Chapter XVII.
The Vril-ya, being excluded from all sight of the heavenly
bodies, and having no other difference between night and day
than that which they deem it convenient to make for
themselves,- do not, of course, arrive at their divisions of
time by the same process that we do; but I found it easy by the
aid of my watch, which I luckily had about me, to compute their
time with great nicety. I reserve for a future work on the
science and literature of the Vril-ya, should I live to
complete it, all details as to the manner in which they
arrive at their rotation of time; and content myself here
with saying, that in point of duration, their year differs
very slightly from ours, but that the divisions of their year
are by no means the same. Their day, (including what we call
night) consists of twenty hours of our time, instead of
twenty-four, and of course their year comprises the
correspondent increase in the number of days by which it is
summed up. They subdivide the twenty hours of their day
thus- eight hours,* called the "Silent Hours," for repose;
eight hours, called the "Earnest Time," for the pursuits and
occupations of life; and four hours called the "Easy Time"
(with which what I may term their day closes), allotted to
festivities, sport, recreation, or family converse, according
to their several tastes and inclinations.
* For the sake of convenience, I adopt the word hours, days,
years, &c., in any general reference to subdivisions of time
among the Vril-ya; those terms but loosely corresponding,
however, with such subdivisions.
But, in truth, out of doors there is no night. They maintain,
both in the streets and in the surrounding country, to the
limits of their territory, the same degree of light at all
hours. Only, within doors, they lower it to a soft twilight
during the Silent Hours. They have a great horror of perfect
81darkness, and their lights are never wholly extinguished. On
occasions of festivity they continue the duration of full
light, but equally keep note of the distinction between night
and day, by mechanical contrivances which answer the purpose of
our clocks and watches. They are very fond of music; and it is
by music that these chronometers strike the principal division
of time. At every one of their hours, during their day, the
sounds coming from all the time-pieces in their public
buildings, and caught up, as it were, by those of houses or
hamlets scattered amidst the landscapes without the city, have
an effect singularly sweet, and yet singularly solemn. But
during the Silent Hours these sounds are so subdued as to be
only faintly heard by a waking ear. They have no change of
seasons, and, at least on the territory of this tribe, the
atmosphere seemed to me very equable, warm as that of an
Italian summer, and humid rather than dry; in the forenoon
usually very still, but at times invaded by strong blasts from
the rocks that made the borders of their domain. But time is
the same to them for sowing or reaping as in the Golden Isles
of the ancient poets. At the same moment you see the younger
plants in blade or bud, the older in ear or fruit. All
fruit-bearing plants, however, after fruitage, either shed or
change the colour of their leaves. But that which interested
me most in reckoning up their divisions of time was the
ascertainment of the average duration of life amongst them. I
found on minute inquiry that this very considerably exceeded
the term allotted to us on the upper earth. What seventy years
are to us, one hundred years are to them. Nor is this the only
advantage they have over us in longevity, for as few among us
attain to the age of seventy, so, on the contrary, few among
them die before the age of one hundred; and they enjoy a
general degree of health and vigour which makes life itself a
blessing even to the last. Various causes contribute to this
result: the absence of all alcoholic stimulants; temperance in
82food; more especially, perhaps, a serenity of mind undisturbed
by anxious occupations and eager passions. They are not
tormented by our avarice or our ambition; they appear perfectly
indifferent even to the desire of fame; they are capable of
great affection, but their love shows itself in a tender and
cheerful complaisance, and, while forming their happiness,
seems rarely, if ever, to constitute their woe. As the Gy is
sure only to marry where she herself fixes her choice, and as
here, not less than above ground, it is the female on whom the
happiness of home depends; so the Gy, having chosen the mate
she prefers to all others, is lenient to his faults, consults
his humours, and does her best to secure his attachment. The
death of a beloved one is of course with them, as with us, a
cause for sorrow; but not only is death with them so much more
rare before that age in which it becomes a release, but when it
does occur the survivor takes much more consolation than, I am
afraid, the generality of us do, in the certainty of reunion in
another and yet happier life.
All these causes, then, concur to their healthful and enjoyable
longevity, though, no doubt, much also must be owing to
hereditary organisation. According to their records, however,
in those earlier stages of their society when they lived in
communities resembling ours, agitated by fierce competition,
their lives were considerably shorter, and their maladies more
numerous and grave. They themselves say that the duration of
life, too, has increased, and is still on the increase, since
their discovery of the invigorating and medicinal properties of
vril, applied for remedial purposes. They have few
professional and regular practitioners of medicine, and these
are chiefly Gy-ei, who, especially if widowed and childless,
find great delight in the healing art, and even undertake
surgical operations in those cases required by accident, or,
more rarely, by disease.
