Limanora

CHAPTER X
THE FIRLA, OR ELECTRIC SENSE

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 applied. These life-lamps appealed not only to their eyes and ears, but to their electric sense. They isolated the magnetic force as well as the sounds and appearance 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 of force 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 graphic record of their mirlans, as the microscope magnifies for the sight. I could see and hear the movements 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 measurable. 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 definable. 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 sensitive 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 intervening 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 attention upon its nature. They soon defined it as a localised electric sense and by practice made it as keen at least as the sense of touch in the fingers. They were at last able to define the direction of an electric influence 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 relationship 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. 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 instinctive 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 application of it. A further development was a soothing influence 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 interplay of thought and emotion. It is true they could not easily communicate any unspiritual fact, needing some concrete image, unless they employed the code of eye-signals which every Limanoran learned; this combined 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 magnetic 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 intercourse 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 communicate even emotions and impulses at such a distance; 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 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 spectacles, 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 electric 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 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 personality, 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 revealing its secret even to its possessor. There was to me something very winsome in 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 magnetism 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 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 pictured, with the eye. In another there was firlamaic sculpture; in this were gathered the noblest achievements 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 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 imagination 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 common 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 descriptions and resolves, and thought upon my incapacity to understand them. In a moment she knew my dejection, and realised how forgetful she had been of me and of her surroundings. She at once threw off her imaginative 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 encouragement 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 Limanoran 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 lightning 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 managed 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 infinite 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 immeasurable 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 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 monstrous forms. Last 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. 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 overlooked 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 magnetism 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.

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 physical 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 impetus that the torrent of the blood through its channels 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 deleterious 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 induration of the brain and heart-tissues. Here any region of the starry night they chose could be made to concentrate its magnetic influence upon their firla. A man might take a new tract and new blending of imaginative 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.

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 inhabitants 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 consciousness 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 constellations 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 existence I had ever known. I seemed to breathe with 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 between 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 experienced 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 abandoned 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 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 exaltation 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.