Chapter VII: Pioneering (2)

What was to hinder him, now he had the mastery of himself and his destiny, becoming again amphibious in a new way? Without guidance of his own, driven only by the forces of nature, he had risen out of the waters that once covered the earth, and taken to dry land; for a long period he had been able to live at will in either of two elements, air and water. Where lay the difficulty in making himself again capable of living in two elements, in air and in the luminiferous ether? In prehistoric times nature had worked her evolution in his system by long and slow stages. But in Limanora progress had become lightning-swift, and would again and again increase its pace. For there man had taken command of nature, and made her accommodate her step to his stride. She was his willing servant, nimble as her own electric flash. He could now compress the work of centuries into hours by his concentration of power in Rimla, and by his countless ingenious contrivances. Thought was the lord of time as of space, and thought was now his essence and characteristic. He could, if he wished, contract the process that used to cover geological ages into a generation. There was no reason why he should not become amphibious again in a less grovelling sense than of old within the few centuries of a lifetime. This was the purport of another production of this time, the book of Amphibious Existence.

It was a mediate book, one bridging the gulf between things as they were and the far ideals held out to the race by the Fraloomiamo. It helped to point out the steps towards the realisation of one of the most cherished productions of the age, the Book of Emigration. It had been many years in the maturer minds of the community before I was introduced to Loomiefa and its wonders, and it had recently been much modified by the discoveries of the new outburst of energy that followed Choktroo’s attempt at invasion. Its ideal was to enable the Limanorans of that or some future generation to travel throught space and reach other stars.

Long ago a publication that had prepared for, and demanded this, was the book of the Destiny of the Earth. It had made a profound impression on the people when first produced; for it dramatically painted the horror of death that would settle on this globe. It had been proved by both astronomers and physicists that our orb was gradually losing its heat by the same process which had brought its originally glowing surface to a state that would allow of life settling upon it. First, vegetation and animal life were found at the poles, where the lessened heat of the sun made the terrestrial heat endurable; then they crept their slow way onwards to the equator, till the whole surface of the earth teemed with vitality, at first developing towards vastitude in the warm vapours, in later periods towards concentration of energy in special points of the animal body, and especially in the head. Round the poles at last settled the ice-sheet, advancing at long intervals towards the tropics, now in one hemisphere and again in the other, according as the one or the other was farthest in winter from the sun during an extensive period. The hyperborean powers shepherded the growing life of the earth down into her central belt. But the brumal shepherds of the one side of the world receded as those of the other advanced with their arctic winds and fleecy drifts. Within measurable time this alternation would cease, and the glacial fences would move forward together north and south, and pen the overcrowded human life and energy with all its enemies into the narrow equatorial belt.

It was the drama of these boreal limitations that the book of Terrestrial Destiny pictured. The teeming life weltered over sea and land alike in search of foothold and nutrition. No inch of tropical earth was sacred from brute appetite. Animal and man fought with venomous passion for dear life. Not animalculæ alone but beasts, and even man, became parasitic. Creatures that had loved a free existence in vast prairies or forests learned to nest and hibernate in the folds and hollows of larger animals. Life swarmed over life till for lack of food it began to fail. Man crept with loathsome beasts of prey into caves of the earth, and grew as loathsome in his troglodytic habits. On moved the brumal prison walls. The sun shrivelled in the sky and withdrew his heat. Nothing lived that was not arctic not even amongst the still-free birds of the air. Man finally ceased to have faculty enough to notice the shrinking of the already narrow enclosure that was soon to be his grave. Feebly the last remnants of the race stole forth into the struggling rays of daylight and killed everything of life they could find. Only in the sea still lived their possible prey and food, and thither they dared not go beneath the gloom of the thick ice. The cannibal habit came upon man again and no relationship or love restrained his appetite. The last scene of the drama was the death of the last man, the grave of the remnants of his race; where he fell, there he lay embalmed; and his tomb was the earth’s own winding-sheet. The meagre relics of terrestrial life soon followed him into silence and darkness, and through the sunless night the dead orb wheeled round the extinguished cinder which had for so many geological ages given it light and life.

