Limanora the island of progress
it had stopped. At first he could not see Tamarna; but on searching he
saw her form lying on the ground close to the pirakno, hidden by one of
its cranks. He touched her temples and left side, and saw that life had
fled. The crank had come upon her as she lay, and bruised her body; the
sight of this completed his despair; he felt that the last hope of her
recall had vanished.
Yet he knew how much the medical elders could do, and there arose in
his mind a flicker of hope. He wasted no time on lamentation, for
there moved in him the carefully trained consciousness that all such
abandonment to emotion was an offence against the progress of the
race. They considered that every occurrence of life demanded as much
concentration of energy and thought as a shipwreck, or the incidents
of a battle, or anything that we in the West would call an alarming
emergency. As grief or despair or fear used up the power that should be
spent on action, emotion was strictly reined in at such a moment; the
instinct was to call the whole resources of the nature to action.
Omirlo braced himself to the emergency, and sent the whole of the
magnetism he was capable of into his will-telegraph. After a few
minutes’ exercise of it, it seemed to relax, and he knew that he had
roused his parents to the danger. Recalling his energies to Tamarna,
he followed the few simple rules that he had been taught for the
recovery of the seeming dead. He made her lungs and heart imitate
the play of life; he switched the magnetism of his own system on to
hers. But after all his efforts she lay still inert when his parents
arrived. They decided to carry her at once to the medical elders, for
they saw that something exceptional had occurred; it was not a swoon,
or even death from the bruise dealt by the pirakno. So they took her
wings, and making them by means of soft leafage into a couch for her,
they bore her through the air swiftly, but just as she had lain when
found. Tamarna’s own parents met them on the way, and helped them to
accelerate their pace with her; and within less than ten minutes after
the accident she was in the hands of the sages in the mountain hospital.
The general medical house was Oomalefa. But there were two houses
of cure which approached more nearly to what our hospitals are. One
was far up the slopes of Lilaroma, not much beneath the winter-line
of snow. The other was aërial and movable, and was, whenever it
was needed, floated upwards to the margin of our atmosphere, where
parasitic and microscopic life was reduced to unaggressive feebleness.
In it were all the necessities of life at hand; the temperature was
kept close to summer heat; and there were lines of communication, so
thin as to be almost invisible in the air, connecting it with the halls
of sustenance and medication. This hospital was meant for the invalid
who was strong enough to be moved up from solid earth; and, as soon as
one had been brought back far enough from the grasp of death to bear
the rarity of the upper air where it merged into the ether, he was
taken up in it. But Tamarna was first borne to the mountain hospital,
where the instruments of investigation and cure were ready. When she
should have had all the ruptures of her bones and organs and tissues
set for mending, and all the tissues that were crushed beyond mending
replaced by freshly manufactured tissues, and when she was seen to hold
on to life with a tenacious grasp again, then would she be borne into
the hospital of accelerative healing high above the clouds.
The biometer recorded the faint presence of life; the spirit had
not yet escaped, and before long it grew manifest to ordinary eyes.
They had apparatus for stirring any organ of the body into activity;
and with the lavolan they soon saw which of Tamarna’s functions
had been deranged and had suffered syncope. It was her heart that
had ceased action; the inrush of magnetism from space drawn by the
pirakno, without provision for storing it or letting it pass harmless,
had paralysed some of the more important cardiac tissues and the
circulation was in many places clogged, whilst a large proportion of
the superficial blood-vessels had been ruptured by the fall of the
crank upon the body. A European medical council would have abandoned
the bruised and discoloured corpse as fit only to be “food for worms.”
But no member of the community could be spared in such a period of
enthusiasm and expansion. The newly discovered agents and methods
were brought to bear. Delicate instruments made the heart first mimic
and then produce the true cardiac action. Currents of magnetism
swept the veins, and cleared the routes for the circulation of the
blood, at the same time stimulating the life-fluid. The livid hue
gradually disappeared from the face. Another instrument gave action
to the lungs, first in mimic and then in vital way. Concentrated
sustenance was injected into the veins and soon the breathing grew
regular. Yet it needed hours of this recreative work to bring the
spirit to consciousness of itself. Out of the depths the soul seemed
to be dragged by slow steps back into the reluctant body again. The
psychometer was far more slow to give signs than the biometer. But, as
soon as it revealed the approach of the soul, the friends of Tamarna
were brought near her, all who had magnetic affinities with her, and
especially her betrothed Omirlo. From that point the recovery was
astonishingly rapid. The magnetism of friendship seemed to draw back
the spirit from its desire to escape. The eyes opened, and a look of
intelligence and love shone through their vitreous dulness like dawn in
a misty sky; recognition quickly irradiated her whole being, then faded
out, then came again, till at last the curtain which hid the soul rose,
and the very body seemed to become diaphanous to the light of reason.
