Chapter XV.
Kind to me as I found all in this household, the young daughter
of my host was the most considerate and thoughtful in her
kindness. At her suggestion I laid aside the habiliments in
which I had descended from the upper earth, and adopted the
dress of the Vril-ya, with the exception of the artful wings
which served them, when on foot, as a graceful mantle. But as
many of the Vril-ya, when occupied in urban pursuits, did not
wear these wings, this exception created no marked difference
between myself and the race among whom I sojourned, and I was
thus enabled to visit the town without exciting unpleasant
60curiosity. Out of the household no one suspected that I had
come from the upper world, and I was but regarded as one of
some inferior and barbarous tribe whom Aph-Lin entertained as a
guest.
The city was large in proportion to the territory round it,
which was of no greater extent than many an English or
Hungarian nobleman's estate; but the whole if it, to the verge
of the rocks which constituted its boundary, was cultivated to
the nicest degree, except where certain allotments of mountain
and pasture were humanely left free to the sustenance of the
harmless animals they had tamed, though not for domestic use.
So great is their kindness towards these humbler creatures,
that a sum is devoted from the public treasury for the purpose
of deporting them to other Vril-ya communities willing to
receive them (chiefly new colonies), whenever they become too
numerous for the pastures allotted to them in their native
place. They do not, however, multiply to an extent comparable
to the ratio at which, with us, animals bred for slaughter,
increase. It seems a law of nature that animals not useful to
man gradually recede from the domains he occupies, or even
become extinct. It is an old custom of the various sovereign
states amidst which the race of the Vril-ya are distributed, to
leave between each state a neutral and uncultivated
border-land. In the instance of the community I speak of, this
tract, being a ridge of savage rocks, was impassable by foot,
but was easily surmounted, whether by the wings of the
inhabitants or the air-boats, of which I shall speak hereafter.
Roads through it were also cut for the transit of vehicles
impelled by vril. These intercommunicating tracts were always
kept lighted, and the expense thereof defrayed by a special
tax, to which all the communities comprehended in the
denomination of Vril-ya contribute in settled proportions. By
these means a considerable commercial traffic with other
states, both near and distant, was carried on. The surplus
wealth on this special community was chiefly agricultural. The
61community was also eminent for skill in constructing implements
connected with the arts of husbandry. In exchange for such
merchandise it obtained articles more of luxury than necessity.
There were few things imported on which they set a higher price
than birds taught to pipe artful tunes in concert. These were
brought from a great distance, and were marvellous for beauty
of song and plumage. I understand that extraordinary care was
taken by their breeders and teachers in selection, and that the
species had wonderfully improved during the last few years. I
saw no other pet animals among this community except some very
amusing and sportive creatures of the Batrachian species,
resembling frogs, but with very intelligent countenances, which
the children were fond of, and kept in their private gardens.
They appear to have no animals akin to our dogs or horses,
though that learned naturalist, Zee, informed me that such
creatures had once existed in those parts, and might now be
found in regions inhabited by other races than the Vril-ya.
She said that they had gradually disappeared from the more
civilised world since the discovery of vril, and the results
attending that discovery had dispensed with their uses.
Machinery and the invention of wings had superseded the horse
as a beast of burden; and the dog was no longer wanted either
for protection or the chase, as it had been when the ancestors
of the Vril-ya feared the aggressions of their own kind, or
hunted the lesser animals for food. Indeed, however, so far as
the horse was concerned, this region was so rocky that a horse
could have been, there, of little use either for pastime or
burden. The only creature they use for the latter purpose is a
kind of large goat which is much employed on farms. The nature
of the surrounding soil in these districts may be said to have
first suggested the invention of wings and air-boats. The
largeness of space in proportion to the space occupied by the
city, was occasioned by the custom of surrounding every house
with a separate garden. The broad main street, in which
Aph-Lin dwelt, expanded into a vast square, in which were
62placed the College of Sages and all the public offices; a
magnificent fountain of the luminous fluid which I call naptha
(I am ignorant of its real nature) in the centre. All these
public edifices have a uniform character of massiveness and
solidity. They reminded me of the architectural pictures of
Martin. Along the upper stories of each ran a balcony, or
rather a terraced garden, supported by columns, filled with
flowering plants, and tenanted by many kinds of tame birds.
