Limanora the island of progress
more sensitive and useful as a power for measuring force. A former
generation of their medical investigators had long noticed and studied
the effect of the concentration of will-power through the eye upon the
back of the neck of one who sat in front of them; although the patient
could tell nothing by means of his five senses of such an effort being
made behind him, he generally turned round. Experiment after experiment
proved that there was a force communicated through the intervening
space to some sensitive spot on the back of the head or neck, and they
knew that relics existed of what seemed once to have been an eye in
that region. They came to the conclusion that this must have a closer
connection with the higher brain-centres than any part of the body
except the eye, and bent their whole attention upon its nature. They
soon defined it as a localised electric sense and by practice made it
as keen at least as the sense of touch in the fingers. They were at
last able to define the direction of an electric influence and to note
its changes of force, and, after several generations, their firla, as
they called it, came to rank next to sight and equal to hearing in the
analysis and investigation of the phenomena of the universe.
Corresponding to this electro-receptive sense, they had also cultivated
the magnetic force of the eye. They had long known and investigated
the exact relationship of light and electricity, and they could at
any moment and place transform the one into the other. They had also
observed ages before that even the commonest and weakest human eye had
a faint luminosity in absolute darkness, and that any exertion of the
will or passing wave of passion greatly increased it. Beside this fact
they put the open secret that men of strong will and character differed
from their fellows in the power of the eye, not only over human beings
but over animals, and also the fact that the long-known plaything,
mesmerism, had the eye as its chief organ. They came to the conclusion
that the will was on its physical side a magnetic force, and that
though most of its play was through the sense of touch, the muscular
energies, and the voice, the eye was its highest and best channel.
This inference was strengthened by noticing that amongst animals the
fiercest-willed and most predatory could paralyse their victims by
the exercise of some optic power, and as they prowled through the
night, they had a perceptible glitter in their eyes that shone in the
dark like lamps. They applied themselves to a minute and systematic
investigation of the subject, and soon had instruments which would
respond to the faintest ocular exercise of the will. They could measure
any increase in the magnetic power of the eye; and before long it was
observed that the subjects they experimented on grew rapidly in optic
magnetism as they practised, and came to have a perceptible sheen in
their eyes when they stood in the darkness. These men and women were
found to have rapidly increasing power of sending anyone to sleep by
gazing at him. At last all doubt vanished as to the new latent faculty
which lay in the eye.
They set themselves vigorously to turn this new knowledge into art, and
trained themselves, and still more their children, in eye-power till
it became an instinctive habit to use it. After a time they came to
see that the power was not one but manifold; the sleep-inducing effect
was only an elementary application of it. A further development was a
soothing influence upon the nerves that never went as far as sleep.
Then the medicative powers of the eye were raised in the families of
medicists into capacities which seemed to me almost preternatural.
A more widely diffused specialisation of the new function was
eye-language. Long-continued emotional dialogues would proceed in
companies where I could not hear a sound, and at the end Thyriel would
tell me the intricacies of the interplay of thought and emotion. It is
true they could not easily communicate any unspiritual fact, needing
some concrete image, unless they employed the code of eye-signals which
every Limanoran learned; this combined the motions of either eye and
magnetic impulses of various kinds and degrees, and contained several
thousand words and phrases. I had so much to learn in the island that I
had not time to master more than a few of the simpler combinations, so
that I was often bewildered in their silent assemblies. But for a long
time what seemed to me most marvellous was that intimate and facile
converse went on when the two friends were at considerable distances
from each other; when occupied in this they kept alternately turning
the back and the face. This was due to the receptive magnetic faculty
being in the back of the neck and the active one being in the eye. The
eye was receptive in only a secondary degree, so that when the magnetic
impulse was weakened by distance, the eye could not interpret it, and
the back had to be turned in order to catch its full force. To see
two men or women standing a mile or two apart and wheeling back and
front every minute, and that, too, in alternating harmony as if they
had been two sympathetic toys, at first would have made me laugh but
for my wonder; and when the intercourse was rapid they looked like
two whirling dervishes; but I grew accustomed to the sight, and soon
began to feel with the people themselves that it was a most dignified
feature of their life. For a time it seemed almost beyond nature that
they could communicate even emotions and impulses at such a distance;
for it was only emotions and impulses, and not facts, that passed, as
the motions of the eye were not apparent except within comparatively
short spaces. Yet there were electro-magnifiers which, affixed
to their firla on the back of the neck, enabled them to feel the
faintest impulse from a distance and interpret it, and a modification
of the vimolan, used like spectacles, reduced the sense-numbing
power of distance a thousand-fold; they could see by means of these
electro-optical instruments the minutest movement many miles off.
