Part 10
"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 sextupedal origin; but it is actually bipedal, bimanous, and what might be called _bialic_, since these beings have two wings.
"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. Passions 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, analogies 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 shores 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 principally 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 shores 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 shores 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 canals, and have constructed a network of immense canals 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 canals, which connect all the seas with one another, and by streams made to resemble canals. 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 analogous to the Channel, the Red Sea, the Adriatic, the Baltic, and the Caspian; pleasant shores, 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 pass 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 passing 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, passes 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 constitution 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 principally 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 analogous 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, space 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."
"Terrestrial humanity is young," answered Spero. "You must not despair. It is a child, and still in primitive ignorance. It is amused at trifles, and obeys masters of its own giving. You like to divide yourselves into nations, to trick yourselves out in national costumes, and to exterminate each other to music! Then you raise statues to those who have led you to butchery. You ruin yourselves, you commit suicide, and yet you cannot live without wresting your daily bread from the Earth. That is a sad condition of things, but one which fully satisfies the greater part of the dwellers on your planet. If some of them, with higher aspirations, think occasionally of problems of the higher order, of the nature of the soul or the existence of God, the result has been no better, because they have put their souls outside of Nature, and have invented strange, horrible gods, who never existed except in their perverted imaginations, and in whose name they have committed all kinds of outrages against the human conscience, have blessed all crimes, and bound weak minds in a slavery from which it will be difficult for them to escape. The lowest animal on Mars is better, finer, gentler, more intelligent, and greater than the god of the armies of David, Constantine, Charlemagne, and all your crowned assassins. There is therefore nothing surprising in the coarseness and stupidity of terrestrial humanity. But the law of progress governs the world. You are more advanced than at the period of your ancestors of the stone age, whose wretched existence was spent in fighting night and day with ferocious beasts. In a few thousands of years you will be more advanced than you are now. Then Urania will reign in your hearts."
"It would require a brutal material fact to teach and convince human beings. If, for instance, we could some day enter into communication with the neighboring world which you inhabit, not into physical communication with one isolated person of it, as I am now doing, but with the planet itself, by hundreds and thousands of witnesses, that would be a gigantic stride towards progress."
"You could do it now if you chose, for we Martials are all prepared for it, and have even tried it many times. But you have never replied to us. Solar reflections, showing geometrical figures on our vast plains, prove to you that we exist. You could reply to us by like figures also displayed on your plains, either during the day by the sun, or during the night by the electric light. But you never even think of it; and if some one should propose to try it, your courts would interpose to prevent it, for the very idea is immeasurably too high for the general approval of the denizens of your planet. What do your scientific assemblies work for? The preservation of the past. To what do your political assemblies direct their attention? Increasing the taxes. In the land of the blind, one-eyed men are kings.
"But you must not utterly despair. Progress bears you on in spite of yourselves. One of these days, too, you will realize that you are citizens of the sky; then you will live in the light, in knowledge, in the mind's true world."
While the inhabitant of Mars was teaching me the principal characteristics of his new country, the terrestrial globe had turned towards the east, the horizon had sunk lower, and the Moon had gradually risen in the sky, which she was illuminating with her radiance.
Suddenly chancing to lower my eyes to where Spero sat, I could not repress a start of surprise. The moonlight was streaming over him as it did over me, and yet, although my body cast a shadow on the parapet, his figure was shadowless. I arose abruptly to assure myself of this fact. I turned about at once and stretched out my hand to touch his shoulder, watching the shadow of my gesture on the parapet. But my visitor had instantly disappeared. I was absolutely alone on the silent tower. My very dark shadow was thrown out sharply on the parapet. The Moon was brilliant, the village was sleeping at my feet. The air was mild and very still. And yet I thought I heard footsteps. I listened, and indeed did hear rather heavy footsteps coming towards me. Some one was evidently climbing the tower-stairs.
