 Chapter 11 Part 3 of Lymanora, the Island of Progress by Godfrey Swevin. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Ethics Part 3 They had learned from the revolutions of their past how snaky and torturous are the ways of deceit. And the first sure sign of its triumphant success is the bold adoption of the doctrine that good men may do evil, provided their aim is good. Under this the liars sheltered themselves for ages before they were exiled. The era of the history of the island that filled them most with shrinking and loathing was that of the struggle with the various forms of deceit. The first lesson in the Valley of Memories was drawn from this division of their annals. They filled their youth with hatred and scorn of untruth and hypocrisy. No firm step could be taken in education till this had become a deeply rooted feeling in their natures, and nothing awakened it so well as the study of this struggle with the liars. But they never taught any subject merely from books or records. Everything, even history and its lessons, was made practical and living. Deceit, for instance, was traced back to its sources in nature, and the difficulty of getting rid of it was revealed by finding it so widespread in the lower ranks of life. Mimicry or involuntary deceit was investigated all through plant and animal life, and it was found to be more prevalent the lower the investigators went in vital organisms. Their loathing of it as a deliberate adoption amongst human beings grew deeper as they saw in the animal world it belonged either to incompetence or rapacity. The frame mimicked the form and color of another species that was loathsome to its enemy in order to avoid his grasp. Unconsciously the mimicry spread, for only those members of the attractive species which were like the repellent species escaped and propagated. Or the spoiler mimicked the form and color of a species that was friendly or neutral to its victim, and only those members of the species similar to the unfeared kind succeeded in catching enough of their favorite food to survive and hand on their nature to a posterity. It was the same in the higher life of human self-consciousness and will. Only here intention and deliberateness entered in and turned mimicry into deceit. Wherever hypocrisy existed it was a sure sign of a vast number of incompetent and feeble who made an easy quarry to the villain and of the vigor of a cunning minority who often found it difficult to entrap. Diplomacy and convention are the deliberate mimicry of the predatory section of a race or of its gullible section. When once the Lymanorans had purged the island of the liars they had to prevent the propagation of the feeble and incompetent. For they knew that, as long as these existed in a community, there would persist the more futile forms of deceit. After that first purgation, the weak, though retained in the island, had to abandon family life. They were provided with the means that made existence easy and pleasant in order that they might not resort to their only method of survival, and in a generation the problem of hypocrisy had disappeared. It was then that the Idrovimalan was invented and came into use in education. Having driven out the hate advice, they found that there was still the need of impressing its evil results upon the minds of the maturing youth, just as it was necessary even yet to study the diseases that had disappeared for generations from their midst in order to be able to cope with them, should they ever be reintroduced through their communication with other atmospheres. But they knew the unreality of teaching anything in a merely theoretical way. They felt that lecturing and sermonizing and the mere reading of history would give them no such grasp of the vice and its evils as would living, acting things. The Idrovimalan, with its telescopic, telecoastic and telematic powers, came to their assistance in this difficulty. By its help, parents and pro-parents were able to bring the youths into the very presence of the loth deceit without submitting them to the chance of contagion. They turned the object tubes of the wonderful instrument upon allophane and its society, and through them they saw and heard and felt men like insects mimic and like stinging worms crawl and diplomatize, lie and cheat, still with the worship of reality and sincerity and truth upon their lips. There they noted the growth of the most offensive form of the vice. The weak learned it for protection, flattering the great and groveling in the dust before them, whilst they cursed them in their hearts, and all in order that some favor might perhaps be flung like a bone to a dog. Having learned the vicious art in this cringing fashion, the feeble were seen to march off with the proud gate and the conceit of adepts and use it like brigands on the still feebler. This combination of incompetence and unscrupulousness was the final curse of a civilization that had taken deceit to its bosom. The whole of the energy of the race was spent in simulation and dissimulation. Every vice simulated its antagonistic virtue, even virtue simulated the vigour and arrogance of vice. The Lymanorn youth needed no more teaching on the evils of hypocrisy. They rose from the idrovim land with an intense loathing for all forms of deceit, so impressive was the drama they saw enacted in allophane. Even what seemed innocent mimicry they shrank from, seeing it universally employed as the means of cheating in that island of liars. Mimicry they were encouraged to enchew. For as surely as the art was mastered, it was used for mean or foul purposes at some time or other, either for envy and jealousy and scorn, or in order to lay traps, sometimes for the strong, but chiefly for the weak. Even in art all mimicry was avoided, for there it betrayed feebleness or lack of individuality. The existence of mimicry in the animal world was the mark of degeneracy upon terrestrial life. It argued the wide domain of feebleness and drapicity, and the dominance of the passion for mere existence. Wherever it was widespread, it meant the abeyance of progress and of eagerness for progress. Mimicry is the sterilizing process of faculty and power. Origination is the principle of fertility, of stimulus to progress. Whatsoever dallied with an outgrown principle or element was immoral. Mere copying of what had been already attained and was about to be left behind, or used as a stepping stone to something better was neighbor to evil. Morality is the effort to adapt conduct and ideals to the new vistas opened up into the future by an advanced already achieved, and it is ever being bribed or throttled by what is outworn. Evil is the past which has become so obsolete and is yet so living as to be obstructive. What has been outgrown has ever its allies among living elements, and its advocates in every mixed and unpurified race. Especially is the case where there are fixed codes or creeds, and along them professions organize to preserve and continue their sway. The world is constantly seeing the spectacle of a nation or race or species coming to a standstill after centuries of brilliant progress, and getting fossilized in a certain stage of its advance. There it remains for generation after generation, as if alive, yet practically dead for all purposes of development, like a fly in amber. This dead stop is due to the dominance of some code or creed that seem to embody the spirit of its greatest success. The nation or race sought to secure forever to itself the advantages of the ethical or spiritual methods that had achieved for its most brilliant results by fixing them unalterably for all time, with their official guardians to protect them from change, so that which had given such vigorous life and development for a time became a prison house in grave. Only the most tremendous revolution and cataclysm could burst the walls of the tomb, tear off its grave clothes, and release its spirit for new conquests. Sometimes a nation seems to fossilize the creed or polity that first gave energy to its life, yet at the same time grows and develops spasmodically. It has only made pretense of having fixed this code for all time, whilst the living spirit of it escapes and follows its own course in freedom. It has periodically to return to its pretended prison and tomb, and to reconcile by jesuitry and in makeshift way the two methods of life which have come to differ so widely. Then it flees again into the struggle of existence and gradually ignores even the new versions of the old code, till the divorce becomes too obstructive to escape attention, and the process of reinterpretation of the antiquated creed begins again. This has been a common enough mode of advance in the history of the world, but it is fraught with incalculable risks. It induces a habit of self-deceit and hypocrisy, and the nation or race ultimately makes a tomb and prison house for a spirit out of its own falsities and self-delusions. Advance like this, the Lymanorans held, was no true advance. They would have no part or lot in fixity of methods or codes, for whatever became fixed grew thereby evil and obstructed development and advance to higher points of view. They had only to look into their history to see how every new step antiquated some universally accepted belief or maxim. Not so many ages ago a crudely philanthropic spirit was considered one of the surest signs of advancing virtue, in fact one of the noblest of the virtues. Now it was considered distinctly