Limanora the island of progress
in groups or pairs, round a verdant cliff or into some overarching
bower. I was left alone with Thyriel. The sudden loneliness of the vast
valley-hall made me feel the delight of having her spirit to lean upon.
In spite of the companionship of the flowers and the close ranks of the
forest, I felt the great spaces of the valley solitary because of the
loftiness of the roof, like the arch of night making space seem more
vast than under the warm, indefinite sky of noonday. Bewildered and
alone, my thoughts sought the shelter of friendship.
Not long had I felt this consolation when both of us were in the shadow
of a nobler and more mature personality. He came I knew not whence,
and the suddenness of his appearance added to the awe I felt at once
for his character. He was, I was certain, one of the sages of the
community, so deeply had the centuries engraved their experience upon
his face and spirit. There seemed to come from him even before he
spoke or recognised our presence a benign and godlike influence, and I
knew at once the greatness of his soul. There were the lines of long
struggle and complete self-mastery upon the countenance like the curved
stratification and cleavage of the older rocks. He had not to speak
before I had surrendered myself entirely to his guidance. He who had
seen so many hundreds of years pass over the earth and learned all the
lessons they had to teach was the natural master of two such novices
in life as we were. For I now felt that, however superior Thyriel was
to myself in instincts and development and beauty of soul, she was
completely overshadowed by this spirit of centuries.
Yet when he spoke to us we felt that he had still the elasticity of
youth about him; he had in his words and actions the rapid recoil
of healthy tissues that have a long career before them yet, and in
his faculties and ideas there was still the unlimited capacity of
development. After explaining that he was to be the interpreter of
this house beautiful for us, he led us by a maze of paths through the
blossom and the verdure to an open space, from the centre of which rose
a noble flight of steps flanked by porticoes and colonnades. These we
ascended, resting at times on broad platforms, and looking out on the
fairy scene that more and more unfolded itself to our eyes.
At last we stood on the highest platform, not many hundred feet from
the gleaming roof. He touched a spring here and there, and out of
the tessellated floor came rests that moved automatically with the
movements of the head and eyes; wherever I gazed as I reclined thither
my rest wheeled round. This I afterwards discovered was managed by
hidden springs in the groove in which the head rested. These were
rests of observation, and the purpose was to allow of the whole energy
and consciousness being directed into one channel, that of vision. The
numberless easy methods of rest and motion that this people used would
have certainly induced sloth and luxury but for their inherent energy
of nature. To them these methods were but economisers of the time and
power which might be spent on less routine work.
I soon saw that the valley ran more than a score of miles into the
heart of the mountains, its deepest hollows rising now by easy
gradations, again by bold platforms of rock far above the level on
which we rested. For the dome, I could now see, consisted not of one
span whose top ran horizontally along the ridges of the valley, but
of hundreds of spans that rose arch above arch up the slope of the
mountain. There was something in the terracing of the valley, too, that
suggested the hand of man. Nature’s work had been supplemented and
rounded by noble art. There was regularity in irregularity, statuesque
beauty amid wild grandeur. Human thought had utilised the massive
ideas of nature. The scene would have overawed the spirit and made it
solitary, but for the familiarity of minor features moulded by human
imagination that had not geological ages and forces at its disposal.
In amongst the greenery of the forest stood on lofty pedestals what
I took for memorial statues of the dead, with features so like to
life in every minute line and curve and even graining of the skin,
that I marvelled at such waste of human energy and imagination. My
guide soon saw my mental question, and showed me that they were the
dead themselves. The moment after every trace of life had gone from
the body it was ireliumised by an ingenious process; for every atom
of tissue and cell there was substituted one of irelium, and thus no
decay could approach it; it would retain for untold centuries the form
and expression of the vanished man down to the minutest detail. As
we passed farther back into the valley I noticed a difference in the
appearance of the statuesque dead; they had not the hues and expression
of the living, but were leprous white, as if hewn out of marble with
infinite care. I appealed to Oolmo, my guide, and he told me that these
were their dead as they had been preserved before the age of irelium
and the discovery of the process that rapidly changed living tissue
into this metal. At that period the body used to be buried for years in
stalactitic caves, where the percolation of the liquid gypsum turned it
after a time into a calcareous statue.
These caves ran into the mountain at the head of Fialume, and were now
used for converting traceries and forms too delicate to work in marble
into white stone. They made a beautiful contrast in ornamentation to
the rainbow-hued limpidity of irelium. The process had been too long
and slow for the petrifaction of the dead. And about the same time as
the method of extracting irelium from the rocks had been discovered,
the careful study of the petrifactive methods of nature had led to the
new and rapid process of immortalising the form and features of those
who had passed from life.
