Limanora

CHAPTER III
DEATH

THE accident drew the two together, strengthening their affinities into irrevocable bonds. And now that all was well with them, their sense of the joy of life welled through their whole nature. Those who came near them felt its contagion. Yet there was one in their family who felt it only to smile at it. The aged Amiralno had seen so many centuries fleet past him that the passage of time with its triumphs had grown stale. He was battling with this nausea of life when the new age of discovery and invention had come upon them. And it so far renewed his energy that he was willing to live through it and take his share in the additional duties which it laid upon his generation. He had seen the infancy of the science over which he now presided pass into lusty youth and thence into manhood; and was he to cut his terrene roots before he had seen its greatest triumphs? Meteorology seemed about to take as wide regions of space within its scope as astronomy had; it seemed about to master secrets that would drive mere chance out of its calculations. The curiosity and wonder of youth were again stirred within him. He longed to advance with the new age into spheres that had so long lain under the horizon, only half-guessed at. Before he closed his eyes on Limanora what wonders might not yet be revealed to them? His blood had tingled with the thought, and his organs were filled with the old energy. He would resume the direction of his science for many a year to come.

But the intrusion of accident into his own sphere had palsied his renewed enthusiasms. For a time, whilst he was restoring Tamarna to her old self, and barring out the chance of accident again, he was not conscious of the check given to the vigour of his functions. But, when all was well and the families of the Piramo were busy again at the expansion of meteorology, he knew that the old nausea had returned with redoubled force. The impetus of the new age was beginning to fail; its pace had perceptibly slackened; its best triumphs had been won; and it needed the ignorance of eyes newly opened upon the green earth and the azure vault of sky to peer into the darkness with thrilling hope; it needed the elasticity of youthful muscles and tissues to withstand the weariness and despair that come with the truer perspective of a gigantic future become a pigmy past. What had he to do with human prospects, when a thousand times he had seen them loom large on the horizon, and then fade into commonplace when realised? Here had he outlasted a dozen generations of ordinary men, and shared the triumphs of a people whose progress compared with that of the rest of the earth was as lightning to the pace of a snail; and yet, when he looked at all that they had done in these thousand years, it was as nothing in the shadow of what had yet to be done, a poor hand’s breadth beside the voyage of light from a distant star. Where lay the advantage in extending a life that had seen such humiliation before the everlasting future? He might spin the thread of his life out for another thousand years without great effort. But what would that do for his race, or himself who had seen his past, with all the achievements that had each seemed as it came within the range of possibility a marvel surpassing the human, fade into a microscopic speck underneath the sumless stars? The voices of his friends, as they poured consolation and eulogy, persuasion and prayer, into his ears, sounded now like the undistinguishable hum of insects as sleep comes upon a man in the open. What would they not have meant to him in the ambitious time of youth? How strongly they rang out to him at the beginning of the last stage of enthusiasm, when they drove out of him the love of going for ever to sleep! But, now, that the longing had come to him again, they sounded idly as the exultant wail of gnats on the evening air. The life of earth was withdrawn and distant for him.

And who could raise a word against his release? He had done more than his share for the progress of the race. He had watched the interests of his science and made it an essential of all advance. He had braced his energies again and again to meet the requirements of a new age, another march ahead into the night. He had time after time molten the Piramo into a new unity by the magnetism of his enthusiasm. More than once he had extended the years of his life that he might serve his race. And now he had skilled men and women under him, who could do all that he had done, and more. The exceptional needs of the new time had found their attendants mechanic or human. The strain it had put on the efforts of the race was unbent. Why should he linger in a world grown so stale to him, a world that needed no longer his guidance or even his help?

There was one question to answer before the mind of the community was made up. It was the final scientific question. Was his vitality great enough yet to bear the strain, were the impulses of another new age to give it enthusiasm? Was the soul already too detached from the body to allow of the two being closely reunited for another great effort? The question was one for their medical science and psychology to answer. The sidralan or biometer abridged the task of the medical elders. It reported a low pitch of vital energy, too feeble to bear up through the labours and watches of another period. But they were afraid to trust wholly to so newly invented an instrument and fell back upon their old elaborate methods of testing; they investigated the state of every organ and tissue of the aged body with lavolans, the heart and brain with especial care. And it was clear from their state that the spirit could not long reside in them and function them with ease. It was at this point that the Ooaromo came in to aid them with their instruments for testing the bond between soul and body, and for measuring the psychic power that still remained ready to use the brain and its instruments the senses. Their older methods and their newest apparatus, the ooaran, all agreed in confirming the conclusion that the medical elders had come to.

For Amiralno himself there remained one serious question, which had troubled the race from the time that mere faith had ceased to rule and pilot their creed, and reason had been accepted as the only ultimate guide of life, the final court of appeal in which all questions must be decided. They could not trust to emotion or instinct; for these were but hard-won creeds and habits of past imperfect ages grown unconscious of their origin by transmission from generation to generation. Authority out of the past, tradition, law of nature, had the same taint upon them. They were but the crude conclusions of comparatively primitive times, with the logic leading to them veiled by oblivion, then thrust upon later ages as inspiration. All these dogmatic judges of the present and the future were but the shadows of their own worst and atavistic selves. It was only an illusion, a mirage in the desert of the past, to trust these merely subjective impressions as reflections from the ultimately real, the absolute. A people like this was sure to abandon all such projections of their own dead selves as steps to higher than themselves.

Every man had to settle for himself the problems that his science had been unable to solve, and that he must find some solution of in death. They had longed and striven for absolute certainty, yet every new age had to fall back upon the individual consciousness and hope, which were wholly on the side of belief in personal immortality. They knew that the energy in them could never die, whatever form it might take. Never had they found in the whole round of their investigations anything like absolute death or annihilation; every change that they observed, however far into infinity they had searched, was but a transformation of energy, and not its final evanishment. Matter was only a resting-place, a half-way house, of energy. And even matter was a comparative term, depending on the sensuous point of view of the observer. What was matter to one generation was found by a later to be pure energy, or even a mass of life. What was matter to one sense was to another nothing but energy. And the development of new senses, that gave them full consciousness of some hitherto-unrecognised type of energy, saved them from the dogmatism about the future based upon the idea that all types of energy were known to them. Their wonderful instruments of research revealed to them worlds of energy which might have lain for ages undiscovered, and swept out all stupid trust in the omniscience of the senses or the instincts. They refused to dogmatise about the existence or non-existence of any type of energy or being. Nay, they preferred to accept provisionally the existence of any form that their imagination might sketch out as possible and as consistent with the laws they had found permeating all the known universe. Belief was for them hope waiting for realisation.