immoral to philanthropize, without taking care to foresee the results of the philanthropy. Lymanorans used to go out into the archipelagos and try to convert the barbarians to the special code or creed then in vogue. Instead of helping on the human race, it actually stopped the development of a section of it. For the adoption of a creed and its symbols and rites and phrases, far in advance of any possible civilization they could reach only made the savages, whose virtues had hitherto been at least genuine, conventional, false and hypocritical, whilst the apostles left thousands of their own countrymen at home stagnant or retrogressive. It soon came to be acknowledged that intercourse with inferior civilizations, even for the purpose of raising them, lowered the moral standard of the missionaries, whilst failing in its original motive. Much of the philanthropy that began at home was found to be no less obstructive and immoral. It fed and clothed the poor and improvident, and thus helped to slay and bury the only habit that could save them out of their sloth, the habit of measuring every step they took, and seeing whither it led, and had helped to perpetuate the evil, for the ready yet limited supplies combined with the improvidence to make them breed like lower animals, and the race of paupers and unprogressive was inordinately multiplied. The same feeble and immoral philanthropy opposed all attempts to stop the multiplication of the diseased and semi-criminal, and had to increase the armies of doctors and guardians of the peace every generation. It did well to nurse the feeble in mind and body, and to reduce the penalties under which heredity had placed them, but it failed to see that it was doing endless evil by letting them penalize an increasing posterity with their own punishment. Not till it was branded as the worst of immortalities was such philanthropy ended. This had been a distinct advance and a true virtue, when it had taken the place of cruelty and neglect, and when there was unmeasured space on the earth for expansion of population. But once this stage had been passed, and the purgation crusade was proceeding, it became a real plague and vice. Another immorality that had once been a virtue was the pursuit of beauty for its own sake. Men gave up their lives to the production of beautiful things which served no other purpose than their own glory and the entertainment of idle and leisured people. Others made fortunes and devoted them to the purchase of such works of art, in order that crowds might collect and admire them, and for a time there was something of truth in the assertion that it educated the taste of the people. But this was only when the bulk of the race was unenlightened and unprogressive, and anything that softened their barbarity, anything that drew their thoughts away for even a brief time from sordid cares or cruel projects or mechanical and conventional habits, implied progress or a chance of progress. When the race had been purified, and every eye was bent on the future, and every nerve strained toward some advance in human civilization, beautiful things came the commonest features and necessities of life, and beauty ceased to be noticed as anything remarkable. Then to spend energies on producing what was artistic and beautiful without serving any other purpose than pleasing was reckless extravagance, and by wasting what should have been extended upon the progress of the race was condemned as immoral. There was no virtue in doing what everyone did by instinct. There was positive vice in making it the sole and deliberate purpose of expenditure of energy. Another instance of a former virtue having become a vice was statesmanship and political patriotism. At one time half the conspicuous talent of the race went in this direction, so greatly was it admired. And when there were other races and nations to diplomatize or struggle with, and one half of the race had to provide for or keep watch on the other half, it is no strange thing that to enter into the domain of politics was considered the noblest thing a man could do, and love of the welfare of the country was considered the noblest sentiment a man could entertain. The most difficult problems involving some of them, the very continuance of the race, occupied the attention of the statesman and politician. What to do with the vast pauper class and still vaster fringe of the poverty-stricken and improvident, how to deal with the criminally inclined, how to educate the half-savage deacons of hovels and cities, and even in the open country, how to prevent the deadlocks in industry, how to regulate the labor market, and how to check the recurrent plagues and famines were questions that tasked the finest intellectual energies of the nation. What complicated the answer was the fact that the themes of the discussions, the pauper, the criminal, the improvident, the employer, the laborer, the plague-stricken, and the starving all had a share in the government of the country, and had to be persuaded that any scheme proposed was to their individual interests. The virtue of political patriotism was streaked with locustity, conceit, self-seeking, hypocrisy, corruption, and intrigue, long before it came to be recognized as a vice. The statesman and politician had to make his principles as interchangeable as his coats, had to be a master in the art of making the worse appear the better reason, had to be skillful in lying without seeming to lie, had to rob whilst putting on the disguise of self-sacrifice, had to cringe and fawn, bully and overbear, by-turns had to be an artist in bribing men and in taking bribes, in short, had to be the most expert of the criminal classes. By the time the end came, none in the list of virtues had become so like a vice as patriotism. The great purgation swept out all occasions for politics and patriots in exiling all the subjects of statesmanship. Where there were no poppers or criminals, no masters or servants, no uneducated or savage except young children, and no chance of plague or famine, the occupation of the statesman and politician vanished. Where every man was taught how to be a law to himself, legislation had no place. The problems of most incoate civilizations had gone into exile with all the isms that were proposed to solve them, and all the charlatans that proposed their solution. Patriotism was now, like breathing, the organic and unconscious process of every mind, and not the exception upon which any one could plume himself. No longer was it the safety of the country or the continuance of the race or the sustenance or justice or criminality of the part of the people that demanded conscious effort but the advance of the human system in all. To propose and argue legislative schemes for the benefit of any section of the race would have been accounted immorality, if it had not been taken as a symptom of adivism or mental disease. The hospital was the certain fate of anyone who indulged in political projects or political eloquence. The old virtue had passed beyond the stage of obstructiveness and vice, and had become one of the tests of insanity. This disease of politics rarely appeared except amongst the youthful and immature, and the methods of driving out the evil spirit had recently grown scientific and unflattering. The old plan of exiling, it was now felt, had become cruel and pitiless. For in recent generations the pace of evolution in the race had so quickened that now even its laggards and the breakers of its moral law were centuries ahead of the most advanced citizens of the most advanced nations on the face of the earth, and no longer could they, if expatriated, find any to consort with. They would have to live with men who, in their eyes, were vicious and criminal. Nula had been the last to be exiled. The system was finally abandoned as inhumane and unscientific, and science soon found methods of treatment that were prompt and efficient in their cure of all such mental diseases. My final instance of the old virtue grown vice is of a different kind. It belonged more to the intellectual sphere than to the practical, and seemed to me at first rather a mistake than a defect of the nature. It was the common error of taking a verbal originality or advance for a real, a mere change of name for a change in essence. In the old times it had been counted as a great merit to a man, if he manufactured a new nomenclature for any widespread phase of civilization, and so gave the race the sensation of dealing with something novel. Some of the greatest heroes of philosophy and science in the pre-purgation ages of the island had their own fame to the substitution of fresh phraseology. For what had grown outworn and tried, and most of the great writers had done nothing more for their fellows than reillumin a linguistic world fallen dull and dark. Men grow sick of ideas that have worn the same verbal dress for a generation or more, and hail as a discoverer and benefactor, anyone who tricks them out anew. They delight in feeling them to be familiar old friends, whom they have to make no mental effort to know. Even to die the old garments in new imaginative tents is a service they will not readily forget. Whilst the great discoverers and pioneers of the human race have had years or ages of oblivion according to the newness and difficulty of their ideas and the distance beyond the common horizon they have looked into the future. The Lymanorans of old, like most other men, abhorred having to think out