The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton (read more books .TXT) 📕

/> the more they chuckle and exact, and cry out, 'See by what great
exceptions to the common littleness of our race we prove the
magnificent results of our system!'"
69
"In fact," resumed Zee, "if the wisdom of human life be to
approximate to the serene equality of immortals, there can be no
more direct flying off into the opposite direction than a system
which aims at carrying to the utmost the inequalities and
turbulences of mortals. Nor do I see how, by any forms of
religious belief, mortals, so acting, could fit themselves even to
appreciate the joys of immortals to which they still expect to be
transferred by the mere act of dying. On the contrary, minds
accustomed to place happiness in things so much the reverse of
godlike, would find the happiness of gods exceedingly dull, and
would long to get back to a world in which they could quarrel with
each other."


Chapter XVI.


I have spoken so much of the Vril Staff that my reader may
expect me to describe it. This I cannot do accurately, for I
was never allowed to handle it for fear of some terrible
accident occasioned by my ignorance of its use; and I have no
doubt that it requires much skill and practice in the exercise
of its various powers. It is hollow, and has in the handle
several stops, keys, or springs by which its force can be
altered, modified, or directed- so that by one process it
destroys, by another it heals- by one it can rend the rock, by
another disperse the vapour- by one it affects bodies, by
another it can exercise a certain influence over minds. It is
usually carried in the convenient size of a walking-staff, but
it has slides by which it can be lengthened or shortened at
will. When used for special purposes, the upper part rests in
the hollow of the palm with the fore and middle fingers
protruded. I was assured, however, that its power was not
equal in all, but proportioned to the amount of certain vril
70properties in the wearer in affinity, or 'rapport' with the
purposes to be effected. Some were more potent to destroy,
others to heal, &c.; much also depended on the calm and
steadiness of volition in the manipulator. They assert that
the full exercise of vril power can only be acquired by the
constitutional temperament- i.e., by hereditarily transmitted
organisation- and that a female infant of four years old
belonging to the Vril-ya races can accomplish feats which a
life spent in its practice would not enable the strongest and
most skilled mechanician, born out of the pale of the Vril-ya
to achieve. All these wands are not equally complicated; those
intrusted to children are much simpler than those borne by
sages of either sex, and constructed with a view to the special
object on which the children are employed; which as I have
before said, is among the youngest children the most
destructive. In the wands of wives and mothers the correlative
destroying force is usually abstracted, the healing power fully
charged. I wish I could say more in detail of this singular
conductor of the vril fluid, but its machinery is as exquisite
as its effects are marvellous.

I should say, however, that this people have invented certain
tubes by which the vril fluid can be conducted towards the
object it is meant to destroy, throughout a distance almost
indefinite; at least I put it modestly when I say from 500 to
600 miles. And their mathematical science as applied to such
purpose is so nicely accurate, that on the report of some
observer in an air-boat, any member of the vril department can
estimate unerringly the nature of intervening obstacles, the
height to which the projectile instrument should be raised, and
the extent to which it should be charged, so as to reduce to
ashes within a space of time too short for me to venture to
specify it, a capital twice as vast as London.

Certainly these Ana are wonderful mathematicians- wonderful for
the adaptation of the inventive faculty to practical uses.
71
I went with my host and his daughter Zee over the great public
museum, which occupies a wing in the College of Sages, and in
which are hoarded, as curious specimens of the ignorant and
blundering experiments of ancient times, many contrivances on
which we pride ourselves as recent achievements. In one
department, carelessly thrown aside as obsolete lumber, are
tubes for destroying life by metallic balls and an inflammable
powder, on the principle of our cannons and catapults, and even
still more murderous than our latest improvements.

My host spoke of these with a smile of contempt, such as an
artillery officer might bestow on the bows and arrows of the
Chinese. In another department there were models of vehicles
and vessels worked by steam, and of an air-balloon which might
have been constructed by Montgolfier. "Such," said Zee, with
an air of meditative wisdom- "such were the feeble triflings
with nature of our savage forefathers, ere they had even a
glimmering perception of the properties of vril!"

