 Chapter 7 Part 2 of Lymanora, the Island of Progress by Godfrey Swevin. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Pioneering Part 2 Immediate book, soon afterward produced by one of the Lumiamo, supplied one of the steps towards the consummation of this ideal. It was the book of ethereal It took as basis a former discovery, the liquefaction of air, and showed how, by similar methods, the medium that filled interstellar space could be made available in the halls of nutriment and medication, and how it could be manufactured in such a concentrated form as to allow of its being poured along conduits and imbibed by human organs through the mouth and nostrils, just as air was. For some time the atmosphere had been distilled in liquid form, and supplied to the houses of the citizens absolutely red of all impurities. Nay, it had been made a fountain of power, transmissible to long distances, and available in a form that was easily carried. Compressed and liquefied, it rapidly returned to the gaseous form as soon as the pressure began to be removed. And the equilibriizing of the liquid to the expansion of the surrounding air had been made to supply vast quantities of power in the center of force. The new book proposed to find in the compression and liquefaction of the ether an infinite fountain of force that would enable their civilization to progress at an ever-accelerating pace. But the most immediate effect proposed by the book was to enable the Lymanorans to etherealize their bodies by introducing the liquefied ether into their dietary. The result would be that the tissues would grow more diaphanous. They had already been able to transport some of the universal medium in their anchored vacuum felinas from the outer margin of the atmosphere to their laboratories, and now they had been able to find it in their manufactured vacuums. With the enormous power they had in rimla they could easily compress it into forms that would touch the senses and enter into the blood and the formation of the tissues. As the medium of light and magnetism it was almost certain to make the human body more translucent than it had ever been. All the tissues, even the oceus, had always been previous to light, but many of them not apparently so to the untrained human eye. Recently their lavalands had shown that by means of certain kinds of luminous rays the human system gave up its most hidden secrets to the human eye. But once they were able to chemicalize and compress the luminiferous ether into palpable form, and to mingle it with the volatile food that could be taken into their bodies as they breathed, there would be no need of lavalands or other apparatus to see the inner movements of the human system. The sanitary effects of this advance would be no mean result. The medical council would have much of their time set free for their ever-pressing investigations. They would not be needed for the diagnosis of deteriorative symptoms in the tissues. Each individual would be able, and by the aid of magnifying mirrors, to examine for himself what was going on in any part of his system, and every man had sufficient physiological and medical knowledge to understand the beginnings of all the ordinary diseases, and, if he recognized them, to prescribe for himself the hall in the Milifa that he should frequent in order to check them. Now it would be only the symptoms of obscure or new diseases or deteriorations of the system that the medical elders would have to diagnose. And thus they would have great tracks of their life to devote to new discoveries, and medical science was certain to advance more rapidly. Another sanitary effect of the new permeability to light would be to render the human body less open to diseases either known or unknown. For it had long been a common place of medical science that some light reduced the vitality, and therefore the virulence, of all noxious microbes, after nightfall their power increased tenfold. Wherever the sun's rays could not reach by day, their diseases multiplied and festered. And one of the chief reasons why, in their far-past history, incurable maladies were generally internal, was that sunshine could not get to the parts affected except in a feeble and strangling way. The fact that they had fixed themselves deeply in the tissues before they could be observed, and that it was difficult to get at their roots without cutting a passage into them had been generally accepted as the explanation of their frequency and deadliness. But it had been one of the most important discoveries of the new era, after the Purgation period, that pure oxygen and pure sunlight were the most meditative of all things, and that the nearer any affected part could get to them the sooner it healed. The new book of ethereal nutrition pointed out that one of the results of rendering the human system easily pervious to light would be to read its internal parts of all trace of immediate capability. Sunlight, permeating the inner organs and tissues, would make any noxious microbes that might lodge in them innocuous. The reciprocity of suggestion and discovery was never more saliently exemplified than by one of the less immediate results pointed out by this book as likely to flow from the attainment of this ideal. Volatile ether food, gradually introduced into the halls of nutrition and gradually increased, would step by step bring the human organs to adapt themselves to existence outside the atmosphere of the earth. For a long time they would be amphibious, with organs adapted to both aerial and ethereal life. Even as it was, the human body revealed in its traces of having already passed through an amphibious stage. There were in the neck glands that were the remains of gills, which must have once belonged to an aquatic habit. Besides, there was the last vestige of an eye in the back of the neck still extant in the pineal gland, and this could have been of use only when the ancestor of man was passing through the stage of a water animal, which must watch his enemies from the surface, his body being submerged and out of sight. Step by step he abandoned the water for a literal, and even at first a boreal habit. The result was that the gills came to be unused and closed up, and the upward-looking eye was useless in a head that was held upright and could be turned swiftly in all directions. Still man retains the memory of the aquatic stage of his ancestry with the ease with which he learns to swim, and in his love of a life on the sea, whilst an occasional birth in more barbarous tribes with the webtolls of a water animal still showing reveals his ancestry adivistically. What was to hinder him, now that he had the mastery of himself and his destiny, becoming again amphibious in a new way? Without guidance of his own, driven only by the forces of nature, he had risen out of the waters that once covered the earth, and taken to dry land. For a long period he had been able to live at will in either of two elements, air and water. Where lay the difficulty in making himself again capable of living in two elements, in air and in the luminiferous ether? In prehistoric times nature had worked her evolution in its system by long and slow stages. But in Lymenora progress had become lightning-swift, and would again and again increase its pace. For there man had taken command of nature, and made her accommodate her step to his stride. She was his willing servant, nimble as her own electric flash. He could now compress the work of centuries into hours by his concentration of power in remla, and by his countless ingenious contrivances. Thought was the Lord of Time as of space, and thought was now his essence in 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 groveling 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 immediate book, one bridging the gulf between things as they were, and the far ideals held out to the race by the Frelumiamo. It helped to point out the steps towards the realization of one of the most cherished productions of the age, the Book of Immigration. It had been many years in the mature minds of the community before I was introduced to Lumiefa and its wonders, and it had recently been much modified by the discoveries of the new outburst of