again their creeds and ideas, and especially having to reform them, and so they stood out lustily against every real advance proposed, and shouted it down as a reverence or blasphemy in overturning the old barriers and old altars. The maker of a new nomenclature and the tinder of the old phraseology pandered to this intellectual indolence. One of the most striking results of the new point of view after the great purgation was the transformation the fame of these old scientists and philosophers and writers suffered. They began to be execrated as dealers in illusions, as men who fed the passion of the human race for stagnants or retrogression to monstrous proportions. They were thrown down from their lofty pedestals and cast into oblivion for their sins against truth and reality. To seduce men from the pursuit of truth by mere verbal jugglery was now counted no mere mistake, but a heinous offense against morality. To take as a real discovery what was but a new name or set of names revealed a vicious obliquity of mental vision that needed attention from the ethical physicians. This was especially easy in the domain of ethics, and the Lyman Orans were constantly on their guard against the delusion of accepting a change of nomenclature as a moral advance. The elders carefully reviewed every stage of progress, lest it should have been in words and phrases. This was the main purpose of the menorah and of the immonorah, and every month linguistic councils were held to revise the language and to throw out any fallacies and illusions it might harbor. Every new nomenclature and phraseology was searched and probed, and torn off the ideas that they were meant to express, in order to see if there was anything new underneath them. Delusion they had resolved. They would have nothing to do with in any shape or form. For delusion blinded the eyes to the route they were taking, and made them march in a circle or back over the older-olds under the belief that they were advancing to what was new. It was the greatest fault to true progress, and any man who fell into it revealed vicious tendencies, which needed the ministrations of the physicians and nurses in the ethical sanatorium. To take verbal ingenuity for true pioneering was the most grievous offense against the future of the race. The great standard and test of morality was progress. How far will an act or habit aid the true development of the race? This was the crucial question in limanorah, and in order that it might be answered satisfactorily and easily by any member of the community. The Council of Elders was careful to accommodate the ideals of the race to every advance made. It had been a rare thing in their history to change or add to the cardinal instincts of morality. But this they knew was by no means impossible, and indeed they were buoyed up with the hope that the moral cosmos was still to open up new marvels like the physical cosmos, that in fact the two would ultimately be found to be one when looked at from the final and divine point of view. There was the strongest conservatism in the ethical phase of life, for it is the last, highest, and most complex development of vitality. The lower we investigate in the animal world, the more revolutions and transformations we see the individual go through, the more enslaved it is to circumstances, to locality, to season, to the moment. The higher we go, the greater we find the conservatism, and at the same time the greater the origination and the adaptability. In man these two conflicting powers grow stronger side by side as he advances in civilization. He retains features and forms that are outworn and useless longer than most of the higher animals, and yet he originates and adapts himself and his surroundings with far more ease and swiftness. In ethics his last evolution, the conservatism dominates the origination and the advance, obscures them or makes them simulate its own features, and produces the belief that the final maxims and cue of morality have been reached from the first. Ethical progress has naturally been slow, and it is only the student of vast periods of history and of many nations and races who becomes fully persuaded that there has been any change in the point of view. Because there is not complete transformation, as in the case of the manuter and lower animals, it is assumed that there is no evolution and that morality and conscience have remained fixed quantities from the beginning of historic times at least. And the close bond between ethics and religion has assisted this dominant and elusive conservatism in its task. Each great step in ethical evolution has been claimed by religion as its own, and as resulting from its own special revelation from heaven. The Lyman Orans were quick to recognize that morality must be subject to growth and development, not only in the individual, but in the race, and that man must gain higher ethical points of view as he progresses. They knew that many of the finest impulses and inspiration towards progress, and especially ethical progress, had come from beyond the earth and the earth's atmosphere. But that any age or race could have caught the ultimate ethical light from the central sun of the cosmos, seemed to them after their experience the height of absurdity. There could be no spiritual eye trained and developed enough to receive it. As the bodily eye of man is capable of taking in only a limited range of rays of light, whilst an immense range of them above and below its faculty either blinded or pass unnoticed, so his spirit in any given stage of its development can understand and accept ethical ideas only within certain limits. But as it progresses it is able to see beyond and appreciate ideas that were nonexistent to it before. There is as much difference between the ethical comprehension of the modern Lyman Oran and that of the most highly civilized European as between that of the latter and the savages, or as between the savages and the pigs, and if they could have brought themselves to believe that they had attained the fullest and the final light upon morality, the thought would have struck their very hearts to stone. It was this that kept them from formulating their morality or ethics in any definite code. They knew that a code would soon petrify morality and itself become a fetish ignorantly worshipped, and, gathering it through the ages the self-interest of its officials and the irrational devotion of its worshippers, attained a despotism that could never be broken or controlled. A code of issues in a series of prohibitions which become a boundless slavery, and prohibitions develop the sense of rights which dominates and obscures all sense of duties, this keeps men hanging between savagery and true civilization. The growing dominance of duty with its complementary obscuration of rights is the first symptom of the approach of rapid ethical progress. To insist on one's rights imprisons the soul in the living sepulcher of selfishness. To think of one's duty is to admit the self-revealing and future unmisting light of self-sacrifice. One's prohibitions become the order of the day, especially in a limited community. The spirit of intolerance is abroad. Every man yearns to confine his neighbor and put him in moral and intellectual leading strings. The origin and the meaning of the, thou shalt not, are forgotten. The spirit of them dies rapidly, and the letter binds and petrifies the souls that must obey them. Progress in ethics is finally stopped, and it is accepted as a law of nature that there never was any development of conscious, and never can be any other ethical point of view. Moral stagnance is taken as the rule of human life, and nothing short of a new impulse from spheres outside the world can liberate the race. Thus blinded from its vicious circle of thought. Advance of the human system to higher points of view is in Limonora the moral test and standard of actions and conduct. In all that is, nothing has ever died. Nothing is dead. What seems dead and fixed forever in permanent form is suffering change as truly as the flitting aurora of the North, the rock that seems the same in our old age as when we saw it in infancy, is in the process of transformation no less than we ourselves are. It is made up of particles that are groups of molecules, and these molecules, moving with varying degrees of rapidity round and across each other's orbits, consist themselves of still more minute atoms that are but points of living energy. Send another form of energy, like heat, through this apparently torpid mass, and it stirs palpably to our senses. What was dormant to us before has awakened, and as the supply of the foreign energy increases, the rock moves and changes beneath our gaze. Not that the long torpid mass has not an energy of its own. It is a store of energy. Every atom of it waiting but for the touch of another kind to awaken from its age-long sleep, and to send most of it free and a step higher into the wandering sphere again. The difference between solid and liquid and between liquid and gas is only a question of time. In the solids the molecules take longer to move through the same space as those of the liquid, which in their turn take longer than those of the gas. For solids flow under the influence of gravitation, or other force just as truly as liquids or gases flow. It is the same with energies. One differs from another in pace. Time is the only essential difference between them. The pace of vital energy is so distinctive