Limanora

CHAPTER XV
THE DUOMOVAMOLAN OR COSMOPHONE

THOUGH the Limanorans calmly pursued their regular employments during these attempts at invasion, I had myself felt the uneasy spiritual atmosphere that precedes and presages turmoil. None but the Lilamo 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 exceptional stimulus was needed to raise their lives and 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 problems. Purposes here moved to conclusions with lightning 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 Lilaroma. 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 Lilaroma, 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 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 terrace 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 compare 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 gossamer. 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 sounded empty, so vast was it and so silent were all. The slightest whisper rang across its great untrammelled spaces with the sharpness of a word beside us. Not a column or beam or ornament broke the harmonious 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-off music. To me there was as deep stillness as before. I listened intently, but felt no change except 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 at last the system wheeled on through darkness, seeming 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, translating 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 contrivance 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 modulated. One key could make the apparatus soundproof 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 volume, 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.

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 hearing; 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 immense 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, 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 sublimity. 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 lightning 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 duomovamolan, a marvellous instrument which reversed the processes of Oolorefa, we heard the harmony 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 converting 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 produced could be made themselves to reproduce it.

From the use of this little instrument it came to be seen that their telescopes could by a little modification 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 conceived 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 tremendous 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 melodies still ringing in our ears.

When the treasured-up music of the spheric movements 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 infinite 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 constellations. Sleep came on me by unconscious, scarce-heard footfalls, and through its magic portal the universe 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 immaterial, that I felt ashamed of my body and its sensuous methods of knowledge; so ethereal were the beings there that the common forces of gravitation and attraction 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 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 constitution 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 creation, 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! Looking 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 uplifting 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 immediate 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 proportion 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 infinities was enough to throw human conquests, however great they might seem, into pettiness and oblivion. Thus the evil spirit such events might raise was exorcised, 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, would 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.