Limanora the island of progress
levels of the breeze; their wings seemed to be at peace. I can find no
analogy in my own experience for their delight in the swift-curving
movement but my youthful enjoyment of skating before the wind for miles
over clear ice. It was a gladness merely to watch them sport amid the
rays of the growing or lessening sun. Often would they time their
movements to some rhythm, and flash through intricate evolutions like
rooks in the evening air. Again half of them would fold their wings and
be borne by the other half with a speed and lightness almost as great
as when flight was unburdened. All mere earthly amusements and exercise
had ceased when the secret of flight had been mastered.
For generations their biologists, anatomists, and physicists had
studied the wing-power of animals with a view to the practical mastery
of it for the Limanorans themselves. Their chief guide towards the
analysis was the study, not of birds or insects, but of the bat. They
measured the force of the strong chest muscles that enabled it to
move its wings with such rapidity; this could be done to a nicety by
means of their refined instruments for gauging latent power, whether
in tissue or nerve or muscle. They calculated the number of beats it
could make in a minute. They measured the spread of the wings and the
weight of the body. Thus they came to an almost constant equation of
wing-power to size and weight. The physicist and mechanic were then
called in; but they would have been helpless without the new metal,
irelium, and their power of concentrating great power into small space.
This metal was extracted by a process from common earth, but could
also be found pure some miles down in the earth. It was perhaps the
first essential to the rapid advance of their civilisation because
of its extreme lightness and strength, and still more its wonderful
flexibility and elasticity when mixed with certain proportions of other
substances. It could be made into the most delicate membrane, fine as
gauze and yet tough and resistant as leather. It formed the material of
their most massive engineering works, and of their lightest draperies
and garments. Nothing could surpass its adaptability to all purposes of
civilisation.
It was out of this that they were able to make their wings which seemed
so fragile and yet could bear the force of the wildest storms. It
would stand stiffly on its framework against the strongest pressure,
and yet could be expanded balloon-wise from within. The only means of
disabling these wings was perforation by a hard, sharp point. This
could never occur in the air except from the beak of a bird; and
then they could still use their spread as a parachute to break their
descent. Another quality this metal had was its transparency, and their
flight was somewhat concealed from the sight of gazers below by the
colour they took from their atmospheric surroundings; it was difficult
to distinguish them from a floating cloud or a darker patch of grey or
blue sky. The wings could be easily folded or expanded, so flexible
was the material; and, when the Limanorans landed from their flight,
scarcely a minute elapsed before the huge sails, framework and all, had
been furled and had disappeared in the ordinary outline of their bodies.
And these bodies differed as much as their natures from those I had
been accustomed to see. They were short and squat; and this, with their
broad chests, great heads, and long arms, would have led Europeans to
call the Limanorans gnomes. Muscles and bones that in other men had
been of little importance had grown into what we should have called
abnormal size and strength. But after I had met the power of their eyes
and felt the beauty of the natures that shone in their faces, their
bodies seemed to me the normal garment of the highest human spirits;
and I came to understand the high purpose of every change they had
brought about in their forms and features. Without their broad chests
they could never have had such expansible lungs or such powerful
heart-action essential to easy flight, as well as to the lightning
sweep of their thoughts and energies and the rapid advance of their
civilisation. The pulse could be seen in many parts of the body, it was
so strong; and its beats were twice as frequent as in my own. The great
heat of summer was to them little inconvenience; they could thrust
their arms into what seemed to be boiling water without shrinking;
and they could bear a degree of cold far below the lowest temperature
I had ever felt, for the high temperature of their bodies made them
capable of enduring far greater extremes of climate than any race I
had ever known or heard of. But their breathing was much less frequent
than mine; they seemed to take in enormous draughts of air at each
inspiration and to retain stores of it in their system. They continued
at their ease in difficult atmospheres and exertions long after I had
begun to pant and gasp for breath. The spaces within their bodies that
had once been wholly filled with the organs of digestion and discharge
had evidently been largely utilised for their marvellous expansion of
lungs and heart.