They have their diversions and entertainments, and, during the
Easy Time of their day, they are wont to assemble in great
numbers for those winged sports in the air which I have already
83described. They have also public halls for music, and even
theatres, at which are performed pieces that appeared to me
somewhat to resemble the plays of the Chinese- dramas that are
thrown back into distant times for their events and personages,
in which all classic unities are outrageously violated, and the
hero, in once scene a child, in the next is an old man, and so
forth. These plays are of very ancient composition, and their
stories cast in remote times. They appeared to me very dull,
on the whole, but were relieved by startling mechanical
contrivances, and a kind of farcical broad humour, and detached
passages of great vigour and power expressed in language highly
poetical, but somewhat overcharged with metaphor and trope. In
fine, they seemed to me very much what the plays of Shakespeare
seemed to a Parisian in the time of Louis XV., or perhaps to an
Englishman in the reign of Charles II.
The audience, of which the Gy-ei constituted the chief portion,
appeared to enjoy greatly the representation of these dramas,
which, for so sedate and majestic a race of females, surprised
me, till I observed that all the performers were under the age
of adolescence, and conjectured truly that the mothers and
sisters came to please their children and brothers.
I have said that these dramas are of great antiquity. No new
plays, indeed no imaginative works sufficiently important to
survive their immediate day, appear to have been composed for
several generations. In fact, though there is no lack of new
publications, and they have even what may be called newspapers,
these are chiefly devoted to mechanical science, reports of new
inventions, announcements respecting various details of
business- in short, to practical matters. Sometimes a child
writes a little tale of adventure, or a young Gy vents her
amorous hopes or fears in a poem; but these effusions are of
very little merit, and are seldom read except by children and
maiden Gy-ei. The most interesting works of a purely literary
character are those of explorations and travels into other
regions of this nether world, which are generally written by
84young emigrants, and are read with great avidity by the
relations and friends they have left behind.
I could not help expressing to Aph-Lin my surprise that a
community in which mechanical science had made so marvellous a
progress, and in which intellectual civilisation had exhibited
itself in realising those objects for the happiness of the
people, which the political philosophers above ground had, after
ages of struggle, pretty generally agreed to consider
unattainable visions, should, nevertheless, be so wholly
without a contemporaneous literature, despite the excellence to
which culture had brought a language at once so rich and
simple, vigourous and musical.
My host replied- "Do you not percieve that a literature such as
you mean would be wholly incompatible with that perfection of
social or political felicity at which you do us the honour to
think we have arrived? We have at last, after centuries of
struggle, settled into a form of government with which we are
content, and in which, as we allow no differences of rank, and
no honours are paid to administrators distinguishing them from
others, there is no stimulus given to individual ambition. No
one would read works advocating theories that involved any
political or social change, and therefore no one writes them.
If now and then an An feels himself dissatisfied with our
tranquil mode of life, he does not attack it; he goes away.
Thus all that part of literature (and to judge by the ancient
books in our public libraries, it was once a very large part),
which relates to speculative theories on society is become
utterly extinct. Again, formerly there was a vast deal written
respecting the attributes and essence of the All-Good, and the
arguments for and against a future state; but now we all
recognise two facts, that there IS a Divine Being, and there IS
a future state, and we all equally agree that if we wrote our
fingers to the bone, we could not throw any light upon the
nature and conditions of that future state, or quicken our
apprehensions of the attributes and essence of that Divine
85Being. Thus another part of literature has become also
extinct, happily for our race; for in the time when so much was
written on subjects which no one could determine, people seemed
to live in a perpetual state of quarrel and contention. So,
too, a vast part of our ancient literature consists of
historical records of wars an revolutions during the times when
the Ana lived in large and turbulent societies, each seeking
aggrandisement at the expense of the other. You see our serene
mode of life now; such it has been for ages. We have no events
to chronicle. What more of us can be said than that, 'they
were born, they were happy, they died?' Coming next to that
part of literature which is more under the control of the
imagination, such as what we call Glaubsila, or colloquially
'Glaubs,' and you call poetry, the reasons for its decline
amongst us are abundantly obvious.