From our movable rests I could never have seen what all these statues
were. I would have said that this was the island’s great gallery of
sculpture. But there were other things that Oolmo pointed out to us
before he led us round this vast hall of his ancestry. He showed us
far back in the recesses of the valley up the slope of the mountain
what looked in the distance like a great settlement of some burrowing
animal. This was the oldest burying-place of the island, where had
been laid in apertures in the rock the urns that contained the ashes
of the dead; for they had brought the practice of cremation with them
in their primitive migration from the south. Then followed a period of
superstition and recession, in which the priests taught the sacredness
of the human form and its final resurrection and when they buried the
bodies deep in the earth beneath the urned rock recesses. A period of
reaction against religion followed, and sanitation became one of the
first essentials of the new scientific era. It was feared that plagues
would come from this old burying-place on the side of the mountain, if
the percolating waters brought the corruption of the rotting corpses
down into the valley. It was resolved that the remains of their
ancestors should be dug up and removed to a mound made for them on a
level with the sea. Then it was found that almost all the bodies had
become stone white as snow, for the calcareous percolations that came
along the surface of the rock down the hill had done their work, and
an accident in digging up one of the lower row of graves revealed the
marvellous stalactitic caves underneath. There had been a movement
towards a return to the practice of cremation, but it was stopped at
once by this discovery. The caves became the natural burying-place, and
out of them the dead were brought and erected in the valley when they
had turned into stone.
After we had viewed the whole scene from our platform under Oolmo’s
direction, he bade us enter a car that had sprung up at his touch. It
seemed made of gossamer, and I was afraid to enter it, till I felt
the toughness and strength of its material. It floated rather than
ran round the valley above the tops of the tall trees. I could see
no wheels, and there were no rails for them to travel on if it had
had them, nor had it any wings or sails like our faleena. At last I
saw that it was hung by a transparent cord of metal from some moving
force in the dome that to me was invisible. It was an electric car,
and electric currents bore it aloft and swept it along with lightning
rapidity. But a touch of Oolmo’s finger broke the circuit and stopped
it in a moment.
I was not long held by this new wonder, for beneath and around
stretched the great graveyard, that seemed a harmony of forest,
wild, and garden. We rested at intervals of a few miles on the lofty
platforms, descending the flights of steps at times to view the
statuesque dead and their surroundings. Here and there we came across
groups of young men and young women intently listening to strange
voices that seemed to issue from some hidden being within the statued
dead. These were students, and the sounds were the voices of the dead,
treasured up on fine tablets of irelium, which could either be read or
made to re-utter their recorded words. To me the silent bowed figures
of the living seemed the lifeless, the whispering dead seemed the
living. It was a piece of necromancy, I felt at first; and, but for my
questioning intellect, I should have shrunk back in fear. It is true, I
could not see the lips of the erect figure move, and when I gazed long
enough some tremor of the eyelid would betray the life of the listener;
but for the first few minutes the illusion was complete, and all the
surroundings, the stillness, the far echo of wailing music, the sombre
trees, seemed to confirm it. Every new group we encountered produced
the same eerie feeling.
But we passed on; and the joy which filled the spaces of the great
valley buried the sense of death. It was the least funereal scene I had
ever witnessed; for along the paths and wide tree-arched avenues went
bands of carollers singing songs of triumph and gladness, the air was
sweet with the perfume of flowers, and masses of varied colour broke
the olive darkness of the groves. The world was at once jubilant and
harmonious.
Farther and farther into the valley we flashed in our lightning car,
and even my inexperienced eye could see the change in the erect dead.
Many of the figures were taller; the attitude was often overbearing and
arrogant, and the expression was generally mean or cunning or truculent
like so many European faces when surprised in unconscious repose. The
farther we receded, the more familiar the forms and features seemed to
become, so like were they to the normal human beings of our Western
world. Animalism, sensuousness, rapacity, vindictiveness, cruelty,
fanaticism grew more and more frequent, the nearer to the primitive
graveyard we approached. At last on the faces of the dead that had
been dug out of their old tombs there was the manifest touch of the
ape, the tiger, the wolf, or the snake. I shuddered to see withal the
regularity of the features and the stature and grace of the figures.
They came nearest of all to the ideal beauty and the haughty bearing
of aristocratic Europe. It scarcely needed the explanation of Oolmo
to see that the body had then been developed at the expense of the
soul. Underneath the handsome and generous outlines lurked the beast
that had entered into the making of ancestry. Splendid animals they
had been; and, as our interpreter explained, given up to war and field
sports and at intervals debauchery, or to the over-reaching of trade
and money-making, or to the subtleties and falsehoods of political
life. They belonged to the age just before the great emigrations. As