3 stand of Pro 
 
 (j 
 
\ 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 OF 
 
 Class 
 
BY GODFREY SWEVEN 
 
 RIALLARO: THE ARCHIPELAGO OF EXILES 
 
 12. $1.50 
 
 LIMANORA: THE ISLAND OF PROGRESS 
 
 12. $1.50 
 
 Q. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 New York and London 
 
LIMANORA 
 
 THE ISLAND OF PROGRESS 
 
 BY 
 
 GODFREY SWEVEN 
 
 J AA Id-ro-vAj-vx* 
 Author of " Riallaro, The v Archipelago of Exiles" 
 
 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM^S SONS 
 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 
 <Jbc UvUichcrbochcr iprcse 
 
 1903 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1903 
 
 BY 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 Published, June, 1903 
 
 Ube IKnicfeerbocfeer iprcss, IWcw 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IT was long before our strange guest could be induced 
 to continue his narrative. He had seemed to hesi- 
 tate as he approached the close of his sojourn in the 
 outer islets of the archipelago. He several times post- 
 poned the story of his exit from it in the projectile. 
 And for months he left his history hanging in air, and 
 the strange coffin in which he had been confined exe- 
 cuting its parabola from his yacht. 
 
 There was some excuse for his delay, for the winter 
 had fled, and the birds and the flowering trees around 
 us gloried again in song and colour. He grew restless 
 as the days lengthened, and could not bear to settle in 
 our shelter by the fiord. All that we saw of him for 
 months was his occasional flight from precipice to 
 precipice above the sombre green of the bush. It was 
 as easy for him to flit from knoll to knoll as it was for 
 us to leap a ditch. He had regained his old bird-like 
 gait, that to us was noiseless. What he fed on came to 
 be a puzzle, for he seldom joined us now in our meals; 
 and the old semi-transparency came into his face. 
 
 Weeks and weeks together none of us would see 
 him. Where he went we knew not, nor had we the 
 heart to follow him and trace his whereabouts. Now 
 and again he would join one or another of us at our 
 
 1 1 58fi9 
 
iv Preface 
 
 work, and indicate the direction in which we should 
 tunnel or dig for the richer layers of wash-dirt. His 
 instinctive sense of the presence of gold beneath the 
 surface of the earth seemed to us in our blind groping 
 miraculous. We never found him mistaken in his in- 
 dications. But we felt it a kind of desecration to ask 
 him to condescend to such base and trivial pursuits as 
 the research for wealth. At times his absence was so 
 prolonged that we thought he had vanished back to 
 the ring of mist, whence he had come. But a great 
 storm always brought him to our huts again. 
 
 The summer waned into autumn, and the days began 
 to narrow down. Blasts from the south grew keener; 
 and his flight from us was more circumscribed. We 
 saw him almost daily. When the winter nights began, 
 he gave himself up again to memory. He drew to- 
 wards us in sympathy, and there were in his narrative 
 fewer and fewer reserves. His English became fuller 
 and more exact, though time and again he stumbled 
 over thoughts too subtle to transfuse into so rough and 
 materialistic a language. Our own interpretations of 
 his descriptions must often have been mistaken, we are 
 certain, and many passages we have had to omit be- 
 cause of manifest ambiguity or mistiness of expression. 
 
 GODFREY 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 PREFACE iii 
 
 GLOSSARY vii 
 
 I. MY AWAKENING i 
 
 II. MY EDUCATION 15 
 
 III. SLEEP, REST, AND FLIGHT 25 
 
 IV. HERMITRY 35 
 
 V. JOURNEY TO THE VALLEY OF MEMORIES . .51 
 
 VI. FIALUME 63 
 
 VII. LEOMARIE 88 
 
 VIII. RIMLA 99 
 
 IX. OOMALEFA 112 
 
 X. THE FIRLA, OR ELECTRIC SENSE . . .133 
 
 XI. A CATASTROPHE 149 
 
 XII. OOLOREFA . . ... . . . 162 
 
 XIII. THE IvILARAN 174 
 
 XIV. CHOKTROO 192 
 
 XV. THE DUOMOVAMOLAN OR COSMOPHONE . .219 
 
 XVI. THEIR HEAVEN AND THEIR HELL . . . 230 
 
 XVII. MY EDUCATION CONTINUED 244 
 
 POSTSCRIPT 283 
 
GLOSSARY 
 
 AII.OMO The astrobiological families. 
 
 AIROI,AN A sensometer, or instrument for finding the per- 
 sonal equation of a man. 
 
 AifCUROivAN Radiographic cinematograph; an instrument 
 combining microscope, camera in vacuo, and electric 
 power. 
 
 AivFARENE Oxygen shrub. 
 
 AMMERUN Historoscope. 
 
 CIRAI^AISON Museum of terrors. 
 
 CivEVAMOi,AN Combination of telescope and makrakoust, or 
 distance-hearer. 
 
 CUMOI^AN Earth-sensor. 
 
 CUROLAN Instrument that combines electro-microscopy and 
 photography. 
 
 CUROI,ANIC Infinitesimally microscopic. 
 
 COREAI,EENA Vacuum-engine car. 
 
 DOOMAI<ONA The hill of farewells. 
 
 DUOMOVAMOI,AN Instrument that interprets the music of the 
 cosmos. 
 
 ERFAI,EENA Anti-gravitation flight-car. 
 
 FAI^EENA Ship of the air. 
 
 FARFAI,EENA Electric faleena. 
 
 FAROSAN Arotn a-recorder. 
 
 FIAI^UME The valley of memories. 
 
 FII,AMMU The will-telegraph. 
 
 FIRI.A The electric sense. 
 
 FIRI,AI,AIN The firlamaic department of Oomalefa. 
 
 FIRI.AMAI The arts of the electric sense. 
 
viii Glossary 
 
 Belonging to the arts of the firla. 
 FIRI.AMAN A musical instrument that appeals to the firla. 
 FLORAMO The botanical families. 
 
 FIXJRONAI, The tree of life. 
 
 FRAI,OOMIAMO The families of pioneers that imagine and 
 
 represent the distant future. 
 GERMABEU, A tree with fruit that makes the muscles and 
 
 cartilage more elastic. 
 IDIJJMIAN Electric steriliser. 
 
 iDROivAN Observer and magnifier of electric impulses. 
 IDROUNASAN Machine-reporter of the thoughts and feelings 
 
 and words of an assembly. 
 
 IDROSAN Recorder of electric impulses and sensations. 
 iDROVAMOiyAN Instrument for at once seeing and hearing at 
 
 great distances. 
 IiyARiME Edifice devoted to the arts of smell, taste, and sound 
 
 combined. 
 
 IMANORA Centennial review of the civilisation and its progress. 
 IMATARAN The focusser of history. 
 
 INAMAR Instrument for splitting up light into its constituents. 
 INASAN Recorder of luminous impressions. 
 INDIAN Measurer of light. 
 IREUUM Irridescent metal applicable to all manner of purposes 
 
 by the Limanorans. 
 I/ABRAMOR Alloy of irelium that sponges up and retains 
 
 electricity. 
 lyABRO^AN Instrument for drawing electricity from the air 
 
 and the clouds. 
 
 LA VIDRO I,AN< Camera-telescope. 
 
 LAVOI.AN Revealer of the inner tissues and mechanism. 
 LEOMARIE The science and art of earth-seeing. 
 LEOMO The families of earth-seers. 
 
 The earth -perforator. 
 
 The minutest division of time in Limanora. 
 LII.AMO The families that watch the security of the island. 
 LII^ARAN The storm-cone. 
 
 Ivii,ARiE The science and art of island-security/ 
 LINAMAR The analyst of sounds. 
 I/INASAN Recorder and reproducer of sounds. 
 
Glossary ix 
 
 LINOKI.AR Spectroscopic analyst and recorder of vapours. 
 
 lyOOMiAMO Families of pioneers who imagine and represent 
 the links that connect the present with the distant future. 
 
 LOOMIEFA The theatre of futurition. 
 
 MANORA Decennial review of the progress made by the people. 
 
 MARGOI, Electric instrument for blending or reducing the 
 strength of perfumes, flavours, and sounds. 
 
 Edifice for formula-machines. 
 
 Life-lamp for revealing and recording internal pro- 
 cesses for the use of the eye, the ear, and the electric sense. 
 
 MOI/TA The Ivimanoran measure of infinitesimal length. 
 
 MONAI.AN Electrical distance-analyst. 
 
 MORNAI,AN Time-telescope. 
 
 NAROU,A Dream-stimulants. 
 
 OOARAN Psychometer. 
 
 OOAROMO Psycho-physiological families. 
 
 OoiyORAN The sonarchitect. 
 
 OOI.OREFA The hall of souarchitecture. 
 
 Halls of nutrition and medication. 
 Instrument for transforming form and colour into 
 melody. 
 
 PIRAKNO Machine for drawing electricity from space. 
 
 PIRAMO The meteorological families. 
 
 RIMLA The centre of force. 
 
 SAI<OSAN The gustagraph. 
 
 SARiFOiyAN Instrument that interprets for sight, hearing, and 
 the electric sense the graphic records of the mirlan. 
 
 SARMOI.AN Cosmic barometer. 
 
 SIDRAI.AN Biometer. 
 
 SIDRAI,MO Bio-chemical families. 
 
 SIDRAMO The chemical families. 
 
 TERRAI,ONA The edifice of outlook into heaven and hell. 
 
 THINAMAR Visualiser of sound. 
 
 TIRI,EOMORAN Electric earth-perforator. 
 
 TREMOI^AN Electric clock indicating the changes of electricity 
 in various parts of the island. 
 
 TREVAMOI^AN Graduated modifier of sound. 
 
 VAMOiyAN Makro-mikrakoust. 
 
 Photo-electric analyser. 
 
ERRATA 
 
 Page 31, line 6. For " resistent " read " resistant." 
 Page 93, line 16. For ''maintained" read "maimed." 
 Page 155, line 2. For " I that felt " raz</ " Ihad felt." 
 Page 211, lines 13 and 17. For " somnifractive " read 
 
 "somnifactive." 
 
 Page 230, line 3. For ' ' onwonted ' ' read ' ' unwonted. ' ' 
 Page 348, last line. For " rareity " read " rarity." 
 Page 369, line 12. For " amosphere " read "atmo- 
 sphere. ' ' 
 
 Page 377, line 5. For " its " read "it." 
 Page 440, line 17. For " we the saw " read " we saw 
 
 the." 
 
 Page 465, line 8 from bottom. For "thought" read 
 "through." 
 
LIMANORA 
 
 BOOK I 
 The Outer or Material Civilisation 
 
 
 
 UNIVERS 
 
 OF 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 MY AWAKENING 
 
 I OPENED my eyes in a world no feature of which I 
 could recognise. Everything around me was of 
 the most dazzling beauty. The walls and vaulted roof 
 of the room where I lay gleamed like mosaic- work of 
 lit jewellery. The floors were duller, and yet shone 
 with a coloured radiance like that in a dew-belled 
 meadow under the light of the slant-rayed forenoon 
 sun. The light broke up in innumerable points and 
 corners of the roof into a magnificent display of pris- 
 matic colours, moving and changing every minute. 
 Yet, with all the marvellous iridescence, there was 
 sufficient shade in the vault and walls to check the 
 fiery oppression of the sun. I had dreamt of such fairy 
 palaces; but the dream had ever been abortive or 
 
2 Limanora 
 
 glanced off into something hideous or appalling. Here 
 was architecture as unlike anything I had seen upon 
 earth as a dream, and yet it had a grace that no dream 
 had ever caught. 
 
 Nor did I know the material of which this room was 
 formed. It seemed like ice, yet was never changed by 
 the fire of the sun. It was capable of being moulded 
 into the most delicate lace- work, and yet could be 
 made as massive as marble walls of Eastern palaces 
 that were built for both pleasure and siege. It was in 
 portions as transparent as glass, and in others frosted 
 with wondrous pictures. And how were those count- 
 less domes and arches and arborescent columns pro- 
 duced with such ease? How were those airy galleries 
 hung ? How were those fragrant fountains poised so 
 nicely that an infant's finger seemed capable of over- 
 turning them ? Even the gently moving curtains had 
 the same crystalline character as the walls, now 
 frosted as by the artist of our winter-mornings, again 
 goldenly dim, or rainbow-hued. 
 
 There was a spaciousness that reminded me of the 
 colonnaded aisles of our great cathedrals. Was I rest- 
 ing in one of the temples of the island ? Was I being 
 consecrated for sacrifice? And yet the dainty warm 
 nooks, the close-hung curtains, and graceful tapestries 
 so broke the awe and loneliness of the place as to make 
 me feel that it was a chamber for a solitary. And I 
 could look out upon the fields and forests and the far- 
 stretching sea; for every foot of wall had in it some 
 transparency that with its landscape stood like a picture 
 framed in the frosted tracery around it. I seemed 
 never to reach the limit of these varied perspectives 
 and distances. I sank back exhausted on my perfumed 
 couch, then slowly recovered by aid of the sweetness 
 
My Awakening 3 
 
 that met my every sense. The fragrance that filled 
 the room was like that of finest garden flowers, and 
 kept changing from one lovely variety to another, 
 never cloying the sense. Around, too, from unseen 
 sources, floated sweet music, that now swelled into a 
 chorus, and again fell into angelic softness. Then .a 
 new sensation came to me; with every breath I seemed 
 to draw in a subtle nourishment and stimulation to my 
 senses; every minute added to the renewal of my 
 strength. And, to increase my delighted bewilder- 
 ment, I gradually felt a new sense appealed to; every 
 nerve in my body seemed exhilarated, and I felt 
 capable of heroic actions. Some magnetic influence 
 was raying towards me through the atmosphere, and 
 a dormant electric faculty seemed to be awakened in 
 my mind and in my body, producing the effect of in- 
 toxication without its stupor or the numbing of the 
 moral powers. It was like a beautiful dream without 
 the helplessness of the dreamer. I felt no delirium or 
 voluptuous languor from the excitement of the senses. 
 It all led to spiritual vigour, that would have made the 
 body its prompt ally. 
 
 My renewed energies turned my mind to my strange 
 surroundings. I wondered where the beings were who 
 had built this wondrous palace, and were now doubt- 
 less playing upon my senses. Was it all a dream ? 
 And had I never been shot into the sea with Noola ? 
 It seemed as if my inmost thoughts were at once com- 
 municated to my watchers; for from some direction, 
 out of some niche or doorway I had not noticed, moved 
 softly a figure, that, in its muscular breadth, large 
 head, and springy gait, reminded me of Noola. Upon 
 the face a smile shone out of unfathomed depths of 
 thought and sympathy, and yet the lips were close as 
 
4 Limanora 
 
 if to forbid speech. It was enough to rest and gaze at 
 the beautiful expression of the face with its intensity 
 of love and pity in the eyes. But the features had not 
 that symmetry of outline which we call beauty in 
 Europe; and the form was not " divinely tall." The 
 whole of the attraction lay in the upraying of the soul 
 into the face. It was like gazing into the limpid waters 
 of a lake; I tried to give speech to my emotions, but 
 the hand rose gently to the lips in a gesture that com- 
 manded silence, then waved over me, and, as I looked, 
 I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. 
 
 I knew not how long I had been unconscious; for 
 when I woke I seemed to be a new man ; every faculty 
 tingled with energy ; health glowed through my tissues; 
 I wandered from niche to niche, from arcade to recess; 
 I climbed the lofty galleries and raised the curtains, 
 shaking the sweet perfumes from them as they swung in 
 the air ; I ran from transparency to transparency with 
 the delight of a child, and gazed through each at the 
 ever- varying landscapes that stretched outwards to the 
 sea. Music, distant and entrancing, floated around me 
 in the air, with variations and cooling bars of silence, so 
 that it made a subtle ether circumambient rather than 
 a definite impression on the senses. Under such condi- 
 tions what could not I do in life ? I remembered the old 
 weariness and despair that used to cling around me like 
 a shirt of Nessus even in the morning when I was re- 
 freshed with sleep, and the clogging humours that used 
 to retard my most generous or most energetic action. 
 In my former life I had moved in a clammy viscous 
 medium that dragged back my most eager faculties. 
 Now I was built of air, and stirred lightly as air. 
 
 What was it that had accomplished this strange 
 transformation ? I had not felt so in the other islands 
 
My Awakening 5 
 
 of the archipelago or even on its seas. I had not been 
 so exhilarated at my first awaking. How had this 
 great change come about ? Or was it but momentary, 
 to pass away like other intoxications and leave ex- 
 haustion and ache ? I began to be puzzled and to feel 
 the return of the thought that it was perhaps only a 
 dream after all. How was I to test the matter ? 
 
 Surely I could not have thought aloud. Yet here 
 from somewhere or other was moving across the floor 
 the figure that had appeared after my first trance. I 
 was so awestruck by the noiseless flash of the approach 
 that I could make no sign of welcome. What could I 
 say to a being who came so near to what we consider 
 in the old world the supernatural ? As soon as my 
 thoughts touched upon the state of my mind and the 
 circumstances that surrounded me, my host (should I 
 call him so?) appeared. And, though my senses, I 
 thought, had acquired preternatural acuteness, not a 
 sound had I heard of his entrance or of his footsteps 
 across the chamber. 
 
 He seemed to know the perplexity of my thoughts 
 again, for he advanced with so airy a grace that my 
 eyes were fascinated by the ease of the motion. And 
 his words came almost like music; I scarcely considered 
 what he was saying, so beautiful were the tones and 
 manner in which it was said. " Come, and I shall tell 
 you what has occurred," was what I understood. It 
 was in the primary or simplest vocabulary of Limanora, 
 the vocabulary that Noola had taught me. 
 
 He led me by a covered but transparent way into a 
 vaulted chamber, that seemed to the other as a cathe- 
 dral to a chapel; for it was pillared and galleried and 
 aisled with the most transcendent art. But I was too 
 interested in the story he had to tell to give way to my 
 
6 Limanora 
 
 passive enjoyment of the scene. He motioned me to 
 ascend with him a platform that rose above us in a 
 lofty recess at one brightly sunlit corner of the build- 
 ing. I saw him lean back, and feared that he would 
 fall to the floor ; but with his motion the rich mosaic of 
 the platform opened, and a rest rose to meet his body 
 which was of the same alabaster-like texture as the 
 curtains and seemed to shape itself to every curve and 
 bend of his figure. He stretched out his hand towards 
 me, and before I knew what he had done I was resting, 
 in an attitude not far from the upright, on a soft ma- 
 chine like his own. He showed me how to control this 
 by a knob under my right hand, and then together we 
 flew to the ceiling and back, wheeled round, swung 
 gently in the air, or remained still. It moved like a 
 thing of life in sympathy with every desire; a slight 
 change of the position would relieve any part of the 
 body and yet leave all the rest supported; any kind of 
 motion was accomplished on changing the screw that 
 lay in the knob. I afterwards investigated the mechan- 
 ism, and was amazed at its simplicity; a few levers, 
 cunningly mastering all the various combinations of 
 motion, turned on or off the force needed for the neces- 
 sary changes. After a few hours' experience of it, I 
 could find no comparison in nature but the couch of air 
 on which the albatross seems to rest as it moves. I 
 afterwards found that a nice nlanagement of compressed 
 air was the secret of this wonderful rest that was neither 
 couch nor chair. As soon as we ceased to use it, it 
 disappeared as suddenly as it had risen. This ac- 
 counted for the complete absence of the furniture that 
 impedes free motion in our European houses and 
 made me think as I awoke in my chamber of our great 
 cathedrals with their free floor space. 
 
My Awakening 7 
 
 There in mid-air we lightly hung as if resting on 
 wings; he seemed to know my anatomy and the points 
 of greatest pressure in any attitude, and controlled both 
 machine-rests with such adroitness that we swung 
 hither and thither, changing slowly from the recumbent 
 to the erect attitude or back again, finding every few 
 minutes a different point of view of the chamber or of 
 the landscapes that could be seen through the walls. 
 But I soon grew oblivious to the beauty that stole 
 through every sense; my whole consciousness was ab- 
 sorbed in watching the play of the intelligence on his 
 face and listening to his narrative. I missed many of 
 the links in his story, even though he contrived to put 
 most of it into the primary and secondary vocabularies, 
 and, where he was compelled to go beyond them, put 
 so much of his thoughts into his features that I could 
 almost have gathered it from them. But I saw the 
 drift of the story, and, when it was over, pieced the 
 fragments together and found, when afterwards I knew 
 the language and the civilisation better, I had missed 
 little of the real meaning. I give it, then, as if it were 
 in his own words, although my intelligence seemed to 
 stumble at every step in it. 
 
 " You wonder at your hospitable reception. But you 
 will not wonder when you know the change in the con- 
 dition of our knowledge since Noola was exiled. He 
 was unhurt by the ricochet of the missiles on the beach. 
 In the darkness they were ill-aimed, and, though they 
 struck in sand, they were shattered by the impact and 
 recoiled from the shingle underneath. He disentan- 
 gled himself from the wreck and rescued you. But 
 soon the watchers by the storm-cone were down on the 
 beach and carried you to our house, whilst they led 
 your comrade to another. You were each examined 
 
8 Limanora 
 
 by the wise men and the medical families. Your 
 faculties and emotions and tendencies were all tested, 
 and their various strengths measured by means of the 
 different kinds of cerebrometers whilst you slept. Since 
 Noola was exiled a hundred years ago, our knowledge 
 of the brain and the nerves and their various functions 
 has been applied in the most practical way to the art of 
 living. Every curve and convolution of the controlling 
 instrument of the body has its value and meaning tabu- 
 lated. Every action, thought, and emotion has had its 
 physical symbol and locality fixed; and the minutest 
 change in the strength of any one of these points in the 
 brain or in the nervous system can be discovered by 
 applying one of the cerebrometers. You will know 
 what these are some day; but it is enough to say that 
 they can measure, by means of a delicate apparatus 
 controlled by electricity, the amount of force that exists 
 in any living tissue; there is a separate kind for each 
 portion of the brain and each nerve section of the 
 trunk, and it will move only when near that portion 
 or any living tissue that has similar properties and 
 powers. Our own magnetic sense, which has greatly 
 developed since Noola' s banishment, can roughly gauge 
 the relative strengths of the various faculties and emo- 
 tions in any man; and it is deeply thrilled when any 
 thought or passion is energising in his nature. But it 
 cannot accurately measure the strength, as these in- 
 struments can. We can absolutely trust them, in test- 
 ing the character of any human being. 
 
 " Noola fully expected to be thrust back, unless he 
 came across his own relations and friends, to whose 
 pity and sympathy he might appeal. He trembled in 
 alarm when he was led to the chamber in which he was 
 to be tested. But it was found that, though his hu- 
 
My Awakening 9 
 
 manity had not progressed in the lines or with the 
 rapidity that the L,imanorans have developed since his 
 departure, all the atavistic taint had disappeared from 
 his nature, and the weak elements of his system, love, 
 pity, tenderness, sympathy, had greatly strengthened. 
 He could no longer by any possibility side with the 
 warlike and revengeful in human nature. 
 
 " But even if he had only kept the evil qualities in 
 abeyance, in the state they showed before his exile, we 
 should have let him return ; for with his strong de- 
 sire to keep pace with our advance and his regret for 
 his retrogression, he would have gladly submitted 
 himself to our new creative surgery. Our increased 
 knowledge of the functions and constitution of the 
 brain and nervous system enables us to reduce or ex- 
 cise any portion that interferes with the development 
 of the individual. And we can also stimulate or retard 
 the activity of any part by placing the patient in any 
 of our medicated atmospheres specially adapted to his 
 circumstances, and making him breathe in the element 
 required by his system. 
 
 " Noola is now supremely happy in the confidence 
 that he is to be allowed to remain. Every defect in 
 his system has been tested and measured, and he knows 
 how far he has fallen behind our race. He would have 
 accepted any conditions, and in order to overtake us is 
 willing to enter upon a new education, the abbrevia- 
 tion of the slow and painful advance of many ages into 
 the hurried pace of a few years. He wishes, though 
 three hundred years of age, to become a child again 
 and return to his first century. But his long and painful 
 self-discipline in Broolyi has shortened the process; 
 and he will soon be able to keep step with his old com- 
 rades. He will be aided in every way by the wise men, 
 
io Limanora 
 
 some of whom will give their best wisdom and energies 
 to him. All the physical arts we have will be brought 
 into play to shorten his term of probation, our creative 
 surgery and medicine, our arts for the development of 
 tissue and nerve, our magnetic arts for the development 
 of the senses, and our ethical arts for the development 
 of the spiritual sensitiveness. 
 
 "For yourself he has pleaded, and, though our wise 
 men have recognised that you are thousands of years 
 in the rear of our civilisation, and have confirmed their 
 recognition by scientific measurement of the forces and 
 elements in you, they have consented to let you remain 
 and to take your education in hand. It seems an 
 almost impossible task to contract thousands of years 
 into tens; but they do not despair; for our system of 
 education has already accomplished this for children 
 born amongst us, and you have a nature peculiarly 
 open to our educational influences. You have first of 
 all the passion for progress as strongly in you as in any 
 of ourselves; and this is the prime essential of our 
 ethics and civilisation; to it all other passions must 
 yield; from it flows all that subdues the material world 
 and gives dominance to the spirit, and makes for 
 righteousness. But with it often go pride and arro- 
 gance. In you was found strongly developed the desire 
 to treat all good men as equals, whatever difference of 
 capacity or position or possessions might seem to sepa- 
 rate them from you. Had you had even the slightest 
 tinge of contemptuousness or hauteur in you, you 
 would have been sternly repelled. To contemn is the 
 mark of an incurably savage nature, a nature incapable 
 of true knowledge of itself and of its relations to life. 
 From these two desires come purity of thought and life, 
 the love of peace, respect for the rights of others and 
 
My Awakening n 
 
 reverence for what is fine in their personality, and abso- 
 lute transparency of nature. This last we ever take to 
 be the shortest and truest test of a progressive charac- 
 ter, the love of truth and simplicity, complete harmony 
 of word and act with the inmost thought. As long as 
 a man or a nation lacks this, there can be no real ad- 
 vance; what seems advance is but a mirage of fame or 
 glory. Accuracy of vision and of prevision is the first 
 condition of true progress. It was one of the first 
 things that Noola saw in you, and the first reason he 
 urged for your retention; you had no desire to conceal 
 your thoughts, so closely did they tally with your life; 
 you had an overwhelming passion for truth and for the 
 truthful. 
 
 "There was no need to distrust his assertions for 
 we all felt how genuine he had become; and even sick 
 and unconscious as you were, our magnetic sense told 
 us that his description of you was correct. But it has 
 become the custom to test scientifically the nature of 
 every inhabitant of our island every week, and also at 
 every crisis in his nature or in the history of the com- 
 munity, in order that any incipient defect may be at 
 once remedied, and that drastic applications may never 
 be needed. A complete survey of your character and 
 faculties and corporeal system was the first step towards 
 your admission into the community. Everything had 
 to be known, in order that your education should be 
 mapped out. And the cerebrometers gave us a favour- 
 able report of you. Your body and your working 
 faculties are far in the rear of ours; you lack trans- 
 parency of tissue, ethereality of motion; the material 
 side of you is earthy and ponderous. These elements 
 of retrogression we shall never be able to eject wholly 
 from your system ; but we shall be able to modify them, 
 
12 Limanora 
 
 and in your children and your children's children the 
 body will keep pace with the spirit. The forwardness 
 of your emotions, of your soul, is what has drawn us 
 to you; you love the ideal and imaginative more than 
 any but one section of our community; and you have 
 an intermixture of the finer spiritual elements such as 
 we have either lost or never had amongst us. We hope 
 to graft your nature upon one of the divisions or castes 
 of our race and so produce in the next generation a 
 variety that we need. Your retention has thus been 
 justified by the highest morality of our civilisation. 
 We never take any step without reference to the ulti- 
 mate aims of our progress: so to improve the breed 
 that our posterity may feel nearer to the highest life in 
 the universe. 
 
 "Your education has indeed already begun. We 
 have assumed from your highly disciplined and pro- 
 gressive spirit that you would be willing to submit to 
 those medical methods that shorten the already abbre- 
 viative process of education. It is true that these 
 make an enormous drain upon the physical strength 
 for a time ; and we prefer the ordinary spiritual methods 
 of training. But you have gained from the open-air 
 employments in which you have passed your life great 
 stores of bodily health and vigour. You are still but a 
 child. The period of childhood and tutelage extends 
 with us to the thirtieth, sometimes to the fiftieth, year, 
 that of youth to beyond the hundredth. At the time 
 that other men are preparing to die the natural death 
 of old age, we are just beginning to feel what it is to 
 live. 
 
 " And from some ancestral cause you are developed 
 beyond your years in some of our ethical lines. You 
 have reached a humility before the living forces of the 
 
My Awakening 13 
 
 universe which is the primary mark of the true governor 
 of the world. How you have attained so rare a virtue 
 amidst the pretentious barbarity of civilisation it is not 
 easy to conceive. There worldliness and arrogance in- 
 herit the earth, though there are not signs wanting 
 that they feel the approaching triumph of its true heirs 
 and mask as the meeker virtues. In older times they 
 were not ashamed to show themselves as they really 
 were ; for those were the days of glorified highway- 
 men who seized the throne of the world. Conquest is 
 nothing but successful brigandage on a large scale, 
 veneer it over with diplomacy and historical fame as 
 you will. But for centuries there has been an uneasy 
 feeling abroad that the humble must come to their 
 rights some day ; and so the gilded brigands have allied 
 themselves with a religion of the meek and despised, 
 that they may hoodwink mankind into acquiescence in 
 their ancient dishonesty. 
 
 "We banished all the makings of monarchs, aris- 
 tocracies, and great men at the purifications of our 
 people. We could see no difference between these and 
 the worst criminals except one of degree. We meas- 
 ured their skulls and brains by the rough, unscientific 
 methods we used to have, and found in them almost no 
 difference from those of murderers and thieves; and 
 comparing them with the skulls of savages and of our 
 own far-back ancestry, we found that in the case of 
 both heroes and criminals the cause of their likeness 
 to each other was their recoil upon the footsteps of the 
 past, and away from the line of human progress which 
 leads towards harmony with the higher laws of the 
 universe. 
 
 ' ' Happily for you every trace of such arrogance and 
 contempt and ambition is absent from your system. 
 
i4 Limanora 
 
 You have nothing merely mimetic in you; you live 
 unashamed and truthful in presence of all that the 
 world is capable of being. It is one of the surest signs 
 of fear of threatening annihilation that a species has to 
 simulate the appearance or the modes of life of another. 
 Hypocrisy in the human race, like mimicry in the kinds 
 of animals and plants, is the brand of feebleness and 
 the omen of coming decay and subjugation. We use 
 truth and sincerity as one of the most inward of tests 
 of a strong and healthy nature. In the olden days, as 
 in all large and mixed civilisations, it was difficult to 
 distinguish the imitation virtue from the real, and 
 when it was discovered it was easy to pardon it and 
 even accept it as a virtue amid the universal effort at 
 simulation. But when we had swept out the survivals 
 of primitive and savage times and the atavistic returns 
 to them, we found that every need of mimetic virtue 
 had disappeared. The slightest taint of unreality or 
 falsehood in any of our community is as offensive as 
 carrion; we rise in a body and have it removed. And 
 we have as keen an enjoyment of sincerity and truth- 
 fulness. Your loyal character at once attracted us to 
 you; we felt that all germs of moral disease would lose 
 their virulence within its influence, as germs of physi- 
 cal disease lose theirs in sunshine." 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 MY EDUCATION 
 
 THE strain on my attention had been extreme as I 
 tried to follow his explanations. It was not 
 merely the words that were unfamiliar, but the very 
 manner of the thoughts. I had not felt how exhausted 
 my tissues were growing, or how soothing was the in- 
 fluence of the perfumes and soft music. I had been 
 deeply moved by the joy of my acceptance by this 
 strange community and by the profound truths woven 
 into the fabric of its civilisation. Imperceptibly the 
 mist of dreams stole over me. I was not even con- 
 scious of the gesture of his hand. I thought that I had 
 fallen back again into the darkness of Western civilisa- 
 tion, and yet that my Umanoran guardian was silently 
 hovering round me, protecting me amid the horrors of 
 the reality. I seemed to be present at a court scene, 
 where the monarch and his ablest statesmen and sol- 
 diers were welcoming a hero back from a victorious 
 campaign that had added a great province to the 
 kingdom. There were shoutings and huzzas without, 
 whilst within strains of triumphant music alternated 
 with bowings and ceremonies from the gorgeously robed 
 officials. In some strange way I thought that it was 
 I who was being lauded. Conscious of the tens of 
 
 15 
 
1 6 Limanora 
 
 thousands left dead upon my battle-fields, I loathed it 
 all ; for by some soul-magic, perchance my I^imanoran 
 influence, the hearts of eulogists and courtiers were 
 laid bare before my eyes, all (there was not an excep- 
 tion) black with envy and designings; the king himself 
 was sick of me and my honours, even as he showered 
 them on me. I knew the pitfalls and intrigues pre- 
 pared for me ; I saw the whole mass of humanity, both 
 lacquered and tattered, that was now cheering, hiss and 
 groan at me as I fell ; and I turned away from the ap- 
 plauding crowd and looked into the homes of my dead 
 soldiers, and I heard the weeping and despair of the 
 widow with her orphans and the mother bereft of her 
 children in their prime. Here the depths of sorrow 
 were its surface too. What was there to my credit in 
 the book of time ? 
 
 Then with sudden transformation I saw the crowd 
 swaying like billows before the wind; every inch of 
 space on the floor of the vast cathedral was filled with 
 an adoring multitude, tears falling from the eyes of 
 every up-turned face. What could not be done with a 
 mass of humanity so filled with passion for the highest! 
 None too large were the vaulted aisles and nave for the 
 tremulous thunder of the anthem. It seemed as if 
 the dome of the sanctuary would open and the Deity 
 would reveal Himself to His rapt suppliants. Then the 
 music died away and silence magnetised the people 
 and drew down the influence of heaven upon them. 
 And it was I that was in the pulpit, seeming a feeble 
 and sinful thing beside this divinely inspired multitude. 
 Could I do aught but still their quivering hearts? 
 
 With sudden impulse my voice rang out in the 
 cadences of the great organ as I raised their thoughts 
 to the cross over the altar where hung the One who 
 
My Education 17 
 
 was rejected and despised of men. I painted the 
 poverty and neglect and scorn of the life of the Man of 
 Sorrows. They wept as I bent their thoughts to the 
 weary mission of this lofty spirit amongst men, and 
 His despair as He saw them turn in contempt from Him. 
 The death of torture that marked the close of His so- 
 journ here was as nothing to the crucifixion of the 
 spirit that He bore each day from the cold neglect or 
 the supercilious sneer with which His message was met. 
 None but lowly fishermen would accept His divine 
 teachings. And never a murmur issued from His lips. 
 Heart-broken and martyred in soul, the crown of thorns 
 was a fit close to His career. I seemed to hold the great 
 assemblage in the hollow of my hand. The sound of 
 weeping rose, while with love and adoration they 
 gazed on the crowned agony as it hung on the cross. 
 
 Then I blessed the people and left the pulpit, my heart 
 hard and dry within me, when an alien sound broke 
 upon my ear from the farther end of the great aisle. A 
 commotion arose, and before many minutes the whole 
 mass of worshippers had joined in the passionate dis- 
 cord. There was a conflict about some centre that was 
 moving upwards from the door. Before I could regain 
 the pulpit, a bruised and bleeding body had been raised 
 above the sea of heads upon a cross against one of the 
 huge pillars. A cry of execration rose from the whole 
 church. It was useless to attempt interference, for my 
 voice could not be heard in the tumult. In a few 
 minutes the insults and bufferings had accomplished 
 their work; the wounded, bleeding head sank upon 
 the breast of the figure on the cross; his spirit had 
 fled. It was a preaching reformer of the town, who 
 was accounted a madman for his enthusiasm. He 
 had fallen into some controversy and had shown his 
 
1 8 Limanora 
 
 opponents the gross and material nature of their wor- 
 ship, insulting to a Deity who was pure spirit ; he had 
 prophesied the downfall of all their gorgeous churches 
 and ceremonials, and the substitution of silent reverence 
 within the temple of the heart. They had taken his 
 prophesy as an insult to the Christ and His church. 
 Fleeing to the sanctuary to be safe from the furious 
 attack of the crowd, they had followed him and with a 
 few hurried words had enlisted the worshippers within 
 against the blasphemer. And this had been the result. 
 
 As I looked at the blood-stained features, there 
 seemed to gather round the head a halo of light as of 
 a crown of thorns. I was struck with a strange re- 
 semblance and glancing back at the altar, saw the faces 
 were the same. This passionate devotion to a dead 
 Christ had found Him in living form and had crucified 
 Him again. 
 
 I was appalled at the thought of all the centuries 
 having passed for naught. Not one step upward had 
 been made. No nearer were the multitude to recog- 
 nising their Saviour when He came in the form of living 
 man. There seemed to be nothing to live for, if this 
 were the end of the agonising toil of the ages. 
 
 How sweet it was when I awoke to find it was but a 
 dream, and that I was not in Christendom but in 
 Limanora ! I was alone, but there was the sense of 
 comradeship around me. I found afterwards that the 
 wise men of the medical caste had been electrising por- 
 tions of my brain as I lay asleep. It was the beginning 
 of my education, which was to go on even in sleep, 
 moulding dreams that should modify my whole nature. 
 Perhaps the most important part of the growth of the 
 spirit is during the hours of rest, when the past or 
 future may enter the vacant mind. My imagination 
 
My Education 19 
 
 had been sent out on its travels into my past and had 
 found its way into the heart of Western ambitions and 
 hypocrisies. Thus the wise men had perceived by 
 their electric sense the dreams that had oppressed me, 
 and they drew from them "the master- sorrows of my 
 past. 
 
 Half of the success of education depends upon the 
 most intimate knowledge of the history of the soul to 
 be educated, a knowledge more intimate than the soul 
 itself can have; else the educator will be alarmed and 
 defeated by the surprises of survivals or resurrections. 
 It is not the history of the mere incidents of life, of 
 even spiritual life, from birth that is needed, but the 
 unrecorded history of the mental and emotional tissues 
 of a countless ancestry. And no annals could reveal 
 this so -well as the dream-flashes of the night. They 
 are brief as the tremors of lightning, but they illumi- 
 nate a midnight world, a glimpse of which is as great 
 as an inspiration. " Night is the confessional of the 
 unknown"; "Sleep unburies the dead"; "Dreams 
 kaleidoscope the vanished past." These are three of 
 their world-old sayings, which were striking at first, 
 but after I knew their exact science of somnology, be- 
 came as commonplace to me as they were to the 
 L,imanorans. 
 
 This science, like all their sciences, was practical 
 and but the other side of an art; it was one of the most 
 helpful auxiliaries of education. It had classified all 
 types of dreams, and found the inner test of truth in 
 them. Though seemingly capricious, to these medical 
 wise men not a dream occurred but had its significance 
 in the life of the individual. They could touch any 
 section of the brain tissue into dream-activity during 
 sleep by means of their magnetic and electric probes 
 
20 Limanora 
 
 and stimulators; they could feel by their own electric 
 sense all that was flashing through the corridors of 
 sleep; and, with their electrographs could take an exact 
 image of every portion of the dream. 
 
 Dreams, they held, made men children again, with 
 their souls upon their skins, so absolutely transparent 
 did they render the nature, so free from convention 
 and the mask of policy. And what was best of all, 
 the shadows of the past, at times of the primeval past, 
 answered to their call and played upon the mind during 
 sleep. " We are such stuff as dreams are made of" 
 was a saying of our own far-seeing dramatist's which 
 often came into my mind as I looked into their som- 
 nology. Into the making of our bodies and our brain- 
 tissues go elements from all the ages of our human and 
 animal past, ages buried beyond the reach of history or 
 speculation. They enter subtly into the tissue of our 
 life, though we are all unconscious of the process. 
 And these elements are the stuff that goes to the mak- 
 ing of dreams as well. But in the dream-world there 
 is no central personality, no will to control or trans- 
 form, no mask to wear, no power to conceal. We are 
 ofttimes ashamed of our dreams because they are so un- 
 consciously naked in their savagery or even animality. 
 
 Nor is it an uncommon or unnatural thing that 
 dreams foreshadow incidents in the after-life of the in- 
 dividual ; for they bring into play elements in his 
 nature that he has never been conscious of and whose 
 existence he would stoutly deny. Then, when the 
 favouring circumstance or set of conditions brings these 
 elements into action, he is startled to remember how 
 close the long-forgotten dream had come to the un- 
 imagined reality. If only he had known how much it 
 liad meant, as it entered on the theatre of sleep and 
 
My Education 21 
 
 then vanished, he might have been forewarned and 
 have avoided the opportunity for its reappearance on 
 the stage of life. 
 
 And the Limanoran medical sages had taken ad- 
 vantage of this prophetic provision of nature. They 
 systematically tested every fibre and cell of the brain 
 of each individual they had to educate and develop, 
 and without hesitation or error found out every pos- 
 sibility of his nature. They tested and tabulated the 
 results of every electric stimulus and every dream that 
 followed it, and by this means had a complete natural 
 history of all his ancestral past. No revolution could 
 happen in the state of any Limanoran, nothing of what 
 we mean by conversion. It has sometimes been said in 
 the science of the West that there are two brains or 
 physical organs of soul in every man, and this explains 
 the strange actions and reactions, conversions and re- 
 coils that so often occur in life. But it is far truer that 
 there are a hundred brains in every man, and that his 
 brain is composed of elements out of all his ancestry, 
 even his far-back animal ancestry; and it all depends on 
 the stimulus which of those brains or ancestral brain- 
 elements will come uppermost. The Limanorans had 
 millions of sun pictures of their own exiles and of the 
 various peoples of the rest of the world in innumerable 
 attitudes and situations, and with expressions on their 
 faces unconsciously worn ; and they could point out 
 in each the predominating animal. In going over the 
 memories of the men and women I had known I could 
 recall times when the look of some animal had come 
 out strongly on their faces. I had had, to my mis- 
 fortune, much acquaintance with the serpent nature, 
 the most predominant in an unwisely progressive civili- 
 sation like that of Western Europe where convention 
 
22 Limanora 
 
 and custom and law become the opportunity and the 
 mask of characters fallen far into the rear of progress. 
 When laggard natures are not monasticised and pre- 
 vented from breeding, a progressive people get overrun 
 with hypocrisy; under convention and custom and law 
 they take shelter and there is no power that can drive 
 them out; the finer phases of civilisation, industry, art, 
 learning, speculation, morality, religion, become their 
 nesting-ground. At last the serpent nature is accepted 
 as the type, provided there is not too fatal a sting in it. 
 The religious legends mirror this serpent-like develop- 
 ment. The serpent is the spirit of evil which caused 
 their degeneration from the godlike. The serpent they 
 see everywhere, even when it has disappeared from 
 their own land. Their greatest successes in any sphere 
 are by means of serpent-like subtlety, whilst they still 
 profess to worship the ideal of truth and candour aban- 
 doned by them in the far past. In practice it is the 
 qualities of the serpent they embody and develop ; in 
 theory they worship its foe and conqueror. 
 
 The lyimanoran sages explain this reappearance of 
 animal natures in human civilisations and individuals 
 by showing how the elements of all exist in infinitesimal 
 germ in the most primitive form of animal life; as this 
 crept up the scale, certain elements grew stronger and 
 led to new species still retaining the others in subordi- 
 nation; at each higher and higher division of the vital 
 way the elements became more vigorous and more dis- 
 tinct in their characteristics; it is therefore traces of 
 the higher animals that are most apt to appear in man. 
 And the only means of ridding these of their retrogres- 
 sive influence is to make the newer and higher spiritual 
 qualities more dominant. The first rule of a civilisation 
 that means to advance in reality and not in mere ap- 
 
My Education 23 
 
 pearance is to monasticise all atavistic natures and pre- 
 vent them from handing on their retrogression to a 
 posterity; the second is to encourage only the higher 
 and more spiritual features of those that remain. 
 
 It took many months to examine and catalogue my 
 powers and tendencies. I often awoke unconscious or 
 with a confused recollection of the dreams they had 
 stimulated and recorded. The first few were most dis- 
 tinct, and seemed to follow me when I waked with the 
 reality and perspective of life. But I could not interp/et 
 them; they seemed fanciful and capricious, and when I 
 puzzled over them, yielded nothing. And yet, when I 
 saw my dream-confession and autobiography, I was 
 startled with the truth of its great features; thoughts 
 that I had never uttered to mortal ear were there; words 
 that had been spoken in the secrecy of confidence far off 
 in my village home were recorded; actions light and 
 insignificant had their due place, and seemed to have 
 new and infinite meaning in their new setting. So 
 circumstantial were the details of much of my past life 
 and character that I could not but accept the rest as 
 absolute truth. And what a strange array of facts it 
 was! Parts of my immediate ancestral history I knew, 
 more I had conjectured, some I could never have 
 guessed at ; but here it was spread out as on a map, 
 with every new advance or retrogression any progenitor 
 had accomplished or suffered. I seemed to see my 
 inner nature photographed and by the light of a magic- 
 lantern. 
 
 At first, when I saw it stand out detail after detail in 
 lifelike truthfulness, I felt in the presence of some 
 supernatural power. But when I came to know the 
 methods they had employed, it seemed as simple as a 
 child's puzzle. Every conclusion had been reached in 
 
24 Limanora 
 
 the most scientific way. All the minutiae of every 
 dream had been faithfully recorded and microscopically 
 examined. Then they were tabulated and compared 
 with the most untiring industry. And out of the 
 shapeless mass had come by the aid of their logical 
 methods or dream-tests the clear, unquestionable truth. 
 Their brilliant, but by no means reckless, imaginations 
 did the rest, evolving order and lifelikeness out of 
 seemingly barren and confused facts. It is true, they 
 did not make any attempt at the chronology of the 
 past; they had been able only to group the facts in 
 great spaces of time, and in a certain order of develop- 
 ment. Their minute knowledge of the evolution of life, 
 and especially of human life, gave them the framework 
 for this grouping. I was astonished at the quickness 
 of their work, when I considered the fulness of the 
 natural history of my mind and character; it seemed 
 as if they should have taken years and not months to 
 investigate with such care every atom and cell of the 
 tissue of my brain. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 SLEEP, REST, AND FLIGHT 
 
 I COULD not but surrender myself into the hands of 
 men whose wisdom seemed to me to approach om- 
 niscience; and this I was the more inclined to do that 
 I felt, instead of exhaustion from their operations on 
 my brain during sleep, the greatest sense of exhilara- 
 tion I had ever experienced in my life. They acted 
 on the principle of giving complete rest to one set of 
 nerves and tissues by stimulating the others. They 
 could produce the deepest sleep in all the brain- and 
 nerve-centres by gathering the life-energy that remains 
 during sleep into one minute point, which they stimu- 
 lated by magnetism. 
 
 They smiled' at the clumsy methods of resting that 
 Western civilisation had adopted, the awkward, un- 
 yielding beds and chairs and sofas, and the wasteful 
 and futile attempts at exercise that were meant to give 
 rest. Ages ago they had banished dancing and all 
 corybantic amusements as extravagant waste of tissue, 
 destroying a hundred cells or nerves for every one that 
 they saved or invigorated. All frantic and violent ex- 
 ercise encouraged the animal part at the expense of the 
 progressive: it mangled and rent the delicate tissues 
 of the brain and heart, and sent the currents of suste- 
 nance into the muscles and bones of the legs and arms. 
 
 25 
 
26 Limanora 
 
 The riding and hunting and athletics of the aristocracies 
 only helped the animal to persist, and clearly identified 
 their ancestry with the conquering nomad hordes that 
 swept down on the peaceful plains and destroyed primi- 
 tive civilisations. Exercise, they held, should help, on 
 the one hand, to increase the store of energy to be 
 transformed into the higher elements, and on the other 
 to rest the spiritual forces and faculties. 
 
 Rational rest was one of the great secrets of the pro- 
 longation of life. There was a latent passion in living 
 things for rest: and this rose to its highest in man. To 
 balk it was to shorten the career of all the powers. And 
 they had set themselves to understand this passion and 
 the methods for its satisfaction as one of the first duties 
 of an advancing people. They knew that there never 
 could be any complete rest for a living system short of 
 death. Even in the soundest sleep the functions pro- 
 ceeded, though feebly, and there was a misty conscious- 
 ness of existence; else it would lapse into annihilation. 
 They realised that they must provide for many grada- 
 tions of rest between the edge of death and the border- 
 land of full activi ty . Nor should any portion or element 
 of the human system go long without its period of rest 
 and its period of exercise. 
 
 On these principles they built their methods of alter- 
 nating rest and activity, all duly subordinated to their 
 great aim, the advance of the higher' nature. The 
 only reason for muscular pursuits was that the intellect 
 and the imagination might be relaxed and the higher 
 energy reinforced. Even the loftiest thought resulted 
 in certain waste products, that, if left to accumulate, 
 would soon clog and stifle it. This waste must be car- 
 ried off by reposeful exercise of the lower and more 
 physical organs. All the lower elements which remain 
 
Sleep, Rest, and Flight 27 
 
 to mingle with those of a higher plane after they cease 
 to be needed as regenerators of energy grow at once 
 poisonous and must be removed by exercise. 
 
 For many months I occupied one of their beds, half 
 hammock, half framework, made of soft, flexible stuff 
 that looked like metal, yet yielded like down. These 
 beds were hung not only at the four corners, but along 
 the two sides, so that the body lay in a kind of groove; 
 yet, by a second series of rests, the material was kept 
 from contact with the sides of the body or from any 
 pressure upon it. Within this groove was laid an air- 
 cushion of still softer and more elastic material, which 
 fitted itself to every irregularity of the body and to its 
 various changes of position. The pillow was of the 
 same soft network, and so shaped as to fit the head. I 
 afterwards found that through the whole fabric of the 
 pillow passed a mild current of positive electricity, that 
 drew the energy from the nerve-centres of the head, 
 and soothed every tissue to rest. The framework of 
 the lower portion of the bed was charged with the 
 mildest currents of negative electricity, and thus the 
 circulation and the life were kept up, however deep 
 might be the sleep. The sense of exhilaration and re- 
 plenished stores of energy with which I rose each 
 morning was enough to make me enamoured of life. 
 Day by day I grew lighter in step, and seemed to walk 
 and rest on air. It was the grosser particles of my 
 system that were being withdrawn from it by this 
 nightly process of rest. I gained energy and lost 
 weight till I felt that I could soon rise on wings. I 
 noticed before long that I had acquired the tripping, 
 elastic gait that I had remarked in Noola. My move- 
 ments and footfall came to leave almost no impression 
 on my senses, and I could have played the ghost with 
 
28 Limanora 
 
 appalling effect in the superstitious atmospheres of my 
 native land. I did not seem to grow much smaller in 
 bulk ; yet in a year or more I must have weighed one 
 half what I did when I arrived. Whether they applied 
 some other degravitating process to my bones and 
 tissues besides the magnetic sleep I never ascertained. 
 But they had the power of reducing their own weight 
 considerably in a few moments. It seemed as if their 
 bones were hollow like those of birds; for I could lift 
 even the largest of them with my one hand; and they 
 had some reserve store of an element lighter than air 
 in their bodies, which they could increase and dis- 
 tribute over their system at will. When they were 
 asleep I found I could raise them as lightly as a feather, 
 but when awake they could, whether by muscular 
 effort or by some other process of their bodies, prevent 
 me lifting them even the fraction of an inch from the 
 ground. They seemed able at a thought to increase 
 their weight tenfold, and though they had wonderful 
 strength of muscle, I am certain that was not all, for I 
 observed they made little use of it on such occasions. 
 
 It can be easily imagined then how little friction 
 of the body there was during sleep; indeed, they never 
 moved whilst resting, for there was no need of relieving 
 the tension of any part. I enjoyed still more another 
 kind of rest they had ; it was half chair, half bed, and 
 consisted of an incline of the softest netting made out 
 of their usual metal and in such a way that the body 
 could not collapse when loosed in sleep. Even pleas- 
 anter was the swing-sleep; here a huge magnet kept 
 the supple incline gently swaying whilst at the same 
 time it drew the blood from the head. The float-rest 
 was as pleasing; in this the head rested on a floating 
 pillow whilst two air-cushions stretched along one side 
 
Sleep, Rest, and Flight 29 
 
 of the body and supported it on a network held between 
 them. But the most complete of all rests was that in 
 which the Limanorans were supported in the air by a 
 cloud of sweet-scented and wholesome gas blown from 
 innumerable jets with steady power; electric fences 
 kept it from spreading into the atmosphere around. I 
 never reached that power of reducing myself in weight 
 so that I could enjoy this rest. It needed fine skill 
 of poise to climb to this bed and remain there, and 
 I was ever afraid of falling. 
 
 The same physical incapacity prevented me from 
 reaching the most graceful and soothing of all their 
 combinations of exercise and repose. This was the 
 wing-rest. I had often seen the albatross, as it followed 
 in the wake of our yacht, swoop down and float up the 
 curves of the wind without apparent effort, its broad 
 wings motionless but for occasional adaptation, like 
 sails, to the changes in the strength or direction of the 
 breeze. I had never expected to see human beings 
 master this bird-power over the air; but it became the 
 commonest sight in the breezes of the dawn and the 
 sunset to see old and young of both sexes in Limanora 
 fasten great wings to their arms and feet, and, charging 
 their small wing-engines with new stores of energy, 
 sail up underneath the chameleon clouds, and float 
 hither and thither like spirits of the storm. This was 
 part of their night's rest and their morning's exercise; 
 and they used to descend from it with heightened 
 colour in their cheeks and the look of profound repose 
 in their eyes. The long training they had had from 
 youth in the management of their wings and in gauging 
 the force and current of the winds had made their skill 
 and knowledge habitual, if not instinctive. They could 
 shut their eyes and rest their intelligence as they floated 
 
30 Limanora 
 
 up and down the levels of the breeze; their wings 
 seemed to be at peace. I can find no analogy in my 
 own experience for their delight in the swift-curving 
 movement but my youthful enjoyment of skating before 
 the wind for miles over clear ice. It was a gladness 
 merely to watch them sport amid the rays of the grow- 
 ing or lessening sun. Often would they time their 
 movements to some rhythm, and flash through intricate 
 evolutions like rooks in the evening air. Again half 
 of them would fold their wings and be borne by the 
 other half with a speed and lightness almost as great 
 as when flight was unburdened. All mere earthly 
 amusements and exercise had ceased when the secret 
 of flight had been mastered. 
 
 For generations their biologists, anatomists, and 
 physicists had studied the wing-power of animals with 
 a view to the practical mastery of it for the Limanorans 
 themselves. Their chief guide towards the analysis 
 was the study, not of birds or insects, but of the bat. 
 They measured the force of the strong chest muscles 
 that enabled it to move its wings with such rapidity; 
 this could be done to a nicety by means of their refined 
 instruments for gauging latent power, whether in 
 tissue or nerve or muscle. They calculated the num- 
 ber of beats it could make in a minute. They measured 
 the spread of the wings and the weight of the body. 
 Thus they came to an almost constant equation of 
 wing-power to size and weight. The physicist and 
 mechanic were then called in; but they would have 
 been helpless without the new metal, irelium, and their 
 power of concentrating great power into small space. 
 This metal was extracted by a process from common 
 earth, but could also be found pure some miles down 
 in the earth. It was perhaps the first essential to the 
 
Sleep, Rest, and Flight 31 
 
 rapid advance of their civilisation because of its extreme 
 lightness and strength, and still more its wonderful 
 flexibility and elasticity when mixed with certain pro- 
 portions of other substances. It could be made into 
 the most delicate membrane, fine as gauze and yet 
 tough and resistent as leather. It formed the material 
 of their most massive engineering works, and of their 
 lightest draperies and garments. Nothing could sur- 
 pass its adaptability to all purposes of civilisation. 
 
 It was out of this that they were able to make their 
 wings which seemed so fragile and yet could bear the 
 force of the wildest storms. It would stand stiffly on 
 its framework against the strongest pressure, and yet 
 could be expanded balloon-wise from within. The 
 only means of disabling these wings was perforation by 
 a hard, sharp point. This could never occur in the air 
 except from the beak of a bird; and then they could 
 still use their spread as a parachute to break their de- 
 scent. Another quality this metal had was its trans- 
 parency, and their flight was somewhat concealed from 
 the sight of gazers below by the colour they took from 
 their atmospheric surroundings; it was difficult to dis- 
 tinguish them from a floating cloud or a darker patch 
 of grey or blue sky. The wings could be easily folded 
 or expanded, so flexible was the material; and, when 
 the L,imanorans landed from their flight, scarcely a 
 minute elapsed before the huge sails, framework and 
 all, had been furled and had disappeared in the ordinary 
 outline of their bodies. 
 
 And these bodies differed as much as their natures 
 from those I had been accustomed to see. They were 
 short and squat; and this, with their broad chests, great 
 heads, and long arms, would have led Europeans to 
 call the lyimanorans gnomes. Muscles and bones that 
 
32 Limanora 
 
 in other men had been of little importance had grown 
 into what we should have called abnormal size and 
 strength*. But after I had met the power of their eyes 
 and felt the beauty of the natures that shone in their 
 faces, their bodies seemed to me the normal garment 
 of the highest human spirits ; and I came to under- 
 stand the high purpose of every change they had 
 brought about in their forms and features. Without 
 their broad chests they could never have had such ex- 
 pansible lungs or such powerful heart-action essential 
 to easy flight, as well as to the lightning sweep of their 
 thoughts and energies and the rapid advance of their 
 civilisation. The pulse could be seen in many parts 
 of the body, it was so strong; and its beats were twice 
 as frequent as in my own. The great heat of summer 
 was to them little inconvenience; they could thrust 
 their arms into what seemed to be boiling water with- 
 out shrinking; and they could bear a degree of cold far 
 below the lowest temperature I had ever felt, for the 
 high temperature of their bodies made them capable of 
 enduring far greater extremes of climate than any race 
 I had ever known or heard of. But their breathing 
 was much less frequent than mine; they seemed to 
 take in enormous draughts of air at each inspiration 
 and to retain stores of it in their system. They con- 
 tinued at their ease in difficult atmospheres and exer- 
 tions long after I had begun to pant and gasp for 
 breath. The spaces within their bodies that had once 
 been wholly filled with the organs of digestion and dis- 
 charge had evidently been largely utilised for their 
 marvellous expansion of lungs and heart. 
 
 Another purpose that their huge chests served was 
 to bear the strain of the great muscles that controlled 
 their arms, and of the powerful engines that, strapped 
 
Sleep,. Rest, and Flight 33 
 
 on to them, gave the strong and swift beat to their 
 wings. Their arms were moulded on lines of similar 
 strength ; for they had to bear the strain of the forward 
 stroke of the wing, whilst also having to manipulate by 
 means of the long and sinewy fingers its great folds in 
 the backward sweep; and, when more expanse was 
 needed during calmer weather or when resting in the 
 sky, the arms had to thrust out and to bear long rods that 
 in their turn bore expansions of the wings like the stud- 
 ding-sails of a ship. The thumb of each hand was kept 
 free for the management of their breast and shoulder- 
 engines; and it had become by exercise more vigorous 
 and more flexible than the ordinary human thumb. In 
 each armpit was carried a small engine that could be 
 used either as subsidiary to the great breast- engine or 
 for the partial or complete furling of the wings. Beside 
 it was a storage-battery, in which could be generated by 
 the movements of the arm more electricity to supply the 
 central power, thus enabling them to extend their flight 
 through long periods. If they became tired they could 
 expand and inflate their wings with a gas made much 
 warmer by the heat of their bodies than the surround- 
 ing atmosphere ; then throwing themselves on their 
 backs they could rest or rise in the air as on a balloon. 
 In slow or ordinary flight, or when the wind was not 
 high, they could steer themselves rudely by manipu- 
 lating the outer folds of their wings with their fingers. 
 But if they wished to fly swiftly, or in some other 
 direction than the wind would bear them, they could 
 push out a tail-like membrane of irelium from between 
 the feet and move it hither and thither by the sinewy 
 power of the heels. The great toe of each foot was 
 also much developed by long use for stretching out and 
 managing the wings; it had become more like a thumb, 
 
34 Limanora 
 
 capable of seizing and manipulating cords or mem- 
 branes. It was this, added to the lightness of their 
 bodies, that gave them their springy gait, and made 
 them seem when they walked as if they scarcely touched 
 the ground; they could skim like a bird close to the 
 earth by using. only the outer folds of their wings and 
 the tip of the great toe for propulsion. 
 
 Much though my weight was reduced, and ardent 
 though I was in my attempts to come up with their 
 mastery over the air, I was seldom able to do more 
 than quicken my pace in running and rise in short, 
 clumsy, laboured flights on their wings like a callow 
 nestling fallen from its nest. I was soon exhausted by 
 my efforts, even when aided by my ultimately deft 
 management of the breast-engine and the shoulder- 
 engines; for my lungs were short of compass, my 
 heart soon beat too rapidly for the strength of its tis- 
 sue, and my arms and fingers and great toe soon grew 
 weary of the work they had to do. Nothing but the 
 selection and adaptation of my ancestry could have 
 made me capable of progressing physically to their 
 level. Their past had been a rapid and deliberate 
 process of adjustment to new and higher ideas of life, 
 one of the main aims being this new mode of locomo- 
 tion in order to give them command of a sphere that 
 other men had abandoned to the birds and insects; 
 for it was but one of the corollaries of the great pur- 
 pose of their existence, which was to master or eject 
 the grosser elements of their system, that they might 
 rise into a more ethereal or spiritual life. By the 
 power of flight they seemed to gain independence of the 
 earth, greater freedom of movement, and an approach 
 to that frictionless, untrammelled motion through 
 limitless space which thought gives a foretaste of. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 HERMITRY 
 
 FLIGHT was one of their best methods too of 
 achieving complete solitude. One of the early 
 discoveries of this people in the art of progress was 
 that, where men are too much or too long together, 
 they confirm each other's faults and clog advance; the 
 weaker and more superficial ambitions get the mastery 
 and force energy into mistaken directions. The risk 
 of this grew less as the individual grew older; for he 
 receded farther and farther from the ancestral stages 
 of life through which he must pass in youth and early 
 manhood; and he came to have less desire and less 
 need for intercourse with his fellows. Complete love 
 of solitude and capacity for solitude were two of the 
 signs of the perfecting of the individual life; thereafter 
 death, the rending of the veil that divides the seen 
 from the unseen, was the most natural step in develop- 
 ment, and scarcely needed effort. They held solitude 
 as much one of the essentials of noble life as society; 
 and the latter needed no stimulus; by nature and be- 
 ginnings man was a social animal, but only some strong 
 impulse would make him seek the companionship of his 
 own thoughts. The final triumph of life was to be able 
 to be confidently alone, to stand with the highest man 
 
 35 
 
36 Limanora 
 
 can think and feel against the herded universe. Under 
 the stimulus of the more physical and primary passions 
 it is the universal instinct to flock together. The baser, 
 the more destructive feelings are gregarious. 
 
 To ensure periods of solitude for each member of the 
 community, every man and every woman had a separate 
 house, as soon as the powers were mature. One of the 
 horrors of the past out of which they had come was the 
 intrusion of friends and relatives every hour of the day, 
 and the irritating sense of the continually watchful eyes 
 of servants or slaves. Only by seeking the wilds could 
 one find real solitude. In all human communities 
 there are endless opportunities for social intercourse; 
 opportunities for solitude are artificial. Life was ar- 
 ranged in Limanora with a view to allowing and secur- 
 ing as frequent and as long solitudes as were consonant 
 with the progress of the race. On the most prominent 
 point of every house there was the representation of 
 two climbing flowers; and if these hung drooping, 
 colourless, and apart, everyone knew that the occupant 
 desired seclusion; if they flushed with rose, stood up to 
 the sun, and twined round each other, then was it 
 known that human converse was permissible, if not 
 desired. 
 
 There was indeed sufficient magnetic communion of 
 spirit among all the people to touch into life at inter- 
 vals the love of that definite and open intercourse so 
 native to the human system. This inborn social faculty 
 might be trusted to prevent the love of loneliness from 
 severing all ties. There were daily public duties that 
 brought everyone into the knowledge and sight of his 
 fellow-men, the rota of physical exercise at the centre of 
 force, the flight-drill, the general meeting of the com- 
 munity, and the medical review. And every day and 
 
Hermitry 37 
 
 almost every hour of the day communion of spirit could 
 go on in the magnificent baths, in the halls of recupera- 
 tion, and in the valley of memories. There was no 
 lack of occasion to draw the Limanorans together. 
 
 But the other duty to the higher self was sacredly 
 guarded and fostered, especially in the earlier stages of 
 life. One of the greatest blunders they had to correct 
 in their former civilisation had been gregarious educa- 
 tion. Large families had been one of the consequences 
 of a half-developed humanity, more kin to the animal 
 world than to the spiritual. The lower a living thing 
 is in the scale of life the more prolific it is, the more 
 devoted to the mere function of keeping its species 
 alive. Unicellular organisms perpetuate their exist- 
 ence by continual fission. Microbes become massive 
 in their effects by the countless myriads each is capable 
 of producing. The higher the organisation, the less 
 is the energy that can be spared for generation, and 
 the more capable is the offspring when matured of en- 
 suring its own survival, of rising above and managing 
 the laws of nature. Civilisation has not advanced far 
 when it acts by masses and needs masses to keep it 
 going. Then mere subsistence and procreation are 
 the only purposes and functions of most life. To feed, 
 to reproduce, to die, that is their history. 
 
 The L,imanorans looked back to that stage of their 
 development with a shudder, so far in the mists and 
 darkness of animalism did it seem. Now one man of 
 them was more able to do battle with nature and her 
 fecundity and her catastrophes than a hundred thou- 
 sand of that olden time, and not one hundred-thou- 
 sandth of the generative power was needed. Then but 
 a poor fraction of the life-energy could be given up to 
 education. The offspring had to be trained in masses 
 
38 Limanora 
 
 or have no training at all. The parents were too 
 busy earning the means of life to mould their fami- 
 lies, and had too many children to give heed to the 
 character of the individual. All the offspring were 
 handed over to professional trainers, who managed 
 them in the mass, and who had to work by the methods 
 of nature with its myriad children through the law of 
 the survival of the fittest. They had to be handled 
 like armies, and the stricter the discipline, the better 
 the result was supposed to be; and where the people 
 were counted in masses and moved in masses the bet- 
 ter it undoubtedly was for the survival of the state. 
 Schools and universities were a necessity of that far- 
 back stage of civilisation; they were the drill-sergeants 
 of civil life, dragooning the young and their ideas into 
 accordance with the prevailing and accepted type. 
 Too much independence of character or thought or 
 manner would have broken the ranks and endangered 
 the existence of the commonweal. But the chief pur- 
 pose of life on the world, the progress of the species, 
 was ignored in this devotion to mere persistence of the 
 species. All variant germs and elements that nature 
 supplies in every individual it brings forth were 
 smoothed down or annihilated into uniformity. The 
 type persisted from century to century unchanged. 
 Only by stealth or by audacity did any new or alien 
 element succeed in modifying the species; and when 
 it did succeed the modification was as often retrograde 
 as progressive. Therefore, in order to be secure from 
 variation, public opinion punished all habits that would 
 lead to independence of character or thought or feeling. 
 As soon as the great exilings had been completed, 
 the lyimanorans recognised that the best chance of swift 
 progress was the selection and preservation of the finest 
 
Hermitry 39 
 
 variants in their character and thoughts. They there- 
 fore abolished the profession of teacher, that manufac- 
 turer of uniformity, and all schools and universities, 
 hot-beds of convention, worship of antiquity, and 
 retrogression. They by no means abolished education ; 
 they recreated it, intensified it, and made it the chief 
 function of the community. The whole time and ener- 
 gies of the parents, or, as the case might be, of the 
 proparents, were given up for a period of from fifty 
 to seventy years to the training and moulding of each 
 child. Nothing was left to nature or haphazard. And 
 every new tendency or faculty that was discovered in 
 the pupil was recorded and reported to the council of 
 sages. It was discussed by them, and, if judged to be 
 hostile to the progress of the race, the parents were as- 
 sisted in eradicating it; if manifestly progressive, every 
 means was taken to make it grow; if doubtful in its 
 results, it was submitted to the community, and their 
 instincts soon brought them to a decision. Thus it 
 was that their world was being continually renovated. 
 Never was an idea or method of action rejected simply 
 because it was new. Every opportunity of advance 
 was seized and tested. Every suggestion of a new 
 direction of progress was investigated and followed 
 out till it was seen to be impracticable. 
 
 And, to prevent emphasising the old and outworn or 
 reviving the past, the young were isolated from one 
 another; for, as the embryo records in its growth the 
 stages of animalism through which terrestrial life passed 
 upwards from the unicellular to the complex human 
 organisation, so the immature periods that come be- 
 tween infancy and full manhood record human develop- 
 ment, prehistoric as well as historic. The long ages of 
 primitive futility in presence of the powers of nature 
 
40 Limanora 
 
 are abbreviated into the helpless years of infancy. 
 Prehistoric savagery shows itself in various traces in 
 the rebellious, adventure-loving, omnivorous phase of 
 boyhood. The first stages of civilisation appear in the 
 early years of puberty; its later stages in the approach 
 to full manhood. The imperfect past ever springs up 
 like weeds amid the growth of the new life, and will 
 choke it if encouraged. And nothing, they held, gave 
 such persistence to the evils and imperfections of the 
 past, thus appearing in early life, as the gregariousness 
 of youth. Nothing had done so great a wrong to the 
 race, or had so hindered its progress, as their former 
 education system with its schools and universities. To 
 throw men in the immature stages of their life into 
 close intercourse was to confirm their immaturities, to 
 encourage atavism, to make the past tyrannise over 
 the future. As long as their old system continued, 
 their civilisation was enslaved to the times that were 
 gone, and imagination deified the world as it had been. 
 Next to their exiling policy, their educational reform 
 was one of the most important starting-points of their 
 new and swiftly progressive civilisation. I was aston- 
 ished at the length and frequency of my isolations 
 during the period of my training. For years I saw few 
 or none but the two proparents to whose care I had 
 been handed over, even after I had been introduced to 
 other sections of the community. In the process of my 
 advance towards lyimanoran habits and powers, I was 
 often left for days together to my own thoughts, and 
 yet in the presence of some supervising power that 
 seldom made itself definite to any of my senses or even 
 to my mind. Throughout these intervals of solitude, 
 I felt continual suggestion of noble thought and emotion 
 come to me from my surroundings, the divine music 
 
Hermitry 4 1 
 
 that rang so softly and variedly amid the silences, the 
 deep meaning of the arts that filled every corner of my 
 life, the magnetic energy that rayed forth from un- 
 known centres upon my spirit. The finest impulses of 
 my nature became dominant in me at these times and 
 grew in strength. I came to recognise the power that 
 such solitude gave to character. Without it I should 
 have inclined to become the echo of my tutors, even 
 though they were ever impressing upon me the neces- 
 sity of thinking and acting for myself. They were so 
 noble, so far above the men and women I had met or 
 heard of or read of that it was a hard task not to fall 
 down and worship them. 
 
 Once I had the misfortune to question the benefits* 
 of prolonged seclusion. I urged the praises of friend- 
 ship so common in the literature of my country, and 
 spoke with great fervour of the pleasures of social inter- 
 course, the keen emulation on the path of development 
 it stirred, and the wide influence which the finest char- 
 acters had. I painted in glowing colours all that re- 
 fined society might become, the witty Parisian salons 
 of the eighteenth century, the artistic circles in the 
 fifteenth-century Italian republics, the brilliant associa- 
 tion of thoughtful men in some of the London literary 
 sets of the nineteenth century. What could be nobler 
 than such intellectual brilliancy of intercourse as is re- 
 corded in the biographies of the great men and beautiful 
 and refined women of the West ! Then I turned to the 
 happiness of children and youth together in the gardens 
 or woods or on the shores of the ocean, and their sad- 
 ness when they moped alone in their rooms or at their 
 books. Companionship was the very life of childhood 
 and youth. Did not solitary musings even in maturity 
 produce morbid self-introspection ? The intercourse, 
 
42 Limanora 
 
 even with superiors and elders, was somewhat unwhole- 
 some for the young spirit, it crushed spontaneity and 
 naturalness and confidence in one's inner self. 
 
 I worked myself up to a climax of eloquence, and 
 thought that I had demolished all possibility of defence 
 of their system. But I had succeeded only by ignoring 
 the vices and weaknesses of society. These wise men 
 quietly and almost unconcernedly took me behind the 
 gaudy theatrical curtain of the world, and smiled to 
 think how like their old social ideals had been to those 
 I had described, and to see the same vanity and postur- 
 ing in European refinement as in their own evil past. 
 They mourned over my blindness of mind in failing to 
 look through the gorgeous transparency at the tawdry 
 vulgarities behind. Following it through many forms 
 and stages of life, animal and human, they showed me 
 the law of social intercourse; not the highest but the 
 lowest emotional and moral level of a herd or circle do 
 the natures arid minds of its members ultimately reach, 
 however lofty the aspirations of some of them may be. 
 A company in which free utterance is the rule is soon 
 mastered by base interpretation of the noblest lives, 
 and it is to guard against the effects of this hydrostatic 
 law of ethics that churches and temples have been 
 erected. There the awe of a higher power and the 
 conventions of worship conceal the inevitability of the 
 law, and save the shyer natures for brief periods from 
 the evil influence of the bold. The most masterful re- 
 ligions have always provided permanent refuges for 
 the finer spirits who dread conflict with the unscru- 
 pulous wit or power of the world, and who know how 
 in a struggle of speech or action or even pure thought 
 the wielder of the fouler weapons wins. It has been 
 the rule throughout civilised history that the greatest 
 
Hermitry .43 
 
 characters, if they cling to moral principle, at last 
 withdraw into solitude partial or complete, and become 
 the sages of the world ; if they remain in action and 
 succeed, the necessity for further success drives them 
 to accept the moral level of the lowest they have to 
 struggle with; for if immoral men of less intellectual 
 power overcome them, defeat means to them ultimate 
 exhaustion of the soul; nothing bleaches the faculties 
 and reduces them to the common level like failure after 
 failure. However great a hero may be to begin with, 
 success in action closes his moral career, whilst failure 
 closes his intellectual. To die in his first great victory 
 is the truest happiness that can befall him. 
 
 In fact the lyimanorans came ages before to see that 
 all public life with its competitions and ambitions, 
 social, artistic, political, military, meant the triumph 
 of cunning or force; it meant the retrogression to the 
 nakedest savagery hidden underneath the gewgaws of 
 civilisation. No real advance could be made by any 
 form of humanity so long as its ablest spirits were 
 drawn into the furious struggle for glory, in which the 
 cruellest and most audacious cunning was bound to 
 win. The founders of new religions and new philoso- 
 phies have been strong spirits who saw the foul im- 
 broglio before them in public life and shrank back from 
 it. The first aim of the Limanorans, when once they 
 had rid themselves of their more degenerate brethren, 
 was to abolish this contest of might and cunning, and 
 turn their stronger spirits to the true progress of them- 
 selves and their race. And little difficulty was ex- 
 perienced in accomplishing this most fundamental 
 reform; the island had been purged of the furiously 
 ambitious, of all who longed for the naked palaestra of 
 civilised savagery. They knew better than most men 
 
44 Limanora 
 
 how much of the essence of life was competition, how 
 necessary to all progress was the struggle for existence, 
 how fundamental was the law of the survival of the 
 fittest. But they realised vividly that nature unguided 
 often chose false directions, that the struggle may be in 
 a myriad various arenas that differ greatly from one 
 another in nobleness or baseness, that the law if left to 
 itself might lead to the survival of the fiercest or cun- 
 ningest or basest according to the conditions that were 
 to be fitted. The will of man could work on the con- 
 ditions, so elevating the struggle and leading the law 
 to a nobler issue. They did not, they could not, put 
 an end to the struggle. What they did was to with- 
 draw it from false grounds and false aims, and guard 
 it from any appearance of the lower nature, sensuality, 
 cunning, or force. The competitive energy in every 
 Limanoran's nature was bent towards his own future 
 and the future of his race, and strove to surpass the 
 past, if it were great and noble, and to cast it out, if it 
 were base and threatened to reappear. To strive up- 
 wards, to help the whole people to progress, these were 
 the aims that transformed the everlasting struggle and 
 the ever-working law. 
 
 This revolution in existence accomplished, and pub- 
 lic life having in consequence vanished, there ceased 
 all need of social display, of conversational fireworks, 
 and of tact in managing men either singly or in masses. 
 The object of gregarious education disappeared at once. 
 As long as the coarse and selfish struggle called public 
 life was the highest sphere, they knew the youth had 
 to be trained for it, its methods and aims had to be 
 adopted, and schools and universities were a necessity, 
 as miniature reflections of the greater world. In order 
 to succeed in life they had to be rolled together and 
 
Hermitry 45 
 
 tumbled against one another like pebbles in a stream 
 till they had taken the conventional smoothness of 
 outline and similarity of sheen; they had to learn to 
 keep the wild beast in their hearts and the silken cour- 
 tier in their manners, to cloak untruth and hypocrisy 
 in an appearance of brilliancy or wisdom, to make 
 grasping selfishness seem almost divine love, and brutal 
 cruelty and arrogance the most dazzling refinement. 
 It was painful to read the flashy lies and stabs in the 
 dark that went for wit, and the cruel intrigue and 
 showy falsehood that went to the making of history, 
 in those old times. Even the friendship of the foremost 
 was but a piece of acting; little trust could be put in 
 it; it served its purpose and was abandoned as soon as 
 it failed to impress the dupes. And solitaries then 
 seemed useless, moping self- analysers; they made no 
 history and they were soon forgotten. No parents 
 could afford to let any one of their children thus lose 
 his life; and, however gentle and meditative he might 
 be by nature, he must be thrust into the cruel struggle 
 of school and university in order to acquire hardness 
 and brilliancy; however virtuous and noble in purpose, 
 he had to prepare for the arena of polished scoundrelism. 
 As soon as these conditions of competition ceased, 
 education in masses had to cease too; it must be a 
 miniature of the general life and a preparation for it. 
 At a distance and in a haze it seems as if the immature 
 in their sports were leading a life of primitive and 
 happy innocence; but innocence often accompanies un- 
 tamed passion and fierce emulation. The appearance 
 of simplicity comes from their ignorance of the advance 
 of the world. Nothing did the Limanorans so shudder 
 at as the chance of perpetuating the methods and habits 
 of this early and undeveloped stage throughout later 
 
4 6 Limanora 
 
 life. What their associative education in former times 
 had done for them was to confirm the vices of savagery 
 under the gloved conventions that civilised life de- 
 manded, and to destroy the simplicity for ever. Soli- 
 tary training under the supervision of sages, they soon 
 found, had the reverse effect; it confirmed the natural- 
 ness and spontaneity, and swept out the inclination to 
 intrigue and arrogance and cruelty. 
 
 There was a childlikeness in their natures that gave 
 great beauty to their faces; and this they retained 
 through the longest life and the most absorbing work. 
 If there was one quality more than others which 
 marked them as a race, it was their gentle and trustful 
 outlook upon life, their naive candour and transparency 
 of character, their simple wonder and delight over any 
 new discovery or invention. They never grudged the 
 quiet admiration any word or action deserved. They 
 never assumed that tone of superiority or sophistica- 
 tion, which, coming as it does from envy, jealousy, or 
 malice, mars all praise or blame. They were children 
 to one another in the limpidity of their life. And so 
 their features, which had not often the attractions of 
 regularity, had come to be transfigured by this single- 
 heartedness; however old and experienced and wise 
 they might be, all possessed this divine beauty of child- 
 hood. Sailors and backwoodsmen, men who have to 
 spend long periods of their lives in comparative soli- 
 tude, away from the sophistications of crowded life, 
 often reveal traces of this childlike beauty of nature 
 and expression. And it was this peculiar educational 
 system and its long intervals of solitary meditation 
 that kept the L/imanorans children, simple and ingenu- 
 ous, till the day each vanished in the ether. 
 
 What deprived these isolations of bitterness was that 
 
Hermitry 47 
 
 one never felt lonely nor abandoned by his fellows dur- 
 ing them. In a moment, there could be communica- 
 tion in thought or magnetic sympathy with his dearest 
 friends, and within a brief space they would be at his 
 side. They often resisted the associative impulse, 
 through fear that it might be but the return of the old 
 immaturity in disguise; and they knew that friend- 
 ship was ever at call, and that all true solitudes deep- 
 ened the current of life. 
 
 As I came to feel the spirit of their existence, these 
 arguments grew self-evident; I saw how all-important 
 to progress were these intervals of isolation. They had 
 studied with the minutest care and ultimate shuddering 
 the features of their old civilisation, and they had 
 found that the worst of them came from the associative 
 principle in the training of youth. Atavism became 
 their greatest horror; in the breast of every child born 
 into civilised life an embryo savage is born, and this 
 had been vitalised and fostered by sympathy with what 
 was savage in companions and schoolmates. Under 
 their old school and university systems the age of train- 
 ing was that which corresponded to the military stage in 
 the development of man; and boys were for ever fight- 
 ing, girls ever encouraging to fight; emulation became 
 fierce rivalry and hatred. A crude stage of the past 
 was confirmed and perpetuated through life by con- 
 stant association in the time of life that stood for it. 
 That was why their leisured classes had so devoted 
 themselves during peace to the wilder sports of the 
 hunting stage of mankind, whilst they were ever itch- 
 ing for war that their sons might distinguish themselves. 
 That was why they had indulged so often in breaches 
 of the marriage bond, and outraged the monogamy that 
 they professed to revere; the minds of the youth had 
 
48 Limanora 
 
 been inflamed by the free proximity of the sexes before 
 the passions had been mastered, before the polygamous 
 and unmoral stage of their career had been passed 
 through. And education, instead of checking the 
 perpetuation of these immaturities, encouraged it. 
 Teachers had come to pride themselves in the develop- 
 ment of these savage stages of boyhood and girlhood, 
 and called the weaknesses by euphemistic names, pluck, 
 pride, grace. The young men and women were taught 
 to glory in them. And thus evil became eternal. In 
 more primitive life, there had been of necessity a wiser 
 method of training. There were no large centres of 
 population where their youth was massed in schools 
 and universities. Families wandered or rested by 
 themselves; and the hardships of existence ensured 
 the survival of the few that were fittest. These few 
 had from their earliest years to join their elders in 
 their pursuits, and they learned in such society to pass 
 rapidly through the primitive stages of man's develop- 
 ment, emulating the skill of their betters and following 
 them with modesty and reverence. In the later in- 
 dustrial and centralistic ages the youth had to be 
 massed educationally, and by the mutual encourage- 
 ment of sympathy came to glory in their immaturities 
 as perfections, and desired to prolong the savage stage 
 of their life into later years. They judged their elders 
 by false and atavistic standards and so lost their 
 modesty and reverence. It was only an occasional 
 wave of lofty feeling issuing from some inspired poet 
 or prophet that raised one generation above the preced- 
 ing. For centuries and centuries they stood still or 
 retrograded. Crimes were sanctified in war and poli- 
 tics; the evil past became a fetich; impetuosity, anger, 
 hatred, revenge, falsehood, lust, were tricked out in 
 
Hermitry 49 
 
 the apparel of virtues, and made the aims and the 
 glories of the leisured. It was the associative method 
 of education that produced such results. And, after 
 the great purgation of the race, they were amazed to 
 see how blind they had been. Would any civilised 
 parents agree to send out their child into the wilderness 
 there to spend the educable period of life amongst 
 savages, primitive in their instincts and habits, even 
 if the savages had the most persuasive and influential 
 missionaries amongst them who would change them in 
 a few years into civilised beings? Yet this was what 
 their ancestors had been doing when they concentrated 
 youth in schools and universities. 
 
 Never before the age of twenty-five were the Lima- 
 noran youth allowed any freedom of social intercourse, 
 and then only for brief periods and under the super- 
 vision of sages. And if there was any sign of atavism 
 apparent in them at their first draught of social life, 
 back they were sent into isolation, that their character 
 might be strengthened, and the stage of peril passed. 
 Even when socially enfranchised, theip first companions 
 had lived beyond their fiftieth year. By that boundary- 
 line, it was held, all the risk of atavism had passed, and 
 all the chances and possibilities of the character had 
 been discovered and provided for. It was not till the 
 seventy-fifth year that anyone was supposed to be fit 
 for parenthood; for then, though the faculties and 
 powers still went on improving even till death, most of 
 them had reached the maturity of self-control and inter- 
 subordination; then reason had begun to be master, 
 and all the stages of the development of man before the 
 final purgation of the race had been traversed. 
 
 Only a few years before this epoch in their lives were 
 they permitted to look into the deeper mysteries of 
 
50 Limanora 
 
 existence. They thought it one of the strangest pieces 
 of inversion, if not desecration, to place religious ideas, 
 as we did, before the youngest. Nothing but evil could 
 come of such an attempt. With the lyimanorans it was 
 the final initiation into life to acquaint their grown 
 men and women with the sublimest thoughts and 
 doubts and emotions on the purpose of existence; it 
 was the copestone of their education; after all the field 
 of knowledge had been traversed by them and all the 
 reverences had been instilled into them, the last rever- 
 ence was revealed to them. Then and not till then 
 were they capable of realising its fulness. Communi- 
 cated in childhood or early youth, before the powers 
 were mature, before the animal and savage stages of 
 development had been gone through, it could end only 
 in gross familiarity or gross superstition; the noblest 
 and most inward of thoughts and emotions would be 
 misunderstood. What was it that had made their old 
 religions so stagnant, so obstructive to all advance, but 
 this mistaken principle of attempting to teach the 
 holiest and deepest ideas to the young! It made their 
 ancestors cleave to crude superstitions as if divine 
 and refuse to give up any item of their childish ideas 
 of them. So thoroughly are the sources of our youth- 
 ful impressions lost in the mists of the past that any 
 connected with reverence seem to come from the divine 
 eternity beyond birth. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 JOURNEY TO THE VALLEY OF MEMORIES 
 
 ONE of the things this people feared most was en- 
 slavement to the past ; and I was encouraged 
 to strip my mind of all sentiment connected with the 
 life I had led before my arrival and all superstitious 
 devotion to the historic. Bury the dead past, was one 
 of their primary maxims. Nor would they permit re- 
 ligion or any other conservative element to hallow 
 tradition. The world is well quit of what it has been, 
 was another of their sayings. They seemed to look 
 upon the past as a fierce pursuer ever ready to overtake 
 and strangle them. Out and away from it were they 
 ever hurrying. It was the dark shadow over existence. 
 And into the future, into the future and the sunshine, 
 they cut their way through the thick tangle of life. 
 
 I was much surprised, then, after I had been admitted 
 to the full confidence of my proparents, to hear them 
 refer with pleasure, if not joy, to what seemed nothing 
 but a glorification of the past. The name Fialume 
 came repeatedly into their conversations with each 
 other till at last it roused my curiosity. There was 
 something imaginative in the ideas connected with it; 
 it never rose to their lips without bringing into their 
 eyes a beautifully piteous expression that bordered 
 
52 Limanora 
 
 almost on the ecstasy of joy. They saw that they had 
 piqued my curiosity; and before I had asked them they 
 gave me the information I desired. The word, Fialume, 
 translated, meant " the valley of memories." It was 
 the great library and university of the island. There 
 the second stage of education was largely passed. If 
 by the age of fifty all superstitious veneration of the 
 past had been eradicated from the nature of the new 
 citizen, he was led to this valley day after day, month 
 after month, until he had seen the career of the race, 
 and had grown familiar with the steps of its develop- 
 ment; he learned to shudder at the darkness out of 
 which it had come, and to watch with joy the growing 
 light and the fleeing shadows as it neared the present. 
 Thus did he learn true gratitude for what he was, and 
 true reverence for the future towards which they were 
 all striving. I was not yet fit to enter the precincts of 
 the valley. I had still too much of that anguished yet 
 exquisite homesickness for my own past to be trusted 
 with insight into a past that might seem great to me. 
 And yet my probation would be shorter, as my buried 
 world was so different from theirs; there would be less 
 danger of superstitious reverence awaking in me for any 
 of their old stages or antiquated institutions, and no 
 danger of Ayala stirring my idolatrous devotion. This 
 new word puzzled me, they saw. And they explained 
 that it was but the older name for the same valley; it 
 meant " the resting-place of the untrammelled." In 
 fact, their great library and university was their grave- 
 yard too. 
 
 Years passed in happy renovation of my whole be- 
 ing, body and soul. As I looked back I began to 
 shudder at the past out of which I had come, its low 
 ideals, and its still lower planes of living; it seemed 
 
Journey to the Valley of Memories 53 
 
 centuries behind me and not mere years; it had grown 
 into a murky cloud on the far horizon. I could see 
 how often I had been on the verge of despair or disease 
 and began to know the blindness and ignorance that 
 had been almost the air I breathed. I shrank in 
 horror from all I had been; for I could examine the 
 poor fabric of it almost microscopically now. There 
 was little fear indeed of my ever longing for what I had 
 left behind me. 
 
 Thus at last there came the supreme moment that 
 I had laboured for. I was to be permitted to visit 
 Fialume. I shall never forget the day. I had swept 
 out of my mind analogies for their great graveyard 
 from the doleful surroundings of death to which I had 
 been accustomed in my native land, the long train of 
 mourners, the ghastly hearse with its burden of mor- 
 tality, the unkempt grass of the place of tombs, the 
 dreary wait beneath the unsympathetic sky; and then 
 the rattle of the clods upon the coffin-lid, and the frantic 
 effort to drive from the soul the thought of the gradual 
 corruption of the body and the final residue of skull and 
 bones. Years though I had been in Limanora, I had 
 never heard of a funeral. Indeed deaths were as 
 rare as births in a community that had striven to avoid 
 the lavish waste of nature, and had so studied the 
 human frame as to know how to arrest decay of its 
 powers and to give every individual full possibility 
 of developing himself and through himself his race. 
 The reckless and indiscriminate bearings and dyings 
 of the old world were no advance on the course of the 
 animal or even the vegetable sphere; the higher the 
 organisation the fewer the young and the greater 
 the care of them. But man in other lands had still, 
 with all his thought and foresight, the extravagant 
 
54 Limanora 
 
 method of nature, and had increased and multiplied 
 without stint in order that an occasional exception 
 might help by favouring conditions to lead the race 
 onwards and perhaps upwards. Thousands of Alex- 
 anders and Cromwells, of Mahomets and Socrates, of 
 Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares had lived and 
 died unknown, because they had not been born into 
 the circumstances which fitted their peculiar faculties. 
 This people had seen that the method of nature was 
 haphazard, if not heartless,. that the rate of progress 
 could be indefinitely accelerated if every child that 
 was born were born with a definite purpose, and his 
 life were guarded and extended till that purpose was 
 fulfilled. They meant every act of generation for a 
 definite advance. Birth and death were in the hands 
 of the race and not of chance, and thus it was that I 
 had never seen or heard of obsequies during the many 
 years of my probation. 
 
 So my difficulties were solved by my guardians be- 
 fore we set out for the national place of tombs. Yet 
 my curiosity was as active as before. This was the 
 beginning of a new epoch in my new life. How could 
 its wonders surpass those of the past years! And I 
 was all eagerness to study the past history of this noble 
 race, to study the gradual ascent to the height they 
 had now reached. 
 
 The whole atmosphere was jubilant as we rose into 
 its upper levels and thrilled with light and electricity; 
 even unseen living forms from other stars mingled with 
 the sunlight that supplied so much for the support of 
 our being. There was not a cloud to mar the purity 
 of the ether, inspired with wandering breaths of wind. 
 We rose joyous and bright under the gleam of the sun, 
 I alone having my exhilaration somewhat dashed by 
 
Journey to the Valley of Memories 55 
 
 the consciousness of my laggard gait; for my limbs 
 were not yet light enough, my arm and leg muscles 
 not strong enough, to accomplish any but the briefest 
 journey upon wings, and that in the most awkward 
 and shambling way. I was borne in one of their 
 faleenas or weight-transference flies; it was one of the 
 smallest, yet I had room to move about freely in the 
 car in spite of the baggage of the troop. It was not 
 unlike a huge tropical butterfly that I had admired in 
 a case in one of our museums; the car was long and 
 narrow and pointed like a boat at either end; from 
 each side stretched out wings that were enormous be- 
 side the body they carried; and these, rainbow-hued, 
 seemed to fill the whole air through which we passed 
 with a solid gleam, so quickly did they shuttle up and 
 down; aft extended slantwise two great antennae-like 
 shafts that moved hither and thither to defeat the 
 baffling puffs of wind and so direct our flight; along 
 the keel lay the engine that produced the beat of the 
 wings, silent and motionless as if it were but a shaft 
 that strengthened the framework. There was no vibra- 
 tion, in spite of the great speed of the faleena. A huge 
 awning, so high above us as to be out of reach of the 
 wings at their fullest stretch, seemed to hold us easily 
 aloft at whatever level we desired, and to let us gently 
 down whenever the wings beat slowly enough to be 
 seen as they moved up and down. It was in one of 
 these slow movements that I discovered the principle 
 of these sails; they were made of the wonderful metal, 
 irelium, and had its properties of lightness, tenuity, 
 and strength; I had noticed as they flashed solidly 
 through the air that there was an alternation in the 
 flash of greater or less sheen; I now saw that each 
 wing consisted of two fine plates of open scroll-work 
 
56 Limanora 
 
 sliding over one another back and forth; in the upward 
 stroke the holes were open so that the air passed easily 
 through, and the whole expanse looked like a delicately 
 reticulated fan; in the downward stroke the upper plate 
 so slid over the lower that the apertures of both were 
 completely closed, and the wing formed a solid sheet 
 of metal. I afterwards saw how simply this was ac- 
 complished. The under irelium network had but one 
 motion, that on the hinges attached to the side of the 
 car, but it had grooves on its fore and aft edges; into 
 these, corresponding projections on the upper network 
 fitted, moving in them easily by means of small half- 
 hidden wheels; this upper plate was attached to inde- 
 pendent hinges on a long rod that was drawn back and 
 forth about half an inch by a connection with the driv- 
 ing engine; its motion, however, was completely con- 
 trolled by the ligatures that drew the wing upwards 
 and downwards, so that they should ever be in harmony, 
 and the closing of the pores should occur only at the 
 beginning of the downward beat, and their opening 
 only at the beginning of the upward beat. The effect 
 to the eye was very beautiful ; the transparency of the 
 metal let the coloured light of the sky shine through it 
 even when solid; but when reticulated the azure seemed 
 to form into a flashing loom of the finest lace. I could 
 not cease gazing at the ever-shifting lights that played 
 through the embroidery of the wings. It was pleasing 
 to the ear as well: for the whirr and creak that usually 
 accompany the flight of great birds and the movement 
 of machinery were used up as undertones to a grand 
 but simple musical march that seemed the very spirit 
 of the beat of the wings. 
 
 For a time these sights and sounds held me en- 
 tranced, so that I was scarcely conscious of our ascent. 
 
Journey to the Valley of Memories 57 
 
 When the power of the charm had freed my senses, 
 I looked down, and my heart leapt into my mouth; 
 eagles being swept from the island by the blast of 
 the storm-cone appeared to me as flies crawling over 
 the sun-glitter of the houses below or on the snows of 
 Lilaroma. I shrank back breathless at the sight, and 
 imagined myself falling down this heart-sickening dis- 
 tance. Then the almost irresistible desire to throw 
 myself into this abyss came over me, and I clutched at 
 the framework of the car that I might not yield to this 
 feeling. 
 
 I had forgotten my companion for the time: one 
 glance at her drove the terror from my mind. I saw 
 the beauty of the benignance that shone upon her face, 
 and my spirit nestled in her protecting smile that had 
 interpreted aright the horrors of my thoughts. I was 
 not merely thankful that I had not been alone with my 
 terrible longing: I could almost give my life up to this 
 being who swept out my fear by the loving- kindness of 
 her glance. My guardians had been unwilling to trust 
 me alone in the faleena, even though the engine and 
 the machinery were simple enough to have been man- 
 aged by a child. So they sent with me Thyriel, who, 
 I long afterwards found, had been selected by the sages 
 as my spiritual twin as soon as they had tested my 
 past history, my faculties, and my possibilities. None 
 other in the whole community was so fitted to stimulate 
 my best qualities, to be preferred by me as intimate 
 friend and comrade or, if passionate emotions followed 
 the same direction as friendship, to mate with me as 
 parent or proparent, when full maturity had been 
 reached. This I came to know only when all had 
 fallen out as they had anticipated and desired. We 
 were both allowed our full option and free will in our 
 
58 Limanora 
 
 spiritual approaches and agreements: we were not 
 forced into each other's company, only when oppor- 
 tunity for mutual protection or confidence came were 
 we paired for the venture. Everything issued as they 
 had planned just as if we had had no free choice in 
 the matter, and yet our impulses felt as free as if we 
 had been the only living organisms in the universe. 
 We chose with a passion that would not be denied; we 
 were willing in our freedom of attraction to surrender 
 life and all to each other. 
 
 This flight was one of the first great adventures on 
 which we were together, and it is graven upon my 
 very heart. Thyriel, O Thyriel, I await thee with soul 
 weary of waiting! What are the years now but cen- 
 turies without thee ? I am alone but for God and thee. 
 It is the only consolation of my soul that thou risest 
 ever towards God and livest in God, and that I rise 
 and live with thee. 
 
 It is exquisite pain (and delight too) for me to tell 
 of that flight into the ether; for then I first realised 
 how incomplete was the sum of my existence without 
 this being. She was so gentle and yet so strong, so 
 full of eager sympathy and yet so vigorous of character. 
 She knew every weak point in my system, and bent 
 herself to correct its weakness or protect me from its 
 effects without making me conscious of her sacrifice. 
 With power that I could not but acknowledge as the 
 superior of mine, she played the companion and equal. 
 I could have worshipped her almost as a divinity ; but 
 she modestly bent herself to my level, and veiled her 
 superiority in her childlike playfulness. I shrank in 
 fear from the implied familiarity, and could not bring 
 myself to recognise except intellectually the common 
 humanity and the difference of sex. For years I felt 
 
Journey to the Valley of Memories 59 
 
 too much adoration to pass into love. It was indeed 
 long before I could admit myself capable of her friend- 
 ship. But gradually she led me to put more confidence 
 in my powers, and to recognise the superiority of some 
 of them. My intellectual admiration took a warmer 
 glow that soon fused our intercourse into the most de- 
 voted friendship. So braced were we by our mutual 
 help in our common pursuits that we seemed helpless, 
 the one without the other. Yet the sense of sex was 
 not stirred for years after the bond between us had 
 grown inseverable. 
 
 It was this flight that first awakened me to the 
 wealth of her nature and her immeasurable power and 
 desire of self-sacrifice. Like her people, she had none 
 of the statuesque beauty or moulded regularity of 
 feature that has swayed the thoughts and passions 
 of European sex; but the spirit that shone through 
 made the face divine. I rested almost as in a dream, 
 as I felt the benignance of her soul; and before long 
 I was able to look calmly over with her at the increas- 
 ing depths of light through which we had come. Be- 
 low us we saw valley and hill pearled with the gleam 
 of wide-scattered houses; we could see the flash of 
 streams and rivers as they broke through the darkness 
 of forests or fell in snowy cascades; and around the 
 coast the sea spun for the black fringe of rock a mov- 
 ing thread of surf. Around us rose the carolling of 
 many voices to the gates of heaven. Song after song, 
 anthem after anthem, burst forth from the various 
 groups of our comrades. Buoyant were they as thistle- 
 down, revelling in the pure serenity of the upper air. 
 For very joy I could have thrown myself among them 
 and joined the harmony of their flight; but her glance 
 was upon me, and I returned to thoughts of prudence. 
 
60 Limanora 
 
 She showed me why we had risen so high into upper 
 air far above most of the Limanorans who were flying 
 with us. These faleenas could not adapt themselves 
 to the varying winds as the human figure and arms 
 could when managing wings. They had to rise into 
 the regions of calms or of steady winds, in order that 
 they might float by power of sail down to their destina- 
 tion. What seemed a mere awning acted in two ways; 
 it served as aeroplane to steady the whole structure in 
 the air and as parachute when it began to descend ; and 
 could be inflated with heated air, to help the wings in 
 raising the faleena upwards. She pointed out in the 
 far distance below us a gleaming line that marked the 
 valley towards which we were voyaging, and then 
 looking at a height-gauge that hung beside her steering- 
 seat and at a wind-gauge' that stretched over the side 
 of the car, she decided by a brief calculation that we 
 had reached the proper key-place of the arch we were 
 making in our journey, and that we should by chang- 
 ing our course wing our way with ease down to the de- 
 sired goal. She touched a notch in the side of the car 
 and above there sounded a flute-like note, that, varying 
 in strength and pitch, made no disharmony with the 
 music of the wings. I looked up and there I could 
 see the awning gradually collapse ; it had bulged 
 downwards, I had noticed, in a strange way ; the 
 tenseness of its curves disappeared, and as we began 
 to fall, it became concave, and broke the velocity of 
 our descent. 
 
 The wings still plied with bewildering swiftness of 
 beat, and forced us onwards as we shortened our dis- 
 tance from the earth. We still could hear the music of 
 our comrades, but so softened by the ong space between 
 that I could have imagined it the spheral harmony 
 
Journey to the Valley of Memories 61 
 
 of orbs which circle round the throne of God. But I 
 could see them, dim flakes of light in the azure as they 
 outdistanced us, the few laggards that had skimmed 
 above us for a short time still showing the outlines of 
 their forms, yet rapidly lessening into star-specks. I 
 was gazing out at them with the exhilaration of the 
 outlook and of the ether in my blood, when the wings 
 suddenly began to labour with short, irregular beat. I 
 glanced at Thyriel. She kept her face unmoved, as 
 she examined the engine beside her and the various 
 keys and wheels and hinges of the machinery. I took 
 courage, for she looked quite unconcerned, yet I could 
 see that she had not discovered the cause for the uneasy 
 motion of the wings. She told me that she would have 
 to examine the outside, but that I might keep my mind 
 at peace, for there was no danger. She adjusted her 
 wings and dived from the side, then rose to our swiftly 
 descending faleena, and by the strength of her muscles 
 seemed to stay the descent, while she looked at all the 
 gearing of the sails from below. Then she climbed into 
 the car, and began to work at a small pump in the fore- 
 part. I ran to help her, and in a few minutes I felt the 
 faleena buoyant again and holding its own against 
 gravitation; we had refilled the balloon of the awning 
 enough to keep her afloat. Thyriel stopped the engines 
 and let the sails lie lazily out on the same plane as the 
 car, then she fastened a cord to the bow and, having 
 adjusted her wings again, seized the cord and leapt 
 over. I saw her purpose : she was towing the maimed 
 faleena through the air, still at a great height from the 
 earth. We were near enough, however, for me to see 
 as I looked over the danger we had escaped. We had 
 been falling upon a group of pinnacled and serrated 
 rocks that would have gored our vehicle and endangered 
 
62 Limanora 
 
 my life. Moreover, we were still a long way from 
 Fialume. 
 
 Thanks to the cessation of our music, the attention 
 of the distant aeronauts was drawn to our laboured 
 flight. It was not half an hour before we saw them 
 hastening back to meet us like a swarm of butterflies; 
 and in a few minutes more they were beside us. I 
 watched their evolutions in the air with absorbed de- 
 light; and ere I knew what they were about, they each 
 held a cord from the bow of our faleena, and Thyriel 
 was on board with me directing our flight. How loud 
 their chorus sounded now that they were near! They 
 timed the beat of their wings and the straining of their 
 cords to it, and we sped on our downward way even 
 more quickly than before. I did not know till long 
 after how great was the danger out of which I had 
 escaped. Yet I was conscious of my comrade's courage 
 and that to her I owed much. It brought us closer 
 together in spiritual friendship, and we seemed to feel 
 ourselves singled out of mankind for mutual confidence. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 FIAUJME 
 
 I WAS revelling in the thought of our comradeship 
 and in the exhilaration of the motion through the 
 air, when the chorus began to soften. It sounded far 
 off, like the echo of an echo, and out of the distance 
 rang notes of welcome. Our company burst out of 
 their low tones of pleading into loud triumph and joy. 
 Then came the whispered softness of their former song; 
 answered softly as if from the hollows of the earth. 
 This swelled again into welcome, and the air rang with 
 notes of joy. 
 
 My eyes followed our route; and beneath us I saw a 
 huge valley forested to the ridge on either side and 
 spanned with a glittering roof that turned the light of 
 the sun into myriads of many-coloured gems. Over 
 the cliffs or in through the olive-green or blossoming 
 trees swept streams with rainbowed cascades, covering 
 the vast dome with spray till it seemed an arch of ice 
 that melted in the sun. We made for the entrance of 
 the gorge, out of which fumed and fretted through 
 gates of pinnacled rock a milky torrent. Borne on 
 mighty pillars of limpid metal rose a great archway; 
 and this enclosed lesser semicircles spanning the vari- 
 ous roads that led into the wild tropical scenery of the 
 
 63 
 
64 Limanora 
 
 dale. I never saw such an impressive spectacle be- 
 neath human roof. Cataract rose above cataract in 
 the centre. On all sides fell miniature cascades, or 
 rose fountains that sent in wayward clouds their break- 
 ing water-spears and flags. The flowers and shrubs 
 and trees of every climate under heaven seemed to be 
 collected here, and to blend in marvellous harmony of 
 colour. Cool winds blew from hidden sources wafting 
 the fountain-spray or the odours of the flowers about us. 
 The beating rays of the sun were softened by the stream- 
 cooled dome; and out of some cave or hollow in the 
 far distance came the murmur of entrancing music. 
 
 We had descended and passed far within the won- 
 drous structure before I could recall my senses from 
 their bewildered enjoyment of the scene. Then I saw 
 that our company had parted in various directions, 
 vanishing in groups or pairs, round a verdant cliff or 
 into some overarching bower. I was left alone with 
 Thyriel. The sudden loneliness of the vast valley- 
 hall made me feel the delight of having her spirit to 
 lean upon. In spite of the companionship of the 
 flowers and the close ranks of the forest, I felt the 
 great spaces of the valley solitary because of the lofti- 
 ness of the roof, like the arch of night making space 
 seem more vast than under the warm, indefinite sky of 
 noonday. Bewildered and alone, my thoughts sought 
 the shelter of friendship. 
 
 Not long had I felt this consolation when both of us 
 were in the shadow of a nobler and more mature per- 
 sonality. He came I knew not whence, and the sud- 
 denness of his appearance added to the awe I felt at 
 once for his character. He was, I was certain, one of 
 the sages of the community, so deeply had the centuries 
 engraved their experience upon his face and spirit. 
 
Fialume 65 
 
 There seemed to come from him even before he spoke 
 or recognised our presence a benign and godlike in- 
 fluence, and I knew at once the greatness of his soul. 
 There were the lines of long struggle and complete self- 
 mastery upon the countenance like the curved stratifi- 
 cation and cleavage of the older rocks. He had not to 
 speak before I had surrendered myself entirely to his 
 guidance. He who had seen so many hundreds of years 
 pass over the earth and learned all the lessons they 
 had to teach was the natural master of two such novices 
 in life as we were. For I now felt that, however superior 
 Thyriel was to myself in instincts and development 
 and beauty of soul, she was completely overshadowed 
 by this spirit of centuries. 
 
 Yet when he spoke to us we felt that he had still the 
 elasticity of youth about him; he had in his words and 
 actions the rapid recoil of healthy tissues that have a 
 long career before them yet, and in his faculties and 
 ideas there was still the unlimited capacity of develop- 
 ment. After explaining that he was to be the inter- 
 preter of this house beautiful for us, he led us by a 
 maze of paths through the blossom and the verdure to 
 an open space, from the centre of which rose a noble 
 flight of steps flanked by porticoes and colonnades. 
 These we ascended, resting at times on broad platforms, 
 and looking out on the fairy scene that more and more 
 unfolded itself to our eyes. 
 
 At last we stood on the highest platform, not many 
 hundred feet from the gleaming roof. He touched a 
 spring here and there, and out of the tessellated floor 
 came rests that moved automatically with the move- 
 ments of the head and eyes; wherever I gazed as I 
 reclined thither my rest wheeled round. This I after- 
 wards discovered was managed by hidden springs in 
 
66 Limanora 
 
 the groove in which the head rested. These were rests 
 of observation, and the purpose was to allow of the 
 whole energy and consciousness being directed into one 
 channel, that of vision. The numberless easy methods 
 of rest and motion that this people used would have 
 certainly induced sloth and luxury but for their in- 
 herent energy of nature. To them these methods were 
 but economisers of the time and power which might be 
 spent on less routine work. 
 
 I soon saw that the valley ran more than a score of 
 miles into the heart of the mountains, its deepest hol- 
 lows rising now by easy gradations, again by bold plat- 
 forms of rock far above the level on which we rested. 
 For the dome, I could now see, consisted not of one 
 span whose top ran horizontally along the ridges of the 
 valley, but of hundreds of spans that rose arch above 
 arch up the slope of the mountain. There was some- 
 thing in the terracing of the valley, too, that suggested 
 the hand of man. Nature's work had been supple- 
 mented and rounded by noble art. There was regu- 
 larity in irregularity, statuesque beauty amid wild 
 grandeur. Human thought had utilised the massive 
 ideas of nature. The scene would have overawed the 
 spirit and made it solitary, but for the familiarity of 
 minor features moulded by human imagination that 
 had not geological ages and forces at its disposal. 
 
 In amongst the greenery of the forest stood on lofty 
 pedestals what I took for memorial statues of the dead, 
 with features so like to life in every minute line and 
 curve and even graining of the skin, that I marvelled 
 at such waste of human energy and imagination. My 
 guide soon saw my mental question, and showed me 
 that they were the dead themselves. The moment 
 after every trace of life had gone from the body it was 
 
Fialume 67 
 
 ireliumised by an ingenious process; for every atom of 
 tissue and cell there was substituted one of irelium, 
 and thus no decay could approach it; it would retain 
 for untold centuries the form and expression of the 
 vanished man down to the minutest detail. As we 
 passed farther back into the valley I noticed a differ- 
 ence in the appearance of the statuesque dead; they 
 had not the hues and expression of the living, but were 
 leprous white, as if hewn out of marble with infinite 
 care. I appealed to Oolmo, my guide, and he told me 
 that these were their dead as they had been preserved 
 before the age of irelium and the discovery of the 
 process that rapidly changed living tissue into this 
 metal. At that period the body used to be buried for 
 years in stalactitic caves, where the percolation of 
 the liquid gypsum turned it after a time into a calca- 
 reous statue. 
 
 These caves ran into the mountain at the head of 
 Fialume, and were now used for converting traceries 
 and forms too delicate to work in marble into white 
 stone. They made a beautiful contrast in ornamen- 
 tation to the rainbow-hued limpidity of irelium. The 
 process had been too long and slow for the petrifaction 
 of the dead. And about the same time as the method 
 of extracting irelium from the rocks had been dis- 
 covered, the careful study of the petrifactive methods 
 of nature had led to the new and rapid process of im- 
 mortalising the form and features of those who had 
 passed from life. 
 
 From our movable rests I could never have seen 
 what all these statues were. I would have said that 
 this was the island's great gallery of sculpture. But 
 there were other things that Oolmo pointed out to us 
 before he led us round this vast hall of his ancestry. 
 
68 Limanora 
 
 He showed us far back in the recesses of the valley up 
 the slope of the mountain what looked in the distance 
 like a great settlement of some burrowing animal. 
 This was the oldest burying-place of the island, where 
 had been laid in apertures in the rock the urns that 
 contained the ashes of the dead; for they had brought 
 the practice of cremation with them in their primitive 
 migration from the south. Then followed a period of 
 superstition and recession, in which the priests taught 
 the sacredness of the human form and its final resur- 
 rection and when they buried the bodies deep in the 
 earth beneath the urned rock recesses. A period of re- 
 action against religion followed, and sanitation became 
 one of the first essentials of the new scientific era. It 
 was feared that plagues would come from this old 
 burying-place on the side of the mountain, if the per- 
 colating waters brought the corruption of the rotting 
 corpses down into the valley. It was resolved that the 
 remains of their ancestors should be dug up and re- 
 moved to a mound made for them on a level with the 
 sea. Then it was found that almost all the bodies had 
 become stone white as snow, for the calcareous perco- 
 lations that came along the surface of the rock down 
 the hill had done their work, and an accident in dig- 
 ging up one of the lower row of graves revealed the 
 marvellous stalactitic caves underneath. There had 
 been a movement towards a return to the practice of 
 cremation, but it was stopped at once by this discovery. 
 The caves became the natural burying-place, and out 
 of them the dead were brought and erected in the val- 
 ley when they had turned into stone. 
 
 After we had viewed the whole scene from our plat- 
 form under Oolmo's direction, he bade us enter a car 
 that had sprung up at his touch. It seemed made of 
 
Fialume 69 
 
 gossamer, and I was afraid to enter it, till I felt the 
 toughness and strength of its material. It floated 
 rather than ran round the valley above the tops of the 
 tall trees. I could see no wheels, and there were no 
 rails for them to travel on if it had had them, nor had 
 it any wings or sails like our faleena. At last I saw 
 that it was hung by a transparent cord of metal from 
 some moving force in the dome that to me was invisible. 
 It was an electric car, and electric currents bore it aloft 
 and swept it along with lightning rapidity. But a 
 touch of Oolmo's finger broke the circuit and stopped 
 it in a moment. 
 
 I was not long held by this new wonder, for beneath 
 and around stretched the great graveyard, that seemed 
 a harmony of forest, wild, and garden. We rested at 
 intervals of a few miles on the lofty platforms, descend- 
 ing the flights of steps at times to view the statuesque 
 dead and their surroundings. Plere and there we came 
 across groups of young men and young women intently 
 listening to strange voices that seemed to issue from 
 some hidden being within the statued dead. These 
 were students, and the sounds were the voices of the 
 dead, treasured up on fine tablets of irelium, which 
 could either be read or made to re-utter their recorded 
 words. To me the silent bowed figures of the living 
 seemed the lifeless, the whispering dead seemed the 
 living. It was a piece of necromancy, I felt at first; 
 and, but for my questioning intellect, I should have 
 shrunk back in fear. It is true, I could not see the 
 lips of the erect figure move, and when I gazed long 
 enough some tremor of the eyelid would betray the life 
 of the listener; but for the first few minutes the illusion 
 was complete, and all the surroundings, the stillness, 
 the far echo of wailing music, the sombre trees, seemed 
 
70 Limanora 
 
 to confirm it. Every new group we encountered pro- 
 duced the same eerie feeling. 
 
 But we passed on; and the joy which filled the 
 spaces of the great valley buried the sense of death. 
 It was the least funereal scene I had ever witnessed; 
 for along the paths and wide tree-arched avenues went 
 bands of carollers singing songs of triumph and glad- 
 ness, the air was sweet with the perfume of flowers, 
 and masses of varied colour broke the olive darkness 
 of the groves. The world was at once jubilant and 
 harmonious. 
 
 Farther and farther into the valley we flashed in our 
 lightning car, and even my inexperienced eye could 
 see the change in the erect dead. Many of the figures 
 were taller; the attitude was often overbearing and 
 arrogant, and the expression was generally mean or 
 cunning or truculent like so many European faces when 
 surprised in unconscious repose. The farther we re- 
 ceded, the more familiar the forms and features seemed 
 to become, so like were they to the normal human be- 
 ings of our Western world. Animalism, sensuous- 
 ness, rapacity, vindictiveness, cruelty, fanaticism grew 
 more and more frequent, the nearer to the primitive 
 graveyard we approached. At last on the faces of the 
 dead that had been dug out of their old tombs there 
 was the manifest touch of the ape, the tiger, the wolf, 
 or the snake. I shuddered to see withal the regularity 
 of the features and the stature and grace of the figures. 
 They came nearest of all to the ideal beauty and the 
 haughty bearing of aristocratic Europe. It scarcely 
 needed the explanation of Oolmo to see that the body 
 had then been developed at the expense of the soul. 
 Underneath the handsome and generous outlines lurked 
 the beast that had entered into the making of ancestry. 
 
Fialume 71 
 
 Splendid animals they had been ; and, as our inter- 
 preter explained, given up to war and field sports and 
 at intervals debauchery, or to the over-reaching of 
 trade and money-making, or to the subtleties and false- 
 hoods of political life. They belonged to the age just 
 before the great emigrations. As we took our way 
 back on the other side of the valley, I could notice how 
 rapidly these lordly animal forms disappeared, and 
 yielded to the compact little figures, irregular features, 
 and divine expression of face I had grown accustomed 
 to in the L,imanorans. 
 
 The dead were grouped in families and in order of 
 time after the epoch of exiling, and a student could 
 trace the growth of a talent or virtue. But many of the 
 family groups were small ; the line had suddenly ceased. 
 In these I could see after a time an occasional evidence 
 of atavism in the size or the sensuousness of the form, 
 and the interpreter explained how on the appearance 
 of this recession the right of having posterity had 
 ceased, or expatriation had occurred. The general 
 sense of the unfitness of an individual for fatherhood 
 or motherhood was too strong in the community to 
 need any expression in public resolve. Those who felt 
 this great misfortune fall upon them knew that their 
 race must be cut off; and they set themselves to eradi- 
 cate the desire of family life. If they could not eradi- 
 cate it and at the same time make effort to subdue their 
 retrogressive tendency, they had to go into exile. At 
 first action on the part of the community had been 
 needed. Now this expurgative policy worked almost 
 automatically and without friction. 
 
 When we had taken a comprehensive view of Fia- 
 lume, we entered another faleena, which had been sub- 
 stituted for our disabled car. We shot farewell glances 
 
72 Limanora 
 
 at Oolmo and were off in the air before I had well dis- 
 entangled my thoughts from the last sight. Below us 
 receded the massive archways of the door and the foam- 
 ing streams at the entrance of the valley. The jubi- 
 lant music began to grow dim, and the dome shone 
 softly in the colours of the sunset. I thought we were 
 to be alone on our return journey, and began to ques- 
 tion Thyriel on some of the mysteries of the day. She 
 had not much light to throw on them, for she was her- 
 self a novice in life. But of a sudden like a flock of 
 homing pigeons a band of our comrades broke out into 
 the level sunlight from the mouth of Fialume; and 
 along with them other bands that streamed east and 
 north and south. Before long the western train had 
 overtaken us, and their voices rang like carolling at 
 heaven's gate. They saw our faleena land in safety at 
 the house of my proparents, and then, joined by Thy- 
 riel, they streamed away through the twilight sky, ever 
 breaking off into more and more widely separated 
 groups till they were lost across the horizon, or in the 
 darkness of some distant valley. 
 
 Week after week, and at last day after day, we took 
 our path through the azure to Fialume. For several 
 years under the direction of Oolmo we became ac- 
 quainted with the history of Linianora, and saw the 
 gradual development of the civilisation and of the hu- 
 man form and faculty. We came to feel how naturally 
 ends followed means chosen in the mind and frame of 
 man, as in the plant creation and in the other animals. 
 We saw how creative had been this community, not in 
 the arts merely, but in that art of all arts, human 
 nature. They had moulded generation after generation 
 to higher and ever higher purpose. How poor and 
 subsidiary seemed all the sciences when compared with 
 
Fialume 73 
 
 this great practical science, the knowledge to mould 
 man into any required form, to bend his energies ever 
 upwards! Every week there grew upon us the con- 
 sciousness that there was no more plastic material in the 
 whole world than the human soul, when it had reached 
 a certain stage of development. 
 
 Oolmo traced for us each new faculty and power and 
 virtue to its starting-point, and showed us how feeble 
 it was to begin with, and how rapidly it grew when 
 once artificial effort was turned upon it. At first it was 
 the physical powers that he drew our attention to; in 
 family after family, for example, he showed us how the 
 capacity of flight had been acquired, and how the hu- 
 man frame had gradually become adapted to it; the 
 body grew lighter, the shoulder and breast muscles 
 stronger, the bones hollower, the arms longer, and the 
 legs shorter, with greater strength at the heels. 
 
 He acknowledged that there was something peculiar 
 in Limanora that made this adaptation easier; a mag- 
 netism seemed to come from the earth that made the 
 force of gravitation less; there was also something 
 more exhilarating in the atmosphere and climate that 
 differentiated it from all other lands. This explained 
 why I had so rapidly acquired the tripping, noiseless 
 gait I had so admired when first I saw Noola. There 
 had been a time in the history of the earth when the 
 human body was so light and agile in proportion to its 
 size that a few coincidences in nature, as, for example, 
 the increase of swift land and tree enemies, would 
 have made it ultimately winged. That was the geo- 
 logical epoch, when, after a period of great contraction 
 and increase of density (the period of the huge saurians 
 and other monsters of the prime), the orb had, through 
 volcanic explosions within it and the impact of myriads 
 
74 Limanora 
 
 of aerolites on its crust, expanded its texture and par- 
 tially volatilised its internal elements. Since then it 
 has been cooling down within, and thus growing less 
 in size, though losing none of its mass; this can be 
 seen in the twistings and foldings of the rocks and the 
 enormous wrinkles on its surface. The result has been 
 that animals, and men with them, have been growing 
 heavier for their size. The possibility of man becom- 
 ing a flying race has passed away. Land and sea 
 animals have no longer the chance of developing into 
 birds of the air; and even some of the tribes of winged 
 things have almost surrendered their prerogative of 
 flight; nothing but embryo and unused wings remain 
 to them. It is only in exceptional spots like Limanora, 
 where the magnetic conditions and the spongy nature 
 of the interior of the earth lessen the force of gravita- 
 tion, that men could ever acquire the power of artificial 
 flight with any ease. By dint of the application of 
 enormous force, and of inventive mechanical power, 
 men in other lands may master the art of aerial voyag- 
 ing; but it will never become an accomplishment of the 
 individual; there will be too much strain and stress for 
 it ever to grow a pleasant mode of travel. 
 
 Thus Oolmo flashed light upon the past and the 
 future as we traversed the groves of Fialume. We grew 
 familiar with the great forces of the universe, and their 
 bearing upon the problems of mankind, and gained the 
 true perspective of existence. I felt that Europe was 
 but standing still, reform herself and advance in science 
 and art and civilisation as quickly as she might. 
 European man himself was not progressing, but only 
 the external results of his individual efforts. It would 
 take ten thousand years for the huge nations of Europe 
 to make the step upwards that these islanders made in 
 
Fialume 75 
 
 a day. Material progress meant nothing to the Lima- 
 norans unless it meant also the progress of the men 
 themselves in capacity, in power of attaining higher 
 and higher goals. 
 
 Year by year I came nearer to the special purpose of 
 my education. As we passed over the family groups 
 of the island, and learned their sciences and arts, both 
 Thyriel and myself began to feel drawn to one branch 
 of investigation above all others. Every family had a 
 special department of the civilisation assigned to it, 
 and for generations it had cultivated this. To prevent 
 narrowness of view in its members, and to enable all to 
 understand the value and purpose of the work of each, 
 a long tract of their youth was devoted to a bird's-eye 
 view of the departments of human knowledge and pro- 
 gress. And, that no section of life might be left at the 
 mercy of accident, there worked with the representa- 
 tives of every family one or two supernumeraries. 
 Thus new blood was introduced, for the alien was gen- 
 erally chosen from a family not even distantly con- 
 nected, and had such a nature and temperament as 
 would be likely to lead to marriage and to the best re- 
 sults in posterity. 
 
 There was one family grove to which I was specially 
 drawn. The faces of the dead seemed to me exquisitely 
 beautiful; the natures that shone through their petri- 
 fied bodies attracted me with tenfold power. Ever}- 
 day as I entered Fialume I felt inclined to bend my 
 steps thither, and the close of the day generally found 
 me amongst them. Oolmo tried with some amusement 
 to himself to break me of the habit, which yet grew 
 stronger and stronger. And Thyriel showed the same 
 tendency. Perhaps one feature which gave great at- 
 traction to the place was its seclusion; it was almost 
 
76 Limanora 
 
 the only family grove that had not two or three study- 
 ing the records. Here we were generally left to our 
 own companionship; for Oolmo had often to go when 
 we arrived there; and, with our common tastes, we 
 found the time far too short. 
 
 At last I came upon the explanation. We were 
 studying the growth of some feature through the gen- 
 erations, and I had remarked to Thyriel how like she 
 was to this family in character and appearance, when 
 suddenly the foliage parted near where we stood and 
 disclosed three figures, two of whom seemed to my un- 
 discriminative eyes facsimiles of the last of the group 
 which had been ireliumised. The feeling of worship 
 was aroused in me, for I felt in them the beautiful 
 nature of Thyriel, and besides this the atmosphere of 
 years and experience mellowing it and making it seem 
 loftier and more divine. The third was different and 
 yet as noble, and when I gazed into her face I found 
 the solution of a problem that had begun to perplex 
 me, the source of those characteristics of Thyriel which 
 made her different from the two others and from the 
 family group. The last was her mother; the other two 
 were her father and aunt. This was the treasure-house 
 and sleeping place of her ancestry. Her own relation- 
 ship had instinctively drawn her to it, and my natural 
 kinship with her had attracted me there. 
 
