Limanora the island of progress
now compress the work of centuries into hours by his concentration of
power in Rimla, and by his countless ingenious contrivances. Thought
was the lord of time as of space, and thought was now his essence and
characteristic. He could, if he wished, contract the process that used
to cover geological ages into a generation. There was no reason why he
should not become amphibious again in a less grovelling sense than of
old within the few centuries of a lifetime. This was the purport of
another production of this time, the book of Amphibious Existence.
It was a mediate book, one bridging the gulf between things as they
were and the far ideals held out to the race by the Fraloomiamo. It
helped to point out the steps towards the realisation of one of the
most cherished productions of the age, the Book of Emigration. It had
been many years in the maturer minds of the community before I was
introduced to Loomiefa and its wonders, and it had recently been much
modified by the discoveries of the new outburst of energy that followed
Choktroo’s attempt at invasion. Its ideal was to enable the Limanorans
of that or some future generation to travel throught space and reach
other stars.
Long ago a publication that had prepared for, and demanded this, was
the book of the Destiny of the Earth. It had made a profound impression
on the people when first produced; for it dramatically painted the
horror of death that would settle on this globe. It had been proved
by both astronomers and physicists that our orb was gradually losing
its heat by the same process which had brought its originally glowing
surface to a state that would allow of life settling upon it. First,
vegetation and animal life were found at the poles, where the lessened
heat of the sun made the terrestrial heat endurable; then they crept
their slow way onwards to the equator, till the whole surface of the
earth teemed with vitality, at first developing towards vastitude in
the warm vapours, in later periods towards concentration of energy in
special points of the animal body, and especially in the head. Round
the poles at last settled the ice-sheet, advancing at long intervals
towards the tropics, now in one hemisphere and again in the other,
according as the one or the other was farthest in winter from the sun
during an extensive period. The hyperborean powers shepherded the
growing life of the earth down into her central belt. But the brumal
shepherds of the one side of the world receded as those of the other
advanced with their arctic winds and fleecy drifts. Within measurable
time this alternation would cease, and the glacial fences would move
forward together north and south, and pen the overcrowded human life
and energy with all its enemies into the narrow equatorial belt.
It was the drama of these boreal limitations that the book of
Terrestrial Destiny pictured. The teeming life weltered over sea and
land alike in search of foothold and nutrition. No inch of tropical
earth was sacred from brute appetite. Animal and man fought with
venomous passion for dear life. Not animalculæ alone but beasts, and
even man, became parasitic. Creatures that had loved a free existence
in vast prairies or forests learned to nest and hibernate in the folds
and hollows of larger animals. Life swarmed over life till for lack
of food it began to fail. Man crept with loathsome beasts of prey into
caves of the earth, and grew as loathsome in his troglodytic habits.
On moved the brumal prison walls. The sun shrivelled in the sky and
withdrew his heat. Nothing lived that was not arctic not even amongst
the still-free birds of the air. Man finally ceased to have faculty
enough to notice the shrinking of the already narrow enclosure that
was soon to be his grave. Feebly the last remnants of the race stole
forth into the struggling rays of daylight and killed everything of
life they could find. Only in the sea still lived their possible prey
and food, and thither they dared not go beneath the gloom of the thick
ice. The cannibal habit came upon man again and no relationship or love
restrained his appetite. The last scene of the drama was the death of
the last man, the grave of the remnants of his race; where he fell,
there he lay embalmed; and his tomb was the earth’s own winding-sheet.
The meagre relics of terrestrial life soon followed him into silence
and darkness, and through the sunless night the dead orb wheeled round
the extinguished cinder which had for so many geological ages given it
light and life.
The publication of the book would have frozen the hearts within them,
had not the Limanorans known that that was not the end of all. They
saw that the alternations of death and life were not confined to the
vegetal and animal species around them. The same pendulum swung through
the whole cosmos. The universe which was dead now would live again in
blazing rounds of vapour that would solidify and cool till life could
settle on the new orbs again. Dead it only seemed. For it never rested
but revolved round some centre revolving also, and too distant for man
to see or feel. Out of these motions would come resuscitation. After
millions of ages, that are but as moments in the history of the cosmos,
it would encounter another exhausted universe, and from the collision
would a new system of glowing worlds arise, ready for another series of
vital colonisations from the limitless life of sidereal space.