Every new discovery pointed more and more definitely to the greater persistence of the higher forms of energy. What appeals to the more primitive and lower set of senses holds to even its inner form for but a comparatively brief time. Touch is the primary sense, and all that it, unaided by the other senses, can discover is apt to keep changing its form. Taste and smell are simple modifications of touch and they report of things in perpetual transformation. Hearing and sight are the highest of the first set of senses; for they respond to types of energy that travel from vast distances. Hearing is the lower of the two, because the lower senses are conscious unaided of the medium in which the energy travels. Sight has as her courier an energy which bridges infinity, and its medium no lower sense can cognise. Light approaches nearer to indestructibility than anything the original senses know. The last-developed of the senses, the firla, takes cognisance of an energy, magnetism, which is farthest of all from the need of a material medium; whilst the filammu or will-telegraph brings soul to soul irrespective of all sense-cognisable means of communication, and proves the existence of a medium more refined than any that either the senses or the reason has yet come to know. This medium, doubtless that of thought itself, as the highest and least material, must be least destructible, least transformable, least unstable in equilibrium of all known mediums. Their ooarans would soon be made delicate enough to measure the faintest presence of soul, and would decide the point whether this medium, evidently spread throughout the universe, was of the same stuff as the soul.

Still were they far from scientific proof of the eternal unity and individuality of the soul. They had reasoned out in accordance with all the axioms of their science the indestructibility of energy, and the rising untransformability of the higher types of energy; they had also reasoned out as certainly that mediums of energy had stability of equilibrium proportionate to the refinement of the energy travelling through them, and that thus the soul was nearer to everlasting persistence as a unity than any medium they scientifically knew. But that on its escape from the body it continued for ever as an individuality they could only assume; they could not prove it. They shrank from the idea that it was for ever past transformation; for that meant the eternal continuance of the last stage of life. It was indeed contrary to all the results of their scientific investigations to think that any type of energy or medium could at any time cease to change, that is, to improve or degenerate. Perpetual transformation was, as far as they had been able to search, the universal law: it might be into a higher or more stable form, or into a lower or more material form, but onwards must every energy move. The higher it went, the less did it tend to fall back. The law of eternal advance was surer in its action in the higher ranges of existence. And the whole effort of Limanoran life was to purify and ennoble the energy that was in it. For, reasoning on the analogy of all the nature they knew, they had little doubt that the platform they reached by the end of their terrene life was the platform from which their enfranchised energy or individuality, whichever it was, started on its new career.

Whether it was mere unconscious energy or energy conscious of its own unity that escaped from the body, when it was left to the disintegrant power of microscopic organisms, was still a question. The recent discoveries and investigations of the Ailomo or astrobiological families had revealed all space filled not merely with types of energy that were directed and did not guide themselves, but with embodiments of energy which were clearly individualities; not alone the poor microscopic attenuations of life that were waiting for a world to settle on, but highly organised beings, leading a vigorous, self-dependent life in the vast regions of infinitude. This much they knew from the filmy impressions which their air-transcending lavolans brought down from the heights of heaven they scaled. But whence those inhabitants of the ether came they had not yet been able to tell; for their presence affected no existing human sense, but only left on the irelium films certain visible impressions. Whether they were refugees from other stars, or everlasting occupants of interstellar space, and whether amongst them there were any of the emancipate from human trammels were questions they had not yet been able to answer. But they hoped soon to have an instrument which would indicate the presence of personality as apart from vital energy, and as apart from the thought and thought-faculty. Then would they be able to tell in what state the enfranchised energy fled from the body at death.

Amiralno knew not, cared not, whether he would retain consciousness of his past, or would become but a part of the wandering energy of space; what he did know was that he would be released from the burden of his body and the growing weariness that dragged it down. Certain he was that his flesh-emancipated energy would find a career at least as noble as his past. And he believed that its development would not end there, whatever became of it; whether it was to continue the unity it had been conscious of for so many years, or to take another form and individuality, was to him a matter of little concern. One thing he knew, and that was the growing imperfection of the body as an instrument of the energy that functioned it. It weighted to the ground the soul, the spirit, the mind, or whatever name he might give to the fiery stuff which kept it still aflame, and yet chafed to be free. As long as it held this energy in leash, it would live and glow with thought. Nor was this fiery stuff mere vitality, the mere principle of life, though the two were yoked together. It was different in quality from that which merely vegetated in the plant, and that which did nothing but feed and evacuate in the mollusc. Nay, it differed in inner character, not merely from the mind of the savage, but from that of their own highly civilised exiles. Limanoran advance had purified it of grosser desires and passions and made it a thing of ethereal longings and ideals; even the body had been transformed into something more like what the soul of their far past had been, subtle, buoyant, sublimated. Still it dragged the spirit down, whenever the limits of corporeal life became too apparent. Many a long generation of fiery self-disciplined work upon their constitutions would it take even this marvellous people to etherealise their bodies so far as to make them fit companions of their souls.

Amiralno had not the vital energy to bear up against the conditions that harassed their still hybrid system. He had no desire to stay and see the slow evolution of a body that would pace with the soul through infinity. Better to have release and a new and untrammelled career even if the form he should take was unknown to him. It was the nature of all energy to change, and the higher in the scale it rose, the nimbler it became. But in order to rise it had to be yoked for a time with a lower form, which it used as medium and leverage, leaving it as soon as it had accomplished its due development. All things tended to rise above themselves; and it was the greatest of disasters, the very reversal of nature, if ever they should fall back, as they often did. What we call death was but the unyoking of a higher energy from a lower, which it had temporarily made its comrade and medium. It was no misfortune or degradation, but a step higher in enfranchisement. The animate resisted this step, because one member in the lifelong partnership refused to descend into a grosser transformation again. In the human, the nobler the thought-energy, the higher it strove to raise itself before the inevitable divorce from its lower medium and yoke-fellow. But when the time of severance approached, it mastered the reluctance of the lower, and yearned to be set free. And little wonder that the lower resisted; for back it had to fall in the cosmic order, and begin again its slow progress upward from grade to grade; first into the clutches of myriads of microscopic disintegrators of its tissues that would transform it into food for plant-life, and then by weary stages upwards through vegetable and animal tissue, perchance into the sustenance of thought again.