The publication of the book would have frozen the hearts within them, had not the Limanorans known that that was not the end of all. They saw that the alternations of death and life were not confined to the vegetal and animal species around them. The same pendulum swung through the whole cosmos. The universe which was dead now would live again in blazing rounds of vapour that would solidify and cool till life could settle on the new orbs again. Dead it only seemed. For it never rested but revolved round some centre revolving also, and too distant for man to see or feel. Out of these motions would come resuscitation. After millions of ages, that are but as moments in the history of the cosmos, it would encounter another exhausted universe, and from the collision would a new system of glowing worlds arise, ready for another series of vital colonisations from the limitless life of sidereal space.

It was this knowledge that took the sting out of their sadness over the new book. Yet the fate of man, age by age more closely penned in by the walls of his glacial-coffin, and drawn back by the eddy of time into his primeval savagery, left a loophole for despair and palsy to enter into their lives. Were they to let their descendants fall back again into the beast, whence their ancestors had come? Was this glacial prison and tomb to remain a possibility and a shadow on even the distant horizon of their race? Once before had their ancestry evaded such a fate, penned between the invasive glaciers and the sea; once before had the race committed their fates to an element they feared and hated, lest the encroaching ice-sheet should smother their civilisation and reduce their vitality to the level of barbarism and at last annihilation. Better to let the race die out at its noblest than leave it to go down into such an inferno. Nothing now so made them shudder as the prospect of retrogression, however slight. But to think of their civilisation ebbing away from their posterity before the waning power of the sun and the earth, to think of the lapse of their own intellectual mastery of nature into decrepitude and putrescence, was to turn their hearts to stone.

Under such a prospect they could not sit in intellectual paralysis. For years the imagination of the race worked feverishly towards its rescue from such an appalling destiny, and every new scientific advance brought forth a new book of Emigration. Their one thought of escape was taken from their old migration out of the reach of antarctic glacial advance. To sail out from the earth and commit themselves to the strange conditions and uncertainties of a new element seemed no more hazardous to them now than in their primeval stage of land-civilisation to launch out with their lives in their hands upon the unknown and terrifying ocean. It was urged that there was precedent and basis for their marine adventure in that their ancestry had been amphibious, and that one of the primeval species out of which they had come had been aquatic. The reply was that the case was parallel and not antagonistic. The original vital germs that settled on the cooling surface of the globe must have come out of sidereal space, and must have lived in the element that they would have to cross in emigrating from the glacial orb again; and from these vital germs they, and all living terrestrial things, had evolved. It was only one stage farther back in the history of life; the precedent was the same, though the training and modification of the system would have to be more strenuous and drastic than they had been before the former leap was taken from land to sea. Preparation had already been made; for they had learned aërial navigation far more thoroughly than they had ever known the mastery of the sea. Their airships had ventured right up into the ether, whilst on wings they had themselves coasted the earth’s atmosphere. Nothing was impossible to intellect which had mastered the art of evolution.

Recent discovery had led them far on the difficult ascent towards safe departure from the surface of the world. It only needed ingenuity and development to give them a concentration of aërated sustenance, which would enable them to journey for ages outside of an atmosphere such as they had been accustomed to inhabit; they had the germ of this in the nuts of the alfarene or oxygen-shrub; recently their chemists had been able to reproduce the essence of them, and to compress it into microscopic globules. Not till a later age of discovery did they supersede this by the liquefaction and solidification of air. They were rapidly adapting their own systems to the vacuums they could produce and to the rarefied atmosphere high above the clouds. They were introducing the quintessence of the ether into their halls of sustenance and medication, and thus accustoming their organs and tissues to conditions which they would meet continually on their voyage through sidereal space. The next generation would practically be amphibious, able to live in the luminiferous ether with occasional return to an atmosphere such as surrounds the earth. Every new age would enable them to make longer and longer excursions away from the bosom of mother-earth out towards the influence of other planets. Every new generation would have more elastic and adaptable tissues and organs, which would fit varied pressure and varied mediums of vitality. And with all this the Limanoran body would grow lighter at the same time as it would grow more consolidated, coherent, and indissoluble. But most important of all was the new command of gravitation given them by the discovery of the varying sensitiveness or nonsensitiveness of certain rays to magnetism and gravity according to conditions that were in human hands. There were limitless possibilities in this for sidereal migration. And already out of it had come the lavolamma or gravitation power-machine.