It was this knowledge that took the sting out of their sadness over
the new book. Yet the fate of man, age by age more closely penned
in by the walls of his glacial-coffin, and drawn back by the eddy
of time into his primeval savagery, left a loophole for despair and
palsy to enter into their lives. Were they to let their descendants
fall back again into the beast, whence their ancestors had come? Was
this glacial prison and tomb to remain a possibility and a shadow on
even the distant horizon of their race? Once before had their ancestry
evaded such a fate, penned between the invasive glaciers and the sea;
once before had the race committed their fates to an element they
feared and hated, lest the encroaching ice-sheet should smother their
civilisation and reduce their vitality to the level of barbarism and
at last annihilation. Better to let the race die out at its noblest
than leave it to go down into such an inferno. Nothing now so made
them shudder as the prospect of retrogression, however slight. But to
think of their civilisation ebbing away from their posterity before the
waning power of the sun and the earth, to think of the lapse of their
own intellectual mastery of nature into decrepitude and putrescence,
was to turn their hearts to stone.
Under such a prospect they could not sit in intellectual paralysis.
For years the imagination of the race worked feverishly towards its
rescue from such an appalling destiny, and every new scientific advance
brought forth a new book of Emigration. Their one thought of escape was
taken from their old migration out of the reach of antarctic glacial
advance. To sail out from the earth and commit themselves to the
strange conditions and uncertainties of a new element seemed no more
hazardous to them now than in their primeval stage of land-civilisation
to launch out with their lives in their hands upon the unknown and
terrifying ocean. It was urged that there was precedent and basis for
their marine adventure in that their ancestry had been amphibious, and
that one of the primeval species out of which they had come had been
aquatic. The reply was that the case was parallel and not antagonistic.
The original vital germs that settled on the cooling surface of the
globe must have come out of sidereal space, and must have lived in
the element that they would have to cross in emigrating from the
glacial orb again; and from these vital germs they, and all living
terrestrial things, had evolved. It was only one stage farther back in
the history of life; the precedent was the same, though the training
and modification of the system would have to be more strenuous and
drastic than they had been before the former leap was taken from land
to sea. Preparation had already been made; for they had learned aërial
navigation far more thoroughly than they had ever known the mastery of
the sea. Their airships had ventured right up into the ether, whilst on
wings they had themselves coasted the earth’s atmosphere. Nothing was
impossible to intellect which had mastered the art of evolution.
Recent discovery had led them far on the difficult ascent towards
safe departure from the surface of the world. It only needed ingenuity
and development to give them a concentration of aërated sustenance,
which would enable them to journey for ages outside of an atmosphere
such as they had been accustomed to inhabit; they had the germ of this
in the nuts of the alfarene or oxygen-shrub; recently their chemists
had been able to reproduce the essence of them, and to compress it
into microscopic globules. Not till a later age of discovery did they
supersede this by the liquefaction and solidification of air. They
were rapidly adapting their own systems to the vacuums they could
produce and to the rarefied atmosphere high above the clouds. They
were introducing the quintessence of the ether into their halls of
sustenance and medication, and thus accustoming their organs and
tissues to conditions which they would meet continually on their
voyage through sidereal space. The next generation would practically
be amphibious, able to live in the luminiferous ether with occasional
return to an atmosphere such as surrounds the earth. Every new age
would enable them to make longer and longer excursions away from the
bosom of mother-earth out towards the influence of other planets.
Every new generation would have more elastic and adaptable tissues and
organs, which would fit varied pressure and varied mediums of vitality.
And with all this the Limanoran body would grow lighter at the same
time as it would grow more consolidated, coherent, and indissoluble.
But most important of all was the new command of gravitation given
them by the discovery of the varying sensitiveness or nonsensitiveness
of certain rays to magnetism and gravity according to conditions that
were in human hands. There were limitless possibilities in this for
sidereal migration. And already out of it had come the lavolamma or
gravitation power-machine.
The new book of Emigration brought all these discoveries and thoughts
into bearing on its problem and harmonised them, and developed them
by means of imaginative suggestion. The drama of its publication drew
the bulk of the people to Loomiefa. There we saw a representation of
Lilaroma itself, piercing the sky in pure and lonely grandeur. Near
its top lay moored a fleet of faleenas of strikingly new form and
material; they were as light as foam-bubbles, and as opalescently
transparent; within each of them we could see stored quantities of
alfarene globules, that seemed enough to serve a people for thousands
of years; in each we saw a new anti-gravitation engine, ready to deal
with every form of attraction and repulsion in the wide ether and
turn it into available power. Men and women in Limanoran form, but as
transparent and as imponderable and buoyant as their new ships, floated
round the ethereal fleet. Now and again a flash of artificial light
would dart across the scene, and along it, as if impelled by it, ran
with lightning-swiftness one of the rainbow-flecked faleenas, bearing
its full freight. We could see the lavolamma work, and we concluded
that there was a new form of it that could take advantage of beams
of light to travel with them, as an electric impulse travels along
them. Innumerable evolutions with the ethereal fleet took place. The