CHAPTER IV
Of the Origin of Rational Life in Hesperos—Of the Cyclical Organic Life—Of the Law of Evanescence by Mortal Lesion—The story of the Hesperian Cain—Of the Law of Evanescence by adverse Metronomic Balance—How a Court of Justice sentenced a culprit to Eternal Punishment; and how the culprit escaped.
[Warnung by Antares Skorpios.—Should this book, by any mischance, have fallen into the hands of any habitual consumer of the style of literature known as ‘Shilling Shockers,’ or ‘Penny Dreadfuls,’ the Shocked or Terrified is earnestly exhorted to waste none of his valuable time on the pages which follow. He may rely on it that, although up to this point he may have been able to comprehend the narrative, the remainder of the work is utterly beyond his tether. I now proceed with my translation.]
I shall now proceed to give an account of the nature and origin of rational life in Hesperos; but, before doing so, I must venture to address a word of advice and exhortation to the reader. Should he, unhappily, be one of those narrow-minded persons who exalt the normal phenomena of this little globe of earth into the unique standard and pattern of what must needs prevail throughout the entire universe, he had better close the book at once. But should he be of larger mind, and allow the possibility of more than he has dreamed of in his philosophy existing in heaven, he may perhaps find in the following sketch of the ancient history of Hesperos, communicated to me by those who were themselves the eye-witnesses of what they related, abundant matter both for profitable reflection and delectable entertainment.
I may here add that, for the convenience of these large-minded readers, I have in all cases reduced the measures of time and distance from the Hesperian terms in which they were given to me, to those which are best known in Europe. Thus, when I speak of years, I mean our own period of 365 days, and not the Hesperian of 224; and similarly I have expressed their measure of distance in English miles and feet; these being, perhaps, the best international standards.
The whole surface of Hesperos contains a little over one hundred and eighty-two millions of square miles. Hence, as land and water occur in nearly equal proportions, we have as the total amount of land about ninety-one millions. This again, being nearly equally divided between the north and south hemispheres, gives forty-five and a-half millions for each. If we deduct from this the odd five and a-half millions, as an allowance for the immensely high mountain chains, and other districts not suited for supporting life, we shall have left forty millions of square miles in each hemisphere available for that purpose.
Such being the physical condition of the planet, it happened that, in the year B.C. 18,270, just twenty thousand years ago, there suddenly appeared, uniformly dispersed over the forty million square miles of the northern hemisphere, exactly one hundred millions of rational creatures in the likeness of the human race. This is an ultimate fact which has hitherto baffled all inquiry. The manifestation took place suddenly and simultaneously; but whether it was the result of a new creation, or of a translation from other regions of space, is wrapped in impenetrable mystery. For twenty thousand years the Unknown Power which called them into being has preserved a rigid and unbroken silence. All that is known is that at the above epoch one hundred millions of highly intelligent creatures, equally divided between the two sexes, male and female, simultaneously awoke into conscious life.
Though thus strictly contemporaneous in origin, they were nevertheless, so far as appearance indicated, of very different ages. They all seemed to be adults, but their aspects varied between that of an adult of twenty and one of sixty years of age.
It is not my intention to describe the long and complicated process by which these detached creations, all alike ignorant of what had taken place, were, in the long course of ages, gradually amalgamated into communities and states. This would form the subject of a separate work on the ancient history of Hesperos, for which I possess copious materials. [I fear lost.] I must here confine myself to setting out more in detail the extraordinary differences, as to their circumstances and conditions of life, which exist between the rational inhabitants of Hesperos and those of the earth.
The first fact which will strike the reader as a very extraordinary difference indeed is this—that, although there is the same distinction of sexes as is found on earth, and although there is just the same mutual attraction between them, there is no such thing as reproduction of the species. To counterbalance this strange fact, however, there are no such things, at least as the result of natural causes, as disease, decay, and death. When I said that the apparent ages of the new created or imported Hesperians varied between twenty and sixty years, I did not mean to intimate, and the reader is not to infer, that anything in the slightest degree resembling the horrible condition of the Struldbrugs of Luggnagg has place in Hesperos. Far from it; the dependence of the bodily organism on the age of the individual in that planet has no analogy with the progressive decay of the wretched Struldbrug; it follows a more complicated law.
Every Hesperian, in fact, considered solely with reference to this bodily organism, leads a periodical life. The length of this period is not absolutely fixed, but it may be taken on an average at one hundred years, which may be conveniently divided into three sections, which may be respectively named as stationary, senescent, and juvenescent. For example, if we take a person who has just reached the apparent age of twenty years, his organic life will proceed somewhat as follow:—For the next twenty years he or she shows no outward and visible sign of change; but, at the end of this first or stationary period, traces of departing youth begin to manifest themselves. This process goes on for forty years, much in the same way as is the case with the human race on earth; and, at the end of this period, which we call senescent, the person has, in external form, all the look of a man or woman sixty years old.
