Urania Part 12

Shortly after the accident at Lake Tyrifiorden he had felt like a man who awakes from a long and heavy sleep. He was alone in midnight darkness on the border of a lake; he knew that he was living, but could neither see nor feel himself. The air did not affect him; he was not only light, but imponderable. Apparently, what remained of him was solely his thinking faculty. His first idea on trying to remember was that he had awakened from his fall by the Norwegian lake; but when the day broke he saw that he was in another world. The two moons revolving rapidly in the sky in opposite directions made him surmise that he was upon our neighbor, the planet Mars, and other evidences soon proved that he was correct.

He lived there for a while in the spirit state, and recognized there the presence of a very beautiful humanity, in which the feminine s.e.x reigns supreme, from an acknowledged superiority over the masculine s.e.x. These organisms are light and delicate, their density of body very slight, their weight slighter still. On the surface of this world material force plays but a secondary part in nature; delicacy of sensation decides everything. There is a large number of animal species, and several human races. In all these species and races the feminine s.e.x is stronger and handsomer (the strength consisting in the superiority of sensation) than the masculine s.e.x, and it is she who rules the world.

His great desire to know the life before him induced him not to remain long as an onlooker in the spirit state, but to come to life again under a corporeal form, and, knowing the organic condition of this planet, in a feminine form.

Among the terrestrial souls floating about in the atmosphere of Mars he had already met Iclea's (for souls feel each other), who had followed him, guided by a constant attraction. She on her part had felt inclined towards a masculine incarnation. Thus they were reunited, in one of the most privileged countries in that world, neighbors and predestined to meet again in life, to share the same emotions, the same thoughts, the same works; thus, although the memory of their earthly life remained veiled and as if effaced by the new transformation, yet a vague feeling of spiritual relationship and an immediate sympathetic attachment had reunited them as soon as they saw each other. Their psychic superiority, the nature of their habitual thoughts, their condition of mind, accustomed to seek ends and causes, had given them both a kind of inward clairvoyance which freed them from the general ignorance of the living.

They had fallen in love with each other so suddenly, they had yielded so pa.s.sively to the magnetic influence of the thunder-clap of their meeting, that they soon formed but a single being, united as at the time of their earthly separation. They remembered that they had met before, and were sure that it must have been on the Earth,--that neighboring planet which shines in the evening so brilliantly in the sky of Mars; and sometimes, in their solitary flights over the little hills peopled with aerial plants, they contemplated the "evening star," trying to re-tie the broken thread of an interrupted tradition.

An unexpected event explained their reminiscences, and proved that they were not mistaken.

The inhabitants of Mars are very superior to those of Earth by their organizations, by the number and delicacy of their senses, and by their intellectual faculties.

The fact that density is very slight on the surface of that world, and that the const.i.tuent particles of bodies are less heavy there than here, has permitted the formation of beings of incomparably less weight, more aerial, more delicate, more sensitive. The fact that the atmosphere is nutritive has freed Martial organisms from the coa.r.s.eness of earthly needs. It is an entirely different state of things. The light there is less bright, that planet being farther from the Sun than we, and the optic nerve is more sensitive. Electric and magnetic influences being very intense, the inhabitants possess senses unknown to terrestrial organizations,--senses which put them into communication with these influences. Everything is evenly balanced in Nature. Beings are everywhere adapted to their surroundings and to the soil from which they spring. Organisms can no more be earthly on Mars than they could be aerial at the bottom of the sea. More than that, the condition of superiority generated by this nature of things is developed of itself by the facility by which all intellectual work is accomplished. Nature seems to obey thought. The architect desirous of erecting a building, the engineer who wants to change the surface of the ground, either to lower or to raise, to cut down mountains or fill up valleys, does not strike against material weight and material difficulties, as he does here. Art, too, has made the most rapid progress from the beginning.

And yet more. Martial humanity, being several hundreds of thousands of years older than terrestrial humanity, went through all the phases of its development before we did; our real scientific progress, even the most transcendent, is but a child's foolish toy, compared to the science of the inhabitants of that planet. In astronomy, especially, they are incomparably more advanced than we, and know the Earth much better than we know their home. They have invented, among other things, a kind of tele-photographic apparatus, in which a roll of stuff constantly receives the picture of our world, and is impressed by it unalterably as it unrolls. An immense museum, devoted especially to the planets of the solar system, preserves all these photographic pictures, fixed forever in chronological order.