The new book of Emigration brought all these discoveries and thoughts into bearing on its problem and harmonised them, and developed them by means of imaginative suggestion. The drama of its publication drew the bulk of the people to Loomiefa. There we saw a representation of Lilaroma itself, piercing the sky in pure and lonely grandeur. Near its top lay moored a fleet of faleenas of strikingly new form and material; they were as light as foam-bubbles, and as opalescently transparent; within each of them we could see stored quantities of alfarene globules, that seemed enough to serve a people for thousands of years; in each we saw a new anti-gravitation engine, ready to deal with every form of attraction and repulsion in the wide ether and turn it into available power. Men and women in Limanoran form, but as transparent and as imponderable and buoyant as their new ships, floated round the ethereal fleet. Now and again a flash of artificial light would dart across the scene, and along it, as if impelled by it, ran with lightning-swiftness one of the rainbow-flecked faleenas, bearing its full freight. We could see the lavolamma work, and we concluded that there was a new form of it that could take advantage of beams of light to travel with them, as an electric impulse travels along them. Innumerable evolutions with the ethereal fleet took place. The sublimated Limanorans of the future seemed to have complete command of the new ships and of the new power over light and gravitation.

Suddenly came tremors in the framework of the great mountain. It rocked like a buoy in the uneasy surge of a reef. Its snows fell in huge avalanches. Then the conical top was ejected into the sky like a shot from a cannon. The air was thick with dust and stones. But when it cleared and great flames shot forth and licked the face of heaven, we could see far above their reach the rainbow-coloured fleet speeding aloft, filled with their tiny diaphanous sailors.

The scene changed, and we saw universes set in the vault of heaven, and across the space between them we could discern minute specks of light flashing mercurial as thought. Behind them in dim eclipse sped the noctambulant earth, still eddying round the central spot of light; now it broke forth in ragged coruscation, only to sink back into pitchy gloom. Yet a thread of light stretched forth to the luminous atoms that flitted on through the night. Nearer they came and, one by one, grew more distinct and larger. At last we could see that it was the fleet on its way from the top of Lilaroma. Within each ether-ship we could make out the movements of the sailors as they bent its way this side and that. The light from a brilliant star in the new universe made play upon the surface of their faleenas. They had caught in its rays, and were speeding as swift as light towards the now-definite goal. The luminiferous current bore them steadily on, their little engines palpitating with the impulse of the new light and the new gravitation.

Again the scene changed, and we looked upon the surface of a new orb, more advanced in vital development, more highly organised than the earth with which we were familiar. We saw the inhabitants in crowds, face upwards into the night, all eyes upon some distant star. The excitement was rising like a tempest. It seemed as if the object on which they gazed were swiftly approaching them. And in a flash there swept within our sight the fleet of prismatic ether-ships, like rainbows in the light of another sun. They stopped and hovered above the atmosphere. We saw their crews breathe in the elements in which they floated. Lower and lower they came, still sounding the atmosphere and testing its effects upon their organs. The absence of commotion and the steady descent showed that nothing alien to their systems had yet been encountered. Out of their faleenas they gazed as wonderingly down upon the new star as its sea of up-turned faces watched their slow descent.

The scene was brought still nearer to our eyes. Instead of microscopic foam-bells floating in the sky, and microscopic crowds resting on the surface of the other world, we felt present at the meeting of these creatures of different universes. They seemed to feel conscious of this great event in the history of the cosmos. The dwellers of the new world were almost paralysed at first with wonder at these beings so like and yet so unlike themselves; they could recognise, we could see in their friendly faces, the divine community of spirit; their eyes, as soon as they recovered from their waking dream, flashed welcome in magnetic fire; there was no need of community of words for open intercourse; the dwellers of the new star had the same development of electric sense as the Limanorans had; their souls could speak without a sound from the lips.

