CHAPTER XVI
THEIR HEAVEN AND THEIR HELL
THE race returned to its daily life, purified and elevated. The danger of intrusion upon their upward struggle had called out unwonted 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 development 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 obscured; and to prevent or obviate this false perspective 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 purified 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 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 purification 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 thereafter 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 consequence was that the inside of the edifice was never two days alike, and the most frequent visitor never found 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 difference is that in truly advancing human life the process 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 proportions 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 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 hovering, 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 Limanora; 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 travellers 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 themselves, 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 enfranchisement 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 Limanorans 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 immediate confines of the earth. Beyond and above it they 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 learning 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 repulsed 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 swiftness 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, returning 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 saw, and showed me the spiritual meaning of this cosmorama of the future. The details of the living picture I had not time to mark; nor were my guardians 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 ambitions. I grew ashamed of ever having harboured anything but contempt for even the greatest career of mortal upon earth.
Nor yet were we done with our cure. The imaginative 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 enough, upon one of the most prominent spurs of Lilaroma 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 mediæval 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 suggestion 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 gutter children, the reeling drunkards issuing from the gin palaces, the cursing drabs behind them, the tatters, the filth, the dilapidated buildings. It was but an unending series of instantaneous photographs moving 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 attentively 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.
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 occupation and seemed to have forgotten the evils of mankind. They were much in the open air, which was bright with the colours of the sunlight; and the children’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 thousandth generation must live, without power of perceiving the nobleness that was above them and around them, without the chance of ever developing the spiritual energy that was in them, without one approach to the line of infinite progress going on throughout the universe. To stand still or recede was the true inferno of the Limanorans.
Again I changed my optic glass and a greater sadness came to me through my magnetic sense. I saw men and women such as I used to envy for their respectable 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 consciousness 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 progressing; 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 enough to tempt the eye and palate of the most fastidious 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 childhood. The vulgar consequences of vice or the entanglements 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 early in the hateful 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 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 smiling 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 worshipped 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 become 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 statesmen 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 unearthly light threw out into relief the hidden mechanism of their existence. Round everyone was a network 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 applauding 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 murderous 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 adamantine 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 clutch 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 appeared, 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 microscopic 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.