This young Gy was a magnificent specimen of the muscular force
to which the females of her country attain. Her features were
beautiful, like those of all her race: never in the upper world
have I seen a face so grand and so faultless, but her devotion
to the severer studies had given to her countenance an
expression of abstract thought which rendered it somewhat stern
when in repose; and such a sternness became formidable when
observed in connection with her ample shoulders and lofty
stature. She was tall even for a Gy, and I saw her lift up a
cannon as easily as I could lift a pocket-pistol. Zee inspired
me with a profound terror- a terror which increased when we
came into a department of the museum appropriated to models of
contrivances worked by the agency of vril; for here, merely by
a certain play of her vril staff, she herself standing at a
distance, she put into movement large and weighty substances.
She seemed to endow them with intelligence, and to make them
72comprehend and obey her command. She set complicated pieces of
machinery into movement, arrested the movement or continued it,
until, within an incredibly short time, various kinds of raw
material were reproduced as symmetrical works of art, complete
and perfect. Whatever effect mesmerism or electro-biology
produces over the nerves and muscles of animated objects, this
young Gy produced by the motions of her slender rod over the
springs and wheels of lifeless mechanism.

When I mentioned to my companions my astonishment at this
influence over inanimate matter- while owning that, in our
world, I had witnessed phenomena which showed that over certain
living organisations certain other living organisations could
establish an influence genuine in itself, but often exaggerated
by credulity or craft- Zee, who was more interested in such
subjects than her father, bade me stretch forth my hand, and
then, placing it beside her own, she called my attention to
certain distinctions of type and character. In the first
place, the thumb of the Gy (and, as I afterwards noticed, of
all that race, male or female) was much larger, at once longer
and more massive, than is found with our species above ground.
There is almost, in this, as great a difference as there is
between the thumb of a man and that of a gorilla. Secondly,
the palm is proportionally thicker than ours- the texture of
the skin infinitely finer and softer- its average warmth is
greater. More remarkable than all this, is a visible nerve,
perceptible under the skin, which starts from the wrist
skirting the ball of the thumb, and branching, fork-like, at
the roots of the fore and middle fingers. "With your slight
formation of thumb," said the philosophical young Gy, "and with
the absence of the nerve which you find more or less developed
in the hands of our race, you can never achieve other than
imperfect and feeble power over the agency of vril; but so far
as the nerve is concerned, that is not found in the hands of
our earliest progenitors, nor in those of the ruder tribes
without the pale of the Vril-ya. It has been slowly developed
73in the course of generations, commencing in the early
achievements, and increasing with the continuous exercise, of
the vril power; therefore, in the course of one or two thousand
years, such a nerve may possibly be engendered in those higher
beings of your race, who devote themselves to that paramount
science through which is attained command over all the subtler
forces of nature permeated by vril. But when you talk of
matter as something in itself inert and motionless, your
parents or tutors surely cannot have left you so ignorant as
not to know that no form of matter is motionless and inert:
every particle is constantly in motion and constantly acted
upon by agencies, of which heat is the most apparent and rapid,
but vril the most subtle, and, when skilfully wielded, the most
powerful. So that, in fact, the current launched by my hand
and guided by my will does but render quicker and more potent
the action which is eternally at work upon every particle of
matter, however inert and stubborn it may seem. If a heap of
metal be not capable of originating a thought of its own, yet,
through its internal susceptibility to movement, it obtains the
power to receive the thought of the intellectual agent at work
on it; by which, when conveyed with a sufficient force of the
vril power, it is as much compelled to obey as if it were
displaced by a visible bodily force. It is animated for the
time being by the soul thus infused into it, so that one may
almost say that it lives and reasons. Without this we could
not make our automata supply the place of servants.

I was too much in awe of the thews and the learning of the
young Gy to hazard the risk of arguing with her. I had read
somewhere in my schoolboy days that a wise man, disputing with
a Roman Emperor, suddenly drew in his horns; and when the
emperor asked him whether he had nothing further to say on his
side of the question, replied, "Nay, Caesar, there is no
arguing against a reasoner who commands ten legions."
74
Though I had a secret persuasion that, whatever the real
effects of vril upon matter, Mr. Faraday could have proved her
a very shallow philosopher as to its extent or its causes, I
had no doubt that Zee could have brained all the Fellows of the
Royal Society, one after the other, with a blow of her fist.
Every sensible man knows that it is useless to argue with any
ordinary female upon matters he comprehends; but to argue with
a Gy seven feet high upon the mysteries of vril,- as well argue
in a desert, and with a simoon!

Amid the various departments to which the vast building of the
College of Sages was appropriated, that which interested me
most was devoted to the archaeology of the Vril-ya, and
comprised a very ancient collection of portraits. In these the
pigments and groundwork employed were of so durable a nature
that even pictures said to be executed at dates as remote as
those in the earliest annals of the Chinese, retained much
freshness of colour. In examining this collection, two things
especially struck me:- first, that the pictures said to be
between 6000 and 7000 years old were of a much higher degree of
art than any produced within the last 3000 or 4000 years; and,
second, that the portraits within the former period much more
resembled our