in its swiftness that it forms a new order of existence. Thought is the swiftest of the vital energies that we know, and to rise in the scale is to quicken the pace. The civilized man thinks as much more rapidly than the savage as the savage thinks more rapidly than the mollusk, if the last may be said to think or feel at all. And there are heights above existing human thought for man to climb. Higher and ever higher the scale of energies in the cosmos must go, till time becomes what would seem to us but a vanishing point. Immediately above us lies the vital energy to which a thousand years are but a moment. To the microbe, if it could think, human life would seem an eternity. To creative thought, which is the Lymanoran ideal, eternity, future as well as past, is focused into a moment. Up through the scale of energy the whole cosmos is ever climbing, with occasional lapses and falls, timing is the only differentiating quality. To quicken the pace of development is the one immediate aim of Lymanoran civilization, and the morality of an action is measured by its contribution to this aim. The higher they climb, the nobler, the more ethereal, becomes their energy, the less governed and clogged by animal conditions, the more easy to quicken the pace of development. For the cosmic law of influence is that the closer in quality and degree the spheres of energy, the more likely is the higher to mould the lower and raise it near to its level. The source of the everlasting moment and life in the cosmos is the unstable equilibrium of all nuclei and stores of energy. Every world differs from every other world in its capacity for various forms of energy, and so does everything in it differ from everything else in the amount of any particular form of energy it can contain. Comparative proximity sets up a current between any two nuclei of energy that thus differ. Whenever the two reach stable equilibrium, that is, whenever they come to have equal shares of the energy, the current of influence ceases, and they are dead to each other. The socialistic ideal is political and social death. When all the members of a community are equal and alike in their share of its privileges and products and capacities, its rights and duties, it ceases to grow or develop. Stagnation is the law of its being, especially if there are no neighbouring communities differing from it on which it can react. The Lyman Orans deliberately strove to keep up and strengthen the differences between not only families but individuals, in rights, duties, capacities, aims. The differences were an everlasting fountain of renewing life. The law of political and social life is exactly the same as that of gravitation and of all the other cosmic forces. Two sources of energy will continue to influence each other till they reach equality, the greater giving its share of energy to the larger proportion than the less. What keeps the cosmos eternally alive is the complexity of the mutual influences. There are no two bodies or centres of an energy so isolated or so simply constituted as to remain forever dead or unchanging, once they have reached stable equilibrium towards each other in respect to their special form of energy. And so it is with men, the socialistic ideal is an impossibility in this universe. In the human sphere this cosmic law has farther reaching issues than the merely political. The Lyman Orans were willing to do much for the advance of mankind, but they had come to see that Apostolism is a case of this law of mutuality of influence as truly as any other phenomenon. The higher must not only give voluntarily of his influence and character to the lower, but the lower must give of his to the Apostle. And if the proximity continues long enough, this mutual give and take will end in the missionary coming near to the original moral standard of the convert then the convert comes to his patron's original standard. Where the grades of the two civilizations are widely separated, though the process of assimilation may be long, extended over even many generations, it will be most disastrous to human progress. It is better, they concluded from their long experience, to isolate an advancing race that is far ahead of all other races and thus to give it the chance of coming within the sphere of still higher intelligences. Most advanced religions have begun with the impulse towards this, yearning for a loftier sphere than that in which they are hedged. They try to isolate their followers from the lowering influences of the world around, in order that they may reach the ideal and influence that are just above them. But as they apostleize and expand, the worshippers become mere parasites of their God. They try to batten upon Him with their lower natures, and thus drag Him down to their level. After the first noble impulse and inspiration, it is seldom that a religion does not become as truly an instance of parasitism as the meanest bacterial life. The lower all through the universe is eager to parasite on the higher. Manute organisms try to lodge in the tissues of those that are larger and more developed. As long as host and parasite can pursue their functions unhindered by their intimate relationships, little harm is done. But as soon as the debris of the lower clogs of the organs of the host, what we call disease results, and the minute guess becomes a hurtful parasite. As long as the religious impulse sends a nature higher on the path of development, so long does it give of its best to the deity, so long does it fail to clog the advance of the cosmos. But when it extends its conquest to mean and unprogressive natures, the common, unenthusiastic natures that are saturated with envy and jealousy, then does it become mere parasitism, the religion has grown into a disease. The warm, humane, and generous natures which are touched by a new inspiration, rise to an exceptional pitch of fervor under its influence, and develop at a pace that stirs the alarm and envy of their neighbors. Whilst the resultant persecution continues unabated, there can be no degeneration, the worship can never be parasitic. But as soon as the persistence and progress of the earlier worshippers and their propagandist enthusiasm begin to invite the commonplace, cowardly spirits of the mass, who can never appreciate what is above them except to envy it and drag it down to their level, its era of development is past. The cosmic law of reciprocity never fails to act, and the united influence of the meaner majority is greater in its power over the whole than the fervor of the noble few, downfalls the worship to the level of the many. It was on this cosmic law that the Lyman Orons based their refusal to go out and attempt to convert and raise the rest of mankind to their standard. They knew from the nature of the universe that the attempt would end in corrupting themselves and dragging them down farther than they could drag up their converts. They preferred to give of their best to the unorbed existence which filled space outside of the world and to make their best still better. Thus they knew they were serving most truly the great end of all being, the development of the cosmos, the elevation of the energy in it towards more and more spiritual and progressive grades. They strove to perpetuate and strengthen their consciousness of what was above them and to break the yoke of the lower self, the self that at death amalgamates with what is material and stagnant, although the latter was needed as a stepping stone as long as they remained upon the face of the earth. In seeking the proximity and influence of the higher energies and existences that seldom touched the earth, they anxiously guarded themselves from all parasitism, which might drag down these in the scale of being, and this led them to abandon attempts to personalize the relationship to them. They would have no part in worshipping or prostrating themselves before these beings in order to obtain their protection and patronage. For this they knew becomes merely sectarian, the outcome of envy and jealousy, the cause of bigotry and intolerance, persecution and revenge. They did not desire the exclusive influence of a higher being, nor to become obstructions to its further development. To rise to its level was their active spiritual ambition in striving to gain proximity to it. As their senses, especially their inner senses, developed, they were getting more and more certain of a vast universe of being just outside the merely terrestrial and new inspirations and senses were ever awakening in them. Nobler ideas and impulses pressed in upon them. They scarcely knew whence. They were afraid to define the source, lest they should humanize the idea of it and pollute it. What they were sure of was that the infinite space was filled with unorbed life and energy, rising in higher and higher grades as it receded from the terrain. The energy of the worlds and of the other nuclei of force was gradually rising through the grades of being, thanks chiefly to the majorless existence which hovered round them, yet settled upon no center of fixed energy. Out of this unorbed life came the impulses and inspiration that made such epics in the history of a world. Their magnetic sympathy with this they were strengthened and elevating every generation, as they strove to rise higher and higher amongst these existences in order that into their spirits might come nobler and nobler influences. As long as they were conscious of qualities and degrees of existence