The most striking manifestation of their active electric faculty was to
be seen only in a few Limanorans, who would have been in the primitive
ages leaders of masses either as orators or as warriors. These had such
power of eye that they could bend others to their purpose without the
utterance of a word. It was not greater genius or nobility of thought
or strength of character that made them so much more influential than
their fellows, but sheer magnetic force of will. With evil motives or
depraved minds, they would have been dangerous to the whole community:
as mere war leaders or beasts of prey they would have been exiled; but
with beneficent purpose and a deep-ingrained sense of the ultimate aim
of their whole civilisation, they were of great power on the side of
progress. They were the organisers of the community, the captains of
industry. They managed and directed the various services in which all
the citizens had to take part so that there should be no superfluous
issue of commands, no friction, or even consciousness of direction.
They were in complete sympathy with all the people, binding them into a
unity of discipline; and their magnetism of will, applied through the
eye, served but to stir the love of service and duty to enthusiasm. In
an age of semi-savagery, or of revised savagery such as the military
ages of Europe were, some of them would have been great conquerors,
combining many peoples and vast territories for a few years in
order to sate their ambition or love of glory. As it was, the equal
development of their other powers and the universal dominance of the
moral aim of the race made their wills innocuous.
It was the same with the other manifestations of human magnetism, which
in defective or half-developed civilisations played so maleficent a
part. That power of voice and speech which could sway mobs to evil
in such communities was in Limanora the endowment of every citizen.
The electric tone quivered and rang in every voice I heard; it was
like the sweetest music, drawing the soul to it. The fascination of
personality, which so often in Western women, even where they have no
beauty or grace, proves the ruin of dozens of men, belonged to both
sexes in Limanora and to every citizen. It was a powerful, diffused
magnetism ever attracting its opposite without revealing its secret
even to its possessor. There was to me something very winsome in most
of them, even when saying and doing nothing; and in Thyriel, although
my intellect told me she was not what Europeans call beautiful, this
became ravishing. Her personal magnetism was overpowering, even when
she was silent and stood at a distance, and in rude times of ignorance
would have been set down to witchcraft.
All these investigations and results I learned as clearly as if I saw
them with the eye, in the firlamai or division of the electric sense,
one of the vast halls of Oomalefa. Here were all the instruments needed
to develop the firla or aid it, and all those by which it sought deeper
into the secrets of nature. Off the hall ran corridors and arcades,
which were to the firla what picture and sculpture galleries are to
the ocular imagination, supplying it with noble and pleasurable
excitation, as the music domes touched the aural imagination. They
had their passive firlamaic arts of beauty as well as their active.
In one vast arcade they could sit and feel with their firlas the
electric harmonies of any given tract of air or earth or ocean, the
harmonies that play as it were on the surface; this was equivalent
to gazing at landscapes, real or pictured, with the eye. In another
there was firlamaic sculpture; in this were gathered the noblest
achievements of their electric artists, who strove to concentrate
into some definite form varied magnetic materials so as to stir the
imagination through the firla to thoughts of the titanic harmonies of
the universe. They gave this form beauty for the eye as well; but that
was not the primary aim; the gazers, as they sat, preferred to turn
their backs to the work; for then through the firla their imagination
was thrown into an attitude of placid meditation which seemed to have
before it some great spheral harmony of the stars. In a third series of
lofty corridors there was continually proceeding what might be called
firlamaic music. In two or three it was entirely instrumental. Great
firlamans or electric organs, at each end of one corridor I entered,
flashed out what was to me the most appalling medley of lightnings;
the gleams crossed and interwove and changed mass and form as if it
were a dance of meteors, now slow and stately like a minuet, again
swift and brilliant and dazzling as if the stars of heaven had joined
the lightnings in a bewildering yet harmonious ballet. At first I
was stunned and blinded; but soon I felt dimly the ecstasy apparent
in my neighbours. Their eyes gleamed with joy; to me some of them
seemed almost in a delirium; they were unconscious of their immediate
surroundings, for I spoke to Thyriel and received no answer, and her
motion through the hall as we started to leave it was somnambulous.
She told me afterwards that, though her firla was only in its infancy,
she felt drawn up into the heavens as in a trance; she seemed to feel
the worlds move around her and attract her into their spheral chant;
her imagination dealt with interastral forces as with playmates from
eternity; she leapt vast ages every moment, and spanned in a stride
spaces which seemed to her common powers infinite. She would not rest
till she could enjoy this macrocosmic orchestra to the full as her
parents did; she would not let a day pass without such practice as