Chapter XVI.
I have spoken so much of the Vril Staff that my reader may
expect me to describe it. This I cannot do accurately, for I
was never allowed to handle it for fear of some terrible
accident occasioned by my ignorance of its use; and I have no
doubt that it requires much skill and practice in the exercise
of its various powers. It is hollow, and has in the handle
several stops, keys, or springs by which its force can be
altered, modified, or directed- so that by one process it
destroys, by another it heals- by one it can rend the rock, by
another disperse the vapour- by one it affects bodies, by
another it can exercise a certain influence over minds. It is
usually carried in the convenient size of a walking-staff, but
it has slides by which it can be lengthened or shortened at
will. When used for special purposes, the upper part rests in
the hollow of the palm with the fore and middle fingers
protruded. I was assured, however, that its power was not
equal in all, but proportioned to the amount of certain vril
70properties in the wearer in affinity, or 'rapport' with the
purposes to be effected. Some were more potent to destroy,
others to heal, &c.; much also depended on the calm and
steadiness of volition in the manipulator. They assert that
the full exercise of vril power can only be acquired by the
constitutional temperament- i.e., by hereditarily transmitted
organisation- and that a female infant of four years old
belonging to the Vril-ya races can accomplish feats which a
life spent in its practice would not enable the strongest and
most skilled mechanician, born out of the pale of the Vril-ya
to achieve. All these wands are not equally complicated; those
intrusted to children are much simpler than those borne by
sages of either sex, and constructed with a view to the special
object on which the children are employed; which as I have
before said, is among the youngest children the most
destructive. In the wands of wives and mothers the correlative
destroying force is usually abstracted, the healing power fully
charged. I wish I could say more in detail of this singular
conductor of the vril fluid, but its machinery is as exquisite
as its effects are marvellous.
I should say, however, that this people have invented certain
tubes by which the vril fluid can be conducted towards the
object it is meant to destroy, throughout a distance almost
indefinite; at least I put it modestly when I say from 500 to
600 miles. And their mathematical science as applied to such
purpose is so nicely accurate, that on the report of some
observer in an air-boat, any member of the vril department can
estimate unerringly the nature of intervening obstacles, the
height to which the projectile instrument should be raised, and
the extent to which it should be charged, so as to reduce to
ashes within a space of time too short for me to venture to
specify it, a capital twice as vast as London.
Certainly these Ana are wonderful mathematicians- wonderful for
the adaptation of the inventive faculty to practical uses.
71
I went with my host and his daughter Zee over the great public
museum, which occupies a wing in the College of Sages, and in
which are hoarded, as curious specimens of the ignorant and
blundering experiments of ancient times, many contrivances on
which we pride ourselves as recent achievements. In one
department, carelessly thrown aside as obsolete lumber, are
tubes for destroying life by metallic balls and an inflammable
powder, on the principle of our cannons and catapults, and even
still more murderous than our latest improvements.
My host spoke of these with a smile of contempt, such as an
artillery officer might bestow on the bows and arrows of the
Chinese. In another department there were models of vehicles
and vessels worked by steam, and of an air-balloon which might
have been constructed by Montgolfier. "Such," said Zee, with
an air of meditative wisdom- "such were the feeble triflings
with nature of our savage forefathers, ere they had even a
glimmering perception of the properties of vril!"
This young Gy was a magnificent specimen of the muscular force
to which the females of her country attain. Her features were
beautiful, like those of all her race: never in the upper world
have I seen a face so grand and so faultless, but her devotion
to the severer studies had given to her countenance an
expression of abstract thought which rendered it somewhat stern
when in repose; and such a sternness became formidable when
observed in connection with her ample shoulders and lofty
stature. She was tall even for a Gy, and I saw her lift up a
cannon as easily as I could lift a pocket-pistol. Zee inspired
me with a profound terror- a terror which increased when we
came into a department of the museum appropriated to models of
contrivances worked by the agency of vril; for here, merely by
a certain play of her vril staff, she herself standing at a
distance, she put into movement large and weighty substances.
She seemed to endow them with intelligence, and to make them
72comprehend and obey her command. She set complicated pieces of
machinery into movement, arrested the movement or continued it,
until, within an incredibly short time, various kinds of raw
material were reproduced as symmetrical works of art, complete
and perfect. Whatever effect mesmerism or electro-biology
produces over the nerves and muscles of animated objects, this
young Gy produced by the motions of her slender rod over the
springs and wheels of lifeless mechanism.