"Monsieur has not gone down yet?" said the custodian, coming up to the top. "I was waiting to lock the doors, and thought the experiments must be over."
IV.
THE FIXED POINT IN THE UNIVERSE.
The memory of Urania and the celestial journey on which she had borne me away, the truths she had made me realize, Spero's history, his trials in his pursuit of the absolute, his apparition, his story of another world, still haunted me, and kept the same problems (partly solved, partly veiled in the uncertainty of our knowledge) incessantly before my mind. I felt that I had gradually risen to a perception of the truth, and that the visible universe was really but an appearance, which we must pass through in order to reach reality.
The testimony of our senses is but an illusion. The Earth is not what it seems to be. Nature is not what we think. In the physical universe itself, where is the fixed point upon which material creation is in equilibrium?
The natural and direct impression given by the observation of Nature is that we inhabit a solid, stable Earth, fixed in the centre of the universe. It took long centuries of study and a great deal of boldness to free ourselves from that natural conviction, and to realize that the world we are on is isolated in space, without any support whatever, in rapid motion on itself and around the Sun. But to the ages before scientific analysis, to primitive peoples, and even to-day to three quarters of the human race, our feet are resting on a solid Earth which is fixed at the base of the universe, and whose foundations are supposed to extend into the depths of the infinite.
And yet from the time when it was first realized that it is the same Sun which rises and sets every day; that it is the same Moon, the same stars, the same constellations which revolve about us, those very facts forced one to admit with absolute certainty that there must be empty space underneath the Earth, to let the stars of the firmament pass from their setting to their rising. This first recognition was a turning-point. The admission of the Earth's isolation in space was astronomy's first triumph. It was the first step, and indeed the most difficult one. Think of it! To give up the foundations of the Earth! Such an idea would never have sprung from any brain without the study of the stars, or indeed without the transparency of the atmosphere. Under a perpetually cloudy sky, human thoughts would have remained fixed on terrestrial ground like the oyster to the rock.
The Earth once isolated in space, the first step was taken. Before this revolution, whose philosophical bearing equals its scientific value, all manner of shapes had been imagined for our sublunary dwelling-place. In the first place, the Earth was thought to be an island emerging from a boundless ocean, the island having infinite roots. Then the Earth, with its seas, was supposed to be a flat, circular disk, all around which rested the vault of the firmament. Later, cubic, cylindrical, polyhedric forms, etc., were imagined. But still the progress of navigation tended to reveal its spherical nature, and when its isolation, with its incontestable proofs, was recognized, this sphericity was admitted as a natural corollary of that isolation and of the circular motion of the celestial spheres around the supposed central globe.
The terrestrial globe being from that time recognized as isolated, to move it was no longer difficult. Formerly, when the sky was looked upon as a dome crowning the massive and unlimited Earth, the very idea of supposing it to be in motion would have been not only absurd but untenable. But from the time that we could see it in our minds, placed like a globe in the centre of celestial motion, the idea of imagining that perhaps this globe could revolve on itself, so as to avoid obliging the whole sky and the immense universe to perform this daily task, might come naturally into a thinker's mind; and indeed we see the hypothesis of the daily rotation of the terrestrial sphere coming to light in ancient civilizations, among the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Indians, etc. It is sufficient to read a few chapters of Ptolemy, Plutarch, or Surya-Siddhanta for an account of these conjectures. But this new hypothesis, although it had been prepared for by the first one, was none the less bold, and contrary to the feelings inspired by the direct contemplation of Nature. Thoughtful mankind was obliged to wait until the sixteenth century, or, to speak more correctly, until the seventeenth century, to learn our planet's true position in the universe, and to _know_ by supported proofs that it has a double movement,--daily about itself, and yearly about the Sun. From that time only, from the time of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, has real astronomy existed.
And yet again, that was but a beginning, for the great remodeller of the world's system, Copernicus himself, had no suspicion of the Earth's other motions, or of the distances of the stars. It is only in our own century that the first measurements of the distances of the stars could be made, and it is only in our day that sidereal discoveries have afforded us the necessary data by which we might endeavor to account for the forces which maintain the equilibrium of creation.
