glance of the stranger.

Amongst all their public buildings there was none that could be taken

as devoted to the worship of a deity, and there was no family or caste

or set of men whose chief functions were to superintend such a worship.

But perhaps their religious acts were private or even secret and I

was on the alert many years for any sign of such a thing in the house

of my proparents or in that of Thyriel. Finally discovering nothing

that could be construed even in the most distant way into a ceremonial

attitude or word, I gradually abandoned any expectation of such a thing.

My attention was now aroused by the new halo around their serene

acceptance of the conditions of life. There was rapture and there

was longing in their halcyon view of the world; yet the rapture

and the longing never withdrew them from immediate pursuits and

duties, never gave them the ennui of life that transport and passion

generally entrain. They seemed to have the vision and the upward

glance of the seer without his brooding and apartness. It was rather

an intensification of their usual feelings and attitude to life. This

was nearer than anything else I had experienced in Limanora to the

unperturbed faith in a higher being and the yearning for proximity to

him that I had witnessed in those whom we used in Europe to call, for

lack of a less trite term, saints. At the next Manora or decennial

review the predominating interest was the theopathic side of human

nature, and I discovered more of their views of religion in the few

years preceding it than in all the decades I had spent amongst them.

So devotional did I think the magnetism which ran through the

community, that I plucked up courage to ask about the religion. My

question was dealt with in the calmest and most rational way possible

amongst human beings. There was no immediate reply, except an elevation

of the finger to the brow and then to the wide vault of the sky, but I

was led to a part of Fialume I had not visited. It lay in a region of

the valley that I had carefully avoided as full of gloom, and damp with

the vapour of a tumbling waterfall; I had never noticed any one enter

it, and my curiosity had never been awakened about it.

Here were stored the records that illustrated the evolution of

religion, records made by light, sound, and magnetism. It was intensely

interesting for me to see so complete a museum of the natural history

of worship. Every faith in the world had its due place, fixed

according to its inner spirit and development. So graphic was the

map of the whole that in a moment I saw the common kinship of all,

and the differentiating qualities that made one worship higher and

more advanced than another. My guide flashed living pictures of the

ceremonies of each, and then let me listen to the speeches and talks of

the officiants and of many of the worshippers. The magnetographs struck

into me the feelings that pervaded the masses in the temples, and those

that filled the breast of the solitary priest or devotee during the

most solemn and enthusiastic act of worship. I could feel how much or

how little the religion introduced into the life of the people. Day

after day I returned with eagerness to the sight and the study of this

absorbing phase of human nature, and seemed to get to the very heart of

every faith and its influence. The mere accidents of its history were

felt to be non-essential; its inner development stood out as plainly as

if written in letters of fire.

My guide did not need to teach me the lesson. I knew it as well as

if I had learned it from infancy. I knew why there were no temples,

no ceremonies, no hierophantic families, no outward sign of faith,

amongst this far-seeing people. Their own early endeavours to purify

and develop the faith handed down to them from their forefathers were

there as vividly pictured as any faith from the world outside. They had

had temples as splendid as any I have ever seen or heard described;

their ceremonies were artistic, noble, and significant; their music was

as nearly sublime as earthly music can be; and the priestly profession

attracted many of the ablest and some of the best natures in the

community by its princely salaries, drawn from the gifts of former ages

of the faithful, and by its high prerogatives.

At first I wondered how it had been possible to uproot an institution

that had evidently grown out of the most intimate instincts of the

race. The higher dignitaries were so lordly and influential they might

easily control even by their private alliances and social dominance

the powers of the state; and the poorer hierophants had ingratiated

themselves with the middle classes and proletariate, from whom they

came. Reverence, fear, love, ambition, pride, self-interest, all

the commoner emotions and passions of humanity, were engaged and

intertwined with the worship. How could such a widely ramifying

profession allow itself to be overthrown?

When the exilings were over, it was found that there was not a member

of the priestly profession left on the island; nor was there anything

of the wealth of the church, except the solid walls of the temples. The

dignitaries and most of the transferable riches had found their way to

Aleofane; the bulk of the poor clergy landed in Tirralaria, and smaller

bands drifted away to smaller islands like Coxuria, establishing there

communities marked by some extreme eccentricity of faith. All the

vestments and altars and ornaments of the temples had vanished before

the last expedition left the shores of Limanora; even the huge bells

that had rung to service, and the baser metals for making the roofs

water-tight, had disappeared. Nothing but the stones and mortar were

left to indicate where the great faith of the past had housed itself.

One or two expeditions even were seen to set out from Tirralaria and

Aleofane to fetch the very temples away stone by stone. To prevent the

cupidity of the exiles from wasting itself on futile attempts against

the island, the edifices were tumbled into the sea, and helped to make

the bastions which guarded the shores.

Having thus got rid of all the outward property and signs of their

former worship, they had to count the cost and consider how they were

to meet the situation. It had been inculcated by the officiants of

the church for untold generations that all morality, and in fact all

civilisation, would vanish with faith. Religion was the foundation of

everything in life that was worth preserving, and most of the people

trembled if any change were proposed in the national worship. They

feared that the object of their devotion would withdraw the light

of his countenance from them, should the slightest feature of it be

modified. Even the scientific and cultured thought that religion acted

as an excellent watchdog or policeman, keeping the uneducated within

the bounds of the laws and traditions of the nation. Changes had crept

in unobserved by the worshippers, and had been sanctified by time; then

open proposals for change gave the shock and the alarm, and made the

whole fabric seem to shake and totter. The unperceived changes were far

greater and more revolutionary in their ultimate effect, for they were

generally changes of degeneration which ended in decay and ruin. But

everything that was deliberately intended to fit the old institution

to the new times was looked on with horror, as sacrilege never to be

forgiven.

It was therefore with a certain tremor that they demolished the ancient

temples, and put their stones to new and seemingly secular uses. But

once the transformation was accomplished and no great catastrophe

followed, even the less bold gathered courage. As time went on and the

old faith was forgotten and no definite new creed took its place, it

began to be felt that the terror of religious change and the belief

that religion alone gave the guaranty of all morality and civilisation

were alike baseless. After a decade or two, when they began to

reflect on their past and analyse their new states of mind and public

feeling, they discovered the most striking effect of this abeyance of

ecclesiasticism to be the attainment of the ideal of all true religion.

Into their very life had soaked the inner spirit of devotion. Every

act was done with a reference to something far higher than itself,

to which the doer looked up with reverence yet with the sense of its

possible attainment in the future. Every piece of conduct, every item

of character was moulded as if for all time. All their work they

laboured at with an earnestness, enthusiasm, and care that evinced

the consciousness of its everlasting issues. In short, they found

that the surest way to exclude religion from the life was to assign

to it a special section of time, a special profession, and special

edifices. These acted as a conduit that drew it from the true business

of existence. Men and women came to feel that, these once being set

apart, all was done that could be done for the object of their worship,

and that the rest of their life upon earth could be given up to

whatsoever pleased them, be it irreligious, wicked, or even vile. The

religious section of their lives threw its consecrating and protecting

shadow over the worst they might do or say or think. Thus came about

the strange paradox that the vilest of criminals were often the most

devoted to religion when they went into the temples. The specialisation

of what should belong to the whole life and conduct lessens its value.

If there is a particular channel for religion it will be confined to

that channel, except in rare seasons of enthusiasm, when it floods the

adjacent regions and does universal havoc.

Formerly the most religious had been the least trustworthy in the

ordinary business of life, and they had not been able to understand

why; for the deity they worshipped was a compound of all the noblest

virtues they could conceive, and honesty and truth and constancy were

three of these. Now they perceived that, having given a tithe of their

civilisation and energy to the object of their worship, they had shut

him and the virtues he embodied out from the rest; he had no claim

on that. It was vain for the creed or the priests to insist that the

faith should be carried into the life, as long as there was a special

part of life dedicated to it. Once the pales were down, and there was

no distinction between time and time, between place and place, and

between act and act, the nesting-place of hypocrisy disappeared. Every

day was sacred; every place was a sanctuary; every act was holy; every

moment of their life, every action was a prayer. For they were ever

looking upwards and forwards towards the ideal and believed that the

noblest reverence they could pay to the cosmos and to the presiding

spirit of the cosmos was to raise their own natures ever higher in the

cosmic scale. Everything that withdrew them from this cultivation of

the special plot assigned to them in the universe, from the development

of their better selves, was delaying the true purpose of existence;

even acts of reverence and ceremonies of faith were but waste of cosmic

energy. As long as they kept raising their struggle for existence to a

higher plane, so long were they truly reverencing the greatest being of

all, the spirit that gave and was the palpitating life of the cosmos.

