It is the natural result of the long periods of sun and darkness. The polar night binds them in closer sympathy, even as it did those of the Billowcrest, while during the long sunny day they have only to bask in the sun and dream, and let the fecund soil provide amply for their wants. There is no need of struggle—no effort, save to retain life, if I may apply that term to this languorous melody of existence wherein greed, jealousy, vanity and the other elements of discord find no place.
There is no old age here—our most frequent excuse for greed. No necessity for a life of heavy toil to provide for a ghastly period when all save physical want has perished.
Indeed, there is little effort here of any sort. They are not even obliged to talk, for their minds are as open books, and there is not, as with us, the need of many words to cloud and diffuse a few poor thoughts, that in the beginning were hardly worth while.
Truth here is not a luxury—a thing produced with difficulty and therefore conserved for special occasions—but an abounding necessity, like air and water. Concealment, ever the first step toward sorrow, is impossible.
Love flowers naturally and where all may see. Marriage is union, and separation unknown. Joy to one is answered in the bosom of many, and grief is the minor chord that stirs mournfully the heart of a multitude. Verily is it a “Land of the Heart’s Desire,”
“Where nobody ever grows old, and crafty and wise—
Where nobody ever grows false and bitter of tongue.”
If I seem to have waxed poetic in speaking of these people, it is because poetry is the language and breath of their race. Even Chauncey Gale has imbibed something of the pervading spirit, and adapted his phraseology to the conditions.
“The chant of the trolley and the song of the lawn-mower are heard not nor needed,” he said to me this morning, as we looked from our high terrace down on the dream world below.
I speak of it as morning, but there is no morning now. It is always afternoon—the afternoon of a June day, before the gray dust and the withering heat of summer have begun their blight. We have been here a week and we would roam no farther. The world, the vessel, the crew—even Edith Gale—all seem as a page of some half-forgotten tale—something of another and long-ago existence in which we have no further part. The spell of the lotus is upon us. The lives of the lotus-eaters have become our lives.