energy that followed Chakru's attempt at invasion. Its ideal was to enable the limanorans of that or some future generation to travel thought-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 indurable. Then they crept their slow way towards the equator till the whole surface of the earth teamed with vitality, at first developing towards vastitude in the warm vapors, 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 other or the other was farthest in winter from the sun during an extensive period. The hyperborean powers shepherded the growing life of earth down into her central belt. But the brumel 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 pin 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 welded 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 verminous passion for dear life. Not animal could lie 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 as his troglodytic habits. On moved the brumo-prison walls. The sun shriveled in the sky and withdrew his heat. Nothing lived that was not arctic enough 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 as grave. Feebly the last remnants of the ray stole forth into the struggling rays of daylight and killed everything of life they could find. Only in the sea still lived there 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 on winding sheet. The meager relics of terrestrial life soon followed him into silence and darkness, and through the sunless night the dead orb wheeled round the extinguished center 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 limanorns known that it 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 vapor 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 center 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 colonization 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 entombed to remain a possibility and a shadow on even the distant horizon of their race? Once before had their ancestry evaded such a fate, pinned between the invasive glaciers in 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 civilization 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 civilization 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 immigration. Their one thought of escape was taken from their old migration out of the reach of the anti-eclacial advance. To sail out from the earth and commit themselves to the strange conditions and uncertainties of a new element seem no more hazardous to them now than in their primeval stage of land civilization, to launch out with their lives in their hands upon the unknown and terrifying ocean. It was urged that there was a 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 immigrating 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 modifications 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 aerial 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 to 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 toward safe departure from the surface of the world. It only needed ingenuity and development to give them a concentration of aerated 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 alpharine or oxygen's 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 hulls of sustenance and medication, and thus to customing 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 limonorn 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 lavalama or gravitation power machine. The new book of immigration brought all these discoveries and thoughts into bearing on its problem and harmonized them, and developed them by means of imaginative suggestion. The drama of its publication drew the bulk of the people to Lumiefa. There we saw a representation of Lila Rome itself, piercing the sky in pure and lonely grandeur. Near its top lay mort a fleet of falinas 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 alpharine 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 white ether and turn it into available power. Men and women in limonorn 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 the lightning swiftness of one of the rainbow-flecked falinas bearing its full freight. We could see the lavalama work, and we concluded that there was a new form of it that could take advantage of the beams of light to travel with them, as an electric impulse travels along them. Enumerable evolutions with the ethereal fleet took place. The sublimated limonorans of the future seemed to have complete command of the new ships and of the new power over light and gravitation. Suddenly came tremors in the framework of the great mountain. It rocked like a boy in the uneasy surge of a reef. Its snows fell in huge avalanches. Then the conical top was ejected into the sky like a shot from a cannon. The air was thick with dust and stones. But when it cleared and great flame shot forth and licked the face of heaven, we could see far above their reach the rainbow-colored fleet speeding aloft, filled with their tiny diaphanous sailors. The scene changed, and we saw the universes set in the vault of heaven, and across the space between them we could discern minute specks of light flashing mercurial as thought. Behind them, in dimmy lips, sped the noctambulant earth, still eddying around the central spot of light. Now it broke forth in ragged coruscation, only to sink back into a pitchy gloom. Yet a thread of light stretched forth into the luminous atoms that flooded on through the night. Nearer they came, and one by one grew more distinct and larger. At last we could see that it was the fleet on its way from the top of Lila Roma. Within each aether ship we could make out the movements of the sailors as they bent its way this side and that. The light from a brilliant star in the new universe may play upon the surface of their felinas. They had caught in its rays, and were speeding as swift as light towards the now definite goal. The luminiferous current bore them steadily on, their little engines palpitating with the impulse of the new light and the new gravitation. Then the scene changed, and we looked upon the surface of a new orb, more advanced in development, more highly organized than the earth with which we were familiar. We saw the inhabitants in crowds, face upwards into the night, all eyes on some distant star. The excitement was rising like a tempest. It seemed as if the object on which they gazed were swiftly approaching them. And in a flash they're swept within our sight the fleet of prismatic aether ships, like rainbows in the light of another sun. They stopped and hovered above the atmosphere. We saw their crews breathe in the elements in which they floated. Lower and lower they came, still sounding the atmosphere and testing its effects upon their organs. The absence of commotion and the steady descent showed that nothing alien to their systems had yet been encountered. Out of their felinas they gazed as wonderingly down upon the new star as its sea of upturned faces watched their slow descent. The scene was brought still nearer to our eyes. Instead of microscopic foam-bells floating in the sky and microscopic crowds resting on the surface of the other world, we felt present at the meeting of these creatures of different universes. They seemed to feel conscious of this great event in the history of the cosmos. The dwellers of the new world were almost paralyzed at first with wonder at these beings so like and yet so unlike themselves. They could recognize, we could see in their friendly faces, the divine community of spirit. Their eyes, as soon as they recovered from their waking dream, flashed welcome in magnetic fire. There was no need of community of words for open intercourse. The dwellers of the new star had the same development of electric sense as the Lymanorans had. Their souls could speak without a sound from the lips. Step by step their mutual sympathy grew more definite, more cordial, and approximated to the communication of thought and fact. Within a brief period they knew enough of each other's language to tell out their wince and wither. But in the people of the new star the language was that of feature and not of tongue. Over their faces flashed the signals of thought as well as of emotion, astonishing the newcomers at the rapidity with which expression