Limanora the island of progress
millions of horse-power--into the electric engine, the arm of which
they had at once brought to rest. Fierce lightnings again played
through the atmosphere, marking the line of the new despatch. And
again the luminous tongue of the magnetometer told of its reception by
intelligences like ours. Then came the astronomic families who marked
the exact position of the sensitive spot in the sky. And thereafter
their sentry stood with sarmolan directed thither, ready to announce
the slightest sign of astral impulse or response.
The scene changed, and we saw a new type of electric engine placed in
position on the stage. On its long arm was a singularly crooked cage of
transparent irelium, flat and sharp like the blade of a sword yet bent
into a right angle in the direction of the edge. Within it were placed
recording magnetometers. We could see the directors fix them towards
their responsive universe. Then Rimla concentrated its tremendous power
upon the machine; the arm swung right and left, and finally with a jerk
shot the crooked cage like lightning through the air. We followed its
luminous track far into the sky, till it seemed nothing but one of the
countless stars that silvered the night. Suddenly, like a rocket, it
bent back on its course, and as swiftly retraced its flight. I thought
to see it shattered into dust as it struck the earth, but there was a
deep pool ready to break its force. Its sharp edge cut the water and it
vanished, but slowly rose to the surface unhurt, and on the faces of
the observers we could see how successful had been the experiment with
the limotar, or new boomerang vehicle of electric indications. It had
shot far up into space along the true electric impulse that travelled
away beyond it towards the sensitive point of sky they had discovered.
Before it bent back from its headlong course, the response, speeding
more freely and more swiftly through the untrammelled ether, imprinted
itself upon the face of the sarmolan. It was this answer, more decided
than any they had yet received, that filled the eyes of the observers
with joyous light.
There was another change of scene. The gigantic engines had disappeared
and in their place we saw the ether-courier families floating on the
outskirts of the atmosphere with strata of clouds far below them. On
the back of their necks, where the electric sense had its special
seat, they bore a singular apparatus, not unlike a small telescope. On
their chests they had strapped a small engine of irelium, a miniature
of those we had seen in former scenes. The one was a magnifier of
electric indications, and the other was an electricity catapult. The
couriers could not only draw upon the electric resources of the spaces
around them, but upon those of the centre of force. And we could see
them converse with distant stars by means of these apparatus. Through
unobstructed space they could send with ease their electric impulses
to limitless distances, free from the atmospheric retardation which
before had demanded immense power to overcome its inertia. And with
their new electro-telescopes they could magnify ten-thousand-fold
any electric ray for their firlas to receive, although it might have
travelled a thousand times the distance between the earth and the sun.
They might have to wait days for their answer; but again and again were
they rewarded with it. With the dim stars circling round the nearer
suns they were able to hold comparatively rapid converse. But they were
going farther afield through the cosmos, and they had often to watch
and wait for weeks or months or years for any indication of response.
The book awakened little enthusiasm compared with the publication of
some of those that I had witnessed. For, though the authors had been
rapid in the composition of it, they had been somewhat forestalled by
one of the ingenious inventions of the last great age of discovery.
This was the modification of the lavolan which brought them records
of the life of extra-aërial space. Amongst the luminous impressions
that their combination of lavolan and faleena had brought down out of
the ether, they had found evidences of highly organised systems which
frequented the vacuum outside our atmosphere. They were satisfied
with the knowledge of this new-discovered teeming life, and they
believed that before many ages they would have developed, first their
apparatus, and next their senses, so far as to open intercourse with
it. And if they could come to converse with nobler intelligences near
the earth, they did not need to go so far afield in the cosmos as the
new book suggested. Their own filammus would serve to bring them into
close sympathy with the best life that was to be found in space until
they should know the conditions of such life and aim at fulfilling them.
It was one of the subsidiary studies and ideals of the book that drew
most attention and produced most result. It pictured an apparatus and
method for tapping the thoughts of men as they travelled along the
nerves, an adaptation of their huge electric engines for sidereal
intercommunication. For some ages they had been able to send emotions
and impulses through the air, or rather through the medium that
interpenetrated the air, and recently they had developed this into the
despatch of thoughts through long distances. The combination of great
magnetic power and sensitive sarmolans, this book showed, would draw
off thought at any point along its line of flight whether in the body
or in the air; and underneath an electric magnifier and interpreter the
indicator would reveal the meaning of the thoughts. Thus would they
be able to find out the intentions of men, however distant. But this
was only a minor result of the ideal. They would be able, with the aid
of the apparatus, to tap the torrents of thought speeding through the
ether, and so drink of the highest intelligence and imagination which
approached the earth. Much of it would be too intricate and abstruse
for them to follow or understand. But they already knew that most of
their greatest inspirations had come from this ocean of tremulous
energy, bordering the shores of our world; and development of their
faculties and of their sympathy with this extra-terrestrial thought
would gradually lead them to the interpretation of its more complex and
deeper elements. All their civilisation had been an attempt to know the
thoughts that lie in the structure of our universe, in its complicated
energy and minute life. By this new means they would feel the throb
of the very heart of our system, perchance of the very heart whose
beats are the life of the cosmos; at least they would get to know the
intelligence that flashes through space around our world, the wisdom
and the inspirations passing between the inhabitants of the ether
beyond our grosser senses.
