 Chapter 1 Part 2 of Lymanora, The Island of Progress by Godfrey Swevin. The Lymanorans had no fear of such effects in their own island, except indirectly, for they had complete command of their own birth-rate and death-rate, and kept the numbers commensurate with all the purposes of their existence. Climate was to them as plastic as any material or force of nature, and the unexpected in meteorology was gradually becoming unknown. But they had a strong indirect interest in all in bursts of the cosmic. For the peoples of the other islands, the descendants of their ancient exiles, were as ready victims as ever to what seemed the caprices of the seasons and the years, and the frustration of the consequent movements involving the interests of the Lymanorans absorbed more of their time and reserve energy than they desired. A violent tornado would obliterate the products of a year over the whole archipelago, and the fear of starvation would goad the inhabitants into expeditions in search of food, sometimes even towards the Isle of Devils. Again, hungry microbes, the spawn of some plague-stricken world, would float into the Earth's atmosphere and find new soil on the islands, and the dwellers would die so quickly that there was no time or room on their circles of Earth for sepulcher. Into the sea the festering dead would be thrown by the thousands, each bearing its moderate germs of contagion. The very fish that fed on them would dive the plague and bear its microbes to every shore. The currents and the winds, if left to their own bent, would sweep down the foulness of contagion on the Lymanorans and it would take them weeks of superhuman effort to prevent the bacterial spawn from settling in their systems and to cleanse the adjacent seas of all taint. The effort to prevent these disasters often wasted their store of force and checked their advance. It seemed to them, therefore, more economical of their energy to help in dispelling the original evil or making it swerve towards other oceans, for a time they considered it to the interests of their progress to save the whole archipelago from the eruptions of interstellar magnetism or bacterial life. But even this was found to have serious disadvantages. Unbroken prosperity surcharged the leaders of the other islands with conceit and made them lose their fear of the central isle and resumed their projects for its conquest or it deluged them with population, which, whenever nature grew economical again, was driven to foreign means for its sustenance and at times, goaded by hunger, made in military wise for the Isle of Devils. Yet these alarms and dangers were more infrequent and more easily repelled than when the more ambitious of the archipelago were driven by the spur of famine and disaster to incursion. And, though for a brief period the Lyman Orans allowed an occasional tornado or plague to devastate the islands of hostile neighbors, they came to the conclusion that it needed less of their energy to repel an occasional hive of enemies, impelled by narrowing limits or lessening generosity of nature than to beat off vast bodies of embattled peoples, frantic with hunger and reckless of life, led by the keenest skill and fiercest ambition of the archipelago. They could better avoid all destruction of life in the one case than in the other, one of the duties of their civilization, even though a subsidiary one. The Paramo were less essential to the progress of the race. Their growing knowledge of the conditions that governed the climate as well as the passing weather, saved in the day as much power as the use of such an instrument as the Pyrrachno at first could add to rimla in a year. And the scene of the labors of the Paramo was every year more and more extended to the extra terrain. Meteorology became, in its investigatory and experimental department, more and more cosmic, and often overlapped astronomy, astrobiology, and astrophysics, and aided them. More and more did they find their problems, questions of magnetism, or electricity. In the interstellar spaces must be sought the sources of the greater disturbances of season and climate, and the Pyrrachno grew every year of more and more importance, as they traced the magnetic influences around the earth back into the infinite fields of space. About this very time they invented an instrument of great delicacy, which foretold the vaster tracks of magnetism into which the earth was swinging, and measured the increase. It depended for its principle and basis on the intimate relationship between electricity and light, on the effect of magnetism upon light and upon electric radiation from the negative pole in a vacuum. They had noticed for some time that the light from any meteor or illuminous body outside the sphere of influence of the earth never reached the instruments of the observers on the edge of the atmosphere quite true, and that the aberration differed at different times. By means of various experiments they came to the conclusion that the aberration was due to magnetism in the extra-terrene spaces. Their new instrument, which they called a Sarmalan, they sent out into the ether beyond the earth's atmosphere and beyond the influence of terrestrial magnetism, and as it received beams of light from any one heavenly body towards which it had been directed, it recorded the amount of this body's deflection from the straight course. They preferred to turn it to the moon or to Venus or Mars, for then they were sure that the deflecting masses of magnetism lay within immediate range of the earth. This Sarmalan turned out to be, for cosmic changes of climate, what the barometer is for daily or hourly changes of weather. Whenever it recorded violent deflection, it meant that the earth was approaching an exceptionally vast tract of magnetic influence, and that there would be great and frequent disturbances for months, if not years, in the regularity of the earth's seasons and climates, or at least of those of one's own. It warned the limanorans to get ready their pyrrachnose and all other instruments they had for drawing and imprisoning for their own use the electricity from the atmosphere in the spaces above it. It was in short their cosmic barometer foretelling changes in the climate years ahead. It eased the minds of the Pyrramo and set free half their energies for other investigations, as soon as it had proved itself a true prophet. Later improvements in it measured the distance of the super-magnetized region of space from the earth, and thus indicated the exact year and sometimes even the month and the day when the series of climactic perturbances were likely to begin. What had been guesswork before, made just before meeting the phenomenon itself, was now reduced to predictive law, and they look forward to the time when by recording, classifying, and mapping the variations and regions of cosmic magnetism they would be able to get at the cause of its unequal distribution in interstellar space. Nay, when they had charted the great drifts and currents of varied energy that the earth encountered as its universe swung through space, they might have ready for their future voyagers to other worlds a full cosmography, which would instruct them in the kind of oceans and torrents they would have to breast, the types of energy they would have to accustom their systems to, and all the risks and dangers they would have to meet. And when their knowledge of the conditions and regions and tracks in the boundless space they might have to traverse was fairly rounded and complete, then some slight adaptation of their sermoan would be to them their cosmic compass. There was evidence in other discoveries, too, that this hope was not so utopian as it seemed at first, that at least not countless centuries would pass before they might be able to fulfill it. One especially, that of the floraimo, or botanical families, quickened their expectation far beyond the mere flight of fancy. It was a new sublimation of vegetable extract, which seemed to give their lungs free play when there was little or no air to breathe. They had used for ages the fruit of what they called the floraimo, or tree of life, for giving new vigor to the organs and especially the nerve tissues. They still continued to use it, even though the chemical families had analyzed it and found all its constituents, and then reproduced a mixture that had most of the revivifying qualities of the fruit. The tree grew only in marshy districts, and they had reserved an obscure and rarely visited corner of the island for its culture and for the culture of plants and trees like it. There was another tree growing, only in the cooler zone halfway up the mountain, and preferring shallow and poor soil to root in, whose fruit gave extreme flexibility to the more muscular and cartilaginous tissues, and especially to those in the chest, if taken inwardly or through the pores, muscular exercise became more easy, and breathing became deeper and slower or quicker as the will directed. A third low plant or shrub, which grew only on the highest altitudes of Lila Roma, and had its roots generally in the soil underneath a layer of snow, had been found recently to have in its tissues, and in a concentrated form in its nuts, great stores of oxygen. For ages it had been considered a poisonous plant and avoided, for within a considerable radius of it breathing had always been more difficult than at a distance from it. It had therefore been eradicated from all parts of the cone frequented by the limanorans. It had no beauty of form, often grew low like a lichen or moss, and could remain under the snow for years without perishing. It had thus been neglected, and in fact seldom observed in its growth, whilst its nuts had been thought to be as poisonous as the plant itself. But recently an avalanche from one of the little visited slopes of Lila Roma had uncovered a hollow, in which one of the floremo had found a emaciated and unable to fly, yet still alive, and beside it were the remains of a number of these poisonous plants and particles of many of their nuts. It had evidently been imprisoned many weeks, if not months, and its only food had been the obscure and offensive snow-bush, stunted, scabrous, and without green or leaf. The floremo became deeply interested in the phenomenon, and gathered many specimens of the shrub from the top of the mountain. They fed the bird till it became plump, and then shut it up in one of their irrelinium vacuum chambers with only nuts to peck. There they watched it from day to day, and saw that as long as it fed on the nuts it continued vigorous and lively, even though it began to lose its rounded outlines again. They soon closed their experiment, and set the winged creature free to fly whither it would, satisfied that there could be only one logical conclusion with regard to the plant. They saw that its nature was to lay up stores of oxygen in all its tissues, and they called it alfaring or oxygen shrub. It was this treasure in it that enabled it to live so long beneath vast accumulations of snow and ice. It was this feature of its life that made it when open to the air so exhaust the oxygen for yards around it that men found it difficult to breathe beside it. It was this that, when it became the food of the bird, enabled it to live and breathe so long away from the air. It was the outcome of long ages of selection