This people, I soon found, had overcome the ancient abhorrence of death. For they identified their life and personality with the higher of their energies, and not with the lower and bodily forms. They shrank, it is true, from all that would lead to the divorce of the yoked energies of any animate being before its due time; not so much because they thought this an evil for the victim as because the perpetration would implant in the doer a germ of retrogression. To be cruel, to shed blood, was the beginning of degradation of the soul; it was one of the acts that allowed the lower to take command of the higher in their system. But for a Limanoran himself to approach death became, whenever he saw it to be inevitable, the keenest joy, in spite of the farewells it entailed. He knew that thereafter, should he make effort to live, he would only clog the wheels of progress, he would only be a burden on the race instead of its helper. Amiralno never showed the slightest sign of shrinking from the dissolution of his life-bonds. He was sad to leave his lifelong mate, with whom he had done so much for the race; but he knew that she would soon follow him; it was a matter of but a few days or months; her thought-energy would mingle and commune with his again, freed from the material trammels that checked and dulled their intercourse in their terrene life; upwards through the ether their souls would climb, ever becoming purer and swifter in their flight.

But, as I went about my duties, my thoughts would break away to the coming death-scene and sadness would cloud them. I remembered the last farewells of my buried life, and most of all the watch over the fading light in my mother’s eyes. Nothing could burn out of my memory the bitterness of at last facing the inevitable. Slowly had I been led by the physician to realise that nothing could save her, and still I hoped against hope, checking my tears lest she should see them and conjecture my alarm. Only when the lips became silent and pale did I at last admit the thought that this was death. How could I stifle my grief longer? Were we not all to each other, this mother, who had clung to me and nursed me through sorrows and misfortunes, I her only child, who had refused to leave her for the seductions of great place and fortune? She was vanishing for ever from me, and nothing I could do would bring her back. I was caught and crushed by the iron hand of fate and stood in stony silence, paralysed by my grief and my impotence. There was too much of the man and the stoic in my young blood to cry out; but if only I could give up my own life to bring hers back! In one of her final waking dreams she prattled and wept over me as if I were a child again, saved once more from the clutching breakers. Raising herself with a wild cry from her pillow, she held me in her arms with fierce love; only for a moment; then the cords that bound her life brake; the memory had torn her heart. There she lay, all that I cared for on earth, rigid, uncaring. If but I could have died with her there! Alas, the life in me was too puissant to yield, the nerves too tough to break! The passion came on me to hurl myself into her grave as the clods fell. It was but an insensate impulse. I made no cry or sign till I got into the lonely chamber; and there God alone knows how I survived my hurricane of grief and desolation. Nor could years ever root out the sorrow. There in Limanora, with an abyss between me and my past, and a noble new life around me, I worked and wept. The wound had opened afresh. Was I never to commune with that loving loved spirit again?

There was a touch on my hand, and the magnetism of sympathy and consolation flowed through my system. It was Thyriel. She had felt my deep grief, though then at a great distance from me, and without noise or speech she had come to my side. So absorbed had I been in my past and my sorrow that I knew not her presence till her magnetic touch awakened me from my dream. She had realised in a moment whither my thoughts had gone, and reverenced the holy past. Then, when the mood was growing despotic and paralysing the soul, she stepped into the startled silence. I was myself again, and swept the unmanly tears away.

Yet I could not drive the sadness of farewell out of my system. Here was this sage, who had so often counselled me and guided my faltering footsteps, about to vanish for ever from the scene of his triumphs. Oblivion would sweep his memory and his work into the abyss. We would see him no more; no more hear his grave wise sayings, weighted with the experience of centuries. All his gathered knowledge and skill would lapse; and our civilisation would be the poorer. Up the steep of progress it would have to climb, weaker for the absence of this strong arm, this much-exercised and full brain and heart.

These were the thoughts at the root of my sadness, when I was startled out of them by my companion’s voice. She had waited in reverential silence as long as I lived my filial past over again; but, when I returned to my starting-point, and began spending fruitless regrets and pangs over that which neither demanded nor warranted them, her thoughts broke out into loud protest. She could no longer endure such futilities, such waste of tissue, and she met my wailing reflections one by one. Amiralno was glad to leave his chrysalis stage of existence; the energy that was in him would find a freer scope, a nobler sphere, as soon as it had shed its earthly trammels. His counsel and guidance would not be lost to progress; all that he was and had would still be part of what he would become; not one thought or faculty would be left behind; and all would then be spent not on the progress of a little island of a small terrestrial archipelago or its race, but on that of the universe, if not of the cosmos. All of him that could still appeal to our lower senses would remain with us, and would immortalise his memory, as far as immortality would go upon this ephemeral orb. As for his sympathy and love, they were doubtless still with us, or at least with what in us was best and nearest the cosmic. The only thing to regret was that we could not personally feel his presence in the universe. But even this was not for idle regrets. It was mere palsy, if it did not stir us to still further mastery of our conditions. Were we not in the way to feel and know the escaped spirits of our dead? Had we not developed senses in us that were receivers of impulses from the infinite around us, impulses that had been dormant through the uncounted past? Had we not instruments that told us of energies and beings unfelt even by our new-developed senses? And were we to grope in our prison-house, and wail over what we had lost and could not longer see? Were we to sit in the darkness, and weep and wait, hoping for the light? Such feeble conclusions from the past, such futile regrets over the dead, Limanoran progress could not endure. There were new masteries for every generation. Before many years could pass they would get into touch with the spirits and energies that had fled; it might be by means of new instruments; it might be by new senses; nothing but our own dulness broke the connection between our energies and theirs; what we had still to win was consciousness, if not mastery, of that finer type of matter which they now used as medium for their energy. It was only the lifting of another of the myriad veils that hung before our senses dulling their perceptions. This was no more than what they had done a thousand times already. A death was a stimulus to joy and new effort. It taught us the limits of our knowledge and our power; and limits known were limits soon to be overpassed.

