Part 9
"You are all more or less butchers. Your hands are stained with blood, your stomachs are gorged with food. How can you expect to have wholesome, pure, elevated ideas,--I will even say (excuse my frankness) clean ideas,--with such coarse organisms? What souls could live in such bodies? Reflect a moment, and do not soothe yourself any more with blind illusions, too ideal for such a world."
"What!" I cried, interrupting him, "do you deny us the possibility of having clean ideas? Do you take human beings for animals? Have Homer, Plato, Phidias, Seneca, Virgil, Dante, Columbus, Bacon, Galileo, Pascal, Leonardo, Raphael, Mozart, Beethoven, never had lofty aspirations? You think our bodies coarse and repulsive; if you had seen Helen, Phryne, Aspasia, Sappho, Cleopatra, Lucretia Borgia, Agnes Sorel, Diane de Poitiers, Marguerite de Valois, Borghese, Talien, Récamier, Georges, and their charming rivals, you would perhaps think differently. Ah, my dear Martial, let me in my turn regret that you know the Earth only from afar."
"You are mistaken there; I lived in that world for fifty years. That was enough for me, and I assure you I would not return to it again. Everything is a failure there, even--what seems most delightful to you. Do you imagine that in all the earths of heaven the flowers produce the fruits of the same sorts? Would not that be a little cruel? As for me, I like primroses and rosebuds."
"Well, but still," I answered, "notwithstanding all that, there have been great minds on the Earth, and creatures really worthy of admiration. May we not comfort ourselves with the hope that physical and moral beauty will go on perfecting themselves more and more as they have done hitherto, and that intelligence will enlighten itself progressively? We do not spend all our time eating. Men will surely end, in spite of their material labors, by giving up a few hours every day to the development of their understanding. Then probably they will no longer continue to manufacture little gods in their own image; and perhaps also they will abolish their childish boundaries, so that harmony and fraternity may reign."
"No, my friend, for if they wished it, they could do so now; but they are very careful not to. Terrestrial man is a little animal who on the one hand feels no need of thinking, not even having independence of soul, and who on the other likes to fight, and squarely establishes right by might. Such is his good pleasure, and such is his nature. You will never make peaches grow on a thorn-bush. Remember that the most exquisite beauties, to whom you alluded just now, are but coarse monsters compared to the aerial women of Mars, who live on our spring air, the perfume of our flowers, and are so captivating in the very quivering of their wings, in the ideal kiss of a mouth which has never eaten, that if Dante's Beatrice had been of such a nature, the immortal Florentine would never have been able to write two of the parts of his 'Divine Comedy;' he would have begun with Paradise, and could never have left it. Reflect that our youths have as much innate science as Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Kepler, Newton, Laplace, and Darwin after all their laborious studies; our twelve senses put us in direct communication with the universe; we feel from here Jupiter's attraction as he passes, a hundred million leagues away. We see the rings of Saturn with the naked eye, we detect the coming of a comet, and our body is impregnated with the solar electricity which puts all Nature in vibration. Here there has never been either religious fanaticism or executioners, or martyrs or international divisions or wars, but from the first, humanity, naturally peaceful, and freed from all material needs, has lived independent in body and mind, in a constant intellectual activity, raising itself unhindered to the knowledge of the truth. But come over here."
* * * * *
I walked a few steps on the mountain-top with my new acquaintances, and coming in sight of the other slope, I saw multitudes of different colored lights flitting about in the air. It was the inhabitants, who, when they desire it, become luminous at night. Aerial cars, apparently formed of phosphorescent flowers, were carrying orchestras and choruses; one of them passed us, and we took our places in it, in the midst of a cloud of perfumes. The sensations which I experienced were singularly unlike any which I had ever felt on the Earth, and this first night on Mars passed like a rapid dream; for the dawn found me still in the aerial car conversing with my entertainers, their friends, and their indescribably lovely companions. What a panorama with the rising sun! Flowers, fruits, perfumes, fairy-like palaces rose on the islands with their orange vegetation; the waters stretched themselves out like limpid mirrors, and joyous aerial couples were whirling down to these enchanting shores. There, all material work is done by machines, and directed by a few perfected races of animals whose intelligence is very nearly of the same order as that of mankind on the Earth. The inhabitants live only for and by the mind; their nervous system has reached such a degree of development that each one of these beings, at once very delicate and very strong, seems an electric battery, and their most sensual impressions, felt more by their souls than their bodies, surpass a hundredfold all those that our five terrestrial senses together could ever offer us. A kind of summer palace illuminated by the rays of the rising Sun opened beneath our aerial gondola. My neighbor, whose wings were fluttering with impatience, placed her delicate foot upon a tuft of flowers which rose between two jets of perfume. "Will you return to the Earth?" she asked, holding out her arms to me.