They acknowledged that every religion in its origin was a recognition

of unknown elements or beings far above the plane of the worshippers.

But it rapidly degenerated into mere parasitism upon its deity. The

more spiritual faiths in their earlier stages express the yearning

for higher scales of being in true efforts to bring the life of the

worshipper nearer to that of the worshipped. But soon the curse of

religion comes upon them; they try to include races on a lower plane

than that of their first worshippers and moulders and to these they

must adapt themselves; for it is the mass, the numbers that form the

ultimate mould of a faith; the noble natures, for whom they originally

came into being, are left neglected and undeveloped, and the whole

worship goes lower and lower to fit the needs of the increasing numbers

of converts.

Insignificant though the Limanorans felt themselves to be against the

infinity of the cosmos, they refused to formulate their worship lest

it should fall into parasitism, the source of most of the evil and

retrogression in the universe. They knew that it was possible for the

lower being to try to rise to the level of existence of the higher

and worshipped, and, in advancing, to help his advance. But they had

seen too much in history and in contemporary life of the symbiosis of

worshippers becoming mere parasitism to trust themselves to anything

definite and outward in religion. In daily intercourse the lower and

weaker natures cling to the higher and stronger; and if they fail to

reciprocate the benefit they receive, and cease to attempt to elevate

themselves to the level of their hosts, then they suck the life-blood

from them and degrade them. The same holds in religion. The mean

worshippers (and the majority in mixed communities are mean) make no

effort to better themselves; the higher ideal that they are taught to

reverence as a god, they batten upon for favours; they pray to him

and yearn for him, not that they may be like him but that he may be

like them, and become their active and efficient partner in material

things and their accomplice in their mean or evil deeds. The Limanorans

conceived that all the higher beings of space struggle to keep clear

of such parasitic religionists as the majority of men are. There is

no road up the steep of being but by patient self-development through

generations and generations. Almost all religions, after their early

and enthusiastic stage, are royal roads that seem to lead to the

heights of heaven, and are but descents to hell. They only delude men

into thinking that there are other ways to divine happiness than that

likeness to the divine nature which is to be attained by nothing but

slow, gradual, inward change.

They had seen so much of the degeneration and immorality of faiths,

not only in their own history but in the history of the world, that

nothing would persuade them to formulate or define in words what they

meant by religion at any stage of their development. For, once they

had defined, there was a platform of self-opinion and self-interest to

fight for, a nucleus of petrifaction. Rites and outward worship would

follow, and a priesthood whose interest it would be to teach that what

they profess as a creed is absolute truth. Right well the Limanorans

knew how false such teaching is. No age can have a view of life that is

not moulded by contemporaneous circumstances and capacity of thought

and feeling, and the farther the people pass in time and spirit from

the primitive age of the founders of their religion, the more stoutly

will they uphold every word of the creed and every feature of the

institution. Nothing but a sanguinary revolution will avail to undo

the tragic knot with which the spirit of man has thus bound itself.

However good for progress the enthusiasm of a faith might be in its

early stage, it inevitably became the tomb of the human spirit. Occult

explanations of statements that did not tally with acknowledged facts

or laws were bound to appear, as soon as the mind of the people began

to move and develop; and the Limanorans knew that their marvellous

progress had been largely due to the early resolve to have nothing

to do with the occult or merely mysterious. Their pioneering books

dealt with what still lay under the horizon of the future; but they

started from recognised facts and principles and attempted to supply

working hypotheses for the men of science. There was nothing of magic

or superstition in them, nothing that did not appeal to the laws of

reason and ascertained scientific data, nothing that was not meant to

be tested by the methods of daily practical life.

Not that they never thought over the problems that are commonly called

religious, or yearned for communion with existences nobler than their

own. But their thoughts and feelings were kept out of the sphere of

definite expression, through fear that their temporary solutions might

crystallise and become permanent. Their faith was purely individual and

inward. Yet, when some great step was to be taken in the onward march

of the race, as for instance, when a new type of child or enterprise

was preparing to be born, the whole community yearned silently towards

the living spirit of the cosmos; all their being thrilled with one

magnetism that seemed to quiver upwards through the ether, and return

again to strengthen and console them in their work. Their ideal seemed

to pass as by an inspiration into the child or the enterprise about

to be born. The universe, they felt, echoed to their thought; but it

would have been desecration to put their seerlike longing into any form

of human expression.

This was the nearest they came to what is called worship in other

nations. It was difficult to get them to speak of it, for what they

would have called their religion was their whole life, their pressing

forward and upward in development. Their religion was what Europeans

would have defined as the discovery of God, rather than the worship

of any idea of Him. It was based on the knowledge that the world had

advanced from insignificant life to comparatively noble self-conscious

life, and it held firmly that no finality could have yet been reached,

that there was nobler life beyond still to achieve. Ever, as they

climbed upwards in development, they had descried new ideals on the far

horizon that threw into shadow what they had been aiming at. On and on

would they still climb, nearer and nearer to the ultimate ideal of the

cosmos, which is God.

Not to progress was to be irreligious; even to look back and make an

idol out of a superseded ideal, a hero out of a past saviour, was to

sin. There had been revelations of the ultimate spirit of the cosmos,

but they were ever superseded by the advance of the race; for every

advance to a new type was a revelation; all true and developing life

was a revelation. No revelation could be other than for a time; it was

sure to lose its illuminating power as the years or the generations

progressed. Many sacred books they had had, books that were no longer

sacred, only retaining the reverence for that which had once aided in

their development. As long as it continued to hold a beacon ahead of

the race, a book remained sacred, but once its ideal had been overtaken

by the national progress, light died out of it. For a dead book that

retained its sacredness became a fetich and obstructed development.

Not only did they reverence their sacred books; every noble utterance,

every noble act, that held out an ideal for men to strive after was as

sacred; but as soon as the sentiment or thought or morality was seen

to be merely of the past, it was set aside. Nothing could possibly be

final in a universe that was ever developing, with faculties and powers

of observation that were ever getting more capable of comprehending new

phases and energies of the cosmos. To accept a book or a faith or an

ideal as finally sacred was to offend against the ultimate, the free

spirit of the cosmos which was ever leading onwards to new heights

and new outlooks into the future. There was no outer worship except

life and all its works. All other worship was waste of time and effort

which might have been used to raise the worshippers in the scale of

being. Every attempt to conciliate God or imagine Him or model Him was

blasphemy against the effort to rise towards Him. But every man had his

own religious thoughts in silence, and there was welding the whole race

to a common purpose, a magnetic sympathy which was deeply religious;

it was the sympathy with every thought that tended to advance. But all

vain contemplation or self-reflection not leading to a progressive

purpose was waste of life and therefore evil. For evil, they held,

is the rebellion of the past against the future; and though a new

religion is an effort of nature to make alliance with the future, it

soon, by reason of having reached or seeming to have reached its ideal,

crystallises and becomes the ally of the past. The spirit of stagnancy

and retrogression, what we in Christendom would call the devil, laughs

at new religions and counts old religions as its best allies; so ran

a common maxim of theirs. They would have nothing to do with what

would withdraw any current of their life energy from the great work of

advance.

If there was any division of their race that could be said to approach

to a priesthood, it was the men and women of science, especially the

pioneers, or the imaginative amongst them; for they had their eyes bent

unflinchingly on the future. Theirs it was to see that the race was

ever advancing. They never suffered the present to interfere with the

development that was to be. They stirred their fellow-Limanorans to

the enthusiasm of anticipation, and watched with unfaltering jealousy

every glance turned upon the past. The moments spent upon history

and antiquarian research they counted lost, unless their aim was to

throw illumination upon the future. Mere students of the past were

backsliders, whom they had to chide for their offences against the

evolution of the cosmos. They held up to the eyes of their countrymen

the nobleness and beauty of the ideals that were to be soon attained,

or, if need were, the sublimity of those that lay just under the

horizon in the dimness of twilight.

