Urania Part 11

And the elder added,--

"Let your compatriots alone. They will never be any more intelligent or less blind than they are now. They have been there eighty thousand years already, and you yourself acknowledge that they are not yet capable of thinking. It is really very absurd of you to look at the Earth with such sorrowful eyes. It is too foolish."

Dear reader, have you not, in your journey through the world, sometimes met men who were puffed up with imperturbable pride, and who thought themselves sincerely and unquestionably above all the rest of the world?

When these proud personages find themselves face to face with anything superior, they are instantly hostile to it, they cannot endure it. Very well. In the preceding dithyramb (of which you have had but a very poor translation), I felt myself greatly superior to earthly humanity, since I felt pity for it, and invoked for it better days. But when these two inhabitants of Mars pitied me, and I thought I discovered in them a cold superiority to myself, I was for a moment like these foolish, proud people. My blood gave one bound, and, restraining myself by a remnant of French politeness, I opened my mouth to say,--

"After all, gentlemen, the inhabitants of the Earth are not as stupid as you appear to think, but are worth perhaps more than you."

Unfortunately they did not give me time to begin my sentence, inasmuch as they had understood it all while it was being formed by the vibration of the substance of the brain.

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"Permit me to remark at once," said the younger, "that your planet is an absolute failure, in consequence of an occurrence which happened about ten million years ago. It was at the time of the primary period of the earthly genesis. There were plants already, and very fine plants too; the first animals were beginning to appear in the depths of the sea and along the sh.o.r.es,--mollusks that were headless, deaf, mute, and without s.e.x. You know that respiration is all a tree requires for its entire nourishment, and that your most robust oaks, your most gigantic cedars, have never eaten anything, and that that has not prevented their growth.

They are nourished solely by respiration. Misfortune, Fatality, had willed that a drop of water thicker than the surrounding medium should pa.s.s through one of the mollusks. Perhaps he liked it. That was the first digestive tube, which was to exert so baleful an effect on the entire animal kingdom, and later on mankind itself. The first murderer was the mollusk who ate. Here we do not eat, have never eaten, and never shall eat. Creation is developing itself gradually, peacefully, and n.o.bly, as it began. Organisms are nourished; or, to express it differently, renew their molecules by a simple respiration, like your terrestrial trees, each leaf of which is a little stomach. In your precious country you can live a single day only on condition of killing.

With you, the law of life is the law of death. Here, the idea of killing even a bird has never occurred to any one.

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"You are all more or less butchers. Your hands are stained with blood, your stomachs are gorged with food. How can you expect to have wholesome, pure, elevated ideas,--I will even say (excuse my frankness) clean ideas,--with such coa.r.s.e organisms? What souls could live in such bodies? Reflect a moment, and do not soothe yourself any more with blind illusions, too ideal for such a world."

"What!" I cried, interrupting him, "do you deny us the possibility of having clean ideas? Do you take human beings for animals? Have Homer, Plato, Phidias, Seneca, Virgil, Dante, Columbus, Bacon, Galileo, Pascal, Leonardo, Raphael, Mozart, Beethoven, never had lofty aspirations? You think our bodies coa.r.s.e and repulsive; if you had seen Helen, Phryne, Aspasia, Sappho, Cleopatra, Lucretia Borgia, Agnes Sorel, Diane de Poitiers, Marguerite de Valois, Borghese, Talien, Recamier, Georges, and their charming rivals, you would perhaps think differently. Ah, my dear Martial, let me in my turn regret that you know the Earth only from afar."

"You are mistaken there; I lived in that world for fifty years. That was enough for me, and I a.s.sure you I would not return to it again.

Everything is a failure there, even--what seems most delightful to you.

Do you imagine that in all the earths of heaven the flowers produce the fruits of the same sorts? Would not that be a little cruel? As for me, I like primroses and rosebuds."