Her bright activity and banter surprised me into laughter at my own folly and obtuseness. Scarcely had I reached this consummation before I knew that there was gladness in the air of the island. How could I have failed to notice the jubilant strains that were fitfully wafted across my hearing, unless through my dull absorption in my own feelings? I felt thankful to Thyriel that I had been drawn out of my isolation, which seemed to me now little less than disloyalty to the race that had done so much for me.

I wondered what could be the occasion of all this exultation that I was conscious of. Pæan after pæan rose from every part of the island, and, as the moments passed, the many-sounding music seemed to gather towards one centre. The radius lessened, and adjacent masses of melody fused together. Nearer and nearer they came, ever more coalescing and lessening in number; then the jubilance melted into grave and massive harmony, and I recognised some of the world-music I had heard from the cosmophone. The sense of universes creating and dissolving sprang into my mind. It was the diapason of creation that was ringing through the island. Loud, then low, the cosmic symphony swept the atmosphere like a tempest. I knew that some far-reaching event or movement was occurring amongst this people.

I turned to my comrade to confirm and define my conjectures, but she was gone. Away on the horizon I could see the rapid beat of her wings. I followed as swiftly as I could, and, as I rose in the air, I saw company after company soaring like coveys of birds towards a high isolated plateau that stretched from far up Lilaroma and beetled cliff-like over the sea. I had often used it as a flight-platform whence I could spring into the air, and had long known it by the name of Doomalona. I had never thought over the meaning of the word, but now it flashed upon me that it meant the hill of farewells. Thence messengers who were embarking on difficult and important expeditions set out. The elders of the people and the families of the couriers came here to give them their love and benison, in order to make them feel, as they journeyed, that the sympathy of their home went with them like a fire from the hearth.

I had observed that in these farewells this simple-hearted people made little outward sign of the depth of their emotions. Only the magnetic look out of the eyes would have told a stranger what benignity lay underneath. Nor was it merely to show how sympathetic they were that they thus accompanied their foreign couriers to the outskirts of the island. It was chiefly to give them each his contribution of magnetism, to lessen their burden on their far journey, to make them feel how much the spirit of the community went with them. Not one of them would ever allow himself to indulge in so idle an evidence of emotion as tears. There was in this people a vein of stoicism, I thought; they seemed to repress all mere symbols of feeling. A European would have called their farewells dull and emotionless, if not stony-hearted. There was no kissing or embracing; there was not even the shaking of hands or bowing of heads. Without physical contact their spirits could work upon each other with a power that in other civilisations would have been called witchcraft. Through their firlas, through their eyes, rayed forth a keen soul-stirring magnetism. And each assisted the other in preventing the approach of the old wasteful manifestations of sorrow or despondency. Lamentation was a thing of the far, almost prehistoric, past; a sob or sigh or even complaint they knew too well from their physiological knowledge to be mere emotional extravagance, a waste of the energy or the tissue, all of which was needed for the strenuous endeavour towards a higher plane. So it was that they seemed to me stoical in positions where the men and women I had known in my youth would burst into weeping and wailing, or cries and gestures of affection.

But in these scenes of farewell there was needed little energy of repression; the real struggle had occurred many generations before in their history. They had once had a most elaborate symbolism not merely of feelings but of almost every human thought and spiritual attitude. But when the great national repentance was leading to the series of exilings that ultimately purified the race, they became uneasy about this vast system of symbolism; it covered their whole existence from birth to death, from toothache to the salvation of the soul, and seemed to be nature her very self. They had long known it to be the nesting-place of all hypocrisies and untruth. Under its shelter mean things and falsity and even grossness and cruelty could flourish fearless of harm. Everything could masquerade in the guise of anything else it pleased. Of course there were painful revelations and scandals at times; but they were soon hushed up. The system was too much the interest of all who had power or reputation or prosperity, the best of what was then life, to let it get into disrepute, or into risk of revolution or reform. There were various professions which were deeply involved in the retention of it, and they were recruited chiefly from the highest social classes. The lawyers battened on the ambiguity of the symbols, whether expressed in word or deed; the doctors would have lost half their hysterical and hypochondriac patients if it had been abolished; without it the life and pretensions of the military during time of peace would have been a farce and a mockery; and the occupation of the priests would have vanished altogether. Ceremony seemed the very life-blood of an aristocratic state, and especially of its army and its church. It kept the mere workers and plodders at a respectful distance, it fenced off criticism, and supplied topics for the tongue of fame. To abolish ceremony would have been to strike at the heart of all existing institutions.

But, as the purgation proceeded, every occasion for it naturally disappeared. Ceremonial ceased when the church lapsed and the priestly profession went into exile. Ceremony vanished with the expulsion of the militant elements and the professional politicians. The bureau of fame collapsed with its accursed spawn, uncharitableness and evil feeling, servility, adulation, and pretence. The pharisaism of the whole system stood out in all its offensiveness, and the foulness and injustice that were concealed by this constant masquerade in the robes of greatness. It was meant to overawe the unthinking, to make ignorance grovel at the feet of those in power. It had been useful in far past times of savagery in cowing the beast in the human mind and keeping it caged. But a form that has life and meaning and power in the ruder stages of development becomes a curse, if continued into periods of advanced civilisation. They now felt that their elaborate symbolism had been an insult to their intelligence; for they had no brutality in them to be muzzled. To keep up the pretence of greatness or virtue or love or respect or truth, where there was none, was useful as long as most of the community were ignorant, or superstitious, or fierce and intolerant in disposition. But when the race had grown gentle and humane and more and more progressive, it was not merely a farce to retain so much deception and mummery in life, it was a gross outrage on all that was just and noble and spiritual. Why should not the reverence or affection of the human spirit be allowed to shine forth from the countenance without such ridiculous trammels, such coarse humiliations? Forms compelling a show of reverence or love where there is none, are but the trappings of slaves, and soon ingrain the thoughts and feelings of slaves on the one side, whilst bringing out and confirming the nature of bullies and tyrants on the other. Every relic of a past that had harboured and perpetuated such a system was painfully ejected from their natures. They would have nothing in them that savoured of such a death-in-life. All mere forms, all ceremonials and ceremonies had to go. Ostentation and parade became abhorrent to them. Pageant and spectacle, pomp and solemnity vanished from their lives. All formality of manner or intercourse, even etiquette and salutation, was driven out with contumely.

