Limanora the island of progress
the poor microscopic attenuations of life that were waiting for a
world to settle on, but highly organised beings, leading a vigorous,
self-dependent life in the vast regions of infinitude. This much they
knew from the filmy impressions which their air-transcending lavolans
brought down from the heights of heaven they scaled. But whence those
inhabitants of the ether came they had not yet been able to tell; for
their presence affected no existing human sense, but only left on the
irelium films certain visible impressions. Whether they were refugees
from other stars, or everlasting occupants of interstellar space,
and whether amongst them there were any of the emancipate from human
trammels were questions they had not yet been able to answer. But they
hoped soon to have an instrument which would indicate the presence of
personality as apart from vital energy, and as apart from the thought
and thought-faculty. Then would they be able to tell in what state the
enfranchised energy fled from the body at death.
Amiralno knew not, cared not, whether he would retain consciousness
of his past, or would become but a part of the wandering energy of
space; what he did know was that he would be released from the burden
of his body and the growing weariness that dragged it down. Certain
he was that his flesh-emancipated energy would find a career at least
as noble as his past. And he believed that its development would not
end there, whatever became of it; whether it was to continue the unity
it had been conscious of for so many years, or to take another form
and individuality, was to him a matter of little concern. One thing
he knew, and that was the growing imperfection of the body as an
instrument of the energy that functioned it. It weighted to the ground
the soul, the spirit, the mind, or whatever name he might give to the
fiery stuff which kept it still aflame, and yet chafed to be free.
As long as it held this energy in leash, it would live and glow with
thought. Nor was this fiery stuff mere vitality, the mere principle
of life, though the two were yoked together. It was different in
quality from that which merely vegetated in the plant, and that which
did nothing but feed and evacuate in the mollusc. Nay, it differed in
inner character, not merely from the mind of the savage, but from that
of their own highly civilised exiles. Limanoran advance had purified
it of grosser desires and passions and made it a thing of ethereal
longings and ideals; even the body had been transformed into something
more like what the soul of their far past had been, subtle, buoyant,
sublimated. Still it dragged the spirit down, whenever the limits of
corporeal life became too apparent. Many a long generation of fiery
self-disciplined work upon their constitutions would it take even this
marvellous people to etherealise their bodies so far as to make them
fit companions of their souls.
Amiralno had not the vital energy to bear up against the conditions
that harassed their still hybrid system. He had no desire to stay and
see the slow evolution of a body that would pace with the soul through
infinity. Better to have release and a new and untrammelled career even
if the form he should take was unknown to him. It was the nature of all
energy to change, and the higher in the scale it rose, the nimbler it
became. But in order to rise it had to be yoked for a time with a lower
form, which it used as medium and leverage, leaving it as soon as it
had accomplished its due development. All things tended to rise above
themselves; and it was the greatest of disasters, the very reversal of
nature, if ever they should fall back, as they often did. What we call
death was but the unyoking of a higher energy from a lower, which it
had temporarily made its comrade and medium. It was no misfortune or
degradation, but a step higher in enfranchisement. The animate resisted
this step, because one member in the lifelong partnership refused to
descend into a grosser transformation again. In the human, the nobler
the thought-energy, the higher it strove to raise itself before the
inevitable divorce from its lower medium and yoke-fellow. But when the
time of severance approached, it mastered the reluctance of the lower,
and yearned to be set free. And little wonder that the lower resisted;
for back it had to fall in the cosmic order, and begin again its slow
progress upward from grade to grade; first into the clutches of myriads
of microscopic disintegrators of its tissues that would transform it
into food for plant-life, and then by weary stages upwards through
vegetable and animal tissue, perchance into the sustenance of thought
again.
This people, I soon found, had overcome the ancient abhorrence of
death. For they identified their life and personality with the
higher of their energies, and not with the lower and bodily forms.
They shrank, it is true, from all that would lead to the divorce of
the yoked energies of any animate being before its due time; not so
much because they thought this an evil for the victim as because the
perpetration would implant in the doer a germ of retrogression. To be
cruel, to shed blood, was the beginning of degradation of the soul;
it was one of the acts that allowed the lower to take command of the
higher in their system. But for a Limanoran himself to approach death
became, whenever he saw it to be inevitable, the keenest joy, in spite
of the farewells it entailed. He knew that thereafter, should he make
effort to live, he would only clog the wheels of progress, he would
only be a burden on the race instead of its helper. Amiralno never
showed the slightest sign of shrinking from the dissolution of his
life-bonds. He was sad to leave his lifelong mate, with whom he had
done so much for the race; but he knew that she would soon follow him;
it was a matter of but a few days or months; her thought-energy would
mingle and commune with his again, freed from the material trammels
that checked and dulled their intercourse in their terrene life;
upwards through the ether their souls would climb, ever becoming purer
and swifter in their flight.