flitted over their features. Equally astonished were their hosts to hear the countless variety of tone and accent come from the throats of the strangers. They covered their ears as if shielding them from the assault of some thunderous report. Even the voyagers shrank from the voice of their own spokesman. And, tone it down as he would, still it was too loud for any delicate ear to endure. They were in a new atmosphere that bore sound so quickly and clearly as to make a whisper reverberate like thunder. So did it make their eyes of the dwellers in it as keen and far in sight as if armed with the most powerful microscopes and telescopes. The slightest adjustment of them and their lids changed them back and forth from distant observation to near. And the same translucency marked their tissues as made the inner movements of the newcomer's heart and brain apparent. There was needed no sound to interpret the magnetic messages of the brain along its nerves. Hosts and guests were seen at one, familiar as lifelong friends and thrilling each other with the strange new experiences of their history. The voyagers from earth soon knew why the use of the tongue and throat had been abandoned by their hosts as means of communication. The uncontrollable volume of sound offended their hearing, and drove them to develop the language of eye and feature. The sight grew more powerful and adaptable as voice and ear gave up their share of energy and sustenance of the system. Their tissues, too, had ever been, to a large extent, transparent, because of the rarity and clearness of their atmosphere, and by selection and training they had been able to make them plucid as they now were. The gleam of question and answer showed us clearly on the stage of Lumeifah as the movement of the figures themselves. And when the colloquy had ended and the strangers had gained all the information they needed for their farther journey through space, we saw them enter their felinas and rise above the eager, penetrating gaze of their new friends. Across the face of the heavens we followed the ethereal fleet as it faded again into insignificance. Another scene showed us their landing upon another planet of the universe they had entered. The drama thus bore us with the light from system to system throughout the cosmos, and revealed the ease with which stellar voyaging could be accomplished, once the initial difficulties had been overcome. Immediate book, dramatically published in Lumeifah just before, shared the way for this. It was the book of sidereal intercourse. They had always held that the other universes in the cosmos were as much inhabited by life as theirs was. It had ever seemed to them the absurdist of arrogance for the dwellers on the earth to assume that theirs was the only oar above the countless myriads on the face of night that had life upon it, that it monopolized the vital energy of infinity, and the attention of its divine intelligence. The wider they had ranged with their sidereal sciences, the more they smiled at the primitive thought of the remote ancestors that they were the sin ashore of the cosmos. It had come to be used as the radiast and most striking example of infatuation and conceit. That the poor earthlings were as microscopic in their importance compared with the vastitude of existence as the bacterial swarms of a wayside pool compared to the denizens of the great ocean, was assumed in every movement and act of their minds. And wherever life was, there was the chance that highly developed intelligence existed. They were not so sure that this was yet the case on the farthest of our planets. It might be that the inner and smaller bodies of our universe had passed the stage in which they could support the higher life. The others, they thought, were rapidly evolving a life of their own. Most of it still in a low grade. When the earth had passed its climax and began to decay, they would probably, one after the other, be attaining a loftier type of life and intelligence. Whilst they were running their course of progress, the earth and her inner sister planets would be waiting in their frozen silence the time when the whole of their universe would be exhausted. Nearer and near would the whole solar system be approaching some other system that had run its course, and the encounter of the two would evolve a young universe, full of heat and energy, enough from the collision to make a new cosmic career. They had little hope of them stirring reply. If ever they were able to send an embassy of thought to any star of our own system. All their hopes of astral inner communication were pointed to other stars and other universes, and as they looked up into the eyes of night, they seemed to feel magnetic answer to impulses of their soul, not from Mars or Venus, from Saturn or Jupiter, but from the stars that throbbed in far more distant depths. They had ever believed, of course, that they had now scientifically shown, that the centers of light flashing in the nightly sky were not the true sisters of earth but only suns, round which the unseen universes circled. They tried to find the dim worlds which drew their heat and light from these poignant watch-fires of heaven, and their more recent instruments had revealed the dark outlines of many of these twilight wanderers which hung on the radiance of the visible stars. The magnetism that came with the rays from some of those far distant luminous points had shown striking aberration early in its course, and nothing could explain this but the existence of rayless planets revolving round these lambent sources of light. Step by step they had honed these aberrations, till they knew the courses of the dusky satellites of many stars, and they could tell the moment when a circular shadow would cross the face of any one of these suns. The eyes of the astronomical families had become so accustomed to the times and places of such obscurations that their furloughs acted with them and searched for magnetic impulses from the dark sisters of the star they were watching, till at last they could tell by their electric sense the place of many dim planets in the nearer universes. It was on this that the book of Sidereal intercourse based its forecast of the immediate future. Since the definite discovery of varied types of life in the spaces beyond the Earth's atmosphere, the last suspicion of mere fancy had vanished from the belief in the existence of high intelligence on the universes of infinity, and now their faces were set towards communication with some of this intelligence on distant worlds. The new book assumed that the electric sense, or something equivalent for the perception of the great cosmic force, had been developed in the inhabitants of some invisible worlds, and it laid down as an axiom that there were vast stores of magnetic material in these orbs, just as there were in the Earth and in the sun. What they must first do was to sweep the range of a universe with an electric impulse on which the whole force of room looks should be concentrated, and to keep their delicate indicators all set in the same direction. At the publication of the book in Lumiipa we saw gigantic engines slowly moving their long arms this way and a thwart one of the most brilliant stars of night, and scientists eagerly scanning the numerous magnetometers that surrounded the huge electric machine. We could see the air thrill and undulate with the mighty impulse, and the very light of the star seemed to flicker and wink before the penetration of the intrusive force. At last a flash of hope came over the faces of the watchers. The pendant beam of one Sarmolan began to quiver. It was a message from the world they sought. Again they turned the whole available power of the island—millions of millions of horsepower—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 dispatch. And again the luminous tongue of the magnetometer told of its reception by intelligences like ours. Then came the astronomical 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 irrelinium, flat and sharp like the blade of a sword, yet bent to 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 Remla 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 slivered 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 limator, or new boomerang vehicle of electric indications. It had shot far up into space along the true electric impulse that traveled away beyond it towards the sensitive point of the sky they had discovered. Before it bent back from its headlong course, the response, speeding more freely and more swiftly through the untrammeled ether, imprinted itself upon the surface of the Sarmalan. 