San Salvadors of the Sky—a Plymouth Rock that hangs in the heavens of
Servia—a foreign coast from which storms have brought materials to the
city of Birmingham, England.
Or the mentally freezing, or dying, will tighten their prohibitions, and
the chill of their censorships will contract, to extinction, our lives,
which, without sin, represent matter deprived of motion. Their ideal is
Death, or approximate death, warmed over occasionally only enough to
fringe with uniform, decorous icicles—from which there will be no
escape, if, for the living and sinful and adventurous there be not San
Salvadors somewhere else, a Plymouth Rock of reversed significance,
coasts of sky-continents.
But every consciousness that we have of needs, and all hosts,
departments, and sub-divisions of data that indicate the possible
requital of needs are opposed—not by the orthodoxy of the common
Puritans, but by the Puritans of Science, and their austere,
disheartening, dried or frozen orthodoxy.
Islands of space—see _Sci. Amer._, vol. this and p. that—accounts from
the _Repts. of the Brit. Assoc. for the Ad. of Sci._—_Nature_
etc.—except for an occasional lapse, our sources of data will not be
sneered at. As to our interpretations, I consider them, myself, more as
suggestions and gropings and stimuli. Islands of space and the rivers
and the oceans of an extra-geography—
Stay and let salvation damn you—or straddle an auroral beam and paddle
it from Rigel to Betelgeuse. If there be no accepting that there are
such rivers and oceans beyond this earth, stay and travel upon
steamships with schedules that can be depended upon, food so well cooked
and well served, comfort looked after so carefully—or some day board the
thing that was seen over the city of Marseilles, Aug. 19, 1887, and ride
on that, bearing down upon the moon, giving up for lost, escaping
collision by the swirl of a current that was never heard of before.
There are, or there are not, nearby cities of foreign existences. They
have, or they have not, been seen, by reflection, in the skies, of
Sweden and Alaska. As one will. Whether acceptable, or too preposterous
to be thought of, our data are of rabbles of living things that have
been seen in the sky; also of processions of military beings—monsters
that live in the sky and die in the sky, and spatter this earth with
their red life-fluids—ships from other worlds that have been seen by
millions of the inhabitants of this earth, exploring, night after night,
in the sky of France, England, New England, and Canada—signals from the
moon, which, according to notable indications, may not be so far from
this earth as New York is from London—definitely reported and, in some
instances, multitudinously witnessed, events that have been disregarded
by our opposition—