"We find, by referring to the great masterpieces in that
department of literature which we all still read with pleasure,
but of which none would tolerate imitations, that they consist
in the portraiture of passions which we no longer experience-
ambition, vengeance, unhallowed love, the thirst for warlike
renown, and suchlike. The old poets lived in an atmosphere
impregnated with these passions, and felt vividly what they
expressed glowingly. No one can express such passions now, for
no one can feel them, or meet with any sympathy in his readers
if he did. Again, the old poetry has a main element in its
dissection of those complex mysteries of human character which
conduce to abnormal vices and crimes, or lead to signal and
extraordinary virtues. But our society, having got rid of
temptations to any prominent vices and crimes, has necessarily
rendered the moral average so equal, that there are no very
salient virtues. Without its ancient food of strong passions,
vast crimes, heroic excellences, poetry therefore is, if not
actually starved to death, reduced to a very meagre diet.
There is still the poetry of description- description of rocks,
and trees, and waters, and common household life; and our young
Gy-ei weave much of this insipid kind of composition into their
love verses."
86
"Such poetry," said I, "might surely be made very charming; and
we have critics amongst us who consider it a higher kind than
that which depicts the crimes, or analyses the passions, of
man. At all events, poetry of the inspired kind you mention is
a poetry that nowadays commands more readers than any other
among the people I have left above ground."
"Possibly; but then I suppose the writers take great pains with
the language they employ, and devote themselves to the culture
and polish of words and rhythms of an art?"
"Certainly they do: all great poets do that. Though the gift
of poetry may be inborn, the gift requires as much care to make
it available as a block of metal does to be made into one of
your engines."
"And doubtless your poets have some incentive to bestow all
those pains upon such verbal prettinesses?"
"Well, I presume their instinct of song would make them sing as
the bird does; but to cultivate the song into verbal or
artificial prettiness, probably does need an inducement from
without, and our poets find it in the love of fame- perhaps,
now and then, in the want of money."
"Precisely so. But in our society we attach fame to nothing
which man, in that moment of his duration which is called
'life,' can perform. We should soon lose that equality which
constitutes the felicitous essence of our commonwealth if we
selected any individual for pre-eminent praise: pre-eminent
praise would confer pre-eminent power, and the moment it were
given, evil passions, now dormant, would awake: other men would
immediately covet praise, then would arise envy, and with envy
hate, and with hate calumny and persecution. Our history tells
us that most of the poets and most of the writers who, in the
old time, were favoured with the greatest praise, were also
assailed by the greatest vituperation, and even, on the whole,
87rendered very unhappy, partly by the attacks of jealous rivals,
partly by the diseased mental constitution which an acquired
sensitiveness to praise and to blame tends to engender. As for
the stimulus of want; in the first place, no man in our
community knows the goad of poverty; and, secondly, if he did,
almost every occupation would be more lucrative than writing.
"Our public libraries contain all the books of the past which
time has preserved; those books, for the reasons above stated,
are infinitely better than any can write nowadays, and they are
open to all to read without cost. We are not such fools as to
pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books
for nothing."
"With us, novelty has an attraction; and a new book, if bad, is
read when an old book, though good, is neglected."
"Novelty, to barbarous states of society struggling in despair
for something better, has no doubt an attraction, denied to us,
who see nothing to gain in novelties; but after all, it is
observed by one of our great authors four thousand years ago,
that 'he who studies old books will always find in them
something new, and he who reads new books will always find in
them something old.' But to return to the question you have
raised, there being then amongst us no stimulus to painstaking
labour, whether in desire of fame or in pressure of want, such
as have the poetic temperament, no doubt vent it in song, as
you say the bird sings; but for lack of elaborate culture it
fails of an audience, and, failing of an audience, dies out, of
itself, amidst the ordinary avocations of life."
"But how is it that these discouragements to the cultivation of
literature do not operate against that of science?"
"Your question amazes me. The motive to science is the love of
truth apart from all consideration of fame, and science with us
too is devoted almost solely to practical uses, essential to
our social conversation and the comforts of our daily life. No
88fame is asked by the inventor, and none is given to him; he
enjoys an occupation congenial to his tastes, and needing no
wear and tear of the passions. Man must have exercise for his
mind as well as body; and continuous exercise, rather than
violent, is best for both. Our most ingenious cultivators of
science are, as a general rule, the longest lived and the most
free from disease. Painting is an amusement to many, but the
art is not what it was in former times, when the great painters
in our various communities vied with each other for the prize
of a golden crown, which gave them a social rank equal to that
of the kings under whom they lived. You will thus doubtless
have observed in our archaeological department how superior in
point of art the pictures were several thousand years ago.
Perhaps it is because music is, in reality, more allied to
science than it is to poetry, that, of all the pleasurable
arts, music is that which flourishes the most amongst us.
Still, even in music the absence of stimulus in praise or fame
has served to prevent any great superiority of one individual
over another; and we rather excel in choral music, with the aid
of our vast mechanical instruments, in which we make great use
of the agency of water,* than in single performers."