up in those difficult altitudes, where nothing could live under the snow without this power of storing up oxygen. And its nuts, too hard and innutricious except for hunger-driven birds to attack, concentrated round the seeds an extraordinary amount of this oxygen stuff, and by means of this, when underneath the pressure of the snows the husk broke, the seeds were able to support themselves and develop into plants away from the vital air. It was evident that these alfaring nuts were treasure-houses of oxygen, and soon they were tried by the Lymanorans themselves when they flew into the upper regions of the air. At first they broke the nuts into powder, which was made into a hard but soluble paste. A small piece of this held in the mouth till it melted, enabled them in their flights to breathe freely in rarer altitudes than they had ever reached before. The floramo afterwards brought out the oxygen-storing power of the shrub more strongly by careful cultivation and selection. Within a few years they made of it a vigorous, large, and comparatively handsome tree, and its nuts grew larger and more oxygenated, so that they became a necessity for all flight into higher atmospheres. More attention was also paid to the floronal or tree of life and to the germabelle or tree whose fruit produced elasticity of the muscles and cartilage. The development of all three in the direction in which they might be useful to the race quickened. The energy stored up in their fruits came to be more and more concentrated. Selection of plants, cross-fertilization of them, special soil and feed for their roots, and special surroundings were all powerful in the hands of the floramo for changing plants and trees to any purpose they had in view. They studied the tissues and habits of the species they wished to adapt, not as an abstract and merely scientific investigation, but as one of the practical problems of their own life. They turned to the chloroen on its inner and outer tissues as they anatomized it. They watched its inner processes with the lavaline as it grew or decayed. They chemically analyzed its sap in all its stages and the various soils at its roots. Then they experimented with new elements in the soil in the direction of the qualities they wished to encourage. They tried it with various degrees and hours of sunshine by day, and various amounts of moisture by night, at different stages in its growth. If they found some of the qualities that they desired in its fruit or tissues, more vigorous in some other species, they fertilized its blossom with the pollen of the second plant and from the seed raised a new species which would fully realize their purpose. The whole of vegetable nature was plastic in their hands, and every year saw hundreds of new species. The floremo were the forerunners of the sidramo or chemical families and experimented in materials and juices and essences, which would be useful to the race in its ever-quickening advance. Often would vegetable nature reveal a compound that shortened some route through the future, and the sidramo would then analyze the product and find the secret of its special efficiency. The floremo were indefatigable in that department of their work which experimented with the application of plants and their fruits and tissues to useful purposes, and every day saw some process accelerated by the results of their labors. In fact they classified the vegetable world, not merely according to the structure and methods of growth and propagation, but mainly according to the particular utility of the products. The one classification was more essential to their creation of new species, the other to their discovery of purposes for which new species might be created. Like all their sciences, botany was nothing if it was not creative. Having discovered the oxygen-storing shrub, the floremo gave a new bent to it, applying their energies to strengthen its vitality and its vitalizing powers, and to finding out the most convenient form in which to use its treasured energy. Aided by the sidramo they were able to combine the juice of the fruits of the floremo and the germa-bell with the paste of the nut of alfering into minute, but to my eyes almost microscopic, globules, each of which would support one of their couriers on the ether side of our atmosphere for several hours. At first they lost one of the vitalizing elements in securing another, and even after they had been able to bind the three essences together in one form, it gave air and sustenance for only a few minutes when they tried it in a complete vacuum. But after experimenting for many months they were able to concentrate these essences under enormous pressure and by the aid of electric stimulus into a form which would not volatilize except in the saliva of the mouth and under electric stimulus. They were also able to give their globules such electric power as would utilize the streams of magnetic energy that fill the ether. Thus the ether couriers found them far more strengthening and sustaining just above the earth's atmosphere than it. One globule lasted several hours longer in a vacuum and made breathing and the other vital functions more easy and enjoyable. Thus was opened up to them by this discovery a long vista of investigation. The new type of sustenance and oxygenation was so concentrated that the couriers into the sky could carry with them enough to serve through months. During the next great period of discovery the cedramo superseded this use of alpharine by a more rapid method of concentrating air. As usual they followed up the steps of the floremo and created what the botanical families had found in nature. The use of great pressure in the manufacture of the sustenant globules in their final form suggested the track they should take and the immense accumulation of energy and remla and the rapidly increasing faculty of concentrating it on any point or purpose gave them the requisite power. They came to reduce air to liquid and finally to solid and permanent form. And following up the lead of this discovery they applied greater and greater pressures and were at last able to transform with these and without danger any element into gaseous, liquid or solid form. They contracted the slow processes, that in terrestrial nature covered myriads of ages into a few minutes or hours and thus again multiplied indefinitely their vast treasures of power in remla. A pioneering production, the book of elemental transformations foreshadowed the discoveries to which this would lead. Ether, it was shown, would be transformed into any desired substance as soon as its constituents and formations were found out. Even modes of motion, like sound and light and electricity, would with this vast expansion of the possibility of compression and the growing power of amalgamating and concentrating forms of energy come to be bottled up in liquid or solid form for any required period. A block of latent sound or latent light or latent electricity would be as common as a block of ice. Another pioneer, the book of abbreviation of geological time, opened up a second vista of power that the discovery pointed out. Nature took geological ages to perform most of her processes, but in great passion she accomplished as much in a few minutes. The safe imitation of these creative and destructive proxisms was certain to be one of the conquests of limonore and posterity. For the actual concentration of power in remla was as nothing compared with what it would be in the future. Now they were able to contract the work of years into minutes, then they would be able to leap in one moment across geological ages. Time was the inertia of realization and creative power. The whole drift of their civilization was towards the mastery of finite periods of time. Years were to them what minutes had been to their ancestry. To their far posterity geological ages would be as brief as years were to them. Swifter and more swiftly would they eliminate from their creative processes the reluctant element of time and feel that they were pacing in the footsteps of eternity. As it was, they soon put the liquefaction and solidification of the elements to countless uses. A few of these were the cooling of their buildings by concentrated air, the use in the arts of its corrosive power and of its power of rendering most metals easily plastic, its amalgamation with other elements into an explosive matter so destructive as to supersede the use of the lemuran in earth perforation and the storage of their felinas with supplies for expeditions that would take years in interstellar space. A minor use to which they put alphorine was the production of vacuums. They had long had mechanical air pumps that gave them the vacuums they needed for their experiments. But now they found it much easier to enclose one of these snow-stunded shrubs in an airtight vessel of transparent aerolinium and watch it absorb the air within the walls. The energy formerly spanned on the making of air pumps was saved and devoted to some other useful purpose. What was still better was the continual experimentation on the human system carried on by means of these so easily accessible vacuums. The alphorine vacuum became the daily plating of the limanoran and he took pleasure in finding out the needs of his body in it and the length of time he could endure the pure ether. It was not long before they knew every difficulty they would be likely to encounter in crossing from star to star. The minor defects of the body were easily met after a few years of study of them by the various scientific families, but two of them gave long pause. One was the intense cold they were sure to experience. Where there was no terrain matter or moisture or air to retain the solar or astral heat that traveled through space, that a fusion of streams of thermal energy would render any far-boaging from earth impracticable. The experiments to meet this difficulty took three directions. One was physiological, to make the body capable of resisting as great a degree of cold as they would be likely to encounter. This attempt was only partially successful, and that by slow steps. They brought themselves to live with pleasure in any cold that could be found in or around the earth, but it would take many centuries, perhaps geological ages, to bring endurance up to the pitch of instiller cold. It would in fact mean such a sublimation of their bodies as would make them like spirits. Another direction was chemical, to produce a regular atmosphere around the body as it flew, so that it might retain some of the streams of heat that swept past it. The use of the essence of the oxygen plant helped them in this direction to some extent, but the amount of it that would be needed to keep up such as an atmosphere for years, concentrated as much as they liked, meant so huge a cargo that none of their wing-cards would be able to bear it above the earth. The third direction was physical, to produce as much heat around the body as would act as a shield against the cold of the ether. This was the most successful, for there were such torrents of energy ever moving through interstellar space that it merely needed its utilization to solve the problem. One plan, that when carefully developed, would ensure success, was a magnetic garment which would cover the whole of the body, and draw to it all the electric energy within