 We were now to begin the special study which was 
 to make us useful working members of the community, 
 filling our own places in it, and serving its great and 
 final purpose with our own labour and thought. Many 
 years would we have to spend in this secluded grove 
 mastering the knowledge and achievements of this 
 family. Its distinctive name was L,eomo, which meant 
 earth-seers, and its department was the study of the 
 
Fialume 77 
 
 crust and inner movements of our orb. It was one of 
 the peculiarities of all Limanoran science that it was 
 art too; nothing was lost; every investigation or dis- 
 covery or law had practical issue; and it was the duty 
 of the investigator to find out how his work bore upon 
 the progress of the race to its final aim. As I saw 
 farther and got deeper into this study I discovered that 
 much which had seemed purely speculative was most 
 practical and relevant to the purpose of the race. A 
 shallow view would have rejected nine tenths of it as 
 useless application of the energies, as mere fancy think- 
 ing. The wider my knowledge, the more my admira- 
 tion of the far-sight of these investigators grew. They 
 seemed to me to have almost the gift of prophecy as 
 they looked at the facts they accumulated and the con- 
 clusions they tried to draw. 
 
 It was easy to follow them for every generation 
 had reduced the ancestral writings and thoughts and 
 achievements to the briefest available form, and in- 
 dexed all that previous generations had done. It was 
 the duty of every new student of a family, after he had 
 finished his general education and seen the advances 
 made in other branches, to bring all his ancestors' re- 
 searches and suggestions into relation to these, and to 
 place a brief account of them on record in the latest 
 phraseology and scientific light, so that any alien 
 student might read or hear with understanding. There 
 was thus in every family grove a summary of all that 
 was known or achieved in its department of science or 
 life. And this great graveyard was also the library of 
 the race, so classified and summarised and indexed that 
 any man could take a complete survey of its contents 
 in a few years. There was the living index, too, avail- 
 able in every grove. Anything that was obscure could 
 
?8 Limanora 
 
 be at once explained by the representatives of the 
 family. Besides these there were families whose duty 
 it was to supervise the relationships of the various 
 sciences and branches; they could point out to the 
 investigators how far their work tended to overlap 
 or interfere, what was futile in their efforts, what 
 directions had still to be taken and what paths to be 
 traversed. They permitted no piece of work to be 
 wasted ; everything was correlated by them to the pur- 
 pose of the race and to its contemporary efforts. The 
 boundary-lines of the various departments were defined 
 and mapped by them. They were the organisers of 
 research, the dividers and economisers of intellectual 
 labour. 
 
 But they themselves had their separate functions and 
 duties. Some had the faculty of order exceptionally 
 developed; and they were the classifiers of the com- 
 munity and of the work of the community. Others 
 had the logical powers in especial vigour; and they 
 followed out the philosophy of the race, the correlation 
 of the ideas and of the lines of reasoning. A third 
 group consisted of those with a dominant imagination; 
 these looked- into the future; they performed some of 
 the functions of imaginative writers in Europe, sketch- 
 ing out imaginary routes for the race and for each 
 family into the unknown; but they also covered a much 
 wider field; they put into form and expression schemes 
 and projects such as European men of action of the 
 most romantic careers have often attempted to carry 
 out, but have seldom been able to put into words; 
 these were not allowed to interfere with action, but 
 the ideas, plans, and romances they invented and put 
 into shape were tested and accepted or rejected by the 
 practical men whose sphere they touched. Imagina- 
 
Fialume 79 
 
 tion, it was held by the L,imanorans, was apt to be a 
 futile, if not mischievous, faculty through want of its 
 being ranged on the side of utility; and yet, if tram- 
 melled and yoked to the necessity of practice in the 
 individual, it came to be stifled. They specially culti- 
 vated it in these families in order that it should have 
 full scope and development, but took care, by ranging 
 these families with those that superintend the purpose 
 and progress of the race, that their romances should 
 have full relevancy to the goal of all their efforts. 
 Many of the projects and ideas which seemed at first 
 the most fantastic were found after many generations 
 to be sound and most possible of realisation. 
 
 One of the striking features of the civilisation was 
 the complete absence of a literary class or profession 
 or group of families. They smiled at the " pure frip- 
 pery " of European literature, which used imagination 
 as a mere means of entertainment. It seemed a com- 
 plete inversion of the natural order of things to make 
 that faculty which was the prerogative of everyone who 
 could speak, and the servant of the highest purpose of 
 life, into a special art to suit the pleasure of the idler 
 hours. They held that the man who had thought a 
 thing out could express it best. So they trained up 
 every citizen to the fullest power of lucid and final ex- 
 pression. In their language, so perfect was it, there 
 was one best way of saying a thing; and everyone who 
 knew the language aright and understood the thing 
 could find this best way. Style as a matter of mere 
 expression they laughed at as linguistic trickery; the 
 force and life of everything lay in the idea, and the 
 expression grew out of that and was a part of it, as 
 the colour was a part of the flower. It was only a 
 clumsy and inchoate language that could admit of style 
 
8o Limanora 
 
 or literature as a special art; and it was trifling with 
 one of the most divine faculties to prostitute it to the 
 entertainment of leisure hours; it was to class imagina- 
 tion with the arts of the mimic, the buffoon, and the 
 juggler. 
 
 Art for art's sake, one of the latest creeds of the 
 writers of Europe, was to them almost blasphemy. It 
 made the garment of ideas, the garb of human progress, 
 into a separate entity, and the servants of God into the 
 tailors of human folly, the dress more than the figure 
 it clothed and the body more than the soul. litera- 
 ture without the intensity of the loftiest purpose of the 
 race was but a tinkling cymbal. Expression was the 
 gift of nature to every civilised man, and woe to 
 the race that neglected it in any of its individuals, the 
 race that should divorce it from its ideas, that let the 
 men who write filch the glory of those who think! 
 
 Ivike strong beliefs had they about the profession of 
 teaching as separate from parenthood and investigation. 
 It meant disloyalty on the part of most citizens to their 
 most immediate duties. Who could develop the in- 
 stincts of youth and be so deeply interested in his 
 future welfare as those who were bound to him by the 
 ties of nature ? And then, when he had matured and 
 needed the wider education, who could give it him 
 so well as those who were most familiar with its special 
 objects and themes? If he was to follow the art and 
 knowledge of some other family, the sooner he went 
 under the tutelage of its representatives after his intel- 
 lectual life began the better. The only portion of their 
 youth that the young men and women could spend 
 with profit under others than their parents or proparents 
 was the period of general knowledge, of summarising 
 the results of the whole past. The representative of 
 
Fialume 81 
 
 one of the supervising families alone could give with 
 ease a survey of the whole field of knowledge and art 
 and action. They and they alone were in any way an 
 approach to the profession of teaching, and they were 
 saved from the petrifying influence of pedagogy by 
 their wider duties in correlating the sciences and arts, 
 the fields of knowledge and action. Thus reason and 
 the emotions were kept from getting benumbed by the 
 vanity of a too easy superiority. The beings they 
 pitied most in the world were the despot and the pro- 
 fessional teacher; for these get buried in unreality be- 
 fore the life is out of them, and are so unquestionably 
 supreme that nothing but what is pleasing to their 
 minds dare approach them. They fall out of relation 
 to truth, and it is difficult for them ever to regain that 
 wholesome fear of contradiction and that shyness before 
 destiny which constitute the essence of sanity; they 
 have to become intolerant. The schoolmaster soon 
 becomes intellectually barren; the despot soon falls the 
 victim of luxury and of illusion. For the sake of the 
 grown men and women who might be sacrificed to it, 
 as well as of the children and youth, they abolished the 
 profession of teacher. Individual training was the only 
 true foundation of a sound progress. Two might be 
 permitted to form a companionship in education and 
 study, just as two might form the friendship of mar- 
 riage; but that was only when the periods of possible 
 atavism had been safely traversed. Nor must they be 
 wholly given up to their comradeship; the parental 
 influence and solitude must continue to govern their 
 lives. 
 
 Thyriel and I had become educational companions 
 and friends; but every item of our education was 
 supervised without our noticing or feeling galled by it. 
 
 6 
 
82 Limanora 
 
 There was no prying into details; but every change 
 in our character and every stage in our training was 
 tested at the periodical investigation of the citizens. 
 Our parents or proparents took the keenest interest in 
 all that we did and all that we tended to become. 
 
 Now, that our specialisation had begun, we were 
 put wholly under the care of Thyriel's parents and 
 family. I still returned to the home of my proparents, 
 but spent the hours of training with the Leomo. There 
 had evidently been discovered in the preliminary in- 
 vestigation of my faculties some especially suited to 
 the pursuit of earth-seeing. From the beginning of 
 my journeys to Fialume I had been attached to this 
 family of earth-seers, and the result confirmed the 
 decision; my tastes all developed in this same direc- 
 tion, and the more I penetrated into the mysteries of 
 the science and craft, the more deeply interested in it 
 I became. Every day, under the guidance of my new 
 friends, I listened to the voices of their ancestors stored 
 up on irelium tablets; for these tablets, when placed in 
 a voice instrument, reproduced the exact sounds which 
 had engraved the letters upon them. Their written 
 alphabet was in fact a natural one; the letters were the 
 forms produced by the sounds themselves when uttered 
 by an instrument that blew upon loose particles of 
 irelium arranged on a vibrating disc of the same metal. 
 By a simple process the particles, when they took their 
 form, were permanently fixed to the disc, which then 
 became an everlasting record, easily read by any L,ima- 
 noran; or, when placed in the voice instrument, speak- 
 ing the words into his ear. This voice instrument was 
 a kind of organ, whose minute keys and stops were 
 easily controlled by the ridge of letters. 
 
 I ever preferred to listen to the records of the past 
 
Fialume 83 
 
 instead of reading them; for I never attained great 
 facility in deciphering the letters because of my own 
 long familiarity with the English alphabet and writing. 
 But Thyriel could read the tablets with great ease; 
 I came to prefer her reading to the sound of her an- 
 cestors' voices although these gave fuller meaning to 
 the ideas they communicated, and it was pleasant to 
 feel that she was listening with me and not tiring her 
 throat. Our minds seemed to become one, as we sat 
 silent and motionless with ears intent on the statue of 
 some one of her forefathers. There was a strong mag- 
 netism from the dead minds gradually welding our 
 souls together. 
 
 Yet there was nothing personal or em'otional in our 
 studies. For years they were chiefly historical, watch- 
 ing the growth of earth-science through the generations, 
 seeing the share that each member had in its develop- 
 ment. How little they knew of it even up to the time 
 of the exilings ! The earliest ancestors groped amongst 
 barren facts and their classifications. They named the 
 rocks and the elements of the rocks, and speculated on 
 the order of their formation; they told the story of the 
 growth of glaciers in the original Antarctic land from 
 which their ancestors had migrated, and tried to ex- 
 plain the origin and development of the strange archi- 
 pelago in which they lived. But they saw no practical 
 application of the resulting theories: even when they 
 knew the stratum and its trend, they often failed in 
 their directions as to where certain minerals would be 
 found in it. 
 
 Still the strides made by the family both in the 
 knowledge and its application were marvellous, since 
 the island had been purified and the true purpose of 
 their civilisation was known. An instrument that I 
 
84 Limanora 
 
 had grown accustomed to during the previous or gen- 
 eral stage of my education enabled me now to see at a 
 glance the improvements of each age or generation. 
 It was the ammerlin, which might be translated his- 
 toroscope. It focussed for the eye and ear any periods 
 of the past. The whole pageant of some section of the 
 history of any man, science, or object could be flashed 
 stereoscopically in a few minutes on a dark surface, 
 whilst all the sounds that accompanied the scenes 
 would be reproduced in any required pitch and tone. 
 It was one of the duties of the students and representa- 
 tives to take numberless sun pictures and sound pictures 
 of all the important scenes in the life of the family and 
 in the development of their science and art and instru- 
 ments. In order to reproduce any scene, the two long 
 strips of irelium that contained the series of momentary 
 pictures of it were made to rotate as swiftly as they had 
 rotated when receiving the impressions, and the sun 
 pictures being transparent, light and magnifying glasses 
 threw them life-size on a wall opposite the spectator; 
 the lightning movement produced the full effect of 
 action in life; and, as all the tints of the scene had also 
 been impressed on the strips, there was nothing want- 
 ing to produce the illusion of life but the voices and the 
 sounds. These, too, had been taken on an irelium 
 strip and this, when placed in a voice instrument, 
 added all that was needed to make the whole scene 
 live. It was the duty of the students in each genera- 
 tion to single out the most striking and representative 
 series and have them ready mounted in the instruments, 
 that any new scholar might in a few days take a bird's- 
 eye view of the whole development of the family. 
 Thus was I enabled to sit and study the past as if I had 
 been a contemporary and eye-witness of it. The very 
 
Fialume 85 
 
 music that accompanied and harmonised each act and 
 scene was faithfully reproduced as loud or as low as I 
 desired. I had but to touch a certain spring in the 
 historoscope, and raise or lower the tone. 
 
 It was little wonder that we so rapidly covered the 
 history of the family and its achievements. By means 
 of the work of former students we were able to avoid 
 all the mistakes and unessential details of the route 
 they had traversed; and Thyriel's friends pointed 
 out every pitfall that edged the road, every by-path 
 that led only into the darkness or into some inextricable 
 labyrinth. Our steps were watched with infinite care; 
 for, with all the knowledge and skill we had already 
 acquired, we were but infants on the threshold of a 
 universe of darkness. What was twilight in the future 
 to our guides was to us midnight blackness. That 
 was no science, they held, which did not flash light 
 upon the gloom before us; and their whole efforts were 
 bent on turning every fact and law into a prophecy and 
 every student into a foreseer as well as a seer in his 
 own science. The limited faculties of man fenced in 
 by narrow bounds the future into which it was possible 
 for them to see; but they were ever extending these 
 bounds and creeping towards the infinite. 
 
 It took but a few years to master the recorded lore 
 of the L,eomo, the work of our predecessors had made 
 it so easy, and it was an epoch in our existence when 
 we began the practical part of our training. We were 
 by no means done with Fialume, but less time was now 
 devoted to its historical and theoretical studies. I well 
 remember the morning when our guardians and guides 
 informed us we were fit to see the practical applica- 
 tions of the science throughout the island. Taking 
 some new apparatus, they embarked me in a kind of 
 
86 Limanora 
 
 faleena which had been invented since I came to the 
 island. The families of imagination had long ago 
 suggested^ it, and one of the families engaged in the 
 development of methods of flight had just succeeded 
 in perfecting its mechanism and making it easy to 
 manage. This aerial car had no wings, but rose by 
 means of the many vacuum tubes which were the most 
 important part of its impelling machinery. A power- 
 ful electric engine created and destroyed the vacuums 
 many hundred times a minute. Bach tube sucked in 
 the air ahead and expelled it with great violence at the 
 stern of the car. Both actions aided in propelling the 
 faleena. The result was that, though not so graceful 
 as the old winged car, it went with much greater swift- 
 ness. Indeed, laden though we were, we kept pace 
 easily with the flight of my companions and guides 
 through the air; and its parachute attachments ob- 
 viated any risk, even if all the tubes should by accident 
 become ineffective. Its chief disadvantage was that it 
 could not rise out of the denser air of the lower atmo- 
 sphere, and at the same time keep up its great speed. 
 The old style of faleena, or farfaleena, as it was called, 
 to distinguish it from its new rival, the corfaleena, was 
 still kept in use for higher journeys, and the flight- 
 families set themselves the problem of inventing a 
 means of propulsion through space without the aid of 
 air. One dealt with the possibilities of electric cur- 
 rents, and experimented on the method of alternating 
 attraction and repulsion, using the repulsion in the 
 rear of the car and the attraction in front. Another 
 dealt with the possibilities of the rays of light that were 
 ever traversing space, experimenting on their power of 
 starting machinery in vacuo and keeping it in rotation. 
 A third made effort to test the capacities of the ether, 
 
Fialume 87 
 
 which was the basis and medium of all things, a more 
 difficult and problematical path of investigation, yet 
 one not to be abandoned without certain proof of its 
 impossibility; formally apparently insoluble problems 
 had been solved in a manner that made incredulity 
 hide its head. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 LKOMARIE 
 
 AS I was attached to Leomarie or the science of 
 earth-seeing, I did not follow up their experi- 
 ments in the building of air-cars; I only saw the re- 
 sults when at last they came out perfect from their 
 hands, and greatly admired the easy and swift action 
 of their corfaleena. Over the hills and valleys and 
 plains we flew close enough to see what was going on 
 upon the earth below. Again and again we passed 
 over long wisps of steam or columns of dense smoke. 
 I conjectured that the steam indicated the heat wells 
 like that which penetrated the rock near the house of 
 my proparents, and supplied every chamber with heat 
 or power as required. It went down some miles into 
 the crust of the earth, and could be closed or opened 
 at will by a huge lever worked by the steam it emitted 
 itself. The denser brooms of smoke I took to indicate 
 the sinking of their artesian power wells by the 
 leomoran. 
 
 For I had seen ours being mined; I had seen the 
 entrance of the great irelium tube into the earth, ring 
 within ring, and its slow but inevitable work from day 
 to day and week to week. The principle of this leo- 
 moran or earth perforator had been found by investiga- 
 
 88 
 
Leomarie 89 
 
 tion of the anatomy and method of work of the pholas 
 or rock-boring shell, partly chemical, partly mechani- 
 cal. The edge of the lowest ring was like a sharp- 
 toothed file that, as it rotated by means of power 
 applied from the centre of force, wore its way gradually 
 into the rock, the ridges of the file being as hard as the 
 diamond. An inner ring-file was attached to it on the 
 inside, and between the two was let down a certain 
 chemical compound, which by the friction of the files 
 produced little explosions in the rock below and thus 
 quickened the process. Other ring-files followed in 
 the same way. Another chemical compound, differing 
 according to the character of the rock to be attacked, 
 was let down in the space within the concentric rings, 
 and rapidly decayed the rock so that it ascended like a 
 column of thick black smoke. After all the ring-files 
 were at work, the leomoran needed little guidance; 
 for by an application of the principle of the spectro- 
 scope, its use of the chemicals according to the nature 
 of the rock became automatic. As soon as the volatil- 
 ised mineral that ascended out of the rings changed its 
 character, the beams of light that passed through it 
 changed the spectrum; and the new spectrum in- 
 fluenced a certain solution that controlled a thread, 
 and this thread set free a stream of the proper chemical 
 compound down the leomoran. 
 
 A still more striking use of the spectrum was the 
 linoklar or spectroscope analyst and recorder. It ana- 
 lysed the vapours that ascended from the tubes, and 
 recorded their spectra on a moving strip of irelium 
 that was guided by the descent of the leomoran into 
 the earth. Thus anyone could see what strata were 
 passed through in any given time and the extent of 
 the strata. But the linoklar did much more than this; 
 
90 Limanora 
 
 whenever it struck any vein that had the much-desired 
 irelium in it in any quantity, its spectrum released a 
 spring which opened a small tube; through this 
 streamed the irelium vapour into a cavity of the earth, 
 where by means of a purifier it deposited only the pure 
 metal. There was less demand for the other metals, 
 gold, silver, platinum, tin, copper, iron. But there 
 was also an arrangement for separating and depositing 
 their volatilised forms in other cavities. Thus they 
 were able to have more than they required of the 
 metals, and especially of irelium, the most precious 
 because the most adaptable of all. 
 
 I was now to see a further development of these 
 mining instruments. We winged our way to a part of 
 the coast which was farthest from the surrounding 
 islands and most easily protected from invaders by the 
 storm-cone. I noticed the exceptional lowness of the 
 sandy beach, as shelving as that on which I had 
 originally landed; there were none of the great bastions 
 of rock which, moulded with such symmetry of terrace 
 and escarpment, barred off all landing on the island. 
 We directed our course far up the mountain and 
 alighted on a rocky platform overlooking the sea. 
 The new apparatus had been sent after us in a faleena 
 and was now placed in position. A cylinder was 
 erected on the ground and attached by machinery to 
 wires and pipes that had been laid from the centre of 
 force. But this was unlike the old leomoran in having 
 the mouth tightly closed, and I soon saw the principle 
 on which the new perforator was to work. The air 
 was exhausted in the cylinder, and then a powerful 
 stream of electricity was made to pass through a piston 
 constructed of innumerable wires which kept moving 
 with lightning rapidity over the surface of the rock at 
 
Leomarie 91 
 
 the bottom. The success of the experiment soon mani- 
 fested itself; for, as soon as a spring was touched, a 
 valve that separated the end of a projecting tube from 
 the air-tight cylinder was opened, and out streamed a 
 dense column into the atmosphere above. The spring 
 was afterwards managed automatically so that as soon 
 as the red-hot electric piston had eroded enough of the 
 rock and volatilised it, the valve sprang open, and the 
 moment the vapour and smoke had all escaped, it was 
 shut, and the air was immediately exhausted. 
 
 We returned day after day to the place and found 
 that the new perforator, or tirleomoran as it was called, 
 worked with ten times the swiftness of the old instru- 
 ment. The chief objections to it were that the metal 
 vapours were denser and more offensive, and that the 
 irelium cylinders had to be oftener renewed because of 
 the great friction and the intensity of the electric heat. 
 The one was obviated by a longer smoke-tube and an 
 application of a vent of wind from the storm-cone; the 
 other was obviated by longer cylinders and refrigera- 
 tive packing between two of their layers of irelium. 
 But the strangest result strangest for me at least 
 was to come. The tirleomoran descended miles beyond 
 the usual force well into the crust of the earth, at a 
 great rate of speed, and I soon saw preparations for 
 some change. Great channels of their usual metal 
 were laid down to the beach, and irelium barriers 
 erected in the sea along the shelving shore from bas- 
 tion to bastion. By the greater rapidity of the descent, 
 the increase of the proportion of their favourite metal, 
 and the ease with which the electric current volatilised 
 the material below, our guides judged that they had 
 reached rock that was already molten. Before long 
 there began to ooze out of the smoke- tube a red-hot 
 
9 2 Limanora 
 
 stream, that trickled its way down the slope. Then 
 the air-tight lid was burst off the cylinder, out of it 
 came the electric piston on a wave of red-hot lava, and 
 down the channels the thick stream of molten rock 
 flowed till it reached the barriers in the sea. There 
 with vast columns of steam it cooled and solidified, 
 forming a new and stronger rampart to check the in- 
 flowing fire. Day after day we found that the beach 
 was disappearing, and in its place, when the steam 
 cleared, w r e could see that the great gap in the bastion- 
 works of the island was filled up. 
 
 This was the first of their lava wells I had seen. Its 
 operations explained to me the massive symmetry of 
 the rocky shores and the cyclopean terraces and shoots 
 down the mountain-sides, that had, I thought, been 
 either chiselled by tens of thousands of years of slavish 
 labour, or laid by the hands of a race of giants now 
 vanished from the earth. This little people was itself 
 the Vulcan that turned the bowels of the world into 
 smelting-works and used the mighty forces lying 
 underneath the crust of our orb with the ease- of a 
 smith at his forge. What had the lyimanorans to fear 
 from invaders with even the mightiest war-engines 
 that had ever been invented ? They had made them- 
 selves fortifications which would outlast the attacks of 
 any human invention. When the beetling circle of 
 precipices was complete around their island who could 
 land troops, even if they evaded the blast of the storm- 
 cone? To the Limanorans themselves the height of 
 their shores was no disadvantage; in fact it gave them 
 easy starting-points for their wing expeditions; they 
 could plunge from the jutting cliffs into the air and so 
 gain impetus for their flight. 
 
 Thus had they been able to destroy that spirit of 
 
UN1V 
 ^_ 
 
 Leomarie 93 
 
 militarism which, after a certain stage, is the implacable 
 foe of true progress. It is based on two of the most 
 childish and most primitive of forces in the human 
 breast, combativeness and the passion for display. 
 Hence the impossibility of stamping out the contagion. 
 Ever and anon in the former history of the island the 
 age of peace seemed to have begun; but marauders 
 from abroad would land and stir the instinct of brigand- 
 age and make an army and a military leader necessary. 
 Thenceforward again all the arrangements of the com- 
 munity were made subordinate to the ambition of the 
 soldier. An intrusion of savagery and brute force, 
 however veiled in glory and the panoplies of civilisa- 
 tion, is irresistible by the powers of peace. Only slow 
 and silent conquest of the armed power brought back 
 progress in peaceful arts again, again to be maintained 
 and thrown back from some external accident. Not 
 that they ever pretended that they could eject struggle 
 out of their life, but they did aim to raise the plane of 
 conflict and competition. Never could this people 
 have entered on the rapid development of their powers 
 without their lava ramparts and their storm-cone to 
 keep off all occasions of militarism. 
 
 These lava wells had still other uses. Out of their 
 flow were made the rock foundations on which the 
 houses of this people were built. It puzzled me for 
 years to know how they succeeded in making their 
 immense platforms and terraces out of the hardest trap. 
 Their mansions stood out from the precipices and cliffy 
 sides of the mountain on isolated plateaus that gave 
 the inmates free view on every side and free circula- 
 tion of air around. They rose picturesque and romantic 
 from the top of lonely rocks, like the castles of the 
 Rhine, dominating the whole locality. Down the 
 
94 Limanora 
 
 rocky foundations poured at times torrents of water 
 from the sluice-gates of the mountain, cleansing or 
 cooling the surroundings; yet never was there any 
 danger for these everlasting ramparts. 
 
 Another use to which these lava wells were put was to 
 modify the temperature. They were generally opened 
 and let flow in the coolest months of winter, and the 
 red-hot cascades falling into the sea heated it to such 
 an extent that the climate of the whole island was 
 mellowed and tempered. From the wells far up the 
 slope of the mountain the lava flow had been so guided 
 and moulded that immense channels had been made 
 down to the edge of the cliffs, with sides as lofty as the 
 precipitous shores themselves. Down these were shot 
 in summer great avalanches of mountain snow right 
 into the ocean, so tempering the strength of the sum- 
 mer heat. 
 
 But these were only subsidiary uses of the tappings 
 of the central earth fires. Their main and original 
 purpose was to relieve the perturbations of Lilaroma. 
 It was one of the chief duties of the Leomo to watch 
 over the destiny of their island, which was volcanic 
 in its origin, though it had been greatly added to in 
 former ages by the coral insect. Lava-streams had 
 overspread the coral, and then the myriads of minute 
 architects had thrust out their structures farther and 
 farther into the sea and thus the lowlands had been 
 broadly extended, while the red-hot layers of lava 
 added massiveness to the body of the island. Yet it 
 was continually shaken by earthquakes and threatened 
 with partial if not complete disaster. It was the func- 
 tion of Leomarie to watch the approach of these earth- 
 quakes and guard against them. The Leomo had the 
 most delicate instruments for recording every tremor 
 
Leomarie 95 
 
 of the earth's crust. They had also thermometers and 
 electrometers down their heat wells and lava wells, 
 and the^e automatically recorded at the surface every 
 variation of the heat and magnetism of the earth. 
 They had classified through many centuries all the 
 preliminary and concomitant circumstances of earth- 
 quakes, and had found and formulated certain causal 
 relations amongst them. Thus the minutest symptom 
 of change in the records made by their instruments 
 roused them to watchfulness. They were soon able to 
 tell in what direction the explosive materials were ac- 
 cumulating and how far below the surface of the earth ; 
 then, when they had fixed with more or less definite- 
 ness the time they had to spare, they began sinking 
 lava wells right into the perturbed lake of fire. The 
 vent acted as safety-valve; the shakings of the island 
 ceased as the steam roared forth, and the molten rock 
 began to yeast down the side- of the mountain. All 
 danger was past for another period of time. Again 
 and again throughout the past ages the L,eomo had 
 saved the island from the ravages of earthquake and 
 uncontrolled lava-streams from the crater of Lilaroma. 
 Never did they intermit their vigilance or cease to ad- 
 vance their knowledge of the earth and its habits and 
 laws. It seemed to me at first that nothing could occur 
 in the crust of our planet which they would not foresee. 
 I came afterwards to know the limits of Leomarie, and 
 the reasons why they pushed almost feverishly forward 
 to further knowledge. They were ever afraid that 
 something unforeseen might occur and threaten the 
 stability of their land and the progress towards the 
 nobler life. 
 
 Once in the dark ages before the great exilings an 
 appalling disaster had occurred which ploughed deep 
 
96 Limanora 
 
 into the consciousness of the people the necessity for 
 the development of this earth science. Their central 
 city stood upon a great plateau up the slope of Lila- 
 roma. Within recorded memory there had been no 
 great outburst from the mountain; and the inhabitants 
 travelled fearlessly up to its rim and down the bowl of 
 its crater. At times there had been slight spittings of 
 ashes and once or twice a new fumarole or hot spring 
 or even lava fountain had opened at some point on 
 the mountain slope; but these were all at a distance 
 from the bustling, luxurious city; and most of them 
 had awakened slight notice. The volcano indeed had 
 been practically quiescent since the great migration 
 from the Antarctic regions and the sealing of the archi- 
 pelago by the circle of fog. The citizens were keeping 
 one of their annual feasts, and were lapped in luxurious 
 ease and pleasure. They had been exhilarated by a 
 long period of prosperity and a recent victory over the 
 savage clan that inhabited one of the adjacent islands. 
 The country people and a number of hermits living in 
 lonely parts of L,imanora had been alarmed by various 
 premonitory symptoms, sultry clouds turbaning the 
 head of L,ilaroma, tremors in the earth more and more 
 threateningly repeated, great and unaccountable dis- 
 turbances in the sea, and a hot, heavy, brooding atmos- 
 phere around the whole island. Some of them came to 
 the city and warned the revellers to be prepared for some 
 catastrophe; but they were waved aside as dreamers, 
 mere superstitious disturbers of life and its traffic. 
 Half the city was gathered together in the central 
 market-place to see a great spectacle, when the earth 
 shook beneath them. They fell on their faces and 
 cried to their gods; but it was in vain. The market 
 stood upon a plateau high above the rest of the city, 
 
Leomarie 97 
 
 overlooking the ocean. Like a cap this platform was 
 blown into the air, and all the pleasure- seekers vanished 
 like smoke. Out on the sea and here and there on the 
 land a rain of dust fell mingled with minute pieces of 
 human flesh ; but never was any one of the gathered 
 thousands found ; and as if to obliterate the traces of 
 her ghastly work, the mountain sent down a broad 
 stream of lava, which filled up the gulf where the 
 market-place had been, and sealed up the dust-buried 
 city, preserving it for after-ages like a fly in amber. 
 Those who escaped destruction fled, some to distant 
 parts of Limanora, some to other islands; but all were 
 buried for centuries in grovelling superstition. It was 
 out of the hermits and the country people that a new na- 
 tion was built up, which set itself as a first duty to es- 
 tablish Leomarie, that it should not be taken unawares 
 by any repetition of this great catastrophe. Nor has 
 it ever recurred, although there have been many pre- 
 monitory symptoms. The lava wells or vents eased 
 the labours of the internal fires and saved the island. 
 
 Their new and deeper wells, driven by the tirleo- 
 moran, and reaching the internal fires, gave them 
 greater sense of security. Irelium floats were let down 
 which would not be injured by the great heat, and 
 these, communicating with an indicator at the mouth, 
 told of every disturbance in the surface of the lake of 
 fire. All the indicators were connected with the centre 
 of force, and automatically recorded there all they had 
 to tell. The same system of centralised record placed 
 the various indications of the clinicians or earth-sensors 
 at every moment ready to the hand of the Leomo. 
 These clinicians were down every force-well and told 
 every variation in the heat, the density of the air, the 
 kind of vapour, the magnetism, and the movement of 
 
98 Limanora 
 
 the crust of the earth. No change in the earth below 
 the island down to a distance of thirty or forty miles 
 (the latter the greatest depth they had reached) was 
 neglected. Kvery indication was properly tabulated 
 and classified, and year was compared with year and 
 month with month, till the meaning and importance 
 of every change were exactly known. The furthest 
 records of the past, as well as those more recent, were 
 daily consulted in order to find the generalisation that 
 would fit any new symptom. The Leomo felt daily the 
 pulse of lyilaroma as a doctor would that of his most 
 valued fever patient. They knew that they had the 
 fate of the race in their hands, and no indication was 
 of too little importance for them to consider. What 
 would all the strivings and labours of the nation come 
 to if any laxity on their part should allow such a vol- 
 canic catastrophe to recur as had destroyed the capital 
 of old? 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 IN studying the practical aims and issues of earth 
 science, I was taught to manage their apparatus, 
 and to interpret every tremor in the earth's crust and 
 every indication of the instruments. I had already 
 been taught to make their apparatus, for my physical 
 discipline had begun several years before I was ad- 
 mitted to Fialume. It was in fact one of their primary 
 maxims that muscular exercises should go on contem- 
 poraneously with intellectual and spiritual pursuits, 
 that no citizen should be allowed to neglect for even a 
 day the development of the body, intimately as the soul 
 was interwoven with it. As soon as I was thoroughly 
 tested and put through my course of probation, the 
 training of my muscles was begun, and along with the 
 magnetic moulding of my brain-tissues went the de- 
 velopment of the force-tissues of the body and the 
 powers of my senses. But no one was permitted to 
 enter their great practical university or workshop till 
 he had become a certain devotee of the race. The 
 mysteries and arts and crafts which gave the nation its 
 peculiar powers could not be communicated to anyone 
 who might by some change become an alien. It was 
 thus that many years of residence in L,imanora passed 
 
 99 
 
ioo Limanora 
 
 before I was admitted to one of the marvels of the 
 island, the great valley of Rimla. 
 
 I well remember the evening of my initiation. The 
 night work was as a rule done by the younger men 
 and women of the community; the elders took their 
 turn at the machinery by day, as they had to husband 
 sleep during the hours of darkness and silence. I had 
 often wondered whither went my proparents at a fixed 
 hour every day; they vanished in the distance as the 
 sun began to wester, and they returned at evening with 
 high colour in their cheeks and the look of having used 
 their muscles with a will. Their physical life seemed 
 to take new impetus from these expeditions. 
 
 One day on their return they told me that I was to 
 be admitted to Rimla, which they explained to mean 
 the centre of force. The mature judgment of the com- 
 munity had decided that I could now be fully trusted. 
 My practical and muscular education was to begin. I 
 was to set out that evening with a band of young 
 workmen who kept the first watch of the night. 
 
 The sun had scarcely set when my escort arrived ; 
 and, as with my slow powers of locomotion I could not 
 be expected to keep up with them, I was placed in 
 one of their flight-cars. I had no companion, for the 
 whole band flew in front and drew the car by some 
 magnetic power unseen; and it was so light- hung and 
 so balanced by wings and domes and parachutes that 
 it seemed capable of being the sport of every wind. 
 Over the central ridge of the island we swept towards a 
 distant slope of Lilaroma. Suddenly underneath me 
 in the growing darkness there shone out in a deep 
 broad valley a vast dome of light, transparent enough 
 to reveal the flitting shadows underneath it. It seemed 
 the laboratory of a world. Innumerable streams flashed 
 
Rimla 101 
 
 under its upper edge; they sped from the summits of 
 the surrounding hills, or across the gorges from other 
 and more distant ranges. I had seen as we flew hun- 
 dreds of noble aqueducts spanning the valleys with 
 their arches and columns, some of them thousands of 
 feet up the slopes of L,ilaroma. All the waters which 
 the great mountain gathered from the clouds of heaven 
 made their way towards this marvellous domed valley. 
 At its mouth there was a deep gorge, whether artificial 
 or natural was not clear to me then ; and through the 
 chasm leaped a river mightier than any I had ever 
 seen; it seemed to be on its way to the sea, but I could 
 not trace its course farther than its massive gateway 
 out of the valley. Underneath the dome I could see 
 vast wheels of irelium move at all levels; they seemed 
 so fragile that a pebble thrown at them would break 
 them; yet each turned spindles of enormous power, 
 which moved swifter than lightning. I soon saw that 
 all the intricate machinery was sheathed in casings of 
 their translucent metal, along which flowed a slow, 
 glutinous stream of some liquid that dripped through 
 perforations on all points of friction. 
 
 As we alighted, night fell, and the titanic crystal 
 workshop gleamed with a soft radiance that seemed to 
 come from no centres, but was diffused everywhere in 
 the manner of the sunlight or the atmosphere. It was 
 like a vast ice cave of the Arctic circle lit by brief and 
 splendid summer. Fairy-like yet vast, it seemed a 
 fabric of some dream-world; but the splash and hiss 
 of the forceful waters and the unresting motion of the 
 machinery made it all real enough. The noises were 
 by no means deafening ; they were subdued and musical 
 with a halo of mysterious whisper like the sounds of 
 nature on a bright day of summer. Nor was the sight 
 
102 Limanora 
 
 bewildering to the eyes; there was too much symmetry 
 in it to perplex and dazzle. 
 
 My guides and companions tripped lightly and fear- 
 lessly through the labyrinth of movement till they 
 reached an edifice underneath the dome more elaborate 
 and majestic in its beauty than the noblest of Gothic 
 cathedrals; its towers and spires and pinnacles seemed 
 to aspire to the very stars as we looked up, and yet the 
 loftiest of them failed to reach the zenith of the vast 
 diaphanous roof. Towards this building radiated the 
 moving network of spindles and axles that the flashing 
 water-wheels turned, and out from it passed great trans- 
 parent tubes of metal, woven together fantastically into 
 a forest of gigantic trees and flowers. Nothing of this 
 arabesque of movement marred the colossal symmetry 
 of all beneath the crystal canopy. The church-like 
 building was the shrine of force. In it we found one 
 of the wise men of the elders seated on a high throne; 
 and beside him stood muscular forms ready to do his 
 behests. He laid his hand on a key-board of in- 
 numerable keys, each of which was marked with some 
 hieroglyphic. The attendants scattered to various 
 points along the mosaic floor, and watched the working 
 of the labyrinth of wires and tubes. At the touch of 
 the master the whole edifice vibrated, and a sound as 
 of the most sublime orchestration filled the vault. We 
 saw countless wheels and pistons move and flash be- 
 neath their transparent metal sheaths, and along each 
 tube, now lit as with starlight, we could watch the rush 
 of vapours or liquids towards their destination in the 
 various factories and houses in the valley and along the 
 mountain-side. 
 
 It was one of the masters of physical force who 
 manipulated the keys. He was controlling and har- 
 
Rimla 103 
 
 monising the vast power that was concentrated in 
 Rimla, and, instead of the demoniac jarring of the 
 engines and machinery which I had been accustomed 
 to in the industrial centres of other lands, the sounds 
 of the marvellous vault made sweet concord that ever 
 varied with th'e transference of power from purpose to 
 purpose. He was the pointsman of the numberless 
 railroads of energy, and at the same time the musician 
 of the titanic workshop. His will disciplined and 
 guided both the generation and the distribution of all 
 the force of the island. Our troop took the place of 
 that which had been on guard through the sunset and 
 twilight, and separated in pairs throughout the val- 
 ley, each pair taking under its charge one section of 
 the labyrinthine movement. My comrade, Ooriel, the 
 cousin of Thyriel, was a youth of splendid build, the 
 strength of his upper limbs seeming almost bovine, his 
 shoulders and arms not too large for his size, yet giving 
 the impression of gigantic power. I soon saw how 
 much he could do. We were to inspect the generators 
 of force underneath the dome. He first led me to the 
 various streams which came leaping down the slopes 
 and cliffs. One of them from some cause only to be 
 ascertained at the cone of Lilaroma was swollen into a 
 yellow torrent that threatened to overflow its lava 
 banks and flood the valley. In a moment he saw the 
 danger, and rushed to the wing-dam dividing the upper 
 course and controlling the amount of water which 
 should flow down to its various wheels and the amount 
 which unused should find its way to the great exit. He 
 found that the separating barrier had lost its automatic 
 motion through the sudden increase of the overflow and 
 the intrusion of a huge, boulder that had come down 
 like a battering-ram upon it. He set me to guide the 
 
104 Limanora 
 
 machinery and power that moved the dam to suit the 
 strength of the current, and then, fixing a narrow 
 irelium shield in the bottom of the channel, he leapt 
 into the torrent. The shield, I could see, keeping 
 erect just above him, shed the stones and boulders to 
 this side and that. Thus protected he raised a huge 
 hammer which he had taken with him and by three or 
 four well-directed blows split the obstacle into half a 
 dozen pieces; he then bent down and removed them 
 out of the way, and suddenly I felt the steering-gear 
 begin to work, and saw the dam swing round into the 
 channel leading to the centre of force, whilst the bulk 
 of the torrent found its way into the exit, which was 
 deeper and broader. The danger was past; but a 
 moment's hesitation, either in order to bring up the 
 heavier tools or to call other assistance, would have 
 ruined many of the great works upon the levels below 
 and stopped the whole of the operations of Rimla for 
 several days. 
 
 Ooriel shook the water from his garments as he leapt 
 out, and in a few minutes he was on his way with me 
 to the other brooks, cascades, and conduits which 
 gathered the aqueous forces of Lilaroma into this valley 
 of power. Not a drop that fell from the tributary 
 clouds about the head of the mountain but did its work 
 for this singular people; the moisture-lifting power of 
 the sun, and the force of gravitation that fought with 
 it were alike made the servants and yoke-fellows of the 
 L,imanorans. 
 
 They refused to waste the energy that nature gave 
 them so freely. This I saw more fully illustrated as 
 I followed Ooriel. Having inspected all the forms of 
 stream-power, he sped round to the side of the valley 
 nearest to the western shore of the island; there in a 
 
Rimla 105 
 
 great cave or hollow in the rock, brilliantly lit, I saw 
 myriads of wires and cables concentrating from all 
 westward directions on an immense block of labramor 
 or irelium alloy. This, he explained to me, was the 
 great electric storage-battery of the waves. From the 
 north-west and the south-west came the chief storms 
 and currents that broke on the shores of the island; and 
 underneath the beetling cliffs of lava erected on the 
 western shores they had a line of long, lofty caves run- 
 ning some hundreds of feet underneath into the land; 
 in these huge vanes and water-wheels were hung from 
 the roofs and the higher portions of the sides; and the 
 waves as they ran in and out beat their paddles and 
 made them whirl with lightning swiftness. The mo- 
 tion thus communicated was turned by their electro- 
 generators into currents of electric force which found 
 its way by the network of wires and cables that I saw 
 into this enormous storage-battery. In another series 
 of caves they cooped up the water of the full tides by 
 means of gigantic dams and sluice-gates, and this dur- 
 ing ebb drove huge wheels and turbines and thus sent 
 the power of the moon into their treasure-house of 
 power. Every storm that ruffled the surface of the 
 ocean, every current that swept past their shores, every 
 ebb or flow of their tides added its quota to the energy 
 accumulated in their electric treasury, a far more won- 
 derful concentration of wealth than any Sindbad's val- 
 ley or Golconda. Here was ready to the hand of man 
 power greater than all that the nations and the gen- 
 erations had ever been capable of. 
 
 And the winds had been made as much the slaves 
 of this people as the waves; for another great cavern 
 that we visited was the storehouse of the energy of the 
 winds. In every gorge and pass and gully around 
 
io6 Limanora 
 
 Lil aroma up almost to its crater had been erected im- 
 mense windmills, which as they revolved generated 
 electricity; this found its way from all points by mas- 
 sive cables buried in the earth to the conservator 
 of energy in this second cave. Ooriel tested the wires 
 to see that they were not leaking anywhere and tested 
 the batteries for faults, and finding everything in good 
 order, we passed into a third power treasury in the 
 rock. This was vastest of all; for into it there poured 
 the energy of the power-wells which was not needed 
 by the private houses spread over the face of the island. 
 As soon as the head of steam was shut off from the 
 machinery or the tubes of any mansion, its whole force 
 was turned upon an engine near the mouth of the well, 
 which kept generating electric force day and night. 
 The accumulation of energy in this cave of the wells 
 would have been enough to supply ten times the power 
 that Europe had ever used in her industries. 
 
 In order to round off our tour of inspection, Ooriel 
 led me to another but smaller cave which had just been 
 fitted up with storage-batteries. This was the cave of 
 the sun. For generations it had been contended that 
 most of the power from the sun's rays was lost, even 
 when they reached the earth; and the inventors had 
 at last worked out the problem of its utilisation. I had 
 noticed as I flew over the country in a faleena vast 
 gleaming spaces sparkling like gigantic diamonds in 
 the sunlight. These were the reflectors which collected 
 the sunbeams and concentrated their heat and light 
 into power. Upon the slope of lyilaronia they utilised 
 the miles of snow surface and gathered their gleam into 
 a few heat-engines that sent the generated electricity 
 into Rimla. 
 
 Vast as the force was which in these various ways 
 
Rimla 107 
 
 was bent into the service of this people, there seemed 
 still to be the need of increasing it. Never a week 
 passed without some facilitation of the collection and 
 distribution of energy by an improvement in the ma- 
 chinery. The mechanic families were ever busy com- 
 peting with one another in invention and practical 
 application of some principle or idea, and the pioneering 
 families who rode imagination to the verge of practica- 
 bility marched ahead of them, mapping tracks and 
 highways into the unknown future. One proposal was 
 to utilise the magnetism of the earth as a new source of 
 energy, and already one of the mechanical families was 
 far on the way to its realisation. Another that was 
 near at hand was the use of the expansion of their 
 liquefied and solidified air for purposes of power. One 
 plan somewhat farther off from the realm of practica- 
 bility was the utilisation of the primal ether by means 
 of its compression and expansion. Yet they were 
 working at it in full hope of finding a solution of the 
 problem at some unexpected turn of their imaginative 
 road into the darkness. They had achieved so much 
 that they had almost boundless faith in their ultimate 
 power to solve all problems presented to their minds. 
 They would face the death of the whole race sooner 
 than the thought of ceasing to push forward into the 
 night that encircled life. 
 
 My mind was almost paralysed at the thought of the 
 vastness of the power controlled in this centre of force; 
 but it explained to me the ease with which they could 
 drive their leomorans miles and miles through the solid 
 crust of the earth, the power they had over the vol- 
 canic fires of Lilaroma, the strength of the blast they 
 could send far out to sea from their storm-cone, and 
 the general facility with which they could control and 
 
io8 Limanora 
 
 use even the most titanic forces of nature. I did not 
 wonder now that they were the masters rather 'than the 
 servants of nature, especially when I saw that by the 
 strength and nicety of their machines they could con- 
 centrate all this tremendous force upon any single point 
 or distribute it over a wide area at the striking of a key 
 on the great key-board of forces. I have seen one of 
 the masters of energy turn the whole current from the 
 ten thousand services it was doing throughout the 
 island upon the making of a diamond; so enormous was 
 the temperature it generated in a few moments that a 
 piece of carbon, submitted to the heat and pressure, 
 came forth a magnificent jewel, gleaming and sheening 
 in the light. But this was for no silly purpose of per- 
 sonal ornamentation ; it was meant for the friction edge 
 of a leomoran down where it bit into the rock. It was 
 the easiest thing in the world for this people with all 
 the concentration of power they had at their call to 
 follow nature in her most occult or tremendous pro- 
 cesses. There was not a metal they could not produce 
 with their high temperatures and enormous pressures. 
 It is true that all other operations had to be stopped in 
 order to transmute rapidly common materials into gold, 
 irelium, or diamonds; but it could be done, and they 
 had no need to dig into the bowels of the earth like 
 other men for the more precious metals and crystals 
 which had accumulated there in the volcanic or chemi- 
 cal past. 
 
 It was one of their commonest sayings that no science 
 which was not creative was worthy of the name. True, 
 there were often long tracts of scientific investigation 
 that seemed entirely barren; and many of their re- 
 searches seemed to lead nowhither. But when I in- 
 quired more minutely I found that the investigators had 
 
Rimla 109 
 
 realised many of the practical applications of the dis- 
 covery when once they should reach it. They re- 
 garded as futile all abstract inquiries which had only 
 a distant and unforeseen chance of ending in some- 
 thing useful. Even their astronomy had a keen eye 
 to the possibilities of their future; it led not only to a 
 deeper knowledge of the living heart of creation, and to 
 a wider enjoyment of the pleasures of imagination and 
 faith, but to the purposes of the immediate life; it gave 
 them immortal forms for their art and especially their 
 architecture;' it moulded or suggested their divinest 
 music; it brought into even their physical life influences 
 unlike those of the earth, and they hoped with full faith 
 that through this they might catch the wandering 
 thoughts or voices of the beings of other worlds and at 
 last reach the power of emigration from star to star. 
 
 Their most creative science was chemistry; for this 
 had reached the secrets of nature's most mysterious 
 processes, and had imitated and generally abbreviated 
 the workings of her great laboratory. The Limanorans 
 did not need to grow the plants and trees that used 
 to produce their food. Agriculture had ceased to be 
 necessary for them except as a part of landscape- 
 gardening. The elements and combinations that used 
 to be extracted from their harvests in order to support 
 and exhilarate life could be created directly in the 
 chemical laboratories. Everything needed as diet was 
 drawn straight from the earth without the long pro- 
 cess of growth and culination. They had the prime 
 factors of sustenance in unlimited quantity and purest 
 form with the minimum of labour, and they could give 
 to these the exact quality and refinement which would 
 bear them straight to the various tissues or cells of 
 the body without the need of its offensive chemical 
 
1 10 Limanora 
 
 processes. Most of the chemistry of life-sustenance 
 was accomplished before the food entered the human 
 system, and the space and energy of the body that had 
 before gone to the alimentary processes of life were 
 now free for other and higher functions. Pharmacy 
 and chemical science combined to create all that the 
 constitution required not only for its support and fric- 
 tionless continuance, but for its progress towards longer 
 life and more ethereal texture. Their medicine had 
 ages before passed the crude stage of mere cure of dis- 
 ease. They laughed at the idea of the science as 
 merely therapeutic: it must be creative. The inter- 
 relations of the higher and lower elements of the nature 
 were unremittingly studied in the case of every mem- 
 ber of the community, and every means of change in 
 them that would lead to the ennobling of lyimanoran 
 humanity was carefully prescribed. 
 
 I was led through their food factories and grew 
 deeply interested in their processes of analysis and 
 combination. They seemed never to have any hesita- 
 tion about the exact quantity of each element and the 
 exact temperature and pressure needed to produce any 
 given kind of sustenance. One of the most singular 
 departments of these factories was that in which they 
 had yoked the infinitesimal plant and animal life of the 
 universe to the chemicalisation of their food and medi- 
 cine. They knew how to utilise all the life they could 
 come across, however microscopic, and here under their 
 marvellously powerful magnifying instruments I could 
 see the minutest of all life enslaved to their purposes. 
 Nothing could surpass the exactitude with which they 
 had defined the functions and spheres of these mys- 
 terious beings invisible to the naked eye. Each had 
 its own department of industry. No one of them inter- 
 
Rimla 1 1 1 
 
 fered with the other. It was life put to its best pur- 
 pose of sustaining the noblest life. When I saw the 
 huge irelium tubes bearing out the results in aerial or 
 vaporous form, I grew anxious to test the effects at the 
 other end of them. At my own request I was taken 
 one day to Oomalefa, the great series of public halls 
 and baths which formed the chief centre of associative 
 life in the island. I had not known of the institution 
 before; for I was still too little advanced in physical 
 nature to be clear of the inner chemical processes 
 needed for nutrition, and it had not been thought 
 necessary to show me a section of their public life in 
 which I could have no special share. But, now that 
 my own eagerness for knowledge had brought me to 
 the stage of education which demanded insight into this 
 institution, they were willing that I should inspect it 
 and see all its peculiar features. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 OOMALEFA 
 
 THESE halls of nutrition and medication were situ- 
 ated on a great promontory extending miles into 
 the sea. It had been ledged and bastioned with lava 
 walls, and round the gleaming edifice ran a balcony or 
 rocky platform, which broke the fury of any ambitious 
 billows that might threaten the crystal translucence of 
 the walls. Here, overlooking the sea, the lyimanorans 
 could drink in its medicating breath; here in the vast 
 hall could they take that restful exercise which is the 
 first essential of all life; here they could commune with 
 their own souls or with the stars and listen to the ever- 
 changing rhythm of the waves as they broke into spray 
 or climbed to the rocky wall beneath. They considered 
 this chamber of the ocean and the stars as more uiedi- 
 cant and alimentary than any they could make with 
 human hands; hence it was that they had thrown out 
 this great projection into the sea, where they could 
 spend most of their hours of nutrition. 
 
 Along its highest ridge ran a series of the noblest 
 buildings that ever met my eye, unlike all other edifices 
 I had ever heard of in style of architecture and method 
 of grouping, but resembling in their bewildering variety 
 and inherent symmetry the gleaming clusters of night. 
 
 112 
 
Oomalefa 113 
 
 Countless points of fire aimed at the heavens from 
 spires and towers which shone with rainbow fluctuation 
 in the sun. There was a milky way of jewelled pin- 
 nacles; and around were strewn fire-flashing constel- 
 lations of jewel minarets and domes. Innumerable 
 centres of varied roof and aspiring form led the eye by 
 their incompleteness to some great centre; and soon it 
 rested calmly on the vast yet ever-broken and chang- 
 ing dome that like a snow-clad mountain-ridge mas- 
 tered every spirit that was drawn to it. Alone this 
 galaxy of clustered starry forms stood out above the 
 sea, undwarfed by any neighbouring land and master- 
 ful over the billows below it. A true temple was it 
 even in the presence of the universe of suns that 
 stretched out into endless night. Within it surely 
 might the spirit of man feel no unholy doubts of its 
 immortal destiny or of its kinship with the divine. 
 Pure and noble orison might here be raised to the 
 Maker of the makers of this shrine; all trivial and 
 mean thoughts would here be sacrilege. When night 
 fell, the stars in the heavens held spirit communion 
 with this their brother. This was Oomalefa, or the 
 jewel of immortal longings. 
 
 My first visit to Oomalefa is engraved upon the 
 record of my past, for it was one of my first expeditions 
 under the guidance of Thyriel. The beauty of her 
 spirit dawned upon me as the day passed; afterwards 
 I came to see that it was everything that my own 
 needed, but at the time I could not reason out the 
 nature of my feelings. She grew upon me as the day 
 upon the night, and when we parted it was as if my 
 sun had set; helpless and stumbling, my spirit groped 
 for the guiding dawn again; I was forlorn, reaching 
 out for my other half in a lonely universe. 
 
IH Limanora 
 
 Her presence doubtless coloured all the scenes 
 through which I passed, yet they were enough of 
 themselves to impress my mind. We alighted on the 
 mainland and made our way out towards the archway 
 which spanned the root of the promontory. The 
 weight of our bodies as we stood upon a certain spot 
 swung up the transparent portcullis, and we found 
 ourselves in a spacious entrance hall, its roof a moving 
 orrery of the sky of night, its walls lit pictures of 
 the ocean around framed in living sections of the sea 
 alive with sea-denizens, its floor a tidal beach of sand, 
 soft yet firm, whereon the sea ever seemed to cream 
 and retreat. It had all the beauty and the freshness 
 of the shore beneath the starred night when the tide is 
 making. 
 
 The next chamber we entered was as vast, and was 
 as many-coloured as the rainbow. It was the index 
 hall ; for here were marked the name and number and 
 situation of every chamber in Oomalefa, and under- 
 neath each name was shown in graphic experiment the 
 effect of the different medicated atmospheres upon the 
 various tissues of the human body. Complete repro- 
 ductions of the bones and muscles, the flesh and blood, 
 the cells and nerves and coatings were here enclosed 
 and the transformations pictured in the transparent 
 sections of the walls. An expert from the family 
 having the manufacture of each atmosphere under its 
 charge stood by and guided and explained the process. 
 It was a physiological laboratory, in which every 
 lyimanoran might see with his own eyes and hear ex- 
 plained by one who knew, every modification in the 
 tissues that a longer or shorter time spent in any 
 chamber would produce. 
 
 Twin with this hall was that of measurement and 
 
Oomalefa 115 
 
 consultation. Here every entrant had all his import- 
 ant organs and tissues tested scientifically, and was 
 then told the atmospheres which would best suit the 
 development of any or all of his parts and faculties. 
 He stated the chief purpose of his existence, and con- 
 sulted the experts on the directions that would best 
 lead to it. He was told of any defect in his organic 
 functions and advised how it could be remedied. After 
 this consultation he could return to the hall of experi- 
 ment and see with his own eyes the effect of the various 
 atmospheres upon the unseen portions of his system. 
 Then he was permitted to enter the halls of nutrition 
 and medication, and choosing those which he specially 
 needed that day spent the time required in each. He 
 found exit again by the hall of measurement, and there 
 another testing revealed whether he had been success- 
 ful in his alimentary sojourn in Oomalefa, and whether 
 he would have to remain longer or have a certain at- 
 mosphere introduced into his sleeping-chamber in his 
 own mansion. 
 
 Every Limanoran except the young and undeveloped 
 had as the result of attention to health in past ages 
 what they called the conscience of the health. This 
 put them on the alert the moment any function was 
 disordered, and off they went to Oomalefa to consult 
 the medical families on the exact nature of the de- 
 rangement, its locality, and the diet or treatment that 
 would restore to complete health. Few or none of full 
 maturity but would feel this sanitary sense within 
 them like a whip or goad which would not let them 
 rest till the evil element was swept out. It was a daily 
 occurrence to meet some islander hurrying post-haste 
 for consultation and medication, and I came at last to 
 be ashamed of the lethargy which would let ine remain 
 
n6 Limanora 
 
 inert under some decay of nerve or tissue in its primary 
 stages until it had resulted in ache or pain. The feel- 
 ing of lassitude or the absence of the sense of the full 
 tide of life made me rush in fear and trembling to the 
 hall of consultation. In my former existence I had 
 had the embryo of this sanitary conscience in the 
 pains or prostration accompanying disease, but then the 
 warning generally came too late. Now I was sensitive 
 to the slightest derangement of any tissue or part of my 
 system and without the goad of ache flew to Oomalefa 
 to find the remedy; otherwise I felt that I was doing 
 wrong to my future and my posterity and to the future 
 of the whole race. Even the actual present of the peo- 
 ple was affected; the slightest disorder of my constitu- 
 tion seemed to weigh upon the spirits of my companions 
 and friends, for they believed there was contagion in 
 every disease. As strongly did they hold that there 
 was a contagion of health, and would not allow any 
 member of their medical families or council to approach 
 a citizen even in consultation unless the healer was 
 himself whole in every atom of his constitution. To be 
 sound in body and spirit was as sanative of the de- 
 rangements of others as any active remedy. 
 
 Kvery citizen was taught enough of the medical 
 science of the island to know what was wrong in him- 
 self or his neighbour; for every citizen was a possible 
 father or mother; and for parenthood a thorough and 
 practical acquaintance with the laws of health and the 
 causes and cures of the commonest diseases was a first 
 essential. The Limanorans laughed at the absurdity 
 of Western civilisation in allowing men and women to 
 generate and bring up children with no more knowledge 
 of their constitution than if they were mere animals. 
 Still oftener they mourned that so much human gen- 
 
Oomalefa 117 
 
 eration in the world was left to the chance dictates of 
 caprice, and that most medicine and education were 
 only blind groping in the dark. That nothing should 
 be done on mere authority was one of the first prin- 
 ciples of their civilisation. 
 
 The medical councillor knew that he had a keen 
 critic in every citizen; and he had to justify and make 
 clear every process he recommended, in order that 
 faith in him might remain clear. His sole advantage 
 was his fuller and deeper knowledge and the faculty he 
 had acquired from long familiarity with the questions 
 and problems he had to deal with. Kach member of 
 the medical families and council had a special section 
 of the human system to explore, besides having a 
 mastery of the whole. It was this division of labour 
 that caused their science of the human tissues to ad- 
 vance so swiftly. Not a moment of their work was lost. 
 
 I had thought at first that a people so healthy and 
 vigorous and devoted to such wholesome ways of life 
 had no need of medical science; but I soon saw that 
 their general sanativeness demanded a more advanced 
 science and art than the rude quackery of Western 
 medicine. All the worst diseases of maturity in 
 Europe, fevers, consumption, diphtheria, rheumatism, 
 indigestion, and the rest, were relegated in I/imanora 
 to childhood, and were then as mild and innocuous as 
 scarlatina or measles or whooping-cough; they had be- 
 come the enemies of unformed tissues, and found little 
 to batten upon even in them. Generally they were 
 checked in their first stage by the medical knowledge 
 of the parents or proparents, and it was the rarest oc- 
 currence to have to resort to the deeper knowledge of 
 the medical council, rarest of all where childhood was 
 concerned. 
 
n8 Limanora 
 
 I rushed to the conclusion that the medical families 
 would have nothing to investigate but the development 
 of the tissues and organs and faculties as they existed 
 in Limanora; but I was disabused of this idea by the 
 occurrence of an epidemic in the island not long after 
 I arrived there. It took the form of dream-disturbed 
 sleep, which held the'faculties in its grasp beyond the 
 usual number of hours of rest. The patients tossed 
 and moaned and imagined horrors of the past of hu- 
 manity and animalhood as still occurring in their lives. 
 It abridged the hours of consciousness, and left the 
 sufferers spent and unexhilarated. It was no fever, 
 but only a languor that attacked the imaginative facul- 
 ties and made them morbid and secretive in their activi- 
 ties. My brain-tissues were perhaps not fine enough 
 to be attacked by it, and I escaped; but I was greatly 
 distressed to find that Thyriel had been touched by the 
 epidemic. My anxiety led me to know all that the 
 specialists discovered concerning it. It could not be 
 fatal, they assured me; for no epidemic had been fatal 
 to Limanorans for many centuries. It only meant the 
 loss of a valuable portion of the time of working. In 
 the other islands, the winged scouts brought the news, 
 it had swept half the populations into the grave; but 
 so vigorous and healthy were the various tissues of our 
 people that no disease could produce anything but a 
 temporary derangement. 
 
 By means of their skilful surgery they soon isolated 
 under the microscope some specimens of the living 
 organisms that produced the disease; they experi- 
 mented with all the elements and their combinations 
 and saw what encouraged them, what attenuated them, 
 and what killed them. It was not long before every 
 trace of the microscopic creature had vanished from 
 
Oomalefa 119 
 
 the, island; there remained only the knowledge and the 
 antidote that would enable their outposts or messengers 
 through the sky to resist its attacks, should they ever 
 encounter it again. Limanorans who were sent on 
 missions out of the country had to be made epidemic- 
 proof by inoculation against known diseases before set- 
 ting out. But it sometimes happened, especially to 
 scouts into the higher regions on the outskirts of the 
 earth's atmosphere, that they brought back with them 
 symptoms that were new, and a new disease and a new 
 microbe had to be added to their medical lists. It was 
 explained to me that our solar system was travelling 
 every moment of its existence into new regions of 
 space; and as it moved it passed from time to time 
 through swarms of minute and attenuated life which 
 had been left myriads of ages before in its tracks by 
 some diseased member of another system. This micro- 
 scopic life was in its own special way immortal, and 
 could subsist on the scattered material life that floated 
 though the ether unclaimed by any planetary centre. 
 It was out of such waifs of life peopling space that a 
 new world made a new beginning in vital history; as 
 soon as it cooled down sufficiently, after creative col- 
 lision and separation, to allow of individual existence 
 upon it, myriads of these microscopic inhabitants of 
 space took possession of it, and began again the strug- 
 gle of life which was the universal law of infinity, and 
 meant the ascension of all energy through higher and 
 higher circles. 
 
 Disease was but a form of this eternal struggle for 
 existence; it was the attempt of invisible lower forms 
 to master the higher human tissues and make them 
 their feeding-ground. The original enemies of man, 
 the wild beasts, were subdued or tamed or driven forth 
 
i2o Limanora 
 
 into the deserts as soon as savage life was passed. 
 Then began the fiercer contest for the possession of his 
 own cells and tissues and organs. Enemies that he 
 could not see migrated out of the surrounding elements 
 into his system as soon as it became delicate enough to 
 stir their appetite, and for ages there were no weapons 
 against them; chance now and again offered one; but 
 generally he groped about in his frantic ignorance for 
 anything that would ease the pain from these gnawing 
 foes within him. Out of this rose by slow steps a kind 
 of quackery they called the science of medicine; but 
 the conflict still remained unequal; the invisible ene- 
 mies had the best of it, and they were ever being re- 
 cruited by new enemies out of space, which bred new 
 and more appalling plagues. Not till it was found that 
 the newer these settlers were the more virulent were 
 their ravages was there any chance of a real science 
 of medicine arising from this everlasting agonism. 
 
 The first beginnings of a true science appeared in the 
 attempts to deplete the soil by setting tamed and ex- 
 hausted specimens of their foes to feed on it. A soil 
 once reft of the elements that invited and fitted any 
 disease germs seldom suffered in any serious degree 
 from them again. Soon by their new electro-micro- 
 scopes or clirolans they were able to classify the in- 
 finitely minute foods of these infinitely minute pasturers 
 on the human tissue. Their microscopes, enormously 
 though they had added to the power of human vision 
 into the atomic world, had been unable to advance be- 
 yond the discovery and complete classification of the 
 invisible organisms. Their clirolans combined pho- 
 tography with electro-microscopy in such a way that 
 every change in the systems of their minute foes was 
 recorded; they were able to see the elements taken from 
 
Oomalefa 121 
 
 the human system absorbed and sifted of their nutri- 
 tive powers, and the debris or manure ejected and left 
 to poison the human tissues; it was not the presence of 
 the organisms themselves, or even their destruction of 
 essential elements that generally produced the disease, 
 but the accumulation of the exhausted excreta, clog- 
 ging the various functions. At first medical science 
 satisfied itself with cultivating feeble and underbred 
 germs, and turning them loose on the human body in 
 order to make them exhaust the elements which at- 
 tracted their kin. Next they discovered the chemical 
 combination that, introduced into the body, would neu- 
 tralise the poisonous qualities of the bacterial debris. 
 Last of all by their vimolans or photo electric analysers 
 they found the exact food which attracted each form of 
 microbe to the tissue and nourished them there; and 
 they experimented electro-chemically till they knew 
 the element that, combining with this bacterial food, 
 would neutralise its attraction and yet leave the body 
 as efficient and healthy as before; in short, they could 
 prescribe the antidote to every disease that had ever 
 enfeebled any portion of their system. Diseases were 
 nothing else than the infinitesimal life of space fixing 
 itself, after an eternity of detachment and attenuation, 
 upon a living soil fat with the elements of attraction 
 and nourishment and yet too feeble to hold out against 
 its ravages. They drew an analogy from their old 
 agriculture; weeds were nothing but plants finding at 
 last the conditions which would give them the victory 
 in the struggle for existence and would enable them to 
 grow so rapidly and luxuriantly as to choke all neigh- 
 bours; and their old science of earth culture set them 
 on the way to a true medical science. They had 
 watched with their clirolans the selective processes of 
 
i22 Limanora 
 
 the roots of each weed, and by various analysers had 
 found the combination of elements in the soil and air 
 by which it overcame its rivals; they then discovered 
 the special component which, uniting with its food, 
 would deprive the weed of its nutritive powers. Thus 
 were they able to encourage or discourage on any soil 
 any growth they might select. But agriculture had 
 been completely superseded by their later chemistry. 
 The best thing it had left to their civilisation was the 
 cue it gave by analogy to their true science of thera- 
 peutics. 
 
 How minute and detailed was their study of the in- 
 finitesimal life of the universe, I could not have 
 imagined without having seen it in practice. They 
 had advanced so far with their clirolans and vimolans 
 that they were now discovering a still more infinitesi- 
 mal world which was parasitic on microscopic life. 
 There had been elements and effects at times discover- 
 able in their therapeutic problems that disturbed the 
 certainty of their conclusions and solutions. Again 
 and again their foresights had been mistaken, their 
 calculations thrown out. Most often was this the case 
 on the border-land of the moral world. They had 
 known in their own far past history, and in the more 
 recent history of the other islands of the archipelago, 
 the demoralising effect of epidemics and plagues, especi- 
 ally of a new and vigorous type. For a time the people 
 who came within the influence of the disease seemed to 
 return almost to savagery. And yet every plague 
 differed slightly from every other in its moral results. 
 One made the whole population thieves; another made 
 them liars; a third stirred up a fury of lust; a fourth 
 delivered over the soul to despair of life, and a fifth to 
 disloyalty and intrigue. When once their attention 
 
Oomalefa 123 
 
 was called to this widespread demoralisation after an 
 epidemic, they began to watch the effect of individual 
 illnesses on the mind; and in every case there were re- 
 sults, emotional, moral, or intellectual, that were not to 
 be accounted for by mere weakness of the body or irri- 
 tation of the nerves, or by the poisonous debris that 
 the minute organisms threw off. 
 
 They invented still more powerful clirolans, which 
 revealed an intensity of life they had not imagined. 
 The disease germs brought into the human system still 
 more minute parasites that at once attacked the brain 
 and the nerve-centres. In one disease these invisible 
 vermin preferred one set of brain-cells, in another they 
 preferred another. The therapeutic families engaged 
 in the investigations were only just coming to classify 
 these moral and intellectutl parasites of the disease 
 germs. Nor had they yet been able to discover any 
 cure for these but the sympathetic proximity of strong 
 and noble minds. The look from the eyes of some of 
 their greatest doctors, even the touch of their hands, 
 seemed to drive the living evil forth, or at least to at- 
 tenuate and enfeeble it. The mind of the patient rose 
 triumphant in the presence of one of these wise and 
 healing personalities. It had been for ages the tradi- 
 tional maxim of polity that only the loftiest and most 
 advanced, as well as most sympathetic natures should 
 be allowed to specialise for the medical castes, or marry 
 into the medical families. None were allowed to nurse 
 the sick but the beautiful souls of the community; 
 their mere presence seemed to strengthen the fainting 
 heart in the struggle for life. As the mind grew strong, 
 the ravages of the disease lessened. For now with 
 their more powerful clirolans they found that, as the 
 brain or nerve-centres acquired strength, the parasitic, 
 
1 24 Limanora 
 
 invisible life took its way back to its original hosts and 
 preyed on them. It was indeed one of the maxims of 
 their community to keep the system of every individual 
 at its highest point of vitality. A loss of exhilaration 
 in any citizen was marked at once by his neighbours, 
 just like a lapse into criminality in Western civilisation. 
 It was the symptom of possible disease with all its 
 power of contagion. The sense of active vitalisation 
 (what we call the spirits) was the barometer of the 
 sanitary, moral, and intellectual atmosphere, and 
 every L,imanoran was keenly sensitive to all its 
 changes. 
 
 In Oomalefa it was impossible to conceal the source 
 of the degeneration. The specialised families of the 
 medical council knew where to apply their investiga- 
 tory instruments. Kven With their own eyes and ears 
 and electric sense they could often detect the exact 
 nesting-place of the intrusive microbes; for though to 
 my muddy senses their bodies were as opaque as my 
 own, except for a certain pellucid light which illumi- 
 nated the skin and made the complexion so beautiful, 
 the processes of life seemed an open book to their acute 
 observation. Their hearing could detect any change 
 in the normal beat of the heart and even the passage of 
 the blood in the veins, which, Thyriel has told me, 
 sounded like the liquid rhythm of mountain-rills. 
 Their eyes could see through the skin the delicate 
 veinings underneath and detect every nervous or mus- 
 cular effort. Their magnetic sense could tell them 
 whether thought or emotion was developing in the 
 centres or passing along the nerves. The very casing 
 of the brain seemed to them to be semi-transparent, and 
 they were conscious, though dimly, of the movements 
 of even the finer tissues, non-existent to my senses ex- 
 
Oomalefa 125 
 
 cept under the microscope. Hence it was that each 
 Limanoran had an isolated dwelling-place for himself. 
 It would have been impossible for him to find rest 
 or sleep close to the living and unresting functions 
 of another human system; and it was only the 
 rhythm of the movements and sounds of all the organs 
 and processes which made proximity to one another 
 tolerable. I have often seen Thyriel in raptures 
 over the noble harmony of a healthy and virtuous 
 personality; to her ear the 'pulsations and other 
 sounds were like a majestic piece of music; to her 
 eye the rush and hurry of the vital processes were 
 not unlike the motions of the starry system of night; 
 whilst the exhilaration through the electric sense 
 from the speeding thoughts and emotions of a sound 
 mind in a sound body was at times ecstatic. The 
 nobler the soul that she was conscious of in her 
 neighbour, the keener was her enjoyment of proximity. 
 It was this that made only the purest and greatest 
 minds in the healthiest bodies admissible to the medical 
 families or council. There was a curative power in 
 their very presence. 
 
 With their clirolans and vimolans and other aids to 
 the senses the medical sages could detect the slightest 
 jar in the rhythm of the system and locate it with the 
 greatest ease. Having located it, they knew the para- 
 site that had begun to multiply and clog the organ or 
 tissue or function, and the treatment that it required. 
 Every moral fault had its corresponding disease and 
 infinitesimal parasite they held; and so rapidly could 
 the minute organisms increase and so impalpably and 
 easily could they migrate from human being to human 
 being that the contagion of vice was a thousand times 
 more appalling in its ravages than that of mere physi- 
 
i26 Limanora 
 
 cal disease. There was great trepidation when any 
 ailment attacked the body of a Limanoran, and he was 
 heartily ashamed of its appearance and alarmed lest it 
 should spread, or lead to its natural consequence, moral 
 degeneracy; but, if the parasitic attack was found to be 
 on one of the higher centres of life, the alarm was great 
 and wide, for it was far more subtle in its insidiousness 
 and omnipotence. The patient was at once quaran- 
 tined and only the noblest of medical sages could break 
 his isolation. All the powers of his mind and of the 
 minds of his nurses and medical attendants were con- 
 centrated on the offending tissue, and strong thermo- 
 electric aids were applied to it, so that it should soon 
 regain its old vitality and drive the intruders out. In 
 the chamber was kept up an atmosphere of the special 
 elements which would nourish the degenerate cells and 
 also of those that would destroy the microbes ; only as 
 a last resort was surgery used and the part laid open to 
 the local application of re- agents against the hostile 
 organisms. The ruder and older forms of evil passion, 
 envy, malice, hatred, jealousy, contempt, vanity 
 rarely appeared in grown men and women at that ad- 
 vanced stage of their civilisation. They had become 
 diseases of the immature periods of life, when the soul 
 was passing through the primitive phases of the devel- 
 opment of mankind. They were the ailments of child- 
 hood and youth ; and hundreds of the lyimanorans now 
 grew up without once experiencing any one of them. 
 When they did appear, isolation was the first step ; and 
 the parents or proparents could generally cope with the 
 moral disease without having recourse to a medical 
 family or to Oomalefa. Every traditional method of 
 cure was applied most vigorously, for they shrank from 
 the thought of leaving any seed of the contagion in 
 
Oomalefa 127 
 
 the system to germinate at some later and more danger- 
 ous period of life. 
 
 When the home circle was unable to detect the exact 
 character of the disturbing influence, the young patient 
 was brought under the gaze and the tests of the medi- 
 cal families. If their clirolans and vimolans failed to 
 identify the parasitic evil, they tried their magnetome- 
 ters, which were so delicate as to indicate the first be- 
 ginnings of mental or moral disorder. By means of 
 another magnetic instrument they were able to ex- 
 tract portions of the microbic debris, and then with 
 their photo-electric analysers or vimolans they sepa- 
 rated its various elements and saw what moral evils 
 had entered into the system. They had the physical 
 equivalents and results of every form of guilt and 
 crime, and thus in its very inception a moral taint 
 could be detected and cured before it had time to ap- 
 pear in the words or conduct of the patient. Most 
 often this taint was due to some ancestral weakness of 
 tissue inviting the swarms of parasitic microbes through 
 which the earth is for ever passing. On the first signs 
 of lowering vitality the pedigree of the patient was 
 consulted for the record of the retrogressive tendencies 
 of his forefathers, and not till the possibilities of atavism 
 were exhausted were the other tests resorted to. 
 
 It was on the basis of these two coincident causes, 
 degeneration of tissue and microbic life in the atmo- 
 sphere, that they were able to explain the strange 
 contemporaneity of revolutions, panics, wars, religious 
 revivals, and widespread outbreaks of crime or im- 
 morality in various parts of the earth. The planetary 
 system as it sweeps through space cannot help passing 
 through vast oceans of living microscopic matter which 
 have drifted from other universes geological ages before 
 
128 Limanora 
 
 in their unresting migration from infinity to infinity, 
 and which lead a feeble death-in-life till they meet with 
 fit atmospheres, such as will make them strong and 
 teeming. For new-born worlds, just ready for the 
 settlement of life upon them, this is a blessing; but 
 for those having upon them highly developed organised 
 life it is too often a curse. Kvery nation or tribe where 
 civilisation has become enfeebled by luxury or immoral 
 systems of polity or domestic manners becomes the 
 prey of the new swarm, which multiplies and spreads 
 itself on a fat and unexhausted soil with the swiftness of 
 a long unsated appetite. The people rise in epidemic 
 fury, and every institution suffers from the madness. 
 In different ages the frenzy takes different forms, but 
 there is a striking simultaneity in these outbreaks all 
 over history; and only this intrusion of cosmic infinites- 
 imal life on the weakened higher centres of the human 
 system can explain it fully. None but the peoples who 
 have ordered their existence on the moral laws of the 
 universe and thus kept the tissues strong, solid, and 
 unyielding can resist the plague-like mania. The result 
 of these epidemics was in the end, they held, a benefit 
 to humanity; for they swept away most of the tainted 
 life from the earth and left the healthier constitutions 
 able for another advance in intellectual power or in 
 morality. The Ivimanoran medicists were ever testing 
 and analysing the atmosphere of the earth for these in- 
 trusive emigrants from other worlds; vigorous and 
 healthy though their systems were, some chance minute 
 stranger might find a lodgment in them, and cause 
 much derangement before he could be got rid of. 
 Ethics, psychology, history, and ethnology were as 
 important to their medical investigations as physiology, 
 anatomy, and chemistry. 
 
Oomalefa 129 
 
 With all this extension of medicine into regions that 
 seemed to me, a man of Western civilisation, the most 
 remote from it, there had been a gradual contraction 
 of the sphere of surgery. The hacking and hewing of 
 the human frame to get rid of some intrusive organism 
 seemed to them as barbarous as the butchering of ani- 
 mals for food. Brilliant operations they thought the 
 confession of failure in previsional and preventive medi- 
 cine. They would have considered it a disaster, if not 
 a crime, to let any disease proceed so far unobserved as 
 to need the excision of the part affected. Even when, 
 by an accident, a bone was fractured, they could light 
 up the whole sphere of the accident and see exactly 
 how to get the sections or fragments to meet again. 
 Then, keeping the limb or organ at rest, they concen- 
 trated all the energy of the patient's body and mind 
 and the curative influence of their own presence upon 
 it. They sent the nutritive powers of circulation and 
 nerve-energy into it by application of their various 
 electric instruments, some of which combined the effect 
 of exercise and the effect of heat. In a few days, 
 sometimes in a few hours, the junction was complete, 
 and only rest and a medicated and nutritive atmo- 
 sphere were needed to make the tissue as sound as 
 before. 
 
 One of their newest instruments and the most 
 effective for the avoidance of surgical operations was 
 the alclirolan, a combination of microscope, camera in 
 vacuo, and electric power. It could by means of a 
 swiftly moving film, on which fell electric light through 
 a vacuum, take a picture of the life- processes within 
 the living body, however minute. Then by means of 
 magnifiers and brilliant light they could throw from 
 this film a moving picture on a screen, so enormously 
 
130 Limanora 
 
 enlarging the process of any part of the body that even 
 a novice could see at a glance what was healthy and 
 what was diseased or obstructed. It was this alclirolan 
 that made the study of physiology in the living body 
 simple enough for the very youngest. It was by this 
 that they were able to supplement the experimental 
 hall at the entrance to Oomalefa, and to show in pro- 
 cess the effect in actual human bodies of disease, 
 microbes, and remedies. Every minute process of the 
 various organs and tissues of the body and of the brain 
 was reproduced marvellously magnified on the walls. 
 There was no new medicine but was tested and had its 
 effects on the various parts of the body revealed by this 
 new method. There was no new disease or microbe 
 but gave up its secrets to this instrument. 
 
 The only surgery they had was creative, like all their 
 other sciences and arts. It had to do chiefly with the 
 capacity of the skull. The appearance of epilepsy in 
 some of their ablest men and families ages before had 
 pointed the way. Their knowledge of the localities 
 and tissues of the brain, along with the semi -trans- 
 parency of their skulls and the advantages their alcli- 
 rolan had introduced, gave them complete command of 
 everything that was proceeding within the head. They 
 could by their electric apparatus light up the tissues 
 and see what part was growing and pressing upon the 
 containing bone. They therefore learned to trephine 
 the epileptic sufferers and thus relieve the oppressed 
 locality of the brain. From this practice and the grow- 
 ing knowledge of the great purpose of life they passed 
 into the stage of creative surgery. For imperfect tissue 
 perfect was substituted. Man-grafting had become the 
 most important branch of surgery. They could modify 
 and even create new faculty or organ or tissue by graft- 
 
Oomalefa 131 
 
 ing what they had made on to the part of the infantile 
 system which needed it. A child to be devoted to a 
 special pursuit which needed some faculty exceptionally 
 developed had his skull enlarged in its early and plastic 
 stage over the portion of the brain that was the material 
 equivalent and instrument of the faculty; and when 
 most of the energies of life began to pour into his pur- 
 suit the tissue had room to grow. If a combination of 
 exceptional faculties were needed in any profession or 
 pursuit, protuberances in various parts under the hair 
 or even on the brow could be perceived on looking 
 closely. So nice had this creative art become that the 
 most delicate and minute trephining could be accom- 
 plished without the patient knowing much about it; 
 the operation was generally finished and the wound 
 healed whilst he slept. Their bodies had great re- 
 cuperative powers, and the means applied were 
 wonderful in their rapidity of working. The hand of 
 the operator, too, manipulated the part under a huge 
 microscope that magnified the tissues ten thousand-fold. 
 In fact they had all kinds of modifications of the micro- 
 scope that would fit even internal investigations; one 
 reflected the part in the manner of the reflecting tele- 
 scope, and turned microscopes of great power on the 
 reflected image. They had surgical modifications of 
 their clirolans and vimolans so that they could examine 
 permanent moving pictures or analyses of the tissues 
 to be investigated. Nothing could escape their methods 
 of finding out defects in the human system. However 
 deep the organ or tissue to be examined might be in 
 the body, it flashed out its forms and processes upon 
 their irelium sheets as they moved. By moving these 
 photographic records rapidly underneath their micro- 
 scopes the physiological processes of life could be 
 
132 
 
 Limanora 
 
 reproduced and examined; stationary, each moment of 
 the processes could be slowly investigated. Their 
 photo-electric instruments could light up and make 
 transparent any stratum of tissue desired, whilst keep- 
 ing the rest in shadow or dark outline. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE FIRI,A, OR ELECTRIC SKNSE 
 
 THEIR physiology had no longer any need of 
 anatomy or vivisection as its foundation and 
 starting-point. Besides the alclirolans, they had their 
 mirlans or life-lamps, as they called them; and these 
 enabled them to watch any process of the human body 
 and see how it changed under the treatment they ap- 
 plied. These life-lamps appealed not only to their 
 eyes and ears, but to their electric sense. They iso- 
 lated the magnetic force as well as the sounds and ap- 
 pearance of any section of tissue, and took graphic and 
 permanent record of it, as they did of the changes in 
 form or texture or sound. Every kind of tissue in any 
 organ or limb had its normal magnetic equivalent 
 measured in terms of the personal equation offeree and 
 beat of the heart. The slightest deviation from this at 
 any time of the day or month would at once challenge 
 attention and lead to microscopic investigation. They 
 enlarged the electrograph, the phonograph, and the 
 photograph of the point indicated and were thus able 
 to examine under the sarifolan every infinitesimal atom 
 of it in all the aspects which appealed to their sight, 
 hearing, and electric sense. Their sarifolan magnified 
 and interpreted for these investigative senses the 
 
 133 
 
134 Limanora 
 
 graphic record of their mirlans, as the microscope mag- 
 nifies for the sight. I could see and hear the move- 
 ments and processes in the tissue, but the electric 
 effect was to me as general as a shock from a galvanic 
 battery; I could not detect anything definite or measur- 
 able. But the Limanorans, though they had something 
 of our diffusion of electric sense, had also in the back 
 of their necks a localised sense that responded to the 
 faintest magnetic influence and measured roughly its 
 amount and its changes in kind and degree. The 
 delicate nerve-centre there, which might have been the 
 remains of a backward-looking eye, had developed with 
 them into a most sensitive collector of electric vibration 
 in the air or in any section of matter; and in every 
 atom, whether organic or inorganic, they declared 
 there was ever some electric wave motion; in some it 
 was too faint to affect their firla or electric sense, but 
 then their delicate instruments for magnifying it, like 
 their mirlans, made it manifest to their senses and de- 
 finable. It was to my general feeling of magnetism 
 what the muscular sense in my fingers was to my 
 diffused sense of touch. It had taken many generations 
 to develop, and in their children it never appeared till 
 they had reached the close of youth; but part of their 
 education was directed towards making it more sensi- 
 tive and useful as a power for measuring force. A 
 former generation of their medical investigators had 
 long noticed and studied the effect of the concentration 
 of will-power through the eye upon the back of the 
 neck of one who sat in front of them; although the 
 patient could tell nothing by means of his five senses 
 of such an effort being made behind him, he generally 
 turned round. Experiment after experiment proved 
 that there was a force communicated through the inter- 
 
The Firla, or Electric Sense 135 
 
 vening space to some sensitive spot on the back of the 
 head or neck, and they knew that relics existed of what 
 seemed once to have been an eye in that region. They 
 came to the conclusion that this must have a closer 
 connection with the higher brain-centres than any part 
 of the body except the eye, and bent their whole atten- 
 tion upon its nature. They soon defined it as a local- 
 ised electric sense and by practice made it as keen at 
 least as the sense of touch in the ringers. They were 
 at last able to define the direction of an electric in- 
 fluence and to note its changes of force, and, after 
 several generations, their firla, as they called it, came 
 to rank next to sight and equal to hearing in the 
 analysis and investigation of the phenomena of the 
 universe. 
 
 Corresponding to this electro- receptive sense, they 
 had also cultivated the magnetic force of the eye. 
 They had long known and investigated the exact re- 
 lationship of light and electricity, and they could at 
 any moment and place transform the one into the 
 other. They had also observed ages before that 
 even the commonest and weakest human eye had 
 a faint luminosity in absolute darkness, and that 
 any exertion of the will or passing wave of passion 
 greatly increased it. Beside this fact they put the 
 open secret that men of strong will and character 
 differed from their fellows in the power of the eye, not 
 only over human beings but over animals, and also 
 the fact that the long-known plaything, mesmerism, 
 had the eye as its chief organ. They came to the 
 conclusion that the will was on its physical side a 
 magnetic force, and that though most of its play was 
 through the sense of touch, the muscular energies, and 
 the voice, the eye was its highest and best channel. 
 
136 Limanora 
 
 This inference was strengthened by noticing that 
 amongst animals the fiercest-willed and most predatory 
 could paralyse their victims by the exercise of some 
 optic power, and as they prowled through the night, 
 they had a perceptible glitter in their eyes that shone 
 in the dark like lamps. They applied themselves to 
 a minute and systematic investigation of the subject, 
 and soon had instruments which would respond to the 
 faintest ocular exercise of the will. They could 
 measure any increase in the magnetic power of the 
 eye; and before long it was observed that the subjects 
 they experimented on grew rapidly in optic magnetism 
 as they practised, and came to have a perceptible sheen 
 in their eyes when they stood in the darkness. These 
 men and women were found to have rapidly increasing 
 power of sending anyone to sleep by gazing at him. 
 At last all doubt vanished as to the new latent faculty 
 which lay in the eye. 
 
 They set themselves vigorously to turn this new 
 knowledge into art, and trained themselves, and still 
 more their children, in eye-power till it became an in- 
 stinctive habit to use it. After a time they came 
 to see that the power was not one but manifold; the 
 sleep-inducing effect was only an elementary applica- 
 tion of it. A further development was a soothing in- 
 fluence upon the nerves that never went as far as sleep. 
 Then the medicative powers of the eye were raised in 
 the families of medicists into capacities which seemed 
 to me almost preternatural. A more widely diffused 
 specialisation of the new function was eye-language. 
 Long-continued emotional dialogues would proceed in 
 companies where I could not hear a sound, and at the 
 end Thyriel would tell me the intricacies of the inter- 
 play of thought and emotion. It is true they could 
 
The Firla, or Electric Sense 137 
 
 not easily communicate any unspiritual fact, needing 
 some concrete image, unless they employed the code of 
 eye-signals which every L,imanoran learned ; this com- 
 bined the motions of either eye and magnetic impulses 
 of various kinds and degrees, and contained several 
 thousand words and phrases. I had so much to learn 
 in the island that I had not time to master more than 
 a few of the simpler combinations, so that I was often 
 bewildered in their silent assemblies. But for a long 
 time what seemed to me most marvellous was that 
 intimate and facile converse went on when the two 
 friends were at considerable distances from each other; 
 when occupied in this they kept alternately turning the 
 back and the face. This was due to the receptive mag- 
 netic faculty being in the back of the neck and the 
 active one being in the eye. The eye was receptive in 
 only a secondary degree, so that when the magnetic 
 impulse was weakened by distance, the eye could not 
 interpret it, and the back had to be turned in order to 
 catch its full force. To see two men or women standing 
 a mile or two apart and wheeling back and front every 
 minute, and that, too, in alternating harmony as if they 
 had been two sympathetic toys, at first would have 
 made me laugh but for my wonder; and when the in- 
 tercourse was rapid they looked like two whirling 
 dervishes; but I grew accustomed to the sight, and 
 soon began .to feel with the people themselves that it 
 was a most dignified feature of their life. For a time 
 it seemed almost beyond nature that they could com- 
 municate even emotions and impulses at such a dis- 
 tance; for it was only emotions and impulses, and not 
 facts, that passed, as the motions of the eye were 
 not apparent except within comparatively short spaces. 
 Yet there were electro-magnifiers which, affixed to 
 
138 Limanora 
 
 their firla on the back of the neck, enabled them to 
 feel the faintest impulse from a distance and interpret 
 it, and a modification of the vimolan, used like spec- 
 tacles, reduced the sense-numbing power of distance a 
 thousand-fold ; they could see by means of these electro- 
 optical instruments the minutest movement many miles 
 off. 
 
 The most striking manifestation of their active elec- 
 tric faculty was to be seen only in a few Limanorans, 
 who would have been in the primitive ages leaders of 
 masses either as orators or as warriors. These had 
 such power of eye that they could bend others to their 
 purpose without the utterance of a word. It was not 
 greater genius or nobility of thought or strength of 
 character that made them so much more influential 
 than their fellows, but sheer magnetic force of will. 
 With evil motives or depraved minds, they would have 
 been dangerous to the whole community: as mere war 
 leaders or beasts of prey they would have been exiled; 
 but with beneficent purpose and a deep-ingrained sense 
 of the ultimate aim of their whole civilisation, they 
 were of great power on the side of progress. They 
 were the- organisers of the community, the captains of 
 industry. They managed and directed the various 
 services in which all the citizens had to take part so 
 that there should be no superfluous issue of commands, 
 no friction, or even consciousness of direction. They 
 were in complete sympathy with all the people, binding 
 them into a unity of discipline; and their magnetism of 
 will, applied through the eye, served but to stir the 
 love of service and duty to enthusiasm. In an age of 
 semi-savagery, or of revised savagery such as the 
 military ages of Europe were, some of them would 
 have been great conquerors, combining many peoples 
 
The Firla, or Electric Sense 139 
 
 and vast territories for a few years in order to sate 
 their ambition or love of glory. As it was, the equal 
 development of their other powers and the universal 
 dominance of the moral aim of the race made their 
 wills innocuous. 
 
 It was the same with the other manifestations of 
 human magnetism, which in defective or half- developed 
 civilisations played so maleficent a part. That power 
 of voice and speech which could sway mobs to evil in 
 such communities was in Limanora the endowment of 
 every citizen. The electric tone quivered and rang in 
 every voice I heard; it was like the sweetest music, 
 drawing the soul to it. The fascination of person- 
 ality, which so often in Western women, even where 
 they have no beauty or grace, proves the ruin of 
 dozens of men, belonged to both sexes in Limanora 
 and to every citizen. It was a powerful, diffused 
 magnetism ever attracting its opposite without reveal- 
 ing its secret even to its possessor. There was to me 
 something very winsome iti most of them, even when 
 saying and doing nothing; and in Thyriel, although 
 my intellect told me she was not what Europeans call 
 beautiful, this became ravishing. Her personal mag- 
 netism was overpowering, even when she was silent and 
 stood at a distance, and in rude times of ignorance 
 would have been set down to witchcraft. 
 
 All these investigations and results I learned as 
 clearly as if I saw them with the eye, in the firlamai or 
 division of the electric sense, one of the vast halls of 
 Oomalefa. Here were all the instruments needed to 
 develop the firla or aid it, and all those by which 
 it sought deeper into the secrets of nature. Off the 
 hall ran corridors and arcades, which were to the firla 
 what picture and sculpture galleries are to the ocular 
 
140 Limanora 
 
 imagination, supplying it with noble and pleasurable 
 excitation, as the music domes touched the aural 
 imagination. They had their passive firlamaic arts 
 of beauty as well as their active. In one vast arcade 
 they could sit and feel with their firlas the electric 
 harmonies of any given tract of air or earth or ocean, 
 the harmonies that play as it were on the surface; this 
 was equivalent to gazing at landscapes, real or pic- 
 tured, with the eye. In another there was firlamaic 
 sculpture; in this were gathered the noblest achieve- 
 ments of their electric artists, who strove to concentrate 
 into some definite form varied magnetic materials so 
 as to stir the imagination through the firla to thoughts 
 of the titanic harmonies of the universe. They gave this 
 form beauty for the eye as well ; but that was not the 
 primary aim; the gazers, as they sat, preferred to turn 
 their backs to the work; for then through the firla 
 their imagination was thrown into an attitude of placid 
 meditation which seemed to have before it some great 
 spheral harmony of the stars. In a third series of lofty 
 corridors there was continually proceeding what might 
 be called firlamaic music. In two or three it was 
 entirely instrumental. Great firlamans or electric 
 organs, at each end of one corridor I entered, flashed 
 out what was to me the most appalling medley of 
 lightnings; the gleams crossed and interwove and 
 changed mass and form as if it were a dance of meteors, 
 now slow and stately like a minuet, again swift and 
 brilliant and dazzling as if the stars of heaven had 
 joined the lightnings in a bewildering yet harmonious 
 ballet. At first I was stunned and blinded; but soon 
 I felt dimly the ecstasy apparent in my neighbours. 
 Their eyes gleamed with joy; to me some of them 
 seemed almost in a delirium; they were unconscious 
 
The Firla, or Electric Sense 
 
 of their immediate surroundings, for I spoke to Thyriel 
 and received no answer, and her motion through the 
 hall as we started to leave it was somnambulous. She 
 told me afterwards that, though her firla was only in 
 its infancy, she felt drawn up into the heavens as in a 
 trance; she seemed to feel the worlds move around her 
 and attract her into their spheral chant; her imagina- 
 tion dealt with interastral forces as with playmates 
 from eternity ; she leapt vast ages every moment, and 
 spanned in a stride spaces which seemed to her com- 
 mon powers infinite. She would not rest till she could 
 enjoy this macrocosmic orchestra to the full as her 
 parents did; she would not let a day pass without such 
 practice as would develop her firla to the utmost. I 
 felt solitary and forlorn as I heard her ecstatic descrip- 
 tions and resolves, and thought upon my incapacity to 
 understand them. In a moment she knew my dejec- 
 tion, and realised how forgetful she had been of me and 
 of her surroundings. She at once threw off her imagi- 
 native trance of magnetic enjoyment, and determined 
 to keep pace with my advance. It was a slow and 
 weary path I had to travel ; but her cheerful encourage- 
 ment prevented despair. Through the years between 
 I was able by dint of constant and vigorous practice to 
 concentrate into my eyes and into the back of my head 
 much of the magnetic power and receptiveness that had 
 existed before in my body, but in a diffused condition. 
 I was at last able to go with her and appreciate the 
 stellar imaginings which the flashing firlamans excited. 
 There was another majestic arcade, in which Lima- 
 noran artists themselves joined in sublime firlamaic 
 music. On my first visit to it, many years after my 
 introduction to Oomalefa, I was appalled to see human 
 beings stand like Joves flashing long tongues of light- 
 
i4 2 Limanora 
 
 ning or flame from their eyes or fingers; they seemed 
 to stand unscathed in a fiery furnace, or rather to 
 weave and plait and mould the flames as if they had 
 been threads of some plastic material. Had I come 
 here during my early novitiate in the island, I should 
 have fled in terror as from dreams of hell realised. 
 There in the midst passed the artist like a dark shuttle 
 through a loom of lightnings as he wove them into an 
 ever-changing web of living colour. For a time I 
 could not control my terror, as I looked to see him 
 shrivelled to ashes. At last through my reason I man- 
 aged to calm myself into feeling that he was the master 
 and creator of this display and that the dreadful tongues 
 of flame and swift meteors which rose and vanished 
 around him were unstinged and innocuous. Then 
 began to creep into me a sweet sense of some magnetic 
 harmony, stirring my mind to contemplation of the 
 mighty forces of the world. I seemed to know the 
 voiceless majesty of time, as if vast ages were crushed 
 into moments; I followed our orb as it swept away from 
 the immense concentric circles of flame wheeling round 
 the core of whirling fire; I saw it mass into an eye of 
 passion fixed in gaze upon the mother star it had left; 
 alone it travelled into space tied like an infant still by 
 magnetic threads to the parent sun; out into the in- 
 finite it yearned to rush seeking life and souls to nestle 
 in its bosom ; yet never would the unseen mother cord 
 give way. Out and out flamed the earth into immeas- 
 urable space and the wild longing was calmed; the 
 tempests of fire lulled and fell; the luminous billows 
 ceased to rear their crests or toss their fiery spindrift; 
 a dull, still-glimmering crust imprisoned her torrid 
 heart; the conflagrations burst forth in wider and 
 wider intervals. At last she wooed the germs of life 
 
The Firla, or Electric Sense 143 
 
 from the wandering infinities to rest for brief spaces on 
 her bosom. Night brought peace to her, and the stars 
 with their cool and unimpassioned rays bred within 
 her through the ages gentle thoughts and a love of 
 teeming life; they quenched her superficial fires, and, 
 binding chains of magnetic power around her, drew her 
 out into spaces of infinity beyond the scorching flame 
 tongues of her fervid mother. Life born and nursed in 
 the cold interstellar tracts teemed on her breast. Back 
 she sprang again into the warmer rays of the mother 
 orb, breaking the stellar bonds, and life leapt from sea 
 to air and crawled upon the new-won lands in mon- 
 strous forms. I/ast came the strangest monster of all, 
 erect like a bird, yet wingless, first swinging from tree 
 to tree, then skimming the plains upon the backs of 
 fellow-beasts he had mastered: man, the portent of 
 God, had come. Slowly he grew and slowly sloughed 
 off his beast habits Prehistoric time focussed into a 
 moment. First came tyranny and war as moulders of 
 his spirit; then they became monsters, barring his way 
 to the divine. Great monarchies and empires flew by 
 like a lightning flash; thousands of years with their 
 events or somnolences passed swift as a dream. 
 Stronger grew reason in man's brain, the love in his 
 heart; divine influences surrounded him, watching the 
 dawn of the new power of thought and nursing the 
 growth of the spirit in him. Then out of the darkness 
 came the historic ages of this island's progress towards 
 diviner light, and rushed in a flash across my brain. 
 
 Then I awoke from this ennobling dream, swift and 
 beautiful as a trance made up of moments, each of which 
 contained an eternity. The electric song of the history 
 of our world had ceased, and my spirit fell like a meteor 
 from heaven, out of the exhilaration and the ecstasy. 
 
144 Limanora 
 
 Never before had I felt as if my life was that of a god 
 watching from above the flight of time. I scarcely 
 knew that the darkness around me had suddenly 
 turned into daylight and the web of lightning flashes 
 had vanished ; I was led from the arcade by Thyriel as 
 in a dream. When we reached the gallery which over- 
 looked the ocean and I turned my eyes to the dome of 
 heaven, I was conscious that a new glory had come into 
 my life. Dim though my conception of the electric 
 song of creation had been, I realised with joy what a 
 vast universe had been added to the possibilities of 
 my life by the discovery of this new sense and of the 
 sublime things I might perceive through it. I would 
 not be behind Thyriel in the cultivation of the magnet- 
 ism in my system, but would enter with redoubled 
 ardour on the practice of my firla. 
 
 It was thus too I came to understand the passion 
 they had for Firlalain, as this section of Oomalefa was 
 called. The young were not allowed to enter it, lest it 
 should act as a narcotic on their sense of duty to the 
 ultimate aim of their civilisation. Not till they had 
 gained full mastery of themselves, and especially of 
 their appetites and passions, were they admitted, and 
 even then it was with a caution which showed the 
 greatness of the risk they incurred. The delights of 
 the new sense were apt to grow intoxicating, and there 
 had been at one time a fear of some becoming magnetic 
 drunkards, who would spend their days in Firlalain 
 besotted with indolent enjoyment of the exhilarating 
 flight through the realms of fancy, and heedless of the 
 health and interests of their other tissues. Once they 
 had reached maturity, there was no such fear; and no 
 curb was then set upon their liberty to enter these halls 
 of electric harmony. 
 
The Firla, or Electric Sense 145 
 
 After they had come to that stage of life when the 
 walls of their blood-vessels began to lose flexibility, it 
 became almost a duty to frequent Firlalain. The 
 stimulus given to the currents of life by the mere phy- 
 sical influence of the electricity was enough to overcome 
 the growing rigidity of cell and tissue; but the rush 
 of thought and fancy gave the whole nature such im- 
 petus that the torrent of the blood through its chan- 
 nels induced the plasticity of youth again. They had 
 other methods of postponing the approach of old age; 
 they could withdraw from the walls of the various 
 vessels of the body the accumulation of lime and other 
 hardening elements; there were several chambers of 
 diet the atmosphere of which neutralised the increase 
 of salts and carbons in the body, and other medicinal 
 chambers which could bring off by the pores any dele- 
 terious or obstructive matters forming in any of the 
 tissues; but Firlalain was the most effective postponer 
 of that stage of life when yearnings come into the heart 
 for final and complete rest, for it flooded the whole 
 being with new impulse and new energy. Most of all 
 was the great stellar arcade frequented by the old in 
 order to drive off the ennui of existence; a feeling 
 which indicated the gradual calcarescence or indura- 
 tion of the brain and heart-tissues. Here any region 
 of the starry night they chose could be made to con- 
 centrate its magnetic influence upon their firla. A 
 man might take a new tract and new blending of im- 
 aginative impulse every day of life for centuries and 
 yet not exhaust the limit of variety; for the stars 
 moved through infinite space as the earth moved, but 
 in different directions, and ever new universes or worlds 
 were coming within the range of the Limanoran electric 
 
 sense. 
 
 10 
 
146 Limanora 
 
 I shall not easily forget my first experience of this 
 astral gallery. Along it at intervals were placed great 
 electroscopes and magnetic magnifiers, that gathered in 
 electric influences from various portions of the heavens. 
 Almost every seat was occupied by one of the older in- 
 habitants of the island, and as they sat with the focus 
 of the huge instrument resting on their neck their faces 
 seemed almost to have a halo round them, so brightly 
 did they beam with ecstasy. Their eyes were closed, 
 and I would have said that each was dreaming some 
 dream of glory which inundated his being, had I not 
 seen their eyes open for a moment as we passed, in con- 
 sciousness of the world around; the vision came to 
 their waking imagination. Then I looked up through 
 the great magnifying domes and saw the stars and con- 
 stellations mass upon the face of heaven, and huge 
 spheres concentrating upon themselves the sheen of 
 some starry circle. 
 
 Thyriel led me to one vacant seat, and before I 
 turned my back to the magnetic lens, I gazed upwards 
 and saw the Southern Cross pouring down its silver 
 arrows. I had not sat there long before a thrill came 
 upon me which spread throughout my system; my 
 pulse fluttered like a bird in contending storms; every 
 nerve began to throb with expectation and delight; I 
 could have created worlds in my ardour ; sublime 
 thoughts swam in from eternity upon my soul ; I had 
 the mother passion within me which would have 
 moulded nobler spirits than my own. At last I felt 
 the currents of my existence centre upon one realm of 
 space and was conscious of countless life around me 
 which struggled and mounted upwards. I felt my 
 nature drawn to higher levels than any terrene exist- 
 ence I had ever known. I seemed to breathe with 
 
The Firla, or Electric Sense 147 
 
 difficulty the diviner airs of greater purpose, and yet 
 there were strains of discord from lower types of being 
 revealing gradations in the new universe. Some orbs 
 were already on the path of decay ; and on them the 
 higher life was succumbing to the weakened vitality. 
 Others had just attained to life; and on them had 
 settled migrants from other spheres, whose elevating 
 powers they had exhausted. Some were flitting like 
 ghosts about their mother suns with but a thin ethereal 
 life now darting between atmosphere and solid crust. 
 Only one planet in each system was passing through 
 the climax in its history, and near it my rapture became 
 too great to bear; my veins seemed on the point of 
 bursting with the fulness of life; my soul was dragged 
 above my natural level, till .the physical bonds which 
 fettered me were about to break, and I was glad to be 
 attracted to other circling orbs that with coarser but 
 stronger magnetism drew me to them. The median 
 point of balanced joy was reached when, resting be- 
 tween two spheres, I felt their magnetic currents 
 neutralise each other, and yet the higher influence of 
 the new system raise the pulsing of my spirit. As full 
 bliss was it when, darting from system to system, I ex- 
 perienced the power of life that dwelt in each, and felt 
 the varied types of existence mingling their magnetic 
 thought with mine; I could feel the struggling of 
 worlds up to their goal thrill through my spirit; on 
 the underside it was like the wail of one who has aban- 
 doned the upward conflict and plunged into the waters 
 of oblivion ; on its upper side it was like the fervour of 
 souls who see through mists of life the elysium they 
 have yearned for. I was conscious of the infinite 
 tragedy being enacted upon each orb, and yet not near 
 enough to see what destiny awaited it. I was drawn 
 
148 Limanora 
 
 within the eddy of a new and loftier ambition; my 
 spirit perceived stages of being within its reach, yet 
 beyond all it had known; and it throbbed with new 
 eagerness to rise above itself. Nothing could be more 
 rapturous than the consciousness of this system beyond 
 system, each with its own type of life and stage of 
 spiritual aim, each with its peculiar medley of magnetic 
 influence, each drawn into its own vortex of emotion 
 and energy. 
 
 A touch on my hand broke the spell, and I was down 
 on earth again, exalted, yet knowing the contrast. It 
 was Thyriel, who would remind me of my duty to my 
 own being and to the state. I arose and moved out 
 with her but she knew the ecstasy too well to break 
 in on my dream, and led me out to the sea arcade, 
 where I could hear the low rippling melody of the 
 waves beneath and the faint music of the world of air. 
 I turned my eyes up to the azure, and seemed to tread 
 amongst the orbs that veiled their silver radiance in the 
 blaze of noon. Out of my life, I am sure, the exalta- 
 tion never wholly vanished. I had been among the 
 living fountains of eternity. I had moved conscious of 
 the birth of worlds, and known the throb that is a 
 myriad of ages. Was this not to be kin with God, to 
 know the all-grasping passion of a moment of divine 
 life? Ever and again the greatness of the memory 
 flamed out into conflagration within me, and I was 
 then in the mood to make or conquer worlds; and 
 never wholly out of my blood died the exaltation I 
 had felt. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 A CATASTROPHE 
 
 BUT long years divided my first visit to Oomalefa 
 and my admission to Firlalain. I saw that there 
 were certain vast sections of Oomalefa that I was led 
 past; massive portals showed their rank, but the num- 
 ber on them defining the age at which entrance was 
 possible warned us off, and allegorical pictures adorn- 
 ing their arches figured the decay of tissue and cell that 
 would result in the youthful body from too early ad- 
 mittance. Any curiosity Thyriel or I could have felt 
 was repressed by these ominous symbols; for this 
 people never relied on mere authority. Their strongest 
 prohibitions were in the form of graphic appeals to the 
 reason, and only where these could not impress youth- 
 ful natures sufficiently were the emotions involved; 
 the influences of any special indulgence upon the 
 human system were represented in living form, which, 
 looked at through a medium magnifying them ten 
 thousand-fold, stirred the heart of all the more deeply. 
 We saw in a moment that we were unfit to enter Fir- 
 lalain, and we passed on into the vast series of baths 
 wherein the Umanorans could rid their bodies of ob- 
 structive or noxious elements. Here was every grade 
 of temperature endurable by their tissues: for every 
 
 149 
 
150 Limanora 
 
 grade there was a separate swimming-pool in which 
 they could exercise themselves; and every hour auto- 
 matic machinery driven by force from Rimla sent the 
 contents of each pool into one of the lava wells, where 
 jn a few moments the water and all the debris thrown 
 off from the bathers' bodies vanished in fire. These 
 baths were so arranged that not more than two should 
 be empty together, and at the general entrance were 
 seated two medical counsellors, who measured and 
 tested the state and temperature of the body, and 
 showed graphically what would be the effect of enter- 
 ing each bath of the series to which the state of the 
 bather restricted him. 
 
 Far more important than these water baths were the 
 baths of ether, baths of magnetism, and solar baths, in 
 which any portion of the body or the whole of it could 
 be submitted to the purified forces of the world. From 
 the ethereal baths all terrene elements were exhausted, 
 and there remained the pure medium of life beyond 
 our atmosphere, the divine air which spiritual beings 
 breathe. Nothing so raised the power of the mind 
 over the body or the part of the body immersed in this. 
 It partially and for the time being dematerialised the 
 part, withdrawing its earthy tendencies, and giving it 
 an exhilarant atmosphere in which it acquired new life 
 and energy, and resisted the encroachments of lower 
 parasitic life. The two other kinds of baths had some- 
 what the same effect, but were less powerful than this. 
 Magnetism allowed the ether a more direct influence 
 than either water or air; it concentrated the force of 
 the purer medium on any point. The solar baths had 
 been used from time immemorial. It had been one of 
 the earliest discoveries of their science that the lower 
 organisations and microscopic forms of life that bat- 
 
A Catastrophe 15 1 
 
 tened on the human frame lost vitality in the full 
 beams of the sun. Later their investigators had found 
 that solar radiance dispelled the vapours and terrene 
 elements which floated in the air, clinging invisibly to 
 bodies and forming the feeding-ground of quickly 
 generative microbes. It purified by its energy all that 
 it came into contact with, and in short allowed the 
 ether which was its medium freer play. For genera- 
 tions sunshine had been one of their most successful 
 curative agencies and was now used to reinforce and 
 stimulate human life and energy. The rays of the sun, 
 blanched to some extent of their heat and excessive 
 force, were concentrated in rooms made wholly of 
 transparent irelium, or upon irelium glasses of various 
 shapes and forms to suit the part of the body to be 
 subjected to their influence. These were their solar 
 baths; but their whole system of life was one con- 
 tinuous solar bath: for every corner of their houses 
 both public and private was laid open to the sun's in- 
 fluence from dawn to twilight, and this stored up in the 
 atmosphere of the rooms and halls forms of energy 
 which during the night gave ease and exhilaration to 
 those who slept. They fully realised that it was not 
 merely heat and light they got from the sun, but subtle 
 energies, a fine aroma from the diviner medium that 
 filled the interstellar spaces. 
 
 Kvery Limanoran of an age to be admitted to Ooma- 
 lefa resorted several times a day to each of these three 
 kinds of baths. First came a magnetic bath, in which 
 every organ and tissue was stimulated to throw off its 
 debris towards the pores. Then came the swim in one 
 or more of the pools, in order that all this rejected 
 part might be washed off. After this came the solar 
 bath, which penetrated into the superficial channels of 
 
i5 2 Limanora 
 
 the body and swept away all bacterial life that might 
 be nocuous. The last stage was the ethereal bath, 
 which was enjoyed in solitude and could be endured by 
 any but the mature for only a few minutes; the ex- 
 hilaration and tenuity of atmosphere were too great for 
 unaccustomed lungs, and I could see the heads of the 
 bathers thrust out at short intervals to take a breath. 
 But long practice made the older Limanorans enjoy the 
 buoyancy of the pure medium for hours. It was in- 
 deed one of the hopes of the race that they would be 
 able at last to breathe the interstellar ether with greater 
 ease than the air surrounding their own earth. 
 
 It was in these baths I first came to see the marvel- 
 lous grace and plasticity of their garments. They 
 were outside of all my previous experiences and concep- 
 tions, and seemed so natural that I took them for a part 
 of their material outfit like their hair. It had never 
 entered into my mind to question whether they laid 
 them aside in sleep or not. Perhaps it was owing to 
 the beauty and animation of the countenance, when 
 they spoke or even looked, that I had not paid any 
 attention to their dress except to see how it never im- 
 peded their movements either in flight or in work, and 
 how it varied with the individual, and never with the 
 sex or age or profession; it belonged to the childhood 
 of the world to regiment men in the minor details of 
 life. Now I saw in the baths that the vesture did not 
 need to be laid aside in other elements than air. It 
 was made of some fine and flexible stuff woven out of 
 irelium threads, plastic to the shape, yet capable of 
 stiffening out when the wearer sent an electric wave 
 through it from the electro-generator he always bore 
 under his right arm. This process at once shook out 
 every drop of water from it, when he issued from the 
 
A Catastrophe 153 
 
 bath or the sea. It was so porous that it seemed 
 fragile, and yet it could bear great strains. Through 
 its pores passed with ease the water or air or ether that 
 was to influence the body underneath; and along its 
 threads passed with ease any magnetism the wearer 
 wished to feel. In certain lights it was almost trans- 
 parent, yet with such a play of rainbow colors that it 
 seemed a living fence against lights and shadows. In 
 the darkness it shone with dazzling radiance as soon 
 as the electric current flowed into it. At the will of 
 the wearer it could be, like a magic garment of invis- 
 ibility, black as midnight, yet in daylight could reveal 
 every grace and tint of the limbs it covered, clinging 
 closely like an outer epidermis to the body. Nor was 
 it ever laid aside except to be replaced by a new ves- 
 ture, and that was every few days; for all germs and 
 debris that adhered to it or obstructed its pores could 
 be destroyed and got rid of by the electric current the 
 wearer had control of. It was on my first visit to 
 Oomalefa that I came to know these things, as it was 
 then that I first donned a like vesture, and was taught 
 its properties and the ways of managing it and the 
 minute electro-generator that went with it. 
 
 There were alternative garments, that they wore 
 under different conditions. One, almost as plastic as 
 the ordinary vesture, but armoured by electricity 
 against the inroads of excessive cold, was worn when 
 they ventured up into the higher regions of the air or 
 beyond; for it enabled them to keep up the natural 
 temperature of the body as they flew. Another was as 
 well suited for protection against extreme heat. It 
 consisted of an asbestine double wall of irelium, within 
 which was kept up a constant current of cold air by 
 means of a minute apparatus worked by their wings 
 
154 Limanora 
 
 and arms; and, if they could get moisture from the 
 atmosphere to run between the two textile folds, it was 
 at once frozen. Such an arrangement was necessary 
 in their adventurous experiments in the bowels of the 
 earth or under the blazing eye of the sun. The most 
 beautiful and most convenient of all their vestures 
 was one which looked and felt like a film of white 
 cloud; I would have said that it was woven of the 
 misty fleeces that caught and rent themselves on the 
 lesser peaks of Lilaroma. It was indeed no distant 
 mimicry of this; for though it could be thrown loosely 
 round the figure in the most graceful forms like a toga, 
 and seemed as thin and fragile as gossamer, it consisted 
 of a treble fabric; between two transparent films, fairly 
 delicate as if woven by a spider on a windless dawn, 
 moved in cloud-like rJurity and dimness the airy vapour 
 of some liquid that shone as silvery and warm as moon- 
 light. Its purpose was to conceal and yet to reveal the 
 general contour and movements of the body; to sift 
 the strength of the sun's rays as they fell in their purity 
 from heaven, and yet to pass as much of their curative 
 power through it as the skin needed; to cling to the 
 limbs, and yet to impede them no more than a fleece of 
 cloud would. 
 
 It was as I was studying the texture and the beauty 
 of these garments that there happened the first ap- 
 proach to panic I had yet witnessed among this calm- 
 eyed people. There had been a stillness as of ill-bridled 
 tumult in the atmosphere all day. My proparents had 
 moved restlessly abroad from daybreak, and all the 
 Leomo were on the wing husbanding every minute with 
 feverish clutch. We were sent in squadrons to differ- 
 ent parts of the island, and many new leomorans were 
 set to work in unaccustomed corners of the mountain, 
 
A Catastrophe 155 
 
 yet there was a look of baffled intelligence in every 
 face. I that felt there was an undeciphered portent 
 overshadowing their life. Thyriel and I had worked at 
 two new leomorans and watched them till they wielded 
 their brush of smoke across the sky. We had done all 
 that we could and were sent out to Oomalefa to uncloud 
 our troubled minds. 
 
 The excitement of this new sphere had removed from 
 our thoughts all ominous shadows and we were as 
 innocently absorbed as primitive men of the wood- 
 lands in the wonders now opened to us; but silence 
 had fallen upon the gambolling swimmers, and the 
 hush awakened us from our new dream. We felt the 
 foundations of the building tremble and quiver like a 
 panic-stricken beast. Up the translucent walls clicked 
 a huge rent, and slowly the liquid in the baths hissed 
 and vanished. A tumultuous muffled cannonade rolled 
 beneath us. The crystal roof crackled and snapped 
 like ice-rafts that groan and toss before a sudden flood. 
 The chink widened into a chasm, and through it we 
 could see the ocean seethe in turbulence and revolution. 
 Up through the roof whizzed the wings of the alarmed 
 bathers, and as the jarring and detonation grew, I 
 stood knowing not whither to turn. All I could do 
 was to bid Thyriel follow her mates. More awful 
 came back the reverberations from the domes, and 
 Thyriel' s face was pale and her lips set, but she did 
 not move. Finally she bade me follow her to that end 
 of the gallery farthest from the chasm in the walls, a 
 raised platform whence the swimmers dived. There 
 she placed me with my back to hers, and ran a rope 
 under my arms. Before I knew what she was about, 
 I was off my feet; she was running at full speed up 
 the rising platform and with a sudden jerk we were in 
 
156 Limanora 
 
 the air. I heard the beating of her wings, and lay still 
 lest I should baffle her purpose. I lay on my back be- 
 tween her wings, and shuddered as I saw their points 
 broken against the lips of the chasm. A deep-mouthed 
 clangour filled my ears; and for a moment my eyelids 
 fell in palsied terror. When I raised them and looked 
 down, the vast crystal of Oomalefa had vanished and 
 the great promontory stood gaping, with the surf hiss- 
 ing and baying as it leapt over the upper surface. 
 
 I felt that Thyriel was almost exhausted, and thought 
 of detaching myself from the rope which bound me and 
 leaping into the ocean; but the idea had not quite 
 grown into resolve when I saw her wings beat slower 
 and knew that we were hovering over the solid land. 
 In a moment we were standing side by side, she 
 exhausted, I supporting her with my arms. It was 
 not long before she recovered herself, for her attention 
 had been awakened by a startling appearance out in 
 mid-ocean. A high peak rose beyond the cleft and 
 scarred promontory where there had been only waves 
 before, its head turbaned with steam and smoke. It 
 was still shouldering the sea to right and left with hiss 
 of lava tongue and splash of cinder shower. We could 
 not speak for alarmed wonder, and mingling with mine 
 there was deep sorrow over Oomalefa vanished. What 
 had become of it I could not tell. Thyriel roused her- 
 self and, divining my thoughts, led me to the steps 
 which had once given entrance to the starry portal. 
 She stooped and lifted in her hand some of what 
 seemed to me fine-sprinkled snow, that covered every 
 inch of rock. It was irelium dust. Once the cohesion 
 of the great edifice had been overcome by the shocks 
 of the earthquake, it fell not into fragments or huge 
 blocks, but into its constituent atoms. Nothing, I 
 
A Catastrophe 157 
 
 thought, could ever replace the wondrous palace of 
 delights that I had only begun to know. 
 
 I felt saddened beyond recovery, as we turned home- 
 wards, over the ruin of such magnificence and so great 
 hopes. Thyriel's dejection, I discovered, was retro- 
 spective. She mourned over the failure of L,eomarie, 
 the earthquake art of her family and friends. They 
 had thought that they could anticipate and prevent all 
 the grumblings and revolutions of L,il aroma, and this 
 outbreak had shown the imperfection of their know- 
 ledge and the limits of their art. Though but a novice, 
 I could see that something was yet wanting to make 
 them masters of the crust of the earth. For the first 
 time for many generations their foresight had failed. 
 They had known that there was disturbance beneath 
 the mountain, but they had been unable to fix its 
 centre, which was far out at sea. The inflow of the 
 waters had baffled the power of their mountain-cupping 
 instruments, and the rapidly generated steam had rent 
 the crust in the line of Oomalefa; and until the slow- 
 trickling lavas and the swift-belched ashes had sealed 
 the lips of the chasm again, there was danger, they 
 knew, of the whole island exploding. How they were 
 to prevent or even anticipate such cataclysms was a 
 problem that weighed upon every member of the family 
 and saddened every leisure moment. 
 
 For some days the Leomo were busy with the 
 wreckage of the outbreak. I was attached to the sec- 
 tion that had to inspect the lava wells, gauge the 
 amount of molten matter which had oozed from each, 
 repair every clirolan or other instrument that had been 
 deranged, and replace those submerged. The urgency 
 of the occasion excused us from the regular duties and 
 pleasures of the day. All our ablutions and essential 
 
158 Limanora 
 
 exercises were performed in the private mansions. 
 Most of the hours not spent in sleep were devoted to 
 the tasks made 'for us by the new exigency. The 
 excitement removed the monotony and burden of the 
 work, and almost before we knew that there was so 
 much to do it was done. New wells were sunk and 
 new clirolans fixed wherever the overflow had choked 
 or sealed the old. The instruments of even the most 
 distant section of the island were put into their best 
 working order. 
 
 Then we were free to scatter to the winds and to fol- 
 low our old delights. Thyriel set herself with renewed 
 eagerness to teach me the art of flight, and I attained 
 the power of describing an easy curve from a shoulder 
 of Lilaroma down to the plain. Again and again in 
 her new desire to master flight with me seated between 
 her wings, she carried me up to some jutting platform 
 of the mountain: and then she showed me how to work 
 the wing-engine with ease. I could keep level with 
 my starting-point for a few minutes, but after that I 
 had to let myself glide down the parabola of the air. I 
 was too heavily weighted by gravity and the inertia of 
 my muscles to rise as she did. 
 
 There were many secrets of their flight that I soon 
 understood. The curious construction of the wings, 
 formed as they were of two sliding membranes, I have 
 already described. What I had taken for a mere 
 rudder was a large series of small screws that gave 
 forward motion to the flight. The engine that whirled 
 them round as they churned the air was of great 
 power, and without them the flight would have been 
 but slow and clumsy. It was through inability to 
 manage this engine that I was so long in mastering 
 even the rudiments of the art. 
 
A Catastrophe 159 
 
 I progressed greatly that day, and would have pro- 
 gressed more but that the lesson was abruptly broken 
 off. In each new air voyage to a higher sally-point 
 she bore me farther round the mountain towards the 
 great plain that stretched to the south. When we 
 reached our last flight platform, and I had descended, 
 my glance shot over the countless centres of industry 
 and investigation that stippled the rolling downs. It 
 was a noble sight, and I could have long rested in the 
 gaze: but an unwonted gleam drew my eyes to the 
 precipitous coast. There on a vast new promontory 
 which ran out miles into the sea was gathered such a 
 galaxy of jewelled domes rainbow-lit by the sun as I 
 could not have conceived even from my remembrance 
 of Oomalefa and its marvellous architecture. Thyriel's 
 eyes had also been riveted by the spectacle. "It is a 
 new Oomalefa," she burst forth. I could not believe 
 it ; how could such a palace of wonders be reconstructed 
 in so short a time? There were only a few thousand 
 mature Limanorans; and if they had been all engaged 
 on such a structure night and day it would have taken 
 many busy years to rear it. I took it for a mere illu- 
 sion. The position of the sun and some unusual com- 
 motion in the sea had produced it by reflection and 
 refraction. It was but a bubble of the imagination 
 bred by some abnormality in our eyes upon our memory 
 of Oomalefa and the grief of our minds at its evanish- 
 ment. 
 
