Limanora the island of progress
more and more definite impulses through considerable distances. This
was their filammu or will-telegraph, one of their most remarkable
faculties, drawn with deliberate purpose by the elders of the race out
of the chaos of mere vague influence and tendency.
Though making use of the active electric sense as channel, it was not
the same as the firla, for it implied a greater effort and outwelling
of the whole spirit. Only exceptional impulses and enthusiasms set it
into full efficiency, such impulses as entangled the whole soul in
their issue. It was no mere toy to be used for the amusement of the
passing moment; dormant it lay, if ever summoned to such a purpose.
It was the faculty that in other races and periods of history had set
up men as heroes and leaders; not that these had even been conscious
of its existence in them when they began their career; success and
gathering enthusiasm in their followers gave it strength and issue,
till their mere glance seemed to command. But when failure came, and
the glamour or magnetic atmosphere rarefied about them, their faculty
vanished; for it had no means of communicating its meaning or power.
In certain periods of exaltation every Limanoran was conscious of
the filammu or will-telegraph; he could not only receive but send
emotional impulses through long distances. The intervening air was
magnetised by their great enthusiasm or sympathy, and became a medium
for transmitting emotional or imaginative thought from mind to mind.
Not yet had they been able to send a definite piece of information by
this means, unless it represented the spiritual crisis through which
the sender was passing. But in movements that shook the whole race to
its core, like Choktroo’s threat of invasion, even those who were still
in pupillage seemed to feel the beginnings of the faculty, at least on
its receptive side; secluded though they were far from the scene of
deliberation, they knew the magnitude of the danger that threatened the
life of the commonweal; the air seemed to tingle with it, and their
embryonic filammu could not help responding to the vibration. Once
awakened they were eager to bring out its latent power, that they might
feel and know the impulses which sped the race onwards as a whole.
They soon discovered that it ceased to grow or even work except under
certain conditions; they must keep step with the people, and fix their
eyes steadily on the future: they must never swerve from uprightness or
candour, never let the perfect transparency of their lives be clouded.
Such had been the conditions of the development of the filammu in
the race. In fact its indications had become unmistakable as soon as
candour and truth had become the primary virtues, and progress the
watchword. And it grew as the ideal of the nation became clearer and
more imperative, and their character more uniformly strong and noble.
They also found that something depended on the physical conditions;
the atmosphere must be free from all impurity, and the body must be
supremely healthy, whilst the magnetism of the will must have free
course along the nerves. As my nature clarified under their training
and my spirit grew more at one with the purpose of the race, I grew
more sure of the stirrings of the filammu within me. At first its
indications might be explained by other and more patent causes; I had
been in an attitude of expectancy, or my reason had been following
up certain trains of thought from previous events. But after a time
there came to me thrills of emotion that were out of the range of my
immediate surroundings and thoughts. I followed them out and found that
they originated far from the locality in which I was working at the
time.
Once a sudden tremor passed through my system as of some great fear;
I had not been thinking of anything but the work before me; no cloud
had come over my sky; no danger that I knew of threatened. As I was
trying to explain the emotion, it suddenly passed into longing to see
Thyriel. I knew where she had gone that day and my work had almost
reached a finish, so I adjusted a faleena, and flew quickly over the
country in her direction. I soon knew why I had come. She was pinioned
by a huge rock that had just tumbled from Lilaroma. Happily only her
wings had been caught, but they had been caught in such a way that she
was wedged tightly between them and could not free her arms and legs
nor move her hands; and the boulder was too large for her to heave up
by the strength of her body, even when magnetised by her will. When she
saw this, she withdrew the magnetism from the effort, and turned it in
its full power into her filammu as she thought of me. I was not long in
disentangling her wings from their prison. But, before I was done, her
family were beside us; they too had experienced the thrill, though more
feebly than I had and at a greater distance.
