How great in fact was their amazement and their ecstasy! They expected a tomb; they opened their eyes in the most brilliant and interminable galleries of art they could possibly see, in salons more beautiful than those of Versailles, in enchanted palaces, in which all extremes of climate, rain, and wind, cold and torrid heat were unknown; where innumerable lamps, veritable suns in brilliancy and moons in softness, shed unceasingly through the blue depths their daylight that knew no night. Assuredly the sight was far from what it has since become; we need an effort of imagination in order to represent the psychological condition of our poor ancestors, hitherto accustomed to the perpetual and insufferable discomforts and inconveniences of life on the surface of the globe, in order to realise their enthusiasm, at a moment, when only counting on escaping from the most appalling of deaths by means of the gloomiest of dungeons, they felt themselves delivered of all their troubles, and of all their apprehensions at the same time! Have you noticed in the retrospective museum that quaint bit of apparatus of our fathers, which is called an umbrella? Look at it and reflect on the heart-breaking element, in a situation, which condemned man to make use of this ridiculous piece of furniture. Imagine yourself obliged to protect yourselves against those gigantic downpours which would unexpectedly arrive on the scene and drench you for three or four days running. Think likewise of sailors caught in a whirling cyclone, of the victims of sunstroke, of the 20,000 Indians annually devoured by tigers or killed by the bite of venomous serpents; think of those struck by lightning. I do not speak of the legions of parasites and insects, of the acarus, the phylloxera, and the microscopic beings which drained the blood, the sweat, and the life of man, inoculating him with typhus, plague, and cholera. In truth, if our change of condition has demanded some sacrifices, it is not an illusion to declare that the balance of advantage is immensely greater. What in comparison with this unparalleled revolution is the most renowned of the petty revolutions of the past which to-day are treated so lightly, and rightly so, by our historians. One wonders how the first inhabitants of these underground dwellings could, even for a moment, regret the sun, a mode of lighting that bristled with so many inconveniences. The sun was a capricious luminary which went out and was relit at variable hours, shone when it felt disposed, sometimes was eclipsed, or hid itself behind the clouds when one had most need of it, or pitilessly blinded one at the very moment one yearned for shade! Every night,—do we really realise the full force of the inconvenience?—every night the sun commanded social life to desist and social life desisted. Humanity was actually to that extent the slave of nature! To think it never succeeded in, never even dreamed of, freeing itself from this slavery which weighed so heavily and unconsciously on its destinies, on the course of its progress thus straitened and confined! Ah! Let us once more bless our fortunate disaster!
What excuses or explains the weakness of the first immigrants of the inner world is the fact that their life was necessarily rough and full of hardships, in spite of a notable improvement after their descent into the caverns. They had perpetually to enlarge them, to adjust them to the requirements of the two civilisations, ancient and modern. That was not the work of a single day. I am well aware how happily fortune favoured them; how they again and again had the good luck when driving their tunnels to discover natural grottoes of the utmost beauty, in which it was enough to illuminate with the usual methods of lighting (which was absolutely cost-free, as Miltiades had foreseen) in order to render them almost habitable: delightful squares, as it were, enshrined and sparsely disseminated throughout the labyrinth of our brilliantly lighted streets; mines of sparkling diamonds, lakes of quicksilver, mounds of golden ingots. I am well aware that they had at their disposition a sum of natural forces very superior to all that the preceding ages had been acquainted with. That is very easy to understand. In fact, if they lacked waterfalls, they replaced them very advantageously by the finest falls in temperature that physicists have ever dreamed of. The central heat of the globe could not, it is true, by itself alone be a mechanical force, any more than formerly a large mass of water falling by hypothesis to the greatest possible depth. It is in its passage from a higher to a lower level that the mass of water becomes (or rather became) available energy: it is in its descent from a higher to a lower degree of the thermometer that heat likewise becomes so. The greater distance between any two degrees the greater amount of surplus energy. Now, the mining physicists had hardly descended into the bowels of the earth ere they at once perceived that thus placed between the furnaces of the central fire, as it were, a forge of the Cyclops, hot enough to liquefy granite, and the outer cold, which was sufficient to solidify oxygen and nitrogen, they had at their disposal the most enormous extremes in temperature, and consequently thermic cataracts by the side of which all the cataracts of Abyssinia and Niagara were only toys. What caldrons did they own in the ancient volcanoes! What condensers in the glaciers! At first sight they must have seen that if a few distributing agencies of this prodigious energy were provided, they had power enough there to perform the whole work of mankind—excavation, air supply, water supply, sanitation, locomotion, descent and transport of provisions, etc.