 So I argued. But Thyriel was silently decided in 
 her dissent. We could take no more interest in our 
 aeronautics, nothing could keep our gaze from that 
 radiant orb resting, gigantic, on the beach. As the 
 sun declined the facets of the new jewel shimmered 
 with living sheen: now it was a city of burnished gold, 
 
160 Limanora 
 
 again it was a myriad of lambent flames aspiring to the 
 centre of fire: now a thousand rainbows weaving and 
 unweaving themselves, again uncounted stars clustered 
 and heaped in restless silver, or wintry thistledown of 
 swarming snow. Surely it was but an army of will-o'- 
 the-wisps lit in the marsh fumes that the gaping sea 
 had sent forth. Yet as I gazed it grew in my mind 
 that this sparkling halo had a fixed centre; there was 
 symmetry in the refulgence and in the recurrence of 
 colour and sheen. It could not be illusion; we were 
 both transfixed like sculptures in eternal gaze. 
 
 The flash of wings broke the completeness of the 
 glory and our spell. Above the transplendent spec- 
 tacle fluttered a snow-storm of ariels; the sun shot a 
 fiery gleam through a rent cloud, and across his silvery 
 beams danced and played these winged motes. The 
 beauty of the sight moved us almost to tears. We 
 knew that this wa no phantom joy; our fellows were 
 aloft in the air hymning the glory of a new creation. 
 Soon Thyriel had persuaded me to start with her 
 towards the new palace of wonders. We had not got 
 half-way when I felt my arms weary and my flight 
 dragging towards the plain. She would not leave me 
 to trudge across the uneven earth; before I could 
 argue she had me safely nestling between her wings as 
 they beat the air upwards from the low knoll on which 
 we had alighted. She no longer laboured under her 
 burden, as she had done in her first attempt some days 
 before 5 yet I felt that she grew tired, and made her 
 land upon a hill a few miles from the new Oomalefa. 
 After a rest I was able on my own wings to curve down 
 towards its flight of new-rocked steps and its scintillant 
 portal. 
 
 We entered, and all was joy and music. Up under- 
 
A Catastrophe 161 
 
 neath the new domes flitted the happy artists putting 
 the final touches on the tinted translucence of the 
 irelium walls. The plan was more elaborate and yet 
 simpler than the old Oomalefa. The beauty of it was 
 more overwhelming to the imagination of the eyes. I 
 could not have conceived two structures more unlike 
 from their larger architecture down to their minutest 
 detail of ornament, and yet so adapted to the one pur- 
 pose. The halls of medication and sustenance, the 
 galleries of the magnetic sense, the baths, the arcades, 
 and the sea balconies were all complete, yet as different 
 from those that had gone to dust as Western architec- 
 ture from Oriental. New instruments and apparatus, 
 new indexes and tests were there at work. Not a 
 detail had been neglected; but the rocky platforms 
 over the sea were broader, and when we flew into the 
 air and looked at it from above we could see that the 
 promontory stretched farther into the sea and was 
 broader both on its surface and at its base; and 
 strange to say, it had as its outermost point the new 
 peak that the eruption had thrown up in the ocean. It 
 was conjectured by the L,eomo, I soon knew, that this 
 line, now sealed up as it was and with its lava vent at 
 its outer extremity, would be freer from terrene par- 
 oxysms than any other portion of the island marge. 
 This was where my proparents and the rest of the 
 earth artisans had been engaged so busily during these 
 days; they had been guiding the lava flow along the 
 line of rent out through the sea to the great beacon 
 which the outburst had raised; and the dash of the 
 waves had cooled and congealed each layer as it flowed 
 and curdled from the new peak to the shore of the 
 island. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 BUT by what magic had this wondrous jewel group 
 of domes and spires and minarets grown upon the 
 platform within these few alternations of sun and dark ? 
 From my own experience of hastioning the shore I was 
 able to understand the rapidity with which the founda- 
 tions had been laid. My wonder grew all the more at 
 the marvellous piece of art that now stood upon them ; 
 every detail was so complete and so beautiful. The 
 giant forest aisle of Cologne Cathedral, the mosaic 
 splendour that had overawed me within St. Peter's, 
 the statued frost-work of Milan, seemed to me tawdry 
 beside the colossal domes with their jewelled magnifi- 
 cence and the infinite variety in simplicity of the laby- 
 rinth of arcades and galleries and arches. Yet those 
 were the fruits of a thousand years' faith and work ; 
 this was the product of a few days. The more I 
 thought of it, the more bewildered I was. 
 
 Thyriel divined my thoughts and saved me from my 
 perplexity. " You have never seen the Ooloran," she 
 exclaimed. I asked her what it was. I could see that 
 the word might be translated sonarchitect. Her de- 
 scription of it, though lucid as usual, did not convey to 
 my slow thoughts a full idea of the instrument; and 
 
 162 
 
Oolorefa 163 
 
 we got permission to visit Oolorefa, or the hall of archi- 
 tecture, the following day. 
 
 In the multiplicity of wonders throughout L,imanora 
 I had failed to notice this great edifice, although it 
 stood on a level, symmetrically cut plateau, command- 
 ing all the region in which were gathered most of the 
 exceptionally great and magnificent structures of the 
 island, and was but one of a series of gleaming palaces 
 which crowned the points of the rocky spurs of L,ila- 
 roma. In each palace was concentrated some one of 
 the services that the new civilisation had to offer to the 
 progress of the race. I had visited a few of them, and 
 it was part of the programme of my education to make 
 me spend such space and time in each as the desire or 
 the necessity arose in my life; but it had never struck 
 me to inquire how the marvellous buildings had arisen. 
 Nor, though I had noticed the frequent change of out- 
 ward shape and ornamentation of parts of the mansion 
 of my proparents, had I ever had leisure or curiosity 
 to find out the reason or source of the transformations. 
 It was delightful to see the growth of the building and 
 to remove into the new parts; and as silently and 
 invisibly the sections we had left vanished. I had 
 never time to grow tired of one chamber or set of 
 chambers before another was ready for me. It was 
 like the growth of a palace of dreams; but I soon ac- 
 cepted it as one of the magic habits of the island, a 
 natural feature of my life, never rousing query and 
 seldom awakening even thought. So much of new 
 and striking was crowded into the days and months 
 and years that large portions of the civilisation had to 
 pass uncommented on and ultimately unnoticed. 
 
 With the same wonder with which in later life we be- 
 gin to watch the marvellous workings of the functions of 
 
1 64 Limanora 
 
 our bodies I entered on my new investigation. As we 
 approached Oolorefa it seemed to me that we had made a 
 mistake and come to the wrong building; for it rang 
 with the most entrancing music and I thought that it 
 must be the cathedral of the island. It had one vast 
 central dome surrounded by countless cupolas, and as 
 we skirted the edifice I heard underneath each of these 
 smaller roofs sweet melodies sounding too low to be 
 heard beyond its partition walls and almost drowned in 
 the thunderous diapason of the central dome. These 
 I took for chapels and fanes subsidiary to the great 
 temple, round which they clustered. 
 
 We entered and I was amazed to find under what I 
 had thought to be the temple of the island a great 
 mansion, but dwarfed by the height and size of the 
 temple roof. The fence enclosing it had just been 
 shaken to dust by their new electric process for the 
 atomising of irelium. What was to be done with 
 the new structure? It was walled in by the giant 
 cupola, and could not possibly be removed. The 
 thought was beating about in my mind, but ceased 
 before a sudden crash; I looked up and there, one 
 complete and evenly cut quadrant of the dome had 
 vanished, and the bright sun shone in undimmed by 
 any medium. I again noticed something going on 
 around us. Great flanks like the sides of a ship were 
 fitted to the bottom of the new building, and along 
 them underneath were adjusted huge floats. Wings 
 were then attached to either side, and a strong wing- 
 engine was placed in the body and two rudder-engines 
 in the after-part of the raft. They were rapidly charged 
 with electricity, the floats were exhausted of their 
 heavier air, and up rose the whole structure through 
 the huge aperture in the dome; and I could see its 
 
Oolorefa 165 
 
 pilots guide it this way and that through the air to fit 
 the unequal and varying wind that blew, till at last it 
 disappeared round a shoulder of Lilaroma. I had run 
 out of Oolorefa to watch the flight of the great mansion 
 on its aerial raft, and when it went out of sight I re- 
 turned, reflecting with a sigh of relief that this ex- 
 plained the magic growth of the house in which I lived; 
 the additions had arrived and been fixed and adapted 
 to the purposes of human habitation while I was sleep- 
 ing or absent on my daily pursuits. 
 
 I was startled when I got back to find the dome com- 
 plete again and preparation being made for construct- 
 ing some other irelium shell. The fence- work had 
 been raised. By its wall stood the key-board of a 
 gigantic organ-like musical instrument, the other half 
 of which was so arranged within the new framework 
 that the whole volume of its sound should bear upon 
 whatever the fence enclosed. A huge bell mouth 
 opened out into the chamber; and I soon saw that out 
 of this issued a snow-storm of irelium particles which 
 floated lightly in the air. A peal of music rang out 
 from the instrument, and I saw the dust motes settle 
 rapidly into a symmetrical figure, that minute by 
 minute grew into a gigantic nautilus shell. The musi- 
 cian who sat at the key-board watched the snow-whirl 
 within and the magical rise of the walls. I perceived 
 that the bar of music was repeated again and again, 
 with gradual ingrafting of variation as the shell-like 
 walls bent over. At a certain point where the whorl 
 began to incurve backwards the strain completely 
 changed and reminded me of a fugue. Back and forth 
 it shot its monotonous shuttle of sound. I was spell- 
 bound by the cradling melody and the sinuous flexure 
 of the vast conch. The completion of the process and 
 
1 66 Limanora 
 
 the cessation of the music broke the spell, and I pressed 
 near to ask explanations and to see the result. Some 
 enchanter's power must surely have drawn in the float- 
 ing particles to the thin curves of the structure and 
 held them there; for the motes continued to float un- 
 attracted, but in sparse and sparser cloud; and at last 
 they ceased to move, and settled on the fence, dimming 
 its translucence. I felt the metal floor grow first hotter 
 and hotter, and then cooler and cooler till it was ice- 
 cold. Within a fraction of an hour the whole process 
 was complete; the fencing walls were shaken to dust, 
 and there stood the gigantic nautilus perfect in its grace, 
 clear as crystal but for the frostwork of nautilus pat- 
 terns all over its surface. It was a new experiment in 
 form for a winged ship of the air, and as I stood the 
 wings were added and the engines put on board. The 
 navigators embarked; a smaller quadrant of the dome 
 crashed aside; and out by the aperture floated this 
 huge air-bubble rainbow-lustrous in the sun. 
 
 Thyriel led me to the vacant space whence the air- 
 ship had been launched ; and there I was shown how 
 powerful magnets made the snow-storm sweep so rapidly 
 downwards and held the irelium dust in position, once 
 it had taken shape. Then the alternate floors were 
 exhibited to me, one emanating heat which melted the 
 new structure into a permanency, and another that re- 
 duced the temperature below freezing-point and com- 
 pleted the architectural process by chilling the metal. 
 There were other floors easy of substitution by means 
 of leverage and the application of great force; as one was 
 withdrawn, another was run into its place. One was 
 suited for one chemical process, another for another. 
 A second set were for applying to the walls of the new 
 structure different forms or grades of electricity. A 
 
Oolorefa 167 
 
 third set could infuse into them various kinds of con- 
 creting fluids to make them cohere when the heating 
 and chilling process was likely to fail. This was the 
 great Ooloran that I had come to see, and only the 
 most skilled musician and architect was allowed to sit 
 down at the key -board. 
 
 In order to show me the part that music took in this 
 swift architecture, I was led round the circle of sub- 
 chapels, that I had seen surrounding the great dome. 
 In these were employed the various draughtsmen of 
 Oolorefa. In the first we entered the experimenter was 
 engaged in seeking the most beautiful form for a new 
 mansion which was to be placed up amongst the snows 
 of Lilaroma; it would have to withstand great gusts of 
 wind and at times heavy drifts of snow; it would also 
 have to bear a variety of high temperatures within in 
 order to protect the dwellers from the bitterness of the 
 night. The building was meant for those who had to 
 watch the storm-cone and keep it in perfect working 
 order. The draughtsman was using a miniature Ool- 
 oran, and deftly sounding various musical notes, and 
 sometimes songs into its irelium dust whirlwind; but 
 there was always one predominating note, meant to in- 
 troduce into each experiment a feature that had been 
 before tested and found suitable. He fixed his experi- 
 ments by means of his small movable floors, and then 
 placed the resulting forms in order along a shelf, attach- 
 ing to each the score of music which had produced it. 
 It was like a collection of toy observatories. Within 
 a neighbouring compartment of like transparent walls 
 another artisan submitted each of the models to the in- 
 fluences of stress and strain, of heat and cold, of snow 
 pressure and tornado violence that the ultimate and 
 full-sized mansion would have to undergo. One sue- 
 
i68. Limanora 
 
 climbed to the heat, another to the severe cold, a third 
 to an avalanche from above, a fourth to a gust of wind. 
 He marked the flaw in each and the influence that had 
 brought it out, and handed the model back to the 
 draughtsman, who at once corrected the note or notes 
 in the score of music which symbolised the flaw. 
 When the result of the experimentation was complete, 
 the score of the music and the miniature fabric were 
 sent to the central dome; and in less than an hour the 
 huge mansion was on its winged raft speeding towards 
 its destination far up the great mountain-slope. 
 
 I was led through the whole series of experimenting 
 chapels; in each was there a miniature sonarchitect pro- 
 ducing test forms for special purposes under the skilled 
 hands of creative workmen and their pupils. In most 
 of them new designs were being produced for private 
 houses; for of these was needed the greatest variety, 
 as each islander had his home renewed so frequently. 
 I could not have conceived that so many different 
 forms could be created for the same purpose; indeed 
 the number seemed to be limited only by the possible 
 combination of notes of music and the need of adapting 
 each design to habitation and the habits of the dwell- 
 ers. The skill of the artist lay in the selection of the 
 proper forms out of the multitude he daily evolved, and 
 in their adaptation to the necessities of lyimanoran life. 
 It was in these designs that the younger members of 
 the architect families were engaged ; thus they learned 
 their art and developed their creative instincts. 
 
 Under some cupolas which we visited we found ex- 
 periments on new designs for the large public buildings, 
 and to these the wisest members of the families were 
 applying their century-tried skill. As we approached 
 any such chapel, we could hear the most elaborate and 
 
Oolorefa 169 
 
 entrancing music, for the design in such cases was 
 labyrinthine, and needed the noblest artistic faculties 
 to select and develop it. The executive musical talent 
 displayed and the talent of extemporaneous composi- 
 tion and modification would have been called genius in 
 European communities; btit this people had no word 
 corresponding to the quicksand of meaning this word 
 covers in Christendom. They knew the origin and 
 growth of each faculty, even when exceptionally de- 
 veloped, too well to attribute it to an indefinable some- 
 thing which nature had somehow conferred upon a 
 chance-chosen individual. They knew as exactly the 
 causes that produced given effects in the human system 
 as they could calculate the forces of the inanimate 
 world, and had no belief in the power of nature to give 
 to human work by some caprice more value than it 
 deserved and that deranged all calculation. This 
 criticism I brought down on me from my guide when I 
 expressed amazement at the beauty of the music and the 
 resulting design in one chapel, and attempted to trans- 
 late the word "genius" into Limanoran. Such ex- 
 pressions, he persuaded me, are but the half-articulate 
 escape-valves of wide-mouthed ignorance; they mean 
 no more than a confession of blindness and incapacity, 
 and should be rapidly rejected by 'every progressive 
 civilisation. The musical and designing power of this 
 particular Limanoran belonged to most in his family 
 of his own age, and was merely the stage the art of 
 sonarchitecture had reached in its development on the 
 island. Wherever a nature especially adapted to the 
 double art was found it was imported into the family 
 to reinforce it. 
 
 In spite of the dissertation, I could not but listen, 
 entranced by the intricate splendour of the music; and 
 
1 70 Limanora 
 
 my eyes were riveted on the growing design within 
 the receiver of the Ooloran. Yet when finished 
 and tested it was found inadequate to the artist's new 
 conception of the utilities of the ultimate- edifice. It 
 was shaken again into dust before I left the workman, 
 and its faults were noted and corrected in the score of 
 music which he had before him. He had been years 
 on this single design, which he had been moulding and 
 improving every day; and he hoped soon to find a 
 form that would be strikingly new and in every feature 
 adapted to the purpose of the building. 
 
 I could well understand now that the new Oomalefa 
 was no work of magic; but I was still unable to see 
 how its vast proportions could have been shifted from 
 its place of fabrication to its ultimate site. Thyriel 
 led me to a new structure which had just issued from 
 the central sonarchitect; and the master- workman bade 
 me lean upon it; huge though it was, it shifted before 
 my weight and I fell. It was as light as if made of 
 silk, and we two could lift it from the floor. This ex- 
 plained the ease of rafting the great edifices through the 
 air; but how did they resist the winds that blew, or 
 the impact of wave and storm ? I was led to a wall of 
 Oolorefa itself; and I was bidden to raise one low 
 parapet of it ; riot the application of my greatest 
 strength could move it. My guide then waved what 
 seemed to be a magnet above it, and bade me try again ; 
 it rose in my hands and my muscular effort landed me 
 on my back. He showed me how the foundations of 
 their buildings were powerful magnets, and how the 
 fabric would be torn to pieces before it could be hoisted 
 off them unless an equally powerful magnet was ap- 
 plied in another direction. I now understood the 
 strength of their structures before winds and the 
 
Oolorefa 171 
 
 rapid disappearance of Oomalefa after the earth- 
 quake. 
 
 But I had seen only one department of Oolorefa, that 
 which consummated the work of the rest. One branch 
 of the sonarchitect families was specially charged with 
 experimentation on the materials for building. Ire- 
 lium was the general name for the metallic combination 
 of elements best suited to the state of civilisation they 
 had reached; but there were innumerable modifica- 
 tions and grades of it, and there were more being 
 discovered every day. We entered one magnificent 
 building, and there found a dozen or more workmen, 
 each isolated in a transparent chamber and busy with 
 some combination of irelium and one or other of the 
 stellar metals. Every star or series of stars had its 
 own predominant and characteristic element or amal- 
 gam of elements; and it was a main duty of one 
 of the chemical families of the island to examine every 
 star for its new element and to find something cor- 
 responding to it in terrene matter. This section of 
 the people studied with the most anxious care the pro- 
 ducts and the results of the leomorans; they visited 
 almost hourly the mouths of the lava wells and watched 
 the spectroscopic recorders of the fumes that rose out 
 of them; for they seldom failed to find at one time or 
 another some constituent of the interior of the earth cor- 
 responding to any new stellar element or metal recently 
 discovered. Whenever it was found in any leomoran 
 a chamber for its deposition was constructed and the 
 clirolan was specially adapted to the preservation of 
 all of it that issued out of the bowels of the earth. 
 These new metallic constituents were called by the 
 name of the stars in which they predominated, and were 
 at once put into the hands of the sonarchitect families 
 
Limanora 
 
 to be tested for structural utilities. It was thus ireliutn 
 had been discovered, and thus they hoped to find ma- 
 terials still more plastic to their purposes. Already 
 they had so modified their new metal by amalgamation 
 with other stellar metals that they had fitted it to func- 
 tions no inetal had served before; it could be made 
 flexible or tough, light or heavy, transparent or opaque, 
 malleable or brittle, soluble before heat or water or 
 electricity, or resistent to any or all of them; it was 
 difficult to say what quality they could not impart to 
 it; and here I could see the workmen testing new com- 
 binations in order to find new qualities or new grades 
 of a quality already found. I stood and watched one 
 who was trying an amalgam of a new stellar metal 
 called vanelium with gold; he had already attempted 
 to combine it with iron, silver, copper, irelium, and 
 found it in each case either impossible or useless; but 
 the reactions had pointed him to gold as its natural 
 ally; and now, having found the two combine with 
 ease, he was exhausting the various possibilities of 
 combination in different proportions, and after submit- 
 ting the new amalgam to his tests, was recording the 
 results. It gave a marvellous toughness and elasticity 
 to gold, so that, when beaten thin enough for a breath 
 to raise it in the air, it could not be torn except by 
 sudden and great mechanical force. Another workman 
 near him was testing the effect of electricity on the 
 various grades of the new amalgam and recording the 
 results minutely. In each of the crystal chambers 
 there were at hand supplies of all the forms of energy 
 that might be needed, such as heat, cold, pressure, 
 electricity. Each workman was isolated in order that 
 the elements he used might not interfere with the ex- 
 periments of his neighbour; but his workshop was 
 
Oolorefa 1 73 
 
 transparent, that he might beckon for help at any mo- 
 ment, or exhibit to his fellows the result of any experi- 
 ment without modifying the conditions or breaking the 
 continuity. 
 
 A third branch of these families dealt with the 
 adaptation of the new amalgams to the various struc- 
 tural necessities of the community; they found out 
 which form or grade would resist the disintegrating 
 influence or the power of water or of electric force; 
 they tested what shape would best suit each grade, 
 solid or hollow, cylindrical or spheral, cubic or rec- 
 tangular, thin or thick, curved or rectilinear. Another 
 branch devoted itself to the means of making the 
 various metals or amalgams cohere either temporarily 
 or permanently. A fifth studied the adaptation of the 
 new discoveries to tools and machines and to the in- 
 vention of new mechanical forms that would bring out 
 their greatest utilities. To go through all the depart- 
 ments of this vast architectural workshop would need 
 a week's rehearsal. To my first view it seemed be- 
 wildering in its complexity of specialisation; but after 
 closer acquaintance it became simplicity itself, in fact 
 the only plan that nature itself could have pointed out. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE ULARAN 
 
 HAVING finished our survey of Oolorefa, my mind 
 returned to the observatory for Lilaroma, which 
 I had seen growing in miniature under the modeller's 
 hand and music. It seemed to me a strange romance 
 that citizens of this beautiful island lived amid ever- 
 lasting snow and ice tens of thousands of feet above 
 their fellows. How could those who were accustomed 
 to the conditions and privileges I saw around me bring 
 themselves to surrender it all and live the lives of 
 hermits amid antarctic rigours ? Thyriel reminded me 
 of the glacial cold of the southern land from which 
 their ancestry had come; but this did not wholly 
 satisfy me. The long centuries of life in a new zone 
 had changed their powers and tastes, and it must be a 
 great sacrifice to live in a climate so different as was 
 the glacier region of a mountain. My curiosity was 
 roused, and I resolved to observe and know for myself 
 at the earliest opportunity. I could see the observa- 
 tory now perched on the gleaming shoulder of the 
 mountain above the circle of the storm-cone, and every 
 day I turned my eyes upwards I grew more eager to 
 inquire into the conditions of life in so different a 
 temperature. 
 
 i74 
 
The Lilaran 175 
 
 It happened that the next department of the civilisa- 
 tion of the island that had to be studied by me in our 
 educational development was Lilarie, or the science of 
 island-security. We were handed over to one who be- 
 longed to the lyilamo, or families specially absorbed in 
 this section of practical knowledge, and were told to 
 choose our mode of ascent, car flight or wing flight, 
 or either of the two instantaneous methods of transit. 
 We preferred one of the two last, so he decided on the 
 wire-line or aerial method for our first ascent. We 
 were enclosed in a casing, shaped like a shuttle and 
 rounded and sharpened to a point at each end; it lay 
 slightly inclined on a close web of wires, which sloped 
 up to the mountain- top. The door was closed and 
 made secure, but, as our shuttle car was made of trans- 
 parent irelium, we could see on all sides. It was then 
 drawn slightly upwards into a complete enclosure of 
 wires, each of which touched it at some point. When 
 our guide saw that we were all ready, he pressed a 
 button, and we shot up at incredible speed. The whole 
 sky and earth and sea fell from us in an instant. I 
 closed my eyes in alarm. No sooner had I done so 
 than the whizzing sound which accompanied our flight 
 ceased and in a moment we were at our destination, 
 close to the peak of Ijlaroma. Our shuttle car slid 
 into another groove and rested; the door opened, and 
 I stood amid the eternal snows. I could see the great 
 buildings of Rimla and Oomalefa and Oolorefa like 
 minute soap-bubbles gleaming in the sun far below. 
 We had travelled these tens of thousands of feet with 
 the ease and swiftness of lightning; for it had indeed 
 been the lightning that had borne us up. Along this 
 cylinder of wires so great an electric power could be 
 sent that it seemed to undo the force of gravitation. 
 
1 76 Limanora 
 
 Distance was almost annihilated by this mode of transit. 
 It outdistanced sound, if not light too, in its magic 
 motion. 
 
 As soon as I began to reflect, I was astounded to 
 find the cold not merely bearable, but deprived of its 
 bitter penetrativeness. My heart bounded with ex- 
 hilaration; every tissue of my body seemed elastic and 
 full of spring. I could account for these sensations by 
 the atmosphere of these heights, but how was I to 
 explain the mild temperature of this snow region ? 
 When puzzling over the problem, I began to notice a 
 haze of half-glowing light like the shimmer of heat 
 over the surface of the earth at blazing noon. It 
 seemed at first to be an optical illusion coming, I 
 thought, from the suddenness of my transference from 
 the plain to such a height, but its unsteady gleam 
 moved so uniformly that I soon saw it was outside of 
 me. Yet it did not intercept my view of the snow and 
 ice around. They fascinated me by their splendour of 
 whiteness, but there was a warmth, a pallid glow over 
 them that was quite unwonted. Our guide felt my 
 mental interrogation, and pointed out that we had 
 stepped from the shuttle car on to a movable platform, 
 which would soon bring us to the observatory; over 
 this platform was an electric covering, that protected 
 us from the outer air and radiated heat in all direc- 
 tions. He showed us the snow melting on all sides of 
 our platform in form corresponding to it, and, as it 
 moved along the steep, the dark honeycombed square 
 of snow moved with us. There was above and on 
 every side of us an electric field produced by unseen 
 circuits of wires; and these fields gave out heat falling 
 short of light. 
 
 This was how they modified the climate up in 
 
The Lilaran 177 
 
 these glacial regions and made it even sweeter and 
 healthier than the purified atmosphere of the Lirna- 
 noran plateaux below. They had done much for the 
 climate of the lower levels; by daily casting their elec- 
 tric shuttles through the atmosphere they brought its 
 impurities to the earth, its particles of dust and minute 
 living organisms; but as more of these crowded in again 
 from the outlying regions of air, the electric shuttles 
 would have to ply ceaselessly in all directions in order 
 to keep the lower strata pure. In those mountain 
 altitudes the air was naturally sterilised to a large ex- 
 tent; few organisms could persist in so keen a medium; 
 and the constant use of electric walls and roof for 
 modifying the bitterness of the cold swept every trace 
 of bacterial life into the snow. Hence the purity of 
 the air we breathed up there and the buoyancy of the 
 soul. The body seemed no clog upon the spiritual 
 functions, and the magnetism that came from the 
 heavenly bodies uniting with that of the earth had free 
 play upon our minds, stimulating them to lofty flight. 
 I no longer wondered why the L,ilamo had no aver- 
 sion to life at this altitude. They passionately loved 
 it. It was, indeed, being drunk without wine, without 
 self-abandonment, without waste of tissue. 
 
 They kept strict rein on this intoxication, ethereal 
 though it was; for, like all their race, they had 
 severe practical issues before them. Daily each of 
 them returned to the less volatile and less pure air of 
 the lower levels in order to check excess of buoyancy 
 and to reinforce the graver purposes of life by consulta- 
 tion with the elders and wise men. They had in their 
 hands an important phase of the well-being and con- 
 tinuance of their race. They had all the foes of human 
 life, as it existed amongst the Urnanorans, to fight off, 
 
178 Limanora 
 
 whether seen or unseen. The tornadoes that swept 
 across these subtropical regions, the climatic strata 
 that drifted from other lands or realms of space, the 
 bacterial swarms bringing plague in their train, the 
 lower-planed human life which might swoop down on 
 their shores from the archipelago around them, all 
 these had to be watched and directed past Limanora. 
 Any one of these evils might in a few hours or days 
 sweep out the civilisation that had taken long centuries 
 to develop and leave them all their steps to retrace. 
 Eye-tense vigilance was needed to watch for any sign 
 of their approach, and the keenest invention to prevent 
 their advance when observed. 
 
 I had not long to wait for evidences of the great ser- 
 vices the Lilamo did to their country. Thyriel and I 
 were led by our guide into the various divisions of the 
 observatory. We inspected the innumerable testing 
 and controlling machines without fully understanding 
 their intricate and often subtle arrangements. Had 
 we not been acquainted with Rimla and Oomalefa 
 and Oolorefa, we should have been bewildered or even 
 awestruck. As it was we were amazed at the refine- 
 ment of purpose in the apparatus, approaching almost 
 to human intelligence; but we saw that a mere novice 
 would have deranged most of it, so nice were the ad- 
 justments. 
 
 Our attention had been especially arrested by the 
 electric indicator or tremolan. It contained a complete 
 chart of the electric variations of every point of the 
 island throughout every day in the year. This had 
 been compiled and drawn up from the observations of 
 several centuries, and marked the differences between 
 periodical and temporary, regional and narrowly local, 
 terrestrial and planetary variations. Every day the in- 
 
The Lilaran 179 
 
 strument was set like a clock to all the electric changes 
 which they expected to occur periodically on that day. 
 Each of these, indicated at every point of the map, re- 
 presented an electrically uniform locality of the island 
 with which it was connected. The superintendent of 
 the tremolan for any section of the day specially studied 
 all the unclassified variations which had occurred at the 
 corresponding hour of the same day and period of time. 
 He knew every change in the position of the earth or 
 in the movements of the stars that might affect the 
 electricity of the atmosphere at any moment during his 
 watch. Along with him there was a sky- watcher, who 
 used one of their marvellous reducers of distance and 
 magnifiers to scan the sky and the whole horizon, and 
 reported every new appearance which broke the uni- 
 formity of the sky-line. In an adjoining chamber with 
 transparent partitions a third observer was stationed 
 with his ear at a makro-mikrakoust or vamolan, that 
 gathered in the slightest sounds at the distance of even 
 hundreds of miles and magnified them for the listening 
 sense applied to it; it also indicated approximately the 
 distance of the source of the sound by an automatic 
 calculator. This was a kind of eavesdropper that 
 could pick up whispers on the orb of the earth, just as 
 their astronomical instruments could catch the faintest 
 gleam in space myriads of miles beyond the scope of the 
 eye. In another crystal-walled apartment stood a 
 fourth watcher, who used an instrument that was 
 to his electric sense what the telescope is to the 
 eye and their vamolan was to their ear. With this 
 idrolan he swept the sky for new and unclassified 
 electric impulses; and the faintest and most distant 
 indication, quite unrecognisable by his unaided sense, 
 was magnified ten thousand-fold; at the same time 
 
180 Limanora 
 
 the distance of the source was roughly measured and 
 indicated. 
 
 This was by far the most attractive group of chambers 
 for us. Not only could we test the wonderful instru- 
 ments for ourselves; but we could examine by aid of 
 magnifiers the graphic results of their observations 
 automatically recorded as if by photography. We 
 could minutely study the flight of sea birds not visible 
 to the naked eye. The babel of sounds that went on 
 in the cities of the archipelago quite beneath the hori- 
 zon we could hear like a great roar beside us when we 
 placed the sonoscripts in the sound-magnifier; and with 
 the aid of its analyst we could unravel the sounds by 
 repeating them slowly. Though I had not my 
 electric sense sufficiently developed to feel the differ- 
 ences in the starry impulses when the electrographs 
 were placed in the electro-magnifier, I could distin- 
 guish their differing degrees of force, and I could see 
 how much Thyriel appreciated the fine shades of variety 
 in the impulses. 
 
 We were engaged in testing the electric records, when 
 we could see the observer of the tremolan bustling from 
 table to table and map to map, whilst his pupil watched 
 the indicator. His excitement spread into the adjoin- 
 ing chambers, and their occupants, leaving their instru- 
 ments to assistants, came to his aid. There was an 
 inexplicable electric disturbance on the north-east 
 shore of the island; the field in that direction was 
 agitated. They ran to the idrolan and turned it to the 
 north-east; at once they knew that some seven or eight 
 hundred miles off there was advancing at a rapid rate a 
 great wave of electric disturbance. We all recognised 
 a growing sultriness of heat in the profound calm of 
 the atmosphere even at those icy heights. No time 
 
The Lilaran 181 
 
 was to be lost. All the members of the Lilamo were 
 called up, and in a few minutes were assembled in the 
 observatory. 
 
 It was resolved to turn the whole force available in 
 the island into the storm-cone, and especially into that 
 part of it which could shoot masses and streamers of 
 electric energy out to great distances in the atmo- 
 sphere. Other indications of an approaching tornado 
 soon appeared. The great telescope discovered a vast 
 cloud of birds on the horizon, and the sea greatly 
 agitated by shoals of fish beneath them. The vamolan 
 analysed the sounds made by the birds and revealed 
 that they were not all of one species; sea birds small 
 and great were predominant; but there was no lack of 
 land birds, insect-eaters chiefly, and a few great flesh- 
 eaters, vultures, hawks, and falcons. The Lilamo 
 knew in a moment what this meant. Myriads of 
 microbes were afloat in the air in front of the storm, 
 and the sky in the van of the cloud of birds was 
 obscured by the mass of insect life battening on the 
 unseen plague. The fish had gathered to eat the 
 clotted life that dropped into the ocean, and the sea 
 birds had assembled in pursuit of the fish. It was a 
 striking sight, this great moving internecine slaughter 
 and feast. Seated at a clevamolan, or combination of 
 telescope and makrakoust, we were present at the 
 scene, though hundreds of miles off. We could see 
 the swoop of the vultures down on the land birds, too 
 busy with their banquet of insects to foresee their own 
 fate, the water boiling with the leap of the fish and the 
 dive of the sea birds, and the air turbid with the flash 
 and glimmer of wings; at the same time we could hear 
 the war of jubilance and dismay, the wild cry of fore- 
 tasting appetite, and the still wilder death-shriek; and 
 
1 82 Limanora 
 
 round and through the clangour like an atmosphere 
 moved the dull hum of happy glutted insect life. It 
 sickened us and we had to cover our eyes and ears to 
 shut out the carnage. We had forgotten that we had 
 been using the clevatnolan, and were glad to find that 
 we could leave it and return to the ordinary powers of 
 our senses; there was a speck on the horizon, which 
 might be a boat at sea for anything our eyes could 
 make out; whilst to our hearing there was the pro- 
 foundest calm. 
 
 Everything was ready for the concentration of our 
 millions of horse-power in tfce direction of the north- 
 east, when a new but by no means unexpected phase 
 of the phenomenon occurred. Word came up from the 
 north-east shore that a plague had broken out amongst 
 the dwellers in the district, and that the medical wise 
 men had been summoned to their help. The Lilamo 
 had already given warning that something of this kind 
 might be expected in that quarter, and the physicians 
 were by this time removing all the Limanorans in the 
 north-east to Oomalefa. So dense a cloud of insects 
 was not there without the attraction of superfluous 
 bacterial life. Not always was a tornado thus heralded 
 and vanguarded by a winged army, but when it was, 
 it meant the migration under magnetic impulse of 
 clirolanic plague-swarms from some favourite breeding 
 area. 
 
 As soon as it was thus known that the bacterial 
 couriers of the storm had reached the shores of L,ima- 
 nora, the electric forces of the lilaran were brought 
 into play, and we could see lightnings belch forth which 
 seemed to make the north-east atmosphere and ocean 
 glow. Swiftly the shoals of fish were gathered close to 
 the bastions of the coast, for masses of insects were fall- 
 
The Lilaran 183 
 
 ing every moment into the water. Soon we could see 
 our lightnings reach as far as the insect darkness and 
 the bird cloud. The air cleared and the surface of the 
 sea was covered with death. Away to the west screamed 
 and shrieked the survivors of the winged army. Then 
 could we see the pitchy midnight of the coming tempest 
 moving stealthily towards us; and its heralds howled 
 and shrieked through every crevice of our mansion. 
 It was bearing right on Lilaroma. 
 
 How could that battering-ram of heaven's fury be 
 turned aside or evaded ? It seemed to me that nothing 
 but death and destruction were before us. I had al- 
 ready seen a tropical cyclone level a gigantic forest 
 clean as a mower would clear his swath in his breast- 
 high corn. What could man do in presence of so ter- 
 rific a force but hide hi holes of the rocks? The 
 thought of those noble buildings levelled with the dust 
 mingled sadness with my fear and shook all cowardice 
 from it. What was the immolation of animal exist- 
 ence which I had just witnessed compared to the de- 
 struction of all this people had done ? I felt as if the 
 torch of the world's salvation were about to be extin- 
 guished. 
 
 There was no sadness or languid inaction of despair 
 about the other inmates of the observatory. All was 
 bustle and joyous effort for a time as in veterans quiver- 
 ing with the passion of battle. Every man had his 
 duty and place; and every woman was there, too, in the 
 ranks of champions. We could now see the nucleus 
 of the storm just above the horizon, a mass raven-black. 
 At once the whole power of the island was concen- 
 trated in the electric charge of the lilaran ; and a long 
 tongue of flame shot straight for the dense cloud. As 
 if by magic the whole atmosphere was in a moment 
 
184 Limanora 
 
 ablaze with lightnings. The sea was cloven into bil- 
 lows of raging foam, and seemed itself to aid in the 
 hellish pyrotechny. It shot forth great tongues of 
 purple flame, yet fled with reared crest from the strokes 
 of the storm-flail. Slowly the lilaran moved its light- 
 ning-thrust away to the east. Then half the island 
 power was put into the blast of the storm-cone; and 
 we could see the war of elements and the thunderous 
 scowl of the tempest shift round the circle of the hori- 
 zon, instead of bearing down on us. For hours the 
 roarof the lilaran went on. The edge of the tornado 
 struck us, and the building shook and swayed. Hail 
 pelted its sides; rain and snow blinded our outlook; 
 we could see not one inch outside for the gloom. Yet 
 within, all was radiant and calm. They knew that the 
 centre of the tornado had passed many miles to the 
 east, and that its trailing skirts could do no harm to 
 anything in the island. Even if it had come straight 
 on Lilaroma, they had given a vent to its fury so many 
 leagues out to sea that its force would have been largely 
 spent before it reached the shore. It was a yearly 
 occurrence, this throttling of a tornado from the 
 tropics; for these great electric disturbances made 
 straight for the loftiest peak within their reach, drawn 
 by their polar complement, the masses of electric 
 energy which played within the heart of L,ilaroma. 
 
 One of the ordinary duties of the Lilamo was to milk 
 the great mountain of its electricity, in order that it 
 should offer less attraction to cloud and storm. Every 
 night, especially during the season of tempests, I could 
 hear the roar of the energy out of the earth, and, if I 
 looked up to the shoulders of the mountain, I could 
 see at a hundred points the purple streamers flicker in 
 the wind like living, moving flame-flowers growing 
 
The Lilaran 185 
 
 out of the soil. When needed, this escaping energy 
 was collected and sent down to Rimla for storage and 
 was another of the numerous sources of power that that 
 treasury of force drew upon. 
 
 When the tornado had passed and left its huge con- 
 tribution to the snows of the peak, the lilaran was 
 stopped, and the electric energy used in it was rapidly 
 run over the white slopes that now obliterated every 
 trace of the great groove and railway on which the 
 storm-cone moved. In a few minutes the outline ap- 
 peared, and soon the whole circlet was cleared of its 
 encumbering snows. So the weight that pressed on 
 the roofs of the observatory and the drifts that kept the 
 light from its walls melted before the electric snow- 
 plough. The storm had not vanished an hour before 
 all on the peak of Lilaroma was as it had been when 
 we arrived, except for the greater purity of the snow 
 on its shoulders. Beneath, the brush of the tempest 
 had swept out all traces of the plague that the physi- 
 cians had not got rid of, and the atmosphere was 
 clearer and more exhilarating. 
 
 So calmly and fearlessly had the whole danger been 
 met that there had even been leisure in the midst of the 
 turmoil to discuss this great waste of natural power. 
 It took them as many days as the tornado lasted hours 
 to generate and store in Rimla all this energy which 
 was now falling useless, or rather mischievous, upon 
 the face of the ocean. Could they not yoke the cyclone 
 as they had yoked the billows and the winds, the rivers 
 and the snows, the lightnings and the central fires of 
 the earth ? There was nothing impossible to a peo- 
 ple who had tamed the raging of the volcano and the 
 earthquake. The difficulty was the very greatness of 
 the force. Any machinery they might erect would be 
 
1 86 Limanora 
 
 trampled to pieces by the brute power of the giant 
 they yoked. Here was a problem worthy of their 
 most imaginative men, of their most inventive faculties. 
 
 Not a year had passed before a trial was made, and 
 within a decade the machinery was complete for storing 
 the energy of the tempests. An immense cave was 
 hollowed out in the rocks of L,il aroma, and its mouth 
 was extended out into the ocean for miles by means of 
 lava bastions. In it was placed enough of the alloy 
 called labramor, or electricity sponge, to take in trillions 
 of horse-power of electric force. At first cables con- 
 taining millions of wires were floated out towards the 
 coming tornado and electric fields were raised in the air 
 to tap the energy of the blackness. This was con- 
 tinued afterwards to some extent; but it was found 
 that, if only the clouds were electrically tapped, most 
 of the current transmitted itself to the receivers in the 
 cave by means of the water of the ocean. It was thus 
 unnecessary to float out towards the storm more than 
 one cable, so binding to the shore a great raft which held 
 up many labrolans or electricity milkers towards the 
 blackening sky. They acknowledged that they lost by 
 this water-transmission much of the energy emitted 
 from the clouds; for the ocean bore it away in all direc- 
 tions; but they got as much of it as they needed to 
 fill their storehouse, and they killed the cloud monster; 
 at least it floated away across the horizon blowing a 
 mere gale that could do no havoc except upon the 
 careless and unforethinking. 
 
 One of the most singular effects of this new contriv- 
 ance was to rid the sea in the neighbourhood of the 
 island of its teeming life and to precipitate to the bot- 
 tom the matter that floated in the water. For weeks 
 after, we could see the rocks or streaming weeds in the 
 
The Lilaran 187 
 
 depths as clearly as if it were an ocean of air. Its 
 emerald or azure had vanished, and white light poured 
 down into the hitherto unfathomed hollows and val- 
 leys. There could we see the dead denizens sway idly 
 with the forests of marine vegetation and here and 
 there the bulk of some monster lay tangled in the herb- 
 age. Only by degrees and after some months did the 
 colour and opacity return to the waves and the myriad 
 life stream from other regions into the void. The cur- 
 rents that swept past the coasts bore down the sus- 
 pended particles from other seas; and with them came 
 new fish and their parasites. 
 
 Until these came a new danger to the health of Um- 
 anora threatened. A few days after the tornado, the 
 precipitated organisms began to rise to the surface of 
 the water and underneath the hot sun to form breeding- 
 grounds for the dangerous microbes of the air. Up 
 against the bastions of rock beat the stench of the 
 living death. A plague threatened for a brief time; 
 but they were not a people to remain passive in pres- 
 ence of such a danger, even though they could easily 
 prevent its worst results by remedial measures. They 
 sank the dead organic masses again by means of a 
 charge of electricity, and then the deeper currents that 
 brushed their shores swept the corruption into the 
 great valleys of the ocean-bed, there to be embalmed 
 for geological ages hence. 
 
 They regretted that they should be the instruments 
 of this great waste of life before it had fulfilled the pur- 
 pose of its stage of development; but their regret was 
 tempered by the thought that it was a low and feeble 
 stage, that an infinity of such existence would not 
 weigh in the balance with one day's advance of a 
 single Limanoran, and that the energy set free by this 
 
1 88 Limanora 
 
 wholesale dissolution of organisms was still ready for 
 other embodiments in the universe. The worst effect 
 they feared was upon their own natures; to destroy life 
 or deal with it frivolously was one of the worst offences 
 against their humanity, for it introduced into the mind 
 a brutalising element. Respect for life in all its forms 
 was one of the truest tests of a civilisation, they held. 
 
 And the L,ilamo were, almost as much as the physi- 
 cians, imbued with reverence for human life and with the 
 sense of the importance of preserving it and giving it 
 the longest opportunity in the individual to gain its 
 highest possibility. They had to protect their race 
 from all external foes. They had therefore to study 
 climatic changes and watch the sanitary conditions of 
 the island. Sanitation meant primarily the expulsion 
 of all hostile clirolanic life and the prevention of all 
 conditions that would attract it or form its breeding- 
 ground. They were especially interested in the mag- 
 netic and electric peculiarities of Limanora and of the 
 section of the globe in which they lived; for these 
 affected not only the health and spirits of the people, 
 but the amount of minute life that harboured in the 
 earth or floated in the atmosphere. They could by 
 an increase of these elements rid an unwholesome dis- 
 trict of its unhealthy conditions; and yet the in- 
 habitants of it could not remain whilst the process of 
 purification was going on. Too much magnetism or 
 electricity in the earth or air would endanger the 
 nervous balance of the human frame. The test in- 
 struments in the lava wells were frequently examined 
 to find the electric state of any section of the island ; 
 and one central electrometer was constantly recording 
 the electric state of the atmosphere in all parts of it. 
 Thus were they able to recharge by means of their 
 
The Lilaran 189 
 
 apparatus whatever localities were found defective, and 
 tap those that had a superfluity; and over the country 
 at night the flame-like streamers lit up the darkness 
 here and there. But this occurred at rare intervals, for 
 it was only in certain conditions of the sun that the 
 earth sponged up more electricity than was good for 
 the highest life upon its surface. 
 
 The storm-cone as a rule was enough for sanitation. 
 By its wind force it could drift all dangerous clouds of 
 moisture or of bacterial life past Limanora. By its 
 electric-darting powers the heart could be squeezed out 
 of storms before they struck the shores. It regu- 
 lated the rainfall, depositing the contents of clouds by 
 day far out upon the sea and by night upon the thirst- 
 ing land. Sultry blacknesses that would otherwise 
 float past with only stifling effect were tapped, first 
 for their electricity and then for their rain. Storms of 
 dust that now and again darkened over the circle of 
 fog could be precipitated into the ocean partly by 
 electricity, partly by the blasts of the storm-cone. 
 The atmosphere was kept singularly pure and free 
 from deleterious germs or particles, and few nights 
 passed without a drenching shower cleansing the whole 
 lower portion of the island. The peak of Ljlaroma 
 drew to it like a magnet all the masses of moisture that 
 collected within many hundred miles of it; and a lit- 
 tle manipulation would break these up into refreshing 
 night showers that swept its slopes and the plateaux 
 and levels below; and, in order to prevent the de- 
 structive floods that this might produce in the rivers, 
 the shoulders of the mountain and its deep valleys 
 bristled with great forests which sponged up the falling 
 moisture and let it down gently from hour to hour into 
 the bastioned channels. 
 
i9 Limanora 
 
 Climate was to this people as much a matter of man- 
 agement as food and its production. They could 
 modify it to fit any change in the conditions or neces- 
 sities or purposes of life. To be at the mercy of the 
 forces of nature was a state of existence in what they 
 now considered their barbarous past. It was only the 
 unforeseen that had them at a disadvantage; and the 
 unforeseen was to them now only the cosmic. As 
 the planetary system shifted through space, it had to 
 encounter conditions and modes and degrees of energy 
 and life that nothing short of omniscience could antici- 
 pate; but they were beginning to master the secret 
 of many of those unexpected changes of condition. 
 The astro-sciential families had been classifying for 
 centuries the symptoms that accompanied these in the 
 appearance of the sun or of one or other of the planets. 
 With their innumerable delicate instruments for record- 
 ing and analysing the electric, magnetic, luminous, and 
 heat- vaporous state of distant space, they could see afar 
 off the beginnings of cosmic disturbances and anticipate 
 their ultimate direction; and in many cases they could 
 guard Limanora against the more patent and destruc- 
 tive effects of magnetic and electric storms and of great 
 waves of heat or light. 
 
 Yet there was much to master in the new cosmic 
 conditions that from time to time beset the earth or the 
 planetary system. Some seemed to arise so suddenly 
 that no observation could have anticipated them. Es- 
 pecially was this the case with living drift, into shoals 
 of which the universe struck, the spawn of undeveloped 
 worlds. Hence came new diseases so widespread as to 
 be plagues. These generally evaded the fine instru- 
 ments of the astro-scientist, till they had reached the 
 very atmosphere of the earth; for in the interstellar 
 
The Lilaran 
 
 191 
 
 spaces they led so meagre a life and were spread so 
 thinly and widely that they scarcely intercepted the 
 light or other forms of energy from the sun or other 
 systems. Yet the imaginative families and the inven- 
 tors were struggling towards some more delicate in- 
 strument, which would observe and record the presence 
 of interstellar material life. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 CHOKTROO 
 
 THE Lilamo were usually occupied in these sanitary 
 duties, but at times the other section of their de- 
 fence of lyimanora claimed their attention. I had had 
 good reason to know the force of the lilaran, or storm- 
 cone, in my attempt to arrive in the island. Had it not 
 been decided to permit our entrance, our perseverance 
 would have failed of the attainment of our object. 
 
 I was soon to witness a marvellous display of the 
 defensive and repulsive powers of the storm-cone. For 
 some years after the first period of my novitiate and my 
 partial admission" to privileges as a citizen with which 
 this period ended, there had been observed throughout 
 the archipelago a movement which spread with con- 
 siderable rapidity. It was one of the amusements of 
 the Limanorans to watch the comedy of life upon the 
 other islands through the idrovamolan, or instrument 
 for distance seeing and hearing, which they had fixed 
 high up the mountain. On a floating strip of ire- 
 lium, that could be projected far into the sky, scenes 
 beneath the horizon could be mirrored and watched 
 through this instrument and through other instruments 
 for reducing distance. The sounds, too, that rose from 
 the scene re-echoed from the under-surface of the float- 
 
 192 
 
Choktroo 193 
 
 ing mirror, and could be magnified by the makrakous- 
 tic part of the idrovamolan into their original volume. 
 A rarer and more difficult instrument was one which 
 combined with this power of seeing and hearing at a 
 great distance that of noting the magnetism working 
 in a community even under the horizon. 
 
 Recently they had found that they could dispense 
 with the floating mirror and reflector. The ether was 
 their transmitter of all they wished to see or hear at a 
 distance. Through it passed electric waves from even 
 immeasurable distances, whilst the sky itself formed a 
 sufficiently complete mirror for reflecting whatever was 
 occurring under the horizon. By recent discoveries 
 and inventions they were enabled to transform electric 
 impulses into the scene or sound that gave them out 
 into the surrounding air. Their new instruments 
 would tap the occurrences at any point on any given 
 line or in any given direction. They were now inde- 
 pendent of any artificial medium for their knowledge 
 of the outside world. The receivers of their new idro- 
 vamolan were every moment recording and analysing 
 whatsoever occurred along the line in which it was 
 directed; and its transformers were constantly trans- 
 lating the electric records into the forms or sounds 
 which originally sent out the impulses; it was so con- 
 structed as to prevent the confusion of waves that came 
 from different points on the route, for it moved with 
 the swiftness of light or, if required, with that of 
 electricity. These new modifications gave them hope 
 that they would soon be able to see and hear much 
 of what goes on in universes which, though invisible, 
 yet transmit luminous and electric waves sufficiently 
 strong to affect their telescopic instruments, and that 
 the straggling rays of light or electricity might be 
 
i94 Limanora 
 
 transformed into the scenes and sounds which gave 
 them birth. 
 
 As it was, the L,imanorans were able to watch all that 
 was going on in the islands around them. During 
 their leisure hours, when it was their duty as well as 
 their pleasure to relax the mind, they would sit and 
 observe the life of what they called their menagerie. 
 To them, indeed, the whirling eddy of existence with 
 its ambitions and crimes, its luxury and misery, in the 
 archipelago around seemed little more than the antics 
 of monkeys or the internecine appetites of wild beasts. 
 The scenes were generally amusing in the ape-like 
 vanities and mimicries they exhibited. Sometimes 
 they were offensive and even repulsive in their filth 
 or brutalities. How beings formed like themselves 
 could endure the grossness of their luxuries and the 
 falsity and hollowness of their most admired social dis- 
 plays was to them a bewildering problem. Even the 
 best of these islanders were as far behind the Lima- 
 norans in true human qualities as they thought them- 
 selves in advance of apes. The daily observation of 
 these creatures so humanly endowed and yet so foul 
 and blind in act was often too much to bear for any 
 length of time; the most repulsive 'scenes were those 
 of what was considered high life, of courts and courtly 
 circles, of rulers and leaders of act and thought. 
 " Who can bear the horror of their intrigues and hypo- 
 crisies, their cruel trampling of the fallen, their hideous 
 fawning on the successful, their insolent pride and in- 
 tolerance of the weak ! " I often heard exclamations 
 like this from the lips of the watchers as they turned 
 away from the idrovamolan with a shudder. The 
 combination of ape and bully, of reptile and vapourer 
 was, in the thoughts of this people, the lowest depth to 
 
Choktroo 195 
 
 which human nature could fall ; and it was the usual 
 and most envied form in the high social life of most of 
 these islands. The barbarism and ignorance of the 
 poor and downtrodden marked a less retrograde phase 
 of humanity. The sight of the posturings and scrap- 
 ings, the insolence and spaniel manners of the higher 
 classes served every day to deepen the horror of exile 
 and to frighten every Limanoran from anything that 
 would lead even to the slightest retrogression. Had it 
 not been for this wholesome effect upon their minds, 
 they would have long ago abandoned the custom of 
 watching this beast spectacle of retrograde and showy 
 civilisation, so much pain mingled with their amuse- 
 ment at it. They knew that their pity was vain ; for 
 it would take unremitting effort for thousands of years 
 to raise these peoples to the Limanoran level, if the 
 Limanoran missionaries had not in the meantime been 
 dragged down to the lower level ; and these thousands 
 of years could be better spent in attaining higher 
 and higher ideals in their own life. The task, they 
 knew, was as hopeless as if these descendants of their 
 degenerate exiles should attempt to drag the lower 
 animals up to their stage of human development, and 
 this irremediable nature of their state added to the pain 
 of the observers. 
 
 Had the habit of watching the comedy of their 
 menagerie been given up, the Lilamo would have still 
 had to observe the enactment of history in the sur- 
 rounding islands. It was part of their duty of defence 
 to anticipate all armaments against Limanora; and 
 they had discovered that there was unusual excitement 
 amongst the various peoples since the arrival of the 
 Daydream in their waters. It was evident that this 
 formed an epoch in the history of the archipelago. The 
 
196 Limanora 
 
 L,ilamo reported the movements of the portentous 
 smoke-pennoned ship which sailed in the teeth of all 
 winds like their own ships of the air. What was to 
 prevent it approaching lyimanora in spite of the force 
 of the storm-cone? The thought brought the first 
 trace of fear into the breasts of this people; for, once 
 a foreign element had been able to force its way into 
 their midst, how could they prevent moral contamina- 
 tion and swift retrogression? Their advance would 
 crumble away in a few centuries, nothing but their 
 material progress being likely to survive the incursion 
 of barbarism. 
 
 It was imperative that new measures of defence be 
 adopted. It was then that the forces of Rimla had 
 been enormously increased, thus making it possible for 
 most of its energy to take the electric form in the storm- 
 cone. With this they would be able to repel the new 
 monster with so much metal in its bosom ; they would 
 play with it as with a toy on the water. All my wan- 
 derings had been narrowly watched, my landing in 
 Aleofane, my escape from it, my sojourn in Tirralaria 
 and ascent of Klimarol, my companionship with Sneek- 
 ape and my scorn of him, my sympathy with the 
 refugees in Nookoo, and my friendship with Noola. 
 Nothing escaped their attention, and my character was 
 analysed in the most minute way by deductions from 
 the details of my conduct. It was decided that, if I 
 showed eagerness and persistence enough, I should be 
 allowed to land with Noola; but that my fire-ship and 
 my men should be blown off from the coast. 
 
 Since then the affairs of the archipelago had been 
 observed as narrowly as before, and especially the 
 wanderings and history of the Daydream. As I ex- 
 pected, it passed finally into the possession of Broolyi, 
 
Choktroo 197 
 
 and the new ideas and methods it brought into the 
 warfare of this isolated zone of the world made an era 
 in its history. A great military organiser had arisen; 
 and he had by the potency of his will moulded Broolyi 
 into a unity which with the help of new fire-ships built 
 on the model of my yacht had brought the other islands 
 into subjection. Even the aristocratic and refined 
 Aleofane with its subtle government and all-powerful 
 central institutions had to bow its neck to the yoke. 
 This strange romance had been enacting for more than 
 a decade; and the Limanorans had been watching it, 
 at first with amusement, and afterwards with resolution 
 and clear purpose. They knew the whole of this sub- 
 jugative process was based on hypocrisy and injustice 
 and bloodshed, but it was not worse than the methods 
 of political existence it displaced; it only meant the 
 substitution of one vicious ideal for others as vicious. 
 There would be more movement and activity for a time, 
 but as soon as the masterful will had vanished, there 
 would be a quick return to the old lazy luxury in the 
 few and lazy misery in the many. It had cost multi- 
 tudes of lives, and would cost many more before the 
 military mania had burned itself out ; but of what 
 worth were most of those lives to themselves or to the 
 world ? They succeeded, where they did succeed, only 
 in sustaining themselves wretchedly and perpetuating 
 a strain of existence that was, if changed at all, tending 
 downwards. The new spectacle was more sanguinary, 
 but not one whit more dismal than the ones the Ivima- 
 norans had witnessed for many generations. The 
 misery was irremediable, the standard of existence 
 was so low. To fence it off like a plague was all that 
 could be done. 
 
 When I sat down to the idrovamolan I soon dis- 
 
198 Limanora 
 
 covered the master ot this transformation scene. I 
 heard in Broolyi from all the entrenched camps and 
 the towns loud huzzas and cries of " Long live Chok- 
 troo!" Turning the line of sight to the capital, the 
 conflagration of cries which swept the crowded streets 
 soon led my eye to the centre of the far-reaching mag- 
 netic thrill, the square of the imperial palace. There I 
 saw step out on a balcony and bow to the enthusiastic 
 populace a little firm-set figure that seemed to awaken 
 memories in me. I strengthened the power of vision 
 in order to examine the face more keenly, and, as a 
 great burst of " Long live our emperor! Long live 
 Choktroo!" kindled and blazed athwart the city, the 
 identity of the little conqueror broke upon my con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 It was my cabin-boy, Jock Drew, whom I had 
 rescued from a life of degradation, if not ultimate in- 
 famy, in his native village. His father, the local 
 chimney-sweep, a man of vigorous but small physique, 
 had succumbed to the fate of so many of his trade, and 
 swept his throat hourly with the fiercest of whiskey. 
 His mother, a brave, strong little peasant girl, had 
 died early of the effort to master this thirsty piece of 
 humanity that had been tied to her, and his vice. The 
 boy had the maternal lines in his nature, strong will, 
 great courage, and fiery passion. It stirred my pity to 
 see him struggle with such a mean destiny, doubtless 
 to sink hopelessly into the ditch. He had been shield- 
 ing himself from the temptation that his drunken 
 father set before him by living in a world of penny 
 romance. His imagination was strung to its highest 
 pitch by the gory pages of his hard-won treasures. 
 When he heard of my proposed expedition to the other 
 side of the world, he came and pleaded for even the 
 
Choktroo 199 
 
 most menial position on board the Daydream. I was 
 only too eager to rescue him from the hideous fate be- 
 fore him, and engaged him as cabin-boy. 
 
 After he came on board, some of the men were in- 
 clined to patronise him, and, when he resisted their 
 approaches and grew sulky, to apply a rope's end to 
 him. I had to stand between him and them, even 
 though I saw that in the end he would have the best of 
 the quarrel; for he was strong of build and violent 
 in temper, and only controlled himself, I could see, 
 that he might have the surer and more complete re- 
 venge. He was a solitary, musing boy, and I thought 
 to draw him from his solitude by interesting him in 
 scientific and philosophical books; but he returned 
 with the greater gusto to his penny series of lives of the 
 great pirates, robbers, warriors, and conquerors. The 
 only section of the Daydream 's library which could 
 seduce him from his loved studies was that containing 
 history and adventures. The crew, as was natural, 
 held the studious little recluse too cheap; and occasion- 
 ally felt the sting of his tongue when they bantered 
 him; but his melodramatic manners and attitude, 
 copied from the coloured representations of his heroes 
 in his favourite series, laid him open again to their 
 laughter and scorn. His, mind was unwholesome 
 with brooding over gory achievements and tremendous 
 ambitions. He often uttered absurd boasts and gave 
 himself airs that were incongruous with his minute 
 figure and menial position, and Jock Drew ceased to be 
 the butt of the ship only when I was present ; but he 
 never ceased to read and meditate. The laughter of 
 his shipmates drove him more and more into his books 
 and into himself. L,ater on in the voyage he extended 
 his reading to books on naval architecture and the 
 
200 Limanora 
 
 management of the steam-engine, and at last would 
 spend hours assisting the engineer below. He came 
 to know every part of the machinery and every secret 
 of its construction and management. Indeed, the chief 
 engineer acknowledged that in case of his illness he 
 had an able successor on board. The guns and all the 
 ironwork of the ship drew his attention next, and he 
 came to be respected for his practical knowledge of 
 every part; when anything needed mending, it was he 
 who was ultimately called in to give advice or aid. 
 Slowly he rose to be the real master of the Daydream, 
 even though he continued to be laughed at for his hero- 
 mimic airs and his occasional boasts. He had by his 
 reading and studies made himself essential to every 
 man on board, and his strong will exacted outward 
 respect, if not obedience to him, in return. It was 
 strange to see the revolution in the ship's crew during 
 their voyaging about the archipelago. When I came 
 on board again, I saw that, though they continued a 
 semblance of their old bantering, they had in their 
 hearts begun to bow before the boy of twenty. The 
 very gall of their scorn and of his menial position had 
 driven him into this slow but striking revolt. 
 
 And here I saw the result. His boyhood, neglected 
 and beaten, had given the cunning and worldly wisdom 
 and concentration of power that belong in most to late 
 maturity. The strength that had lain dormant for so 
 many centuries in his mother's peasant race had 
 gathered in him like a torrent. The hard conditions 
 of his youth had reined iri the wildness and animality 
 which had run riot in his father's debauchery. Hun- 
 dreds of such masterful natures, finding no sphere in 
 their native locality to give scope to the long-dammed- 
 up powers of their race, waste themselves in chafing 
 
Choktroo 201 
 
 against their petty surroundings and die with the 
 reputation of miniature devils. The focussed energy 
 of two long-suppressed races had in this case found its 
 career and scope, and a diabolic conflagration was the 
 consequence in this isolated region of the world. The 
 race of Jock Drew had never before blossomed; now 
 that it had found the fit soil, it had flowered porten- 
 tously. 
 
 The misfortune was that his ill-moulded youth 
 and his favourite reading had left him naked of moral- 
 ity. He was not in this respect much worse than the 
 people whom he misled into war or than those whom 
 he subjugated. He had only more concentrated will 
 and energy and a keener appreciation of the means 
 that would best satisfy his appetite for power. The 
 complete suppression of the desire through thousands 
 of years of his peasant ancestry made its ultimate man- 
 ifestation on finding freedom of action all the more 
 tremendous. It grew with growing self-confidence; 
 and confidence grew with success. His bearing wholly 
 altered during the wanderings of the Daydream before 
 I had abandoned her. He had grown erect and threw 
 his great chest out and held his large head up till he 
 overawed his persecutors. Seeing him only in a sitting 
 position or looking only at his bust one would have 
 guessed him to be of lofty stature. Yet like his father 
 and mother he never rose above five feet in height; 
 and as his face filled up with good fare and the know- 
 ledge of his own powers it grew handsome and calm, 
 seldom showing the fierce brute slumbering under- 
 neath. His wonderful self-control and reserve held 
 him silent in circumstances where speech or action 
 would have revealed his innate folly or animality, and 
 he learned the power of such reserve, allied with 
 
202 Limanora 
 
 sudden and decisive action, over the wills of others; he 
 saw that it throws an air of mystery round the indi- 
 viduality. So he refrained from action till he had com- 
 plete control of the circumstances and had gathered 
 such resources into his hands as would astonish his 
 rivals or enemies; silently, unscrupulously, he got to 
 know the cards they held in their hands, whilst he con- 
 cealed his own under seeming inaction; then with a 
 sudden and unnerving move he threw all his forces 
 upon them and demoralised them. I had watched the 
 method in the little intrigues and conspiracies on ship- 
 board, and I knew when I observed him through the 
 idrovamolan that he was the same Jock Drew, only 
 more developed by his astonishing successes. 
 
 He had found his opportunity when the Daydream 
 finally anchored in the chief harbour of Broolyi. 
 There was much need of government after the plague; 
 the monarch and his family had fled and finally per- 
 ished; and the two rivals for the position were almost 
 equally matched. There was prospect of a long civil 
 war. The wiser and stronger counsellors set up a 
 republic, but this was only a feeble stop-gap. The 
 flames of civil war burst out in spite of it. 
 
 Jock arrived at this stage of their history, and joined 
 the staff of the competitor for the throne who held the 
 capital and the key of the public treasury. He rapidly 
 became prime adviser in the camp, and as soon as he 
 had attracted confidence in himself and his character 
 he set his method to work. He led an army out to 
 attack the enemy, and completely routed them by the 
 suddenness of his action; he had led one half of his 
 troops straight out to meet the forces opposed to him, 
 but he had sent the others round by a secret path into 
 their rear, and they burst simultaneously upon the 
 
Choktroo 203 
 
 enemy. The surprise broke the spirit of the attacked 
 and they fled in rout. 
 
 With wily stratagem he incited other officers to rival 
 him, and took care that they went out under disad- 
 vantageous conditions. They failed, and their failures 
 led to loud demands for Choktroo, as he came to be 
 called. He now got command of the whole of the re- 
 sources of the state, and used them for the making of 
 guns and other surprises for the enemy. Meanwhile he 
 allowed the enemy to think that his party was wholly 
 demoralised by defeats, and they crept up towards the 
 walls of the city in their excess of confidence. He knew 
 by his spies in their camp how vainglorious they had 
 become; but he allowed their bravado to rise to the 
 pitch of fool hardiness, and then, his preparations being 
 made, he opened fire upon them, from all sides. So com- 
 plete was the rout, that the enemy disappeared from 
 the country around and took refuge in distant castles 
 and forts. 
 
 His name grew into a power of itself, rousing enthu- 
 siasm wherever he appeared and greatly terrifying 
 his opponents. It was then that there began the 
 most striking part of his career. All the brave and 
 able generals who during the civil war had come up 
 from the ranks were completely in his power. He 
 sent them out to master castles or detachments of the 
 enemy, but with such imperfect forces or supplies as 
 would render them inactive. Their individual talents 
 snatched occasional small victories, but as a rule they 
 only prepared for ultimate victory by raising entrench- 
 ments and scouring the country around. Whenever 
 he discovered that in any part a general was about to 
 be successful in spite of his disadvantages, he hurried 
 thither and led the troops to victory. If the feebleness 
 
204 Limanora 
 
 of an officer anywhere seemed about to ensure defeat 
 he marched reinforcements to his aid and turned it into 
 success. Whenever he suffered defeat himself, he 
 always managed to represent it as a brilliant success 
 marred by the incompetence of some other general. 
 At last he grew weary of the guerrilla warfare and re- 
 solved that it should end. So he withdrew his troops 
 from siege- work and allowed the rebels to gather con- 
 fidence and to mass again. He sent several generals 
 against them with small armies. Their defeats gave 
 the enemy still greater boldness. They ventured 
 nearer to the capital; and when they were defiling 
 through a pass he appeared on the heights with his 
 guns. The two sections of his army closed the mouths 
 of the pass, and the finest array the rebels had ever 
 shown was shattered. The castles and forts soon sur- 
 rendered. With one acclaim Choktroo was elected 
 emperor, and the candidate whom he was supposed to 
 be helping vanished from the scene. 
 
 His boyish reading had made him as much of an 
 actor as he was by nature an organiser. Before long 
 the whole people of Broolyi were adoring him as a god. 
 Their passion was glory; and in him they had found 
 the incarnation of glory. No piece of work in the state 
 so minute but, if successful, he claimed as his own, even 
 should it have been centuries old. No act of his own 
 but, if unsuccessful, he found a scapegoat for. He was 
 mean enough to steal and eavesdrop in his own house- 
 hold; he was bold enough to outlie the foulest of his 
 minions, to outface the most manifest exposure of his 
 crimes. He even dared to assume the r61e of divinity. 
 He ringed himself round with mystery and ceremonial, 
 and when he did appear in public made the appear- 
 ance impressive by its display. He knew the effect of 
 
Choktroo 205 
 
 silence, and cheapened neither himself nor his words. 
 He organised the state on military lines and made it 
 centre in his personality. 
 
 He soon had exhausted the treasury and the resources 
 of the country in the civil war and in his public dis- 
 plays. Nor could he keep up his glory long in in- 
 action, even though it was an inaction of mystery. He 
 must soon go to war beyond the bounds of the island. 
 There he could shine, there he could get all the sup- 
 plies he needed; but he had to keep up the farce the 
 nation had played for centuries of professing to keep 
 the peace, for he had adopted the title of the Prince 
 of Peace. He had to make it appear that his wars 
 were forced on him by his neighbours, and for this 
 invented an elaborate system of diplomacies which 
 enabled him to pick a quarrel and yet seem to have it 
 thrust upon him. 
 
 His first quarry was Aleofane; for it was the wealth- 
 iest island in the archipelago. For years he kept up a 
 show of alliance with it, till he had his fire-ships ready, 
 built under his direction on the model of the Daydream. 
 He racked his dominion to make guns and all kinds of 
 firearms. When the expedition was complete, he made 
 a demand of Aleofane that had show of reason and yet 
 could not be complied with. It was refused, and his 
 fleet was outside the capital before it could make prepa- 
 ration. He sent some of his ships to the other side of 
 the island to land troops, and as these marched up by 
 land he disembarked the rest under protection of his 
 guns. The first battle decided the war. He dethroned 
 the monarch of Aleofane and annexed the island to 
 his dominions, setting up a viceroy, with a strong force 
 to support him. 
 
 He drew new troops from the ranks of the people for 
 
206 Limanora 
 
 service in other islands. He impoverished those nobles 
 who refused to join his court or his staff. He broke 
 the spirit of all who would not adore him, and he 
 drained by taxation the resources of the country. 
 
 With still larger armies and larger fleets he swept 
 conquering over the whole archipelago, till every 
 people bowed before him. Those who distinguished 
 themselves in his wars or in his service he elevated to 
 new distinctions and titles. Those who died in his 
 wars he beatified. With great ceremony he would 
 raise all the dead on one of his battle-fields to the rank 
 of sub-divinities, till his heaven was as crowded as his 
 court. He did not obliterate the old religions; but he 
 overshadowed them, and his policy kept subject to 
 him the passion for glory in life and deification after 
 death that lurks in every human bosom. The active 
 and the romantic were strung up to enthusiasm by the 
 magnetism of his name. Most thought it was his per- 
 sonality which set their blood throbbing, but it was 
 only that his deeds and his histrionic power of magni- 
 fying them worked on their imaginations. How wild 
 their fervour I could scarcely have realised had I not 
 observed it with my own senses. 
 
 He had to keep moving and victoriously moving 
 if his magnetism were not to vanish. When his em- 
 pire included all the islands in the archipelago but the 
 Isle of Devils in the centre, there was nothing for it but 
 to attempt its conquest. We heard him bluster out 
 his favourite bombastic phrases, learned from his penny 
 romances and biographies. " Heaven is our ally, and 
 who on earth can stand against us? Is it not our 
 mission, the mission of a god, to chase all devils from 
 the earth ? Our last conquest shall be hell, and its 
 denizens shall die by fire and sword." Utterances and 
 
Choktroo 207 
 
 proclamations like this fired the imaginations of his 
 soldiers, and they would have laid their lives down at 
 the moment for this fire-eater. What he had boasted 
 or threatened before, he had done, or had by astute 
 fiction persuaded his followers that he had done; and 
 what limit was there to his deeds ? If he said that he 
 would scale the heavens, they were certain he would 
 do it. The thought fused them into a unity and 
 chased out of their breasts the panic which the mere 
 mention of the central isle produced. 
 
 He had not the traditional and hereditary ague-fit to 
 overcome in his blood, yet there was a new sinking of 
 the heart when he thought of his task. He had to 
 reassure himself by wild rhodomontade, as he superin- 
 tended the building and armament of an enormous 
 fleet and the concentration of the largest army the 
 archipelago had ever seen. He could not pick a diplo- 
 matic quarrel with his new victim; yet he must have 
 at least the semblance of a cause in order to put heart 
 into his followers. He announced that he had sent 
 envoys to the Isle of Devils to open intercourse with it, 
 but they were not allowed to approach. Again and 
 again had he tried this pacific measure, but no heed 
 had been given to him. I,et vengeance be upon the 
 heads of so churlish and unjust a people! How could 
 such poltroons and men-haters be allowed to cumber 
 the earth ? 
 
 I watched the great fleet put out from Broolyi with 
 its streamers of smoke. We could have heard the ac- 
 clamations almost with the unaided ear; they rent the 
 sky when Choktroo went on board his own fire-ship, 
 which was thrice the size of the largest of the others, 
 and thrice more brilliantly caparisoned. He passed 
 with his favourite silent and self-absorbed look on his 
 
2o8 Limanora 
 
 face through the applauding crowds on to a raised 
 platform in the stern, reserved for him and his staff. 
 Arrived there he paced silently with his chin resting 
 on his folded arms. He knew what an impression of 
 godlikeness this made on the crowd. Small though he 
 was in stature, he doubtless seemed to his followers and 
 the people on the shore to take gigantic proportions. 
 
 I was amazed to see so little perturbation amongst the 
 Limanorans. They seemed to watch the whole scene 
 as if it were a comedy. On the fleet steamed, and yet 
 there was perfect calm in the community; only the 
 Lilamo were at their posts on the peak of L,ilarorna. 
 The rest were peacefully seated at the idrovamolans or 
 busy with their usual avocations. I knew the destruc- 
 tiveness of the great cannon that Choktroo had pre- 
 pared, and the distance they would carry. On this 
 point indeed I had been consulted some months before. 
 I knew, too, how this people shrank from every act that 
 would involve the loss of a human life. How were 
 they to repel this great armament without whelming 
 it in the ocean and drowning a large proportion of 
 those in the ships? Thyriel could throw no light on 
 the problem; we were both too young to be taken into 
 the confidence of the wise men or to know their designs. 
 I could do nothing but watch the fleet and then pass 
 to my daily duties. 
 
 A night passed, and at dawn we could see the islands 
 of smoke lie black on the horizon; the ships themselves 
 had not appeared. Choktroo evidently knew that it 
 was useless to conceal the expedition or its object from 
 this far-seeing people under the darkness of night. It 
 was too well known throughout the archipelago how 
 penetrative was their gaze. He meant to make his 
 attack by day. Soon the funnels and the masts broke 
 
Choktroo 209 
 
 the sky-line. Yet there was not a sound from the 
 storm-cone. The slight wind had fallen; everything 
 favoured the invader. He could see through the trans- 
 lucent air every feature of our island and almost every 
 movement of its inhabitants as soon as we could dis- 
 cern the human beings on board his ships with the 
 naked eye. Were they getting drawn into some gigan- 
 tic trap? This thought evidently occurred to the 
 leader of the armament, as it occurred to me, for the 
 fleet lessened speed. I could see Choktroo, at a loss 
 what to do, on his poop consulting with his officers, 
 who could help him little. Still the storm-cone stood 
 silent on the mountain-peak. 
 
 The bold.step had to be taken; the order was given 
 for advance. The smoke again streamed in the rear of 
 the fleet, and I could see the gunners prepare for 
 action and the sailors and soldiers set the boats ready 
 for launching. What had happened to the Lilamo ? 
 Were they all asleep ? Was the progress of the island 
 at last to be trampled under the feet of this brutal 
 soldier and his forces? The fire-ships were almost 
 within cannon-shot of the shore; there puffed out the 
 preliminary whiff from the side of Choktroo' s steamer 
 and the ball fell with a roar into the ocean between. 
 Another five minutes and matters would be past 
 remedy. Yet there was perfect calm among the Lima- 
 norans. I controlled my excitement and watched the 
 fleet. Everything was bustle on board, and when I 
 sat down to the idrovamolan all sounds were jubilant 
 and boasting. This Isle of Devils was at last to have 
 her master. This proud isolation was at last to be 
 broken. Such exclamations I could hear from the 
 gunners as they loaded and ran out their guns. 
 
 All was silence, for all was ready for the word of 
 
210 Limanora 
 
 command. Choktroo paced his poop in scarce-con- 
 trollable glee. His thoughts were doubtless stretching 
 out beyond the fog circle to the countries he had left 
 behind him with his boyhood, other worlds for him to 
 conquer. His arms were folded and his eye was turned 
 inward; he knew that the whole expedition was await- 
 ing his nod. Soon he stopped stone-silent and stiff, as 
 if to give the decisive word. I waited the action, but 
 he still stood moveless. I looked over the ship; there 
 was his staff awaiting his beck as if petrified. Every 
 man was at his post, but not a muscle moved; the eyes 
 stared as if they belonged to the dead. My glance 
 took in the other ships; all were as silent and still as 
 the grave. The whole armament seemed^ turned to 
 stone. 
 
 Then there fluttered down upon the vessels human 
 figures that I recognised as of the Lilamo. In a mo- 
 ment a Limanoran pilot stood at the helm of each fire- 
 ship; and as if by nature the whole fleet turned 
 majestically round and made for the shelving beach of 
 a low uninhabited island underneath the horizon. On 
 and on they sped straight for the shore, round whose 
 margin not the least fringe of surf whitened. Through 
 the idrovamolan I could hear the grating keels as they 
 struck the sand and pebbles at full speed. The crash 
 seemed to awaken the crews and the soldiers, who 
 rubbed their eyes as if roused from a dream. Before 
 them the bows of their ships were burrowing themselves 
 in the .blown sand of the beach; but already I could 
 see the pilots winging their way through the sky back 
 to lyimanora. 
 
 There was a silent power in the lilaran which I had 
 not investigated: its power of magnetism. This it 
 could exercise several miles off; but it grew feebler 
 
Choktroo 2 1 1 
 
 with the distance. In this aspect, then, the lilaran 
 could not be used as a weapon of defence far from the 
 shore of Limanora. If, however, there was a mass of 
 iron or like magnetisable metal in the ship that con- 
 tained its victims, its power had been discovered to be 
 as great far as near. It was only recently that they 
 had so far developed their personal power of arresting 
 the consciousness by sudden sleep-petrifaction as to be 
 able to exercise it at a distance. This they accom- 
 plished by material aids to the magnetic faculty. The 
 sudden flashing of brilliant objects before the eyes and 
 the use of powerful magnets had been found to inten- 
 sify the somnifractive power of the eye and the mag- 
 netic sense. This led them to make experiments with 
 the concentrated power of magnets all brilliant with 
 irelium jewels. The result was that they found the 
 somnifractive power to reside even more in things than 
 in persons. They tried it through the lilaran on L,ima- 
 norans of the most powerful will at the farthest corner 
 of the island, and found it to be the more effective the 
 more power they concentrated and the more iron or 
 metals of similar quality were near the patient. 
 
 This result had been reached about the time they had 
 come to see that the invasion of their island by Chok- 
 troo was inevitable without some other than the mere 
 wind-power of the lilaran. Step by step the L,ilamo 
 brought their new weapon to perfection; at any mo- 
 ment they could concentrate the forces of Rimla into 
 this faculty of the lilaran. They experimented on 
 Limanorans in boats out at sea, and finally could tabu- 
 late the magnetic powers at various distances. This 
 explained to me the flashings I had often seen on the 
 horizon and had taken for an effect of the idrovamolan ; 
 but they were too near the surface of the sea for that. 
 
2 1 2 Limanora 
 
 This explained the perfect calm with which the Lima- 
 norans watched the approach of Choktroo's expedition 
 and the thrilling keenness of the flashes that swept 
 over his fire-ships. 
 
 I watched for many days the effect of this great blow 
 upon the nature and fortunes of my old cabin-boy. 
 Over his immediate staff and army he was able to 
 regain his full sway as soon as they recovered from the 
 shock; but his power over the other islanders was 
 completely shaken. Bodies of them launched the boats 
 from the steamers and made off for their own islands 
 before the leaders were aware of their intentions. The 
 moment Choktroo realised the position he turned his 
 still uninjured guns in the direction of the sea and 
 commanded all issue from the beach where his ships 
 were buried. For wholesome example he sank several 
 boats which had almost got out of his reach. Then 
 he set his army to dig canals around one of his fire- 
 ships; but no sooner was she ready for floating than 
 the whole force of the lilaran was turned in her direc- 
 tion; the waves rose and a single night's surf com- 
 pletely undid the labour of days. The ship was as 
 deeply embedded as ever; and her sisters had almost 
 disappeared beneath the sand-dunes. The weight of 
 metal in them shortened the process of burial. 
 
 It was clear that nothing could be done to save the 
 expedition or bring its material back to Broolyi. Be- 
 fore many days we saw the soldiers embark somewhat 
 sadly in the boats and find their way across the ocean 
 to the adjacent islands. Piecemeal the whole army 
 retraced its steps to Broolyi. 
 
 It was not likely that Choktroo would allow this slur 
 to rest on his fame and eat into his power like rust, for 
 there was clear evidence that his influence over even 
 
Choktroo 213 
 
 the Broolyians had greatly suffered. By means of his 
 advertising and his histrionic abilities he had brought 
 them to believe that he was invincible; they now began 
 to feel that he had the same limitations as themselves: 
 he was powerless against the magic of the Isle of Devils. 
 All his wiles were needed to check the spread of panic 
 and distrust. He first of all minimised the defeat in 
 his proclamations, and before many months were over 
 he had come to speak of it as a victory marred by the 
 invincible powers of nature. He had been quick to 
 recognise the similarity of the phenomenon to that 
 we had experienced in the Daydream when running the 
 gauntlet of the fog circle, and he sent out party after 
 party to explore the ring of mystery and to come back 
 with tales of its magical powers of inducing sleep. 
 Thus was he soon able to convince the archipelago that 
 the failure of his great expedition was due, not to the 
 inhabitants of the Isle of Devils, but to the forces of 
 nature. He had in his own eye and will great mes- 
 meric power, and by practice was able to develop it 
 into something that he could exercise at pleasure. 
 Then he made public exhibition of his capacity in the 
 various islands. He threw numbers into mesmeric 
 sleep, nor would he or could he release them from its 
 thrall. They became his willing slaves and lived only 
 to please him. A milder form of mesmeric fascination 
 he used in order to rivet his despotism on his armies. 
 He would address sections of them with bombastic self- 
 glorification of his deeds and powers and with flatteries 
 of them and their glorious courage. His personal 
 magnetism worked upon them as they gazed at him, 
 and by the close of his speech he had them enthralled 
 to his will. 
 
 It was not long before he was feared as a magician 
 
214 Limanora 
 
 by all who did not mesmerically worship'him; and tens 
 of thousands were eager to do the most wicked and 
 shameful deeds, if only he bade them. Yet he dared 
 not shrink from another fall with the inhabitants of the 
 Isle of Devils; else even this preternatural fascination 
 that he exercised might vanish. For years he racked 
 the wealth of the islands and built an enormous fleet of 
 still more powerful fire-ships, and armed it with still 
 more powerful guns. To supply the funds for the ex- 
 pedition, those who were not trained fighting men be- 
 came slaves, who toiled for him all but their few hours 
 of sleep. Rebellion against this galling and impover- 
 ishing despotism was slowly forming in the breasts of 
 the people. Many of them were disappearing myster- 
 iously. They had betaken themselves to unapproach- 
 able caverns like Nookoo, and my dreamer of Swoonarie 
 was arming them with his plague-pellets. A few more 
 months and revolution would have broken out against 
 the despot, and he at least would have perished ; but 
 the expedition sailed in all its pomp, again deeply im- 
 pressing the imaginations of the islanders. This time 
 he had taken precautions against the somnifaction of 
 his army by means of a sleep-expelling drug. Every 
 man was furnished with a dose of it to take as soon as 
 they came near the dreaded isle. The L,ilamo had 
 been busy for some time, I had seen; but the I,ima- 
 norans were as unconcerned at this approach as at the 
 former one. What new defence had they ? I could see 
 no more preparation than there had been on the pre- 
 vious occasion. The calm which prevailed reassured 
 me; yet soon I grew restless with the fear that this fire- 
 eating cabin-boy with the mystery in his eyes would 
 sully the shores of L,imanora with his vulgar ambitions. 
 My fear became alarm as I saw on the horizon the 
 
Choktroo 2 1 5 
 
 smoke of the fleet and heard through the idrovamolan 
 the shout of triumph rise from the army when the peak 
 of lyilaroma had burst on their view. I could see each 
 man drink his drug; and I thought that all was lost. 
 Suddenly there came a roar from every ship; and I 
 could see that it accompanied a plume of steam that 
 escaped from the sides. The boiler of every fire-ship 
 had evidently been punctured; and soon I could see 
 that it cost those on board unceasing effort to keep 
 afloat. The soldiers were about to take to the boats 
 when a deeper-mouthed roar numbed every other 
 sound. It was the lilaran at work, and the whole fleet 
 soon vanished over the horizon before its compulsive 
 blast. 
 
 The puncturing had been accomplished by submarine 
 action. The Lilamo had sent through the waters their 
 floating batteries, which by nicely adjusted weights lay 
 beneath the surface right on the track of the fleet. 
 The electric cables by which they were secured could 
 shift them hither and thither; and through them im- 
 mense force could be applied, sending a volley of keen 
 darts up towards whatever iron there was above them. 
 These darts had entered the hulls of the ships just be- 
 neath the water-line and made their way into the iron 
 of the engines; one or other told on the boilers and 
 disabled the ships. The electric floats were unseen by 
 the expedition, and the wounding of the fleet was as 
 mysterious and magical as the sleep had been on the 
 previous attempt. Panic seized on every soldier and 
 sailor, and they thanked their gods when the blast of 
 the lilaran hurried them to the shelving beach of a low 
 island and they heard the keels grate on shingle and 
 sand. They scrambled on shore through the surf and 
 found shelter from the wind behind the mounds that 
 
216 Limanora 
 
 covered the former fleet or under their gaunt ribs or 
 sides. 
 
 But a new panic overcame them when they dis- 
 covered that their leader was gone and could nowhere 
 be found. Then it was remembered that in the worst 
 of the storm which blew from Lilaroma a giant bird 
 had swooped down towards his ship and rested for a 
 moment on the platform, where he stood in solitary 
 meditation, and as suddenly soared up again. It was 
 two messengers of the Lilamo who had been sent in 
 one of their bird-shaped air-ships to make an end 
 of these warlike expeditions. They had alighted be- 
 side Choktroo, and by the powerful means they com- 
 manded had sent him into a deep sleep in spite of his 
 drug; they tossed him into their air-ship and in a few 
 moments were high in the azure rushing before the 
 blast of the lilaran. Away they fled with him all day 
 and all night across the belt of fog, and having reached 
 the outer world they let him down still tranced on the 
 shore of a lonely coral islet of the Pacific close to a 
 group inhabited by a savage and warlike tribe. 
 Choktroo had their instincts and ambitions; let him 
 master the savages when he awakened. A wild beast 
 could do no harm amongst wild beasts. 
 
 His memory and example haunted the archipelago 
 like an evil dream for generations. Some thought that 
 he had been borne aloft to heaven by a messenger of 
 the gods, and worshipped him as divine; his cruel 
 tyranny and wars goaded on his worshippers to wild 
 fury of injustice and slaughter. Others who were 
 keener of brain and had perceived the earthly character 
 of their leader and his purposes were incited to like 
 ambitions. The romance of his life was glorified in 
 verse and prose by every new school of literature and 
 
Choktroo 2 1 7 
 
 fired the imaginations of boyhood to warlike exploits. 
 War, piracy, plunder came to be the favourite forms 
 of dishonesty in the archipelago. It was marvellous 
 how much the peaceful and obscure suffered from the 
 romance of this cabin-boy's adventures. 
 
 But no man of the islands dared again to approach 
 the Isle of Devils. Even he whom so many of them 
 reputed a god had been unable to break in; and the 
 mishap to. the last fleet had been more bewildering 
 than that to the first. Magical powers were possessed 
 by the inhabitants of this island without a doubt; 
 there seemed to be no limit to their transcendence of 
 the order of nature. Evil they were, and the fear of 
 them the Broolyians had to endure in patience. Nor 
 did it grow less from generation to generation. Fancy 
 never let the stories of the defeat of the great Choktroo 
 rest; they gathered to them features more and more 
 terrible to contemplate. A halo of dread and mystery 
 is far more effective as a ferice against human intru- 
 sion than a halo of sanctity or even divinity. It cows 
 the miscreant and the brute in the human breast. The 
 duties of the Lilamo in repelling the attacks of men 
 would vanish for hundreds of generations. 
 
 For Choktroo, his fate was a romantic contrast to 
 that of his fame. Reports were brought in by the 
 idrovamolan or by flying messengers who had ventured 
 over the belt of fog. He was rescued by the neigh- 
 bouring tribe before he starved on the barren islet, 
 only to be threatened with sacrifice to one of their 
 gods. A missionary who had some influence over the 
 heathen arrived at the moment of sacrifice and saved 
 him. After learning their language he worked his 
 way by intrigues and assassinations and what they 
 thought magic up to the headship of the tribe. When 
 
2i8 Limanora 
 
 he had made himself secure in his power over them, he 
 built a great fleet of war-canoes, and, after mastering 
 the groups of islands within range and enlisting their 
 warriors and canoes in his service, he set sail southward 
 for some land they knew not of. South and then east 
 the fleet made way, his followers still unalarmed. At 
 last appeared the circle of mystery on the horizon. He 
 gave the word to row forward into it; but, before the 
 command had reached the outermost of the-canoes, he 
 was hurled from his platform into the sea, and, as he 
 rose to the surface, he was promptly speared by his 
 own immediate staff. Round swung the heads of the 
 canoes by one simultaneous impulse. Their chief had 
 become a madman to think of entering that belt of 
 mystery; and away they paddled for very life; nor 
 did they cease their frantic efforts till the dark cloud 
 had sunk beneath the horizon. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE DUOMOVAMOLAN OR COSMOPHONK 
 
 THOUGH the Limanorans calmly pursued their 
 regular employments during these attempts at 
 invasion, I had myself felt the uneasy spiritual atrno- 
 . sphere that precedes and presages turmoil. None but 
 the lyilamo were engaged in preparation for defence; 
 yet during all the years every spirit was tense and 
 giving out its energy in sympathy to this section of the 
 people. There was a palpable loss of nervous power in 
 the community, for they knew that by accident some 
 joint in the arrangements might fail to work and all the 
 defence miscarry. Not till the bold disturber of their 
 progress was finally disposed of did the tension or the 
 leakage of nerve- energy cease. To be absorbed in mere 
 war was to them the hades of human society, and to 
 have again sealed up their island from the intrusion of 
 degenerate souls was a happy epoch in their history. 
 
 While the whole community quivered with inward 
 jubilance, two momentary dangers threatened it: it 
 might take some time to recover its equilibrium; and 
 its thoughts and interests, narrowed by the necessity 
 of defence against this threat from below, might be 
 long in rising to the true cosmic level. Some excep- 
 tional stimulus was needed to raise their lives and 
 
 219 
 
220 Limanora 
 
 aims, some appeal to the spirit, which would set them 
 free from the trammels of earth and all deteriorative 
 excitement. Such liberation had been by no means 
 uncommon in their past, but no occasion for it had 
 occurred since I had entered on my novitiate, except 
 in the case of individuals and families; then I had 
 been too busy with my training or too distant from the 
 household concerned to notice it. 
 
 Now it was to be a national purification of the nature, 
 and I was to share in it. Would this be a religious 
 ceremony, a day of humiliation and prayer, such as I 
 had often witnessed in my old home after great national 
 disasters or during plague or famine? I had seen no 
 churches or temples, no signs of religious service, no 
 acts of private worship. I had never heard anyone 
 speak of gods or priests or expiations. Was this at 
 last to be the revelation of the inner shrine, into which 
 I had never been able to penetrate ? 
 
 I had not long to wait for the solution of my prob- 
 lems. Purposes here moved to conclusions with light- 
 ning swiftness, and when one impulse stirred the 
 people, there was needed no heralding to mass them 
 in the desired place. I found myself drawn with my 
 proparents and Thyriel and her household towards a 
 massive building that stood upon a peak far up the 
 slopes of Ularoma. There was no need of road or 
 steps to it; wings made the wide air the highway. 
 Yet were there great terraces ramparting the sides of 
 the peak, and from the highest seawards there was a 
 marvellous flight of steps which, when the clouds hid 
 L,ilaroma, seemed to lead up into heaven. I had often 
 seen the edifice gleam high in the setting sun, yet there 
 were so many temple-like structures on the shoulders 
 and peaks of the giant mountain that it had ceased to 
 
The Duomovamolan 221 
 
 excite inquiry. Now as we flew towards it its titanic 
 proportions and jewelled beauty seemed to dominate 
 all the lower world. The building, the most striking 
 that I had ever seen, raised an enormous circular dome 
 of crystal to the sky, and around this were innumerable 
 smaller structures, which elsewhere would have bulked 
 huge to the eye. As we drew nearer, I saw that each 
 crystal cupola, instead of crouching low upon the ter- 
 race as I had thought at first, rose upon a lofty and 
 massive tower of great strength. What I had taken 
 for smaller and higher terraces and bastions were the 
 walls of towers and square citadels that seemed built 
 to outlast the wars of Titans. Solid lava they were of 
 extraordinary thickness. There was nothing here of 
 that slenderness and delicacy which had made me com- 
 pare their other buildings to lace-work. The terraces 
 and flight of steps I had seen from below were but the 
 outer flanks of the layer on layer of foundations laid 
 upon the plateau to save the structure from all but the 
 deepest-sourced tremors. 
 
 As we entered the mighty portal, I felt that no 
 storm or earthquake could move it. It seemed a city 
 sculptured out of the solid rock; but, as soon as we 
 were in, the sense of this massiveness vanished and the 
 whole appeared as we looked up fairy-like and gossa- 
 mer. In any one of the vast temples nothing but a 
 film seemed to separate us from the azure sky. In the 
 smaller towers we gazed up a dark shaft roofed by a 
 circle of sky, and the very stars shone out upon our 
 vision by day, so palpable was the column of darkness 
 above us. 
 
 We soon settled in our hanging rests under the great 
 central dome. Around us were thousands hung in 
 mid-air in different attitudes of rest. Yet the building 
 
222 Limanora 
 
 sounded empty, so vast was it and so silent were all. 
 The slightest whisper rang across its great untram- 
 melled spaces with the sharpness of a word beside us. 
 Not a column or beam or ornament broke the harmon- 
 ious simplicity of the spacious circle from vault to floor, 
 from side to side. Everyone by instinct kept still; for 
 the mere rustle of a wing appalled by its far-reaching 
 effect. We even held our breath lest the sound should 
 break the colossal stillness. To me it seemed for a 
 time frozen silence. 
 
 I soon perceived that there was no effort in the self- 
 repression of my neighbours' movements. They were 
 entranced, their heads erect as if catching the echo of 
 some far-ofif music. To me there was as deep stillness 
 as before. I listened intently, but felt no change ex- 
 cept a slight exhilaration; an electric influence was 
 pulsing around. To the electric sense in them some 
 great harmony was appealing. Yet there was more 
 than this; for their eyes were fixed intently on the 
 dome. I looked up and felt awestruck. There on a 
 scale that seemed to match the sky of night I saw 
 enacting the evolution of a universe. In the blue vault 
 a great sphere of glowing vapour was whirling round; 
 from it sprang off huge concentric rings, that one after 
 the other, themselves became whirling spheres ablaze 
 with the intensity of white heat. Step by step a system 
 of earths revolving round a central sun was developed. 
 On one as it cooled we could see life appear and grow 
 varied, then fade away and finally vanish. Before the 
 last tragedy had closed, another had taken up the 
 strain of existence, had run its course upon the globe, 
 and a third had stepped into the ranks of life-bearers. 
 The torch of generation was passed on from orbit to 
 orbit, the central luminary ever dimming its fires., till 
 
The Duomovamolan 223 
 
 at last the system wheeled on through darkness, seem- 
 ing to have no purpose in the universe; but just as 
 the last light flickered and began to vanish from the 
 surface of the sun, out of the darkness seemed to rush 
 another dead universe ; through the eternities the two 
 had been approaching nearer and nearer, drawn by 
 their common doom. In a moment they had crashed 
 together and out of the collision came a mist of fire, 
 that soon by whirling in space became again another 
 and a larger sphere of glowing vapour. 
 
 How impressive was this reincarnation of worlds! 
 Deeper and deeper the scene sank into the spirit, as 
 the electric thrill which accompanied the earlier steps 
 of the process passed into dim-echoing music, translat- 
 ing all we saw into sounds. A singular feature of their 
 music was that it was never produced in the same room 
 in which it was to be listened to. The machinery and 
 the orchestra drown by their clack and clamour the 
 soft footfalls of harmony that are the only true spirit 
 of music; this was their reason. They had a contriv- 
 ance in every large room, a huge-mouthed tube by 
 which inflowing music was softened or strengthened 
 and which could if need be raise a whisper into a 
 thunder-peal ; in this was a series of keys or stops, by 
 which any sound coming through it could be modu- 
 lated. One key could make the apparatus sound- 
 proof by filling its throat with a pledget of a peculiar 
 fibrous metal they had. One series could wring out 
 the harshness of any sound till it became soft as a 
 much-reverberated echo. A second magnified any 
 sound, however soft, to the required loudness and vol- 
 ume, and the whole was controlled by a minute key- 
 board which could be held in the hand and moved to 
 any part of the room. 
 
224 Limanora 
 
 In this vast auditorium I could not see where the 
 key-board was managed; but he must have been a 
 poet-musician who manipulated it, so delicately did the 
 volume of sound adapt itself to the mood of those who 
 watched the growth and decay of worlds. Now it 
 swelled with the collision into thunderous harmony; 
 again as a crisis approached in the tragedy it fell to the 
 low music of far-echoing nature-sounds. At times this 
 marvellous opera of universes died away to my hear- 
 ing; yet my neighbours lay in trance as if still catching 
 harmonies that mastered the soul. I knew nothing but 
 the vague electric thrill that passes through the nature 
 at some great thought. Harmonies as colossal touched 
 their electric sense as those which before had come 
 through their hearing. I longed to follow them into 
 those spheres of melodious being that were still beyond 
 me. 
 
 I came afterwards to know the astronomic family that 
 had arranged these wonderful effects upon the soul 
 through the various senses, and I saw the mechanism 
 by which they were contrived. Its simplicity was what 
 struck me most, when I remembered how complicated 
 were the sensuous modes of appeal to the spirit. Out 
 of innumerable sonoscripts and electrographs impressed 
 by the world of stars upon their records, they had 
 selected those that would fit together and raise the 
 souls of the listeners to the sublimity of seeing the 
 infinite cosmos. 
 
 This daylight representation of the music of the 
 spheres was but a prelude to a more impressive effect 
 as night fell. By some ingenious mechanism the im- 
 mense dome was changed; instead of a semi-opaque 
 crystal, on which could be enacted a mimic evolution 
 of systems, there slid into its place an enormous lens, 
 
The Duomovamolan 225 
 
 which gathered the sky ten thousand thousand times 
 magnified into the focus of a smaller lens; and upon 
 this was turned another magnifier, which threw upon 
 some light-bearing film in front of us a picture of the 
 sky a million million times the size of what appeared to 
 the unaided eye. Here we saw enacting the infinite 
 tragedy of the cosmos. We could turn aside and view 
 the azure above us strewn with its silver eyes, and the 
 contrast raised the soul to unknown heights of sub- 
 limity. In the picture the worlds lived and moved, 
 and the number of those that filled the spaces behind 
 was past all counting; we seemed to have drawn as 
 near to some of the golden centres of systems as light- 
 ning flight from the beginning of our earth would have 
 brought us. 
 
 And what gave transcendent sublimity to the scene 
 was the strange music that accompanied it. By means 
 of the duotnovamolan, a marvellous instrument which 
 reversed the processes of Oolorefa, we heard the har- 
 mony that the worlds made in their motions. As they 
 moved across our lens and round and across one another, 
 their movements, enormously magnified, awakened 
 such harmony of sounds as never embodied soul had 
 heard. Their flight and their magnetism affected an 
 irelium film in such a way that the complicated lines 
 and curves and figures produced upon it translated 
 themselves into the music which would have produced 
 these figures in the ooloran. This people had long 
 practised architecture by music in Oolorefa before they 
 thought of attempting the reverse process and convert- 
 ing form and colour into melody; but once thought 
 of, it was soon accomplished, and the oorolan was the 
 result. The shadowy figures which any melody pro- 
 duced could be made themselves to reproduce it. 
 
226 Limanora 
 
 From the use of this little instrument it came to be 
 seen that their telescopes could by a little modifica- 
 tion and addition be made to tell out in music the 
 scenes they witnessed and recorded. Step by step the 
 astronomic families advanced till at last they reached 
 the wonderful duomovamolan, or cosmophone, which, 
 facing the heavens unbrokenly for generations, stored 
 up the music of the spheres in their various changes. 
 It was this instrument we heard as we gazed into the 
 hitherto unfathomed depths of night. The worlds 
 themselves in their motion played upon it, and through 
 it upon our souls. No human thought could have con- 
 ceived the marvels of harmony that rang through the 
 great auditorium. We felt as if we had been present at 
 the creation of the universe and our thoughts ranged 
 through infinite space. A dream of the most tremen- 
 dous kind was being enacted before our waking senses. 
 How poor seemed the whole long history of life upon 
 our earth ! Thought was the only element in us akin 
 with infinity or like to last through eternity, the 
 thought that could thus span the abysses between the 
 systems of worlds and comprehend these cosmic melo- 
 dies still ringing in our ears. 
 
 When the treasured- up music of the spheric move- 
 ments of the past ceased, the night itself, the very sky 
 we were contemplating began to stir fresh harmonies 
 through the lenses of the subsidiary towers. We 
 gazed, and the stars in their silver motions, motions 
 unnoticed by the naked eye, told their tale in sweet 
 harmony. These new symphonies were simpler than 
 the operas of creation and decadence that we had been 
 listening to and, after those titanic effects, seemed 
 almost monotonous, so few complications had they. 
 They soothed the souls lost in the sublimities of in- 
 
The Duomovamolan 227 
 
 finite space and time and we came gentlier down to 
 the earth on which our life was cast. We still trod 
 on air, our heads were still amongst the stars, but the 
 earth was near us and counted as one of the myriad 
 worlds. 
 
 As night swung towards the mid-vault, the music 
 faded and seemed to sound from far valleys. At last it 
 sank into a lullaby, the lullaby of slow-moving constel- 
 lations. Sleep came on me by unconscious, scarce- 
 heard footfalls, and through its magic portal the uni- 
 verse of dreams appeared. Amongst the stars I flew, 
 never-resting, eager to visit and know all. Here I 
 communed with beings so like me and yet so far above 
 me that I yearned to remain with them; but on I had 
 to speed. Then I rested on a world still dominated by 
 the rudimentary stages of life-energy, and so repulsive 
 were the sights and sounds there that I fled shrieking 
 from it. Next came a sphere so filmy and translucent 
 I scarcely knew how it persisted in tiding the storms 
 of space; yet here, too, was life, life so noble, so im- 
 material, that I felt ashamed of my body and its sensu- 
 ous methods of knowledge; so ethereal were the beings 
 there that the common forces of gravitation and attrac- 
 tion seemed to have no power over them; so far below 
 them did I feel myself to be in the process of evolution 
 that I had not the heart to remain. Away into space 
 I winged, till a dark orb drew me towards it, shone on 
 by suns of the most fantastic and ill-omened colours. 
 Here, too, was a manhood not unlike that of earth, yet 
 so sinister that it seemed an orb of devils; the forms 
 were graceful; the faces had a beauty of their own, 
 but shone with such evil meaning that they fascinated 
 like snakes; amongst them I could recognise the great 
 conquerors and monarchs and warriors and colossal 
 
228 Limanora 
 
 criminals whose faces or the representations of whose 
 faces I had seen upon earth; war and pillage were 
 their occupations; cunning and force, hypocrisy and 
 arrogance, were their weapons. In horror I fled from 
 the sight of their internecine passions and into the 
 depths of the night I sped on. So varied was the con- 
 stitution of the orbs that I approached, so marvellous 
 the range of the kinds of beings inhabiting them, that 
 my mind seemed to sink under the task of imagining 
 them. Everything was in transition, there was no 
 rest for any form of energy in the cosmos. On it must 
 sweep towards a higher transformation or a lower. I 
 saw beings that seemed to be the very acme of crea- 
 tion, so beautiful and noble were they, so purged of 
 all grossness and materiality; yet ever beyond them I 
 found some form they looked up to and yearned to 
 reach. Below me I could see on endless orbs lower 
 and lower kinds of energy receding into darker night, 
 yet ever pressing upwards, step by step. What an 
 eternity of ascent was before them! I^ooking up, my 
 soul was drawn to some great centre my eyes could not 
 discern; the exhilarant force seemed to give me wings 
 finer and nobler than those of my body. With infinite 
 longing I left my material part behind floating slowly 
 in space. A trance came upon me as I flew upwards 
 with lightning speed and I swooned with the ecstasy 
 of final achievement. 
 
 Then I awoke, still lying in my pendulous rest. 
 Morning had broken and the cosmic strains had died 
 away. This dream-flight had been but the climax of 
 the purification. Such music, such electric impulse 
 had been poured about us as we slept, that our spirits 
 could not but accomplish these imaginary voyages 
 through space and time. Without this sublime up- 
 
The Duomovamolan 229 
 
 lifting into the diviner realms of ether our souls might 
 have fallen back to the mean purposes and ambitions 
 of earth induced by the fears of the invasion and the 
 necessities of its repulse. Now we walked like angels 
 amongst men, a wall of eternity separating us from the 
 gross needs of war and defence. We were again on 
 the upward path that leads towards the highest, and, 
 purified and ennobled, were eager again for the imme- 
 diate duties of life. 
 
 Such purifications of the soul occurred amongst the 
 community as a whole whenever any influence tended 
 to drag it down to a lower plane. Their eyes were 
 drawn downwards; they had again to be turned to the 
 goal of all energy. Victory over such a conqueror as 
 Choktroo had to be given its due insignificant propor- 
 tion in the results and aims of life, else it might atavise 
 some of their spirits and bring to life ambitions buried 
 for long ages. One night's voyage amongst the in- 
 finities was enough to throw human conquests, however 
 great they might seem, into pettiness and oblivion. 
 Thus the evil spirit such events might raise was exor- 
 cised, and yet the sensuous power of the music by 
 which the exorcism was achieved was evaded. Mere 
 music, such as I had been accustomed to hear with 
 luxurious passion in my old home, wt>uld have let our 
 spirits, after raising them to the heights of ecstasy, 
 fall crashing into the world of commonplace as soon as 
 it ceased; but this cosmophonic harmony permanently 
 soothed and elevated the embruted soul. It implanted 
 thoughts so high that it seemed sacrilege to return to 
 any lower plane. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THEIR HEAVEN AND THEIR HEU, 
 
 THE race returned to its daily life, purified and 
 elevated. The danger of intrusion upon their 
 upward struggle had called out on wonted vigour; and 
 the expulsion of the grosser elements and ambitions 
 which threatened to accompany this had resulted in 
 clear gain for their progress. The pace at which they 
 developed greatly quickened; and we felt the pulses of 
 the race beat with the eagerness of prevision. Every 
 new age had accelerated its advance till it seemed to 
 have breasted all possibility, yet as the step grew 
 swifter and swifter the lightning swiftness of a far past 
 seemed to them but a snail's pace. Back the darkness 
 of the future was pushed, and new vistas opened where 
 the black wall of fate had seemed to face them. 
 
 One of the most striking proofs of their advancement 
 was to them the rapidly developing love and power 
 of foreseeing. They seemed to live in the future, and 
 that future was an ever-receding circle like the horizon 
 ahead of them, widening and widening as they rose 
 above mere earth necessities. A considerable section 
 of their community was devoted to pioneering for the 
 race, exploring the possibilities of the future; and 
 whenever there was a danger that the energy of de- 
 
 230 
 
Their Heaven and their Hell 231 
 
 velopment would slacken the imaginations of the youth 
 were fired by a sight of all that they might be. 
 
 One of the chief duties of the imaginative pioneers of 
 the race was to prepare a vision of the time to come 
 that would at once appeal to the youthful fancy and 
 fire it to renewed effort; for often in a generation a 
 family or individual would become so absorbed in 
 a special pursuit that the idea of the whole was ob- 
 scured; and to prevent or obviate this false perspect- 
 ive imaginative prevision was ever and again needed. 
 An easy bird's-eye view of all that the race might 
 become was the best means of attaining this. 
 
 Another magnificent edifice was set apart for this 
 purpose, again on the slopes of Lilaroma, not to give 
 outlook, but. merely to draw all eyes. It was perhaps 
 the most impressive of the great buildings of Limanora; 
 so vast were its proportions that it seemed almost a 
 city in itself; for in huge subsidiary halls every phase 
 of the possibilities of their civilisation was represented. 
 These were dwarfed by the central hall, which seemed 
 large enough to contain the whole of them. In it all 
 the phases of the future were focussed in what they 
 called the mornalan, or time-telescope. This made the 
 pictures of what they might become live and move 
 before the eyes of the gazers, who as they gazed through 
 one of the many thousand eye-pieces seemed to look 
 upon life itself in its noblest ideals. 
 
 My first visit to the great building, which they called 
 Terralona, or millenarium, was not long after the final 
 repulse of Choktroo. Into the younger and less puri- 
 fied hearts of the community the idea of warlike glory 
 had returned with some force, even though we realised 
 intellectually how shallow and false and retrograde it 
 was. The introduction to what I might call the 
 
232 Limanora 
 
 heaven of the race ought to have come naturally later 
 in life, when we had passed completely out of pupilage 
 and assumed the full duties and privileges of maturity; 
 but it seemed necessary to erase from our emotions 
 this atavistic taint that the appearance of Choktroo and 
 his expeditions had begotten in us. The national puri- 
 fication had succeeded in making earthly ambitions 
 seem insignificant, but as we settled down again to our 
 pursuits the awe that the cosmophone had bred in us 
 grew fainter. The world narrowed into a prison- 
 house, and our daily duties forced a recoil to a wider 
 sphere of ambitions, such as we had seen out in the 
 archipelago in the masterful wars so lately witnessed. 
 It was time, indeed, that some of us were brought into 
 the presence of the immediate ideals of the race towards 
 which they were as a whole struggling. 
 
 We were now to enter upon a new epoch of our 
 existence and to know the wider heaven in which our 
 own special pursuits took their orbit. We were there- 
 after to drink at the purer fountains of inspiration, to 
 know the rewards of all our struggles, the possibilities 
 that lay within the reach of a measurable number of 
 years. 
 
 Up through the morning air we flew, exhilarate with 
 the wine of healthy life, joyous in anticipation. My 
 proparents were with us, and explained in answer to 
 our inquiries the character of the building we were to 
 visit. It absorbed the best energies of some of the most 
 imaginative and artistic families of the island. They 
 were ever forging ahead of their own work. Like life, 
 their art never rested. What they imagined to-day 
 grew familiar or even tame to-morrow. The conse- 
 quence was that the inside of the edifice was never two 
 days alike, and the most frequent visitor never found 
 
Their Heaven and their Hell 233 
 
 it monotonous. There was no such thing as a fixed 
 paradise for any race; it varied, it must vary, with 
 every development or retrogression of its members. 
 Heaven was merely the brightest ideal that a people 
 could imagine for itself; and the heaven of a highly 
 progressive race was rapidly antiquated, and in the 
 long flight of ages came to neighbour their hell. It is 
 like climbing a mountain; the shining peak we long to 
 attain as we start from the plains at dawn is found to 
 be but a lower ridge of plateau which conceals the 
 gleam of higher snows; these again when reached are 
 found to be overtopped by still higher peaks. The dif- 
 ference is that in truly advancing human life the pro- 
 cess seems unending. There is no spiritual ambition, 
 no ideal, no creed, no ethical code, but when realised 
 in practice is found to reveal something higher still 
 to long for and realise. A stationary heaven means a 
 stagnant civilisation. 
 
 Onwards we sped as we discussed or listened, ever 
 nearer to the vast pile of buildings that was our goal. 
 We who had never been inside or known its purpose 
 tingled with expectation. Even our elders, we could 
 see, were eager and alert with anticipated pleasure. 
 They were sure to see some new and striking features 
 in the fore-picture. 
 
 It was with great awe that we found ourselves within 
 Terralona; for we had entered the great central hall 
 at once, without any attempt to study the separate 
 sections of the experiments in progress depicted in the 
 subsidiary halls. It was more impressive in its pro- 
 portions and size than any I had yet seen, and was 
 dimly lit with that strange, diffusive, centreless light 
 of which they had command. In no one part was 
 the light brightest, so that it was impossible to say 
 
234 Limanora 
 
 whence it came or how it was produced. The roof 
 rose so high and the walls were so far apart that we 
 found flight easy inside; and there were platforms all 
 round for leaping into the air and taking flight. Along 
 the farther wall we could see many Limanorans hover- 
 ing, like butterflies that alight for a moment and then 
 flit to another flower. There were also rising to the 
 roof hundreds of tiers of different kinds of rests. 
 
 What these were for I could not conjecture, unless 
 they were placed for easy flight. At length we reached 
 that end of the building and saw that every rest was 
 placed so as to bring the eyes level with a large lens 
 set in the wall. We each mounted into one of them, 
 and I set my face against the smooth transparency. 
 The sight that met me I cannot even at this distance 
 describe. There seemed to be miles and miles of space 
 beyond filled with a representation of an island which 
 I soon recognised as Limauora; but it seemed to be 
 afloat in the azure of the sky, and from it a pathway of 
 silken threads of light led upwards to the stars, which 
 floated within neighbourly distance of it. Busy travel- 
 lers sped up and down the climbing flightway with a 
 swiftness that almost obscured their form and size. It 
 was only when they rested at either goal that I could 
 see their features or study their nature. They were 
 Limanorans, yet completely transformed. The tissue 
 of their bodies seemed like light itself, so transparent 
 and filmy was it. Their wings seemed a part of them- 
 selves, and their flight was as easy as a swallow's. 
 They moved through the air like shreds of sunlight or 
 animated snowflakes, with power to fly up or down, 
 often at lightning speed. In their faces were none of 
 the deep shadows of baffled thought or blind emotion, 
 but they seemed supremely happy in their enfranchise- 
 
Their Heaven and their Hell 235 
 
 ment from earth. Yet they were but human, only a 
 few steps removed from the humanity I saw around 
 me. They had still upon their faces the look of pity 
 so frequent amongst the Linianorans when they gazed 
 out on the men and life of other lands; but it was only 
 when they gazed or travelled downwards that this took 
 the place of the serene calm which marked them out as 
 sages. At times an agitation marked their gait as they 
 set out on the gauzy pathway of the stars. I could 
 feel that there was still a world beyond that which they 
 had reached, and that towards this they must progress 
 with eager thought and effort. 
 
 It was the inhabitants of other stars that they 
 were trying to emulate or gain as friends. They could 
 live in the intervening ether and found movement 
 through it rapid as thought. Their highest wishes, 
 the subjects of their imagination, encountered little 
 obstacle or friction in the accomplishment. They were 
 evidently nearer omnipotence over the forces around 
 them than they had ever been. Their bodies were so 
 much dematerialised that they were not far from the 
 state and texture of their souls. Thought was not 
 clogged with an earthy matter so different from itself 
 as to hold it down till freed by death. Yet I could 
 see that there were limits to their actions. The forces 
 of other worlds and the conditions of interstellar space 
 narrowed and checked their activity. They could not 
 yet create; they could only transform what already 
 existed, for there I saw one pair, moulding a creature 
 perfect according to their ideals and trying to breathe 
 life into it, and not yet could they know the centre of 
 all being. The path was still upwards and onwards. 
 
 Their activity was no longer restricted to the imme- 
 diate confines of the earth. Beyond and above it they 
 
236 Limanora 
 
 soared till it became an insignificant speck of light in 
 the azure, busily exploring the universes that strewed 
 infinity and finding out the higher and ever higher life 
 that inhabited them. I could see them marking on 
 their itineraries of the sky the orbs to be avoided for 
 their degenerate or degraded forms of life or energy. 
 Every grade of existence was found and indicated by 
 brighter light or deeper shadow. They loved to linger 
 over those orbs whose dwellers were but a step above 
 them, watching their actions and thoughts and learn- 
 ing their higher ambitions. At a distance they hovered 
 over the worlds of beings many stages beyond them in 
 the evolution of energy, afraid lest they might be re- 
 pulsed as degenerate. As they watched, their longing 
 study helped them to rise more rapidly in the scale of 
 being, and back they would come to Limanora with 
 new thoughts and methods and set themselves thus 
 equipped to work out with increasing pace their own 
 evolution. 
 
 This vast widening of their horizon was evidently 
 an era in their history, it added such lightning swift- 
 ness to their rise in the scale of existence, it gave them 
 such power of fulfilling whatever they designed or 
 even imagined. Nobler and nobler ideals remained to 
 be discovered in every corner of the cosmos. They 
 had only to sail out and investigate, .and then, return- 
 ing with higher thoughts and ways of life, mould their 
 being to them. And to die, what was it now but to 
 slough off a trammelling form? Death was to them 
 an ecstasy. Every moment of advance was to them a 
 death, a death of the old, a realisation of the nobler 
 and higher. 
 
 Such was the representation I watched through my 
 optic glass; for my proparents interpreted what I 
 
Their Heaven and Their Hell 237 
 
 saw, and showed me the spiritual meaning of this cos- 
 morama of the future. The details of the living 
 picture I had not time to mark ; nor were my guard- 
 ians willing that these should distract my attention 
 from the central ideas; they emphasised the guiding 
 principles of the new life we might perhaps soon lead, 
 and the glory of it overcame my earth-born ambitions. 
 What a pitiful figure did Choktroo and his armies and 
 fleets seem in comparison with such a life! All the 
 great conquerors and heroes of earth were pigmies seen 
 in a light like this, slaves to brute longings and ambi- 
 tions. I grew ashamed of ever having harboured any- 
 thing but contempt for even the greatest career of 
 mortal upon earth. 
 
 Nor yet were we done with our cure. The imagina- 
 tive artists had filled another and complementary edifice 
 with living pictures of all that by means of horror could 
 drive us forward on the path of progress. It was called 
 Ciralaison, or the museum of terrors. I had often heard 
 of it and had imagined it as a place of unending torture, 
 a Limanoran and rationalised version of the hell of 
 Christendom, and looked forward with much loathing 
 and curiosity to the sight of it. We were taught that 
 this was no imaginary place, but the too real result of 
 all retrogression and encouragement of atavism, and 
 that there was nothing supernatural in it, but that it 
 was the natural outcome of all lapses from the existing 
 ethical path of advance. It was the contrivance of 
 nature herself to prevent degeneration. 
 
 As I had read Dante's Inferno, it was easy for me to 
 map out the features of Ciralaison. I knew the vices 
 and faults they most shrank from, and these would 
 define their own natural punishments. As we winged 
 our way towards the sombre edifice, perched, strangely 
 
238 Limanora 
 
 enough, upon one of the most prominent spurs of 
 roma that beetled over the sea, I let my mind wander 
 over what was soon to meet my eyes; pictured a 
 place of intense woe, full of the horrors of a mediaeval 
 place of torture; I could almost imagine I heard the 
 weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. 
 
 We entered the gloomy porch and passed into the 
 central hall; it was almost the exact counterpart of 
 Terralona, except that there was no brilliant sugges- 
 tion of all that was beautiful and noble. There was 
 the same dim suffusion of light, the same lofty wall of 
 lenses with rests, the same series of flight platforms 
 round the other walls. With some precipitancy I 
 made for one of the optic rounds in the wall, and the 
 first sight I saw struck me as the most commonplace 
 and familiar. It was a representation of one of the 
 foul lanes of our Western cities. There were the gut- 
 ter children, the reeling drunkards issuing from the 
 gin palaces, the cursing drabs behind them, the tat- 
 ters, the filth, the dilapidated buildings. It was but 
 an unending series of instantaneous photographs mov- 
 ing with great speed under stereoscopic glasses, whilst 
 the sounds accompanying the scene, having impressed 
 themselves similarly on long strips of irelium, were in 
 one of their sound machines reproducing themselves. 
 It was indeed the commonest and most repulsive of 
 sights in the east end of any of our large towns. What 
 astonished me was that it should have been taken from 
 .European life; and yet, when I gazed more atten- 
 tively at it and put the sound-magnifier to my ears, I 
 knew that it was not European. The words spoken 
 were in a language I did not know, and the rags of the 
 men and women were the rags of a national costume I 
 did not recognise. 
 
Their Heaven and Their Hell 239 
 
 I shifted my rest and lens, and I saw a rustic village, 
 such as I had known in my boyhood, with the toilers 
 busy at their work. At a distance it was a happy 
 scene; for the men and women were absorbed in occu- 
 pation and seemed to have forgotten the evils of man- 
 kind. They were much in the open air, which was 
 bright with the colours of the sunlight; and the child- 
 ren's voices sounded merry at play or humming like 
 bees from the window of the schoolhouse. It was a 
 picture such as city poets had often painted as ideal 
 and primitive happiness, yet some contrivance seemed 
 to analyse it all for my mind and reveal to me that it 
 was even more repulsive than that of the foul city lane. 
 Not to my hearing or my eyes did this come; but to 
 my magnetic sense, ill-developed though it was. I 
 felt a deadly stupor over the whole pressing out the 
 higher life of every rustic. Not the diseases which 
 often overtook them unprovided, not the poverty 
 leaving no outlook for their old age except reluctant 
 and hated charity, not the constant slavery of toil, or 
 the meagre assuagement of its woes by a weekly booze 
 in the tavern, weighed upon my spirit and made me 
 sad to look at the scene. It was the stagnant spiritual 
 level on which they and their children to the thou- 
 sandth generation must live, without power of per- 
 ceiving the nobleness that was above them and around 
 them, without the chance of ever developing the 
 spiritual energy that was in them, without one ap- 
 proach to the line of infinite progress going on through- 
 out the universe. To stand still or recede was the true 
 inferno of the Limanorans. 
 
 Again I changed my optic glass and a greater sad- 
 ness came to me through my magnetic sense. I saw 
 men and women such as I used to envy for their re- 
 
240 Limanora 
 
 spectable life, their serene comfort, and their sure grasp 
 of both worlds trooping into buildings for religious 
 worship They bowed and sang, they genuflected 
 and prayed, they raised their eyes to the ceiling, they 
 groaned and professed to pity themselves as miserable 
 sinners; yet I could feel they had an inner conscious- 
 ness that these performances were superfluous on their 
 part, so comfortably worldly, so charitably godly were 
 they. As they rose to leave the temple, they seemed 
 to purr and pat their sleek stomachs in supreme self- 
 content. Yet through the magnetic magnifier I knew 
 that they were in a lower circle of the inferno than the 
 rustic slaves. Their past stood out through many 
 generations of ancestors exactly the same as their 
 present or better. Never a chance had they of pro- 
 gressing; they thought they had reached perfection as 
 far as earthly conditions would allow. They prayed 
 that they might be made better; but that was only as 
 they prayed that their sins might be forgiven when they 
 were certain that they had committed none, or as 
 they prayed for guidance in their daily duties when they 
 knew that no one could manage them better than 
 they. Stagnancy was written on every feature of their 
 faces and of their lives, fatty degeneration of every 
 faculty and organ necessary to development. Their 
 ethics, their religion, their business, their habits of life 
 had all reached a stage that made criticism superfluous 
 and that knew no higher outlook. 
 