When I mentioned to my companions my astonishment at this
influence over inanimate matter- while owning that, in our
world, I had witnessed phenomena which showed that over certain
living organisations certain other living organisations could
establish an influence genuine in itself, but often exaggerated
by credulity or craft- Zee, who was more interested in such
subjects than her father, bade me stretch forth my hand, and
then, placing it beside her own, she called my attention to
certain distinctions of type and character. In the first
place, the thumb of the Gy (and, as I afterwards noticed, of
all that race, male or female) was much larger, at once longer
and more massive, than is found with our species above ground.
There is almost, in this, as great a difference as there is
between the thumb of a man and that of a gorilla. Secondly,
the palm is proportionally thicker than ours- the texture of
the skin infinitely finer and softer- its average warmth is
greater. More remarkable than all this, is a visible nerve,
perceptible under the skin, which starts from the wrist
skirting the ball of the thumb, and branching, fork-like, at
the roots of the fore and middle fingers. "With your slight
formation of thumb," said the philosophical young Gy, "and with
the absence of the nerve which you find more or less developed
in the hands of our race, you can never achieve other than
imperfect and feeble power over the agency of vril; but so far
as the nerve is concerned, that is not found in the hands of
our earliest progenitors, nor in those of the ruder tribes
without the pale of the Vril-ya. It has been slowly developed
73in the course of generations, commencing in the early
achievements, and increasing with the continuous exercise, of
the vril power; therefore, in the course of one or two thousand
years, such a nerve may possibly be engendered in those higher
beings of your race, who devote themselves to that paramount
science through which is attained command over all the subtler
forces of nature permeated by vril. But when you talk of
matter as something in itself inert and motionless, your
parents or tutors surely cannot have left you so ignorant as
not to know that no form of matter is motionless and inert:
every particle is constantly in motion and constantly acted
upon by agencies, of which heat is the most apparent and rapid,
but vril the most subtle, and, when skilfully wielded, the most
powerful. So that, in fact, the current launched by my hand
and guided by my will does but render quicker and more potent
the action which is eternally at work upon every particle of
matter, however inert and stubborn it may seem. If a heap of
metal be not capable of originating a thought of its own, yet,
through its internal susceptibility to movement, it obtains the
power to receive the thought of the intellectual agent at work
on it; by which, when conveyed with a sufficient force of the
vril power, it is as much compelled to obey as if it were
displaced by a visible bodily force. It is animated for the
time being by the soul thus infused into it, so that one may
almost say that it lives and reasons. Without this we could
not make our automata supply the place of servants.
I was too much in awe of the thews and the learning of the
young Gy to hazard the risk of arguing with her. I had read
somewhere in my schoolboy days that a wise man, disputing with
a Roman Emperor, suddenly drew in his horns; and when the
emperor asked him whether he had nothing further to say on his
side of the question, replied, "Nay, Caesar, there is no
arguing against a reasoner who commands ten legions."
74
Though I had a secret persuasion that, whatever the real
effects of vril upon matter, Mr. Faraday could have proved her
a very shallow philosopher as to its extent or its causes, I
had no doubt that Zee could have brained all the Fellows of the
Royal Society, one after the other, with a blow of her fist.
Every sensible man knows that it is useless to argue with any
ordinary female upon matters he comprehends; but to argue with
a Gy seven feet high upon the mysteries of vril,- as well argue
in a desert, and with a simoon!
Amid the various departments to which the vast building of the
College of Sages was appropriated, that which interested me
most was devoted to the archaeology of the Vril-ya, and
comprised a very ancient collection of portraits. In these the
pigments and groundwork employed were of so durable a nature
that even pictures said to be executed at dates as remote as
those in the earliest annals of the Chinese, retained much
freshness of colour. In examining this collection, two things
especially struck me:- first, that the pictures said to be
between 6000 and 7000 years old were of a much higher degree of
art than any produced within the last 3000 or 4000 years; and,
second, that the portraits within the former period much more
resembled our own upper world and European types of
countenance. Some of them, indeed reminded me of the Italian
heads which look out from the canvases of Titian- speaking of
ambition or craft, of care or of grief, with furrows in which
the passions have passed with iron ploughshare. These were the
countenances of men who had lived in struggle and conflict
before the discovery of the latent forces of vril had changed
the character of society- men who had fought with each other
for power or fame as we in the upper world fight.
