Limanora the island of progress

prelude to a more impressive effect as night fell. By some ingenious mechanism the immense dome was changed; instead of a semi-opaque crystal, on which could be enacted a mimic evolution of systems, there slid into its place an enormous lens, which gathered the sky ten thousand thousand times magnified into the focus of a smaller lens; and upon this was turned another magnifier, which threw upon some light-bearing film in front of us a picture of the sky a million million times the size of what appeared to the unaided eye. Here we saw enacting the infinite tragedy of the cosmos. We could turn aside and view the azure above us strewn with its silver eyes, and the contrast raised the soul to unknown heights of sublimity. In the picture the worlds lived and moved, and the number of those that filled the spaces behind was past all counting; we seemed to have drawn as near to some of the golden centres of systems as lightning flight from the beginning of our earth would have brought us. And what gave transcendent sublimity to the scene was the strange music that accompanied it. By means of the duomovamolan, a marvellous instrument which reversed the processes of Oolorefa, we heard the harmony that the worlds made in their motions. As they moved across our lens and round and across one another, their movements, enormously magnified, awakened such harmony of sounds as never embodied soul had heard. Their flight and their magnetism affected an irelium film in such a way that the complicated lines and curves and figures produced upon it translated themselves into the music which would have produced these figures in the ooloran. This people had long practised architecture by music in Oolorefa before they thought of attempting the reverse process and converting form and colour into melody; but once thought of, it was soon accomplished, and the oorolan was the result. The shadowy figures which any melody produced could be made themselves to reproduce it. From the use of this little instrument it came to be seen that their telescopes could by a little modification and addition be made to tell out in music the scenes they witnessed and recorded. Step by step the astronomic families advanced till at last they reached the wonderful duomovamolan, or cosmophone, which, facing the heavens unbrokenly for generations, stored up the music of the spheres in their various changes. It was this instrument we heard as we gazed into the hitherto unfathomed depths of night. The worlds themselves in their motion played upon it, and through it upon our souls. No human thought could have conceived the marvels of harmony that rang through the great auditorium. We felt as if we had been present at the creation of the universe and our thoughts ranged through infinite space. A dream of the most tremendous kind was being enacted before our waking senses. How poor seemed the whole long history of life upon our earth! Thought was the only element in us akin with infinity or like to last through eternity, the thought that could thus span the abysses between the systems of worlds and comprehend these cosmic melodies still ringing in our ears. When the treasured-up music of the spheric movements of the past ceased, the night itself, the very sky we were contemplating began to stir fresh harmonies through the lenses of the subsidiary towers. We gazed, and the stars in their silver motions, motions unnoticed by the naked eye, told their tale in sweet harmony. These new symphonies were simpler than the operas of creation and decadence that we had been listening to and, after those titanic effects, seemed almost monotonous, so few complications had they. They soothed the souls lost in the sublimities of infinite space and time and we came gentlier down to the earth on which our life was cast. We still trod on air, our heads were still amongst the stars, but the earth was near us and counted as one of the myriad worlds. As night swung towards the mid-vault, the music faded and seemed to sound from far valleys. At last it sank into a lullaby, the lullaby of slow-moving constellations. Sleep came on me by unconscious, scarce-heard footfalls, and through its magic portal the universe of dreams appeared. Amongst the stars I flew, never-resting, eager to visit and know all. Here I communed with beings so like me and yet so far above me that I yearned to remain with them; but on I had to speed. Then I rested on a world still dominated by the rudimentary stages of life-energy, and so repulsive were the sights and sounds there that I fled shrieking from it. Next came a sphere so filmy and translucent I scarcely knew how it persisted in tiding the storms of space; yet here, too, was life, life so noble, so immaterial, that I felt ashamed of my body and its sensuous methods of knowledge; so ethereal were the beings there that the common forces of gravitation and attraction seemed to have no power over them; so far below them did I feel myself to be in the process of evolution that I had not the heart to remain. Away into space I winged, till a dark orb drew me towards it, shone on by suns of the most fantastic and ill-omened colours. Here, too, was a manhood not unlike that of earth, yet so sinister that it seemed an orb of devils; the forms were graceful; the faces had a beauty of their own, but shone with such evil meaning that they fascinated like snakes; amongst them I could recognise the great conquerors and monarchs and warriors and colossal criminals whose faces or the representations of whose faces I had seen upon earth; war and pillage were their occupations; cunning and force, hypocrisy and arrogance, were their weapons. In horror I fled from the sight of their internecine passions and into the depths of the night I sped on. So varied was the constitution of the orbs that I approached, so