 The next scene that came through the lens was one 
 of the most envied of Christendom. Men and women 
 of the highest birth and best breeding were moving to 
 and fro in brilliantly lit and decorated rooms, in the 
 largest of which the dance was proceeding. In another 
 room a luxurious supper was laid, varied and fine 
 
Their Heaven and Their Hell 241 
 
 enough to tempt the eye and palate of the most fastidi- 
 ous gourmand. Voluptuous music and scents filled 
 the air; witty conversation was stirring even the most 
 languid faces to smiles. What could be more perfect 
 on earth than the enjoyment of such a scene ? Yet this 
 was a deeper slough of hell than any I had yet viewed. 
 The whole of life was concentrated in the senses, the 
 least progressive of all the organs of human nature, the 
 organs soonest sated with what they desire. And what 
 a horror of life was revealed beneath all this brilliancy! 
 A crescendo of such pleasures was needed to drive off 
 ennui; and such a crescendo was not to be found. 
 The young still lived in hopeful mirage. The middle- 
 aged were sick of it all. The old sneered cynically 
 over everything or babbled the senility of second child- 
 hood. The vulgar consequences of vice or the en- 
 tanglements of crime, the surfeit of pleasure or the 
 tedium of life kept most of them within one step of 
 suicide. Their course was ever downwards. I pitied 
 these magnificent voluptuaries, in all their ephemeral 
 pursuits and aims. The brilliancy was only an attempt 
 to hide the ghastly grinning of death and corruption in 
 the reality underneath. 
 
 Another change of the point of view, and the world 
 of fame revealed itself in its gilded horrors. I watched 
 the struggling poet trampled beneath the foot of luxury 
 and contempt, happy if only he died earl}' in the hate- 
 ful wrestle for glory. I saw the drowning agonies of 
 the novices in the sea of literature, appealing in vain 
 for help to the wealthy as they passed in barges lulled 
 by the rich music of flattery; here and there a frantic 
 swimmer clutched at help, and out again he was thrust 
 into the depths by the minions of literary fame. How 
 little the rejected knew of the reality that they strove 
 
 16 
 
242 Limanora 
 
 after ! I looked into the hearts of the famous and saw 
 corrupt masses of jealousy and hate, or hollow shells 
 echoing the misery of life. The most appalling sight 
 was, not the failures in art and learning, science and 
 commerce, but the successes. Behind a mask of smil- 
 ing prosperity and conventional enjoyment of the world 
 there was but a handful of dust that bore the weary load 
 of existence in agony. 
 
 Generation after generation came and passed through 
 this torturing fire, knowing not why they bore the 
 pangs for threescore years and ten, or whither they 
 were borne. They seemed to improve, but only sank 
 deeper into the original barbarism. Here and there 
 they picked out a name of one long dead and wor- 
 shipped it; but the shrine was empty; it was only a 
 name, and not the personality for which it had once 
 stood. Behind I could hear the spirit wailing and 
 cursing its fate and the falsehood and hypocrisy of his 
 adorers. He knew the hollowness and pretence of the 
 whole performance; he knew that the name had be- 
 come a weapon for offending and maiming those who 
 in their innocence were struggling for fame, as he had 
 done, in vain. 
 
 The deepest circle of hell was still to meet my 
 eyes. I thought, as I was guided to it, that it must 
 be that of murderers and furious criminals. My 
 amazement grew, as I looked into the lens and saw 
 that the actors, or I should more truly say the sufferers, 
 were the great of the earth, the monarchs and states- 
 men and warriors, who drew all men's eyes to them as 
 the masters of life. A movement on the part of my 
 guide touched some key, and a strange gleam of un- 
 earthly light threw out into relief the hidden mechan- 
 ism of their existence. Round everyone was a network 
 
Their Heaven and Their Hell 243 
 
 of threads like a spider's web, and the controlling ends 
 of the threads led up obscurely into the hands of a 
 crowd of miscreants, who lay out of sight of the ap- 
 plauding mobs; when a limb or a lip or an eye seemed 
 to move of its own accord to the music of huzzas, it 
 was jerked by a thread in the control of some scowling 
 villain who worked the movement for his own murder- 
 ous purpose. These gorgeous figures were but puppets 
 playing a marionette-play upon the stage of life. One 
 or two of the strongest seemed instinct with the breath 
 of originality, but a still stronger light revealed ada- 
 mantine chains woven around them, and attached to 
 these one master-chain which disappeared into infinity; 
 they were in the spider-web of fate. Still more awful 
 was the sight of their own hearts; each had a crimson- 
 taloned vulture gnawing the vitals, and each saw every 
 detail of the agonising sight; nor could he move to the 
 right or left except to cluch at the bared heart of his 
 rival and torture him. Who could imagine hell more 
 appalling than this? Yet up the giddy approach to 
 the seats of the mighty climbed eager competitors for 
 any place in this torture-chamber death or defeat might 
 empty. 
 
 Then behind all stretched the curtain of infinity; 
 and as it rose the ranks of worlds and universes ap- 
 peared, dwarfing into pettiness the sights that had 
 racked my eyes. Life and the ideals of life rose 
 higher and higher up through the regimented worlds, 
 and the little inferno I had watched became a micro- 
 scopic speck on the round of existence. The shadow 
 of their heaven fell over their heads. The agony I had 
 seen became but an atom in infinity. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 MY EDUCATION CONTINUED 
 
 THE gaze into the probabilities of the future and 
 into the realities of the past ejected from my sys- 
 tem whatever of dangerous admiration I might have 
 felt for the career of such a military adventurer as 
 Choktroo. In spite of my self-control and rapidly de- 
 veloping reasoning faculty, there lurked in me the same 
 longing for power that had been so evident in my 
 cabin-boy. Though he had fallen so wretchedly there 
 was a romance about his career which appealed to some- 
 thing deep-seated in my spirit. I knew what a hypo- 
 crite arid scoundrel he had become in order to make his 
 success, yet the success seemed to condone his offences 
 against the progress of humanity. The lust of rule 
 that lies in the hearts of all men had not yet been eradi- 
 cated from mine. I had advanced so far as to be 
 ashamed of it; and I tried to reason it down or to con- 
 ceal even from myself the fact of its existence; but 
 my guardians knew that it was there, and they took 
 the necessary precautions against its growth. Thus 
 did I pass with the whole people through the national 
 purification ending with a glimpse of their heaven and 
 their hell. 
 
 And now I was ready to re-enter on my process of 
 244 
 
My Education Continued 245 
 
 education. The more spiritual portions of my nature 
 had been remoulded or confirmed to follow in the true 
 path of Limanoran development. The last purificatory 
 process had revealed in me the virtuous or progressive 
 balance that ensured success in the island. The minds 
 of my guardians were now at rest with regard to my 
 spiritual future, and I was on the fair way to become 
 one of the community. 
 
 Still my physical constitution lagged far behind the 
 race. Nor had I any hope of ever making up this 
 lost time, so much had the education of generations 
 and the accumulations of heredity done for them. My 
 senses were but feebly developed compared with those 
 of the lyimanorans; and though they gave sensuous 
 faculties a far lower place than the most advanced 
 thinkers I had ever known of in Europe, they by no 
 means neglected them, but considered them important 
 instruments of progress in the material conditions of 
 their life. 
 
 My proparents thought it necessary that I should be 
 brought in the development of my sensuous perceptions 
 nearer to their own level, now that my love of reason 
 was so strong as to preclude the possibility of being 
 overwhelmed by sensuous energy. They began with 
 the most intellectual of the senses, the eyesight, and by 
 the help of magnetism, hypnotic suggestion, and con- 
 stant practice under their tuition, they soon brought 
 me to see farther afield and more keenly into the struc- 
 ture of things around me than I had in Europe thought 
 it possible for the human eye to accomplish. I could 
 perceive with the naked eye stars that I had been 
 able to see before only through the telescope. I began 
 to note the changes of tissue underneath the skull of 
 my neighbours when any great thought or emotion 
 
Limanora 
 
 stirred in them, and could use their wonderful instru- 
 ments of far and near research with appreciation. 
 Through these instruments faint stars appeared moons, 
 and the nearer planets revealed many of the secrets of 
 their surface; whilst the elements resolved themselves 
 into even simpler constituents. What still lay beyond 
 I could not imagine, yet there were manifestly worlds, 
 intensive and extensive, still to be explored beyond the 
 limits of these aids to sight. 
 
 In the life of an individual I could not expect to ap- 
 proach the development of optic faculty attained by 
 this people. This impressed itself more deeply upon 
 me when my guardians tried to evolve in me the mag- 
 netic power of eye which every Limanoran had by 
 nature. When any one of them turned his full glance 
 upon me, it was like encountering the direct beams of 
 the sun; I had to drop my eyelids in self-defence. It 
 was this that gave them such hypnotic power over 
 Choktroo and his followers. Their eye was an active 
 exponent of the soul within as well as a passive re- 
 cipient of messages from the world without, and could 
 concentrate into its glance the energy of their powerful 
 wills. Any one of these Limanorans amongst the 
 feebler-eyed millions of the rest of the world would 
 have proved himself a master-spirit. He would, with 
 his unhesitating will and the magnetism of his eye, 
 have kept masses of men in check and moulded them 
 into a unity, and the great commanders of history 
 would have blenched before his gaze. 
 
 From the first I had felt uneasy under the full glance 
 of my island friends, in spite of its kindliness and 
 benevolence. Before I left England, I had been 
 supposed to have the mesmeric faculty to an excep- 
 tional degree. Now I found it pale before those mar- 
 
My Education Continued 247 
 
 vellous Limanoran eyes, and all the training and 
 physical aid iny proparents could give me in this direc- 
 tion, though they added greatly to my energy of will 
 and eye, only brought out my hopeless inferiority. I 
 was able at last to bear their glances with ease, and 
 even to raise my eyes to theirs for a few seconds; but 
 I ceased to hope for the attainment of their ocular com- 
 mand or their magnetic power. 
 
 Even their passive electric sense was far beyond my 
 possibility in many of its ramifications. For years I 
 had wondered why their couriers into far regions of the 
 sky could without any chart or landmarks find their way 
 back to their island home with such ease. It could not 
 be by means of vision ; for they often went flying above 
 the clouds to the antipodes; nor could it be by smell: 
 for that sense was not nearly so much developed as the 
 others. In some of my now more distant flights with 
 Thyriel I discovered that they homed by the electric 
 sense. It had become keen in the measurements of 
 amounts of electricity; and every locality had its own 
 electric possibilities, not to speak of a certain peculiar 
 quality in its electricity which differentiated it from 
 all others. One of the most important branches of 
 their education was the magnetography of the earth 
 and sky. Although I never got beyond a vague per- 
 ception of differences in the degrees of electricity, it was 
 of some use to me in my flights to have learned the 
 elements of this great descriptive science. I could 
 tell with fair accuracy how high I was above the earth 
 and whether I was drifting away from L,imanora or 
 towards it; for the amount of electricity in any region 
 varied within certain definite limits and the conditions 
 governing it were constant for long periods of time; 
 these were, roughly, the metals beneath the surface of 
 
248 Limanora 
 
 the earth, the differences in temperature of the strata 
 of air above, the evaporation and chemical changes on 
 the earth below, and the periodicity of the influence of 
 the sun and the stars. Their electric charts of the sky 
 and air were ever in process of correction, but so slightly 
 and gradually in each region that it was only after 
 long periods that the Limanoran couriers had to revise 
 their magnetographic knowledge; indeed it was their 
 reports after long flights which generally led to the 
 minute corrections of their charts. It was the work of 
 a few minutes only to learn the new modifications, for 
 their charts were exact miniature models of that which 
 they were intended to represent; the learner had only 
 to touch a spring and by the inner mechanism of the 
 globe out would ray to each point of it the electricities 
 that in degree and quality belonged to the region indi- 
 cated; the member of the electric family who guided 
 him would explain the changes that had occurred since 
 he last consulted the instrument, and his own electric 
 sense would tell him the rest. 
 
 Nor was this magnetographic training useful merely 
 for the purpose of pilotage through the heavenly 
 vault. It enabled any courier to seek the region 
 where he would most easily recharge the little en- 
 gines which he bore with him under his arms to 
 aid in his wing journey. Although he could prevent 
 the complete exhaustion of these power auxiliaries 
 by supplying them with some of the magnetism in 
 his own body, it was only in emergencies that he did 
 this; for his own system needed electric recuperation 
 as well. Whenever this was required, he made for 
 some region of the air that he knew to be highly elec- 
 tric; and there he floated, whilst with his receptive 
 sense he drew in new stores for his own system and 
 
My Education Continued 249 
 
 for his little armpit engines. Then he went on his 
 way rejoicing, exhilarated by his new energy. One of 
 the purposes of their frequent flight into atmospheric 
 spheres other than their own was to drink in new mag- 
 netism from one of the great sky fountains. 
 
 When a Limanoran returned from an aerial flight 
 there was renewed life in him. His eyes glowed with 
 a heightened radiancy; I could see a soft light play 
 about them in the dark, and this, if needed, he could 
 make even piercing in its brilliancy. He required no 
 light to guide him in the deepest night. His electric 
 sense gathered in from the atmosphere the scattered 
 radiance that was hidden from my sight; and from his 
 eyes he could emit this electricity in the form of light. 
 For me, who, under all their training, was never able 
 to develop such power over the unseen forces of the air, 
 the eyes of Thyriel were a guide in our flight through 
 the night sky; and by day so gentle a brilliance 
 played around them it was little wonder they fascinated 
 and drew me ever to them. After experiencing their 
 power, I was not surprised at the hypnotic influence 
 Ivimanoran eyes had had over the leaders of the hostile 
 expedition. 
 
 It did not astonish me to find that by means of their 
 electric energy they could move vast masses which no. 
 mere muscular force could have touched. I had a con- 
 stitution that seemed to be physically far stronger than 
 Thyriel's; yet, if she had time to reinforce her store of 
 magnetism, she could accomplish feats of strength I 
 could not approach. In her fragile system there seemed 
 to reside a giant's energy; but this was only at times, 
 and especially after she had made some long journey 
 into the regions of the air. The tissues and fibres of 
 her body seemed to grow tenfold stronger when the 
 
250 Limanora 
 
 new electric energy tingled along her nerves. In only 
 the faintest way was I ever able to develop my electric- 
 receptive sense so far as to realise what a new store 
 meant to their physical powers. 
 
 Yet my guardians set themselves to bring out my 
 latent electric sense or firla. After much practice and 
 the application of many stimuli I began to feel im- 
 pulses more keenly even when they came from a dis- 
 tance: the back of my neck grew more and more 
 sensitive, so that I would wheel round instinctively 
 when anyone looked at me from behind. There was 
 almost hope that I should, after many years' practice, 
 come to distinguish the different kinds of emotion with 
 which anyone, though unseen, might look at me; and 
 I could produce by a concentration of will-force in the 
 eyes a certain luminosity, noticeable when I stood in 
 deep darkness. 
 
 My power of sight was greatly strengthened by this 
 new electric faculty that the eyes acquired. I began 
 to raise my eyelids before the penetrative glance of a 
 Limanoran, or even the full majesty of the sun; but 
 never could I hope to reach their analytic power of 
 vision. Their senses were distinguished from those of 
 the rest of mankind by intellectuality, and were, I 
 thought, not merely the observers and reporters of the 
 mind, but its outlying parts or functions. The eye 
 especially seemed to do what through its means reason 
 and experiment might have done. At a glance a 
 Limanoran would tell to an inch the distance of any 
 object, and was not far wrong in his estimate of the 
 space between the earth and any star when its rays 
 reached his eye. He could distinguish one ray from 
 another by its colour or colour-constituents and by 
 its magnetic affinities. What he had learned in the 
 
My Education Continued 251 
 
 use of the inamar or spectroscope in the lava wells and 
 in the fusion of metals in Rimla had come to be a visual 
 instinct. With scarcely a minute's hesitation he would 
 tell the predominant elements in any one of the 
 heavenly bodies. Doubtless the firla had something 
 to do with this analytic power. One of their imagina- 
 tive pioneering books held out the by no means remote 
 possibility of catching symptoms of the life which, they 
 knew well, filled the dim worlds above. 
 
 Their auditory powers had been far less developed 
 than their visual, and gave but faint hope of transcend- 
 ing interstellar space, and my training soon brought 
 me within easy distance of their hearing capacity. 
 The range of this faculty both at its upper and its 
 lower limit had been considerably extended. Sounds 
 dangerous on account of their loudness to the inner 
 mechanism of ordinary ears were by means partly of 
 strengthening the protective cartilages and partly of a 
 trevamolan or graduated modifier of sound, which they 
 constantly wore, made harmless and even gentle and 
 enjoyable. Those that were too faint to reach any 
 human ear became audible to me after some training 
 in the use of their vamolans or makro-mikrakousts. So 
 greatly had these been improved along with the power 
 of hearing that they could discriminate the different 
 noises of microscopic life. These vamolans in their 
 application of electricity to hearing could make the 
 buzzing of an insect sound like the roar of thunder. 
 By modifications of them any of the sounds heard 
 through them could be recorded for ever. 
 
 Thus had been formed a library and museum of the 
 phonology of animal life. They had been able to study 
 the records of sounds emitted by the various species of 
 animals and had come to know the meaning of each 
 
252 Limanora 
 
 sound before they had driven all but microscopic life 
 from the island; thus they had learned by means ot 
 the recording vamolans the language of animals. The 
 birds of the air I have seen follow the cries of Thyriel, 
 gathering around her in clouds, as she flew, until by 
 a sudden change of tone she would scatter the flutter- 
 ing masses to the four winds. Even the fish of the sea 
 would rise and leap above the waves to her notes; 
 ferocious, devouring monsters would leave their prey 
 and follow gently in her train. Most of this power 
 over the undeveloped creation was due to the record 
 and study of their cries; but not all. The magnetism 
 of her personality had a strange effect upon the wildest 
 birds of prey: it seemed to bear with it tacitly the les- 
 son of lyimanoran civilisation that no life was to be de- 
 stroyed by those who meant to make the best of life; 
 there was a gentle, merciful spirit in the glow of the 
 eyes. I have seen her take a wounded bird to her 
 bosom as she flew, and, putting new life into it by the 
 stroke of her fingers, set it free, strong and happy. 
 
 There was a life-giving power in the tips of Lima- 
 noran fingers that puzzled me at first. Why the mere 
 touch should so soothe the lower creation that the agony 
 of their wounds would soon vanish and their cries cease 
 bewildered me for a time. My own pains rapidly dis- 
 appeared under the touch of my proparents. I after- 
 wards knew that part of the active magnetism of their 
 system came through their fingers and they helped me 
 to develop this channel of influence in myself. I could 
 at last by passing my fingers over Thyriel's hair or face 
 relieve any tension of her nerves which might have 
 produced pain; nay, I could hear her hair crackle 
 under my touch when I had charged my system with 
 much electricity. Once or twice I was able to draw a 
 
My Education Continued 253 
 
 wounded bird to me, and change by my stroke on the 
 feathers its cries of pain into low notes of content; 
 but I could never draw the winged creation to me in 
 clouds as Thyriel did. 
 
 It was all the more surprising to me that they fenced 
 off animal life from their island. What might they 
 not have done with such powers over the lower crea- 
 tion? When I put my question into words, the answer 
 was unhesitating and unanswerable. All failures in 
 development had to be thrust from the path of pro- 
 gress; they could do nothing but clog it. If the 
 Limanorans had little hesitation in the case of their 
 own flesh and blood, they had still less when they had 
 to deal with animals. It was quite true that many of 
 the more highly developed of the servants of man had 
 nobler natures than most of their masters, deeper 
 loyalty, greater sincerity, truer and more lasting cour- 
 age; much might and did come from companionship 
 with their primitive and guilt-proof natures; but the 
 fact that when associated with man they were destined 
 to serve, made such good impracticable and rather 
 brought out the mean and brutal tyranny of man than 
 helped to implant in his nature their own virtues. 
 Even with such noble qualities as they had it was im- 
 possible for them to overleap the many ages their sys- 
 tems had lagged behind in other respects, the open 
 offensiveness of their grosser animal appetites and 
 needs, their lack of that great instrument and teacher 
 of the brain, a fully developed hand, and the inability 
 to foresee beyond a few hours, days, or months. Nor 
 could any human process prolong their period of life 
 and postpone their day of dissolution. It was not a 
 good thing for these pioneers of the human race to see 
 the approach of death and its agonies in a being that 
 
254 Limanora 
 
 could not assuage or postpone it. Still less beneficial 
 was it to touch the carcases and reduce them to harm- 
 less atoms. The presence of animals meant the daily 
 obtrusion of offensive sights that would either shock 
 or degrade their natures. All that animals could do 
 for them was already done by their science or their 
 machinery. Nothing that had fallen so far behind in 
 the race of life was worth the trouble of missionary ism; 
 for the energy that was in it had a better chance of 
 rising swiftly in the scale of existence by dissolution 
 and entrance into some other form. 
 
 None the less had they studied the language of ani- 
 mals when they had had the opportunity. It belonged 
 to the orchestration of the world, and all the sounds 
 of nature were of interest to them. They were in the 
 habit of visualising what they heard by a refined and 
 complicated instrument which they called a thinamar, 
 and had long been able to translate into its appropriate 
 form and colour every sound, inarticulate as well as 
 articulate. Through long use of this instrument the 
 tones of nature bore with them something that ap- 
 pealed to their eye. I never grew expert enough in 
 its use to make the visualisation of sound an instinct; 
 still less could I reverse the process. A modification 
 of their thinamar had enabled them to translate sights 
 into the symbols of sound, and by skill in using it they 
 had come to attach certain notes to certain sights. 
 Thus a noble landscape would appeal to their imagina- 
 tion not only through the eye, but in the form of music, 
 and they spoke of hearing the beauty of a star or a 
 flower. A section of this instrument did for compli- 
 cated sounds what the spectroscope, or inamar as they 
 called it, did for light. Every substance, every indi- 
 vidual living thing, had its natural and peculiar note; 
 
My Education Continued 255 
 
 and the linamar analysed what seemed to me the sim- 
 plest sound into its constituent primary notes, each of 
 which revealed its source. Aided by their mikrakousts 
 and inakrakousts, it enabled the I,imanorans to analyse 
 the chemical elements of any object, whether at a great 
 distance from them or too minute to appeal to their 
 senses. 
 
 Their makrakousts were instruments which by means 
 of electric currents and magnetism could make a beam 
 of light transmit any sound to its source, or make the 
 ear gather in the same way whatsoever sounds were 
 filling the air at any point on its course. I knew when 
 I saw a steady flash in any direction that the sound of 
 some point was getting tapped by one of these instru- 
 ments. Each had an apparatus for laying and keeping 
 fixed its luminous telegraph-wire along which it re- 
 ceived and transmitted. An application of this in the 
 gossip-telegraph enabled them to listen to the comedy 
 of life as it went on in any one of the adjacent islands 
 of the archipelago. Their mikrakousts used the same 
 means for gathering the faint sounds which echoed from 
 the clouds or through the upper regions of the atmos- 
 phere and turning them into loud notes, which might be 
 recorded, analysed, and interpreted. Their magnifying 
 power was quite equal to that of the clirolan. Faint 
 buzzings of insects at vast distances could be collected 
 and made as loud as thunder. It was even applied to 
 cosmic sounds that impinged on the atmospheric en- 
 velope of the earth. Mikrakoustic balloons rose into 
 the upper air, and after gathering whatever faint sounds 
 wandered thither from outside the world, were drawn 
 back again to divulge their secrets; eavesdroppers of 
 the cosmos they were, and perchance in some future 
 age they would enable the L,imanoran to listen to 
 
256 Limanora 
 
 voices from other worlds or even to communicate with 
 the dwellers there. A more immediate and practical 
 advantage of these instruments was found in medicine. 
 They told in clear accents the unexpected or dangerous 
 changes in the tissues or organs of any man's system. 
 They were used in the weekly medical inspection^ 
 which every member of the commonwealth underwent. 
 When the keen eye, aided by the camera-microscope, 
 could detect nothing abnormal in the body, the mikra- 
 koust would tell the examiner's ear of some obstruc- 
 tion or deleterious change; he knew the normal sounds 
 of healthy action in every part when they were mag- 
 nified thousands of times by this instrument, and every 
 departure from them readily caught the ear. All the 
 citizens were trained to use it as an aid in diagnosis, so 
 that they might be able to locate in the system any 
 beginning of disease. It was part of the training of 
 my ear to use the mikrakoust and to interpret its phy- 
 siological revelations. 
 
 But these instruments were getting antiquated by 
 the rapid development of the electric sense that could, 
 by the aid of their various electro-magnifiers and ana- 
 lysers, gather in cosmic news from distances which the 
 sense of hearing and its aids would count infinite. 
 Magnetic kites and balloons rose to the uttermost 
 fringe of our atmosphere, whither common terrestrial 
 influences could reach only in such faint waves as to 
 be neutralised; there they gathered the electric im- 
 pressions and impulses coming from other planets and 
 even other systems. On them were recorded the vary- 
 ing strengths of the waves and their direction. From 
 these records the astronomical families could tell what 
 was happening of a cosmic character in universes far 
 out of the reach of even their lavidrolans or camera- 
 
My Education Continued 257 
 
 telescopes, perturbations in the atmospheres of great 
 unseen suns, collisions between worlds that circled 
 round them, births of new universes from these lost 
 systems, periodic disturbances of the routine revolutions 
 through the approach of some meteoric wanderer, the 
 settlement of life on worlds grown ripe for it, and the 
 death of outworn stars. For many generations had 
 they kept and classified these reports of cosmic history 
 and were beginning to recognise a wide periodicity in 
 many of them and to draw conclusions as to the path 
 of our universe through infinite space. It seemed to 
 them that there was some point far distant in the cos- 
 mos, round which our sun and its satellites with in- 
 numerable other systems of stars revolved, and that 
 this point, with its satellites, had its own independent 
 movement. Age by age, with the aid of their idrolans 
 or electric telescopes, and other electric instruments, 
 they felt that they were getting nearer and nearer to 
 the centre of this interwoven epicycloidal movement 
 and were almost convinced that it did not proceed in- 
 finitely, but that there was some ultimate centre which 
 had no movement round another. Their instincts told 
 them that this was the divine consciousness towards 
 which all things rose in the scale of being. They 
 never remitted their ardour and diligence in the de- 
 velopment of their electric sense and of the instruments 
 that aided it to become a receiver of cosmic news and 
 a recorder of cosmic history, for they were confident 
 that this was one of the tracks that led up through the 
 intricacy of the cosmos to God. 
 
 One of my greatest regrets was that my electric sense 
 could not follow the footsteps of these pioneers in the 
 infinite; it had but a dim consciousness of the reports 
 of their instruments, and train it as eagerly and dili- 
 
258 Limanora 
 
 gently as I would, it lagged behind my power of vision 
 and even my sense of hearing. On this account I pre- 
 ferred to learn the results of their researches through 
 these two senses, for the electric reports were carefully 
 translated into appeals to the eye and the ear. I could 
 see their wonderful discoveries in the unknown, as they 
 worked them into picture and mechanism, and I could 
 listen from day to day to the orchestration of their 
 newly discovered spaces and movements. What seemed 
 at the moment an intolerable discord chimed in with 
 the notes which preceded or followed and formed mar- 
 vellous harmony. Not the least part of my education 
 lay in this cosmic stimulus to my imagination. Out of 
 my terrestrial conditions and limits I daily rose into 
 spheres which seemed to me more and more divine. 
 Sight and hearing became noble channels of the in- 
 fluences of infinity, instead of gross senses. I strug- 
 gled to bring my firla up to the enjoyment of their 
 labours, but ever fell back hopeless. 
 
 This was especially the case when I was brought to 
 examine and test their monalan or electrical distance- 
 analyst, for a fully developed electric sense was needed 
 to appreciate its refined analysis of impulses from far 
 distances. It was an ingenious application of an alloy 
 called by them labramor, or electricity sponge, and had 
 the power of splitting up any electric wave or impulse 
 into its constituent movements. Each of these had its 
 own clear and distinct effect upon the firla and varied 
 with the substance from which the impulse came or 
 through which it passed. All substances and elements 
 in the terrestrial system were classified according to 
 their electric impulses. Even before the Limanorans 
 brought the firla to its high state of sensitiveness and 
 efficiency, they had been able to examine the stars 
 
My Education Continued 259 
 
 and other distant bodies and analyse their elements by 
 means of this classification and the application of their 
 alloy, labramor. Every substance or element had its 
 place in their tables according as it was positive or 
 negative in its electric impulse towards some other sub 
 stance or element; and all its affinities, strong or weak, 
 were tabulated. Thus when they turned their monalan 
 upon any distant body like a star they were able to 
 analyse its elements by means of these tables. Even 
 now that their firla interpreted the analysis of the 
 monalan without the intervention of classifications and 
 tables, they had another electrically analystic instru- 
 ment which appealed to the eye; this turned the elec- 
 tric impulse into a flash or glow, which at once revealed 
 in the inamar or spectroscope the substances or elements 
 whence it had come. 
 
 Their lower or more material senses I was more 
 nearly able to approach, even though they too were 
 highly intellectualised and were more the servants of 
 the spirit than of the animal part. In developing mine 
 I had more hope of raising myself to the Limanoran 
 level, and yet there was less stimulus; for I felt that 
 they looked down upon these senses of smell, taste, and 
 touch because of their need of close contact with their 
 objects; they were the primitive senses; they were 
 narrow and bound down to immediate matter, and 
 seemed poor gropers in the finite and the dark com- 
 pared with those rangers of infinity, the ear, the eye, 
 and the electric sense. It was then with a feeling of 
 humiliation that I saw those lower and more finite 
 senses in me develop so quickly, proving me a being of 
 a more primitive and material type. 
 
 Yet there was no neglect of these in their education 
 and no contempt for them and their uses; in fact con- 
 
260 Limanora 
 
 tempt was one of the vices that they had with most 
 pains weeded out of their systems and civilisation. 
 They had not merely considered that nothing in crea- 
 tion, if looked into scientifically, was worthy of con- 
 tempt, but that contempt was the truest symptom of 
 crudity of character and ignorance of reality and na- 
 ture. Even if they had had any remains of this primal 
 savagery, they would not have felt it towards those 
 finite-seeking senses. They only set themselves to 
 make them more and more the servants of the soul, 
 the instruments of the imagination. They rejected 
 the idea that the arts belonged only to sight and hear- 
 ing. Their arts of the firla were far more important 
 and striking than any sculpture or painting or music 
 could be. Not merely as a variation on these and a 
 relief from them did they have arts that brought in 
 the senses of smell and taste and touch; these had 
 their own special uses in their civilisation. All of 
 them, but especially smell and taste, were closely 
 linked with memory, and through memory with imagi- 
 nation. A special perfume and even a special taste 
 would flash before the mind a scene or fact with more 
 vividness than even a piece of music would. 
 
 The perfumes and tastes had been classified accord- 
 ing to their affinity to certain virtues and ideas and to 
 the great deeds and scenes which best represented them. 
 The island was one vast flower-garden at all seasons of 
 the year, arranged not alone to please the eye, but to 
 bring by the suggestion of their perfumes the noblest 
 virtues and deeds constantly into the mind. For ex- 
 ample, wherever a child or youth was being trained, 
 the flowers possessing certain well-known scents which 
 were closely connected with the finest qualities and 
 ideas of the race shone profusely yet with striking art. 
 
My Education Continued 261 
 
 The art of the gardening family did not consist merely 
 in arrangement of the landscape and the varied colora- 
 tion of it. The scent of every flower had to be taken 
 into consideration and the faint flavour or taste the 
 seed or fruit might produce in the air when sent adrift 
 or bruised. The problem of no science or art was so 
 complicated as that of gardening in this island, it had 
 to take account of so many senses, seasons, and con- 
 ditions of growth. They were never done with creat- 
 ing and selecting new variations of flowers and plants, 
 and colour, scent, and taste in the vegetable world were 
 as adaptable in their hands as tones in the hands of their 
 musical composers. Their task was made compara- 
 tively easy by the great development of methods and 
 appliances for rapid growth and decay. They had not 
 only complete command of the weather and clouds and 
 sunshine; but they could bring up and perfect flowers 
 in a few nights over vast areas by the use of their 
 streams and watering platforms and of artificial light. 
 When the Umanorans slept, wonders were being ac- 
 complished in colouring the landscape; for first some 
 of their great rivers would pour refreshing rain all over 
 the plains; and then the electric glow, brought close 
 over the plants, would develop their bloom-producing 
 capacity. As careful were the gardeners that no 
 withering or dead vegetable matter should ever taint 
 the air of the island; the moment one set of blossoms 
 had perfected and shown traces of decay, an electric 
 pruner ran in a few minutes over the whole area, and 
 not merely cut them off, but burnt them to dust that 
 fell on the roots to stimulate the new growth of the 
 plants. As soon as the plants had passed their bloom- 
 productive point, an electric life-destroyer ploughed 
 lightly through the soil in all directions; and by the 
 
262 Limanora 
 
 morning what had been profusely flower-coloured the 
 day before was brown earth, ready for the new plant- 
 growth of next day. The slow-growing perennials 
 and bushes and trees occupied separate and fixed 
 quarters at a distance from the residences and the great 
 centres of intercourse, and all rampant vegetation and 
 rotting boughs and leaves were daily turned into good 
 soil by the electric weed-destroyer. No decay was ever 
 allowed to approach the senses. Their knowledge of 
 the secrets of the soil made them independent of rotting 
 or offensive manures. The particular elements of which 
 any kind of plant or flower robbed the soil were ac- 
 curately ascertained, and their chemistry enabled them 
 with ease to supply the deficiency after a crop had 
 been removed. 
 
 The gardening family had to be familiar on the one 
 hand with the innermost secrets of psychology, and on 
 the other with the last discoveries of the more material 
 sciences; for no one could avoid the effects of the 
 flowers and trees, as he could painting and sculpture, 
 music and firlamai. Gardening, in short, was the most 
 public of all the arts and the most pervasive in its re- 
 sults. A garden (and in Limanora there was only one 
 vast garden) was a great mnemonic instrument, which 
 could play upon the souls of the whole community at 
 once. That it should not be in the hands of novices, 
 or of unwise or wrong-thoughted men and women, was 
 one of the prime cares of the people. Of all families 
 those that managed the garden of the island had to be 
 most simple-hearted and true, most sure in their know- 
 ledge of the human heart, and most eager to stir to 
 what is great and noble and humane. They were the 
 lords of the sense of smell, one of the most immediate 
 portals to memory and to imagination. To have the 
 
My Education Continued 263 
 
 complete command of one out of the six dominant 
 sense-entrances to the soul was, they considered, the 
 greatest of responsibilities, and no care was neglected 
 in selecting, purifying, and training the families of 
 gardeners. 
 
 They, too, had the superintendence of Ilarime, a 
 structure devoted to the arts of smell, taste, and sound 
 combined. Aided by the musicians and the chemists, 
 they produced symphonies which appealed to all three 
 senses and roused the imagination to exceptional 
 flights. The imaginative or pioneering families fre- 
 quented the halls of this great building daily in pursuit 
 of new stimulus to their faculty. Every chamber in it 
 had special emotions to rouse. A garden could have 
 only a mingled effect upon the memory and mnemonic 
 imagination ; Ilarime separated the effects and classified 
 the emotions and imaginative ideas which were to be 
 stimulated. Anyone entering could find out at the 
 porch, either by looking in the index-chamber or by 
 consulting one of the superintendents, what hall or 
 halls he ought to rest in. I had often during my edu- 
 cation to take refuge in Ilarime, when clogged in my 
 endeavours to advance by dulness of memory or im- 
 agination or by the weakness of some emotion. After 
 a time I did not need to consult a guide; I knew what 
 element in my soul was deficient and what emotion or 
 memory would stir it to activity, and by aid of the 
 index-hall and its graphic representation of the effect 
 of every chamber upon the spirit I could choose what 
 symphony I needed. As soon as I had entered the 
 hall that I had chosen, I lay down on one of their 
 hanging rests and shut my eyes. At once the medi- 
 cated atmosphere began to affect my palate, whilst 
 the delicate perfume entered my nostrils and my ears 
 
264 Limanora 
 
 drank in the sweet-sounding music. Before many 
 minutes had passed memories of striking scenes I had 
 witnessed or heard of or seen represented in the island 
 began to rise in my mind, and the emotion I needed 
 thrilled me through; if it was heroism or courage, I 
 felt myself urged to deeds of valour; if it was benevo- 
 lence, I was soon inclined to rush to the help of the 
 suffering and the poor; if it was hope, I saw bright 
 visions of the future. 
 
 But this exercise was too passive to be allowed for 
 any length of time. The imagination and emotions 
 were apt to gain at the expense of the will and the 
 nervous energy by too frequent resort to Ilarime. 
 Strenuous endeavour was held to be one of the prime 
 essentials of progress, not only in the race, but even 
 more in the individual. And, though all the prevail- 
 ing odours and tastes and sounds of the island were 
 agreeable, the L,imanoraiis carried with them a small 
 instrument, called margol, that by an adaptation of 
 electricity could blunt at will the acuteness of smelling 
 and tasting and hearing, and, on the other hand, reduce 
 the powers of perfumes and flavours and sounds; it 
 acted by drying the air around the head and drawing 
 the moisture and heat from the nostrils, the tongue, 
 and the ears. It was partly to mitigate the force of 
 smells and tastes and sounds that they always kept the 
 atmosphere dry and cool by day. In the margol, too, 
 there was a combination of chemicals and electricity 
 which would modify any odour or flavour to suit the 
 taste; but if they wished to increase the strength of 
 any perfume or taste, they applied electric heat to the 
 source of it, and moistened the nostrils and the mouth. 
 It was one of the new peculiarities of the race that 
 the mucous and salivary flow was under the command 
 
My Education Continued 265 
 
 of the will, and they could smell and taste with satis- 
 faction to themselves without the aid of moisture on 
 the organs. 
 
 Their senses of smell and taste had become by means 
 of their acuteness what they were originally meant to 
 be, the guardians of the throat and the digestion. 
 They told with accuracy the nature of the substances 
 brought to the mouth ; whatsoever would be deleterious 
 to the system was offensive. In most civilised peoples 
 what is grateful to the palate and the olfactory nerves 
 is often pernicious to some tissue of the body or some 
 faculty of the mind. Here the two senses were the 
 true friends and protectors of both body and soul ; there 
 was no seducing them or bribing them into evil or irra- 
 tional reports, so completely had they been saturated 
 with reason. 
 
 In the medical, chemical, and alimentary families 
 these senses were trained to a pitch that seemed to me 
 marvellous. By either smell or taste a member of these 
 families could tell the constituent elements of any 
 compound. A medical sage, if a man, could distinguish 
 by the faint odour that marked each human body 
 whether it was losing energy or expending it, making 
 progress or decaying; if a woman, the sage, in order to 
 make this decision, had as a rule to bring in the help 
 of taste; for it had remained from the primitive ani- 
 mal stage of man's development one of the differentiat- 
 ing marks of sex that the male had more energy of 
 smell, the female more energy of taste; now that they 
 had so spiritualised their senses, perfumes formed the 
 quickest stimulus of the masculine imagination and 
 flavours of the feminine. At the food vats it was 
 always the Limanoran women who superintended the 
 flavouring of any compound; whilst it was the men 
 
266 Limanora 
 
 who had most to do with medicating the atmospheres 
 of the chambers, and men presided in the chemical 
 laboratories. The historical origin of this distinction, 
 they thought, was on the one hand the development 
 of the acuteness of smell in male animals at rutting 
 time, and on the other the power in dams of recognis- 
 ing their own offspring by licking it with the tongue. 
 And it was a well-known maxim in their medical 
 families that every individual had a distinctive odour 
 and taste. They could tell one man from another in 
 the dark, and even at a considerable distance; and to 
 touch him with the tongue was to make assurance 
 doubly sure. The kissing that was so common in the 
 West as a symbol of friendship and love, like the rub- 
 bing of noses amongst less civilised peoples, had as its 
 origin and basis the recognition of the individual by 
 the taste or smell. They did not need so close or ma- 
 terial an investigation of the individual to have pleasant 
 memories of friendship aroused. Their methods and 
 symbols of companionship and love had become more 
 and more spiritual with the passion itself. 
 
 But, preternaturally acute though their senses 
 seemed to me to be, they would rely upon their de- 
 cisions no more than the modern scientist of the West 
 would rely upon his. Error, they held, was ever 
 maiming the conclusions from reports of the senses, 
 and they took every precaution in recording or using 
 their own perceptions. Accurate though their sense- 
 memory was, they had instruments which kept a per- 
 manent record of any report of the senses they meant 
 to use again. Not merely sounds and sights did they 
 automatically record, but perfumes, and flavours, and 
 electric impressions. Ages before, the inasan or re- 
 corder of light and the linasan or recorder of sound had 
 
My Education Continued 267 
 
 been brought to a high pitch of perfection; all the 
 colours and forms seen in nature, at whatever distance, 
 could be kept in permanence on irelium-plates and re- 
 produced to the eye by the insertion of the plates in the 
 inasan and the reversal of the instrument. So was it 
 with sounds, however loud or faint; the linasan would 
 tell out to the ear music or speeches recorded hundreds 
 of years before down to the minutest tone. By a modi- 
 fication of these two instruments they took record of 
 the inner structure of things even at cosmic distances, 
 and of sounds which seemed to be intercepted by vast 
 material obstructions. The development of the re- 
 corders of the other senses had been more recent; not 
 till perfumes and tastes and electricity had begun to 
 enter largely into education and the stimulance of 
 memory did the necessity for such instruments arise. 
 In the earlier times before the purgation of the race 
 these instruments would have been a temptation to 
 new and epicurean vices. Now they were nothing if 
 not educational aids. The farosan or aromagraph 
 enabled the gardeners to arrange the mnemonic har- 
 monies of flowers as mere sense-memory could never 
 have done; it could reproduce any subtle perfume or 
 mixture of perfumes that had ever been experienced in 
 the island. The salosan or gustagraph gave incalcul- 
 able aid to the chemical and alimentary families; with- 
 out its permanencies of flavour they would have fallen 
 into daily errors in mingling the atmospheres of the 
 halls of sustenance and medication and those of Ilarime. 
 By its aid they could recall any of the tastes which 
 had made substances or compounds pleasing to the 
 palate. But it was the idrosan or electrograph that 
 was most needed; for the firla or electric sense had 
 been so recently developed that its reports as to the 
 
268 Limanora 
 
 amount and quality of any electric impulse were most 
 untrustworthy. Without the aid of this recorder they 
 could never have compared the electric impulses of the 
 past with those of the present, nor could they have 
 been so accurate in measuring the electric powers of 
 various substances. 
 
 They knew that the basis of all scientific advance 
 was accurate measurement. Their old measuring in- 
 struments had gradually been overtaken by their own 
 senses, and had to be replaced by others more and more 
 refined. In order to make sure that their senses in- 
 troduced no personal element into the reports and re- 
 presentations of their various delicate measurers, they 
 had invented an instrument which for fine adjustment 
 surpassed all of these. It was the airolan or senso- 
 meter, and by it the medical families in their weekly 
 review of every system in the community were enabled 
 to find the exact personal equation of each. It re- 
 corded the upper and lower limit of the various sens- 
 ations, the limit of endurance, and the vanishing 
 point. Although there was a great evenness in the 
 development of the senses in the community, there 
 was yet considerable variation in the delicacy of per- 
 ception. One man was keenest in .sight, another in 
 hearing, a third in the electric sense, yet there was a 
 certain constancy or proportion in all the senses of 
 every man, a proportion varying according to well-as- 
 certained laws with the hour and the season, the man's 
 age, and the temperature and health of his body. The 
 airolan tested, measured, and recorded the regular vari- 
 ations of each Limanoran's senses, and thus he was 
 able to know how far he judged accurately anything 
 he perceived. By its aid he was able to know the exact 
 point at which he would need to call in any one of the 
 
OF : >^ 
 
 ft UNJV 
 
 My Education Continued 269 
 . 
 
 various mechanical aids to the senses, the magnifiers, 
 or modifiers, or distance-reducers. By its means they 
 were able to gauge the proper mixture of colours and 
 proper size in architecture that would please at certain 
 distances. By its means, too, they could accurately 
 measure the distance from which any electric or lumin- 
 ous or somniferous impulse had come, when it struck 
 on the senses. 
 
 It was one of the commonplaces of their policy that 
 whatever could be done by machinery it was waste of 
 skill and energy to do by human labour and thought; 
 and instruments were generally more exact and reliable 
 than the senses and active powers of man, however 
 delicately developed and refined. Of course man's brain 
 and hand must still guide and superintend all instru- 
 ments and machinery, but his interference with their 
 automatic working was reduced to a minimum, in order 
 that the discount for personal equation should be as 
 little as possible. It was not, however, so much for 
 the sake of accuracy of result that mechanism was 
 substituted for human work, as for the sake of progress. 
 Every operation and function which could be performed 
 mechanically it was a slur upon human dignity to do; 
 and at once Limanoran humanity was relieved from 
 the necessity, and the freed energy was applied to other 
 and nobler efforts towards progress. 
 
 During my education I had noticed again and again 
 with surprise that mathematics took no part in it. Not 
 once had I heard the subject mentioned by any of my 
 guides or companions. I remembered the important 
 place it held in Western curriculums, and wondered 
 how the various scientific families could manage their 
 abstruse formulae and calculations without that science. 
 A people that laid so much stress on exactitude of 
 
270 Limanora 
 
 research as an essential of all scientific progress were 
 surely lax to a degree in failing to train their youth in 
 the various branches of mathematics. 
 
 On having my senses tested by the airolan, the 
 thought came uppermost in my mind again; and my 
 proparents at last took notice of it, perhaps as the time 
 had arrived for enlightening me on the subject. They 
 led me to a vast museum-like building, crammed with 
 all kinds of small and intricate machines, not unlike a 
 kind of patent office, where the models of new inven- 
 tions are deposited for examination and comparison. 
 There was evident in the arrangement a careful classi- 
 fication according to elaboration and delicacy. In the 
 first section we entered there were- the simplest of ma- 
 chines, having a few levers and cog-wheels, and a few 
 keys set in a keyboard; these were meant for the easier 
 rules of calculation, addition, subtraction, multiplica- 
 tion, and division. We tested most of them and I 
 saw that they were infallibly accurate; never once 
 even in the longest and most intricate calculation was 
 there any error. In fact, these machines had been 
 first invented to avoid the constant errors that vitiated 
 important results when novices were set to work them 
 out. It was then found that not only did they rid 
 calculations of fallibility and the youth of heartless 
 drudgery, but they enabled the race to advance more 
 rapidly. They set free years of life, especially in the 
 formative stage, that had been wasted on mere routine 
 and mechanical work; and, best of all, they allowed 
 the tissues of young brains to be less rigid. It was 
 noted that, after the calculating machines were set 
 to work, the youth grew in mental and especially in im- 
 aginative power at twice the old rate. The elders of 
 the state were amazed at the result, prizing as they 
 
My Education Continued 271 
 
 had done the effect of arithmetic in the discipline and 
 education of the young; indeed, it had been with 
 great regret that they saw the youth relieved of so 
 disciplinary an exercise; and they even thought of 
 making an exception to their usual utilitarian state- 
 principle, and training the boys and girls in rapid cal- 
 culation, although it would be of so little use to them 
 in their after-lives. But a few years convinced them 
 of the serious mistake they had made. The pace of 
 development so suddenly and greatly quickened in the 
 new generation that the result could be set down to 
 nothing else than the new freedom from calculations. 
 Their own faculties and imagination seemed stiff and 
 almost ossified compared to the ease and flexibility of 
 those of their sons and daughters. Invention and dis- 
 covery struck out with unprecedented energy, and the 
 ethical and emotional phase of imagination grew at a 
 marvellous pace; new ideal realms were opened out for 
 morality and practical thought. 
 
 The experience threw a remarkable light upon a 
 phenomenon which had puzzled them for generations. 
 After the period of youth the members of the com- 
 munity had to specialise; and for some undiscoverable 
 reason those who devoted themselves to mathematics 
 and the working of abstruse formulae had been found, 
 able though most of them were, to be the most rigidly 
 unreasonable in the community ; they refused to admit 
 that they could be mistaken in any of their judgments 
 or even opinions; nothing would move them, neither 
 logical argument nor emotional appeal; they assumed 
 that they had found absolute truth, and refused to 
 have compromise. In one generation in the far past 
 the mathematical families had to be exiled, so serious 
 an obstruction had they become to progress. Again 
 
272 Limanora 
 
 they had been completely renewed, children of the 
 most noble-minded, freest, and most imaginative fami- 
 lies being substituted for the old members, and trained 
 to fulfil their functions; within a generation the result 
 was the same; these scions of the finest of the race 
 became as narrow-minded and obstructive as their pre- 
 decessors had been. It seemed to be useless to change 
 the stock, and for some generations the community ac- 
 cepted their conservatism and obstinacy as inevitable; 
 they grew accustomed to smiling at the mathematical 
 families as " the omniscients." 
 
 Why the true cause of this degeneracy had not oc- 
 curred to such a shrewd and logical people it is hard 
 to say; probably because they were so wedded by long 
 tradition and practice to the idea that mathematics was 
 one of the loftiest of sciences and one of the most es- 
 sential elements in education. They doubtless refused 
 to reconsider its claims or to abandon their inherited 
 reverence for it. But the discovery of the effect of 
 the calculative habit on the tissues of the brain at last 
 forced them to face the true cause of the infallibility of 
 the mathematical families. It was their occupation 
 that caused their degeneracy. Men began to pity them 
 for the slavery in which they had been so long held 
 and to devise means for their liberating. The old 
 habitual smile at the mention of their name became 
 sadness at the thought of what these members of the 
 race might have accomplished for its civilisation had 
 they not been so frozen in their tissues by the perpetual 
 use of formulae. They were amazed at their own dul- 
 ness in failing to see that men who dealt in such me- 
 chanical methods and exact results could not but be 
 mechanical themselves and easily fall into the fixed 
 mental attitude of the omniscient, and dealing with a 
 
My Education Continued 273 
 
 world so unreal in its stiff, skeleton-like outlines could 
 not but fail in a world of conditions and compromises. 
 
 At first the prevailing idea was that all the studies 
 and sciences needing exactitude of formulae and result 
 should be neglected by the community. On considera- 
 tion it was felt that some of the most valuable stepping- 
 stones to the loftier ideals of the future would be 
 sacrificed if this were done. The other alternative was 
 chosen. The inventors who had made the calculating 
 machines were set on to find instruments which would 
 accomplish what the mathematicians had had to do for 
 the community. And, one after the other, the years 
 had produced them. Even differential and integral 
 calculus had been superseded by a series of machines 
 that with little guidance worked out all the applications 
 of their intricate formulae to the sciences. As we ad- 
 vanced from department to department we watched 
 these machines at work confirming the imaginative re- 
 sults of the physicists, the chemists, and the astronom- 
 ers. The mathematical families were relieved of their 
 duties and distributed, and every member of the scien- 
 tific families was taught to use all these formulating 
 instruments. Their brain-energy was not monopolised 
 by calculations; the use of the machines was but a 
 routine detail in their wider intellectual life, and ab- 
 sorbed so little of their energy that it seemed to have 
 no effect on their faculties. 
 
 I was not many days in mastering the details of the 
 formula-machines; for I had paid some attention to 
 mathematics in my buried life and the memory of the 
 subject rapidly revived. I soon came to see the wisdom 
 of the lyimanorans in eliminating the study from their 
 scheme of education. It would have been the height 
 of extravagance to waste long periods of their lives in 
 
 18 
 
274 Limanora 
 
 studying and doing what a machine could do better. 
 It was exactly the kind of work best done by a ma- 
 chine, for it had to do with a world rid of all conditions 
 and, mathematically speaking, perfect. The inventors 
 were still busy making new and simpler machines for 
 the use of the scientists; and, though they had to know 
 the new mathematical formulae needed, they busied 
 their brains rather with their practical application and 
 with the machinery that would use them. It was 
 imagination in the practice of mechanics rather than 
 the mechanical use of methods and formulae that they 
 were engaged on. Hence it was that they avoided 
 the old unpracticality of the mathematical families, and 
 stood in no danger of thinking themselves infallible 
 and the only treasuries of absolute truth. 
 
 One of the most interesting departments of Minella, 
 as this great building was called, was that which con- 
 tained the measurers of time. I was somewhat sur- 
 prised that this department should exist, for I had 
 admired every day the power the L,imanorans had of 
 telling to a minute fraction the passage of time. Their 
 sense of time seemed to me to make watches and clocks 
 superfluous. Even when the sky was clouded over 
 and no heavenly body or light to be perceived, they 
 could tell the exact fraction of the day or night that 
 had passed, as I tested again and again by the watch I 
 had brought with me. Their knowledge of the natural 
 signs of the time of day or year had become instinctive 
 and automatic through long centuries of daily use. 
 The position and state of the petals of flowers would 
 at any moment by day or night, by shine or cloud, re- 
 veal to them the time. So would the temperature of 
 anything they touched, or, if it were highly contractile, 
 its size. But these external signs were quite unneces- 
 
My Education Continued 275 
 
 sary. They had not to go beyond the sensations of 
 their own bodies to tell the time or season. They knew 
 by the intensity of the magnetism in them, by the 
 acuteness of their senses, by the amount of energy 
 they could command. 
 
 But their experiments needed far more exactness 
 than even their senses could afford. Time had to be 
 counted in their science not by mere seconds, but by 
 the hundred-thousandth, or even the millionth, part 
 of a second. One old-fashioned measurer of time was 
 based on the length of a wave of sound as it passed 
 through a vessel of water. The length of the vessel 
 contained a round number of nioltas (their smallest 
 measure of length, perhaps about the millionth part of 
 an inch); the vibration in the water reflected a bright 
 light through a microscope and camera combined ; and a 
 photograph of the pulsations imprinted itself on a strip 
 of irelium that kept moving with lightning swiftness 
 across the focus; this strip was divided into minute 
 sections, each of them corresponding to a lenta or mil- 
 lionth part of a second and numbered in order up to a 
 million. A newer clock had its principle based on the 
 length of a wave of light in a vacuum. Another and 
 more convenient clock, or rather watch, consisted of 
 an electric battery that kept a light irelium tongue 
 vibrating; this latter controlled a graduated mechan- 
 ism which pointed out on a face the exact lenta in the 
 time of day that it was. It was small enough to be 
 carried about on the person like a watch. 
 
 A similar microscopic minuteness of division appeared 
 in all their weights and measures. They could weigh 
 in their balances down to the million-millionth part of 
 an ounce. So with their measurement of heat and 
 cold; their thermometers couW test ten thousand times 
 
276 Limanora 
 
 the range of temperature that their senses could bear, 
 although their power of endurance of fire and frost was 
 to me something miraculous; their furnaces were able 
 to volatilise the most refractory of metals and earths; 
 they could reproduce the conditions of the most glow- 
 ing suns, and also the temperature of the coldest 
 interstellar space, which, age by age, they were bring- 
 ing their frames gradually to bear with the aid of cer- 
 tain foods and combinations of elements. Thus did 
 they hope in some future age to subsist, even when 
 they ventured outside of the atmosphere of the earth. 
 
 All their measures were based on the decimal system, 
 the fundamental unit for microscopic measurements 
 being the amount of energy in an atom of one of their 
 elements, and that for cosmic measurements the energy 
 that would bring a beam of light from the sun's surface 
 to the earth's. They were able to see at a glance the 
 exact amount of energy in any phenomenon, to what- 
 ever sense it might appeal, and in their minds there 
 was ever a common measure for all types of force. 
 Their electrometers and magnetometers told not merely 
 the amount of electricity or magnetism in any machine, 
 material, or phenomenon, but the motive-power it would 
 have when applied to any purpose. They could com- 
 pare at a glance, without any elaborate calculations, 
 the advantages to be obtained from any substance when 
 using it as a force, whether through the electricity or 
 the heat or the gravitational power to be obtained from 
 it. 
 
 Especially useful was this common measure in deal- 
 ing with the power of light as separate from that of 
 heat. It was of great importance to them to know the 
 exact amount of energy even in a beam of light which 
 their eyes could not perceive. For they used sunshine 
 
My Education Continued 277 
 
 as one of their great curative agencies, and the medical 
 families were constantly experimenting on the effect of 
 more or less light upon the microscopic life existing in 
 and around the human body. One of their own new 
 developments had been the consciousness of light all 
 over their skin; they could tell with eyes shut whether 
 it was the light of sun, stars, or moon, or an artificial 
 light which was falling on any part of their body; the 
 effect, even on the mind, differed completely in the four; 
 the sunlight, or at least a certain amount of it, gave 
 exhilaration or even joy; the starshine brought con- 
 templative melancholy; the moonbeam mildly stirred 
 the passions; whilst artificial light varied. in its power 
 of exhausting brain and nerve energy with the material 
 or element that produced it. 
 
 Sunlight deprived of the intensity of its heat was to 
 them one of the essentials of life. Its bactericidal 
 power had been scientifically proved ages before, and a 
 family had been set apart for testing its effects both 
 qualitatively and quantitatively. It was not merely a 
 loose knowledge that they had acquired of the anti- 
 septic influence of sunshine. They had measured ex- 
 actly its power of depriving microbes of their deadliness 
 in the case of every disease; and they knew to a nicety 
 how strong or weak it would be needed in order to 
 check their ravages in any constitution, whether con- 
 centrated on a spot or diluted and spread as in a bath, 
 how long daily its application would be required, and 
 how many days. It was this family that superintended 
 the sunbaths in their halls of medication, and assisted 
 the medical sages in advising as to their use. It was 
 true that daylight, and especially that of a sunny day, 
 swept one third of the noxious life out of all water open 
 to its influence, whilst the rays of the sun bleached 
 
278 ^Limanora 
 
 most bacteria of their pestiferous tendency. Yet used 
 indiscriminately sunshine became itself unwholesome, 
 because of the other forms of energy besides light that 
 it brought with it from the sun and the intervening 
 spaces. If not used with caution, it would destroy the 
 microscopic allies of human life in the body, rendering 
 feeble the phagocytes that devour the virulent microbes; 
 it would by its great heat injure the delicate tissues 
 of the brain, and by its magnetism and weight press 
 heavily on the nerves and the circulation. It was the 
 duty of the solometric family to rid it of its unwholesome 
 elements, and to indicate the exact amount and use of 
 it that would be beneficial in every state of the body. 
 Another of the duties of this family was to cultivate 
 colonies of microbes of the various diseases and make 
 them harmless by means of sunlight for use in inocula- 
 tions against their own unmodified bacterial kin. One 
 of their greatest aids in this process was the use of the 
 water of the sea; wherever it did not kill the bacteria 
 completely, it emphasised the bleaching power of sun- 
 light over them and rendered them the allies of the 
 human system in its struggle against all disease and 
 decay. This sterilisation of disease was one of the 
 most important functions of the family. It was they 
 who led the flight-gambols of the Limanorans into the 
 outer fringe of the atmosphere, where they might drink 
 in the elixir of unadulterated sunshine; their guidance 
 and contrivances were needed even there, in order to 
 prevent the action of the other energies in the light 
 growing deleterious. Even moonlight and starshine 
 had their uses in the hands of this skilled family. They 
 could separate the deadly or poisonous elements of 
 moonbeams to help them in destroying bacterial life, 
 and leave only their healthy and inspiring tendencies; 
 
My Education Continued 279 
 
 thus dealt with, the rays of the moon gave a stimulus 
 to the brain-tissues which worked up imaginative ma- 
 terials. And every star had, in their science, its own 
 peculiar influence, sometimes malign, more commonly 
 beneficial, when treated according to their wise dis- 
 coveries. 
 
 Little of all this would have been possible without 
 the inolan or measurer of light, one of the most delicate 
 instruments they possessed. This was but a modifica- 
 tion of the human eye as it had been developed in their 
 bodies. It magnified the impression made on the lens 
 so that it should move a small mirror delicately hung 
 in vacua; the reflection of this mirror ran along a 
 graduated scale on which it recorded by bleaching a 
 point of colour, the energy of light in the beam pro- 
 ducing the movement. This recorded not merely the 
 strength of the rays of which their eyes were conscious, 
 but that of many octaves of light outside of the range 
 of all human eyes. A more modern and delicate 
 form of the inolan used a microscopic camera as the 
 medium of measurement; this had accomplished new 
 wonders in the way of measuring the power of rays from 
 stars out of reach of the human eye. A third photometer, 
 recently invented and still untested when I visited the 
 collection of measurers, had made use of electricity in 
 collecting and testing the quality and energy of beams 
 of light. 
 
 In all of these forms of the inolan there was an ar- 
 rangement for ridding each ray of its heat and of other 
 forms of energy before it entered the lens ; a thermometer 
 measured the heat; and the other elements were ab- 
 sorbed and analysed by a subsidiary apparatus as the 
 beam approached the inolan. Another modification of 
 the apparatus had a prismatic arrangement attached to 
 
280 Limanora 
 
 it, not unlike their inamar, and this broke up the beam 
 of light into its colour components; the inolan measured 
 each separate component, the length of its wave, and 
 the energy required to produce it, its camera also re- 
 cording in photographic form the metallic elements 
 through which the beam had passed. A more recent 
 modification, promising great results, was one which 
 by means of a vacuum-lens recorded the dark beams 
 that shone from unseen stellar bodies through the 
 corona of our own or other suns. When fully de- 
 veloped they expected this to reveal the secrets of the 
 darker depths of the heavens; the systems revolving 
 round the stars would stand out clearly with all their 
 elements for the investigation of the astronomic 
 families. 
 
 Nor did the extraordinary refinement of these instru- 
 ments, that were constantly being discovered, interfere 
 in any way with the development of Limanoran senses. 
 On the contrary they stimulated advance. Every new 
 aid to any sense pointed the way to its improvement; 
 and in a few years or generations this aid was rendered 
 almost superfluous and a new and more delicate ma- 
 chine must be invented; for the combination of so 
 many functions in the living body rendered the ob- 
 servations of any one sense less exact and trustworthy 
 than those of a machine which had but one purpose. 
 
 Thus the evolution of the senses kept up an unending 
 race with the evolution of fine machinery to aid them. 
 Even the roughest, most material, and least specialised 
 of all the senses, touch, had grown into something that 
 was most delicate in its manipulation; and one of the 
 most important parts of the education of my senses 
 was to refine and develop it. They had specialised it 
 to an astonishing degree. The lips, especially the 
 
My Education Continued 281 
 
 outer edges of them, were able to distinguish the latent 
 energy in any substance applied to them; whilst a deli- 
 cate fringe of hair upon the upper lip, too minute to be 
 seen by ordinary eyes, revealed to them the movements 
 and character of gases and vapours that were so faint 
 in their impulse as to be unrecognisable by the other 
 senses. The measurement of force had been raised to 
 a high point of exactness in their huge chests and 
 shoulders. Their hands, within certain limits, felt 
 temperature with the accuracy and minuteness of a 
 thermometer. And the prehensile and manipulative 
 skill of their fingers far surpassed that of the ablest 
 European conjuror I had ever seen. Without any in- 
 tention to outwit my senses, they would do things 
 with their hands so swiftly that I could not follow the 
 movements. It seemed to me at first as if they had 
 more joints in their fingers than other human beings, 
 so nimble were they; but this was not the case, al- 
 though the arm had greater scope of movement than 
 mine; in fact it seemed to move in the shoulder socket 
 as in a universal joint, so freely could it revolve in all 
 directions. Their joints were really more padded with 
 cartilage than mine, so that there was more flexibility 
 in the limbs along with greater firmness and strength. 
 Their nerves were also more magnetic than those of 
 other men, conveying the messages to and from the 
 brain and will-centres with far more swiftness and 
 certitude. Indeed, if I were to find any one point in 
 their systems which most differentiated them from 
 European humanity, it was this increased and ac- 
 celerated nerve-energy. For a long time their rapidity 
 and ease of movement and action bewildered me; 
 whilst I was deliberating what was to be done, they 
 had done all that was needed. They had instruments 
 
282 Limanora 
 
 for measuring the flash of thought from brain to hand 
 and of sensation from hand to brain, and when tested 
 at first, the swiftness of the message along my nerves 
 was not one tithe of theirs, but when my education had 
 somewhat advanced, this disparity was reduced by 
 half. This advance was accomplished, not merely by 
 practice, but by variety of diet and medication, and 
 by living in a more magnetic atmosphere. I was often 
 borne aloft into the purer air that fringes the envelope 
 of our earth, and there, half-asleep, I drew into my sys- 
 tem the electric elements which went to the quickening 
 of my nerves. Down in the island everything that 
 would excite me was avoided; the muscles and the 
 other tissues of the body were exercised, whilst the 
 nerves completely rested. Then they would be given 
 gentle exercise of their own, to strengthen and make 
 them supple, without unduly stimulating them. I soon 
 began to feel the difference in the increasing nimble- 
 ness of my limbs and could move with more celerity 
 and ease. The fingers were quicker to follow the eye. 
 I grew what my old companions would have thought 
 unerring in my aim and would have made a deadly 
 shot with bullet or arrow in the wars of my native 
 country. What was still better, the tips of my fingers 
 came to be powerfully magnetic both in their apprecia- 
 tion of the electricity in any body they touched, and 
 in actively producing magnetic currents. I was even 
 able to cause a faint flash in the darkness by concen- 
 trating my will-power in my fingers, and waving them 
 in the air. 
 
POSTSCRIPT TO UMANORA 
 
 WHEN he had reached this point in his narrative, 
 a striking instance of the result of his educa- 
 tion occurred. It was getting towards the end of win- 
 ter, and we who had our rules of thumb for the changes 
 in the weather were looking for the equinoctial gales 
 that harbinger the approach of spring. The days were 
 lengthening, and the light of the sun was growing clear 
 and strong upon our high-perched huts. 
 
 We had noticed a certain distraction in his manner, 
 an absence of thought or of consciousness, when he 
 was describing the development of his magnetic sense. 
 And when he ceased for the night he could not rest 
 but paced uneasily along our platform of cliff which 
 overlooked the waters of the sound. The moon had 
 begun to wane, and our weather lore bade us look out 
 for storms at the beginning of her next phase. I could 
 not go myself to rest for thinking of his strange nar- 
 rative and the wonderful people he had sojourned 
 amongst. I sat up many hours writing out what I 
 could remember of his conversations and descriptions 
 while it was still clear in my mind. 
 
 Some time after midnight I looked out and saw the 
 silver moonshine on the still waters below and was at- 
 tracted by the beauty of the scene. I had thought 
 that he had retired, but I had scarcely seated myself 
 
 283 
 
284 Limanora 
 
 on a projecting boss of rock that took in one of our 
 widest views, when his musical voice startled me out 
 of my reverie. 
 
 We fell into such sympathetic intercourse as the 
 beauty of night often stimulates in two sleepless spirits 
 meeting under the moon. He told me that the earth 
 was then tremulous with suppressed passion, and that 
 far off in his old home in the Pacific her heart was 
 about to break. He felt waves of magnetic feeling 
 pass through him, and they drew his soul back to 
 Limanora. He knew that the spirits he loved there 
 were yearning for him. For his heart quivered and 
 throbbed with full memories of all he had known and 
 experienced. There was anguish in the magnetic un- 
 dulance vibrating across his being. It was not merely 
 that a great storm was approaching; that he had 
 known for some days. There were human pulsations 
 in the ether which beat like an ocean upon his brain. 
 That was why he could not rest. If only he could 
 have his wings again, he would try to respond to the 
 call. But it was useless with the recrudescence of his 
 muddier humanity to attempt return by such aerial 
 means. I offered to go with him on the morrow to the 
 nearest city and charter a ship to carry us to his former 
 home. But he would not listen to my proposal, and 
 bade me seek rest and sleep. 
 
 I began to feel that I was intruding on the privacy 
 of an agonised soul, and I bade him good- night and left 
 him to his own thoughts. 
 
 The exhaustion of overcharged emotion soon let me 
 drift into troubled unconsciousness. Dream followed 
 dream like hurrying clouds over the moon. At dawn 
 I woke in nightmare. The hut was shaking. I thought 
 that I was still dreaming. But the swish of the rain 
 
Postscript to Limanora 285 
 
 and the lashing of the tree-branches on the roof soon 
 made me understand. The calm of the night before 
 had given way to tempest; and the earth was suffering 
 rupture. 
 
 I remembered the prediction of our guest, and rushed 
 to his hut. He was not there; nor could I conjecture 
 whither he had gone. I thought he had taken shelter 
 in the bush from the storm. Three days it lasted, and 
 then we were able to go out and search the drenched 
 forest. We followed up every track that he had been 
 accustomed to take. We went to all his favourite 
 haunts. But no trace could we find of him, though 
 days were spent on the search. Then we forced our 
 way through the dense undergrowth in several direc- 
 tions we had never seen him take; and at last we came 
 upon a yawning chasm, which had every appearance 
 of being newly opened. The precipitous side of the 
 mountain had split, and a vast landslip had swept 
 down it and filled the bottom of the gulf. We could 
 not resist the natural conclusion; this was the tomb of 
 our guest. After all his wanderings he had found 
 appropriate resting-place. The earth he knew so well 
 had taken him to her bosom. 
 
BOOK II 
 
 The Limanorans 
 The Inner Life of a Self-Selected People 
 
 287 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 GLOSSARY .... 
 
 I. DISCOVERIES .... 
 
 II AN ACCIDENT .... 
 
 III. DEATH 
 
 IV. AN EPIDEMIC .... 
 
 V. LITERATURE .... 
 
 VI. INSPIRATION .... 
 
 VII. PIONEERING .... 
 
 VIII. ANOTHER THREAT . 
 
 IX. POWTY 
 
 X. THE MANORA AND THE IMANORA 
 
 XI. ETHICS 
 
 XII. A WARNING .... 
 XIII. REWGION .... 
 XIV. THE LAST FLIGHT . 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 PAGE 
 2 9 I 
 
 295 
 2 99 
 
 339 
 354 
 392 
 407 
 419 
 436 
 487 
 507 
 538 
 554 
 629 
 
 654 
 694 
 707 
 
 289 
 
PREFACE 
 
 LATE in the autumn, when the memory of the 
 stranger who had told us so many wonderful 
 things had begun to lose its sharpness and we had 
 almost ceased to talk of him, we were startled by his 
 re-appearance. 
 
 We were in our tunnels, taking advantage of the dry 
 weather to get piles of our wash dirt out ready for sluic- 
 ing in the wet season, and were working till nightfall. 
 On a still, fair evening, which reminded me of the night 
 he vanished, we were returning jaded from our long 
 work and had just issued from the belt of bush that 
 fringed our clearing when the moon rose above the 
 peaks on the other side of the fiord and flashed a shuttle 
 of gold across the waters. Raising our eyes to our 
 huts, we stopped thunderstruck. Was that but a lunar 
 effect on the throne-like cliff in front of them? It 
 could not be a spirit; we had never heard of ghosts in 
 these new lands, nor could the belief in them seize hold 
 of minds so accustomed as ours were to deal with the 
 rougher and more material elements of nature. We 
 shook off our trance, and stepped forward. The sound 
 of our footsteps made the figure move and as he turned 
 in the moonlight we recognised our lost friend (his 
 apparition, we first supposed). But he rose with his 
 old quiet and dignified salute of welcome, and joining 
 
 291 
 
292 Limanora 
 
 us as we sat at our evening meal, we talked as if he 
 had parted with us only that morning. We had not 
 the hardihood to ask him what had become of him 
 these long months. But I noticed that he had more 
 of his old semi-transparency of tissue and ethereality of 
 hue, and in his eyes, as he ceased from talking, there 
 was a baffled look I had never seen before in them. 
 He would lapse more frequently into deep reverie. He 
 seemed to have gone through a lifetime of effort and 
 suffering, and his spirit was, I could see, weary and 
 sore within him. 
 
 He shrank at first from all reference to his life within 
 the circle of mist out on the Pacific. It seemed now 
 to be a painful memory. There was a pathos in his 
 tone as he spoke far keener than I had noted in it be- 
 fore. But gradually I drew him into reminiscence of 
 it when we were alone in the bush, and he seemed after 
 a time to find consolation in thinking and speaking 
 about it, especially when he talked of the spiritual side 
 of the civilisation in the midst of which he had lived 
 for so many years. 
 
 In the long nights of that last winter he resumed his 
 narrative again. He seemed to have difficulty in find- 
 ing English expression for what he had to tell, but I 
 encouraged him in our wanderings around the fiord to 
 repeat and interpret and explain what he had told 
 us. Gradually the narrative found a more intelligible 
 language, and I was able to jot down notes that I 
 understood. I have done my best to throw them to- 
 gether into the form that they ultimately found in his 
 story as he told it to us sitting together in our hut. 
 But I am still puzzled and sometimes confused by many 
 of the ideas and feel that they have baffled my best 
 skill to put them into our tongue. Some of his de- 
 
Preface 293 
 
 scriptions awakened in us a sense of incredulity, and 
 others shook our old world of beliefs to its foundations. 
 But we were drawn to him by the noble and ingenuous 
 way in which he told us all; indeed, were often fasci- 
 nated and blinded as we listened. We could not but 
 accept his story as the highest truth we could hear in 
 this world, and yet we were struck dumb by its strange- 
 ness. Much of our bewilderment we attributed to the 
 difficulty of understanding his strange speech, and 
 more to our own ignorance of the intricate problems 
 that have troubled sages. We have kept back this 
 latter part of his story for a time in order that by study 
 and care we might make it more intelligible and more 
 suited to the thoughts of Christendom. But we have 
 to acknowledge ourselves still baffled by the impossible 
 task of making this road through difficult regions plain 
 and easy, and so have resolved to issue the narrative 
 with all its faults upon it. 
 
 GODFREY SWEVEN. 
 
GLOSSARY 
 
 AII,OMO The astrobiological families. 
 
 AiROLAN A sensometer, or instrument for rinding the per- 
 sonal equation of a man. 
 
 Ai,ci,iROLAN Radiographic cinematograph; an instrument 
 combining microscope, camera in vacuo, and electric 
 power. 
 
 AI,FARENE Oxygen shrub. 
 
 AMMERUN Historoscope.' 
 
 CIRAI,AISON Museum of terrors. 
 
 CLEVAMOI,AN Combination of telescope and makrakoust, or 
 distance-hearer. 
 
 CWMOI^AN Earth-sensor. 
 
 CUROLAN Instrument that combines electro-microscopy and 
 photography. 
 
 CUROLANIC Infinitesimally microscopic. 
 
 CORFAiyEENA Vacuum-engine car. 
 
 DOOMAI.ONA The hill of farewells. 
 
 DUOMOVAMOI,AN -Instrument that interprets the music of the 
 cosmos. 
 
 ERFAI,EENA An ti-gravitation flight-car. 
 
 FAI,EENA Ship of the air. 
 
 FARFAIEENA Electric faleena. 
 
 FAROSAN Aroma-recorder. 
 
 FIAI,UME The valley of memories 
 
 FII,AMMU The will- telegraph. 
 
 FIRI.A The electric sense. 
 
 FIRI,AI,AIN The firlamaic department of Oomalela. 
 
 FiRiyAMAi The arts of the electric sense. 
 
 FIRI,AMAIC Belonging to the arts of the firla. 
 
 FIRLAMAN A musical instrument that appeals to the firla. 
 
 295 
 
296 Limanora 
 
 FLORAMO The botanical families. 
 
 FIX>RONAI, The tree of life. 
 
 FRAI,OOMIAMO The families of pioneers that imagine and 
 
 represent the distant future. 
 GERMABEU, A tree with fruit that makes the muscles and 
 
 cartilage more elastic. 
 IDIJJMIAN Electric steriliser. 
 
 IDROAN Observer and magnifier of electric impulses. 
 IDROUNASAN Machine-reporter of the thoughts and feelings 
 
 and words of a council. 
 
 IDROSAN Recorder of electric impulses and sensations. 
 IDROVAMOI^AN Instrument for at once seeing and hearing at 
 
 great distances. 
 IXARIME Edifice devoted to the arts of smell, taste, and sound 
 
 combined. 
 
 IMANORA Centennial review of the civilisation and its progress. 
 IMATARAN The focnsser of history. 
 
 INAMAR Instrument for splitting up light into its constituents. 
 INASAN Recorder of luminous impressions. 
 INOI.AN Measurer of light. 
 IREUUM- Iridescent metal applicable to all manner of purposes 
 
 by the Limanorans. 
 LABRAMOR Alloy of irelium that sponges up and retains 
 
 electricity. 
 LABROI.AN Instrument for drawing electricity from the air 
 
 and the clouds. 
 
 LAViDROiyAN Camera-telescope. 
 
 LAVOI,AN Revealer of the inner tissues and mechanism. 
 LENTA The minutest division of time in Limanora. 
 LEOMARIE The science and art of earth-seeing. 
 LEOMO The families of earth-seers. 
 IvEOMORAN The earth-perforator. 
 
 LII.AMO The families that watch the security of the island. 
 IviivARAN The storm-cone. 
 
 LII<ARIE The science and art of island-security. 
 LINAMAR The analyst of sounds. 
 LINASAN Recorder and reproducer of sounds. 
 LINOKI^AR Spectroscopic analyst and recorder of vapours. 
 LOOMIAMO Families of pioneers who imagine and represent 
 
 the links that connect the present with the distant future. 
 
Glossary 297 
 
 LOOMIEFA The theatre of futurition. 
 
 MANORA Decennial review of the progress made by the people. 
 
 MARGOL Electric instrument for blending or reducing the 
 strength of perfumes, flavours, and sounds. 
 
 MINEU,A Edifice for formula-machines. 
 
 MIRI,AN Life-lamp for revealing and recording internal pro- 
 cesses for the use of the eye, the ear, and the electric sense. 
 
 MQI/TA The Ivimanoran measure of infinitesimal length. 
 
 MONAI,AN Electrical distance-analyst. 
 
 MORNAI.AN Time-telescope. 
 
 NAROU,A Dream-stimulants. 
 
 OOARAN Psych ometer. 
 
 OOAROMO Psych o-phy siological fam ilies. 
 
 OOI,ORA:N The sonarchitect. 
 
 OOLOREFA The hall of sonarchitecture. 
 
 OOMAUBFA Halls of nutrition and medication. 
 
 OoROivAN Instrument for transforming form and colour into 
 melody. 
 
 PIRAKNO Machine for drawing electricity from space. 
 
 PIRAMO The meteorological families. 
 
 RiMi,A The centre of force. 
 
 SAI,OSAN The gustagraph. 
 
 SARIFOI^AN Instrument that interprets for sight, hearing, and 
 the electric sense the graphic records of the mirlan. 
 
 SARMOLAN Cosmic barometer. 
 
 SIDRALAN Biometer. 
 
 SIDRAI.MO Bio-chemical families. 
 
 SIDRAMO The chemical families. 
 
 TERRAI,ONA The edifice of outlook into heaven and hell. 
 
 THINAMAR Visualiser of sound. 
 
 TIRI,EOMORAN Electric earth-perforator. 
 
 TREMOI.AN Electric clock indicating the changes of electricity 
 in various parts of the island. 
 
 TREVAMOI, AN Graduated modifier of sound. 
 
 VAMOI,AN Makro-mikrakoust. 
 
 VIMOI.AN Photo-electric analyser. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 DISCOVERIES 
 
 WHAT I rejoiced over most of all was the growth 
 of my sympathetic magnetism. Not merely 
 was my firla or electric sense developing more satis- 
 factorily; but I was becoming rapidly conscious of the 
 impulses of the race. I no longer walked amongst this 
 refined people like a blind man amongst men who see. 
 I began to feel the enthusiasms that stirred them as 
 a body, like a wind across a cornfield. I seemed to 
 know whatsoever of public concern was occurring 
 without having it directly communicated to me. I re- 
 membered in the buried life of my boyhood and youth, 
 the lightning-spread of a new impulse through an as- 
 sembly or a crowd ; the most rational members of the 
 mass were unable to resist it, even though it might be 
 irrational or vile. How like a tornado the war-impulse 
 bursts through a nation is one of the commonest ob- 
 servations in the study of history; statesmen and kings 
 and heroes have to bow before it, and are swept along 
 with it in spite of their better judgments. And as 
 swift and widespread is the coward-impulse that sends 
 a defeated people cowering to their homes. It is this 
 unspoken magnetism, giving vent as it too often does 
 to the evil in the human heart, that makes the cause of 
 
 299 
 
300 Limanora 
 
 progress in even civilised races so hopeless. Through 
 its all-leavening power success inspires and often con- 
 secrates the diabolic, and failure damns the noblest and 
 most divine. 
 
 And this it was that made progress so easy amongst 
 the Limanorans; it became the instrument of the high- 
 est elements and thoughts in them. The whole weight 
 of their humanity was on the side of advance, and it 
 was to the better future that they ever gravitated. 
 Everything that made for a higher plane was an in- 
 spiration to this people. 
 
 This personal magnetism had been developed in 
 them into a definite faculty of their souls. They had 
 recognised for many ages the close affinity of mass-in- 
 spiration and the power of the individual will. It was 
 the same energy working along the nerves, and even, 
 though with some dissipation, through the space inter- 
 vening between individualities. They had investigated 
 its nature, conditions, and methods of action in their 
 exact scientific way, and had identified it, as far at 
 least as its form of energy was concerned, with elec- 
 tricity. It was even less dependent on material con- 
 tact than that universal force. As they developed it 
 in their frames, they were able to send more and more 
 definite impulses through considerable distances. This 
 was their filainmu or will-telegraph, one of their most 
 remarkable faculties, drawn with deliberate purpose by 
 the elders of the race out of the chaos of mere vague 
 influence and tendency. 
 
 Though making use of the active electric sense as 
 channel, it was not the same as the firla, for it implied 
 a greater effort and outwelling of the whole spirit. 
 Only exceptional impulses and enthusiasms set it into 
 full efficiency, such impulses as entangled the whole 
 
Discoveries 3 01 
 
 soul in their issue. It was no mere toy to be used for 
 the amusement of the passing moment; dormant it 
 lay, if ever summoned to such a purpose. It was the 
 faculty that in other races and periods of history had 
 set up men as heroes and leaders; not that these had 
 even been conscious of its existence in them when they 
 began their career; success and gathering enthusiasm 
 in their followers gave it strength and issue, till their 
 mere glance seemed to command. But when failure 
 came, and the glamour or magnetic atmosphere rarefied 
 about them, their faculty vanished; for it had no means 
 of communicating its meaning or power. 
 
 In certain periods of exaltation every Limanoran was 
 conscious of the filammu or will-telegraph; he could 
 not only receive but send emotional impulses through 
 long distances. The intervening air was magnetised 
 by their great enthusiasm or sympathy, and became 
 a medium for transmitting emotional or imaginative 
 thought from mind to mind. Not yet had they been 
 able to send a definite piece of information by this 
 means, unless it represented the spiritual crisis through 
 which the sender was passing. But in movements that 
 shook the whole race to its core, like Choktroo's threat 
 of invasion, even those who were still in pupillage 
 seemed to feel the beginnings of the faculty, at least 
 on its receptive side; secluded though they were far 
 from the scene of deliberation, they knew the magni- 
 tude of the danger that threatened the life of the com- 
 monweal ; the air seemed to tingle with it, and their 
 embryonic filammu could not help responding to the 
 vibration. Once awakened they were eager to bring 
 out its latent power, that they might feel and know the 
 impulses which sped the race onwards as .a whole. 
 They soon discovered that it ceased to grow or even 
 
302 Limanora 
 
 work except under certain conditions; they must keep 
 step with the people, and fix their eyes steadily on the 
 future: they must never swerve from uprightness or 
 candour, never let the perfect transparency of their 
 lives be clouded. 
 
 Such had been the conditions of the development of 
 the filammu in the race. In fact its indications had be- 
 come unmistakable as soon as candour and truth had 
 become the primary virtues, and progress the watch- 
 word. And it grew as the ideal of the nation became 
 clearer and more imperative, and their character more 
 uniformly strong and noble. They also found that 
 something depended on the physical conditions; the 
 atmosphere must be free from all impurity, and the 
 body must be supremely healthy, whilst the magnetism 
 of the will must have free course along the nerves. 
 As my nature clarified under their training and my 
 spirit grew more at one with the purpose of the race, I 
 grew more sure of the stirrings of the filammu within 
 me. At first its indications might be explained by 
 other and more patent causes; I had been in an atti- 
 tude of expectancy, or my reason had been following 
 up certain trains of thought from previous events. But 
 after a time there came to me thrills of emotion that 
 were out of the range of my immediate surroundings 
 and thoughts. I followed them out and found that 
 they originated far from the locality in which I was 
 working at the time. 
 
 Once a sudden tremor passed through my system as 
 of some great fear; I had not been thinking of any- 
 thing but the work before me; no cloud had come over 
 my sky; no danger that I knew of threatened. As I 
 was trying to explain the emotion, it suddenly passed 
 
Discoveries 303 
 
 into longing to see Thyriel. I knew where she had 
 gone that day and my work had almost reached a 
 finish, so I adjusted a faleena, and flew quickly over 
 the country in her direction. I soon knew why I had 
 come. She was pinioned by a huge rock that had just 
 tumbled from Lilaroina. Happily only her wings had 
 been caught, but they had been caught in such a way 
 that she was wedged tightly between them and could 
 not free her arms and legs nor move her hands; and 
 the boulder was too large for her to heave up by the 
 strength of her body, even when magnetised by her 
 will. When she saw this, she withdrew the magnetism 
 from the effort, and turned it in its full power into her 
 filammu as she thought of me. I was not long in dis- 
 entangling her wings from their prison. But, before I 
 was done, her family were beside us; they too had ex- 
 perienced the thrill, though more feebly than I had 
 and at a greater distance. 
 
 Another time I had not seen Thyriel for some days; 
 we were both busy at our own pursuits in different 
 parts of the island. She, as I learned afterwards, had 
 been set to account for a new and somewhat peculiar 
 odour that had recently begun to accompany the issue 
 of vapour from a distant lava- well. I was engaged in 
 timing a new and intermittent disturbance on the sur- 
 face of the sea off the eastern shore, and trying to find 
 whether it had any relationship to an intermittent 
 fumarole which had recently broken out on the eastern 
 slope of Lilaroma. I had kept watch for several days, 
 and could find no synchronism in their periods, al- 
 though I was convinced that there was a close connec- 
 tion between them, if there was not a common cause. 
 I was feeling baffled and somewhat downcast; when 
 suddenly there sprang up in me a sense of elation, if not 
 
304 Limanora 
 
 of triumph, which continued for the rest of the day, al- 
 though I still failed to discover the connection between 
 the two phenomena. When I set out next day for the 
 scene of my observations, I was joined by Thyriel, who 
 explained that she had finished her task the day before 
 and had now been detailed to assist me in mine. I 
 then knew the cause of my thrill of joy, and told her 
 of it. She had at that very hour not only discovered 
 the source of the fumes in a new mineral that the 
 leomoran had touched, but found that this new deposit 
 was extraordinarily generative of electricity. It was 
 this that had made her heart leap for joy and go out 
 towards me. She had longed for my sympathy in her 
 rejoicing, and unconsciously her filammu had energised 
 in my direction. Between us we soon saw that there 
 was a complicated periodicity in the alternations of my 
 two phenomena; it needed several days' observation 
 to catch the rhythm, and for that reason I had been 
 baffled at first. Before long I discovered the cause; 
 as soon as a lava- well farther north had ceased to flow, 
 they also ceased; it was the viscous intermittance of its 
 stream opening and then closing two apertures below 
 tide-line into the subterraneous fires that had regulated 
 the rhythm of these new vents; the break in the lava- 
 current, the rise and fall of the tide, and the rush of the 
 breakers had made it complex. And the lava had 
 finally closed both before it had ceased to flow. 
 
 It was at the same period that the whole race breasted 
 back the darkness. There came at times in their his- 
 tory an age of exceptional advance, that made the pre- 
 ceding era seem almost stationary. Nor had they yet 
 been able to explain its appearance satisfactorily It 
 was easy enough to say that such and such exceptional 
 
Discoveries 35 
 
 men lived then, and that they produced the phe- 
 nomenon. But that was only reasoning in a circle; 
 they were as much a product of the time as their fel- 
 lows; whence did they get the inspiration which spurred 
 them on, or the plastic material in which they could 
 work? They would have been nothing without their 
 conditions and circumstances. They surprised them- 
 selves with their powers and successes, as they strode 
 forth into the primeval darkness and illuminated it. 
 It all appeared very simple when once accomplished. 
 They had been gazing for generations into the dark- 
 ness, where now there was a blaze of light. 
 
 An imaginative pioneering book had long ago sug- 
 gested that the impulse came from outside the round of 
 the earth. And one of the most brilliant discoveries 
 of this newest period of advance was a scientific proof of 
 this hypothesis. The great development of the filammu 
 or will-telegraph had made it easy, by localising the 
 new thrill of expectation, and revealing that it came 
 from no terrene source. Out of what seemed the pro- 
 found inane such inspirations issued, and if they found 
 a soil prepared for them by long self-denial and patient 
 outlook and industrious collection of materials, they 
 fertilised the period into exceptional efflorescence and 
 fruition. Many an impulse comes out of the blue and 
 falls unavailing in that no nation or race or period is 
 fit to receive it. The profound inane, they came to see, 
 was one of the falsest of ideas ; because no matter patent 
 to the human sight fills it, the interstellar space was 
 believed to be the wilderness of the universe, cold, 
 bleak, inhospitable, lifeless. Now it was felt to be the 
 home of all supersensuous life, crowded with an energy 
 that needed no stellar matter or atmosphere to sup- 
 port it, that never appealed to any but the highest 
 
306 Limanora 
 
 and latest- developed senses of man. The Limanoran 
 couriers out on the verge of the earth's atmosphere 
 had been the first to feel this new flash that lit up such 
 a vast region of the infinite darkness; they came back 
 inspired with new resolution and made the first of the 
 discoveries; they gave a magnetism to their fellow- 
 workers in the same line, and soon the leaven spread 
 through the whole people. The fervour of originality 
 became the order of the day. To decipher the un- 
 known handwritings on the wall of life, to solve its 
 hardest problems, to make new inventions and dis- 
 coveries, to push out into the darkness that surrounds 
 the world, these became the ambitions of all. 
 
 Nor did the filammu of any in the island fail to thrill 
 to the influence. Thyriel felt before I did that there 
 was something exceptional in the atmosphere. But 
 even my will-telegraph seemed to respond. I longed 
 to go out and conquer the unknown, to outpace the 
 slow movements of human discovery. At first I thought 
 the impulse had come from Thyriel, and then from my 
 proparents or my teachers. And so it was with every 
 Limanoran; his first thought ran to his closest friend 
 as the source of the magnetic thrill. But after much 
 consultation and report, the conclusion appeared that 
 no one in the island had originated the impulse, that 
 all in the air had felt it simultaneously in their filam- 
 mus, and after them all down in the island had felt it 
 simultaneously. The truth gradually forced itself home 
 on the investigating families that the magnetic vibra- 
 tion had had its source far beyond the limits of the 
 earth; for they knew that from no other country or 
 race upon the surface of the globe could it have come. 
 
 Ages before, they had abandoned the belief in what 
 seemed supra-terrene influence as unscientific and lead- 
 
Discoveries 37 
 
 ing to superstition. Faith had been in the past so often 
 the cue and basis of the worst of tyrannies, the inspira- 
 tion of the grossest immoralities and irrationalities, the 
 impulse to most retrogression. It had also, it is true, 
 been the nurse of gentle and just spirits. But it made 
 them so timid that they were afraid to go forward ; it 
 wound round the soul such a network of fears and 
 observances that its life was useless to the race. As 
 soon as the final purgation of the people had been ac- 
 complished, it was found that every citizen ceased to 
 speak of faith, or to use it as the basis of any work or 
 practical step. They did not thrust it out by any pub- 
 lic act, nor consciously reject it, they only left off giv- 
 ing weight to any of its commands or suggestions; not 
 that they might not be true or on the side of all that 
 was best ; but that it had so often discredited its au- 
 thority by prompting, or allowing itself to be used 
 as the pretext for, retrogression or baseness. They 
 preferred to take every step in life on ground made 
 sure by investigation and proof that appealed to reason. 
 And here they were again on the limits of the un- 
 known and vague. This sense that was closest to the 
 portal of the soul, their filammu, had brought them to 
 face an intelligence that came they knew not whence, 
 and to stand in the presence of an infinite darkness 
 that flashed out at times the lightning of noble impulse. 
 They were by no means unwilling to listen to its re- 
 port, but gladly received it as a sure and trustworthy 
 revelation; however dim the region into which it was 
 about to lead them, they were eager to follow, if only 
 they set each step upon solid fact. If there was any- 
 thing unverifiable in this new leading, they would soon 
 be done with it. It now became one of the duties 
 of the astrobiological families to watch for these 
 
308 Limanora 
 
 extraterrene vibrations of the will-telegraph, and to 
 investigate the circumstances and conditions. 
 
 These families had been the first to feel the new im- 
 petus to discovery, for they were the couriers who 
 went out to the borders of the atmosphere and watched 
 for signs of energy and life in the infinite beyond. 
 Again and again, had they brought back specimens of 
 microscopic and attenuated life, which seemed to float 
 in interstellar space. Again and again had they ana- 
 lysed the beams of light shooting through it, but with- 
 out much result. Now they were to be rewarded for 
 their patience. They had taken out with them one of 
 the new faleenas made of transparent and colourless 
 irelium like glass; and as an experiment they sent it 
 up by means of electricity far above themselves. As it 
 rose above the limit of the earth's atmosphere, they 
 saw all over its surface a strange fluorescence, which 
 grew unearthly in its beauty and brilliance. Rainbow 
 colours played through its texture as if they were 
 threads thrown by the shuttle of some hand out of 
 heaven. Its wings moved at lightning pace, and yet 
 soon it began to fall towards the earth. Again it 
 struck upwards, and again the prismatic weavings gave 
 it more brilliant life. They watched it as it rose and 
 fell between the denser and the rarer medium. And 
 when finally they caught it and brought it down to 
 earth, upon its wings both within and without there 
 was imprinted, not the iridescent web that had been 
 weaving over it, but a hieroglyph of faint, half-distin- 
 guishable forms, some familiar, some strange, inex- 
 tricably mingled. 
 
 They investigated the phenomenon, and came to the 
 conclusion that the faleena, in the comparative vacuum 
 which lies on the borders of our atmosphere, had acted 
 
Discoveries 309 
 
 with its electric motors like the lavolan, one of their 
 medical instruments for the inspection of the inner 
 tisues, whilst the wings acted like the films of a photo- 
 graphic apparatus, and retained a shadowed impress of 
 the inner structure of all the beings or forms coming 
 between them and the body of the car. A new world 
 was opened up to them beyond even their electric sense. 
 Outside of the denser envelope of our orb the rarefaction 
 of space meant no longer lifeless desolation traversed 
 only by beams of light, electric impulses from other 
 worlds, and the flight of occasional meteors. Now 
 they knew that there were ethereal beings living in in- 
 finite space, and that their inner structure differed in 
 density from their enveloping material. Some of this 
 life was manifestly minute and attenuated, unsuited to 
 the medium in which it floated, waiting for some fit orb 
 to land on. But under their powerful clirolans it was as 
 clear that there were highly developed organisms fitted 
 to this element in which they swam, organisms prob- 
 ably higher than any to be found on the earth, yet too 
 ethereal and shadowy to touch any of even the latest- 
 evolved senses of the L,imanorans. 
 
 What possibilities this glimpse into the vast unknown 
 opened up for them they shrank for a time from im- 
 agining, lest they should again enslave themselves to 
 superstition and absurd fancy. For astrobiology they 
 saw at a glance there was begun a new and lofty career. 
 Soon would they modify and improve the lavolan to fit 
 the conditions of interstellar space, and the faleena, if 
 not their own organs, for venturing far into the rarest 
 ether. And then what reports, what pictures of the in- 
 visible universes would they bring before the eyes and 
 the firlas of their fellow-islanders! How would they 
 ever have time to investigate and classify the genera 
 
Limanora 
 
 and species that inhabited the ether? What limit was 
 there to the ambitions and ideals they would be able to 
 set before the race ? 
 
 Another investigation that followed from this dis- 
 covery had as its object the nature of the new forms of 
 energy that evidently filled interstellar space. This 
 was the province of the families devoted to astro- 
 physics. They produced apparatus for isolating each 
 type of energy which seemed to have full action only in 
 a vacuum, and they experimented with it in an innu- 
 merable variety of ways so as to find out its character- 
 istics. The force of gravitation had been familiar to 
 them even in primitive ages, and had long been investi- 
 gated so as to reveal many of the qualities of its action 
 that were unperceived by ordinary senses. Electricity 
 had been one of the commonest of their phenomena, and 
 recently a vast unknown region had been opened up by 
 them, lying between the verge of eye-awakening light 
 and the verge of firla-awakening electricity which their 
 machines had made plain even to untrained senses. 
 For generations they had passed with ease in their in- 
 amars or spectroscopes beyond the bands of colour that 
 affected their eye, and the unseen rays had yielded most 
 of their secrets to them. In their lavolans or vacuum- 
 energy mirrors they had traced the characteristics of 
 the torrents of energy which tore away from the nega- 
 tive pole of their batteries. And now they had to face 
 a new form of radiant energy, the product of these 
 negative streams and of the irelium which they struck. 
 Experimenting with it in their lavolans they found it 
 different from its parent energy; by passing through 
 the irelium it had grown indifferent to the power of 
 magnetism. This peculiarity enabled them to investi- 
 gate the inner nature of magnetism; for on the two 
 
Discoveries 311 
 
 sides of an irelium sheet they had the same electric rays 
 acting differently towards a magnet; on the one side 
 they could be deflected by it, on the other they went on 
 their way as if it were not there. The difference was 
 also used in producing a new kind of electric motor, 
 governed by an irelium film which closed or opened a 
 channel of magnetic influence. A third useful applica- 
 tion of the discovery was a new irelium-covering for 
 the head and the body, that milked the east wind of its 
 deleterious qualities. And a fourth was an apparatus 
 for finding by the aid of a magnet the stuff of irelium 
 with greater certainty in their lava-wells. 
 
 But the discoveries that flowed from this were still 
 more important. By further experimentation they 
 found another type of radiant energy that behaved in a 
 similar way towards gravitation. In a vacuum formed 
 within a vessel of an alloy of irelium it ceased to obey 
 the force of gravity; but as soon as it had passed 
 through the side of the vessel, it gave full heed to the 
 force. Within a few months after this had been dis- 
 covered, there had been invented a faleena that fell or 
 rose according as the new rays were intercepted by a 
 film of the irelium-alloy or were allowed free passage 
 in vacua. The energy in mass drove the car on indif- 
 ferent to the earth's influence, or at the will of the guide 
 brought the erfaleena, as they called it, gently sloping 
 downwards at any angle required to the surface of the 
 globe. A pioneering book at once developed the re- 
 sults of this discovery and invention. It showed how a 
 way was now opened to other stars. For this new 
 radiant energy was found to stream in and past the 
 earth's atmosphere in vast currents. The denser the 
 medium, the more was it absorbed and lost, so that in 
 the earth and the atmosphere it seldom or never mani- 
 
3 1 2 Limanora 
 
 fested itself. Hence the long ages of scientific investi- 
 gation before it was discovered. By means of these 
 currents, which evidently set through space in definite 
 directions, they would be able to guide their new anti- 
 gravitation faleena to any point in the interstellar 
 ether, and be able to keep up the supply of force that 
 would drive it. And when they approached a new 
 world they could by means of their new machinery 
 bring its force of gravitation to bear on the car and so 
 hasten its flight; and they would be able to hover over 
 the atmosphere by means of the alternating movements 
 of their engine, till they could find out its conditions, 
 and see whether it would be safe to land on it or not. 
 What they wanted yet was the evolution of their phys- 
 ical system in the direction of living in ether or in 
 various atmospheres indifferently. It pointed out to 
 the physiological families the way that would lead in 
 this direction; and it showed how, though it would 
 take countless ages, it was yet within the scope of 
 their humanity. 
 
 For their knowledge of the constitution of the uni- 
 verse the discovery of these two forms of radiant energy 
 proved to be of great importance. They were able to 
 find out the relationships of gravitation, electricity, the 
 dark rays of the inamar, the negative rays of the lavo- 
 Ian, light,- heat, and the two new types of energy. 
 And by means of the similarities and differences found 
 to exist between any two of them they were enabled to 
 resolve the molecules of any element into their, con- 
 stituent atoms, and thus to reveal the characteristics 
 of the fundamental ether. They felt that they were at 
 last in the immediate presence of the medium which 
 filled space, and they invented an apparatus isolating 
 the ether from all the forms it enters into, so that it 
 
Discoveries 313 
 
 became manifest under their magnifiers to several of 
 their senses. In it they were able to make any one of 
 the forms of energy move and play. From it they 
 were able to mould many of the terrene forms of latent 
 energy, and they hoped to mould most of the others 
 with which they were familiar. 
 
 One of the most immediately practical results that 
 came from the discovery of these two modes of energy 
 was another kind of engine, which almost doubled their 
 store of force in Rimla. The main form of it took ad- 
 vantage of the radiant energy that showed indifference 
 or obedience to gravitation according as it played in a 
 vacuum or through an alloy of irelium into the air. 
 The new rays lifted a piston in vacuo t and by an auto- 
 matic arrangement they passed through a film of the 
 alloy and then allowed gravitation to pull them and the 
 piston with them back into its first position ; the rapid 
 alternations drove magnetic machinery which produced 
 and stored up electricity. Another form of the new en- 
 gine used the difference between the conduct the other 
 newly discovered radiant energy displayed towards 
 magnets when it played in a vacuum vessel of irelium, 
 and when it had issued through the vessel's filmy side. 
 
 The increase and concentration of force in their island 
 was one of the great subordinate aims of their civilisa- 
 tion. For they knew that the greater the power they 
 had command of the more rapidly could they advance 
 towards higher and higher goals. Greater force meant 
 greater dominion over nature and her secrets and laws; 
 and this implied accelerated speed in progress. It had 
 been one of the primitive blunders of their civilisation, 
 as it still was of all other civilisations, to imagine that 
 extended empire over men meant a true development 
 of humanity; wide sovereignty was mere artificial 
 
314 Limanora 
 
 change of the locality and application of the forces of 
 mankind, without increasing them; it was but a re- 
 shuffling of the cards (to use your similes), with all the 
 honours in one hand instead of being distributed over 
 all; it was merely political and not real. Any gain 
 that might come from the concentration of power and 
 wealth was wasted on increased war-material and mili- 
 tary expeditions for retaining or subduing territories 
 and peoples, on futile and routine administration, and 
 on growth of court splendour and luxury. The pur- 
 suit of the sanguinary phantom of power over other 
 men had to be for ever abandoned before any real human 
 advance could be made. Empire over the powers of 
 nature was the primary condition of full development 
 of human possibilities, and every tissue of their won- 
 derful brains was strained to its utmost for the rapid 
 extension of this sway. A new addition to the stores 
 of the centre of for.ce, a new source of energy, was 
 therefore ever hailed by them as the warranty of a 
 leap upward and onward into the future. 
 
 The invention of these new engines, then, had no 
 slight significance as events in their history. And the 
 assurance of more and more rapid progress was in- 
 creased by a discovery of the chemic families in the 
 same direction. They had used coal for the generation 
 of heat before they had left their primeval home around 
 the south pole. But in their more tropical archipelago 
 they found no coal-beds, the islands having originated 
 in volcanic and coral formation ; and the climate made 
 the use of such a concentrated fuel unnecessary; it was 
 warm even in winter, and it supplied fruits and cereals 
 which needed little cooking. The forests of the islands 
 had furnished whatever fuel had been required for 
 hundreds of generations, and outside of L,imanora they 
 
Discoveries 3 X 5 
 
 were still sufficient for all purposes. But the centre of 
 force had recalled the great heat they used to have 
 from coal, and the Leomo, in their probings of the 
 earth, had ever been on the outlook for beds of the old 
 fuel. Recently they had found thin strata of it, but so 
 deep in the earth that it was of little value to them. 
 
 But a discovery by the Sidramo, or chemic families, 
 made them reconsider this decision and try to invent 
 some form of the leomoran, which would cut and send 
 with ease to the surface of the earth the coal they had 
 found. The Sidramo had experimented with it in 
 various lines. They had made the steam from it give 
 power as they had seen it give power to the Daydream 
 and her Broolyian imitations. But so large a propor- 
 tion of the latent energy in it had been lost in the 
 process that they turned their researches in other 
 directions. Before long the) T found that, when the 
 coal was placed in a chemical solution containing com- 
 paratively common and cheap elements, electric power 
 was largely generated. And following up their dis- 
 covery the Sidramo were soon able to draw electricity 
 from any of the rocks of the island. Once having had 
 their attention applied to such problems, they made a 
 number of them surrender their secret; by surround- 
 ing one common rock, e. g. , with a certain solution they 
 brought from it heat alone. But the discovery most 
 important for the development of the race was that 
 which brought electric power directly from the rocks 
 and even from the earth. For this increased the pos- 
 sible store of force in Rimla enormously. And there 
 was no limit to what they might use there for the ad- 
 vancement of civilisation. 
 
 Within a few days of this discovery the Piramo or 
 meteorological families had applied the lavolan to one 
 
316 Limanora 
 
 of their long-unsolved problems, the extraction of mag- 
 netic power in large quantities from the air. They 
 had been already able to draw from the thunder-clouds 
 their electricity, and make them pass harmless. And 
 by means of personal effort and the magnetism of the 
 body they were able when high up in the rarer regions 
 of the atmosphere to recharge their little shoulder-en- 
 gines for driving their wings. But in the lower air 
 they had failed to draw electricity from any but thun- 
 der-clouds in any quantity. They based a new appar- 
 atus called pirakno on the lavolan and its discoveries, 
 and with this they were able to draw magnetism from 
 even the gentlest breeze. They increased its size and 
 capacity, and soon could give a daily supply of new 
 power to the centre of force. Nor did this deprive the 
 air of the island of its exhilarant quality; for the more 
 they took from it, the more seemed to flow in from 
 surrounding space. But, when the east wind blew, 
 they found the inflow of magnetism too much for their 
 smaller piraknos; only the larger could cope with it; 
 and then the store of power in Rimla received enormous 
 additions. 
 
 For ages they had been testing the amount of mag- 
 netism in the air at various heights and temperatures 
 and various times of day, month, and year, and record- 
 ing the results of their investigations. They were now 
 able to decide from these and from their experiences of 
 the pirakno that irregular changes in the weather were 
 due chiefly to magnetic influence. They saw that the 
 tremendous storms which every few years swept the 
 earth had their origin in exceptional inflows of cosmic 
 magnetism. During the history of man since he had 
 come to self-consciousness and to the habit of recording 
 his own movements, there had been many sudden and 
 
Discoveries 317 
 
 temporary climatic changes, that had led to vast dis- 
 placements of the inhabitants of the earth. A series of 
 severe winters in the north and in the temperate zone 
 would strip the trees and fields of all frugiferous quali- 
 ties, and drive the animals of the chase away to the 
 south in search of food. And the races of man had to 
 follow them. So in the tropics a series of droughts 
 would destroy half the chances of life, and exterminate 
 one-third of the dwellers inland. As a rule the agony 
 there led to no displacement of nations, so passive and 
 fatalistic are they by nature near the equator; but in 
 times when some new religious idea had broken the 
 spell of fatalism, the first goad of starvation drove 
 hordes to search for food in other zones. Oftentimes 
 there has been a simultaneity in the meteorological 
 severity, partly due to a universal influx of interstellar 
 magnetism, but still more to the fact that the earth and 
 the planetary system to which it belongs have swung 
 into a region of space that is exceptionally, barren of all 
 life-impetus. At such periods came those wide-spread 
 migrations of the dwellers on the globe that made new 
 eras in history. It was one of those cosmic disturb- 
 ances of climate that sent the Arabs out of their deserts, 
 a flaming portent along the shores of the Mediterranean 
 with their newly reformed religion, the creed of Ma- 
 homet, and at the same moment flung the Saxons 
 against the northern frontier of Charlemagne's empire, 
 and the Danes on the coast of Britain. So, earlier, in 
 the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era, the 
 Huns burst from the east like a torrent, and again and 
 again swept all before them in the west, whilst simul- 
 taneously the Goths broke in from the north across the 
 boundaries of the Roman empire. Later, in the ninth 
 century, . the Danes and Normans broke away from the 
 
318 Limanora 
 
 north again and again, and plagued Europe with their 
 piratical energy in the very period when the Magyars 
 were migrating from the east to the west. And it 
 was only the closer packing of the continents, and the 
 consequent military organisation of European nations 
 that checked these displacements in later centuries, 
 though there were refluxes towards the east, as in the 
 crusades. But the cosmic meteorology of the earth 
 took different effect in the same direction, when plagues 
 mowed down their millions of victims from east to 
 west; where wide-spread displacements are impossible, 
 there must be decimation by some cosmic means in 
 order to let the light into the overpopulated regions. 
 Another escape- valve was found for the pressure of 
 those periods of temporary climatic change, when the 
 western peoples were driven over the oceans to find a 
 home. Emigration then came to mean transference 
 of masses across the sea, at first to America, where 
 there were other but weaker civilisations to be over- 
 come, afterwards to lands and islands that were either 
 empty or occupied by a few scattered savages. It was 
 their circle of mist that saved the archipelago of Rial- 
 laro from the effect of these vast displacements of popu- 
 lation. When every acre of land on the earth shall 
 have been filled with its complement, and human fore- 
 thought and ingenuity are still unequal to the sudden 
 changes of cosmic meteorology, then famine and plague 
 will be the only means of relieving the pressure. 
 
 The L,imanorans had no fear of such effects in their 
 own island, except indirectly. For they had complete 
 command of their own birth-rate and death-rate, and 
 kept the numbers commensurate with all the purposes 
 of their existence. Climate was to them as plastic as 
 any material or force of nature, and the unexpected in 
 
Discoveries 319 
 
 meteorology was gradually becoming unknown. But 
 they had a strong indirect interest in all inbursts of 
 the cosmic. For the peoples of the other islands, the 
 descendants of their ancient exiles, were as ready vic- 
 tims as ever to what seemed the caprices of the seasons 
 and the years. And the frustration of the consequent 
 movements involving the interests of the L,imanorans 
 absorbed more of their time and reserve energy than 
 they desired. A violent tornado would obliterate the 
 products of a year over the whole archipelago, and the 
 fear of starvation would goad the inhabitants into ex- 
 peditions in search of food, sometimes even towards the 
 isle of devils. Again, hungry microbes, the spawn of 
 some pi ague- stricken world, would float into the earth's 
 atmosphere and find new soil on the islands; and the 
 dwellers would die so quickly that there was no time 
 or room on their circles of earth for sepulture. Into 
 the sea the festering dead would be thrown by the thou- 
 sand, each bearing its myriad germs of contagion; the 
 very fish that fed on them would die of the plague and 
 bear its microbes to every shore; the currents and the 
 winds, if left to their own bent, would sweep down the 
 foul nests of contagion on the L,imanorans; and it 
 would take them weeks of superhuman effort to pre- 
 vent the bacterial spawn from settling in their systems, 
 and to cleanse the adjacent seas of all taint. The effort 
 to prevent these disasters often wasted their store of 
 force and checked their advance. It seemed to them 
 therefore more economical of their energy to help in 
 dispelling the original evil or making it swerve towards 
 other oceans. For a time they considered it to the in- 
 terests of their progress to save the whole archipelago 
 from the irruptions of interstellar magnetism or bac- 
 terial life. But even this was found to have serious 
 
320 Limanora 
 
 disadvantages. Unbroken prosperity surcharged the 
 leaders of the other islands with conceit, and made 
 them lose their fear of the central isle and resume their 
 projects for its conquest; or it deluged them with popu- 
 lation, which, whenever nature grew economical again, 
 was driven to foreign means for its sustenance, and, at 
 times, goaded by hunger, made in military wise for the 
 isle of devils. 
 
 Yet these alarms and dangers were more infrequent 
 and more easily repelled than when the more ambitious 
 of the archipelago were driven by the spur of famine 
 and disaster to incursion. And, though for a brief 
 period the Li ma nor an s allowed an occasional tornado 
 or plague to devastate the islands of hostile neighbours, 
 they came to the conclusion that it needed less of their 
 energy to repel an occasional hive of enemies im- 
 pelled by narrowing limits or the lessening generosity 
 of nature than to beat off vast bodies of embattled peo- 
 ples frantic with hunger and reckless of life, led by the 
 keenest skill and fieriest ambition of the archipelago. 
 They could better avoid all destruction of life in the 
 one case than in the other, one of the duties of their 
 civilisation, even though a subsidiary one. 
 
 The Piramo were thus essential to the progress of the 
 race; their growing knowledge of the conditions that 
 governed the climate as well as the passing weather 
 saved in a day as much power as the use of such an in- 
 strument as the pirakno at first could add to Rimla in 
 a year. And the scene of the labours of the Piramo 
 was every year more and more extended to the extra- 
 terrene; meteorology became in its investigatory and 
 experimental department more and more cosmic, and 
 often overlapped astronomy, astrobiology, and astro- 
 physics, and aided them; more and more did they find 
 
Discoveries 321 
 
 their problems questions of magnetism or electricity. 
 In the interstellar spaces must be sought the sources of 
 the greater disturbances of season and climate and the 
 pirakno grew every year of more and more importance, 
 as they traced the magnetic influences around the earth 
 back into the infinite fields of space. 
 
 About this very time they invented an instrument of 
 great delicacy, which foretold the vaster tracts of mag- 
 netism into which the earth was swinging, and meas- 
 ured the increase. It depended for its principle and 
 basis on the intimate relationship between electricity 
 and light, on the effect of magnetism upon light and 
 upon electric radiation from the negative pole in a 
 vacuum. They had noticed for some time that the 
 light from any meteor or luminous body outside the 
 sphere of influence of the earth never reached the in- 
 struments of the observers on the edge of the atmos- 
 phere quite true, and that the aberration differed at 
 different times. By means of various experiments they 
 came to the conclusion that the aberration was due to 
 magnetism in the extra-terrene spaces. Their new in- 
 strument, which they called a sarmolan, they sent out 
 into the ether beyond the earth's atmosphere and be- 
 yond the influence of terrestrial magnetism; and, as it 
 received beams of light from any one heavenly body 
 towards which it had been directed, it recorded the 
 amount of this body's deflection from the straight 
 course. They preferred to turn it to the moon or to 
 Venus or Mars; for then they were sure that the de- 
 flecting masses of magnetism lay within immediate 
 range of the earth. This sarmolan turned out to be 
 for cosmic changes of climate what the barometer is for 
 daily or hourly changes of weather. Whenever it re- 
 corded violent deflection, it meant that the earth was 
 
322 Limanora 
 
 approaching an exceptionally vast tract of magnetic in- 
 fluence, and that there would be great and frequent dis- 
 turbances for months, if not for years, in the regularity 
 of the earth's seasons and climates, or at least of those 
 of one zone. It warned the lyimanorans to get ready 
 their piraknos and all other instruments they had for 
 drawing and imprisoning for their own use the elec- 
 tricity from the atmosphere and the spaces above it. It 
 was in short their cosmic barometer foretelling changes 
 in climate years ahead. It eased the minds of the Pi- 
 ramo and set free half their energies for other investi- 
 gations, as soon as it had proved itself a true prophet. 
 Later improvements in it measured the distance of the 
 supermagnetised region of space from the earth, and 
 thus indicated the exact year and sometimes even the 
 month and the day when the series of climatic perturb- 
 ations were likely to begin. What had been guess- 
 work before, made just before meeting the phenomenon 
 itself, was how reduced to predictive law; and they 
 looked forward to the time when by recording, classify- 
 ing, and mapping the variations and regions of cosmic 
 magnetism they would be able to get at the cause of its 
 unequal distribution in interstellar space. Nay, when 
 they had charted the great drifts and currents of varied 
 energy that the earth encountered as its universe 
 swung through space, they might have ready for their 
 future voyagers to other worlds a full cosmography, 
 which would instruct them in the kind of oceans and 
 torrents they would have to breast, the types of energy 
 they would have to accustom their systems to, and all 
 the risks and dangers they would have to meet. And, 
 when their knowledge of the conditions and regions 
 and tracks in the boundless space they might have to 
 traverse was fairly rounded and complete, then some 
 
Discoveries 323 
 
 slight adaptation of their sarmolan would be to them 
 their cosmic compass. 
 
 There was evidence in other discoveries too that this 
 hope was not so Utopian as it seemed at first, that at 
 least not countless centuries would pass before they 
 might be able to fulfil it. One especially, that of the 
 Floramo or botanical families, quickened their expecta- 
 tion far beyond the mere flight of fancy. It was a new 
 sublimation of a vegetable extract, which seemed to 
 give their lungs free play when there was little or no 
 air to breathe. They had used for ages the fruit of 
 . what they called the floronal or tree of life for giving 
 new vigour to the organs and especially to the nerve- 
 tissues; they still continued to use it, even though the 
 chemical families had analysed it and found all its con- 
 stituents, and then reproduced a mixture that had 
 most of the revivifying qualities of the fruit. The tree 
 grew only in marshy 'districts, and they had reserved 
 an obscure and rarely visited corner of the island for its 
 culture and for the culture of plants and trees like it. 
 There was another tree growing only in the cooler zone 
 half-way up the mountain, and preferring shallow and 
 poor soil to root in, whose fruit gave extreme flexibility 
 to the more muscular and cartilaginous tissues, and 
 especially to those in the chest; if taken inwardly or 
 through the pores, muscular exercise became more 
 easy, and breathing became deeper and slower or 
 quicker as the will directed. A third low plant or 
 shrub, which grew only on the highest altitudes of 
 L,ilaroma, and had its roots generally in the soil under- 
 neath a layer of snow, had been found recently to have 
 in its tissues, and in a concentrated form in its nuts, 
 great stores of oxygen. For ages it had been consid- 
 ered a poisonous plant, and avoided; for within a con- 
 
324 Limanora 
 
 siderable radius of it breathing had always been more 
 difficult than at a distance from it; it had therefore 
 been eradicated from all parts of the cone frequented 
 by the Limanorans. It had no beauty of form, often 
 grew low like a lichen or moss, and could remain under 
 the snow for years without perishing. It had thus 
 been neglected and in fact seldom observed in its 
 growth; whilst its nuts had been thought to be as 
 poisonous as the plant itself. But recently an ava- 
 lanche from one of the little-visited slopes of Lilaroma 
 had uncovered a hollow, in which one of the Floramo 
 had found a bird, emaciated and unable to fly, yet still 
 alive; and beside it were the remains of a number of 
 these poison plants and particles of many of their nuts. 
 It had evidently been imprisoned many weeks, if not 
 months, and its only food had been the obscure and 
 offensive snow-bush, stunted, scabrous, and without 
 green or leaf. 
 
 The Floramo became deeply interested in the phe- 
 nomenon, and gathered many specimens of the shrub 
 from the top of the mountain. They fed the bird till 
 it became plump, and then shut it up in one of their 
 irelium vacuum-chambers with only the nuts to peck. 
 There they watched it from day to day, and saw that 
 as long as it fed on the nuts it continued vigorous and 
 lively, even though it began to lose its rounded out- 
 lines again. They soon closed their experiment, and 
 set the winged creature free to fly whither it would, 
 satisfied that there could be only one logical conclusion 
 with regard to the plant. They saw that its nature 
 was to lay up stores of oxygen in all its tissues, and 
 they called it alfarene or the oxygen-shrub. It was 
 this treasure in it that enabled it to live so long be- 
 neath vast accumulations of snow and ice; it was this 
 
Discoveries 3 2 5 
 
 feature of its life that made it when open to the air so 
 exhaust the oxygen for yards around it that men found 
 it difficult to breathe beside it; it was this that, when 
 it became the food of the bird, enabled it to live and 
 breathe so long away from the air. It was the outcome 
 of long ages of selection up in those difficult altitudes, 
 where nothing could live under the snow without this 
 power of storing up oxygen. And its nuts, too hard 
 and innutritions except for hunger-driven birds to at- 
 tack, concentrated round the seeds an extraordinary 
 amount of this oxygen-stuff; and by means of this, 
 when underneath the pressure of the snows the husk 
 broke, the seeds were able to support themselves and 
 develop into plants away from the vital air. 
 
 It was evident that these alfarene nuts were treasure- 
 houses of oxygen; and soon they were tried by the 
 Limanorans themselves when they flew into the upper 
 regions of the air. At first they broke the nuts into 
 powder, which was made into a hard but soluble paste: 
 a small piece of this held in the mouth till it melted 
 enabled them in their flights to breathe freely in rarer 
 altitudes than they had ever reached before. The 
 Floramo afterwards brought out the oxygen-storing 
 power of the shrub more strongly by careful cultivation 
 and. selection. Within a few years they made of it a 
 vigorous, large, and comparatively handsome tree, and 
 its nuts grew larger and more oxygenated, so that they 
 became a necessity for all flight into higher atmospheres. 
 More attention was also paid to the floronal or tree of 
 life and to the germabell or tree whose fruit produced 
 elasticity of the muscles and cartilage. The develop- 
 ment of all three in the direction in which they might 
 be useful to the race quickened; the energy stored up 
 in their fruits came to be more and more concentrated; 
 
326 'Limanora 
 
 selection of the plants, cross - fertilisation of them, 
 special soil and feed for their roots, and special sur- 
 roundings, were all-powerful in the hands of the Flor- 
 amo for changing plants and trees to any purpose they 
 had in view. They studied the tissues and habits of 
 the species that they wished to adapt, not as an abstract 
 and merely scientific investigation, but as one of the 
 practical problems of their own life; they turned the 
 clirolan on its inner and outer tissues, as they anatom- 
 ised it; they watched its inner processes with the 
 lavolan as it grew or decayed; they chemically analysed 
 its sap in all its stages, and the various soils at its 
 roots; then they experimented with new elements in 
 the soil in the direction of the qualities they wished 
 to encourage; they tried it with various degrees and 
 hours of sunshine by day, and various amounts of 
 moisture by night, at different stages in its growth; if 
 they found some of the qualities that they desired in 
 its fruit or tissues more vigorous in some other species, 
 they fertilised its blossom with the pollen of this second 
 plant, and from the seed raised a new species, which 
 would fully realise their purpose. The whole of vegetal 
 nature was plastic in their hands. And every year saw 
 hundreds of new species. 
 
 The Floramo were the forerunners of the Sidramo or 
 chemical families, and experimented in materials and 
 juices and essences, which would be useful to the race 
 in its ever-quickening advance. Often would vegetal 
 nature reveal a compound that shortened some route 
 through the future, and the Sidramo would then ana- 
 lyse the product, and find the secret of its special 
 efficiency. The Floramo were indefatigable in that de- 
 partment of their work which experimented with the 
 application of plants and their fruits and tissues to use- 
 
Discoveries 327 
 
 ful purposes, and every day saw some process accel- 
 erated by the results of their labours. In fact they 
 classified the vegetal world not merely according to the 
 structure and methods of growth and propagation, but 
 mainly according to the particular utility of the pro- 
 ducts. The one classification was more essential to 
 their creation of new species, the other to their dis- 
 covery of purposes for which new species might be 
 created. L,ike all their sciences, botany was nothing if 
 it was not creative. 
 
 Having discovered the oxygen-storing shrub, the 
 Floramo gave a new bent to it, applying their energies 
 to strengthening its vitality and its vitalising powers, 
 and to finding out the most convenient form in which 
 to use its treasured energy. Aided by the Sidramo 
 they were able to combine the juice of the fruits of the 
 floronal and the germabell with the paste of the nut of 
 alfarene into minute, to my eyes almost microscopic, 
 globules, each of which would support one of their 
 couriers in the ether outside of our atmosphere for sev- 
 eral hours. At first they lost one of the vitalising ele- 
 ments in securing another; and even after they had 
 been able to bind the three essences together in one 
 form, it gave air and sustenance for only a few minutes 
 when they tried it in a complete vacuum. But after 
 experimenting for many months, they were able to con- 
 centrate these essences under enormous pressure and 
 by the aid of electric stimulus into a form which would 
 not volatilise except in the saliva of the mouth and 
 under electric stimulus. They were also able to give 
 their globules such electric power as would utilise the 
 streams of magnetic energy that filled the ether. Thus 
 the ether-couriers found them far more strengthening 
 and sustaining just above the earth's atmosphere than 
 
328 Limanora 
 
 in it. One globule lasted several hours longer in a 
 vacuum, and made breathing and the other vital func- 
 tions more easy and enjoyable. Thus was opened up to 
 them by this discovery a long vista of investigation. 
 The new type of sustenance and oxygenation was so 
 concentrated that the couriers into the sky could carry 
 with them enough to serve through months. 
 
 During the next great period of discovery the Sidramo 
 superseded this use of alfarene by a more rapid method of 
 concentrating air. As usual they followed up the steps 
 of the Floramo, and created what the botanical families 
 had found in nature. The use of great pressure in the 
 manufacture of the sustenant globules in their final 
 form suggested the track they should take; and the 
 immense accumulation of energy in Rimla and the 
 rapidly increasing faculty of concentrating it on any 
 point or purpose gave them the requisite power. 
 They came to reduce air to liquid, and finally to solid 
 and permanent, form. And, following up the lead of 
 this discovery, they applied greater and greater pres- 
 sures, and were at last able to transform with ease and 
 without danger any element into gaseous, liquid, or 
 solid form. They contracted the slow processes, that 
 in terrestrial nature covered myriads of ages, into a few 
 minutes or hours, and thus again multiplied indefinitely 
 their vast treasures of power in Rimla. 
 
