Limanora

CHAPTER VI
FIALUME

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 various roads that led into the wild tropical scenery of the dale. I never saw such an impressive spectacle beneath human roof. Cataract rose above cataract in the centre. On all sides fell miniature cascades, or rose fountains that sent in wayward clouds their breaking 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 wondrous 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 loftiness 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 personality. He came I knew not whence, and the suddenness 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. There seemed to come from him even before he spoke or recognised our presence a benign and godlike influence, 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 stratification 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 development. After explaining that he was to be the interpreter 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 movements of the head and eyes; wherever I gazed as I reclined thither my rest wheeled round. This I afterwards discovered was managed by hidden springs in 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 inherent 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 hollows rising now by easy gradations, again by bold platforms 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 something in the terracing of the valley, too, that suggested the hand of man. Nature’s work had been supplemented and rounded by noble art. There was regularity 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 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 difference 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 calcareous 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 ornamentation 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 discovered, the careful study of the petrifactive methods of nature had led to the new and rapid process of immortalising 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. 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 resurrection and when they buried the bodies deep in the earth beneath the urned rock recesses. A period of reaction 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 percolating 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 removed 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 percolations that came along the surface of the rock down the hill had done their work, and an accident in digging 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 valley when they had turned into stone.

After we had viewed the whole scene from our platform under Oolmo’s direction, he bade us enter a car that had sprung up at his touch. It seemed made of 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, descending the flights of steps at times to view the statuesque dead and their surroundings. Here 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 to confirm it. Every new group we encountered produced 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 gladness, 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 receded, the more familiar the forms and features seemed to become, so like were they to the normal human beings of our Western world. Animalism, sensuousness, 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. Splendid animals they had been; and, as our interpreter 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 falsehoods 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 Limanorans.

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 eradicate the desire of family life. If they could not eradicate 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 Fialume, we entered another faleena, which had been substituted for our disabled car. We shot farewell glances at Oolmo and were off in the air before I had well disentangled my thoughts from the last sight. Below us receded the massive archways of the door and the foaming streams at the entrance of the valley. The jubilant 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 question Thyriel on some of the mysteries of the day. She had not much light to throw on them, for she was herself 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 Thyriel, 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 acquainted with the history of Limanora, and saw the gradual development of the civilisation and of the human 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 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 consciousness 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 human 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 magnetism 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 geological 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 of aërolites on its crust, expanded its texture and partially 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 becoming 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 gravitation, 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 aërial voyaging; 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 a day. Material progress meant nothing to the Limanorans 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 progress. And, that no section of life might be left at the mercy of accident, there worked with the representatives of every family one or two supernumeraries. Thus new blood was introduced, for the alien was generally chosen from a family not even distantly connected, and had such a nature and temperament as would be likely to lead to marriage and to the best results 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 petrified bodies attracted me with tenfold power. Every 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 attraction to the place was its seclusion; it was almost the only family grove that had not two or three studying 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 generations, 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 undiscriminative 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 relationship 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 Leomo, which meant earth-seers, and its department was the study of the 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 discovery 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 thinking. The wider my knowledge, the more my admiration 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 conclusions 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 indexed 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’ researches 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, available in every grove. Anything that was obscure could 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 purpose 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 community 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, sketching 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. Imagination, it was held by the Limanorans, was apt to be a futile, if not mischievous, faculty through want of its being ranged on the side of utility; and yet, if trammelled and yoked to the necessity of practice in the individual, it came to be stifled. They specially cultivated 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 frippery” of European literature, which used imagination as a mere means of entertainment. It seemed a complete 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 expression. 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 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 imagination 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. Literature 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!

Like 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 instincts 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 intellectual 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 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 professional teacher; for these get buried in unreality before 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 marriage; 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. 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 investigation 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 direction, 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 Limanoran; or, when placed in the voice instrument, speaking 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 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 ancestors’ 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 magnetism from the dead minds gradually welding our souls together.

Yet there was nothing personal or emotional in our studies. For years they were chiefly historical, watching the growth of earth-science through the generations, seeing the share that each member had in its development. 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 explain the origin and development of the strange archipelago 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 had grown accustomed to during the previous or general 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 historoscope. 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 representatives 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 instruments. 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 wanting 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 generation 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 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 Leomo, 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 applications of the science throughout the island. Taking some new apparatus, they embarked me in a kind of 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 aërial car had no wings, but rose by means of the many vacuum tubes which were the most important part of its impelling machinery. A powerful electric engine created and destroyed the vacuums many hundred times a minute. Each 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 swiftness. Indeed, laden though we were, we kept pace easily with the flight of my companions and guides through the air; and its parachute attachments obviated 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 atmosphere, 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 currents, 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, 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; for many apparently insoluble problems had been solved in a manner that made incredulity hide its head.