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 were the electric scents had its special seat. They bore a singular apparatus, not unlike a small telescope. On their chest they had strapped a small engine of irrelinium, 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 drop on the electric resources of the spaces around them, but upon those of the center 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 furloughs to receive, although it might have traveled 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 nearest 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 publications 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 lavalan which brought them records of the life of extra aerial space. Amongst the luminous impressions that their combination of lavalan and fulina had brought down out of the ether, they had found evidences of highly organized 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 open intercourse with it. And if they could come to converse with nobler intelligence near the earth, they did not need to go far afield in the cosmos as the new book suggested. Their own phyliamos 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 taping the thoughts of men as they traveled 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 dispatch of thoughts through long distances. The combination of great magnetic power and sensitive psalmolans, 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 thoughts 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 obtuse 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 civilization 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 Lymanorans able to join the inhabitants of the ether without any violent transition or death. We saw a Lymanoran on the stage of Lumeifah 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 the 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 centers of energy had vanished, and gravitation seemed to have little or no influence upon him. Whether so ever 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 in an expunable center of the highest energy, whether flowed the sympathetic force of other centers, and whether nothing hostile could approach. Storms passed effectless over his head. The deadliest engine shot their darts at him in vain. Poisonous fumes, lethal showers, armies of pistolential microbes swept round him and threw him innocuous. All the evanescent centers 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 centers which we called 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 centers of thought and imagination. With our furloughs we could feel stream from him great currents of magnetic influence, unobstructed by any of those terrain or aerial 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 immortalizing and the immortal would then be continuous, and there would be no sudden break in existence, no great golf fix 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 thought it was, they would never think of longing for such a fate. For the lower centers of energy, forming what is called the body, yield demanded amount of attention and sustenance that was burdensome. They had great delight in their life. They energized 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 terrain 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 cognitive theme, the dimension of time. It seemed to me the most fanciful of all the productions I had witnessed in Lumiefa, yet it did not seem to strike the Lyman Orans as beyond the bounds of possibility. It was called the Book of Time-Focusing. 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 counseled the development of the imagination on its propitiant side till it should count aeons as moments and take easy flight through eternities. It was the real-time faculty, and had already in the production of Lumiefa forrun the civilization 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 hinder extending its range of vision beyond the immediate horizon, and taking in at a glance the course of the future as it did the page of history? And as it reached higher and higher points of view, it could paint eternity as it now pictured the past. There was no limit to its provisional powers, as there had been none to its penetration into the prehistoric and permeable darkness. Pre-science should be as organized and exact as any science. In fact, all their sciences had become pre-sensual, those that were merely retrospective or synchronous, having gradually fallen out of notice. And the families that had been devoted to them were one by one absorbed into other services. No study was counted of much value that had not one eye on the future. Their whole intellectual system was thus becoming futurative, and all the faculties looked up and centered in the greatest and most predictive of them all, the imagination. They had already been able, in the valley of memories, to focus the past into the view of a few moments or days or months. The time stretching behind us into the darkness was underneath one glance of the intellectual eye. Only greater certainty in their imaginative methods was needed for the eternity that stretches in front of us to flash before the soul a single picture. Only developed the prophet faculty as rapidly in the next few generations as it had been developed in the past few, and we might move at will from age to age of the future, as we now move from age to age of the past, living at any moment in any period we pleased, or in a thousand periods at once. From past to future would be as easy as a leap as from hell to heaven for this great time and space focusing faculty. Eternity would be as focal to the imagination as infinity. It was an eye towards which radiated all time and all space. Posthistoric pictures would be as vivid to it as prehistoric. Even now interest was fast leaking from mere recorded history before the romance of eternity passed in future. What was the history of the race upon earth compared with the periscope of the cosmos? Then would their posterity be able to stand on a watchtower in the heights of heaven and view the whole arena of existence as it stretched through time and space. There is no faculty so close to the divine as its imagination. I felt that this publication was like all their work, singularly self-regardless. It clearly recognized that the realization of its proposed ideal would mean the doom of its art. Pioneering all of theirs which we in the West would call literature, would be superseded. Lumiefa would then become an institution of the past, less and less interesting but as rapidly receding item of history. Self-affacement for the sake of progress was the dominant note of limonor and civilization. And in this book it seemed to me to rise to its highest pitch, for it held before the race a goal which, when attained, would render literature and its publication unnecessary to its advance. END OF CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII OF LIMONORA, THE ISLAND OF PROGRESS BY GODFREE SWEVEN. