I have spoken so much of the Vril Staff that my reader may expect me
to describe it. This I cannot do accurately, for I was never allowed to
handle it for fear of some terrible accident occasioned by my ignorance
of its use; and I have no doubt that it requires much skill and practice
in the exercise of its various powers. It is hollow, and has in the
handle several stops, keys, or springs by which its force can be
altered, modified, or directed--so that by one process it destroys, by
another it heals--by one it can rend the rock, by another disperse the
vapour--by one it affects bodies, by another it can exercise a certain
influence over minds. It is usually carried in the convenient size of
a walking-staff, but it has slides by which it can be lengthened or
shortened at will. When used for special purposes, the upper part rests
in the hollow of the palm with the fore and middle fingers protruded.
I was assured, however, that its power was not equal in all, but
proportioned to the amount of certain vril properties in the wearer in
affinity, or ‘rapport’ with the purposes to be effected. Some were more
potent to destroy, others to heal, &c.; much also depended on the calm
and steadiness of volition in the manipulator. They assert that the
full exercise of vril power can only be acquired by the constitutional
temperament--i.e., by hereditarily transmitted organisation--and that
a female infant of four years old belonging to the Vril-ya races can
accomplish feats which a life spent in its practice would not enable
the strongest and most skilled mechanician, born out of the pale of the
Vril-ya to achieve. All these wands are not equally complicated; those
intrusted to children are much simpler than those borne by sages of
either sex, and constructed with a view to the special object on which
the children are employed; which as I have before said, is among the
youngest children the most destructive. In the wands of wives and
mothers the correlative destroying force is usually abstracted, the
healing power fully charged. I wish I could say more in detail of this
singular conductor of the vril fluid, but its machinery is as exquisite
as its effects are marvellous.
I should say, however, that this people have invented certain tubes by
which the vril fluid can be conducted towards the object it is meant
to destroy, throughout a distance almost indefinite; at least I put
it modestly when I say from 500 to 1000 miles. And their mathematical
science as applied to such purpose is so nicely accurate, that on
the report of some observer in an air-boat, any member of the vril
department can estimate unerringly the nature of intervening obstacles,
the height to which the projectile instrument should be raised, and the
extent to which it should be charged, so as to reduce to ashes within a
space of time too short for me to venture to specify it, a capital twice
as vast as London.
Certainly these Ana are wonderful mathematicians--wonderful for the
adaptation of the inventive faculty to practical uses.
I went with my host and his daughter Zee over the great public museum,
which occupies a wing in the College of Sages, and in which are hoarded,
as curious specimens of the ignorant and blundering experiments of
ancient times, many contrivances on which we pride ourselves as recent
achievements. In one department, carelessly thrown aside as obsolete
lumber, are tubes for destroying life by metallic balls and an
inflammable powder, on the principle of our cannons and catapults, and
even still more murderous than our latest improvements.
My host spoke of these with a smile of contempt, such as an artillery
officer might bestow on the bows and arrows of the Chinese. In another
department there were models of vehicles and vessels worked by steam,
and of an air-balloon which might have been constructed by Montgolfier.
“Such,” said Zee, with an air of meditative wisdom--“such were the
feeble triflings with nature of our savage forefathers, ere they had
even a glimmering perception of the properties of vril!”
This young Gy was a magnificent specimen of the muscular force to which
the females of her country attain. Her features were beautiful, like
those of all her race: never in the upper world have I seen a face so
grand and so faultless, but her devotion to the severer studies had
given to her countenance an expression of abstract thought which
rendered it somewhat stern when in repose; and such a sternness became
formidable when observed in connection with her ample shoulders and
lofty stature. She was tall even for a Gy, and I saw her lift up a
cannon as easily as I could lift a pocket-pistol. Zee inspired me with a
profound terror--a terror which increased when we came into a department
of the museum appropriated to models of contrivances worked by the
agency of vril; for here, merely by a certain play of her vril staff,
she herself standing at a distance, she put into movement large and
weighty substances. She seemed to endow them with intelligence, and to
make them comprehend and obey her command. She set complicated pieces of
machinery into movement, arrested the movement or continued it, until,
within an incredibly short time, various kinds of raw material were
reproduced as symmetrical works of art, complete and perfect. Whatever
effect mesmerism or electro-biology produces over the nerves and muscles
of animated objects, this young Gy produced by the motions of her
slender rod over the springs and wheels of lifeless mechanism.