But, as I went about my duties, my thoughts would break away to the
coming death-scene and sadness would cloud them. I remembered the last
farewells of my buried life, and most of all the watch over the fading
light in my mother’s eyes. Nothing could burn out of my memory the
bitterness of at last facing the inevitable. Slowly had I been led by
the physician to realise that nothing could save her, and still I hoped
against hope, checking my tears lest she should see them and conjecture
my alarm. Only when the lips became silent and pale did I at last admit
the thought that this was death. How could I stifle my grief longer?
Were we not all to each other, this mother, who had clung to me and
nursed me through sorrows and misfortunes, I her only child, who had
refused to leave her for the seductions of great place and fortune?
She was vanishing for ever from me, and nothing I could do would bring
her back. I was caught and crushed by the iron hand of fate and stood
in stony silence, paralysed by my grief and my impotence. There was
too much of the man and the stoic in my young blood to cry out; but
if only I could give up my own life to bring hers back! In one of her
final waking dreams she prattled and wept over me as if I were a child
again, saved once more from the clutching breakers. Raising herself
with a wild cry from her pillow, she held me in her arms with fierce
love; only for a moment; then the cords that bound her life brake;
the memory had torn her heart. There she lay, all that I cared for
on earth, rigid, uncaring. If but I could have died with her there!
Alas, the life in me was too puissant to yield, the nerves too tough
to break! The passion came on me to hurl myself into her grave as the
clods fell. It was but an insensate impulse. I made no cry or sign till
I got into the lonely chamber; and there God alone knows how I survived
my hurricane of grief and desolation. Nor could years ever root out the
sorrow. There in Limanora, with an abyss between me and my past, and
a noble new life around me, I worked and wept. The wound had opened
afresh. Was I never to commune with that loving loved spirit again?
There was a touch on my hand, and the magnetism of sympathy and
consolation flowed through my system. It was Thyriel. She had felt my
deep grief, though then at a great distance from me, and without noise
or speech she had come to my side. So absorbed had I been in my past
and my sorrow that I knew not her presence till her magnetic touch
awakened me from my dream. She had realised in a moment whither my
thoughts had gone, and reverenced the holy past. Then, when the mood
was growing despotic and paralysing the soul, she stepped into the
startled silence. I was myself again, and swept the unmanly tears away.
Yet I could not drive the sadness of farewell out of my system. Here
was this sage, who had so often counselled me and guided my faltering
footsteps, about to vanish for ever from the scene of his triumphs.
Oblivion would sweep his memory and his work into the abyss. We would
see him no more; no more hear his grave wise sayings, weighted with
the experience of centuries. All his gathered knowledge and skill
would lapse; and our civilisation would be the poorer. Up the steep of
progress it would have to climb, weaker for the absence of this strong
arm, this much-exercised and full brain and heart.
These were the thoughts at the root of my sadness, when I was startled
out of them by my companion’s voice. She had waited in reverential
silence as long as I lived my filial past over again; but, when I
returned to my starting-point, and began spending fruitless regrets
and pangs over that which neither demanded nor warranted them, her
thoughts broke out into loud protest. She could no longer endure
such futilities, such waste of tissue, and she met my wailing
reflections one by one. Amiralno was glad to leave his chrysalis stage
of existence; the energy that was in him would find a freer scope,
a nobler sphere, as soon as it had shed its earthly trammels. His
counsel and guidance would not be lost to progress; all that he was and
had would still be part of what he would become; not one thought or
faculty would be left behind; and all would then be spent not on the
progress of a little island of a small terrestrial archipelago or its
race, but on that of the universe, if not of the cosmos. All of him
that could still appeal to our lower senses would remain with us, and
would immortalise his memory, as far as immortality would go upon this
ephemeral orb. As for his sympathy and love, they were doubtless still
with us, or at least with what in us was best and nearest the cosmic.
The only thing to regret was that we could not personally feel his
presence in the universe. But even this was not for idle regrets. It
was mere palsy, if it did not stir us to still further mastery of our
conditions. Were we not in the way to feel and know the escaped spirits
of our dead? Had we not developed senses in us that were receivers of
impulses from the infinite around us, impulses that had been dormant
through the uncounted past? Had we not instruments that told us of
energies and beings unfelt even by our new-developed senses? And were
we to grope in our prison-house, and wail over what we had lost and
could not longer see? Were we to sit in the darkness, and weep and
wait, hoping for the light? Such feeble conclusions from the past, such
futile regrets over the dead, Limanoran progress could not endure.
There were new masteries for every generation. Before many years could
pass they would get into touch with the spirits and energies that