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. ANOTHER THREAT When the island was absorbed in the productions of this new literary or pioneering era, its attention was suddenly called to its immediate surroundings. Out of eternity they were jerked into the passing moment to defend their own little plot of earth. Their existence was endangered if they did not at once withdraw their powers from their march through the future. It had been the result of their humane and lenient policy towards their exiles that every few generations rebellion and menace arose in the archipelago against their mysterious isolation. Fear of the Isle of Demons awed the imaginations of the other islands for a century or two, and then foolhardy prosperity or conquest demanded a new lesson. Half a century had not passed since the romance of Chakru's rise and fall, and unaided and unstimulated the other inhabitants of the archipelago would have groveled in helpless fear and hate of the central Isle. The discipline applied in the repulsion of Chakru's fleet would have sufficed for several centuries, but for a new power which had insinuated itself within the circle of mist. One of the days when the book of Immigration was holding the stage of Lumiefa, the spectators were startled by realistic transference of their drama to the sky above them. Just as the opalescent felinas were about to land on the new star, every eye was suddenly drawn away from the stage to the blue spreading above the valley. Across it was passing a strange airship of huge proportions and ungainly structure. I recognized it as a development of the balloon, with which I had been familiar in my European experience. There was the immense inflated globe, or rather pair, with the car hung underneath, but there was something new in the motions of this balloon. It seemed to be a dirgeable, for attack this way and that across the direction of the wind. And still more strange, the car was filled with implements of war. I could see their great muzzles pointed over the sides. The Lymanorns were startled by this anticipation of their science, but only for a moment, and as soon as the apparitions sailed out of sight, they bent their senses eagerly on the spectacle before them. They knew that their sentries were at their watch-pulse on Lylaroma, and nothing hostile to the interests of the civilization could occur in air or sea or upon earth without stirring their attention, and so placing the whole island on the alert. They waited till the publication of the book was finished and then streamed off to their various businesses and pursuits. As we flew across the upper slopes of the mountain, we found out that the aerial stranger had settled upon one of the lonelier heights of the island of Brulee. No action was taken by the Lymanorns against the singular invader of the Archipelago, except who said a special watchman who should observe his movements through the Indrovamelan and should report to the elders anything out of the common that might occur. The stranger had evidently been disabled away to the east of the circle of Fog. His steering gear had ceased to act, and before a tornado he was hurried away from the great continent over which he had hovered. The Ampetus bore him helplessly above and across the ring of mist, and within its calmer sphere the steering gear was again adjusted. It was then that the watchers on Lylaroma saw his purpose to make for their island, and they sent through the Lylaran a blast which would carry him away from their shores, not rude enough to harm him, yet sufficiently strong to defeat his intention. Feeling himself born again farther away from his home he tacked for the nearest peak that he thought he could reach. This was evidently climoral. But the blast of the Lylaran was too much for him, and to save himself from drifting still farther west he grappled one of the heights of Brulee as he passed over it and settled there. It became one of the amusements of the younger Lylarans to observe the behavior and the fate of the newcomer in the Isle of Peace. The crew of the airship was numerous. They were taken prisoners not long after they had descended from their car, and their captain was hurried off to the court of the new ruler. Before long the balloon was brought to the capital and carefully guarded, and anchored firmly to the earth. It made a sense with the royal engineers under the direction of the balloonist. His every movement was watched lest he should release the captive by cutting the rope that bound it, and sail off with the officers of his Brulean majesty. But as the months and years passed on, the newcomer with his strange new ship came to be trusted by the king and his advisors. He saw an arena for his ambitions and talents, and bent his whole energies to his new purpose. We could see him from day to day and week to week add to the aerial fleet, which yet once began to build an imitation of the balloon he had brought with him. His original subordinates and companions were at first his only assistants, their Brulean engineers and machinations afterwards joined in the work in great numbers, and became as deft at it as the strangers. Every new balloon that was made was tested in the air. At first there were accidents, which for a time prejudiced the court and the people against the aerial monsters. But by carefully selecting his men from the army, the director was able at last to furnish every airship that he made with a complete and efficient crew, able under the leadership of one of his companions to manipulate the vehicle and every implement on board of it. It even became the favorite pastime of the court to make voyages across the island in these swift frigates of the sky. Ultimately the king so thoroughly trusted the master of this new style of transportation that he abandoned himself to his guidance and allowed him free use of all the resources of the island. He came to see the marvelous possibilities that lay in warfare carried on by such a navy. Though the Bruleans had, after Choctrew's deportation, lost one by one all the conquests that the audacious warrior had made, and had at last been confined again to the limits of their island, they never gave up their ambitious dreams. And the monarch who could fulfill them would be certain to fix his empire in their hearts. The king looked round for some means to gratify this passion for conquest. But their old methods were now comparatively useless, for the larger islands borne by their past experience, built fleets as large and formidable as the Brulean, and the smaller groups confederated for the purposes of defense. It was vain then to think of remastering the archipelago in any attempt by sea. With extreme delight then did the monarch watch a demonstration of the warlike possibilities of the new aircraft. The director had some old hulks moored out at sea inside of the king and his court. Then he entered one of his new balloons, well provided with guns and explosives and well-manned, and bade the crew let go. They sailed straight out till they rose high over the remains of the antiquated navy. As they approached their prey, several guns belched out their fires from the car, and their shots struck and sank three of the ancient ships. But two tough old halls resisted all their attempts. So the balloon rose straight over them, but much higher in the air. Out of the car was seen to fall two packages, which made for the decks of the old tempest resistors. In the twinkling of an eye, before we could realize that the packets had reached their destination, there was a thunderous roar, and the air was filled with jets of water and with the flying fragments of the shattered hulks. When the commotion settled, nothing but floating planks and spars and shreds of the vanished ships was to be seen on the surface of the water, and a way out of reach of the fierce convulsion rode the airship majestic and unharmed in the blue. The monarch needed no further demonstration. He gave up to the master of the new power the use of his whole army and navy. Before many months were over a vast aerial fleet was equipped and manned, ready for the first emergency, and this emergency rolls at once. The sullen jealousy which ever smolders and wrangles between two powerful and neighboring empires took substance and outward shape between alleophane and brulee. The old enemy knew nothing of the new instruments of war which had been forged, and prepared with good cheer and good hope for the struggle. Her fleet was in excellent order, well equipped and manned, but within a few weeks it had completely vanished before the wrecking terror of the air. Continuous torrents of lead and iron stream from above onto their decks, making those of their gunners that survived helpless and inert. When their captains invented methods of pointing their guns at the aerial ships and of floating fire kites against them to set them on fire, then the most tremendous engines of the navy in the air were brought into train, and with appalling explosions the alleophanean