THOUGH this Manora seemed to me so solemn and almost sacramental in its spirit, there was no withdrawal of any of the families from the duties of their daily life. They were as eager for the advance of their special sciences as they had ever been. Nay, the progress seemed to me more and more rapid. The faculties were whetted to their utmost keenness; their energies were buoyant and free. I had expected at this religious review of the whole of their life to find a relaxation of their intellectual temper, a languor in their wills, such as I had often noted in periods of great religious outburst in the West. I had been accustomed to look for an aloofness from the common pursuits of life and a prostration before the great ideals of faith, whenever a wave of worshipful enthusiasm broke over any community in Europe.
This people would have thought a religion that thus blanched common life of its interests and enthusiasms not merely useless but mischievous. Prostration before the infinities and eternities was the last attitude they would encourage; for they considered it blasphemy against the spirit of the cosmos. If the Manora had in any way withdrawn their energies from their forward march, they would have abolished it. Progress was religion, or the fulfilment of the irrepressible yearning of all things to rise in the cosmic scale of being, and that anything religious should check or obstruct advance was to them the grossest contradiction in terms. Religion was in Limanora the essence of practical life, or rather practical life was the highest religion.
Though the review was an intense pleasure to the whole nation, throwing the thought as it did farther and farther into the future, none neglected for a moment the severe physical labour that was their daily portion in the centre of force. None felt their spirits relax in their eagerness to perform the work of their life. On the contrary, the new religious enthusiasm added a zest to all that they had to do.
To no families did so many or so urgent demands come as to those of the Leomo; for the great mountain had been more than ordinarily perturbed. In spite of numerous new lava-wells, the crust of the whole island had been shaken by frequent earthquakes, and out of the mouth of the crater had stormed far pennons of dust and ashes, showing that something unusual was occurring in the depths below. Then had come a sudden and ominous lull during the latter half of the Manora; the earth had grown quiescent and the whole summit of Limanora stood vivid and clear in the azure.
The Leomo were not deceived by this sudden cessation of subterranean activity. It meant new issues for the volcanic energy amid the antarctic snows, and new dangers from the possible intrusion of southern waters. Most members of the families were needed in the island itself for the investigation of the new phenomena and the sinking of lava-wells, and only two could be spared for an inspection of the volcanoes of their old home. Thyriel and I were chosen to make the expedition. For we had lately been accorded the high privilege of marriage, and comradeship in danger was the usual and natural welder of the new bonds. As soon as the review was over we had to set forth on our venture, and we were instructed to return with all the speed we could manage.
We did not need such instructions; our own quickened enthusiasms were incentive enough. We knew that the reports by the idrovamolan of events occurring so far to the south could not be wholly trusted; for these regions were too often enveloped in mist or blinding snow-storm, and it was difficult to float the observer in the teeth of their furious winds and impossible to send the telepathic line of light to such a distance. Even if electric, aural, and visual records had been gathered by means of the machine-reporters, they would not have been minute enough for the purposes of the Leomo. There was generally needed therefore a personal inspection of the lands away to the south, whenever there were unusual perturbations in the great mountain and its precincts.
To have been selected for this difficult duty was honour so great as to stir us to unwonted effort. A few hours after the duty had been assigned us we had everything on board our faleena, and from the hill of farewells we had started, full of eagerness to do our best for our people. We were too happy in our new comradeship and in our extraordinary task to allow any sense of separation or fear of disaster to cloud our thoughts. So anxious were we to be on our way that we scarcely looked back at our companions and guardians, as they stood watching our flight after giving us of their magnetism.
Nothing occurred to make the voyage south especially memorable. We did notice far below us in the night one or two dark masses that were not identifiable with anything in our maps. But we set them down as great icebergs, borne out of their usual course; and the cap they seemed to bear we took for a turban of mist round their heads. From our later observation of the southern lands, we afterwards judged that they were temporary volcanic islands thrown up on the line of shallow water by the renewed violence of the fires below.
A great storm met us as we approached the ice-cliffs of the Antarctic; nothing could be seen for the drift of snow and hail through the air, and we were forced to rise high into the atmosphere beyond the region of winds and tempests and clouds. For days we could see no break in the massed blackness below us. We chafed at the delay but knew that it was inevitable; for even if we could have landed in safety, we should have been able to see nothing for the thickness of the driving snow-storm, and we would assuredly have imperilled our faleena in attempting to come to earth in the baffling winds.