One of the most singular effects of this expulsion of mere symbolism was the disappearance of ridicule and jest. This disappearance was quite unexpected, and yet, when they came to reflect on the phenomenon, they saw how natural it was. The obverse of the passion for applause and influence is necessarily the desire to depreciate possible rivals, to make them seem small, and even to trample them in the dust. And the most successful and least apparently ill-natured method of fulfilling this is to get them laughed at and so contemned. With the ignoble itch for fame went the love of ridicule. The jesters, habitual as well as professional, disappeared with the priests, the soldiers, the lawyers, and the politicians. Not that the Limanorans abandoned the use of humour; they still saw too clearly the incongruities of existence, cosmic as well as human, to cease bringing them out in startling flashes of vivid expression. They never indulged in that boisterous laughter which is so often thought in the West the simplest and most primitive guaranty of enjoyment; for that is as much a waste of valuable tissue as uncontrollable grief. Their laughter was of that low, gentle, tolerant, almost inward, kind, which brightens the nature to its very heart; its only outer mark was perhaps a smile. Never indeed was I amongst a people that looked at existence so cheerfully or enjoyed its little ironies with so light-hearted a geniality. Buoyancy, joyousness, was the most constant characteristic of their spirits. Their intercourse with each other was ever sunny and pleasant-witted, though never jocular. There was no malice or false sense of superiority in their humour or laughter.

But jest they came to abhor as an indignity to the human spirit which was striving to obliterate all traces of its ape-ancestry. The jester implied or produced contempt for his topic, for his victim, and generally for himself. He usually adopted mimicry as the easiest method of bringing about his effect. And so he nursed the ape in him, and pointed back to the vile type from which he had sprung. It was the other kinship of man, his divine relationship, that the Limanorans preferred to acknowledge and nurture. Never did they forget it in their conduct. It moulded their ideals, it directed their purposes, it created their instincts. And to use ridicule was to outrage it, to call up the beast in them, the element, the ancestry that they did their best to forget. Whenever the sense of mutual sympathy crept through the community, the degradation of jest and ridicule, not for the victim alone, but for the jester, became self-evident. They were felt to be inhumane, if not inhuman, and died an easy death with all the vast system of symbolism.

It was a surprise to me then to see so large an assemblage winging their way to Doomalona. It seemed as if there was about to be a great ceremonial. And I was not long in doubt as to the occasion. For with music that rose and fell in marvellous rhythm like the waves of the sea there came across the sky a splendid flight-car, more brilliant in opalescent glow, more majestic in architecture, than anything I had ever seen. Its wings flashed fire through the air and seemed to weave the lightnings of heaven into a diaphanous web. It was a car of victory; for around it bands of flying youth raised jubilant harmony, and over its rear rose a canopy crowned with fire. As it floated nearer I could see beneath this a figure resting upon an elevated couch. The music grew more loudly triumphant as it hovered downwards to the central plateau of the hill of farewells. And then I knew that this was Amiralno on the couch; and all the people, except the few who were needed for the essential services of the island, had assembled to bid him farewell, as he sped in front of them into the land of shadows whither no eye could penetrate.

I had without knowing it landed close to Thyriel, so absorbed had I been in the wondrous spectacle. She had been busy with the chorus of acclaim, her thoughts bent on this rare scene of farewell; and she had not noticed my approach. Then a sudden silence, as Amiralno stepped from the faleena, startled the great concourse out of their entranced attitude; their thoughts were set free as by the touch of a magic wand. It was at this that Thyriel became conscious of my presence. I knew in a moment that she had recognised the criticism in my mind. Yet she did not answer or explain the anomaly. She remained perfectly still.

A burst of jubilant music broke my reverie, as the sudden silence had broken it before. It led me back to the symphony of the spheres to which I had been accustomed to listen with rapt attention. I could recognise the harmonious strain that meant the creation of a world. I could almost see the whirling orb of fire, as it flew off from the parent sun, and swept into its glowing round through heaven. Nothing I had ever heard could match the rapturous melody which expressed the approach of life to the surface of the new star. Quicker and quicker grew the pace, and higher the pitch, as the living creation developed and spread over the world. Then came a wild dithyramb, as man broke from his bestial surroundings, and mastered his fellow-beasts by cunning, and drew fire from heaven for his purposes. A nobler strain followed, rhythmically measuring the steps by which he rose out of himself and climbed the steep of heaven. Silver-toned harmonies told of his masterpieces of art. Loud diapasons spoke out his marching armies and fierce battles. Soft involved fugues and dulcet chants expressed the struggles and conquests of thought.

I stood absorbed in the interpretation of this ravishing music, and failed to observe the progress of events upon the lofty plateau. Amiralno had taken up an erect position on what might have been called an altar, had the scene been a religious one. His face was towards heaven. He held his right hand as if waving back those whom he forbade to follow him; for close to him stood the partner of his earthly life, her face set as if she would depart. Around stood his lifelong comrades and counsellors, yet at a lower level, so that every act of the departing could be seen by the concourse. Near him were erected two columns, on the higher of which and above his head I could distinguish a psychometer, on the lower a biometer. Behind him had been built into the rock an elaborate piece of machinery, which I recognised as a manana or petrifier. Often had I seen it transfix almost in a moment a beautiful plant, substituting irelium for its living tissues, and making every leaf and flower of it translucent crystal. By means of electric currents, it sent streams of the atomic constituents of irelium along the sap-channels from rootlet to leaf-tip; it used the living powers of the plant to turn it as it died into undecaying metal. For hundreds of years the flower would live and be a thing of beauty, even if no care was further spent on it; and, if cared for, it would resist the finger of decay for thousands and thousands of years.