Step by step their mutual sympathy grew more definite, more cordial, and approximated to the communication of thought and fact. Within a brief period they knew enough of each other’s language to tell out their whence and whither. But in the people of the new star the language was that of feature and not of tongue. Over their faces flashed the signals of thought as well as of emotion, astonishing the newcomers at the rapidity with which expression flitted over their features. Equally astonished were their hosts to hear the countless variety of tone and accent come from the throats of the strangers. They covered their ears as if shielding them from the assault of some thunderous report. Even the voyagers shrank from the voice of their own spokesman. And, tone it down as he would, still was it too loud for any delicate ear to endure. They were in a new atmosphere that bore sound so quickly and clearly as to make a whisper reverberate like thunder. So did it make the eyes of the dwellers in it as keen and far in sight as if armed with the most powerful microscopes and telescopes. The slightest adjustment of them and their lids changed them back and forth from distant observation to near. And the same translucency marked their tissues as made the inner movements of the newcomers’ heart and brain apparent. There was needed no sound to interpret the magnetic messages of the brain along its nerves. Hosts and guests were seen at one, familiar as lifelong friends and thrilling each other with the strange new experiences of their history. The voyagers from earth soon knew why the use of the tongue and throat had been abandoned by their hosts as means of communication; the uncontrollable volume of sound offended their hearing, and drove them to develop the language of eye and feature; the sight grew more powerful and adaptable as voice and ear gave up their share of the energy and sustenance of the system; their tissues, too, had ever been to a large extent transparent because of the rarity and clearness of their atmosphere, and by selection and training they had been able to make them pellucid as they now were.

The gleam of question and answer showed as clearly on the stage of Loomiefa as the movement of the figures themselves. And, when the colloquy had ended, and the strangers had gained all the information they needed for their farther journey through space, we saw them enter their faleenas and rise above the eager, penetrating gaze of their new friends. Across the face of the heaven we followed the ethereal fleet as it faded again into insignificance. Another scene showed us their landing upon another planet of the universe they had entered. The drama thus bore us with delight from system to system throughout the cosmos, and revealed the ease with which stellar voyaging could be accomplished, once the initial difficulties had been overcome.

A mediate book, dramatically published in Loomiefa just before, prepared the way for this. It was the book of Sidereal Intercourse. They had always held that the other universes in the cosmos were as much inhabited by life as theirs was. It had ever seemed to them the absurdest of arrogance for the dwellers on the earth to assume that theirs was the only orb out of the countless myriads on the face of night that had life upon it; that it monopolised the vital energy of infinity, and the attention of its divine intelligence. The wider they had ranged with their sidereal sciences, the more they smiled at the primitive thought of their remote ancestors that they were the cynosure of the cosmos. It had come to be used as the readiest and most striking example of infatuation and conceit. That the poor earthlings were as microscopic in their importance compared with the vastitude of existence, as the bacterial swarms of a wayside pool compared to the denizens of the great ocean, was assumed in every movement and act of their minds.

And, wherever life was, there was the chance that highly developed intelligence existed. They were not so sure that this was yet the case on the farthest of our planets. It might be that the inner and smaller bodies of our universe had passed the stage in which they could support the higher life. The others, they thought, were rapidly evolving a life of their own, most of it still in a low grade; when the earth had passed its climax and begun to decay, they would probably, one after the other, be attaining to a loftier type of life and intelligence. Whilst they were running their course of progress the earth and her inner sister planets would be waiting in their frozen silence the time when the whole of their universe would be exhausted. Nearer and nearer would the whole solar system be approaching some other system that had run its course; and the encounter of the two would evolve a young universe, full of heat and energy enough from the collision to make a new cosmic career.

They had little hope then of stirring reply, if ever they were able to send an embassy of thought to any star of our own system. All their hopes of astral intercommunication were pointed to other stars and other universes; and, as they looked up into the eyes of night, they seemed to feel magnetic answer to the impulses of their souls, not from Mars or Venus, from Saturn or Jupiter, but from the stars that throbbed in far more distant depths. They had ever believed, of course, and they had now scientifically shown, that the centres of light flashing in the nightly sky were not the true sisters of earth but only suns, round which the unseen universes circled. They tried to find the dim worlds which drew their heat and light from these poignant watch-fires of heaven; and their more recent instruments had revealed the dark outlines of many of these twilight wanderers which hung on the radiance of the visible stars. The magnetism that came with the rays from some of those far distant luminous points had shown striking aberration early in its course; and nothing could explain this but the existence of rayless planets revolving round these lambent sources of light. Step by step had they homed these aberrations, till they knew the courses of the dusky satellites of many stars, and they could tell the moment when a circular shadow would cross the face of any one of these suns.

