Limanora the island of progress
energy that had gained consciousness of itself and its purpose.
Their conscience and morality were based upon this quickening
ascension. The test of an action was this: does it help in raising
the humanity higher in the scale of being? Nothing could be good that
stopped their ascent; nothing could be bad that compelled them to rise
more quickly. The elders generally saw at a glance all the bearings
of an act and knew whether it contributed to this general aim or not.
Where they hesitated on account of the complexity of the problem, they
met and discussed it, calling in all the accurate science they had to
their aid; if after all they had to lay the question aside unanswered,
then was the act left in that neutral zone of conduct which the
Limanorans might or might not enter as they saw fit. Such acts carried
no moral discount or credit with them for the time. But often the
advance of an age, or even a few years, would remove the act from the
neutral zone into the bad or the good; a higher point of view generally
solved their doubt. From the opinion of the elders there rayed out
magnetically into the young and immature the sense of what was right,
to act as conscience where they were incapable of reasoning out the
position.
There was thus no feature of their lives but came within the range of
morality. Even the habitual and automatic movements and actions, which
form so large a proportion of the life of the other terrestrial races
had been reduced to an almost inappreciable proportion in theirs and
were ever being questioned and tested to see if they harmonised with
the newer points of view that had been reached. There was nothing in
their whole existence that had not its moral relationships. Their
sciences and arts, their experiments and inventions, were as much a
part of their moral life as their character and their conduct towards
each other. Morality was the relationship to the ever-developing,
ever-advancing, aim of the race, and nothing in the whole range of
their life was indifferent to that.
CHAPTER XII
A WARNING
EVER and again there overshadowed the spirit of the race a cloud, a
foreboding, that contrasted deeply with their usual exhilaration. The
intervals between its appearances were often long, occasionally brief.
At first I could not understand the cause of it; for I was still in
pupillage and had not yet developed the sympathetic magnetism that
ultimately made me a member of the race. But, when it recurred once
or twice, I began to see that it followed the passions of Lilaroma,
and that the families of the Leomo were least affected by it and most
active whilst it lasted. Another concomitance was the subsequent
importance of the questions connected with interstellar migration.
The discovery of the infinite and invisible life of unorbed space, not
only infinitesimal but highly organised, lessened the gloom of these
beclouded periods, and made the Limanorans less feverish in their
astronomic and volitational researches. They felt that the divorce
of the higher and lower energies of their human system, commonly
called death, was no annihilation of their entity, no closure of
their career of development, but only an incident in it, that took
the further history of their higher energies out of the reach of the
grosser terrestrial senses. They had no need, they felt, to reach out
frantically towards some other world. They had lost all fear of death,
and all thought of it as the end of their evolution. Still upwards
would they climb through higher stages of existence, in spite of the
loss of that grosser stepping-stone which we call the body. Knowing how
full the interstellar infinities are of vital energies and organisms,
and knowing too how the body began a new, though perhaps lower, career
at death, they were certain that the vitality and spiritual energy
that left it on dissolution, a far loftier and more highly organised
entity than the divorced terrene elements, would still exist and still
develop. The whole encyclopædia of their scientific knowledge was
opposed to its annihilation, and the discovery of the vital fulness of
space left no other alternative than that it was thither the spiritual
energy of the human personality escaped at death.
Yet there lingered a tinge of gloom at the time of any overwhelming
spasm in the heart of the great mountain; and the Leomo bated not a
jot of their activity at such periods in combating the once-dreaded
catastrophe. For they had no definite knowledge of the future pace
of their evolution, once the two types of energy in them should be
divorced; and they had as a firmly grasped fact their development
as they existed upon their island, and the increasing swiftness of
its pace as the years went on. They had ever been a people readier
to accept a bird in the hand than two in the bush, although they
might be fairly confident of their skill in bird-catching. This very
preference for facts had helped them to abandon the promises of faith
that their old religion had so lavishly held out to them, and to accept
the attitude of patiently waiting for light. So now, when their
science had found the light and they had every prospect of opening
communication with the intelligences that lived just outside of their
unaided ken, they would rather wait upon the solid earth till they saw
as solid fact to rest on in their flight from the earth.