a large radius of it, to be transformed into heat by minute engines distributed all over the envelope. Another was to combine the mechanical collection of electricity from the ether and the powerful development of the magnetic powers of the body. Already they had been able to flash lightnings around them as they flew through the night, and it would need but small mechanical manipulation to increase this display and to turn it into heat. Like meteors they would blaze across space, wrapped in a mantle of flame. But this difficulty in the way of flight through the ether was but slight against the other defect that their systems had in common with altering bodies. They could develop heat easily enough, but how were they to keep intact and consistent in a vacuum constitutions which had been developed under the pressure of an atmosphere? How would the tissues and the organs of their body adjust themselves to the absence of atmospheric conditions? As they rose above the clouds they had long felled as if their limbs and even the molecules of their bodies were without due subordination and apt to assume individual independence, even when the spirit grew boldest and most concentrated in its energy. Their own wings and felinas that were intended for upper and rarer altitudes had to be made tougher and more elastic than for common flight close to the earth. They had to make them at last in a vacuum and subject them to all the conditions that met them in the ether. But it would take myriads of generations, if not geological ages, to bring their own bodies into such a state as to bear vacuum around them for years, and then in their terrain life with such a new constitution they would be unable to endorse so great a pressure as that of the atmosphere near the earth. The only contrivance that seemed feasible was a far felina enclosing the traveler round, large enough to hold alpharine supplies for the long voyage, and strong enough to stand the pressure of an atmosphere within it. This they might manage after some years of experimentation. But enclosure within such a narrow space for so long a period, without the possibility of free movement into the ether, did not attract them, and any little accident in their machinery or to their supplies might make their felina their tomb. Some other line must be taken by investigation and invention, if stellar migration was to become a possible and desirable thing. This line was indicated by discoveries of the cedralamo or biochemical families and the oromo or psychophysiological families. The cedralamo had long been investigating the ultimate constituents of living matter, and again and again, when seeming to be on their track, they were baffled by the escape of some element, and left only with the kaput mortem to analyze. Under their Clarolians, too, powerful though they were, the principle of life showed itself in many ways to their senses, and yet evaded all attempt to isolate it. The Lavalan, which showed the inner structure of living bodies as they lived and moved, brought them nearest of all to the veil that hung over the secret of vitality. Plants and stationary animal organisms allowed them full scope for their investigations. In them they could see the life ebb and flow, as death approached or receded. In them they could find every material element entering into their composition, and test with their varied and minute meteorological apparatus all the forms of energy which moved them. They checked the current of life, and watched in the plant or animal the elements and energies that remain comparatively stable and those that deteriorated. They let it die out, and watched the throb and struggle of the various constituents and forces as they collapsed. Then, when it seemed to have surrendered all life or hope of life, they brought it back, by their knowledge of existence, to the upward struggle again and no feature of the return escaped their notice. Most watchful of all were they on that dim border land between life and death, where dawn is sunset and sunset dawn. In every stage were they able to isolate each strand of the thread of life, yet the essential secret of all escaped them. Once the organism had shriveled into a bundle of dead fibers or fallen to dust, no effort of theirs could give it the throb of life again. They could reproduce every element and tissue and fiber, and under their chloroans place them together in the forms of life with marvelous art. One thing was still wanting to make it all it had been. They could even mimic the flow of life through it by means of their command over the sources of energy, but the result was only mechanical. They had not supplied it with the never-failing spring of vitality. At last, during the period of this great illumination, there was thrown a beam of light on the right path for solving this problem. One of the Ciderlamo was experimenting on certain substances to see how they behaved under the rays issuing from a lavalan or reveler of inner mechanism. They were chiefly knew vegetable substances, the properties of which it was his duty to discover and tabulate. He was also mingling one or two new minerals with the plant products in order to see what implications the blending would cause. One metal had lately been found issuing from the deepest of their lava wells in the form of vapor. When cooled it had assumed a crystalline character, and acted to some extent like a magnet, yet it was sensitive to energies that an ordinary magnet ignored, as for instance the passage of exceptional nerve force through the human body. Lightly hung, it quivered when near anyone who happened to be greatly excited. But it paid no heed to the normal currents of energy along the nerves. There was also a species of plant recently evolved that had shown itself singularly sensitive on the approach of any living thing. It shrank not merely from the touch of a hand or of any animal, but from the proximity of life. Whilst it remained unmoved when touched by any falling leaf or stone, the experimenter had taken a number of these plants and made them a basket work, in which he hung a piece of the new magnetic metal by a slender thread. This he placed above his lavaline to see how the rays from it would affect or be affected by the new combination of influences. There seemed to be little or no effect, but he continued his experiment to make sure. Through some imperfection in its walls his vacuum failed. He tried to pump the air out again, but this failing too, he substituted an alfering vacuum which happened to be near him. The result was most striking. The metal, lightly hung in the basket, became agitated at once, and its movements grew more or less active as it approached or was drawn off from the vacuum. After a time it began to show less sensitiveness, and at last became almost quiescent, even though the vacuum remained efficient. On examining the alfering plant under a magnifier, he found a minute slug that had evidently escaped the notice of the maker of the vacuum. This had been the source of the agitation of the metal in the basket during its less spasmodic efforts to hold on to life, and when death, through the lack of air had overcome it, the agitation had ceased. The plant itself had by the presence of its life kept the test from becoming completely quiescent. The influence of life of the experimenter himself seemed to be largely neutralized by the surrounding air. It was only when he came very close to the test that it indicated his presence. Here was revealed to the cidrilamo the path they had to follow. A wide vista into the darkness had been suddenly opened. It was not long before they had taken full advantage of the discovery. They invented the most helpful of all their instruments, the cidrilan, or biometer. They hung the combination of life-sensitive plant and nerve-sensitive metal itself in a vacuum, directly in the path of an electric current. The details of its mechanism they rapidly improved till it measured with accuracy the degree of vitality in any plant or animal. But they soon found that it was entirely differently affected by vegetable and animal life. The energy of the former moved it but slightly, and only in certain directions. The latter seemed to surround it and agitate it from all sides. It quivered as if with subdued excitement. Yet there were degrees in both. Some plants moved it more than the most primitive unicellular animals, although the movement was less pervasive. Thus they were well on the way towards the isolation of the life principle from its constant concomitance. The biometer came to be as much important to the medical superintendents as to the cidrilamo. It abridged the labor of their weekly inspection, for it told in a moment whether the vitality in any member of the community had fallen or risen in degree, whether it was below the parper average, in short, whether all his organs and tissues would have to be minutely examined for the cause, and whether his dietary scheme would have to be revised. The psychophysiological families founded of some use in their investigations into the faculties of man and their basis in his bodily constitution. They found that the wiser and more intellectual a personality was, the more gently he moved the cidriland, the more of animal vitality he had, the more violently he agitated it by his presence. But the instrument was too rough and undiscriminating for their purposes. It could not distinguish between the purely spiritual and the purely animal except in this loose way. They tried modifications of it, but without success. It was the ilomo or astrobiological families that helped them to take the right direction. They were constantly bringing down out of the stratum above the atmosphere vessels full of the steaming nothingness that existed there, in order to investigate it and see whether it was mere vacuum or not, and though the contents appeal to none of their senses but the electric. Their various instruments of research reveal different energies and a large amount of life, besides minute forms of matter without life. On several occasions they had noticed that the contents affected their tests differently when the peer-mander was near and when he stood at a distance. Step by step they separated the element that acted thus from its various concomitance, and soon they were able to concentrate a considerable quantity of it in a receiver exhausted of air and to precipitate it in powdery metallic form. The substance was handed over to the ororomo, who saw that it would supply the test they wanted, for it was but slightly sensitive to the presence of animals, and its sensitiveness gradually vanished as they tried it with lower and lower species of animals, whilst it quivered near men, less near young men and women, only slightly near infants, but with quick tremors when near the older and wiser Lymanorans, who had suffered and thought through long centuries. They came to the conclusion that this residuum was the essence of some element in the ether that responded to the energy of the higher faculties, that the magnet responded to electricity. They had in fact found at last a true test of soul, that refinement of the higher animal energies which has assumed a new grade in life, the consciousness of itself, and the power of keeping its own form and essence as an entity forever separate from all other beings and things. It