At last we felt the magnetism of the upper atmosphere lessen in force and caprice, and we knew that the disturbances below would gradually vanish. The sun seemed to gather power, and we saw the cloud-floor rend like an ice-sheet on flooding waters. The fifth morning broke brilliant and clear. There lay the heaving surface of the ocean blue as the sky, and away to the south gleamed on the horizon the knife-edge of far-stretching ice. But there was something new and strange beyond it. Thick smoke trailed heavily above it, and a dozen new points of light made it lurid.
We had drifted far to the north, and anxiously we turned the prow of our airship towards the old home of the race. We seemed to wing our way with inordinate slowness, so eager were our spirits to know the new phenomena and to carry the report back to Limanora. Every league nearer made us more certain that some great disturbance had occurred in the crust of the earth. The sea was covered with the débris of a world of ice. Huge icebergs swam lazily breasting the swell, or clashed against each other in splintering collision; in some of them we could see the dark motes that marked them as portions of the vast graveyard we had once visited. Closer still to them we could see many of the long-buried bodies emerging from their tombs of frost, like Lazaruses still bound in their grave-clothes. It was a strange sight, this phantom-like resurrection at the touch of sunlight.
Over the unguided procession of icy funeral-barges, bearing their century-sheeted dead to burial in the ocean, we hurriedly winged to land. There were still more striking sights in store for us. The appearance of the cliffs and mountains had been completely changed. It looked, as we approached, as if what had formerly been a great plateau had been ridged and furrowed by some titanic plough; and where a dozen smoke-vents had once borne witness to the living fires beneath, hundreds belched forth ashes or sent a red tongue of molten lava oozing and licking down their slopes.
We had to change our landing-place far to the west; for dozens of miles had been added to the eruptive area and the cliffs where we used to land were scarred by explosion or were tottering before the assaults of the billows. The storm that we had encountered had evidently been the companion, if not the result, of this vast upheaval and at the same time had hidden from us, as we hovered above the clouds, the titanic pyrotechny.
We flew along the cliff-line, till we reached a region that seemed untouched by the orgasm of the earth. Our airship we piloted into a cleft or valley which, we thought, could protect it from any showers of ashes or torrents of lava that might approach. But to guard against possible disaster, we adjusted our wings and took with us as much of the minute stores of sustenance as we could carry in our garments. We securely fastened down the faleena, so that no storm might bear it away; and then we rose into the air on our wings above the smoke and steam that hung over this region.
It was with great difficulty and some danger that we investigated the state of the land where the lava-wells had been sunk. For the vents spat out great showers of dust and ashes intermittently, and the pall of smoke brushed this way and that as the light breeze rose and fell. By dint of care and watchfulness we managed to see most of the ridge-side that abutted on the ocean. Its whole appearance had been changed. There was not a sign of our old lava-wells. The side of one hill had been blown away, and a torrent of melted snow and ice raced down the ravine. Vents had been broken out where there had been glacier or precipice or rocky peak. But as yet none of the vents were low enough to let the sea break over their lips. The worst of all had not yet occurred.
We could not finish our investigation in the first day. So we lay down in our faleena to sleep, as the brief darkness approached. We were well content with our day’s work; and we would have slept easily and well but for the tremors in the earth beneath us. Its very foundations seemed at times to shake and threaten convulsion. Once we thought of taking to the air again for safety, so billow-like were the movements that tossed us as we lay.
However, morning broke without catastrophe, and we were soon busy at our work of inspection. We flew to the other side of the range of mountains in order to note how the shores of the inland sea had borne the effects of the commotion in the crust of the earth. At first we seemed to see no change, but when we had left our faleena and followed the old line of cliffs, the magnitude of the disturbance impressed us. New precipices stood beetling over the still waters, where we remembered to have seen low shelving bays. We searched for the old sections in which we had seen the stratification of civilised abode; but the strange palimpsest of prehistoric history, a dozen times rewritten by the toil and hope of man, had been again obliterated by the finger of fire. A tongue of lava only just cool had licked out the record of the dead ages. A tawny glacis of rock confronted us instead of the panorama of thousands of years.