At last I was to see the transfiguration of a Limanoran. I had often almost doubted the origin of those lifelike statues that stood in Fialume, and death was so rare a thing among this long-lived people that during my many years amongst them I had never had the opportunity of satisfying the doubt. Curiosity overshadowed my other feelings and made me forget the grief which would keep creeping into my heart at this farewell scene in spite of the jubilant music. I strained every nerve and sense to catch the features of the strange event. Thyriel, I felt, was as eager as I to see all that would occur, and I could see that the younger half of the concourse had their attention closely riveted upon the scene.

The observer of the biometer raised his eyes to the indicator, which had now begun to move in rapid oscillations. Amiralno lifted the forefinger of his left hand as if giving a signal. He looked back a moment with longing in his eyes at his life-partner. From the manana there sprang out an upright groove towards the dying man, and in this he was caught, as his vitality rose to its greatest effort before the final collapse. The indicator of the sidralan shot upwards with great violence, and then fell still. Almost at the same moment the guardian who stood on the loftier column beside the psychometer raised himself in agitation. The indicator had begun the same violent oscillations as that of the biometer. There could be little doubt that the individual energy or soul of the vanished Amiralno had passed near it in his flight upwards.

Through the brief and impressive scene the note of creation rang in the music that filled the air, and never that of dissolution. Then burst forth the chorus of freedom, which was the national song, if anything might be so called. It was the liberation of the energy of their friend and comrade that they united to celebrate, his entrance on a new career untrammelled by lower forms of inert energy. The music rose as if on wings, higher, higher, ever more exhilarant. There were in it none of the undertones, or deeper notes, or mystic subtleties that marked so many of their spheral harmonies. It was a sound of pure joy, ethereal, supernal, unalloyed by any terrene longings. Who could think of grief or the bitterness of farewells, as long as it rang through the sky? Courage, confidence to climb upwards was the only emotion that could live with joy in its presence.

Suddenly the music broke away into a tempest of cosmic melody. Now wailed forth the wild song of dissolution of worlds, again the clashing of conflicting systems, followed by the surge of new life in orbs that were to whirl through space and elevate the existence upon them for thousands of thousands of ages. It was the music of mingled creation and disintegration, of development and decay which we heard once more.

Our thoughts were recalled from the heights of heaven, whither the lost personality of our guide and friend had fled. We were absorbed again in the struggle of a mixed existence; we felt again the agonies of the higher active energies bound to lower and merely latent energies. My eyes came down to the scene of the last farewell. There stood the almost living statue of our vanished brother, erect, eager as for flight, as at the moment when his energy had gone forth. But now it had the clear metallic translucence of the thousands I had seen in Fialume. The transfiguration was complete.

But there was more on the plateau than the figure of what had been. Beside it with rapt, pleading gaze on her face stood yet unmoved the life-comrade of the vanished. The manana was again in position, the observers again stood by the biometer and the psychometer. Another scene of departure and transfiguration was to be enacted. The whole consciousness of the community had granted without words the petition of Amiralno’s spouse. Nothing seemed to be so fitting as that the two should leave their trammelled life together, and within the space of a few hundred beatings of the pulse partner had followed partner. The two lives, joined for so many centuries, had come to a close together. Out into infinite space had fled the two intertwined energies, only a few heartbeats apart. Perhaps together they would find their new sphere, their new platform for still higher flight through the diviner stages of existence.

The Limanorans, when they had reached what they considered the limits of their usefulness in corporeal life, gained an instinctive knowledge of the moment when death was certain to come, or perhaps it was an instinctive power of dying. It is a common thing to see amongst savage or half-civilised tribes a man or woman in full health deliberately lie down, turn the face away from friends and light, and prepare to die. They seem to know when their destiny is coming upon them, and nothing will persuade them to take measures for driving it off. Strong though the currents of life may be flowing in the veins at the moment, it is not long before they have completely ebbed, and left the body a pulseless mass of inert matter. It was this instinct, whether prophetic or suicidal, that the aged amongst this people seemed to resume when they had weighed the vital powers in their systems against the duties that new ages with their progress would bring, and found them wanting. Destiny seemed to speak out to them, when they saw the transference of the minus to the wrong side. Their minds were made up and it needed but a few days or hours to set the imprisoned energy free. In these later and more scientific ages there was some delay, and not uncommonly a postponement of the departure. A careful examination of the system by means of their new scientific instruments revealed some radical mistake in the judgment of the elder as to himself, or the demands of a new age of discovery made the need of more brains and hands imperative. The result was the same in both cases; the reason was persuaded to give up its resolve; life flowed on in the veins with even power again; all the old duties were resumed; and the day of farewells was put off till a more convenient season. But once they were convinced that they were retarding progress instead of accelerating it, the end, they felt, was within measurable distance; they straightway relinquished their grasp of life; they withdrew purpose and power of will from all their vital functions; and the moment of the final collapse was practically within their own choice, as soon as they had the consciousness of the whole community with them.

Here stood two solid memorials to the working of this prescient or devitalising power. The beauty of expression on the two faces was very striking. The attitudes were as natural and noble as life itself, that of Amiralno bidding his partner farewell, hers full of loving petition to follow. That the whole people approved was clear in the heartiness with which they broke into the song of liberation. Everyone was glad that the energies of these two, who had done their full duty by the race, were free to enter other spheres, and follow other than the terrene methods of advance. Reverently, but still with great rejoicing, the family of the departed placed the two lifelike statues in the car of victory, and guided it in triumphal flight to the valley of memories. Then the people as reverently and joyously bent their way to the duties they had left.