was not long before the oromo had made from it an apparatus which would test the presence of soul and measure its force. This oran, or psychometer, they were at last furnished with an instrument that would give organic unity a new purpose to their science. They would now be able to watch and measure the growth of soul in the child, and the ebb and flow of its strength in youth, and thus would they give new vigor and life to the creative function of their science. They had now an exact basis for education, as guides of parents and pro-parents in tuition they would walk in the full day, where before they had groped in dim twilight. In every case would they be able to advise with the same certainty as the medical elders advised on the health of the body. For the mature men and women would they act as true father-confessors and do what the priests of so many religions pretended to do, but did not do. They would be able to tell everyone, who desired it, whether his soul had advanced or receded in power after any series of sufferings and deeds, or any line of conduct, and thus give advice as to what should be done or omitted in the future. And when the elders had come near what had before seemed the utmost limit of life they would be able to tell them whether their nausea of existence was only fleeting and subjective, or whether the roots of their soul were loosening themselves from the soil of the body. But so vast an expansion of science and the unveiling of so many outlooks into the future left no room for the thought of death. The pace of life quickened perceptibly, and the energy of every dweller on the island was strained to its utmost to meet the requirements of the new additions to the force of the country and all of the new inventions. It was impossible to think of anything but the tasks in hand. None had an idle thought, none a leisure moment to waste on mere introspection or dreams. In fact it became quite clear that the old dream factory might be closed for a time at least. For several generations it had been the custom of the Lymanorans to stimulate invention and discovery by the use of magnetism. When any one felt his problem insoluble, or an insuperable obstacle in the way of his advance towards some practical goal, he had his dream conscious awakened and quickened as he slept. A member of the medical families would attend by his bedside and apply a magnetic current to the particular point of his brain that controlled the powers concerned in his pursuit, and especially to the parts which were the physical expression of the imaginative faculties. And day by day he would instruct the thinker as to what nutritive or medicated chambers he should enter in order to draw the main strength of his system towards the faculties he needed. Day after day the patient nurtured the parts of the brain and of the nervous system that would help him to the solution. Night after night he dreamt out the terms of the problem. At last, either in day-dream or night fancy, the curtain would be raised and he would see the path to take. Light flashed in on him as if from another world. What in my buried life used to be called inspiration was cultivated, molded, and directed as with deliberate foresight and care as any feature of the body or the character. Nor were these dream stimulants ever abused. When the purpose had been served, the goal reached. At once the other faculties and physical parts had equal attention. The strain was unbent, and the symmetry and balance of the whole system restored. Never was the stimulation of dream consciousness permitted for a mere pleasure or whim. The importance of the aim to the progress of the race had to be proved before it was granted. Nay, it was only problems the solution of which would lead to extraordinary advances that were dealt with by Narola, or dream consciousness stimulants. Now the Narola were entirely abandoned, for imagination was preternaturally excited, and discovery and invention seemed to come to investigators almost without effort. It was indeed a period of accelerated progress, if not precipitants, in the work of all families. The darkness around existence lifted over the whole horizon, and demanded redoubled exertion in order that the new region should be mapped before it fell. The tissues and nerves of every Lymanoran felt the stimulus. Each worked with a will. Still the necessities of the situation almost ran ahead of their powers. One thing became unclear, that they must have more workers. The new generation would have to be more numerous than the last. For the young had to be drawn upon for active nerve and head work before their usual time, and these would need more leisure in the next stage of their life to compensate for the loss of it in the period of growth. It grew evident that parents who had been exceptionally successful in the two children they had brought forth, reared, and launched full fledged on the career of life, should be permitted and stimulated to resume parentage. It was considered one of the highest privileges and honors to be selected as parents again by the magnetic consciousness of the nation. There was needed no formal agreement or resolution. The mind of the race was known without consulting it openly, and every pair felt in a moment that they were selected for parentage. They required no stimulation, no permission to enter on the patriotic duty, and all considered it a duty of the loftiest kind. Passion in the race burned low. No longer was it a sting or gold that had to be mastered. It was in short no more a passion, such as the use of imagination, the love of the race, or the yearning after advance had become. The animal element in it had grown insignificant, and left it at the bidding of intellect and will. These trite parents hadn't thus no sensuous pleasure to seek in the new task assigned to them. They took it upon them as a duty, and their chief pleasure lay in the honor they had been paid, and in the service they were doing to the race and to the progress of their humanity. A second necessity of the new position was earlier marriage on the part of the men and women of the community. As soon as bare maturity had been reached, pairing now began. First it had to be scientifically ascertained that all the merely primitive stages of mankind had been passed through. Not only the prehistoric, but the historical. It would be one of the greatest of evils to allow the privilege of parenting for the community to any one who might have yet to go through a stage of individual life that represented centuries of the past of mankind. Little better would this be then stalking their island with children from their exiles. It was a question of testing every individual, for some passed more rapidly through the life of their ancestry than others, and these were not always the best as parents or even as citizens. Every tissue and faculty had to be tested after careful study of the records of the childhood and youth. No possible prospect or chance of atavistic taint was overlooked. The next duty was to review the needs of the race. The tasks and abilities of every family were measured, and the possible expansion of these were estimated. Then new sciences or new divisions of sciences or new duties that would need the services of a family or family specifically selected and molded for the purpose were taken into the account. From this elaborate review of the resources and needs of the population, conclusions were carefully drawn as to the number and quality of the children that were required. The problem was easy enough as far as mere extensions of the existing families were concerned. But the creation of new types was a question that tasked the abilities of the wisest to the utmost. The special faculties needed for the new science or art or duty had to be discussed and decided, and especially how far existing faculties would have to be modified or newly combined. Then out of the various families those two had to be chosen, a cross which would produce the required modification or combination. But, as this was still largely of the nature of the experiment, more than one effort was made towards each new type. In order that, if one child failed, the others might be available. But the wise creators of the new types were rapidly sure of their ground. Their experiments were growing less of experiments. They could almost foretell to a faculty or tissue the result of the crossing of any two families, and where any quality was unequal to the new duty. First creative surgery was called in to modify or add to the tissue of that part of the brain, which was the physical equivalent of the faculty, and afterwards education with its various magnetic and dietary aids was brought to bear on its development. Yet there might be some chance of their new type falling short of its purpose, and, to guard against this, several individuals of it were brought forth and trained. It was generally found that all of them were needed to carry out the duties of the new position. After everything had been settled in the program of the next generation, the task of matching began. Time after time the two who were to be the parents of the new type were thrown together as if by accident in circumstances and surroundings which would touch their imaginations and rouse their enthusiasm for each other. They were put into difficult positions together so that one might help to extricate the other from them. Alternate debt and service wove mutual bonds around them, till at last neither desired to issue from the network of obligation and love in which they were caught. The magnetism of one was complementary to that of the other, and when separated they longed to see each other. With none in the community was the flammoo of either in such communion as with the loved-mate. Thus partly wise choice and partly spontaneity produced the match. The lifelong bond could never become enslaving for either, for the material of it had been selected not by mere youthful caprice, but by the maturest wisdom of the race, whilst it was spun by the impulse and will of the two friends themselves. Neither the state or either of the partners could possibly regret the friendship or wish it dissolved. It passed as naturally into marriage as flower into fruit. But whilst the future was thus being safeguarded, the new duties or expanded duties had to be looked after. Seventy-five years of work had to be provided for before the new citizens could be made fit for their duties. Part of this was covered by drawing earlier on the powers of the new generation. The youth must come out of seclusion a few years sooner than usual. But that was not sufficient. What way was there out of the difficulty? It was a tacit rule in the community that none were to overstrain their energies. Overwork was considered as great a vice as indolence, for it cheated the race of some of its advance by demoralizing the faculties and tissues and bringing on the nausea of life earlier than it should come by nature. The biometer was carefully applied to every citizen in order to test how far he could go in work without wasting his energies. And after all had been assigned additional work to their utmost limit. There was still so much unassigned. The only chance of meeting it was the extension of life. The elders must live longer. Happily every condition was now present for managing