 A pioneering production, the book of elemental trans- 
 formations, foreshadowed the discoveries to which this 
 would lead. Ether, it was shown, would be trans- 
 formed into any desired substance, as soon as its con- 
 stituents and formation were found out. Even modes 
 of motion, like sound and light and electricity, would, 
 with this vast expansion of the possibility of compres- 
 sion, and the growing power of amalgamating and con- 
 
Discoveries 329 
 
 centrating forms of energy, come to be bottled up in 
 liquid or solid form for any required period. A block 
 of latent sound or latent light or latent electricity 
 would be as common as a block of ice. Another pio- 
 neer, the book of abbreviation of geological time, 
 opened up a second vista of power that the discovery 
 pointed out. Nature took geological ages to perform 
 most of her processes; but in great passions she accom- 
 plished as much in a few minutes. The safe imitation 
 of these creative and destructive paroxysms was certain 
 to be one of the conquests of Limanoran posterity. For 
 the actual concentration of power in Rimla was as no- 
 thing compared with what it would be in the future. 
 Now they were able to contract the work of years into 
 minutes; then would they be able to leap in one mo- 
 ment across geological ages. Time was the inertia of 
 realisation and creative power. The whole drift of 
 their civilisation was towards the mastery of finite 
 periods of time. Years were to them what minutes 
 had been to their ancestry; to their far posterity geo- 
 logical ages would be as brief as years were to them. 
 Swifter and more swiftly would they eliminate from 
 their creative processes the reluctant element of time, and 
 feel that they were pacing in the footsteps of eternity. 
 As it was, they soon put the liquefaction and solidi- 
 fication of the elements to countless uses. A few of 
 these were the cooling of their buildings by concen- 
 trated air, the use in the arts of its corrosive power and 
 of its power of rendering most metals easily plastic, its 
 amalgamation with other elements into an explosive 
 matter so destructive as to supersede the use of the 
 leomoran in earth-perforation, and the storage of their 
 faleenas with supplies for expeditions that would take 
 years in interstellar space. 
 
33 Limanora 
 
 A minor use to which they put alfarene was the pro- 
 duction of vacuums. They had long had mechanical 
 air-pumps, that gave them the vacuums they needed 
 for their experiments. But they now found it much 
 easier to enclose one of these snow-stunted shrubs in 
 an air-tight vessel of transparent irelium, and watch it 
 absorb the air within the walls. The energy formerly 
 spent on the making of air-pumps was saved, and de- 
 voted to some other useful purpose. 
 
 What was still better was the continual experiment- 
 ation on the human system carried on by means of 
 these so easily accessible vacuums. The alfarene vac- 
 uum became the daily plaything of the Limanoran, and 
 he took pleasure in finding out the needs of his body in 
 it, and the length of time he could endure the pure 
 ether. It was not long before they knew every diffi-- 
 culty they would be likely to encounter in crossing 
 from star to star. The minor defects of the body were 
 easily met after a few years' study of them by the vari- 
 ous scientific families. But two gave them long pause. 
 
 One was the intense cold they were sure to experi- 
 ence. Where there was no terrene matter or moisture 
 or air to retain the solar or astral heat that travelled 
 through space, the diffusion of the streams of thermal 
 energy would render any far voyaging from the earth 
 impracticable. The experiments to meet this difficulty 
 took three directions. One was physiological, to 
 make the body capable of resisting as great a degree of 
 cold as they would be likely to encounter; this attempt 
 was only partially successful, and that by slow steps. 
 They brought themselves to live with pleasure in any 
 cold that could be found in or around the earth; but it 
 would take many centuries, perhaps geological ages, to 
 bring endurance up to the pitch of interstellar cold; it 
 
Discoveries 33 1 
 
 would in fact mean such a sublimation of their bodies 
 as would make them like spirits. Another direction 
 was chemical, to produce a regular atmosphere round 
 the body as it flew, so that it might retain some of the 
 streams of heat that swept past it; the use of the essence 
 of the oxygen-plant helped them in this direction to 
 some extent ; but the amount of it that would be needed 
 to keep up such an atmosphere for years, concentrate it 
 as much as they liked, meant so huge a cargo that none 
 of their winged cars would be able to bear it above the 
 earth. The third direction was physical, to produce 
 as much heat around the body as would act as a shield 
 against the cold of the ether; this was the most success- 
 ful ; for there were such torrents of energy ever moving 
 through interstellar space that it merely needed its util- 
 isation to solve the problem. One plan, that, when 
 carefully developed, would ensure success, was a mag- 
 netic garment which would cover the whole of the body 
 and draw to it all the electric energy within a large 
 radius of it, to be transformed into heat by minute en- 
 gines distributed all over the envelope. Another was, 
 to combine the mechanical collection of electricity from 
 the ether and the full development of the magnetic 
 powers of the body. Already they had been able to 
 flash lightnings around them as the} 7 flew through the 
 night; and it would need but small mechanical man- 
 ipulation to increase this display and to turn it into 
 heat. Like meteors, they would blaze across space, 
 wrapped in a mantle of flame. 
 
 But this difficulty in the way of flight through the 
 ether was but slight as against the other defect that 
 their systems had in common with all terrene bodies. 
 They could develop heat easily enough ; but how were 
 they to keep intact and consistent in a vacuum consti- 
 
33 2 Limanora 
 
 tutions which had been developed under the pressure 
 of an atmosphere? How would the tissues and the 
 organs of their bodies adjust themselves to the absence 
 of atmospheric conditions? As they rose above the 
 clouds, they had long felt as if their limbs and even the 
 molecules of their bodies were without due subordina- 
 tion and apt to assume individual independence, even 
 when the spirit grew boldest and most concentrated in 
 its energy. Their own wings and faleenas that were 
 intended for upper and rarer altitudes had to be made 
 tougher and more elastic than for common flight close 
 to the earth. They had to make them at last in a 
 vacuum, and subject them to all the conditions that 
 met them in the ether. But it would take myriads of 
 generations, if not of geological ages, to bring their 
 own bodies into such a state as to bear vacuum around 
 them for years; and then in their terrene life with such 
 a new constitution they would be unable to endure so 
 great a pressure as that of the atmosphere near the 
 earth. The only contrivance that seemed feasible was 
 a faffaleena enclosing the traveller round, large enough 
 to hold alfarene supplies for the long voyage, and strong 
 enough to stand the pressure of an atmosphere within 
 it. This they might manage after some years of ex- 
 perimentation. 
 
 But enclosure within such a narrow space for so long 
 a period, without the possibility of free movement into 
 the ether, did not attract them; and any little accident 
 in their machinery or to their supplies might make 
 their faleena their tomb. Some other line must be 
 taken by investigation and invention, if stellar migra- 
 tion was to become a possible and desirable thing. 
 
 This line was indicated by discoveries of the Sidralmo 
 or bio-chemical families, and the Ooaromo or psycho- 
 
Discoveries 333 
 
 physiological families. The Sidralmo had long been 
 investigating the ultimate constituents of living mat- 
 ter; and again and again, when seeming to be on their 
 track, they were baffled by the escape of some element, 
 and left with only the caput mortuum to analyse. 
 Under their clirolans too, powerful though they were, 
 the principle of life showed itself in many ways to their 
 senses, and yet evaded all attempt to isolate it. The 
 lavolan, which showed the inner structure of living 
 bodies as they lived and moved, brought them nearest 
 of all to the veil that hung over the secret of vitality. 
 Plants and stationary animal organisms allowed them 
 full scope for their investigations. In them they could 
 see the "life ebb and flow, as death approached or re- 
 ceded; in them they could find every material element 
 entering into their composition, and test with their 
 varied and minute meteorological apparatus all the 
 forms of energy which moved them; they checked 
 the current of life, and watched in the plant or animal 
 the elements and energies that remained comparatively 
 stable and those that deteriorated; they let it die out, 
 and watched the throb and struggle of the various con- 
 stituents and forces as they collapsed; then, when it 
 seemed to have surrendered all life or hope of life, they 
 brought it back, by their knowledge of its existence, to 
 the upward struggle again and no feature of the re- 
 turn escaped their notice; most watchful of all were 
 they on that dim borderland between life and death, 
 where dawn is sunset and sunset dawn. In every stage 
 were they able to isolate each strand of the thread of 
 life; yet the essential secret of all escaped them. Once 
 the organism had shrivelled into a bundle of dead fibres 
 or fallen to dust, no effort of theirs could give it the 
 throb of life again. They could reproduce every ele- 
 
334 Limanora 
 
 meiit and tissue and fibre, and under their clirolans 
 place them together in the forms of life with marvel- 
 lous art. One thing was still wanting to make it all it 
 had been. They could even mimic the flow of life 
 through it by means of their command over the sources 
 of energy; but the result was only mechanical; they 
 had not supplied it with the never- failing spring of 
 vitality. 
 
 At last, during the period of this great illumination 
 there was thrown a beam of light on the right path for 
 solving this problem. One of the Sidralmo was experi- 
 menting on certain substances to see how they behaved 
 under the rays issuing from a lavolan or revealer of 
 inner mechanism. They were chiefly new vegetable 
 substances the properties of which it was his duty to 
 discover and tabulate. He was also mingling one or 
 two new minerals with the plant-products in order to 
 see what modification the blending would cause. One 
 metal had lately been found issuing from the deepest of 
 their lava-wells in the form of vapour; when cooled, it 
 had assumed a crystalline character, and acted to some 
 extent like a magnet; yet it was sensitive to energies 
 that an ordinary magnet ignored, as, for instance, the 
 passage of exceptional nerve-force through the human 
 body. Lightly hung, it quivered when near anyone 
 who happened to be greatly excited. But it paid no 
 heed to the normal currents of energy along the nerves. 
 There was also a species of plant recently evolved that 
 had shown itself singularly sensitive on the approach of 
 any living thing; it shrank not merely from the touch 
 of a hand or of any animal, but from the proximity of 
 life, whilst it remained unmoved when touched by any 
 falling leaf or stone. The experimenter had taken a 
 number of these plants and made of them a basket- 
 
Discoveries 335 
 
 work, in which he hung a piece of the new magnetic 
 metal by a slender thread. This he placed above his 
 lavolan to see how the rays from it would affect, or be 
 affected by, the new combination of influences. There 
 seemed to be little or no effect, but he continued his 
 experiment to make sure. Through some imperfec- 
 tion in its walls his vacuum failed; he tried to pump 
 the air out again, but, this failing too, he substituted 
 an alfarene-vacuum which happened to be near him. 
 The result was most striking. The metal, lightly 
 hung in the basket, became agitated at once, and its 
 movements grew more or less active as it approached or 
 was drawn off from the vacuum. After a time it began 
 to show less sensitiveness, and at last became almost 
 quiescent, even though the vacuum remained efficient. 
 On examining the alfarene plant under a magnifier, he 
 found a minute slug, that had evidently escaped the 
 notice of the maker of the vacuum ; this had been the 
 source of the agitation of the metal in the basket dur- 
 ing its last spasmodic efforts to hold on to life; and, 
 when death, through the lack of air, had overcome it, 
 the agitation had ceased. The plant itself had by the 
 presence of its life kept the test from becoming com- 
 pletely quiescent. The influence of the life of the ex- 
 perimenter himself seemed to be largely neutralised by 
 the surrounding air; it was only when he came very 
 close to the test that it indicated his presence. 
 
 Here was revealed to the Sidralmo the path the}^ had 
 to follow; a wide vista into the darkness had been sud- 
 denly opened. It was not long before they had taken 
 full advantage of the discovery. They invented the 
 most helpful of all their instruments, the sidralan or 
 biometer; they hung the combination of life-sensitive 
 plant and nerve-sensitive metal itself in a vacuum, 
 
33 6 Limanora 
 
 directly in the path of an electric current; the details 
 of its mechanism they rapidly improved till it measured 
 with accuracy the degree of vitality in any plant or 
 animal. But they soon found that it was differently 
 affected by vegetable and animal life. The energy of 
 the former moved it but slightly, and only in certain 
 directions; the latter seemed to surround it and agitate 
 it from all sides; it quivered as if with subdued excite- 
 ment. Yet there were degrees in both; some plants 
 moved it more than the most primitive unicellular ani- 
 mals, although the movement was less pervasive. Thus 
 were they well on the way towards the isolation of the 
 life-principle from its constant concomitants. 
 
 The biometer came to be of as much importance to 
 the medical superintendents as to the Sidralmo; it 
 abridged the labour of their weekly inspection; for it 
 told in a moment whether the vitality in any member 
 of the community had fallen or risen in degree, whether 
 it was below the proper average, in short whether all 
 his organs and tissues would have to be minutely ex- 
 amined for the cause, and whether his dietary scheme 
 would have to be revised. The psycho-physiological 
 families found it of some use in their investigations into 
 the faculties of man and their basis in his bodily consti- 
 tution. They found that the wiser and more intellec- 
 tual a personality was, the more gently he moved the 
 sidralan; the more of animal vitality he had, the more 
 violently he agitated it by his presence. 
 
 But the instrument was too rough and undiscriminat- 
 ing for their purposes. It could not distinguish be- 
 tween the purely spiritual and the purely animal except 
 in this loose way. They tried modifications of it, but 
 without success. It was the Ailomo or astrobiological 
 families that helped them to take the right direction. 
 
Discoveries 337 
 
 They were constantly bringing down out of the stratum 
 above the atmosphere vessels full of the seeming no- 
 thingness that existed there, in order to investigate it 
 and see whether it was mere vacuum or not; and 
 though the contents appealed to none of their senses 
 but the electric, their various instruments of research 
 revealed different energies and a large amount of life, 
 besides minute forms of matter without life. On several 
 occasions they had noticed that the contents affected 
 their tests differently when the experimenter was near 
 and when he stood at a distance. Step by step they 
 separated the element that acted thus from its various 
 concomitants. And soon they were able to concentrate 
 a considerable quantity of it in a receiver exhausted of 
 air, and to precipitate it in powdery metallic form. 
 
 The substance was handed over to the Ooaromo, who 
 saw that it would supply the test they wanted; for it 
 was but slightly sensitive to the presence of animals, 
 and its sensitiveness gradually vanished as they tried 
 it with lower and lower species of animals; whilst it 
 quivered near men, less near young men and women, 
 only slightly near infants, but with quick tremors when 
 near the older and wiser Limanorans, who had suffered 
 and thought through long centuries. They came to 
 the conclusion that this residuum was the essence of 
 some element in the ether that responded to the energy 
 of the higher faculties, as the magnet responded to 
 electricity. They had in fact found at last a true test 
 of soul, that refinement of the higher animal energies 
 which has assumed a new grade in life, the conscious- 
 ness of itself, and the power of keeping its own form 
 and essence as an entity for ever separate from all other 
 beings and things. 
 
 It was not long before the Ooaromo had made from it 
 
338 Limanora 
 
 an apparatus which would test the presence of soul and 
 measure its force. In this ooaran or psychometer they 
 were at last furnished with an instrument that would 
 give organic unity and new purpose to their science. 
 They would now be able to watch and measure the 
 growth of soul in the child, and the ebb and flow of 
 its strength in youth; and thus would they give new 
 vigour and life to the creative function of their science. 
 They had now an exact basis for education ; as guides of 
 parents and proparents in tuition they would walk in 
 the full day, where before they had groped in dim twi- 
 light; in every case would they be able to advise with 
 the same certainty as the medical elders advised on the 
 health of the body. For the mature men and women 
 would they act as true father-confessors,, and do what 
 the priests of so many religions pretended to do, but 
 did not do; they would be able to tell everyone, who 
 desired it, whether his soul had advanced or receded in 
 power after any series of sufferings and deeds, or any 
 line of conduct, and thus to give advice as to what 
 should be done or omitted in the future. And when 
 the elders had come near what had before seemed the 
 utmost limit of life, they would be able to tell them 
 whether their nausea of existence was only fleeting and 
 subjective, or whether the roots of their soul were 
 loosening themselves from the soil of the body. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 AN ACCIDENT 
 
 BUT so vast an expansion of science and the un- 
 veiling of so many outlooks into the future left 
 no room for the thought of death. The pace of life 
 quickened perceptibly, and the energy of every dweller 
 on the island was strained to its utmost to meet the re- 
 quirements of the new additions to the force of the 
 country and of all the new inventions. It was impos- 
 sible to think of anything but the tasks in hand. None 
 had an idle thought, none a leisure moment to waste 
 on mere introspection or dreams. 
 
 In fact it became quite clear that the old dream-fac- 
 tory might be closed for a time at least. For several 
 generations it had been the custom of the L,imanorans 
 to stimulate invention and discovery by the use of 
 magnetism. When anyone felt his problem insoluble, 
 or an insuperable obstacle in the way of his advance 
 towards some practical goal, he had his dream-con- 
 sciousness awakened and quickened as he slept. A 
 member of the medical families would attend by his 
 bedside, and apply a magnetic current to the particular 
 point of his brain that controlled the powers concerned 
 in his pursuit, and especially to the parts which were 
 the physical expression of the imaginative faculties, 
 
 339 
 
34 Limanora 
 
 And by day he would instruct the thinker as to what 
 nutritive or medicated chambers he should enter in 
 order to draw the main strength of his system towards 
 the faculties he needed. Day after day the patient 
 nurtured the parts of the brain and of the nervous sys- 
 tem that would help him to the solution; night after 
 night he dreamt out the terms of the problem. At last 
 either in day-dream or night-fancy the curtain would be 
 raised, and he would see the path to take; light flashed 
 in on him as if from another world. What in my 
 buried life used to be called inspiration was cultivated, 
 moulded, and directed with as deliberate foresight and 
 care as any feature of the body or the character. Nor 
 were these dream- stimulants ever abused; when the 
 purpose had been served, the goal reached, at once the 
 other faculties and physical parts had equal attention ; 
 the strain was unbent, and the symmetry and bal- 
 ance of the whole system restored. Never was the 
 stimulation of dream-consciousness permitted for a 
 mere pleasure or whim; the importance of the aim to 
 the progress of the race had to be proved before it was 
 granted; nay it was only problems the solution of 
 which would lead to extraordinary advances, that were 
 dealt with by narolla or dream-consciousness stimu- 
 lants. Now the narolla were entirely abandoned; for 
 imagination was preternaturally excited, and discovery 
 and invention seemed to come to investigators almost 
 without effort. 
 
 It was indeed a period of accelerated progress, if not 
 of precipitance, in the work of all families. The dark- 
 ness around existence lifted over the whole horizon, 
 and demanded redoubled exertion, in order that the 
 new regions should be mapped before it fell. The 
 tissues and nerves of every L,imanoran felt the stimu- 
 
An Accident 341 
 
 lus; each worked with a will. Still the necessities of 
 the situation almost ran ahead of their powers. One 
 thing became clear, that they must have more workers; 
 the new generation would have to be more numerous 
 than the last. For the young had to be drawn upon for 
 active nerve- and head-work before their usual time; 
 and these would need more leisure in the next stage of 
 their life to compensate for the loss of it in the period 
 of growth. 
 
 It grew evident that parents who had been excep- 
 tionally successful in the two children they had brought 
 forth, reared, and launched full-fledged on the career 
 of life should be permitted and stimulated to resume 
 parentage. It was considered one of the highest privi- 
 leges and honours to be selected as parents again by 
 the magnetic consciousness of the nation. There was 
 needed no formal agreement or resolution; the mind of 
 the race was known without consulting it openly; and 
 every pair felt in a moment that they were selected for 
 reparentage; they required no stimulation, no permis- 
 sion to enter on the patriotic duty. And all considered 
 it a duty of the loftiest kind. Passion in the race 
 burned low; no longer was it a sting or goad that had 
 to be mastered; it was in short no more a passion, such 
 as the use of imagination, the love of the race, or the 
 yearning after advance had become. The animal ele- 
 ment in it had grown insignificant, and left it at the 
 bidding of intellect and will. These tried parents had 
 thus no sensuous pleasure to seek in the new task as- 
 signed to them. They took it upon them as a duty, 
 and their chief pleasure lay in the honour they had 
 been paid, and in the service they were doing to the 
 race and to the progress of their humanity. 
 
 A second necessity of the new position was earlier 
 
34 2 Limanora 
 
 marriage on the part of the men and women of the 
 community. As soon as bare maturity had been 
 reached, pairing now began. First it had to be scien- 
 tifically ascertained that all the merely primitive 
 stages of mankind had been passed through, not only 
 the prehistoric, but the historical. It would be one of 
 the greatest of evils to allow the privilege of parenting 
 for the community to any who might have yet to go 
 through a stage of individual life that represented cent- 
 uries of the past of mankind. Little better would this 
 be than stocking their island with children from their 
 exiles. It was a question of testing every individual; 
 for some passed more rapidly through the life of their 
 ancestry than others; and these were not always the 
 best as parents or even as citizens. Every tissue and 
 faculty had to be tested, after careful study of the 
 records of the childhood and youth. No possible pro- 
 spect or chance of atavistic taint was overlooked. 
 
 The next duty was to review the needs of the race. 
 The tasks and abilities of every family were measured, 
 and the possible expansions of these were estimated; 
 then new sciences, or new divisions of sciences, or new 
 duties that would need the services of a family or 
 families specially selected and moulded for the purpose, 
 were taken into the account. From this elaborate re- 
 view of the resources and needs of the population con- 
 clusions were carefully drawn as to the number and 
 quality of the children that were required. The pro- 
 blem was easy enough as far as mere extensions of the 
 existing families were concerned. But the creation of 
 new types was a question that tasked the abilities of 
 the wisest to the utmost. The special faculties needed 
 for the new science or art or duty had to be discussed 
 and decided; and especially how far existing faculties 
 
An Accident 343 
 
 would have to be modified or newly combined. Then 
 out of the various families those two had to be chosen, 
 a cross which would produce the required modifica- 
 tion or combination. But, as this was still largely of 
 the nature of experiment, more than one effort was 
 made towards each new type, in order that, if one child 
 failed, the others might be available. But the wise 
 creators of new types were rapidly getting surer of their 
 ground; their experiments were growing less of experi- 
 ments; they could almost foretell to a faculty or tissue 
 the result of the crossing of any two families. And 
 where any quality was unequal to the new duty, first 
 creative surgery was called in to modify or add to the 
 tissue of that part of the brain which was the physical 
 equivalent of the faculty, and afterwards education with 
 its various magnetic and dietary aids was brought to 
 bear on its development. Yet there might be some 
 chance of their new type falling short of its purpose 
 and, to guard against this, several individuals of it 
 were brought forth and trained. It was generally 
 found that all of them were needed to carry out the 
 duties of the new position. 
 
 After everything had been settled in the programme 
 of the next generation, the task of matching began. 
 Time after time the two who were to be the parents of 
 the new type were thrown together as if by accident 
 in circumstances and surroundings which would touch 
 their imaginations and rouse their enthusiasm for each 
 other. They were put into difficult positions together, 
 so that one might help to extricate the other from 
 them. Alternate debt and service wove mutual bonds 
 around them, till at last neither desired to issue from 
 the network of obligation and love in which they were 
 caught. The magnetism of one was complementary to 
 
344 Limanora 
 
 that of the other; and when separated they longed to 
 see each other. With none in the community was the 
 filammu of either in such communion as with the loved 
 mate. Thus partly wise choice, and partly spontaneity, 
 produced the match. The lifelong bond could never 
 become enslaving for either; for the material of it had 
 been selected not by mere youthful caprice, but by the 
 maturest wisdom of the race, whilst it was spun by 
 the impulse and will of the two friends themselves. 
 Neither the state nor either of the partners could pos- 
 sibly regret the friendship, or wish it dissolved. It 
 passed as naturally into marriage as flower into fruit. 
 
 But, whilst the future was thus being safeguarded, 
 the new duties or expanded duties had to be looked 
 after. Seventy-five years of work had to be provided 
 for before the new citizens could be made fit for their 
 duties. Part of this was covered by drawing earlier on 
 the powers of the new generation; the youth must come 
 out of their seclusion a few years sooner than usual. 
 But that was not sufficient. What way was there out 
 of the difficulty? It was a tacit rule of the community 
 that none were to overstrain their energies; overwork 
 was considered as great a vice as indolence; for it 
 cheated the race of some of its advance by demoralising 
 the faculties and tissues, and bringing on the nausea 
 of life earlier than it should come by nature. The 
 biometer was carefully applied to every citizen in order 
 to test how far he could go in work without wasting 
 his energies. And after all had been assigned addi- 
 tional work to their utmost limit, there was still so 
 much unassigned. The only chance of meeting it was 
 the extension of life. The elders must live longer. 
 Happily every condition was now present for managing 
 this. They had new foods and agents for revitalising 
 
An Accident 345 
 
 the tissues; they had new apparatus for discovering in- 
 ternal defects in the human system, and new methods 
 of remedying them; the far vistas opened up into the 
 future gave a new purpose to the life even of the most 
 aged ; they longed to see what would come of all the 
 expanded invention and discovery; the enthusiasm of 
 the new age fired the imagination of the oldest. Lima- 
 noran life had another century added to it. 
 
 In the midst of the bustle of these preparations for 
 the future (if anything the Limanorans did could be 
 called bustle), there occurred an accident that smote 
 them almost with dismay, and brought them as near as 
 I had ever seen them approach to melancholy. The 
 additions to the sources of the energy available in 
 Rimla had entailed more muscular work as well as 
 more superintendence, and it was necessary to assign 
 more physical toil to the now-earlier mature than had 
 been customary. Two scions of the meteorological 
 families, who had been selected for marriage and par- 
 entage, were sent to manage a large pirakno, which 
 had been constructed for drawing the magnetism from 
 the air- and the spaces just beyond the atmosphere. 
 The great machine had been placed on an isolated spur 
 of Lilaroma, so that if ever through the sudden sweep- 
 ing of the earth into a supermagnetised area it should 
 become dangerous, it could easily be detached from 
 Rimla and insulated. And there were never less than 
 two beside it to help in its management. 
 
 The younger men and women took the night watches 
 in all the physical labour that had to be undertaken. 
 And Tamarna and Omirlo, as one of the youngest and 
 least experienced of the pairs that had to manage this 
 huge pirakno, kept the last watch of the night, the 
 watch that included sunrise and was followed by that 
 
34 6 Limanora 
 
 of two of the most mature workers. It was thought 
 that, as every lyimanoran would be awake and on the 
 alert at dawn, help in any emergency could easily be 
 procured. As it was well known that during that 
 period there was a great increase of magnetism in the 
 atmosphere, provision was made in the machine itself 
 for so regular a change; it was so arranged that, when 
 the sun's rays first touched it, it should automatically 
 increase its capacity for magnetism. But so recent had 
 been the development of cosmic magnetography that 
 the times and seasons of the irregular increase of mag- 
 netism had not been tabulated and classified. Had the 
 observations been made for a long enough time to allow 
 of inferring a uniformity or law, then it would have 
 been seen that these supermagnetised spaces, though 
 they may have been entered by the earth during the 
 night, have little effect upon her atmosphere till day 
 dawns; the excess of magnetism seems to lie dormant 
 in the dark; the first rays of the sun act like a fuse to 
 a mine and complete the circuit between extra-terrene 
 space and the surface of the earth. Sunrise, in fact, as 
 they came afterwards to see, was the most critical time 
 for such a machine as the pirakno. 
 
 It happened, too, that on this particular night the 
 sarmolan or cosmic barometer had been getting out of 
 order; but its watchers did not think it called for im- 
 mediate attention; the morning would be time enough 
 to put it right. Its indicator thus lay tongue-tied and 
 misleading, when it should have been violently agi- 
 tated. Tamarna and Omirlo had no warning of the 
 approaching magnetic tornado. The hour before dawn 
 the pirakno moved as regularly and quietly as at that 
 point of the night when the magnetic tide is at its 
 lowest ebb, the point when sleep is deepest and death is 
 
An Accident 347 
 
 most frequent. They had just seen that every part 
 was moving without friction and fully coping with its 
 work; and Omirlo felt that he could leave his mate for 
 a brief space and consult the sarmolan- watchers. He 
 had been gone but a few minutes when he heard a loud 
 crash behind him, and at the same moment he noticed 
 that the first beams of the sun had struck across the 
 levels of the sea. He turned and saw a flash from the 
 place where, he thought, the pirakno stood. Flying 
 back in trepidation, he found the machine as he had 
 left it, but it had stopped. At first he could not see 
 Tamarna; but on searching he saw her form lying on 
 the ground close to the pirakno, hidden by one of its 
 cranks. He touched her temples and left side, and 
 saw that life had fled. The crank had come upon her 
 as she lay, and bruised her body; the sight of this 
 completed his despair; he felt that the last hope of her 
 recall had vanished. 
 
 Yet he knew how much the medical elders could do, 
 and there arose in his mind a flicker of hope. He 
 wasted no time on lamentation, for there moved in him 
 the carefully trained consciousness that all such aban- 
 donment to emotion was an offence against the progress 
 of the race. They considered that every occurrence of 
 life demanded as much concentration of energy and 
 thought as a shipwreck, or the incidents of a battle, or 
 anything that we in the West would call an alarming 
 emergency. As grief or despair or fear used up the 
 power that should be spent on action, emotion was 
 strictly reined in at such a moment; the instinct was to 
 call the whole resources of the nature to action. 
 
 Omirlo braced himself to the emergency, and sent 
 the whole of the magnetism he was capable of into his 
 will-telegraph. After a few minutes' exercise of it, it 
 
348 Limanora 
 
 seemed to relax, and he knew that he had roused his 
 parents to the danger. Recalling his energies to 
 Tamarna, he followed the few simple rules that he had 
 been taught for the recovery of the seeming dead. He 
 made her lungs and heart imitate the play of life; he 
 switched the magnetism of his own system on to hers. 
 But after all his efforts she lay still inert when his 
 parents arrived. They decided to carry her at once to 
 the medical elders, for they saw that something excep- 
 tional had occurred; it was not a swoon, or even death 
 from the bruise dealt by the pirakno. So they took 
 her wings, and making them by means of soft leafage 
 into a couch for her, they bore her through the air 
 swiftly, but just as she had lain when found. Tam- 
 arna's own parents met them on the way, and helped 
 them to accelerate their pace with her; and within less 
 than ten minutes after -the accident she was in the 
 hands of the sages in the mountain hospital. 
 
 The general medical house was Oomalefa. But 
 there were two houses of cure which approached more 
 nearly to what our hospitals are. One was far up the 
 slopes of L,ilaroma, not much beneath the winter-line of 
 snow. The other was aerial and movable, and was, 
 whenever it was needed, floated upwards to the margin 
 of our atmosphere, where parasitic and microscopic life 
 was reduced to unaggressive feebleness. In it were all 
 the necessities of life at hand; the temperature was kept 
 close to summer heat; and there were lines of communi- 
 cation, so thin as to be almost invisible in the air, con- 
 necting it with the halls of sustenance and medication. 
 This hospital was meant for the invalid who was strong 
 enough to be moved up from solid earth; and, as soon 
 as one had been brought back far enough from the 
 grasp of death to bear the rareity of the upper air 
 
An Accident 349 
 
 where it merged into the ether, he was taken up in it. 
 But Tamarna was first borne to the mountain hospital, 
 where the instruments of investigation and cure were 
 ready. When she should have had all the ruptures of 
 her bones and organs and tissues set for mending, and 
 all the tissues that were crushed beyond mending re- 
 placed by freshly manufactured tissues, and when she 
 was seen to hold on to life with a tenacious grasp again, 
 then would she be borne into the hospital of accelera- 
 tive healing high above the clouds. 
 
 The biometer recorded the faint presence of life; the 
 spirit had not yet escaped, and before long it grew 
 manifest to ordinary eyes. They had apparatus for 
 stirring any organ of the body into activity; and with 
 the lavolan they soon saw which of Tamarna' s functions 
 had been deranged and had suffered syncope. It was 
 her heart that had ceased action; the inrush of mag- 
 netism from space drawn by the pirakno, without pro- 
 vision for storing it or letting it pass harmless, had 
 paralysed some of the more important cardiac tissues 
 and the circulation was in many places clogged, whilst 
 a large proportion of the superficial blood-vessels had 
 been ruptured by the fall of the crank upon the body. 
 A Kuropean medical council would have abandoned the 
 bruised and discoloured corpse as fit only to be " food 
 for worms." But no member of the community could 
 be spared in such a period of enthusiasm and expan- 
 sion. The newly discovered agents and methods were 
 brought to bear. Delicate instruments made the heart 
 first mimic and then produce the true cardiac action. 
 Currents of magnetism swept the veins, and cleared the 
 routes for the circulation of the blood, at the same time 
 stimulating the life-fluid. The livid hue gradually dis- 
 appeared from the face. Another instrument gave ac- 
 
35 Limanora 
 
 tion to the lungs, first in mimic and then in vital way. 
 Concentrated sustenance was injected into the veins and 
 soon the breathing grew regular. Yet it needed hours 
 of this recreative work to bring the spirit to conscious- 
 ness of itself. Out of the depths the soul seemed to 
 be dragged by slow steps back into the reluctant body 
 again. The psych ometer was far more slow to give 
 signs than the biometer. But, as soon as it revealed 
 the approach of the soul, the friends of Tamarna were 
 brought near her, all who had magnetic affinities with 
 her, and especially her betrothed Omirlo. From that 
 point the recovery was astonishingly rapid. The mag- 
 netism of friendship seemed to draw back the spirit 
 from its desire to escape. The eyes opened, and a 
 look of intelligence and love shone through their vit- 
 reous dulness like dawn in a misty sky; recognition 
 quickly irradiated her whole being, then faded out, 
 then came again, till at last the curtain which hid the 
 soul rose, and the very body seemed to become dia- 
 phanous to the light of reason. The spirit dwelt again 
 in its old habitation. 
 
 The rest was a matter of the commonest medical sci- 
 ence. Every tissue was restored to its previous healthy 
 state. Every fracture and bruise and scar was obliter- 
 ated. Every item of her system which had suffered 
 beyond the possibility of repair was remade and 
 grafted into her body again. Nursing and medicated 
 atmospheres under the wisest medical guidance restored 
 Tamarna to her duties and to Omirlo as efficient and 
 graceful and healthy as before the accident. 
 
 In spite of this triumphant success of their medical 
 science, I could see that depression prevailed in the 
 community. Not even what appeared to me to be the 
 almost supernatural power of drawing the life back 
 
An Accident 35 l 
 
 seemed to console them. For they had often seen still 
 more wonderful displays of medical skill. Men who 
 had been for months to all appearance dead were re- 
 stored to full vital power, even when the microscopic 
 transformers of dead matter had begun to batten on 
 their tissues. No body that still retained the human 
 form was beyond their skill; the soul could be enticed 
 back after it had accomplished its flight from earth, for 
 it still kept its affinities to its terrene companions, 
 though cosmic distances should separate them. That 
 was the most difficult task, not the recrudescence of 
 life, but the re-enticement of the spirit that had grown 
 happy in its release. 
 
 When I observed that the meteorological families 
 were the nearest of all to dejection, even though they 
 had recovered their loved member, I came to the right 
 conclusion. It was the accident that had unmanned 
 them. That they should be taken unawares in a sphere 
 they had mastered preyed on their minds. For one of 
 the immediate objects of their science was to take com- 
 mand of their future, to eliminate the unexpected from 
 life. What was the value of their progress, if they did 
 not see more clearly and farther into the sphere of dark- 
 ness that bounded life like a horizon ? True, the cos- 
 mic was still infinite in its night for them, and in the 
 cosmic lay ambushed countless alarms. But they had 
 driven their outposts far into the twilight. The age 
 they were in had seen such an expansion of science 
 that the veil seemed lifted from the face of boundless 
 night. Their sarmolan pioneered before them into 
 space, and foretold them the dire catastrophes that 
 might lie in wait for them. And yet they were at the 
 mercy of accident. What was the use of such an in- 
 flux of suggestion from the unknown? What was their 
 
35 2 Limanora 
 
 power over nature, if thus they allowed the fortuitous 
 to drift in upon them ? They had not suffered such 
 discomfiture for ages. They abhorred the thought 
 that they should again be the slaves of mere hazard. 
 
 But they rebelled against even the appearance of im- 
 potence, and would not allow any mood approaching 
 despair to settle on their spirits. At once the Piramo 
 set about the repair of their defences against accident. 
 The pirakno was found to be fused into one mass of 
 metal by the force of magnetism which had gathered 
 into it from the space around. Another, larger and 
 more effective, was produced and in it there was a new 
 arrangement by which the storage was automatically 
 governed; any increase in the magnetism it received 
 was at once provided for; and if at any time the inflow 
 should surpass the capacity for storage, there was a 
 governor which automatically switched the surplusage 
 into the sea, or back again into the air. 
 
 A sarmolan too was invented which had greater 
 strength, and at the same time greater nicety of ad- 
 justment. It could be left in the space beyond the 
 atmosphere, untended for nights together; for it was 
 self-recording, and as long as its parts were kept clear 
 of extraneous matter or force, it was incapable of de- 
 rangement. Not that it was to be left to itself for a 
 moment; even though it now regularly telegraphed all 
 its changes to Rimla and to the locality of the pirakno, 
 meteorological observers were near it night and day to 
 watch and interpret its signals. To guard against any 
 possible assault of accident, other sarmolans were bal- 
 looned into space whose indications were mutually cor- 
 rective; where one went astray, the others would be 
 right. 
 
 When Tamarna was completely restored to health 
 
An Accident 
 
 353 
 
 and it was made certain by the medical tests that every 
 organ and tissue of her system was fit for its task, her 
 marriage with Omirlo was accorded; and the two en- 
 tered on their career of parentage. Their duties were 
 made lighter, in order that their energy might pass 
 unimpaired into posterity. They still had their round 
 of work, that their tissues might not grow flaccid, or 
 their life tend to excessive solitude. But Omirlo did 
 for both all that needed great exertion of mental or 
 physical faculty. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 DEATH 
 
 THE accident drew the two together, strengthening 
 their affinities into irrevocable bonds. And now 
 that all was well with them, their sense of the joy. of 
 life welled through their whole nature. Those who 
 came near them felt its contagion. Yet there was one 
 in their family who felt it only to smile at it. The 
 aged Amiralno had seen so many centuries fleet past 
 him that the passage of time with its triumphs had 
 grown stale. He was battling with this nausea of life 
 when the new age of discovery and invention had come 
 upon them. And it so far renewed his energy that he 
 was willing to live through it and take his share in the 
 additional duties which it laid upon his generation. 
 He had seen the infancy of the science over which he 
 now presided pass into lusty youth and thence into 
 manhood ; and was he to cut his terrene roots before he 
 had seen its greatest triumphs? Meteorology seemed 
 about to take as wide regions of space within its scope 
 as astronomy had; it seemed about to master secrets 
 that would drive mere chance out of its calculations. 
 The curiosity and wonder of youth were again stirred 
 within him. He longed to advance with the new age 
 into spheres that had so long lain under the horizon, 
 
 354 
 
Death 355 
 
 only half-guessed at. Before he closed his eyes on 
 Limanora what wonders might not yet be revealed to 
 them ? His blood had tingled with the thought, and 
 his organs were filled with the old energy. He would 
 resume the direction of his science for many a year to 
 come. 
 
 But the intrusion of accident into his own sphere had 
 palsied his renewed enthusiasms. For a time, whilst 
 he was restoring Tamarna to her old self, and barring 
 out the chance of accident again, he was not conscious 
 of the check given to the vigour of his functions. But, 
 when all was well and the families of the Piramo were 
 busy again at the expansion of meteorology, he knew 
 that the old nausea had returned with redoubled force. 
 The impetus of the new age was beginning to fail; its 
 pace had perceptibly slackened; its best triumphs had 
 been won; and it needed the ignorance of eyes newly 
 opened upon the green earth and the azure vault of sky 
 to peer into the darkness with thrilling hope; it needed 
 the elasticity of youthful muscles and tissues to with- 
 stand the weariness and despair that come with the 
 truer perspective of a gigantic future become a pigmy 
 past. What had he to do with human prospects, when 
 a thousand times he had seen them loom large on the 
 horizon, and then fade into commonplace when real- 
 ised ? Here had he outlasted a dozen generations of 
 ordinary men, and shared the triumphs of a people 
 whose progress compared with that of the rest of the 
 earth was as lightning to the pace of a snail; and yet, 
 when he looked at all that they had done in these 
 thousand years, it was as nothing in the shadow of 
 what had yet to be done, a poor hand's breadth beside 
 the voyage of light from a distant star. Where lay 
 the advantage in extending a life that had seen such 
 
35 6 Limanora 
 
 humiliation before the everlasting future ? He might 
 spin the thread of his life out for another thousand 
 years without great effort. But what would that do for 
 his race, or himself who had seen his past, with all the 
 achievements that had each seemed as it came within 
 the range of possibility a marvel surpassing the human, 
 fade into a microscopic speck underneath the sumless 
 stars ? The voices of his friends, as they poured con- 
 solation and eulogy, persuasion and prayer, into his 
 ears, sounded now like the undistinguishable hum of 
 insects as sleep comes upon a man in the open. What 
 would they not have meant to him in the ambitious 
 time of youth ? How strongly they rang out to him at 
 the beginning of the last stage of enthusiasm, when 
 they drove out of him the love of going for ever to 
 sleep! But, now, that the longing had come to him 
 again, they sounded idly as the exultant wail of gnats 
 on the evening air. The life of earth was withdrawn 
 and distant for him. 
 
 And who could raise a word against his release ? He 
 had done more than his share for the progress of the 
 race. He had watched the interests of his science and 
 made it an essential of all advance. He had braced his 
 energies again and again to meet the requirements of a 
 new age, another march ahead into the night. He had 
 time after time molten the Piramo into a new unity by 
 the magnetism of his enthusiasm. More than once he 
 had extended the years of his life that he might serve 
 his race. And now he had skilled men and women 
 under him, who could do all that he had done, and 
 more. The exceptional needs of the new time had 
 found their attendants mechanic or human. The strain 
 it had put on the efforts of the race was unbent. Why 
 should he linger in a world grown so stale to him, a 
 
Death 357 
 
 world that needed no longer his guidance or even his 
 help ? 
 
 There was one question to answer before the mind of 
 the community was made up. It was the final scientific 
 question. Was his vitality great enough yet to bear 
 the strain, were the impulses of another new age to give 
 it enthusiasm? Was the soul already too detached from 
 the body to allow of the two being closel) T reunited for 
 another great effort? The question was one for their 
 medical science and psychology to answer. The sid- 
 ralan or biometer abridged the task of the medical 
 elders. It reported a low pitch of vital energy, too 
 feeble to bear up through the labours and watches of 
 another period. But they were afraid to trust wholly 
 to so newly invented an instrument and fell back upon 
 their old elaborate methods of testing; they investigated 
 the state of every organ and tissue of the aged body with 
 lavolans, the heart and brain with especial care. And 
 it was clear from their state that the spirit could not 
 long reside in them and function them with ease. It 
 was at this point that the Ooaromo came in to aid them 
 with their instruments for testing the bond between 
 soul and body, and for measuring the psychic power 
 that still remained ready to use the brain and its in- 
 struments the senses. Their older methods and their 
 newest apparatus, the ooaran, all agreed in confirm- 
 ing the conclusion that the medical elders had come to. 
 
 For Amiralno himself there remained one serious 
 question, which had troubled the race from the time 
 that mere faith had ceased to rule and pilot their creed, 
 and reason had been accepted as the only ultimate 
 guide of life, the final court of appeal in which all ques- 
 tions must be decided. They could not trust to emo- 
 
35 8 Limanora 
 
 tion or instinct; for these were but hard- won creeds and 
 habits of past imperfect ages grown unconscious of their 
 origin by transmission from generation to generation. 
 Authority out of the past, tradition, law of nature, had 
 the same taint upon them. They were but the crude 
 conclusions of comparatively primitive times, with the 
 logic leading to them veiled by oblivion, then thrust 
 upon later ages as inspiration. All these dogmatic 
 judges of the present and the future were but the shad- 
 ows of their own worst and atavistic selves. It was 
 only an illusion, a mirage in the desert of the past, to 
 trust these merely subjective impressions as reflections 
 from the ultimately real, the absolute. A people like 
 this was sure to abandon all such projections of their 
 own dead selves as steps to higher than themselves. 
 
 Every man had to settle for himself the problems that 
 his science had been unable to solve, and that he must 
 find some solution of in death. They had longed and 
 striven for absolute certainty, yet every new age had to 
 fall back upon the individual consciousness and hope, 
 which were wholly on the side of belief in personal im- 
 mortality. They knew that the energy in them could 
 never die, whatever form it might take. Never had 
 they found in the whole round of their investigations 
 anything like absolute death or annihilation; every 
 change that they observed, however far into infinity 
 they had searched, was but a transformation of energy, 
 and not its final evanishment. Matter was only a rest- 
 ing-place, a half-way house, of energy. And even 
 matter was a comparative term, depending on the 
 sensuous point of view of the observer. What was 
 matter to one generation was found by a later to be 
 pure energy, or even a mass of life. What was matter 
 to one sense was to another nothing but energy. And 
 
Death 359 
 
 the development of new senses, that gave them full 
 consciousness of some hitherto- unrecognised type of 
 energy, saved them from the dogmatism about the 
 future based upon the idea that all types of energy were 
 known to them. Their wonderful instruments of re- 
 search revealed to them worlds of energy which might 
 have lain for ages undiscovered, and swept out all 
 stupid trust in the omniscience of the senses or the in- 
 stincts. They refused to dogmatise about the existence 
 or non-existence of any type of energy or being. Nay, 
 they preferred to accept provisionallythe existence of 
 any form that their imagination might sketch out as 
 possible and as consistent with the laws they had found 
 permeating all the known universe. Belief was for 
 them hope waiting for realisation. 
 
 Every new discovery pointed more and more defin- 
 itely to the greater persistence of the higher forms of 
 energy. What appeals to the more primitive and lower 
 set of senses holds to even its inner form for but a com- 
 paratively brief time. Touch is the primary sense, 
 and all that it, unaided by the other senses, can dis- 
 cover is apt to keep changing its form. Taste and 
 smell are simple modifications of touch and they report 
 of things in perpetual transformation. Hearing and 
 sight are the highest of the first set of senses; for they 
 respond to types of energy that travel from vast dis- 
 tances. Hearing is the lower of the two, because the 
 lower senses are conscious unaided of the medium in 
 which the energy travels. Sight has as her courier an 
 energy which bridges infinity, and its medium no lower 
 sense can cognise. lyight approaches nearer to inde- 
 structibility than anything the original senses know. 
 The last- developed of the senses, the firla, takes cog- 
 nisance of an energy, magnetism, which is farthest of 
 
360 Limanora 
 
 all from the need of a material medium; whilst the fil- 
 ammu or will-telegraph brings soul to soul irrespective 
 of all sense-cognisable means of communication, and 
 proves the existence of a medium more refined than 
 any that either the senses or the reason has yet come 
 to know. This medium, doubtless that of thought 
 itself, as the highest and least material, must be least 
 destructible, least transformable, least unstable in 
 equilibrium of all known mediums. Their ooarans 
 would soon be made delicate enough to measure the 
 faintest presence of soul, and would decide the point 
 whether this medium, evidently spread throughout the 
 universe, was of the same stuff as the soul. 
 
 Still were they far from scientific proof of the eternal 
 unity and individuality of the soul. They had rea- 
 soned out iii accordance with all the axioms of their 
 science the indestructibility of energy, and the rising 
 untransformability of the higher types of energy; they 
 had also reasoned out as certainly that mediums of en- 
 ergy had stability of equilibrium proportionate to the 
 refinement of the energy travelling through them, and 
 that thus the soul was nearer to everlasting persistence 
 as a unity than any medium they scientifically knew. 
 But that on its escape from the body it continued for 
 ever as an individuality they could only assume; they 
 could not prove it. They shrank from the idea that it 
 was for ever past transformation; for that meant the 
 eternal continuance of the last stage of life. It was 
 indeed contrary to all the results of their scientific 
 investigations to think that any type of energy or 
 medium could at any time cease to change, that is, to 
 improve or degenerate. Perpetual transformation was, 
 as far as they had been able to search, the universal 
 law: it might be into a higher or more stable form, 
 
Death 361 
 
 or into a lower or more material form, but onwards 
 must every energy move. The higher it went, the less 
 did it tend to fall back. The law of eternal advance 
 was surer in its action in the higher ranges of existence. 
 And the whole effort of I^imanoran life was to purify 
 and ennoble the energy that was in it. For, reasoning 
 on the analogy of all the nature they knew, they had 
 little doubt that the platform they reached by the end 
 of their terrene life was the platform from which their 
 enfranchised energy or individuality, whichever it was, 
 started on its new career. 
 
 Whether it was mere unconscious energy or energy 
 conscious of its own unity that escaped from the body, 
 when it was left to the disintegrant power of micro- 
 scopic organisms, was still a question. The recent 
 discoveries and investigations of the Ailomo or astrobio- 
 logical families had revealed all space filled not merely 
 with types of energy that were directed and did not 
 guide themselves, but with embodiments of energy 
 which were clearly individualities; not alone the poor 
 microscopic attenuations of life that were waiting for 
 a world to settle on, but highly organised beings, lead- 
 ing a vigorous, self-dependent life in the vast regions 
 of infinitude. This much they knew from the filmy 
 impressions which their air-transcending lavolans 
 brought down from the heights of heaven they scaled. 
 But whence those inhabitants of the ether came they 
 had not yet been able to tell; for their presence 
 affected no existing human sense, but only left on the 
 irelium films certain visible impressions. Whether 
 they were refugees from other stars, or everlasting oc- 
 cupants of interstellar space, and whether amongst 
 them there were any of the emancipate from human 
 trammels were questions they had not yet been able to 
 
3 62 Limanora 
 
 answer. But they hoped soon to have an instrument 
 which would indicate the presence of personality as 
 apart from vital energy, and as apart from the thought 
 and thought-faculty. Then would they be able to tell 
 in what state the enfranchised energy fled from the 
 body at death. 
 
 Amiralno knew not, cared not, whether he would re- 
 tain consciousness of his past, or would become but a 
 part of the wandering energy of space; what he did 
 know was that he would be released from the burden 
 of his body and the growing weariness that dragged it 
 down. Certain he was that his flesh-emancipated en- 
 ergy would find a career at least as noble as his past. 
 And he believed that its development would not end 
 there, whatever became of it; whether it was to con- 
 tinue the unity it had been conscious of for so many 
 years, or to take another form and individuality, was 
 to him a matter of little concern. One thing he knew, 
 and that was the growing imperfection of the body as 
 an instrument of the energy that functioned it. It 
 weighted to the ground the soul, the spirit, the mind, 
 or whatever name he might give to the fiery stuff which 
 kept it still aflame, and yet chafed to be free. As 
 long as it held this energy in leash, it would live and 
 glow with thought. Nor was this fiery stuff mere 
 vitality, the mere principle of life, though the two 
 were yoked together. It was different in quality from 
 that which merely vegetated in the plant, and that 
 which did nothing but feed and evacuate in the mol- 
 lusc. Nay, it differed in inner character, not merely 
 from the mind of the savage, but from that of their own 
 highly civilised exiles. Limanoran advance had puri- 
 fied it of grosser desires and passions and made it a 
 thing of ethereal longings and ideals; even the body 
 
Death 363 
 
 had been transformed into something more like what 
 the soul of their far past had been, subtle, buoyant, 
 sublimated. Still it dragged the spirit down, whenever 
 the limits of corporeal life became too apparent. Many 
 a long generation of fiery self -disciplined work upon 
 their constitutions would it take even this marvellous 
 people to etherealise their bodies so far as to make 
 them fit companions of their souls. 
 
 Amiralno had not the vital energy to bear up against 
 the conditions that harassed their still hybrid system. 
 He had no desire to stay and see the slow evolution of 
 a body that would pace with the soul through infinity. 
 Better to have release and a new and untrammelled 
 career even if the form he should take was unknown to 
 him. It was the nature of all energy to change, and 
 the higher in the scale it rose, the nimbler it became. 
 But in order to rise it had to be yoked for a time with 
 a lower form, which it used as medium and leverage, 
 leaving it as soon as it had accomplished its due devel- 
 opment. All things tended to rise above themselves; 
 and it was the greatest of disasters, the very reversal of 
 nature, if ever they should fall back, as they often did. 
 What we call death was but the unyoking of a higher 
 energy from a lower, which it had temporarily made 
 its comrade and medium. It was no misfortune or 
 degradation, but a step higher in enfranchisement. 
 The animate resisted this step, because one member 
 in the lifelong partnership refused to descend into 
 a grosser transformation again. In the human, the 
 nobler the thought-energy, the higher it strove to raise 
 itself before the inevitable divorce from its lower 
 medium and yoke- fellow. But when the time of sever- 
 ance approached, it mastered the reluctance of the 
 lower, and yearned to be set free. And little wonder 
 
364 Limanora 
 
 that the lower resisted; for back it had to fall in the 
 cosmic order, and begin again its slow progress upward 
 from grade to grade; first into the clutches of myriads 
 of microscopic disintegrators of its tissues that would 
 transform it into food for plant-life, and then by weary 
 stages upwards through vegetable and animal tissue, 
 perchance into the sustenance of thought again. 
 
 This people, I soon found, had overcome the ancient 
 abhorrence of death. For they identified their life and 
 personality with the higher of their energies, and not 
 with the lower and bodily forms. They shrank, it is 
 true, from all that would lead to the divorce of the 
 yoked energies of any animate being before its due 
 time; not so much because they thought this an evil 
 for the victim as because the perpetration would im- 
 plant in the doer a germ of retrogression. To be cruel, 
 to shed blood, was the beginning of degradation of the 
 soul ; it was one of the acts that allowed the lower to 
 take command of the higher in their system. But for 
 a Limanoran himself to approach death became, when- 
 ever he saw it to be inevitable, the keenest joy, in spite 
 of the farewells it entailed. He knew that thereafter, 
 should he make effort to live, he would only clog the 
 wheels of progress, he would only be a burden on the 
 race instead of its helper. Amiralno never showed the 
 slightest sign of shrinking from the dissolution of his 
 life-bonds. He was sad to leave his lifelong mate, with 
 whom he had done so much for the race; but he knew 
 that she would soon follow him; it was a matter of 
 but a few days or months; her thought-energy would 
 mingle and commune with his again, freed from the 
 material trammels that checked and dulled their inter- 
 course in their terrene life; upwards through the ether 
 
Death 3 6 5 
 
 their souls would climb, ever becoming purer and 
 swifter in their flight. 
 
 But, as I went about my duties, my thoughts would 
 break away to the coming death-scene and sadness 
 would cloud them. I remembered the last farewells of 
 my buried life, and most of all the watch over the 
 fading light in my mother's eyes. Nothing could burn 
 out of my memory the bitterness of at last facing the 
 inevitable. Slowly had I been led by the physician to 
 realise that nothing could save her, and still I hoped 
 against hope, checking my tears lest she should see 
 them and conjecture my alarm. Only when the lips 
 became silent and pale did I at last admit the thought 
 that this was death. How could I stifle my grief 
 longer ? Were we not all to each other, this mother, 
 who had clung to me and nursed me through sorrows 
 and misfortunes, I her only child, who had refused to 
 leave her for the seductions of great place and fortune ? 
 She was vanishing for ever from me, and nothing I 
 could do would bring her back. I was caught and 
 crushed by the iron hand of fate and stood in stony 
 silence, paralysed by my grief and my impotence. 
 There was too much of the man and the stoic in my 
 young blood to cry out; but if only I could give up my 
 own life to bring hers back! In one of her final wak- 
 ing dreams she prattled and wept over me as if I were 
 a child again, saved once more from the clutching 
 breakers. Raising herself with a wild cry from her 
 pillow, she held me in her arms with fierce love; only 
 for a moment; then the cords that bound her life 
 brake; the memory had torn her heart. There she 
 lay, all that I cared for on earth, rigid, uncaring. If 
 but I could have died with her there! Alas, the life in 
 me was too puissant to yield, the nerves too tough to 
 
366 Limanora 
 
 break! The passion came on me to hurl myself into 
 her grave as the clods fell. It was but an insensate im- 
 pulse. I made no cry or sign till I got into the lonely 
 chamber; and there God alone knows how I survived 
 my hurricane of grief and desolation. Nor could years 
 ever root out the sorrow. There in L,imanora, with an 
 abyss between me and my past, and a noble new life 
 around me, I worked and wept. The wound had 
 opened afresh. Was I never to commune with that 
 loving loved spirit again ? 
 
 There was a touch on my hand, and the magnetism 
 of sympathy and consolation flowed through my sys- 
 tem. It was Thyriel. She had felt my deep grief, 
 though then at a great distance from me, and without 
 noise or speech she had come to my side. So absorbed 
 had I been in my past and my sorrow that I knew not 
 her presence till her magnetic touch awakened me from 
 my dream. She had realised in a moment whither my 
 thoughts had gone, and reverenced the holy past. 
 Then, when the mood was growing despotic and para- 
 lysing the soul, she stepped into the startled silence. I 
 was myself again, and swept the unmanly tears away. 
 
 Yet I could not drive the sadness of farewell out of 
 my system. Here was this sage, who had so often 
 counselled me and guided my faltering footsteps, about 
 to vanish for ever from the scene of his triumphs. 
 Oblivion would sweep his memory and his work into 
 the abyss. We would see him no more; no more hear 
 his grave wise sayings, weighted with the experience of 
 centuries. All his gathered knowledge and skill would 
 lapse; and our civilisation would be the poorer. Up 
 the steep of progress it would have to climb, weaker for 
 the absence of this strong arm, this much-exercised and 
 full brain and heart. 
 
Death 367 
 
 These were the thoughts at the root of my sadness, 
 when I was startled out of them by my companion's 
 voice. She had waited in reverential silence as long as 
 I lived my filial past over again ; but, when I returned 
 to my starting-point, and began spending fruitless re- 
 grets and pangs over that which neither demanded nor 
 warranted them, her thoughts broke out into loud 
 protest. She could no longer endure such futilities, 
 such waste of tissue, and she met my wailing reflections 
 one by one. Amiralno was glad to leave his chrysalis 
 stage of existence; the energy that was in him would 
 find a freer scope, a nobler sphere, as soon as it had 
 shed its earthly trammels. His counsel and guidance 
 would not be lost to progress; all that he was and had 
 would still be part of what he would become; not one 
 thought or faculty would be left behind; and all would 
 then be spent not on the progress of a little island of a 
 small terrestrial archipelago or its race, but on that of 
 the universe, if not of the cosmos. All of him that 
 could still appeal to our lower senses would remain 
 with us, and would immortalise his memory, as far as 
 immortality would go upon this ephemeral orb. As for 
 his sympathy and love, they were doubtless still with 
 us, or at least with what in us was best and nearest the 
 cosmic. The only thing to regret was that we could 
 not personally feel his presence in the universe. But 
 even this was not for idle regrets. It was mere palsy, 
 if it did not stir us to still further mastery of our con- 
 ditions. Were we not in the way to feel and know the 
 escaped spirits of our dead ? Had we not developed 
 senses in us that were receivers of impulses from the 
 infinite around us, impulses that had been dormant 
 through the uncounted past ? Had we not instru- 
 ments that told us of energies and beings unfelt even 
 
368 Limanora 
 
 by our new-developed senses ? And were we to 
 grope in our prison-house, and wail over what we 
 had lost and could not longer see ? Were we to sit 
 in the darkness, and weep and wait, hoping for the 
 light? Such feeble conclusions from the past, such 
 futile regrets over the dead, Limanoran progress could 
 not endure. There were new masteries for every gen- 
 eration. Before many years could pass they would get 
 into touch with the spirits and energies that had fled; 
 it might be by means of new instruments; it might be 
 by new senses; nothing but our own dulness broke the 
 connection between our energies and theirs; what we 
 had still to win was consciousness, if not mastery, of 
 that finer type of matter which they now used as 
 medium for their energy. It was only the lifting of 
 another of the myriad veils that hung before our senses 
 dulling their perceptions. This was no more than 
 what they had done a thousand times already. A death 
 was a stimulus to joy and new effort. It taught us the 
 limits of our knowledge and our power; and limits 
 known were limits soon to be overpassed. 
 
 Her bright activity and banter surprised me into 
 laughter at my own folly and obtuseness. Scarcely 
 had I reached this consummation before I knew that 
 there was gladness in the air of the island. How could 
 I have failed to notice the jubilant strains that were 
 fitfully wafted across my hearing, unless through my 
 dull absorption in my own feelings ? I felt thankful 
 to Thyriel that I had been drawn out of my isolation, 
 which seemed to me now little less than disloyalty to 
 the race that had done so much for me. 
 
 I wondered what could be the occasion of all this 
 exultation that I was conscious of. Paean after paean 
 
Death 369 
 
 rose from every part of the island, and, as the moments 
 passed, the many-sounding music seemed to gather to- 
 wards one centre. The radius lessened, and adjacent 
 masses of melody fused together. Nearer and nearer 
 they came, ever more coalescing and lessening in num- 
 ber; then the jubilance melted into grave and massive 
 harmony, and I recognised some of the world-music I 
 had heard from the cosmophone. The sense of uni- 
 verses creating and dissolving sprang into my mind. It 
 was the diapason of creation that was ringing through 
 the island. Loud, then low, the cosmic symphony 
 swept the amosphere like a tempest. I knew that some 
 far-reaching event or movement was occurring amongst 
 this people. 
 
 I turned to my comrade to confirm and define my 
 conjectures, but she was gone. Away on the horizon 
 I could see the rapid beat of her wings. I followed as 
 swiftly as I could, and, as I rose in the air, I saw com- 
 pany after company soaring like coveys of birds towards 
 a high isolated plateau that stretched from far up Lila- 
 roma and beetled cliff-like over the sea. I had often 
 used it as a flight-platform whence I could spring into 
 the air, and had long known it by the name of Dooma- 
 lona. I had never thought over the meaning of the 
 word, but now it flashed upon me that it meant the hill 
 of farewells. Thence messengers who were embarking 
 on difficult and important expeditions set out. The 
 elders of the people and the families of the couriers 
 came here to give them their love and benison, in order 
 to make them feel, as they journeyed, that the sym- 
 pathy of their home went with them like a fire from the 
 hearth. 
 
 I had observed that in these farewells this simple- 
 hearted people made little outward sign of the depth of 
 
37 Limanora 
 
 their emotions. Only the magnetic look out of the 
 eyes would have told a stranger what benignity lay 
 underneath. Nor was it merely to show how sympa- 
 thetic they were that they thus accompanied their for- 
 eign couriers to the outskirts of the island. It was 
 chiefly to give them each his contribution of magnet- 
 ism, to lessen their burden on their far journey, to 
 make them feel how much the spirit of the community 
 went with them. Not one of them would ever allow 
 himself to indulge in so idle an evidence of emotion as 
 tears. There was in this people a vein of stoicism, I 
 thought; they seemed to repress all mere symbols of 
 feeling. A European would have called their farewells 
 dull and emotionless, if not stony-hearted. There was 
 no kissing or embracing; there was not even the shak- 
 ing of hands or bowing of heads. Without physical 
 contact their spirits could work upon each other with 
 a power that in other civilisations would have been 
 called witchcraft. Through their firlas, through their 
 eyes, rayed forth a keen soul-stirring magnetism. And 
 each assisted the other in preventing the approach of 
 the old wasteful manifestations of sorrow or despon- 
 dency. Lamentation was a thing of the far, almost 
 prehistoric, past; a sob or sigh or even complaint they 
 knew too well from their physiological knowledge to 
 be mere emotional extravagance, a waste of the energy 
 or the tissue, all of which was needed for the strenuous 
 endeavour towards a higher plane. So it was that they 
 seemed to me stoical in positions where the men and 
 women I had known in my youth would burst into 
 weeping and wailing, or cries and gestures of affection. 
 But in these scenes of farewell there was needed little 
 energy of repression; the real struggle had occurred 
 many generations before in their history. They had 
 
Death 37 1 
 
 once had a most elaborate symbolism not merely of feel- 
 ings but of almost every human thought and spiritual 
 attitude. But when the great national repentance was 
 leading to the series of exilings that ultimately purified 
 the race, they became uneasy about this vast system 
 of symbolism; it covered their whole existence from 
 birth to death, from toothache to the salvation of the 
 soul, and seemed to be nature her very self. They had 
 long known it to be the nesting-place of all hypocrisies 
 and untruth. Under its shelter mean things and falsity 
 and even grossness and cruelty could flourish fearless 
 of harm. Everything could masquerade in the guise 
 of anything else it pleased. Of course there were pain- 
 ful revelations and scandals at times; but they were 
 soon hushed up. The system was too much the in- 
 terest of all who had power or reputation or prosperity, 
 the best of what was then life, to let it get into disre- 
 pute, or into risk of revolution or reform. There were 
 various professions which were deeply involved in the 
 retention of it, and they were recruited chiefly from 
 the highest social classes. The lawyers battened on the 
 ambiguity of the symbols, whether expressed in word 
 or deed ; the doctors would have lost half their hysteri- 
 cal and hypochondriac patients if it had been abol- 
 ished; without it the life and pretensions of the military 
 during time of peace would have been a farce and a 
 mockery ; and the occupation of the priests would have 
 vanished altogether. Ceremony seemed the very life- 
 blood of an aristocratic state, and especially of its army 
 and its church. It kept the mere workers and plodders 
 at a respectful distance, it fenced off criticism, and 
 supplied topics for the tongue of fame. To abolish 
 ceremony would have been to strike at the heart of all 
 existing institutions. 
 
37 2 Limanora 
 
 But, as the purgation proceeded, every occasion for 
 it naturally disappeared. Ceremonial ceased when the 
 church lapsed and the priestly profession went into 
 exile. Ceremony vanished with the expulsion of the 
 militant elements and the professional politicians. The 
 bureau of fame collapsed with its accursed spawn, un- 
 charitableness and evil feeling, servility, adulation, 
 and pretence. The pharisaism of the whole system 
 stood out in all its offensiveness, and the foulness and 
 injustice that were concealed by this constant mas- 
 querade in the robes of greatness. It was meant to 
 overawe the unthinking, to make ignorance grovel at 
 the feet of those in power. It had been useful in far 
 past times of savagery in cowing the beast in the hu- 
 man mind and keeping it caged. But a form that has 
 life and meaning and power in the ruder stages of de- 
 velopment becomes a curse, if continued into periods 
 of advanced civilisation. They now felt that their elab- 
 orate symbolism had been an insult to their intelli- 
 gence; for they had no brutality in them to be muzzled. 
 To keep up the pretence of greatness or virtue or love 
 or respect or truth, where there was none, was useful 
 as long as most of the community were ignorant, or su- 
 perstitious, or fierce and intolerant in disposition. But 
 when the race had grown gentle and humane and more 
 and more progressive, it was not merely a farce to re- 
 tain so much deception and mummery in life, it was a 
 gross outrage on all that was just and noble and 
 spiritual. Why should not the reverence or affection 
 of the human spirit be allowed to shine forth from the 
 countenance without such ridiculous trammels, such 
 coarse humiliations ? Forms compelling a show of rev- 
 erence or love where there is none, are but the trap- 
 pings of slaves, and soon ingrain the thoughts and 
 
Death 373 
 
 feelings of slaves on the one side, whilst bringing out 
 and confirming the nature of bullies and tyrants on the 
 other. Every relic of a past that had harboured and 
 perpetuated such a system was painfully ejected from 
 their natures. They would have nothing in them that 
 savoured of such a death-in-life. All mere forms, all 
 ceremonials and ceremonies had to go. Ostentation 
 and parade became abhorrent to them. Pageant and 
 spectacle, pomp and solemnity vanished from their 
 lives. All formality of manner or intercourse, even 
 etiquette and salutation, was driven out with con- 
 tumely. 
 
 One of the most singular effects of this expulsion 
 of mere symbolism was the disappearance of ridicule 
 and jest. This disappearance was quite unexpected, 
 and yet, when they came to reflect on the phenomenon, 
 they saw how natural it was. The obverse of the pas- 
 sion for applause and influence is necessarily the desire 
 to depreciate possible rivals, to make them seem small, 
 and even to trample them in the dust. And the most 
 successful and least apparently ill-natured method of 
 fulfilling this is to get them laughed at and so con- 
 temned. With the ignoble itch for fame went the love 
 of ridicule. The jesters, habitual as well as profes- 
 sional, disappeared with the priests, the soldiers, the 
 lawyers, and the politicians. Not that the Limanorans 
 abandoned the use of humour; they still saw too clearly 
 the incongruities of existence, cosmic as well as human, 
 to cease bringing them out in startling flashes of vivid 
 expression. They never indulged in that boisterous 
 laughter which is so often thought in the West the 
 simplest and most primitive guaranty of enjoyment; 
 for that is as much a waste of valuable tissue as uncon- 
 trollable grief. Their laughter was of that low, gentle, 
 
374 Limanora 
 
 tolerant, almost inward, kind, which brightens the na- 
 ture to its very heart; its only outer mark was perhaps 
 a smile. Never indeed was I amongst a people that 
 looked at existence so cheerfully or enjoyed its little 
 ironies with so light-hearted a geniality. Buoyancy, 
 joyousness, was the most constant characteristic of 
 their spirits. Their intercourse with each other was 
 ever sunny and pleasant-witted, though never jocular. 
 There was no malice or false sense of superiority in 
 their humour or laughter. 
 
 But jest tbey came to abhor as an indignity to the 
 human spirit which was striving to obliterate all traces 
 of its ape-ancestry. The jester implied or produced 
 contempt for his topic, for his victim, and generally for 
 himself. He usually adopted mimicry as the easiest 
 method of bringing about his effect. And so he nursed 
 the ape in him, and pointed back to the vile type from 
 which he had sprung. It was the other kinship of 
 man, his divine relationship, that the Limanorans pre- 
 ferred to acknowledge and nurture. Never did they 
 forget it in their conduct. It moulded their ideals, it 
 directed their purposes, it created their instincts. And 
 to use ridicule was to outrage it, to call up the beast in 
 them, the element, the ancestry that they did their 
 best to forget. Whenever the sense of mutual sym- 
 pathy crept through the community, the degradation of 
 jest and ridicule, not for the victim alone, but for the 
 jester, became self-evident. They were felt to be in- 
 humane, if not inhuman, and died an easy death with 
 all the vast system of symbolism. 
 
 It was a surprise to me then to see so large an as- 
 semblage winging their way to Doomalona. It seemed 
 as if there was about to be a great ceremonial. And I 
 
Death 375 
 
 was not long in doubt as to the occasion. For with 
 music that rose and fell in marvellous rhythm like the 
 waves of the sea there came across the sky a splendid 
 flight-car, more brilliant in opalescent glow, more ma- 
 jestic in architecture, than anything I had ever seen. 
 Its wings flashed fire through the air and seemed to 
 weave the lightnings of heaven into a diaphanous web. 
 It was a car of victory; for around it bands of flying 
 youth raised jubilant harmony, and over its rear rose a 
 canopy crowned with fire. As it floated nearer I could 
 see beneath this a figure resting upon an elevated 
 oouch. The music grew more loudly triumphant as it 
 hovered downwards to the central plateau of the hill 
 of farewells. And then I knew that this was Amir- 
 alno on the couch; and all the people, except the few 
 who were needed for the essential services of the 
 island, had assembled to bid him farewell, as he sped 
 in front of them into the land of shadows whither no 
 eye could penetrate. 
 
 I had without knowing it landed close to Thyriel, 
 so absorbed had I been in the wondrous spectacle. 
 She had been busy with the chorus of acclaim, her 
 thoughts bent on this rare scene of farewell; and she 
 had not noticed my approach. Then a sudden silence, 
 as Amiralno stepped from the faleena, startled the 
 great concourse out of their entranced attitude; their 
 thoughts were set free as by the touch of a magic 
 wand. It was at this that Thyriel became conscious of 
 my presence. I knew in a moment that she had recog- 
 nised the criticism in my mind. Yet she did not an- 
 swer or explain the anomaly. She remained perfectly 
 still. 
 
 A burst of jubilant music broke my reverie, as the 
 sudden silence had broken it before. It led me back 
 
37 6 Limanora 
 
 to the symphony of the spheres to which I had been ac- 
 customed to listen with rapt attention. I could recog- 
 nise the harmonious strain that meant the creation of a 
 world. I could almost see the whirling orb of fire, as 
 it flew off from the parent sun, and swept into its glow- 
 ing round through heaven. Nothing I had ever heard 
 could match the rapturous melody which expressed the 
 approach of life to the surface of the new star. Quicker 
 and quicker grew the* pace, and higher the pitch, as the 
 living creation developed and spread over the world. 
 Then came a wild dithyramb, as man broke from his 
 bestial surroundings, and mastered his fellow-beasts by 
 cunning, and drew fire from heaven for his purposes. 
 A nobler strain followed, rhythmically measuring the 
 steps by which he rose out of himself and climbed the 
 steep of heaven. Silver-toned harmonies told of his 
 masterpieces of art. L,oud diapasons spoke out his 
 marching armies and fierce battles. Soft involved 
 fugues and dulcet chants expressed the struggles and 
 conquests of thought. 
 
 I stood absorbed in the interpretation of this ravish- 
 ing music, and failed to observe the progress of events 
 upon the lofty plateau. Amiralno had taken up an 
 erect position on what might have been called an altar, 
 had the scene been a religious one. His face was to- 
 wards heaven. He held his right hand as if waving 
 back those whom he forbade to follow him; for close to 
 him stood the partner of his earthly life, her face set as 
 if she would depart. Around stood his lifelong com- 
 rades and counsellors, yet at a lower level, so that every 
 act of the departing could be seen by the concourse. 
 Near him were erected two columns, on the higher of 
 which and above his head I could distinguish a psy- 
 chometer, on the lower a biometer. Behind him had 
 
Death 377 
 
 been built into the rock an elaborate piece of machin- 
 ery, which I recognised as a manana or petrifier. Often 
 had I seen it transfix almost in a moment a beautiful 
 plant, substituting irelium for its living tissues, and 
 making every leaf and flower of its translucent crystal. 
 By means of electric currents, it sent streams of the 
 atomic constituents of irelium along the sap-channels 
 from rootlet to leaf- tip; it used the living powers of the 
 plant to turn it as it died into undecaying metal. For 
 hundreds of years the flower would live and be a thing 
 of beauty, even if no care was further spent on it; and, 
 if cared for, it would resist the finger of decay for thou- 
 sands and thousands of years. 
 
 At last I was to see the transfiguration of a Lima- 
 noran. I had often almost doubted the origin of those 
 lifelike statues that stood in Fialume, and death was so 
 rare a thing among this long-lived people that during 
 my many years amongst them I had never had the 
 opportunity of satisfying the doubt. Curiosity over- 
 shadowed my other feelings and made me forget the 
 grief which would keep creeping into my heart at this 
 farewell scene in spite of the j ubilant music. I strained 
 every nerve and sense to catch the features of the 
 strange event. Thyriel, I felt, was as eager as I to see 
 all that would occur, and I could see that the younger 
 half of the concourse had their attention closely riveted 
 upon the scene. 
 
 The observer of the biometer raised his eyes to the 
 indicator, which had now begun to move in rapid oscil- 
 lations. Amiralno lifted the forefinger of his left hand 
 as if giving a signal. He looked back a moment with 
 longing in his eyes at his life-partner. From the 
 manana there sprang out an upright groove towards 
 the dying man, and in this he was caught, as his 
 
Limanora 
 
 vitalityrose to its greatest effort before the final collapse. 
 The indicator of the sidralan shot upwards with great 
 violence, and then' fell still. Almost at the same mo- 
 ment the guardian who stood on the loftier column be- 
 side the psychometer raised himself in agitation. The 
 indicator had begun the same violent oscillations as 
 that of the biometer. There could be little doubt that 
 the individual energy or soul of the vanished Amiralno 
 had passed near it in his flight upwards. 
 
 Through the brief and impressive scene the note of 
 creation rang in the music that filled the air, and never 
 that of dissolution. Then burst forth the chorus of 
 freedom, which was the national song, if anything 
 might be so called. It was the liberation of the energy 
 of their friend and comrade that they united to cele- 
 brate, his entrance on a new career untrammelled by 
 lower forms of inert energy. The music rose as if on 
 wings, higher, higher, ever more exhilarant. There 
 were in it none of the undertones, or deeper notes, or 
 mystic subtleties that marked so many of their spheral 
 harmonies. It was a sound of pure joy, ethereal, su- 
 pernal, unalloyed by any terrene longings. Who could 
 think of grief or the bitterness of farewells, as long as 
 it rang through the sky ? Courage, confidence to climb 
 upwards was the only emotion that could live with joy 
 in its presence. 
 
 Suddenly the music broke away into a tempest of 
 cosmic melody. Now wailed forth the wild song of 
 dissolution of worlds, again the clashing of conflicting 
 systems, followed by the surge of new life in orbs that 
 were to whirl through space and elevate the existence 
 upon them for thousands of thousands of ages. It was 
 the music of mingled creation and disintegration, of 
 development and decay which we heard once more. 
 
Death 379 
 
 Our thoughts were recalled from the heights of 
 heaven, whither the lost personality of our guide and 
 friend had fled. We were absorbed again in the strug- 
 gle of a mixed existence; we felt again the agonies of 
 the higher active energies bound to lower and merely 
 latent energies. My eyes came down to the scene of 
 the last farewell. There stood the almost living statue 
 of our vanished brother, erect, eager as for flight, as 
 at the moment when his energy had gone forth. But 
 now it had the clear metallic translucence of the thou- 
 sands I had seen in Fialume. The transfiguration was 
 complete. 
 
 But there was more on the plateau than the figure of 
 what had been. Beside it with rapt, pleading gaze on 
 her face stood yet unmoved the life-comrade of the 
 vanished. The manana was again in position, the 
 observers again stood by the biometer and the psy- 
 chometer. Another scene of departure and trans- 
 figuration was to be enacted. The whole consciousness 
 of the community had granted without words the peti- 
 tion of Amiralno's spouse. Nothing seemed to be so 
 fitting as that the two should leave their trammelled 
 life together, and within the space of a few hundred 
 beatings of the pulse partner had followed partner. 
 The two lives, joined for so many centuries, had come 
 to a close together. Out into infinite space had fled the 
 two intertwined energies, only a few heartbeats apart. 
 Perhaps together they would find their new sphere, 
 their new platform for still higher flight through the 
 diviner stages of existence. 
 
 The Limanorans, when they had reached what they 
 considered the limits of their usefulness in corporeal 
 life, gained an instinctive knowledge of the moment 
 when death was certain to come, or perhaps it was an 
 
380 Limanora 
 
 instinctive power of dying. It is a common thing to 
 see amongst savage or half -civilised tribes a man or 
 woman in full health deliberately lie down, turn the 
 face away from friends and light, and prepare to die. 
 They seem to know when their destiny is coming upon 
 them, and nothing will persuade them to take measures 
 for driving it off. Strong though the currents of life 
 may be flowing in the veins at the moment, it is not 
 long before they have completely ebbed, and left the 
 body a pulseless mass of inert matter. It was this 
 instinct, whether prophetic or suicidal, that the aged 
 amongst this people seemed to resume when they had 
 weighed the vital powers in their systems against the 
 duties that new ages with their progress would bring, 
 and found them wanting. Destiny seemed to speak 
 out to them, when they saw the transference of the 
 minus to the wrong side. Their minds were made up 
 and it needed but a few days or hours to set the im- 
 prisoned energy free. In these later and more scien- 
 tific ages there was some delay, and not uncommonly a 
 postponement of the departure. A careful examination 
 of the system by means of their new scientific instru- 
 ments revealed some radical mistake in the judgment 
 of the elder as to himself, or the demands of a new age 
 of discovery made the need of more brains and hands 
 imperative. The result was the same in both cases; 
 the reason was persuaded to give up its resolve; life 
 flowed on in the veins with even power again; all the 
 old duties were resumed; and the day of farewells was 
 put off till a more convenient season. But once they 
 were convinced that they were retarding progress in- 
 stead of accelerating it, the end, they felt, was within 
 measurable distance; they straightway relinquished 
 their grasp of life; they withdrew purpose and power 
 
Death 381 
 
 of will from all their vital functions; and the moment 
 of the final collapse was practically within their own 
 choice, as soon as they had the consciousness of the 
 whole community with them. 
 
 Here stood two solid memorials to the working of 
 this prescient or devitalising power. The beauty of 
 expression on the two faces was very striking. The 
 attitudes were as natural and noble as life itself, that 
 of Amiralno bidding his partner farewell, hers full of 
 loving petition to follow. That the whole people ap- 
 proved was clear in the heartiness with which they 
 broke into the song of liberation. Everyone was glad 
 that the energies of these two, who had done their full 
 duty by the race, were free to enter other spheres, and 
 follow other than the terrene methods of advance. 
 Reverently, but still with great rejoicing, the family of 
 the departed placed the two lifelike statues in the car 
 of victory, and guided it in triumphal flight to the val- 
 ley of memories. Then the people as reverently and 
 joyously bent their way to the duties they had left. 
 
 I stood in a day-dream of the strange but noble ways 
 of life that this people followed, and suddenly awakened 
 to find myself alone on the hill of farewells overlooking 
 the ocean. Sorrow over the departures I had witnessed 
 welled back into my heart; I had not yet got rid of the 
 old attitude of Western civilisation towards death. 
 With the sorrow mingled still the old curiosity ; ques- 
 tions sprang into my mind concerning the significance 
 of the ceremony I had seen ; or was it a ceremony ? I 
 was startled with the answer in the negative. It came 
 from Thyriel, who, knowing my doubts, had remained 
 to solve them. Soon I knew the whole meaning of the 
 scene. It was not premeditated. There was nothing 
 
382 Limanora 
 
 deliberate about it except the deaths themselves. The 
 dulness of my own inner senses had prevented me from 
 knowing the common impulse of the race towards 
 Doomalona. As soon as Amiralno had finally resolved 
 to die, the consciousness of his resolve spread over the 
 island, and stirred the people at their duties to common 
 action. They knew that the hill of farewells would be 
 the scene of the departure, and in bands singing the 
 cosmic music of farewell they made their flight through 
 the air to give a last valediction to the voyager into the 
 unknown and to impart to him in his final effort on 
 earth all the magnetic power they could spare for him 
 on his journey. Every act of what I had thought was 
 a ceremonial was the natural and spontaneous impulse 
 of a people united in spirit. Their music and the 
 changes in it were due to no leader or signal, but to 
 the sympathetic inspiration of the moment. Their 
 creational chant was an assertion of their mood of be- 
 lief that this scene was one of advance, and not of retro- 
 gression, of development and not of decay, that the act 
 was as much an act of cosmic life as the creation of a 
 world. Certain portions of the system were about to 
 become manifestly inert, those which were called bodily 
 and material, but which were as truly forms of energy 
 as the individual energy that was being liberated. 
 They were made unchanging, permanent, for a time, 
 and so were unable to progress or retrograde; they 
 were to retain their energy in latency for a period long 
 or short; but at last they too, when their immediate 
 purpose of remembrance of the vanished was served, 
 would be set free to take other forms. Their creational 
 music was intended, if there was any intention in so 
 spontaneous a thing, to keep before their minds the 
 progressive and evolutionary nature of death, and to 
 
Death 3&3 
 
 quell the old and barbarous attitude of grief which 
 might attempt to show itself when they were bidding 
 the final farewell to a comrade. It was meant to bring 
 into prominence the joy of the spirit freed from the 
 bondage to lower forms of energy, and the delight of 
 all who remained in the progress of the cosmos, even 
 though the immediate act should imply a separation of 
 a loved spirit from them. It helped them to repress 
 any sadness at the thought that they might never 
 recognise the energy of their lost comrade again as an 
 individual and personal thing. Enough for them that 
 the sum of existence should be enriched by the change 
 which was occurring to him. 
 
 But was it not a grief to them that the parting was 
 perhaps eternal, as far as personal recognition went ? 
 The question rose spontaneously in my mind; and I 
 was answered almost before I had thought it. The 
 doubt was still unsolved whether as impersonal energy 
 they developed into something new at death and for 
 ever ceased to bear marks and memories of the phase 
 of existence they had just left, or whether they sallied 
 forth from the bonds of a lower and inert energy into 
 the freer scope of infinity, an individual and complete 
 unity. This doubt, they were certain, would be solved 
 some da}' by scientific experiment. Meantime there 
 were compensating advantages, whichever alternative 
 was true. If they continued the personality they had 
 already developed on earth without break in conscious- 
 ness or memory, then would they recognise their old 
 comrades and partners in Limanoran life, and make 
 further progress through existence together. 
 
 If, on the other hand, there was a break in the con- 
 tinuity, and only as an impersonal energy they passed 
 forth into the interstellar spaces, then would there be 
 
3 8 4 Limanora 
 
 the obliteration of all the animal and barbarous past 
 which they abhorred, as well as of the immediate and 
 Limanoran past which they loved. Any being that 
 has advanced much in its more recent stages must 
 naturally try to forget the lower stages through which 
 it has gone in a more distant past. They were by no 
 means proud of their relationship to their exiles or to 
 the still older and wider humanity existing outside of 
 their archipelago. To remember it was to encourage 
 the lower and less-advancing man in them. To forget 
 it was one of the ethical duties which their progress 
 demanded. It was only as a horror, as a possible hell 
 into which they might fall, if they retrograded, that it 
 was still brought before them. 
 
 A race or nation that remains long proud of its past 
 must be but imperceptibly progressive, if it is pro- 
 gressive at all. Its ethical point of view is stationary, 
 its morals and religion are stagnant. The history of a 
 people should rapidly come to seem ignoble to it, if it 
 does its duty to itself and its progress. What is the 
 history of other races but a record of wars, of wholesale 
 slaughters, because of the ambition of a man or a sec- 
 tion of men ? And as long as we are proud of such a 
 past we can never advance. To have an ancestry 
 nobler than ourselves is an undying disgrace, and to 
 suggest such a thing to a man should be considered the 
 grossest insult. Where a people is developing as it 
 ought to develop in the brief period it has upon earth, 
 oblivion should be one of its foremost duties to all but 
 its immediate past. Man has forgotten his bestial 
 ancestry so effectually that when he comes across the 
 manifest relics of the relationship in his system, he 
 is startled and wildly denies it. If he progressed as 
 rapidly as he ought to do, after there has been im- 
 
Death 
 
 planted in him the divine principle of reason, then 
 would he as surely cast into oblivion his savage and 
 semi-civilised ancestry. Out with the ape and all relics 
 and memories of it is the struggle of thinking men. To 
 be done with the crude undeveloped past is the duty of 
 progressive men. The ideal of to-day should be the 
 commonplace of to-morrow, and the disgrace of next 
 week. It was useful to study the immediate past in 
 order to get perspective for the present, and to decide on 
 the rate of progress for the future. But it was becoming 
 doubtful to this people whether they should perpetuate 
 in the valley of memories so much of the past after it 
 had faded into insignificance. They had come to think 
 that to forget was as necessarj 7 to the advance of man 
 as to remember, and that a universal rubbish-destructor 
 for the now poverty-stricken achievements of their far 
 past would one day become essential. As it was they 
 still preserved records of them lest some historical 
 question might grow to be of importance to their future. 
 It was little wonder then that they had no great 
 abhorrence for the obliteration of the past from their 
 energy at death. If the other alternative were the true, 
 and if, as so many religions teach, they were to be 
 herded with the criminal and besotted and undeveloped 
 souls that have passed from the earth, then might they 
 bid farewell to true progress beyond death. And what 
 is the meaning of continuity of existence and memory, 
 unless it be the intercourse of terrene souls in the life 
 outside of life ? To be rid of the flesh and its inert 
 energies is still to be enslaved to worse evils, the possi- 
 bility of contact with the foul beings that inhabit the 
 human form, even the noblest and most belauded hu- 
 man form. The Limanorans would gladly abandon 
 the delight of recognising and loving again the souls 
 
386 Limanora 
 
 they knew and loved, if only to be free from such a 
 horror. Better almost annihilation than enslavement 
 to the retrogrades of earth in another sphere. Whence 
 the terror of discontinuity of memory, if the burden of 
 the past were to be lifted off us, and a new and more 
 progressive career given to our energy ? The L,inia- 
 norans believed that when unyoked from the inert 
 forms which had come from their animal past, their 
 higher energy would enter on a progress that would 
 make all they now did seem almost stagnancy; and the 
 power of remembering any . past would only mean 
 shame at its having been theirs. 
 
 It never gave them pause to think that what came 
 after death was still .unknown. They had passed a 
 happy bright life upon the earth, free from the pangs 
 and agonies as well as the fierce pleasures, the snaky 
 involvements as well as the passionate amours, of other 
 civilisations. But, when the effort to live had come to 
 be so great as to overbalance the compensations and 
 utilities of their life, then was it no pang for them to 
 leave it; for they were scientifically sure that death 
 would be no break in their progressive existence; if 
 anything, it was certain to be an intensification of the 
 progress which they loved most. 
 
 One of the last of their great series of exilings had 
 been to cast out of their midst a number of men and 
 women who never did anything but long for death, 
 and advocated early suicide with religious fervour as 
 the true and only panacea for all ills. Their doctrines 
 would have done little harm to the community, if they 
 had not been rooted in practice, and often led to tragic 
 results. For they came from languid, low-strung tem- 
 peraments, that felt disinclined to face the strain of life 
 
Death 387 
 
 or to help the advance of the race. The current of 
 energy in their ancestry had gradually run more and 
 more feebly, till it was in them at its lowest ebb. It 
 was against their grain to work, and they did their 
 share in the tasks of the community with the most 
 patent reluctance. This alone would have been reason 
 enough for their exile, inasmuch as they gave evil ex- 
 ample to the youth around, But they were subtle in 
 the use of the tongue too, and could with skilful Jesuitry 
 show how indolence was the noblest life. And worse 
 still, when they were left to their own devices, they 
 soon made a violent end to their feeble lives, and gave 
 a tragic and ghastly appearance to death. Out into 
 Thanasia or the isle of death they were one and all de- 
 ported, with enough goods and provisions to keep them 
 and their descendants alive, if only they were indus- 
 trious, for thousands of years. But none of them 
 would work, or till the soil, or even cook their food; 
 and one by one they gave themselves up to death. 
 The more ingenious invented a method of leaving life 
 which had a certain grace if not nobility. They erected 
 great funeral pyres and connected them by a slow fuse 
 to a huge battery that sent up its rod into the heavens. 
 When a tempest threatened, they laid themselves out 
 on these, and when the lightning began to flash, the 
 electricity ran along the wires, lit their fagots, and in a 
 few moments swept them out of existence. It was not 
 long before the isle of death was again left to its 
 silences, nothing but the ashes of its former inhabit- 
 ants upon the tops of numerous mounds being left to 
 tell that human life had once been there. No one from 
 the rest of the archipelago seemed to care for life upon 
 it; none ever landed there. The only things that 
 marred the mortuary stillness of the isle were the 
 
388 Limanora 
 
 screaming seabirds, and the tempests which drove 
 them thither. 
 
 It was better for the cosmos that these emasculate 
 weaklings should as soon as possible submit the relics 
 of energy in them to other conditions of being. But it 
 was not well for L,imanoran immaturity to have the 
 spectacle of self-slaughter before them, or the con- 
 tagion of their death-pyre romance and eloquence 
 touch the spirit of youth. Moreover they took some 
 time to resolve on death; and, in the process of form- 
 ing their resolution, it was the natural habit of these 
 tame triflers with death to put all the energy they had 
 into their tongues. As long as they could talk heroics 
 to anyone about the deed they contemplated, they were 
 certain not to accomplish it. And romantic chatter is 
 catching where youth is still unbridled by reason, and 
 in the young who had robuster wills, the results might 
 be more prompt. 
 
 It was different with the death-scenes of men and 
 women who had done their duty by the race and by 
 human progress, and had worked out the best possible 
 results from the yoking of higher and lower energies. 
 Theirs was a true liberation from exhausted lower 
 forms. It was not the languor of the loftier element in 
 them, but the exhaustion of the lower, that brought 
 the nausea of their hybrid life. They could feel, as 
 they looked back, how far their higher or spiritual 
 energy had risen since their entrance into earthly ex- 
 istence. Kvery year had seen them climb upwards; 
 nearer and nearer had their inner energy come towards 
 touch with that divine medium which was in and yet 
 above all life and which in youth they were conscious 
 of only in lofty moments of inspiration. Such were 
 the supreme ascensions of life, when they were capable 
 
Death 
 
 ot the noblest actions and the noblest moral resolves. 
 These moments became more and more frequent as they 
 grew older and more progressive, till towards the close 
 of life they were almost habitual. Limanoran youth 
 snatched at these supernal moments by the help of 
 imagination. Limanoran age dwelt habitually in these 
 moral altitudes that lay far above mere passion or in- 
 stinct. It was the old amongst them who were alone 
 capable of great creative spiritual life. They seemed 
 to feel the tiding of the subtlest energy in the universe, 
 and gave the impulses to most spiritual advance. 
 
 Here and there in other civilisations was bred a 
 nature that had fitful consciousness of this divine 
 medium, at times through great creative imagination, 
 but oftener through noble life. Such a nature is 
 spoken of as inspired; and so far is it true in that it 
 has come into communication with the most refined 
 and most creative medium of the universe, that through 
 which what we call the divine seems to work; but only 
 through patient self-moulding and development has it 
 reached such a height of nobleness. Oftenest in past 
 ages these natures have folind shelter in religion; for 
 in the world ambition must make use of the coarsest 
 tools and the grossest energies to reach its aim; and 
 the growth of a loftier spirit is at once checked, and 
 noble aspiration stifled. Peace and the shadow of de 
 votional thought were the only conditions allowing 
 such a nature any scope in a world based upon war 
 and guided in its search for the right by might alone. 
 
 It was different with lyimanoran civilisation. There 
 it was the rule, and not the exception, to raise the 
 spiritual energies to sympathy with the diviner media 
 of the cosmos, and every condition favoured the pur- 
 suit. Life began with but a fitful consciousness of it, 
 
39 Limanora 
 
 but it grew more continuous and surer. The young 
 could scarcely distinguish its impulses from those of 
 their own lower energies. But the old had seldom any 
 hesitation as to when they were inspired; they seemed 
 to keep in touch with all that is divine in the world. 
 They needed no retreat, no religious shelter, to nurse 
 the magnetic sympathy with the divine. Their affinity 
 to it grew more and more the essence of their being, 
 without ever having to leave their daily routine of 
 duties. It was this that gave them their wisdom and 
 character, and that made the young feel them to be 
 almost a type apart from the ordinarily human. They 
 became more distinct and striking in their personality 
 as they grew older and felt this affinity. It had come 
 to be a common observation of daily life that the nobler 
 the aspirations and the closer the intercourse with the 
 ethical media of the cosmos, the stronger and more 
 distinctive was the character; and science was not far 
 from the conclusion that on this intercourse depended 
 persistence of individuality, and that the higher they 
 reached in their sympathies with the more refined 
 media of the universe, the less need was there of change 
 in their personality at death, of making alliance with 
 other lower energies when they shed their inferior and 
 earthly forms of energy. 
 
 There was, they felt, a noble isolation or apartness 
 of spirit in their old men and women which raised them 
 above common humanity, and made the human body 
 seem an incongruous garment for their soul. They 
 lived above the demands of their corporeal energies 
 rather than in them or by them. In the young the 
 two seemed blended together; it was difficult often to 
 distinguish in them the movements of the two types of 
 energy. But in the old, though the corporeal had 
 
Death 391 
 
 been raised and etherealised, it seemed to hang on the 
 skirts of the spiritual and try to drag it down; it bore 
 its earthly origination more manifestly on it in com- 
 parison with the nobler refinement of the spiritual. 
 And the longer they lived, the stronger the contrast 
 became, till at last nature herself seemed to demand 
 their eternal divorce. Euthanasia at a certain stage in 
 the development of Limanoran life came to be not so 
 much a privilege as a holy duty. To liberate the 
 higher energy from its alliance with the lower, to die, 
 was but the next and most natural stage in the evolu- 
 tion of the life. Even the family, who would feel the 
 bereavement most in the loss of their wise help and 
 guidance, acquiesced gladly, feeling that the liberation 
 must mean a nobler career for the released spiritual 
 energy. Thus it was that on Doomalona they used 
 the music of creation; they gave utterance to their 
 feeling that death was not dissolution but creation, 
 that the retrogression of the body was an advance for 
 the higher energy, the truer self. The sense of decay 
 or degeneration was quite absent from their thoughts. 
 It was a triumphal farewell; for they were convinced 
 that for the liberated it was the noblest deed of all to 
 die, the very crown of all their life. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 AN EPIDEMIC 
 
 HPHOUGHT by thought I ejected my old view of 
 1 death from my mind. I could not forget the 
 scene of triumph which had been enacted on the hill 
 of farewells; and the chanting that rilled through it 
 haunted my imagination, bringing a sense of satisfac- 
 tion, if not joy. I got into the habit of winging my 
 exercise-flights towards Doomalona. I was there with 
 Thyriel when dawn struck the world into gladness and 
 music. There were we together to see the flaming 
 picture the set of sun drew on Lilaroma. No platform 
 on the island so caught the inspiration of the coming 
 or departing orb. None, I came to feel, was so fitted 
 for the hegira of earth- weary souls. No such launch- 
 ing-ground was there for the voyage through infinity. 
 As I frequented it in my leisure moments, there grew 
 into my system the sense that death was not so much 
 an end as a beginning, not a dissolution, but a birth 
 and perhaps a forgetting. More and more was the 
 idea of it a nucleus of delight; and the old melancholy 
 and sorrow, making it a burden and a terror for the 
 mind, disappeared. 
 
 As a proselyte to the new feeling I was eager to talk 
 of it and make much of its surprises. Not with Thyriel 
 
 392 
 
An Epidemic 393 
 
 and my proparents alone did I discuss its varied aspects; 
 I could listen by the hour to their teachings. But it 
 brought me into intercourse with many whom I had 
 scarcely seen before except in the course of my educa- 
 tion as I wandered through the various halls. I was 
 astonished to find how often they sought opportunity 
 to talk to me. They drew me aside as if they had im- 
 portant business with me, and confidentially imparted 
 their views of death which I had heard a hundred 
 times from others, until I grew weary of their chatter, 
 for I wished to talk myself. But they would not allow 
 me to break in on their everlasting torrent of babble; 
 even Thyriel could not endure my interruptions. 
 Though I never grew weary of her talk, I could not 
 restrain the desire to have my say, too. There was no 
 subject on which we could not soliloquise by the hour, 
 but we preferred to talk of death, the freshest and most 
 joyous of topics. And every other youth was just as 
 eager to deliver his opinions to me and to everybody 
 else. However busy they might be with the task in 
 hand, off they would break from it for colloquy, which 
 soon spun itself into the soliloquy of the stronger lungs 
 and the most enduring tongue. Everyone seemed to 
 comport himself as if his views were of the utmost im- 
 portance to the world. They all seemed bursting with 
 the obvious; out it must come or they would die. In 
 every other corner I would find two or three debating 
 with faces all aglow, sometimes in the most confidential 
 whispers; approaching to listen, I would find their 
 topic trite and stale as last year's gossip; the speaker 
 was pressing home on his hearers in a voice of por- 
 tentous awe what no one would think of disputing. 
 
 The elders interfered and tried by patient advice to 
 stop this tempest of loquacity. Hurrying from post to 
 
394 Limanora 
 
 post they tried to keep the young at their work, but it 
 was an endless task. On would go the glib current as 
 soon as their attention was turned elsewhere. Matters 
 began to look serious, for the work of the community 
 was being neglected. The ordinary services of life 
 were barely performed. Little or no progress could 
 be made in such a state of affairs. Indeed, it became 
 manifest that the main aim of the race, progress, would 
 soon be forgotten, and retrogression supervene. The 
 faces of the elders became graver every day; their 
 advice was unheeded, their example unfollowed. Bab- 
 ble, babble, babble, on rolled the fluent river of talk, 
 as if the island had been in the midst of Western civil- 
 isation. When I closed my eyes so loud and empty 
 sounded the magpie babel I could easily fancy myself 
 back again in my native land, and believe that I had 
 dreamt my recent years and wakened again in Christ- 
 endom. 
 
 The ominous gravity of the elders dispelled the 
 fancy. They looked as if doomsday were near, and 
 were often heard to say that something must be done. 
 For the talkativeness was bringing other vices in its 
 train, vanity, flippancy, carelessness, and want of 
 reason. The torrent of eloquence was spreading wider 
 every day and seemed to have broken down the pales 
 of their long centuries of civilisation. No one was 
 capable of stopping it either by precept or example. 
 
 At last in their despair the elders appealed to the 
 medicants. Nothing like the phenomenon had oc- 
 curred within the memory of the oldest; nothing in 
 the records could be found that in the least resembled 
 it since the series of exilings had been completed. At 
 the periodical inspection, the medicants made a more 
 minute investigation of the systems of the youth and 
 
An Epidemic 395 
 
 turned their attention especially to the left side of the 
 brain, which is the great originator and controller of 
 speech. In a few they could see evidences of in- 
 flammation and morbid secretion in the brain-tissue 
 of this region; in most cases nothing out of the com- 
 mon revealed itself to their most recent lavolans. So 
 they took careful electrographs of the left side of the 
 brain of most of them, and when they put these under 
 their strongest clirolans, it became plain that all of them 
 were in a diseased condition. 
 
 The elders were now convinced that they were on 
 the right track of investigation, and all the young peo- 
 ple who had shown symptoms of the passion for elo- 
 quence were isolated and brought hourly under the 
 inspection of the medicauts. Moving electrographs 
 of the thought-processes in the diseased parts were 
 taken daily by means of modifications of the lavolan; 
 and under still more powerful clirolans, made for the 
 purpose, these revealed a microbe of extraordinary 
 minuteness at work in the tissue. Having found the 
 source of the mischief, they set themselves to remove 
 it. At first they put the patient into profound sleep, 
 and, trephining the skull, they cleansed away under 
 the clirolan all traces of the parasite and its debris. 
 What they removed they carefully preserved and 
 analysed; then, having found the chemical elements 
 of the mischievous spawn and their debris, they repro- 
 duced the mixture as a cure of the new and singular 
 disease. For a time this was administered as an in- 
 ternal medicine; but finding that it injured other 
 nerve-centres besides those that they intended to affect, 
 they resolved to apply it only locally, and soon learned 
 how to avoid the necessity of trephining the skull. 
 They invented an electric syringe and injector, which 
 
Limanora 
 
 caused the mixture to penetrate through the skull into 
 the part of the brain affected, thus sterilising the tissues 
 that had to do with speech and making them unattrac- 
 tive as a feeding-ground for the microbe of loquacity. 
 
 The plague soon vanished and the babel ceased. 
 There was comparative silence throughout the island. 
 Only such words were spoken as were essential and 
 relevant to the business in hand. It was, indeed, ac- 
 cepted as the surest mark of the sanity of a nature that 
 it was never betrayed into speech unless that which 
 conveyed necessary information, forceful reasoning, or 
 fresh thought. The trite was avoided as mephitic 
 vapours or an exhausted atmosphere would be. The 
 utterance of truisms immediately led to a microscopic 
 examination of the brain of the speaker in expectation 
 of finding disease there. The habit of expression 
 merely for its own sake and not for what it expressed, 
 for its beauty or wit or pungency, was considered a 
 sure indication of a diseased or morbid condition of the 
 brain-tissue, and the sufferer was at once isolated for 
 treatment, lest he should spread the contagion. 
 
 For the whole phenomenon was scientifically investi- 
 gated, and precautions were carefully taken against a 
 return of the plague. It had been noticed that, after 
 any age of exceptional progress, there generally oc- 
 curred some epidemic connected with the brain-tissues 
 or nerve-centres, sometimes appearing in excess of emo- 
 tion, sometimes in various forms of feebleness of 
 thought. It was due, they found, to the comparative 
 exhaustion of the brain and nerves by exceptional 
 strain upon them. As long as the enthusiasm of the 
 new ideas and rapid advance inspired the people, they 
 worked with a will, nor ever thought of sparing any 
 part of their system. The more mature amongst them 
 
An Epidemic 397 
 
 knew how to bridle this passion for work, and took 
 the necessary precautions against its evil effects; from 
 experience they had found out that they needed more 
 sustenance and more sleep in such periods, and they 
 knew almost by instinct when to rest and how often, 
 and what halls of sustenance and medication they 
 should frequent. The young had not their instincts 
 checked or confirmed by experience, and carried even 
 the best of movements and impulses to abuse. In 
 spite of inspection and superintendence they ignored 
 the rules laid down for their guidance, and took their 
 inspiration to work as better than the wisdom of their 
 elders, knowing that progress was the ideal and law of 
 their race, and thinking that everything done for pro- 
 gress was right. 
 
 It was thus the young and immature who generally 
 suffered from these epidemics. The impulse of their 
 enthusiasm carried them far beyond the limits of fer- 
 tility of their tissues, and the ebullience of their delight, 
 as they saw the work grow before their eyes, obscured 
 from them the gradual exhaustion of their powers. 
 They grew oblivious to everything but the end they 
 had immediately in view, and thus became short- 
 sighted in their enthusiasm for progress; they sacrificed 
 the demands of the future for the sake of the present, 
 and it was difficult for even the elders at the medical 
 inspection to get at the real state of the case, such an 
 appearance of new vigour did the impetuosity of their 
 passion and the tumult in their blood give to their sys- 
 tems. Only when the wandering germs of emotional 
 disease had fixed on the exhausted tissue did the result 
 become apparent. 
 
 The wide area and serious effects of the plague of 
 verbosity awakened the medical elders to the necessity 
 
39 8 Limanora 
 
 of special precautions. A section of them was organised 
 as a medical police to guard against the invasion of such 
 pestilences, and to prevent such exhaustion of youthful 
 tissues as would invite the vagrant germs or fail to re- 
 pel their attacks. A science was specialised for this 
 purpose, the pathology of epidemic emotions; and a 
 special art grew up to correspond, the hygiene and 
 therapeutics of emotional infection. 
 
 The elders who attended to this periodically made 
 careful examination of all the tissue of the immature 
 that had to do with emotion or with any crude spiritual 
 moods inapt to the control of reason and will. And it 
 was astonishing how rapid was the growth of the new 
 science and art in their hands. Delicate instruments 
 were invented responding to the presence even in 
 the air of deleterious germs that tended to settle in the 
 nerve-centres. Still finer instruments revealed the 
 state of the tissues underneath the skull. The symp- 
 toms of every disease of the emotions were classified, 
 and the means of checking each was investigated scien- 
 tifically. Before the next period of exceptional flor- 
 escence and harvest arrived, the hygiene of all the 
 epidemics that had been known to follow on ages of 
 great exertion was completely organised; and it was 
 chiefly an art of prevention rather than of cure. Pre- 
 cautions were taken by the new section of the medicants 
 against the abuse of the enthusiasm natural to such a 
 period ; they examined the nerve-tissues of the imma- 
 ture almost daily, and pointed out everyone that was 
 getting overworked, and the remedies that should be 
 adopted for checking the evil. The result was that no 
 abuse could proceed for longer than a day, and no 
 moral or emotional epidemic unless of the mildest type 
 could settle in the community. 
 
An Epidemic 399 
 
 What roused them to such a step as the foundation 
 of a new science and art was the seriousness with which 
 they viewed the last plague, that of loquacity. In the 
 series of exilings no evil had given them such trouble 
 as that of oratory, and they were afraid lest it was 
 about to return in all its virulence. At first they feared 
 this plague to be a case of atavism; for those whom it 
 attacked earliest were descendants of ancestors, or 
 closely related to families, that had been famous in the 
 far past for power of expression. But it soon spread to 
 strains of blood that had been marked by great reti- 
 cence, if not taciturnity, and ultimately it was com- 
 pletely impartial in its choice of victims. It was 
 manifest, however, that those who had ancestral oratory 
 in the blood were first open to the attacks of the plague 
 and were most difficult to cure; and the phenomenon 
 sent alarm to the very heart of the community. All 
 the mature citizens and especially the elders looked 
 graver than I had ever seen them look, even at the 
 prospect of Choktroo's invasion; they came nearer to 
 the appearance of dejection than I had imagined they 
 could come. 
 
 The whole matter drove my thoughts to work. When 
 I reflected on the occasion, the attitude my mind had 
 been accustomed to in my forgotten life returned, and 
 it seemed to me as if there had been a storm over no- 
 thing. Talkativeness had been one of the commonest 
 features of the men and women I had known in Kurope; 
 and loquacity was as little noticed as a red head or a 
 pug nose. Indeed the chatterbox was ranked among 
 the innocents who did little harm except to their own 
 reputations. It became a complete puzzle to me, when 
 I saw the horror with which the Limanoraus looked on 
 
400 Limanora 
 
 oratory. Had it not been one of the greatest of the 
 arts of Christendom ? Were not the great orators of 
 my own nation looked upon as little short of inspired, 
 and their statues placed in the noblest niche of our 
 temple of fame ? Did we not rush by the thousand to 
 hear any one of them, when he was about to perform, 
 and stand breathless by the hour, laying up for our- 
 selves fatigue and faintness and asphyxia, merely for 
 the delight of hanging on his lips? In life he roused 
 hurricanes of enthusiasm; and when he died thousands 
 who had never known him personally followed him 
 mourning to the tomb, and on the most revered page 
 of our literature was his name written. What could be 
 the meaning of so hearty a detestation of so noble an 
 art on the part of this progressive race ? 
 
 As usual I had not long to wait for a solution. My 
 bewilderment had already stirred the curiosity of my 
 proparents and Thyriel; and they had been watching 
 my thoughts for some time before I put my questions, 
 simple enough for my young comrade and betrothed to 
 answer. She spent a whole afternoon that was de- 
 voted to flight-exercise, in discussing and solving my 
 difficulties, and the struggle ended in strengthening 
 my admiration for this noble people. 
 
 Their abhorrence of the vice of oratory was not the 
 growth of any sudden revolution, or the unreasoning 
 prejudice often originating amongst a long-established 
 nation in some great personal hatred or fear now buried 
 in oblivion. It was the result of ages of the most 
 patient scientific investigation. And it found its way 
 into practice so slowly that the steps up to the final one 
 are scarcely noticeable on the pages of their history. 
 It had an inborn prejudice in favour of oratory to com- 
 bat, all the deeper that it could not explain itself or its 
 
An Epidemic 
 
 origin. The reputation of some of the ablest and most 
 influential sections of the community was based upon 
 the art. The orators of the nation had acquired a fame 
 almost greater than that of the soldiers. They had 
 been its leaders and founders; they had developed and 
 mastered its politics; they had moulded the people at 
 certain crises in their history into a unity. Their art 
 had been enrolled for ages amongst the noblest they 
 had. It was the only civilised force which could move 
 great masses to enthusiasm, or fuse their varied pur- 
 poses and thoughts together to form a single ideal and 
 aim. It was the only means their statesmen had 
 had for accomplishing their schemes, the only step- 
 ping-stones by which their lawyers and preachers and 
 politicians could rise to fame. It seemed for ages a 
 hopeless task to unseat it from its place in their civilis- 
 ation, or eradicate the prejudice in its favour from the 
 people's minds. 
 
 The wisest Limanoraus had watched its evil in- 
 fluence through many ages; although they had. often 
 themselves to make use of it for their purposes of re- 
 form and although some of the best men had been suc- 
 cessful in its employment, yet they were certain that it 
 sapped the finer sense of truth. So easily could the 
 orator persuade a crowd to accept all he said as true 
 and noble that he came to think there was little differ- 
 ence between the true and the false, the noble and the 
 ignoble; his own aim was all that was of significance, 
 and it was, however selfish or mean, just as good as 
 anybody else's aim. He needed as little to persuade 
 himself of the justice of an evil cause, provided it was 
 his own, as to persuade an assembly. He had but 
 to isolate certain facts and phases, and what were 
 antagonistic to them fell into shadow; the unjust 
 
402 Limanora 
 
 course began to appear just, and those who opposed 
 it were the enemies of justice and of the orator. It 
 mattered not what side he took, if only it stirred his 
 interest; he could rouse thousands to enthusiasm for it 
 by touching their emotions and awakening the passions 
 that were connected with their own self-interest. This 
 power of moving great masses to whatever tune he 
 pleased gave the orator a sense of omnipotence; after 
 a stirring speech he felt like a Jove who held in his 
 hand the destinies of the world. Happily for the wel- 
 fare of the state, the tongue-doughty was hopelessly 
 incapable when he turned to practice; he could not 
 organise the crusade he had preached; everything he 
 did with his crowd of followers tumbled to pieces as 
 soon as he had to do anything further than speak; a 
 few days or even hours of cool action revealed the hol- 
 lowness of his cause or his power; the omnipotent Jove 
 of yesterday appeared the skulking slave of to-day. 
 The only crusades that ever prospered under his in- 
 fluence were those which aimed at destruction; for the 
 work of destruction is brief and sharp; it needs but the 
 passion of the moment to accomplish it; and the love 
 of demolition is the most primitive of all savage de- 
 sires, and the most unbridled when let loose; its own 
 action as it proceeds kindles into a conflagration the 
 fires that give it strength. Creation is a calm and 
 gradual process, the last conquest of the human mind, 
 as it is the highest function of the energy of the cosmos. 
 The wrecking Omnipotence of oratory is parted from 
 this by the eternity of cosmic development; it is kin 
 with the clashing of worlds and systems that may come 
 before the birth of a universe; but it is as opposite 
 in nature to the slow building up of a world and the 
 slow evolution of its life-energy as hell is to heaven. 
 
An Epidemic 43 
 
 The barrenness of the art in all that would develop 
 humanity struck even the less mature minds of L,ima- 
 nora forcibly as soon as vast schemes of reform like 
 socialism began to be discussed. These schemes meant 
 the devastation or the dismantling of existing institu- 
 tions and systems of life. A plague of demagogues 
 spread throughout the nation. Hitherto orator had 
 neutralised orator as in a debate. Now it was the idle 
 and indolent who grew most tongue-valiant. They, 
 who had before been so discredited, now found them- 
 selves on the way to fame. They, who had before been 
 able to gather only a few embeggared discontents at 
 the street-corners to listen, and perhaps to sniff at their 
 eloquence, could now stir masses to action. They had 
 been despised even by their out-at-elbows followers for 
 their impotence in face of the problem of making a bare 
 living for themselves. Now they saw before them 
 place and power, fortune and fame, and all through this 
 poor member of theirs that had not been able to earn 
 enough to lick. Beggarly grovellers, none so poor as 
 not to scorn them, they were now omnipotent, with 
 all the work of devastation before them that these new 
 vast political schemes implied. When the revolution 
 was in full blaze, they were at their best, they thought. 
 But it was just at this point they found their limit. 
 The conflagration they had kindled their eloquence 
 failed to control or even guide; it swept past them 
 through institutions and sections of the community 
 that they specially favoured; and at last even they, 
 many of them, fell themselves victims to its undiscrim- 
 inating ravage. And, when it had burned itself out, 
 not one of them but skulked away in fear, unable to 
 face the task of building up again. Then it was the 
 man of action that stepped in, the silent, masterful 
 
404 Limanora 
 
 disciplinarian, moulded in war and accustomed to no 
 other means of solving human problems than war; he it 
 was who reaped the dragon 's-teeth harvest sown by 
 tongue- bravery : he seized all the glory and place and 
 fortune that the mob-spaniels had thought within their 
 grasp. Some of their ancient folk-maxims embodied 
 this experience: The breath of the demagogue blows 
 the warrior to his fortune; The mouth of the orator is 
 the banqueting-chamber of the soldier; Tempests of 
 eloquence and torrents of blood; Spout, vain tongue, 
 you invite your tyrant; Sow a country with the teeth 
 of haranguers and they will come up the swords of 
 despots; Loquacity is eaten up by her son pugnacity. 
 
 In spite of the fear of the art indicated in such folk- 
 lore, it continued to flourish; for the upper classes, 
 who delighted in war, flattered themselves that they 
 would ever be the best orators, and it is the inevitable 
 tendency of human nature to run to tongue. Not till 
 the age of unbridled freedom of speech did they begin 
 to change their opinions. Then were they easily out- 
 faced and out-harangued by any idler of the poverty- 
 stricken districts. Even in their own assemblies they 
 were no match for the spoil ters from the slums; with 
 all their high-toned irony and scornful superiority, they 
 were beaten into silence at the public palavers; they 
 were mere stammerers beside the glib orators of the un- 
 washed. This age of tongue-exploits was naturally an 
 age of single ideas, too. When their energy had gone 
 into speech, they had none left for thoughts. One-idea 
 crusades became the order of the day. Every tongue- 
 quixote had his scheme wherewith he would sweep all 
 evils out of life. He was so enamoured of his own that 
 he could not bear to listen to any other. And therein 
 lay safety. 
 
An Epidemic 405 
 
 But there came a time when the wordy bravos joined 
 forces; one vast socialistic scheme included all theirs. 
 The institutions of the island were to be wiped out, and 
 something undefined that was to make men equal and 
 prosperous and happy was to be put in their place. 
 Their tongues now wagged in unison with wonderful 
 velocity. Each was still for his own special construct- 
 ive scheme, but they were at one in their scheme of 
 demolition; they must have a clear space to build on, 
 and their ideal was the same, to make all equal and 
 happy. The babel of eloquence drowned the sounds 
 of other industry. Another revolution was almost 
 within earshot. 
 
 Some of the wiser hearts of Limanora anticipated the 
 danger, and saw that it would be better to give the dis- 
 contented all than to let destruction ravage unmuzzled 
 again. The whole of the property of the island was 
 estimated, land, houses, furniture, and luxuries; and 
 money equivalent to its full value was handed over to 
 the malcontent socialists to divide amongst themselves, 
 provided they migrated to another island. The offer 
 was readily accepted; for it was clear that nothing 
 would then be left in Umanora worth plundering. The 
 ships landed the enraptured equalisers of human goods 
 with their belongings on the shore of their new Eden, 
 and returned. 
 
 When the decks were cleared, and a census was 
 taken of all that remained, it was found that the island 
 in purging out the socialists was rid of the plague of 
 orators. The price they paid for their deliverance was 
 small indeed, they felt. They soon recreated the 
 wealth they had surrendered. Everyone grew ashamed 
 and afraid of anything that approached to oratory. 
 Eloquence became a word of evil omen. To prate was 
 
406 Limanora 
 
 now the greatest offence against the commonwealth. 
 And for generations there reigned comparative silence 
 and complete peace over the land. 
 
 In the series of purgations every remaining trace of 
 tongue-ambition was swept out. Much of the flatter- 
 ing kind was found to have migrated with the lecher- 
 ous; much of the haughty kind with the aristocratic 
 warriors; but most of it went with the liars. There 
 remained a horror of all prating and tongue-valiance, 
 and this repressed every atavistic tendency in that 
 direction that appeared. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 LITERATURE 
 
 ALL mere word-mongering was to this people an 
 immoral thing, a shameless waste of the tissue 
 and energy that were needed by the evolution of the 
 race, an offence against its aim and ideal, its progress 
 upwards through the cosmic grades. They were per- 
 suaded that it was a base substitution of the shows of 
 life for the reality to make an art of words which should 
 absorb the imagination and the skill of hundreds for 
 their whole lifetime. They would have nothing to do 
 with attention to the appearance and ornamentation of 
 a subject to the neglect of its true spirit. Into the very 
 heart and purpose of life every worker must penetrate. 
 His relation to the progress of the race must be clearly 
 shown. No work that took up any of the time or 
 energy of anyone of the community was to be useless 
 or unfertile. 
 
 But this did not mean that language was allowed to 
 take care of itself. It was one of the most diligently 
 tended blossoms of human capacity. No word or 
 phrase, whether spontaneous or invented, was allowed 
 to take root without the fiat of the mature community. 
 Language was more a public institution than even gov- 
 ernment or justice in a people whose every member 
 
 407 
 
408 Limanora 
 
 was able to be a law to himself. It was not only the 
 great channel of communication; it was the medium 
 and garment of every thought. If it became corrupt, 
 how could the mind itself be saved from its contagion ? 
 If it acquired a false tone, how could the falsity fail to 
 enter into the very spirit of the men and women ? It 
 was the guardian of law and truth; it was the key to 
 the human heart; it was the ether, the medium, in 
 which the human mind lived, moved, and had its 
 being. 
 
 How could such a potent factor in human progress 
 be left to the caprices of accident, or of single persons, 
 or even of a family ? It had more influence over the 
 spirit than all their sciences put together, for it was 
 more universal in its use than any one of them ; and it 
 subtly tinged all of them, whilst it was almost the 
 breath of the mind which dealt with them. It might 
 be the life or the poison of the whole race. He who 
 was the sole guide of language would be the master of 
 Limanora, not in the shallow sense of a ruler, but in 
 that of the complete arbiter of its destinies. He would 
 be the despot of the Limanoran mind and might subtly 
 throw it back centuries, if it pleased him. 
 
 A people so experienced and wise as this would have 
 ruined the whole ideal of their existence if they had 
 allowed the most public of the functions of their civil- 
 isation to move at the caprice of individuals. As soon 
 as the purgation of the race had been completed it be- 
 came plain that their language must be purified too. 
 Hundreds of words and phrases and idioms had had 
 soaked into them the infiltrations of the evil minds 
 which were now banished. Worse than all, language 
 had been the commonest and safest ambush of malignity 
 and deceit; it had been a perpetual trap for the inno- 
 
Literature 49 
 
 cent and unwary; it had been a labyrinth, in which 
 even the ablest and purest-minded often lost their 
 way when following the lead of some great and noble 
 thought. 
 
 The first aim of the elders was to clear it of coarse or 
 vulgar suggestion. But, as they proceeded, they found 
 their horizon widen; and the intricacies, ambiguities, 
 and pitfalls showed themselves the most serious evils 
 of all. It became absolutely necessary, if they were to 
 have a clear and unrefractive medium of expression, to 
 give a definite meaning to every word, and to have one 
 word for every meaning or shade of meaning. The 
 task extended itself through years. But then they 
 knew that, until it was thoroughly done, their science 
 would be like shifting clouds, and their progress would 
 be over quicksands. If their language was treacherous, 
 their civilisation was but a mirage. So they toiled on 
 sustained by the hope that they were making sure their 
 footsteps in the pursuit of truth. 
 
 When their work was done, they found it was only 
 begun. For it took n generation to make the new and 
 purified language the natural medium of the whole 
 people, and by that time new sub-meanings had crept 
 into most of the common words, and new shadings had 
 discoloured most of the everyday phraseology. The 
 new and less used words, and the purely technical and 
 scientific words stood where they were. Everything 
 that lived had shifted ground. Everything that was 
 purely artificial and had taken no root had remained 
 as it began, had been in short petrified. It was clear 
 that with living language there must be perpetual vigil- 
 ance and superintendence. And the whole people had 
 to become a council for the preservation of its purity 
 and transl licence. Every citizen set a watch upon his 
 
Limanora 
 
 words, as he used them from day to day or as he heard 
 them used, and reported any drift in the sense and any 
 new shade of meaning ; and after deliberation in council 
 and careful consideration by the elders a new form was 
 moulded for each new signification. This form had to 
 pass the ordeal of universal use for some time, and if it 
 stood the test, it was finally accepted as part of the 
 language. 
 
 Nor was it ever forgotten that the ear and the sense 
 of harmony had as much to do with the acceptance of 
 a word as its fitness to express an idea. Harsh sounds 
 wasted valuable tissue as much as unmeaning syllables. 
 The verbal atrocities of Western science would have 
 made the Limanorans shudder. Dissonance was an 
 offence against the spirit of harmony which pervaded 
 the cosmos; it was as easy to form a melodious word or 
 phrase as one that was grating or stridulous. Euphony, 
 it seemed to them, was one of the first essentials of a 
 language; and it was much pleasanter to be silent than 
 to talk unmusically. There had grown up an instinct 
 in them that moulded their sentences into what Euro- 
 peans would have called poems. The barest statement 
 of fact ran with a liquid sweetness that drew the ear 
 like a piece of beautiful music. The strictest scientific 
 discourse sounded to me as majestic and melodious as 
 some of the greatest passages in our Western poets. 
 Their most ordinary conversation had the liquid har- 
 mony of our finest lyrics without the monotonous 
 rhythm, the jingling rhyme, or the mincing gait. It 
 never struck them that there should be a special art of 
 words apart from that skill which all had by instinct 
 whenever there was a thought to express. If it were 
 a perfectly new thought, a discovery or invention that 
 was still unnamed, then it was the duty of the whole 
 
Literature 4 11 
 
 people to make or approve of a word which would ex- 
 actly fit it. Loose-fitting language soon meant loose, 
 shambling thought, and it was one of their foremost 
 responsibilities as a race to see that no one of them was 
 driven into that. The appearance of a special literary 
 art, for which some were specially gifted, would have 
 told them at once that their language was disorganised 
 and that the first great public need was its reform. 
 