ships and their crews vanished in atoms. No such destruction of a nation's war material had ever occurred in the history of the Archipelago. The alleophanean marine force was swept from the face of the sea. One or two other islands were bold enough to attempt the struggle with the new power, but with the same disastrous results to themselves. Over the whole Archipelago, except at Central Island, the air fleet passed, inspiring terror and reducing the peoples to servitude. It was the same all conquering story as was told under Choctru's leadership. And now the Brulian army and people were willing to worship the maker and manipulator of these balloons as a god. He had plenty of ambition, but he was by nature and acquirement only a mechanization and not a born leader of men. He had none of the self-confidence made monstrous by success, or of the unscrupulousness that forges a masterful will. He did love power, but he hesitated before those audacious measures which gave a conquer the highest vantage ground. He yearned to rule widely, but he had not the self-mastery and the leavening imagination which secure command over the minds of human aggregations. But he was an average nature with complete mastery over the newest and most powerful invention. The Brulian monarch saw the peril of his two great success and set the stranger and his balloons aside in time to let the popular enthusiasm cool. Along with his fleet and his army, the king completed the round of conquests. He knew that when the power of Eleophane and one or two other chief islands was broken there was nothing to fear from the others, and his task, though brilliant, was easy. He took care that there were several great and segueary battles that put heart and pride into his soldiers and sailors. Thus by the time the war was finished the newcomer and his appalling fleet were almost forgotten. But the monarch himself did not forget them. He knew that the climax of this new era of national conquest and pride was certain to come soon. Never had the Brulians been continuously successful in war without losing their traditional fear of the Isle of Devils and demanding its subjugation. He set his house in order against the day of Vainglory. He would develop his new method of warfare. He made the stranger again his commander-in-chief, urging him onwards the increase of the aerial fleet and its terrorizing weapons. Then, fearing from his knowledge of the past that there was little chance of success, he gave him complete command of the expedition, so that all the blame of failure should be on the shoulders of another. In order to complete the contrast, he kept rebellion smoldering in one or two of the adjacent islands, and took care that it broke out simultaneously with the attack upon the Isle of Devils. Ignorant of the conditions he had to meet, and puffed up by his past successes, the stranger thought that all he had to do was to add to the number of his fleet and the deadliness of his weapons. We saw him set out with banners flying amid the applause and enthusiasm of the people, whilst the wily king led off his own forces, quietly to embark from an opposite shore of the country against the rebels of neighboring coasts. Success seemed to follow the aerial navy, for favoring winds bore them swiftly and majestically over the horizon out of the range of brilliant vision. For myself, as I said at an Androva Milan, I feared the strange new torrential guns in the showers of deadly explosives that would rain down from these aerial ships, and my heart sank as I saw them sail like great vultures near and near to their prey. But my compatriots were tranquil and free from all anxiety. Everything was really in readiness, and they were only waiting the exact moment for action. It came, and the huge balloons fell suddenly away from the blast of the Lillaran, like a flock of storm-beaten birds. I could see them struggling, many of them half-disabled, to stand up to the wind. But it was vain, they whirled like snowflakes before an arctic tempest. Their helms became entangled in their snap-cortage, and I could see their guns roll and pitch with fatal effect upon the crews, till from many the suicidal weapons were tumbled overboard into the sea below. Yet the expedition by no means acknowledged itself defeated. Guided by some experienced brilliant advisor, the admiral of the fleet changed its formation. Evidently from knowledge that the blast from Lila Roma could play upon only one point at once, he divided his air navy into three squadrons, and making the central face the blast, he sent the other two in different directions round the island. He thought that these two would be able to bring their explosives and guns to bear upon the Lillaran by his flank movement. It was as unsuccessful as his other efforts. Both sections came almost within firing distance of the shore, when suddenly their gaseous fears were seen to collapse. A slight and silent flash was all that told whence the disaster had come. Electric rockets had issued from magnetic ejectors of great power, and almost invisibly punctured the spherical support of each ship. It seemed as if the hull of the three squadrons would soon be in the sea, and with the weight of their war material they were certain to sink to the bottom and carry all their crews with them. But the invaders promptly threw overboard their weighty cargoes, and with their usual humanity the Lymanorans now did their best to save their enemies. The punctures in the balloons were so minute that it would take some time to exhaust them. So the Lillaran sent its blast underneath them and buoyed them up like thistle down, at the same time blowing the three sections of the navy off in different directions. It was amusing to watch the alternate rise and fall of the various airships as it turned its blast from one squadron to another, like a game of battledore and shuttlecock played by giant jugglers. The warriors in the cars kept crouching in panic and holding on to the cordage as they rose or fell in the air upon the billows of wind. Their cars danced and leaped and jerked like corks in a netty where currents meet, and they were too panic-stricken or too paralyzed with terror to see that with all the tumult of their movements they were gradually approaching solid earth. We saw each squadron land on the shores of a separate island, and after their terrible voyage the crews threw themselves upon the earth and seemed to clutch it, in fear lest they should be torn again from its sweet anchorage into the warring whirlpools of the upper air. After a few days they collected their wits and the shattered fragments of their air fleet, and hiring boats from the islanders, sailed homewards. As they entered the main harbor of Brulie, crestfallen and dispirited, the army and fleet of the king were returning from their victories with triumphal music and with banners flying. The contrast was striking and set the monarch more firmly on his throne for another generation. Yet matters could not remain where they were. The defeat of the new methods of warfare stirred hope in the breasts of the conquered peoples, and muffled sounds of rebellion came from many of the islands. The king knew that he must make another move, and held long councils with the defeated balloonist. The result of the conferences soon became manifest. The stranger had seen that his aerial fleet was useless against tempests and electric missiles, such as the Isle of Demons had command of, and he willingly handed it over to his superior to use against the threatened revolts. With the blind obstinacy of the average mind placed in a position greater than its powers, he ran counter to the traditions of the Archipelago, and uttered loud resolves that he was not to be beaten. He would show them how fertile he was in resources. He had no fear of their bag of winds. The king gave him free scope with all the material and forces of the country, and the ingenious mecanition forged huge guns that would throw their projectiles enormous distances, and build great ships to hold them. As he launched one vessel after another, he practiced his crews on board of it, and taught them how to handle the marvellous artillery. The people stood in awe as they