>From the square branched several streets, all broad and
brilliantly lighted, and ascending up the eminence on either
side. In my excursions in the town I was never allowed to go
alone; Aph-Lin or his daughter was my habitual companion. In
this community the adult Gy is seen walking with any young An
as familiarly as if there were no difference of sex.
The retail shops are not very numerous; the persons who attend
on a customer are all children of various ages, and exceedingly
intelligent and courteous, but without the least touch of
importunity or cringing. The shopkeeper himself might or might
not be visible; when visible, he seemed rarely employed on any
matter connected with his professional business; and yet he had
taken to that business from special liking for it, and quite
independently of his general sources of fortune.
The Ana of the community are, on the whole, an indolent set of
beings after the active age of childhood. Whether by
temperament or philosophy, they rank repose among the chief
blessings of life. Indeed, when you take away from a human
63being the incentives to action which are found in cupidity or
ambition, it seems to me no wonder that he rests quiet.
In their ordinary movements they prefer the use of their feet
to that of their wings. But for their sports or (to indulge in
a bold misuse of terms) their public 'promenades,' they employ
the latter, also for the aerial dances I have described, as
well as for visiting their country places, which are mostly
placed on lofty heights; and, when still young, they prefer
their wings for travel into the other regions of the Ana, to
vehicular conveyances.
Those who accustom themselves to flight can fly, if less
rapidly than some birds, yet from twenty-five to thirty miles
an hour, and keep up that rate for five or six hours at a
stretch. But the Ana generally, on reaching middle age, are
not fond of rapid movements requiring violent exercise.
Perhaps for this reason, as they hold a doctrine which our own
physicians will doubtless approve- viz., that regular
transpiration through the pores of the skin is essential to
health, they habitually use the sweating-baths to which we give
the name Turkish or Roman, succeeded by douches of perfumed
waters. They have great faith in the salubrious virtue of
certain perfumes.
It is their custom also, at stated but rare periods, perhaps
four times a-year when in health, to use a bath charged with
vril.*
* I once tried the effect of the vril bath. It was very
similar in its invigorating powers to that of the baths at
Gastein, the virtues of which are ascribed by many physicians
to electricity; but though similar, the effect of the vril bath
was more lasting.
They consider that this fluid, sparingly used, is a great
sustainer of life; but used in excess, when in the normal state
of health, rather tends to reaction and exhausted vitality.
For nearly all their diseases, however, they resort to it as
the chief assistant to nature in throwing off their complaint.
In their own way they are the most luxurious of people, but all
their luxuries are innocent. They may be said to dwell in an
atmosphere of music and fragrance. Every room has its
64mechanical contrivances for melodious sounds, usually tuned
down to soft-murmured notes, which seem like sweet whispers
from invisible spirits. They are too accustomed to these
gentle sounds to find them a hindrance to conversation, nor,
when alone, to reflection. But they have a notion that to
breathe an air filled with continuous melody and perfume has
necessarily an effect at once soothing and elevating upon the
formation of character and the habits of thought. Though so
temperate, and with total abstinence from other animal food
than milk, and from all intoxicating drinks, they are delicate
and dainty to an extreme in food and beverage; and in all their
sports even the old exhibit a childlike gaiety. Happiness is
the end at which they aim, not as the excitement of a moment,
but as the prevailing condition of the entire existence; and
regard for the happiness of each other is evinced by the
exquisite amenity of their manners.
