Limanora the island of progress
of farewells overlooking the ocean. Sorrow over the departures I had
witnessed welled back into my heart; I had not yet got rid of the old
attitude of Western civilisation towards death. With the sorrow mingled
still the old curiosity; questions sprang into my mind concerning the
significance of the ceremony I had seen; or was it a ceremony? I was
startled with the answer in the negative. It came from Thyriel, who,
knowing my doubts, had remained to solve them. Soon I knew the whole
meaning of the scene. It was not premeditated. There was nothing
deliberate about it except the deaths themselves. The dulness of my
own inner senses had prevented me from knowing the common impulse of
the race towards Doomalona. As soon as Amiralno had finally resolved
to die, the consciousness of his resolve spread over the island, and
stirred the people at their duties to common action. They knew that the
hill of farewells would be the scene of the departure, and in bands
singing the cosmic music of farewell they made their flight through the
air to give a last valediction to the voyager into the unknown and to
impart to him in his final effort on earth all the magnetic power they
could spare for him on his journey. Every act of what I had thought
was a ceremonial was the natural and spontaneous impulse of a people
united in spirit. Their music and the changes in it were due to no
leader or signal, but to the sympathetic inspiration of the moment.
Their creational chant was an assertion of their mood of belief that
this scene was one of advance, and not of retrogression, of development
and not of decay, that the act was as much an act of cosmic life as
the creation of a world. Certain portions of the system were about to
become manifestly inert, those which were called bodily and material,
but which were as truly forms of energy as the individual energy that
was being liberated. They were made unchanging, permanent, for a time,
and so were unable to progress or retrograde; they were to retain
their energy in latency for a period long or short; but at last they
too, when their immediate purpose of remembrance of the vanished was
served, would be set free to take other forms. Their creational music
was intended, if there was any intention in so spontaneous a thing,
to keep before their minds the progressive and evolutionary nature of
death, and to quell the old and barbarous attitude of grief which
might attempt to show itself when they were bidding the final farewell
to a comrade. It was meant to bring into prominence the joy of the
spirit freed from the bondage to lower forms of energy, and the delight
of all who remained in the progress of the cosmos, even though the
immediate act should imply a separation of a loved spirit from them.
It helped them to repress any sadness at the thought that they might
never recognise the energy of their lost comrade again as an individual
and personal thing. Enough for them that the sum of existence should be
enriched by the change which was occurring to him.
But was it not a grief to them that the parting was perhaps eternal, as
far as personal recognition went? The question rose spontaneously in
my mind; and I was answered almost before I had thought it. The doubt
was still unsolved whether as impersonal energy they developed into
something new at death and for ever ceased to bear marks and memories
of the phase of existence they had just left, or whether they sallied
forth from the bonds of a lower and inert energy into the freer scope
of infinity, an individual and complete unity. This doubt, they were
certain, would be solved some day by scientific experiment. Meantime
there were compensating advantages, whichever alternative was true.
If they continued the personality they had already developed on earth
without break in consciousness or memory, then would they recognise
their old comrades and partners in Limanoran life, and make further
progress through existence together.
If, on the other hand, there was a break in the continuity, and only as
an impersonal energy they passed forth into the interstellar spaces,
then would there be the obliteration of all the animal and barbarous
past which they abhorred, as well as of the immediate and Limanoran
past which they loved. Any being that has advanced much in its more
recent stages must naturally try to forget the lower stages through
which it has gone in a more distant past. They were by no means proud
of their relationship to their exiles or to the still older and wider
humanity existing outside of their archipelago. To remember it was to
encourage the lower and less-advancing man in them. To forget it was
one of the ethical duties which their progress demanded. It was only
as a horror, as a possible hell into which they might fall, if they
retrograded, that it was still brought before them.
A race or nation that remains long proud of its past must be but
imperceptibly progressive, if it is progressive at all. Its ethical
point of view is stationary, its morals and religion are stagnant.
The history of a people should rapidly come to seem ignoble to it, if
it does its duty to itself and its progress. What is the history of
other races but a record of wars, of wholesale slaughters, because of
the ambition of a man or a section of men? And as long as we are proud
of such a past we can never advance. To have an ancestry nobler than
ourselves is an undying disgrace, and to suggest such a thing to a man
should be considered the grossest insult. Where a people is developing
as it ought to develop in the brief period it has upon earth, oblivion
should be one of its foremost duties to all but its immediate past.