heard the thunder of their fired dozens of leagues away, and saw their missiles fall in the sea miles and miles from the ship once they had issued, and they shook their heads wisely and said to each other, Now we shall see at last the end to this Isle of Demons. When the great Armada was already after long years of work, and the ships lay at anchor in the harbor, their magazines filled, their guns in train, and everything prepared for the final expedition, the people were so overjoyed at the sight that they organized a festival to the sailors of the wonderful fleet. They had such confidence in the destructive powers of these ships and their guns that they resolved to pre-celebrate with magnificent pageantry and feast the triumph they were so assured of. And as the monarch had already defeated the incipient rebellion by his aerial fleet, and the mutterings of the subjugated were stifled or unheard, there could be no danger in inviting all the sailors on shore to take part in the festivities. So the great fleet lay peacefully at anchor unmanned, whilst their crews were being lauded to the skies for their intrepidity and the certainty of their success. The night was moonless and deep darkness was flecked only by the occasional blaze of sky-daring illumination. Everything had gone off with brilliancy, and the banquet to the sailors was nearing its climax and close. Suddenly the hubbub of jubilance was hushed. There was a series of appalling detonations, shaking the banqueting edifice to its foundations. Many thought that the world had come to an end, so terrifying and eardefening was the continuous roar. The people in the streets at first fell on the earth and prayed to their gods, but they soon saw what had occurred. There, out on the harbor, the pro-technique display overshadowed anything they had ever seen or even thought of. The great ships were all of them in flames. The magazine of each had exploded, and sent decks and fittings and armaments sputtering in fragments against the black of the sky. The brilliancy of the spectacle overcame the natural alarm and regret. Such satanic Catherine wheels they had never seen, such rendering of the heavens, such flame-lit jets of water rising in columns above the doomed ships. But the spectacle was brief. Ship after ship rolls high above the scene of its devastation, its banners of fire all flying against the darkness, and then plunged into the extinction and gloom of the depths. The breach in the side close to the magazine sucked in the waters most swiftly, and sent the bow-end of each first into the watery assagement over fires. In an hour after the first deafening proxism all was still and dark again on the face of the waters, but for a flaming fragment here and there, hissing and sputtering against the night. Then came terror again. The brillians jubilant over the invincibility of their marvellous fleet knew not whence the disaster had come or who had been the enemy. And now they crouched in fear, or ran for shelter, lest the invisible foe should take advantage of their palsy and reap his harvest of blood. But no enemy came. No carnage followed the strange catastrophe. The morning dawned, and the waters of the bay shone as peacefully in the level rays of the sun as if no fleet had ever been there, as if no conflagration had occurred. Not a boat or a sign of an enemy was to be seen. Out crept the soldiers and sailors from the shelters, the people in their rear, and soon the harbour was alive with craft, seeking relics and explanation of the disaster. But no explanation could be found in all the babble of theories that chattered and echoed over the water. A council of the royal advisors was called. They consulted and questioned every admiral in general, but all in vain. The stranger, who had brought the fleet and its equipment into existence, failed to account for the occurrence. He refuted all charges of negligence and appealed to the desire of the people and the command of the king as his warrant for withdrawing the crews from the ships for the night. Treachery there must have been. There were a thousand conjectures, but no sure knowledge as to whence it came. With the irrationality and ingratitude which mark all panic in nations or other aggregations of men when unexplained disaster has overtaken them, they broke out in fury against the very hero of the night's festivities. They had to find a scapegoat and his figure was foremost in every man's mind. The destructive magnetism of the crowd gathered round the name that was on every lip, and the cry arose that he was the traitor. The mob howled outside the council room for his blood. He had to be bundled off by a secret passage to the outskirts of the city and thence into the mountains, and to appease their frantic passions the king had to proclaim his exile, and to promote that no such engines of war should again be forged in the royal armories. Fear of the island of demons again crept over the superstitious hearts of the people. As they brooded over the mystery, they felt that somehow or other it was connected with that inexpugnable center which had defied all their efforts at its invasion. And this was right, for the Lymanorans had watched the long preparation for the assault and made calmly ready to defeat it. They knew that, if they ever allowed the fleet to sail, they could not well beat it off without loss of life amongst its crews. It could lie in the shelter of an island some miles distant from their shores and drain great projectiles upon them. The repulse must be accomplished long before this had been reached. They therefore waited till the ammunition was on board each ship. Then, in order to avoid the destruction of life, they sent into the air of Brulee the exhilarative magnetism required, and into the minds of the inhabitants the suggestion that the whole fleet should be fated. When the ships had been deserted and not a human being was within reach of them, they launched through the air in its direction a series of electric shocks which, as soon as they came in contact with the medals of the magazine, ignited the ammunition. Most of the ships were set on fire in this way, the rest by the falling fragments and sparks from their exploding sisters. Thus was the new threat to Lymanoran civilization frustrated without loss of life or breach of the mystery that sealed the central isle. But the waste of time and progress upon such threats by the withdrawal of so many Lymanorans from their ordinary pursuits was an evil not to be tolerated. Something must be done to prevent the recurrence of these expeditions. It was generally from Brulee they came, the result of warlike ambition. It would be a service to the whole archipelago to reduce this military people to insignificance and silence. There was no security in their subjugation by the people of another island, for the war fanaticism would surge up again in a later generation. The conversion of them to a religion of peace would mean no change in the blood. It would only transform the method and cue of attack. What was needed was the elimination of the ambitious and military natures from the Bruleans. For only the aristocracy and the descendants of the original conquering exiles had set their hearts on military pursuits. The conquered and many of the families that came to the island at later dates than the Great Brigation were not unwilling to keep their own bounds, and preferred possession and dispossession. There was no need of extermination of the people, but only decimation. Nor would the limanorns endure any shedding of blood in the process. It must be gradual, peaceful, free from torture and bloodshed, and almost unobservable. The physiological and physicist families worked out a scheme that would fulfill all these conditions, and yet finally eject the disturbers of peace from the archipelago within a generation. The scare they had just suffered, and the exile of the balloonist ensured to limanora freedom from their attacks for some years. But they aimed at permanent immunity, and this could be secured by nothing less than the sterilization of the warlike element in Brulee. The end was accomplished in the next aggression upon a neighboring island. The expedition was formidable, and