 For a time after my arrival in the island I was ac- 
 customed to speak with admiration of the great litera- 
 tures of Europe, one of the few features of our Western 
 civilisation which I felt it no shame to mention. I 
 would launch into glowing praises of the beauty and 
 aptness of the expression, the nobleness of the music, 
 and the majesty and harmony of each work. When I 
 spoke of Homer and ^schylus, of Dante and Milton, 
 of Shakespeare and Goethe, I was unbounded in my 
 admiration of their lofty genius in the management of 
 their material. Questioned as to the character of their 
 thoughts, I contended that there was no need for these 
 to be absolutely new; the greatest merit of such poets 
 was that they took the wisdom of their age or country, 
 or the wisdom of all ages and countries, and expressed 
 it in a way that was inimitable. Their material they 
 had gathered from books or from the experience of their 
 time; and most of their great poems had been analysed 
 by admiring commentators into their original elements; 
 the source from which almost every idea had been 
 taken could be pointed out. But this was only to en- 
 hance the value of their work, to increase their great- 
 ness. It was one of the commonest observations 
 amongst literary men in the West, when defending 
 themselves against the charge of plagiarism, that there 
 was no such thing as absolute originality of idea or 
 
412 Limanora 
 
 material; the great merit in literature, the test of its 
 lastingness, was the originality or freshness of expres- 
 sion; the rest belonged to the age or people in which 
 it was produced, or to mankind of all ages and nations. 
 And young men and women were encouraged to learn 
 foreign languages, and especially the classical tongues, 
 at all hazards, because translations missed what was 
 distinctive in the great authors; if they would enjoy 
 the true flavour of their originality, they must learn 
 and study the language of the great books for them- 
 selves. 
 
 I found my efforts to communicate my enthusiasm all 
 in vain. I was met by a look of pity in the eyes of my 
 listeners, and soon came to know the source and mean- 
 ing of the emotion. They were sorry that I should 
 continue to admire that which was the symptom of a 
 diseased condition, and they commiserated the retro- 
 grade state of so many millions of the inhabitants of 
 the globe, who could spend some of the best moments 
 and feelings of their lives on what was merely super- 
 ficial. They sympathised with the effort to live in a 
 world of thought, a spiritual world, a nobler existence 
 than that of eating and drinking; this was a sign of a 
 yearning for advance. But they grieved that it should 
 take such a mistaken direction, that their fellow-men 
 in the West should glory in what was an evidence of 
 disease. Language was singularly disordered, when 
 only a few could be found throughout the ages with 
 the capacity to use it aptly and musically. Where 
 was the wisdom that guided the people, if it could let 
 this greatest instrument and medium of thought remain 
 so chaotic and infirm that whosoever was skilled in 
 fit and melodious use of it was held to be inspired ? 
 Surely it was the first care of the elders and governors 
 
Literature 413 
 
 to see that the universal means of communication was 
 at least unambiguous and explicit. The highway of 
 thought was left a jungle, primeval and inarticulate as 
 the intercourse of animals; and one who made a clear 
 track through any part of the labyrinth was lauded as 
 divine. The literature of Europe was evidently but 
 the outcome of the incapacity of its people for proper 
 self-government. That only a few should be able to 
 write or speak in so clear and fitting a way was a dis- 
 grace to the civilisation. To honour them so greatly 
 as the people did revealed the depths of incapacity 
 into which all had fallen, and the corrupt state of the 
 language. 
 
 I urged the marvellous power of suggestion that 
 European words had in the hands of the poets. They 
 bore so many sub-meanings and branches of meaning 
 that the full depths of a poem or great prose work 
 were never sounded. Age after age of students could 
 go on studying it and still find in it new significance, 
 new inspiration. Commentary after commentary had 
 been written on the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and 
 Shakespeare's plays, without exhausting all the mean- 
 ing they had in them. Vast libraries of interpret- 
 ation of them had accumulated, and yet every new age 
 found opportunity for additions to them. This was 
 due to the subtle under-meanings that touched innumer- 
 able keys in the soul, and played upon a vast variety of 
 emotions. An able writer could bring words together 
 so aptly as to affect different minds in different ways. 
 A nebulous significance gathered round his phrases 
 and sentences, and out of this a hundred scholars 
 would make each his own discovery. Mystically lay 
 the thoughts in the depths of his words, ready for the 
 profounder students to fathom. And so every great 
 
4H Limanora 
 
 poem inspired age after age in a thousand different 
 directions. Would this have been the case, if every 
 word had been made to serve but one purpose, if 
 every phrase had been unequivocal in meaning, and 
 every sentence unshaded and perspicuous ? It was the 
 play of meaning, the opalescent glimmer of light in lan- 
 guage that rendered European poetry so beautiful and 
 undyiiigly suggestive. It was the twilight of words that 
 gave such majestic and shadowy forms to the ideas and 
 characters and scenes of the great poems of the past. 
 And what would the generations of scholars and teach- 
 ers have done without these hidden meanings to reveal 
 in their literature, without these intricacies to disen- 
 tangle, without these dim allusions and adumbrations 
 of sense to make clear ? Where would our youth have 
 found their intellectual training, if all our great litera- 
 ture had been transparent and precise in meaning ? 
 
 I thought I had made out a splendid case for our 
 European tongues. But a glance at the face of my 
 querist served to scatter my vanity to the winds. There 
 was the same inscrutable look of pity in the eyes. 
 Everything I had pleaded, as I thought, so eloquently 
 had only deepened the Limanoran view of the shame- 
 ful waste of talent which the undefined and perpetually 
 shifting sense of European words produced in the West. 
 There must the ablest minds of most generations 
 wrestle all their lives with the loose-jointed languages 
 they had to employ, and try to get their benediction 
 and inspiration into form for the ages to wrestle with. 
 There must thousands of capable men and women 
 waste their best years in searching for recondite mean- 
 ings in the works these have produced. There must 
 all the immature minds spend their youth on the hated, 
 barren task of trying to grasp the mirage of sense in 
 
Literature 4 r 5 
 
 the books they learn. What progress would there not 
 have been in Europe if all this talent and energy and 
 time had been saved for the real work of life, if all the 
 best thinkers she produced had been set to the labour 
 of true discovery ? It was little wonder that her civil- 
 isation was practically unprogressive, when so much 
 of it was built on the quicksands of her language. All 
 the shades and suggestions of meaning were but pitfalls 
 wherein most of her men and women foundered on the 
 journey of life. It was with mere shadows and shows 
 that her greatest minds fought ; they were not conquer- 
 ing the. unknown and undiscovered that their fellow- 
 men might advance in their footsteps. The night 
 encircled them as deeply as before their preternatural 
 efforts. How could the blind lead the blind in a land 
 covered with mists and full of pitfalls ? 
 
 I had still a few arrows in my quiver, I thought. No 
 one could deny the beauty of the literary art and the 
 training it gave to the sense of what was fair and noble. 
 Where will one find anything so melodious as our great 
 poems ? Where anything so harmonious as the prose 
 of our finest stylists ? A beautiful lyric can hold a na- 
 tion entranced. A fine piece of prose can stir thousands 
 to admiration. What could be more ennobling than 
 the effect of our greatest poems on the youth of our 
 nations, what more refining than the study of our great 
 prose- writers ? 
 
 Again I knew how far beside the mark I had shot. 
 Style was but the effort of a language to throw off its 
 diseases, an acknowledgment of the gross imperfections 
 that burdened it and made it a clog on the progress of 
 thought. If a language were what it ought to be, a 
 precise means of intercourse between soul and soul, a 
 true medium of intellectual energy, then ought the 
 
4i 6 Limanora 
 
 race that uses it to be completely unconscious of any- 
 thing like style. We never know we breathe, or how 
 we breathe, till some stoppage makes breathing diffi- 
 cult; we never realise we have a heart whose pulsa- 
 tions are essential to life, till it beats irregularly, and 
 alarms us with the prospect of disease in it. So it is 
 with speech, the instrument of communication among 
 men, the ether of thought; did it perform all its func- 
 tions in a healthy and perfect way, we should pay little 
 or no attention to it; were words unambiguous and 
 precise, every man would speak and write in the best 
 of all styles, that natural and transpicuous method of 
 expression which fixes the whole mind of the listener 
 or reader, not on the means of conveyance, but on the 
 energy that passes through it. Speech should be no 
 more than one of the unpremeditated, unguided func- 
 tions of our system; as soon as it calls for attention, it 
 is deranged; as long as we are unconscious of it, it is 
 healthful and strong, acting in every way as it should, 
 without shadow or broken light, without indefinite- 
 ness of meaning or mistaken suggestion. 
 
 Nor should a language even in its commonest thor- 
 oughfares be devoid of music. How false must be the 
 rendering of a thought, if for the sake of melody he 
 who is called a poet should have to reject all but musi- 
 cal expressions in a language which has little music in 
 it! How artificial must be the labours of this profes- 
 sional word-monger, when he must sit amongst the 
 debris of his vocabulary, and pick and choose with 
 weary exertion the words that will fit into his poem ! 
 With most of his language unsuited to his purpose, as 
 being invented or moulded by unmusical people, he is 
 like a mosaic- worker who has to make his work out of 
 common stone, or out of fragments of pottery thrown 
 
Literature 4 1 ? 
 
 into the rubbish-heap of the ages. Most languages 
 sound like the rasping of a file over iron, or the shoot- 
 ing of debris over a precipice, or at best the crackle and 
 hiss of fireworks. And it is not surprising; for their 
 individual words are made out of anything that is ready 
 to hand by men who care nothing for the sound of them, 
 whether it is harsh or melodious. Now and again if a 
 word or phrase becomes current out of the range of 
 literary products, it will get its harsh grating syllables 
 ground off, or rounded and polished in the torrent of 
 common speech. Thus are prepared the only elements 
 of the language that are fit for the fine mosaic- work of 
 Western poets. They rescue these time-smoothed 
 pebbles from their gross or vulgar surroundings and 
 place them in a setting that will make them seem 
 beautiful for a time. 
 
 It is only fora time; again the fair structure they 
 have made falls into ruin, and fragments are whirled 
 into the eddies of everyday speech and abandon their 
 beauty of form and meaning for something their original 
 maker would never recognise. Then begins the old 
 process; the debris of forgotten works, rounded and 
 smoothed in the current of time, serves as the rubble 
 to be concreted into the artistic works of a new age. 
 Alas for the artists who have such a task before them ! 
 Out of the rubbish heap of the past they must mould 
 what will please the new times. And where is there 
 room for true harmony iji the result of such a process ? 
 The materials depend for their form on the caprice of 
 chance; the artists depend for the form they give on 
 the caprice of the age in which they work, certain to 
 be antiquated by the next new fashion. As long as 
 a literary product depends on its form for its lasting 
 
 effect, it must be comparatively ephemeral; for form is 
 27 
 
4i8 
 
 Limanora 
 
 nothing if it does not suit the fancy of the age to which 
 it appeals, and the fancy of one age conflicts with most 
 others. Artificial means may seem to keep it alive, an 
 ecclesiastical or political movement, the aid of an ex- 
 traneous art, or the ambition of scholars and critics; 
 but the life is only galvanic, and not from the heart of 
 the people. No true music can come out of that which 
 is essentially unmusical. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 INSPIRATION 
 
 {ABANDONED the effort to defend the literature 
 of Christendom, and came to the conclusion that a 
 people that so scorned all word-mongering could not 
 have any literature. I was soon disabused of the idea. 
 One day, after my education had advanced into the 
 final stage of its earlier course, and my loyalty to the 
 race had been tested in many ways, my proparents bade 
 me accompany them to the production of a new book. 
 After what I had heard in depreciation of literature 
 such as I had been accusomed to in Europe, I was 
 somewhat startled at this invitation. But they said 
 nothing to explain the anomaly, although they knew 
 well the nature of the discussion I had had with 
 Thyriel. 
 
 I had thought that, during my long residence in the 
 island and in my countless flights over it, I had come 
 to know every public institution existing on it. But I 
 was mistaken again. In our course we chose a direc- 
 tion that for a space was one I had several times taken. 
 But soon we bent out of the usual track up Lilaroma, 
 and turning one of its western spurs, made for a deep 
 valley which was concealed from view, except to voy- 
 agers towards the sunset. Here we found the air filled 
 
 419 
 
420 Limanora 
 
 with wings and airships streaming onwards. It was a 
 beautiful sight, this navy of the sky fleeting across 
 the snows of Lilaroma, or winnowing the depths of 
 the azure. We had been on the adjoining coast of the 
 island, and had not to strike far upwards in order to 
 reach our destination. So the air-fleet moved far above 
 us, most of it having to round the heights of the gleam- 
 ing mountain. Nothing could surpass the grace with 
 which they took their way through the heaven, now to 
 this point, now to that; and after a time I could hear 
 the movement of their wings, like the rustle of silken 
 sails. 
 
 In gazing dreamily upwards, I had allowed myself to 
 drop too near the earth, and in order to reach the goal 
 of our flight exactly I had to take another long rise. 
 Thereafter my gaze was bent earthwards on a still 
 more beautiful sight beneath me. A broad valley nar- 
 rowed coastwards to a deep gorge and mountainwards 
 into a rift in the rocks. The river which had sculp- 
 tured this singular amphitheatre had been deflected by 
 an artificial channel into the centre of force, but was 
 allowed at times to sweep its old bed free of the debris 
 of rocks and vegetation. Up each side vibrated in the 
 air tier upon tier of their automatic rests, enough to 
 accommodate a nation. All lay open to the sky; yet 
 there was a subdued light down in the hollow of the 
 vale, that soothed the eyes tired with the gleam of the 
 blue and snow above; and this twilignt deepened into 
 gloom towards the head and the exit of the valley. 
 Only in the afternoon, as the sun westered, it shot its 
 level rays through the chasm at the entrance, and mel- 
 lowed the gloom even of the ravine at the upper end 
 with its golden light. And at sunset the concentration 
 of the many-coloured rays through the gorge had a 
 
Inspiration 4 21 
 
 striking effect upon the whole amphiteatre ; it was as 
 if a theatrical artist were lighting it up for some super- 
 natural scene. 
 
 The afternoon sunlight indeed soon revealed to our 
 eyes, as we settled on the slopes, an immense stage 
 that shot out of the ravine on the mountain-side. It 
 was, I could see, the natural theatre of the island, cut 
 out by other than human powers. And from side to 
 side the gentlest whisper would carry, yet without re- 
 coil; while the sound of the moving stage, as it rolled 
 forth, rose along the tiers and without break or reper- 
 cussion died away into the open sky above our heads. 
 It must have been here, I thought, that the architects 
 of Limanoran buildings had learned the acoustic secrets 
 of nature. Never a sound was lessened or confused in 
 passing to the farthest corner of any of their vast halls. 
 Nor was it from any mechanical contrivance underneath 
 the roof, but simply from the shape of the enclosure. 
 Nature had formed this valley into a perfect theatre, 
 in the highest tier of which not one listener could miss 
 the smallest sound. Yet by a singular contrivance, by 
 means of which a globe of irelium was kept over the 
 stage, every sound was tenfold magnified lest the merest 
 whisper should escape, whilst every hearer had at hand 
 a margol, which would soften sounds that carried too 
 loudly to the ear. Another strange effect of this irelium 
 shell was that it magnified to the eye everything upon 
 the stage a hundredfold; it acted as a powerful micro- 
 scope, so that each spectator was far nearer to the inner 
 structure of any object than mere human eye-power 
 could bring him. 
 
 We had not to wait long for the purpose of these 
 preparations. There entered upon the stage two figures 
 that underneath the globe seemed gigantic beside the 
 
422 Limanora 
 
 bodies of Limanoran men and women. They had 
 L,imanoran outlines, but transmuted into something 
 more ethereal than aught I had seen. There was a 
 grace of form and a beauty of face beyond any of those 
 around me on the slope of the hill. And even to my 
 eyes, untrained and limited as they were in their 
 powers, there was a transparency in the tissue of their 
 bodies which revealed the movements of their organs; 
 I saw their hearts pulsate, and the currents of the 
 blood move quicker or slower along their veins as they 
 walked or stood still. We could even watch the effect 
 of their emotions in their systems, and the excited or 
 tranquil movement of thoughts in the tissues of their 
 brains. The impulses that travelled along their nerves 
 from brain to hand or foot, and the reports that kept 
 journeying from the various senses to the nerve-centres, 
 seemed all to be made plain to us; and seemed the 
 work of a magician, so marvellous was it, so far above 
 mere human achievement. 
 
 But still greater marvels were to follow. These two 
 beings or automata or moving shadows of beings, or 
 whatever they might be, enacted a scene, the signifi- 
 cance of which I comprehended only after many days' 
 thought. My immediate impressions and my subse- 
 quent conclusions and knowledge have so amalgamated 
 that it is difficult to separate the two elements. These 
 two beings were chosen friends, the complements of 
 each other, with tendencies and tastes and loves all in 
 unison. Such perfect fitting of nature to nature was 
 not as yet to be found even in Limanora. Thought 
 sprang to thought, and emotion to emotion, and yet 
 there was a spontaneity and origination in both that 
 made each a separate fountain of life and action. How 
 independent the characters and powers, and yet how 
 
Inspiration 4 2 3 
 
 mutually adapted ! The scene was meant to picture a 
 friendship that was a true and perfect marriage. 
 
 The two had grown year by year closer in harmony 
 till at last the mutual sympathy had culminated in a 
 yearning to see an individuality that would combine 
 the best peculiarities of each and perpetuate the combin- 
 ation. We could see the thought flame into a passion 
 in the two systems, and then we could hear the friends 
 talk around the longing till it grew definite, into a 
 common project. We saw them gather the materials 
 needed for the formation of the body. With intricacies 
 of furnace and crucible and machinery they moulded 
 these into the skeleton of a man, flawless and strong 
 in every part. They tried every bone with numberless 
 tests, till they found it all to their satisfaction. Then 
 they started on the cartilages that kept the bones in 
 place or moved them, giving permanence and life to 
 each, as they made it, by the magnetism they com- 
 municated to it. Tissue by tissue they built up the 
 internal organs, modelling them with loving care on 
 those they saw at play beneath their own eyes, and 
 testing them to see that they performed their functions 
 perfectly. What delicate artistic energy they spent 
 upon the upper tissues of the body, upon the brain and 
 ear and eye! Each created and developed the quality 
 loved and admired in the other. There was nothing 
 they omitted to make the new being complete and 
 happy in all his functions. On the minute nerves 
 and tissues they worked under powerful microscopes, 
 and the minutiae of every sense and organ and function 
 were examined and tested again and again with the 
 same magnifying power turned on them. The figure 
 they made most noble and symmetrical in proportions 
 and outlines, the face they made as beautiful as human 
 
424 Limanora 
 
 face could look. The stuff in which they worked was 
 ethereal in its texture and constituents. It was difficult 
 to discern it with our senses even under the great mag- 
 nifying globe. It seemed to be of air or some product 
 of the ether; for it flowed underneath their guiding 
 fingers almost invisible. And the result was a body 
 more transparent than their own. It was a marvel of 
 refinement and strength combined; they experimented, 
 on every limb and sense, every nerve and muscle and 
 tissue, and they corrected every defect in it before they 
 reached the final act. 
 
 At last the work was completed to their satisfaction, 
 and they braced themselves for the most exhausting 
 task of all. How were they to make of this image a 
 living creature ? I smiled as I thought of the impossi- 
 bility of what was evidently before them. Yet they 
 seemed perfectly calm in their preparation for the final 
 endeavour. Only there was a subdued volcanic energy 
 in their systems that seemed to show that they con- 
 sidered it a task almost superhuman. They encouraged 
 each other, and we could see them infuse new magnet- 
 ism into their bodies by means of machinery of great 
 power. Their faces were filled with the glow of a rap- 
 turous appeal .to heaven. They were putting them- 
 selves into connection with some being they adored 
 invisible to us, some impalpable fountain of life. They 
 took the hands of the image they had formed, and 
 raised it; they placed it between them, so that it should 
 be in the path of all energy that passed from one to the 
 other. They laid their hands upon its head and nerve- 
 centres, and at the same time the pleading rapture on 
 their faces rose almost to trance. Their spirits seemed 
 to go out from them. They looked like two in dream. 
 A faint flush came upon the cheeks of the image be- 
 
Inspiration 425 
 
 tween them, and died out. Again their souls seemed 
 to return to full consciousness, and the rapture grew 
 upon their faces. Again the signal of life dawned on 
 the countenance of the image. Throb by throb they 
 gave of their own souls to his, meantime drawing from 
 some fountain of life and spirit unseen by us. Slowly 
 the eyelids rose, and the lips moved. There was true 
 life in the image. The three walked as in trance, yet 
 with the joy of creation pulsing through them. The 
 child of their imagination was like both, yet inde- 
 pendent, and more beautiful to look upon. Love broke 
 through the new being and theirs in wild pulsations. 
 The three awoke to a new life. And then the scene 
 vanished, and I seemed to have but dreamed. 
 
 Yet there was the deep valley with the sunset rays 
 shooting through it ; and up the slopes rested thou- 
 sands of flesh-and-blood Limanoraus beside me. A few 
 thoughts, and I knew that it was no dream. Was it 
 magic ? I could not believe that such a people would 
 indulge in mere trifling with life and the powers above 
 life. My spirit of enquiry stirred my guardians, and I 
 soon knew from them that this was the first publication 
 of a new book, called Human Sculpture. The deep 
 valley with its apparatus was the theatre of futurition, 
 where every imaginative foresight was first put into 
 a form that would appeal to the whole people. It was 
 called Loomiefa or the display of pioneering. 
 
 Their literature was all science, and that the science 
 of the future. Romancing about the past or the present 
 seemed to this utilitarian people waste of the noblest 
 faculty of man, shameful squandering of imaginative 
 wealth on that which is naught. Mere retrospection 
 for its own sake without reference to subsequent ad- 
 vance was thought by them the most pernicious of 
 
426 Limanora 
 
 madnesses; they diagnosed it as a kind of ethical blind- 
 ness, that could neither see the right nor do it. The 
 state of peoples who looked at nothing but the past 
 with admiration was one of the lowest circles of their 
 inferno; another was that of nations that saw nothing 
 good outside of themselves and their immediate sur- 
 roundings. In such unprogressive national or racial 
 attitudes they saw all the evils of inbreeding; the 
 weaknesses and intellectual and moral diseases of the 
 past grew despotic in their power over the human sys- 
 tem, till they came to seem the only virtues; even what 
 had been once virtues grew inveterate and routine, or 
 monstrous and overpowering in their excess. The 
 past served only as the soil for the better growths of 
 the future. And an exhausted soil became barren, if 
 not poisonous, for all but weeds, or growths that 
 needed and deserved no attention or cultivation. 
 
 To spend imagination on the past, therefore, was to 
 them a crime against the future. What was dead and 
 needed invention to bring before the mind again was 
 better in its grave. A literature that turned back to 
 the past for its progress clogged the wheels of progress, 
 unless it belonged to a race that had fallen back cent- 
 uries behind the natural advance of the world. For a 
 progressive nation to give of its best for the resurrec- 
 tion of a dead past was to confess a strain of barbarism 
 in it, and to prophesy its own rapid decay. The im- 
 agination was the faculty of the future; it had its eyes 
 set in front, and not behind like memory; it was meant 
 to investigate the horizon before us, and to interpret 
 the lights and shadows thrown from below the rim of 
 vision, and not to look back, whether with regret or 
 adoration, over the region that humanity had beaten 
 hard with its weary footing. The future is infinite; 
 
Inspiration 4 2 7 
 
 the human past covers but a few centuries, and a nar- 
 row track through them. It is not for want of scope 
 that the faculty of futurition is driven back on the 
 ground already trodden; it is through a grievous and 
 incurable malady, the malady of preterpluperfection, 
 that twists the face round to the back of the neck, and 
 rots or petrifies the tissues of the brain and the heart. 
 They counted it the saddest of all spectacles on earth 
 to see a race, that by its nature could be rapidly pro- 
 gressive, waste its highest energies in retracing again 
 and again the footsteps of its own ancestry or of the 
 ancestry of some other race. Nothing would persuade 
 them to permit any study of the past that was not 
 meant to be wholly relevant to the future. They 
 tended to be, I thought, almost negligent of the value 
 of history and historical study; for, as our Western 
 commonplace goes, history repeats itself; and however 
 new and ameliorative an age may be, it may obtain 
 lessons, and still more warnings, from ages past. 
 
 Their literature was all of the future. There were 
 two of the largest families of the race devoted to it, and 
 their numbers were ever being recruited by adoption 
 into them of scions of others, who revealed exceptional 
 imaginative faculty. They had the generalised train- 
 ing of the island; but their particular training was 
 more completely specialised than that of any other 
 family. Nothing was omitted that would tend to make 
 them of imagination all compact, or to give them such 
 ease in their command of language as would bring 
 them the exact word without effort. Next to these 
 points in their education stood tutelage in all that per- 
 tained to scenic art and music. For they had to give 
 their ideas a staging that would at once appeal to the 
 imagination of the whole people. Loomiefa was in 
 
428 Limanora 
 
 their province. And the literary form into which they 
 were to put their communications as to the future had 
 to be as perfect as it could be in their language, exactly 
 expressing all they had to convey, and at the same 
 time appealing to the ear by its melody and harmony. 
 As far as histrionic art was allowable in the island they 
 were the artists, whilst in the linguistic conventions of 
 the people they were the leaders and suggesters in the 
 making of words, and in the choice of words made. 
 They had, I could see, the finest heads in the com- 
 munity; the brow was broad, full, and shapely; the 
 eyes were large and yet deeply set under the brows; 
 the base of the skull was of great width; every section 
 of the brain that had to do with imaginative and poetic 
 power was well developed. Yet their faces and features 
 showed no difference from the common Limanoran 
 type; they had no more beauty or regularity of outline. 
 It was clear that all children of a certain shape of skull 
 and development of brain were selected for training 
 and adoption by these two families, whenever they 
 needed recruits. 
 
 From the first the youth of these two families were 
 educated in the sciences of the day in order that they 
 might know what gaps in knowledge had to be filled, 
 and what laws should guide and limit their imaginative 
 prospecting. For the literature they produce is science 
 in embryo. Science lays the foundations of literature, 
 and literature prepares the way for science. These 
 families by their imaginative productions based on all 
 that is already known pioneer the scientific investi- 
 gators into the new regions of the future. They keep 
 in touch with the leaders of science, and act as allies to 
 them, finding out the track of what these are trying to 
 discover or invent, and suggesting methods of supply- 
 
Inspiration 4 2 9 
 
 ing their wants or reaching their aims. They provide 
 working hypotheses for the scientists to apply and test 
 and they map out roads for the whole race into the 
 darkness of the unknown or the twilight of the half- 
 conjectured. 
 
 Thus their literature is fiction; for tentative fiction, 
 they hold, is the only unstagnant truth. The produc- 
 tions of the pioneering families have all to be submitted 
 to the national test. What the race disapproves of is 
 promptly cancelled and forgotten. What meets with 
 the approval of the elders or of the leaders of any one 
 of the sciences is handed over to them for experimenta- 
 tion, even though it should not attract the rest of the 
 people. What strikes the fancy of the nation as a 
 whole is adopted as the map and guide of the future; 
 it is the sacred book of the time, and the citizens study 
 it daily for the purpose of reaching the goal it sets be- 
 fore their life. 
 
 But every new age antiquates one or more of these 
 sacred books. For the region they have mapped out 
 in the future is reached and travelled over, the advance 
 they anticipate is made, the ideal they paint is realised 
 and rapidly becoming commonplace. It puzzled me 
 for a time to guess what they did with their superseded 
 books, knowing as I did how superfluous they counted 
 all researches into the past and all imaginative pictures 
 of the present. My question as usual was not long 
 unanswered. I was shown the library of antiquated 
 fiction in the valley of memories. It was used in the 
 very earliest stages of education. The children read 
 the books or heard them in order to see, when they 
 reached years of maturity, what the race had come 
 from and how much it might yet advance, to gather 
 enthusiasm from the spectacle of the progress made, 
 
430 Limanora 
 
 and to learn lessons for their own future. Beyond 
 childhood and early youth every minute was counted 
 lost that was not spent on the future and its possibili- 
 ties; and for a man or woman of mature years all forms 
 of antiquarianisin were counted idleness. 
 
 They never permitted themselves to lay too much 
 stress on any sacred book, or to adore it too passion- 
 ately, however much they might be guided by it for a 
 time; for they knew from experience that it would soon 
 be worked into the nature of the race and the system 
 of the individual, and another would take its place. 
 The sacred book of to-day was bound to be transcended 
 to-morrow. The foresights and ideals of this year would 
 be the truisms of next. The real desecration, they 
 thought, was to rest too many ages over a sacred book, 
 its precepts un worked into the life, its pictures and 
 ideals unrealised; to adore its words and deny its spirit 
 by failing to advance beyond its point of view. A book 
 too long held sacred is a charge of stagnancy and bar- 
 barism against a race and an insult to its intelligence. 
 It proves that the civilisation has become stereotyped, 
 or worse, retrospective ; to eat, to sleep, to fall prostrate 
 before a dead ideal, to propagate and die, sum up the 
 ultimate duties of existence at its highest level. 
 
 Every book was sacred to the Linianorans which 
 threw light upon the track ahead into the darkness; 
 and so long as it still gave light where light was 
 needed, it remained sacred. Whenever its light be- 
 came the common daylight around the race, and espe- 
 cially if they had to look backwards in order to see its 
 wayrnarks, then was it promptly committed to the val- 
 ley of memories. Not a moment was wasted on its pre- 
 cepts after they had become the laws of everyday 
 existence. They had known from their own history 
 
Inspiration 43 l 
 
 what a terrible engine of oppression a book might be 
 when once it had become antiquated without losing the 
 adoration of the people; its prophecies, which had be- 
 come mere tales of the past, had to be projected again 
 into the future by mystic interpretation; its precepts, 
 embodying the spirit of a generation long dead, had to 
 be galvanised into life by casuistry; and innumerable 
 methods had to be extorted from its overstrained text 
 to prevent the human mind moving on past its own 
 stage of morality and civilisation. How many ages in 
 their own history did their ancestors live with their 
 dead! Into the warmest feelings of their hearts had 
 the grave-clothes of the past intertwined; and what 
 torture to love and the noblest feelings, what bloodshed 
 and horrors it cost them to be able to stand off from 
 their dead authority, and look at it with unprejudiced 
 mind! It had become a part of their best selves, and 
 it seemed like suicide to cast it from them, and relegate 
 it to its true home, the graveyard of the past. 
 
 That long experience was burned into their natures; 
 and to lay too much stress on any new book or idea 
 gave them an instinctive pang. They could not bear 
 to linger over it, once the light had died out of it and 
 its leading had become a highway-mark for the passer- 
 by. To utter or admire the obvious or commonplace 
 was counted one of the gravest offences against the 
 commonweal; it awakened a look of pity in the eyes of 
 the listener as for one who was smitten with an incura- 
 ble disease. A repetition of the offence would lead to 
 drastic measures with the victim. He was haled before 
 the medicists, and his system was minutely examined 
 for the source of the malady, and for weeks was he 
 kept under medical supervision ; no labour or watch- 
 ing or remedial pain was spared till the source of 
 
43 2 Limanora 
 
 offending was scourged out of the constitution of the 
 sufferer. 
 
 As a rule it was found on investigation that the in- 
 fection had come from some book, whose spirit and 
 precepts had become incorporated in the past of the 
 race and could give no more vitality to it. It was 
 good enough for children and youth, who were passing 
 through the primitive stages of development; to them 
 it was fresh and new for a time, and was even the 
 source of life and vigour. But once out of the valley 
 of memories the men and women who could read it 
 with any pleasure were considered unhealthy and ata- 
 vistic, and were sent to hospital for treatment. The 
 symptoms of the malady of the commonplace were well 
 known and most patent, loquacity, fondness for con- 
 fidential communications and mysterious suggestions 
 under solemn conditionings, or even oaths of silence, 
 bustling idleness, feeble smiles of impotent superiority, 
 jocular dogmatism, assumption of wisdom, and exces- 
 sive vanity. If the disease had not been so infectious 
 and stealthy in its spread, it would never have been 
 treated so seriously and so promptly; for it was seldom 
 malignant, in its earlier appearances at least; only 
 when it became morbid, and took the shape of injured 
 feeling at unrecognised genius, resulting at times in 
 jealousy and slander, or conspiracy and rebellion, or 
 when it grew masterful and acquired a sense of its own 
 infallibility and omnipotence, resulting generally in 
 petty spite and persecution, was there any deadly virus 
 in it. It was its epidemic character that made it most 
 formidable, and necessitated a system of moral quaran- 
 tine. vSpecial precautions were taken in permitting the 
 use of the sacred books of the past, and of antiquated 
 or superseded ideas. They were only useful for teach- 
 
Inspiration 433 
 
 ing the young reverence for great thoughts and great 
 thinkers, and for leading the mature to estimate their 
 own achievements modestly, when they saw the rapid 
 antiquation of even the most striking books. 
 
 One evil that arose from the study of past literature, 
 the over-valuation of literary work, they tried to ob- 
 viate. They placed noble deeds on the same footing 
 with noble words and thoughts, and saw that they were 
 as carefully recorded and described. It was the duty 
 of the young to report, and give permanent form to, 
 anything that was done greatly. With their enthusi- 
 asm made more glowing by their ignorance and in- 
 experience, they acted as the historiographers of the 
 race. The youth of a family went with the elders 
 whenever any difficulty offered itself, and with their 
 recording instruments, inasans and linasans and idro- 
 sans, they took flying pictures, electrographs, and re- 
 ports of the scene for deposit in the valley of memories. 
 If any emergency arose and was nobly met when the 
 youthful remembrancers were not present, they wrote 
 the annals of it none the less, and reproduced its scenes 
 in moving representations after interviewing all who 
 witnessed the deed. There was as much inspiration, 
 this people held, in a great action as in a great book, 
 provided it illumined the darkness of the road ahead 
 of them. 
 
 For to them the true test of greatness and inspiration 
 was the power of fore-illumination or of stimulus to 
 progress. Whatsoever flashed light over the unknown 
 in front must have come from a higher point of view 
 than their own immediate surroundings. Word or 
 deed, it was to them all the same, if it had this divine 
 characteristic; the one was as worthy of chronicling 
 
 and preserving as the other. But they ceased to look 
 
 28 
 
434 Limanora 
 
 upon it as a source of stimulus to action as soon as it 
 failed to throw light upon their future, or to hold up 
 an ideal that they had not yet attained. Inspiration, 
 like all other things and beings in the universe, was 
 progressive. No idea or deed, no word or book could 
 be permanently inspired. And the quicker a race pro- 
 gressed, the sooner it sterilised its sacred thoughts and 
 deeds. All noble human advance was a process of de- 
 inspiration; a step upwards makes the climber capable 
 of looking down upon the previous point of vision, and 
 of looking up for a still higher, and to gaze downwards 
 is to encourage retrogression. Whosoever or whatso- 
 ever caught the first gleam of a peak above them was 
 to them inspired. But it was the duty to reach that 
 peak in their march upwards as soon as possible; and 
 once it was reached, where was the inspiration ? It 
 was itself far below with the age that supplied it. 
 
 Some new deed or thought or book was certain to 
 take the place of that which had for a time been con- 
 sidered sacred. And, if that did not come, then woe 
 to the race! Progress must stop and darkness must 
 close in on their purblind leaders, who, in order to re- 
 tain their dominance, must elevate the past, immediate 
 or distant, into a divinity, and its best book into an 
 oracle. After a time so obscured do the pages of this 
 book become with cobwebs of interpretation that at last 
 they must spin new cobwebs out of their intestines. 
 The dread of light from without becomes a horror. If 
 a new teacher or prophet should come, down with him 
 into the dust; his teachings are false, for they agree 
 not with the devotion-cobwebbed book. If a reformer 
 sees light above and ahead, he is banned as a messenger 
 of hell; and what he sees is nothing but a diabolic 
 marshlight. All through the race spread the awful 
 
Inspiration 
 
 435 
 
 diseases of spiritual inbreeding, inability to distinguish 
 the true from the false, love of delusion, unwholesome 
 and insane pursuits and ends, and the madness of 
 cruelty and intolerance. Nothing but fierce revolution 
 could save a race from such a plight. And the germs 
 of revolution must come from without themselves and 
 without the world. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 PIONEERING 
 
 I IMAGINATION, corrected by racial instinct in the 
 I assemblies of all, was the seeker for foregleams of 
 what was to be. And a people that had organised its 
 civilisation into a disciplined advance was not likely to 
 leave its scouts and vanguard unorganised. Its destiny 
 was largely in the hands of those who went before it 
 into the night, or who ascended the heights above it, 
 and told of the region to be traversed next, and the 
 best routes through it. There was no service that 
 needed so much the best powers of the race and its best 
 organisation. 
 
 Into the pioneering families were gathered their most 
 powerful imaginations. For imagination is the only 
 clairvoyant of the faculties; it can see what lies below 
 the horizon of knowledge; it can forecast the world as 
 it might be and as it is to be; and it can draw the hu- 
 man mind onwards by the splendours of this forecast. 
 This people had early realised the sibylline character 
 of the faculty, and the great part it might play in their 
 devotion to progress. And they resolved to save it 
 from all waste. They refused to have it become the 
 mere slave of luxury or of popular amusement, such 
 as they saw it was in most other civilised nations. 
 
 436 
 
Pioneering 437 
 
 Even where it conjured up the past in magnificent 
 literary pictures, what else was it than the pander to 
 tastes and habits that were overworn, the encomiast of 
 deeds that had better be buried in oblivion ? It fre- 
 quented the palaces of kings and licked the dust off 
 their feet, or it played the buffoon to the indolent, sen- 
 suous crowd. At rare times it isolated itself, and, 
 heedless of the babbling world that offered it so many 
 prizes, it wrestled with the powers of darkness and 
 ignorance. But what could a poor recluse do against 
 the infinite night? If it were to help the forward 
 march of humanity, it must be disciplined and or- 
 ganised to a definite aim. 
 
 All other peoples have left imagination to struggle 
 for itself. This people recognised it as the most un- 
 schooled and shiftless of the human faculties, whilst 
 they felt it to be the most divine and fullest of promise. 
 They determined that amongst them it should lose its 
 reeling gait and wandering, aimless eye, and become 
 the pioneer of their march onwards; instead of fixing 
 its eye on the past or on the favours of the great, it 
 should skirmish before* the main army into the region 
 of the unknown ; it should report on the difficulties and 
 the enemies to be met, and map out the world as it was 
 to be. What would be thought of the shipmaster who 
 let the keenest-eyed of his crew lounge round the ship 
 looking into the pockets of his comrades and making 
 them laugh, or lean over the stern watching the track 
 left behind, if darkness and cloud and a broken sea 
 ever lay on the horizon ahead ? What else were the 
 nations doing with their lookout faculty, imagination, 
 but allowing it to waste itself on providing amusement 
 for the luxurious, or on figuring the problem of the past ? 
 
 It was one of the first duties of the Limanoran elders, 
 
Limanora 
 
 after the great series of purgations of the race, to or- 
 ganise and develop the imagination they had in their 
 midst. They had observed that there were two great 
 types and uses of the faculty; one was short of vision, 
 and could see with great distinctness the regions that 
 were hidden in twilight immediately in front of them; 
 the other was far-sighted, and could descry the fea- 
 tures of wide regions that lay in darkness under the 
 horizon. There happened to be amongst them two 
 families distinguished from all others by their great 
 imaginativeness, and from each other by pre-eminence 
 in one of these two kinds of imagination. The task 
 therefore was easy. It only needed care in disciplin- 
 ing the members of these to the main purpose of the 
 race, in developing the faculty of each, and in recruit- 
 ing their numbers from the most imaginative children 
 of other families. The L,oomiamo or pioneers of the 
 immediate were recruited chiefly from the scientific and 
 technical families; for their duties lay most of all in 
 supplying hypotheses for experimentation, in suggest- 
 ing methods of solving difficult problems, and in tracing 
 out paths that invention should take; invention in fact 
 was what they were oftenest engaged in. But there 
 was a subordinate function, that was, however, of equal 
 importance for the forward movements of the race; it 
 was to take the far-reaching conceptions of the other 
 imaginative family, and show how they could be at- 
 tained by the civilisation and means they already had. 
 They accepted the scientific ideas and apparatus of the 
 time as they were and out of them and their develop- 
 ment they engineered a highway through the inter- 
 vening twilight to the ideal that the Fraloomiamo or 
 pioneers of the distant had pictured and set up ahead 
 of the race. 
 
Pioneering 439 
 
 I had not known of this division of pioneering work 
 when I flew back from the marvellous spectacle in the 
 valley of futuritions. As I thought over it, I became 
 more and more sceptical of the realisability of the 
 scene. It had the inconsecution and absurdity of a 
 dream. I said to Thyriel, where was the possibility of 
 ever substituting artificial for natural propagation of 
 the race ? It was completely out of the line of evolu- 
 tion, and could lead to nothing but what was unnatural 
 and evil. They could modify nature to an indefinite 
 extent, I knew; but what was the use of attempting to 
 supersede nature ? And suppose it were possible to 
 supersede it in this respect, where would be the advan- 
 tage? They could already modify and guide nature 
 so as to produce the type of children they desired for 
 the progress of the race ; what more was needed ? 
 
 Thyriel gave no answer, partly because she thought 
 that the elders were more capable of answering, partly 
 because she knew that the publication of the book on 
 human sculpture was by no means finished. Next day 
 my sense of community with the immediate yearning 
 and aim of the Limanorans drew me unconsciously to 
 lyoomiefa again; and on my way the streaming wings 
 through the sky showed me that my impulse was not 
 purposeless; there was a general movement towards 
 the same goal. Soon the whole amphitheatre was filled 
 from height to hollow with spectators enriched in colour 
 by the rays of the afternoon sun. 
 
 I had scarcely settled in my rest and surveyed the 
 scene when I knew that all eyes were fixed on the hol- 
 low of the valley. The platform had again run out 
 with the globular magnifier covering it. But the suc- 
 cession of scenes upon it was almost too swift for my 
 observation, untrained as I still was in my senses, and 
 
44 Limanora 
 
 a certain confusion still rests over the spectacle in my 
 memory. Many of the links in the chain were so 
 amazing as to bewilder me, and yet the general pur- 
 pose and effect of the scene as a whole rise above the 
 confusion in my mind. 
 
 I knew before it was done that it was a complete 
 answer to my questions and scepticism. The Loomiamo 
 were enacting the various stages in the evolution of the 
 race which would connect its actual state with the 
 possibility of artificial human propagation. One scene 
 enacted what they had long been able to do, the pro- 
 duction of animal tissue of all kinds; even the most 
 subtle nerve was spun, and under their microscopes 
 they could examine it like a rope. Another showed 
 animal creation at work on the combination of tissue 
 into one of the lower types of animal. One after an- 
 other in a long series we the saw creative power rise 
 in its ambitions and efforts through the animal creation 
 up to the human. But the most striking scene was to 
 come. It was the application of the newly discovered 
 biometer to the search for the principle of life. We 
 saw the creative artists investigate with the instrument 
 plant after plant and animal after animal, and fail in 
 their attempts to isolate it or produce it. They modi- 
 fied the biometer in innumerable ways. Then we saw 
 them fly though the atmosphere, and set the new life- 
 measuring apparatus afloat in space. After repeated 
 attempts, ever pulling the faleena back empty, they at 
 last showed by the joy on their faces that they had at- 
 tained the goal of their quest. In the delicate test- 
 tubes of their new biometers was found something that 
 kept agitating their indicators. Soon they had it in 
 their laboratories, and were experimenting with it. 
 Again and again they gathered it from the vacuum 
 
Pioneering 441 
 
 above the atmosphere. At last by means of it they 
 were enabled to find it in the plants around them, and 
 in the animals of the surrounding islands. A series 
 of scenes as amazing showed how they came at the 
 discovery of the principle of soul by means of the psy- 
 chometer. Step by step (and each step, I came after- 
 wards to feel, represented a Limanoran generation) 
 they traced it back to its secret. Most of all were they 
 aided in their researches by investigations outside of 
 the atmosphere; there they captured in the tubes of 
 their psychometers the form of energy that constituted 
 human soul. And in their laboratories they were able 
 to study it at leisure. 
 
 For long I felt that these pictures of the future were 
 unlikely to be realised. Yet the steps in the process 
 were so gradual, and the scene representing each so 
 vivid that I came in after years to accept it as well 
 within the range of Limanoran possibilities; for I real- 
 ised at last how far into the future imagination could 
 pioneer, and what a vast number of ages one of these 
 predictive dramas would cover. My sense of time was 
 crude and weak during my earlier years in the island, 
 and it was difficult for me to appreciate the passage of 
 cosmic periods, such as were often implied in the scenes 
 representing the publication of a book by the Fraloo- 
 miamo. 
 
 I afterwards listened to the book of Human Sculpture 
 itself, as it uttered itself from a loud- sounding linasan 
 or reproducer of speech. This automaton-reader had 
 the long strip of irelium constituting a Limanoran book 
 fed into it off the cylinder on which the book was kept 
 rolled. It gave the sound and every intonation of the 
 author's voice, so that there was no difficulty in follow- 
 ing his every thought as it found expression. I never 
 
44 2 Limanora 
 
 came to be able to read those books on the irelium rolls 
 themselves under a microscope, as the Limanorans 
 could, and preferred to use my hearing instead of my 
 eyes. There was no possibility of ambiguity if I lis- 
 tened to the words as they came hot from the thinker's 
 own lips. 
 
 A new and more esoteric kind of book tended to 
 supersede this at a later period. It consisted of an 
 electrogram of the author's thoughts, as they developed 
 and shaped themselves, flashed on to long moving strips 
 of labramor or electricity-sponge by his active magnetic 
 sense; this placed in an idrosan or electrograph affected 
 the firla of the receiver so that he followed the whole 
 process of thinking. Such a permanent record of crea- 
 tive thought in its process of creating was of measure- 
 less value to such a people as this, for every economy 
 of time and intelligence meant a quickening of their 
 march into the nobler future. But for many ages the 
 effort of electrographing the thought was too much ex- 
 cept for the most powerful of mature creative minds; 
 and that of receiving the flash of the electrogram 
 through the firla was within the capacity of none but 
 those who had developed their magnetic faculty to 
 great refinement of power. 
 
 The book of Human Sculpture was the first of the re- 
 cent imaginative productions that I became acquainted 
 with. Thyriel and I joined a party of youth who, 
 under the guidance of our proparents, were to listen to 
 it, as it sounded through the liiiasan in the valley of 
 Ivoomiefa. Hour after hour we followed the melodious 
 periods, as they echoed up the slopes; at brief in- 
 tervals on the rocky curtain at the head of the gorge 
 there would flame out for several minutes a moving 
 picture of the scenes we had witnessed the enaction of 
 
Pioneering 443 
 
 on the stage; and a still more striking illustration of 
 the text of the book was a magnetic communication to 
 our minds of the originating impulse which moulded 
 each thought and scene in the imagination of the 
 author, and the creative enthusiasm he felt as each 
 idea burst in all its light upon his soul. By the time 
 we had finished the book we knew its whole conception 
 and history, its purpose, and its probable effect upon 
 the civilisation. 
 
 It answered all my questions, and rooted out all my 
 scepticism. The whole object of their unending labours 
 was to take command of nature by finding out her se- 
 crets and abridging her processes, so as to make them 
 serviceable to their advance. I felt how absurd had 
 been my objections; for where would this people have 
 been, if they had left nature to herself? What else 
 was barbarism but leaving nature to herself, so that the 
 more cruel animal part of her became dominant ? Na- 
 ture included an infinite range of gradations of energy 
 and life from what we call dead matter to the subtle 
 and elevated organisations that fill space and evade the 
 finest perception of our senses. Within our own sys- 
 tems are to be found many of those, from the debris of 
 our bodily tissues and organs to the noblest thought 
 we can conceive; the precept to let nature alone is 
 fraught with inextricable ambiguity; and if we let the 
 myriad natures within us fight it out, it is not difficult 
 to see which would have dominance, for it is easier to 
 level down than to level up. Every interference with 
 the lower nature in order to bring it under the sway of 
 the higher, every new mastery of our systems as a 
 whole by our creative thought, is a step upwards in the 
 scale of existences. Three fourths of the process of 
 human propagation belonged to the sphere of our lower 
 
444 Limanora 
 
 nature, so that civilised men and women were ashamed 
 to speak of it, and tended to become gross and coarse 
 if they did freely speak of it. Every act seemed to 
 drag them back again to the level of the animals, and 
 it took them years of effort to drive the thoughts and 
 traces of it into oblivion. They had as a people pain- 
 fully fought their way up out of the slough of passion, 
 and mastered the emotions that tended to overbalance 
 them by their excess, and to plunge them back again 
 into it. Guard themselves as they might by all kinds 
 of precautions, and spiritualise the act as they ever 
 tried to do, its necessary recurrence never failed to em- 
 brute the nature for a moment, whilst it still kept open 
 a path for retrogression. To shut out this possibility 
 of re-descent into the beast would be one of the greatest 
 services to their race. 
 
 As useful for their advance would the command 
 of human propagation be in another direction. The 
 only fear of deterioration that still haunted them arose 
 from atavism. Nature had still a trick of returning on 
 her own footsteps. The child of the noblest pair had 
 at times traces of far-back ancestry resurgent in evil or 
 retrogressive traits; and it wasted the time and the 
 best energy of parents and proparents to obliterate 
 these. In every germ lay dormant the potentialities 
 of its whole ancestral past; and any one of them might 
 assert itself as master during the dim unguided life of 
 gestation. With all their precautions something evil 
 might still lurk in the systems of the young to be de- 
 veloped in full maturity of life. But if they moulded 
 every tissue and organ and faculty for themselves, this 
 retrogressive tendency that nature treasures up in 
 every germ and child would disappear. There would 
 be nothing to watch or obliterate in the immature. 
 
Pioneering 445 
 
 A still greater economy of time and labour would 
 result in the abridgment of the earlier processes of 
 education. Education, it is true, never ceased through- 
 out life. But the education of the mature was self- 
 conducted; the citizen was his own schoolmaster, and 
 his surroundings were his instruments and assistants. 
 That of the earlier stages used up the labour and wis- 
 dom of two other personalities for the long period of 
 discipline; they were ever on watch and guard lest the 
 past that lay in the youthful nature should suddenly 
 rise and master it. For all education is a wrestle with 
 the superseded past, which becomes evil as soon as it 
 grows superfluous or obstructs further advance. Every 
 form of vitality that has played its part on the stage of 
 existence leaves it with reluctance; it clings to the new, 
 that it may have a little more of life, and impedes its 
 advance. The obsolete most survives in the tissues of 
 the young and immature; and to educate is to strug- 
 gle with the obsolete or obsolescent. The labour and 
 thought needed to make the struggle end in the suc- 
 cess of the new and progressive have never been under- 
 stood so well by any as by the elders of the L,imanorans. 
 No effort of their civilisation was so exhausting as the 
 educative. To enter on parenthood or proparenthood 
 made them pause, for all acknowledged that the as- 
 sumption of this duty was the greatest sacrifice a man 
 or woman could make for the progress of the race. 
 They knew that for half a century their individual 
 vigilance could never cease, and that the strain would 
 come on all their faculties, and not on one or two 
 alone, as it would in most of the other duties they owed 
 to the race, even invention or discovery. Whatsoever 
 would commute or abolish this heavy service to the 
 nation was sure to be welcomed. So vast an amount 
 
446 Limanora 
 
 of the best time and wisest ability of the island would 
 be set free that it would be difficult to calculate the 
 acceleration of progress it would effect. 
 
 All this and a thousand other considerations passed 
 through my mind, as I listened to the book of Hu- 
 man Sculpture and drank in its inspirations. The 
 doubts that its dramatic publication had left in me were 
 all laid. I now knew that this would be a new sacred 
 book, which would hold up for ages an ideal for Lima- 
 nora to struggle towards. 
 
 This book of Human Sculpture made clear to me the 
 meaning and purpose of another publication that I soon 
 witnessed. It was the book of Asexuality, which 
 showed us dramatically how sex and its results be- 
 longed to a lower and more physical stage of personal 
 development. It revealed to us the nature of the be- 
 ings that flit through sidereal space just outside the 
 ken of our senses, centres of energy less inert and more 
 ethereal than any terrestrial creatures. Into them 
 flows more freely than it flows into us the divine energy 
 that is above all. Out of themselves they give as freely 
 to their fellows as they receive. They need no such 
 inequality and unstable equilibrium as sex to teach 
 them such bounteous benignity. Living in the pre- 
 cincts of the fountain of life as they do, not imprisoned 
 within local and temporal limits, but free to move 
 whither they will and to drink unstintingly of supernal 
 existence, they know how essentially all nobler life 
 consists in free bounty; the more of themselves and 
 their energy they give, the higher the energy they re- 
 ceive in its place. Sex is only the rude beginning of 
 this higher law, the principle of antagonism to stag- 
 nation, of giving lavishly in order to have room for 
 
Pioneering 447 
 
 receiving from higher sources. It supersedes and 
 antagonises the law of parasitism, which governs the 
 crude beginnings of life on a new world. The lower 
 microscopic creatures that live a famished jejune life 
 in space ready to pounce upon any orb their shoals en- 
 counter, propagate by mere self-division; they have 
 nothing to give. A new star cooling down on its sur- 
 face sufficiently for life to settle on is their great op- 
 portunity. There they may parasite and feed to their 
 heart's content, propagating by the myriad every in- 
 finitesimal fraction of time. And, as long as they live 
 in such primeval luxury, they never move one step 
 higher in life. Over-supply of food, indeed all luxury, 
 damns a being to stagnancy. The full-fed parasite is 
 unprogressive, and, though multiplying teemingly, is 
 practically sterile; his generations are on a level with 
 himself ; he is immortal by mere fission ; the only func- 
 tion of his life is to grab, till his gettings make him too 
 big for his microscopic unity, and he has to break up. 
 In the higher stages of life, even in human life, this 
 infecundity attaches in the same way to luxurious liv- 
 ing, whilst the sycophant is sterile of purpose and ex- 
 istence. All take and no give is a monstrosity above 
 the lowest bacterial life. The more of dependence or 
 flattery there is in a people, the lower their natures; a 
 tyranny is the lowest political organism; and of tyran- 
 nies the worst is the socialistic; for there, there is no 
 inequality to antagonise and overcome the lethargy of 
 parasitism. 
 
 Even when bacteria begin to feel the pinch of scanty 
 nutrition or malnutrition, they start on a new career, 
 and show the first traces of an advance in life. They 
 incline to give as well as receive, and here are the 
 primeval beginnings of sex. Ill- fed bacteria tend to 
 
448 Limanora 
 
 propagate by means of special cells or spores. Instead 
 of steeping themselves in food till they burst, they now 
 begin to nurse within their systems a germ, to which 
 they give of their best till it is able to launch out for 
 itself; they cease to reproduce by fission, and reproduce 
 by spore-formation. This is the first step upwards on 
 the long road to human morality. The beginnings of 
 sex are the beginnings of unlikeness of individuals, and 
 the beginnings of unstable equilibrium and of overflow 
 of energy from one being into another. This is the 
 organisation of the policy of give in a new star, ultim- 
 ately meant to drive out, after a world-long struggle, 
 the antagonistic policy of mere get. Sex first intro- 
 duced into our world the eagerness of one being to give 
 of its best for the good of another being. Conjugal 
 love in the human era is the first noble form of sexual- 
 ky; and parental love is its still nobler offshoot. 
 
 The development of parenthood is the knell of sex- 
 uality. For it is a new and higher phase of the policy 
 of give, and anliquates the mere mutuality of sexual 
 love. It gives of its all expecting nought in return. 
 And into the place of the energy that has gone out of 
 it flows an energy that is nearer the divine and raises 
 towards the divine. It is at this point that sex be- 
 comes a lower stage, seeming almost to mingle with 
 brute life. Out of it must humanity struggle in order 
 to progress. " In the spirit there is no sex." This I 
 had heard as a meaningless echo from wise lips in the 
 West. Now I saw its significance. The higher, the 
 more spiritual we become, the less we permit sex to 
 dominate, and the less difference there is between the 
 sexes. It was in the world of imagination and intel- 
 lect that the first idea of equality of the sexes arose. 
 And the more intellectual a people became, the less it 
 
Pioneering 449 
 
 insisted on the difference between man and woman. 
 Emphasis on sex in a civilised people was a sure sign 
 of approaching decay. 
 
 For the goal towards which the human race is ad- 
 vancing is asexual; not that that will be the main 
 characteristic; but it is the most striking compared 
 with our present phase of being. The more highly 
 organised existences that fill space and hover just out- 
 side the range of our grosser senses have reached the 
 stage in which the stimulus of sex or even of parent- 
 hood is no longer needed in order to save the benignant 
 instincts from dying out. And the higher a centre of 
 energy climbs in the scale of existence, the more eager 
 does it become to overflow into other centres, to give 
 of its highest and best. What we call life, or the spon- 
 taneous rejection of stagnancy, begins on its lowest 
 fringe with a tendency to take all and give none, with 
 appetite. Below this are inert centres of energy, that 
 resist all receiving as well as all giving, that exist only 
 in persisting, in keeping what they have and what they 
 are; this stage is usually called dead matter in contrast 
 to energy, although it consists of nuclei of energy as 
 truly as any living creature. Between the two stages 
 of mere keep and mere take seems to lie a great gulf 
 fixed; but there are minute evidences of transition to 
 be found all through nature. We ourselves, the hu- 
 man race, form the transition from the stage of take all 
 to the stage of give all. And sex is the chief impetus 
 to progress in the earlier history of human evolution. 
 Parenthood takes its place in the upper levels, where 
 the human is rapidly approaching the supersensuous. 
 The very fact of our nature being so heterogeneous and 
 complex reveals that we are making for something 
 higher; and, as our appetites imply a stage behind us, 
 
45 Limanora 
 
 in which our systems were fitted for nothing but tak- 
 ing, so our loves, our benevolences, our self-sacrifices, 
 point forward to a stage in which the whole of exist- 
 ence will consist in giving. I remember, whenever an 
 average man in Europe quoted the phrase, " It is more 
 blessed to give than to receive," he meant it as a jest, 
 or in a sinister sense; even the priest, when he had to 
 preach the doctrine as one of the foundations of his re- 
 ligion, had incredulity in his heart if not in the smile 
 on his lips, as he spoke the words. Amongst the 
 Limanorans it was a truism that was implied in all 
 conduct and need never be explicitly stated. And the 
 book of Asexuality revealed the inner and scientific 
 significance to me. The highest state of any centre of 
 energy in the cosmos was to be eagerly, lavishly, and 
 perpetually giving out of its best. For thus was it ever 
 kept in unstable equilibrium, towards which flowed 
 higher and higher energies from centres above it; thus 
 it kept its life unstagnant and immortal. That which 
 only received, and was eager only to receive, suffered 
 the maladies of the luxurious, soon reached its utmost 
 capacity, and fell into stagnancy and decay. Above 
 the human rose the hierarchy of sexless, supersensuous 
 beings, who peopled infinite space; but into their ranks 
 rose the human by means of struggle, by means of the 
 effluence of their energy into others, by means of sex, 
 and still more of parenthood. The purpose of sex is to 
 attain to the higher asexuality. 
 
 Not that monasticism is good for the human race. 
 It is on the contrary the greatest of evils in the sexual 
 stage of progress. It counts as wicked and harmful 
 that which alone prevents self-absorption and the be- 
 ginning of decay and death. Sex is the provision of 
 nature for drawing the animal outside of itself so that 
 
Pioneering 451 
 
 it may introduce into its generations the seeds of de- 
 velopment. It makes it as a centre of energy feel the 
 need of other centres, to which it may give, from which 
 it may receive. It is her chief means of keeping any 
 vital centre from falling back into stagnancy and the 
 desire of stagnancy. And, as long as man is still ani- 
 mal, sex and its resultant parenthood must continue to 
 play the main part in development. To attempt to 
 reach asexuality before the animal is ejected from his 
 system is to balk progress and invite stagnancy and 
 decay. 
 
 The book of Asexuality showed how the family must 
 remain the unit and lever of advance till sex should be 
 superseded by individual creation. Then friendship or 
 the bond of contrast in community will take the place 
 of the bond of heredity, or of that bond which is based 
 upon sexual passion. The mutual choice will be com- 
 pletely rational and in the will of the choosers. There 
 will be nothing instinctive or mediate or unconscious 
 about it. It is indeed one of the indignities of this 
 present sexual stage of evolution that we are thrust on 
 in spite of ourselves, that we have little command over 
 the stimulus that is urging us on the road of progress. 
 
 The Limanorans had got rid of some of this indignity 
 inasmuch as the elders and wise men took command of 
 the instinct of sex, and bent it in the direction of their 
 own line of advance. In other peoples, and especially 
 in the West, it stumbled blindly on, led sometimes by 
 the love of youthful beauty, sometimes by the love 
 of money, sometimes by the necessities of position 
 and diplomacy, most frequently by ambition and the 
 love of power or social influence, seldom or never by 
 the deliberate intent of producing noble posterity. 
 As a consequence retrogression in health, physique, 
 
45 2 Limanora 
 
 morality, or intellectual power was seen in all ranks far 
 oftener than progress. Over the whole there might be 
 a slight advance in centuries; but in most families it 
 was one generation forward and the next back. This 
 people had by their purgations become the assistants of 
 nature; and since the era of the exilings they had 
 wisely piloted sex to serve the highest purposes of evo- 
 lution. The young were still driven half-blindly by 
 the sting of sex, and might by chance accelerate pro- 
 gress; but the elders without revealing their art wisely 
 controlled the instinct, and by the governance of prox- 
 imity and opportunity, companionship and circum- 
 stances, amongst the immature made it the guardian 
 and keeper of past advance and the prompter of still 
 renewed advance. The final step was pictured by this 
 new imaginative book, the supersession of sex and the 
 deliberate creation of posterity. This would relieve 
 the elders of their anxious task of match-making, and 
 put into the hands of the pairs themselves the control 
 of the parental instinct and the power of improving 
 their posterity. 
 
 Even as it was, I could see, from the axioms and 
 postulates of this book of Asexuality, and the impres- 
 sion it made on my friends and companions, that the 
 sex-instinct was already to a large extent under the 
 control of those whom it impelled. It had become, 
 like their appetite for food, saturated with intellect and 
 deliberation. It was no mere goad that drove them 
 on in the dark stumbling towards some object that 
 would gratify the passion. They knew its physio- 
 logical and psychological working, and understood 
 how the destinies of the race waited upon the wisdom 
 or folly of its guidance. Not even the youngest of 
 them would allow it the caprice and perverse whimsi- 
 
Pioneering 453 
 
 cality that was considered its native prerogative in the 
 West. The passionate whim of the moment for "a 
 grey eye or so " was no more to them than toothache 
 or the pangs of indigestion, an aberrancy from healthy 
 nature, to be checked and healed as soon as possible. 
 I found that I was far in the rear of their advance in 
 respect to love. My Western heroics and amorous 
 transports were discounted and yet curiously watched 
 as the antiquated manners of an age long gone by. 
 Nothing gave so keen a shock to my self-approval as the 
 smile that played upon the face of Thyriel when I first 
 broke into the raptures of adoration for her which are 
 the natural expression of passionate love in my native 
 Europe. Romeo-and-Julietism had been consecrated 
 by centuries of the traditions of Christendom as the 
 true attitude and conduct of lovers. And here was I, 
 only fulfilling the instinct and bursting into the ap- 
 propriate transports of passion, reined in by what I 
 thought at first the cynicism of my Juliet. The smile 
 would have been cynical on the lips of a young Euro- 
 pean inamorata. In Thyriel it was no more than the 
 amused recognition of manners which she had laughed 
 at in studying the ancient history and literature of the 
 island, as if I had seen a comrade in the commonness 
 of European daily life adopting the language and atti- 
 tude of Homeric or Ossianic heroes. 
 
 I grew ashamed of the amorous ardours of the West, 
 and, when I felt the tendency to erotic idolatry come 
 upon me, I kept it to myself. Even then I knew that 
 I was centuries behind my Limanoran coevals in the 
 rational guidance of the sexual instinct. Nothing 
 brought this so clearly to my mind as the reception of 
 the book of Asexuality. During its dramatic publica- 
 tion I looked round to see the shock of unnatural 
 
454 Limanora 
 
 innovation on the faces of the audience, or the shrinking 
 of modesty, or the sense of outraged religious or tra- 
 ditional instincts. But there was none of these to be 
 found there. The ideal was accepted at once as the 
 proper and possible goal of the race, and the book was 
 treasured amongst the sacred literature of the time. 
 
 It soon flashed upon me, too, as I frequented L,oo- 
 miefa, that their art had all a far higher purpose than 
 I had conjectured from my European experience. It 
 was not meant merely to stir or to satisfy the sense of 
 beauty and harmony, but to implant in the emotions 
 and the imagination the love of the future and the 
 passion for rising in the scale of existence. I grew 
 ashamed to think that I had attributed to this wonder- 
 ful people the frivolity and even lowness of aim that I 
 had so often seen in European art. Here was a drama 
 that the West had not even a conception of. At its 
 best the stage of Europe professed to educate by repre- 
 senting heroic scenes from the past, by evolving from 
 them lessons for the audience, and by stirring their 
 enthusiasm for great deeds of history or myth. In its 
 commonest mood it reproduced in mimic form some 
 scene or action from contemporary life. At its worst 
 it was but a pander to the survivals of a gross and ani- 
 mal past. What I now thought of as the Linianoran 
 stage was wholly occupied with the future, so far as it 
 was a possible evolution from the present. The noblest 
 ideal that the imagination of the race could shape was 
 brought dramatically before the people that their 
 thoughts and ambitions might be fixed on something 
 beyond themselves. 
 
 For this high purpose and not for luxury or personal 
 enjoyment their sculpture and painting and music had 
 
Pioneering 455 
 
 been developed, and the newest discoveries and inven- 
 tions of science had been brought to their aid. There 
 was no objection to what gave pleasure; but to spend 
 the thought and effort of the fully developed human 
 mind on that alone was, they held, a degradation: 
 Strenuous endeavour towards a higher and better future 
 was the note that characterised their pursuits. But, if 
 they could add attractiveness to the prosecution of the 
 aim, the task was all the easier; if they could make 
 the path ahead beautiful and pleasant so as to decoy the 
 reluctant senses onwards, the pace would be all the 
 swifter. 
 
 Even with this high aim, I could not understand how 
 this people, who loathed all pretence, could condescend 
 to their dramatic art; for on this stage of Loomiefa 
 were members of their community representing in their 
 persons what they were not and could not be for many 
 ages. And I had heard them often decry the histri- 
 onic art as one that encouraged in the actors a habit of 
 delighting in mere semblance and superficial show, a 
 habit that is the basis of hypocrisy and deceit; whilst 
 the love of mimicry and pageantry, I had been led to 
 believe, had vanished from the island at one of the last 
 purgations of the race. 
 
 The seeming contradiction was afterwards explained. 
 As one of the necessary steps in my initiation into the 
 privileges and duties of the mature citizen I was led 
 behind the scenes. Through the gorge at the upper 
 end of the valley I passed into a great hall that seemed 
 to me a combination of a -museum and workshop. 
 Here were the youth of the Loomiamo and the Fra- 
 loomiamo at work upon automata and the elaborate ma- 
 chinery that would guide their motions. Had I kept 
 at a distance from them as they worked, I would 
 
45 6 Limanora 
 
 have thought that the play of human sculpture was 
 being again enacted, such exact reproductions of the 
 human system were the figures that grew under their 
 hands. In one section stood thousands of what I 
 would have called statues, which had served in the 
 publication of former books. In another the puppets 
 were going through dramatic scenes by way of experi- 
 mentation, and in many the illusion was complete; I 
 should have said that human beings were talking and 
 acting. In others there was some imperfection, and 
 there one could see that they were all mere fantoccini 
 galvanised into life. In a third section the tissues and 
 parts that were to make mimic men and women were 
 being manufactured ; the workers and artists could 
 draw on Rimla for as much force as they needed, whilst 
 the advice of the scientific families was at their com- 
 mand. The machinery of the great workshop was 
 bewildering in its complexity and refinement. The 
 finest tissue or nerve of the human brain could be 
 here imitated so that under a microscope I would have 
 said it was part of a living body. 
 
 After all it was only the acting of marionettes that I 
 had seen upon the stage in the valley. But it was 
 greatly aided by another department where the pio- 
 neering families cultivated the art and science of 
 illusions. They could imitate the human voice at any 
 point in the valley measured to the fraction of an inch; 
 they could reproduce any scene of history, of contem- 
 porary existence, or of futuritive fiction so exactly, 
 making it so full of the lights and shadows of life and 
 of the developments of all advance, that none of the 
 senses unaided by the reasoning and analytic faculties 
 could assert that the men and women were not living, 
 and that their actions and words were not real. Even 
 
Pioneering 
 
 the electric sense could be deluded by the impulses man- 
 ufactured by these machinists and illusionists; it would 
 take the magnetic thrills it received for genuine en- 
 thusiasm and sympathy from the mind of a man or from 
 a crowd. This department was even more important 
 than the factory of puppets; for it made the play of the 
 marionettes look still more human on the stage. After 
 all it was not the puppets themselves I had watched 
 with such breathless excitement, but a mere illusory 
 picture of their proceedings; the illusion was far more 
 lifelike than the play of the marionettes themselves. 
 So much stress did they lay on stirring the imagination 
 and emotions of the race in favour of the ideals of the 
 future that half the work of these two families con- 
 sisted in the dramatic publication of their books. 
 
 The next sacred book I saw produced in Loomiefa 
 would have of itself persuaded me that this people 
 could have nothing to do with the histrionic art or any 
 art that would encourage the habit of pretence and 
 show in the individual nature. It was called the book 
 of Human Transparency and described the various 
 methods by which the inner working of the human 
 brain could be made patent to Limanoran senses. The 
 tissues could be clarified; the significance of every 
 fibre and nerve could be made familiar to all as an 
 essential part of their education; the eye, the ear, and 
 the firla could be made more subtle and acute in their 
 perceptions, till at last they were able to tell in a mo- 
 ment everything that was proceeding beneath the skull 
 and within the heart. What was done slowly and pain- 
 fully by the medical elders with the help of their instru- 
 ments, their hypnotic powers, and the interpretation 
 of dreams, every man would be able to do instantane- 
 ously, and without extraneous aid, exceptional wisdom, 
 
45 8 Limanora 
 
 or occult powers. The general drift of a neighbour's 
 emotions was known to everyone through his magnetic 
 senses, but not the particular intention or thought; 
 this would be known only after the long course of 
 training and development mapped out in the book of 
 Human Transparency. 
 
 One of the chief ethical purposes that had in recent 
 times been fixed in the mind of the community was to 
 eject from the human system all elements and processes 
 that were offensive to the finer feelings and senses, 
 everything in fact that a man or woman might be 
 ashamed of or wish to conceal. The new book of the 
 time aimed at extending this to the operations of 
 thought and emotion. To get clear of the waste pro- 
 ducts of the mind in a way that would be inoffensive to 
 others was an ideal they had not yet been able to enter- 
 tain. They had learned with much pain and self- 
 denial the habit of concealing the crude processes of 
 thought that lead to what is worth saying or doing. It 
 was one of the things they were most ashamed of in 
 looking over the history or the memorials of their far 
 past to see the vast amount of the raw digestion of 
 thought and of the refuse of emotion that was made 
 public, and even put into literature meant to be per- 
 manent. Most of the orations and magazine articles, 
 and ultimately most of the books that had been pro- 
 duced in past ages were much the same as if the 
 stomach and intestines of the speaker or writer had 
 been anatomised and laid open with all their offensive 
 processes to the gaze of spectators. One of the most 
 beneficent events of their later history had been a con- 
 flagration in their valley of memories; for it had wiped 
 out of existence the libraries and art accumulations of 
 many centuries, of which they had come to be ashamed. 
 
Pioneering 459 
 
 They could not understand the long-past stage of their 
 civilisation, in which men, and especially young men, 
 had been so proud of displaying the mere debris of 
 their worst and crudest processes of thought; it had 
 actually been the case that most of the literature and 
 art had been produced by youths under fifty years of 
 age, who had not yet begun to appreciate the differ- 
 ence between the processes of thinking and the results 
 of thinking; and one of the most extraordinary feat- 
 ures of that period was that the most applauded literary 
 and artistic productions, those that were supposed to 
 be most distinctively the outcome of what they called 
 genius, were the work of boys and girls, mere children 
 under twenty-five years of age. Natures that should 
 still have been in the nursery for many a year were 
 stimulated to address the public and seek applause with 
 work that was merely tentative and disciplinary. The 
 result was that, on the one hand, one half of the most 
 original and promising minds racked themselves to 
 death years before they should have faced life, whilst 
 on the other a juvenile ideal was set before literature 
 and art, and boys and girls became their chief audience 
 and most powerful arbiters. They felt heartily ashamed 
 of that singular stage in their development, and were 
 glad to have accidental fire come to their assistance in 
 huddling its products out of sight. 
 
 One of the first instincts they evolved after the series 
 of purgations was the desire to conceal within their 
 minds what was crude or mere process in thinking, 
 and, still more, what was mere waste product and re- 
 fuse of the mind. Instead of being eager to speak out 
 or publish all that came into the thoughts, bad or good, 
 they grew shy of public exhibition of their projects and 
 schemes till they had been shaped by long years of 
 
460 Limanora 
 
 thinking and experimenting, and criticised and checked 
 by the caution and wisdom of their fully matured 
 nature. Publication became the last resort of the 
 mature and old instead of the first ambition of the 
 young, so afraid were they of exhibiting what might 
 be crude or offensive. Even in the give and take of 
 conversation and social intercourse they preferred long 
 periods of silence to the utterance of truisms and com- 
 monplaces. The trivial and conventional in speech, as 
 in life, was what they abhorred, as revealing an intel- 
 lectual nature on the road back to the infertility and 
 childishness of barbarism, the elaborate mechanism of 
 thought whizzing round without connection with what 
 represents work. 
 
 But now the book of Human Transparency proposed 
 as an ideal to eject from the system every process of 
 thought and feeling that they might blush to let others 
 see. If the nature was made transparent then would 
 it become a self-preserving instinct to develop their 
 natures in this direction. Everything crude or false 
 or offensive, that might begin to show itself in their 
 minds, would be at once suppressed before it got head- 
 way, instead of having to be slowly reasoned out of 
 existence with the aid of the moral instincts,. This 
 accomplished, the race would be able to take another 
 great leap forward. The advance of their processes of 
 thought and feeling to the level of the former results 
 of them would give them a higher point of view from 
 which to look forth into the future. 
 
 A mediate book, soon afterward produced by one of 
 the Loomiamo, supplied one of the steps towards the 
 consummation of this ideal. It was the book of Ethe- 
 real Nutriment. It took as basis a former discovery, 
 
Pioneering 4 61 
 
 the liquefaction of air, and showed how, by similar 
 methods, the medium that filled interstellar space could 
 be made available in the halls of nutriment and medi- 
 cation, and how it could be manufactured in such a 
 concentrated form as to allow of its being poured along 
 conduits and imbibed by the human organs through 
 the mouth and nostrils, just as air was. For some 
 time the atmosphere had been distilled in liquid form, 
 and supplied to the houses of the citizens absolutely 
 rid of all impurities. Nay, it had been made a fountain 
 of power, transmissible to long distances, and available 
 in a form that was easily carried. Compressed and 
 liquefied, it rapidly returned to the gaseous form as 
 soon as the pressure began to be removed. And the re- 
 equilibrising of the liquid to the expansion of the sur- 
 rounding air had been made to supply vast quantities 
 of power in the centre of force. The new book pro- 
 posed to find in the compression and liquefication of the 
 ether an infinite fountain of force that would enable 
 their civilisation to progress at an ever-accelerating 
 pace. 
 
 But the most immediate effect proposed by the book 
 was to enable the Limanorans to etherealise their bodies 
 by introducing the liquefied ether into their dietary. 
 The result would be that the tissues would grow more 
 diaphanous. They had already been able to transport 
 some of the universal medium in their anchored va- 
 cuum faleenas from the outer margin of the atmosphere 
 to their laboratories, and now they had been able to 
 find it in their manufactured vacuums. With the 
 enormous power they had in Rimla they could easily 
 compress it into forms that would touch the senses, 
 and enter into the blood and the formation of the tissues. 
 As the medium of light and magnetism it was almost 
 
462 5 Limanora 
 
 certain to make the human body more translucent than 
 it had ever been. All the tissues, even the osseous, 
 had always been pervious to light, but many of them 
 not apparently so to the untrained human eye. Re- 
 cently their lavolans had shown that by means of cer- 
 tain kinds of luminous rays the human system gave up 
 its most hidden secrets to the human eye. But once 
 they were able to chemicalise and compress the luinin- 
 iferous ether into palpable form, and to mingle it with 
 the volatile food that could be taken into their bodies 
 as they breathed, there would be no need of lavolans 
 or other apparatus to see the inner movements of the 
 human system. 
 
 The sanitary effects of this advance would be no 
 mean result. The medical council would have much 
 of their time set free for their ever-pressing investiga- 
 tions; they would not be needed for the diagnosis of 
 deteriorative symptoms in the tissues; each individual 
 would be able, by the aid of magnifying mirrors to 
 examine for himself what was going on in any part of 
 his system; and every man had sufficient physiological 
 and medical knowledge to understand the beginnings 
 of all the ordinary diseases, and, if he recognised them, 
 to prescribe for himself the hall in Oomalefa that he 
 should frequent in order to check them. Now it would 
 be only the symptoms of obscure or new diseases or 
 deteriorations of the system that the medical elders 
 would have to diagnose. And thus they would have 
 great tracts of their life to devote to new discoveries, 
 and medical science was certain to advance more 
 rapidly. 
 
 Another sanitary effect of the new permeability to 
 light would be to render the human body less open to 
 diseases either known or unknown. For it had long 
 
Pioneering , 463 
 
 been a commonplace of medical science that sunlight 
 reduced the vitality, and therefore the virulence, of all 
 noxious microbes; after nightfall their power increased 
 tenfold. Wherever the sun's rays could not reach by 
 day, there diseases multiplied and festered. And one 
 of the chief reasons why, in their far past history, in- 
 curable maladies were generally internal, was that 
 sunshine could not get to the parts affected except in 
 a feeble and straggling way. The fact that they had 
 fixed themselves deeply in the tissues before they could 
 be observed, and that it was difficult to get at their 
 roots without cutting a passage in to them had been 
 generally accepted as the explanation of their fre- 
 quency and deadliness. But it had been one of the 
 most important discoveries of the new era after the 
 purgation period, that pure oxygen and pure sunlight 
 were the most medicative of all things, and that the 
 nearer any affected part could get to them the sooner 
 it healed. The new book of Ethereal Nutrition pointed 
 out that one of the results of rendering the human sys- 
 tem easily pervious to light would be to rid its internal 
 parts of all trace of immedicability ; sunlight, permeat- 
 ing the inner organs and tissues, would make any 
 noxious microbes that might lodge in them innocuous. 
 
 The reciprocity of suggestion and discovery was 
 never more saliently exemplified than by one of the less 
 immediate results pointed out by this book as likely to 
 flow from the attainment of its ideal. Volatile ether- 
 food, gradually introduced into the halls of nutrition 
 and gradually increased, would, step by step, bring the 
 human organs to adapt themselves to existence outside 
 of the atmosphere of the earth. For a long time they 
 would be amphibious, with organs adapted to both 
 
464 Limanora 
 
 aerial and ethereal life. Even as it was, the human 
 body revealed in it traces of having already passed 
 through an amphibious stage. There were in the neck 
 glands that were the remains of gills, which must 
 have once belonged to an aquatic habit; besides, there 
 was the last vestige of an eye in the back of the neck 
 still extant in the pineal gland, and this could have 
 been of use only when the ancestor of man was passing 
 through the stage of a water-animal which must 
 watch his enemies from the surface, his body being 
 submerged and out of sight. Step by step he aban- 
 doned the water for a littoral, and even at first arboreal, 
 habit; the result was that the gills came to be unused 
 and closed up, and the upward-looking eye was useless 
 in a head that was held upright and could be turned 
 swiftly in all directions; still man retains the memory 
 of the aquatic stage of his ancestry in the ease with 
 which he learns to swim, and in his love of a life on 
 the sea; whilst an occasional birth in more barbarous 
 tribes with the webbed toes of a water-animal still 
 showing reveals his ancestry atavistically. 
 
 What was to hinder him, now he had the mastery of 
 himself and his destiny, becoming again amphibious 
 in a new way ? Without guidance of his own, driven 
 only by the forces of nature, he had risen out of the 
 waters that once covered the earth, and taken to dry 
 land; for a long period he had been able to live at will 
 in either of two elements, air and water. Where 
 lay the difficulty in making himself again capable of 
 living in two elements, in air and in the luminiferous 
 ether? In prehistoric times nature had worked her 
 evolution in his system by long and slow stages. But 
 in lyimanora progress had become lightning-swift, and 
 would again and again increase its pace. For there 
 
Pioneering 465 
 
 man had taken command of nature, and made her ac- 
 commodate her step to his stride. She was his willing 
 servant, nimble as her own electric flash. He could 
 now compress the work of centuries into hours by his 
 concentration of power in Rimla, and by his countless 
 ingenious contrivances. Thought was the lord of time 
 as of space, and thought was now his essence and 
 characteristic. He could, if he wished, contract the 
 process that used to cover geological ages into a gen- 
 eration. There was no reason why he should not be- 
 come amphibious again in a less grovelling sense than 
 of old within the few centuries of a lifetime. This was 
 the purport of another production of this time, the book 
 of Amphibious Existence. 
 
 It was a mediate book, one bridging the gulf between 
 things as they were and the far ideals held out to the 
 race by the Fraloomiamo. It helped to point out the 
 steps towards the realisation of one of the most 
 cherished productions of the age, the Book of Emigra- 
 tion. It had been many years in the maturer minds of 
 the community before I was introduced to Loomiefa 
 and its wonders, and it had recently been much modi- 
 fied by the discoveries of the new outburst of energy 
 that followed Choktroo's attempt at invasion. Its 
 ideal was to enable the L,imanorans of that or some 
 future generation to travel thought space and reach 
 other stars. 
 
 Long ago a publication that had prepared for, and 
 demanded this, was the book of the Destiny of the 
 Earth. It had made a profound impression on the peo- 
 ple when first produced; for it dramatically painted the 
 horror of death that would settle on this globe. It had 
 been proved by both astronomers and physicists that 
 
466 Limanora 
 
 our orb was gradually losing its heat by the same pro- 
 cess which had brought its originally glowing surface 
 to a state that would allow of life settling upon it. 
 First, vegetation and animal life were found at the 
 poles, where the lessened heat of the sun made the ter- 
 restrial heat endurable; then they crept their slow way 
 onwards to the equator, till the whole surface of the 
 earth teemed with vitality, at first developing towards 
 vastitude in the warm vapours, in later periods towards 
 concentration of energy in special points of the animal 
 body, and especially in the head. Round the poles at 
 last settled the ice-sheet, advancing at long intervals 
 towards the tropics, now in one hemisphere and again 
 in the other, according as the one or the other was 
 farthest in winter from the sun during an extensive 
 period. The hyperborean powers shepherded the 
 growing life of the earth down into her central belt. 
 But the brumal shepherds of the one side of the world 
 receded as those of the other advanced with their arctic 
 winds and fleecy drifts. Within measurable time this 
 alternation would cease, and the glacial fences would 
 move forward together north and south, and pen the 
 overcrowded human life and energy with all its ene- 
 mies into the narrow equatorial belt. 
 
 It was the drama of these boreal limitations that the 
 book of Terrestrial Destiny pictured. The teeming 
 life weltered over sea and land alike in search of foot- 
 hold and nutrition. No inch of tropical earth was 
 sacred from brute appetite. Animal and man fought 
 with venomous passion for dear life. Not animalculae 
 alone but beasts, and even man, became parasitic. 
 Creatures that had loved a free existence in vast prairies 
 or forests learned to nest and hibernate in the folds 
 and hollows of larger animals. Life swarmed over life 
 
Pioneering 467 
 
 till for lack of food it began to fail. Man crept with 
 loathsome beasts of prey into caves of the earth, and 
 grew as loathsome in his troglodytic habits. On moved 
 the brumal prison walls. The sun shrivelled in the sky 
 and withdrew his heat. Nothing lived that was not 
 arctic not even amongst the still-free birds of the air. 
 Man finally ceased to have faculty enough to notice the 
 shrinking of the already narrow enclosure that was 
 soon to be his grave. Feebly the last remnants of the 
 race stole forth into the struggling rays of daylight and 
 killed everything of life they could find. Only in the 
 sea still lived their possible prey and food, and thither 
 they dared not go beneath the gloom of the thick ice. 
 The cannibal habit came upon man again and no re- 
 lationship or love restrained his appetite. The last 
 scene of the drama was the death of the last man, the 
 grave of the remnants of his race; where he fell, there 
 he lay embalmed; and his tomb was the earth's own 
 winding-sheet. The meagre relics of terrestrial life 
 soon followed him into silence and darkness, and 
 through the sunless night the dead orb wheeled round 
 the extinguished cinder which had for so many geo- 
 logical ages given it light and life. 
 
 The publication of the book would have frozen the 
 hearts within them, had not the Limanorans known 
 that that was not the end of all. They saw that the 
 alternations of death and life were not confined to the 
 vegetal and animal species around them. The same 
 pendulum swung through the whole cosmos. The 
 universe which was dead now would live again in 
 blazing rounds of vapour that would solidify and cool 
 till life could settle on the new orbs again. Dead it 
 only seemed. For it never rested but revolved round 
 some centre revolving ajso, and too distant for man to 
 
468 Limanora 
 
 see or feel. Out of these motions would come resusci- 
 tation. After millions of ages, that are but as moments 
 in the history of the cosmos, it would encounter an- 
 other exhausted universe, and from the collision would 
 a new system of glowing worlds arise, ready for another 
 series of vital colonisations from the limitless life of 
 sidereal space. 
 
 It was this knowledge that took the sting out of their 
 sadness over the new book. Yet the fate of man, age 
 by age more closely penned in by the walls of his 
 glacial-coffin, and drawn back by the eddy of time into 
 his primeval savagery, left a loophole for despair and 
 palsy to enter into their lives. Were they to let their 
 descendants fall back again into the beast, whence their 
 ancestors had come ? Was this glacial prison and tomb 
 to remain a possibility and a shadow on even the dis- 
 tant horizon of their race ? Once before had their an- 
 cestry evaded such a fate, penned between the invasive 
 glaciers and the sea; once before had the race com- 
 mitted their fates to an element they feared and hated, 
 lest -the encroaching ice-sheet should smother their 
 civilisation and reduce their vitality to the level of bar- 
 barism and at last annihilation. Better to let the race 
 die out at its noblest than leave it to go down into such 
 an inferno. Nothing now so made them shudder as the 
 prospect of retrogression, however slight. But to think 
 of their civilisation ebbing away from their posterity 
 before the waning power of the sun and the earth, to 
 think of the lapse of their own intellectual mastery of 
 nature into decrepitude and putrescence, was to turn 
 their hearts to stone. 
 
 Under such a prospect they could not sit in intellect- 
 ual paralysis. For years the imagination of the race 
 
Pioneering 469 
 
 worked feverishly towards its rescue from such an 
 appalling destiny, and every new scientific advance 
 brought forth a new book of Emigration. Their one 
 thought of escape was taken from their old migration 
 out of the reach of antarctic glacial advance. To sail 
 out from the earth and commit themselves to the 
 strange conditions and uncertainties of a new element 
 seemed no more hazardous to them now than in their 
 primeval stage of land-civilisation to launch out with 
 their lives in their hands upon the unknown and terri- 
 fying ocean. It was urged that there was precedent 
 and basis for their marine adventure in that their an- 
 cestry had been amphibious, and that one of the prim- 
 eval species out of which they had come had been 
 aquatic. The reply was that the case was parallel and 
 not antagonistic. The original vital germs that set- 
 tled on the cooling surface of the globe must have 
 come out of sidereal space, and must have lived in the 
 element that they would have to cross in emigrating 
 from the glacial orb again; and from these vital germs 
 they, and all living terrestrial things, had evolved. It 
 was only one stage farther back in the history of life; 
 the precedent was the same, though the training and 
 modification of the system would have to be more 
 strenuous and drastic than they had been before the 
 former leap was taken from land to sea. Preparation 
 had already been made; for they had learned aerial 
 navigation far more thoroughly than they had ever 
 known the mastery of the sea. Their air-ships had 
 ventured right up into the ether, whilst on wings they 
 had themselves coasted the earth's atmosphere. No- 
 thing was impossible to intellect which had mastered 
 the art of evolution. 
 
 Recent discovery had led them far on the difficult 
 
47 Limanora 
 
 ascent towards safe departure from the surface of the 
 world. It only needed ingenuity and development to 
 give them a concentration of aerated sustenance, which 
 would enable them to journey for ages outside of an at- 
 mosphere such as they had been accustomed to inhabit; 
 they had the germ of this in the nuts of the alfarene or 
 oxygen-shrub; recently their chemists had been able to 
 reproduce the essence of them, and to compress it into 
 microscopic globules. Not till a later age of discovery 
 did they supersede this by the liquefaction and solidifi- 
 cation of air. They were rapidly adapting their own 
 systems to the vacuums they could produce and to the 
 rarefied atmosphere high above the clouds. They were 
 introducing the quintessence of the ether into their 
 halls of sustenance and medication, and thus accustom- 
 ing their organs and tissues to conditions which they 
 would meet continually on their voyage through sid- 
 ereal space. The next generation would practically 
 be amphibious, able to live in the luminiferous ether 
 with occasional return to an atmosphere such as sur- 
 rounds the earth. Kvery new age would enable them 
 to make longer and longer excursions away from the 
 bosom of mother-earth out towards the influence of 
 other planets. Kvery new generation would have more 
 elastic and adaptable tissues and organs, which would 
 fit varied pressure and varied mediums of vitality. 
 And with all this the lyimanoran body would grow 
 lighter at the same time as it would grow more consol- 
 idated, coherent, and indissoluble. But most important 
 of all was the new command of gravitation given them 
 by the discovery of the varying sensitiveness or non- 
 sensitiveness of certain rays to magnetism and gravity 
 according to conditions that were in human hands. 
 There were limitless possibilities in this for sidereal 
 
Pioneering 47 1 
 
 migration. And already out of it had come the lavo- 
 lamma or gravitation power-machine. 
 
 The new book of Emigration brought all these dis- 
 coveries and thoughts into bearing on its problem and 
 harmonised them, and developed them by means of 
 imaginative suggestion. The drama of its publication 
 drew the bulk of the people to Loomiefa. There we 
 saw a representation of Lilaroma itself, piercing the 
 sky in pure and lonely grandeur. Near its top lay 
 moored a fleet of faleenas of strikingly new form and 
 material; they were as light as foam-bubbles, and as 
 opalescently transparent; within each of them we could 
 see stored quantities of alfarene globules, that seemed 
 enough to serve a people for thousands of years; in 
 each we saw a new anti-gravitation engine, ready to 
 deal with every form of attraction and repulsion in the 
 wide ether and turn it into available power. Men and 
 women in Limanoran form, but as transparent and as 
 imponderable and buoyant as their new ships, floated 
 round the ethereal fleet. Now and again a flash of arti- 
 ficial light would dart across the scene, and along it, as 
 if impelled by it, ran with lightning-swiftness one of 
 the rainbow-flecked faleenas, bearing its full freight. 
 We could see the lavolamma work, and we concluded 
 that there was a new form of it that could take advan- 
 tage of beams of light to travel with them, as an elec- 
 tric impulse travels along them. Innumerable evolu- 
 tions with the ethereal fleet took place. The sublimated 
 Limanorans of the future seemed to have complete 
 command of the new ships and of the new power over 
 light and gravitation. 
 
 Suddenly came tremors in the framework of the 
 great mountain. It rocked like a buoy in the uneasy 
 surge of a reef. Its snows fell in huge avalanches. 
 
47 2 Limanora 
 
 Then the conical top was ejected into the sky like a 
 shot from a cannon. The air was thick with dust and 
 stones. But when it cleared and great flames shot 
 forth and licked the face of heaven, we could see far 
 above their reach the rainbow-coloured fleet speeding 
 aloft, filled with their tiny diaphanous sailors. 
 
 The scene changed, and we saw universes set in the 
 vault of heaven, and across the space between them we 
 could discern minute specks of light flashing mercurial 
 as thought. Behind them in dim eclipse sped the 
 noctambulant earth, still eddying round the central 
 spot of light; now it broke forth in ragged coruscation, 
 only to sink back into pitchy gloom. Yet a thread of 
 light stretched forth to the luminous atoms that flitted 
 on through the night. Nearer they came and, one by 
 one, grew more distinct and larger. At last we could 
 see that it was the fleet on its way from the top of 
 L,ilaroma. Within each ether-ship we could make out 
 the movements of the sailors as they bent its way this 
 side and that. The light from a brilliant star in the 
 new universe made play upon the surface of their fa- 
 leenas. They had caught in its rays, and were speed- 
 ing as swift as light towards the now-definite goal. 
 The luminiferous current bore them steadily on, their 
 little engines palpitating with the impulse of the new 
 light and the new gravitation. 
 
 Again the scene changed, and we looked upon the 
 surface of a new orb, more advanced in vital develop- 
 ment, more highly organised than the earth with which 
 we were familiar. We saw the inhabitants in crowds, 
 face upwards into the night, all eyes upon some distant 
 star. The excitement was rising like a tempest. It 
 seemed as if the object on which they gazed were 
 swiftly approaching them. And in a flash there swept 
 
Pioneering 473 
 
 within oar sight the fleet of prismatic ether-ships, like 
 rainbows in the light of another sun. They stopped 
 and hovered above the atmosphere. We saw their 
 crews breathe in the elements in which they floated. 
 Lower and lower they came, still sounding the atmo- 
 sphere and testing its effects upon their organs. The 
 absence of commotion and the steady descent showed 
 that nothing alien to their systems had yet been en- 
 countered. Out of their faleenas they gazed as won- 
 deringly down upon the new star as its sea of upturned 
 faces watched their slow descent. 
 
 The scene was brought still nearer to our eyes. In- 
 stead of microscopic foam-bells floating in the sky, and 
 microscopic crowds resting on the surface of the other 
 world, we felt present at the meeting of these creatures 
 of different universes. They seemed to feel conscious 
 of this great event in the history of the cosmos. The 
 dwellers of the new world were almost paralysed at 
 first with wonder at these beings so like and yet so un- 
 like themselves; they could recognise, we could see in 
 their friendly faces, the divine community of spirit; 
 their eyes, as soon as they recovered from their waking 
 dream, flashed welcome in magnetic fire; there was no 
 need of community of words for open intercourse; the 
 dwellers of the new star had the same development of 
 electric sense as the Limanorans had; their souls could 
 speak without a sound from the lips. 
 
 Step by step their mutual sympathy grew more 
 definite, more cordial, and approximated to the com- 
 munication of thought and fact. Within a brief period 
 they knew enough of each other's language to tell out 
 their whence and whither. But in the people of the 
 new star the language was that of feature and not of 
 tongue. Over their faces flashed the signals of thought 
 
474 Limanora 
 
 as well as of emotion, astonishing the newcomers at the 
 rapidity with which expression flitted over their feat- 
 ures. Equally astonished were their hosts to hear the 
 countless variety of tone and accent come from the 
 throats of the strangers. They covered their ears as 
 if shielding them from the assault of some thunderous 
 report. Even the voyagers shrank from the voice of 
 their own spokesman. And, tone it down as he would, 
 still was it too loud for any delicate ear to endure. 
 They were in a new atmosphere that bore sound so 
 quickly and clearly as to make a whisper reverberate 
 like thunder. So did it make the eyes of the dwellers 
 in it as keen and far in sight as if armed with the most 
 powerful microscopes and telescopes. The slightest 
 adjustment of them and their lids changed them back 
 and forth from distant observation to near. And the 
 same translucency marked their tissues as made the 
 inner movements of the newcomers' heart and brain 
 apparent. There was needed no sound to interpret the 
 magnetic messages of the brain along its nerves. 
 Hosts and guests were seen at one, familiar as lifelong 
 friends and thrilling each other with the strange new 
 experiences of their history. The voyagers from earth 
 soon knew why the use of the tongue and throat had 
 been abandoned by their hosts as means of commun- 
 ication; the uncontrollable volume of sound offended 
 their hearing, and drove them to develop the language 
 of eye and feature; the sight grew more powerful and 
 adaptable as voice and ear gave up their share of the 
 energy and sustenance of the system; their tissues, 
 too, had ever been to a large extent transparent be- 
 cause of the rarity and clearness of their atmosphere, 
 and by selection and training they had been able to 
 make them pellucid as they now were. 
 
Pioneering 475 
 
 The gleam of question and answer showed as clearly 
 on the stage of Loomiefa as the movement of the figures 
 themselves. And, when the colloquy had ended, and 
 the strangers had gained all the information they 
 needed for their farther journey through space, we saw 
 them enter their faleenas and rise above the eager, 
 penetrating gaze of their new friends. Across the face 
 of the heaven we followed the ethereal fleet as it faded 
 again into insignificance. Another scene showed us 
 their landing upon another planet of the universe they 
 had entered. The drama thus bore us with delight 
 from system to system throughout the cosmos, and re- 
 vealed the ease with which stellar voyaging could be 
 accomplished, once the initial difficulties had been 
 overcome. 
 
 A mediate book, dramatically published in Loomiefa 
 just before, prepared the way for this. It was the 
 book of Sidereal Intercourse. They had always held 
 that the other universes in the cosmos were as much 
 inhabited by life as theirs was. It had ever seemed to 
 them the absurdest of arrogance for the dwellers on 
 the earth to assume that theirs was the only orb out of 
 the countless myriads on the face of night that had life 
 upon it; that it monopolised the vital energy of in- 
 finity, and the attention of its divine intelligence. The 
 wider they had ranged with their sidereal sciences, the 
 more they smiled at the primitive thought of their re- 
 mote ancestors that they were the cynosure of the cos- 
 mos. It had come to be used as the readiest and most 
 striking example of infatuation and conceit. That the 
 poor earthlings were as microscopic in their import- 
 ance compared with the vastitude of existence, as the 
 bacterial swarms of a wayside pool compared to the 
 
47 6 Limanora 
 
 denizens of the great ocean, was assumed in every 
 movement and act of their minds. 
 
 And, wherever life was, there was the chance that 
 highly developed intelligence existed. They were not 
 so sure that this was yet the case on the farthest of our 
 planets. It might be that the inner and smaller bodies 
 of our universe had passed the stage in which they 
 could support the higher life. The others, the} 7 
 thought, were rapidly evolving a life of their own, 
 most of it still in a low grade; when the earth had 
 passed its climax and begun to deca}', they would 
 probably, one after the other, be attaining to a loftier 
 type of life and intelligence. Whilst they were run- 
 ning their course of progress the earth and her inner 
 sister planets would be waiting in their frozen silence 
 the time when the whole of their universe would be 
 exhausted. Nearer and nearer would the whole solar 
 system be approaching some other system that had 
 run its course; and the encounter of the two would 
 evolve a young universe, full of heat and energy 
 enough from the collision to make a new cosmic 
 career. 
 
 They had little hope then of stirring reply, if ever 
 they were able to send an embassy of thought to any 
 star of our own system. All their hopes of astral inter- 
 communication were pointed to other stars and other 
 universes; and, as they looked up into the eyes of 
 night, they seemed to feel magnetic answer to the im- 
 pulses of their souls, not from Mars or Venus, from 
 Saturn or Jupiter, but from the stars that throbbed 
 in far more distant depths. They had ever believed, 
 of course, and they had now scientifically shown, that 
 the centres of light flashing in the nightly sky were 
 not the true sisters of earth but only suns, round 
 
Pioneering 477 
 
 which the unseen universes circled. They tried to find 
 the dim worlds which drew their heat and light from 
 these poignant watch-fires of heaven; and their more 
 recent instruments had revealed the dark outlines of 
 many of these twilight wanderers which hung on the 
 radiance of the visible stars. The magnetism that 
 came with the rays from some of those far distant 
 luminous points had shown striking aberration early 
 in its course; and nothing could explain this but the 
 existence of rayless planets revolving round these lam- 
 bent sources of light. Step by step had they homed 
 these aberrations, till they knew the courses of the 
 dusky satellites of many stars, and they could tell the 
 moment when a circular shadow would cross the face 
 of any one of these suns. 
 
 The eyes of the astronomical families had become so 
 accustomed to the times and places of such obscurations 
 that their firlas acted with them and searched for mag- 
 netic impulses from the dark sisters of the star they 
 were watching; till at last they could tell by their 
 electric sense the place of many dim planets in the 
 nearer universes. 
 
 It was on this that the book of Sidereal Intercourse 
 based its forecast of the immediate future. Since the 
 definite discovery of varied types of life in the spaces 
 beyond the earth's atmosphere, the last suspicion of mere 
 fancy had vanished from the belief in the existence of 
 high intelligence on the universes of infinity. And 
 now their faces were set towards communication with 
 some of this intelligence on distant worlds. The new 
 book assumed that the electric sense, or something 
 equivalent for the perception of the great cosmic force, 
 had been developed in the inhabitants of some invisible 
 worlds; and it laid down as an axiom that there were 
 
47$ Limanora 
 
 vast stores of magnetic material in these orbs, just as 
 there were in the earth and in the sun. 
 
 What they must first do was to sweep the range of a 
 universe with an electric impulse on which the whole 
 force of Rimla should be concentrated, and to keep 
 their delicate indicators all set in the same direction. 
 At the publication of the book in lyoomiefa we saw 
 gigantic engines slowly moving their long arms this 
 way and that athwart one of the most brilliant stars of 
 night, and scientists eagerly scanning the numerous 
 magnetometers that surrounded the huge electric ma- 
 chine. We could see the air thrill and undulate with 
 the mighty impulse, and the very light of the star 
 seemed to flicker and wink before the penetration of 
 the intrusive force. At last a flash of hope came over 
 the faces of the watchers; the pendent beam of one 
 sarmolan began to quiver. It was a message from the 
 world they sought. Again they turned the whole 
 available power of the island millions of millions of 
 horse-power into the electric engine, the arm of which 
 they had at once brought to rest. Fierce lightnings 
 again played through the atmosphere, marking the line 
 of the new despatch. And again the luminous tongue 
 of the magnetometer told of its reception by intelli- 
 gences like ours. Then came the astronomic families 
 who marked the exact position of the sensitive spot in 
 the sky. And thereafter their sentry stood with sar- 
 molan directed thither, ready to announce the slightest 
 sign of astral impulse or response. 
 
 The scene changed, and we saw a new type of elec- 
 tric engine placed in position on the stage. On its 
 long arm was a singularly crooked cage of transparent 
 irelium, flat and sharp like the blade of a sword yet 
 bent into a right angle in the direction of the edge. 
 
Pioneering 479 
 
 Within it were placed recording magnetometers. We 
 could see the directors fix them towards their respon- 
 sive universe. Then Rimla concentrated its tremen- 
 dous power upon the machine; the arm swung right 
 and left, and finally with a jerk shot the crooked cage 
 like lightning through the air. We followed its lum- 
 inous track far into the sky, till it seemed nothing but 
 one of the countless stars that silvered the night. Sud- 
 denly, like a rocket, it bent back on its course, and as 
 swiftly retraced its flight. I thought to see it shattered 
 into dust as it struck the earth, but there was a deep 
 pool ready to break its force. Its sharp edge cut the 
 water and it vanished, but slowly rose to the surface 
 unhurt, and on the faces of the observers we could see 
 how successful had been the experiment with the limo- 
 tar, or new boomerang vehicle of electric indications. It 
 had shot far up into space along the true electric impulse 
 that travelled away beyond it towards the sensitive point 
 of sky they had discovered. Before it bent back from its 
 headlong course, the response, speeding more freely 
 and more swiftly through the untrammelled ether, im- 
 printed itself upon the face of the sarmolan. It was 
 this answer, more decided than any they had yet re- 
 ceived, that filled the eyes of the observers with joyous 
 light. 
 
 There was another change of scene. The gigantic 
 engines had disappeared and in their place we saw the 
 ether-courier families floating on the outskirts of the 
 atmosphere with strata of clouds far below them. On 
 the back of their necks, where the electric sense had 
 its special seat, they bore a singular apparatus, not 
 unlike a small telescope. On their chests they had 
 strapped a small engine of irelium, a miniature of 
 those we had seen in former scenes. The one was a 
 
480 Limanora 
 
 magnifier of electric indications, and the other was an 
 electricity catapult. The couriers could not only draw 
 upon the electric resources of the spaces around them, 
 but upon those of the centre of force. And we could see 
 them converse with distant stars by means of these ap- 
 paratus. Through unobstructed space they could send 
 with ease their electric impulses to limitless distances, 
 free from the atmospheric retardation which before 
 had demanded immense power to overcome its inertia. 
 And with their new- electro-telescopes they could mag- 
 nify ten-thousandfold any electric ray for their firlas to 
 receive, although it might have travelled a thousand 
 times the distance between the earth and the sun. 
 They might have to wait days for their answer; but 
 again and again were they rewarded with it. With 
 the dim stars circling round the nearer suns they were 
 able to hold comparatively rapid converse. But they 
 were going farther afield through the cosmos, and they 
 had often to watch and wait for weeks or months or 
 years for any indication of response. 
 
 The book awakened little enthusiasm compared with 
 the publication of some of those that I had witnessed. 
 For, though the authors had been rapid in the compo- 
 sition of it, they had been somewhat forestalled by one 
 of the ingenious inventions of the last great age of dis- 
 covery. This was the modification of the lavolan which 
 brought them records of the life of extra-aerial space. 
 Amongst the luminous impressions that their combina- 
 tion of lavolan and faleena had brought down out of 
 the ether, they had found evidences of highly organised 
 systems which frequented the vacuum outside our at- 
 mosphere. They were satisfied with the knowledge of 
 this new-discovered teeming life, and they believed that 
 before many ages they would have developed, first 
 
Pioneering 481 
 
 their apparatus, and next their senses, so far as to open 
 intercourse with it. And if they could come to con- 
 verse with nobler intelligences near the earth, they did 
 not need to go so far afield in the cosmos as the new 
 book suggested. Their own filammus would serve to 
 bring them into close sympathy with the best life that 
 was to be found in space until they should know the 
 conditions of such life and aim at fulfilling them. 
 
 It was one of the subsidiary studies and ideals of the 
 book that drew most attention and produced most re- 
 sult. It pictured an apparatus and method for tapping 
 the thoughts of men as they travelled along the nerves, 
 an adaptation of their huge electric engines for sidereal 
 intercommunication. For some ages they had been 
 able to send emotions and impulses through the air, or 
 rather through the medium that interpenetrated the 
 air, and recently they had developed this into the de- 
 spatch of thoughts through long distances. The combi- 
 nation of great magnetic power and sensitive sarmolans, 
 this book showed, would draw off thought at any point 
 along its line of flight whether in the body or in the 
 air; and underneath an electric magnifier and inter- 
 preter the indicator would reveal the meaning of the 
 thoughts. Thus would they be able to find out the in- 
 tentions of men, however distant. But this was only 
 a minor result of the ideal. They would be able, with 
 the aid of the apparatus, to tap the torrents of thought 
 speeding through the ether, and so drink of the high- 
 est intelligence and imagination which approached the 
 earth. Much of it would be too intricate and abstruse 
 for them to follow or understand. But they already 
 knew that most of their greatest inspirations had come 
 from this ocean of tremulous energy, bordering the 
 shores of our world ; and development of their faculties 
 
482 Limanora 
 
 and of their sympathy with this extra-terrestrial thought 
 would gradually lead them to the interpretation of its 
 more complex and deeper elements. All their civilisa- 
 tion had been an attempt to know the thoughts that 
 lie in the structure of our universe, in its complicated 
 energy and minute life. By this new means they would 
 feel the throb of the very heart of our system, per- 
 chance of the very heart whose beats are the life of the 
 cosmos; at least they would get to know the intelli- 
 gence that flashes through space around our world, the 
 wisdom and the inspirations passing between the in- 
 habitants of the ether beyond our grosser senses. 
 
 Had it not been for this minor issue and ideal, the 
 publication of the book would have been completely 
 overshadowed by that of the book of Immortality. 
 This took as basis the great expansion of life they had 
 been able to produce and their ideals of ethereal nutri- 
 tion and amphibious life, and pictured the posterity of 
 the lyimanorans able to join the inhabitants of the 
 ether without any violent transition or death. We 
 saw a L,imanoran on the stage in L,oomiefa passing 
 through the new transmutation from mortal to im- 
 mortal. His transient elements were atom by atom 
 sublimed away in a new hall of medication, where 
 magnetic energy took the place of more material nutri- 
 tion. His tissues became diaphanous, till only the 
 light and the magnetism he emitted marked the place 
 where he lay. It was what he thought and felt rather 
 than what he was that told us he was still there. His 
 lower and more stagnant centres of energy had van- 
 ished; and gravitation seemed to have little or no in- 
 fluence upon him. Whithersoever his thought willed, 
 thither he floated, rather the luminous reflection of a 
 
Pioneering 4 8 3 
 
 man than the man himself. To our grosser senses he 
 seemed as impalpable and evanescent as a perfume or a 
 mist on the morning hills. Yet there he stood or moved 
 an inexpugnable centre of the highest energy, whither 
 flowed the sympathetic force of other centres, and 
 whither nothing hostile could approach. Storms 
 passed effectless over his head; the deadliest engines 
 shot their darts at him in vain; poisonous fumes, lethal 
 showers, armies of pestilential microbes, swept round 
 him and through him innocuous. All the evanescent 
 centres of energy that had laid him open to the attacks 
 of these, had dissolved and left him fit to be a dweller 
 in the infinite ether. There might be other noxious 
 elements, to whose assaults he was yet vulnerable; but 
 these we could not discover. He was immortal as far 
 as terrestrial enemies were concerned, immortal with- 
 out the sudden collapse and dissolution of the lower 
 centres which we call death upon our world. By the 
 most natural of processes he lost the substance that 
 awakened our grosser senses and became the mere 
 halo of what he had been, fit only to make himself felt 
 by our centres of thought and imagination. With our 
 firlas we could feel stream from him great currents of 
 magnetic influence, unobstructed by any of those ter- 
 rene or aerial media that make spiritual intercourse so 
 difficult upon this world. 
 
 Such an ideal, when attained, would spread what is 
 now called death over the greater part of our terrestrial 
 lifetime, instead of massing it into a few moments of 
 farewell. It would be difficult to fence off the im- 
 mortal from the mortal, so many stages would there 
 be of transmutation. The intercourse between the 
 immortalising and the immortal would then be con- 
 tinuous and there would be no sudden break in 
 
484 Limanora 
 
 existence, no great gulf fixed between the spiritual and 
 the material. 
 
 With the same corporeal and mental faculties which 
 their ancestry had had in primeval ages, and the bulk 
 of men had in their own day, they would have counted 
 immortality as the gift of a friend. Even with their 
 existing development, noble though it was, they would 
 never think of longing for such a fate; for the lower 
 centres of energy, forming what is called the body, still 
 demanded an amount of attention and sustenance that 
 was burdensome. They had great delight in their life; 
 they energised so purely and continually that they often 
 forgot the corporeal system and its claims. Yet the 
 time came in all men's lives when they felt their still- 
 mixed constitutions advance too slowly for their spirit- 
 ual ambitions; and then they longed for change, 
 perhaps rest, such as the dissolution we call death 
 accomplished. If, however, they could get rid of the 
 inferior and clogging elements of their systems and 
 float free of terrene forces and conditions like gravita- 
 tion, then might immortality be an object of desire. 
 
 A publication that delighted them even more than 
 this was one that had a cognate theme, the dimension 
 of time. It seemed to me the most fanciful of all the 
 productions I had witnessed in Loomiefa. Yet it did 
 not seem to strike the L,imanorans as beyond the 
 bounds of possibility. It was called the book of Time- 
 focussing. So fantastic and Utopian did I think it that 
 I paid little attention when it was dramatically pub- 
 lished on the stage. Yet I remember some of the chief 
 features of the new book. 
 
 It counselled the development of the imagination on 
 its prospicient side till it should count aeons as mo- 
 
Pioneering 485 
 
 ments and take easy flight through eternities. It was 
 the real time- faculty, and had already in the produc- 
 tions of lyoomiefa forerun the civilisation of the race by 
 long periods. It had become true prophet not merely 
 over months or years, but over centuries. Trained to 
 use the data of the past and the present, it had been 
 able to forecast the evolution of the future with a cer- 
 tainty that made its art almost a science. What was 
 to hinder extending its range of vision beyond the im- 
 mediate horizon, and taking in at a glance the course 
 of the future as it did the page of history ? And as it 
 reached higher and higher points of view, it could 
 paint eternity as' it now pictured the past. There was 
 no limit to its previsional powers, as there had been 
 none to its penetration into the prehistoric and prim- 
 eval darkness. Prescience should be as organised and 
 exact as any science. In fact all their sciences had be- 
 come presciential, those that were merely retrospective 
 or synchronous having gradually fallen out of notice. 
 And the families that had been devoted to them were 
 one by one absorbed into other services. No study 
 was counted of much value that had not one eye on 
 the future. Their whole intellectual system was thus 
 becoming futuritive, and all the faculties looked up to 
 and centred in the greatest and most predictive of them 
 all the imagination. 
 
 They had already been able in the valley of memories 
 to focus the past into the view of a few moments or 
 days or months. The time stretching behind us into 
 the darkness was underneath one glance of the intel- 
 lectual eye. Only greater certainty in their imagina- 
 tive methods was needed for the eternity that stretches 
 in front of us to flash before the soul in a single picture. 
 Only develop the prophet- faculty as rapidly in the next 
 
486 Limanora 
 
 few generations as it had been developed in the past 
 few, and we might move at will from age to age of the 
 future, as we now move from age to age of the past, 
 living at any moment in any period we pleased, or in 
 a thousand periods at once. From past to future 
 would be as easy a leap as from hell to heaven for this 
 great time-and-space-focussing faculty. Eternity would 
 be as focal to imagination as infinity. It was an eye 
 towards which radiated all time and all space. Post- 
 historic pictures would be as vivid to it as prehistoric. 
 Even now interest was fast leaking from mere recorded 
 history before the romance of eternity past and future. 
 What was the history of the race upon earth, compared 
 with the periscope of the cosmos ? Then would their 
 posterity be able to stand on a watch-tower in the 
 heights of heaven, and view the whole arena of exist- 
 ence as it stretched through time and space. There is 
 no faculty so close to the divine as imagination. 
 
 I felt that this publication was like all their work, 
 singularly self-regardless. It clearly recognised that 
 the realisation of its proposed ideal would mean the 
 doom of its art. Pioneering, all of theirs which we in 
 the West would call literature, would be superseded. 
 L,oomiefa would then become an institution of the past, 
 less and less interesting as but a rapidly receding item 
 of history. Self-effacement for the sake of progress was 
 the dominant note of L,imanoran civilisation. And in 
 this book it seemed to me to rise to its highest pitch; 
 for it held before the race a goal, which, when attained, 
 would render literature and its publication unnecessary 
 to its advance. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 ANOTHER THREAT 
 
 WHEN the island was absorbed in the productions 
 of this new literary or pioneering era, its 
 attention was suddenly called to its immediate sur- 
 roundings. Out of eternity they were jerked into the 
 passing moment to defend their own little plot of earth. 
 Mere existence was endangered if they did not at once 
 withdraw their powers from their march through the 
 future. It had been the result of their humane and 
 lenient policy towards their exiles that every few gen- 
 erations rebellion and menace rose in the archipelago 
 against their mysterious isolation. Fear of the isle of 
 demons awed the imaginations of the other islands 
 for a century or two, and then foolhardy prosperity, or 
 conquest, demanded a new lesson. 
 
 Half a century had not passed since the romance of 
 Choktroo's rise and fall; and unaided and unstimulated, 
 the other inhabitants of the archipelago would have 
 grovelled in helpless fear and hate of the central isle. 
 The discipline applied in the repulsion of Choktroo's 
 fleet would have sufficed for several centuries, but for 
 a new power which had insinuated itself within the 
 circle of mist. 
 
 487 
 
488 Limanora 
 
 One of the days when the book of Emigration was 
 holding the stage of Loomiefa, the spectators were 
 startled by realistic transference of their drama to the 
 sky above them. Just as the opalescent faleenas were 
 about to land on the new star, every eye was suddenly 
 drawn away from the stage to the blue spreading above 
 the valley. Across it was passing a strange airship of 
 huge proportions and ungainly structure. I recognised 
 it as a development of the balloon, with which I had 
 been familiar in my European experience. There was 
 the immense inflated globe, or rather pear, with the car 
 hung underneath; but there was something new in the 
 motions of this balloon. It seemed to be dirigible, for 
 it tacked this way and that across the direction of the 
 wind. And still more strange, the car was filled with 
 implements of war; I could see their great muzzles 
 pointed over the sides. 
 
 The Limanorans were startled by this anticipation 
 of their science, but only for a moment; and as soon 
 as the apparition sailed out of sight, they bent their 
 senses as eagerly on the spectacle before them. They 
 knew that their sentries were at their watch-posts on 
 Lilaroma, and nothing hostile to the interests of the 
 civilisation could occur in air or sea or upon earth with- 
 out stirring their attention, and so placing the whole 
 island on the alert. They waited till the publication 
 of the book was finished and then streamed off to their 
 various businesses and pursuits. As we flew across the 
 upper slopes of the mountain we found out that the 
 aerial stranger had settled upon one of the lonelier 
 heights of the island of Broolyi. No action was taken 
 by the lyimanorans against the singular invader of the 
 archipelago, except to set a special watchman who 
 should observe his movements through the idrovamo- 
 
Another Threat 489 
 
 Ian, and should report to the elders anything out of the 
 common that might occur. 
 
 The stranger had evidently been disabled away to 
 the east of the circle of fog; his steering-gear had 
 ceased to act, and before a tornado he was hurried away 
 from the great continent over which he had hovered. 
 The impetus bore him helpless above and across the 
 ring of mist, and within its calmer sphere the steering- 
 gear was again adjusted. It was then that the watchers 
 on Lilaroma saw his purpose to make for their island, 
 and they sent through the lilaran a blast which would 
 carry him away from their shores, not rude enough to 
 harm him, yet sufficiently strong to defeat his inten- 
 tion. Feeling himself borne again farther away from 
 his home he tacked for the nearest peak that he thought 
 he could reach. This was evidently Klimarol. But 
 the blast of the lilaran was too much for him; and to 
 save himself from drifting still farther west he grappled 
 one of the heights of Broolyi as he passed over it, and 
 settled there. 
 
 It became one of the amusements of the younger 
 Umanorans to observe the behaviour and the fate of 
 the newcomer in the isle of peace. The crew of the 
 airship was numerous; they were taken prisoners not 
 long after they had descended from their car, and their 
 captain was hurried off to the court of the new ruler. 
 Before long the balloon was brought to the capital and 
 carefully guarded; and, anchored firmly to the earth, 
 it made ascents with the royal engineers under the 
 direction of the balloonist. His every movement was 
 watched lest he should release the captive by cutting 
 the rope that bound it, and sail off with the officers of 
 his Broolyian majesty. But as the months and years 
 passed on, the newcomer with his strange new ship 
 
49 Limanora 
 
 came to be trusted by the king and his advisers. He 
 saw an arena for his ambitions and talents, and bent 
 his whole energies to his new purpose. 
 
 We could see him from day to day and week to week 
 add to the aerial fleet, which he at once began to build 
 in imitation of the balloon he had brought with him. 
 His original subordinates and companions were at first 
 his only assistants, but the Broolyian engineers and 
 mechanicians afterwards joined in the work in great 
 numbers, and became as deft at it as the strangers. 
 Every new balloon that was made was tested in the air. 
 At first there were accidents, which for a time preju- 
 diced the court and the people against the aerial mon- 
 sters. But by carefully selecting his men from the 
 army the director was able at last to furnish every air- 
 ship that he made with a complete and efficient crew, 
 able under the leadership of one of his companions to 
 manipulate the vehicle and every implement on board 
 of it. It even became the favourite pastime of the 
 court to make voyages across the island in these swift 
 frigates of the sky. 
 
 Ultimately the king so thoroughly trusted the master 
 of this new style of transportation that he abandoned 
 himself to his guidance and allowed him free use of all 
 the resources of the island. He came to see the mar- 
 vellous possibilities that lay in warfare carried on by 
 such a navy. Though the Broolyians had, after Chok- 
 troo's deportation, lost one by one all the conquests 
 that that audacious warrior had made, and had at last 
 been confined again to the limits of their island, they 
 never gave up their ambitious dreams. And the mon- 
 arch who could fulfil them would be certain to fix his 
 empire in their hearts. The new king looked round for 
 some means to gratify this passion for conquest. But 
 
Another Threat 49 l 
 
 their old methods were now comparatively useless; for 
 the other large islands, warned by their past experi- 
 ence, built fleets as large and formidable as the Brool- 
 yian, and the smaller groups confederated for the pur- 
 poses of defence. It was vain then to think of re-mas- 
 tering the archipelago in any attempt by sea. 
 
 With extreme delight then did the monarch watch a 
 demonstration of the warlike possibilities of the new 
 air craft. The director had some old hulks moored out 
 at sea in sight of the king and his court. Then he en- 
 tered one of his new balloons, well provided with guns 
 and explosives and well-manned, and bade the crew let 
 go. They sailed straight out till they rose high over 
 the remains of the antiquated navy. As they ap- 
 proached their prey, several guns belched out their 
 fires from the car, and their shot struck and sank three 
 of the ancient ships. But two tough old hulls resisted 
 all their attempts. So the balloon rose straight over 
 them, but much higher in the air. Out of the car was 
 seen to fall two packages, which made for the decks of 
 the old tempest resisters. In the twinkling of an eye, 
 before we could realise that the packets had reached 
 their destinations, there was a thunderous roar, and 
 the air was filled with jets of water and with the flying 
 fragments of the shattered hulks. When the commo- 
 tion settled, nothing but floating planks and spars and 
 shreds of the vanished ships was to be seen on the sur- 
 face of the water. And away out of reach of the fierce 
 convulsion rode the airship majestic and unharmed in 
 the blue. 
 
 The monarch need no further demonstration. He 
 gave up to the master of the new power the use of his 
 whole army and navy. Before many months were over 
 a vast aerial fleet was equipped and manned ready for 
 
49 2 Limanora 
 
 the first emergency, and this emergency arose at once. 
 The sullen jealousy which ever smoulders and rankles 
 between two powerful and neighbouring empires took 
 substance and outward shape between Aleofane and 
 Broolyi. The old enemy knew nothing of the new in- 
 struments of war which had been forged, and prepared 
 with cheer and good hope for the struggle. Her fleet 
 was in excellent order, well equipped and manned, but 
 within a few weeks it had completely vanished before 
 the wrecking terror of the air. Continuous torrents of 
 lead and iron streamed from above onto their decks, 
 making those of their gunners that survived helpless 
 and inert. And when their captains invented methods 
 of pointing their guns at the aerial ships and of floating 
 fire-kites against them to set them on fire, then the 
 most tremendous engines of the navy in the air were 
 brought into train; and with appalling explosions the 
 Aleofanian ships and their crews vanished in atoms. 
 
 No such destruction of a nation's war material had 
 ever occurred in the history of the archipelago. The 
 Aleofanian marine force was swept from the face of the 
 sea. One or two other islands were bold enough to 
 attempt the struggle with the new power, but with the 
 same disastrous results to themselves. Over the whole 
 archipelago except its central island the air- fleet passed, 
 inspiring terror and reducing the peoples to servitude. 
 It was the same all-conquering story as was told under 
 Choktroo's leadership. 
 
 And now the Broolyian army and people were will- 
 ing to worship the maker and manipulator of these 
 balloons as a god. He had plenty of ambition; but he 
 was by nature and acquirement only a mechanician and 
 not a born leader of men. He had none of the self- 
 confidence made monstrous by success, or of the un- 
 
Another Threat 493 
 
 scrupulousness, that forges the masterful will. He did 
 love power, but he hesitated before those audacious 
 measures which give a conqueror the highest vantage- 
 ground. He yearned to rule widely. But he had not 
 the self-mastery and the leavening imagination which 
 secure command over the minds of human aggrega- 
 tions. He was but an average nature with complete 
 mastery over the newest and most masterful in- 
 vention. 
 
 The Broolyian monarch saw the peril of his too great 
 success, and set the stranger and his balloons aside in 
 time to let the popular enthusiasm cool. Alone with 
 his fleet and his army the king completed the round of 
 conquests. He knew that when the power of Aleofane 
 and one or two other chief islands was broken, there 
 was nothing to fear from the others, and his task, 
 though brilliant, was easy. He took care that there 
 were several great and sanguinary battles that put 
 heart and pride into his soldiers and sailors. Thus by 
 the time the war was finished, the newcomer and his 
 appalling fleet were almost forgotten. 
 