Man has forgotten his bestial ancestry so effectually that when he
comes across the manifest relics of the relationship in his system,
he is startled and wildly denies it. If he progressed as rapidly as
he ought to do, after there has been implanted in him the divine
principle of reason, then would he as surely cast into oblivion his
savage and semi-civilised ancestry. Out with the ape and all relics
and memories of it is the struggle of thinking men. To be done with
the crude undeveloped past is the duty of progressive men. The ideal
of to-day should be the commonplace of to-morrow, and the disgrace of
next week. It was useful to study the immediate past in order to get
perspective for the present, and to decide on the rate of progress for
the future. But it was becoming doubtful to this people whether they
should perpetuate in the valley of memories so much of the past after
it had faded into insignificance. They had come to think that to forget
was as necessary to the advance of man as to remember, and that a
universal rubbish-destructor for the now poverty-stricken achievements
of their far past would one day become essential. As it was they still
preserved records of them lest some historical question might grow to
be of importance to their future.
It was little wonder then that they had no great abhorrence for the
obliteration of the past from their energy at death. If the other
alternative were the true, and if, as so many religions teach, they
were to be herded with the criminal and besotted and undeveloped souls
that have passed from the earth, then might they bid farewell to
true progress beyond death. And what is the meaning of continuity of
existence and memory, unless it be the intercourse of terrene souls in
the life outside of life? To be rid of the flesh and its inert energies
is still to be enslaved to worse evils, the possibility of contact with
the foul beings that inhabit the human form, even the noblest and most
belauded human form. The Limanorans would gladly abandon the delight of
recognising and loving again the souls they knew and loved, if only to
be free from such a horror. Better almost annihilation than enslavement
to the retrogrades of earth in another sphere. Whence the terror of
discontinuity of memory, if the burden of the past were to be lifted
off us, and a new and more progressive career given to our energy?
The Limanorans believed that when unyoked from the inert forms which
had come from their animal past, their higher energy would enter on a
progress that would make all they now did seem almost stagnancy; and
the power of remembering any past would only mean shame at its having
been theirs.
It never gave them pause to think that what came after death was still
unknown. They had passed a happy bright life upon the earth, free
from the pangs and agonies as well as the fierce pleasures, the snaky
involvements as well as the passionate amours, of other civilisations.
But, when the effort to live had come to be so great as to overbalance
the compensations and utilities of their life, then was it no pang for
them to leave it; for they were scientifically sure that death would be
no break in their progressive existence; if anything, it was certain to
be an intensification of the progress which they loved most.
One of the last of their great series of exilings had been to cast out
of their midst a number of men and women who never did anything but
long for death, and advocated early suicide with religious fervour as
the true and only panacea for all ills. Their doctrines would have
done little harm to the community, if they had not been rooted in
practice, and often led to tragic results. For they came from languid,
low-strung temperaments, that felt disinclined to face the strain of
life or to help the advance of the race. The current of energy in
their ancestry had gradually run more and more feebly, till it was in
them at its lowest ebb. It was against their grain to work, and they
did their share in the tasks of the community with the most patent
reluctance. This alone would have been reason enough for their exile,
inasmuch as they gave evil example to the youth around. But they were
subtle in the use of the tongue too, and could with skilful jesuitry
show how indolence was the noblest life. And worse still, when they
were left to their own devices, they soon made a violent end to their
feeble lives, and gave a tragic and ghastly appearance to death. Out
into Thanasia or the isle of death they were one and all deported, with
enough goods and provisions to keep them and their descendants alive,
if only they were industrious, for thousands of years. But none of them
would work, or till the soil, or even cook their food; and one by one
they gave themselves up to death. The more ingenious invented a method
of leaving life which had a certain grace if not nobility. They erected
great funeral pyres and connected them by a slow fuse to a huge battery
that sent up its rod into the heavens. When a tempest threatened, they
laid themselves out on these, and when the lightning began to flash,
the electricity ran along the wires, lit their fagots, and in a few
moments swept them out of existence. It was not long before the isle
of death was again left to its silences, nothing but the ashes of its
former inhabitants upon the tops of numerous mounds being left to
tell that human life had once been there. No one from the rest of the
archipelago seemed to care for life upon it; none ever landed there.
The only things that marred the mortuary stillness of the isle were
the screaming seabirds, and the tempests which drove them thither.
It was better for the cosmos that these emasculate weaklings should
as soon as possible submit the relics of energy in them to other
conditions of being. But it was not well for Limanoran immaturity to
have the spectacle of self-slaughter before them, or the contagion
of their death-pyre romance and eloquence touch the spirit of youth.
Moreover they took some time to resolve on death; and, in the process