When I mentioned to my companions my astonishment at this influence
over inanimate matter--while owning that, in our world, I had witnessed
phenomena which showed that over certain living organisations certain
other living organisations could establish an influence genuine in
itself, but often exaggerated by credulity or craft--Zee, who was more
interested in such subjects than her father, bade me stretch forth my
hand, and then, placing it beside her own, she called my attention to
certain distinctions of type and character. In the first place, the
thumb of the Gy (and, as I afterwards noticed, of all that race, male or
female) was much larger, at once longer and more massive, than is found
with our species above ground. There is almost, in this, as great a
difference as there is between the thumb of a man and that of a gorilla.
Secondly, the palm is proportionally thicker than ours--the texture of
the skin infinitely finer and softer--its average warmth is greater.
More remarkable than all this, is a visible nerve, perceptible under the
skin, which starts from the wrist skirting the ball of the thumb, and
branching, fork-like, at the roots of the fore and middle fingers. “With
your slight formation of thumb,” said the philosophical young Gy, “and
with the absence of the nerve which you find more or less developed in
the hands of our race, you can never achieve other than imperfect
and feeble power over the agency of vril; but so far as the nerve is
concerned, that is not found in the hands of our earliest progenitors,
nor in those of the ruder tribes without the pale of the Vril-ya. It has
been slowly developed in the course of generations, commencing in the
early achievements, and increasing with the continuous exercise, of the
vril power; therefore, in the course of one or two thousand years, such
a nerve may possibly be engendered in those higher beings of your
race, who devote themselves to that paramount science through which
is attained command over all the subtler forces of nature permeated
by vril. But when you talk of matter as something in itself inert
and motionless, your parents or tutors surely cannot have left you so
ignorant as not to know that no form of matter is motionless and inert:
every particle is constantly in motion and constantly acted upon by
agencies, of which heat is the most apparent and rapid, but vril the
most subtle, and, when skilfully wielded, the most powerful. So that,
in fact, the current launched by my hand and guided by my will does but
render quicker and more potent the action which is eternally at work
upon every particle of matter, however inert and stubborn it may seem.
If a heap of metal be not capable of originating a thought of its own,
yet, through its internal susceptibility to movement, it obtains the
power to receive the thought of the intellectual agent at work on it; by
which, when conveyed with a sufficient force of the vril power, it is
as much compelled to obey as if it were displaced by a visible bodily
force. It is animated for the time being by the soul thus infused into
it, so that one may almost say that it lives and reasons. Without this
we could not make our automata supply the place of servants.”
I was too much in awe of the thews and the learning of the young Gy
to hazard the risk of arguing with her. I had read somewhere in my
schoolboy days that a wise man, disputing with a Roman Emperor, suddenly
drew in his horns; and when the emperor asked him whether he had nothing
further to say on his side of the question, replied, “Nay, Caesar, there
is no arguing against a reasoner who commands ten legions.”
Though I had a secret persuasion that, whatever the real effects of
vril upon matter, Mr. Faraday could have proved her a very shallow
philosopher as to its extent or its causes, I had no doubt that Zee
could have brained all the Fellows of the Royal Society, one after the
other, with a blow of her fist. Every sensible man knows that it is
useless to argue with any ordinary female upon matters he comprehends;
but to argue with a Gy seven feet high upon the mysteries of vril,--as
well argue in a desert, and with a simoon!
Amid the various departments to which the vast building of the College
of Sages was appropriated, that which interested me most was devoted to
the archaeology of the Vril-ya, and comprised a very ancient collection
of portraits. In these the pigments and groundwork employed were of
so durable a nature that even pictures said to be executed at dates as
remote as those in the earliest annals of the Chinese, retained much
freshness of colour. In examining this collection, two things especially
struck me:--first, that the pictures said to be between 6000 and 7000
years old were of a much higher degree of art than any produced within
the last 3000 or 4000 years; and, second, that the portraits within the
former period much more resembled our own upper world and European types
of countenance. Some of them, indeed reminded me of the Italian heads
which look out from the canvases of Titian--speaking of ambition or
craft, of care or of grief, with furrows in which the passions have
passed with iron ploughshare. These were the countenances of men who had
lived in struggle and conflict before the discovery of the latent forces
of vril had changed the character of society--men who had fought with
each other for power or fame as we in the upper world fight.