Everywhere we flew were marks of the recent volcanic work; and not merely creative, but destructive. Still farther off we found vast subsidences which had suddenly unveiled the secrets of many geological epochs. Some of them had been titanic in the abruptness and extent of their work; but the great ice-planes and ice-harrows had been already smoothing and rounding or levelling the serrated or sharp edges. Only in one new cliff did we see a repetition of the now hidden record. A bold hill had been cut through as by a sword and here had evidently been built and overwhelmed village after village; we could discern here and there traces of their employments suddenly abandoned, their looms and ploughs and anvils embalmed in rock; and once or twice the forms of the workers, tragically surprised at their work by the showers of ashes, showed empty and void, the living tissues having fallen to dust leaving only the shell, like the tunnel of a huge worm in the petrified débris. We lingered over this open volume of human history longer than we would have done had we been older and wiser, so deeply did it touch the fountains of romance, and the dimmer twilight of the brief antarctic night overtook us before our task was done.
When we awoke at dawn, we resumed our investigations, only to find countless signs of renewed subterranean energy. We hurried to the various points of danger and discovered only too clearly that the first storm would send the waters of the ocean breaching into many new volcanic vents. We could have no hesitance as to the conclusion to be drawn and the next steps to take. It would be impossible for us, unprovided as we were with instruments and engines, to guard against the threatening catastrophe. The best we could do would be to return with all swiftness to Limanora and warn the elders of our family. Perchance we should be able to anticipate the approach of any tempest; and if temporary measures were taken, the coming winter might stop the gaping mouths of ruin with her downward-creeping glaciers.
We hastened back to the slope on which we had left our faleena. Even at a distance, as we swept down from aloft, we began to be troubled at the changes in the landscape. Where there had been a great ice-cap crowning a precipitous ridge, there was a gaping chasm; rock and incrustation had been together blown to atoms. A new smoking cone was brushing the azure with its cloud of dust; and, as we descended, we found its streams of lava still licking and hissing their way through the snow and ice that clothed its feet.
We recognised the features of the locality with difficulty, and it was long before we fixed the valley in which we had left our airship. Still we could see no trace of our trusty faleena; it had vanished. After long search we came to the conclusion that it had been swept on by a billow of molten rock and overwhelmed, and the realisation of the calamity cast me despairing to the ground.
How different it was with Thyriel, I perceived, as soon as my dismay allowed me to rouse my consciousness from its palsy. She was exploring the edges of the tongue of fire; and up the side of the opposing hill she found a section of our flight-car unmelted by the heat, broken off by a bold jut of rock and left scarred by the fire and twisted by the force of the sea of lava, yet recognisable in its outlines. Happily it was the part that contained our store of sustenance and all our equipments for a long wing-voyage, spare chest-and-shoulder engines and the apparatus necessary for supplying them with electricity from the air.
We did not encumber ourselves with more than we thought would be essential for the long air-journey back to Riallaro. The minute pellets of sustenance were easily disposed of. But it puzzled us to know what to do with the additional apparatus for so protracted a voyage. My powers of flight were still so crude and undeveloped and my locomotion through the air so clumsy and slow that Thyriel had to carry both hers and mine. I was greatly perturbed over the possible result of so dangerous a venture. But it had to be undertaken, and she had buoyancy and exhilaration enough for both. My sinking heart felt the influence of her magnetism, and I gained confidence after we set out.
The first half of our voyage was marked by singular good fortune. The breeze went with us every day, and at night, or when the muscles of my legs and arms grew numb from fatigue, we sighted an iceberg and rested on it; though it heaved and rocked and on occasion threatened submersion, our minds were at rest, for we had our wings always attached and everything in readiness to sweep upwards from our perch.
The difficulty came when we passed beyond the Antarctic Ocean, and voyaged high above that heaving trackless desert of water which lies between the region of icebergs and the first ring of islets that stipple the tropical seas. How were we to find resting-places at night or during the day, when my wing-achievements grew lame and tardy? Even Thyriel’s heart sank, as she thought of the hundreds of leagues we had to traverse unbroken by any sign of land.