this. They had new foods and agents for revitalizing the tissues. They had new apparatus for discovering internal defects in the human system, and new methods of remedying them. The far vistas opened up to the future gave a new purpose to the life of even the most aged. They longed to see what would come of all the expanded invention and discovery. The enthusiasm of the new age fired the imagination of the oldest. Lymanoran life had another century added to it. In the midst of the bustle of these preparations for the future, if anything the Lymanorans did could be called bustle. There occurred an accident that smote them almost with dismay, and brought them as near as I had ever seen them approach to melancholy. The additions to the new sources of energy available in RIMLA had entailed more muscular work as well as more superintendents, and it was necessary to assign more physical toil to the now earlier mature than had been customary. Two signs of the meteorological families who had been selected for marriage and parentage were sent to manage a large poracno, which had been constructed for drawing the magnetism from the air and the spaces just beyond the atmosphere. The great machine had been placed on an isolated spur of Lilaroma, so that if ever through the sudden sweeping of the earth into a super magnetized area it should become dangerous. It could easily be detached from RIMLA and insulated. And there were never less than two beside it to help in its management. The younger men and women took the night watches in all the physical labor that had to be undertaken. And Tamarna and Imirlo, as one of the youngest and least experienced of the pairs that had to manage this huge poracno, kept the last watch of the night, the watch that included sunrise and was followed by that of two of the most mature workers. It was thought that, as every Lymanoran would be awake and on the alert at dawn, help in any emergency could easily be procured. As it was well known that during that period there was a great increase of magnetism in the atmosphere, provision was made in the machine itself for so regular a change. It was so arranged that, when the sun's rays first touched it, it should automatically increase its capacity for magnetism. But so recent had been the development of cosmic magnetography that the times and seasons of the irregular increase of magnetism had not been tabulated and classified. Had the observations been made for a long enough time to allow of inferring a uniformity or law, then it would have been seen that these super-magnetized spaces, though they may have been entered by the earth during the night, have little effect upon her atmosphere till day dawns. The excess magnetism seems to lie dormant in the dark. The first rays of the sun act like a fuse to a mine and complete the circuit between extra terrain space and the surface of the earth. Sunrise, in fact, as they came afterwards to sea, was the most critical time for such a machine as the Parankno. It happened, too, that on this particular night the Sarmalan or cosmic barometer had been getting out of order, but its watchers did not think it called for immediate attention. The morning would be time enough to put it right. Its indicator thus lay tongue-tied and misleading, when it should have been violently agitated. Tamarna and Amirolo had no warning of the approaching magnetic tornado. The hour before dawn the Parankno moved as regularly and quietly as at that point of the night when the magnetic tide is at its lowest ebb, the point when sleep is deepest and death is most frequent. They had just seen that every part was moving without friction and fully coping with its work, and Amirolo felt that he could leave his mate for a brief space and consult the Sarmalan watchers. He had been gone but a few minutes when he heard a loud crash behind him, and at the same moment he noticed that the first beams of the sun had struck across the levels of the sea. He turned and saw a flash from the place where he thought the Parankno stood. Flying back in trepidation he found the machine as he had left it, but it had stopped. At first he could not see Tamarna, but on searching he saw her form lying on the ground close to the Parankno, hidden by one of its cranks. He touched her temples and left side, and saw that life had fled. The crank had come upon her as she lay, and bruised her body. The sight of this completed his despair. He felt that the last hope of her recall had vanished. Yet he knew how much the medical elders could do, and there rose in his mind a flicker of hope. He wasted no time on lamentation, for there moved in him the carefully trained consciousness that all such abandonment to emotion was an offense against the progress of the race. They considered that every occurrence of life demanded as much concentration of energy and thought as a shipwreck, or the incidence of a battle, or anything that we in the West would call an alarming emergency. As grief or despair or fear used up the power that should be spent on action, emotion was strictly reigned in at such a moment. Instinct was to call the whole resources of the nature to action. Omerold braced himself to the emergency, and sent the whole of the magnetism he was capable of into his will telegraph. After a few minutes of exercise of it, it seemed to relax, and he knew that he had roused his parents to the danger. Recalling his energies to Tamarna, he followed the few simple rules that he had been taught for the recovery of the seeming dead. He made her lungs and heart imitate the play of life. He switched the magnetism of his own system onto hers. But after all his efforts she still lay a nerd when his parents arrived. They decided to carry her at once to the medical elders, for they saw that something exceptional had occurred. It was not a swoon, or even death from the bruised dell by the paracno. So they took her wings and making them by means of soft leafage into a couch for her. They bore her through the air swiftly, but just as she had lain when found. Tamarna's own parents met them on the way, and helped them to accelerate their pace with her. And within less than ten minutes after the accident, she was in the hands of the sages in the mountain hospital. The general medicine house was Omalipha. But there were two houses of cure which approached more nearly to what our hospitals are. One was far up the slopes of Lila Roma, not much beneath the winter line of snow. The other was aerial and movable, and was, whenever it was needed, floated upwards to the margin of our atmosphere, where parasitic and microscopic life was reduced to unegressive feebleness. In it were all the necessities of life at hand. The temperature was kept close to summer heat, and there were lines of communication, so thin as to be almost invisible in the air, connecting it with the halls of sustenance and medication. This hospital was meant for the invalid who was strong enough to be moved up from the solid earth, and, as soon as one had been brought back far enough from the grasp of death to bear the rarity of the upper air where it merged into the ether, he was taken up in it. But Tamarna was first born to the mountain hospital, where the instruments of investigation and cure were ready. When she should have all the ruptures of her bones and organs and tissues set for mending, and all the tissues that were crushed beyond mending replaced by freshly manufactured tissues, and when she was seen to hold on to life with the tenacious grip again, then would she be born into the hospital of accelerative healing high above the clouds? The biometer recorded the faint presence of life. The spirit had not yet escaped, and before long it grew manifest to ordinary eyes. They had apparatus for stirring any organ of the body into activity, and with the lavaland they soon saw which of Tamarna's functions had been deranged and had suffered syncope. It was her heart that had ceased action. The inrush of magnetism from space drawn by the prerachno, without provision for storing it or letting it pass harmless, had paralyzed some of the more important cardiac tissues and the circulation was in many places clogged, whilst a large portion of the superficial blood vessels had been ruptured by the fall of the crank upon the body. A European Medical Council would have abandoned the bruised and discolored corpse as fit only to be food for worms, but no member of the community could be spared in such a period of enthusiasm and expansion. The newly discovered agents and methods were brought to bear. Delicate instruments made the heart first mimic and then produced the true cardiac action. Currents of magnetism swept the veins and cleared the routes for the circulation of the blood, at the same time stimulating the life fluid. The livid hue gradually disappeared from the face. Another instrument gave action to the lungs, first in mimic and then in a vital way. Concentrated sustenance was injected into the veins and soon the breathing grew regular. Yet it needed hours of this recreative work to bring the spirit to consciousness of itself. Out of the depths of the soul seemed to be dragged by slow steps back into the reluctant body again. The psychometer was far more slow to give signs than the biometer. But as soon as it revealed the approach of the soul, the friends of Tamarana were brought near her, all who had magnetic affinities with her, and especially her betrothed Omerlo. From that point the recovery was astonishingly rapid. The magnetism of friendship seemed to draw back the spirit from its desire to escape. The eyes opened and a look of intelligence and love shone through their vitreous dalmas like dawn in a misty sky. Recognition quickly irradiated her whole being, then faded out, then came again, till at last the curtain which hid the soul rose, and the body seemed to become diaphanous to the light of reason. The spirit dwelt again in its old habitation. The rest was a matter of the commonest medical science. Every tissue was restored to its previous healthy state. Every fracture and bruise and scar was obliterated. Every item of her system which had suffered beyond the possibility of repair was remade and grafted into her body again. Nursing and medicated atmospheres under the wisest medical guidance restored Tamarana to her duties and to Omerlo as efficient and graceful and healthy as before the accident. In spite of this triumph success of their medical science, I could see that depression prevailed in the community. Not even what appeared to me to be the most supernatural power of drying the life back seemed to console them. For they had often still seen more wonderful displays of medical skill. Men who had been for months to all appearance dead were restored to full vital power, even when the microscopic transformers of dead matter had begun to baton on their tissues. Nobody that still retained the human form was beyond their skill. The soul could be enticed back after it had accomplished its flight from earth, for it still kept its affinities to its terrain companions, though cosmic distances should separate them. That was the most difficult task, not the recrudescence of life, but the reenticement of the spirit that had grown happy in its release. When I observed that the meteorological families were the nearest of all to dejection, even though they had recovered