Had it not been for this minor issue and ideal, the publication of
the book would have been completely overshadowed by that of the book
of Immortality. This took as basis the great expansion of life they
had been able to produce and their ideals of ethereal nutrition and
amphibious life, and pictured the posterity of the Limanorans able to
join the inhabitants of the ether without any violent transition or
death. We saw a Limanoran on the stage in Loomiefa passing through the
new transmutation from mortal to immortal. His transient elements were
atom by atom sublimed away in a new hall of medication, where magnetic
energy took the place of more material nutrition. His tissues became
diaphanous, till only the light and the magnetism he emitted marked the
place where he lay. It was what he thought and felt rather than what
he was that told us he was still there. His lower and more stagnant
centres of energy had vanished; and gravitation seemed to have little
or no influence upon him. Whithersoever his thought willed, thither
he floated, rather the luminous reflection of a man than the man
himself. To our grosser senses he seemed as impalpable and evanescent
as a perfume or a mist on the morning hills. Yet there he stood or
moved an inexpugnable centre of the highest energy, whither flowed the
sympathetic force of other centres, and whither nothing hostile could
approach. Storms passed effectless over his head; the deadliest engines
shot their darts at him in vain; poisonous fumes, lethal showers,
armies of pestilential microbes, swept round him and through him
innocuous. All the evanescent centres of energy that had laid him open
to the attacks of these, had dissolved and left him fit to be a dweller
in the infinite ether. There might be other noxious elements, to whose
assaults he was yet vulnerable; but these we could not discover. He
was immortal as far as terrestrial enemies were concerned, immortal
without the sudden collapse and dissolution of the lower centres which
we call death upon our world. By the most natural of processes he lost
the substance that awakened our grosser senses and became the mere
halo of what he had been, fit only to make himself felt by our centres
of thought and imagination. With our firlas we could feel stream from
him great currents of magnetic influence, unobstructed by any of those
terrene or aërial media that make spiritual intercourse so difficult
upon this world.
Such an ideal, when attained, would spread what is now called death
over the greater part of our terrestrial lifetime, instead of massing
it into a few moments of farewell. It would be difficult to fence
off the immortal from the mortal, so many stages would there be of
transmutation. The intercourse between the immortalising and the
immortal would then be continuous and there would be no sudden break
in existence, no great gulf fixed between the spiritual and the
material.
With the same corporeal and mental faculties which their ancestry had
had in primeval ages, and the bulk of men had in their own day, they
would have counted immortality as the gift of a friend. Even with
their existing development, noble though it was, they would never
think of longing for such a fate; for the lower centres of energy,
forming what is called the body, still demanded an amount of attention
and sustenance that was burdensome. They had great delight in their
life; they energised so purely and continually that they often forgot
the corporeal system and its claims. Yet the time came in all men’s
lives when they felt their still-mixed constitutions advance too
slowly for their spiritual ambitions; and then they longed for change,
perhaps rest, such as the dissolution we call death accomplished. If,
however, they could get rid of the inferior and clogging elements of
their systems and float free of terrene forces and conditions like
gravitation, then might immortality be an object of desire.
A publication that delighted them even more than this was one that
had a cognate theme, the dimension of time. It seemed to me the most
fanciful of all the productions I had witnessed in Loomiefa. Yet it did
not seem to strike the Limanorans as beyond the bounds of possibility.
It was called the book of Time-focussing. So fantastic and utopian
did I think it that I paid little attention when it was dramatically
published on the stage. Yet I remember some of the chief features of
the new book.
It counselled the development of the imagination on its prospicient
side till it should count æons as moments and take easy flight
through eternities. It was the real time-faculty, and had already in
the productions of Loomiefa forerun the civilisation of the race by
long periods. It had become true prophet not merely over months or
years, but over centuries. Trained to use the data of the past and
the present, it had been able to forecast the evolution of the future
with a certainty that made its art almost a science. What was to