I stood in a day-dream of the strange but noble ways of life that this people followed, and suddenly awakened to find myself alone on the hill of farewells overlooking the ocean. Sorrow over the departures I had witnessed welled back into my heart; I had not yet got rid of the old attitude of Western civilisation towards death. With the sorrow mingled still the old curiosity; questions sprang into my mind concerning the significance of the ceremony I had seen; or was it a ceremony? I was startled with the answer in the negative. It came from Thyriel, who, knowing my doubts, had remained to solve them. Soon I knew the whole meaning of the scene. It was not premeditated. There was nothing deliberate about it except the deaths themselves. The dulness of my own inner senses had prevented me from knowing the common impulse of the race towards Doomalona. As soon as Amiralno had finally resolved to die, the consciousness of his resolve spread over the island, and stirred the people at their duties to common action. They knew that the hill of farewells would be the scene of the departure, and in bands singing the cosmic music of farewell they made their flight through the air to give a last valediction to the voyager into the unknown and to impart to him in his final effort on earth all the magnetic power they could spare for him on his journey. Every act of what I had thought was a ceremonial was the natural and spontaneous impulse of a people united in spirit. Their music and the changes in it were due to no leader or signal, but to the sympathetic inspiration of the moment. Their creational chant was an assertion of their mood of belief that this scene was one of advance, and not of retrogression, of development and not of decay, that the act was as much an act of cosmic life as the creation of a world. Certain portions of the system were about to become manifestly inert, those which were called bodily and material, but which were as truly forms of energy as the individual energy that was being liberated. They were made unchanging, permanent, for a time, and so were unable to progress or retrograde; they were to retain their energy in latency for a period long or short; but at last they too, when their immediate purpose of remembrance of the vanished was served, would be set free to take other forms. Their creational music was intended, if there was any intention in so spontaneous a thing, to keep before their minds the progressive and evolutionary nature of death, and to quell the old and barbarous attitude of grief which might attempt to show itself when they were bidding the final farewell to a comrade. It was meant to bring into prominence the joy of the spirit freed from the bondage to lower forms of energy, and the delight of all who remained in the progress of the cosmos, even though the immediate act should imply a separation of a loved spirit from them. It helped them to repress any sadness at the thought that they might never recognise the energy of their lost comrade again as an individual and personal thing. Enough for them that the sum of existence should be enriched by the change which was occurring to him.

But was it not a grief to them that the parting was perhaps eternal, as far as personal recognition went? The question rose spontaneously in my mind; and I was answered almost before I had thought it. The doubt was still unsolved whether as impersonal energy they developed into something new at death and for ever ceased to bear marks and memories of the phase of existence they had just left, or whether they sallied forth from the bonds of a lower and inert energy into the freer scope of infinity, an individual and complete unity. This doubt, they were certain, would be solved some day by scientific experiment. Meantime there were compensating advantages, whichever alternative was true. If they continued the personality they had already developed on earth without break in consciousness or memory, then would they recognise their old comrades and partners in Limanoran life, and make further progress through existence together.

If, on the other hand, there was a break in the continuity, and only as an impersonal energy they passed forth into the interstellar spaces, then would there be the obliteration of all the animal and barbarous past which they abhorred, as well as of the immediate and Limanoran past which they loved. Any being that has advanced much in its more recent stages must naturally try to forget the lower stages through which it has gone in a more distant past. They were by no means proud of their relationship to their exiles or to the still older and wider humanity existing outside of their archipelago. To remember it was to encourage the lower and less-advancing man in them. To forget it was one of the ethical duties which their progress demanded. It was only as a horror, as a possible hell into which they might fall, if they retrograded, that it was still brought before them.

A race or nation that remains long proud of its past must be but imperceptibly progressive, if it is progressive at all. Its ethical point of view is stationary, its morals and religion are stagnant. The history of a people should rapidly come to seem ignoble to it, if it does its duty to itself and its progress. What is the history of other races but a record of wars, of wholesale slaughters, because of the ambition of a man or a section of men? And as long as we are proud of such a past we can never advance. To have an ancestry nobler than ourselves is an undying disgrace, and to suggest such a thing to a man should be considered the grossest insult. Where a people is developing as it ought to develop in the brief period it has upon earth, oblivion should be one of its foremost duties to all but its immediate past. Man has forgotten his bestial ancestry so effectually that when he comes across the manifest relics of the relationship in his system, he is startled and wildly denies it. If he progressed as rapidly as he ought to do, after there has been implanted in him the divine principle of reason, then would he as surely cast into oblivion his savage and semi-civilised ancestry. Out with the ape and all relics and memories of it is the struggle of thinking men. To be done with the crude undeveloped past is the duty of progressive men. The ideal of to-day should be the commonplace of to-morrow, and the disgrace of next week. It was useful to study the immediate past in order to get perspective for the present, and to decide on the rate of progress for the future. But it was becoming doubtful to this people whether they should perpetuate in the valley of memories so much of the past after it had faded into insignificance. They had come to think that to forget was as necessary to the advance of man as to remember, and that a universal rubbish-destructor for the now poverty-stricken achievements of their far past would one day become essential. As it was they still preserved records of them lest some historical question might grow to be of importance to their future.

It was little wonder then that they had no great abhorrence for the obliteration of the past from their energy at death. If the other alternative were the true, and if, as so many religions teach, they were to be herded with the criminal and besotted and undeveloped souls that have passed from the earth, then might they bid farewell to true progress beyond death. And what is the meaning of continuity of existence and memory, unless it be the intercourse of terrene souls in the life outside of life? To be rid of the flesh and its inert energies is still to be enslaved to worse evils, the possibility of contact with the foul beings that inhabit the human form, even the noblest and most belauded human form. The Limanorans would gladly abandon the delight of recognising and loving again the souls they knew and loved, if only to be free from such a horror. Better almost annihilation than enslavement to the retrogrades of earth in another sphere. Whence the terror of discontinuity of memory, if the burden of the past were to be lifted off us, and a new and more progressive career given to our energy? The Limanorans believed that when unyoked from the inert forms which had come from their animal past, their higher energy would enter on a progress that would make all they now did seem almost stagnancy; and the power of remembering any past would only mean shame at its having been theirs.

It never gave them pause to think that what came after death was still unknown. They had passed a happy bright life upon the earth, free from the pangs and agonies as well as the fierce pleasures, the snaky involvements as well as the passionate amours, of other civilisations. But, when the effort to live had come to be so great as to overbalance the compensations and utilities of their life, then was it no pang for them to leave it; for they were scientifically sure that death would be no break in their progressive existence; if anything, it was certain to be an intensification of the progress which they loved most.