The eyes of the astronomical families had become so accustomed to the times and places of such obscurations that their firlas acted with them and searched for magnetic impulses from the dark sisters of the star they were watching; till at last they could tell by their electric sense the place of many dim planets in the nearer universes.

It was on this that the book of Sidereal Intercourse based its forecast of the immediate future. Since the definite discovery of varied types of life in the spaces beyond the earth’s atmosphere, the last suspicion of mere fancy had vanished from the belief in the existence of high intelligence on the universes of infinity. And now their faces were set towards communication with some of this intelligence on distant worlds. The new book assumed that the electric sense, or something equivalent for the perception of the great cosmic force, had been developed in the inhabitants of some invisible worlds; and it laid down as an axiom that there were vast stores of magnetic material in these orbs, just as there were in the earth and in the sun.

What they must first do was to sweep the range of a universe with an electric impulse on which the whole force of Rimla should be concentrated, and to keep their delicate indicators all set in the same direction. At the publication of the book in Loomiefa we saw gigantic engines slowly moving their long arms this way and that athwart one of the most brilliant stars of night, and scientists eagerly scanning the numerous magnetometers that surrounded the huge electric machine. We could see the air thrill and undulate with the mighty impulse, and the very light of the star seemed to flicker and wink before the penetration of the intrusive force. At last a flash of hope came over the faces of the watchers; the pendent beam of one sarmolan began to quiver. It was a message from the world they sought. Again they turned the whole available power of the island--millions of millions of horse-power--into the electric engine, the arm of which they had at once brought to rest. Fierce lightnings again played through the atmosphere, marking the line of the new despatch. And again the luminous tongue of the magnetometer told of its reception by intelligences like ours. Then came the astronomic families who marked the exact position of the sensitive spot in the sky. And thereafter their sentry stood with sarmolan directed thither, ready to announce the slightest sign of astral impulse or response.

The scene changed, and we saw a new type of electric engine placed in position on the stage. On its long arm was a singularly crooked cage of transparent irelium, flat and sharp like the blade of a sword yet bent into a right angle in the direction of the edge. Within it were placed recording magnetometers. We could see the directors fix them towards their responsive universe. Then Rimla concentrated its tremendous power upon the machine; the arm swung right and left, and finally with a jerk shot the crooked cage like lightning through the air. We followed its luminous track far into the sky, till it seemed nothing but one of the countless stars that silvered the night. Suddenly, like a rocket, it bent back on its course, and as swiftly retraced its flight. I thought to see it shattered into dust as it struck the earth, but there was a deep pool ready to break its force. Its sharp edge cut the water and it vanished, but slowly rose to the surface unhurt, and on the faces of the observers we could see how successful had been the experiment with the limotar, or new boomerang vehicle of electric indications. It had shot far up into space along the true electric impulse that travelled away beyond it towards the sensitive point of sky they had discovered. Before it bent back from its headlong course, the response, speeding more freely and more swiftly through the untrammelled ether, imprinted itself upon the face of the sarmolan. It was this answer, more decided than any they had yet received, that filled the eyes of the observers with joyous light.

There was another change of scene. The gigantic engines had disappeared and in their place we saw the ether-courier families floating on the outskirts of the atmosphere with strata of clouds far below them. On the back of their necks, where the electric sense had its special seat, they bore a singular apparatus, not unlike a small telescope. On their chests they had strapped a small engine of irelium, a miniature of those we had seen in former scenes. The one was a magnifier of electric indications, and the other was an electricity catapult. The couriers could not only draw upon the electric resources of the spaces around them, but upon those of the centre of force. And we could see them converse with distant stars by means of these apparatus. Through unobstructed space they could send with ease their electric impulses to limitless distances, free from the atmospheric retardation which before had demanded immense power to overcome its inertia. And with their new electro-telescopes they could magnify ten-thousand-fold any electric ray for their firlas to receive, although it might have travelled a thousand times the distance between the earth and the sun. They might have to wait days for their answer; but again and again were they rewarded with it. With the dim stars circling round the nearer suns they were able to hold comparatively rapid converse. But they were going farther afield through the cosmos, and they had often to watch and wait for weeks or months or years for any indication of response.