above them, so long would they be stimulated on their upward development. They had no fear they would ever reach a point from which they could not see heights beyond. That they knew would be complete spiritual death. But they knew too that there was no such thing as death or entire annihilation in the whole cosmos. What seemed to us death was but the final parting of two grades of being or energy, the lower to coalesce with some fixed form of energy and attached itself again to some more rapidly developing form, the higher to range itself with un-nuculated energies of space, still to rise by proximity to some higher life. They were scientifically certain that there could be no end to this process of development upwards. Aspiration was the duty and true function of all existence. To quicken the space of the evolution, to range themselves more and more swiftly with the higher life of the cosmos, this was the prerogative of vital energy that had gained consciousness of a self 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 that a glance at 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 Lymanorans 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 they're raided 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 formed so large a proportion of the life of the terrestrial races, had been reduced to an almost inappreciable proportion in theirs and were ever questioned and tested to see if they harmonized 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. End of CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII of Lymanora, the Island of Progress by Godfrey Swevin. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. 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 the Lilaroma, and that the families of the Leomo were least affected by it and most active wilts did lasted. Another concomitance was the subsequent importance of the questions connected with interstellar migration. The discovery of the infinite and invisible life of unorb's face, not only the infinitesimal, but highly organized, lessened the gloom of these beclouded periods, and made the Lymanorans less feverish in their astronomical and volatational 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 toward some other world. They had lost all fear of death, and all thought of it as the end of their evolution. Still upwards they would 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 energy and organisms, and knowing too how the body began anew, 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 organized entity than the divorced terrain elements, would still exist and still develop. The whole encyclopedia of their scientific knowledge was opposed to its annihilation, and the discovery of the vital fullness of space left no other alternative than that it was thither the spiritual energy of the human personality escaped at death. Yet they're lingered a tinge of gloom at the time of any overwhelming spasm in the heart of the Great Mountain, and the Leomo baited 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 firmly grasped the 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 readyer 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 their 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 live just outside their unaided kin, 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 Lila Roma and its connection with the volcanoes in their old and arctic 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 Vlimonora 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 Vlimonorans 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 stared 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 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 localized, and the modifications of the species 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 the tropical and the old or Antarctic. After many ages the migration of birds lessened. For a few returned in the winter, and as the climate became cooler through the 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 in 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 rigors 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 travelers, 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 labors, it became apparent to them that their voyage had been along the coast of a buried continent that had had its northernmost point not too 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 birdline 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 a 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-coffinned land and the expansion of the earth's 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 head-float, the earliest geological ages the oozes of lava that formed the backbone of the old continent as it rose from the sea. It's almost 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 canyons 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 barriers sank and the ocean flowed over its forest 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 untransversable 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 proxysms of Lilaroma what was occurring far off in the southern snows and when they had mastered the art of aerial flight they resumed their expeditions to the glacial regions of the south. Every few years might have been seen had there been mariners there to see them, the strangest of all flying things, beings in human form, winging their way through the air southwards or northwards. At first the bands were large and well equipped in order to guard against all risks, but in time they grew bolder and companies of half a dozen or even three or four ventured on long flight to the south. At last the families of earth scientists were encrusted with the task and sent their messengers to report on the conduct of the Antarctic volcanoes. These reported that if ever those southern vent should close no application of the art of Leomarie could save Lymanora or indeed the archipelago around from disastrous explosion. The circular current with its belt of mist had shown that this was the thinnest crust and the weakest point on the whole line of fissure and if the sea broke into the volcanoes of the other extremity a steam generated from the percolating water would make for the archipelago and blow it to dust. Recent messengers to the south had found dangerous developments in the regions of snow and ice. Where it lay in the line of the ancient fissure the land was rapidly subsiding and that was exactly the locality of the southern volcanoes. If the walls of their craters should sink so low that the waters of the ocean could make breaches in them then would the final catastrophe occur to Lymanora? Whilst the last decennial review was proceeding and high hopes were rising in the breast of all that a few generations would see the race independent of the fear of terrestrial cataclysms their minds were jerked from the future into the present. Our torch cones suddenly broke into a great column of steam and a fine dust fell upon the island. There had been no preliminary warning and little had been put in readiness although the Leomo had been uneasy for weeks as they noticed the spasmodic action of their earth sensors. The heat and the magnetism in their lava wells had been rapidly changing their degree every few hours. But this had occurred in previous periods without any recorded effect above the surface of the earth. They had therefore only kept more zealous watch without resorting to more than the usual relieving action. Now the whole people were called to their assistance and the concentrated power of remla was turned on to the boring events. On every side of Lyla Roma Leomorans were busy and soon the imprisoned lava and steam escaped by a thousand exits. But a new method was adopted by the Leomo. They shipped in huge felinas of the newest and most powerful type a number of earth perforators and along with them a large quantity of machinery that would enable them to use the wasting energies of the southern elements. Amongst others Thayeriel and myself had to manage and steer one of the great aerial cars for it was chiefly members of the Leomo that manned the expedition. High we rose above the archipelago before we attempted to cross the mist-ring. Below us we could see the limanorn houses and buildings gleam rainbow-hued like bubbles on the beach of an ocean. Higher still and the various aisles of the archipelago crept closer together in the perspective a handful of emeralds cast upon a plane of azure. Our eyes wandered over the scene and saw how it was set in its dull white milky ring a narrow and impenetrable hedge that cut this little world off from the side of its fellows upon earth. Through a cloud we shot that drenched and freshened our gleaming car then followed the fleet southwards across the circular thread-drawn round the nest of islets. We were out in the wider spaces of the world again our home receded into a speck on the horizon. Over the waste of waters we sped a great grey plain flecked with white. At first I lost my cool confidence in this trackless wilderness but fearlessness returned to me as I saw the face of Thairiel bent now on the limanorn modifications of the compass and again on the rest of the fleet to the right and left of us. The Lumona or sun compass and the Eulerama or sun chart were our trusty guides by day even if we had lost sight of our companions at any time. Our track had been marked out for us on our sun chart of the heavens and we could not fail to know where we were even if clouds