They would have nothing to do with mere mystery, the basis of all

superstition. They never lost sight of the margin of the half-known

that was ever receding before the advance of investigation into the

dark infinitude, but they would have no dealings with it beyond the

gaze of scientific imagination as it planted itself upon the heights of

already achieved knowledge. Such dealings led to gross superstition and

charlatanry, to pretence of more intercourse with the unknown than was

warranted by the knowledge of the time; there was no standard by which

they could be measured or checked, and, if once they were allowed, they

would give unlimited scope for self-deceit and imposture. Faith was a

matter for silent meditation and for dream; speech or act would only

bring it down to the dull level of memory. The faith they spoke of was

faith in the great future of man, and the pioneers were encouraged to

sketch out and foreshadow its possibilities by way of dream; but that

dream was ever the best which traced the whole faith through practice

to complete achievement.

One of the great imaginative books of the time mapped out the route

of self abnegation; it described the denial of the lower or material

self, and the reduction of it to insignificance in the human system. It

showed how by such means and by meditation a man of lofty thought might

comprehend the whole range of the universe, and, passing from spiritual

height to spiritual height, at last be capable of gathering infinitude

within the scope of his soul. Thus could he approach to communion with

the heart and soul of the cosmos, with the sun of all things. Not in

one generation would this be accomplished. But, by the selection of

parents who had wrought such a habit of thought and life into their

constitutions, they might have in a century of generations beings who

were all spirit unhampered by physical modes of thought and feeling.

Not even this ideal man of the future would they worship. For he would

still be man, infinities short of the highest he could be in the

cosmos; and nothing short of absolute perfection should be the object

of so intense a concentration and prostration of the soul as worship.

To accept any mere embodiment of humanity as the centre of adoration

was antagonistic to their great ethical maxim that the ultimate object

of every action or desire should be higher than the highest existing

human life. To worship even the idea of humanity, were it possible for

a spirit with its feelings and imagination limited to human moulds,

would lower the aspirations of thought; apart from the difficulties

of its abstractness, it would be open to the objection of obstructing

progress by setting up a deity who was but an amalgam of all the

failings, as well as all the virtues, of mankind. The Limanorans smiled

at the ineptitude of making so imperfect creatures as ourselves the

chief elements of godhead, when there were such infinitudes around

us and above us, and such eternities before us. Even if it should be

possible to eliminate from the human idea of deity all but progress

and the noblest virtue, it would be obviously absurd to worship an

ideal that was soon, with the earth it dwelt on, to vanish in the

dust, vapour, and heat of cosmic collision. All open worship was

inevitably hampered, they held, by the limitations of human nature; and

anthropomorphic it must be, despite all efforts to bar out the human

from it, and as anthropomorphic, certain to be antiquated by any real

progress on the part of the worshippers.

These elements in religions make them the enemies of all advance except

perhaps advance in luxury. Their guardians feel that they are sure to

be superseded if the spirit of man should rise above the conditions

in which the worships were moulded. It is one of the strongest

yearnings of life to remain as it is; only there are forces material

and spiritual ever goading it on the path of advance, threatening

inferiority or defeat or death, unless it goes on. But so infinitesimal

is the progress thus made under the sting of natural law that it is

scarcely noticeable in periods short of hundreds of generations; few or

no nations or races have retained historic dominance or even historic

consciousness of their past so long.

This unconscious meliorism was considered by the Limanorans as little

better than the development of animals, when left to themselves. Only

deliberate effort on the part of a state and its members can produce

advance that is to be felt, or that acts as a stimulus to farther

advance. It is seldom that unconscious progress is other than material,

whilst it inevitably entails reaction into stagnancy or retrogression.

Nay, the whole human race at times takes a run forward, and then

stumbles and falls, only to slide back into its old footprints. Some

new impulse, sweeping through the ether, has stirred men in each race,

whose enthusiasm, or, as it is commonly called, inspiration, awakens

the spirit of progress in the era.

Conservatism is the native or fundamental attitude of every being, the

tendency to make the rest of the adjacent world give way that it may

perpetuate its existence or that of its brood. Selfishness is thus the

very texture of life, and it is difficult to see how it can engender

its opposite, self-sacrifice. The sexual and the parental instincts

are the crude material of the latter. But the fire of thought and

enthusiastic impulse is needed to refine this material into a love that

stretches beyond the immediate object of these instincts and takes in

the interests of the race and last of all those of mankind; something

higher and more alien to the instincts of man is demanded for the

comprehension of his nobler development. In the valley of memories

was shown me at one stage of my education a complete elucidation of

the prehistoric phases of evolution; first came the struggle for life

amongst the innumerable claimants for the mastery of the new earth,

those elementary forms that, coming out of space, will settle on any

world new or old that they may encounter, the advanced organisations

seeking only orbs well-fitted for their progress. Across the geological

ages I could see this competition raising the minute cells of the

primeval creatures into elaborately organised beings. I saw sex save

the new existence from the dominion of mere brute appetite. But from

outside the world came the transformation which made it the saviour of

man, the ultimately dominant animal upon the sphere. This transformed

instinct expanded by slow steps love of children into love of race,

then into philanthropy, at first bland and crude and often unreal in

the presence of the old sensual and family love, but finally strong and

noble and able to embrace the progress of man as a spirit. The last

stage overleapt the prehistoric, and came to be limited, except in rare

and isolated instances, to Limanora. Enlightened philanthropy, I could

see, held the attempt to reform all mankind as vain as to convert the

lower animals into the human form and nature. Once more I went back

into Fialume and studied the panorama of evolution, and I recognised

the full meaning of it; the great impulses upwards and forwards had

come from outside the world, and chiefest of all the longing to evolve

a human nature to which death would be but an insignificant step

from life to life, and which would recognise in itself more and more

affinity to the highest life of infinite space.

But this section of Fialume only gave a bird’s-eye view of the

elevation of life upon the earth. None were allowed to linger after

they had drawn from it the lesson and the force it could give them

for marching forward. Minuter study of the past might lead their

youth to think ignobly of life and to accept “Might is right” as its

fundamental maxim. Nature, as seen amongst the ravening beasts or

amongst the naked cruelty and injustice of primitive men, might be

taken by them as dominant through all human evolution. If any history

was to be studied minutely, it was only the more recent history of

their own race, where the old laws of nature that were opposed to

justice and charity and self-sacrifice have been sublimated and

transcended, where new senses have opened gateways for a new knowledge

which would once have been called supersensible. What could this people

learn from the study of lapsed civilisations, that had risen out of

childish savagery only to fall back again? The sole aim of these was

happiness, and this ever degenerated into the pursuit of pleasure,

ending sooner or later in brutal selfishness. It had been one of the

earlier instincts from their post-purgation life, that they have least

happiness who think most of it. Happiness, or even pleasure, might

be made at times the test of successful actions and pursuits; but it

never should be made an aim in itself. Higher civilisations were less

happy than savagery or barbarism; their advances in commerce and even

in science only added more consciousness of misery to the many, and

more eagerness for new luxury to the few. Most civilisations, as they

advance, merely add to the desires and thus more effectually enslave

human nature to locality and time. The newer types produce no greater

intellects, no greater imaginations, than those that have lived and

fallen, whilst their masses have greatly receded in happiness and in

simplicity of virtue. The changes of what is commonly called progress

only bring new evils that have to be cured, and the energetic minority

who have produced the changes and suppose themselves to benefit by

them at first refuse to see the evils, and after a time are driven to

attempt their cure by drastic remedies which bring universal ruin all

the quicker.

The Limanoran horizon was too rapidly widening to allow of more than

the most cursory survey of the degenerate past or of the contemporary

present, even had it been to their interests to study them more

minutely. Their own future was expanding in so many directions as to

demand all their energies. World after world, star after star, universe

after universe, were revealing their character and stage of development

to Limanoran science. New marvels every year impressed upon them the

wisdom of avoiding all denial and scepticism with regard to what

imagination or faith should suggest, of holding neutrality towards all

that was unprovable or even contrary to their knowledge of the laws of

nature. They ventured only in the safe track of facts, whence they shot

their flashes of conjecture into the dark. But from past experience

they learned to distrust denial or even scepticism in regions where

knowledge could not venture yet. Imagination had been found a trusty

pioneer, and one of their recent books held out the hope that before

long the suggestions of faith might be but the messages which flew

through the ether over what might be called a cosmic telegraph, and

that, where these touched the souls of the noblest, they came from the

central spirit of the cosmos.

Already they were far on the way along several lines towards such a

consummation, and modifications of their ooloran or sonarchitect had

been employed in many channels of cosmic investigation. They had long

ago conjectured that the earth’s atmosphere, acting as a gigantic

ooloran, gathered the sound-waves that travelled through space and

used them to shape the things of the earth, as they came into being;

and recent discoveries had almost turned the conjecture into fact.

