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.