At first she kept along the immemorial line of bird-travel from the south on the chance of finding here and there some spot of land thrown up by the growing disturbances beneath the sea. For some days we were fortunate enough to find a nightly perching-place above the billows upon the temporary vents of the submarine fires, dangerous it is true, yet with care and watching safe. Then we came upon a zone of calm water, so strangely still and free from the action of wind and current that the albatrosses basked moveless upon it. Here Thyriel bound our wings together and made a raft, on which we floated as we slept.
But that was only for two revolutions of the earth and was the prelude to a tornado from the north-east, a wind so unusual in those latitudes that the Limanorans never take it into the calculations of their voyages through the air. Just when we were within three days’ wing-journey of our home the tempest began and brought us almost to a standstill. We tried to battle against it but our efforts were vain. Then we rose, according to Limanoran custom, into the higher atmosphere where is usually found perfect calm and perfect freedom from cloud and storm, but the fury of the disturbance seemed to be miles deep. The upper air was as thick and turbulent as the lower.
Our troubles culminated in disaster to my wing-appendages. I was never expert in their management, but in the baffling storm I grew helpless and in my despair let them beat almost unguided. The result was irreparable injury to the left wing and such an obstruction to the movement of the right as made it unmanageable. I felt my heart sink; for I saw that I must soon fall into the ocean below and be dashed to pieces or drowned.
Thyriel looked down and saw my peril. In a flash of thought she abandoned all she carried except her chest-and-shoulder engines, and, swooping down towards me, caught me as I fell. An upward sweep of the wind aided her in her efforts, and she buoyed me up till I had recovered energy and heart. Then she told me what she meant to do. For a time I would not be persuaded and prayed that I might be abandoned to my fate, but she would not hear of such a thing. By the force of her will I soon gave way and nestled, as I had often done when learning to fly, in the hollow between her wings.
Before the storm she let herself go; and I could feel we were moving almost as swiftly as if we had been in our own faleena. It was useless for her, she showed me, to fight against the wind, especially after she had thrown away the apparatus for quickly renewing the power of her engines. After a time I saw how much she laboured under her burden, and I sent promptly into the gulf beneath all that I had carried, my broken wings, my engines, and my stores of sustenance. I felt that her spirit protested; but she said nothing, and I was relieved to feel that we were rising instead of falling. She grew more buoyant and was even able to spare magnetism enough to put heart into me.
The course she had taken so promptly was the only one that could have saved both of us. She might have weathered the storm alone, and then found her way back to Limanora. But as it was she knew that the tempest would bear us, if she could keep us both high above the earth, right across the long narrow cloud of New Zealand.
She felt by her bodily magnetism that we were approaching it, and while it was still daylight we came within reach of it. She, seeing that we were evidently coasting its southern shores, but too far off to make them with her exhausted powers, grew afraid that we would be blown far off to the south again and thus miss our resting-place; for we could see the coasts round northwards. Happily at this juncture the wind suddenly veered round to the south-west, and we were swept before it in the twilight into a deep fiord. Our hearts were glad to feel that soon we should touch the earth and rest. I was tempestuously elated; for I felt, by the beat of her heart and the quick short breaths she drew, that she was near the end of her powers.
We were close to a precipice and I was eagerly preparing to leap from her back, when she seemed suddenly to collapse. I fell through the air, and then knew no more till I awakened in your hut. What became of Thyriel puzzled me for long. But I am persuaded that after seeing me drawn by you safely to land she went off before the favouring wind towards Limanora for help. That she has been so long troubles my thoughts deeply at times. But I believe that she will return for me, if only I rest here long enough. I dare not leave the place long, lest she should come in my absence. And the solitude and your gentle silence soothe me in my weary meditation.
EPILOGUE
WE felt guiltily conscious, as he came to this close of his narrative. But we had not the heart to hint what we thought might have become of her.
Almost three years had passed before his narrative reached the point of contact with our lives. He now became restless and jaded and flitted in and out amongst us like a ghost. For days he vanished in the bush, and again and again we thought he had finally disappeared. But he ever returned, more restless and yet more gentle.
We could not bear to see his agony and yearning, and at last proposed that we should hire or purchase a small steamer, and under his guidance make for Riallaro. He was long reluctant, but after months of hope deferred resigned himself to the enterprise.
Trowm and I made for the nearest port and brought our purchase round to our fiord, well-provisioned and equipped for a tropical voyage. Somm was left by our huts and our mine to guard our interests, but still more to watch for the advent of any messenger from the strange land within the circle of mist.