Sometimes the vibrations came from an inchoate or a degenerate world;

and then, as in the earlier or saurian stage of animal life and

development, the terrene creatures took monstrous shape under the

resonator of the atmosphere. Sometimes they came from orbs that knew

only beauty and grace of form; and then, as when the plants and trees

and flowers and shells of the earth were branching into new species,

few terrestrial things but fell into graceful moulds. And now, having

struck this far-reaching and fundamental thought, they turned it to

noble use. They produced a huge modification of the ooloran which would

fix upon the shape of a flower or fern or shell, and translate it into

the music that had originally moulded it. Nothing earthly but would

yield to them through this reversed sonarchitect the sonant or other

vibrations that had at first shaped it. Step by step this new art which

interpreted the moulding influences of the universe advanced into an

organised and scientific division of the duties of the race. Step by

step it mastered the harmony of form, and gave the people the music

that rang through interstellar space at the shaping of the beautiful

things of the world.

A great book of the time showed how far the art could go in leading

their religion from the silent to the sonant form. There were

vibrations throughout the cosmos that came from no one of the worlds

or their inhabitants. They emanated from the centre of all existence,

whence they had mysteriously moulded the spirits of great reformers and

sages; they were the voice of God ringing down through the aisles of

creation. It was now not only possible, but within the limits of the

practicable, to find by the aid of one of their new sonarchitects the

cosmic harmonies that had moulded the souls of the great enthusiasts

and sages of the world. They might translate the voice of God into the

vibrations that would appeal, if not to their ear, to their higher

and more recent senses. The seemingly fantastic groupings of stars

would send into their minds the divine secret guiding their movements.

Nearer and nearer would they creep under the great dome of heaven to

the centre of energy, whose voice these vibrations were. True religion

though this might be, never would they consent to fix it in creed or

ceremonial. On and on must their art of musical sonarchitecture go,

keeping pace with their ever-advancing science, but never reaching

finality in interpreting the voice of God.

Nothing in fact could be nearer to what other men call religion than

Limanoran science; it was never weary of listening to the voice of

God in the cosmos and ever looked upwards and onwards to a wider and

loftier creation. It refused to look back, unless the retrospect was

to assist its march forward. Every discovery was the truest act of

devotion, a step nearer to the centre of being; and anything that

would obstruct such discoveries or the advance they stimulated was

retrogressive, a sin against the being who was drawing all things into

the path of development. Fixity of beliefs was the surest obstruction

to progress, and, along with all superstition, the grossest immorality.

There was no evil inherent in matter or any of the lower forms of life.

Evil lay in returning to one of these after knowing and fulfilling

something higher. It is this against which the human spirit girds

when its lower elements at death go back into the grave. For, the

Limanorans held, matter is not to be rigidly divided from spirit as

something contrastive and antagonistic. They saw none of the strict

divisions in nature that Western science and philosophy knew, arranging

terrene things into matter and spirit, man and beast, and cosmic things

into God and the world. Matter was vital and moving, as spirit was,

though not in the same degree. Animals were ever on the same path of

evolution as man was, though most species of them were far behind most

of mankind. The worlds were the speech of God, methods of manifesting

Himself and of making His lower manifestations evolve into higher.

There were gradations throughout the cosmos, and the boundaries between

them were difficult to discern.

Man is the highest grade that man knows definitely; for human

personality is the amalgam of the knowing and the known. The animal

as higher than the vegetable knows the world as separate from itself,

but it does not know or study itself as a world apart; nor can it

be conscious of the general being or purpose of the universe. Man

is the first animal on earth, so far as we know, that has gained

self-consciousness, and, through self-consciousness, a glimmering

vision of what God might be. Only by love of retrogression or sin can

this higher element in him return into the ocean of decay again. The

other parts and elements of his system have to suffer reformation like

exhausted worlds, in order that they may rise higher than they have

been.

This was one direction their science took in finding its way towards

the highest of all grades of being. But it had other lines of as truly

religious investigation. For example, it had found as it proceeded more

and more subtle mediums of energy in the universe, mediums which had

long evaded the rude cognisance of their primitive senses but which

now yielded the secret of their presence, first to their imaginations,

then to their refined apparatus, and last of all to their more recently

developed senses. The energies that came through them were impressed

upon their senses before the mediums themselves were; and not till the

senses were touched would the reason be finally persuaded of their

existence. It took long ages to refine their senses or develop new

senses up to the power of detecting new energies or the mediums through

which these travelled. Imagination led the way; but its lead could

not be trusted unless guided by scientific fact and method. Its most

trustworthy henchman was invention; for this supplied apparatus that

increased the perceptive powers of the senses a thousand-fold. And,

as their senses grew in refinement, the instruments they invented to

aid them increased in subtlety and magnifying power, so that they were

ever able to keep well in advance of their own unassisted perceptive

faculties.

Their sciences too had grown subtler and farther-reaching in their

methods every generation. To their older chemistry, for instance, the

atoms had but a speculative existence. The newer, with magnetism and

electricity as its main agents and the clirolans as chief aids, dealt

with them directly; and a still more marvellous analysis was developing

which, adding will-force to magnetism and electricity as reagents,

could find the mediums of nervous energy and classify its various kinds

and modes of action. By means of this analysis they were able to get at

the physical basis of reflex action, desire, appetite, and the various

other semi-spiritual phenomena of humanity.

A book of the time pointed out a science as far beyond this as this had

been beyond the older chemistry, for there were far subtler and higher

media of energy to be discovered and analysed than those of appetite

and desire. Subtlest of all must be that in which the energy called

soul moved. It appeared predominantly in none but the higher types of

the human race, the men and women of wise creative power. Others had

it as a faint aroma which asserted itself only in moments of great

enthusiasm over the gross powers of appetite and passion and at other

times seemed almost to vanish. In the Limanorans it had grown to be

dominant over all the faculties and powers of the human system. The

book foresaw that the medium of this noble energy would be found akin

to that of the central energy of the cosmos, the great being whose

phases and manifestations were stars and universes. And the loftier the

mind, the more of this medium did it possess, and the clearer affinity

it had with the creative power of infinitude. Not far below this was

the medium in which the energy of morality moved; and the higher the

morality the more sympathetic was its medium with that of creation.

The new science foreshadowed by the book would display to the advanced

race of the future the movements of these finer media, and the modes of

action by which moral energy and spiritual and creative energy worked

through them.

Then would they see their way to such continuance of their life as

would seem to other men practical immortality. They would be able so

to refine and sublimate the energies of their systems and the media

through which they acted, as to be free from any of the transformations

called death for almost measureless periods of time. For the subtler

the medium, the more self-existent is the energy that moves in it, the

less is it subject to change and the less it needs change in order to

fulfil the purpose of all being. The nearer to creative power an energy

comes, the less it needs alliance with grosser and more perishable

media in order to rise in the scale of existence; decay and death

become rarer and rarer incidents. As yet Limanoran science had not

discovered absolute immortality; nor did it seem likely to discover

it. Its experience of the cosmos pointed to change as the most widely

spread of all principles; whatsoever is allied with any lower media

must shed them, or in other words suffer death, if it is to continue

its march upwards; the whole history of the earth was a continual

record of these transformations. The Limanorans had taken this aim of

terrestrial existence into their own hands, and by gradually rejecting

the grosser and shorter-lived elements of their system, they had been

able to extend their life, at first to hundreds, and afterwards to

thousands of years. They now saw before them a limitless vista along

which the necessity of death or transformation would be hunted farther

and farther from birth. And the same story they saw written all over

the cosmos, energy as it becomes purer and subtler and less dependent

for evolution upon lower forms approaching nearer and nearer to what

would seem immortality from the human point of view, coming closer and

closer to the creative energy of the cosmos. To them therefore all

their life was religion, and science was its true hierophant.

