Limanora the island of progress
of everlasting ice where their remote ancestry had dwelt; and that
too might at any moment flash into dust before the explosive forces
beneath the crust. The alternative of seeking a home on another star
had seemed to them the only one for many generations, and they had been
preparing for it by inventions that would enable them to float clear
of the terrestrial atmosphere for many centuries, and by explorations
in interstellar space. But many discoveries and thoughts had thrown
a new light upon this stellar migration. They would have to exist
in their circumscribed faleenas as they travelled through the ether
for many generations of even their long lives, and these ships would
be their cradle and their tomb. They would have to resign for many
centuries the conquests of the elements and of the forces of nature,
that they had achieved in Limanora. The broad movement which these
past ages of history had given to their life, would be narrowed into
a space no larger than one chamber of their own mansions. They would
live imprisoned, and their imprisonment would lay its brand upon their
natures and still more upon the natures of their descendants. The
proximity of so many in so small a space would breed physical and,
still worse, spiritual disease, that would haunt their posterity for
generations after they should settle in their new stellar abode. Their
offspring would have the habits and ideas of the savage reared in
the wigwam of the rover or the hut of the slave. Even if they could
achieve individual flight through the ether, they would have to keep
close to their storeships and return every few minutes to the exhausted
atmosphere of their swiftwinging faleenas.
If every condition of their interstellar voyage were the same as
their life in their own Limanora, what disappointments might not they
encounter in their comparative ignorance of the biology of the heavens?
Would not most stars that were fit to be inhabited be already choked
with life and life at a different stage from that they had attained?
If they struck upon a lower grade of existence it would be useless to
attempt to raise it, and contrary to their own morality to obliterate
it. If they met with a higher type of being, they would be repulsed by
it as likely to degrade it. It would be a wretched existence to lead a
life of interstellar vagabondage, poor beggars of the cosmos, seeking
a star whereon they might rest the sole of their foot. Not more than
one world in each system could be at the stage that would fit their
life-evolution; most stars would be too young and fierily crude or too
old and exhausted to give them the conditions they sought for. In
many the life they would encounter would shock and repel them by its
monstrosity. What was to hinder some such gigantic form as, the Leomo
knew, had existed on the earth in its earlier geological ages, some
tremendous winged saurian, having the place on one or more of the stars
they visited that man held upon earth? It only meant the development
of a brain proportionate to the hugeness of the bulk, and some swiftly
moving, deft, and adaptable limb, like the human hand, to give it
complete dominance over all the forms of life around it. The elephant
needed only the mechanical faculty of the beaver or of the ant to
outstrip man in the struggle of life; he had the delicate manipulator
in his trunk, he had the long life, and he had the capacity of skull
to transform him into the dominant race of the earth. In order to the
mastery of his conditions, he had only to make the step from using
anything that came ready to his trunk as a weapon into shaping it to
his will. Circumstances, accidents, opportunities, pilot the evolution
of life upon a world, and the accidental condition of an element or an
energy or a locality might have transformed some terrific monster into
the master of the first star they visited. It was merely a matter of
more or less intricate convolutions of the brain. But perhaps the most
terrible thing of all would be to land on a world whose inhabitants
had developed the purely intellectual faculties and the section of the
brain corresponding to them, at the expense of the nervous centres that
have to do with the control of the passions and with the subordination
of the animal nature; what a horror it would be to find a star full of
Calibans with more than human cunning, and none of human emotion or
morality!
The thought of chances like these gave them pause in their migratorial
quest. They began to feel that even life amongst the ruder of their
fellow-men might be better than landing amongst monsters unstirred by
pity or compassion, reverence or tenderness for highly developed life,
to whom bloodshed was nothing. It was true that there were in most
nations men who were so constituted. But they were, except when they
got the command of huge armies and became conquerors, bridled by fear
of the punishments that the laws of the country meted out to criminals.
It was better to live in proximity to beings amongst whom this moral
and emotional neutrality is an exception, than in a world filled with
such monsters. Perchance, when their island-home was shattered to dust,
their true path lay along the surface of their own globe. They might
settle on the slope of some sky-piercing mountain, round whose feet lay
untainted tribes of primitive savages; there they might preserve their
isolation as perfectly as in Limanora by a hedge of fear around them,
which their exceptional power over the forces of nature should forge.
But they knew that before many ages could pass civilised man would
penetrate amongst the awed tribes with his potent weapons and his
unscrupulous cunning; then would they be unable to avoid bloodshed, or
hypocritical ambush, or diplomacy; ambition and hatred would enter in
and turn their paradise into a hell. On the whole, they inclined to the
other alternative that lay before them when the great catastrophe came;
that is, to let it do its worst on their physical or lower elements.