their loved member, I came to the right conclusion. It was the accident that had unmanned them. That they should be taken unaware in a sphere they had mastered preyed on their minds. For one of the immediate objects of their science was to take command of their future, to eliminate the unexpected from life. What was the value of their progress if they did not see more clearly and farther into the sphere of darkness that bounded life like a horizon? True, the cosmic was still infinite in its night for them, and in the cosmic lay ambushed countless alarms, but they had driven their outpulse far into the twilight. The age they were in had seen such an expansion of science that the veil seemed lifted from the face of boundless night. Their sarmalan pioneered before them into space, and foretold them the dire catastrophes that might lie in wait for them. And yet they were at the mercy of accident. What was the use of such an influx of suggestion from the unknown? What was their power over nature, if thus they allowed the fortuous to drift in upon them? Had they not suffered such discomforture for ages? They abhorred the thought that they should again be the slaves of mere hazard. But they rebelled against even the appearance of impotence and would not allow any mood approaching despair to settle on their spirits. At once the Pyrrhamo said about the repair of their defenses against accident. The Pyrrachna was found to be fused by one mass of metal by the force of magnetism which had gathered into it from the space around. Another, larger and more effective, was produced and in it there was a new arrangement by which the storage was automatically governed. Any increase in the magnetism it received was at once provided for. And if, at any time, the inflow should surpass the capacity for storage, there was a governor which automatically switched the surplusage into the sea or back again into the air. A Sarmalan, too, was invented which had greater strength and at the same time greater nicety of adjustment. It could be left in the space beyond the atmosphere unattended for nights together, for it was self-recording, and as long as its parts were kept clear of extraneous matter or force it was incapable of derangement. Not that it was left to itself for a moment. Even though it now regularly telegraphed all its changes to RIMLA and to the locality of the Pyrrachno, meteorological observers were near at night and day to watch and interpret its signals. To guard against any possible assault of accident. Other Sarmalans were ballooned into space, whose indications were mutually corrective. Where one went astray the others would be right. When Tamarna was completely restored to health and it was made certain by the medical tests that every organ and tissue of her system was fit for its task, her marriage with Omerlo was accorded, and the two entered on their career of parentage. Their duties were made lighter, in order that their energy might pass unimpaired into posterity. They still had their round of work, that their tissues might not grow flaccid, or their life tend to excessive solitude. But Omerlo did for both all that needed great exertion of mental or physical faculty. Part I The accident drew the two together, strengthening their affinities into irrevocable bonds. And now that all was well with them, their sense of the joy of life welled through their whole nature. Those who came near felt its contagion. Yet there was one in their family who felt only to smile at it. The age Damaralno had seen so many centuries fleet past him that the passage of time with its triumphs had grown stale. He was battling with this nausea of life when the new age of discovery and invention had come upon them. And it so far renewed his energy that he was willing to live through it and take his share in the additional duties which had laid upon his generation. He had seen the infancy of the science over which he now presided pass into lusty youth and thence into manhood. And was he to cut his terrine boots before he had seen its greatest triumphs? Meteorology seemed about to take as wide regions of space within its scope as astronomy had. It seemed about to master secrets that would drive mere chance out of its calculations. The curiosity and wonder of youth were again stirred within him. He longed to advance with the new age into spheres that had so long lain under the horizon, only half-guest at. Before he closed his eyes on Lymonora what wonders might not yet be revealed to them. His blood had tingled with the thought, and his organs were filled with the old energy. He would resume the direction of his science for many a year to come. But the intrusion of accident into his own sphere had pulsed his renewed enthousiasms. For a time, whilst he was restoring Tamarna to her old self, and barring out the chance of accident again, he was not conscious of the check given to the vigor of his functions. But when all was well and the families of the Piramo were busy again at the expansion of meteorology, he knew that the old nausea had returned with redoubled force. The impetus of the new age was beginning to fail. Its pace had perceptibly slackened, its best triumphs had been won, and it needed the ignorance of eyes newly opened upon the green earth and the azure bald of sky to peer into the darkness with thrilling hope. It needed the mysticity of youthful muscles and tissues to withstand the weariness and despair that come with the truer perspective of a gigantic future become a pygmy past. What had he to do with human prospects when a thousand times he had seen them loom large on the horizon, and then fade into common place when realized? Here had he outlasted a dozen generations of ordinary men, and shared the triumphs of a people whose progress compared with that of the rest of the earth was as lightning to the pace of a snail. And yet, when he looked at all they had done in these thousand years, it was as nothing in the shadow of what had yet to be done, a poor hand's breath beside the voyage of light from a distant star. Where lay the advantage in extending life that had seen such humiliation before the everlasting future? He had been the threat of his life out for another thousand years without great effort. But what would that do for his race, or himself who had seen his past, with all the achievements that had each seemed as it came within the range of possibility a marvel surpassing the human, fade into a microscopic speck underneath the sumless stars? The voices of his friends, as they poured on consolation and eulogy, passion and prayer, into his ears, sounded now like the undistinguishable hum of insects as sleep comes upon a man in the open. What would they not have meant to him in the ambitious time of youth? How strongly they rang out to him at the beginning of the last age of enthusiasm, when they drove out of him the love of going for ever to sleep. But now, that the longing had come to him again, they sounded idly as the exultant wail of gnats on the evening air. The life of earth was withdrawn and distant for him. And who would raise a word against his release? He had done more than his fair share for the progress of the race. He had watched the interests of his science and made it an essential of all advance. He had braced his energies again and again to meet the requirements of a new age, another march ahead into the night. He had time after time molten the paramo into a new unity by the magnetism of his enthusiasm. More than once he had extended the years of his life that he might serve his race. And now he had skilled men and women under him, who could do all that he had done, and more. The exceptional needs of the new time had found no attendance mechanic or human. The strain it had put on the efforts of the race was unbent. Why should he linger in a world grown so stale to him, a world that needed no longer his guidance or even his help? There was one question to answer before the mind of the community was made up. It was the final scientific question. Was his vitality great enough yet to bear strain, were the impulses of another new age to give it enthusiasm? Was the soul already too detached from the body to allow of the two being closely reunited for another great effort? The question was one for their medical science and psychology to answer. The sidra-lan, or biometer, abridged the task of the medical elders. It reported a low pitch of vital energy, too feeble to bear up through the labors and watches of another period. But they were afraid to trust wholly to so newly invented an instrument and fell back upon their old elaborate methods of testing. They investigated the state of every organ and tissue of the aged body with level ends, the heart and brain with the special care. And it was clear from their state that the spirit could not long reside in them and function them with ease. It was at this point that the Oromo came in to aid them with their instruments for testing the bond between soul and body, and for measuring the psychic power that still remained ready to use the brain and its instruments the senses. The older methods and their newest apparatus, the Oran, all agreed in confirming the conclusion that the medical elders had come to. For Amaralno himself there remained one serious question, which had troubled the race from the time that mere faith had ceased to rule and pilot their creed, and reason had been accepted as the only ultimate guide of life, the final court of appeal in which all questions must be decided. They could not trust to emotion or instinct. For these were but hard-won creeds and habits of past imperfect ages grown unconscious of their origin by transmission from generation to generation. Authority out of the past, tradition, law of nature, had the same taint upon them. They were but the crude conclusions of comparatively primitive times, with the logic leading to them veiled by oblivion, then thrust upon later ages as inspiration. All these dogmatic judges of the present and the future were but the shadows of their own worst and atavistic selves. It was only an illusion, a mirage in the desert of the past, to trust these merely subjective impressions as reflections from the ultimate real, the absolute. A people like this was sure to abandon all such projections of their own dead selves as steps to hire than themselves. Every man had to settle for himself the problems that his science had been unable to solve, and that he must find some solution of in death. They had longed and striven for absolute certainty, yet every new age had to fall back upon the individual consciousness and hope, which were wholly on the side of belief in personal immortality. They knew that the energy in them could never die, whatever form it might take. Never had they found in the whole round of their investigations anything like absolute death or annihilation. Every change that they observed, however far into infinity they had searched, was but a transformation of energy and not its final evanishment. Matter was only a resting place, a halfway house of energy, and even matter was a comparative term, depending on the sensuous point of view of the observer. What was matter to one generation was found by a latter to be pure energy, or even a mass of life. What was matter to one sense was to another nothing but energy, and the development of