"Well, but still," I answered, "notwithstanding all that, there have been great minds on the Earth, and creatures really worthy of admiration. May we not comfort ourselves with the hope that physical and moral beauty will go on perfecting themselves more and more as they have done hitherto, and that intelligence will enlighten itself progressively? We do not spend all our time eating. Men will surely end, in spite of their material labors, by giving up a few hours every day to the development of their understanding. Then probably they will no longer continue to manufacture little G.o.ds in their own image; and perhaps also they will abolish their childish boundaries, so that harmony and fraternity may reign."

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"No, my friend, for if they wished it, they could do so now; but they are very careful not to. Terrestrial man is a little animal who on the one hand feels no need of thinking, not even having independence of soul, and who on the other likes to fight, and squarely establishes right by might. Such is his good pleasure, and such is his nature. You will never make peaches grow on a thorn-bush. Remember that the most exquisite beauties, to whom you alluded just now, are but coa.r.s.e monsters compared to the aerial women of Mars, who live on our spring air, the perfume of our flowers, and are so captivating in the very quivering of their wings, in the ideal kiss of a mouth which has never eaten, that if Dante's Beatrice had been of such a nature, the immortal Florentine would never have been able to write two of the parts of his 'Divine Comedy;' he would have begun with Paradise, and could never have left it. Reflect that our youths have as much innate science as Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Kepler, Newton, Laplace, and Darwin after all their laborious studies; our twelve senses put us in direct communication with the universe; we feel from here Jupiter's attraction as he pa.s.ses, a hundred million leagues away. We see the rings of Saturn with the naked eye, we detect the coming of a comet, and our body is impregnated with the solar electricity which puts all Nature in vibration. Here there has never been either religious fanaticism or executioners, or martyrs or international divisions or wars, but from the first, humanity, naturally peaceful, and freed from all material needs, has lived independent in body and mind, in a constant intellectual activity, raising itself unhindered to the knowledge of the truth. But come over here."

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I walked a few steps on the mountain-top with my new acquaintances, and coming in sight of the other slope, I saw mult.i.tudes of different colored lights flitting about in the air. It was the inhabitants, who, when they desire it, become luminous at night. Aerial cars, apparently formed of phosph.o.r.escent flowers, were carrying orchestras and choruses; one of them pa.s.sed us, and we took our places in it, in the midst of a cloud of perfumes. The sensations which I experienced were singularly unlike any which I had ever felt on the Earth, and this first night on Mars pa.s.sed like a rapid dream; for the dawn found me still in the aerial car conversing with my entertainers, their friends, and their indescribably lovely companions. What a panorama with the rising sun!

Flowers, fruits, perfumes, fairy-like palaces rose on the islands with their orange vegetation; the waters stretched themselves out like limpid mirrors, and joyous aerial couples were whirling down to these enchanting sh.o.r.es. There, all material work is done by machines, and directed by a few perfected races of animals whose intelligence is very nearly of the same order as that of mankind on the Earth. The inhabitants live only for and by the mind; their nervous system has reached such a degree of development that each one of these beings, at once very delicate and very strong, seems an electric battery, and their most sensual impressions, felt more by their souls than their bodies, surpa.s.s a hundredfold all those that our five terrestrial senses together could ever offer us. A kind of summer palace illuminated by the rays of the rising Sun opened beneath our aerial gondola. My neighbor, whose wings were fluttering with impatience, placed her delicate foot upon a tuft of flowers which rose between two jets of perfume. "Will you return to the Earth?" she asked, holding out her arms to me.

"Never," I cried, springing towards her.

But at that moment I found myself alone near the wood on the slope of the hill, at whose feet the Seine was winding with undulating curves.

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"_Never_," I repeated, trying to grasp the sweet, vanished dream once more. Where had I been? It was beautiful. The Sun had just set, and the planet Mars, then very brilliant, was already s.h.i.+ning in the sky. "Ah!"