I am well aware of that. I am further aware that ever favoured by fortune, the inseparable friend of daring, the new Troglodytes have never suffered from famine, nor from shortness of supplies. When one of their snow-covered deposits of carcasses threatened to give out, they used to make several trial borings, drive several shafts in an upward direction. They never failed presently to meet with rich finds of food reserves, extensive enough to close the mouths of the alarmists, whereby there resulted on each occasion, according to the law of Malthus, a sudden increase in the population, coupled with the excavation of new underground cities, more flourishing than their older sisters. But, in spite of all this, we remain overwhelmed with wonder when we consider the incalculable degree of courage and intelligence lavished on such a work, and solely called into being by an idea which, starting one day from one individual brain, has leavened the whole globe. What giant falls of earth, what murderous explosions, what a death-roll there must have been at the outset of the enterprise! We shall never know what bloodthirsty duels, what rapes, what doleful tragedies, took place in this lawless society, which had not yet been reorganised. The history of the early conquerors and colonists of America, if it could be told in detail, would pale entirely beside it. Let us draw a veil over the proceedings. But this pitch of horrors was perhaps necessary to teach us that in the forced intimacy of a cave there is no mean between warfare and love, between mutual slaughter or mutual embraces. We began by fighting; to-day we fall on each other's necks. And in fact, what human ear, nose, or stomach could have longer withstood the deafening roar and smoke of melanite explosions beneath our crypts; the sight and stench of mangled bodies piled up within our narrow confines? Hideous and odious, revolting beyond all expression, the underground war finished by becoming impossible.
It is, however, painful to think that it lasted right up to the death of our glorious preserver. Everyone is acquainted with the heroic adventure in which Miltiades and his companion lost their lives. It has been so often painted, sculptured, sung, and immortalised by the great masters, that it is not allowable to pass it over in silence. The famous struggle between the centralist and federalist cities, that is to say, at bottom, between the industrial and artist cities, having ended in the triumph of the latter, a still more bloodthirsty conflict sprang up between the free thinking and the cellular cities. The former fought to assert the freedom of love with its uncertain fecundity; the second, for its prudent regulation. Miltiades, misled by his passion, committed the fault of siding with the former, a pardonable error which posterity has forgiven him. Besieged in his last grotto—a perfect marvel in strongholds—and at the end of his provisions, the besiegers having intercepted the arrival of all his convoys, he essayed a final effort: he prepared a formidable explosion intended to blow up the vault of his cavern, and forcibly to open a way upwards by which he might have the chance of reaching a deposit of provisions. His hope was deceived. The vault blew up, it is true, and disclosed a cavern above it, the most colossal one had hitherto seen, that dimly resembled a Hindoo temple. But the hero himself perished miserably, buried with Lydia beneath enormous rocks on the very spot on which now stands their double statue in marble, the masterpiece of our new Phidias, which is now the crowded meeting-place of our national pilgrimages.
From these fruitful though troublous times, and from this beneficial disorder, an advantage has accrued to us which we shall never sufficiently appreciate. Our race, already so beautiful, has been further strengthened and purified by these numerous trials. Short-sightedness itself has disappeared under the prolonged influence of a light that is pleasing to the eye, and of the habit of reading books which are written in very large characters. For, from lack of paper, we are obliged to write on slates, on pillars, obelisks, on the broad panels of marble, and this necessity, in addition to compelling us to adopt a sober style and contributing to the formation of taste, prevents the daily newspapers from reappearing, to the great benefit of the optic nerves and the lobes of the brain. It was, by the way, an immense misfortune for "pre-salvationist" man to possess textile plants which allowed him to stereotype without the slightest trouble on rags of paper without the slightest value, all his ideas, idle or serious, piled indiscriminately one on the other. Now, before graving our thoughts on a panel of rock, we take time to reflect on our subject. Yet another bane among our primitive forefathers was tobacco. At present we no longer smoke, we can no longer smoke. The public health is accordingly magnificent.
V
REGENERATION
It does not fall within the scope of my rapid sketch to relate date by date the laborious vicissitudes of humanity since its settlement within the planet from the year 1 of the era of Salvation to the year 596, in which I write these lines in chalk on slabs of schist. I should only like to bring out for my contemporaries, who might very well fail to notice them (for we barely observe what we have always before our eyes), the distinctive and original features of this modern civilisation of which we are so justly proud. Now that after many abortive trials and agonizing convulsions it has succeeded in taking its final shape, we can clearly establish its essential characteristics. It consists in the complete elimination of living nature, whether animal or vegetable, man only excepted. That has produced, so to say, a purification of society. Secluded thus from every influence of the natural milieu into which it was hitherto plunged and confined, the social milieu was for the first time able to reveal and display its true virtues, and the real social bond appeared in all its vigour and purity. It might be said that destiny had desired to make in our case an extended sociological experiment for its own edification by placing us in such extraordinarily unique conditions.[1] The problem, in a way, was to learn, what would social man become if committed to his own keeping, yet left to himself—furnished with all the intellectual acquisitions accumulated through a remote past by human geniuses, but deprived of the assistance of all other living beings, nay, even of those beings half endowed with life, that we call rivers and seas and stars, and thrown back on the conquered, yet passive forces of chemical, inorganic and lifeless Nature, which is separated from man by too deep a chasm to exercise on him any action from the social point of view. The problem was to learn what this humanity would do when restricted to man, and obliged to extract from its own resources, if not its food supplies, yet at least all its pleasures, all its occupations, all its creative inspirations. The answer has been given, and we have realised at the same time what an unsuspected drag the terrestrial fauna and flora had hitherto been on the progress of humanity.
[1] In appearance only: we must not forget that in accordance with all probability many extinct stars must have served as the scene of this normal and necessary phase of social life.