Limanora the island of progress
intellectually how shallow and false and retrograde it was. The
introduction to what I might call the heaven of the race ought to have
come naturally later in life, when we had passed completely out of
pupilage and assumed the full duties and privileges of maturity; but it
seemed necessary to erase from our emotions this atavistic taint that
the appearance of Choktroo and his expeditions had begotten in us. The
national purification had succeeded in making earthly ambitions seem
insignificant, but as we settled down again to our pursuits the awe
that the cosmophone had bred in us grew fainter. The world narrowed
into a prison-house, and our daily duties forced a recoil to a wider
sphere of ambitions, such as we had seen out in the archipelago in the
masterful wars so lately witnessed. It was time, indeed, that some of
us were brought into the presence of the immediate ideals of the race
towards which they were as a whole struggling.
We were now to enter upon a new epoch of our existence and to know the
wider heaven in which our own special pursuits took their orbit. We
were thereafter to drink at the purer fountains of inspiration, to know
the rewards of all our struggles, the possibilities that lay within the
reach of a measurable number of years.
Up through the morning air we flew, exhilarate with the wine of
healthy life, joyous in anticipation. My proparents were with us, and
explained in answer to our inquiries the character of the building
we were to visit. It absorbed the best energies of some of the most
imaginative and artistic families of the island. They were ever forging
ahead of their own work. Like life, their art never rested. What they
imagined to-day grew familiar or even tame to-morrow. The consequence
was that the inside of the edifice was never two days alike, and the
most frequent visitor never found it monotonous. There was no such
thing as a fixed paradise for any race; it varied, it must vary, with
every development or retrogression of its members. Heaven was merely
the brightest ideal that a people could imagine for itself; and the
heaven of a highly progressive race was rapidly antiquated, and in the
long flight of ages came to neighbour their hell. It is like climbing
a mountain; the shining peak we long to attain as we start from the
plains at dawn is found to be but a lower ridge of plateau which
conceals the gleam of higher snows; these again when reached are found
to be overtopped by still higher peaks. The difference is that in truly
advancing human life the process seems unending. There is no spiritual
ambition, no ideal, no creed, no ethical code, but when realised in
practice is found to reveal something higher still to long for and
realise. A stationary heaven means a stagnant civilisation.
Onwards we sped as we discussed or listened, ever nearer to the vast
pile of buildings that was our goal. We who had never been inside or
known its purpose tingled with expectation. Even our elders, we could
see, were eager and alert with anticipated pleasure. They were sure to
see some new and striking features in the fore-picture.
It was with great awe that we found ourselves within Terralona; for
we had entered the great central hall at once, without any attempt to
study the separate sections of the experiments in progress depicted in
the subsidiary halls. It was more impressive in its proportions and
size than any I had yet seen, and was dimly lit with that strange,
diffusive, centreless light of which they had command. In no one part
was the light brightest, so that it was impossible to say whence it
came or how it was produced. The roof rose so high and the walls were
so far apart that we found flight easy inside; and there were platforms
all round for leaping into the air and taking flight. Along the farther
wall we could see many Limanorans hovering, like butterflies that
alight for a moment and then flit to another flower. There were also
rising to the roof hundreds of tiers of different kinds of rests.
What these were for I could not conjecture, unless they were placed
for easy flight. At length we reached that end of the building and saw
that every rest was placed so as to bring the eyes level with a large
lens set in the wall. We each mounted into one of them, and I set my
face against the smooth transparency. The sight that met me I cannot
even at this distance describe. There seemed to be miles and miles of
space beyond filled with a representation of an island which I soon
recognised as Limanora; but it seemed to be afloat in the azure of
the sky, and from it a pathway of silken threads of light led upwards
to the stars, which floated within neighbourly distance of it. Busy
travellers sped up and down the climbing flightway with a swiftness
that almost obscured their form and size. It was only when they rested
at either goal that I could see their features or study their nature.
They were Limanorans, yet completely transformed. The tissue of their
bodies seemed like light itself, so transparent and filmy was it.
Their wings seemed a part of themselves, and their flight was as easy
as a swallow’s. They moved through the air like shreds of sunlight or
animated snowflakes, with power to fly up or down, often at lightning
speed. In their faces were none of the deep shadows of baffled
thought or blind emotion, but they seemed supremely happy in their
enfranchisement from earth. Yet they were but human, only a few steps
removed from the humanity I saw around me. They had still upon their
faces the look of pity so frequent amongst the Limanorans when they
gazed out on the men and life of other lands; but it was only when they
gazed or travelled downwards that this took the place of the serene
calm which marked them out as sages. At times an agitation marked their
gait as they set out on the gauzy pathway of the stars. I could feel
that there was still a world beyond that which they had reached, and
that towards this they must progress with eager thought and effort.