One of the last of their great series of exilings had been to cast out of their midst a number of men and women who never did anything but long for death, and advocated early suicide with religious fervour as the true and only panacea for all ills. Their doctrines would have done little harm to the community, if they had not been rooted in practice, and often led to tragic results. For they came from languid, low-strung temperaments, that felt disinclined to face the strain of life or to help the advance of the race. The current of energy in their ancestry had gradually run more and more feebly, till it was in them at its lowest ebb. It was against their grain to work, and they did their share in the tasks of the community with the most patent reluctance. This alone would have been reason enough for their exile, inasmuch as they gave evil example to the youth around. But they were subtle in the use of the tongue too, and could with skilful jesuitry show how indolence was the noblest life. And worse still, when they were left to their own devices, they soon made a violent end to their feeble lives, and gave a tragic and ghastly appearance to death. Out into Thanasia or the isle of death they were one and all deported, with enough goods and provisions to keep them and their descendants alive, if only they were industrious, for thousands of years. But none of them would work, or till the soil, or even cook their food; and one by one they gave themselves up to death. The more ingenious invented a method of leaving life which had a certain grace if not nobility. They erected great funeral pyres and connected them by a slow fuse to a huge battery that sent up its rod into the heavens. When a tempest threatened, they laid themselves out on these, and when the lightning began to flash, the electricity ran along the wires, lit their fagots, and in a few moments swept them out of existence. It was not long before the isle of death was again left to its silences, nothing but the ashes of its former inhabitants upon the tops of numerous mounds being left to tell that human life had once been there. No one from the rest of the archipelago seemed to care for life upon it; none ever landed there. The only things that marred the mortuary stillness of the isle were the screaming seabirds, and the tempests which drove them thither.

It was better for the cosmos that these emasculate weaklings should as soon as possible submit the relics of energy in them to other conditions of being. But it was not well for Limanoran immaturity to have the spectacle of self-slaughter before them, or the contagion of their death-pyre romance and eloquence touch the spirit of youth. Moreover they took some time to resolve on death; and, in the process of forming their resolution, it was the natural habit of these tame triflers with death to put all the energy they had into their tongues. As long as they could talk heroics to anyone about the deed they contemplated, they were certain not to accomplish it. And romantic chatter is catching where youth is still unbridled by reason, and in the young who had robuster wills, the results might be more prompt.

It was different with the death-scenes of men and women who had done their duty by the race and by human progress, and had worked out the best possible results from the yoking of higher and lower energies. Theirs was a true liberation from exhausted lower forms. It was not the languor of the loftier element in them, but the exhaustion of the lower, that brought the nausea of their hybrid life. They could feel, as they looked back, how far their higher or spiritual energy had risen since their entrance into earthly existence. Every year had seen them climb upwards; nearer and nearer had their inner energy come towards touch with that divine medium which was in and yet above all life and which in youth they were conscious of only in lofty moments of inspiration. Such were the supreme ascensions of life, when they were capable of the noblest actions and the noblest moral resolves. These moments became more and more frequent as they grew older and more progressive, till towards the close of life they were almost habitual. Limanoran youth snatched at these supernal moments by the help of imagination. Limanoran age dwelt habitually in these moral altitudes that lay far above mere passion or instinct. It was the old amongst them who were alone capable of great creative spiritual life. They seemed to feel the tiding of the subtlest energy in the universe, and gave the impulses to most spiritual advance.

Here and there in other civilisations was bred a nature that had fitful consciousness of this divine medium, at times through great creative imagination, but oftener through noble life. Such a nature is spoken of as inspired; and so far is it true in that it has come into communication with the most refined and most creative medium of the universe, that through which what we call the divine seems to work; but only through patient self-moulding and development has it reached such a height of nobleness. Oftenest in past ages these natures have found shelter in religion; for in the world ambition must make use of the coarsest tools and the grossest energies to reach its aim; and the growth of a loftier spirit is at once checked, and noble aspiration stifled. Peace and the shadow of devotional thought were the only conditions allowing such a nature any scope in a world based upon war and guided in its search for the right by might alone.

It was different with Limanoran civilisation. There it was the rule, and not the exception, to raise the spiritual energies to sympathy with the diviner media of the cosmos, and every condition favoured the pursuit. Life began with but a fitful consciousness of it, but it grew more continuous and surer. The young could scarcely distinguish its impulses from those of their own lower energies. But the old had seldom any hesitation as to when they were inspired; they seemed to keep in touch with all that is divine in the world. They needed no retreat, no religious shelter, to nurse the magnetic sympathy with the divine. Their affinity to it grew more and more the essence of their being, without ever having to leave their daily routine of duties. It was this that gave them their wisdom and character, and that made the young feel them to be almost a type apart from the ordinarily human. They became more distinct and striking in their personality as they grew older and felt this affinity. It had come to be a common observation of daily life that the nobler the aspirations and the closer the intercourse with the ethical media of the cosmos, the stronger and more distinctive was the character; and science was not far from the conclusion that on this intercourse depended persistence of individuality, and that the higher they reached in their sympathies with the more refined media of the universe, the less need was there of change in their personality at death, of making alliance with other lower energies when they shed their inferior and earthly forms of energy.

There was, they felt, a noble isolation or apartness of spirit in their old men and women which raised them above common humanity, and made the human body seem an incongruous garment for their soul. They lived above the demands of their corporeal energies rather than in them or by them. In the young the two seemed blended together; it was difficult often to distinguish in them the movements of the two types of energy. But in the old, though the corporeal had been raised and etherealised, it seemed to hang on the skirts of the spiritual and try to drag it down; it bore its earthly origination more manifestly on it in comparison with the nobler refinement of the spiritual. And the longer they lived, the stronger the contrast became, till at last nature herself seemed to demand their eternal divorce. Euthanasia at a certain stage in the development of Limanoran life came to be not so much a privilege as a holy duty. To liberate the higher energy from its alliance with the lower, to die, was but the next and most natural stage in the evolution of the life. Even the family, who would feel the bereavement most in the loss of their wise help and guidance, acquiesced gladly, feeling that the liberation must mean a nobler career for the released spiritual energy. Thus it was that on Doomalona they used the music of creation; they gave utterance to their feeling that death was not dissolution but creation, that the retrogression of the body was an advance for the higher energy, the truer self. The sense of decay or degeneration was quite absent from their thoughts. It was a triumphal farewell; for they were convinced that for the liberated it was the noblest deed of all to die, the very crown of all their life.