Another time I had not seen Thyriel for some days; we were both busy at
our own pursuits in different parts of the island. She, as I learned
afterwards, had been set to account for a new and somewhat peculiar
odour that had recently begun to accompany the issue of vapour from
a distant lava-well. I was engaged in timing a new and intermittent
disturbance on the surface of the sea off the eastern shore, and trying
to find whether it had any relationship to an intermittent fumarole
which had recently broken out on the eastern slope of Lilaroma. I had
kept watch for several days, and could find no synchronism in their
periods, although I was convinced that there was a close connection
between them, if there was not a common cause. I was feeling baffled
and somewhat downcast; when suddenly there sprang up in me a sense of
elation, if not of triumph, which continued for the rest of the day,
although I still failed to discover the connection between the two
phenomena. When I set out next day for the scene of my observations,
I was joined by Thyriel, who explained that she had finished her task
the day before and had now been detailed to assist me in mine. I then
knew the cause of my thrill of joy, and told her of it. She had at that
very hour not only discovered the source of the fumes in a new mineral
that the leomoran had touched, but found that this new deposit was
extraordinarily generative of electricity. It was this that had made
her heart leap for joy and go out towards me. She had longed for my
sympathy in her rejoicing, and unconsciously her filammu had energised
in my direction. Between us we soon saw that there was a complicated
periodicity in the alternations of my two phenomena; it needed several
days’ observation to catch the rhythm, and for that reason I had been
baffled at first. Before long I discovered the cause; as soon as a
lava-well farther north had ceased to flow, they also ceased; it was
the viscous intermittance of its stream opening and then closing
two apertures below tide-line into the subterraneous fires that had
regulated the rhythm of these new vents; the break in the lava-current,
the rise and fall of the tide, and the rush of the breakers had made it
complex. And the lava had finally closed both before it had ceased to
flow.
It was at the same period that the whole race breasted back the
darkness. There came at times in their history an age of exceptional
advance, that made the preceding era seem almost stationary. Nor had
they yet been able to explain its appearance satisfactorily. It was
easy enough to say that such and such exceptional men lived then,
and that they produced the phenomenon. But that was only reasoning in
a circle; they were as much a product of the time as their fellows;
whence did they get the inspiration which spurred them on, or the
plastic material in which they could work? They would have been nothing
without their conditions and circumstances. They surprised themselves
with their powers and successes, as they strode forth into the primeval
darkness and illuminated it. It all appeared very simple when once
accomplished. They had been gazing for generations into the darkness,
where now there was a blaze of light.
An imaginative pioneering book had long ago suggested that the impulse
came from outside the round of the earth. And one of the most brilliant
discoveries of this newest period of advance was a scientific proof of
this hypothesis. The great development of the filammu or will-telegraph
had made it easy, by localising the new thrill of expectation, and
revealing that it came from no terrene source. Out of what seemed
the profound inane such inspirations issued, and if they found a
soil prepared for them by long self-denial and patient outlook and
industrious collection of materials, they fertilised the period into
exceptional efflorescence and fruition. Many an impulse comes out of
the blue and falls unavailing in that no nation or race or period is
fit to receive it. The profound inane, they came to see, was one of the
falsest of ideas; because no matter patent to the human sight fills
it, the interstellar space was believed to be the wilderness of the
universe, cold, bleak, inhospitable, lifeless. Now it was felt to be
the home of all supersensuous life, crowded with an energy that needed
no stellar matter or atmosphere to support it, that never appealed to
any but the highest and latest-developed senses of man. The Limanoran
couriers out on the verge of the earth’s atmosphere had been the first
to feel this new flash that lit up such a vast region of the infinite
darkness; they came back inspired with new resolution and made the
first of the discoveries; they gave a magnetism to their fellow-workers
in the same line, and soon the leaven spread through the whole people.
The fervour of originality became the order of the day. To decipher
the unknown handwritings on the wall of life, to solve its hardest
problems, to make new inventions and discoveries, to push out into the
darkness that surrounds the world,--these became the ambitions of all.
Nor did the filammu of any in the island fail to thrill to the
influence. Thyriel felt before I did that there was something
exceptional in the atmosphere. But even my will-telegraph seemed to
respond. I longed to go out and conquer the unknown, to outpace the
slow movements of human discovery. At first I thought the impulse
had come from Thyriel, and then from my proparents or my teachers.
And so it was with every Limanoran; his first thought ran to his
closest friend as the source of the magnetic thrill. But after much
consultation and report, the conclusion appeared that no one in the
island had originated the impulse, that all in the air had felt it
simultaneously in their filammus, and after them all down in the island
had felt it simultaneously. The truth gradually forced itself home on
the investigating families that the magnetic vibration had had its
source far beyond the limits of the earth; for they knew that from no
other country or race upon the surface of the globe could it have come.
Ages before, they had abandoned the belief in what seemed supra-terrene
influence as unscientific and leading to superstition. Faith had been
in the past so often the cue and basis of the worst of tyrannies, the
inspiration of the grossest immoralities and irrationalities, the
impulse to most retrogression. It had also, it is true, been the nurse
of gentle and just spirits. But it made them so timid that they were
afraid to go forward; it wound round the soul such a network of fears
and observances that its life was useless to the race. As soon as the
final purgation of the people had been accomplished, it was found that
every citizen ceased to speak of faith, or to use it as the basis of
any work or practical step. They did not thrust it out by any public