All the Earth's history is to be found there,--France in the time of Charlemagne, Greece in the days of Alexander, Egypt under Rameses. By the microscope the smallest details can be made out, such as Paris during the French Revolution, Rome under the pontificate of Borgia, Christopher Columbus's Spanish fleet reaching America, the Francs of Clovis taking possession of the Gauls, Julius Caesar's army stopped in its conquest of England by the tide which washed away his ships, the troops of King David, the founder of standing armies, as well as most historic scenes, recognizable from special characters of their own.

One day, when the two friends were visiting the museum, their reminiscences, which had been thus far very vague, were brightened, like a landscape at night, by a flash of lightning. Suddenly they _recognized_ the appearance of Paris during the Exposition of 1867.

Their memory became more definite. They each felt, individually, that they had lived there; and under this strong impression they also felt sure that they had lived there together. Their memory gradually grew clearer, not by interrupted gleams, but rather as the light grows stronger from the beginning of dawn.

Then they both remembered, as if by inspiration, that sentence of Scripture: "In my Father's house are many mansions;" and this other, from Jesus to Nicodemus: "Verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of G.o.d.... Ye must be born again."

From that day they never doubted their former earthly existence, but were convinced that they were continuing on the planet Mars the life they had lived before. They belonged to the cycle of the great minds of all ages, who know that human destiny does not end with the present world, but continues in heaven, and who also know that each planet--Mars, the Earth, or any other--is a star of heaven.

The rather singular fact of the change of s.e.x, which seemed to me to be very important, was really without any weight whatever. Spero told me that souls, contrary to our ideas, have no s.e.x, and that their destinies are the same. I also learned that on that planet, so much less material than our own, organisms have no resemblance whatever to terrestrial bodies. Conceptions and births are effected in another way, which reminds one, but under a more spiritual form, of the fecundation and blooming of flowers. Pleasure has no bitterness. Heavy earthly burdens and the anguish of grief are unknown there. Everything there is more aerial, more ethereal, and less material. The Martials might be called winged, sentient, living flowers; but in fact no earthly being can serve as comparison to aid us in imagining their form and manner of existence.

I listened to the translated soul's story almost without interrupting him, for it seemed to me all the time as if he would disappear as he had come. However, remembering my dream, of which I had been reminded by the coincidence of preceding descriptions with what I had seen, I could not keep from telling my celestial friend of that surprising vision, and expressing my surprise at not having seen him on my trip to Mars,--a fact which made me doubt the reality of the journey.

"But," he answered, "I saw you perfectly well, and you both saw and spoke to me, for it was I."

The tones of his voice were so odd at these last words that I suddenly recognized in them the melodious voice of the beautiful Martial girl who had so enchanted me.

"Yes," he answered, "it was I. I was trying to make you know me; but you were so bewildered by a sight which captivated your mind that you did not throw off your terrestrial sensations,--you remained sensual and earthly, you could not rise high enough for pure perception. Yes, it was I who held out my arms to you in the aerial car to take you down to our dwelling, when you suddenly awoke."

"But then," I cried, "if you are that Martial maiden, how can you appear to me in Spero's form, when he no longer exists?"

"I do not act upon your retina or your optic nerve," he replied, "but on your mental being and your brain. I am in communication with you now; I influence directly the cerebral seat of your sensation. My mental being is really formless, like yours and that of all other souls. But when I put myself in direct relation with your thought, as at this moment, you can see me only as you knew me. It is the same during your dreams; that is to say, during more than a quarter of your terrestrial life,--for twenty years out of seventy,--you see, you hear, you speak, you feel, with the same impression, the same clearness, the same certainty as during your normal life; and yet your eyes are closed, your tympanum is insensible, your mouth is mute, your arms are stretched out motionless.

It is the same, too, in cases of suggestion, in conditions of hypnotic somnambulism. You see me and hear me, you feel me, too, by your brain, which is under influence; but I am no more in the form which you see than the rainbow exists in the presence of the eyes that look at it."

"Could you also appear to me in your Martial form?"