The rest of us set out with our guest in search of his home. Nothing happened to our expedition beyond the usual mishaps of tropical seas. A tornado made us take refuge within an uninhabited atoll; in its harbour our craft was safe enough, but it took all our powers to hold on to the scanty herbage that clung to the reef and prevent our being blown into the ocean beyond. Once or twice we had an awkward incident with sharks, and once we came too close to an island whose shore swarmed with threatening savages. They sprang into their canoes and made for us, but our steam enabled us to outdistance them with ease.
Our stranger knew the exact latitude and longitude of Riallaro. He could point out its place on a map with a confidence that made us feel we were about to enter with him into the mysterious archipelago. We sailed straight for the western side of the ring of mist, but never did we encounter any such feature as he had described to us. Once or twice we thought we saw an extended haze on the horizon and made for it; but it vanished as we approached; it was only the mirage of the ocean. Weeks and weeks we steamed around and over the region, but not a trace of the great archipelago or its nebulous fence did we find.
Even our guide at last fell into silent bewilderment. He could not believe that it had all disappeared like a dream; unless, as we fancied, the subterranean forces had blown it into space. Nor could he mistrust his senses or his knowledge. What to think of it he did not venture to decide. He lay in stupor and silence for days.
But we knew that within a few weeks began the season of hurricanes; and we determined to make back for our shelter in the southern fiord. He reluctantly consented to our persuasion, after making us promise that we should return again to search for his lost paradise. In the meantime he would be able to study the charts of the region, and define the knowledge of it more exactly. He knew by heart its relations to the sun and the stars; and with study he could tell the very place where to follow our search. As it was, he had doubtless made some mistake; and he would rectify it in the interval of rest.
Without mishap or obstructive weather we got back into the shadow of our mountains; and one day of brilliant sunshine we sailed into the fiord. Somm was on the shore to welcome us. He had no news to give. No one had been near the place since we had left. But he had had to make into a neighbouring sound in order to supply his empty larder, and as the wind seemed to favour his trip, he had brought the masts and sails of our boat out of our cave.
Our guest paced up to our hut as in a dream, seeming to hear and see nothing around him. We let him find his way alone, whilst we beached and dismantled our little steamer.
In our bustle of work we had forgotten him. Suddenly a strange, scarcely human cry awakened our attention. We rushed up the steep pathway and found him lying in trance by the mouth of the cave, stretched upon the wings that we had cast into our lumber-hole when we rescued him from the water. Somm had had to turn them out to get at the sails and cordage of the boat, and had forgotten to return them to their place. They were cobwebbed and covered with lichen and mould, yet the transparency of them in spots gathered the rays of the sun upon the herbage underneath.
We raised him from his resting-place and carried him into our spare hut. There we tried to bring him back to consciousness, but our efforts were vain. There was life in him, we were certain; yet there was scarcely a sign of it in movement or breath, only a fragment of the wings held to the mouth showed a trace of moisture. So we left him for the night, remembering that it was long before he recovered from the first trance in which we had found him. We wrapped him round with warm clothing, and placing him comfortably on a soft bed of fern put food and drink near him, so that, if he wakened, he should know we had thought of him and were near.
The next morning at daybreak I rose, and the incident of the previous evening rushed into my mind. I made for the hut, expecting to find him recovered and asleep, but I found no human being there. The wrappings had fallen on either side of the fern-lair. The bowls of meat and drink were almost empty; but there were evident marks of the claws and beaks of birds in them.
We searched for him in the bush for days, but we never found track of him. The only sign of his movements was that the wings were gone. Whether he had adjusted them to his body and flown into the air or buried them in the sea we could not discover. There clings to our thoughts the fancy that he faded away into the azure under the blow of assurance that Thyriel was gone for ever. We kept our eyes on the alert for years after, as we went prospecting through the forest; and slowly the thought lurking in our minds passed into assured belief that his ethereal texture had melted into the air at death, that the earth received none of his material atoms when his energy fled from its surface.
It is only now, when we are sure that he has gone from our orb, that we venture on giving his story to the rest of mankind. We know no better memorial to him, and no better form for our gratitude than to let others know what he gave us, to let others feel what has passed into our own lives as an imperishable memory.