The spirit dwelt again in its old habitation.
The rest was a matter of the commonest medical science. Every tissue
was restored to its previous healthy state. Every fracture and bruise
and scar was obliterated. Every item of her system which had suffered
beyond the possibility of repair was remade and grafted into her body
again. Nursing and medicated atmospheres under the wisest medical
guidance restored Tamarna to her duties and to Omirlo as efficient and
graceful and healthy as before the accident.
In spite of this triumphant success of their medical science, I
could see that depression prevailed in the community. Not even what
appeared to me to be the almost supernatural power of drawing the
life back seemed to console them. For they had often seen still more
wonderful displays of medical skill. Men who had been for months to
all appearance dead were restored to full vital power, even when the
microscopic transformers of dead matter had begun to batten on their
tissues. No body that still retained the human form was beyond their
skill; the soul could be enticed back after it had accomplished its
flight from earth, for it still kept its affinities to its terrene
companions, though cosmic distances should separate them. That was
the most difficult task, not the recrudescence of life, but the
re-enticement of the spirit that had grown happy in its release.
When I observed that the meteorological families were the nearest
of all to dejection, even though they had recovered their loved
member, I came to the right conclusion. It was the accident that had
unmanned them. That they should be taken unawares in a sphere they had
mastered preyed on their minds. For one of the immediate objects of
their science was to take command of their future, to eliminate the
unexpected from life. What was the value of their progress, if they
did not see more clearly and farther into the sphere of darkness that
bounded life like a horizon? True, the cosmic was still infinite in its
night for them, and in the cosmic lay ambushed countless alarms. But
they had driven their outposts far into the twilight. The age they were
in had seen such an expansion of science that the veil seemed lifted
from the face of boundless night. Their sarmolan pioneered before them
into space, and foretold them the dire catastrophes that might lie in
wait for them. And yet they were at the mercy of accident. What was the
use of such an influx of suggestion from the unknown? What was their
power over nature, if thus they allowed the fortuitous to drift in upon
them? They had not suffered such discomfiture for ages. They abhorred
the thought that they should again be the slaves of mere hazard.
But they rebelled against even the appearance of impotence, and would
not allow any mood approaching despair to settle on their spirits.
At once the Piramo set about the repair of their defences against
accident. The pirakno was found to be fused into one mass of metal
by the force of magnetism which had gathered into it from the space
around. Another, larger and more effective, was produced and in it
there was a new arrangement by which the storage was automatically
governed; any increase in the magnetism it received was at once
provided for; and if at any time the inflow should surpass the capacity
for storage, there was a governor which automatically switched the
surplusage into the sea, or back again into the air.
A sarmolan too was invented which had greater strength, and at the
same time greater nicety of adjustment. It could be left in the space
beyond the atmosphere, untended for nights together; for it was
self-recording, and as long as its parts were kept clear of extraneous
matter or force, it was incapable of derangement. Not that it was
to be left to itself for a moment; even though it now regularly
telegraphed all its changes to Rimla and to the locality of the
pirakno, meteorological observers were near it night and day to watch
and interpret its signals. To guard against any possible assault of
accident, other sarmolans were ballooned into space whose indications
were mutually corrective; where one went astray, the others would be
right.
When Tamarna was completely restored to health and it was made certain
by the medical tests that every organ and tissue of her system was
fit for its task, her marriage with Omirlo was accorded; and the two
entered on their career of parentage. Their duties were made lighter,
in order that their energy might pass unimpaired into posterity. They
still had their round of work, that their tissues might not grow
flaccid, or their life tend to excessive solitude. But Omirlo did for
both all that needed great exertion of mental or physical faculty.
CHAPTER III
DEATH
THE accident drew the two together, strengthening their affinities into
irrevocable bonds. And now that all was well with them, their sense of
the joy of life welled through their whole nature. Those who came near
them felt its contagion. Yet there was one in their family who felt it
only to smile at it. The aged Amiralno had seen so many centuries fleet
past him that the passage of time with its triumphs had grown stale.
He was battling with this nausea of life when the new age of discovery
and invention had come upon them. And it so far renewed his energy that
he was willing to live through it and take his share in the additional
duties which it laid upon his generation. He had seen the infancy
of the science over which he now presided pass into lusty youth and
thence into manhood; and was he to cut his terrene roots before he had
seen its greatest triumphs? Meteorology seemed about to take as wide
regions of space within its scope as astronomy had; it seemed about to
master secrets that would drive mere chance out of its calculations.
The curiosity and wonder of youth were again stirred within him. He