Limanora the island of progress
it was one of my first expeditions under the guidance of Thyriel. The
beauty of her spirit dawned upon me as the day passed; afterwards I
came to see that it was everything that my own needed, but at the time
I could not reason out the nature of my feelings. She grew upon me as
the day upon the night, and when we parted it was as if my sun had set;
helpless and stumbling, my spirit groped for the guiding dawn again; I
was forlorn, reaching out for my other half in a lonely universe.
Her presence doubtless coloured all the scenes through which I passed,
yet they were enough of themselves to impress my mind. We alighted on
the mainland and made our way out towards the archway which spanned
the root of the promontory. The weight of our bodies as we stood upon
a certain spot swung up the transparent portcullis, and we found
ourselves in a spacious entrance hall, its roof a moving orrery of the
sky of night, its walls lit pictures of the ocean around framed in
living sections of the sea alive with sea-denizens, its floor a tidal
beach of sand, soft yet firm, whereon the sea ever seemed to cream and
retreat. It had all the beauty and the freshness of the shore beneath
the starred night when the tide is making.
The next chamber we entered was as vast, and was as many-coloured as
the rainbow. It was the index hall; for here were marked the name and
number and situation of every chamber in Oomalefa, and underneath
each name was shown in graphic experiment the effect of the different
medicated atmospheres upon the various tissues of the human body.
Complete reproductions of the bones and muscles, the flesh and
blood, the cells and nerves and coatings were here enclosed and the
transformations pictured in the transparent sections of the walls. An
expert from the family having the manufacture of each atmosphere under
its charge stood by and guided and explained the process. It was a
physiological laboratory, in which every Limanoran might see with his
own eyes and hear explained by one who knew, every modification in
the tissues that a longer or shorter time spent in any chamber would
produce.
Twin with this hall was that of measurement and consultation.
Here every entrant had all his important organs and tissues tested
scientifically, and was then told the atmospheres which would best suit
the development of any or all of his parts and faculties. He stated
the chief purpose of his existence, and consulted the experts on the
directions that would best lead to it. He was told of any defect in
his organic functions and advised how it could be remedied. After this
consultation he could return to the hall of experiment and see with his
own eyes the effect of the various atmospheres upon the unseen portions
of his system. Then he was permitted to enter the halls of nutrition
and medication, and choosing those which he specially needed that day
spent the time required in each. He found exit again by the hall of
measurement, and there another testing revealed whether he had been
successful in his alimentary sojourn in Oomalefa, and whether he would
have to remain longer or have a certain atmosphere introduced into his
sleeping-chamber in his own mansion.
Every Limanoran except the young and undeveloped had as the result
of attention to health in past ages what they called the conscience
of the health. This put them on the alert the moment any function
was disordered, and off they went to Oomalefa to consult the medical
families on the exact nature of the derangement, its locality, and the
diet or treatment that would restore to complete health. Few or none
of full maturity but would feel this sanitary sense within them like a
whip or goad which would not let them rest till the evil element was
swept out. It was a daily occurrence to meet some islander hurrying
post-haste for consultation and medication, and I came at last to be
ashamed of the lethargy which would let me remain inert under some
decay of nerve or tissue in its primary stages until it had resulted in
ache or pain. The feeling of lassitude or the absence of the sense of
the full tide of life made me rush in fear and trembling to the hall
of consultation. In my former existence I had had the embryo of this
sanitary conscience in the pains or prostration accompanying disease,
but then the warning generally came too late. Now I was sensitive
to the slightest derangement of any tissue or part of my system and
without the goad of ache flew to Oomalefa to find the remedy; otherwise
I felt that I was doing wrong to my future and my posterity and to the
future of the whole race. Even the actual present of the people was
affected; the slightest disorder of my constitution seemed to weigh
upon the spirits of my companions and friends, for they believed there
was contagion in every disease. As strongly did they hold that there
was a contagion of health, and would not allow any member of their
medical families or council to approach a citizen even in consultation
unless the healer was himself whole in every atom of his constitution.
To be sound in body and spirit was as sanative of the derangements of
others as any active remedy.
Every citizen was taught enough of the medical science of the island
to know what was wrong in himself or his neighbour; for every citizen
was a possible father or mother; and for parenthood a thorough and
practical acquaintance with the laws of health and the causes and
cures of the commonest diseases was a first essential. The Limanorans
laughed at the absurdity of Western civilisation in allowing men and
women to generate and bring up children with no more knowledge of
their constitution than if they were mere animals. Still oftener they
mourned that so much human generation in the world was left to the
chance dictates of caprice, and that most medicine and education were
only blind groping in the dark. That nothing should be done on mere
authority was one of the first principles of their civilisation.