Another purpose that their huge chests served was to bear the strain
of the great muscles that controlled their arms, and of the powerful
engines that, strapped on to them, gave the strong and swift beat to
their wings. Their arms were moulded on lines of similar strength; for
they had to bear the strain of the forward stroke of the wing, whilst
also having to manipulate by means of the long and sinewy fingers its
great folds in the backward sweep; and, when more expanse was needed
during calmer weather or when resting in the sky, the arms had to
thrust out and to bear long rods that in their turn bore expansions of
the wings like the studding-sails of a ship. The thumb of each hand
was kept free for the management of their breast and shoulder-engines;
and it had become by exercise more vigorous and more flexible than
the ordinary human thumb. In each armpit was carried a small engine
that could be used either as subsidiary to the great breast-engine
or for the partial or complete furling of the wings. Beside it was a
storage-battery, in which could be generated by the movements of the
arm more electricity to supply the central power, thus enabling them
to extend their flight through long periods. If they became tired they
could expand and inflate their wings with a gas made much warmer by the
heat of their bodies than the surrounding atmosphere; then throwing
themselves on their backs they could rest or rise in the air as on a
balloon.
In slow or ordinary flight, or when the wind was not high, they could
steer themselves rudely by manipulating the outer folds of their
wings with their fingers. But if they wished to fly swiftly, or in
some other direction than the wind would bear them, they could push
out a tail-like membrane of irelium from between the feet and move it
hither and thither by the sinewy power of the heels. The great toe
of each foot was also much developed by long use for stretching out
and managing the wings; it had become more like a thumb, capable of
seizing and manipulating cords or membranes. It was this, added to the
lightness of their bodies, that gave them their springy gait, and made
them seem when they walked as if they scarcely touched the ground; they
could skim like a bird close to the earth by using only the outer folds
of their wings and the tip of the great toe for propulsion.
Much though my weight was reduced, and ardent though I was in my
attempts to come up with their mastery over the air, I was seldom
able to do more than quicken my pace in running and rise in short,
clumsy, laboured flights on their wings like a callow nestling
fallen from its nest. I was soon exhausted by my efforts, even when
aided by my ultimately deft management of the breast-engine and the
shoulder-engines; for my lungs were short of compass, my heart soon
beat too rapidly for the strength of its tissue, and my arms and
fingers and great toe soon grew weary of the work they had to do.
Nothing but the selection and adaptation of my ancestry could have made
me capable of progressing physically to their level. Their past had
been a rapid and deliberate process of adjustment to new and higher
ideas of life, one of the main aims being this new mode of locomotion
in order to give them command of a sphere that other men had abandoned
to the birds and insects; for it was but one of the corollaries of the
great purpose of their existence, which was to master or eject the
grosser elements of their system, that they might rise into a more
ethereal or spiritual life. By the power of flight they seemed to gain
independence of the earth, greater freedom of movement, and an approach
to that frictionless, untrammelled motion through limitless space which
thought gives a foretaste of.
CHAPTER IV
HERMITRY
FLIGHT was one of their best methods too of achieving complete
solitude. One of the early discoveries of this people in the art of
progress was that, where men are too much or too long together, they
confirm each other’s faults and clog advance; the weaker and more
superficial ambitions get the mastery and force energy into mistaken
directions. The risk of this grew less as the individual grew older;
for he receded farther and farther from the ancestral stages of life
through which he must pass in youth and early manhood; and he came
to have less desire and less need for intercourse with his fellows.
Complete love of solitude and capacity for solitude were two of the
signs of the perfecting of the individual life; thereafter death, the
rending of the veil that divides the seen from the unseen, was the
most natural step in development, and scarcely needed effort. They
held solitude as much one of the essentials of noble life as society;
and the latter needed no stimulus; by nature and beginnings man was a
social animal, but only some strong impulse would make him seek the
companionship of his own thoughts. The final triumph of life was to be
able to be confidently alone, to stand with the highest man can think
and feel against the herded universe. Under the stimulus of the more
physical and primary passions it is the universal instinct to flock
together. The baser, the more destructive feelings are gregarious.
To ensure periods of solitude for each member of the community, every
man and every woman had a separate house, as soon as the powers were
mature. One of the horrors of the past out of which they had come was
the intrusion of friends and relatives every hour of the day, and
the irritating sense of the continually watchful eyes of servants
or slaves. Only by seeking the wilds could one find real solitude.
In all human communities there are endless opportunities for social
intercourse; opportunities for solitude are artificial. Life was
arranged in Limanora with a view to allowing and securing as frequent
and as long solitudes as were consonant with the progress of the race.
On the most prominent point of every house there was the representation
of two climbing flowers; and if these hung drooping, colourless, and
apart, everyone knew that the occupant desired seclusion; if they
flushed with rose, stood up to the sun, and twined round each other,
then was it known that human converse was permissible, if not desired.
There was indeed sufficient magnetic communion of spirit among all
the people to touch into life at intervals the love of that definite
and open intercourse so native to the human system. This inborn
social faculty might be trusted to prevent the love of loneliness
from severing all ties. There were daily public duties that brought