Limanora the island of progress
to look into the deeper mysteries of existence. They thought it one
of the strangest pieces of inversion, if not desecration, to place
religious ideas, as we did, before the youngest. Nothing but evil
could come of such an attempt. With the Limanorans it was the final
initiation into life to acquaint their grown men and women with the
sublimest thoughts and doubts and emotions on the purpose of existence;
it was the copestone of their education; after all the field of
knowledge had been traversed by them and all the reverences had been
instilled into them, the last reverence was revealed to them. Then and
not till then were they capable of realising its fulness. Communicated
in childhood or early youth, before the powers were mature, before
the animal and savage stages of development had been gone through, it
could end only in gross familiarity or gross superstition; the noblest
and most inward of thoughts and emotions would be misunderstood. What
was it that had made their old religions so stagnant, so obstructive
to all advance, but this mistaken principle of attempting to teach the
holiest and deepest ideas to the young! It made their ancestors cleave
to crude superstitions as if divine and refuse to give up any item of
their childish ideas of them. So thoroughly are the sources of our
youthful impressions lost in the mists of the past that any connected
with reverence seem to come from the divine eternity beyond birth.
CHAPTER V
JOURNEY TO THE VALLEY OF MEMORIES
ONE of the things this people feared most was enslavement to the past;
and I was encouraged to strip my mind of all sentiment connected with
the life I had led before my arrival and all superstitious devotion to
the historic. Bury the dead past, was one of their primary maxims. Nor
would they permit religion or any other conservative element to hallow
tradition. The world is well quit of what it has been, was another of
their sayings. They seemed to look upon the past as a fierce pursuer
ever ready to overtake and strangle them. Out and away from it were
they ever hurrying. It was the dark shadow over existence. And into the
future, into the future and the sunshine, they cut their way through
the thick tangle of life.
I was much surprised, then, after I had been admitted to the full
confidence of my proparents, to hear them refer with pleasure, if not
joy, to what seemed nothing but a glorification of the past. The name
Fialume came repeatedly into their conversations with each other till
at last it roused my curiosity. There was something imaginative in the
ideas connected with it; it never rose to their lips without bringing
into their eyes a beautifully piteous expression that bordered almost
on the ecstasy of joy. They saw that they had piqued my curiosity; and
before I had asked them they gave me the information I desired. The
word, Fialume, translated, meant “the valley of memories.” It was the
great library and university of the island. There the second stage of
education was largely passed. If by the age of fifty all superstitious
veneration of the past had been eradicated from the nature of the new
citizen, he was led to this valley day after day, month after month,
until he had seen the career of the race, and had grown familiar with
the steps of its development; he learned to shudder at the darkness
out of which it had come, and to watch with joy the growing light and
the fleeing shadows as it neared the present. Thus did he learn true
gratitude for what he was, and true reverence for the future towards
which they were all striving. I was not yet fit to enter the precincts
of the valley. I had still too much of that anguished yet exquisite
homesickness for my own past to be trusted with insight into a past
that might seem great to me. And yet my probation would be shorter,
as my buried world was so different from theirs; there would be less
danger of superstitious reverence awaking in me for any of their old
stages or antiquated institutions, and no danger of Ayala stirring
my idolatrous devotion. This new word puzzled me, they saw. And they
explained that it was but the older name for the same valley; it meant
“the resting-place of the untrammelled.” In fact, their great library
and university was their graveyard too.
Years passed in happy renovation of my whole being, body and soul. As I
looked back I began to shudder at the past out of which I had come, its
low ideals, and its still lower planes of living; it seemed centuries
behind me and not mere years; it had grown into a murky cloud on the
far horizon. I could see how often I had been on the verge of despair
or disease and began to know the blindness and ignorance that had been
almost the air I breathed. I shrank in horror from all I had been; for
I could examine the poor fabric of it almost microscopically now. There
was little fear indeed of my ever longing for what I had left behind me.
Thus at last there came the supreme moment that I had laboured for. I
was to be permitted to visit Fialume. I shall never forget the day.
I had swept out of my mind analogies for their great graveyard from
the doleful surroundings of death to which I had been accustomed in
my native land, the long train of mourners, the ghastly hearse with
its burden of mortality, the unkempt grass of the place of tombs, the
dreary wait beneath the unsympathetic sky; and then the rattle of the
clods upon the coffin-lid, and the frantic effort to drive from the
soul the thought of the gradual corruption of the body and the final
residue of skull and bones. Years though I had been in Limanora, I had
never heard of a funeral. Indeed deaths were as rare as births in a
community that had striven to avoid the lavish waste of nature, and
had so studied the human frame as to know how to arrest decay of its
powers and to give every individual full possibility of developing
himself and through himself his race. The reckless and indiscriminate
bearings and dyings of the old world were no advance on the course of
the animal or even the vegetable sphere; the higher the organisation
the fewer the young and the greater the care of them. But man in other
lands had still, with all his thought and foresight, the extravagant
method of nature, and had increased and multiplied without stint in
order that an occasional exception might help by favouring conditions
to lead the race onwards and perhaps upwards. Thousands of Alexanders
and Cromwells, of Mahomets and Socrates, of Homers and Dantes and
Shakespeares had lived and died unknown, because they had not been
born into the circumstances which fitted their peculiar faculties.