The type of face began to evince a marked change about a thousand years
after the vril revolution, becoming then, with each generation, more
serene, and in that serenity more terribly distinct from the faces of
labouring and sinful men; while in proportion as the beauty and the
grandeur of the countenance itself became more fully developed, the art
of the painter became more tame and monotonous.
But the greatest curiosity in the collection was that of three portraits
belonging to the pre-historical age, and, according to mythical
tradition, taken by the orders of a philosopher, whose origin and
attributes were as much mixed up with symbolical fable as those of an
Indian Budh or a Greek Prometheus.
From this mysterious personage, at once a sage and a hero, all the
principal sections of the Vril-ya race pretend to trace a common origin.
The portraits are of the philosopher himself, of his grandfather, and
great-grandfather. They are all at full length. The philosopher is
attired in a long tunic which seems to form a loose suit of scaly
armour, borrowed, perhaps, from some fish or reptile, but the feet and
hands are exposed: the digits in both are wonderfully long, and webbed.
He has little or no perceptible throat, and a low receding forehead, not
at all the ideal of a sage’s. He has bright brown prominent eyes, a very
wide mouth and high cheekbones, and a muddy complexion. According to
tradition, this philosopher had lived to a patriarchal age, extending
over many centuries, and he remembered distinctly in middle life his
grandfather as surviving, and in childhood his great-grandfather; the
portrait of the first he had taken, or caused to be taken, while yet
alive--that of the latter was taken from his effigies in mummy.
The portrait of his grandfather had the features and aspect of the
philosopher, only much more exaggerated: he was not dressed, and the
colour of his body was singular; the breast and stomach yellow, the
shoulders and legs of a dull bronze hue: the great-grandfather was a
magnificent specimen of the Batrachian genus, a Giant Frog, ‘pur et
simple.’
Among the pithy sayings which, according to tradition, the philosopher
bequeathed to posterity in rhythmical form and sententious brevity, this
is notably recorded: “Humble yourselves, my descendants; the father of
your race was a ‘twat’ (tadpole): exalt yourselves, my descendants, for
it was the same Divine Thought which created your father that develops
itself in exalting you.”
Aph-Lin told me this fable while I gazed on the three Batrachian
portraits. I said in reply: “You make a jest of my supposed ignorance
and credulity as an uneducated Tish, but though these horrible daubs
may be of great antiquity, and were intended, perhaps, for some
rude caracature, I presume that none of your race even in the less
enlightened ages, ever believed that the great-grandson of a Frog became
a sententious philosopher; or that any section, I will not say of the
lofty Vril-ya, but of the meanest varieties of the human race, had its
origin in a Tadpole.”
“Pardon me,” answered Aph-Lin: “in what we call the Wrangling or
Philosophical Period of History, which was at its height about seven
thousand years ago, there was a very distinguished naturalist, who
proved to the satisfaction of numerous disciples such analogical and
anatomical agreements in structure between an An and a Frog, as to
show that out of the one must have developed the other. They had some
diseases in common; they were both subject to the same parasitical worms
in the intestines; and, strange to say, the An has, in his structure, a
swimming-bladder, no longer of any use to him, but which is a rudiment
that clearly proves his descent from a Frog. Nor is there any argument
against this theory to be found in the relative difference of size, for
there are still existent in our world Frogs of a size and stature not
inferior to our own, and many thousand years ago they appear to have
been still larger.”
“I understand that,” said I, “because Frogs this enormous are, according
to our eminent geologists, who perhaps saw them in dreams, said to have
been distinguished inhabitants of the upper world before the Deluge; and
such Frogs are exactly the creatures likely to have flourished in the
lakes and morasses of your subterranean regions. But pray, proceed.”