They were eager, therefore, to postpone for some generations or ages
yet the catastrophe they feared. They had had far back in their history
a dim sense of the wrecking power of Lilaroma and its connection
with the volcanoes in their old antarctic home. Their more recent
earth-science had made the twilight prophecy into a clear fact. In
an early geological age of the earth the continent round the south
pole had sent a broad outlier far north through the southern ocean;
it had indeed stretched close up to the equator. This they knew as
soon as they began to study the natural history of Limanora and of
the archipelago around it. Not merely were the birds of the same or
kindred species with those of their old home, but many of them had
long preserved the memory of the former bridge between the two; as the
ancient expedition that brought the ancestry of the Limanorans sailed
across the intervening ocean, flights of the birds they were familiar
with were seen making for their new home, and some of them fell on the
decks or settled occasionally on the rigging of their ships. Their
unscientific and superstitious ancestors took this as an omen of
success; they thought that these birds had been sent from heaven to
direct their course, and they steered straight in the line of their
flight. The successful result confirmed them in their superstition for
many ages after they had landed on their tropical isles.
But the careful observation and the science of later times cleared
up the mystery. For a period they had taken it as a proof of the
similarity of nature all over the world, when they found so much of
the fauna and flora like those of their old home. But at last it began
to strike cautious observers that certain birds disappeared during
their summer season and reappeared in their winter. Classification soon
separated the migratory from the localised, and the modifications of
the species that they had been accustomed to in their old home from
those that were quite new to them. This passed from the birds to the
other animals, and thence to the flora. After the observer had done his
work of classifying all the animal and plant life, scientific thought
entered in and found the causes of both the similarities and the
dissimilarities between the new or tropical and the old or antarctic.
After many ages the migration of birds lessened; for few returned
in the winter, and as the climate became cooler through process of
time, most species preferred to remain the summer long. Then, when an
expedition went back to the ancient home of the race in the south, all
trace of cultivation and cities had vanished underneath the everlasting
snows, and the southern summer was found to be as severe as their
ancient winter had been. The increasing rigours of the new climate to
the south had reduced the mass of the bird-migrations.
The expedition followed the long-charted route of the feathered
travellers, and on its return sounded the depths and tested the seas
and their fauna the whole way. When the investigators had reached the
close of their labours, it became patent to them that their voyage
had been along the coast of a buried continent that had had its
northernmost point not far to the north of Lilaroma. Their soundings
along the line of bird-route were ever the shallowest, and at points
on it, if they left its direction, they suddenly dropped into the
deepest of oceans. A mountain-range, sometimes broken into immense
precipices and forested along its slopes, had evidently margined the
lost continent on its west and had stood the siege of the encroaching
ocean through geological ages, till the slow catastrophe of subsidence
had sent it under the victorious march of its enemy. Here and there it
left a barren rock or a volcanoed isle like a buoy to mark where its
wreckage had been submerged. Everywhere on the bird-line they found
a shallow-ocean flora and fauna; if ever they sounded or dredged or
fished or dived at any distance from it, they passed into a deeply
pelagic belt of life, or rather belt of death.
It dawned upon them that their old home and their new formed the
extremities of the vanished continent, and that their height was one
of the consequences of the submergence; the deeper the great submarine
range sank, the higher Lilaroma and the lofty torch-mountains of their
ancient home rose. But repeated visits to their old snow-coffined
land, and the expansion of their earth science into an art, gave them
farther-reaching views of the causes of this vast subsidence. The old
bird-route was one of the most ancient fissure-lines in the crust of
the earth. Out of it along its whole length had flowed in the earliest
geological ages the oozes of lava that formed the backbone of the old
continent as it rose from the sea, its most lasting bastion against
the encroachments of the watery element. Here and there along the
great chain of mountains, as they rose denuded of their softer rocks
and stood wrinkled into cañons and gorges by the rivers that swept
them clean, blazed at long intervals of time huge vents for the
smouldering fires underneath. As the mountain-barrier sank and the
ocean flowed over its forests that had graved into the winged species
the memory of their ancestral feeding-grounds, and finally closed all
the breathing-spaces of the fiery Titan beneath, his passion sought
vent more and more through the torch-cones of the snow-buried southern
land and through the lofty crater of Lilaroma. Expedition after
expedition to their ancient home revealed the simultaneity of volcanic
action in the two regions; but the greater the titanic paroxysms in
the one, the less they were in the other. They were the two pulses and
breathing-vents of the buried giant.
For many ages after some unknown submarine catastrophe had hedged them
into their archipelago by the untraversible mill-race and the dark belt
of mist, they had been unable to test the connection between their
own fire-mountain and those in their old home. But they could easily
imagine during the paroxysms of Lilaroma what was occurring far off
in the southern snows; and when they had mastered the art of aërial
flight, they resumed their expeditions to the glacial regions of the
south. Every few years might have been seen, had there been mariners