This people had seen that the method of nature was haphazard, if not
heartless, that the rate of progress could be indefinitely accelerated
if every child that was born were born with a definite purpose, and his
life were guarded and extended till that purpose was fulfilled. They
meant every act of generation for a definite advance. Birth and death
were in the hands of the race and not of chance, and thus it was that
I had never seen or heard of obsequies during the many years of my
probation.
So my difficulties were solved by my guardians before we set out for
the national place of tombs. Yet my curiosity was as active as before.
This was the beginning of a new epoch in my new life. How could its
wonders surpass those of the past years! And I was all eagerness to
study the past history of this noble race, to study the gradual ascent
to the height they had now reached.
The whole atmosphere was jubilant as we rose into its upper levels
and thrilled with light and electricity; even unseen living forms
from other stars mingled with the sunlight that supplied so much for
the support of our being. There was not a cloud to mar the purity of
the ether, inspired with wandering breaths of wind. We rose joyous
and bright under the gleam of the sun, I alone having my exhilaration
somewhat dashed by the consciousness of my laggard gait; for my limbs
were not yet light enough, my arm and leg muscles not strong enough,
to accomplish any but the briefest journey upon wings, and that in the
most awkward and shambling way. I was borne in one of their faleenas or
weight-transference flies; it was one of the smallest, yet I had room
to move about freely in the car in spite of the baggage of the troop.
It was not unlike a huge tropical butterfly that I had admired in a
case in one of our museums; the car was long and narrow and pointed
like a boat at either end; from each side stretched out wings that were
enormous beside the body they carried; and these, rainbow-hued, seemed
to fill the whole air through which we passed with a solid gleam,
so quickly did they shuttle up and down; aft extended slantwise two
great antennae-like shafts that moved hither and thither to defeat the
baffling puffs of wind and so direct our flight; along the keel lay the
engine that produced the beat of the wings, silent and motionless as
if it were but a shaft that strengthened the framework. There was no
vibration, in spite of the great speed of the faleena. A huge awning,
so high above us as to be out of reach of the wings at their fullest
stretch, seemed to hold us easily aloft at whatever level we desired,
and to let us gently down whenever the wings beat slowly enough to be
seen as they moved up and down. It was in one of these slow movements
that I discovered the principle of these sails; they were made of
the wonderful metal, irelium, and had its properties of lightness,
tenuity, and strength; I had noticed as they flashed solidly through
the air that there was an alternation in the flash of greater or less
sheen; I now saw that each wing consisted of two fine plates of open
scroll-work sliding over one another back and forth; in the upward
stroke the holes were open so that the air passed easily through,
and the whole expanse looked like a delicately reticulated fan; in
the downward stroke the upper plate so slid over the lower that the
apertures of both were completely closed, and the wing formed a solid
sheet of metal. I afterwards saw how simply this was accomplished.
The under irelium network had but one motion, that on the hinges
attached to the side of the car, but it had grooves on its fore and
aft edges; into these, corresponding projections on the upper network
fitted, moving in them easily by means of small half-hidden wheels;
this upper plate was attached to independent hinges on a long rod that
was drawn back and forth about half an inch by a connection with the
driving engine; its motion, however, was completely controlled by the
ligatures that drew the wing upwards and downwards, so that they should
ever be in harmony, and the closing of the pores should occur only
at the beginning of the downward beat, and their opening only at the
beginning of the upward beat. The effect to the eye was very beautiful;
the transparency of the metal let the coloured light of the sky shine
through it even when solid; but when reticulated the azure seemed to
form into a flashing loom of the finest lace. I could not cease gazing
at the ever-shifting lights that played through the embroidery of the
wings. It was pleasing to the ear as well: for the whirr and creak
that usually accompany the flight of great birds and the movement of
machinery were used up as undertones to a grand but simple musical
march that seemed the very spirit of the beat of the wings.
For a time these sights and sounds held me entranced, so that I was
scarcely conscious of our ascent. When the power of the charm had
freed my senses, I looked down, and my heart leapt into my mouth;
eagles being swept from the island by the blast of the storm-cone