should obscure the face of the great orb. If only a few straggling rays managed to reach the face of the instrument, indistinguishable though they might be to our sense of warmth or of light, they affected its delicate apparatus. It told us their exact direction and angle whilst another face told us the exact point of the day and of the north and south line. There was needed no calculation to find the region where we were. The Lumona did it for us and it kept tracing our course as we accomplished it by means of an indicator on our Eulerama or day chart. Once I had been instructed by Thairiel in the management and guidance of the airship, she lay down to rest and I was alone beneath the oppressive paleness of the vault. I dared not look over the side lest the sight of the gray wilderness far below me should make my head swim. Only once did I look up and the sense of limitlessness numbed me. Now and again I glanced quickly at the rest of the fleet. But I was too fearful lest something should go wrong to turn my eyes away from the tracer of the Lumona as it moved upon the sun chart or to take my nerve power from my hands as they grasped the right governor of our flight power and the left the rod of the steering gear. As the hours flew and nothing untoward occurred I relaxed the tension of my system and enjoyed the glide of the ship and sang to the beat of its wings. The sense of solitude passed as I felt the magnetic sympathy of my comrades in the other cars thrilled me and my spirits rose with the exhilaration of the hides through which we traveled. The sun had reached the western round of the sea and swelled into a vast ball of fire. Thyriella woke as his rim dipped into the ocean and at once prepared for a change of methods. She taught me how to turn on the power of the engine into the rolls of huge lamps that were meant to search the darkness of the night. Then she brought out the alumar or the star compass and substituted it for the Lumona. She removed the day chart and put in its place the manual rama or night chart adjusting the indicator of the star compass to its tracing. Night fell and brought out the lamp-dueled sides of the other airships. They looked like a fleet of gigantic glowworms sweeping through the air. What we showed like to any wandering ship on the ocean beneath us it is difficult to imagine. I myself had transversed those solitary levels in the daydream and I tried to think how I could have explained the strange phenomenon had I seen it from my deck. The superstitious amongst my sailors might have taken it for a portent, some as one from heaven, others as one from hell. The scientific would have concluded it to be a series of fireballs travelling before an upper current of the winds. I should have recorded it in my notebook among the observations of meteors and other similar phenomena and have waited for further illumination. By day we were too high to attract the attention of anyone but the investigator of cloud changes and weather signs and we saw no sign of human life during our long aerial voyage to the south. But away beneath us we could just describe floating brown specks swiftly tracing their zigzag course over the grey plain and knew them for the broad winged albatrosses whose flight the Lyman Orrins had so carefully studied for the construction and navigation of their felinas. For by an automatic arrangement which brought the currents of the wind to bear upon the steering gear our car now gracefully rose and again as gracefully fell when the wind was against it. Now swept to this side, now glided to that. All that I had to think of was the main course. On a later voyage even the steersman was superfluous except in a storm or violent change of winds for a chart was invented on which the course of the voyage was traced in the shape of a mental groove and in this the end of the steering rod was made to move. The two automatic movements governed the manipulation of the winds and the course of the car. It was the same with the engines that achieved the beat of the wings. The slightest change in the opposing medium communicated itself to the electric power and modified it. All that was needed from the occupants of the Felina was a little attention now and again to see that the machinery was working smoothly and solidly and to ensure that the steering rod adjusted itself to the caprices of the wind. On this, our first long aerial expedition, one of us had always to be at the helm, although I found after a few watches that there was needed but little tension of either muscle or nerve to keep the ship to a course. Thaeriel took the first half of the night and of the day, and I took the other two sections. When I awoke in the middle of the first night and took my place at the helm, the sight bewildered and dazed me. I felt as if I had gone back again into the region of dream. The stars seemed to throb close in upon me. I felt as if in a cosmic confessional with myriads of world eyes wide open to see into my heart. I was not afraid, yet my veins throbbed in awe before this palpitation of the cosmos. But I settled down to my task and grew conscious of the surrounding fleet of fireflies, that even in their great distance from me numbed my eyes with the flashes of their lamps that paled the light of the stars. Beneath me as I looked over the bulwark, there was nothing but the solid blackness of midnight. Never had I felt so isolated. Thoughts wove as unceasingly in my brain as the wingbeats wove upon the loom of night. Now and again I was stirred from my meditation by the swoop of our felina as it breasted some great billow of wind. So precipitous were some of those waves that my heart leapt in my bosom as we rose before them or slid down them. I never passed a night of such intensity of exhilaration and thought. There was my lifelong comrade peacefully sleeping as I watched. The infinities above magnetized me with their sympathies as their eyes searched me to the heart. Below me the midnight brooded silently over what I knew to be the untracked ocean. Day after day, night after night we sped on. The air growing rapidly colder, till for the sake of my unadaptable system. We drew the transparent oval roof over the felina and fixed the radiator which kept the temperature at an even level. Thereafter the stars were not so omnipresent in their gaze. There was more of a limit to the space in which we dwelt and the movements of the felina impressed themselves less upon my senses. At last as my watch was ending one moonless night I could see a dim flare in the southern sky which I took for the aura Australis. But when Thairiel gazed at it and then at the agitation of the fireflies abreast of us she knew it was the reflection of the great Antarctic torch mountains. I rose at dawn and could see below us the white glacial cliffs of the polar continent. Thairiel seemed stirred by some emotion that I was ignorant of, but soon knew to be the recognition of the original home of a race. There seemed to move in her blood the ancestral yearning for the land from which they had come. She did not shrivel up in the excessive cold as I did, but look forward with ecstasy to moving amid the snow and the ice, though she had seen little of them in her own short life except around the crater of Lylarama. Bred though I had been in the rigorous winters of Scotland, I could not bear the bite of the wind and had to put on one of their cold repelling garments. This consisted of two layers of flexible, irrelinium woven cloth, one of which was a conductor of electricity and the other a resistor of it. The outer ore-conducting layer was connected with some labrimore which carried a store of electricity and this combination produced a warm, helpful glow all round the body. I had gloves and cap and mask of the same construction, and when fully equipped I could defy the most bitter cold that the uppermost atmosphere of the earth ever experienced. With this armor on I looked forward with delight to her sojourn in the region of Snow and Ice as I watched her approach to the rough ocean-like surface of the new country. For Thaeriel took the helm, now that there was needed more delicate manipulation of the Felina and I stood in the bow and gazed at the rest of the fleet rising and falling on the wind waves. Now and again I interpreted a signal from the Felina of the guiding elder, whilst my comrade was busy adapting the course to the caprices of the wind. But as a rule her own magnetic sense was alert enough to know what were the intentions of the other airships. Round the group of great fire cones we coasted, keeping clear of their smoke brush and dust vomit, for the wind was off the land and bore their ejections miles out to sea and high into the air. Across the icy plains ridged and hummocked by pressure from the higher land beyond, we flew, once rising enough to get a glance over the passes of the great mountain barrier, whence the torrents of ice slowly found their way to the coast. Beyond I could discern, even with my undeveloped eye-power, level plains stretching to the horizon, plains which indicated water underneath, and upon them the direction of the furrows and hummocks revealed whither the mass of the sea beneath flowed towards some narrow exit, overlapping and plain leapfrog in its eagerness to escape the pressure from behind. But the habits of this almost landlocked sea had no immediate interest for us, and we soon turned and made before the wind for a valley that lay sheltered between the mountain