* This may remind the student of Nero's invention of a musical
machine, by which water was made to perform the part of an
orchestra, and on which he was employed when the conspiracy
against him broke out.
"We have had scarcely any original composer for some ages. Our
favorite airs are very ancient in substance, but have admitted
many complicated variations by inferior, though ingenious,
musicians."
"Are there no political societies among the Ana which are
animated by those passions, subjected to those crimes, and
admitting those disparities in condition, in intellect, and in
morality, which the state of your tribe, or indeed of the
Vril-ya generally, has left behind in its progress to
perfection? If so, among such societies perhaps Poetry and her
sister arts still continue to be honoured and to improve?"
89
"There are such societies in remote regions, but we do not
admit them within the pale of civilised communities; we
scarcely even give them the name of Ana, and certainly not that
of Vril-ya. They are savages, living chiefly in that low stage
of being, Koom-Posh, tending necessarily to its own hideous
dissolution in Glek-Nas. Their wretched existence is passed in
perpetual contest and perpetual change. When they do not fight
with their neighbours, they fight among themselves. They are
divided into sections, which abuse, plunder, and sometimes
murder each other, and on the most frivolous points of
difference that would be unintelligible to us if we had not
read history, and seen that we too have passed through the same
early state of ignorance and barbarism. Any trifle is
sufficient to set them together by the ears. They pretend to
be all equals, and the more they have struggled to be so, by
removing old distinctions, and starting afresh, the more
glaring and intolerable the disparity becomes, because nothing
in hereditary affections and associations is left to soften the
one naked distinction between the many who have nothing and the
few who have much. Of course the many hate the few, but
without the few they could not live. The many are always
assailing the few; sometimes they exterminate the few; but as
soon as they have done so, a new few starts out of the many,
and is harder to deal with than the old few. For where
societies are large, and competition to have something is the
predominant fever, there must be always many losers and few
gainers. In short, they are savages groping their way in the
dark towards some gleam of light, and would demand our
commiseration for their infirmities, if, like all savages, they
did not provoke their own destruction by their arrogance and
cruelty. Can you imagine that creatures of this kind, armed
only with such miserable weapons as you may see in our museum
of antiquities, clumsy iron tubes charged with saltpetre, have
more than once threatened with destruction a tribe of the
90Vril-ya, which dwells nearest to them, because they say they
have thirty millions of population- and that tribe may have
fifty thousand- if the latter do not accept their notions of
Soc-Sec (money getting) on some trading principles which they
have the impudence to call 'a law of civilisation'?"
"But thirty millions of population are formidable odds against
fifty thousand!"
My host stared at me astonished. "Stranger," said he, "you
could not have heard me say that this threatened tribe belongs
to the Vril-ya; and it only waits for these savages to declare
war, in order to commission some half-a-dozen small children to
sweep away their whole population."
At these words I felt a thrill of horror, recognising much more
affinity with "the savages" than I did with the Vril-ya, and
remembering all I had said in praise of the glorious American
institutions, which Aph-Lin stigmatised as Koom-Posh.
Recovering my self-possession, I asked if there were modes of
transit by which I could safely visit this temerarious and
remote people.
"You can travel with safety, by vril agency, either along the
ground or amid the air, throughout all the range of the
communities with which we are allied and akin; but I cannot
vouch for your safety in barbarous nations governed by
different laws from ours; nations, indeed, so benighted, that
there are among them large numbers who actually live by
stealing from each other, and one could not with safety in the
Silent Hours even leave the doors of one's own house open."
Here our conversation was interrupted by the entrance of Taee,
who came to inform us that he, having been deputed to discover
and destroy the enormous reptile which I had seen on my first
arrival, had been on the watch for it ever since his visit to
me, and had began to suspect that my eyes had deceived me, or
that the creature had made its way through the cavities within
91the rocks to the wild regions in which dwelt its kindred race,-
when it gave evidences of its whereabouts by a great
devastation of the herbage bordering one of the lakes. "And,"
said Taee, "I feel sure that within that lake it is now hiding.
So," (turning to me) "I thought it might amuse you to accompany
me to see the way we destroy such unpleasant visitors." As I
looked at the face of the young child, and called to mind the
enormous size of the creature he proposed to exterminate, I
felt myself shudder with fear for him, and perhaps fear for
myself, if I accompanied him in such a chase. But my curiosity
to witness the destructive effects of the boasted vril, and my
unwillingness to lower myself in the eyes of an infant by
betraying apprehensions of personal safety, prevailed over my
first impulse. Accordingly, I thanked Taee for his courteous
consideration for my amusement, and professed my willingness to
set out with him on so diverting an enterprise.