“In the Wrangling Period of History, whatever one sage asserted another
sage was sure to contradict. In fact, it was a maxim in that age, that
the human reason could only be sustained aloft by being tossed to and
fro in the perpetual motion of contradiction; and therefore another
sect of philosophers maintained the doctrine that the An was not the
descendant of the Frog, but that the Frog was clearly the improved
development of the An. The shape of the Frog, taken generally, was much
more symmetrical than that of the An; beside the beautiful conformation
of its lower limbs, its flanks and shoulders the majority of the Ana in
that day were almost deformed, and certainly ill-shaped. Again, the Frog
had the power to live alike on land and in water--a mighty privilege,
partaking of a spiritual essence denied to the An, since the disuse
of his swimming-bladder clearly proves his degeneration from a higher
development of species. Again, the earlier races of the Ana seem to
have been covered with hair, and, even to a comparatively recent date,
hirsute bushes deformed the very faces of our ancestors, spreading wild
over their cheeks and chins, as similar bushes, my poor Tish, spread
wild over yours. But the object of the higher races of the Ana through
countless generations has been to erase all vestige of connection with
hairy vertebrata, and they have gradually eliminated that debasing
capillary excrement by the law of sexual selection; the Gy-ei naturally
preferring youth or the beauty of smooth faces. But the degree of the
Frog in the scale of the vertebrata is shown in this, that he has
no hair at all, not even on his head. He was born to that hairless
perfection which the most beautiful of the Ana, despite the culture of
incalculable ages, have not yet attained. The wonderful complication and
delicacy of a Frog’s nervous system and arterial circulation were shown
by this school to be more susceptible of enjoyment than our inferior, or
at least simpler, physical frame allows us to be. The examination of
a Frog’s hand, if I may use that expression, accounted for its keener
susceptibility to love, and to social life in general. In fact,
gregarious and amatory as are the Ana, Frogs are still more so. In
short, these two schools raged against each other; one asserting the An
to be the perfected type of the Frog; the other that the Frog was the
highest development of the An. The moralists were divided in
opinion with the naturalists, but the bulk of them sided with the
Frog-preference school. They said, with much plausibility, that in moral
conduct (viz., in the adherence to rules best adapted to the health and
welfare of the individual and the community) there could be no doubt
of the vast superiority of the Frog. All history showed the wholesale
immorality of the human race, the complete disregard, even by the
most renowned amongst them, of the laws which they acknowledged to be
essential to their own and the general happiness and wellbeing. But the
severest critic of the Frog race could not detect in their manners a
single aberration from the moral law tacitly recognised by themselves.
And what, after all, can be the profit of civilisation if superiority in
moral conduct be not the aim for which it strives, and the test by which
its progress should be judged?
“In fine, the adherents of this theory presumed that in some remote
period the Frog race had been the improved development of the Human; but
that, from some causes which defied rational conjecture, they had not
maintained their original position in the scale of nature; while the
Ana, though of inferior organisation, had, by dint less of their virtues
than their vices, such as ferocity and cunning, gradually acquired
ascendancy, much as among the human race itself tribes utterly barbarous
have, by superiority in similar vices, utterly destroyed or reduced
into insignificance tribes originally excelling them in mental gifts
and culture. Unhappily these disputes became involved with the religious
notions of that age; and as society was then administered under the
government of the Koom-Posh, who, being the most ignorant, were of
course the most inflammable class--the multitude took the whole question
out of the hands of the philosophers; political chiefs saw that the
Frog dispute, so taken up by the populace, could become a most valuable
instrument of their ambition; and for not less than one thousand years
war and massacre prevailed, during which period the philosophers on both
sides were butchered, and the government of Koom-Posh itself was happily
brought to an end by the ascendancy of a family that clearly established
its descent from the aboriginal tadpole, and furnished despotic rulers
to the various nations of the Ana. These despots finally disappeared, at
least from our communities, as the discovery of vril led to the tranquil
institutions under which flourish all the races of the Vril-ya.”
“And do no wranglers or philosophers now exist to revive the dispute; or
do they all recognise the origin of your race in the tadpole?”
“Nay, such disputes,” said Zee, with a lofty smile, “belong to the
Pah-bodh of the dark ages, and now only serve for the amusement of
infants. When we know the elements out of which our bodies are composed,
elements in common to the humblest vegetable plants, can it signify
whether the All-Wise combined those elements out of one form more than
another, in order to create that in which He has placed the capacity to
receive the idea of Himself, and all the varied grandeurs of intellect
to which that idea gives birth? The An in reality commenced to exist
as An with the donation of that capacity, and, with that capacity, the
sense to acknowledge that, however through the countless ages his race
may improve in wisdom, it can never combine the elements at its command
into the form of a tadpole.”
“You speak well, Zee,” said Aph-Lin; “and it is enough for us shortlived
mortals to feel a reasonable assurance that whether the origin of the
An was a tadpole or not, he is no more likely to become a tadpole again
than the institutions of the Vril-ya are likely to relapse into the
heaving quagmire and certain strife-rot of a Koom-Posh.”