 But the monarch himself did not forget them. He 
 knew that the climax of this new era of national con- 
 quest and pride was certain to come soon. Never had 
 the Broolyians been continuously successful in war 
 without losing their traditional fear of the isle of devils, 
 and demanding its subjugation. He set his house in 
 order against the day of vainglory. He would develop 
 his new method of warfare. He made the stranger 
 again his commander-in-chief, urging him on towards 
 the increase of the aerial fleet and of its terrorising 
 weapons. Then, fearing from his knowledge of the 
 past that there was little chance of success, he gave 
 him complete command of the expedition, so that all 
 
494 Limanora 
 
 the blame of failure should be on the shoulders of an- 
 other. In order to complete the contrast, he kept re- 
 bellion smouldering in one or two of the adjacent 
 islands, and took care that it broke out simultaneously 
 with the attack upon the isle of devils. 
 
 Ignorant of the conditions he had to meet, and puffed 
 up by his past successes, the stranger thought that all 
 he had to do was to add to the number of his fleet and 
 the deadliness of his weapons. We saw him set out 
 with banners flying amid the applause and enthusiasm 
 of the people, whilst the wily king led off his own 
 forces, quietly to embark from an opposite shore of 
 the country against the rebels of neighbouring coasts. 
 Success seemed to follow the aerial navy, for favouring 
 winds bore them swiftly and majestically over the hori- 
 zon out of the range of Broolyian vision. For myself, 
 as I sat at an idrovamolan, I feared the strange new 
 torrential guns and the showers of deadly explosives 
 that would rain down from these aerial ships, and my 
 heart sank as I saw them sail like great vultures nearer 
 and nearer to their prey. 
 
 But my compatriots were tranquil and free from all 
 anxiety. Everything was really in readiness and they 
 were only awaiting the exact moment for action. It 
 came, and the huge balloons fell suddenly away before 
 the blast from the lilaran, like a flock of storm-beaten 
 birds. I could see them struggling, many of them 
 half disabled, to stand up to the wind. But it was 
 vain; they whirled like snowflakes before an arctic 
 tempest. Their helms became entangled in their 
 snapped cordage, and I could see their guns roll and 
 pitch with fatal effect upon the crews, till from many 
 the suicidal weapons were tumbled overboard into the 
 sea below. 
 
Another Threat 495 
 
 Yet the expedition by no means acknowledged itself 
 defeated. Guided by some experienced Broolyian ad- 
 viser the admiral of the fleet changed its formation. 
 Evidently from knowledge that the blast from L,ilaroma 
 could play upon only one point at once, he divided his 
 air-navy into three squadrons, and making the central 
 face the blast, he sent the other two in different direc- 
 tions round the island. He thought that these two 
 would be able to bring their explosives and guns to 
 bear upon the lilaran by this flank movement. It was 
 as unsuccessful as his other efforts. Both sections 
 came almost within firing distance of the shore, when 
 suddenly their gaseous spheres were seen to collapse. 
 A slight and silent flash was all that told whence the 
 disaster had come. Electric rockets had issued from 
 magnetic ejectors of great power and almost invisibly 
 punctured the spherical supporter of each airship. 
 
 It seemed as if the whole of the three squadrons 
 would soon be in the sea, and with the weight of their 
 war material they were certain to sink to the bottom 
 and carry all their crews with them. But the invaders 
 promptly threw overboard their weighty cargoes, and 
 with their usual humanity the L,imanorans now did 
 their best to save their enemies. The punctures in the 
 balloons were so minute that it would take some time 
 to exhaust them. So the lilaran sent its blast under- 
 neath them and buoyed them up like thistledown, at 
 the same time blowing the three sections of the navy 
 off in different directions. It was amusing to watch 
 the alternate rise and fall of the various airships as it 
 turned its blast from one squadron to another, like a 
 game of battledoor and shuttlecock played by giant jug- 
 glers. The warriors in the cars kept crouching in 
 panic and holding onto the cordage, as they rose or fell 
 
49 6 Limanora 
 
 in the air upon the billows of wind. Their cars danced 
 and leaped and jerked like corks in an eddy where 
 currents meet, and they were too panic-stricken or too 
 paralysed with terror to see that with all the tumult of 
 their movements they were gradually approaching solid 
 earth. We saw each squadron land on the shores of 
 a separate island; and after their terrible voyage the 
 crews threw themselves upon the earth and seemed to 
 clutch it, in fear lest they should be torn again from 
 its sweet anchorage into the warring whirlpools of the 
 upper air. 
 
 After a few days they collected their wits and the 
 shattered fragments of their air-fleet, and, hiring boats 
 from the islanders, sailed homewards. As they entered 
 the main harbour of Broolyi crestfallen and dispirited, 
 the army and fleet of the king were returning from 
 their victories with triumphal music and with banners 
 flying. The contrast was striking, and set the mon- 
 arch more firmly on his throne for another generation. 
 
 Yet matters could not remain where they were. The 
 defeat of the new methods of warfare stirred hope in 
 the breasts of the conquered peoples; and muffled 
 sounds of rebellion came from many of the islands. 
 The king knew that he must make some other move, 
 and held long councils with the defeated balloonist. 
 
 The result of the conferences soon became manifest. 
 The stranger had seen that his aerial fleet was useless 
 against tempests and electric missiles, such as the isle 
 of demons had command of, and he willingly handed 
 it over to his superior to use against the threatened re- 
 volts. With the blind obstinacy of the average mind 
 placed in a position greater than its powers, he ran 
 counter to the traditions of the archipelago, and uttered 
 loud resolves that he was not to be beaten; he would 
 
Another Threat 497 
 
 show them how fertile he was in resources; he had no 
 fear of their bag of winds. 
 
 The king again gave him free scope with all the ma- 
 terial and forces of the country, and the ingenious 
 mechanician forged huge guns that would throw their 
 projectiles enormous distances, and built great ships to 
 hold them. As he launched one vessel after another, 
 he practised his crews on board of it, and taught them 
 how to handle the marvellous artillery. The people 
 stood in awe, as they heard the thunder of their fire 
 dozens of leagues away, and saw their missiles fall in 
 the sea miles and miles from the ship whence they had 
 issued; and they shook their heads wisely and said to 
 each other: " Now, we shall see at last an end to this 
 isle of demons." 
 
 When the great armada was all ready after long years 
 of work, and the ships lay at anchor in the harbour, 
 their magazines filled, their guns in train, and every- 
 thing prepared for the final expedition, the people were 
 so overjoyed at the sight that they organised a festival 
 to the sailors of the wonderful fleet. They had such 
 confidence in the destructive powers of these ships and 
 their guns that they resolved to pre-celebrate with 
 magnificent pageantry and feast the triumph they were 
 so assured of. And as the monarch had already de- 
 feated the incipient rebellion by his aerial fleet, and 
 the mutterings of the subjugated were stifled or un- 
 heard, there could be no danger in inviting all the sailors 
 on shore to take part in the festivities. So the great 
 fleet lay peacefully at anchor unmanned, whilst their 
 crews were being lauded to the skies for their intre- 
 pidity and the certainty of their success. 
 
 The night was moonless and deep darkness was 
 
 flecked only by the occasional blaze of sky-daring 
 32 
 
49 8 Limanora 
 
 illumination. Everything had gone off with brilliancy, 
 and the banquet to the sailors was nearing its climax 
 and close. Suddenly the hubbub of jubilance was 
 hushed; there was a series of appalling detonations, 
 shaking the banqueting edifice to its foundations; 
 many thought that the world had come to an end so 
 terrifying and ear-deafening was the continuous roar. 
 The people in the streets at first fell on the earth and 
 prayed to their gods. But they soon saw what had 
 occurred. There out on the harbour the pyrotechnic 
 display overshadowed anything they had ever seen or 
 even thought of. The great ships were all of them in 
 flames; the magazine of each had exploded, and sent 
 decks and fittings and armaments sputtering in frag- 
 ments against the black of the sky. The brilliancy of 
 the spectacle overcame the natural alarm and regret. 
 Such titanic Catherine-wheels they had never seen, 
 such rending of the heavens, such flame-lit jets of water 
 rising in columns above the doomed ships. But the 
 spectacle was brief. Ship after ship rose high above 
 the scene of its devastation, its banners of fire all flying 
 against the darkness, and then plunged into the ex- 
 tinction and gloom of the depths. The breach in the 
 side close to the magazine sucked in the waters most 
 swiftly, and sent the bow-end of each first to the watery 
 assuagement of her fires. In an hour after the first 
 deafening paroxysm all was still and dark again on the 
 face of the waters, but for a flaming fragment here 
 and there, hissing and sputtering against the night. 
 
 Then came terror again. The Broolyians, jubilant 
 over the invincibility of their marvellous fleet, knew 
 not whence the disaster had come or who had been the 
 enemy. And they now crouched in fear, or ran for 
 shelter, lest the invisible foe should take advantage 
 
Another Threat 499 
 
 of their palsy and reap his harvest of blood. But no 
 enemy came. No carnage followed the strange catas- 
 trophe. The morning dawned, and the waters of the 
 bay shone as peacefully in the level rays of the sun as 
 if no fleet had ever been there, as if no conflagration 
 had occurred. Not a boat or sign of an enemy was to 
 be seen. Out crept the soldiers and sailors from their 
 shelters, the people in their rear, and soon the harbour 
 was- alive with craft, seeking relics and explanation of 
 the disaster. 
 
 But no explanation could be found in all the babel of 
 theories that chattered and echoed over the water. A 
 council of the royal advisers was called; they consulted 
 and questioned every admiral and general; but all in 
 vain. The stranger, who had brought the fleet and its 
 equipment into existence, failed to account for the oc- 
 currence. He refuted all charges of negligence, and 
 appealed to the desire of the people and the command 
 of the king as his warrant for withdrawing the crews 
 from the ships for the night. Treachery there must 
 have been ; there were a thousand conjectures, but no 
 sure knowledge as to whence it came. With the irra- 
 tionality and ingratitude which mark all panic in na- 
 tions or other aggregations of men when unexplained 
 disaster has overtaken them, they broke out in fury 
 against the very hero of the night's festivities. They 
 had to find a scapegoat and his figure was foremost in 
 every man's mind; the destructive magnetism of the 
 crowd gathered round the name that was on every lip, 
 and the cry arose that he was the traitor. The mob 
 howled outside the council-room for his blood. He 
 had to be bundled off by a secret passage to the out- 
 skirts of the city and thence into the mountains, and to 
 appease their frantic passions the king had to proclaim 
 
500 Limanora 
 
 his exile, and to promise that no such engines of war 
 should again be forged in the royal armories. Fear 
 of the isle of demons again crept over the superstitious 
 hearts of the people. As they brooded over the mys- 
 tery, they felt that somehow or other it was connected 
 with that inexpugnable centre which had defied all 
 their efforts at its invasion. 
 
 And this was right. For the L,imanorans had watched 
 the long preparation for the assault, and made calmly 
 ready to defeat it. They knew that, if they ever al- 
 lowed the fleet to sail, they could not well beat it off 
 without loss of life amongst its crews. It could lie in 
 the shelter of an island some miles distant from their 
 shores and rain great projectiles upon them. The re- 
 pulse must be accomplished long before this had been 
 reached. They therefore waited till the ammunition 
 was on board each ship. Then, in order to avoid the 
 destruction of life, they sent into the air of Broolyi the 
 exhilarative magnetism required, and into the minds 
 of the inhabitants the suggestion that the whole fleet 
 should be fted. When the ships had been deserted 
 and not a human being was within reach of them, they 
 launched through the air in its direction a series of 
 electric shocks, which, as soon as they came in contact 
 with the metals of the magazine, ignited the ammuni- 
 tion. Most of the ships were set on fire in this way, 
 the rest by the falling fragments and sparks from their 
 exploding sisters. 
 
 Thus was the new threat to Limanoran civilisation 
 frustrated without loss of life or breach of the mystery 
 that sealed the central isle. But the waste of time and 
 progress upon such threats by the withdrawal of so 
 many L,imanorans from their ordinary pursuits was an 
 evil not to be tolerated. Something must be done to 
 
Another Threat 501 
 
 prevent the recurrence of these expeditions. It was 
 generally from Broolyi they came, the result of war- 
 like ambition. It would be a service to the whole 
 archipelago to reduce this military people to insignifi- 
 cance and silence. There was no security in their 
 subjugation by the people of another island, for the 
 war-fanaticism would surge up again in a later genera- 
 tion. The conversion of them to a religion of peace 
 would mean no change in the blood; it would only 
 transform the method and cue of attack. 
 
 What was needed was the elimination of the ambitious 
 and military natures from the Broolyians. For only 
 the aristocracy and the descendants of the original con- 
 quering exiles had set their hearts on military pursuits; 
 the conquered and many of the families that came to 
 the island at later dates than the great purgation, were 
 not unwilling to keep to their own bounds, and pre- 
 ferred possession to dispossession. There was no need 
 of extermination of the people, but only decimation. 
 Nor would the Limanorans endure any shedding of 
 blood in the process. It must be gradual, peaceful, 
 free from torture and bloodshed, and almost unobserv- 
 able. 
 
 The physiological and physicist families worked out 
 a scheme that would fulfil all these conditions, and yet 
 finally eject the disturbers of peace from the archipelago 
 within a generation. The scare they had just suffered 
 and the exile of the balloonist ensured to Limanora 
 freedom from their attacks for some years. But they 
 aimed at permanent immunity and this could be secured 
 by nothing less than the sterilisation of the warlike 
 element in Broolyi. 
 
 The end was accomplished in the next aggression 
 upon a neighbouring island. The expedition was 
 
502 Limanora 
 
 formidable, and included all the bellicose males of the 
 offending people. After landing, it lay encamped in 
 the open air; then a band of Limanorans set out on 
 wings by night, armed with a new surgical instrument, 
 called the idlumian, which could give an electric shock 
 to any part of the human system and paralyse it either 
 for a time or permanently, according to the power 
 put into it. They approached the whole army as it 
 lay asleep, and by the whiff of a soporific which they 
 diffused through the air, they steeped the systems of 
 the sentinels in lethargy and by the same means ensured 
 the depth and continuance of the slumbers of the em- 
 battled host. Before a single soldier had awakened 
 from his deep sleep, the whole Broolyian army was de- 
 fertilised without being in the least conscious of any 
 loss of vitality or manhood or enjoyment of life. When 
 the sentries awoke and the troops began to move about 
 in preparation for their struggle, the medical embassy 
 had winged its way back to Limanora. Not till twenty 
 or thirty years after did it strike the Broolyians that 
 the fountain of their military power was dried up, and 
 soon they began to attribute the strange infecundity 
 of their aristocratic and warlike families to the witch- 
 craft of the isle of demons, a belief that finally sealed 
 that centre of the archipelago as with walls of adamant 
 against aggression on the part of their neighbours. 
 
 My Western instincts, in spite of all my training, 
 would reappear at intervals which happily became 
 longer and longer and for a time I could not repress 
 my instinctive disapproval of the use of this idlumian 
 or electro steriliser. Yet my reason told me that it was 
 the only effective method of permanently stopping the 
 horrors of war in the archipelago. Heredity and cir- 
 cumstances would have circumvented any other blood- 
 
Another Threat 503 
 
 less attempt at relief from the Broolyian nightmare. A 
 few discussions with my proparents made this rational 
 view of the matter dominant over the conservative in- 
 stinct in me, and before many years my instinct was 
 quite the other way; it became the ally of the reason; 
 and I had no need to argue with myself on the point 
 or confirm my faith by arguing with others who knew 
 better than I. 
 
 There was another Western instinct of mine which 
 gave me frequent though lessening trouble and came 
 into conflict with the reason of the community at this 
 time and on this topic. It was my approval of propa- 
 gandism. Into my blood had grown through the cent- 
 uries of Christendom the feeling that a faith could not 
 well prove itself unless it spread out amongst new and 
 alien peoples. It is the prerogative and principle of 
 belief to yearn for universality of acceptance amongst 
 human beings. And it urges on the devotees of any 
 faith to spread it through the world at all costs. After 
 centuries of propagandism the habit becomes an in- 
 stinct, and it seems to be a dictate of nature to attempt 
 to convert the world to the tenets which have grown 
 up in us from infancy and been incorporated into our 
 very life. The Christian has ever been from its outset 
 a great missionary religion, and it is difficult for one 
 brought up in Christendom to get rid of the missionary 
 attitude of mind which assumes every alien to it to be 
 sunk in wickedness and unprofitableness, and certain 
 to lose all the future blessings promised to true be- 
 lievers. 
 
 I could not obliterate this instinct wholly from my 
 nature, and whenever I reflected on the wisdom and 
 nobleness of the L,imanoran civilisation, or noticed the 
 marvellous progressiveness of some new phase of it, I 
 
504 Limanora 
 
 found myself longing to go back to the Western world 
 with my knowledge. Thus I often drifted into appeals 
 to the propagandist spirit which I assumed to exist in 
 the breasts of my friends and fellow-citizens, but I was 
 not allowed to rest long in such dreams. Each time I 
 uttered or even thought over my missionary desire, I 
 was brought to book with the widest of knowledge and 
 the keenest of penetration into human nature and its 
 history. I felt that it was almost as useless for Euro- 
 peans to go out amongst the tribes of monkeys and 
 spend their lives trying to bring them up to such a 
 level of intelligence as is implied in the appreciation 
 of the Christian religion, as for the L,imanorans to apos- 
 tolise amongst mankind, and struggle to drag them up 
 to the stage of progress these islanders had reached. 
 
 But now, whenever my missionary moed returned 
 upon me, my friends would point with a smile to the 
 new invention, the electro- steriliser; and if pressed by 
 the disapproving skepticism of my thoughts, they 
 would urge in words the omnipotence of this little in- 
 strument as the apostle of progress. By this and this 
 alone was the snail-pace advance of mankind likely to 
 be quickened. Without more rapid elimination of the 
 unfit than was afforded by natural selection, sexual 
 selection, and the accidents of surroundings, there was 
 little hope of wise propagation of the human race. The 
 blunders and defects and maladies of every new century 
 were treasured up by heredity in the tissues of man- 
 kind along with any feeble tendency to advance that 
 might appear. The struggle was a losing one in spite 
 of the development of science and wealth. And all re- 
 forming theories and efforts were but stumblings in 
 the dark till there had been a thorough purgation of 
 traditional and epidemic diseases, moral as well as phy- 
 
Another Threat 505 
 
 sical. Nine tenths of the race, as at present consti- 
 tuted, were unworthy to hand on their natures to 
 posterity. Under the regime of propagational license 
 universal among all peoples of the earth, the evil and 
 diseased multiplied at a much greater rate than the 
 sound in mind and body. The progressive element in 
 mankind was dragged back by the dead weight of the 
 criminal, the diseased, the habitually pauper, and the 
 naturally incompetent. Some religions even set them- 
 selves to encourage the vitalisation and propagation of 
 the last. It was noble and good to assuage the evils 
 that heredity had accumulated in their systems; but it 
 was anything but noble and good to encourage them to 
 perpetuate their misfortunes throughout a wide pos- 
 terity. " Multiply " should be the last word of an ad- 
 vancing civilisation instead of the first, unless there be 
 added to it the condition " only the best." And who 
 cares or dares to preach this true gospel of progress, 
 when it touches a theme that all are ashamed to men- 
 tion ? If ever there was a sacred mission upon earth 
 it would be that of the man who should go to the wise 
 and good men of all nations and put into their hands 
 the secret of the idlumian, or who should himself pass 
 round the world and sterilise all the morally or physi- 
 cally diseased amongst rich and poor, amongst gentle 
 and simple. Within two generations the races of hu- 
 manity would take such a leap into light and noble 
 vitality and love of progress as would make the most 
 brilliant civilisation of the past seem barbaric. Then 
 would they take command of their own destiny, and 
 look unflinchingly into the future for the path they 
 should take. Advance in material or in the accumu- 
 lation of force is vain, unless it goes hand in hand with 
 such universal moral and intellectual advance. It is 
 
506 Limanora 
 
 progress in the human system through all its parts 
 that should be the aim of every race. 
 
 I gradually came to understand the importance they 
 attached to this new instrument as the most humane 
 and effective of missionaries. Had it come before their 
 great series of purgations, there would have been little 
 need for the expatriation policy. If they had had to 
 eject, they would have taken care that the different 
 sections of exiles should vanish in a generation. They 
 shrank from extinguishing the individual life that had 
 already been brought into being. They would have 
 had no scruple in giving euthanasia to an evil race or 
 a section of a race; for this meant only preventing a 
 posterity coming into existence to take up their burden 
 of evil. And even now it was a question to be seriously 
 discussed and answered whether they would not sweep 
 out the pollution from the rest of the archipelago by 
 the help of this humane little doorkeeper of posterity. 
 Would it not prevent the lifelong evil of thousands? 
 Where lay the humanity or love in allowing a retro- 
 gressive and unhappy race to hand on to myriads to 
 come the evil they had received from their ancestors ? 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 POUTY 
 
 {WAS privileged to hear, or rather to be conscious 
 of, the discussion that the question of idluinian- 
 missionaryism underwent. I had now reached the age 
 and stage of my training which gave me the entry as 
 audience to the councils of the race. It would not have 
 been wise to admit to the treatment of difficult and ad- 
 vanced themes natures that were still hemmed in by 
 the limits of long-past ages of history. They could 
 not have sympathised in, or even followed, the attitude 
 taken up by the elders of the people; and they would 
 have gone back from the meeting with minds perplexed 
 and bewildered by questions too complex and futuritive 
 for them to fathom. Many of them would have suf- 
 fered a warping of their natures from the strain, and 
 this would have meant years of additional training 
 and care to set it right. The exclusion of the imma- 
 ture from the national councils was a matter of educa- 
 tional policy rather than of political necessity. 
 
 It was evidently for my own benefit that I was pre- 
 sent at the discussion of the sterilising embassy. This 
 was somewhat difficult for me to follow, for my mag- 
 netic power and faculties had not been developed 
 enough to interpret the silences between the rare 
 
 507 
 
5o8 Limanora 
 
 speeches. As I sat, my mind ran back to a Quakers' 
 meeting to which I had been taken by my mother; then 
 much self-control had been necessary in order to re- 
 strain the expression of my amusement; now I felt as 
 if in the presence of gods who needed none of the bab- 
 ble of human speech to open a pathway from mind to 
 mind. I had sloughed off that singular prepossession 
 of the Western nature in favour of verbal intercourse 
 and had ceased to think that silence, where 'two or 
 three were gathered together, was a mark of inanity, 
 or incompetence, or at least passivity. I remembered 
 with a shudder the awkwardness that accompanied 
 social lockjaw, even where friends met; each grew 
 afraid of the thoughts of the others; none knew what 
 the silence meant; everyone was frantically searching 
 for something that would break the gag without ap- 
 pearing unnatural. Loquacity, instead of being a bar 
 to ideas, was counted an accomplishment; and freedom 
 of speech was one of the great political watchwords. It 
 was only on rare occasions that reserve was not con- 
 sidered a defect. 
 
 Now I felt that there was nothing so powerful as 
 these silences in council. The magnetism of thought 
 and feeling was flowing from mind to mind, all the 
 more that there was not a word or sound to interrupt 
 it. Now and again, when the divergence of thoughts 
 was dominant, one of the oldest and wisest would call 
 them in from their different tracks to a common centre. 
 Speech was rather a method of focussing thoughts than 
 one of chasing and criticising them. The speaker 
 would review all the mental discussion and concentrate 
 its lines, so that everyone present might have a view of 
 the whole field from a high point. It was marvellous 
 how rapidly they went though the business in hand by 
 
Polity 509 
 
 means of these noble silences, broken by occasional re- 
 views. There were no displays of mental or stylistic 
 legerdemain, no appeals to common feeling, no captious 
 criticisms, such as form the staple of a debate in a 
 Western assembly even of the wisest men. Kvery fal- 
 lacy that crept into the discussion was unmasked in a 
 gentle, fair, and kindly way. There was no partisan- 
 ship, no war-whoop of prospective victory, no lash of 
 sarcasm, and they abhorred above all things the sweet- 
 ness of harangue. 
 
 Yet, the absence of Western methods of beating out 
 a subject was a disadvantage for me, who had as yet 
 little of the magnetic penetration or sympathy needed 
 for the appreciation of their meetings. But my deep 
 reverence for the humanity of the elders, and great 
 sympathy for their aims, made up in part for the lack 
 of magnetic interpretation of their thoughts. At the 
 close of the council I talked the matter over with my 
 proparents, and eked out my own observations and re- 
 flections on its proceedings and thus came to a just 
 view of the whole discussion. 
 
 They were strongly impelled by their love of the hu- 
 man race to the missionary course, which would now 
 be so simple and effective. Missionaryism before meant 
 the hoisting of every separate alien and barbarous na- 
 ture up to a higher platform, and continuing the pro- 
 cess with generation after generation, a gigantic task. 
 There was more chance of the missionaries levelling 
 down to the civilisation of their converts than of ac- 
 complishing their original purpose, while the arguing, 
 preaching, and persuading implied a Niagara of bab- 
 ble for centuries. Where would lie the compensation for 
 such abasement of the mind ? Now there was no need 
 of condescension; it was a mere matter of common 
 
510 Limanora 
 
 professional work for the physiological families. The 
 glib energy of the old process was evaded and in its place 
 came the need of wide practical knowledge and keen 
 judgment. For tongue-force and subtlety of reasoning 
 were substituted physiological exactness and selective 
 talent. The process was now eliminative rather than 
 directly creative. 
 
 But such pleading ignored the true difficulty, the 
 acquisition of so large a knowledge of local and tem- 
 poral conditions as would enable them to foresee the 
 full effects of the step. How were they to be certain 
 that only the nobler natures would hand themselves on 
 in each race ? Streams from the barbarous and evil 
 past might flow through the mothers. Who could 
 guarantee that the reduced numbers of the next gen- 
 eration would be able to accumulate energy quickly 
 enough to keep the mastery of the earth against its 
 unreasoning and unmoral powers? As it was, the peo- 
 ples were able to fight with the seasons and the forces 
 of climate and weather, and with the exuberance of 
 the plant and animal kingdoms. If their numbers 
 were greatly lessened by the elimination of the coarser 
 natures, would not the balance be destroyed, and the 
 natural enemies of man have the best of it ? 
 
 Questions like these made them pause. To be able 
 to answer them would need prolonged and minute in- 
 vestigation of the human race and its conditions, per- 
 haps consuming centuries in the task. Meantime 
 their own forward march would have to be abandoned. 
 Omniscience alone could deal with the problem of mis- 
 sionaryism, and as things were, the omniscience of 
 nature was dealing with it. For evolution was proceed- 
 ing throughout the universe, however slowly. Those, 
 races that seemed to be laggards on the upward path 
 
Polity 511 
 
 were evolving what was needed on their part for the 
 advance of the whole army of creation, and death was 
 ever opening new careers for the vital force of their in- 
 dividuals. It was difficult to tell without complete 
 knowledge of all the conditions whether the spread of 
 a certain faith or phase of civilisation was going to be 
 beneficent or maleficent for the world as a whole. And 
 all missionaryism that was not based on omniscience 
 was striking out a path through a jungle in the dark- 
 ness. Even the idlumian, unless amongst criminals 
 and the morally and intellectually plague-stricken, 
 might do irremediable injury to the prospects of the 
 human race. The problem of propagandism was, as 
 often before, abandoned as too complicated and too far- 
 reaching for limited knowledge and brain power. 
 
 But the discussion gave me an insight into what I had 
 long been, curious about, their polity and methods of 
 guiding the course of their commonweal. I had not 
 dared to inquire into the subject lest I should meet 
 with some rebuff, or find that I had been too inquisitive 
 where reverence was needed. Nor had I been able to 
 see much evidence of government or legislation, and 
 had almost come to the conclusion that there was 
 no such thing in lyimanora as sovereignty or state. 
 Though everything moyed with the harmony and 
 smoothness of perfect organisation I could never find 
 the organising hand. 
 
 At last I discovered part, at least, of the machinery 
 of government. There was one assembly or council 
 to which reformers could appeal with their schemes. 
 The whole community often assembled; but it seemed 
 to me that it was more for training, for the reintegra- 
 tion of some faculty or feeling, or for the purification 
 
512 Limanora 
 
 and elevation of the life, than for legislative purposes. 
 The only trace of any approach to selection and de- 
 cision in these national gatherings was to be found in 
 Ivootniefa and in the linguistic assemblies; in the one 
 they practically accepted or rejected some proposed re- 
 vision of their ideals placed before them in a new book; 
 in the other they decided whether a new word, or the 
 adaptation or application of a word was worthy to live 
 or die, whether a new sense deserved to be kept alive 
 in a form set apart for it, or whether a new distinction 
 was real or merely verbal. I could see that these were 
 the two great functions of a national assembly, to ac- 
 cept or reject a new departure in life or in language, 
 to see that the path into the darkness of the unknown 
 was the right path, and that the verbal armour and 
 weapons they bore allowed of no enemy near. Dis- 
 covery and advance had their own pitfalls and risks; 
 but the language they used in investigation and re- 
 search was the most natural ambush of fallacies and the 
 scientific work of a generation might be rendered nuga- 
 tory by an ambiguous word or phrase. In past time 
 they could point out many ages, which had prided 
 themselves on the marvels of their progress in science 
 and were now regarded as barren and unprogressive; 
 their advance had been apparent and not real, a mere 
 change of nomenclature and not a change of ideas or a 
 discovery of facts. It was natural then that the com- 
 munity, as a whole, should, from the mere instinct of 
 self-preservation, keep the most watchful eye on this 
 unguarded frontier of language, and almost as eager 
 an eye on the regions that lay before them, the ideals 
 they were about to adopt. 
 
 I had now been led to see that there was a council for 
 the decision of foreign questions, for it was this that 
 
Polity 513 
 
 rejected the new idea of the idlumian mission. I soon 
 came to recognise its domestic functions as more im- 
 portant than its policy abroad. The latter occupied its 
 attention only once or twice in a generation. Monthly, 
 almost weekly, it met to agree on questions and schemes 
 which had no connection with the world outside of 
 L,imanora. Now that I was inspired to attend its 
 meetings, I felt that it safeguarded the march forward. 
 It never passed a law; and yet its decisions were as 
 clear, as valid, and as universal in their effects as if 
 they had been written out, proclaimed, and printed in 
 a statute-book. All the parents, proparents, and guar- 
 dians were members of it, and along with them were 
 associated as silent, inactive members the young men 
 and women who had matured and had shown sufficient 
 of the wisdom and virtues of the race to warrant such 
 a privilege. These latter were in training for full and 
 active membership many years before their spirit and 
 influence were felt to have bearing on any decision. 
 On this basis I had been admitted to the meetings. 
 
 The scheme of every new book came before this 
 assembly prior to its publication in Loomiefa. Every 
 new departure on the part of any family was brought 
 up by its heads to be tested by the feeling of the 
 council. But it rarely happened that any scheme was 
 rejected; it was, as a rule, only revised and modified. 
 In fact, every parent or guardian was so keenly in 
 sympathy with the spirit and genius of the race that it 
 was almost impossible for any proposal or idea to come 
 from a family in antagonism to the general welfare 
 and feeling. One feature that struck me as mark- 
 ing their meetings was the absence of those search- 
 ing, flaw- finding criticisms we would have considered 
 absolutely necessary to progress in the West; every 
 
 33 
 
514 Limanora 
 
 modification suggested was an improvement or addition 
 readily welcomed by the author and his family. The 
 council was there to help and develop, and not to be 
 hypercritical or censorious. Every thinker or inventor 
 was eager to bring his work before it; instead of fear- 
 ing its criticism as an ordeal he knew that his creation 
 would have its true spirit appreciated, and if there was 
 genuine and original work in it, it would meet with its 
 due; whatever was likely to aid the race in its forward 
 march would be welcomed and aided. 
 
 Another branch of its duties was the preparation of 
 practical problems and difficulties which were likely to 
 obstruct the national progress till they were solved. 
 The council thought over these as they came up in 
 their minds, and tried to get at their fundamental 
 form or principle. After having ruminated over them 
 for months, or perhaps years, it indicated the family 
 in whose province they lay, and handed them over to 
 it as part of its duty thereafter. In fact, the debatable 
 borderland between family and family was evidently 
 one of its most important spheres. Not that any 
 family ever desired to evade what might be included 
 in its functions or offices, but, on the contrary, was 
 eager to do all that in it lay for the benefit of the race. 
 Often, however, spheres overlapped, so that two differ- 
 ent families or individuals were doing the same thing; 
 and it was necessary to define and apportion the duty 
 of each. 
 
 In all the meetings and discussions I came gradually 
 to feel that there was a dominating spirit that influ- 
 enced from behind the scenes. I could see no overt 
 mastery or guidance of the proceedings, yet there 
 was manifest an organising power within its organism. 
 
Polity 515 
 
 Schemes and problems came before it in lucid order 
 and a definite shape leaving no room for mere idle con- 
 jectures. As the treatment of any one proceeded, I 
 could feel the magnetism of strong, harmonious spirits 
 moulding and bending the thoughts. I knew that I 
 was in tutelage, although there was no open dictation 
 or even guidance. 
 
 After a time I began to trace the vigorous currents 
 of influence that swept us on with such force, to the 
 oldest men and women in the council, those who in 
 Europe would have been thrust aside as incapable of 
 good advice and as on the borders of second childhood. 
 I could see a tendency on the part of most members to 
 look to them for the cue, when thoughts had begun to 
 wander and part company. They did not claim su- 
 perior authority, but the deference to their opinion and 
 instincts was spontaneous and palpable, and often grew 
 into the deepest reverence. This would never have 
 awakened the notice of an unsympathetic stranger, so 
 little was the feeling expressed in open word or act. 
 
 In this way I learned, before many years' experience 
 of the council, that there was an inner council or cabi- 
 net, consisting of all the elders who had proved them- 
 selves able and wise by centuries of discovery, or 
 invention, or penetrative and far-reaching advice. I 
 could discover no formal election to it, everything in 
 the shape of definite constitution or government being 
 manifestly avoided. Age did not form the qualification 
 for this senate although all the senators were men and 
 women who could count their years by hundreds. 
 Many who were older than they still remained outside 
 the charmed circle. It was rather weight of experience, 
 and the fulness of development resulting from it, that 
 admitted. Whosoever by living long had made the 
 
516 Limanora 
 
 most of life in the line of greatest progress was singled 
 out by the reverence paid to his lofty character and ex- 
 pansive wisdom, for the duty of piloting the race. It 
 took years of massive growth in personality and influ- 
 ence to make the community or the man certain that 
 he had been selected by the national spirit. The re- 
 sponsibility was so onerous that the wisest shrank for 
 years from it, fearing they had not developed suffi- 
 ciently. It was only with reluctance that they at last 
 listened to the call of their fellows and entered the 
 noblest of all senates. None sought the honour, but 
 once undertaken, none attempted to shift the burdens 
 of it onto other shoulders till the nausea of life, indi- 
 cating the approach of their mortal liberation, came 
 upon them. No one was jealous of their authority or 
 influence; for all knew that these they would have had 
 by virtue of their nature and advance, even if they had 
 no seat in this inner assembly. And every type of family 
 had its representative there, the ablest, the wisest, the 
 noblest, generally the oldest of the group, whether man 
 or woman. For there was great need in its councils 
 of someone minutely familiar with the practical func- 
 tions and duties of every science and art in the island. 
 Sex made no distinction in the choice; sex was a mere 
 accident in the realm of reason and wisdom; sometimes 
 the greater brain-power and greater moral and intellec- 
 tual development belonged to the male head of the 
 family, sometimes to the female ; and it never entered 
 the minds of this strange people to discount position or 
 influence because of sex. 
 
 In all differences of opinion their decision was final. 
 For everyone felt that the race could not possibly at 
 that particular stage of its progress attain to any clearer 
 light upon the subject than this areopagus had attained. 
 
Polity 5i7 
 
 The upholders of the clashing views received the de- 
 cision as coming from a tribunal, the most impartial 
 and the farthest -seeing that could be found on earth. 
 But it was seldom that any division of view came as 
 far as a controversy which needed the influence of the 
 elders. Where two individuals or families began to 
 feel their opinions on any common topic drawing apart, 
 they each made eager efforts to understand the other's 
 point of view; and their neighbours, recognising a dis- 
 cord in the mental atmosphere, came in with reconcil- 
 ing magnetism and reason. Everyone was too anxious 
 to have the light of others' thoughts thrown on the 
 matters he had to investigate or consider, to reject in 
 haste a view that differed from his, or to let his own 
 view become unreasoning prejudice. I never perceived 
 among them any of that bickering or heat which so 
 commonly attends a misunderstanding in Europe. 
 Long after arriving in the island I still wondered where 
 their courts of law were; and thought there must be 
 some secret tribunal that dealt summarily with all dis- 
 putes. I came at last to see that there was no need of 
 courts of justice, for there was never any approach to 
 jarring or litigation; and, most of all, there was no 
 written law to appeal to. It was one of the primary 
 principles of their life that any law that needed com- 
 mittal to writing was either artificial, and so beyond 
 the necessities of the community, or implied a flaw in 
 the nature of the race* demanding instant attention. 
 Written law, like overt authority, was an evidence of 
 elements in a community which were alien and had 
 better be eliminated. Hostile individuals or factions 
 made a body of recorded laws, backed up by force, a 
 necessity throughout the nations of the world, and 
 rendered most of them practically unprogressive. 
 
518 Limanora 
 
 Since the great series of purgations the spirit of the 
 L,imanoran community, working through the electric 
 sense, had been the master of its unity and progress, 
 and it appeared idle to make or write laws. Every ad- 
 vance it achieved made every individual at once debtor 
 to it ; all moved up to the new level. The laws, if those 
 principles which were continually being revised and 
 constantly progressing could be called so, were writ- 
 ten in the hearts and natures of the race; every new 
 amendment of them was the natural demand of the 
 racial spirit and passed at once through the elders, the 
 parents, and the guardians into the conscience of all 
 the families and individuals. Every man was a law to 
 himself, in that he knew and fully recognised the aim 
 of the community and the part he had to fulfil in its 
 advance. Those who were still in a state of pupillage 
 had each two elders as their guarantors and sponsors, 
 who watched the instillation of the common spirit into 
 them, and any flaw or discord rapidly made itself felt. 
 Reason was at the back of every word and act of the 
 Limanorans; a new feature or thought or discovery 
 had to prove itself worthy and real before it was ac- 
 cepted. There was no such thing as an appeal to 
 authority. Everyone knew that he would have to 
 reason out and make clear the nobleness of what he 
 expected others to believe or agree to. It was one of 
 the main functions, the most urgent duty, of the two 
 councils, therefore, to revise the axioms and postulates 
 in which the national reason found its leverage and to 
 see that they never became mere prejudices. Every 
 new advance antiquated some principle that had been 
 taken as axiomatic, or revealed the fallacy that lay in 
 some pivot-word. Any difference of opinion or of point 
 of view generally set the inner council on the alert. 
 
Polity 5 1 9 
 
 Not infrequently they found that one investigator had 
 been misled by a verbal fallacy or a mistaken axiom, 
 whilst the other had in searching laid his mind open to 
 the light of truth. They never rejected as trifling or 
 insignificant any divergence in the views of a common 
 topic, but rather welcomed it as evidence of some long- 
 hidden flaw in the foundations of their reason. 
 
 Another striking feature of this inner council was 
 that their meetings were open to all but the young and 
 immature. They would have nothing to do with the 
 secret conclave, which, they held, was the beginning 
 and principle of despotism. Away from the sunlight 
 of truth and open thought the most ghastly spiritual 
 diseases of humanity sprang into being and flourished; 
 thoughts and feelings, otherwise healthy and un- 
 ashamed, became sickly, morbid, and often venomous. 
 Resolutions passed in secrecy need have no assigned 
 reasons, and are soon passed without discussion and 
 without any reason but the lower private feelings and 
 prejudices of individual members. A mystery is at- 
 tached to the proceedings of such conclaves that gives 
 well-nigh omnipotence to the terror they instil. Hence 
 until their doom is near they are by nature and of ne- 
 cessity despotism. To every meeting of the inner coun- 
 cil all active councillors of the larger assembly were 
 welcomed. But, when present, they kept silence, and 
 preferred to keep silence. Nay, it was considered a 
 special privilege for one of the senate to withhold his 
 thoughts from the discussions; silence for a year or two 
 was the hard-earned reward for years of painfully 
 guarded responsibility in debate. Not one of them but 
 looked forward to such a breathing-time for relaxation, 
 so heavy was the care of the future of the race. To 
 speak was the burden ; for speech must be weighty, and 
 
520 Limanora 
 
 the recording linasans automatically treasured it up for 
 future years to shed light and criticism on it. 
 
 In fact their senate-house was arranged so as to be 
 a vast linasan itself. Nothing was needed at the end 
 of a meeting but to touch a spring, and the mov- 
 ing irelium-strip, on which the proceedings imprinted 
 themselves, was securely fixed on its roll and trans- 
 ferred to the valley of memories there to be laid past 
 in the archives for future reference, and a fresh strip 
 took its place ready for the next debate. Knowing this 
 each senator weighed his every word with the utmost 
 care. Whatever building was used as a meeting-place 
 for discussion by either the whole of the people or any 
 section of it had its dome constructed in such a way as 
 to serve as a collector and magnifier of sound, so arranged 
 that the sound should not echo back but pass instead 
 into the receiver of a great linasan and at once in- 
 delibly record itself, thus making every member of the 
 community set a watch upon his lips and allow only the 
 maturest wisdom to pass them. 
 
 The memories of the Limanorans were marvellous in 
 their precision and tenacity. They could ransack the 
 records of any man's brain in sleep with the greatest mi- 
 nuteness, though they did not care to use this process on 
 anyone beyond the stage of probation and pupillage; it 
 implied something not unlike prying into the secrets of 
 the nature. They knew, too, how inexact the senses 
 are in their reports of what takes place in the world 
 without. Refined and trained as they were, there was 
 always a liability to error. Whenever exactitude of 
 record was required they used machine-reporters which 
 never made mistake except when their gearing was out 
 of order. At all important assemblies and gatherings 
 
Polity 
 
 521 
 
 they had an instrument called an idrolinasan which re- 
 corded in permanence not merely all that was said or 
 done, but the electric currents which passed from man 
 to man. Whenever they needed to verify a memory 
 of the past, the irelium-strip of the particular occur- 
 rence was brought out of the historical archives and 
 placed in the reversible idrolinasan, and the whole 
 scene flashed vividly before the senses. Doubtless this 
 custom of machine-recording made the Limanorans so 
 watchful of all they said and did and thought; and it 
 was perhaps this as much as any of the wonderful 
 features of their civilisation that quickened the pace 
 of their personal development in more recent years. 
 They made every effort their natures were capable of 
 to think and say and do what was worthy of themselves 
 and their people. Nothing retards the progress of 
 Western civilisation so much as the relaxed habit of 
 life that even the best men and women fall into, when 
 others are not likely to see or hear them. Religion 
 invented the all-watchfulness of God in order to provide 
 a substitute for the consciousness of the eyes and ears 
 of others. But it is too distant and incorporeal to 
 strike a highly materialised civilisation as real; and 
 the belief acts only for a brief period after it has been 
 impressed upon the mind. The economy of breath in 
 churches and of evidence in law courts would be so 
 great if some of those instruments were introduced 
 into the West, that Europe would not know itself within 
 a few years, it would develop and progress intellect- 
 ually and morally with such rapidity. But the most 
 striking result would appear in politics and legislation. 
 The machine would influence the speech and action of 
 the legislators as powerfully as if they believed every 
 moment that the omni-watchfulness of the deity were as 
 
522 Limanora 
 
 real as the presence of the Speaker in the chamber. 
 There could be no revisal of its hansardisings; every 
 politician would be as true, as reverential, as weighed 
 down with the responsibility of his duties as if he were 
 before the final judgment-seat. 
 
 These machines had had a wonderful effect even upon 
 the advanced Limanoran polity. Not even a gesture 
 was wasted in their assemblies. Everything done and 
 said was relevant and weighty. The result was they 
 acted as if they were one man and their meetings were 
 brief and effective; where a Western legislature would 
 discuss a scheme or proposal for years, a few minutes 
 would suffice a L,imanoran assembly to get at the heart 
 of it, and accept or reject it. They seldom had to re- 
 trace their steps; if they did, the error was due to some 
 mistaken principle accepted in past ages as an axiom, 
 or to some undetected fallacy in a pivot-word. The 
 proposer of the scheme had the responsibility of making 
 every feature and consequence of it clear; he must not, 
 and would not, conceal anything that might militate 
 against its acceptance; he had discussed it fully with 
 his family, and seen in their criticisms and suggestions 
 everything that might be amended. There was, there- 
 fore, not a minute lost on defective arrangement or 
 statement. 
 
 It was astonishing how rarely the councils had to 
 meet, and how brief their meetings were. And this 
 was the reason why I had been so long in discovering 
 any trace of constitution or polity in their midst. One 
 of their favourite maxims was that an organism to be 
 Jiealthy must work without calling attention to itself. 
 And this is truest of all in politics. The government 
 that is never seen or heard or felt, and yet has no 
 
Polity 5 2 3 
 
 secrecy or need of secrecy about its proceedings, is they 
 most efficacious and wholesome. Those loud demo-^ 
 cracies which occupy most of their time in discussing 
 themselves and their systems are corrupt already or on 
 the road to corruption. And monarchies that have to 
 parade abroad in threats or expeditions are diseased at 
 home and afraid to become too conscious of their dis- 
 ease. "The minimum of government attains the 
 maximum of development," was another of their 
 favourite sayings. To keep this sentiment living, they 
 led their youth back to the study of certain periods of 
 their past that they were ashamed of, called the stag- 
 nant ages. Some of them had been republican, others 
 monarchic, some religious or superstitious, others 
 rationalistic or sceptical, some warlike, others peaceful. 
 Their one common characteristic was that the state did 
 everything for the subjects; the island was a nursery, 
 the citizens were infants; no one ever thought of taking 
 the initiative in any scheme; whenever anything was 
 needed, the state had to look after it; the chief duty of 
 a citizen was to talk and hold meetings and criticise; 
 to act was beyond his province; the state had to feed 
 and clothe him at last, and to drive him to his work 
 with the lash. It was the lash that disciplined the 
 army, and urged it on to battle. The state had within 
 it or in its service the few who retained activity or 
 energy; and these few knew how to fill their own cof- 
 fers better than those of the country. Then came dis- 
 grace and disaster. Prosperity and patriotism and 
 courage vanished in decay before the universal corrup- 
 tion on the one hand and the senile helplessness on the 
 other. And all that remained fell an easy prey to the 
 first ambitious marauder who invaded the island. 
 There grew up in the breasts of the L,imanorans an 
 
524 Limanora 
 
 instinctive fear of all encroachments of the state on the 
 duties and functions of the family and the individual; 
 and those who formed the inner council were as deeply 
 imbued with this feeling as the rest of the citizens. 
 One of their chief duties was to draw the line with care 
 between what could best be done by the separate units 
 of the state, and what by the state as a whole. They 
 safeguarded the independence of the individual, and 
 encouraged his initiative in order that every tendency 
 to originality should flourish, and that the capability 
 of meeting emergencies should grow stronger and 
 stronger. Every man on the island knew that he must 
 act for himself in innumerable circumstances without 
 waiting for help or counsel. And the women were 
 trained to be similarly self-reliant. Readiness of re- 
 source, confidence, and courage were universal charac- 
 teristics of the people, and they knew from their study 
 of history, as well as if they had mastered it by experi- 
 ence, that dependence on the action of all and interfer- 
 ence on the part of the state would gradually destroy 
 these. 
 
 It was, of course, the elders who were most keenly 
 alive to this fact. In their councils they defined with 
 the most exceeding care what might be done by them 
 without injury to the habit of presence of mind and 
 spontaneity of action on the part of the individual citi- 
 zens. What they had chiefly to look after was the 
 future of the race; and everything done by the citizen 
 or the family that endangered this had to be reviewed 
 and corrected by them. But so powerful a private in- 
 fluence had each elder over every individual of his 
 family that interference in this respect was seldom 
 needed. The ideals held before the race sank into the 
 nature of every citizen and guided him in all his 
 
Polity 
 
 525 
 
 actions, if not now in all his thoughts. The matters 
 that needed most deliberation were the revisal or ex- 
 pansion of those ideals, and the selection of pairs for 
 marriage and parenthood; they knew that a mistake 
 in either of these would lead to incalculable evil, and 
 would necessitate, in retracing the step, long years of 
 thought and labour besides the most drastic remedies. 
 The guidance of the great public institutions needed 
 little counsel or interference, but was almost automatic; 
 everyone concerned knew by instinct what he had to 
 do and had its interests so completely at heart that he 
 required no reminder of the details of his duty. The 
 inspection and review of the various departments were 
 rather the task of the expert families, and chiefly of 
 their elders, than of the elders as a whole. 
 
 But there was one department for which the inner 
 council or senate was wholly responsible. This was 
 Rimla, or the centre of force. Mechanical power was 
 the one thing, they had all along felt, that must belong 
 to the state and be controlled by the state. All other 
 possessions (wealth, property, reputation) were mere 
 symbols of it. To let it drift into the hands of indi- 
 viduals, who might grasp more than was good for them 
 or even monopolise it, was to endanger the future of 
 the race. Only the wisest and best and the most im- 
 bued with Limanoran ideals were ever allowed to con- 
 trol the concentrated force of the island. In fact no 
 one but a member of the inner council could be the 
 master of force, and his term of control was limited to a 
 few hours at a time, for which period he was chosen 
 from day to day from amongst the oldest and most ex- 
 perienced of the nobler-natured. It was the greatest 
 honour the race could bestow. To be trusted by the 
 
526 Limanora 
 
 whole people with the management and distribution of 
 that which was the fulcrum of all progress was to be 
 marked out as one worthy to be divine. When I came 
 to understand this, I saw the meaning of the reverence, 
 almost awe, with which the master of force was pointed 
 out to me on my first visit to Rimla. I had not meas- 
 ured the greatness of his power, or seen that it was far 
 more real and comprehensive than that of any monarch 
 or despot that had ever ruled. 
 
 Where would their civilisation or their ideals or 
 great future be without this marvellous concentration 
 of naked energy ? What would have become of the 
 race, had a base ambition or an insane caprice entered 
 into the thoughts of anyone of their masters of force 
 while he held the reins of dominion in his hands? It 
 was the duty, therefore, of everyone who was elected to 
 the office, however often he had held it, however noble 
 he had proved himself, however trusted he might be by 
 all, to submit himself the hour before he entered Rimla 
 to the tests of the inner nature and thoughts that the 
 race knew, and this in presence of the oldest of the 
 senate. The workings of his brain and heart were 
 stringently investigated, and after that he was sent to 
 sleep, in order to have his dreams read and interpreted. 
 If any of the tests gave dubious answer, he resigned 
 his office and another was chosen in his place. For 
 almost a generation this had never occurred, yet the 
 precautions were as rigidly enforced as if the tests had 
 often revealed defects. For the master of force held in 
 his hands the key of their civilisation and progress. 
 To the elders all private ends and honours seemed 
 trivial beside the aim of the race, the only divine thing, 
 they thought, that they held in their hearts. To have 
 been able to substitute anything on earth for it even for 
 
Polity 5 2 7 
 
 a moment was to them so absurd and insane as to ap- 
 pear impossible for any L,imanoran. All this safe- 
 guarding of the probity and the sanity of the masters 
 of force was therefore counted rather as a tribute to 
 the importance of the office than a slur upon the indi- 
 vidual. 
 
 It was not that private motive or stimulus had been 
 annihilated. On the contrary they considered that the 
 chief spur to progress was the struggle of the indi- 
 vidual in competition with his fellows. He who could 
 attain most rapidly to the ideal set immediately before 
 the race was a marked and striking personality. To 
 level all means of advance so as to make them the same 
 for all was to destroy this stimulus to development. 
 To be respected and at last reverenced by his neighbours 
 was longed for by every man in the community, and 
 everyone had his own special faculty and means for 
 gaining such respect and reverence. At the great pur- 
 gation of the island's socialists and thieves, private 
 property had not been abolished, but only disgraded. 
 The socialists had been willing to erase all other 
 methods of civilisation and progress for the sake of the 
 impossible dream, the equalisation of property; the 
 thieves had been willing to do the same for the sake of 
 the swift acquisition of their share of it. They kept up 
 an abnormal and morbid appetite for property which 
 raised it completely out of scale and proportion, com- 
 pared with the other symbols of power and means of 
 advance. It became a disease that perverted their 
 whole view of life, and nothing wholesome could be 
 done till they were expelled. After their expulsion 
 it was found that property lost its importance, and 
 the word "fortune" ceased to be identified with its 
 
528 Limanora 
 
 acquisition. It fell to its natural and true position in 
 the scale of means of development. 
 
 The motive that the socialists had most prominently 
 put forward for their schemes, the benefit of their pov- 
 erty-stricken and starving brethren, had long become 
 too artificial to hoodwink the wiser patriots. Not since 
 the barbarous stage of their past had bare subsistence 
 been a struggle and aim in the race. They had become 
 too provident to allow population to outrun means or 
 demand. There never had been for centuries anyone 
 who needed his neighbour or the state to aid him with 
 food or clothing or other of the vital necessaries. If 
 there had, he would have been too deeply ashamed of 
 his mismanagement of his life, or his improvidence, to 
 allow anyone to know of it. The arrangements of the 
 state and the carefully proportioned size of the popu- 
 lation left no room for him to throw the blame on 
 others. The body of the people laughed at the social- 
 ists for the patent absurdity of their pretext, and helped 
 the wise leaders to drive them out. Even if this motive 
 had been the real one, to disorganise the whole political 
 and social system, and to throw overboard the aim of 
 the race for the sake of securing a beggarly pittance for 
 feebler folk who ought not to have been brought into 
 the world, and ought not to be allowed to perpetuate 
 their kind, was a monstrous waste of vital power. 
 There had become deeply implanted in them a racial 
 instinct that no step should ever be taken which could 
 in any way weaken or endanger the sense of individual 
 responsibility. They knew that no amount of self- 
 sacrifice, no kind of guaranty of certain subsistence on 
 the part of the workers in the state, would ever make 
 true and good citizens of those who had lost this. 
 
 Even when they had come to have a far more com- 
 
Polity 
 
 529 
 
 prehensive and scientific command of the problem of 
 population, and when the communising of property 
 would have led to no evil results, they refused to think 
 of such a measure. Every man was allowed to ac- 
 cumulate as much wealth as he desired. But none had 
 now the ambition to accumulate it. And as soon as 
 communication with the neighbouring islands was cut 
 off, commerce ceased, and with it all opportunity for 
 growing opulent. Everyone had enough for his needs, 
 and these were great in a country so rich in resources 
 and devices and so rapid in its development. The 
 family safeguarded the solvency of every member of it, 
 as it guaranteed his capacity to do competent work for 
 the state and for himself. The state demanded nothing 
 that could be called taxation from the citizens; part of 
 their time, ability, and work was all that it required. 
 But it was one of the methods of showing patriotism to 
 give freely to the state. 
 
 It was indeed one of the chief reasons for the reten- 
 tion of private property that it allowed of an easy and 
 ever available means of cultivating benevolence. Per- 
 sonal work was a limited thing, and could be given in 
 aid of others only at fixed places and times and in 
 defined quantities. But if it could be concentrated 
 in private possessions, then there was ready at all times 
 and places and in any quantity the power of helping 
 others. Without it generosity and self-sacrifice would 
 have to mourn their petty limitations. With it be- 
 nignity was ever in exercise, and remained an active 
 and vital habit in the community. If the state pos- 
 sessed all and demanded all, then the citizens were 
 little better than slaves; their virtues had no freedom, 
 no exercise, and were bound to disappear. To get as 
 much as they could, to sate their appetites as fully as 
 
 34 
 
53 Limanora 
 
 they could, was the only competition amongst neigh- 
 bours in such a condition of affairs. The blessedness 
 of giving help spontaneously would never be experi- 
 enced and would vanish from the community, and in 
 its train sympathy, beneficence, humanity. 
 
 The competition in L,irnanora was in giving, not in 
 getting, though getting was one of the conditions and 
 bases of giving. It is true that the advance of the race 
 had almost superseded this palpable method of reveal- 
 ing the bounty of the spirit. In former ages, when 
 hypocrisy was still possible, and language and smiles 
 were too cheap and ready a treasury to be wholly 
 trusted as evidence of kindly intent, private property 
 enabled a man to give a trustworthy guaranty of his 
 generosity; the only other things he could sacrifice, 
 work, liberty, life, were too personal and too limited 
 in opportunity to be symbols of a bounteous heart. 
 Now men and women needed no outer symbol to inter- 
 pret and pledge their thoughts and feelings. Everyone 
 knew the soul of his neighbour as he knew his own, 
 and hypocrisy was a lost art, having been long ago 
 stripped of its motive. 
 
 This singular people retained the institution of priv- 
 ate property, fearing the apathy and languor that fall 
 upon the energies of a socialistic people. They had 
 far higher stimuli to competitive vigour in the devotion 
 to progress and to the aim of the race, but they were not 
 so foolish as to abandon the more material stimuli. 
 Everything that would contribute to progress they re- 
 tained, everything that would tend to quicken the pace. 
 Nor were they yet so far away from the more animal 
 stage of their civilisation as to be wholly rid of the fear 
 of its return. Should it return, the other motives, even 
 that of patriotism, would be so shadowy as to be im- 
 
Polity 531 
 
 potent against the deluge of appetite and indolence if 
 the material competitive principle, the system of private 
 property, had been abolished. To avoid the risk of 
 such a doom as had fallen on Tirralaria, they refused 
 to communise possessions. And a certain sweetness of 
 imagination, of memory, and of harmless romance had 
 hallowed the system in their minds; without it they 
 would have felt a distinct depreciation of life that would 
 not have found compensation in any advantage its 
 abolition might have brought. 
 
 The evils that seemed to attach to the system in 
 other times and nations attached to all other symbols 
 of power as well: birth, position, influence, reputation, 
 character, talent, opportunity, luck. All that tended 
 to differentiate one man from another and raise him in 
 the scale of the use of power was open to the same 
 charge as the institution of private property. But 
 early in their reforming career the L,imanorans had 
 discovered that the evils that seemed to attach to these 
 features of human life were not inherent in them ; they 
 arose from the passions of envy and jealousy. As long 
 as these had possession of men's hearts, the levelling 
 process could never be final. 
 
 Communities that made the attempt to plane down 
 human society to a common level, and to equalise all 
 symbols and opportunities of power had an infinite 
 task before them. They really began at the wrong end 
 and struck at the accidental consequences of what they 
 thought an evil, instead of getting to the root and 
 source. The L,imanorans had wisely set themselves to 
 bleach their natures of envy and jealousy; and once 
 this was accomplished they found that inequalities 
 amongst them were, instead of being an evil, the greatest 
 good, the keenest stimulus of progress. They smiled 
 
532 Limanora 
 
 at the farce that went on in Tirralaria, a farce that at 
 intervals culminated in tragedy. They saw the inher- 
 ent futility of all efforts to do away with the occasions 
 of envy and jealousy, instead of eradicating the passions 
 themselves. They compared socialistic and equalising 
 schemes to bailing out the ocean with a sieve. 
 
 The disadvantages and abuses of private property 
 and of all inequality in the symbols of power vanish 
 with the opportunity and the desire to flaunt them in 
 the faces of neighbours and rivals, to use them as ap- 
 peals to envy and jealousy. As a rule it is in small 
 communities and circles and narrow localities, where 
 every man in almost every movement kicks up against 
 some neighbour, that envy and jealousy reach their 
 most virulent development and acquire the greatest re- 
 finement in the use of their weapons. But that is in 
 small communities that form parts of wider arenas of 
 ambition, and so learn arrogance and scorn of their 
 surroundings. Where a limited society lives, isolated 
 from alien and ambitious neighbours, a simple and un- 
 ambitious life, it is generally found to be almost free 
 from the meaner emotions, envy, jealousy, and their 
 counterparts, disdain, pride, and insolence. Amongst 
 them there is little need of coercion or law or govern- 
 ment; the more primitive virtues of honesty, truth, 
 loyalty, courage, come to them by nature; the family 
 eradicates or conceals all symptoms of lapse from them, 
 all rebellion against the interests of all. The great 
 drawback to such commonweals is that they are not 
 progressive; they remain centuries in one stage of 
 civilisation, and seem to travellers from larger and 
 advancing nations mere savages buried in filth, and 
 enslaved to the despotism of the seasons. But this 
 people considered such superficially embruted com- 
 
Polity 
 
 533 
 
 munities nearer to ultimate salvation than the highly 
 refined nations that exhibit a medley of wealth and 
 starvation, militarism and religion. The maximum of 
 government, they held, implied the minimum of pro- 
 gress; for the essentials of spiritual advance are ignored 
 by external administration. 
 
 A long experience of all types of body politic, and a 
 minute knowledge and study of the history of the 
 world, had made this people antagonistic to every form 
 of great empire. In their own far past they had known 
 the ambition to incorporate other peoples, and extend 
 the bounds of their dominion over the world. But 
 that was in periods that were stagnant or retrogressive 
 in the essentials of a noble civilisation. Great empires 
 are able to concentrate vast resources; but they spend 
 them all on pomp, administration, and war. Wherever 
 the world is parcelled out into huge nations, there is 
 no chance of freeing them from the slavery of omnivor- 
 ous armaments. Each is a threat to the freedom of the 
 others, and none dares disarm, or spend her wealth on 
 the arts of peace, lest the others should take advantage 
 of her unwarlike attitude. The only progress continues 
 to be in the size and the equipment of the armies, and 
 in the ingenuity of the instruments of destruction. 
 And, should two or three absorb the others, the mili- 
 tary vigilance has to be all the greater. Even if the 
 impossible should occur, and one great empire should 
 absorb the world, the internal militarism would be 
 nonetheless; half of mankind would have to be em- 
 ployed in keeping the other half from rebellion against 
 the central power. Huge empires, instead of being 
 guaranties of peace, are direct incentives to war, or at 
 least to a permanent warlike attitude. 
 
534 Limanora 
 
 What has most obstructed human progress on its 
 civilised levels is an inevitable tendency at a certain 
 stage to mass into large aggregates; that is, when there 
 has been considerable accumulation of wealth or an ex- 
 ceptional development of commerce, and protection is 
 needed by the wealthy or the merchants. Then the 
 military element gains the mastery of all natural power, 
 and whilst there occurs a rapid evolution of all forms of 
 aggression and defence and of all the virtues connected 
 with them, there is real retrogression; the spirit dwin- 
 dles as the outer integuments bloom. Militarism 
 only perpetuates itself and protects nothing but its own 
 ambitions. It is in its last analysis a subtle fusion of 
 histrionicism and savagery; it attracts the same tastes 
 as the prize-iing and the theatre. Everything that 
 encourages it or develops it stands in the way of the 
 true advance of the human race. 
 
 There is, they held, no hope for mankind in general, 
 unless this stage of imperial ambitions and aggrega- 
 tions can be overleaped. Back must the world recede 
 from vast empires if it would attain to any nobleness 
 of aim, or any development of the higher elements in 
 man. Its sole salvation lies in small communities 
 covering its surface and remaining free from the taint 
 of imperial effort and militarism. Only when the 
 nation has complete command of the numbers within it 
 through the family, that is, when the nation is small, 
 will patriotism become commensurate with humanity, 
 and the true goal of the human race be the aim of the 
 individual. 
 
 The family is the natural unit of administration in a 
 community; and, as long as the heads form the com- 
 mon council that watches the interests and aim of all, 
 it can never come into conflict with national unity and 
 
Polity 
 
 535 
 
 progress. The house and its goods belonged to the 
 household in Umanora; and, although the members 
 of it had equal rights to the livelihood that was counted 
 fullest and best by the community, the individual, if 
 mature, had freedom of action that would surprise a 
 Western freeman; he was the equal of all members of 
 the state; within the aim of the race and the path of its 
 progress he had complete personal initiative; his de- 
 stiny, it is true, had been shaped for him during his 
 pupillage, but the fulfilment of it was his own; his 
 aims and desires had been implanted and developed 
 and pruned whilst he was passing through childhood 
 and youth, so that he would not in full manhood 
 spontaneously change them, but when he became an 
 independent citizen his methods of fulfilling these were 
 all his own. He had to contribute to the family treas- 
 ury what was needed to keep it level with Limanoran 
 affluence, and he was generally eager to give more; but 
 all the rest was at his own disposal. The family had 
 many buildings in common; but each full-grown mem- 
 ber, whether male or female, had a separate house to 
 retire to. Originality in the family, one of the chief 
 methods in the race for encouraging progress, could 
 never be attained without cultivating originality in the 
 individual. It had a track laid out for it through the 
 future, carefully related to the march of the nation ; but 
 it might adopt what means it liked to make that track 
 sure, and it might explore on all sides of it for new 
 ideas and methods and resources. It was the same 
 with the individual within it; he was encouraged to 
 find his own means, and to use his imagination and his 
 other faculties fully and independently, provided he 
 kept his eye on the goal of the family, which was in- 
 volved in the goal of the race. 
 
53 6 Limanora 
 
 All the families were equal in their relations to the 
 state, whatever their occupation or wealth or origin 
 might be. This prevented the family from passing into 
 the rigidity of the caste. All work was alike honoured, 
 and personal worth was the test of the man and of the 
 respect paid him, irrespective of external symbols and 
 representatives of power. And to prevent the super- 
 session of this by any other principle, all the physical 
 forms of toil that might at one time or other be con- 
 sidered offensive, were gathered into the hands of the 
 state, and all men and women had to take their share 
 of them. They were the duties connected with the 
 various public institutions, and especially with the 
 centre of force. It was recognised as a good thing that 
 every man and woman should have physical exercise 
 every day in order to keep the basis of the spirit in the 
 best possible condition, by working off the debris of 
 the various organs and functions of the system. This 
 fitted in with the principle that all force should concen- 
 trate in the hands of the government. The most severe 
 physical toil was certain to be that which collected, 
 divided, and adapted the vast accumulation of energy 
 in Rimla. The duties in the centre of force were there- 
 fore portioned out day by day and week by week; and 
 every man and woman of the community had to spend 
 a certain portion of time each day in this vast forge of 
 energy. But the lighter work was given to the less 
 muscular, and the youthful had to bear the chief bur- 
 den; whilst the older, as their share, were occupied 
 chiefly in superintending it. Besides this, every citizen 
 had to take daily part in the work of some one of the 
 public institutions that were not assigned to special 
 families, or in the mechanical and unskilled toil of one 
 of those that were under the care of special families. 
 
Polity 
 
 537 
 
 Thus two or three hours of every citizen's twenty-four 
 were impounded by the state, much to his bodily and 
 spiritual advantage. 
 
 The only contribution in money or kind that the 
 state made compulsory was that which each family 
 exchequer gave for the support of the medical, archi- 
 tectural, and other public professional families. No 
 valid system could have estimated the value of their 
 services either to the state or to the individual; and it 
 was considered impracticable to valuate the benefits 
 received by each family from their work. An amount 
 was fixed, which each had to contribute to every family 
 that had the care of a public institution, or the per- 
 formance of a public duty. But over and above this 
 amount the voluntary gifts to them were very large. 
 The result was that the treasuries of public and profes- 
 sional families were oftenest the fullest; and they were 
 as ready and as able to give as any. If there was any 
 rivalry amongst the families and individuals in L,ima- 
 nora, it was in the delight of giving. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE MANORA AND THE IMANORA 
 
 WHAT would have been considered taxes in 
 another state were looked on by the people 
 of this land as voluntary contributions. There had 
 been no formal resolution or written law fixing neces- 
 sary imposts, but they came rather from the heart of 
 the people, and expressed themselves in what would 
 have been called in other nations public opinion. It 
 was opinion which needed no verbal communication 
 and might be called rather the public magnetism of the 
 race, that unified its customs and feelings, anc} made a 
 body of written law superfluous. 
 
 One feature of their civilisation that puzzled me for 
 many years was the seeming immobility of their public 
 relationships. When a man or woman got into a certain 
 family with its professional duties and prospects, there 
 was no means, it seemed to me, of changing. Once in 
 a certain groove, a Limanoran was in it for ever. His 
 destiny was irrevocable. It is true that the elders took 
 every precaution to choose his parents and ancestry for 
 such a goal, and to mould his tissues and educate his 
 faculties to it. Yet some inspiration might reveal to 
 him a vista into a future better suited to his powers 
 than that which had been fixed for him. It is true 
 
 538 
 
The Manora and the Imanora 539 
 
 that this feature gave great stability and strength to 
 the state. But a people that believed so firmly in 
 liberty, originality, and progress should surely have 
 adopted some more plastic system for their permanent 
 relationships, some status less rigid and immutable for 
 the individual members. It seemed to me more like 
 the iron system of caste than the flexibility of an ad- 
 vancing civilisation. 
 
 As usual I was mistaken in my criticism. I had not 
 looked deeply enough, or observed long enough to 
 know the marvellous fabric of their polity, a full know- 
 ledge of which meant an experience of several centuries. 
 The immutability was only in appearance and not in 
 reality. 
 
 A few years after I had been admitted to some of the 
 privileges of mature citizenship, I began to feel that 
 we were approaching an exceptional time. There was 
 evident a bustle of preparation, a rare quickening of 
 the pace of all work, and an expectancy that pointed 
 to some unusual event. The flight-exercises and the 
 leisure-time were somewhat curtailed, and as much 
 work was put into four weeks as was commonly put 
 into five. Before the year was half over, I began to 
 understand what it meant. The word Manora occurred 
 too often on the lips and in the minds of my neighbours 
 and friends to escape my observation and on inquiry I 
 found it meant the decennial review. Every ten years, 
 one quarter of the year was devoted to a census of the 
 civilisation of the period. 
 
 With all the other newly matured citizens, I had to 
 be instructed in the part I was to take in this census. 
 Kach day for months I had to devote some hours to 
 tracing out the progress I had made both in character 
 and in works, and in putting it into graphic and easily 
 
540 Limanora 
 
 observed form. I was taught to draw up comparative 
 statistics of the stages I had passed through from year 
 to year for the decennial period, though they considered 
 this a poor and misleading mode of reviewing the past. 
 It was the mere skeleton of the census. 
 
 I was supplied from the valley of memory with 
 irelium-strips, whereon had been recorded automatic- 
 ally without my knowledge my thoughts and feelings 
 and words in the various important scenes in which I 
 had taken part. How surprised was I often to observe 
 the mistakes my memory had fallen into ! As a witness 
 of some act I had seen, or some discussion I had heard, 
 I would have sworn confidently to the opposite of the 
 truth. As to my own deeds and words and even 
 thoughts and feelings, I was ashamed to see how com- 
 pletely my subsequent life had distorted the record of 
 them; the likeness was often unrecognisable. And I 
 knew well which was wrong; for the machine-reporters 
 were infallible as far as their report went. After my 
 perusal of these automatic records of my life I came to 
 the conclusion that common history must be a tissue of 
 fiction and error wherever it has had to depend on the 
 senses and memory of men for its details. I grew less 
 and less inclined to add anything from memory to my 
 decennial biography, which I drew from these machine- 
 reports. It was as refreshing to study them as if I had 
 been examining pictures and memorials of another's 
 life. By the time I had done with them, I seemed to 
 know something real of my past; and side by side I 
 was able to place my review of what I had become, and 
 the account of my various stages of growth during this 
 period, with the definiteness and accuracy of one who 
 was analysing scientifically half a dozen different evo- 
 lutionary specimens of a species. My personality stood 
 
The Manora and the Imanora 541 
 
 out at each different point of its growth as clearly as if 
 it had been that of another man laid under the micro- 
 scope and in these records I lived my life over again. 
 
 But I was still further aided in these researches into 
 my development by the accounts of the weekly inspec- 
 tion of my tissues and faculties kept by the medical fam- 
 ilies. These were not merely statistical and verbal, but 
 pictorial. The appearance and electric state of every 
 part of my system had been made to impress them- 
 selves indelibly in picture-records; and these were 
 now submitted to me for comparison. From the dif- 
 ferent records set side by side with the electrographs 
 and radiographs of all my animal economy, I was 
 taught how to produce an evolutionary picture of my 
 faculties and organs and tissues. 
 
 This was one of the most striking advances in their 
 art. They could combine the pictorial representations 
 of various stages in the life of a growing being in such 
 a way that, when placed in one of their lightning-swift 
 representers, the growth would flash before one's senses 
 as a continuity. A child would grow as by magic into 
 a matured man or woman as we gazed. A seed would 
 grow into a great tree in the space of a few minutes. 
 The brain or heart or lungs of a I^imanoran would pass 
 like a flash through the stages of development that had 
 taken generations to achieve. For spectacular study 
 of the history of any living thing nothing could surpass 
 the imataran, or focusser of history, as the new instru- 
 ment was called. 
 
 From the archives of the medical family I was able 
 to make such a series of pictures of my whole constitu- 
 tion and system as revealed the growth of every faculty 
 and organ and tissue. The rapidity of my develop- 
 ment astounded me as I looked over these graphic 
 
54 2 Limanora 
 
 records of my past. It was like a full-grown man 
 inspecting the photographs and annals of his infancy 
 and childhood. I could not have believed the story of 
 it, had it not been engraved so indubitably on these 
 irelitim-strips by the machine- reporters. My own 
 memory had become so foreshortened by the conscious- 
 ness of my present, and by the disproportionate im- 
 portance of recent events and conditions that I could 
 have no more implicit trust in its representations of 
 the past. But, when I placed the various series of 
 evolutionary pictures in the imataran, the effect was so 
 magical that I was half-inclined to believe in preference 
 my backward-looking faculty again. In the twinkling 
 of an eye the transparent reflection of myself had grown 
 its ten years' growth, and I had developed out of an 
 alien into something not unlike a lyimanoran. 
 
 All that I had done in the period, or rather all that 
 I had done productively, I had similarly to picturise in 
 series, so that every feature that had been in any way 
 developed might reveal itself, and everything that 
 showed stagnation or retrogression might be observed 
 without trouble. 
 
 My proparents and the elders of the family superin- 
 tended and tested my review of my past, and taught 
 me to be unbending in criticism of myself. No feature 
 that seemed to count against my advance was I to 
 shrink from representing in all its nakedness, nor was I 
 through false modesty to depreciate whatsoever stood 
 to my credit. I scarcely needed the precautions; for I 
 had learned during my sojourn amongst this rigidly 
 sincere and ingenuous people to respect the naked 
 truth above all things. Indeed I had come to feel that 
 it was useless to act otherwise than as if my whole 
 system were open to the gaze of my neighbours. 
 
The Manora and the Imanora 543 
 
 Every mature member of the community had this 
 drastic valuation of his work and strict criticism of 
 himself to make and all were occupied for three months 
 in reducing the annals of their past ten years to focus. 
 For the young and those still under tutelage the 
 proparents and guardians were responsible, and they 
 picturised for the imataran the decennial life of their 
 pupils as well as of themselves. 
 
 But over and above this personal work, the elders 
 had to review the growth of the families, institutions, 
 sciences, and arts of which they had the guidance. 
 This they knew well how to do from long practice, and 
 had carefully prepared the records of each separate year 
 of the decennium, and the pictures of the new features 
 and new growths in the departments they superin- 
 tended. During these three months all they had to do 
 was to focus the growth of the years and arrange the 
 various records in series in such a way as to reveal the 
 development. 
 
 When all was ready, each family gathered in its 
 public spectacular hall and viewed the growth of every 
 member of it in the shadows thrown by the imataran. 
 I thought at first that the effect would be too mono- 
 tonous to be interesting. But, as the spectacle of the 
 L,eomo proceeded, it proved to be a marvellous revela- 
 tion of the vast variety of types in one family, and of 
 the amount of growth that had gone on in the tissues 
 and faculties of every member in different directions. 
 
 The growth of the family as a whole was taken first, 
 its power of coping with new problems and of suggest- 
 ing difficulties to come, its additions to the treasury of 
 force and to the civilisation of the race, its attitude 
 toward the aim of the nation, its pace on the forward 
 march, its comprehension of the L,imanoran ethics and 
 
544 Limanora 
 
 of the general problems of the race, its command over 
 its individual members, and its relationships to the 
 other families and to the state as a whole. The decen- 
 nial development of the Leomo was graphically focussed 
 in pictures that told their story in a flash even to the 
 least mature. 
 
 Massed thus, the advance was felt by all to be sur- 
 prising, for each had been watching throughout the 
 decennium his own special work or set of faculties, and 
 had been unable to abstract himself sufficiently from 
 his own sphere to gain a just view of the whole family 
 progress. As we saw the science and the art develop 
 before our eyes, the moment's glance intensified the 
 ten years' work into a marvel. From a hundred dif- 
 ferent points of view we watched the advance of the 
 l>omo, and we felt proud that we belonged to such a 
 family; we knew that taken as a whole it had not been 
 wanting in its duty to the race and the aim of the race. 
 A magnetic thrill went through us, especially when 
 there unrolled before us the living picture of the pre- 
 ceding decennium; the contrast between the two in 
 pace of development was striking. Here and there of 
 course we recognised flaws in the work accomplished 
 during our recent period, when seen against the design 
 of the whole. But we gathered from the spectacle fresh 
 hope and energy for the future, and renewed determ- 
 ination to increase the pace still more during the next 
 period. 
 
 We shrank a little perhaps from the next stage of 
 the spectacle, for it meant the decennial confession of 
 every one of us all. The family as a whole acted the 
 priest, and before it we each laid the story of our fail- 
 ures and successes, our deeds of virtue and our sins. 
 The ordeal was less trying than I had anticipated, for 
 
The Manora and the Imanora 545 
 
 the critic was lenient and sympathetic. If the lapse 
 was slight, the source of it was tenderly pointed out by 
 the elders and the remedy indicated; and the stronger 
 members formed resolves to lend their strength to the 
 lapser to master his weakness; everything that was 
 possible, he felt sure, would be done to help the lag- 
 gard faculty or tissue to recoup its powers and bring 
 itself even with the march of the family. If the lapse 
 was great, the case was sympathetically placed before 
 the council of elders, which investigated the question 
 whether it was due to their mistaken choice of a career 
 for the youth (it was generally a youth that failed 
 strikingly), or whether it had come from some changed 
 faculty or tissue in him; if it were the former, he was 
 aided in deciding what change in his career would 
 be best for him; if the latter, he was dealt with as an 
 invalid, and in the hospital for spiritual diseases the 
 curative powers of the nation were applied to his case. 
 Sometimes his disease originated in atavism, and then 
 the most drastic remedies, both physical and spiritual, 
 were brought to bear; sometimes it was found to come 
 from a new microscopic parasite that had floated from 
 some far atmosphere into the Limanoran arena; and 
 then all the wisdom and science of the race had to be 
 brought into requisition to investigate the conditions 
 of the new foe and the possible means of driving it out. 
 This indeed was the time for anyone who had made 
 a mistake to retrace his steps. Here it was that the 
 seeming rigidity of the system was tempered and ren- 
 dered flexible and plastic as nature herself. Ten years 
 was but a point in the continuity of the force in a man, 
 in the great expansion of I^imanoran life. But it was 
 enough to make sure that a mistake in the choice of a 
 career was real, not merely apparent, and that the 
 
 35 
 
54 6 Limanora 
 
 longing for another was not a mere caprice. A shorter 
 period would not have been test enough ; and the re- 
 view of all careers prevented undue proportion being 
 given to any individual failure or mistake. It was not 
 infrequent for youths who thought that they had mis- 
 taken their career, to change their minds at the Manora, 
 and acknowledge that, all things considered, the wisest 
 course had been chosen for them; they came to see that 
 their work was not so defective as they had imagined, 
 and that they had contributed their due quota to the 
 advance of the family and the race; against the back- 
 ground of the whole science or art in which they toiled, 
 they recovered tone and hope, and the pride they felt 
 in the progress of all stirred them to new exertions in 
 their own special work. It was as much the aim of the 
 elders in these Manoras to give new enthusiasm in the 
 careers that had been chosen as to revise the scheme 
 of careers. The primary aim was to remove the sense 
 of bondage that might grow up in the breasts of any 
 from the feeling of inevitableness and unchangeableness 
 in the development of their lives. It was rare indeed 
 that a real failure ever occurred. But none the less a 
 sense of failure might seize upon a timid or self-depre- 
 ciative mind, and then the knowledge that there could 
 be no turning back would send it rankling home into 
 the soul. Circumscription to a course, if irrevocable, 
 is none the less incarceration that it is a course selected 
 by ourselves. A Limanoran never felt enslaved to his 
 career. He knew he had made his choice, and that he 
 might make it again if he showed sufficient reason. 
 The result of this atmosphere of complete freedom was 
 that not once in a generation was any career, once 
 deliberately selected, changed. The elders were fully 
 justified in the elaborate choice of ancestry and parents, 
 
The Manora and the Imanora 547 
 
 and in the still more elaborate pains taken in the choice 
 of surroundings and in training. Misgivings and hesi- 
 tations all disappeared in the full light of the decennial 
 review. 
 
 It was marvellous how the magnetic sympathy of the 
 family, as the spectacular confessional spread life after 
 life before the gaze of all, eradicated timidities, and 
 strengthened each member in the path he had chosen. 
 Instead of having his little defects emphasised or exag- 
 gerated, all the merits of his work were brought out. 
 I took new courage and hope, as I felt the air of im- 
 partial esteem over the excellencies of each member's 
 development and of sympathetic sorrow and condolence 
 over any evidence of failure or retrogression. Not a 
 sign was there of censorious or captious criticism. Nor 
 was there anything of that barter of laudation and 
 panegyric which makes mutual-admiration societies so 
 unwholesome in their effects. All was subdued, gentle, 
 reasonable, wise, and sympathetic, and the most health- 
 ful and invigorating of all tonics to everyone. From 
 what I had looked forward to as an ordeal I came away 
 refreshed and strong, determined to amend everything 
 that could be deemed faulty in my life, and to quicken 
 my pace in marching towards the goal of the race. 
 
 The national review of every family's progress was 
 somewhat similar, except that the larger arena and the 
 greater volume of magnetism in the audience stirred a 
 deeper thrill in the natures of the individual members. 
 It was held in Loomiefa, and it took many days to 
 view the whole spectacle of the nation's decennial work. 
 Nothing have I ever seen so varied, disciplinal, and 
 impressive. It was as if ten thousand years of the 
 whole world's progress had been focussed in this val- 
 ley. Science after science, art after art, graphically 
 
54$ Limanora 
 
 displayed all that it had achieved during the period. 
 To me it seemed a universal education; and it strained 
 all my faculties to follow the marvellous array of in- 
 ventions and discoveries, whilst my neighbours and 
 comrades drank the whole spectacle in with an ease 
 that in other circumstances would have made me envi- 
 ous. It was not the fault of the masters and makers 
 of the display that I followed it with difficulty, for they 
 had made every feature clear even to the least mature. 
 What puzzled me was the logical sequence or interde- 
 pendence of the various parts of the spectacle. Every- 
 thing had been worked out so as to reveal its relationship 
 to the whole system and to the aim of the race, and to 
 comprehend it tested all my powers. I felt as if I had 
 to study a great encyclopaedia in a few days, or rather 
 its pictorial representation of every feature of the most 
 advanced and intricate civilisation. But even this 
 analogy is inadequate, for the phases of the many-sided 
 progress were not mechanically arranged, but grew out 
 of the central system by a natural and rational magic. 
 The work of every family revealed its central principles 
 and their connection with the advance of the race. It 
 looked as if some master-mind had. sat through the 
 years, and watching the nation's work as it was being 
 accomplished, kept it all in system. We felt that there 
 was one design in the progress of the whole period, 
 and that any feature that stood out in independence 
 marred the symmetry, and needed correction. 
 
 I remembered the waste of energy that took place in 
 all intellectual spheres in Europe, and felt ashamed of 
 the contrast. I could have told this people of the futile 
 skirmishings and endless controversies of the men of 
 science and learning, of their duplications of each 
 other's work with the consequent clutchings after 
 
The Manora and the Imanora 549 
 
 fame, of their assumptions and merely verbal distinc- 
 tions, of their thickets of abstruse definitions and am- 
 biguities, of their everlasting substitutions of theory 
 for fact. I never felt so conscious of the shortcom- 
 ings of the civilisation which had nurtured me as 
 during the array of Limanoran decennial progress in 
 sciences and arts. 
 
 After the spectacle was over, we returned to our 
 usual employments. But I observed that there were 
 now more frequent meetings of the elders for several 
 months, and at last we had as the result of their discus- 
 sion of the review and its aspects a considerable re- 
 arrangement of our work, and of our positions in the 
 family and in the state. Most proceeded on the path 
 they had been taking during the previous period. But 
 many found themselves now at work more congenial to 
 their temperaments and destinies, and were able to put 
 into it their whole energy rid of the friction that the 
 artificial application of will had meant. The changes 
 occurred almost naturally and spontaneously; each 
 elder returned to his family from the final meeting of 
 the senate over the Manora, and it was known without 
 effort or command or waste of time who had to modify 
 his position and work, and how the modification was to 
 be accomplished. 
 
 The impetus given to the civilisation by this loosen- 
 ing of any bonds which had been begun to be felt sent 
 it on with exhilaration and vigour for years. There 
 was an air of buoyant freedom and alacrity, even of 
 mirth amongst the younger, as they spent their best 
 skill and capacity upon the work they had in hand. 
 The pace perceptibly quickened, and at times the nation 
 seemed to advance with the volume and swiftness of a 
 torrent. Discovery and invention became fuller as well 
 
55 Limanora 
 
 as more minute, and the outlook began to take in 
 regions of which they had not thought before. 
 
 I soon came to know that there was a more compre- 
 hensive and far-reaching evaluation of the resources, 
 the faculty, and the personnel of the race ahead of us. 
 Every tenth decennium there occurred the event of the 
 century, the Imanora or prospicient review. Ten years 
 made too short a period to give a bird's-eye view of 
 the future as contrasted with the past. Even a century 
 was short enough for the perspective of past and future 
 progress; but it was considered wise to make the period 
 fixed and of regular recurrence, and ten decenniums 
 formed a space symmetrical with the shorter Manora. 
 The Imanora was thus a centennial review. Tenden- 
 cies that might be ambiguous in their character under 
 a decennial criticism would proclaim themselves evil or 
 good in so long a stretch as a hundred years. Facul- 
 ties that would still be but in embryo after a course 
 often years would be in full maturity when a century 
 had passed. Young men and women, who might still 
 hesitate within a decade as to whether they had chosen 
 their best career, would have found by the Imanora 
 what was their true bent beyond the possibility of 
 mistake. 
 
 But it was not meant merely as a review of the past 
 and a rearrangement of positions, as the Manora was 
 above all things. It was rather a revision of aims and 
 destinies, a futuritive evaluation of the powers of the 
 race. Not merely the elders but the whole people 
 were led up to a mount of vision whence they could 
 see their future for hundreds of years spread out before 
 them, bounded by the lines their past had drawn. 
 There they could view in picture the solutions of the 
 problems they had been working at and the final out- 
 
The Manora and the Imanora 55 l 
 
 come of the lines of development they had been fol- 
 lowing. They had to decide there and then how far 
 these agreed with the ultimate aim and destiny of 
 the race, and how far they had better modify them, 
 or modify the general aim. Then they had to choose 
 whether their path should turn to the right or left, 
 or should continue onwards as it had continued for 
 a century. The spectacle of their future spread out in 
 living picture and symbol must have been a deeply im- 
 pressive sight. Every family had prepared a series of 
 tableaux of their possible destinies and the possible de- 
 velopments of their sciences and arts, of the problems 
 they would have to solve, and of their possible solu- 
 tions, and these were passed in detail before the whole 
 people for criticism and appreciation. It was as if a 
 nation were led to the cave of some great and true 
 prophet, and were shown all that lay before it, whatso- 
 ever path it should choose. The Limanorans had be- 
 fore them the choice of a destiny for a hundred years. 
 It was the care of the elders that no ambiguity or dis- 
 proportion should be admitted into the map of the pos- 
 sible routes that they might take through the future, 
 and that there should be no obscurity in the relation- 
 ships of these to the ultimate goal. 
 
 During the last decade of the century the Loomiamo 
 and the Fraloomiamo were the busiest of all the families 
 in the island. Their exceptional development of im- 
 agination made them essential to the preparation of 
 every map of the future. They seemed to be able to 
 see where others found only night and darkness. Each 
 science and art often awoke to perceive its way barred 
 by some hill of difficulty, round or over which they 
 could discover no way; then the members of the 
 Loomiamo who had made special study of its path 
 
55 2 Limanora 
 
 were called in to point out the possible tracks that 
 might lead past the obstacle. Or again a family would 
 find the way of its science or art untraceable; they 
 would grope blindly about for it and yet see no farther 
 than the facts and methods immediately before them. 
 Here the help of the Fraloomiamo was indispensable; 
 a thousand different way-marks would soon be ap- 
 parent, and the route of future development would 
 grow plain. 
 
 The pioneering families were the heroes of the Ima- 
 nora, although most of the hard work belonged to those 
 who watched over the individual sciences and arts. 
 Nothing could be done without them, and the exhila- 
 ration of trust in them and need of their services gave 
 extraordinary vigour to their special faculty. The 
 close of a century was one of the great autumns of their 
 literature; their harvests at that era were marked by 
 fulness and wealth, and the pace of their work gave it 
 exceptional fervour and glow. In the West we should 
 have called the passionate ardour with which they 
 threw off scheme after scheme, inspiration of the high- 
 est order. But they knew the working of their faculty 
 as well as any of the inventors knew the intricacies of 
 their machines. There was nothing mysterious about 
 it. Their clear knowledge of its constitution and of the 
 conditions that favoured its growth made it easy for 
 them to predict when its pace and volume would be 
 torrential, and every preparation was made by the 
 pioneering families to meet the exceptional drain on 
 their energies at the close of every century. 
 
 Loomiefa was then the scene of the most striking pre- 
 figurant displays that the human mind could conceive. 
 The resources of Limanoran skill and ingenuity were 
 brought to bear on it, and nothing was left undone to 
 
The Manora and the Imanora 553 
 
 impress the event upon the imaginations and memories 
 of the younger, for the elders expected that it would 
 thus mould the natures of the coming generation 
 through the minds of the prospective parents. The 
 world as it might be, if certain lines of development 
 were followed, was pictured in the most impressive way 
 possible; and to this people, it seemed to me,' every- 
 thing was possible. The Imanora had the sublimity 
 and transcendent consecration of a great religious de- 
 parture, whose significance was fully foreseen. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 KTHICS 
 
 [AFTERWARDS found that Imanora necessarily 
 differed from Imanora as widely as age from age or 
 man from man, it being as it was the universal outlook 
 of so progressive a people. What one centennial 
 mount of vision foresaw as a possibility the next viewed 
 as an accomplished fact. What one century peered 
 into the darkness to descry, another brought into the 
 daylight of achievement, and a third antiquated. 
 
 But there were other and wider differences than this 
 I have stated. Though all phases of the civilisation 
 were reviewed in relation to the future, generally one 
 phase took prominence and gave character to each 
 Imanora. In the earlier periods, after the purgations, 
 the physiological and biological sciences and arts pre- 
 dominated; for the elders were most anxious then to 
 bring the physical basis of their life up to the level of 
 quickening progress. Then came the periods specially 
 devoted to advance in chemistry and physics and the 
 other sciences and arts that gave them new power over 
 the outside world. One century was the great as- 
 tronomical period, when the imagination of the race 
 stretched out with yearning to other stars. Another 
 was the great inventive era, when it seemed as easy as 
 
 554 
 
Ethics 555 
 
 a dream to make new machines which should open out 
 wide prospects of additional conquest over nature and 
 humanity. 
 
 In the more recent centuries ethics had again come 
 to the front, new points of view having been shown by 
 the great discoveries and inventions of many centuries. 
 The first Imanora after the series of purgations was 
 complete had been predominantly ethical. The race 
 had bent its attention so exclusively upon the crimes 
 and vices which had hindered their advance for ages, 
 that they could think of almost no other development 
 than the ethical. The elders had been investigating 
 for years little else than the defects in the moral nature, 
 their bases in the physical system, and the methods of 
 remedying them. They had come to the conclusion 
 after all their researches that nothing could be done 
 for the cure of the minor vices till the most vicious and 
 defective characters had been cleared out. A systematic 
 purification of the commonweal must precede attempts 
 at moral reform. Most of the purgations were managed 
 by wise and cautious diplomacy; the bait of more than 
 their share of the wealth of the island in portable form, 
 and the chance of a new country in which to indulge 
 their vice to license, induced them to ship off to a dis- 
 tance. Only a few needed forcible measures to make 
 them remove. The lying and hypocritical, the licen- 
 tious, the envious and jealous, the boastful and the 
 epicurean, the religiously intolerant and superstitious, 
 readily seized the opportunity of seeking a country 
 where they might make their own laws and shape their 
 customs to suit their special weakness. The warlike 
 and murderous and the thievish and socialistic thought 
 they could force a still better bargain; they had strong 
 inner doubts whether they would be likely to have as 
 
55 6 Limanora 
 
 fine an arena for their talents in a new country, and 
 whether they would make the best companions for one 
 another. An increase of the inducement had little 
 effect on them; they felt that their special vices would 
 lose half their attraction when removed from the pre- 
 sence of the contrasted and shrinking virtues. Much 
 of the pleasure of a murder or a theft lay in the neces- 
 sity for its concealment, and the ingenuity required to 
 evade punishment. The occupations ceased to be fine 
 arts as soon as they became the occupations of the 
 whole community. To these criminal sections of the 
 race force had to be applied before they left the island; 
 it had to be a policy of deportation. 
 
 It was little wonder that for a century after absorp- 
 tion in such work the civilisation of Limanora was es- 
 sentially ethical. To rid themselves of every trace of 
 the detestable vices of which they had just seen the 
 worst specimens deported over the horizon, became 
 the one aim and ideal of the now-expurgated people. 
 Development seemed nothing more than greater ease 
 and habitualness in the virtues. To be purer, truer, 
 more tolerant, more generous, more gentle and modest 
 and loving, was their one idea of progress. The out- 
 look from the first Imanora was towards an ideal of 
 such benignity and kindliness as would make all per- 
 sonal relations easy and happy beyond the conception 
 of other nations. 
 
 The first few decades of the next century gave them 
 exhilaration in the pursuit of this aim. They took the 
 greatest delight in eradicating the seedling ferocities of 
 their savage past. Spite, rancour, disdain, pitilessness, 
 vanity, surliness, ingratitude, partiality, want of can- 
 dour, acerbity, meanness, and all uncharitableness were 
 rigorously checked, and every thought or energy that 
 
Ethics 557 
 
 might, when abused, tend in these directions was 
 finally mastered. It was a delight to help one another 
 in the crusade against these petty defects. Nothing 
 seemed so noble or progressive as to spend every leisure 
 moment on cultivating the generous attitude towards 
 one another. 
 
 But they soon saw the limits of such a progress. 
 The virtues became easy and common to all and it 
 grew difficult to find new ethical worlds to conquer. 
 Most of them indulged too eagerly in introspection 
 and some turned morbidly self-critical, finding defects 
 where there were none. Imagination became a factory 
 of petty faults and vices. The result was new and real 
 faults, which threatened to maim their civilisation and 
 bar their further progress. They were painfully self- 
 conscious, fearing lest the eyes of a neighbour or com- 
 rade should discover in them germs of moral disease 
 which had escaped their own microscopic criticism. 
 They shrank from beginning any enterprise; they 
 feared to come to decisions or make resolves, lest they 
 should be wrong. They tolerated and even encouraged 
 faults and defects in their friends which they would 
 have drastically eradicated from their own natures; they 
 nursed in pity and generosity weak characters and dis- 
 eased systems into length of life, and shrank from for- 
 bidding them parenthood and posterity. They strained 
 at gnats and swallowed camels and indulged in constant 
 casuistry. In short, the whole race fell into a chronic 
 spiritual invalidisrn and many of them were afflicted 
 with moral hypochondria. They felt the pulses of 
 their souls daily and hourly, and were ever haunted 
 with the fear of the old vices returning on them, so 
 losing their masculine grit and self-command. Fin- 
 ally they threatened to become a race of sinewless 
 
55 8 Limanora 
 
 effeminates with nothing but spiritual collapse and 
 palsy before them. 
 
 It was clear that this microscopic introspection and 
 moral unrest must cease, if there was to be any real 
 advance. They had already recognised that ethics de- 
 veloped by stages, and that any attempt on the part of 
 a race to force it beyond the intellectual point of view 
 which they had reached only ended in temporary fail- 
 ure and retrogression. No new moral outlook can be 
 attained unless reason has ascended a higher mount 
 of vision. Revelation can never come without new 
 achievement. A fixed quantity of ethical knowledge 
 in a nation is moral death, and to systematise ethical 
 maxims into an absolute code for all time is to enslave 
 the reason of the world. For what is the almost un- 
 attainable ideal of one stage of racial development is 
 the antiquated truism of a later stage. Savage man 
 compares ill in polity and moral code with the repub- 
 lics of the bee and the ant, just as his engineering 
 and architectural skill are infantile beside those of the 
 beaver. How unprotective and even cruel he is to his 
 aged and women and children, compared with many 
 animals! How unadvanced even the most civilised are 
 in truth and loyalty compared with the dog! How 
 weak in the reasoning that is based on the reports of 
 the senses are men in general compared with the wild 
 animals! There is evidently an infinite variety of 
 stages in the ethical and intellectual development and 
 vision of man, as there is in those of the animals. The 
 most advanced human beings, just like the least ad- 
 vanced, are, in some points, lower than the beasts. 
 But man can, if he will, have mastery of his circum- 
 stances and conditions, inasmuch as he can examine 
 himself by reflection, and tends to examine himself 
 
Ethics 559 
 
 through self-consciousness. The power and tendency, 
 however, are only fitfully taken advantage of, and it 
 is therefore at long intervals that even the best races 
 accelerate the pace of their progress beyond that which 
 nature herself indicates. 
 
 The elders, and through them the people, were per- 
 suaded that this absorbing pursuit of ethical improve- 
 ment must be abandoned. The development of the 
 physical system was the first distraction that they 
 thought of; and their bodies grew in muscular power, 
 in grace of form, and in litheness of movement. It 
 was during this athletic period that flight through the 
 air was achieved; then, too, physiology and medicine 
 grew into real sciences and began to direct the evolu- 
 tion of physical man, and the struggle against the 
 hosts of microscopic parasites that over-populate the 
 elements and have to seek pastures in the human body. 
 It was in this era, too, that they mastered the secret of 
 prolonging life and began the series of experiments in 
 food and other forms of sustenance, and in heredity, 
 which ended in giving them centuries instead of decades 
 to live. 
 
 It soon came to be noticed, however, that a new but 
 analogous hypochondria began to seize even the youth- 
 ful athletes of the race. There was too much direct 
 attention paid to the state and development of the body 
 to be wholesome. Athletic egotism became rampant, 
 and as a result of it a scorn of intellectual pursuits. It 
 was as truly a diseased state of the human system as 
 the moral invalidism with which they had been afflicted 
 in the previous era. Thews and sinews were measured 
 and examined with scientific minuteness. Muscular 
 development was appraised and applauded as moral 
 qualities had formerly been. The spirit began to be 
 
560 Limanora 
 
 impoverished; the brain decreased in weight and fine- 
 ness of convolution. Athletic introspection was coming 
 to be as painful and masterful a disease as moral intro- 
 spection had been. Diet and exercise became the ab- 
 sorbing topics of daily conversation and nothing was 
 invented but machines for training the body. Most 
 palpable of all the consequences was the growth of ar- 
 rogant gait and rough manners, and this was the first 
 symptom to call attention to the new malady. It be- 
 came clear to the elders that the worst form of atavism, 
 return to the savagery that is just above animalism, 
 was about to reappear, and with it would come weak- 
 ened heart and lungs and disordered digestion; for the 
 new training overstrained all the organs, and threw 
 them into disrepair. 
 
 The conclusions drawn from these two experiences 
 were that variety of occupation was one of the first es- 
 sentials of mental and bodily health, and that absorp- 
 tion in the improvement of any part or section of the 
 human system induced disease both of mind and body; 
 morality and health are better cultivated as indirect 
 aims of individual existence; they defeat their own 
 ends when they become egoistic or introspective. In 
 order to remedy the evils which were threatening the 
 life of the state, its framework was completely re- 
 formed. To every family and individual was assigned 
 an external work that would draw the thoughts away 
 from self for the greater part of the twenty-four hours; 
 every mature member of the community was expected 
 to achieve something unconnected with himself every 
 day. Kxercise merely for amusement was cut down to 
 a minimum, and in order to keep the body in full 
 vigour, the centre of force was organised, where every 
 man and woman had to do so much useful physical 
 
Ethics 561 
 
 work in the round of the clock. The care of the health, 
 both mental and bodily, was handed over to the medi- 
 cal elders, who were, first of all, the healthiest and 
 healthiest-minded of the older men of the nation. 
 Watching for symptoms of disease in one's system, 
 whether moral or corporeal', fell into oblivion, and the 
 great era of external achievement began. Specialisa- 
 tion of work was its chief principle and the source of 
 its success, but no one was allowed to fall into excessive 
 specialism, such as would atrophy all but one set of 
 faculties and energies. No part of the body or mind 
 was left without daily or weekly exercise. The elders 
 mapped out the various types of intellectual and phy- 
 sical work from which a man or woman might select to 
 fill leisure time. Everyone had a large choice within 
 a limited number of kinds of work, generally kinds of 
 work which were dissimilar to his special employment. 
 If it were left to a man to choose his own type of dis- 
 tractions, he might select that which would feed high 
 the sides of his nature he most used, and atrophy those 
 that most needed development; for ease of application 
 is an important factor in his choice of exercise and 
 amusement, and might become too dominant. 
 
 It was not in order to assimilate the bases of the na- 
 tures of the community that this limitation of leisure 
 employments was adopted. On the contrary, one of 
 the subordinate aims of the elders was to introduce as 
 great a variety as possible into the talents, faculties, 
 and tendencies of the race. Equality, and still more 
 similarity, of members of a community, they well knew 
 from the laws of nature meant stagnation if not com- 
 plete national death. Throughout the cosmos it was 
 the unequal degree to which various bodies and exist- 
 36 
 
562 Limanora 
 
 ences shared in different types of energy that produced 
 the unstable equilibrium we call life. The disparate 
 masses of the planets induced those currents of influ- 
 ence we call gravitation, one of the greatest sources 
 of power in our world. The differences in temperature 
 between the sun and the planets make it of such vast 
 importance as a source of heat and energy to them, and 
 it is the difference of two bodies as to electric state that 
 induces currents of electricity between them. As soon 
 as there is equilibrium of all the atoms or bodies or ex- 
 istences within a certain sphere of influence there 
 ceases to be movement in it and death supervenes; and 
 if all bodies and existences in the cosmos had an equal 
 and similar share of all its elements and forces, it 
 would be dead. The Deity himself, the sum and source 
 of all life, must, as an eternal existence, have unend- 
 ing variety. 
 
 The law of the universe is the law of the political 
 and moral world. There can be no life where there is 
 complete stable equilibrium, that is, where every mem- 
 ber of a community is exactly similar to every other 
 member in privileges. Currents of influence cease. 
 Impetus and motive vanish. Desire and yearning and 
 love disappear with passion and ambition. The social- 
 istic ideal is social and political death. 
 
 The everlasting flow of influence or power from 
 point to point is the essential condition of vigorous 
 existence in a community or race, therefore one of the 
 chief subsidiary aims of the directors of lyimanora was 
 the creation of variety and inequality of nature and 
 position. This made them adopt the family as the unit 
 in the state, for in the family there would be shelter for 
 any new individual talent, and heredity would cherish 
 and increase it as it handed it on. In the Western 
 
Ethics 5 6 3 
 
 states the influence of the family over its children 
 ceases not long after boyhood or girlhood, and the 
 world soon puts them into the same moulds as its 
 favourite men and women; individuality and original- 
 ity in most are planed down by the recognised conven- 
 tions-. A longer continuance of family life and influence 
 would secure and strengthen any new variations in a 
 talent or tendency, till the character was strong enough 
 to stand by them as its own and defend them against 
 the criticism of aliens and strangers. Diversity in 
 unity was the ideal of family life in L,imanora. The 
 elders of a family watched with eagerness for any 
 modification of the special faculties or powers, and 
 nursed it with the most anxious care, if they decided 
 that it would assist the advance of the race, and the 
 medical elders were ever suggesting the proper cross 
 for producing a new variety of the old talents. In- 
 deed, one of the most responsible duties of the council 
 of elders was to decide as to the matings and parent- 
 hoods of the community; in this lay, they felt, the 
 guidance of their destiny, the real germ of the future. 
 Thus and thus alone were they able to keep up that 
 divergence of new species which would ensure an ever- 
 quickening flow of life in the race. 
 
 They had cut off by their policy of complete isola- 
 tion most of the stimulus that comes from alien rivalry. 
 Such rivalry, they thought, would be worse than none; 
 for it would at last drive them to adopt the means and 
 weapons of their rivals, which they considered wholly 
 retrograde and evil. It would be not unlike a compe- 
 tition between man and the wild beasts. Any kind of 
 communication with those who were below them in 
 civilisation and deliberately unprogressive, was certain 
 to taint and drag down, and the strong consciousness 
 
564 Limanora 
 
 of this fact checked the natural tendency of such be- 
 nignity as theirs towards missionaryism. 
 
 At the same time they knew well that no people 
 would ever advance without competition and the strug- 
 gle that ensues on competition. They greatly encour- 
 aged variation and inequality within their state, but 
 were certain that this was not enough. There must 
 be the knowledge, if not the immediate presence, of 
 another type of being, similar to their own yet higher 
 in some features, in order to stimulate advance. To 
 get this was the object of their system of couriers into 
 space, both mechanic and human. They were never 
 weary of gathering in all possible indications of higher 
 intelligences in extra-terrestrial elements and regions. 
 For a long period they had been satisfied with the re- 
 ports of their idrovamolans, and other recorders of 
 events which occurred on the earth, out of reach of 
 their unaided senses. But it gradually pressed itself 
 home upon them that the comedy of terrestrial exist- 
 ence gave no stimulus to progress; it stirred their 
 laughter, or scorn, or indignation, or disgust too often 
 to edify. Rare, indeed, was it to witness a deed or 
 phase of civilisation that gave them a new model, or 
 inspired them to higher life. It was, as a rule, de- 
 grading to watch beings in their own shape waste their 
 noble faculties on the cruelties of war, the meannesses 
 of commerce and industrialism, the pettinesses of social 
 intercourse, and the gross deceits and pretences of 
 politics, diplomacy, and public life. 
 
 Year by year the racial energy was drawn off from 
 the spectacle of terrestrial history. It grew less and 
 less attractive, and the elders came to the decision that 
 it had almost better pass unnoticed by all but the most 
 mature and experienced. Thus it became the more 
 
Ethics 565 
 
 necessary to open up other spheres of stimulus and in- 
 spiration. The thoughts of the race gravitated, first 
 to other stars, then to the exuberant life they found in 
 interstellar space. For a time they thought that only 
 in other worlds could be found intelligences like their 
 own to stimulate them by their competition; and their 
 intellectual energy was set upon opening up intercourse 
 with the inhabitants of these. The imaginative fami- 
 lies published book after book on the possibilities and 
 means of stellar intercommunication, and afterwards 
 of stellar migration. Astronomy and its subsidiary 
 and allied sciences and arts for several centuries out- 
 paced all others in development. The world began to 
 seem narrow and prison-like, so eager was Limanoran 
 thought after stellar flight. All the conditions of voy- 
 aging through space were investigated, all available 
 means experimented on, all the possible routes and 
 their laws discovered. It seemed as if within a few 
 centuries the round of the earth would be spurned, and 
 the nearest star colonised by terrestrial beings. 
 
 The discovery of the varied life inhabiting the ether 
 gave pause to all such speculations and schemes. It 
 was manifestly possible to find stimulus from intelli- 
 gences nearer than the other planets. Infinite space, 
 instead of being a desert strewn with the wrecks or 
 embryos of stars, is as full of life, and of the elements 
 and nuclei of life, as any world which spins through it. 
 They had ever counted it as unlikely that the life and 
 the life-energy of the cosmos should be confined to the 
 star-dust strewn over it, or that its vast interstellar 
 spaces should be given up to nothing but the passage 
 of rays from star to star, cold and inhospitable to every 
 form of existence. They felt it to be more in accord- 
 ance with the lavishness of nature that these spaces 
 
566 Limanora 
 
 should be life-crammed instead of life-proof. Why 
 should life be unable to adapt itself to the conditions 
 of space, when it has been found to adapt itself to the 
 bewildering variety of conditions existing on the sur- 
 face of any one world at different stages of its develop- 
 ment, and even to the infinite variety of conditions that 
 govern the countless stars ? 
 
 On the first discovery of life beyond the atmosphere 
 they were led by the medical investigators to think 
 that it was merely embryonic, waiting to colonise the 
 worlds that pushed through it. But recent reports and 
 researches showed that the existences of interstellar 
 space were far beyond the rudimental stage. Beings as 
 intricately organised as themselves left impressions on 
 their supra-aerial lavolans. They grew more and 
 more convinced that the senses which had evolved 
 in them, amid the gross atmosphere of the earth and 
 with the gross feeding that alone would suit terrene 
 constitutions, were fit to detect no other creatures than 
 those developed under similar terrestrial conditions. 
 Their more recent and more refined developments 
 of sensuous perception, and still more their latest 
 mechanical inventions, had brought them within range 
 of an infinit}^ they had not dreamt of. Daily came 
 in from above the atmosphere reports that confirmed 
 their old belief in the vast and varied population of 
 space. Beings, so constituted as never to impress 
 sight or hearing such as men had, yet fit to hold their 
 own with the noblest spirits that earthly imagination 
 had ever conceived, swam close to their atmosphere, 
 close enough to leave their impress on the sensitive 
 films of their courier-instruments, close enough for 
 their own later-developed senses to perceive, if only 
 these were more exquisitely trained. What a vista 
 
Ethics 5 6 7 
 
 of new stimulus the knowledge opened up to their 
 imaginations! 
 
 There was no more need of projects for stellar migra- 
 tion. Here were beings loftier than themselves at the 
 very gates of their senses, possible sources of exalted, 
 if not divine, influence. Out of them would flow into 
 this little island energy that would give measureless 
 impetus to its inhabitants. Who could place a limit to 
 the nobleness of the existences they might find in the 
 ether, once they were on this track, and were refining 
 and ennobling the perceptive power of their senses? 
 There was no conceivable end to the ethical elevation 
 and development they might reach, now that they had 
 pierced the prison walls of the earth. .The sublimer 
 amongst their old beliefs were, indeed, coming true in 
 the fuller fruition of scientific discovery. These they 
 had long laid aside, lest they should be mere fancies 
 based upon illusion and delusion, when they saw the 
 evil that the perversions of them by churches and 
 priests worked amongst men. Till they discovered a 
 sounder basis for them than faithmongers asserted for 
 their crude superstitions, they felt they must not enter- 
 tain them seriously or found action upon them; and 
 over they threw them till they should find their way to 
 them again upon the solid ground of scientific reason. 
 
 Now that they saw so wide a horizon before them 
 they knew that they need no longer seek stimulus in 
 the races of men that they had left so far behind them, 
 and they rejoiced. For, though there were ever noble 
 and wise individuals to be found here and there 
 throughout the masses of the nations, and though 
 they knew that these set the standard of morality to 
 the world around them, the bulk of men lagged far in 
 
568 Limanora 
 
 the rear and often, when unnoticed, sneaked into the 
 barbarity and vice which they had been persuaded to 
 abandon. The moral law of a nation, or race, or 
 period is voluntarily carried into practice only by the 
 few best of the mature men and women; in fact, their 
 lives and characters are the makers and arbiters of the 
 moral law. Their fellow-countrymen and contempo- 
 raries feel the ideal thus held out practically before 
 them as a mysterious influence that surrounds and 
 shepherds them into the path of right. Sometimes, if 
 the age or nation has degenerated, the mystery comes 
 from the best men of the past through books, or still 
 more powerfully through tradition and instinct; this 
 unaccountable influence they call conscience, or the 
 sense of duty, or the voice of God, or some other name 
 that indicates its mystery, its directing power, and its 
 superior standpoint. Priests and primitive legislators 
 try to formulate its commands in definite codes, and at 
 a later stage thinkers and philosophers attempt to rea- 
 son out its maxims, and find a unity and universality 
 in them. But the influence defies such codification 
 and rationalisation; with the growth of the ages it 
 overflows and antiquates the primitive attempt at its 
 petrifaction, and the variety of codes in different races 
 or in different periods laughs to scorn all efforts at 
 finding a universal basis for them. As soon as a code 
 is proclaimed or a philosophical system worked out, it 
 begins to be antiquated; the best find a better ideal in 
 front of them and, striving after it, reveal the flaws in 
 the life they have hitherto lived, or they resign them- 
 selves passively to the drift of circumstance and degen- 
 erate into luxury and license; in the one case the 
 influence overflows the code or system, and makes it 
 seldom necessary or apparent to the view of the race ; 
 
Ethics 569 
 
 in the other it ebbs from it and leaves it high and dry, 
 the flouted, neglected wreck of an age gone by. 
 
 After all, moral law is nothing but the example and 
 character of the best of them working dimly upon 
 their yearning and capacity for advance; and their 
 best are limited by the point of view of their time and 
 surroundings. A progressive race or age soon dis- 
 covers the flaws in its accepted codes or systems and 
 throws doubt on their authority. It is only in a stag- 
 nant or retrograde period that there is no scepticism or 
 free thought; sufficient unto it is the law that has come 
 down out of the past; so satisfied are its people with it 
 that they never live up to it, and never feel any qualms 
 of conscience or entertain troubled thoughts about its 
 neglect. Developing civilisation means developing 
 ethics; the best of a race advance to higher points of 
 view, and soon come to be astonished at the narrow 
 and primitive moral law their forefathers have handed 
 down to them. As they advance in ideals, the con- 
 science of the mass of their countrymen or contempo- 
 raries advances too; what is the rare virtue or heroism 
 of the noblest of one age becomes the commonplace of 
 the next ; what was the weakness or vice of all becomes 
 the crime of the outcast and atavist. Injunctions not 
 to kill are soon superfluous to all but the criminally in- 
 clined ; addressed to a whole people, they imply an age 
 of the greatest rudeness and ferocity. 
 
 I realised this more and more clearly as I continued 
 to live amongst this wonderful people, and to see into 
 their lives. The criminal and grossly atavistic had 
 been long ago swept out of the island and vicious ten- 
 dencies against the moral law of past ages had vanished 
 before selection, crossing, and training. They would 
 have laughed if they had been enjoined not to kill, or 
 
57 Limanora 
 
 steal, or lie, or commit adultery. It would be like 
 telling the civilised Europeans not to eat each other, 
 especially when uncooked, or telling the latter-day 
 Englishman not to enslave his brothers. The proud 
 tribes of wild men counted it as one of their noblest 
 prerogatives to banquet on their slain foes and even 
 on their dead relatives, and the fathers of the present 
 race of English and Americans, sensitive as these latter 
 are to the crime of enslavement, held their slaves with 
 no feeling that they were outraging the moral law, 
 whilst their grandfathers winked at the horrors of the 
 slave trade. The best protested and gradually their 
 opinions, and still more their characters and lives, sank 
 as a mysterious influence into the hearts of the race. 
 The next generation felt the protest as a moral law and 
 a conscience, stinging them to advance to the standard 
 of their noblest. The Greeks and Romans describe 
 and applaud in their finest literature vices that modern 
 men are ashamed even to mention. And it will be the 
 same with acts and conduct that nineteenth century 
 society condones and even boasts of; if the European 
 world advances, in a century or two respectable men 
 and women will be ashamed to hear them spoken of. 
 
 The lyimanorans repudiated scorn of their lowly kin, 
 the animals; they had long ago shed that blind and 
 false shame which rejected the affinity of universal 
 nature; man was as truly kin in his lower representa- 
 tives to the mammoth as the mammoth to the mollusc, 
 or the mollusc to the microbe. It is true they desired 
 close proximity to the non-human animal as little as 
 they did to undeveloped or degenerate man; inter- 
 course with a lower stage of life and intelligence, they 
 had long ago proved, leads ultimately to adoption of 
 some of its features and much of its standard, even 
 
Ethics 57 t 
 
 where there is in it the aloofness of the master to his 
 slave, or the tamer to his beast; they desired no master- 
 dom over lower natures and so they exiled all animals 
 and all degenerate or undeveloped men from their 
 island. They welcomed, however, every indication of 
 approach to human traits or human intelligence in any 
 section of terrestrial life; it was to them no 'bewilder- 
 ment that they found most species of animals more 
 courageous and many more provident and keen in 
 their outlook than most men, some of them more 
 tender and humane to their fellows, and some infinitely 
 more loyal than the most advanced races. It is diffi- 
 cult to deny, not merely the higher emotions, but the 
 more difficult processes of reasoning to many of the 
 animals. The cunning of man is often outwitted by 
 them. 
 
 Facts like these, instead of driving them to find 
 subtle methods of explaining them away or denying 
 them, urged them on to greater effort in their own 
 evolution. They saw in them evidence that the whole 
 creation was striving upwards, and they resolved to 
 obey the universal law more and more fully and to 
 quicken their pace. Any new observation of animal 
 intelligence or advance only confirmed their faith in 
 the rational spirit that was working but half seen 
 throughout the universe, and gave them greater im- 
 petus on the path of development they had chosen. 
 
 Kvery new age had seen them rise above the possi- 
 bility of some old vice or evil tendency, reach some 
 new and higher mount of ethical vision, and descry 
 some nobler ideal ahead of them. They were far out 
 of reach of any return to the fierce vices or defects of 
 a lawless or militant past. Never since the exile of 
 Noola had they observed any tendency to belligerent 
 
57 2 Limanora 
 
 atavism; and his return, purified and elevated, had 
 finally buried in oblivion that dead and degenerate 
 preterition. Thieving had vanished with such warlike 
 means of destroying and restoring the balance of po- 
 litical power, and its possibility ceased with the de- 
 valuation of all property but time, talent, and character. 
 Once time was taken as the standard of everything of 
 value instead of any dull dead stuff like gold or jewels 
 or land or houses, the whole view of property had 
 changed: for time is a living, moving entity that be- 
 comes great or little, valuable or valueless with the 
 method of using it; the life of a man limits it in quan- 
 tity as far as existence on the earth is concerned ; and 
 as soon as a race realises this, it is the rarest and most 
 highly prized commodity in the world; nothing can 
 take away its value but the heedlessness or indolence 
 of its possessor; no man can steal it from us but our- 
 selves. For many ages then it was in terms of time 
 that the L,imanorans had expressed everything of 
 value; even talent and character were thus express- 
 ible, for their chief value lay in their development; they 
 were estimated according to the rapidity with which 
 they could advance a definite and measurable stage. 
 Thus theft became an impossible crime in this island, 
 the true standard of all value being inseparable from 
 the life that possessed it. 
 
 Ikying and hypocrisy and all the crawling vermin 
 that spawn from them had long ago been ejected from 
 their systems; and wherever atavistic symptoms of 
 them had appeared in any child they were cauterised 
 by every known method, gentle or drastic. The task 
 of cleansing the community of insincerity and artifice 
 had by no means ended with the exiling of all known 
 liars and dissemblers. Open untruth and fraudulence 
 
Ethics 573 
 
 vanished when the development of the intelligence and 
 observation of the people made it easy and universal to 
 divine motives and inner thoughts quite apart from the 
 word or the" act. Yet there was still in some a ten- 
 dency to evasion, or equivocation, or overstatement. 
 The rags of the old conventionality still hung about 
 them, and unawares there would check them in their 
 utterances an old fear lest candour should be ill-man- 
 ners, lest their freedom should hurt the feelings of their 
 auditor, or rouse the sleeping tiger in him. Year by 
 year was all this getting eradicated; but the process 
 was quickened by the evolution of the magnetic sense 
 and by the clarifying of the tissues of the body. The 
 more transparent the human system became to the 
 senses and the keener the senses grew, the less cue and 
 the less chance was there for concealment of emotion 
 or thought. They were all thoroughly trained in the 
 anatomy and physiology of the body and the brain, 
 and in the science that taught the physical equivalents 
 and accompaniments of each type of thought and emo- 
 tion. Even without their preternaturally keen senses 
 they could tell from their practical knowledge of the 
 human system the natural results of any word or act, 
 and their eyes and ears could detect signs of emotion 
 or motive which seemed to be non-existent. It was, 
 however, their magnetic sense that was the greatest 
 foe to all deception or concealment. They could read 
 the feelings that stirred in the heart of a neighbour, 
 and were even conscious of the definite thoughts pass- 
 ing in his brain. 
 
 The physical equivalents and symptoms of certain 
 emotions and passions, that used to be common before 
 the exi lings and are too common in all other races, 
 
574 Limanora 
 
 were scarcely ever to be found in any mature L,ima- 
 noran; they had to be studied in the bodies, and espe- 
 cially in the faces, of children. Jealousy, envy, hate, 
 malice, anger, lust, had become obsolete' in the race, 
 and only the young were afflicted with them now; they 
 were classified as mild spiritual diseases that might, if 
 neglected, risk the permanence of the child in the com- 
 munity ; they were the record of a stage through which 
 the race had long ago passed, and they were treated as 
 no fault of the child itself but its legacy from an an- 
 cestry it could not be made responsible for. Great 
 pains had been taken with these moral childish mala- 
 dies in former periods with the result that their ap- 
 pearance was now seldom virulent or dangerous and 
 never fatal, and that every household knew by heart 
 the simple rules and specifics for checking their de- 
 velopment. The worst characteristic of them was 
 that they were infectious; but the solitary system of 
 education rendered this inoperative; in fact this epi- 
 demic nature of the moral disorders of children 
 made the adoption of the one-child household and 
 the one-pupil school seem an absolute necessity. Oc- 
 casionally, through some strong atavistic taint in the 
 nature, the appearance of one or more of these mala- 
 dies in a child threatened its whole spiritual life; then 
 all the science and wisdom of the island were brought 
 to bear upon it; the nerves and tissues of the part of 
 the human system affected, whether in brain or heart, 
 were isolated and powerful electro-magnetic instru- 
 ments were applied to them so as to atrophy them and 
 render them inactive; the most successful educators of 
 the island were joined to the parents or proparents in 
 the effort to get rid of the evil ; and the child or youth 
 was constantly brought into intercourse with the 
 
Ethics 575 
 
 noblest natures who exercised to the full their morally 
 healing powers. If the malady still tainted the nature 
 up to maturity and outbalanced all the good in it in 
 spite of such continued curative efforts, then were the 
 elders sadly driven to the ultimate step of deporting 
 the diseased personality. But this had not occurred 
 for generations, and it was hoped that the necessity for 
 drastic remedies would cease in a few years. Already 
 the virulence of these childish ailments had almostdisap- 
 peared and they had grown so mild in their attacks that 
 few but the guardians observed their approach. They 
 were generally confined to fixed periods of childhood 
 or youth, periods that corresponded to the ages of past 
 history in which they severally raged in the natures of 
 their ancestors. But every new generation saw these 
 periods shortened and driven farther back towards the 
 beginning of life. 
 
 The sense of shame that attaches to some or all of 
 these emotions in the best of advanced races is a sign 
 that they are recognised as moral maladies and that 
 with farther advance they will be forced back into the 
 earlier stages of life. But, as they are, the need to 
 conceal envy and jealousy, malice, anger, and lust 
 and their symptoms, is felt, and this induces and con- 
 firms wide-spread habits of insincerity and deception 
 in most civilised peoples, Western as well as Eastern. 
 This desire of concealment has seated the habit of dis- 
 simulation so widely and so deeply in the breasts of all 
 that the bolder and more roughly practical openly avow 
 it as a means necessary to their advancement in life. 
 It had been felt ages before in I,imanora that as long 
 as these hateful emotions lurked in the hearts of men 
 and women, there could be no final expulsion of the 
 still more hateful insincerity. Now that they were 
 
576 Limanora 
 
 relegated to childhood, concealment of the inner emo- 
 tions had vanished and the habit of petty evasion and 
 dissimulation had been entirely eradicated. Even the 
 histrionic in manner and gesture and facial expression 
 had disappeared after having been subjected to drastic 
 treatment; it had been criticised and derided whenever 
 it showed itself in any youth; for it was only by the 
 young and immature that so crude an artificiality could 
 ever be adopted. 
 