At or about this time a crisis in life takes place. This crisis is marked by the patient falling into a sort of stupor or trance, in which he usually continues for about seven days. On awakening from this trance he resumes his ordinary life, apparently under the same conditions as before. But the conditions are not the same. It soon becomes plain that the trance has wrought some mysterious change in his powers of bodily life. At the date of his awakening the last section of the periodical life, called the juvenescent, begins. Change both in external form and bodily activity proceeds, but it proceeds in a reversed direction, so that at the end of ten years the man of sixty, instead of being promoted to the rank of a septuagenarian, has all the appearance of a man of fifty; ten years more bring him to forty, and so on, till the limit of twenty is reached again, and the stationary stage sets in once more.
Thus the cycle of one hundred years is completed—twenty years stationary, forty senescent, forty juvenescent. It should be remembered that these numbers only give averages; they vary in different cases within limits of a few years, nor are they, even for one and the same person, quite rigidly fixed. So the reader must not suppose that those who happen to be of the same apparent age at any one given date, will evermore preserve the same chronological relation to each other.
It appears at once from the consideration of this cyclical law, that about one-half of the population of the planet are (apparently) over, and the other half under, the age of thirty-five years. Still it must never be forgotten that this cycle of events affects the corporeal existence exclusively. Mental power is in no way under its control. Although it is true that, during the senescent period, both the desire and the capacity for active bodily exertion alike decline, there is no abatement whatever in the intellectual energy, or the slightest failure in the faculty of memory.
This, then, is the second essential difference between the Hesperian and the Terrestrial conditions of life. The first being the fact of Non-reproduction, the second may be called the Law of Cyclical Organism. A third still remains for our investigation.
This third essential difference was known, during the period of the ancient history of Hesperos, as the Law of Evanescence. But, before proceeding to explain it, I must premise that, since the commencement of the modern history, it has been ascertained that the real significance of this law was entirely misconceived in the earlier period. Though the facts, so far as they had been then observed, were sufficiently accounted for by it, the observations had been very far from complete.
The reader has, of course, already noticed, as an obvious consequence of the fact of non-reproduction, that all the now existing rational inhabitants of Hesperos are contemporaneous with the sudden manifestation of rational life on her surface. Whatever appearances might seem to indicate, not one of them is under twenty thousand years of age. Even the lovely girl who made notes of my conversation was not a day under it, though, at that time, I should have found it very hard to believe the fact. I have already mentioned that there is no such thing as death from disease or other natural and necessary cause. Still other causes may exist, and to these a portion of the original population may have fallen victims, so that the present Hesperians may be only the survivors of the original creation. These, too, some day or other may in like manner disappear, and rational life may thus be ultimately obliterated from the face of the planet. Such indeed was for ages the prevailing belief. How the belief was found to be based on an erroneous view of the actual facts will appear when we come to the history of the wonderful discovery which marks the commencement of the modern history.
But, as for the belief itself in the likelihood of extinction of life in the planet, its origin may be easily explained. Soon after the sudden creation, or manifestation, of the Hesperians, the people in contiguous districts began to fraternise with each other. By degrees small communities were formed; rude languages were invented; private property began to be acquired; the advantages of co-operation and division of labour were dimly discerned. But, side by side with these marks of progress, many discouraging symptoms appeared. These, perhaps the inseparable companions of advancing civilization, were simply envy, hatred, jealousy, and all kinds of malice, too often resulting in energetic quarrelling, blows, and wounds.
In one of these early contests one of the combatants, who had armed himself with an exceptionally heavy bludgeon, chanced to strike his antagonist an awful blow on the temple. The result was equally awful. Instead of falling to the ground, stunned by the force of the blow, as had been the usual result under similar circumstances in many previous encounters, the man who had received it simply vanished—instantaneously vanished. Not a trace of him was left, and the Hesperian Cain stood staring at the vacancy which his departed brother had filled, gasping with amazement and consternation at the work he had achieved.
As years went on many similar cases occurred. Occasionally this evanescence took place as the result of an accident; the co-operation of a neighbour, though a common, was not an indispensable antecedent. For instance, if a man fell over a precipice several hundred feet high—and many such are to be found among the mountains—evanescence on reaching the foot of it was invariable.
At length, by the process of comparing a vast number of instances in which this strange phenomenon had been observed, what was called the Law of Evanescence was established, namely, that a certain class of bodily injuries exist, which result in the instantaneous dissolution and disappearance of the recipient. And here I found my medical education of great service in enabling me to understand the nature of this law; for, from the accounts I got of the various causes of evanescence, it became quite clear to me that in almost every case of the occurrence of the phenomenon, what would be called in human beings a mortal lesion is the invariable antecedent; that, in fact, the decomposition of the body, which on the earth takes place slowly, is instantaneously effected in Hesperos.
Having referred to my medical education, I may call the reader’s attention, just in passing, to a difficulty which that education brought very forcibly before my mind. How could there be any science of anatomy in Hesperos? No corpses could be procured for dissection. An amputated arm or leg might be anatomised, but an examination of the structure of any of the vital organs is simply impossible. Just as, in mediæval times, medical students on the earth were obliged to have recourse to the dissection of the lower mammalia, in order to learn their business, so is it now with the Hesperians; and, in both cases, the results arrived at may be useful as the grounds for more or less ingenious hypotheses, but are quite insufficient as a foundation for any science worthy of the name.