The type of face began to evince a marked change about a
thousand years after the vril revolution, becoming then, with
each generation, more serene, and in that serenity more
75terribly distinct from the faces of labouring and sinful men;
while in proportion as the beauty and the grandeur of the
countenance itself became more fully developed, the art of the
painter became more tame and monotonous.
But the greatest curiosity in the collection was that of three
portraits belonging to the pre-historical age, and, according
to mythical tradition, taken by the orders of a philosopher,
whose origin and attributes were as much mixed up with
symbolical fable as those of an Indian Budh or a Greek
Prometheus.
>From this mysterious personage, at once a sage and a hero, all
the principal sections of the Vril-ya race pretend to trace a
common origin.
The portraits are of the philosopher himself, of his
grandfather, and great-grandfather. They are all at full
length. The philosopher is attired in a long tunic which seems
to form a loose suit of scaly armour, borrowed, perhaps, from
some fish or reptile, but the feet and hands are exposed: the
digits in both are wonderfully long, and webbed. He has little
or no perceptible throat, and a low receding forehead, not at
all the ideal of a sage's. He has bright brown prominent eyes,
a very wide mouth and high cheekbones, and a muddy complexion.
According to tradition, this philosopher had lived to a
patriarchal age, extending over many centuries, and he
remembered distinctly in middle life his grandfather as
surviving, and in childhood his great-grandfather; the portrait
of the first he had taken, or caused to be taken, while yet
alive- that of the latter was taken from his effigies in mummy.
The portrait of his grandfather had the features and aspect of
the philosopher, only much more exaggerated: he was not
dressed, and the colour of his body was singular; the breast
and stomach yellow, the shoulders and legs of a dull bronze
hue: the great-grandfather was a magnificent specimen of the
Batrachian genus, a Giant Frog, 'pur et simple.'
Among the pithy sayings which, according to tradition, the
philosopher bequeathed to posterity in rhythmical form and
76sententious brevity, this is notably recorded: "Humble
yourselves, my descendants; the father of your race was a
'twat' (tadpole): exalt yourselves, my descendants, for it was
the same Divine Thought which created your father that develops
itself in exalting you."
Aph-Lin told me this fable while I gazed on the three
Batrachian portraits. I said in reply: "You make a jest of my
supposed ignorance and credulity as an uneducated Tish, but
though these horrible daubs may be of great antiquity, and were
intended, perhaps, for some rude caracature, I presume that
none of your race even in the less enlightened ages, ever
believed that the great-grandson of a Frog became a sententious
philosopher; or that any section, I will not say of the lofty
Vril-ya, but of the meanest varieties of the human race, had
its origin in a Tadpole."
"Pardon me," answered Aph-Lin: "in what we call the Wrangling
or Philosophical Period of History, which was at its height
about seven thousand years ago, there was a very distinguished
naturalist, who proved to the satisfaction of numerous
disciples such analogical and anatomical agreements in
structure between an An and a Frog, as to show that out of the
one must have developed the other. They had some diseases in
common; they were both subject to the same parasitical worms in
the intestines; and, strange to say, the An has, in his
structure, a swimming-bladder, no longer of any use to him, but
which is a rudiment that clearly proves his descent from a
Frog. Nor is there any argument against this theory to be
found in the relative difference of size, for there are still
existent in our world Frogs of a size and stature not inferior
to our own, and many thousand years ago they appear to have
been still larger."
"I understand that," said I, "because Frogs this enormous are,
according to our eminent geologists, who perhaps saw them in
dreams, said to have been distinguished inhabitants of the
upper world before the Deluge; and such Frogs are exactly the
creatures likely to have flourished in the lakes and morasses
of your subterranean regions. But pray, proceed."
77
"In the Wrangling Period of History, whatever one sage asserted
another sage was sure to contradict. In fact, it was a maxim
in that age, that the human reason could only be sustained
aloft by being tossed to and fro in the perpetual motion of
contradiction; and therefore another sect of philosophers
maintained the doctrine that the An was not the descendant of
the Frog, but that the Frog was clearly the improved
development of the An. The shape of the Frog, taken generally,
was much more symmetrical than that of the An; beside the
beautiful conformation of its lower limbs, its flanks and
shoulders the majority of the Ana in that day were almost
deformed, and certainly ill-shaped. Again, the Frog had the
power to live alike on land and in water- a mighty privilege,
partaking of a spiritual essence denied to the An, since the
disuse of his swimming-bladder clearly proves his degeneration
from a higher development of species. Again, the earlier races
of the Ana seem to have been covered with hair, and, even to a
comparatively recent date, hirsute bushes deformed the very
faces of our ancestors, spreading wild over their cheeks and
chins, as similar bushes, my poor Tish, spread wild over yours.