I said, as a fugitive beam reached me, "I have been there!" Drawn by the same attraction, the two neighboring planets are looking at each other through transparent s.p.a.ce. May we not catch a first glimpse of the eternal journey from this celestial fraternity? The Earth is no longer alone in the universe. The panoramas of the infinite are beginning to open themselves out. Whether we live here or near by, we are not the citizens of a country or of a world, but are in very truth the _Citizens of Heaven_!

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III.

THE PLANET MARS.

Had I been the plaything of a dream?

Had my spirit really been transported to the planet Mars, or had I been the dupe of a purely imaginary illusion?

The feeling of reality had been so strong, so intense, and the things I had seen agreed so perfectly with the scientific notions which we already possess in regard to the physical nature of the Martial world, that I could not entertain a doubt on the subject, although amazed at that ecstatic trip, and asking myself a thousand questions, each one contradicting the other.

Spero's absence in all that vision puzzled me a little. I still felt so closely attached to his dear memory that it seemed to me as if I should have been able to detect his presence, to fly directly to him, see him, speak to him, hear him. But was not the man hypnotized at Nancy the toy of his own imagination, or of mine, or of the experimenter's? On the other hand, even admitting that my two friends had been reincarnated upon that neighboring planet, I reflected that beings might easily not meet one another in going about the same city, and in a world the chances were infinitely less. And yet surely it was not the doctrine of chances which should be invoked in this case; for such a feeling of attraction as that which had united us ought to increase the probability of our meeting, and throw an element into the scale which should outweigh all the rest.

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Talking thus with myself, I went back to my observatory at Juvisy, where I had been preparing some electric batteries for an optical experiment with the tower of Montlhery. When I had satisfied myself that everything was in readiness, I left the task of making the signals agreed upon, between ten and eleven o'clock, to my a.s.sistant, and went to the old tower, where I installed myself an hour later. The night had come. From the top of the old donjon the horizon is perfectly circular, entirely free in all its circ.u.mference, which extended on a radius of twenty to twenty-five kilometres all around this central point. A third post of observation, situated in Paris, was in communication with us. The object of the experiment was to find out whether the rays of different colors of the luminous spectrum all travel with the same speed,--300,000 kilometres a second. The result was affirmative.

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The experiments were ended at about eleven o'clock, the starry night was marvellous, and the moon was beginning to rise. As soon as I had put the apparatus under cover inside the tower, I went to the upper platform again, to look at the broad landscape lighted by the first rays of the waxing moon. The atmosphere was calm, mild, almost warm.

But my foot was still on the last step when I stopped, terror-stricken, uttering a cry which seemed to die away in my throat. Spero, yes, Spero himself, was there, before me, seated on the parapet! I threw up my arms, and felt as if I were going to faint; but he said in his gentle voice, which I knew so well,--

"Do I frighten you?"

I had not strength enough to reply or to advance, and still I dared to look at my friend, who was smiling at me. His dear face, lighted by the moonlight, was just as I had seen it when he left Paris for Christiania,--young, pleasant, and thoughtful, with a very animated look. I left the stairs, and felt a strong desire to rush to him and embrace him; but I dared not, and stood looking at him.

When I had recovered my senses I cried, "Spero, it is you!"

"I was there during your experiments," he replied, "and it was I who inspired you with the idea of comparing the intense violet with the intense red, for the speed of the luminous waves; only I was invisible, like the ultra-violet rays."

"Can it really be so? Let me look at you and feel you."

I pa.s.sed my hands over his face and body, through his hair, and had precisely the same impression as if he had been a living being. My reason refused to admit the testimony of my eyes and hands and ears, yet I could not doubt that it was really he. There could not be such a resemblance. And then, too, my doubts would have disappeared at his first words, for he at once added,--

"My body is at this moment sleeping in Mars."

"So," I said, "you still exist, you are living now, and you know at last the answer to the great problem that so distressed you? And Iclea?"

"We will have a long talk," he answered; "I have many things to tell you."

I sat down beside him on the edge of the wide parapet which rises above the old tower, and this is what I heard.