"Never," I cried, springing towards her.
* * * * *
But at that moment I found myself alone near the wood on the slope of the hill, at whose feet the Seine was winding with undulating curves.
"_Never_," I repeated, trying to grasp the sweet, vanished dream once more. Where had I been? It was beautiful. The Sun had just set, and the planet Mars, then very brilliant, was already shining in the sky. "Ah!" I said, as a fugitive beam reached me, "I have been there!" Drawn by the same attraction, the two neighboring planets are looking at each other through transparent space. May we not catch a first glimpse of the eternal journey from this celestial fraternity? The Earth is no longer alone in the universe. The panoramas of the infinite are beginning to open themselves out. Whether we live here or near by, we are not the citizens of a country or of a world, but are in very truth the _Citizens of Heaven_!
III.
THE PLANET MARS.
Had I been the plaything of a dream?
Had my spirit really been transported to the planet Mars, or had I been the dupe of a purely imaginary illusion?
The feeling of reality had been so strong, so intense, and the things I had seen agreed so perfectly with the scientific notions which we already possess in regard to the physical nature of the Martial world, that I could not entertain a doubt on the subject, although amazed at that ecstatic trip, and asking myself a thousand questions, each one contradicting the other.
Spero's absence in all that vision puzzled me a little. I still felt so closely attached to his dear memory that it seemed to me as if I should have been able to detect his presence, to fly directly to him, see him, speak to him, hear him. But was not the man hypnotized at Nancy the toy of his own imagination, or of mine, or of the experimenter's? On the other hand, even admitting that my two friends had been reincarnated upon that neighboring planet, I reflected that beings might easily not meet one another in going about the same city, and in a world the chances were infinitely less. And yet surely it was not the doctrine of chances which should be invoked in this case; for such a feeling of attraction as that which had united us ought to increase the probability of our meeting, and throw an element into the scale which should outweigh all the rest.
Talking thus with myself, I went back to my observatory at Juvisy, where I had been preparing some electric batteries for an optical experiment with the tower of Montlhéry. When I had satisfied myself that everything was in readiness, I left the task of making the signals agreed upon, between ten and eleven o'clock, to my assistant, and went to the old tower, where I installed myself an hour later. The night had come. From the top of the old donjon the horizon is perfectly circular, entirely free in all its circumference, which extended on a radius of twenty to twenty-five kilometres all around this central point. A third post of observation, situated in Paris, was in communication with us. The object of the experiment was to find out whether the rays of different colors of the luminous spectrum all travel with the same speed,--300,000 kilometres a second. The result was affirmative.
The experiments were ended at about eleven o'clock, the starry night was marvellous, and the moon was beginning to rise. As soon as I had put the apparatus under cover inside the tower, I went to the upper platform again, to look at the broad landscape lighted by the first rays of the waxing moon. The atmosphere was calm, mild, almost warm.
But my foot was still on the last step when I stopped, terror-stricken, uttering a cry which seemed to die away in my throat. Spero, yes, Spero himself, was there, before me, seated on the parapet! I threw up my arms, and felt as if I were going to faint; but he said in his gentle voice, which I knew so well,--
"Do I frighten you?"
I had not strength enough to reply or to advance, and still I dared to look at my friend, who was smiling at me. His dear face, lighted by the moonlight, was just as I had seen it when he left Paris for Christiania,--young, pleasant, and thoughtful, with a very animated look. I left the stairs, and felt a strong desire to rush to him and embrace him; but I dared not, and stood looking at him.
When I had recovered my senses I cried, "Spero, it is you!"
"I was there during your experiments," he replied, "and it was I who inspired you with the idea of comparing the intense violet with the intense red, for the speed of the luminous waves; only I was invisible, like the ultra-violet rays."
"Can it really be so? Let me look at you and feel you."
I passed my hands over his face and body, through his hair, and had precisely the same impression as if he had been a living being. My reason refused to admit the testimony of my eyes and hands and ears, yet I could not doubt that it was really he. There could not be such a resemblance. And then, too, my doubts would have disappeared at his first words, for he at once added,--
"My body is at this moment sleeping in Mars."
"So," I said, "you still exist, you are living now, and you know at last the answer to the great problem that so distressed you? And Icléa?"
"We will have a long talk," he answered; "I have many things to tell you."
I sat down beside him on the edge of the wide parapet which rises above the old tower, and this is what I heard.
* * * * *
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 sex reigns supreme, from an acknowledged superiority over the masculine sex. 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 sex is stronger and handsomer (the strength consisting in the superiority of sensation) than the masculine sex, 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 Icléa'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 passively 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 constituent 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 coarseness 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 Cæsar'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 God.... 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 sex, 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 sex, 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 analyze 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 Médicis are actual monstrosities, on account of their animal heaviness.
"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.