new senses that gave them full consciousness of some hitherto unrecognized type of energy saved them from the dogmatism about the future based upon the idea that all types of energy were known to them. Their wonderful instruments of research revealed to them worlds of energy which might have lain for ages undiscovered, and swept out all stupid trust in the omnescence of the senses or in the instincts. They refused to dogmatize about the existence or non-existence of any type of energy or being. Nay, they preferred to accept provisionally the existence of any form that their imagination might sketch out as possible, and as consistent with the laws they had found permeating all the known universe. Belief was for them hope waiting for realization. Every new discovery pointed more and more definitely to the greater persistence of the higher forms of energy. What appeals to the more primitive and lower set of senses holds to even its inner form but for a comparatively brief time. Touch is the primary sense, and all that it, unaided by the other senses, can discover is apt to keep changing in its form. Taste and smell are simple modifications of touch and they report of things in perpetual transformation. Hearing and sight are the highest of the first set of senses, for they respond to types of energy that travel from vast distances. Hearing is the lower of the two, because the lower senses are conscious unaided of the medium in which the energy travels. Sight has as her courier an energy which bridges infinity, and its medium no lower sense can cognize. Light approaches nearer to indestructibility than anything the original senses know. The last developed of the senses, the firla, takes cognizance of an energy, magnetism, which is farthest of all from the need of a material medium, whilst the filamo or will-telegraph brings soul to soul irrespective of all sense cognizable means of communication, and proves the existence of a medium more refined than any that either the senses or the reasons has yet to come to know. This medium, doubtless that of thought as self, as the highest and least material, must be least destructible, least transformable, least unstable in equilibrium of all known mediums. Their orans would soon be made delicate enough to measure the faintest presence of soul, and would decide the point whether this medium, evidently spread throughout the universe, was of the same stuff as the soul. Still they were far from scientific proof of the eternal unity and individuality of the soul. They had reasoned out in accordance with all the axioms of their science the indestructibility of energy, and the rising untransformability of the higher types of energy. They had also reasoned out as a certainty that mediums of energy had stability of equilibrium proportionate to the refinement of the energy traveling through them, and that thus the soul was near to everlasting persistence as a unity than any medium they scientifically knew. But that on its escape from the body it continued forever as an individuality they could only assume, they could not prove it. They shrank from the idea that it was forever past transformation, for that meant the eternal continuance of the last stage of life. It was indeed contrary to all the results of their scientific investigations to think that any type of energy or medium could at any time cease to change, that is, to improve or degenerate. Perpetual transformation was, as far as they had been able to search, the universal law. It might be into a higher or more stable form, or into a lower or more material form. But onwards must every energy move. The higher it went, the less did it tend to fall back. The law of eternal advance was sure in its action in the higher ranges of existence. And the whole effort of the Lymanorn life was to purify and ennoble the energy that was in it. For reasoning on the analogy of all the nature they knew, they had little doubt that the platform they reached by the end of their terrain life was the platform from which their enfranchised energy or individuality, whichever it was, started on its new career. Whether it was mere unconscious energy or energy conscious of its own unity that escaped from the body when it was left to the disintegrate power of microscopic organisms was still a question. The recent discoveries and investigation of the Alomo or Astrobiological families had revealed all space filled not merely with types of energy that were directed and did not guide themselves, but with embodiments of energy, which were clearly individualities, not alone the poor microscopic attenuations of life that were waiting for a world to settle on, but highly organized beings, leading a vigorous, self-dependent life in the vast regions of infinitude. This much they knew from the filmy impressions which their air transcending lavalands brought down from the heights of heaven they scaled. But whence those inhabitants of the ether came they had not yet been able to tell, for their presence affected no existing human sense, but only left on the Aurelian film certain visible impressions. Whether they were refugees from other stars or everlasting occupants of interstellar space, and whether amongst them there were any of the emancipate from human trammels were questions they had not yet been able to answer. But they hoped soon to have an instrument which would indicate the presence of personality as a part from vital energy and as a part from the thought and thought faculty. Then would they be able to tell in what state the enfranchised energy fled from the body at death? Amaralno knew not, cared not, whether he would retain consciousness of his past, or would become but a part of the wandering energy of space. What he did know was that he would be released from the burden of his body and the growing weariness that dragged it down. Certain he was that his flesh emancipated energy would find a career at least as noble as his past. And he believed that his development would not end there, whatever became of it, whether it was to continue the unity it had been conscious of for so many years, or to take another form and individuality, was to him a matter of little concern. One thing he knew, and that was the growing imperfection of the body as an instrument of the energy that functioned it. It waited to the ground the soul, the spirit, the mind, or whatever name he might give to the fiery stuff which kept it still aflame, yet shaped it to be free. As long as it held its energy in leash it would live and glow with thought. Nor was this fiery stuff mere vitality, the mere principle of life, though the two were yoked together. It was different in quality from that which merely vegetated in the plant, and that which did nothing but feed and evacuate in the mollusk. Nay, it differed in inner character, not merely from the mind of the savage, but from that of their own highly civilized exiles. Lymanorn advance had purified it of grosser desires and passions, and made it a thing of ethereal longings and ideals. Even the body had been transformed into something more like what the soul of their far past had been, subtle, buoyant, sublimated. Still it dragged the spirit down, whenever the limits of corporeal life became too apparent. Many a long generation of the fiery self-disciplined work upon their constitutions, would it take even this marvelous people to etherealize their bodies so far as to make them fit companions of their souls? Amirlano had not the vital energy to bear up against the conditions that harassed their still-hybrid system. He had no desire to stay and see how the slow evolution of a body that would pace with the soul through infinity. Better to have release and a new and untrammeled career, even if the form he should take was unknown to him. It was the nature of all energy to change, and the higher in the scale it rose, the nimbler it became. But in order to rise, it had to be yoked for a time with a lower form, which it used as medium and leverage, leaving it as soon as it had accomplished its due development. All things tended to rise above themselves, and it was the greatest of disasters, the very reversal of nature, if ever they should fall back, as they often did. What we call death was but the unyoking of a higher energy from a lower, which it had temporarily made its comrade and medium. It was no misfortune or degradation, but a step higher in franchisement. The animate resisted this step, because one member in the lifelong partnership refused to descend into a grosser transformation again. In the human, the nobler and thought energy, the higher it strove to raise itself before the inevitable divorce from its lower medium and yoked fellow. But when the time of severance approached, it mastered the reluctance of the lower, and yearned to be set free. And little wonder that the lower resisted, for back it had to fall in the cosmic order, and begin again its slow progress upward from grade to grade, first into the clutches of myriads of microscopic disintegrators of its tissues, that would transform it into food for plant life, and then by weary stages, upwards through the vegetable and animal tissue, perchance into the sustenance of thought again. This people, I soon found, had overcome the ancient abhorrence of death, for they identified their life and personality with the higher of their energies, and not with the lower and bodily forms. They shrank it is true, from all that would lead to the divorce of the yoked energies of any animate being before its due time. Not so much because they thought this an evil for the victim as because the perpetration would implant in the doer a germ of retrogression. To be cruel, to shed blood, was the beginning of degradation of the soul. It was one of the acts that allowed the lower to take command of the higher in their system. But for Lymanor and himself to approach death became, whenever he sought to be inevitable, the keenest joy, in spite of the farewells it entailed. He knew that thereafter, should he make an effort to live, he would only clog the wheels of progress. He would only be a burden on the race instead of its helper. Amiralno never showed the slightest sign of shrinking from the dissolution of his life bonds. He was sad to leave his life long made, with whom he had done so much for the race. But he knew that she would soon follow him. It was a matter of but a few days or months. Her thought energy would mingle and commune with her again, freed from the material trammels that checked and dulled their intercourse in their terrain life. Upwards through the ether their souls would climb, ever becoming pure and swifter in their flight. But as I went about my duties, my thoughts would break away to the coming death scene and sadness would cloud them. I remembered the last farewells of my buried life, and most of all the watch over the fading light in my mother's eyes. Nothing could burn out of my memory the bitterness of at last facing the inevitable. Slowly I had been led by the physician to realize that nothing could save her, and still I hoped against hope, checking my tears lest she should see them and conjecture my alarm. Only when the lips became silent and pale did I at last admit the thought that this was death. How could I stifle my grief longer? Were we not all to each other, this mother, who had clung to me and nursed