“In what manner?” inquired the officer.
“Listen to me, and you shall hear. The whole of this globe, you are aware, is animated. Every object here, from the fibrous and silken down that flies about, carrying the seed of some gigantic tree, to the mountains of consolidated rock, is the theatre of life; and that theatre itself possesses a peculiar animation of its own, or laws of self-development. The various forms and shapes which people these things, vary in their periods of existence from centuries to the incalculable and indivisible points of time, which human ingenuity has hitherto deemed it idle to note. You have the birds of the desert, the huge animals whose years are to be counted but by the hundred; you have again the infinitesimal insect, which comes into existence this moment to depart the next; so that in the shortest space of time that man can calculate, nature ushers into life millions of millions of sentient beings, to sweep them away again with the same rapidity with which they are made. This earth on which this process takes place has existed, as far as we can discover with certainty, for several thousands of years, so that millions of millions of beings have continually perished during every short moment into which the numberless days of those thousands of years can possibly be divided. To consider that death is so dreadful as it is supposed to be, when we find it on such an amazingly extensive scale, and principally, also, among creatures whose only apparent happiness is the mere possession of life itself, is to call the Ordainer of these things cruel—which is untrue, or, as we used to say long ago, ‘reductio ad absurdum.’ What you choose to convert into the horrible and dreadful, is only the working of a wise and general law—that of transition: we live here to-day in one shape, to live to-morrow in a different one. Man has stupidly shut his eyes to this fact as he has done to many other things, and pitifully mourns over the action of a universal and useful law.”
“Emmanuel, I am a plain sailor, and do not pretend to deal in niceties of logical distinction,” replied Charles, “and although it is not my purpose to continue this very peculiar conversation, still I must ask, if our death is merely a transition from one state to another, how is it, that when we have entered into our new condition, we do not retain any consciousness of our previous existence.”
“The answer is plain enough,” answered Appadocca, “when the harp is unstrung the sounds depart: when we change from one condition to another, we necessarily cease to be of the first, else there should be no change at all: and as our consciousness of that condition was merely a natural consequence or effect of it, it follows, that when the cause ceases, the effect must necessarily cease also.”
Appadocca remained silent for a while.
“And as for the ignominy,” he continued, “of a death on the scaffold, for such a crime as the one which is imputed to me, it is purely ridiculous. It is not because mankind may be eager to alter, by their vote, the nature of things, that these things become intrinsically changed.”
Appadocca stopped, apparently expecting Charles Hamilton to speak; but he, however, was anxiously gazing on the side of the ship, and was apparently intent on listening to some sound that it seemed he heard.
“Did you hear that?” he at last asked, in a low tone.
“What?”
“Hush!—do you not hear that sound?”