included all the bellicose males of the offending people. After landing, it lay encamped in the open air, then a bound of limanorns set out on wings by night, armed with a new surgical instrument called the edlumian, which could give an electric shock to any part of the human system and paralyze it either for a time or permanently, according to the power put into it. They approached the whole army as it lay asleep, and by the whiff of a sporific which they diffused through the air, they steeped the systems of the sentinels in lethargy, and by the same means ensured the depth and continuance of the slumbers of the embattled host. Before a single soldier had awakened from his deep sleep, the whole Bruleean army was de-fertilized without being in the elite conscious of any loss of vitality or manhood or the enjoyment of life. When the sentries awoke and the troops began to move about in preparation for their struggle, the Medical Embassy had winged its way back to Limanora. Not till twenty or thirty years after did it strike the Bruleans that the fountain of their military power was dried up, and soon they began to attribute the strange infecundity of their aristocratic and warlike families to the witchcraft of the Isle of Demons, a belief that finally sealed that center of the Archipelago as with walls of adamant against aggression on the part of their neighbors. My western instincts, in spite of all my training, would reappear at intervals which happily became longer and longer, and for a time I could not repress my instinctive disapproval of the use of this edlumian or electrosterilizer. Yet my reason told me that it was the only effective method of permanently stopping the whores of war in the Archipelago. Heredity and circumstances would have circumvented any other bloodless attempt at relief from the Brulean nightmare. A few discussions with my pro-parents made this rational view of the matter dominant over the conservative instinct in me, and before many years my instinct was quite the other way. It became the ally of reason, and I had no need to argue with myself on the point or confirm my faith arguing with others who knew better than I. There was another western instinct of mine which gave me frequent, though lessening trouble, and came into conflict with the reason of the community at this time and on this topic. It was my approval of propagandism. Into my blood had grown through the centuries of Christendom, the feeling that a faith could not well prove itself unless it spread out amongst new and alien peoples. It is the prerogative and principle of belief to yearn for universality of acceptance amongst human beings, and it urges on the devotees of any faith to spread it through the world at all costs. After many centuries of propagandism the habit becomes an instinct, and it seems to be a dictate of nature or attempt to convert the world to the tenants which have grown up in us from infancy, and have been incorporated into our very life. The Christian has ever been from its outset a great missionary religion, and it is difficult for one brought up in Christendom to get rid of the missionary attitude of mind, which assumes every alien to it to be sunk in wickedness and unprofitableness, and certain to lose all the future blessings promised to true believers. I could not obliterate this instinct wholly from my nature, and whenever I reflected on the wisdom and nobleness of the Lymanoran civilization, or noticed the marvellous progressiveness of some new phase of it, I found myself longing to go back to the Western world with my knowledge. Thus I often drifted into appeals to the propagandist spirit which I assumed to exist in the breasts of my friends and fellow-citizens, but I was not allowed to rest long in such dreams. Each time I uttered or even thought over my missionary desire, I was brought to book with the whitest knowledge and the keenest penetration into human nature and its history. I felt that it was almost as useless for Europeans to go out amongst the tribes of monkeys and spend their lives trying to bring them up to such a level of intelligence as is implied in the appreciation of the Christian religion, as for the Lymanorans to apostleize amongst mankind, and struggle to drag them up to the stage of progress these islanders had reached. But now, whenever my missionary mood returned upon me, my friends would point with a smile to the new invention, the electrosterilizer, and if pressed by the disapproving skepticism of my thoughts, they would urge in words of the omnipotence in this little instrument as the apostle of progress. By this and this alone was the snail-pace advance of mankind likely to be quickened. Without more rapid elimination of the unfit than was afforded by natural selection, sexual selection, and the accidents of surroundings, there was little hope of wise propagation of the human race. The blunders and defects and maladies of every new century were treasured up by heredity in the tissues of mankind, along with any feeble tendency to advance that might appear. The struggle was a losing one in spite of the development of science and wealth. And all reforming theories and efforts were but stumblings in the dark till there had been a thorough purgation of traditional and epidemic diseases, moral as well as physical. Nine-tenths of the race, as at present constituted, were unworthy to hand on their natures to posterity. Under the regime of propagational license universal among all peoples of the earth, the evil and disease multiplied at a much greater rate than the sound in body and mind. The progressive element in mankind was dragged back by the dead weight of the criminal, the diseased, the habitual popper, and the naturally incompetent. Some religions even set themselves to encourage the vitalization and propagation of the last. It was noble and good to assuage the evils that heredity had accumulated in their systems, but it was anything but noble and good to encourage them to perpetuate their misfortunes throughout a wide posterity. Multiply should be the last word of an advancing civilization instead of the first, unless there be added to it the condition only the best. And who cares or dares to preach this true gospel of progress, when it touches a theme that all are ashamed to mention? If ever there was a sacred mission upon earth it would be that of man who should go to the wise and good men of all nations, and put into their hands the secrets of the Adilumian, or who should himself pass round the world and sterilize all the morally or physically diseased amongst rich and poor, amongst gentle and simple. Within two generations the races of humanity would take such a leap into light and noble vitality and love of progress, as would make the most brilliant civilization of the past seem barbaric. Then they would take command of their own destiny, and look unflinchingly into the future for the path they should take. Advance in material or in the accumulation of force is vain, unless it goes hand in hand with such universal, moral, and intellectual advance. It is progress in the human system through all its parts that should be the aim of every race. I gradually came to understand the importance they attached to this new instrument as the most humane and effective of missionaries. Had it come before their great series of purgations, there would have been little need for the expatriation policy. If they had had to eject, they would have taken care that the different sections of exile should vanish in a generation. They shrank from extinguishing the individual life that had already been brought into being. They would have had no scruple in giving euthanasia to an evil race or a section of a race, for this meant only preventing a posterity coming into existence to take up their burden of evil. And even now it was a question to be seriously discussed and answered, whether they would not sweep out the pollution from the rest of the Archipelago by the help of this humane little doorkeeper of posterity. Would it not prevent the lifelong evil of thousands? Where lay the humanity or love in allowing retrogressive and unhappy race to hand on to myriads to come the evil they had received from their ancestors?