If the analytic sciences like chemistry revealed a path that led the

minds of men towards God, the wide-ranged sciences like astronomy,

astrobiology, and astromagnetism might themselves be called the

highways to God. The embodied energy and life of the earth on

this side of death seem to the human mind self-explanatory and

self-involved; but the enfranchised life and energy that fill space

have no human philosophy to account for them and have generally been

denied by men. The Limanoran sciences had found space, as far as

they could investigate it with their senses and their instruments,

no less full of energy and life than the world itself, not merely

the infinitesimal and attenuated life that they thought the débris

of other worlds and systems, but the enfranchised life of highly

organised beings, most of it so subtle and noble as to evade even the

new senses of the Limanorans. It was the life of such beings that the

science of this people aimed at knowing intimately. On some stars, they

were certain, existed inhabitants subtly enough organised to cognise

this interstellar life without aid of instruments; and they seemed

themselves to be on the verge of attaining such a power. When they

gained it, they might hold intercourse with that disembodied energy

which perchance has close affinity with the soul of God. Towards this

higher, enfranchised energy they laboured and struggled incessantly.

They believed that its existence could be accounted for only on the

assumption of some perennial fountain of free energy in the cosmos;

that there must be some great centre of completely enfranchised energy;

the course of cosmic evolution pointed that way, and every so-called

death or dissolution was but the enfranchisement of some higher type of

energy from the lower forms with which it had been for a time allied.

Even the fixed nuclei of energy, what were called matter and the atoms,

were ever aiming at liberation of the energy that formed their essence.

Every dissolution, every step higher in the gradation, implied an

ultimate energy that was free from all the trammels of lower forms.

This must be the life of pure thought that sees time past and time to

be as clearly as time present, that takes in the cosmos at a glance,

that needs no sustenance from lower energies, and suffers no birth or

dissolution. Towards this the whole cosmos strives; and perhaps there

may be a time in the history of existence when all the fixed forms

of energy shall have evolved into the free form, till at last there

is nothing but space and disembodied thought which is universally

perceptive and creative without the aid of mediums of energy or senses.

Vast systems of worlds have come and gone in the infinite past only

to distil the energy that was in them through living beings up into

the final and immortal form that needs no process of dissolution or

migration to purify it.

When they turned back from these heights to view the history of the

earth, it seemed to them that creative thought was written all over

it; could there be any clearer manifestation of the vast intelligence

informing the whole than this marvellous elaboration of genus and

species raising terrestrial life step by step upwards from the microbe

to the highest type of man? Their astronomical sciences pointed still

more unmistakably upwards to the fountain of creative thought. The

evolution of stars and systems and of life upon them seemed to them

but the history of the intelligence of infinitude. They deliberately

avoided all conventional idea of the thought of the cosmos, yet were

ever tempted through desire of firm ground to use the analogy of a

living terrene thing. Just as the body of a plant or animal is ever

decaying, ever renewing itself, so is this cosmos, the material

existence, the body of the spirit we call God, ever decaying, ever

renewing itself, ever raising its energies into higher and higher

forms. The universes and systems are molecules, the stars the atoms,

of the infinite body of the cosmos, and each one of them is moving and

developing in strict relation to all the others and to the abiding

spirit that is their aim and master. There is law or thought guiding

the history of every one of them and nothing of them is lost; the

energy of everything that seems to die has but distilled elsewhere, or

transmuted into something higher and less localised. What seems to us

decay is but the liberation of an energy from the less refined forms

with which it has been allied. Every process moves in rhythm to the

pulsations of everlasting thought that is, and realises all that was

and is and is to be. Nothing falls by accident. All is transformation,

growth, development towards self-subsistent thought, which moves

through all the processes, conscious of itself and of them all. To this

final spirit of the cosmos ten thousand ages are but as a moment. The

myriads of millions of years that some stars live, and that crush our

puny thoughts with their vastness, are but one heartbeat of God. The

whirling universes are but molecules looked at from the view-point of

the final spirit; our telescopic is his microscopic.

Thitherwards all their astronomy pointed. Round our sun move our

planets without failure of harmony, and ever round some still farther

point moves our sun and his satellites, as thousands of other suns

and systems do. Nor did the epicycloidal movement cease there; great

systems of universes have still more inward centres. But all this

infinitude of concentricism points to some ultimate centre which is

again the pivot of the cosmos. Following their analogy from man, they

occasionally allowed themselves to think that this was the brain of

God, the concentration of His thought-energy. But they refused to let

the analogy master them; they threw it off as but a metaphor and waited

for clearer and farther-reaching light. To define what lay so far

beyond their horizon was to falsify; and they knew too well from their

own past history into what labyrinths of error a single untruth will

lead a race, especially if it is planted and watered by religion.

Only where science flashed its light forth into the darkness would

they dare to define any feature or form of religion. God, they felt,

was the infinite conservation of energy. Up an infinite scale it ever

climbed towards the ultimate, the purest of all energies, the divine,

the goal to which creation groaned and struggled. The grosser forms

of energy were the _caput mortuum_ of former mixed beings and

worlds, after the sublimation of their purest elements. Out of this

residue in its new period of probation were distilled again energies

that swept upwards. If such lapses from the universal progress of the

cosmos occur in self-conscious forms, as in the soul of man, then are

they breaches of morality, or, from the point of view of the all, sins.

Conversion is the entrance of consciousness of the universal law and

of willing obedience to it into the nature. Religious and moral codes

are strivings after it and, unfortunately, attempts to define it that

soon falsify its spirit. Miracles are fore-glimpses of this law of

progress half-understood, intrusions of an energy loftier than the

sect or circle or star has been accustomed to. Every new faith is a

miracle to its early believers; for it is a prevision of the universal

law which is so far beyond their natural powers that it surprises them

into enthusiasm; its miraculous quality makes them accept it as the

final revelation, and their descendants, after they have advanced to

a natural view of its truths, still uphold the tradition that it is

divine, and strain every word and feature of it in order to find the

divine in it.

A pioneering book of the time attempted to point the way of biological

psychology towards the goal of religion. It showed how the plant

has a dim sense of its being moulded from without, chiefly by the

grosser forms of energy; and how the animal though subject to them

is yet capable of moving amongst them and rebelling against their

power; whilst the human is attained when this rebellion rises into

capacity to rule them and mould them to its will. It emphasised the

Limanoran distinction between the grossly human and the wisely human,

and held that there were geological ages of development lying between

these; for the one is conscious of the self as merely allied with the

grosser forms of energy like the animal; the mark of the other is the

consciousness of self as a part of the all, as allied with the law of

the all. It conceived that the next grade was the divine, distinguished

by consciousness of the all as created and guided by the self. The wise

amongst men in its view had thus in them a share of the divine. There

was it is true in all men the possibility of this, though in most it

was latent. The loftiest kind of energy they had yet discovered had

as its distinction the sense of continuity of existence, the power to

think back through the past and forward through the future; this is

perhaps what is meant by personal identity in Western philosophy, the

capacity to keep the self from being merged in the mass of energies

that fill space. Men have attained it in but a fitful and shadowy

way. In savages and in those of the civilised who fall away from the

universal law of progress it is obscured or buried by the dominance of

the lower and transitory forms of energy. The book imagined that when

the wise die this highest energy is so strong in them that it cannot

amalgamate again with those they have been accustomed to upon earth; it

seeks higher alliance and higher spheres than it has hitherto known;

and, once having found its new and sublimer affinities, it can move

amid the grosser forms and elements untainted, unsubdued, unrecognised,

by them. Gravitation and heat and electricity have no power over it

and come into relationship to it only when it wills to use them; for

they are the mediate forms of energy that move the molecules and

atoms; and they are moved and piloted by still higher forms, that are

perchance the will-power or spirit of God; these higher forms come not

yet within the range of human senses, but are inferred by human reason

and conceived by human imagination as conscious of themselves, evident

every where by their results, the marks of intelligence throughout the

cosmos. But this book imagined that the disembodied energy of the wise

knew and felt them, and thus came nearer to the spirit and fountain of

all. Once our universe has distilled its best energies into space and

has accomplished the best it can, our swarm of firefly worlds “paling

their now ineffectual fires” encounter in their natural epicycloidal

course round unperceived centres the systems that they have encountered

myriads of geological ages before; and the collision of the two again

sends them on their career of the evolution of their lower energies

into higher.