chain and the group of torch cones. Within a brief time we had all our felinas secured, and the multudinous rings of the Leo morans they carried deposited in caves ready for the coming operations. Then the elder who led the expedition took his airship, and with it we saw him circle round the individual volcanoes and reconnoiter the inroads of the sea. He had, we knew, already seen the dangerous proximity of one new crater to the low coast that divided the group of firehills from the galloping waves. Manifestly expedition was demanded, for he returned with great swiftness, and all was soon bustle and preparation in the camp, although it had settled down for a rest. The word was passed round that if the wind changed and whipped the racing billows to their raid, a high tide might find its way into the new crater and undo the local work of Lyman Orrin civilization. The fleet was at once in the air with the engines ready to be placed, and within two hours the winds and the waves, the magnetism of the earth, and the electricity of the air had been yoked to the great power machines. Then the rings of the Leo morans were attached, and the stores of energy brought to bear upon them. Before long we could see at a dozen different points high up the side of the cone, brushes of black smoke bending before the wind. Between the new low crater and the old lofty one, a score of new vents for the explosive energy of the fires underneath had been worked into the crust of the earth, ere the wind had changed round to alliance with the waters. The molten rock which had oozed from the dangerous cone at the edge of the sea had sealed its mouth before the ocean leapt into it. In order to make the seal more secure, a sluggish river of lava was directed down the slope from several Leo morans, and sent over the lips of the exposed crater. After every sign of the offending cone but a low hummock had disappeared under the molten invasion, bastions were drawn all along the coast beneath it in the manner familiar to Lymanora. When this fortification of the mountain was finished and the strain upon our muscles and nerves, and especially upon our eyes was relieved, we had leisure to look about us. The sight that met our view as we looked down the slopes of the mountain was deeply impressive. The flow of the red hot rock from the mouths of our lava wells had melted the glacial concretions for hundreds of yards beyond the margins of the molten currents, and laid bare the ruins of a great city that had evidently been buried in the ice and snow since the lowering of the temperature had made the climate unbearable by men of civilized nature and habits. The steam rising from the neighborhood of ice and fire had covered the disin-tumed secret from our vision whilst we were working, and as the wind fell that had swept the veil aside for a moment, the marvelous sight was again curtained over, and we began to think that it had been but a waking dream. Some days after, when the lava had sufficiently cooled to leave portions of the defrosted slope open to the light of heaven, we revisited the scene. Several broad streets and great squares had been unburied, and the architecture revealed how artistic and how advanced in mechanical condrivences the people that built them had been. A thick covering of volcanic dust and ash had plastered them over, so that it was difficult to move on foot amongst the ruins, now that the moisture of the melting ice had mingled with it. After clearing the debris from the doors, we entered some of the houses that had not lost their roofs, and there was evidence of hasty flight. On the floors and couches were strewn pale-mal, the contents of boxes and cupboards and wardrobes, half of them still stiff with the ice that adjacent streams of lava had been unable to melt. The evacuation of this luxurious city had evidently occurred during some great outburst of the volcano, which had threatened its existence. But the climate had grown rigorous before the catastrophe. For in every house and every room there were elaborate apparatus for heating, and most of the clothing lying about was a fur or of thick, warm stuffs, and when we dug beneath the coating of volcanic ash, we found in places accumulations of ice which must have taken years to freeze. Layer after layer of dirt and rubbish had been embedded by the preservative frost, and had we cared to cut through the stratified ice. We might have counted the years, or perhaps centuries, through which this heap had accumulated. For several visits we could find no human body, though we came across one or two carcasses of emaciated animals that had evidently lived amongst the runes till the last vestige of fodder had disappeared under the volcanic layer or the accumulating ice. But at last in a back lane, probably inhabited by slaves, we penetrated into a low house whose roof had crashed in under the weight of the falling dust, and there we saw a scene that moved us to tears. The mummified body of a little child prepared for burial lay upon a briar, and over it was stretched the corpse of the mother. She could not tear herself away from the last relics of her dead baby, and in returning to rescue it, or to weep over it, had been overwhelmed by the falling roof. The frost of centuries had kept off the finger of decay, and this Nairobi-entered child had remained like sculptured stone. We covered the bodies gently with the volcanic mud there as they lay, and left the frost to work its petrification again, for we had not the heart to disturb the scene. Here amongst the proletariat of this luxurious people there was evidence of that maternal transport which had showed the path of ethical development and exaltation to the Lymanorans, and it was destined to raise the energies of our world into higher and higher forms. This, we knew, was but the terrestrial type of an altruistic law which was working throughout the cosmos, and making every center of energy that had more than the average give of its more to those centers that had less. All inner power was now done to relieve the pressure of the subterranean fires that were threatening to burst the ancient fissure, and all two that could be done to ward off the batteries of the ocean. Then were we sent in different directions to inspect and report on the state of the ice cliffs that beatled over the waves. We hovered for days about the rocks and their glaciers, and the universal observation was that the coast was rapidly subsiding. Since the last visit of the Lymanoran messengers its line had sunk many yards. Marks that had been made far above the reach of the waters were now washed by the break of the higher billows. Thyreal and I were sent to a loftier bluff which extended for almost a mile between Shelving Beach and Shelving Beach just underneath the site of the buried city. After inspecting the higher parts of it for days and measuring the height of the old marks above the farthest reach of the waves, a windless day on which the ocean lay as if frozen gave us opportunity of following the cliff at its lowest sea margin. For half a mile or more nothing exceptional met our eyes. Then suddenly we came upon a great chasm in the rock where a soft intermediate stratum had moldered away into sand before the everlasting battery of the waves. Over it a great dorm of ice was stretched which was ever being thickened by the climbing spray of the billows as they broke into it. The entrance to this cave was somewhat low and narrow, and a jagged rock in the center of it churned the angry waters into milky foam. We saw that this feature would make the opening invisible under its veil of spray on all but days of perfect calm. We were afraid to enter lest the sea should rise and imprison us, so we called some comrades to our aid, and they brought a light felina that was made to serve the double purpose of airboat and waterboat. Then Thaeriel took flight from above, and with the impetus we bore ourselves and the boat through one of the passages past the jagged tooth of rock. As we settled upon our felina and looked up, the sight that met our eyes took our breath away. The sun was shining brilliantly, lighting up the dorm of ice with such power as to make its whole thickness transparent. Through it in every direction thick as notes in a sunbeam were strewn human bodies wrapped in mummy-fight as in death. Some lay on their sides with the head pillowed on the arm, and as the face was uncovered we could see the features as clearly as if we stood in the chamber where they lay. The frost had kept the flesh and the tints of it uncorrupted. We could almost have sworn that they breathed as they slept, yet in the case of most it must have been the sleep of thousands of years. This was the cemetery of that ancient people which had built the city lately found. Doubtless this ice-crust in which their graves had been cut had one stood securely miles away from the coast, and in it they thought that their dead would be safe for all time. But as the shore sank the glacial crust ceased to be a plain and slid downwards along the increasing slope to the ocean, and before many years could pass this hailing, resting place of the dead would be launched into the sea and be swept by the storms and tides into warmer airs and currents which would release the bodies from their beautiful petrification and give their elements to the ravening powers of the waters or the microscopic corruption of invisible life. In fact on a return voyage we flew over several icebergs that