 One of the last refuges of insincerity was artificial 
 self-abasement. As soon as humility before the daily 
 marvels of the universe came to be a common attitude 
 amongst them, its ape, spurious self-depreciation, ap- 
 peared. Young men and women would grossly under- 
 state their achievements or claims, chiefly in order to 
 set up a reaction in the minds of their friends and com- 
 panions, and tempt them to overstatement. Ridicule 
 soon put this habit of poor and common natures to 
 rout. The Limanorans were now proud of anything 
 they had done well or nobly and were not ashamed to 
 acknowledge it. They were willing without vaunting 
 or mock-modesty to talk of any invention or discovery 
 or any good or courageous deed, but in that simple, 
 ingenuous way which revealed nothing but anxiety to 
 enlighten others as to the methods of success and to 
 stir them to advance beyond it. They needed none of 
 that self-advertisement which is the bane of advanced 
 and ambitious civilisations; everything of merit in 
 their conduct and labour and its products was valuated, 
 they knew, with an exactitude that left no room for 
 misacceptation by their friends and companions. 
 Everyone was so eager to find an advance in his neighr 
 bour's work or system that no effort was needed to ex- 
 plain or commend it. When done its merits would be 
 
Ethics 577 
 
 recognised to the full. The elders in their periodical 
 reviews of the work and the progress of the community 
 would estimate it at its full value, and it was one of the 
 most important parts of the training of the youth to 
 appraise the value of every deed and step with a strict 
 impartiality of judgment. To mete out justice to 
 everything in life was impressed upon the young 
 nature as one of the foremost of duties; and to see 
 every feature of history and existence with a dispas- 
 sionate and unerring eye was one of the chief aims of 
 lyimanoran education. 
 
 Thus it was that for a time they enjoyed the comedy 
 of life as it passed in other regions of the world, for 
 they could see very clearly the exact merits of every 
 man and every deed, and the credulity and infatuation 
 which made them unrecognisable in popular estimation. 
 Delusion reigned supreme and the best of the comedy 
 was the ease with which some masters of the art of self- 
 advertisement could swell their puny proportions into 
 the appearance of colossal amplitude; they knew every 
 stop in public opinion, and could play on its gullibility 
 with consummate art. The Limanoran was taught to 
 place every human achievement in the perspective of 
 the future, and as he looked and heard through the 
 idrovamolan, the whole of life, as it went in other na- 
 tions, seemed one continued bathos, ridiculous dispro- 
 portion between what it appeared to be and what it was. 
 
 But they ever saw a darker side to the spectacles 
 they witnessed through this singular instrument, and 
 their laughter was softened and modified by indignation 
 and sorrow. There was a counterpart to the gullibility 
 and applause in the deep-rooted habit of detraction and 
 slander. If any had the power to see conduct and men 
 as they were, impartially and clearly, they were not al- 
 
Limanora 
 
 lowed to use it, so busy were the tongues of traducers 
 and parasites. All human deeds were either under- 
 estimated or overestimated, generally underestimated if 
 the doer or possessor had no favours to bestow and no 
 power or influence to exhibit. Aspersion and back- 
 biting were common habits; for the majority were un- 
 distinguished and only in courts and the circles of the 
 great did that of overestimation find any headway. 
 
 A trivial, yet pathetic, phase of the comedy was the 
 excessive self-esteem that ran parallel with the torrent 
 of detraction. In Limanora the fountains of both had 
 dried up together. For vanity is the effort of a man's 
 emotions to compensate for the fraud that others con- 
 stantly commit upon reputation. Robbery of material 
 things is sternly repressed in most civilised communi- 
 ties; thus far have they attained in their hostility to 
 socialism; finally one or two have begun to be uneasy 
 about fair fame as a possession more valuable than any 
 wealth and have attempted to formulate the crime in 
 some crude law of libel that is found yearly as inade- 
 quate and as primitive as one of the codes of ancient 
 legislators. But the petty robberies of good fame 
 rather than the open brigandage of it make none feel 
 safe. Tongues will keep wagging, and as long as they 
 wag, the conduct or character of some will surely be 
 undervalued. The consciousness of this, that none but 
 the great or distinguished will get their due or more 
 than their due, keeps self-esteem alive in the breasts of 
 all, and self- approbation an unceasing attitude. Men 
 feel that they must recoup themselves out of the un- 
 willing feelings of others for the perpetual fraud upon 
 their reputation. Self-overestimation is the natural 
 complement of the consciousness of detraction. Com- 
 monly the sensitive organisation refuses to rest under 
 
Ethics 579 
 
 the unending injustice and will try to set itself right 
 with the world; but most sink after a time into sullen 
 endurance of the wrong and cease to speak of it, think- 
 ing it irremediable. 
 
 Nothing so greatly astonished the L,imanorans as the 
 concomitant disappearance of detraction and vanity 
 from their midst. One of their earliest crusades was 
 that against evil speaking; it was easier than they had 
 thought, for already the principle of generosity to 
 others had begun to work and reputation was counted 
 more valuable than any property. When magnanimity 
 had eradicated the habit of disparagement, the training 
 in impartial use of the judgment prevented the nature 
 swinging into the opposite extreme of shouting hosan- 
 nas over the nothings of daily life. As they gained 
 clear-sightedness in estimating human actions and char- 
 acter, they found that the cues of vanity had disap- 
 peared. They had no need of crusading against the 
 vice; it had been vanquished. 
 
 Another defect that seemed to have vanished with- 
 out effort was immodesty. The lustful had been exiled 
 and it was easy to eradicate from the natures of those 
 that remained all trace of sexual passion, and with it 
 all pruriency. The chief purpose of sex in nature, that 
 of propagation of the family, became its sole purpose ; 
 and this, by the control which the elders exercised over 
 posterity, grew as rare as death. Its other ends, the 
 development of self-sacrifice and the growth of love 
 and friendship, had been completely detached from it 
 and rationalised. Procreation with the extension of 
 the race into the future was counted so tremendous a 
 responsibility that most preferred to postpone it as far 
 in life as the instinct of the people would allow. The 
 sexual passion thus died out of their minds as out of 
 
580 Limanora 
 
 their natures, just as the mere appetites of eating and 
 drinking had died out. They had become parts of the 
 rational nature when they were thought of at all. 
 
 There was, therefore, nothing to be ashamed of and 
 nothing to conceal. Immodesty vanished with the cue 
 and motive for modesty. They wore irelium draperies 
 more to temper the power of heat and cold and the 
 rigours of the upper atmosphere, and to aid them in 
 flight, than to hide their bodies from the eyes of others. 
 For the draperies were gossamer-like and semi-diapha- 
 nous and emphasised the beauty and grace of the body 
 as an expression of soul. It was not the face alone that 
 interpreted the mind, or attracted by its radiance. Mag- 
 netism rayed from every limb; and none of the surface 
 of the body was lost .under masses of garments; it 
 all came into play as expressive of the life within. 
 They shrank at first from the unhealthy pallidity of 
 my body as it appeared when I first donned their rai- 
 ment, but under the transparency of my new garments 
 it soon lost its ghastly whiteness and acquired the 
 ruddy, healthy tints of the face. For a time I shrank 
 from the eyes of my comrades, but as I grew accus- 
 tomed to their absolute purity of thought, I lost all 
 consciousness of my body. There can be no modesty 
 or immodesty where there is nothing to conceal. It 
 was one of their subordinate aims to simplify and 
 purify the functions of the human system, so that none 
 of them should be offensive to any of the senses, new 
 or old. 
 
 By this semi-diaphanous exposure of most of the sur- 
 face of the body there was far more space of skin for 
 the development of sensations and new types of senses. 
 In their pre-purgation ages, when the greater part of 
 the corporeal system had to be muffled in opaque gar- 
 
Ethics 581 
 
 ments for the sake of what was called decency, the finer 
 modes of perception came to be concentrated in the head 
 and the hand; one sense crowded another and blunted 
 its observations. Now every inch of the corporeal sur- 
 face was open to the influences of sunlight and mag- 
 netism and the other energies that so freely permeated 
 space, and new forms of perception began to develop 
 over the body, chiefly refined modifications of touch. 
 The region of the shoulders became especially sensitive 
 to magnetic indications. The arms and chest mono- 
 oplised the finer sensations of muscular force, and es- 
 pecially of strain and push. Their feet came to gauge 
 with great subtleness the strength and direction of cur- 
 rents of the wind as they flew through the atmosphere. 
 The spinal region tested the temperature of the sur- 
 rounding space better than any other part of the body, 
 reacting at once to the slightest change in heat or cold. 
 Another advantage of the half-transparent raiment was 
 the ease with which the slightest change of emotion or 
 thought could be seen, making concealment and hypo- 
 crisy an impossibility. A third was the aid it gave 
 the medical elders in their periodical inspections of the 
 health of each member of the community; with un- 
 strengthened senses they could detect the smallest ob- 
 struction in any of the organs or tissues, so that a mere 
 passing notice might be enough to report on the health 
 of the people. 
 
 But if the sex-problem had retained its old obtrusive- 
 ness, this seemingly superficial but really important re- 
 form in dress would have been impracticable. Amongst 
 the earliest questions that the Limanoran scientists 
 faced was the place of sex in the universe. After 
 minute and wide research they came to the conclusion 
 
582 Limanora 
 
 that it was but an accident of existence on some worlds. 
 It was not an essential of the propagation of life; for 
 some species, like bacteria, multiply by mere fission, so 
 that part of the individual is immortal, and others, like 
 the medusae, and ferns, and mosses, alternate asexual 
 with sexual reproduction. It was manifestly no char- 
 acteristic of the first and lowliest forms of life that 
 settled on the earth; in fact large sections of vegetal 
 life retain the older habit parallel with the new or 
 sexual habit; any piece of many plants and trees cut 
 off and thrust into the earth will become a new plant 
 or tree of the same kind without the intervention of a 
 seed or germinative stage. But the change in habit 
 must have been introduced into the world not long 
 after the appearance of animal life upon it; for it is 
 only in the least-highly organised animals that par- 
 thenogenesis appears in any form. Their conjecture 
 was that sexuality originated from the meeting of the 
 germs of two worlds on which life had not gone far on 
 the path of evolution. The newcomers would be un- 
 able to adapt themselves and their mode of generation 
 to the new conditions they had to meet; and where 
 members of the two types settled side by side in a po- 
 sition isolated from their kind, the instinct of propaga 
 tion would evolve out of their proximity a new mode 
 of generation, that would, from the cross-fertilisation of 
 two worlds and the combination of the vital energy of 
 both, make a progeny more vigorous and a develop- 
 ment easier and more rapid. The species that re- 
 mained faithful to parthenogenetic propagation, and 
 those that adopted the new mode only partially, fell 
 behind in the evolutionary race. Sexual generation, 
 uniting in itself the vital principles of two universes, 
 swiftly improved the qualities of the species that adopted 
 
Ethics 583 
 
 it and made them dominant upon the earth. Asexual 
 propagation, the easier and more primitive, gave the 
 advantage in numbers of individuals to the vegetal and 
 lowly animal species that clung to it, but left them 
 almost incapable of evolution. On and upwards have 
 passed the dominant species through the invertebrates 
 and the mammals up to man, guided by that bi-sexual 
 principle which has in it the stimulus of two types of 
 life and two universes. Nor did it seem to them con- 
 trary to the analogy that some worlds should have in 
 the life upon them a tri-sexual or even a quadri-sexual 
 mode of propagation, according to the types of vital 
 principle which have settled and continued upon them. 
 Wherever multi-sexual generation holds sway, there life 
 is rarer but swifter, and evolution carries it into those 
 higher reaches where localisation of it upon an orb is 
 unnecessary. 
 
 It was out of sexuality, they acknowledged, that all 
 the higher phases of existence upon earth had come, 
 love, friendship, self-sacrifice;' this, too, had given to 
 humanity in its nobler developments the irrepressible 
 yearning for another and extra-terrene sphere and an- 
 other life. A vital principle issuing from a different 
 universe seemed to have kept within it the memory 
 of its first home if not of the free existence of space. 
 And in man, at least, this had come to consciousness of 
 itself and led him to religious reverence and devotion 
 and the expectation of immortality. 
 
 They considered none the less that sex had almost 
 finished its task in many worlds, and would, in no very 
 distant age, have accomplished all it could do for the 
 Ivimanoran race. When a principle of life has done its 
 task it must retire and give place to something better; 
 else it would become retrogressive and wholly evil, a 
 
584 Limanora 
 
 mere despot selfishly stopping all progress. Every 
 race that meant to quicken the pace of its evolution 
 had to take command of it and guide it to its own 
 higher ends. It is the prerogative of the nobler types 
 of man to raise nature above her lower needs; the 
 Limanoran ideal was to develop the creative power of 
 the human system so far that it might master all the 
 secrets of life and be able to mould human beings and 
 breathe the breath of life into them, and thus they would 
 be able to supersede the sexual mode of propagation. 
 
 As it was, they had gone far towards the complete 
 mastery of the sexual principle, and could mould and 
 guide it to any purpose that the future of the race de- 
 manded. They knew the conditions that would govern 
 any new human variety they needed in the state just 
 as well as they could produce new modifications of 
 trees and plants and flowers. They read the nature 
 of each individual on the island as easily as they could 
 read a book. But besides this they had in the pedi- 
 gree-annals in the valley of memory a complete account 
 of all the possibilities of any family or any branch of 
 it. From the developments of recent years and the 
 outlook that they ever kept up far into the future they 
 judged when some new type of nature would be needed 
 for some post in the community and gauged exactly 
 the qualities that would have to be blended in order to 
 produce it. Then turning to the valley of memories, 
 they studied the characters and possibilities of the 
 various families that had one or more of those qualities 
 exceptionally developed. By the aid of the physio- 
 logical and biological experts they were able to fix the 
 two out of which the individual parents would have 
 to be chosen ; and from their knowledge of the charac- 
 ter and history of every member, the elders of these 
 
Ethics 585 
 
 two families along with the medical elders were able to 
 indicate the man and the woman who would exactly 
 fulfil the purpose of the state. Years were spent on 
 maturing the pair in the directions required and in 
 entangling their imaginations and affections mutually. 
 None were allowed to assume the responsibilities of 
 parenthood till they were matured to their fullest pos- 
 sibility; for they held that all the essential characteris- 
 tics of the two natures had to be developed before the 
 embryo could be produced in its fullest and most virile 
 form. 
 
 One of the most singular features of this moulding 
 of posterity was that they did not always choose the 
 most highly developed to become the parents of the 
 commonweal. For it had often been found in the past 
 that the individual who had brought his peculiar 
 faculties or qualities to the highest state of refinement 
 in his own life had exhausted the natural wellspring 
 of them, and that he handed them on in most dimin- 
 ished degree to his children. They often preferred in 
 their selection of possible parents a member of a family 
 who exhibited no exceptional energy in the use of its 
 special talent; sometimes the least active and the least 
 conspicuous were selected. In them individual work 
 had never overstrained their faculty; it lay fallow for 
 a generation and was likely to spring forth with ex- 
 ceptional vigour the next. To this I attributed their 
 acceptance of my own imperfect nature in their midst 
 and my selection for mating with Thyriel. 
 
 When a pair had bred the child that was required, if 
 they were not conspicuous for wisdom or self-control, 
 it was taken from them and given to a new pair who 
 became its true parents and trained it in the direction 
 it ought to take. These proparents were generally 
 
586 Limanora 
 
 more successful than parents in educating and moulding 
 a character; they never allowed the bias of natural af- 
 finity to affect the future of the child; the parents, 
 besides being swayed by the pride of parenthood and the 
 vigour of their affection for it, were too closely akin to 
 it in qualities and character to view it from an impar- 
 tial and independent standpoint; and the proparents 
 were as a rule selected on account of their contrastive 
 qualities, qualities which would form the complement 
 to its own. 
 
 Though so much care was spent on the choice of the 
 stock, they considered it far more important to have 
 the citizens of the future properly trained, and were 
 quite unbending in their insistence that every child 
 should have the most suitable natures in the commun- 
 ity to educate it, whether these should be its own 
 parents or proparents. Nor for ages had more than 
 one child been permitted in a household at one time. 
 If a pair had proved themselves exceptionally success- 
 ful in the production and moulding of the two children 
 they owed to the community, they were allowed to 
 adopt for a lengthened period the profession of parent, 
 by far the most important, if not really the only, pro- 
 fession in the island. But they must bring one child 
 up to maturity before they undertook another. For, 
 they held, there was no problem so complicated, no 
 duty so responsible, no task so exhausting for every 
 faculty, as the training of a human being in its earlier 
 stages; to sculpture a new and noble nature was con- 
 sidered the greatest creative work that a Limanoran 
 could achieve for the state; the greatest talents that 
 ever appeared on earth could not be better spent than 
 on the parental profession. Another and as important 
 reason for the unitary basis of the household was the 
 
Ethics 587 
 
 moral contagion imperfect natures bring to bear on each 
 other. Children were never allowed together except 
 under the strictest supervision; for they soon undid all 
 the work of their guardians, and confirmed in each 
 other the retrogressive savagery through which they 
 were passing. Before the Limanorans had come to 
 their full heritage of scientific knowledge and wise 
 experience, they had allowed for a few generations 
 households of three or more children together, in order 
 to keep up the breed. But they soon discovered this 
 feature of their domestic life to be at the bottom of 
 the slowness of their development, and abandoned it. 
 After long experience they decided that it was better 
 worth while for the race to devote half a century of the 
 life of the wisest and ablest to the training of one 
 nature than to do any other work to be found in the 
 universe. The greatest book, the most illuminating 
 discovery or invention, was as nothing compared with 
 a living centre of development and progress. Parent- 
 hood and proparenthood well done were considered the 
 greatest claims to gratitude and love, and to everlasting 
 memory if there were such a thing. For a man and a 
 woman to have given to the state by fifty years' work 
 a better trained, more nobly moulded character, with 
 larger possibilities than they themselves had was to 
 have done more than if they had discovered and 
 mapped out a new sphere for science and thought. It 
 was one of the greatest honours therefore that the 
 community could bestow upon any pair, to select them 
 a third or fourth time for parenthood or proparenthood. 
 That the two sexes were both needed for the training 
 of a young nature to maturity was one of the most un- 
 hesitating conclusions from their experience. In spite 
 of the obliteration of all demarcating lines between the 
 
588 Limanora 
 
 sexes as to privileges and duties in the state, there was 
 nothing more clear to them than the permanence of 
 the distinction in their natures, as far as life upon earth 
 was concerned ; it had grown less and less marked as 
 the ages went on, and as maternity came to be a mere 
 episode in the long life of a woman, yet it remained as 
 real as it ever had been, passing into every phase of 
 the nature, imaginative and intellectual as well as 
 emotional and physical, and becoming salient and 
 striking in the procreative era of life. As the animal 
 part of the nature fell into greater subordination, it 
 needed keener powers of observation to note the differ- 
 ence; yet it had left its permanent mark upon the spirit. 
 To women was assigned work which required slow 
 continuous effort; for although they are more emo- 
 tional, they are also by nature more passive. The 
 temperature of the female in all species is lower than 
 that of the male, and in human beings this means less 
 energy and less explosiveness; the woman is ever 
 building up her system by storing sources of energy, 
 the man is ever using up his stores of energy in im- 
 petuous outbursts of work. The generations of active 
 employment in. which L,imanoran women had been en- 
 gaged, and the complete cessation of -the warlike pur- 
 suits that used to fill the lives of the men, had not 
 obliterated these distinctions. The women were still 
 best at sedentary occupations; whatsoever needed con- 
 tinuity and singleness of purpose was given to them; 
 for they have more unity of nature, and can settle down 
 for long periods to an investigation that would be 
 monotonous to a man, and are on the whole longer 
 lived. So any investigation that was uninvolved, but 
 needed intensity of application on the part of one mind 
 for more than an average lifetime, was handed over to 
 
Ethics 589 
 
 a woman; and where the work of several was required 
 for a generation or two, a woman was always one of 
 the workers in order to preserve the continuity. 
 
 In the imaginative families it was generally the men 
 who did the most striking work. Their bursts of 
 energy enabled them to go by leaps. They pioneered 
 best into the future; they found the new principles for 
 advance in invention and discovery. The women 
 gathered the material for the sciences; the men in- 
 vented and applied the great hypotheses leading to 
 new laws and new advances; they also showed the way 
 in progress, and tended rather to revolution than to 
 rest. Whatsoever needed artistic talent was theirs to 
 do. In physical work, wherever rapidity of movement 
 and fitful application of torrents of energy were re- 
 quired, the men took the lead; for they were small and 
 active, having now no distinctively muscular employ- 
 ments, like war and hunting, to develop their muscle 
 and bone exceptionally. The women, as naturally ac- 
 cumulative instead of prodigal of energy, were larger 
 and more passive, and took up departments of labour 
 that needed long and gentle persistence. In counsel 
 they were the conservative element, and in all the as- 
 semblies but those that superintended investigation into 
 the future, invention, and discovery, that is, in all 
 councils of judgment, they slightly predominated in 
 numbers. If they had wholly guided the community, 
 it would have stood still or moved at a rate that would 
 not have been noticeable in the generations of men. 
 Happily the masculine imagination dominated the 
 civilisation, and hence it was ever quickening its pace. 
 But the women were no less useful in preventing revo- 
 lutionary progress, and in making the men wait and 
 meditate over the leaps they thought of taking. 
 
59 Limanora 
 
 It was not so much sex-function itself, as the im- 
 press it had left upon the natures of the people that 
 supplied a rough-and-ready classification of types. A 
 few of the women who were especially fitted to be 
 mothers were assigned to the maternal profession; their 
 natures seemed moulded to bring forth strong, healthy, 
 unexhausted offspring, fit for the duties of a new ad- 
 vance. There were other women who because of their 
 nervous vigour and inclination to exhaust their best 
 energies in work were not the most suitable for the 
 production of children, and yet by their sympathy and 
 wisdom and love of the young seemed especially created 
 to bring up children as citizens; these adopted the 
 proparental profession. A third type of women were, 
 on account of their quick, irritable vigour and their 
 super-emotional temperament and lack of self-control, 
 considered incapable of either function except on rare 
 occasions; and they formed the largest class, the 
 worker-women, rarely generative and always uneduca- 
 tive; they were engaged in the sedentary, acquisitive, 
 and continuous employments that demanded no great 
 strain on the imagination or the creative powers or the 
 muscular vigour. But none in the community were 
 wholly freed from daily active work both of body and of 
 mind, not even those whose lives were given up to the 
 profession of maternity. Amongst men all were eligible 
 as fathers; for though there were always a special diet 
 and training for prospective paternity, these might be 
 enforced simultaneously with the usual work. Not 
 all, however, were called on to exercise paternity; it 
 was a rare and little-noticed duty, and left small im- 
 press on the community. But there were some who 
 on account of their great wisdom and self-control and 
 lofty character were specially fitted for the rearing of 
 
Ethics 591 
 
 youth, and these formed the male proparental profes- 
 sion. These had their other duties to perform in the 
 family and to the state as well as to attend to their in- 
 dividual households, but they were dedicated to the 
 guidance of posterity; their eyes were more on the 
 future than even those of the imaginative families. 
 The rest of the men formed the class of male workers 
 at creative and imaginative work, and at muscular 
 work that required agility and concentration of force. 
 
 Of the numbers in these different classes the elders 
 had full control. They knew all the physiological laws 
 governing the proportions of the sexes and types, and 
 by their dietary and training and medical precautions 
 they could fill the exact number of vacancies to be 
 anticipated in any class. For instance, if one was 
 needed for the profession of maternity, almost all the 
 energy of both parents was spent for a time in nutrition ; 
 they were isolated from most activities, surrounded 
 with what in other civilisations would be called luxur- 
 ies, and encouraged to spend their time in resting. So, 
 if a male worker were required, the man and woman 
 selected for parenthood were active workers them- 
 selves; and during their generative period their nutri- 
 tion was reduced to the minimum for sustaining their 
 energies, whilst they were encouraged to put all the 
 activity they were capable of into their daily work. 
 Their manuals of guidance in the difficult work of fill- 
 ing prospective vacancies in the community were full 
 of minute detail which was based upon long experience 
 carefully recorded and classified, and still more upon 
 scientific experimentation in human embryology and 
 physiology. 
 
 It was one of the earliest conquests of the future 
 that they made after the great purgation, this guidance 
 
59 2 Limanora 
 
 of the sexual and other characteristics of embryos. 
 They knew the exact stage at which any new organ or 
 function appeared, for they had first of all studied the 
 moulding of embryos in animals; and afterwards, by 
 the aid of their new photographic and microscopic ap- 
 paratus that revealed the minutest detail of any part or 
 movement within the living human body, they were 
 able to study the effect of changes in exercise or diet or 
 mode of life upon the development of the human em- 
 bryo. Nothing was neglected to make the knowledge 
 complete and scientific, nothing that might help to turn 
 the science of embryology into a creative art. The in- 
 vention of instruments which could take the senses of 
 the investigators close to any internal item of the living 
 system had made an era in the history of physiology, 
 and cancelled the necessity of anatomy as its handmaid. 
 The most microscopic change in the structure of any 
 tissue in the innermost part of the body became patent 
 to the eye or the ear or the electric sense of research. 
 Embryology had thus become almost an exact science; 
 even the physiological side of it had attained to such 
 exactitude as to make it practically an art. The medi- 
 cal elders could investigate the health of the embryo 
 and guide its development as well as in the case of the 
 full-grown child. 
 
 They were thus able to formulate a complete art for 
 the moulding of the unborn to the purpose the elders 
 indicated as best for the future of the race. Training 
 and education in the truest sense of the words began 
 long before birth. Of course it had begun with the 
 father and mother, if not with the ancestry; but the 
 directly plastic art of fashioning the character began 
 with the first appearance of life. The elders would 
 have blamed themselves if any sign of gross atavism 
 
Ethics 593 
 
 had shown itself in a youth, now that they had full 
 command of his prenatal history, and for generations 
 retrogression had become an impossibility in the race. 
 In former ages it had been one of the most difficult 
 moral problems to fix the responsibility of a man's 
 crimes; somewhat was due to his own choice; but part, 
 they saw, was due to his ancestry, and still more to his 
 parents, not only in their training of him, but in their 
 prenatal preparation if they were not careful to exclude 
 gross or criminal ideas and emotions from their systems 
 whilst he was in process of formation. Now they were 
 able to apportion the blame with ease if anything went 
 astray in the character of the child. They were there- 
 fore minutely careful in the precautions they took not 
 only in the half-century of education, but in the choice 
 of ancestry and in the guidance of the prenatal develop- 
 ment. To prospective parents the character of the 
 future offspring was as a conscience to their daily con- 
 duct and method of life. Every thought, emotion, act, 
 was guided by a sense that it would affect the embryo 
 of the coming citizen. 
 
 The newest addition to their list of sciences, the 
 physiology of ethics, put into their hands one of the 
 most effective aids to this plasmic art of character, pre- 
 natal and postnatal. With their instruments of in- 
 vestigation into the human tissue ever advancing in 
 refinement and power, they were able at last to local- 
 ise the physical centre and equivalent of each emo- 
 tion; and thus having mapped out the brain and the 
 nerve-centres, they were able to watch with their new 
 modifications of the lavolan the palpitating life and 
 movement in each part with the strong manifestations 
 
 of its special feeling. Step by step they found their 
 38 
 
594 Limanora 
 
 way towards the nosology of these centres, and classi- 
 fied every disease that turned an emotion from right to 
 wrong. Whenever a lyimanoran child became afflicted 
 with an evil or retrogressive passion, he was hurried 
 off to the ethical laboratory, and the nerve-centres of 
 his emotional and moral nature were microscopically 
 photographed as they worked; a complete history of 
 his tissues was recorded on irelium-slips, and, after he 
 had gone, the investigators could run these through 
 the recording instrument and study the phases of the 
 feeling or passion at leisure. The bursts of mistaken 
 emotion were livingly photographed with the greatest 
 care, and afterwards the records were watched through 
 their most powerful clirolans. Then experiments were 
 made in finding remedies which would check the 
 growth of the disease in the tissue. At first the thera- 
 peutics of morality were merely empirical; they tried 
 the remedies which had been successful with the com- 
 mon physical ailments of humanity, and found most 
 fail, a few succeed. By degrees they discovered that 
 the most powerful antidote against the moral poison 
 lay in the character of the operator; wherever the 
 ethical investigator had led a nobler life, the cure was 
 more rapid and effective; wherever the attendant had 
 more development of intellect than of lofty moral prin- 
 ciple, the patient lingered and often relapsed. Yet 
 there were other prophylactics of a more material kind 
 that greatly aided in the recovery of the patient. 
 Hygienic measures and courses were prescribed for 
 preventing the recurrence of the disorder; and at last 
 something not unlike a science of the art of moral 
 healing seemed to emerge out of the empiricism and 
 chaos. 
 
 This culminated in the establishment of an ethical 
 
Ethics 595 
 
 sanatorium, which was in reality a children's hospital 
 for obstinate moral diseases. No mature or half-mature 
 lyimanoran had for ages shown symptoms of a relapse 
 upon any ancestral or barbaric ethical code, and the 
 mild moral ailments lasting for only a few hours or 
 days were easily managed by the parents or proparents. 
 Gentle influence, or at most gentle discipline, was all 
 that was needed to dislodge the evil spirit, or if that 
 did not succeed, magnetic remedies were applied to the 
 part of the nervous centres affected. 
 
 Should the moral defect still hold out obstinately 
 against all remedies, the patient was removed to the 
 hospital for treatment. There were collected together 
 as moral physicians and nurses the wisest and noblest 
 personalities of the race, who applied all their therapeu- 
 tic power to the centre that was supposed to be the 
 source of the disease. But the centre had been scien- 
 tifically examined and fixed by the ethical investigators, 
 who reproduced the parts affected and their symptoms 
 in greatly magnified forms, and suggested the various 
 physical remedies that would aid the sanative influ- 
 ences of the physicians and nurses. The child was 
 isolated from circumstances and conditions tending to 
 reinforce the moral poison; and his better nature was 
 invigorated and encouraged, so that it might be able to 
 throw off the germs of the malady. 
 
 Within recent times the ethical investigators had 
 made great advances in their science. The immediate 
 stimulus of the progress was accidental, as so often had 
 been the case, or in other words it had come from out- 
 side their recognised spheres of causation. An epi- 
 demic of deceit had almost simultaneously seized upon 
 the children of the community, in spite of the solitary 
 method of training adopted, Boys and girls who had 
 
59 6 Limanora 
 
 not seen each other for months were on the same day 
 impelled to habits of concealment, even when they were 
 in the stage of development that corresponded to the 
 ravening fury and open warfare of the barbaric past. 
 Nothing in their ordinary methods of research could 
 furnish a cause for the outbreak. They searched the 
 general condition of the previous moral health of the 
 children, and found it excellent. None of the patients 
 had come near each other for long periods; none of 
 them had shown any symptoms of the disorder before 
 the epidemic had appeared. 
 
 They were driven to some hypothesis quite outside 
 the limits of their usual sphere, for they saw that there 
 was something uncommon in the occurrence. Begin- 
 ning to suspect that the germs of the disease had come 
 from other regions, as had so often happened, they in- 
 creased the powers of their magnifying apparatus by 
 means of photography, and invented more delicate aids 
 to the investigation of the nerve-centres than they had 
 ever used before. On watching the part in which they 
 had localised the physical equivalent of deceit, they 
 found signs that the presence of the minutest foreign 
 life was disturbing the nerve-tissues. In the moving 
 microscopic photographs and electrographs of the 
 centre they could detect the growth of a new type of 
 microbe, inflaming and interfering with the nerves of 
 the part. Afterwards they found some specimens 
 of the disturbers in the atmosphere, and were able to 
 cultivate them for investigation and experiment. Soon 
 they accumulated a large enough quantity of the debris 
 to apply to the cultures themselves, and in every case 
 it seemed to prove a steriliser; what the minute life 
 had used up and thrown off acted as a poison and de- 
 stroyer. By means of the medicine that they manufac- 
 
Ethics 597 
 
 tured from it they were able to annihilate or eject the 
 disturbers of the nerve-centre of truth in the patients. 
 But in curing, the part affected the moral equilibrium 
 of the children was upset. The bio-chemical families 
 applied themselves to the problem, and soon succeeded 
 in isolating the medicative elements from the injurious. 
 
 Thus a new and efficient method of treatment was 
 introduced into the ethical sanatorium. Chambers 
 were reserved for sublimating the drug, and thither 
 children were sent if any obstinate form of deceit ap- 
 peared in them. And by means of the sterilised form 
 of it they fumigated the child's quarters in any house- 
 hold, whenever signs of a return of the epidemic ap- 
 peared. The ethical investigators proceeded on the new 
 path thus opened up to them and were in time able to 
 describe and classify the microbes of moral epidemics 
 and their antidotes. After some years' toil they sup- 
 plied the ethical sanatorium with a complete scientific 
 pharmacopoeia, for at least all the grosser forms of vice, 
 all the offences against the moral codes that had been 
 atavised or thrown into the ancestral past. 
 
 The nerve-centres concerned with these offences were 
 easy to find and localise; so the minute life that inter- 
 fered with such centres was studied till it yielded its 
 secrets to science. But it was a more difficult task for 
 the new scientific art of therapeutic ethics to trace out 
 the physiology of the newer moral codes and to dis- 
 cover a cure for the maladies which hindered their 
 complete adoption into the Limanoran human system. 
 The moral offences they had now to deal with were 
 sluggishness of the higher faculties of man, acts that 
 dragged the thoughts downwards, dominance of a 
 physical need, concessions to mere nature as against 
 the highest knowledge of nature, excesses of emotion 
 
598 Limanora 
 
 or disturbances of the mental equilibrium by passion, 
 devotion to the past, superstition, stagnancy of belief, 
 efforts to base belief on unreason or ignorance, faith in 
 a moral code as the terminus of human ethics, or in a 
 state of human scientific knowledge that was omnis- 
 cient. Step by step the ethical investigators found 
 their way to the nerve-centre that was disturbed when 
 any one of these faults appeared in a man; and after 
 long years of research and experiment they were able 
 to add to their pharmacopoeia the antidotes to these 
 maladies or weaknesses. 
 
 They would have thought the basis of existence 
 irrational, if they had persuaded themselves that ethics 
 was unprogressive, whilst all other things in the uni- 
 verse were subject to the law of evolution. A moral 
 code could be as easily superseded as a polity or a type 
 of society. At one time no race could see beyond the 
 moral codes of barbaric life that recognised no evil in 
 treachery or revenge. Some at last advanced to the 
 moral code of the warrior, which based every rule of 
 life upon the idea of honour. Later still the civilised 
 races of the world adopted the moral ideal of the priest, 
 which could find nothing good beyond the limits of 
 its special ecclesiastical forms. One by one these had 
 been antiquated and Limanoran civilisation had now 
 found as the basis for its moral code the principle of 
 the cosmos, that of evolution. To advance, to raise his 
 system higher, to evolve its possibilities, was the first 
 duty of man as understood by the Limanoraus of this 
 later age. To see beyond their present horizon was 
 their ideal.' They would rather march forward into 
 the darkness than stand still or retrograde in light. 
 To know clearly and definitely the possibilities that lay 
 
Ethics 599 
 
 before them, and to be able to choose the best of them 
 was the primary and fundamental maxim of their ethi- 
 cal code. All others were corollaries of it. 
 
 If they had any unreasoned, unreasoning, and au- 
 thoritative monitor within them making for all that was 
 right, in short any conscience, it was now the prophetic 
 voice of the ideals that they were still to reach. Ages 
 before it had ceased to be a voice out of the past. Before 
 the great purgation of the island half of their education 
 and literature had been based upon the literatures of 
 two ancient peoples, to whose conquests and legacies 
 of energy and thought they had fallen heir. They now 
 shuddered at the pollution that these used to com- 
 municate to the minds of their youth. The ethics 
 running through them belonged to a stage of civilisa- 
 tion that had been long antiquated, and embodied 
 ideals now far beneath them. The heroes and wisest 
 men were recorded in them as having done deeds with 
 applause that the most atavistic of their children would 
 be ashamed to mention. Whatever wisdom or noble- 
 ness they might otherwise teach, it would be completely 
 neutralised by the taint of vices which were approved 
 or counted as venial peccadilloes. To submit their 
 youth to such pollution for the sake of the problematic 
 refinement they might gain from the books was to do 
 the greatest wrong a civilisation could commit, to pro- 
 strate its own ideals before those of a vanished and bar- 
 baric past. Out with the exiles went every trace of 
 those old literatures; and the isle of liars and the isle 
 of lechers had taken them to their bosoms, with the 
 result that they had to adopt lying and impurity as 
 their standards of life. To return upon any past was 
 to reject with recklessness the advantages that it had 
 gained and handed on to the centuries between. But 
 
6oo Limanora 
 
 to adopt with deliberateness a past steeped in the gross- 
 est impurities, and honouring intrigue and hypocrisy, 
 was to commit moral suicide. 
 
 It was only in the immature that conscience, or the 
 future invisibly shepherding the present, was either 
 needed or existent. They had pitfalls and dangers 
 out of the savage past to avoid, and an unreasoned 
 instinct was an essential to their development as an 
 ever-present guide, authoritatively bending their steps 
 this way and that. This moral and instinctive antici- 
 pation of the future, though mysterious in its origin to 
 the young whose conduct it moulded, was in reality no 
 mystery; it came from the magnetism of the wisest and 
 best of the elders; the ideal these saw in front of them 
 and held out as the immediate goal of the race, passed 
 sympathetically and magnetically into the moral and 
 intellectual atmosphere of the island. The mature 
 knew whence the influence came, and grasped it ration- 
 ally. But it was round the young as a subtle inspira- 
 tion and halo that came they knew not whence; nor 
 dared they question it or disobey its injunctions, lest 
 some evil should entrap them. When they came to 
 maturity, they learned the origin of the mysterious 
 voice within, not to disregard its monitions, but to 
 reason them out and revise them by the light of the 
 advancing ideals of the race and to know that it changes 
 and grows like everything in the cosmos. 
 
 One of the first aims and maxims of their polity was 
 to let their citizens on reaching maturity think all 
 through their lives for themselves. The first guar- 
 anty of this freedom was rationality, the power of 
 tracing back every act and feeling and thought to 
 the primary principles of existence, combined with the 
 sense of responsibility for the future of the race. There 
 
Ethics 60 1 
 
 was no repression, no prohibition; the prerogative and 
 duty of every man was to make himself fit to be a law 
 to himself. In former ages their ancestors used to talk 
 of the innocence of childhood; all that they meant 
 was unconsciousness of conventional emotions, ideas, 
 phrases, and habits, and superiority to them. They 
 smiled at it as a temporary stage from which they 
 would soon pass into the restrictions of manhood and 
 womanhood ; and only the greatest sages were able to 
 work themselves free again from conventions so far as 
 to be moral and noble and yet to have the innocence, 
 the unperturbed vision and candour of the earliest 
 years. But now all men and women retained the naive 
 openness of childhood and its artless simplicity; for 
 they had no conventions to trammel the freedom of 
 spiritual movement, no prohibitions to make the will 
 shrink from origination or action. Even when child- 
 hood or youth was checked in some mistaken career, 
 the check was veiled in persuasion and reasoning and 
 a vision of the truth. The atmosphere of freedom was 
 an absolute essential for the full development of indi- 
 viduality; and the guaranty that this freedom would 
 never pass into license was the fact that every mature 
 man and woman had a noble aim, and that the magnet- 
 ism of the race was around everyone. None had to 
 obtrude the claims of his personality upon others; and 
 none was abashed by a sense of despair, or the feeling 
 of insignificance. Humility was a virtue needing no 
 conscious cultivation; there was no occasion for its ap- 
 pearance, for the place and merits of everyone were 
 accurately gauged and acknowledged by all. It was 
 only the insignificance of all humanity against the in- 
 finite, of the life of this world against cosmic periods, 
 that deeply impressed them, and rendered them weary 
 
602 Limanora 
 
 of efforts so feeble as those of human life. But the 
 mood was brief in such sanguine temperaments and 
 agile natures. Action they knew to be exhilaration 
 and health and the building up of tissue and faculty. 
 
 All they wished to be sure of was that the action 
 was to lead forward. The test of its morality was this: 
 did it make the human system progress ? How far did 
 it tend to make the future better than the present ? 
 Whether a thing was pleasant or not for the moment, 
 had no influence upon their choice of courses of action. 
 That had been the motive and guide of the barbarous 
 past, the artist of its conduct, the creator of its charac- 
 ter. The civilisation of other periods and races had 
 meant only the development of needs. And the pure 
 savage is ever superior to civilised man in this sense; 
 with his minimum of needs and the wherewithal to 
 satisfy them wherever he may find himself, he is not so 
 localised as even the wealthiest and most cultured man 
 of the most luxurious civilisations who is tied to his 
 property and investments, and is miserable unless in 
 the one or two cities where he can indulge his taste for 
 luxury to the full. There w r as no such thing as luxury 
 in Limanora; everything that was brought into being 
 was essential for advance, for the final aim of the life. 
 Not needs but ultimate ends gave them their point of 
 view, not desires but means, not rights but duties. If 
 there was anything that could stir them to greater 
 eagerness, it was the prospect of more work for the 
 good of others; if anything could be looked upon as a 
 luxury amongst them, it was a surfeit of work that con- 
 templated a widening of the racial horizon. To serve 
 the future of all was their deepest longing. Far into 
 the savage past had faded the idea of servitude; and, 
 as they looked into history, there was nothing they 
 
Ethics 603 
 
 were more thankful for than the disappearance of such 
 a necessity; for they considered the servant, especially 
 if slave, the despot of his master in moulding and pan- 
 dering to his needs and whims, and an evil despot too, 
 as less advanced and less cultivated. 
 
 Among the things they most deeply abhorred was 
 despotism. And the worst despotism of all, they held, 
 was the social, that which is exercised daily and hourly, 
 and from the vantage-ground of proximity ; the narrow 
 scope and limited horizon make it all the more intense. 
 The most accursed of despotisms is the system of espion- 
 age; it wrecks every chance of freedom and crushes 
 originality, turning the race back into crawling venom- 
 ous things. It is a vain attempt at complete spiritual 
 repression and feebly assumes omniscience and omni- 
 presence on the part of the despots. Its only chance 
 of success is a spiritual society disciplined like an army 
 and ruled by nothing but loyalty to its superiors who 
 base their authority on the assumption of intercourse 
 with supernatural omniscience and omnipresence; and 
 its only chance of continuance is grovelling prostration 
 of all its subjects and possible critics, in abject fear of 
 unknown terror and of spies in the very precincts of 
 the heart, who can hear and interpret its every beat. 
 That was one of their hells, which they occasionally 
 brought before their imaginations in order to warn 
 them against minute supervision and interference. It 
 was this that urged them on to complete transparency 
 of nature, so that their inmost thoughts and feelings 
 might be open to all. Kver since the liars had been 
 thrust forth, one of the immediate goals of their civilisa- 
 tion had become absolute truthfulness. Now that this 
 had been attained, a further goal was complete limpid- 
 ity of the human system. The wise elders had already 
 
604 Limanora 
 
 been able to interpret what passed in the heart or brain 
 of a Limanoran ; now the aim was to make the sensuous 
 garment of the soul diaphanous to the magnetic sense, 
 if not to the eyes of all. Of nothing in his whole sys- 
 tem must a man be ashamed, before he could endure 
 such continuous confessional to his fellows, and it was 
 towards this goal that every Limanoran was now con- 
 sciously working. 
 
 The constant inspections and examinations by the 
 elders might seem to conflict with this horror of espion- 
 age and spiritual despotism. But these were voluntary 
 on the part of mature L,imanorans; it was one of their 
 recurring pleasures to be able to submit their tissues 
 and faculties to the wise observation of the elders, and 
 to gain the advantage of their experience. Had it 
 been felt as a despotism, it would have been abandoned 
 at once. With children and the immature it was a 
 matter of discipline; they were in the pre-purgation 
 stages of Limanoran history, and had to be in pupillage 
 and under authority. As soon as they were able to 
 keep step with the advancing civilisation, or in other 
 words to be a law to themselves, they were allowed to 
 walk alone and without the trammels of guidance. It 
 was the strenuous aim of the elders and guides of the 
 community to keep the atmosphere of thought free. 
 They were constantly reviewing and revising the end 
 and aim of existence in the light of the new develop- 
 ments of thought and science; hence its form never 
 became a hard dogma. They believed in ultimate 
 truth, but knew that nothing short of omniscience 
 could attain it. They were now and again getting 
 glimpses of it, but fought shy of expressing it in words, 
 for everyone would know it to be only a provisional 
 expression. Language itself was a shifting mirage of 
 
Ethics 605 
 
 the mind, dependent on the point of view for its mean- 
 ing and even existence; and one of the most constant 
 duties of the community was to define and clarify it, 
 and to free it from its ever-growing opaqueness or 
 nebulosity, and the fallacies that haunted it. One 
 thing they never hesitated about, but grasped with un- 
 erring instinct; and that was the goal that they kept 
 before them, or in other words the advance they were 
 eager to make. They hated all Jesuitry, knowing that 
 it meant the suppression of spiritual freedom by what 
 merely professed to be progressive and good, and the 
 obscuration of spiritual truth in clouds of subtlety. 
 Nothing that was evil, they held firmly, could lead 
 ultimately to good; nothing that was retrograde could 
 in the end be progress. 
 
 They had learned from the revolutions of their past 
 how snaky and tortuous are the ways of deceit; and 
 the first sure sign of its triumphant success is the bold 
 adoption of the doctrine that good men may do evil, 
 provided their aim is good. Under this the liars shel- 
 tered themselves for ages before they were exiled. 
 The era of the history of the island that filled them 
 most with shrinking and loathing was that of the 
 struggle with the various forms of deceit. The first 
 lesson in the valley of memories was drawn from this 
 division of their annals; they filled their youth with 
 hatred and scorn of untruth and hypocrisy; no firm step 
 could be taken in education till this had become a deeply 
 rooted feeling in their natures, and nothing awakened 
 it so well as the study of this struggle with the liars. 
 But they never taught any subject merely from books 
 or records; everything, even history and its lessons, 
 was made practical and living. Deceit, for instance, 
 
606 Limanora 
 
 was traced back to its sources in nature, and the diffi- 
 culty of getting rid of it was revealed by finding it so 
 wide spread in the lower ranks of life. Mimicry or 
 involuntary deceit was investigated all through plant 
 and animal life, and it was found to be more prevalent 
 the lower the investigators went in vital organisms. 
 Their loathing of it as a deliberate adoption amongst 
 human beings grew deeper as they saw that in the 
 animal world it belonged either to incompetence or 
 rapacity. The prey mimicked the form and colour of 
 another species that was loathsome to its enemy in 
 order to avoid his grasp; unconsciously the mimicry 
 spread, for only those members of the attractive species 
 which were like the repellent species escaped and pro- 
 pagated. Or the spoiler mimicked the form and colour 
 of a species that was friendly or neutral to its victim, 
 and only those members of the species similar to the 
 unfeared kind succeeded in catching enough of their 
 favourite food to survive and hand on their nature to a 
 posterity. 
 
 It was the same in the higher life of human self- 
 consciousness and will; only here intention and de- 
 liberateness entered in and turned mimicry into deceit. 
 Wherever hypocrisy existed it was a sure sign of a 
 vast number of incompetent and feeble, who made an 
 easy quarry to the villain, and of the vigour of a cun- 
 ning minority, who often found it difficult to entrap. 
 Diplomacy and convention are the deliberate mimicry 
 of the predatory section of a race or of its gullible sec- 
 tion. When once the L,imanorans had purged the 
 island of the liars, they had to prevent the propagation 
 of the feeble and incompetent; for they knew that, as 
 long as these existed in a community, there would per- 
 sist the more futile forms of deceit. After that first 
 
Ethics 607 
 
 purgation, the weak, though retained in the island, had 
 to abandon family life; they were provided with the 
 means that made existence easy and pleasant in order 
 that they might not resort to their only method of sur- 
 vival; and in a generation the problem of hypocrisy 
 had disappeared. 
 
 It was then that the idrovamolan was invented and 
 came into use in education. Having driven out the 
 hated vice, they found that there was still the need of 
 impressing its evil results upon the minds of the matur- 
 ing youth, just as it was necessary even yet to study 
 the diseases that had disappeared for generations from 
 their midst in order to be able to cope with them, 
 should they ever be reintroduced through their com- 
 munication with other atmospheres. But they knew 
 the unreality of teaching anything in a merely theoreti- 
 cal way; they felt that lecturing and sermonising and 
 the mere reading of history would give them no such 
 grasp of the vice and its evils as would living, acting 
 things. The idrovamolan with its telescopic, telacous- 
 tic, and telemagnetic powers came to their assistance in 
 this difficulty. By its help parents and proparents 
 were able to bring the youths into the very presence of 
 the loathed deceit without submitting them to the 
 chance of contagion. They turned the object-tubes of 
 the wonderful instrument upon Aleofane and its so- 
 ciety; and through them they saw and heard and felt 
 men like insects mimic and like stinging worms crawl 
 and diplomatise, lie and cheat, still with the worship of 
 reality and sincerity and truth upon their lips. There 
 they noted the growth of the most offensive form of the 
 vice. The weak learned it for protection, flattering 
 the great and grovelling in the dust before them whilst 
 they cursed them in their hearts, and all in order that 
 
6o8 Limanora 
 
 some favour might perhaps be flung like a bone to a 
 dog. Having learned the vicious art in this cringing 
 fashion, the feeble were seen to march off with the 
 proud gait and the conceit of adepts and use it like 
 brigands on the still feebler. This combination of in- 
 competence and unscrupulousness was the final curse 
 of a civilisation that had taken deceit to its bosom. 
 The whole of the energy of the race was spent in simu- 
 lation and dissimulation. Kvery vice simulated its 
 antagonistic virtue; even virtue simulated the vigour 
 and arrogance of vice. The L,imanoran youth needed 
 no more teaching on the evils of hypocrisy. They rose 
 from the idrovamolan with an intense loathing for all 
 forms of deceit, so impressive was the drama they saw 
 enacted in Aleofane. Even what seemed innocent mim- 
 icry they shrank from, seeing it universally employed as 
 the means of cheating in that island of liars ; mimicry 
 they were encouraged to eschew; for as surely as the art 
 was mastered, it was used for mean or foul purposes at 
 some time or other, either for envy and jealousy and 
 scorn, or in order to lay traps, sometimes for the strong, 
 but chiefly for the weak. Even in art all mimicry was 
 avoided, for there it betrayed feebleness or lack of in- 
 dividuality. The existence of mimicry in the animal 
 world was the mark of degeneracy upon terrestrial life. 
 It argued the wide domain of feebleness and rapacity, 
 and the dominance of the passion for mere existence. 
 Wherever it was wide-spread, it meant the abeyance of 
 progress and of eagerness for progress. Mimicry is the 
 sterilising process of faculty and power. Origination is 
 the principle of fertility, of stimulus to progress. 
 
 Whatsoever dallied with an outgrown principle or 
 element was immoral. Mere copying of what had 
 been already attained and was about to be left behind 
 
Ethics 609 
 
 or used as a stepping-stone to something better was 
 neighbour to evil. Morality is the effort to adapt con- 
 duct and ideals to the new vistas opened up into the 
 future by an advance already achieved; and it is ever 
 being bribed or throttled by what is outworn. Evil is 
 the past which has become so obsolete and is yet so 
 living as to be obstructive. What has been outgrown 
 has ever its allies among living elements, and its advo- 
 cates in every mixed and unpurified race. Especially 
 is this the case where there are fixed codes or creeds, 
 and along with them professions organised to preserve 
 and continue their sway. The world is constantly see- 
 ing the spectacle of a nation or race or species coming 
 to a standstill after centuries of brilliant progress, and 
 getting fossilised in a certain stage of its advance; 
 there it remains for generation after generation as if 
 alive, yet practically dead for all purposes of develop- 
 ment, like a fly in amber. This dead stop is due to the 
 dominance of some code or creed that seemed to em- 
 body the spirit of its greatest success; the nation or 
 race sought to secure for ever to itself the advantages 
 of the ethical or spiritual methods that had achieved 
 for it its most brilliant results, by fixing them unalter- 
 ably for all time, with their official guardians to protect 
 them from change; so that which had given such vigor- 
 ous life and development for a time became a prison- 
 house and grave. Only the most tremendous revolution 
 and cataclysm could burst the walls of the tomb, tear 
 off its grave-clothes, and release its spirit for new con- 
 quests. Sometimes a nation seems to fossilise the creed 
 or polity that first gave energy to its life, yet at the 
 same time grows and develops spasmodically. It has 
 only made pretence of having fixed this code for all 
 time, whilst the living spirit of it escapes and follows 
 
6 io Limanora 
 
 its own course in freedom ; it has periodically to return 
 to its pretended prison and tomb, and to reconcile by 
 Jesuitry and in makeshift way the two methods of life 
 which have come to differ so widely. Then it flees 
 again into the struggle of existence and gradually 
 ignores even the new versions of the old code, till the 
 divorce becomes too obtrusive to escape attention, and 
 the process of reinterpretation of the antiquated creed 
 begins again. This has been a common enough mode 
 of advance in the history of the world. But it is 
 fraught with incalculable risks. It induces a habit of 
 self-deceit and hypocrisy, and the nation or race ultim- 
 ately makes a tomb and prison-house for its spirit out 
 of its own falsities and self-delusions. 
 
 Advance like this, the Limanorans held, was no true 
 advance. They would have no part or lot in fixity of 
 methods or codes, for whatever became fixed grew 
 thereby evil and obstructed development and advance 
 to higher points of view. They had only to look into 
 their history to see how every new step antiquated some 
 universally accepted belief or maxim. Not so many 
 ages ago a crudely philanthropic spirit was considered 
 one of the surest signs of advancing virtue, in fact one 
 of the noblest of the virtues. Now it was considered 
 distinctly immoral to philanthropise without taking 
 care to foresee the results of the philanthropy. L/iman- 
 orans used to go out into the archipelagos and try to 
 convert the barbarians to the special code or creed 
 then in vogue. Instead of helping on the human race, 
 it actually stopped the development of a section of it; 
 for the adoption of a creed and its symbols and rites 
 and phrases far in advance of any possible civilisation 
 they could reach only made the savages whose virtues 
 
Ethics 6n 
 
 had hitherto been at least genuine conventional, false, 
 and hypocritical; whilst the apostles left thousands of 
 their own countrymen at home stagnant or retrogress- 
 ive. It soon came to be acknowledged that inter- 
 course with inferior civilisations, even for the purpose 
 of raising them, lowered the moral standard of the 
 missionaries, whilst failing in its original motive. 
 Much of the philanthropy that began at home was 
 found to be no less obstructive and immoral. It fed 
 and clothed the poor and improvident, and thus helped 
 to slay and bury the only habit that could save them 
 out of their slough, the habit of measuring every step 
 they took, and seeing whither it led; and it helped to 
 perpetuate the evil; for the ready yet limited supplies 
 combined with the improvidence to make them breed 
 like the lower animals, and the race of paupers and 
 unprogressive was inordinately multiplied. The same 
 feeble and immoral philanthropy opposed all attempts 
 to stop the multiplication of the diseased and semi- 
 criminal, and had to increase the armies of doctors and 
 guardians of the peace every generation. It did well 
 to nurse the feeble in mind and body, and to reduce 
 the penalties under which heredity had placed them; 
 but it failed to see that it was doing endless evil by 
 letting them penalise an increasing posterity with their 
 own punishment. Not till it was branded as the worst 
 of immoralities was such philanthropy ended. This 
 had been a distinct advance and a true virtue, when 
 it had taken the place of cruelty and neglect, and when 
 there was unmeasured space on the earth for the ex- 
 pansion of population; but, once this stage had been 
 passed, and the purgation crusade was proceeding, it 
 became a real plague and vice. 
 
 Another immorality that had once been a virtue was 
 
612 Limanora 
 
 the pursuit of beauty for its own sake. Men gave up 
 their lives to the production of beautiful things which 
 served no other purpose than their own glory and the 
 entertainment of idle and leisured people. Others made 
 fortunes and devoted them to the purchase of such 
 works of art, in order that crowds might collect and 
 admire them, and for a time there was something of 
 truth in the assertion that it educated the taste of the 
 people. But this was only when the bulk of the race 
 was unenlightened and unprogressive, and anything 
 that softened their barbarity, anything that drew their 
 thoughts away for even a brief time from sordid cares 
 or cruel projects or mechanical and conventional habits, 
 implied progress or a chance of progress. When the 
 race had been purified, and every eye was bent on the 
 future, and every nerve strained toward some advance 
 in human civilisation, beautiful things became the 
 commonest features and necessities of life, and beauty 
 ceased to be noticed as anything remarkable. Then 
 to spend energies on producing what was artistic and 
 beautiful without serving any other purpose than pleas- 
 ing was reckless extravagance, and by wasting what 
 should have been expended upon the progress of the 
 race was condemned as immoral. There was no vir- 
 tue in doing what everyone did by instinct. There 
 was positive vice in making it the sole and deliberate 
 purpose of expenditure of energy. 
 
 Another instance of a former virtue having become a 
 vice was statesmanship and political patriotism. At 
 one time half the conspicuous talent of the race went 
 in this direction, so greatly was it admired. And, 
 when there were other races and nations to diplomatise 
 or struggle with, and one half of the race had to pro- 
 vide for or keep watch on the other half, it is no strange 
 
Ethics 613 
 
 thing that to enter into the domain of politics was con- 
 sidered the noblest thing a man could do, and love of 
 the welfare of the country was considered the noblest 
 sentiment a man could entertain. The most difficult . 
 problems, involving, some of them, the very continu- 
 ance of the race, occupied the attention of the states- 
 man and politician; what to do with the vast pauper 
 class and the still vaster fringe of the poverty-stricken 
 and improvident, how to deal with the criminally in- 
 clined, how to educate the half-savage denizens of 
 hovels in cities and even in the open country, how to 
 prevent the deadlocks in industry, how to regulate the 
 labour market and how to check the recurrent plagues 
 and famines, were questions that tasked the finest in- 
 tellectual energies of the nation. What complicated 
 the answer was the fact that the themes of the discus- 
 sions, the pauper, the criminal, the improvident, the 
 employer, the labourer, the plague-stricken, and the 
 starving had all a share in the government of the coun- 
 try, and had to be persuaded that any scheme proposed 
 was to their individual interests. The virtue of poli- 
 tical patriotism was streaked with loquacity, conceit, 
 self-seeking, hypocrisy, corruption, and intrigue, long 
 before it came to be recognised as a vice. The states- 
 man and politician had to make his principles as inter- 
 changeable as his coats, had to be a master in the art 
 of making the worse appear the better reason, had to 
 be skilful in lying without seeming to lie, had to rob 
 whilst putting on the guise of self-sacrifice, had to 
 cringe and fawn, bully and overbear, by turns, had to 
 be an artist in bribing men and in taking bribes, in 
 short had to be the most expert of the criminal classes. 
 By the time the end came, none in the list of virtues 
 had become so like a vice as patriotism. The great 
 
6 14 Limanora 
 
 purgations swept out all occasions for politics and 
 patriots in exiling all the subjects of statesmanship. 
 Where there were no paupers or criminals, no masters 
 or servants, no uneducated or savage except young 
 children, and no chance of plague or famine, the oc- 
 cupation of the statesman and politician vanished. 
 Where every man was taught to be a law to himself, 
 legislation had no place. The problems of most in- 
 choate civilisations had gone into exile with all the isms 
 that were proposed to solve them, and all the charlatans 
 that proposed their solution. Patriotism was now, like 
 breathing, the organic and unconscious process of every 
 mind, and not the exception upon which anyone could 
 plume himself. No longer was it the safety of the 
 country, or the continuance of the race, or the susten- 
 ance or justice or criminality of part of the people that 
 demanded conscious effort, but the advance of the 
 human system in all. To propose and argue legislative 
 schemes for the benefit of any section of the race would 
 have been accounted immorality, if it had not been 
 taken as a symptom of atavism or mental disease. A 
 hospital was the certain fate of anyone who indulged in 
 political projects or political eloquence; the old virtue 
 had passed beyond the stage of obstructiveness and 
 vice, and had become one of the tests of insanity. 
 
 This disease of politics rarely appeared except 
 amongst the youthful and immature and the methods 
 of driving out the evil spirit had recently grown scien- 
 tific and unfaltering. The old plan of exiling, it was 
 now felt, had become cruel and pitiless. For in recent 
 generations the pace of evolution in the race had so 
 quickened that now even its laggards and the breakers 
 of its moral law were centuries ahead of the most ad- 
 vanced citizens of the most advanced nations on the 
 
Ethics 615 
 
 face of the earth; and no longer could they, if expatri- 
 ated, find any to consort with. They would have to 
 live with men who, in their eyes, were vicious and 
 criminal. Noola had been the last to be exiled; the 
 system was finally abandoned as inhumane and un- 
 scientific; and science soon found methods of treatment 
 that were prompt and efficient in their cure of all such 
 mental diseases. 
 
 My final instance of the old virtue grown vice is of a 
 different kind. It belonged more to the intellectual 
 sphere than to the practical, and seemed to me at first 
 rather a mistake than a defect of the nature. It was 
 the common error of taking a verbal originality or ad- 
 vance for a real, a mere change of name for a change 
 in essence. In the old times it had been counted as a 
 great merit to a man, if he manufactured a new nom- 
 enclature for any wide spread phase of civilisation, and 
 so gave the race the sensation of dealing with some- 
 thing novel. Some of the greatest heroes of philosophy 
 and science in the pre-purgation ages of the island had 
 owed their fame to the substitution of fresh phraseology 
 for what had grown outworn and trite, and most of the 
 great writers had done nothing more for their fellows 
 than re-illumine a linguistic world fallen dull and dark. 
 Men grow sick of ideas that have worn the same verbal 
 dress for a generation or more, and hail as a discoverer 
 and benefactor anyone who tricks them out anew; they 
 delight in feeling them to be familiar old friends, whom 
 they have to make no mental effort to know. Even to 
 dye the old garments in new imaginative tints is a 
 service they will not readily forget; whilst the great 
 discoverers and pioneers of the human race have had 
 years or ages of oblivion according to the newness and 
 difficulty of their ideas and the distance beyond the 
 
616 Limanora 
 
 common horizon they have looked into the future. 
 The L,imanorans of old, like most other men, abhorred 
 having to think out again their creeds and ideas, and 
 especially having to reform them; and so they stood 
 out lustily against every real advance proposed, and 
 shouted it down as irreverence or blasphemy in over- 
 turning the old barriers and old altars. The maker of 
 a new nomenclature and the tinter of the old phrase- 
 ology pandered to this intellectual indolence. 
 
 One of the most striking results of the new point of 
 view after the great purgation was the transformation 
 the fame of these old scientists and philosophers and 
 writers suffered. They began to be execrated as 
 dealers in illusions, as men who fed the passion of the 
 human race for stagnance or retrogression to monstrous 
 proportions. They were thrown down from their lofty 
 pedestals, and cast into oblivion for their sins against 
 truth and reality. To seduce men from the pursuit of 
 truth by mere verbal jugglery was now counted no 
 mere mistake, bjut a heinous offence against morality. 
 To take as a real discovery what was but a new name 
 or set of names revealed a vicious obliquity of mental 
 vision, that needed attention from the ethical phy- 
 sicians. This was especially easy in the domain of 
 ethics, and the L,imanorans were constantly on their 
 guard against the delusion of accepting a change of 
 nomenclature as a moral advance. The elders carefully 
 reviewed every stage of progress, lest it should have 
 been in words and phrases. This was the main purpose 
 of the Manora and of the Imanora, and every month 
 linguistic councils were held to revise the language, and 
 to throw out any fallacies and illusions it might har- 
 bour. Every new nomenclature and phraseology was 
 searched and probed, and torn off the ideas that they 
 
Ethics 617 
 
 were meant to express, in order to see if there was any- 
 thing new underneath them. Delusion, they had re- 
 solved, they would have nothing to do with in any 
 shape or form. For delusion blinded the eyes to the 
 route they were taking, and made them march in a 
 circle or back over the old roads under the belief that 
 they were advancing to what was new. It was the 
 greatest foe to true progress, and any man who fell into 
 it revealed vicious tendencies, which needed the minis- 
 trations of the physicians and nurses in the ethical 
 sanatorium. To take verbal ingenuity for true pion- 
 eering was the most grievous offence against the 
 future of the race. 
 
 The great standard and test of morality was pro- 
 gress. How far will an act or habit aid the true de- 
 velopment of the race ? This was the crucial question 
 in Limanora; and in order that it might be answered 
 satisfactorily and easily by any member of the commun- 
 ity, the council of elders was careful to accommodate the 
 ideals of the race to every advance made. It had been 
 a rare thing in their history to change or add to the 
 cardinal instincts of morality. But this they knew was 
 by no means impossible; and indeed they were buoyed 
 up with the hope that the moral cosmos was still to 
 open up new marvels like the physical cosmos, that in 
 fact the two would ultimately be found to be one when 
 looked at from the final and divine point of view. 
 There was the strongest conservatism in the ethical 
 phase of life; for it is the last, highest, and most com- 
 plex development of vitality. The lower we investi- 
 gate in the animal world, the more revolutions and 
 transformations we see the individual go through, the 
 more enslaved is it to circumstances, to locality, to 
 
618 Limanora 
 
 season, to the moment. The higher we go, the greater 
 we find the conservatism, and at the same time the 
 greater the origination and the adaptability. In man 
 these two conflicting powers grow stronger side by side 
 as he advances in civilisation. He retains features and 
 forms that are outworn and useless longer than most of 
 the higher animals; and yet he originates and adapts 
 himself and his surroundings with far more ease and 
 swiftness. In ethics, his last evolution, the conserv- 
 atism dominates the origination and the advance, ob- 
 scures them or makes them simulate its own features, 
 and produces the belief that the final maxims and cue 
 of morality have been reached from the first. Ethical 
 progress has naturally been slow, and it is only the 
 student of vast periods of history and of many nations 
 and races who becomes fully persuaded that there has 
 been any change in the point of view. Because there 
 is not complete transformation, as in the case of the 
 minuter and lower animals, it is assumed that there is 
 no evolution, and that morality and conscience have 
 remained fixed quantities, from the beginning of his- 
 toric times at least. And the close bond between ethics 
 and religion has assisted this dominant and delusive 
 conservatism in its task. Each great step in ethical 
 evolution has been claimed by religion as its own, and 
 as resulting from its own special revelation from 
 heaven. 
 
 The lyimanorans were quick to recognise that mor- 
 ality must be subject to growth and development, not 
 only in the individual, but in the race, and that man 
 must gain higher ethical points of view as he pro- 
 gresses. They knew that many of the finest impulses 
 and inspirations towards progress, and especially ethi- 
 cal progress, had come from beyond the earth and the 
 
Ethics 619 
 
 earth's atmosphere. But that any age or race could 
 have caught the ultimate ethical light from the central 
 sun of the cosmos seemed to them after their experience 
 the height of absurdity. There could be no spiritual 
 eye trained and developed enough to receive it. As 
 the bodily eye of man is capable of taking in only a 
 limited range of rays of light, whilst an immense range 
 of them above and below its faculty either blind it or 
 pass unnoticed, so his spirit at any given stage of its 
 development can understand and accept ethical ideas 
 only within certain limits; but, as it progresses, it is 
 able to see beyond, and appreciate ideas that were 
 non-existent to it before. There is as much difference 
 between the ethical comprehension of the modern Lim- 
 anoran and that of the most highly civilised European 
 as between that of the latter and the savage's, or as be- 
 tween the savage's and the pig's; and if they could 
 have brought themselves to believe that they had at- 
 tained the fullest and the final light upon morality, the 
 thought would have struck their very hearts to stone. 
 It was this that kept them from formulating their 
 morality or ethics in any definite code. They knew 
 that a code would soon petrify morality and itself be- 
 come a fetich ignorantly worshipped, and, gathering to 
 it through the ages the self-interest of its officials and 
 the irrational devotion of its worshippers, attain a de- 
 spotism that could never be broken or controlled. A 
 code issues in a series of prohibitions which become a 
 boundless slavery, and prohibitions develop the sense 
 of rights which dominates and obscures all sense of 
 duties; this keeps men hanging between savagery and 
 true civilisation. The growing dominance of duty with 
 its complementary obscuration -of rights is the first 
 symptom of the approach of rapid ethical progress. To 
 
620 Limanora 
 
 insist on one's rights imprisons the soul in the living 
 sepulture of selfishness. To think of one's duty is to 
 admit the self-revealing and future unmisting light of 
 self-sacrifice. Once prohibitions become the order of the 
 day, especially in a limited community, the spirit of 
 intolerance is abroad; every man yearns to confine his 
 neighbour and put him in moral and intellectual lead- 
 ing strings. The origin and meaning of the " Thou 
 shalt nots" are forgotten; the spirit of them dies rap- 
 idly, and the letter binds and petrifies the souls that 
 must obey them. Progress in ethics is finally stopped, 
 and it is accepted as a law of nature that there never 
 was any development of conscience and never can be 
 any other ethical point of view. Moral stagnance .is 
 taken as the rule of human life, and nothing short of a 
 new impulse from spheres outside the world can lib- 
 erate the race, thus blinded, from its vicious circle of 
 thought. 
 
 Advance of the human system to higher points of 
 view is in L,imanora the moral test and standard of 
 actions and conduct. In all that is, nothing has ever 
 died, nothing is dead; what seems dead and fixed for 
 ever in permanent form is suffering change as truly as 
 the flitting aurora of the north; the rock, that seems 
 the same in our old age as when we saw it in infancy, 
 is in process of transformation no less than we our- 
 selves are; it is made up of particles that are groups of 
 molecules; and these molecules, moving with varying 
 degrees of rapidity round and across each other's orbits, 
 consist themselves of still more minute atoms that are 
 but points of living energy. Send another form of en- 
 ergy, like heat, through this apparently torpid mass, 
 and it stirs palpably to our senses; what was dormant 
 to us before has awakened, and, as the supply of the 
 
Ethics 621 
 
 foreign energy increases, the rock moves and changes 
 beneath our gaze; not that the long-torpid mass has 
 not an energy of its own ; it is a store of energy, every 
 atom of it waiting but for the touch of another kind to 
 awaken from its age-long sleep, and to send most of it 
 free and a step higher into the wandering sphere again. 
 The difference between solid and liquid and between 
 liquid and.gas is only a question of time. In the solids 
 the molecules take longer to move through the same 
 space than those of the liquid, which in their turn take 
 longer than those of the gas; for solids flow under the 
 influence of gravitation or other force just as truly as 
 liquids or gases flow. 
 
 It is the same with energies; one differs from another 
 in pace; time is the only essential difference between 
 them. The pace of vital energy is so distinctive in 
 its swiftness that it forms a new order of existence. 
 Thought is the swiftest of the vital energies that we 
 know, and to rise in the scale is to quicken the pace. 
 The civilised man thinks as much more rapidly than 
 the savage as the savage thinks more rapidly than the 
 mollusc, if the last may be said to think or feel at all. 
 And there are heights above existing human thought 
 for man to climb. Higher and ever higher the scale of 
 energies in the cosmos must go, till time becomes what 
 would seem to us but a vanishing point; immediately 
 above us lies the vital energy to which a thousand 
 years are but as a moment. To the microbe, if it could 
 think, human life would seem an eternity. To creative 
 thought, which is the Limanoran ideal, eternity, future 
 as well as past, is focussed into a moment. 
 
 Up through the scale of energy the whole cosmos is 
 ever climbing, with occasional lapses and falls, time be- 
 ing the only differentiating quality. To quicken the 
 
622 Limanora 
 
 pace of development is the one immediate aim of L,im- 
 anoran civilisation, and the morality of an action is 
 measured by its contribution to this aim. The higher 
 they climb, the nobler, the more ethereal, becomes their 
 energy; the less governed and clogged by animal con- 
 ditions, the more easy to quicken the pace of develop- 
 ment. For the cosmic law of influence is that the 
 closer in quality and degree the spheres of energy, the 
 more likely is the higher to mould the lower and raise 
 it near to its level. The source of the everlasting 
 movement and life in the cosmos is the unstable equi- 
 librium of all nuclei and stores of energy. Every 
 world differs from every other world in its capacity for 
 various forms of energy; and so does everything in it 
 differ from everything else in the amount of any par- 
 ticular form of energy it can contain. Comparative 
 proximity sets up a current between any two nuclei 
 of energy that thus differ. Whenever the two reach 
 stable equilibrium, that is, whenever they come to have 
 equal shares of the energy, the current of influence 
 ceases, and they are dead to each other. The socia- 
 listic ideal is political and social death; when all the 
 members of a community are equal and alike in their 
 share of its privileges and products and capacities, its 
 rights and duties, it ceases to grow or develop; stagna- 
 tion is the law of its being, especially if there are no 
 neighbouring communities differing from it on which 
 it can react. The lyimanorans deliberately strove to 
 keep up and strengthen the differences between not only 
 families, but individuals, in rights, duties, capacities, 
 aims. The differences were an everlasting fountain 
 of renewing life. The law of political and social life is 
 exactly the same as that of gravitation and of all the 
 other cosmic forces. Two sources of energy will con- 
 
Ethics 623 
 
 tinue to influence each other, till they reach equality, 
 the greater giving of its share of energy a larger pro- 
 portion than the less. What keeps the cosmos eternally 
 alive is the complexity of the mutual influences. 
 There are no two bodies or centres of an energy so iso- 
 lated or so simply constituted as to remain for ever 
 dead or unchanging, once they have reached stable 
 equilibrium towards each other in respect to their 
 special form of energy. And so it is with men; the 
 socialistic ideal is an impossibility in this universe. 
 
 In the human sphere this cosmic law has farther- 
 reaching issues than the merely political. The L,im- 
 anorans were willing to do much for the advance of 
 mankind, but they had come to see that apostolism is 
 a case of this law of mutuality of influence as truly as 
 any other phenomenon; the higher must not only give 
 voluntarily of his influence and character to the lower, 
 but the lower must give of his to the apostle; and if the 
 proximit} r continues long enough, this mutual give- 
 and-take will end in the missionary coming nearer to 
 the original moral standard of the convert than the con- 
 vert comes to his patron's original standard. Where 
 the grades of the two civilisations are widely separated, 
 though the process of assimilation may be long, ex- 
 tended over even many generations, it will be most dis- 
 astrous to human progress. It is better, they concluded 
 from their long experience, to isolate an advancing race 
 that is far ahead of all other races, and thus to give it 
 the chance of coming within the sphere of still higher 
 intelligences. 
 
 Most advanced religions have begun with the impulse 
 towards this, yearning for a loftier sphere than that 
 in which they are hedged. They try to isolate their 
 
624 Limanora 
 
 followers from the lowering influences of the world 
 around, in order that they may reach the ideal and 
 influence that are just above them. But, as they 
 apostolise and expand, the worshippers become mere 
 parasites of their God; they try to batten upon Him 
 with their lower natures, and thus drag Him down to 
 their level. After the first noble impulse and inspira- 
 tion, it is seldom that a religion does not become as 
 truly an instance of parasitism as the meanest bacterial 
 life. The lower all through the universe is eager to 
 parasite on the higher; minute organisms try to lodge 
 in the tissues of those that are larger and more de- 
 veloped. As long as host and parasite can pursue their 
 functions unhindered by their intimate relationships, 
 little harm is done; but as soon as the debris of the 
 lower clogs the organs of the host, what we call disease 
 results and the minute guest becomes a hurtful para- 
 site. As long as the religious impulse sends the nature 
 higher on the path of development, so long does it give 
 of its best to the Deity, so long does it fail to clog the 
 advance of the cosmos. But when it extends its con- 
 quest to mean and unprogressive natures, the common, 
 unenthusiastic natures that are saturated with envy 
 and jealousy, then does it become mere parasitism; 
 the religion has grown into a disease. The warm, hu- 
 mane, and generous natures which are touched by a 
 new inspiration, rise to an exceptional pitch of fervour 
 under its influence, and develop at a pace that stirs the 
 alarm and envy of their neighbours; whilst the result- 
 ant persecution continues unabated, there can be no 
 degeneration, the worship can never be parasitic. But 
 as soon as the persistence and progress of the early wor- 
 shippers and their propagandist enthusiasm begin to 
 invite the commonplace, cowardly spirits of the mass, 
 
Ethics 625 
 
 who can never appreciate what is above them except to 
 envy it and drag it down to their level, its era of devel- 
 opment is past. The cosmic law of reciprocity never 
 fails to act, and the united influence of the meaner ma- 
 jority is greater in its power over the whole than the 
 fervour of the noble few; down falls the worship to the 
 level of the many. 
 
 It was on this cosmic law that the Limanorans based 
 their refusal to go out and attempt to convert and raise 
 the rest of mankind to their standard. They knew 
 from the nature of the universe that the attempt would 
 end in corrupting themselves and dragging them down 
 farther than they could drag up their converts. They 
 preferred to give of their best to the unorbed existence 
 which filled space outside of the world, and to make 
 their best still better. Thus they knew they were serv- 
 ing most truly the great end of all being, the develop- 
 ment of the cosmos, the elevation of the energy in it 
 towards more and more spiritual and progressive 
 grades. They strove to perpetuate and strengthen 
 their consciousness of what was above them, and to 
 break the yoke of the lower self, the self that at death 
 amalgamates with what is material and stagnant, al- 
 though the latter was needed as a stepping-stone as 
 long as they remained upon the face of the earth. In 
 seeking the proximity and influence of the higher en- 
 ergies and existences that seldom touched the earth, 
 they anxiously guarded themselves from all parasitism 
 which might drag these down in the scale of being; 
 and this led them to abandon attempts to personalise 
 the relationship to them. They would have no part 
 in worshipping or prostrating themselves before these 
 beings in order to obtain their protection and patron- 
 age; for this, they knew, becomes merely sectarian, the 
 
 4" 
 
626 Limanora 
 
 outcome of envy and jealousy, the cause of bigotry and 
 intolerance, persecution and revenge. They did not 
 desire the exclusive influence of a higher being, nor to 
 become obstructions to its further development; to rise 
 to its level was their active spiritual ambition in striv- 
 ing to gain proximity to it. 
 
 As their senses, especially their inner senses, de- 
 veloped, they were getting more and more certain of 
 a vast universe of being just outside the merely ter- 
 restrial, and new inspirations and senses were ever 
 awakening in them; nobler ideas and impulses pressed 
 in upon them, they scarcely knew whence. They 
 were afraid to define the source, lest they should 
 humanise the idea of it and pollute it. What they 
 were sure of was that infinite space was filled with 
 unorbed life and energy, rising in higher and higher 
 grades, as it receded from the terrene. The energy of 
 the worlds and of the other nuclei of force was gradu- 
 ally rising through the grades of being, thanks chiefly 
 to the measureless existence which hovered round 
 them, yet settled upon no centre of fixed energy. Out 
 of this unorbed life came the impulses and inspira- 
 tions that made such epochs in the history of a world. 
 Their magnetic sympathy with this they were strength- 
 ening and elevating every generation, as they strove to 
 rise higher and higher amongst these existences in 
 order that into their spirits might come nobler and 
 nobler influences. As long as they were conscious of 
 qualities and degrees of existence above them, so long 
 would they be stimulated on their upward develop- 
 ment. They had no fear that they would ever reach a 
 point from which they could not see heights beyond. 
 That, they knew, would be complete spiritual death. 
 But they knew too that there was no such thing as 
 
Ethics 627 
 
 death, or entire annihilation, in the whole cosmos. 
 What seemed to us death was but the final parting of 
 two grades of being or energy, the lower to coalesce 
 with some fixed form of energy and attach itself again 
 to some more rapidly developing form, the higher to 
 range itself with the unnucleated energies of space, 
 still to rise by proximity to some higher life. They 
 were scientifically certain that there could be no end 
 to this process of development upwards. Aspiration 
 was the duty and true function of all existence. To 
 quicken the pace of the evolution, to range themselves 
 more and more swiftly with the higher life of the cos- 
 mos, this was the prerogative of vital energy that had 
 gained consciousness of itself and its purpose. 
 
 Their conscience and morality were based upon this 
 quickening ascension. The test of an action was this: 
 does it help in raising the humanity higher in the scale 
 of being ? Nothing could be good that stopped their 
 ascent; nothing could be bad that compelled them to 
 rise more quickly. The elders generally saw at a 
 glance all the bearings of an act and knew whether it 
 contributed to this general aim or not. Where they 
 hesitated on account of the complexity of the problem, 
 they met and discussed it, calling in all the accurate 
 science they had to their aid; if after all they had to 
 lay the question aside unanswered, then was the act 
 left in that neutral zone of conduct which the Lima- 
 norans might or might not enter as they saw fit. Such 
 acts carried no moral discount or credit with them for 
 the time. But often the advance of an age, or even a 
 few years, would remove the act from the neutral zone 
 into the bad or the good; a higher point of view gen- 
 erally solved their doubt. From the opinion of the 
 elders there rayed out magnetically into the young and 
 
628 Limanora 
 
 immature the sense of what was right, to act as con- 
 science where they were incapable of reasoning out the 
 position. 
 
 There was thus no feature of their lives but came 
 within the range of morality. Even the habitual and 
 automatic movements and actions, which form so large 
 a proportion of the life of the other terrestrial races 
 had been reduced to an almost inappreciable propor- 
 tion in theirs and were ever being questioned and 
 tested to see if they harmonised with the newer points 
 of view that had been reached. There was nothing in 
 their whole existence that had not its moral relation- 
 ships. Their sciences and arts, their experiments and 
 inventions, were as much a part of their moral life as 
 their character and their conduct towards each other. 
 Morality was the relationship to the ever-developing, 
 ever-advancing, aim of the race, and nothing in the 
 whole range of their life was indifferent to that. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 A WARNING 
 
 and again there overshadowed the spirit of 
 L, the race a cloud, a foreboding, that contrasted 
 deeply with their usual exhilaration. The intervals 
 between its appearances were often long, occasionally 
 brief. At first I could not understand the cause of it; 
 for I was still in pupillage and had not yet developed 
 the sympathetic magnetism that ultimately made me a 
 member of the race. But, when it recurred once or 
 twice, I began to see that it followed the passions of 
 Lilaroma; and that the families ot the L,eomo were least 
 affected by it and most active whilst it lasted. A nother 
 concomitance was the subsequent importance of the 
 questions connected with inter-stellar migration. 
 
 The discovery of the infinite and invisible life of 
 unorbed space, not only infinitesimal but highly or- 
 ganised, lessened the gloom of these beclouded periods, 
 and made the Limanorans less feverish in their astro- 
 nomic and volitational researches. They felt that the 
 divorce of the higher and lower energies of their 
 human system, commonly called death, was no annihi- 
 lation of their entity, no closure of their career of devel- 
 opment, but only an incident in it, that took the further 
 history of their higher energies out of the reach of the 
 
 629 
 
630 Limanora 
 
 grosser terrestrial senses. They had no need, they 
 felt, to reach out frantically towards some other world. 
 They had lost all fear of death, and all thought of it as 
 the end of their evolution. Still upwards would they 
 climb through higher stages of existence, in spite of 
 the loss of that grosser stepping-stone which we call the 
 body. Knowing how full the interstellar infinities are 
 of vital energies and organisms, and knowing too how 
 the body began a new, though perhaps lower, career 
 at death, they were certain that the vitality and spiritual 
 energy that left it on dissolution, a far loftier and more 
 highly organised entity than the divorced terrene ele- 
 ments, would still exist and still develop. The whole 
 encyclopaedia of their scientific knowledge was opposed 
 to its annihilation, and the discovery of the vital ful- 
 ness of space left no other alternative than that it was 
 thither the spiritual energy of the human personality 
 escaped at death. 
 
 Yet there lingered a tinge of gloom at the time of 
 any overwhelming spasm in the heart of the great 
 mountain; and the Leomo bated not a jot of their ac- 
 tivity at such periods in combating the once-dreaded 
 catastrophe. For they had no definite knowledge of 
 the future pace of their evolution, once the two types 
 of energy in them should be divorced; and they had 
 as a firmly grasped fact their development as they ex- 
 isted upon their island, and the increasing swiftness of 
 its pace as the years went on. They had ever been a 
 people readier to accept a bird in the hand than two in 
 the bush, although they might be fairly confident of 
 their skill in bird-catching. This very preference for 
 facts had helped them to abandon the promises of faith 
 that their old religion had so lavishly held out to them, 
 and to accept the attitude of patiently waiting for light. 
 
A Warning 631 
 
 So now, when their science had found the light and 
 they had every prospect of opening communication with 
 the intelligences that lived just outside of their unaided 
 ken, they would rather wait upon the solid earth till 
 they saw as solid fact to rest on in their flight from the 
 earth. 
 
 They were eager, therefore, to postpone for some 
 generations or ages yet the catastrophe they feared. 
 They had had far back in their history a dim sense of 
 the wrecking power of Lilaroma and its connection 
 with the volcanoes in their old antarctic home. Their 
 more recent earth-science had made the twilight pro- 
 phecy into a clear fact. In an early geological age of 
 the earth the continent round the south pole had sent 
 a broad outlier far north through the southern ocean; 
 it had indeed stretched close up to the equator. This 
 they knew as soon as they began to study the natural 
 history of Limanora and of the archipelago around it. 
 Not merely were the birds of the same or kindred 
 species with those of their old home, but many of them 
 had long preserved the memory of the former bridge 
 between the two ; as the ancient expedition that 
 brought the ancestry of the Limanorans sailed across 
 the intervening ocean, flights of the birds they were 
 familiar with were seen making for their new home, 
 and some of them fell on the decks or settled occasion- 
 ally on the rigging of their ships. Their unscientific 
 and superstitious ancestors took this as an omen of suc- 
 cess; they thought that these birds had been sent from 
 heaven to direct their course, and they steered straight 
 in the line of their flight. The successful result con- 
 firmed them in their superstition for many ages after 
 they had landed on their tropical isles. 
 
 But the careful observation and the science of later 
 
632 Limanora 
 
 times cleared up the mystery. For a period they had 
 taken it as a proof of the similarity of nature all over 
 the world, when they found so much of the fauna and 
 flora like those of their old home. But at last it began 
 to strike cautious observers that certain birds disap- 
 peared during their summer season and reappeared in 
 their winter. Classification soon separated the migra- 
 tory from the localised, and the modifications of the 
 species that they had been accustomed to in their old 
 home from those that were quite new to them. This 
 passed from the birds to the other animals, and thence 
 to the flora. After the observer had done his work of 
 classifying all the animal and plant life, scientific 
 thought entered in and found the causes of both the 
 similarities and the dissimilarities between the new or 
 tropical and the old or antarctic. After many ages the 
 migration of birds lessened; for few returned in the 
 winter, and as the climate became cooler through pro- 
 cess of time, most species preferred to remain the sum- 
 mer long. Then, when an expedition went back to 
 the ancient home of the race in the south, all trace of 
 cultivation and cities had vanished underneath the 
 everlasting snows, and the southern summer was found 
 to be as severe as their ancient winter had been, The 
 increasing rigours of the new climate to the south had 
 reduced the mass of the bird-migrations. 
 
 The expedition followed the long-charted route of 
 the feathered travellers, and on its return sounded the 
 depths and tested the seas and their fauna the whole 
 way. When the investigators had reached the close of 
 their labours, it became patent to them that their voy- 
 age had been along the coast of a buried continent that 
 had had its northernmost point not far to the north of 
 L,ilaroma. Their soundings along the line of bird-route 
 
A Warning 633 
 
 were ever the shallowest, and at points on it, if they 
 left its direction, they suddenly dropped into the 
 deepest of oceans. A mountain - range, sometimes 
 broken into immense precipices and forested along its 
 slopes, had evidently margined the lost continent on its 
 west and had stood the siege of the encroaching ocean 
 through geological ages, till the slow catastrophe of 
 subsidence had sent it under the victorious march of its 
 enemy. Here and there it left a barren rock or a vol- 
 canoed isle like a buoy to mark where its wreckage had 
 been submerged. Everywhere on the bird-line they 
 found a shallow-ocean flora and fauna; if ever they 
 sounded or dredged or fished or dived at any distance 
 from it, they passed into a deeply pelagic belt of life, 
 or rather belt of death. 
 
 It dawned upon them that their old home and their 
 new formed the extremities of the vanished continent, 
 and that their height was one of the consequences of 
 the submergence; the deeper the great submarine range 
 sank, the higher Lil aroma and the lofty torch-mount- 
 ains of their ancient home rose. But repeated visits 
 to their old snow-coffined land, and the expansion of 
 their earth science into an art, gave them farther- 
 reaching views of the causes of this vast subsidence. 
 The old bird-route was one of the most ancient fissure- 
 lines in the crust of the earth. Out of it along its 
 whole length had flowed in the earliest geological ages 
 the oozes of lava that formed the backbone of the old 
 continent as it rose from the sea, its most lasting bas- 
 tion against the encroachments of the watery element. 
 Here and there along the great chain of mountains, as 
 they rose denuded of their softer rocks and stood 
 wrinkled into canons and gorges by the rivers that 
 swept them clean, blazed at long intervals of time huge 
 
634 Limanora 
 
 vents for the smouldering fires underneath. As the 
 mountain-barrier sank and the ocean flowed over its 
 forests that had graved, into the winged species the 
 memory of their ancestral feeding-grounds, and finally 
 closed all the breathing-spaces of the fiery Titan be- 
 neath, his passion sought vent more and more through 
 the torch- cones of the snow-buried southern land and 
 through the lofty crater of I/ilaroma. Expedition after 
 expedition to their ancient home revealed the simul- 
 taneity of volcanic action in the two regions; but the 
 greater the titanic paroxysms in the one, the less they 
 were in the other. They were the two pulses and 
 breathing-vents of the buried giant. 
 
 For many ages after some unknown submarine catas- 
 trophe had hedged them into their archipelago by the 
 untraversible mill-race and the dark belt of mist, they 
 had been unable to test the connection between their 
 own fire-mountain and those in their old home. But 
 they could easily imagine during the paroxysms of 
 L,ilaroma what was occurring far off in the southern 
 snows; and when they had mastered the art of aerial 
 flight, they resumed their expeditions to the glacial 
 regions of the south. Every few years might have 
 been seen, had there been mariners there to see them, 
 the strangest of all flying things, beings in human 
 form, winging their way through the air southwards or 
 northwards. At first the bands were large and well 
 equipped in order to guard against all risks. But in 
 time they grew bolder, and companies of half a dozen, 
 or even three or four, ventured on the long flight to the 
 south. At last the families of earth-scientists were en- 
 trusted with the task, and sent their messengers to re- 
 port on the conduct of the antarctic volcanoes. 
 
 These reported that, if ever those southern vents 
 
A Warning 635 
 
 should close, no application of the art of Leomarie 
 could save Limanora, or indeed the archipelago around, 
 from disastrous explosion. The circular current with 
 its belt of mist had shown that this was the thinnest 
 crust and the weakest point on the whole line of fissure; 
 and if the sea broke into the volcanoes of the other ex- 
 tremity, the steam generated from the percolating water 
 would make for the archipelago and blow it to dust. 
 Recent messengers to the south had found dangerous 
 developments in the regions of snow and ice. Where 
 it lay in the line of the ancient fissure, the land was 
 rapidly subsiding; and that was exactly the locality of 
 the southern volcanoes. If the walls of their craters 
 should sink so low that the waters of the ocean could 
 make breaches in them, then would the final catas- 
 trophe occur to Limanora. 
 
 Whilst the last decennial review was proceeding, and 
 high hopes were rising in the breasts of all that a few 
 generations would see the race independent of the 
 fear of terrestrial cataclysms, their minds were jerked 
 from the future into the present. Our torch-cone sud- 
 denly broke into a great column of steam, and a fine 
 dust fell upon the island. There had been no prelim- 
 inary warning and little had been put in readiness, al- 
 though the Leomo had been uneasy for weeks as they 
 noticed the spasmodic action of their earth-sensors. 
 The heat and the magnetism in their lava-wells had 
 been rapidly changing their degree every few hours. 
 But this had occurred in previous periods without any 
 recorded effect above the surface of the earth. They 
 had therefore only kept more zealous watch without 
 resorting to more than the usual relieving action. 
 
 Now the whole people were called to their assistance, 
 and the concentrated power of Ritula was turned on to 
 
636 Limanora 
 
 the boring of vents. On every side of Ularorna leo- 
 morans were busy, and soon the imprisoned lava and 
 steam escaped by a thousand exits. But a new method 
 was adopted by the Leomo. They shipped in huge 
 faleenas of the newest and most powerful type a 
 number of earth-perforators, and along with them a 
 large quantity of machinery that would enable them 
 to use the wasting energies of the southern elements. 
 Amongst others Thyriel and myself had to manage 
 and steer one of the great aerial cars, for it was chiefly 
 members of the Leomo that manned the expedition. 
 
 High we rose above the archipelago, before we at- 
 tempted to cross the mist-ring. Below us we could see 
 the Limanoran houses and buildings gleam rainbow- 
 hued like bubbles on the beach of an ocean. Higher 
 still, and the various isles of the archipelago crept closer 
 together in the perspective, a handful of emeralds cast 
 upon a plain of azure. Our eyes wandered over the 
 scene and saw how it was set in its dull-white milky 
 ring, a narrow and impenetrable hedge that cut this 
 little world off from the sight of its fellows upon earth. 
 
 Through a cloud we shot that drenched and freshened 
 our gleaming car, then followed the fleet southwards 
 across the circular thread drawn round the nest of 
 islets. We were out in the wider spaces of the world 
 again, and our home receded into a speck on the hori- 
 zon. Over the waste of waters we sped, a great grey 
 plain flecked with white. At first I lost my cool con- 
 fidence in this trackless wilderness; but fearlessness re- 
 turned to me as I saw the face of Thyriel bent now on 
 the Limanoran modifications of the compass, and again 
 on the rest of the fleet to the right and left of us. The 
 lumona or sun-compass and the ularema or sun-chart 
 were our trusty guides by day, even if we had lost sight 
 
A Warning 637 
 
 of our companions at any time; our track had been 
 marked out for us on our sun- chart of the heavens and 
 we could not fail to know where we were, even if clouds 
 should obscure the face of the great orb. If only a 
 few straggling rays managed to reach the face of the 
 instrument, indistinguishable though they might be 
 to our sense of warmth or of light, they affected its 
 delicate apparatus; it told us their exact direction and 
 angle, whilst another face told us the exact point of 
 the day, and of the north and south line. There was 
 needed no calculation to find the region where we were, 
 the lumona did it for us; and it kept tracing our course, 
 as we accomplished it, by means of an indicator on our 
 ularema or day-chart. 
 
 Once I had been instructed by Thyriel in the man- 
 agement and guidance of the air-ship, she lay down to 
 rest ; and I was alone beneath the oppressive paleness 
 of the vault. I dared not look over the side lest the 
 sight of the grey wilderness far below me should make 
 my head swim. Only once did I look up; and the 
 sense of limitlessness numbed me. Now and again I 
 glanced quickly at the rest of the fleet. But I was too 
 fearful lest something should go wrong to turn my eyes 
 away from the tracer of the lumona as it moved upon 
 the sun-chart, or to take my nerve- power from my 
 hands as they grasped, the right the governor of our 
 flight-power and the left the rod of the steering-gear. 
 As the hours flew and nothing untoward occurred, I re- 
 laxed the tension of my system and enjoyed the glide 
 of the ship and sang to the beat of its wings. The 
 sense of solitude passed as I felt the magnetic sympathy 
 of my comrades in the other cars thrill me and my 
 spirits rose with the exhilaration of the heights through 
 which we travelled. 
 
638 Limanora 
 
 The sun had reached the western round of the sea, 
 and swelled into a vast ball of fire. Thyriel awoke as 
 his rim dipped into the ocean and at once prepared for 
 a change of methods. She taught me how to turn on 
 the power of the engine into the rows of huge lamps 
 that were meant to search the darkness of the night. 
 Then she brought out the alumare or star-compass and 
 substituted it for the lumona; she removed the day- 
 chart and put in its place the manularema or night- 
 chart, adjusting the indicator of the star-compass to its 
 tracing. 
 
 Night fell and brought out the lamp-jewelled sides 
 of the other air-ships. They looked like a fleet of 
 gigantic glow-worms sweeping through the air. What 
 we showed like to any wandering ship on the ocean be- 
 neath us it is difficult to imagine. I myself had tra- 
 versed those solitary levels in the Daydream, and I tried 
 to think how I could have explained the strange phen- 
 omenon had I seen it from my deck. The superstitious 
 amongst my sailors might have taken it for a portent, 
 some as one from heaven, others as one from hell. 
 The scientific would have concluded it to be a series of 
 fireballs travelling before an upper current of the 
 winds. I should have recorded it in my note-book 
 among the observations of meteors and other similar 
 phenomena, and have waited further illumination. By 
 day we were too high to attract the attention of anyone 
 but the investigator of cloud-changes and weather- 
 signs, and we saw no sign of human life during our 
 long aerial voyage to the south. But away beneath us 
 we could just descry floating brown specks swiftly trac- 
 ing their zigzag course over the grey plain and knew 
 them for the broad-winged albatrosses, whose flight the 
 L,imanorans had so carefully studied for the construe- 
 
A Warning 639 
 
 tion and navigation of their faleenas. For by an auto- 
 matic arrangement which brought the currents of the 
 wind to bear upon the steering-gear, our car now grace- 
 fully rose, and again as gracefully fell when the wind 
 was against it, now swept to this side, now glided to 
 that. All that I had to think of was the main course. 
 On a later voyage even the steersman was superfluous, 
 except in a storm or violent change of winds; for a chart 
 was invented on which the course of the voyage was 
 traced in the shape of a metal groove, and in this the 
 end of the steering-rod was made to move. The two 
 automatic movements governed the manipulation of 
 the winds and the course of the car. It was the same 
 with the engines that achieved the beat of the wings; 
 the slightest change in the opposing medium commun- 
 icated itself to the electric power and modified it. All 
 that was needed from the occupants of the faleena was 
 a little attention now and again to see that the ma- 
 chinery was working smoothly and solidly, and to en- 
 sure that the steering-rod adjusted itself to the caprices 
 of the wind. 
 
 On this, our first long aerial expedition, one of us 
 had always to be at the helm, although I found after 
 a few watches that there was needed but little ten- 
 sion either of muscle or nerve to keep the ship to her 
 course. Thyriel took the first half of the night and 
 of the day, and I took the other two sections. When 
 I awoke in the middle of the first night and took 
 my place at the helm, the sight bewildered and dazed 
 me; I felt as if I had gone back again into the region 
 of dream. The stars seemed to throb close in upon 
 me; I felt as if in a cosmic confessional with myriads 
 of world-eyes wide open to see into my heart. I was 
 not afraid; yet my veins throbbed in awe before this 
 
640 Limanora 
 
 palpitation of the cosmos. But I settled down to my 
 task and grew conscious of the surrounding fleet of fire- 
 flies, that even at their great distance from me numbed 
 my eyes with the flash of their lamps and paled the 
 light of the stars. Beneath me, as I looked over the 
 bulwark, there was nothing but the solid blackness of 
 midnight; never had I felt so isolated. Thoughts 
 wove as unceasingly in my brain as the wing-beats 
 wove upon the loom of night. Now and again was I 
 stirred from my meditation by the swoop of our faleena 
 as it breasted some great billow of wind. So precip- 
 itous were some of those waves that my heart leapt in 
 my bosom, as we rose before them or slid down them. 
 I never passed a night of such intensity of exhilaration 
 and thought. There was my lifelong comrade peace- 
 fully sleeping as I watched; the infinities above mag- 
 netised me with their sympathies, as their eyes searched 
 me to the heart; below me the midnight brooded si- 
 lently over what I knew to be the untracked ocean. 
 
 Day after day, night after night, we sped on, the air 
 growing rapidly colder, till, for the sake of my unadapt- 
 able system, we drew the transparent oval roof over the 
 faleena and fixed the radiator which kept the tempera- 
 ture at an even level. Thereafter the stars were not so 
 omnipresent in their gaze; there was more of a limit to 
 the space in which we dwelt; and the movements of 
 the faleena impressed themselves less upon my senses. 
 
 At last as my watch was ending one moonless night 
 I could see a dim flare in the southern sky which I took 
 for the aurora australis. But when Thyriel gazed at it 
 and then at the agitation of the fireflies abreast of us, 
 she knew it was the reflection of the great antarctic 
 torch-mountains. I rose at dawn and could see be- 
 low us the white glacial cliffs of the polar continent. 
 
A Warning 641 
 
 Thyriel seemed stirred by some emotion that I was ig- 
 norant of, but soon knew to be the recognition of the 
 original home of her race; there seemed to move in her 
 blood the ancestral yearning for the land from which 
 they had come. She did not shrivel up in the excess- 
 ive cold as I did, but looked forward with ecstasy to 
 moving amid the snow and the ice, though she had seen 
 little of them in her own short life except around the 
 crater of L,ilaroina. 
 
 Bred though I had been in the rigorous winters of 
 Scotland, I could not bear the bite of the wind and had 
 to put on one of their cold-repelling garments. This 
 consisted of two layers of flexible irelium-woven cloth, 
 one of which was a conductor of electricity and the 
 other a resister of it. The outer or conducting layer 
 was connected with some labramor which carried a 
 store of electricity and this combination produced a 
 warm, healthful glow all round the body. I had gloves 
 and cap and mask of the same construction and, when 
 fully equipped, I could defy the most bitter cold that 
 the upper atmosphere of the earth ever experienced. 
 
 With this armour on I looked forward with delight 
 to our sojourn in the region of snow and ice as I 
 watched our approach to the rough ocean-like surface 
 of the new country. For Thyriel took the helm, now 
 that there was needed more delicate manipulation of 
 the faleena, and I stood in the bow and gazed at the 
 rest of the fleet rising and falling on the wind-waves. 
 Now and again I interpreted a signal from the faleena 
 of the guiding elder, whilst my comrade was busy 
 adapting the course to the caprices of the wind. But 
 as a rule her own magnetic sense was alert enough to 
 know what were the intentions of the other air-ships. 
 
 Round the group of great fire-cones we coasted, 
 
642 Limanora 
 
 keeping clear of their smoke-brush and dust- vomit; for 
 the wind was off the land and bore their ejections miles 
 out to sea and high into the air. Across the icy plains, 
 ridged and hummocked by pressure from the higher 
 land beyond, we flew, once rising high enough to get 
 a glance over the passes of the great mountain-barrier, 
 whence the torrents of ice slowly found their way to 
 the coast. Beyond I could discern, even with my 
 undeveloped eye-power, level plains stretching to the 
 horizon, plains which indicated water underneath; and 
 upon them the direction of the furrows and hummocks 
 revealed whither the mass of the sea beneath flowed to- 
 wards some narrow exit, overlapping and play ing leap- 
 frog in its eagerness to escape the pressure from 
 behind. 
 
 But the habits of this almost land-locked sea had no 
 immediate interest for us, and we soon turned and made 
 before the wind for a valley that lay sheltered between 
 the mountain - chain and the group of torch - cones. 
 Within a brief time we had all our faleenas secured, 
 and the multitudinous rings of the leomorans they 
 carried deposited in caves ready for the coming opera- 
 tions. Then the elder who led the expedition took his 
 air-ship, and with it we saw him circle round the indi- 
 vidual volcanoes and reconnoitre the inroads of the sea. 
 He had, we knew, already seen the dangerous prox- 
 imity of one new crater to the low coast that divided 
 the group of fire-hills from the galloping waves. 
 
 Manifestly expedition was demanded. For he re- 
 turned with great swiftness; and all was soon bustle 
 and preparation in the camp, although it had settled 
 down for a rest. The word was passed round that, if 
 the wind changed and whipped the racing billows to 
 their raid, a high tide might find its way into the new 
 
A Warning 643 
 
 crater and undo the local work of Limanoran civilisa- 
 tion. The fleet was at once in the air with the engines 
 ready to be placed; and within two hours the winds 
 and the waves, the magnetism of the earth, and the 
 electricity of the air had been yoked to the great 
 power-machines. Then the rings of the leomorans 
 were attached, and the stores of energy brought to 
 bear on them; before long we could see at a dozen 
 different points high up the side of the cone brushes of 
 black smoke bending before the wind. Between the 
 new low crater and the old lofty one a score of new 
 vents for the explosive energy of the fires underneath 
 had been worked into the crust of the earth ere the 
 wind had changed round into alliance with the waters. 
 The molten rock which had oozed from the dangerous 
 cone at the edge of the sea had sealed its mouth before 
 the ocean leapt into it. In order to make the seal more 
 secure a sluggish river of lava was directed down the 
 slope from several leomorans, and sent over the lips of 
 the exposed crater. After every sign of the offending 
 cone but a low hummock had disappeared under the 
 molten invasion, bastions were drawn all along the 
 coast beneath it in the manner familiar to L,imanora. 
 
 When this fortification of the mountain was finished 
 and the strain upon our muscles and nerves, and espe- 
 cially upon our eyes, was relieved, we had leisure to 
 look about us. The sight that met our view, as we 
 looked down the slopes of the mountain, was deeply 
 impressive. The flow of the red-hot rock from the 
 mouths of our lava- wells had melted the glacial concre- 
 tions for hundreds of yards beyond the margins of the 
 molten currents, and laid bare the ruins of a great city 
 that had evidently been buried in ice and snow since 
 the lowering of the temperature had made the climate 
 
644 Limanora 
 
 unbearable by men of civilised nurture and habits. 
 The steam rising from the neighbourhood of ice and 
 fire had covered the disentombed secret from our vision 
 whilst we were working, and as the wind fell that had 
 swept the veil aside for a moment, the marvellous sight 
 was again curtained over, and we began to think that 
 it had been but a waking dream. 
 
 Some days after, when the lava had sufficiently 
 cooled to leave portions of the defrosted slope open to 
 the light of heaven, we revisited the scene. Several 
 broad streets and great squares had been unburied ; and 
 the architecture revealed how artistic and how ad- 
 vanced in mechanical contrivances the people that built 
 them had been, A thick covering of volcanic dust and 
 ash had plastered them over, so that it was difficult to 
 move on foot amongst the ruins now that the moisture 
 of the melting ice had mingled with it. After clearing 
 the debris from the doors we entered some of the houses 
 that had not lost their roofs, and there was evidence of 
 hasty flight; on the floors and couches were strewn 
 pellrnell the contents of boxes and cupboards and ward- 
 robes, half of them still stiff with the ice that the ad- 
 jacent streams of lava had been unable to melt. The 
 evacuation of this luxurious city had evidently occurred 
 during some great outburst of the volcano which had 
 threatened its existence. But the climate had grown 
 rigorous before the catastrophe; for in every house and 
 every room there were elaborate apparatus for heating, 
 and most of the clothing lying about was of fur or of 
 thick, warm stuffs, and when we dug beneath the coat- 
 ing of volcanic ash, we found in places accumulations 
 of ice which must have taken years to freeze. Layer 
 after layer of dirt and rubbish had been embedded by 
 the preservative frost; and, had we cared to cut through 
 
A Warning 645 
 
 the stratified ice, we might have counted the years, or 
 perhaps centuries, through which this heap had ac- 
 cumulated. 
 
 For several visits we could find no human body, 
 though we came across one or two carcasses of emaci- 
 ated 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 pene- 
 trated 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 cent- 
 uries 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 exal- 
 tation 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 al- 
 truistic 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 press- 
 ure of the subterranean fires that were threatening 
 
646 Limanora 
 
 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 L,imanoran 
 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. Thy- 
 riel 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 fol- 
 lowing 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 bil- 
 lows 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 open- 
 ing 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 
 
A Warning 647 
 
 Thyriel took flight from above, and with the impetus 
 we bore ourselves and the boat through one of the pas- 
 sages 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 brill- 
 iantly, 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 
 
648 Limanora 
 
 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 our- 
 selves and, taking aim, dashed through the narrow en- 
 trance, 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 Lima- 
 noran 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 north- 
 wards 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 dwell- 
 ings, 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 
 
A Warning 649 
 
 to their masters and ignorance still kept them unrebel- 
 lious in their growing embrutement, till the volcanic 
 catastrophe solved the problem of their future relation- 
 ships. Whither the survivors had gone, when the out- 
 burst 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 expedi- 
 tions 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 ob- 
 vious. 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 catas- 
 trophe; but the amount of subsidence varied from 
 
650 Limanora 
 
 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 over- 
 whelmed 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 
 
A Warning 651 
 
 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 cham- 
 ber 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 un- 
 earthed 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 L,ima- 
 norans, 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 rigor- 
 ous 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 archi- 
 pelago before their own senses, to allay any eager- 
 ness 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 
 
652 Limanora 
 
 acquantance with it. In Fialume we had studied sim- 
 ilar histories during our pupillage; and daily could we 
 watch through the idrovamolan the enactment of simi- 
 lar life in the islands around Limanora. A little ap- 
 parent 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 super- 
 ficial and unvital. It was enough to make the lyima- 
 noran 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 
 
A Warning 653 
 
 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 L,imanora. 
 
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 espe- 
 cially 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 astro-biological, 
 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 re- 
 sult 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 subsid- 
 ence of their old home meant a transference of the de- 
 structive power of the subterranean fires to the other 
 
 654 
 
Religion 655 
 
 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. Hre 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 everlast- 
 ing ice where their remote ancestry had dwelt; and that 
 too might at any moment flash into dust before the ex- 
 plosive 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 pre- 
 paring for it by inventions that would enable them to 
 float clear of the terrestrial atmosphere for many cent- 
 uries, and by explorations in interstellar space. But 
 many discoveries and thoughts had thrown a new light 
 upon this stellar migration. The} 7 would have to ex- 
 ist 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 cent- 
 uries the conquests of the elements and of the forces 
 of nature, that they had achieved in Limauora. The 
 
656 Limanora 
 
 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 swift- 
 winging faleenas. 
 
 If every condition of their interstellar voyage were 
 the same as their life in their own L,imanora, 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 oblit- 
 erate 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 inter- 
 stellar vagabondage, poor beggars of the cosmos, seek- 
 ing 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 
 
Religion 657 
 
 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 Leorno 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 hu- 
 man 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 out- 
 strip 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, op- 
 portunities, 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 sec- 
 tion cf 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 ani- 
 mal 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 
 
658 Limanora 
 
 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 sav- 
 ages; there they might preserve their isolation as per- 
 fectly 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 hypo- 
 critical 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 ele- 
 ments. Out of their shattered bodies would rise the 
 energy of their systems to follow its career of develop- 
 ment untrammelled by any slow-moving matter that 
 was half inert whether living or dead. Death so sud- 
 
Religion 659 
 
 den as that, death under any cirumstances or condi- 
 tions, was no stop or misfortune to the highest that 
 was in them; it was the swiftest way to achieve migra- 
 tion 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 con- 
 sciousness 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 trammel led 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 marvel- 
 lous machinery and inyentjons and their accumulation 
 
660 Limanora 
 
 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 build- 
 ings 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 superin- 
 tend 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 dis- 
 covering 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 hal- . 
 cyon view of the world; yet the rapture and the long- 
 ing never withdrew them from immediate pursuits and 
 
Religion 66 1 
 
 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 intensi- 
 fication of their usual feelings and attitude to life. 
 This was nearer than anything else I had experienced 
 in lyimanora to the unperturbed faith in a higher being 
 and the yearning for proximity to him that I had wit- 
 nessed in those whom we used in Europe to call, for lack 
 of a less trite term, saints. At the next Manora or de- 
 cennial review the predominating interest was the the- 
 opathic 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 evo- 
 lution 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 
 
662 Limanora 
 
 qualities that made one worship higher and more ad- 
 vanced 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 re- 
 ligion 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 er 
 
 /ideavours to purify and develop the faith handed down 
 to them from their forefathers were there as vividly 
 pictured as any faith from the world outsidej They 
 
 ^ Bad 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 at- 
 tracted 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 up- 
 root an institution that had evidently grown out of the 
 
Religion 663 
 
 most intimate instincts of the race. The higher digni- 
 taries were so lordly and influential they might easily 
 control even by their private alliances and social dom- 
 inance the powers of the state; and the poorer hiero- 
 phants had ingratiated themselves with the middle 
 classes and proletariate, from whom they came. Rev- 
 erence, 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 Jtsel 
 be overthrown ? fy s&* && 3^"" 
 
 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 
 the church, except the solid walls of the tem 
 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 lyimanora; 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 expe- 
 ditions 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 
 
664 Limanora 
 
 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 unper- 
 ceived 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 de- 
 molished the ancient temples, and put their stones to 
 new and seemingly secular uses. But once the trans- 
 formation 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 re- 
 ligion alone gave the guaranty of all morality and 
 civilisation were alike baseless. After a decade or two, 
 
Religion 665 
 
 when they began to reflect on their past and analyse 
 their new states of mind and public feeling, they dis- 
 covered the most striking effect of this abeyance of ec- 
 clesiasticism 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 ex- 
 istence. 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 whatsover pleased them, 
 be it irreligious, wicked, or even vile. The religious 
 section of their lives threw its consecrating and protect- 
 ing 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 re- 
 ligion when they went into the temples. The speciali- 
 sation 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 chan- 
 nel, except in rare seasons of enthusiasm, when it floods 
 the adjacent regions and does universal havoc. 
 
 Formerly the most religious had been the least trust- 
 worthy in the ordinary business of life, and they had 
 
666 Limanora 
 
 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 con- 
 stancy 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 in- 
 sist 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 dis- 
 appeared. Kvery 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 coufd 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 delay- 
 ing the true purpose of existence; even acts of rever- 
 ence 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 
 
Religion 667 
 
 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 L,imanorans felt themselves 
 to be against the infinity of the cosmos, they refused 
 to formulate their worship lest it should fall into par- 
 asitism, 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 his- 
 tory and in contemporary life of the symbiosis of wor- 
 shippers 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 
 
668 Limanora 
 
 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 de- 
 lude 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 im- 
 morality 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 petri- 
 faction. 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 insti- 
 tution. 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 
 
Religion 669 
 
 the enthusiasm of a faith might be in its early stage, it 
 inevitably became the tomb of the human spirit. Oc- 
 cult 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 de- 
 velop; 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 mys- 
 terious. 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 com- 
 munion 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 
 
670 Limanora 
 
 would have been desecration to put their seerlike long- 
 ing 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-con- 
 scious life, and it held firmly that no finality could 
 have yet been reached, that there was nobler life be- 
 yond 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 reve- 
 lations 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 pro- 
 gressed. 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. 
 
Religion 671 
 
 For a dead book that retained its sacredness became 
 a fetich and obstructed development. Not only did 
 they reverence their sacred books; every noble utter- 
 ance, 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 on- 
 wards 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 mag- 
 netic 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; 
 
672 Limanora 
 
 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 imagi- 
 native amongst them; for they had their eyes bent un- 
 flinchingly on the future. Theirs it was to see that the 
 race was ever advancing. They never suffered the pres- 
 ent to interfere with the development that was to be. 
 They stirred their fellow-Umanorans 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 illumina- 
 tion 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 in- 
 finitude, but they would have no dealings with it be- 
 yond 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 
 
Religion 673 
 
 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 reduc- 
 tion 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 infin- 
 itude within the scope of his soul. Thus could he ap- 
 proach to communion with the heart and soul of the 
 cosmos, with the sun of all things. Not in one genera-, 
 tion 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 un- 
 hampered 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 
 
 43 
 
674 Limanora 
 
 existing human life. To worship even the idea of hu- 
 manity, 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 hu- 
 man 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 anthropo- 
 morphic 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 super- 
 seded if the spirit of man should rise above the condi- 
 tions 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 
 
Religion 675 
 
 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 pro- 
 duce advance that is to be felt, or that acts as a stimulus 
 to farther advance. It is seldom that unconscious pro- 
 gress is other than material, whilst it inevitably entails 
 reaction into stagnancy or retrogression. Nay, the 
 whole human race at times takes a run forward, arid 
 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 ex- 
 istence 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 lat- 
 ter. 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 
 
676 Limanora 
 
 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 trans- 
 formation which made it the saviour of man, the ul- 
 timately 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 
 
Religion 677 
 
 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 char- 
 ity and self-sacrifice have been sublimated and trans- 
 cended, where new senses have opened gateways for a 
 new knowledge which would once have been called su- 
 persensible. 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 in- 
 stincts 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 suc- 
 cessful 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 con- 
 sciousness 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 
 
678 Limanora 
 
 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 Ivimanoran horizon was too rapidly widening to 
 allow of more than the most cursory survey of the de- 
 generate 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 L,imanoran 
 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, act- 
 ing as a gigantic ooloran, gathered the sound-waves 
 that travelled through space and used them to shape 
 
Religion 679 
 
 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 in- 
 choate 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 re- 
 sonator 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 trans- 
 late 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 uni- 
 verse 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 crea- 
 tion. It was now not only possible, but within the 
 
680 Limanora 
 
 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 cere- 
 monial. On and on must their art of musical sonarchi- 
 tecture 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 dis- 
 covery 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 be- 
 liefs 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. Kvil lay in returning to one of 
 these after knowing and fulfilling something higher. 
 It is this against which the human spirit girds when 
 
Religion 68 1 
 
 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 an- 
 tagonistic. They saw none of the strict divisions in 
 nature that Western science and philosophy knew, ar- 
 ranging 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 Him- 
 self 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 vege- 
 table 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 uni- 
 verse. 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 
 
682 Limanora 
 
 more subtle mediums of energy in the universe, medi- 
 ums 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 pow- 
 ers of the senses a thousandfold. 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. 
 
Religion 683 
 
 A book of the time pointed out a science as far be- 
 yond 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 manifest- 
 ations 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 infin- 
 itude. 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 im- 
 mortality. They would be able so to refine and sub- 
 limate 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 
 
684 Limanora 
 
 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 alli- 
 ance with grosser and more perishable media in order 
 to rise in the scale of existence; decay and death be- 
 come 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 transform- 
 ations. The lyimanorans had taken this aim of terres- 
 trial 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 hu- 
 man 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 hiero- 
 phant. 
 
 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 as- 
 tromagnetism might themselves be called the highways 
 
Religion 685 
 
 to God. The embodied energy and life of the earth on 
 this side of death seem to the human mind self-explan- 
 atory 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 L,imanoran 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 debris 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 L,imanorans. It was the life of 
 such beings that the science of this people aimed at 
 knowing intimately. On some stars, they were cer- 
 tain, 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 ex- 
 istence 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 dissolu- 
 tion 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 
 
686 Limanora 
 
 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 evo- 
 lution 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, 
 
Religion 687 
 
 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 his- 
 tory of every one of them and nothing of them is lost; 
 the energy of everything that seems to die has but dis- 
 tilled 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. No- 
 thing 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 sys- 
 tems 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 oc- 
 casionally allowed themselves to think that this was 
 
688 Limanora 
 
 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 conserva- 
 tion 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 strug- 
 gled. The grosser forms of energy were the caput mor- 
 tuum 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 accus- 
 tomed to. Every new faith is a miracle to its early be- 
 lievers; 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 
 
Religion 689 
 
 them accept it as the final revelation, and their de- 
 scendants, 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 re- 
 ligion. 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 re- 
 belling against their power; whilst the human is at- 
 tained when this rebellion rises into capacity to rule 
 them and mould them to its will. It emphasised the 
 Limauoran 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 hajd 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 arid in those of the civilised who fall away 
 
690 Limanora 
 
 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 k 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 everywhere by their 
 results, the marks of intelligence throughout the cos- 
 mos. 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 uni- 
 verse 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 myr- 
 iads 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 L,imanorans 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 
 
Religion 691 
 
 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 in- 
 ward 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 be- 
 gin 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 re- 
 velation 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 sur- 
 roundings 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 an- 
 other 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 om- 
 nipotent edition of itself. With its vision and all its 
 
692 Limanora 
 
 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 etherealis.ed 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 infin- 
 itude 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 in- 
 vestigations. To know the cosmos better was to ap- 
 proach nearer to the spirit of the cosmos, .to grow more 
 truly religious. 
 
 The last decennial review that I witnessed, occur- 
 ring 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 
 
Religion 693 
 
 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 lyimanorans 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 re- 
 verenced for their pioneering power; but as soon as sci- 
 entific 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 
 
 THK 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 be- 
 fore the infinities and eternities was the last attitude 
 they would encourage; for they considered it blas- 
 phemy against the spirit of the cosmos. If the Man- 
 ora had in any way withdrawn their energies from 
 
 694 
 
The Last Flight 695 
 
 their forward march, they would have abolished it. 
 Progress was religion, or the fulfilment of the irrepress- 
 ible 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 contradic- 
 tion in terms. Religion was in Umanora 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 mo- 
 ment 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 L,eomo; 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 sud- 
 den and ominous lull during the latter half of the Man- 
 ora; the earth had grown quiescent and the whole 
 summit of Umanora stood vivid and clear in the 
 azure. 
 
 The Leomo were not deceived by this sudden cessa- 
 tion 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 
 
696 Limanora 
 
 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 quick- 
 ened 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 blind- 
 ing snowstorm, 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 pur 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 guard- 
 
The Last Flight 697 
 
 ians, as they stood watching our flight after giving us 
 of their magnetism. 
 
 Nothing occurred to make the voyage south espe- 
 cially 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 snowstorm, and we would assuredly have im- 
 perilled our faleena in attempting to come to earth in 
 the baffling winds. 
 
 At last we felt the magnetism of the upper atmo- 
 sphere 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 
 
698 Limanora 
 
 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 inor- 
 dinate slowness, so eager were our spirits to know the 
 new phenomena and to carry the report back to L,ima- 
 nora. 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 debris 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 
 
The Last Flight 699 
 
 explosion or were tottering before the assaults of the 
 billows. The storm that we had encountered had evi- 
 dently 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 pyro- 
 techny. 
 
 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 fast- 
 ened 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 
 
700 Limanora 
 
 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 con- 
 vulsion. 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 mag- 
 nitude of the disturbance impressed us. New preci- 
 pices 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 pal- 
 impsest 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 vol- 
 canic 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 abrupt- 
 ness and extent of their work; but the great ice-planes 
 and ice-harrows had been already smoothing and round- 
 ing or levelling the serrated or sharp edges. Only in 
 one new cliff did we see a repetition of the now hidden 
 
The Last Flight 701 
 
 record. A bold hill had been cut through as by a 
 sword and here had evidently been built and over- 
 whelmed village after village; we could discern here 
 and there traces of their employments suddenly 
 abandoned, their looms and ploughs and anvils em- 
 balmed 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 debris. 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 investiga- 
 tions, only to find countless signs of renewed subter- 
 ranean 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, unpro- 
 vided 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. Per- 
 chance 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 
 
702 Limanora 
 
 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 diffi- 
 culty, 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 conscious- 
 ness 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 sup- 
 plying 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 pro- 
 tracted a voyage. My powers of flight were still so 
 crude and undeveloped and my locomotion through 
 
The Last Flight 703 
 
 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 exhilara- 
 tion enough for both. My sinking heart felt the in- 
 fluence 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 heav- 
 ing 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 rest- 
 ing-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 sub- 
 marine 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 
 
704 Limanora 
 
 upon it. Here Thy tiel .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 Liina- 
 norans never take it into the calculations of their voy- 
 ages 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 atmo- 
 sphere where is usually found perfect calm and perfect 
 freedom from cloud and storm, but the fury of the dis- 
 turbance seemed to be miles deep. The upper air was 
 as thick and turbulent as the lower. 
 
 Our troubles culminated in disaster to my wing-ap- 
 pendages. I was never expert in their management, 
 but in the baffling storm I grew helpless and in my de- 
 spair let them beat almost unguided. The result was 
 irreparable injury to the left wing and such an obstruc- 
 tion to the movement of the right as made it unman- 
 ageable. 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 to- 
 wards 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 
 
The Last Flight 705 
 
 had often done when learning to fly, in the hollow be- 
 tween 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 ap- 
 proaching 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 sud- 
 denly 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, 
 
 45 
 
;o6 Limanora 
 
 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 pre- 
 paring to leap from her back, when she seemed sud- 
 denly to collapse. I fell through the air, and then 
 knew no more till I awakened in your hut. What be- 
 came of Thyriel puzzled me for long. But I am per- 
 suaded that after seeing me drawn by you safely to 
 land she went off before the favouring wind towards 
 L,imanora 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 be- 
 came 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 disap- 
 peared. 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 pur- 
 chase 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 
 
 707 
 
78 Limanora 
 
 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 approache'd ; 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 archi- 
 pelago 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 para- 
 dise. In the meantime he would be able to study the 
 charts of the region, and define the knowledge of it 
 
Epilogue 79 
 
 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 bril- 
 liant 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, seem- 
 ing 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. Sud- 
 denly a strange, scarcely human cry awakened our at- 
 tention. 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 scarce) v a 
 sign of it in movement or breath, only a fragment of 
 
7io Limanora 
 
 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 inci- 
 dent 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 wrap- 
 pings 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 move- 
 ments 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 
 
Epilogue 
 
 711 
 
 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. 
 
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