The medical councillor knew that he had a keen critic in every citizen;
and he had to justify and make clear every process he recommended, in
order that faith in him might remain clear. His sole advantage was his
fuller and deeper knowledge and the faculty he had acquired from long
familiarity with the questions and problems he had to deal with. Each
member of the medical families and council had a special section of the
human system to explore, besides having a mastery of the whole. It was
this division of labour that caused their science of the human tissues
to advance so swiftly. Not a moment of their work was lost.
I had thought at first that a people so healthy and vigorous and
devoted to such wholesome ways of life had no need of medical science;
but I soon saw that their general sanativeness demanded a more advanced
science and art than the rude quackery of Western medicine. All the
worst diseases of maturity in Europe, fevers, consumption, diphtheria,
rheumatism, indigestion, and the rest, were relegated in Limanora to
childhood, and were then as mild and innocuous as scarlatina or measles
or whooping-cough; they had become the enemies of unformed tissues,
and found little to batten upon even in them. Generally they were
checked in their first stage by the medical knowledge of the parents or
proparents, and it was the rarest occurrence to have to resort to the
deeper knowledge of the medical council, rarest of all where childhood
was concerned.
I rushed to the conclusion that the medical families would have nothing
to investigate but the development of the tissues and organs and
faculties as they existed in Limanora; but I was disabused of this idea
by the occurrence of an epidemic in the island not long after I arrived
there. It took the form of dream-disturbed sleep, which held the
faculties in its grasp beyond the usual number of hours of rest. The
patients tossed and moaned and imagined horrors of the past of humanity
and animalhood as still occurring in their lives. It abridged the hours
of consciousness, and left the sufferers spent and unexhilarated.
It was no fever, but only a languor that attacked the imaginative
faculties and made them morbid and secretive in their activities.
My brain-tissues were perhaps not fine enough to be attacked by it,
and I escaped; but I was greatly distressed to find that Thyriel had
been touched by the epidemic. My anxiety led me to know all that the
specialists discovered concerning it. It could not be fatal, they
assured me; for no epidemic had been fatal to Limanorans for many
centuries. It only meant the loss of a valuable portion of the time
of working. In the other islands, the winged scouts brought the news,
it had swept half the populations into the grave; but so vigorous and
healthy were the various tissues of our people that no disease could
produce anything but a temporary derangement.
By means of their skilful surgery they soon isolated under the
microscope some specimens of the living organisms that produced the
disease; they experimented with all the elements and their combinations
and saw what encouraged them, what attenuated them, and what killed
them. It was not long before every trace of the microscopic creature
had vanished from the island; there remained only the knowledge and
the antidote that would enable their outposts or messengers through
the sky to resist its attacks, should they ever encounter it again.
Limanorans who were sent on missions out of the country had to be made
epidemic-proof by inoculation against known diseases before setting
out. But it sometimes happened, especially to scouts into the higher
regions on the outskirts of the earth’s atmosphere, that they brought
back with them symptoms that were new, and a new disease and a new
microbe had to be added to their medical lists. It was explained to
me that our solar system was travelling every moment of its existence
into new regions of space; and as it moved it passed from time to
time through swarms of minute and attenuated life which had been left
myriads of ages before in its tracks by some diseased member of another
system. This microscopic life was in its own special way immortal,
and could subsist on the scattered material life that floated though
the ether unclaimed by any planetary centre. It was out of such waifs
of life peopling space that a new world made a new beginning in vital
history; as soon as it cooled down sufficiently, after creative
collision and separation, to allow of individual existence upon it,
myriads of these microscopic inhabitants of space took possession of
it, and began again the struggle of life which was the universal law
of infinity, and meant the ascension of all energy through higher and
higher circles.
Disease was but a form of this eternal struggle for existence; it
was the attempt of invisible lower forms to master the higher human
tissues and make them their feeding-ground. The original enemies of
man, the wild beasts, were subdued or tamed or driven forth into the
deserts as soon as savage life was passed. Then began the fiercer
contest for the possession of his own cells and tissues and organs.
Enemies that he could not see migrated out of the surrounding elements
into his system as soon as it became delicate enough to stir their
appetite, and for ages there were no weapons against them; chance now
and again offered one; but generally he groped about in his frantic
ignorance for anything that would ease the pain from these gnawing
foes within him. Out of this rose by slow steps a kind of quackery
they called the science of medicine; but the conflict still remained
unequal; the invisible enemies had the best of it, and they were ever
being recruited by new enemies out of space, which bred new and more