The ancient idea of endless roots attributed to the Earth, evidently left much to be desired to minds anxious to go to the bottom of things. It is absolutely impossible for us to conceive of a material pillar, as thick and as wide as you like (of the diameter of the Earth, for example), sinking down into the infinite; just as one cannot admit the real existence of a stick which should have but one end. No matter how far our mind goes down towards the base of such a material pillar, there is a point where it can see the end of it. The difficulty had been obviated by materializing the celestial sphere and putting the Earth inside it, occupying all its lower portion. But in the first place it became difficult to adjust the motion of the stars, and on the other hand this material universe itself, enclosed in an immense crystal globe, was held up by nothing, since the infinite must extend all around, beneath it, as well as above. Investigating minds were at first obliged to free themselves from the vulgar idea of weight.
Isolated in space like a child's balloon floating in the air, and more absolutely too, for the balloon is carried by aerial waves, while worlds gravitate in the void, the Earth is a toy for the invisible cosmic forces which it obeys,--a real soap-bubble, sensitive to the faintest breath. Besides, we can easily judge of it by looking at the same time at the whole of the _eleven_ principal motions of the Earth, by which it is moved. Perhaps they will help us to find that "fixed point" which our philosophical ambition asks for.
Thrown around the Sun at a distance of 37,000,000 leagues, and making at this distance its annual revolution around the luminous star, it consequently moves at the rate of 643,000 leagues per day; that is, 26,800 leagues an hour, or 29,450 metres per second. This speed is eleven hundred times more rapid than an express train going at the rate of a hundred kilometres an hour. It is a ball, going with a rapidity seventy-five times greater than that of a bomb, always hurrying on, but never reaching its goal. In 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 10 seconds, the terrestrial projectile has returned to the same point of its orbit relative to the Sun, and continues its flight. The Sun, on its part, is moving in space, following a line oblique to the plane of the Earth's annual motion,--a line drawn towards the constellation of Hercules. The result is, that instead of describing an exact circle, the Earth describes a spiral, and has never passed over the same road twice in its existence. To its motion of annual revolution around the Sun there is added perpetually, as a second motion, that of the Sun itself, which draws it, with all the solar system, into an oblique descent towards the constellation of Hercules.
During all this time our little globe pirouettes around itself every twenty-four hours, and gives us the daily succession of days and nights,--diurnal rotation: third motion.
It does not turn upright upon itself, like a top, which would be vertical on a table, but is inclined, as everybody knows, by 23° 27'. This inclination, too, is not always the same; it varies from year to year, from age to age, oscillating slowly by secular periods. That is a fourth kind of motion.
The orbit in which our planet yearly travels around the Sun is not circular, but elliptical. This ellipse itself also varies from year to year, and from century to century; sometimes it approaches the circumference of a circle, sometimes it lengthens out to a great eccentricity. It is like an elastic ring, which can be bent more or less out of shape. Fifth complication in the Earth's motion.
This ellipse itself is not fixed in space, but revolves in its own plane in a period of 21,000 years. The perihelion, which at the beginning of our era was at 65 degrees of longitude, starting from the vernal equinox, is now at 101 degrees. This secular displacement of the line of the apsides brings a sixth complication to the motion of our abiding-place.
Here is a seventh. We said just now that our globe's axis of rotation is inclined, and everybody knows that the imaginary prolongation of this axis points towards the polar star. This axis itself is not fixed. It revolves in 25,765 years, keeping its inclination of 22 to 24 degrees, so that its prolongation describes a circle of 44 to 48 degrees in diameter--according to the epoch--on the celestial sphere around the pole of the ecliptic. It is in consequence of this displacement of the pole that Vega, in twelve thousand years, will again become the polar star, as she was fourteen thousand years ago. Seventh kind of movement.