But the above account of evanescence as, in all cases, the result of mortal lesion, is not in absolute conformity with the facts of experience. Such lesions are unquestionably, in the vast majority of instances, the real causes of the phenomena. Still, occasionally, though comparatively rarely, cases occur which seem to be irreducible to any such rule, and these, for many ages, were regarded as inexplicable anomalies. However, the law which governs such mysterious cases of evanescence was at last found out, as I shall now proceed to explain.
This important discovery was really the result of the invention of a most ingenious instrument, by means of which the degrees of pain and suffering on the one hand, and of joy and satisfaction on the other, endured or enjoyed by any given individual, during any assigned period, may be accurately measured, their aggregate amount computed, and the balance on either side struck. The machine is constructed somewhat on the principle of Mr. Fahrenheit’s thermometer, but the details of the construction, and of the mode of fixing the unit on which the calculations rest, were not communicated to me; indeed, the Hesperian who gave me a general account of it very frankly assured me—and I find no difficulty in believing him—that to understand its mode of action lies far beyond the range of my merely human faculties. However this may be, it is not easy to see how, without some such invention, the Second Law of Evanescence could have been discovered; but, by the application of this wonderful instrument to a great number of cases, the Law in question was at last established on a sufficiently wide inductive basis.
This Second Law of Evanescence may be stated in a popular form as follows:—Evanescence takes place whenever the total quantity of suffering undergone by anyone, exceeds, by a certain fixed amount, the total quantity of happiness he has enjoyed. This fixed amount when estimated by the Hesperian joy-and-sorrow-metronome, above described, is exactly ten million units of its scale. When this negative balance is reached, the second law acts spontaneously, and the sufferer is thus released from all further misery.
Under the existing conditions of life in Hesperos, it would be hard to over-estimate the importance of this law. For example, only for it there is nothing to prevent a court of justice from sentencing a prisoner to eternal punishment. And, as a matter of fact, one of the very earliest noticed cases of anomalous evanescence was the result of just such a sentence.
The case occurred, about three thousand years after the creation. At that time, states, governments, and courts of justice had been fully established. In one of the larger islands not far from the northern continent, a somewhat turbulent citizen had, in a quarrel commenced by himself, ‘evanesced’ one of his neighbours, a man who happened to be exceedingly popular in the community where he dwelt. Public indignation was thereby excited to a terrible pitch. Cases of violent evanescence, or, as we should call them, murder, were frequent in the earlier periods; but, at the time of this outrage, they were beginning to be regarded with much disfavour. Owing to the absence of reproduction, it was quite plain that, unless this practice was discountenanced, the depopulation of the planet was inevitable; and, inasmuch as the question ‘Is Life worth living?’ had not yet been answered in the negative, it was resolved that the whole force of society should be brought to bear against all violent evanishers.
This state of public opinion, combined with the great amiability of the victim, induced the judges to pass on the criminal a sentence which they must have believed to amount to eternal punishment, namely, penal servitude for life. Life was, at that time, held to be interminable, except by violence; and, inasmuch as the convict in prison was secure from everything of the kind, the sentence could bear no other interpretation. However, at the end of about three years and a-half, the prisoner, without any apparent lawful reason, suddenly evanesced. This event greatly puzzled the community where it occurred; but after the discovery of the Second Law, there was no further mystery about it. The man’s absolute wretchedness at the forlorn prospect before him of everlasting life in jail, was quite sufficient, without his undergoing any other form of physical suffering, to work his deliverance. The negative balance of ten million units was reached in the three years and a half, whereupon he departed into invisibility under the natural operation of the law.
It is obvious that the time which is required to make up the fixed number of metronomic units will depend very much on the degree of the intensity of the suffering undergone. Instances have occurred where a few days of exceedingly acute bodily torture have sufficed to raise the index to the required point. On the other hand, a man who is only suffering from chronic ennui may endure for half a century; the balance against him rising by very slow degrees. It should also be remembered that when a man who has enjoyed a very happy life falls into adversity, he will certainly have much sorrow to endure, before he can hope for deliverance by this beneficent law; for the balance on the positive side (for joy), which will be high, must be reduced quite down to zero before the negative summation begins.
From the above-stated facts the reader will have perceived that the conditions of rational life among the Hesperians differ from those experienced on the earth in several essential points. The most important of these are the three following:—The absence of any reproduction of the species; the exemption of the individual from death, so far as this is the result of natural and necessary causes; and the cyclical waxing and waning of the powers of the bodily organism. Evanescence, though its real nature was unknown, had plainly, for the ancient Hesperians, the same significance as death has for us; the only difference being that, with them, the dissolution of the body was an instantaneous act, instead of being effected, except when accelerated by fire, through the medium of a slow and loathsome process of decay.