marvellous the range of the kinds of beings inhabiting them, that my mind seemed to sink under the task of imagining them. Everything was in transition, there was no rest for any form of energy in the cosmos. On it must sweep towards a higher transformation or a lower. I saw beings that seemed to be the very acme of creation, so beautiful and noble were they, so purged of all grossness and materiality; yet ever beyond them I found some form they looked up to and yearned to reach. Below me I could see on endless orbs lower and lower kinds of energy receding into darker night, yet ever pressing upwards, step by step. What an eternity of ascent was before them! Looking up, my soul was drawn to some great centre my eyes could not discern; the exhilarant force seemed to give me wings finer and nobler than those of my body. With infinite longing I left my material part behind floating slowly in space. A trance came upon me as I flew upwards with lightning speed and I swooned with the ecstasy of final achievement. Then I awoke, still lying in my pendulous rest. Morning had broken and the cosmic strains had died away. This dream-flight had been but the climax of the purification. Such music, such electric impulse had been poured about us as we slept, that our spirits could not but accomplish these imaginary voyages through space and time. Without this sublime uplifting into the diviner realms of ether our souls might have fallen back to the mean purposes and ambitions of earth induced by the fears of the invasion and the necessities of its repulse. Now we walked like angels amongst men, a wall of eternity separating us from the gross needs of war and defence. We were again on the upward path that leads towards the highest, and, purified and ennobled, were eager again for the immediate duties of life. Such purifications of the soul occurred amongst the community as a whole whenever any influence tended to drag it down to a lower plane. Their eyes were drawn downwards; they had again to be turned to the goal of all energy. Victory over such a conqueror as Choktroo had to be given its due insignificant proportion in the results and aims of life, else it might atavise some of their spirits and bring to life ambitions buried for long ages. One night’s voyage amongst the infinities was enough to throw human conquests, however great they might seem, into pettiness and oblivion. Thus the evil spirit such events might raise was exorcised, and yet the sensuous power of the music by which the exorcism was achieved was evaded. Mere music, such as I had been accustomed to hear with luxurious passion in my old home, would have let our spirits, after raising them to the heights of ecstasy, fall crashing into the world of commonplace as soon as it ceased; but this cosmophonic harmony permanently soothed and elevated the embruted soul. It implanted thoughts so high that it seemed sacrilege to return to any lower plane. CHAPTER XVI THEIR HEAVEN AND THEIR HELL THE race returned to its daily life, purified and elevated. The danger of intrusion upon their upward struggle had called out unwonted vigour; and the expulsion of the grosser elements and ambitions which threatened to accompany this had resulted in clear gain for their progress. The pace at which they developed greatly quickened; and we felt the pulses of the race beat with the eagerness of prevision. Every new age had accelerated its advance till it seemed to have breasted all possibility, yet as the step grew swifter and swifter the lightning swiftness of a far past seemed to them but a snail’s pace. Back the darkness of the future was pushed, and new vistas opened where the black wall of fate had seemed to face them. One of the most striking proofs of their advancement was to them the rapidly developing love and power of foreseeing. They seemed to live in the future, and that future was an ever-receding circle like the horizon ahead of them, widening and widening as they rose above mere earth necessities. A considerable section of their community was devoted to pioneering for the race, exploring the possibilities of the future; and whenever there was a danger that the energy of development would slacken the imaginations of the youth were fired by a sight of all that they might be. One of the chief duties of the imaginative pioneers of the race was to prepare a vision of the time to come that would at once appeal to the youthful fancy and fire it to renewed effort; for often in a generation a family or individual would become so absorbed in a special pursuit that the idea of the whole was obscured; and to prevent or obviate this false perspective imaginative prevision was ever and again needed. An easy bird’s-eye view of all that the race might become was the best means of attaining this. Another magnificent edifice was set apart for this purpose, again on the slopes of Lilaroma, not to give outlook, but merely to draw all eyes. It was perhaps the most impressive of the great buildings of Limanora; so vast were its proportions that it seemed almost a city in itself; for in huge subsidiary halls every phase of the possibilities of their civilisation was represented. These were dwarfed by the central hall, which seemed large enough to contain the whole of them. In it all the phases of the future were focussed in what they called the mornalan, or time-telescope. This made the pictures of what they might become live and move before the eyes of the gazers, who as they gazed through one of the many thousand eye-pieces seemed to look upon life itself in its noblest ideals. My first visit to the great building, which they called Terralona, or millenarium, was not long after the final repulse of Choktroo. Into the younger and less purified hearts of the community the idea of warlike glory had returned with some force, even though we realised