But the Limanorans were chary of claiming anything that they discovered

or conceived as the ultimate or the absolute; so many absolutes of the

past had after a time yielded points of view into infinities beyond

them. Hundreds of their scientific highroads led manifestly towards

one centre; but they could not say that that was the final centre or

God. Just as their sun with its satellites moved round another centre,

which was itself in revolution, so might the common point to which

their various sciences seemed to converge be but on the outer rim of a

series of sciences that had a still more inward centre. Their highest

faculties might have above them faculties belonging to other beings

in the cosmos as superior to reason and imagination as reason and

imagination were to the sensuous perceptions of the animals. The savage

had no power to comprehend the results of the reasoning capacities of

the civilised man; and the soul of the sage, when disembodied, might

begin to perceive the heights of development in faculty he had still

to climb. All their recent experience bade them wait further light

and refuse to accept any revelation of being as ultimate, and in the

rejection of all dogmatism they attained the true religious attitude

for imperfect seekers of knowledge like men, the attitude of waiting

for light. The book had embodied in it an apologue that put this belief

concretely.

If the parasite of a microbe in the body of a flea were able to examine

and analyse its conditions and surroundings and had the faculty of

reverence, its first religion would have as its object the host on

which it battened, and would endow its deity with its own parasitic

faculties and desires. But as its horizon widened and it found its

host but the dependent of another vital centre, it would contemn the

mediacy of the microbe, and fix all its reverence and adoration upon

the flea, which would seem to it a miraculous and omnipotent edition of

itself. With its vision and all its powers of observation fixed upon

the host of its host, it would soon come to see how its deity was not

self-subsistent but ricochetted from spot to spot, and the human body

with its comparative infinitude would afterwards take the place of the

flea in the reverence of the microbe’s parasite, and be accepted as

the vastest and most etherealised edition of itself the parasite could

conceive, having no means of ascertaining the real limits and faculties

of its new deity. As soon as it was able to measure and define these,

it would undeify man and substitute for him that which man inhabited,

and endow it with all its own parasitic powers and limitations.

Following the analogy, the new book saw an infinitude of pitfalls

and disillusionments before the religious faculty of man, and

refused to accept man’s similes and metaphors as in any way accurate

representations of the truth. Similes and metaphors they must remain

marked by all the narrowness of human limitations. Scientific discovery

must be the only guide of religion; and the more they advanced in their

sciences, the nearer they came to the true God. For this reason it was

that they felt it to be sin to withdraw any portion of their energy or

time from scientific pursuits and investigations. To know the cosmos

better was to approach nearer to the spirit of the cosmos, to grow more

truly religious.

The last decennial review that I witnessed, occurring as it did just

before I set out over the circle of mist, impressed upon me the

provisional as well as the fundamental character of their religious

ideals. Most of the books dramatically presented in Loomiefa at that

period had the final aim of cosmic life and energy as their theme; to

me they struck far beyond all that the most idealistic of Western

religious books had ever attempted to foreshadow; and yet they were

wholly based upon the indications that recent discoveries had given.

In a still more startling way, they were taken as but temporary

satisfactions of futuritive yearnings; they bent the highest energies

of the Limanorans into paths that led beyond what they could see from

their actual standpoint in science; but they knew from past experience

that the full blaze of noon would before long fall upon these dim

regions now lit up only by presciential imagination. These books they

now reverenced for their pioneering power; but as soon as scientific

advance should wither them into the trite and commonplace, nothing

could ever make them again guides into the darkness of the unknown,

nothing in short could ever restore their sacredness.

CHAPTER XIV

THE LAST FLIGHT

THOUGH this Manora seemed to me so solemn and almost sacramental in

its spirit, there was no withdrawal of any of the families from the

duties of their daily life. They were as eager for the advance of their

special sciences as they had ever been. Nay, the progress seemed to

me more and more rapid. The faculties were whetted to their utmost

keenness; their energies were buoyant and free. I had expected at this

religious review of the whole of their life to find a relaxation of

their intellectual temper, a languor in their wills, such as I had

often noted in periods of great religious outburst in the West. I had

been accustomed to look for an aloofness from the common pursuits of

life and a prostration before the great ideals of faith, whenever a

wave of worshipful enthusiasm broke over any community in Europe.

This people would have thought a religion that thus blanched

common life of its interests and enthusiasms not merely useless

but mischievous. Prostration before the infinities and eternities

was the last attitude they would encourage; for they considered it

blasphemy against the spirit of the cosmos. If the Manora had in any

way withdrawn their energies from their forward march, they would

have abolished it. Progress was religion, or the fulfilment of the

irrepressible yearning of all things to rise in the cosmic scale of

being, and that anything religious should check or obstruct advance was

to them the grossest contradiction in terms. Religion was in Limanora

the essence of practical life, or rather practical life was the highest

religion.

Though the review was an intense pleasure to the whole nation, throwing

the thought as it did farther and farther into the future, none

neglected for a moment the severe physical labour that was their daily

portion in the centre of force. None felt their spirits relax in their

eagerness to perform the work of their life. On the contrary, the new

religious enthusiasm added a zest to all that they had to do.

To no families did so many or so urgent demands come as to those of the

Leomo; for the great mountain had been more than ordinarily perturbed.

In spite of numerous new lava-wells, the crust of the whole island had

been shaken by frequent earthquakes, and out of the mouth of the crater

had stormed far pennons of dust and ashes, showing that something

unusual was occurring in the depths below. Then had come a sudden and

ominous lull during the latter half of the Manora; the earth had grown

quiescent and the whole summit of Limanora stood vivid and clear in the

azure.

The Leomo were not deceived by this sudden cessation of subterranean

activity. It meant new issues for the volcanic energy amid the

antarctic snows, and new dangers from the possible intrusion of

southern waters. Most members of the families were needed in the island

itself for the investigation of the new phenomena and the sinking

of lava-wells, and only two could be spared for an inspection of the

volcanoes of their old home. Thyriel and I were chosen to make the

expedition. For we had lately been accorded the high privilege of

marriage, and comradeship in danger was the usual and natural welder

of the new bonds. As soon as the review was over we had to set forth

on our venture, and we were instructed to return with all the speed we

could manage.

We did not need such instructions; our own quickened enthusiasms were

incentive enough. We knew that the reports by the idrovamolan of events

occurring so far to the south could not be wholly trusted; for these

regions were too often enveloped in mist or blinding snow-storm, and it

was difficult to float the observer in the teeth of their furious winds

and impossible to send the telepathic line of light to such a distance.

Even if electric, aural, and visual records had been gathered by means

of the machine-reporters, they would not have been minute enough for

the purposes of the Leomo. There was generally needed therefore a

personal inspection of the lands away to the south, whenever there were

unusual perturbations in the great mountain and its precincts.

To have been selected for this difficult duty was honour so great as

to stir us to unwonted effort. A few hours after the duty had been

assigned us we had everything on board our faleena, and from the

hill of farewells we had started, full of eagerness to do our best

for our people. We were too happy in our new comradeship and in our

extraordinary task to allow any sense of separation or fear of disaster

to cloud our thoughts. So anxious were we to be on our way that we

scarcely looked back at our companions and guardians, as they stood

watching our flight after giving us of their magnetism.

Nothing occurred to make the voyage south especially memorable. We did

notice far below us in the night one or two dark masses that were not

identifiable with anything in our maps. But we set them down as great

icebergs, borne out of their usual course; and the cap they seemed to

bear we took for a turban of mist round their heads. From our later

observation of the southern lands, we afterwards judged that they were

temporary volcanic islands thrown up on the line of shallow water by

the renewed violence of the fires below.

A great storm met us as we approached the ice-cliffs of the Antarctic;

nothing could be seen for the drift of snow and hail through the air,

and we were forced to rise high into the atmosphere beyond the region

of winds and tempests and clouds. For days we could see no break in the

massed blackness below us. We chafed at the delay but knew that it was

inevitable; for even if we could have landed in safety, we should have

been able to see nothing for the thickness of the driving snow-storm,

and we would assuredly have imperilled our faleena in attempting to

come to earth in the baffling winds.

At last we felt the magnetism of the upper atmosphere lessen in force

and caprice, and we knew that the disturbances below would gradually

vanish. The sun seemed to gather power, and we saw the cloud-floor

rend like an ice-sheet on flooding waters. The fifth morning broke

brilliant and clear. There lay the heaving surface of the ocean blue as

the sky, and away to the south gleamed on the horizon the knife-edge of

far-stretching ice. But there was something new and strange beyond it.

Thick smoke trailed heavily above it, and a dozen new points of light

made it lurid.