"No,--at least not unless you were really transported in spirit to that planet. There would then be quite a different mode of communication. In our conversation here, everything is subjective to you. The elements of my Martial form do not exist in the terrestrial atmosphere, and your brain could not imagine them. You can see me to-day only through the medium of your dream; but as soon as you try to a.n.a.lyze its details it will vanish away. You did not see us exactly as we are, because your mind can judge only by your earthly eyes, which are not sensitive to all our radiations, and because you do not possess all our senses."

"I must confess," I answered, "that I cannot understand your Martial beings as having six limbs."

"If these forms were not so graceful, they would have seemed frightful to you; the organisms in each world are most appropriate to its conditions of existence. I acknowledge, on my part, that to the inhabitants of Mars the Apollo Belvedere and the Venus de Medicis are actual monstrosities, on account of their animal heaviness.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"Everything with us is exquisitely light, although our planet is much smaller than yours; yet the beings are larger than here, because the weight is less, and beings can grow taller without being impeded by their weight or imperilling their stability.

"They are larger and lighter, because the constructive materials of that planet are of very little density. What would have happened on the Earth if the weight had not been so great, has happened there. The winged species would have ruled over the world, instead of dwindling away in impossibility of development. On Mars, organic development is effected in the series of winged species. Martial humanity is indeed a race of s.e.xtupedal origin; but it is actually bipedal, bimanous, and what might be called _bialic_, since these beings have two wings.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"Their manner of life is totally different from terrestrial life, in the first place because they live in the air and on aerial plants as much as they do on the surface of the ground; and further, because they do not eat, the atmosphere being nutritive. Pa.s.sions are not the same there. Murder is unknown. Humanity, being without material needs, has never lived there, even in the primitive ages, in the barbarity of rapine and war. The ideas and feelings of the inhabitants of Mars are of an entirely intellectual nature.

"Nevertheless, in dwelling on this planet, a.n.a.logies at least, if not resemblances, are to be found. Thus, there is a succession of night and day there as on the Earth, which does not differ essentially from what you have, the duration of night and day being 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds. As there are 668 of these days in a Martial year, we have more time than you for our work, our investigations, and our enjoyments. Our seasons, too, are almost twice as long as yours, but they have the same intensity. The climates are not very different; a country in Mars, on the sh.o.r.es of the equatorial sea, differs less from the climate of France than Lapland differs from Nubia.

"An inhabitant of the Earth would not feel so very foreign. The greatest difference between the two worlds certainly consists in the great superiority of their humanity over yours.

"This superiority is princ.i.p.ally due to the great progress realized by astronomical science and to the universal propagation among the inhabitants of that planet of that science, without which one has but false ideas of life, of creation, and of destiny. We are very much favored, as much by the acuteness of our senses as by the purity of our skies. There is much less water on Mars than on the Earth, and fewer clouds. The sky there is almost always fair, especially in the temperate zone."

"But still you often have inundations."

"Yes; and quite recently your telescopes have noticed one along the sh.o.r.es of a sea to which your colleagues have given a name which will always be dear to me, even when far from the Earth. The greater part of our sh.o.r.es are beaches, level plains. We have few mountains, and our seas are not deep. The inhabitants make use of these overflows for irrigating great stretches of country. They have straightened and enlarged the watercourses and made them like ca.n.a.ls, and have constructed a network of immense ca.n.a.ls all over the continents. The continents themselves are not bristling all over with Alpine or Himalayan upheavals like those of the terrestrial globe, but are _immense plains_, crossed in all directions by ca.n.a.ls, which connect all the seas with one another, and by streams made to resemble ca.n.a.ls.

Formerly there was as much water on Mars, in proportion to the size of the planet, as on the Earth; gradually, from age to age, a part of the rain-water sank into the depths of the soil and did not return to the surface. It combined itself chemically with the rocks, and was withdrawn from atmospheric circulation. Then, too, from age to age, rains, snows, and winds, winter frosts and summer droughts, have disintegrated the mountains, and the watercourses, bringing fragments to the sea-basins, have gradually raised their beds. We have no more large oceans or deep seas,--nothing but inland waters; many straits, gulfs, and seas a.n.a.logous to the Channel, the Red Sea, the Adriatic, the Baltic, and the Caspian; pleasant sh.o.r.es, quiet harbors, large lakes and streams, aerial rather than aquatic fleets, an almost always clear sky, especially in the morning. There are no mornings on Earth so luminous as ours.