It was the inhabitants of other stars that they were trying to emulate
or gain as friends. They could live in the intervening ether and
found movement through it rapid as thought. Their highest wishes, the
subjects of their imagination, encountered little obstacle or friction
in the accomplishment. They were evidently nearer omnipotence over the
forces around them than they had ever been. Their bodies were so much
dematerialised that they were not far from the state and texture of
their souls. Thought was not clogged with an earthy matter so different
from itself as to hold it down till freed by death. Yet I could see
that there were limits to their actions. The forces of other worlds
and the conditions of interstellar space narrowed and checked their
activity. They could not yet create; they could only transform what
already existed, for there I saw one pair, moulding a creature perfect
according to their ideals and trying to breathe life into it, and not
yet could they know the centre of all being. The path was still upwards
and onwards.
Their activity was no longer restricted to the immediate confines
of the earth. Beyond and above it they soared till it became an
insignificant speck of light in the azure, busily exploring the
universes that strewed infinity and finding out the higher and ever
higher life that inhabited them. I could see them marking on their
itineraries of the sky the orbs to be avoided for their degenerate or
degraded forms of life or energy. Every grade of existence was found
and indicated by brighter light or deeper shadow. They loved to linger
over those orbs whose dwellers were but a step above them, watching
their actions and thoughts and learning their higher ambitions. At a
distance they hovered over the worlds of beings many stages beyond
them in the evolution of energy, afraid lest they might be repulsed
as degenerate. As they watched, their longing study helped them to
rise more rapidly in the scale of being, and back they would come to
Limanora with new thoughts and methods and set themselves thus equipped
to work out with increasing pace their own evolution.
This vast widening of their horizon was evidently an era in their
history, it added such lightning swiftness to their rise in the scale
of existence, it gave them such power of fulfilling whatever they
designed or even imagined. Nobler and nobler ideals remained to be
discovered in every corner of the cosmos. They had only to sail out and
investigate, and then, returning with higher thoughts and ways of life,
mould their being to them. And to die,--what was it now but to slough
off a trammelling form? Death was to them an ecstasy. Every moment of
advance was to them a death, a death of the old, a realisation of the
nobler and higher.
Such was the representation I watched through my optic glass; for my
proparents interpreted what I saw, and showed me the spiritual meaning
of this cosmorama of the future. The details of the living picture I
had not time to mark; nor were my guardians willing that these should
distract my attention from the central ideas; they emphasised the
guiding principles of the new life we might perhaps soon lead, and the
glory of it overcame my earth-born ambitions. What a pitiful figure did
Choktroo and his armies and fleets seem in comparison with such a life!
All the great conquerors and heroes of earth were pigmies seen in a
light like this, slaves to brute longings and ambitions. I grew ashamed
of ever having harboured anything but contempt for even the greatest
career of mortal upon earth.
Nor yet were we done with our cure. The imaginative artists had filled
another and complementary edifice with living pictures of all that by
means of horror could drive us forward on the path of progress. It was
called Ciralaison, or the museum of terrors. I had often heard of it
and had imagined it as a place of unending torture, a Limanoran and
rationalised version of the hell of Christendom, and looked forward
with much loathing and curiosity to the sight of it. We were taught
that this was no imaginary place, but the too real result of all
retrogression and encouragement of atavism, and that there was nothing
supernatural in it, but that it was the natural outcome of all lapses
from the existing ethical path of advance. It was the contrivance of
nature herself to prevent degeneration.
As I had read Dante’s _Inferno_, it was easy for me to map out the
features of Ciralaison. I knew the vices and faults they most shrank
from, and these would define their own natural punishments. As we
winged our way towards the sombre edifice, perched, strangely enough,
upon one of the most prominent spurs of Lilaroma that beetled over the
sea, I let my mind wander over what was soon to meet my eyes; pictured
a place of intense woe, full of the horrors of a mediæval place of
torture: I could almost imagine I heard the weeping and wailing and
gnashing of teeth.
We entered the gloomy porch and passed into the central hall; it was
almost the exact counterpart of Terralona, except that there was no
brilliant suggestion of all that was beautiful and noble. There was the
same dim suffusion of light, the same lofty wall of lenses with rests,
the same series of flight platforms round the other walls. With some
precipitancy I made for one of the optic rounds in the wall, and the
first sight I saw struck me as the most commonplace and familiar. It
was a representation of one of the foul lanes of our Western cities.
There were the gutter children, the reeling drunkards issuing from
the gin palaces, the cursing drabs behind them, the tatters, the
filth, the dilapidated buildings. It was but an unending series of
instantaneous photographs moving with great speed under stereoscopic