were floating catacombs. On the surface of one we discerned the power of a mummified face just released by the strong rays of the sun from its ancient rigidity and the still stony garment shining through their pollucid covering. We could almost decipher through the milky blueness of the ice-dome when the sun shone most brightly the inscriptions on the tablets lain beside these forgotten dead. But the winds began to dirge within this strange diaphanous mausoleum and even the water seemed to move around the cave with suppressed sob. We thought the sounds ominous and rising up into the roof of the cave close to the dead that had slept there so lifelike for so many centuries. We poised ourselves and, taking aim, dashed through the narrow entrance while our comrades without drew the felina out by the cord with which they held it securely. Later in the day, as the calm continued, the guiding elder sent others into the cave and they secured one of the most elaborately hieroglyphed tablets. Those of us who had most recently studied in the Valley of Memories were able to trace much resemblance between the language of the inscription and the ancient limanor and tongue. And when we returned to our island it afforded one of the clues by which we were able to unravel the history of this ancient Antarctic people. They were descendants of those whom the northwards migration had left to their fate amid the growing rigors of the southern winter. After the departure of those who founded the colonies of Rialaro and became the ancestry of the limanorans, the wealthier classes had evidently abandoned themselves to pleasure and luxury within their splendid and superheated dwellings, whilst the proletariat, though growing more and more vigorous, and venturing far out upon the ice and the ocean on fishing and furring expeditions, fell deeper and deeper into the contempt of semi-slavery. Loyalty to their masters and ignorance still kept them unrebellious in their growing embrutement, till the volcanic catastrophe solved the problem of their future relationships. Neither the survivors had gone. When outbursts of the subterranean fires drove them forth, no one could say, doubtless the peasant fishermen and hunters took the effeminate cast in their rough bolts over the sea to some warmer climate. Probably, if the expeditions survived the storms and billows of the broad ocean, they landed on the coast of South Africa, or on those of South America, and introduced an alien civilization and more complicated problems amongst the privative peoples of those isolated regions. Before we left we had to investigate the shores of the inland sea for evidence of subsidence, resting on them for a period whilst we punctured the slopes of the mountains in order to give a new direction to the pressure of the fires upspringing from below. When all the leomorans that were needed had been placed in position and got into working order, not more than half of the expedition were required to attend them. The others, and amongst them Thayeriel and myself, were allowed to wander over the shores of the Gulf or sea, everywhere finding abundant evidence that the whole neck of the island which divided it from the ocean, high though it still was in the lofty mountain barrier, was rapidly subsiding, and would ultimately succumb to the batteries of the besieging elements. This might take many centuries, but that huge volcanic range would be submarine within measurable time was obvious. At the rate for even a decade of years been constant, we could easily have calculated the number of centuries that would elapse before the great catastrophe, but the amount of subsidence varied from period to period, increasing and then decreasing. The most alarming change had occurred since the last visit of the Leomo to their old home. Square miles that had been low-lying lands some few years before were now encrusted with marine ice, and lofty precipices were perceptibly lower. The most striking proof of the rapid subsidence was not observed till the day before our return. The shoulder of an outlier of the range pushed its way as a lofty promontory right into the Gulf, its whole length and breadth being covered with glacial concretion. Some recent attempts had broken off the end of its river of ice, and at the same time a sudden subsidence of the land had left the face of its cliff a completely new section, as if shorn by a microtome. The sight that revealed itself to us as we flew round it was most impressive. City after city had evidently been billed upon the broad bluff, its pleasant position overlooking the island sea, and its proximity to easy harbourage ever attracting the population back again after each cataclysm. Time after time the city had, we conjectured, been overwhelmed by the ashes of some great volcanic outburst from the range. There we could see in section the various strata of buildings one above the other, each filled with ash and dust that preserved the power of frost. Hundreds of years must have elapsed between the destruction of one city and the building of the next, a period long enough in fact to obliterate the memory of panic and anguish from the traditions of posterity. In some houses we could still discern the signs of the stampede that had occurred one day thousands of years ago. Articles of value were half torn from their treasuries and then abandoned. Jewelry and dishes made of the precious metals were here and there held in place upon the mosaic floors by the frozen mass of earth above them. They had evidently been seized at the first warning of the coming catastrophe and then thrown away as alarm made life dearer. In one chamber we saw the outline of the body of a man across its threshold, his hand out beyond his head clutching some receptacle of precious metals. In the space between the outer walls of the two houses the body of a woman was exposed, face downwards, and beneath the bosom the form of an infant child. How many long forgotten tragedies might be unearthed we could not stay to discover. A little labor and we could have penetrated into these cities. The application of a leomeran would have melted the dust and ashes and brought to view the stratified life of ages before. Had we been interested in following out the existence of these far distant relatives of the Lyman Orans we could have begun with the lowest layer and followed the evidences of civilization up through each successive entombment till finally the people were driven from the site by frost, a force more rigorous and potent against culture and luxury than fire. But the Lyman Orans had enough in the records of their own ancestry to tell them all the history that might be illuminated by such excavations. They knew that after an advance in the two or three lower strata there would be found no progress except in luxury and the arts that contribute to luxury. And they had enough of such development in their own archipelago before their own senses to ally any eagerness for viewing illustrations of it in ancient and dead history. The site was interesting and impressive, but we all had learned its lesson too well to desire further acquaintance with it. In phialume we had studied similar histories during our pupillage and daily we could watch through the Idovamelan the enactment of similar life in the islands around Lymanora. A little apparent advance was followed by as much retrogression. The generation were as alike in essence as two species of the same genus, the difference being merely superficial and unvital. It was enough to make the Lymanorn heart stop in its beating to see the dreary sameness of the ages in the history of a people as far as development of spiritual character and power were concerned. The changes and revolutions were but changes of lay figures under the official dresses and ceremonials, or at best an expansion of the sphere of luxury. What mattered it to men that were panting after ideals they never saw above and beyond them, who were masters and who were servants, or subjects in some unprogressive levels of humanity, who or how many sated their appetites or covered their skins with the rich and ceremonious reignment of dominance. The heroisms and romances, the striking turns of fortune, the world-renowned victories that made the eyes of other races blaze with wonder were all hysteronic to those who knew what real development was. This section cut through the history of ten thousand years would reveal but the same old story that they had read so often in the annals of their own far past. We turned away sick of heart knowing the countless griefs and agonies, struggles and combats that had gone into the making of this human stratification and the complete futility of them all. The best that could be thought was that oblivion had buried them, and that the energy set free the deaths of so many thousands of generations had perchance a better opportunity of rising in the scale of vitality as it wandered into other spheres than the human or the terrestrial. It was not then without deliberate intention that our departure from the old home of the race occurred soon after the discovery of this strange frozen museum of forgotten peoples. After everything was done that could be done to divert the upward pressure of the subterranean fires from vans close to the margin of the sea, the felinas winged their way back to the north as rapidly as they had come. No incident took place to mar the return voyage, and we were soon back at our old employments in Limonora.