We had to leave him to his problem; he sank into it as into a pit of sleep. We noticed as we passed along his domain that there was not a green blade or shoot to be seen anywhere; his workers had evidently harvested the estate.
The next man we came across was too busy hedging round his shadow to attend to us. It gave him infinite trouble. If only he could fix it down and get it secured in a net, he could make his fortune by exporting it to equatorial climates, to cool down the temperature and reduce the glare.
Everyone we met was absorbed in some problem, and had no time to spare for idle questions like ours. They were ready enough to talk about their experiments and discoveries; but anything else was futile; they at once dropped from consciousness, and no effort could awaken them. We always tried to get at their favourite project in order to lead them on to the information we required. We laid siege to dozens without avail; any divergence from their great scheme at once hypnotised them.
One was engaged in an attempt to exhaust the atmosphere in order that the pure ether might descend upon the world and make them capable of flight. Another was busy upon a rope-making machine that would twist light into strands so that men might draw the sun nearer when they needed more heat and light, or make out of the beams of any star a rope ladder whereby they might climb to it. A neighbour of his was just on the point of discovering a crucible that would extract silver from the lustre of the stars. One had invented a shovel that could level all the mountains into plains, if only he had the force for it, and he was attempting to organise a company to supply the force. Another had made a machine that would tunnel to the centre of the earth; and he was about to form an association for working it; he said that one result alone would enrich them beyond dreams: they could make a market for the precious metals near the centre of the earth, where they would have greatly increased weight. His neighbour was in the way to discover antigravitation, by which they might be able to do what they liked with the stars and the universes. The next man we met had a scheme for the annihilation of all intoxicants throughout the world; and to induce men to agree to it he would supply ailool, their favourite narcotic, instead; the world needed sleep, not excitement.
Other projects and inventions that were in hand, we found, were: to teach spiders to make all the garments men needed, and ants to be providers for the human race; to mass insect-power in order to drive engines; to yoke birds together for aërial navigation and carriage; to utilise the waste breath of men for turning windmills; to run a road back through time as through space, that we might eject our worst faults from our ancestors; to distil the divine essence out of the ether in order to supply it in bottles to religionists all the world over for ceremonies and miracles; and to drive a conduit back into the age when the gods were present in the world, so as to deliver direct inspiration from them at a few pence a gallon.
We got weary of attempting to extract any piece of information available for our purpose. There was not a scheme but had only one link wanting to make it a success. I had been at first inclined to pity these men and women,—their lives seemed so pathetically futile,—but I changed my emotion when I saw that, however long they had been at their project, they never lost the brightest hopes of it; they were the happiest of mortals, so absorbed in their one thought, that care and sorrow could not approach them. Nature gave them enough in most years to support them; and when famine came they ate their opiate, ailool, and stretched themselves upon their narcotic plain. The vultures were their sextons and did the rest.
Sneekape never ceased to sneer at them or find food for petty laughter in their enthusiasms and absorption. Before we left them I felt the keenest envy of their happy unconsciousness of the stings of time.