The book awakened little enthusiasm compared with the publication of some of those that I had witnessed. For, though the authors had been rapid in the composition of it, they had been somewhat forestalled by one of the ingenious inventions of the last great age of discovery. This was the modification of the lavolan which brought them records of the life of extra-aërial space. Amongst the luminous impressions that their combination of lavolan and faleena had brought down out of the ether, they had found evidences of highly organised systems which frequented the vacuum outside our atmosphere. They were satisfied with the knowledge of this new-discovered teeming life, and they believed that before many ages they would have developed, first their apparatus, and next their senses, so far as to open intercourse with it. And if they could come to converse with nobler intelligences near the earth, they did not need to go so far afield in the cosmos as the new book suggested. Their own filammus would serve to bring them into close sympathy with the best life that was to be found in space until they should know the conditions of such life and aim at fulfilling them.

It was one of the subsidiary studies and ideals of the book that drew most attention and produced most result. It pictured an apparatus and method for tapping the thoughts of men as they travelled along the nerves, an adaptation of their huge electric engines for sidereal intercommunication. For some ages they had been able to send emotions and impulses through the air, or rather through the medium that interpenetrated the air, and recently they had developed this into the despatch of thoughts through long distances. The combination of great magnetic power and sensitive sarmolans, this book showed, would draw off thought at any point along its line of flight whether in the body or in the air; and underneath an electric magnifier and interpreter the indicator would reveal the meaning of the thoughts. Thus would they be able to find out the intentions of men, however distant. But this was only a minor result of the ideal. They would be able, with the aid of the apparatus, to tap the torrents of thought speeding through the ether, and so drink of the highest intelligence and imagination which approached the earth. Much of it would be too intricate and abstruse for them to follow or understand. But they already knew that most of their greatest inspirations had come from this ocean of tremulous energy, bordering the shores of our world; and development of their faculties and of their sympathy with this extra-terrestrial thought would gradually lead them to the interpretation of its more complex and deeper elements. All their civilisation had been an attempt to know the thoughts that lie in the structure of our universe, in its complicated energy and minute life. By this new means they would feel the throb of the very heart of our system, perchance of the very heart whose beats are the life of the cosmos; at least they would get to know the intelligence that flashes through space around our world, the wisdom and the inspirations passing between the inhabitants of the ether beyond our grosser senses.

Had it not been for this minor issue and ideal, the publication of the book would have been completely overshadowed by that of the book of Immortality. This took as basis the great expansion of life they had been able to produce and their ideals of ethereal nutrition and amphibious life, and pictured the posterity of the Limanorans able to join the inhabitants of the ether without any violent transition or death. We saw a Limanoran on the stage in Loomiefa passing through the new transmutation from mortal to immortal. His transient elements were atom by atom sublimed away in a new hall of medication, where magnetic energy took the place of more material nutrition. His tissues became diaphanous, till only the light and the magnetism he emitted marked the place where he lay. It was what he thought and felt rather than what he was that told us he was still there. His lower and more stagnant centres of energy had vanished; and gravitation seemed to have little or no influence upon him. Whithersoever his thought willed, thither he floated, rather the luminous reflection of a man than the man himself. To our grosser senses he seemed as impalpable and evanescent as a perfume or a mist on the morning hills. Yet there he stood or moved an inexpugnable centre of the highest energy, whither flowed the sympathetic force of other centres, and whither nothing hostile could approach. Storms passed effectless over his head; the deadliest engines shot their darts at him in vain; poisonous fumes, lethal showers, armies of pestilential microbes, swept round him and through him innocuous. All the evanescent centres of energy that had laid him open to the attacks of these, had dissolved and left him fit to be a dweller in the infinite ether. There might be other noxious elements, to whose assaults he was yet vulnerable; but these we could not discover. He was immortal as far as terrestrial enemies were concerned, immortal without the sudden collapse and dissolution of the lower centres which we call death upon our world. By the most natural of processes he lost the substance that awakened our grosser senses and became the mere halo of what he had been, fit only to make himself felt by our centres of thought and imagination. With our firlas we could feel stream from him great currents of magnetic influence, unobstructed by any of those terrene or aërial media that make spiritual intercourse so difficult upon this world.