me through sorrows and misfortunes? I, her only child, who had refused to leave her for the seductions of great place and fortune. She was vanishing for ever from me, and nothing I could do would bring her back. I was caught and crushed by the iron hand of fate and stood in stony silence, paralyzed by my grief and my impotence. There was too much of the man and the stoic in my young blood to cry out, but if only I could give up my own life to bring hers back. In one of her final waking dreams she prattled and wept over me as if I were a child again, saved once more from the clutching breakers. Raising herself with a wild cry from her pillow, she held me in her arms with fierce love, only for a moment. Then the cords that bound her life break. The memory had torn her heart. There she lay, all that I cared for on earth, rigid, uncaring. If but I could have died with her there. Alas, the life in me was too puescent to yield, the nerves too rough to break. The passion came on me to hurl myself into her grave as the clods fell. It was but an insensate impulse. I made no cry or sign till I got into the lonely chamber, and there God alone knows how I survived my hurricane of grief and desolation. Nor could years ever root out the sorrow. There in Lymonora, with an abyss between me and the past, and a noble new life around me, I worked and wept. The wound had opened afresh. Was I never to commune with that loving love spirit again? There was a touch on my hand, and the magnetism of sympathy and consolation flowed through my system. It was Tyrielle. She had felt my deep grief, though then had a distance from me, and without noise or speech she had come to my side. So absorbed had I been in my past and my sorrow, that I knew not her presence, till her magnetic touch awakened me from my dream. She had realized in a moment whether my thoughts had gone and reverenced the holy past. Then, when the mood was growing despotic and paralyzing the soul, she stepped into the startled silence. I was myself again, and swept the unmanly tears away. Yet I could not drive the sadness of farewell out of my system. Here was this sage, who had so often counseled me and guided my faltering footsteps, about to vanish forever from the scene of his triumphs. Oblivion would sweep his memory and his work into the abyss. We would see him no more. No more here his grave-wise sayings, waited with the experience of centuries. All his gathered knowledge and skill would lapse. Our civilization would be the poorer. Up the steep of progress it would have to climb, weaker for the absence of this strong arm, this much exercised and full brain and heart. These were the thoughts at the root of my sadness, when I was startled out of them by my companion's voice. She had waited in reverential silence as long as I lived my filial past over again. But when I returned to my starting point, and began spending fruitless regrets and pangs over that which neither demanded nor warranted them, her thoughts broke out into loud protest. She could no longer endure such futilities, such waste of tissue, and she met my wailing reflections one by one. Amiralno was glad to leave his chrysalis stage of existence, the energy that was in him would find a freer scope, a nobler sphere, as soon as it had shed its earthly trammels. His counseling guidance would not be lost to progress. All that he was and had would still be part of what he would become. Not one thought or faculty would be left behind, and all would be spent not on the progress of a little island of a small terrestrial archipelago or its rays, but on that of the universe, if not of the cosmos. All of him that could still appeal to our lower senses would remain with us, and would immortalize his memory as far as immortality would go upon this ephemeral orb. As for his sympathy and love, they were doubtless still with us, or at least with what was in us was best and nearest the cosmic. The only thing to regret was that we could not personally feel his presence in the universe. But even this was not for idle regrets. It was mere palsy, if it did not stir us to still further mastery of our conditions. Were we not in the way to feel and know the escaped spirits of our dead? Had we not developed senses in us that were receivers of impulses from the infinite around us, impulses that had been dormant through the uncounted past? Had we not instruments that told us of energies and beings unfelt even by our new developed senses? And are we to grope in our prison-house and wail over what we had lost and could no longer see? Were we to sit in the darkness and weep and wait, hoping for the light? Such feeble conclusions from the past, such futile regrets over the dead, Lymanorn progress could not endure. There were new masteries for every generation. Before many years could pass they would get into touch with the spirits and energies that had fled. It might be by means of new instruments. It might be by new senses. Nothing but our own dullness broke the connection between our energies and theirs. What we had still to win was consciousness, if not mastery, of that finer type of matter which they now used as medium for their energy. It was only the lifting of another of the myriad veils that hung before our senses, dulling their perceptions. This was no more than what they had done a thousand times already. A death was a stimulus to joy and new effort. It taught us the limits of our knowledge and our power, and limits known were limits soon to be over-past. Her bright activity in banter surprised me into laughter at my own folly and obtuseness. Scarcely had I reached this consummation before I knew that there was gladness in the air of the island. How could I have failed to notice the jubilant strains that were fitfully wafted across my hearing, unless through my dull absorption in my own feelings? I felt thankful to Thairiel that I had been drawn out of my isolation, which seemed to me now little less than disloyalty to the race that had done so much for me. I wondered what could be the occasion of all this exultation that I was conscious of. Peon after Peon rose from every part of the island, and, as the moments passed, the many sounding music seemed together towards one center. The radius lessened, and adjacent masses of melody fused together. Near and near they came, evermore coalescing and lessening in number. Then the jubilance melted into grave and massive harmony, and I recognized some of the world music I had heard from the Cosmophone. The sense of the universe is creating and dissolving spring into my mind. It was the diapason of creation that was ringing through the island. Loud, then low, the cosmic symphony swept the atmosphere like a tempest. I knew that some far-reaching event or movement was occurring amongst this people. I turned to my comrade to confirm and define my conjectures, but she was gone. Away on the horizon I could see the rapid beat of her wings. I followed as swiftly as I could, and as I rose in the air, I saw company after company soaring like convoys of birds towards a high-isolated plateau that stretched far up La Meroma and beatled Glyph-like over the sea. I had often used it as a flight platform once I could spring into the air, and had long known it by the name of Dumalona. I had never thought over the meaning of the word, but now it flashed upon me that it meant the hill of farewells. Thence messengers who were embarking on difficult and more important expeditions set out. The elders of the people and the families of the couriers came here to give them their love and benchant, in order to make them feel, as they journeyed, that the sympathy of their home went with them like the fire from the hearth. I had observed that in these farewells the simple-hearted people made little outward sign of the depth of their emotions. Only the magnetic look out of the eyes would have told a stranger what benignity lay underneath. Nor was it merely to show how sympathetic they were that they thus accompanied their foreign couriers to the outskirts of the island. It was chiefly to give them each his contribution of magnetism to lessen their burden on their far journey, to make them feel how much the spirit of the community went with them. Not one of them would ever allow himself to indulge in so idle an evidence of emotion as tears. There was in this people a vein of stoicism. I thought they seemed to repress all mere symbols of feeling. A European would have called their farewells dull and emotionless, if not stony-hearted. There was no kissing or embracing. There was not even the shaking of hands or bowing of heads. Without physical contact their spirits could work upon each other with a power that in other civilizations would have been called witchcraft. Through their furloughs, through their eyes, rate forth a keen soul-stirring magnetism, and each assisted the other in preventing the approach of the old wasteful manifestations of sorrow or despondency. Lamentation was a thing of the far, almost prehistoric past. A sob or sigh or even complaint they knew too well from their physiological knowledge to be mere emotional extravagance, a waste of energy or the tissue, all of which was needed for the strenuous endeavor towards a higher plane. So it was that they seemed to me stoical in positions where the men and women I had known in my youth would burst into weeping and wailing or cries and gestures of affection. But in these scenes of farewell there was needed little energy of repression. The real struggle had occurred many generations before in their history. They had at once had a most elaborate symbolism not merely of feelings, but of almost every human thought and spiritual attitude. But when the great national repentance was leading to the series of exilings that ultimately purified the race, they became uneasy about this vast system of symbolism. It covered their whole existence from birth to death, from toothache to the salvation of the soul, and seemed to be nature her very self. They had long known it to be the nesting place of all hypocrisies and untruth. Under it's shelter mean things and falsidity and even grossness and cruelty could flourish fearless of harm. Everything could masquerade in the guise of anything else it pleased. Of course there were painful revelations and scandals at times, but they were soon hushed up. The system was too much the interest of all who had power or reputation or prosperity, the best of what was then life, to let it get into disrepute or into risk of revolution or reform. There were various professions which were deeply involved in the retention of it, and they were recruited chiefly from the highest social classes. The lawyers batted on the ambiguity of the symbols, whether expressed in word or deed, the doctors would have lost half their hysterical and hypochondriac patience if it had been abolished. Without it the life and pretensions of the military during the time of peace would have been a farce and a mockery, and the occupation of the priests would have vanished altogether. Ceremony seemed the very lifeblood of an aristocratic state, and especially of its army and its church. It kept the mere workers and plotters at a respectful distance, it fenced off criticism and supplied topics for the tongue of fame. To abolish ceremony would have been to strike at the heart of all existing institutions.