Out of their shattered bodies would rise the energy of their systems to
follow its career of development untrammelled by any slow-moving matter
that was half inert whether living or dead. Death so sudden as that,
death under any circumstances or conditions, was no stop or misfortune
to the highest that was in them; it was the swiftest way to achieve
migration into the interstellar spaces. As it was, they were narrowed
and localised in their development, thought (the higher thought) alone
finding its way unchecked to any point or sphere in the cosmos. At
death they would all be freed from the almost vegetative functions of
human existence; they would be released from the prison of locality
and their whole being would have the ease of thought in winging from
infinity to infinity, and in disregarding the limitations of time and
space. Together the whole of their race might find coalescence if not
companionship in following out their career of development, unburdened
by alliance with a lower type of energy, and in more swiftly attaining
a higher and higher goal in the scale of energies.
When this conclusion had been reached by the consciousness of the
people, the old serenity returned to them. They were ready to meet
whatever came, not caring whether their ascent through the grades of
being was trammelled by terrestrial forms of energy or set free in the
infinities of ether. But I dimly felt that there was a sublime looking
upwards in all they did or said added to their former serenity that
transformed it into what approached to the noblest forms of devotional
ecstasy I had seen amongst men. They never allowed themselves to fall
into the moulds of thought that his bodily and terrestrial needs
so freely supply to man. Though recognising the practical demands
of the physical nature, they satisfied and then dismissed them as
rapidly as was possible; and with all their marvellous machinery and
inventions and their accumulation of power, the time occupied in this
satisfaction was so abbreviated as to be scarcely noticeable in the
labyrinth of daily pursuits.
I had been greatly puzzled during my long period of training to see
no trace of religious worship in this noble race. Growing up with
the instinct in me that of all manifestations of human possibilities
religion was the most sublime, yet I had come to know before I left
Europe how degraded, gross, and foul even a lofty-minded religion
might become. But the best men and women I had known there had ever
been stirred with the spirit of religious reverence and love. I could
not account for these, the noblest and ablest beings I had seen on
earth, ignoring the claims of what is the highest of all, and I watched
eagerly for any indication of acts or moods of worship. Early in my
residence on the island I had discovered that there were no temples and
no priests; that was patent to the most casual glance of the stranger.
Amongst all their public buildings there was none that could be taken
as devoted to the worship of a deity, and there was no family or caste
or set of men whose chief functions were to superintend such a worship.
But perhaps their religious acts were private or even secret and I
was on the alert many years for any sign of such a thing in the house
of my proparents or in that of Thyriel. Finally discovering nothing
that could be construed even in the most distant way into a ceremonial
attitude or word, I gradually abandoned any expectation of such a thing.
My attention was now aroused by the new halo around their serene
acceptance of the conditions of life. There was rapture and there
was longing in their halcyon view of the world; yet the rapture
and the longing never withdrew them from immediate pursuits and
duties, never gave them the ennui of life that transport and passion
generally entrain. They seemed to have the vision and the upward
glance of the seer without his brooding and apartness. It was rather
an intensification of their usual feelings and attitude to life. This
was nearer than anything else I had experienced in Limanora to the
unperturbed faith in a higher being and the yearning for proximity to
him that I had witnessed in those whom we used in Europe to call, for
lack of a less trite term, saints. At the next Manora or decennial
review the predominating interest was the theopathic side of human
nature, and I discovered more of their views of religion in the few
years preceding it than in all the decades I had spent amongst them.
So devotional did I think the magnetism which ran through the
community, that I plucked up courage to ask about the religion. My
question was dealt with in the calmest and most rational way possible
amongst human beings. There was no immediate reply, except an elevation
of the finger to the brow and then to the wide vault of the sky, but I
was led to a part of Fialume I had not visited. It lay in a region of
the valley that I had carefully avoided as full of gloom, and damp with
the vapour of a tumbling waterfall; I had never noticed any one enter
it, and my curiosity had never been awakened about it.
Here were stored the records that illustrated the evolution of
religion, records made by light, sound, and magnetism. It was intensely
interesting for me to see so complete a museum of the natural history
of worship. Every faith in the world had its due place, fixed
according to its inner spirit and development. So graphic was the
map of the whole that in a moment I saw the common kinship of all,
and the differentiating qualities that made one worship higher and
more advanced than another. My guide flashed living pictures of the
ceremonies of each, and then let me listen to the speeches and talks of
the officiants and of many of the worshippers. The magnetographs struck