We had drifted far to the north, and anxiously we turned the prow of

our airship towards the old home of the race. We seemed to wing our way

with inordinate slowness, so eager were our spirits to know the new

phenomena and to carry the report back to Limanora. Every league nearer

made us more certain that some great disturbance had occurred in the

crust of the earth. The sea was covered with the débris of a world of

ice. Huge icebergs swam lazily breasting the swell, or clashed against

each other in splintering collision; in some of them we could see the

dark motes that marked them as portions of the vast graveyard we had

once visited. Closer still to them we could see many of the long-buried

bodies emerging from their tombs of frost, like Lazaruses still bound

in their grave-clothes. It was a strange sight, this phantom-like

resurrection at the touch of sunlight.

Over the unguided procession of icy funeral-barges, bearing their

century-sheeted dead to burial in the ocean, we hurriedly winged to

land. There were still more striking sights in store for us. The

appearance of the cliffs and mountains had been completely changed.

It looked, as we approached, as if what had formerly been a great

plateau had been ridged and furrowed by some titanic plough; and where

a dozen smoke-vents had once borne witness to the living fires beneath,

hundreds belched forth ashes or sent a red tongue of molten lava oozing

and licking down their slopes.

We had to change our landing-place far to the west; for dozens of miles

had been added to the eruptive area and the cliffs where we used to

land were scarred by explosion or were tottering before the assaults

of the billows. The storm that we had encountered had evidently been

the companion, if not the result, of this vast upheaval and at the same

time had hidden from us, as we hovered above the clouds, the titanic

pyrotechny.

We flew along the cliff-line, till we reached a region that seemed

untouched by the orgasm of the earth. Our airship we piloted into a

cleft or valley which, we thought, could protect it from any showers

of ashes or torrents of lava that might approach. But to guard against

possible disaster, we adjusted our wings and took with us as much of

the minute stores of sustenance as we could carry in our garments. We

securely fastened down the faleena, so that no storm might bear it

away; and then we rose into the air on our wings above the smoke and

steam that hung over this region.

It was with great difficulty and some danger that we investigated the

state of the land where the lava-wells had been sunk. For the vents

spat out great showers of dust and ashes intermittently, and the

pall of smoke brushed this way and that as the light breeze rose and

fell. By dint of care and watchfulness we managed to see most of the

ridge-side that abutted on the ocean. Its whole appearance had been

changed. There was not a sign of our old lava-wells. The side of one

hill had been blown away, and a torrent of melted snow and ice raced

down the ravine. Vents had been broken out where there had been glacier

or precipice or rocky peak. But as yet none of the vents were low

enough to let the sea break over their lips. The worst of all had not

yet occurred.

We could not finish our investigation in the first day. So we lay down

in our faleena to sleep, as the brief darkness approached. We were

well content with our day’s work; and we would have slept easily and

well but for the tremors in the earth beneath us. Its very foundations

seemed at times to shake and threaten convulsion. Once we thought of

taking to the air again for safety, so billow-like were the movements

that tossed us as we lay.

However, morning broke without catastrophe, and we were soon busy at

our work of inspection. We flew to the other side of the range of

mountains in order to note how the shores of the inland sea had borne

the effects of the commotion in the crust of the earth. At first we

seemed to see no change, but when we had left our faleena and followed

the old line of cliffs, the magnitude of the disturbance impressed

us. New precipices stood beetling over the still waters, where we

remembered to have seen low shelving bays. We searched for the old

sections in which we had seen the stratification of civilised abode;

but the strange palimpsest of prehistoric history, a dozen times

rewritten by the toil and hope of man, had been again obliterated by

the finger of fire. A tongue of lava only just cool had licked out the

record of the dead ages. A tawny glacis of rock confronted us instead

of the panorama of thousands of years.

Everywhere we flew were marks of the recent volcanic work; and not

merely creative, but destructive. Still farther off we found vast

subsidences which had suddenly unveiled the secrets of many geological

epochs. Some of them had been titanic in the abruptness and extent of

their work; but the great ice-planes and ice-harrows had been already

smoothing and rounding or levelling the serrated or sharp edges. Only

in one new cliff did we see a repetition of the now hidden record. A

bold hill had been cut through as by a sword and here had evidently

been built and overwhelmed village after village; we could discern here

and there traces of their employments suddenly abandoned, their looms

and ploughs and anvils embalmed in rock; and once or twice the forms

of the workers, tragically surprised at their work by the showers of

ashes, showed empty and void, the living tissues having fallen to dust

leaving only the shell, like the tunnel of a huge worm in the petrified

débris. We lingered over this open volume of human history longer

than we would have done had we been older and wiser, so deeply did it

touch the fountains of romance, and the dimmer twilight of the brief

antarctic night overtook us before our task was done.

When we awoke at dawn, we resumed our investigations, only to find

countless signs of renewed subterranean energy. We hurried to the

various points of danger and discovered only too clearly that the

first storm would send the waters of the ocean breaching into many new

volcanic vents. We could have no hesitance as to the conclusion to

be drawn and the next steps to take. It would be impossible for us,

unprovided as we were with instruments and engines, to guard against

the threatening catastrophe. The best we could do would be to return

with all swiftness to Limanora and warn the elders of our family.

Perchance we should be able to anticipate the approach of any tempest;

and if temporary measures were taken, the coming winter might stop the

gaping mouths of ruin with her downward-creeping glaciers.

We hastened back to the slope on which we had left our faleena. Even

at a distance, as we swept down from aloft, we began to be troubled at

the changes in the landscape. Where there had been a great ice-cap

crowning a precipitous ridge, there was a gaping chasm; rock and

incrustation had been together blown to atoms. A new smoking cone was

brushing the azure with its cloud of dust; and, as we descended, we

found its streams of lava still licking and hissing their way through

the snow and ice that clothed its feet.

We recognised the features of the locality with difficulty, and it

was long before we fixed the valley in which we had left our airship.

Still we could see no trace of our trusty faleena; it had vanished.

After long search we came to the conclusion that it had been swept on

by a billow of molten rock and overwhelmed, and the realisation of the

calamity cast me despairing to the ground.

How different it was with Thyriel, I perceived, as soon as my dismay

allowed me to rouse my consciousness from its palsy. She was exploring

the edges of the tongue of fire; and up the side of the opposing hill

she found a section of our flight-car unmelted by the heat, broken off

by a bold jut of rock and left scarred by the fire and twisted by the

force of the sea of lava, yet recognisable in its outlines. Happily

it was the part that contained our store of sustenance and all our

equipments for a long wing-voyage, spare chest-and-shoulder engines and

the apparatus necessary for supplying them with electricity from the

air.

We did not encumber ourselves with more than we thought would be

essential for the long air-journey back to Riallaro. The minute pellets

of sustenance were easily disposed of. But it puzzled us to know what

to do with the additional apparatus for so protracted a voyage. My

powers of flight were still so crude and undeveloped and my locomotion

through the air so clumsy and slow that Thyriel had to carry both

hers and mine. I was greatly perturbed over the possible result of so

dangerous a venture. But it had to be undertaken, and she had buoyancy

and exhilaration enough for both. My sinking heart felt the influence

of her magnetism, and I gained confidence after we set out.

The first half of our voyage was marked by singular good fortune. The

breeze went with us every day, and at night, or when the muscles of

my legs and arms grew numb from fatigue, we sighted an iceberg and

rested on it; though it heaved and rocked and on occasion threatened

submersion, our minds were at rest, for we had our wings always

attached and everything in readiness to sweep upwards from our perch.

The difficulty came when we passed beyond the Antarctic Ocean, and

voyaged high above that heaving trackless desert of water which lies

between the region of icebergs and the first ring of islets that

stipple the tropical seas. How were we to find resting-places at night

or during the day, when my wing-achievements grew lame and tardy? Even

Thyriel’s heart sank, as she thought of the hundreds of leagues we had

to traverse unbroken by any sign of land.

At first she kept along the immemorial line of bird-travel from the

south on the chance of finding here and there some spot of land thrown

up by the growing disturbances beneath the sea. For some days we were

fortunate enough to find a nightly perching-place above the billows

upon the temporary vents of the submarine fires, dangerous it is true,

yet with care and watching safe. Then we came upon a zone of calm

water, so strangely still and free from the action of wind and current

that the albatrosses basked moveless upon it. Here Thyriel bound our

wings together and made a raft, on which we floated as we slept.

But that was only for two revolutions of the earth and was the

prelude to a tornado from the north-east, a wind so unusual in those

latitudes that the Limanorans never take it into the calculations of

their voyages through the air. Just when we were within three days’

wing-journey of our home the tempest began and brought us almost to a

standstill. We tried to battle against it but our efforts were vain.