Such an ideal, when attained, would spread what is now called death over the greater part of our terrestrial lifetime, instead of massing it into a few moments of farewell. It would be difficult to fence off the immortal from the mortal, so many stages would there be of transmutation. The intercourse between the immortalising and the immortal would then be continuous and there would be no sudden break in existence, no great gulf fixed between the spiritual and the material.

With the same corporeal and mental faculties which their ancestry had had in primeval ages, and the bulk of men had in their own day, they would have counted immortality as the gift of a friend. Even with their existing development, noble though it was, they would never think of longing for such a fate; for the lower centres of energy, forming what is called the body, still demanded an amount of attention and sustenance that was burdensome. They had great delight in their life; they energised so purely and continually that they often forgot the corporeal system and its claims. Yet the time came in all men’s lives when they felt their still-mixed constitutions advance too slowly for their spiritual ambitions; and then they longed for change, perhaps rest, such as the dissolution we call death accomplished. If, however, they could get rid of the inferior and clogging elements of their systems and float free of terrene forces and conditions like gravitation, then might immortality be an object of desire.

A publication that delighted them even more than this was one that had a cognate theme, the dimension of time. It seemed to me the most fanciful of all the productions I had witnessed in Loomiefa. Yet it did not seem to strike the Limanorans as beyond the bounds of possibility. It was called the book of Time-focussing. So fantastic and utopian did I think it that I paid little attention when it was dramatically published on the stage. Yet I remember some of the chief features of the new book.

It counselled the development of the imagination on its prospicient side till it should count æons as moments and take easy flight through eternities. It was the real time-faculty, and had already in the productions of Loomiefa forerun the civilisation of the race by long periods. It had become true prophet not merely over months or years, but over centuries. Trained to use the data of the past and the present, it had been able to forecast the evolution of the future with a certainty that made its art almost a science. What was to hinder extending its range of vision beyond the immediate horizon, and taking in at a glance the course of the future as it did the page of history? And as it reached higher and higher points of view, it could paint eternity as it now pictured the past. There was no limit to its previsional powers, as there had been none to its penetration into the prehistoric and primeval darkness. Prescience should be as organised and exact as any science. In fact all their sciences had become presciential, those that were merely retrospective or synchronous having gradually fallen out of notice. And the families that had been devoted to them were one by one absorbed into other services. No study was counted of much value that had not one eye on the future. Their whole intellectual system was thus becoming futuritive, and all the faculties looked up to and centred in the greatest and most predictive of them all--the imagination.

They had already been able in the valley of memories to focus the past into the view of a few moments or days or months. The time stretching behind us into the darkness was underneath one glance of the intellectual eye. Only greater certainty in their imaginative methods was needed for the eternity that stretches in front of us to flash before the soul in a single picture. Only develop the prophet-faculty as rapidly in the next few generations as it had been developed in the past few, and we might move at will from age to age of the future, as we now move from age to age of the past, living at any moment in any period we pleased, or in a thousand periods at once. From past to future would be as easy a leap as from hell to heaven for this great time-and-space-focussing faculty. Eternity would be as focal to imagination as infinity. It was an eye towards which radiated all time and all space. Post-historic pictures would be as vivid to it as prehistoric. Even now interest was fast leaking from mere recorded history before the romance of eternity past and future. What was the history of the race upon earth, compared with the periscope of the cosmos? Then would their posterity be able to stand on a watch-tower in the heights of heaven, and view the whole arena of existence as it stretched through time and space. There is no faculty so close to the divine as imagination.

I felt that this publication was like all their work, singularly self-regardless. It clearly recognised that the realisation of its proposed ideal would mean the doom of its art. Pioneering, all of theirs which we in the West would call literature, would be superseded. Loomiefa would then become an institution of the past, less and less interesting as but a rapidly receding item of history. Self-effacement for the sake of progress was the dominant note of Limanoran civilisation. And in this book it seemed to me to rise to its highest pitch; for it held before the race a goal, which, when attained, would render literature and its publication unnecessary to its advance.