But the object of the higher races of the Ana through countless
generations has been to erase all vestige of connection with
hairy vertebrata, and they have gradually eliminated that
debasing capillary excrement by the law of sexual selection;
the Gy-ei naturally preferring youth or the beauty of smooth
faces. But the degree of the Frog in the scale of the
vertebrata is shown in this, that he has no hair at all, not
even on his head. He was born to that hairless perfection
which the most beautiful of the Ana, despite the culture of
incalculable ages, have not yet attained. The wonderful
complication and delicacy of a Frog's nervous system and
arterial circulation were shown by this school to be more
susceptible of enjoyment than our inferior, or at least
simpler, physical frame allows us to be. The examination of a
Frog's hand, if I may use that expression, accounted for its
78keener susceptibility to love, and to social life in general.
In fact, gregarious and amatory as are the Ana, Frogs are still
more so. In short, these two schools raged against each other;
one asserting the An to be the perfected type of the Frog; the
other that the Frog was the highest development of the An. The
moralists were divided in opinion with the naturalists, but the
bulk of them sided with the Frog-preference school. They said,
with much plausibility, that in moral conduct (viz., in the
adherence to rules best adapted to the health and welfare of
the individual and the community) there could be no doubt of
the vast superiority of the Frog. All history showed the
wholesale immorality of the human race, the complete disregard,
even by the most renowned amongst them, of the laws which they
acknowledged to be essential to their own and the general
happiness and wellbeing. But the severest critic of the Frog
race could not detect in their manners a single aberration from
the moral law tacitly recognised by themselves. And what, after
all, can be the profit of civilisation if superiority in moral
conduct be not the aim for which it strives, and the test by which
its progress should be judged?
"In fine, the adherents of this theory presumed that in some
remote period the Frog race had been the improved development
of the Human; but that, from some causes which defied rational
conjecture, they had not maintained their original position in
the scale of nature; while the Ana, though of inferior
organisation, had, by dint less of their virtues than their
vices, such as ferocity and cunning, gradually acquired
ascendancy, much as among the human race itself tribes utterly
barbarous have, by superiority in similar vices, utterly
destroyed or reduced into insignificance tribes originally
excelling them in mental gifts and culture. Unhappily these
disputes became involved with the religious notions of that
age; and as society was then administered under the government
of the Koom-Posh, who, being the most ignorant, were of course
79the most inflammable class- the multitude took the whole
question out of the hands of the philosophers; political chiefs
saw that the Frog dispute, so taken up by the populace, could
become a most valuable instrument of their ambition; and for
not less than one thousand years war and massacre prevailed,
during which period the philosophers on both sides were
butchered, and the government of Koom-Posh itself was happily
brought to an end by the ascendancy of a family that clearly
established its descent from the aboriginal tadpole, and
furnished despotic rulers to the various nations of the Ana.
These despots finally disappeared, at least from our
communities, as the discovery of vril led to the tranquil
institutions under which flourish all the races of the
Vril-ya."
"And do no wranglers or philosophers now exist to revive the
dispute; or do they all recognise the origin of your race in
the tadpole?"
"Nay, such disputes," said Zee, with a lofty smile, "belong to
the Pah-bodh of the dark ages, and now only serve for the
amusement of infants. When we know the elements out of which
our bodies are composed, elements in common to the humblest
vegetable plants, can it signify whether the All-Wise combined
those elements out of one form more than another, in order to
create that in which He has placed the capacity to receive the
idea of Himself, and all the varied grandeurs of intellect to
which that idea gives birth? The An in reality commenced to
exist as An with the donation of that capacity, and, with that
capacity, the sense to acknowledge that, however through the
countless ages his race may improve in wisdom, it can never
combine the elements at its command into the form of a
tadpole."
"You speak well, Zee," said Aph-Lin; "and it is
enough for us shortlived mortals to feel a reasonable
assurance that whether the origin of the An was a tadpole
or not, he is no more likely to become a tadpole
again than the institutions of the Vril-ya are likely to
relapse into the heaving quagmire and certain strife-rot
of a Koom-Posh."