Their conformation of skull has marked differences from that of
any known races in the upper world, though I cannot help
thinking it a development, in the course of countless ages of
the Brachycephalic type of the Age of Stone in Lyell's
'Elements of Geology,' C. X., p. 113, as compared with the
Dolichocephalic type of the beginning of the Age of Iron,
correspondent with that now so prevalent amongst us, and called
the Celtic type. It has the same comparative massiveness of
forehead, not receding like the Celtic- the same even roundness
in the frontal organs; but it is far loftier in the apex, and
far less pronounced in the hinder cranial hemisphere where
phrenologists place the animal organs. To speak as a
phrenologist, the cranium common to the Vril-ya has the organs
of weight, number, tune, form, order, causality, very largely
developed; that of construction much more pronounced than that
of ideality. Those which are called the moral organs, such as
conscientiousness and benevolence, are amazingly full;
amativeness and combativeness are both small; adhesiveness
large; the organ of destructiveness (i.e., of determined
65clearance of intervening obstacles) immense, but less than that
of benevolence; and their philoprogenitiveness takes rather the
character of compassion and tenderness to things that need aid
or protection than of the animal love of offspring. I never
met with one person deformed or misshapen. The beauty of their
countenances is not only in symmetry of feature, but in a
smoothness of surface, which continues without line or wrinkle
to the extreme of old age, and a serene sweetness of
expression, combined with that majesty which seems to come from
consciousness of power and the freedom of all terror, physical
or moral. It is that very sweetness, combined with that
majesty, which inspired in a beholder like myself, accustomed
to strive with the passions of mankind, a sentiment of
humiliation, of awe, of dread. It is such an expression as a
painter might give to a demi-god, a genius, an angel. The
males of the Vril-ya are entirely beardless; the Gy-ei
sometimes, in old age, develop a small moustache.
I was surprised to find that the colour of their skin was not
uniformly that which I had remarked in those individuals whom I
had first encountered,- some being much fairer, and even with
blue eyes, and hair of a deep golden auburn, though still of
complexions warmer or richer in tone than persons in the north
of Europe.
I was told that this admixture of colouring arose from
intermarriage with other and more distant tribes of the
Vril-ya, who, whether by the accident of climate or early
distinction of race, were of fairer hues than the tribes of
which this community formed one. It was considered that the
dark-red skin showed the most ancient family of Ana; but they
attached no sentiment of pride to that antiquity, and, on the
contrary, believed their present excellence of breed came from
frequent crossing with other families differing, yet akin; and
they encourage such intermarriages, always provided that it be
with the Vril-ya nations. Nations which, not conforming their
66manners and institutions to those of the Vril-ya, nor indeed
held capable of acquiring the powers over the vril agencies
which it had taken them generations to attain and transmit,
were regarded with more disdain than the citizens of New York
regard the negroes.
I learned from Zee, who had more lore in all matters than any
male with whom I was brought into familiar converse, that the
superiority of the Vril-ya was supposed to have originated in
the intensity of their earlier struggles against obstacles in
nature amidst the localities in which they had first settled.
"Wherever," said Zee, moralising, "wherever goes on that early
process in the history of civilisation, by which life is made a
struggle, in which the individual has to put forth all his
powers to compete with his fellow, we invariably find this
result- viz., since in the competition a vast number must
perish, nature selects for preservation only the strongest
specimens. With our race, therefore, even before the discovery
of vril, only the highest organisations were preserved; and
there is among our ancient books a legend, once popularly
believed, that we were driven from a region that seems to
denote the world you come from, in order to perfect our
condition and attain to the purest elimination of our species
by the severity of the struggles our forefathers underwent; and
that, when our education shall become finally completed, we are
destined to return to the upper world, and supplant all the
inferior races now existing therein."
Aph-Lin and Zee often conversed with me in private upon the
political and social conditions of that upper world, in which
Zee so philosophically assumed that the inhabitants were to be
exterminated one day or other by the advent of the Vril-ya.