"The meteorological system differs materially from that of the Earth, because, the atmosphere being more rarified, the waters which move over the surface evaporate more easily, and then because in condensing again, instead of forming clouds that last, they pa.s.s almost without transition from the gaseous to the liquid state. There are few clouds and few fogs.

"Astronomy is cultivated there on account of the clearness of the heavens. We have two satellites, whose courses would appear strange to earthly astronomers, for while one of them gives us months of a hundred and thirty hours, or five Martial days, plus eight hours, the other, by a combination of its motion with the daily rotation of the planet, rises in the occident and sets in the orient, crossing the sky from west to east in five hours and a half, and pa.s.sing from one phase to the other in less than three hours. That spectacle is unique in the whole solar system, and has done much to attract the attention of the inhabitants to the study of the sky. Besides that, we have eclipses of the moon almost every day, but never total eclipses of the Sun, because our satellites are too small.

"The Earth looks to us as Venus looks to you. To us it is the morning and evening star; and in old times, before the invention of optical instruments, which have taught us that it is a planet, dwelt upon like ours, but by an inferior race, our ancestors worshipped it as a tutelary divinity. All worlds have a mythology during their centuries of infancy, and this mythology has for its origin, its foundation, and its object the appearance of the celestial bodies.

"Sometimes the Earth, accompanied by the Moon, pa.s.ses between us and the Sun, and projects itself upon its disk like a little black spot, attended by a still smaller one. Every one there follows these celestial phenomena with curiosity. Our newspapers think more of science than of theatres, literary fancies, or political quarrels.

"The Sun looks smaller to us, and we receive a little less light and heat from it; our more sensitive eyes see better than yours. The temperature is a little higher."

"How can that be?" said I. "You are farther from the Sun, yet are warmer than we?"

"Chamounix is a little farther from noonday sun than Mont Blanc," he answered. "The distance from the Sun does not alone regulate the temperature, you must also take into account the const.i.tution of the atmosphere. Our polar ice melts under our summer sun more entirely than yours."

"What lands in Mars are most populous?"

"There is very little, except the polar regions (where, from the Earth, you see the snow and ice melt every spring), which is uninhabited. The population of the temperate regions is very dense, but in the equatorial lands it is more so; the population there is as dense as in China,--and especially the sea-coasts, notwithstanding the inundations. A large number of cities are built almost on the water, suspended in the air in some way above the overflows, which are calculated and expected beforehand."

"Are your arts and your industries like ours? Have you railways, steamships, the telegraph, and the telephone?"

"It is all quite different. We have never had either steam or railways, because we have always known of electricity, and aerial navigation is natural to us. Our fleets are moved by electricity, and are more aerial than aquatic. We live princ.i.p.ally in the air, and have no homes of stone, iron, or wood. We do not experience the rigors of winter, because no one stays exposed to them. Those who do not dwell in the equatorial countries emigrate every autumn, just as your birds do. It would be very difficult for you to form an exact idea of our manner of life."

"Are there many human beings on Mars who have already lived on the Earth?"

"No; among the inhabitants of your planet the greater part are either ignorant, sceptical, or indifferent, and are unprepared for the spiritual life. They are attached to the Earth, and their attachment lasts for a long time. Many souls sleep completely. Those which act, live, and aspire to know the truth, are the only ones called to conscious immortality, the only ones whom the spirit-world interests, and who are capable of understanding it. These souls can leave the Earth and live in other lands. Many come and live for a while on Mars (the first stage of an ultra-terrestrial journey, going from the Sun), or on Venus, the first abode going the other way; but Venus is a world a.n.a.logous to the Earth, and still less favored, on account of its too rapid seasons, which oblige its inhabitants to suffer the most sudden changes of temperature. Certain spirits wing their way at once to the starry regions. As you know, s.p.a.ce has no existence. To sum up, justice reigns in the moral world as equilibrium does in the physical world; and the destiny of souls is but the perpetual result of their capabilities, their aspirations, and consequently of _their works_. The Uranian way is open to all; but the soul becomes truly Uranian only when it has entirely shaken off the weight of material life. The day will come, even on your planet, when there will be no other belief, no other religion, than the knowledge of the universe and the certainty of immortality in its infinite regions, in its eternal domain."

"What a strange thing," said I, "that no one on the Earth should know these sublime truths! No one looks at the sky; we live as though our little isle alone existed in the universe."