Then we rose, according to Limanoran custom, into the higher atmosphere

where is usually found perfect calm and perfect freedom from cloud and

storm, but the fury of the disturbance seemed to be miles deep. The

upper air was as thick and turbulent as the lower.

Our troubles culminated in disaster to my wing-appendages. I was

never expert in their management, but in the baffling storm I grew

helpless and in my despair let them beat almost unguided. The result

was irreparable injury to the left wing and such an obstruction to the

movement of the right as made it unmanageable. I felt my heart sink;

for I saw that I must soon fall into the ocean below and be dashed to

pieces or drowned.

Thyriel looked down and saw my peril. In a flash of thought she

abandoned all she carried except her chest-and-shoulder engines, and,

swooping down towards me, caught me as I fell. An upward sweep of

the wind aided her in her efforts, and she buoyed me up till I had

recovered energy and heart. Then she told me what she meant to do. For

a time I would not be persuaded and prayed that I might be abandoned to

my fate, but she would not hear of such a thing. By the force of her

will I soon gave way and nestled, as I had often done when learning to

fly, in the hollow between her wings.

Before the storm she let herself go; and I could feel we were moving

almost as swiftly as if we had been in our own faleena. It was useless

for her, she showed me, to fight against the wind, especially after she

had thrown away the apparatus for quickly renewing the power of her

engines. After a time I saw how much she laboured under her burden, and

I sent promptly into the gulf beneath all that I had carried, my broken

wings, my engines, and my stores of sustenance. I felt that her spirit

protested; but she said nothing, and I was relieved to feel that we

were rising instead of falling. She grew more buoyant and was even able

to spare magnetism enough to put heart into me.

The course she had taken so promptly was the only one that could have

saved both of us. She might have weathered the storm alone, and then

found her way back to Limanora. But as it was she knew that the tempest

would bear us, if she could keep us both high above the earth, right

across the long narrow cloud of New Zealand.

She felt by her bodily magnetism that we were approaching it, and while

it was still daylight we came within reach of it. She, seeing that we

were evidently coasting its southern shores, but too far off to make

them with her exhausted powers, grew afraid that we would be blown far

off to the south again and thus miss our resting-place; for we could

see the coasts round northwards. Happily at this juncture the wind

suddenly veered round to the south-west, and we were swept before it in

the twilight into a deep fiord. Our hearts were glad to feel that soon

we should touch the earth and rest. I was tempestuously elated; for I

felt, by the beat of her heart and the quick short breaths she drew,

that she was near the end of her powers.

We were close to a precipice and I was eagerly preparing to leap from

her back, when she seemed suddenly to collapse. I fell through the

air, and then knew no more till I awakened in your hut. What became

of Thyriel puzzled me for long. But I am persuaded that after seeing

me drawn by you safely to land she went off before the favouring wind

towards Limanora for help. That she has been so long troubles my

thoughts deeply at times. But I believe that she will return for me,

if only I rest here long enough. I dare not leave the place long, lest

she should come in my absence. And the solitude and your gentle silence

soothe me in my weary meditation.

EPILOGUE

WE felt guiltily conscious, as he came to this close of his narrative.

But we had not the heart to hint what we thought might have become of

her.

Almost three years had passed before his narrative reached the point of

contact with our lives. He now became restless and jaded and flitted

in and out amongst us like a ghost. For days he vanished in the bush,

and again and again we thought he had finally disappeared. But he ever

returned, more restless and yet more gentle.

We could not bear to see his agony and yearning, and at last proposed

that we should hire or purchase a small steamer, and under his guidance

make for Riallaro. He was long reluctant, but after months of hope

deferred resigned himself to the enterprise.

Trowm and I made for the nearest port and brought our purchase round to

our fiord, well-provisioned and equipped for a tropical voyage. Somm

was left by our huts and our mine to guard our interests, but still

more to watch for the advent of any messenger from the strange land

within the circle of mist.

The rest of us set out with our guest in search of his home. Nothing

happened to our expedition beyond the usual mishaps of tropical seas.

A tornado made us take refuge within an uninhabited atoll; in its

harbour our craft was safe enough, but it took all our powers to hold

on to the scanty herbage that clung to the reef and prevent our being

blown into the ocean beyond. Once or twice we had an awkward incident

with sharks, and once we came too close to an island whose shore

swarmed with threatening savages. They sprang into their canoes and

made for us, but our steam enabled us to outdistance them with ease.

Our stranger knew the exact latitude and longitude of Riallaro. He

could point out its place on a map with a confidence that made us feel

we were about to enter with him into the mysterious archipelago. We

sailed straight for the western side of the ring of mist, but never did

we encounter any such feature as he had described to us. Once or twice

we thought we saw an extended haze on the horizon and made for it; but

it vanished as we approached; it was only the mirage of the ocean.

Weeks and weeks we steamed around and over the region, but not a trace

of the great archipelago or its nebulous fence did we find.

Even our guide at last fell into silent bewilderment. He could not

believe that it had all disappeared like a dream; unless, as we

fancied, the subterranean forces had blown it into space. Nor could he

mistrust his senses or his knowledge. What to think of it he did not

venture to decide. He lay in stupor and silence for days.

But we knew that within a few weeks began the season of hurricanes; and

we determined to make back for our shelter in the southern fiord. He

reluctantly consented to our persuasion, after making us promise that

we should return again to search for his lost paradise. In the meantime

he would be able to study the charts of the region, and define the

knowledge of it more exactly. He knew by heart its relations to the

sun and the stars; and with study he could tell the very place where to

follow our search. As it was, he had doubtless made some mistake; and

he would rectify it in the interval of rest.

Without mishap or obstructive weather we got back into the shadow of

our mountains; and one day of brilliant sunshine we sailed into the

fiord. Somm was on the shore to welcome us. He had no news to give. No

one had been near the place since we had left. But he had had to make

into a neighbouring sound in order to supply his empty larder, and as

the wind seemed to favour his trip, he had brought the masts and sails

of our boat out of our cave.

Our guest paced up to our hut as in a dream, seeming to hear and see

nothing around him. We let him find his way alone, whilst we beached

and dismantled our little steamer.

In our bustle of work we had forgotten him. Suddenly a strange,

scarcely human cry awakened our attention. We rushed up the steep

pathway and found him lying in trance by the mouth of the cave,

stretched upon the wings that we had cast into our lumber-hole when we

rescued him from the water. Somm had had to turn them out to get at

the sails and cordage of the boat, and had forgotten to return them to

their place. They were cobwebbed and covered with lichen and mould, yet

the transparency of them in spots gathered the rays of the sun upon the

herbage underneath.

We raised him from his resting-place and carried him into our spare

hut. There we tried to bring him back to consciousness, but our efforts

were vain. There was life in him, we were certain; yet there was

scarcely a sign of it in movement or breath, only a fragment of the

wings held to the mouth showed a trace of moisture. So we left him

for the night, remembering that it was long before he recovered from

the first trance in which we had found him. We wrapped him round with

warm clothing, and placing him comfortably on a soft bed of fern put

food and drink near him, so that, if he wakened, he should know we had

thought of him and were near.

The next morning at daybreak I rose, and the incident of the previous

evening rushed into my mind. I made for the hut, expecting to find him

recovered and asleep, but I found no human being there. The wrappings

had fallen on either side of the fern-lair. The bowls of meat and drink

were almost empty; but there were evident marks of the claws and beaks

of birds in them.

We searched for him in the bush for days, but we never found track

of him. The only sign of his movements was that the wings were gone.

Whether he had adjusted them to his body and flown into the air or

buried them in the sea we could not discover. There clings to our

thoughts the fancy that he faded away into the azure under the blow

of assurance that Thyriel was gone for ever. We kept our eyes on the

alert for years after, as we went prospecting through the forest; and

slowly the thought lurking in our minds passed into assured belief

that his ethereal texture had melted into the air at death, that the

earth received none of his material atoms when his energy fled from its

surface.

It is only now, when we are sure that he has gone from our orb, that we

venture on giving his story to the rest of mankind. We know no better

memorial to him, and no better form for our gratitude than to let

others know what he gave us, to let others feel what has passed into

our own lives as an imperishable memory.

GODFREY SWEVEN.

THE END.

=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=

The corrections in the errata on page 12 have been made.

Contents of Book II is given on page 289.

Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced

quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and

otherwise left unbalanced.

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant

preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not

changed.

Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.