They found in my accounts,- in which I continued to do all I
could (without launching into falsehoods so positive that they
would have been easily detected by the shrewdness of my
listeners) to present our powers and ourselves in the most
flattering point of view,- perpetual subjects of comparison
67between our most civilised populations and the meaner
subterranean races which they considered hopelessly plunged in
barbarism, and doomed to gradual if certain extinction. But
they both agreed in desiring to conceal from their community
all premature opening into the regions lighted by the sun; both
were humane, and shrunk from the thought of annihilating so
many millions of creatures; and the pictures I drew of our
life, highly coloured as they were, saddened them. In vain I
boasted of our great men- poets, philosophers, orators,
generals- and defied the Vril-ya to produce their equals.
"Alas," said Zee, "this predominance of the few over the many
is the surest and most fatal sign of a race incorrigibly
savage. See you not that the primary condition of mortal
happiness consists in the extinction of that strife and
competition between individuals, which, no matter what forms of
government they adopt, render the many subordinate to the few,
destroy real liberty to the individual, whatever may be the
nominal liberty of the state, and annul that calm of existence,
without which, felicity, mental or bodily, cannot be attained?
Our notion is, that the more we can assimilate life to the
existence which our noblest ideas can conceive to be that of
spirits on the other side of the grave, why, the more we
approximate to a divine happiness here, and the more easily we
glide into the conditions of being hereafter. For, surely, all
we can imagine of the life of gods, or of blessed immortals,
supposes the absence of self-made cares and contentious
passions, such as avarice and ambition. It seems to us that it
must be a life of serene tranquility, not indeed without active
occupations to the intellectual or spiritual powers, but
occupations, of whatsoever nature they be, congenial to the
idiosyncrasies of each, not forced and repugnant- a life
gladdened by the untrammelled interchange of gentle affections,
in which the moral atmosphere utterly kills hate and vengeance,
and strife and rivalry. Such is the political state to which
68all the tribes and families of the Vril-ya seek to attain, and
towards that goal all our theories of government are shaped.
You see how utterly opposed is such a progress to that of the
uncivilised nations from which you come, and which aim at a
systematic perpetuity of troubles, and cares, and warring
passions aggravated more and more as their progress storms its
way onward. The most powerful of all the races in our world,
beyond the pale of the Vril-ya, esteems itself the best
governed of all political societies, and to have reached in
that respect the extreme end at which political wisdom can
arrive, so that the other nations should tend more or less to
copy it. It has established, on its broadest base, the
Koom-Posh- viz., the government of the ignorant upon the
principle of being the most numerous. It has placed the
supreme bliss in the vying with each other in all things, so
that the evil passions are never in repose- vying for power,
for wealth, for eminence of some kind; and in this rivalry it
is horrible to hear the vituperation, the slanders, and
calumnies which even the best and mildest among them heap on
each other without remorse or shame."
"Some years ago," said Aph-Lin, "I visited this people, and
their misery and degradation were the more appalling because
they were always boasting of their felicity and grandeur as
compared with the rest of their species. And there is no hope
that this people, which evidently resembles your own, can
improve, because all their notions tend to further
deterioration. They desire to enlarge their dominion more and
more, in direct antagonism to the truth that, beyond a very
limited range, it is impossible to secure to a community the
happiness which belongs to a well-ordered family; and the more
they mature a system by which a few individuals are heated and
swollen to a size above the standard slenderness of the millions,
the more they chuckle and exact, and cry out, 'See by what great
exceptions to the common littleness of our race we prove the
magnificent results of our system!'"
69
"In fact," resumed Zee, "if the wisdom of human life be to
approximate to the serene equality of immortals, there can be no
more direct flying off into the opposite direction than a system
which aims at carrying to the utmost the inequalities and
turbulences of mortals. Nor do I see how, by any forms of
religious belief, mortals, so acting, could fit themselves even to
appreciate the joys of immortals to which they still expect to be
transferred by the mere act of dying. On the contrary, minds
accustomed to place happiness in things so much the reverse of
godlike, would find the happiness of gods exceedingly dull, and
would long to get back to a world in which they could quarrel with
each other."
