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

ground; indeed, when the wings were spread it was
scarcely possible not to soar, but then came the difficulty and
the danger. I utterly failed in the power to use and direct
the pinions, though I am considered among my own race unusually
alert and ready in bodily exercises, and am a very practiced
swimmer. I could only make the most confused and blundering
efforts at flight. I was the servant of the wings; the wings
were not my servants- they were beyond my control; and when by
a violent strain of muscle, and, I must fairly own, in that
abnormal strength which is given by excessive fright, I curbed
their gyrations and brought them near to the body, it seemed as
if I lost the sustaining power stored in them and the
connecting bladders, as when the air is let out of a balloon,
and found myself precipitated again to the earth; saved,
indeed, by some spasmodic flutterings, from being dashed to
pieces, but not saved from the bruises and the stun of a heavy
fall. I would, however, have persevered in my attempts, but
for the advice or the commands of the scientific Zee, who had
benevolently accompanied my flutterings, and, indeed, on the
last occasion, flying just under me, received my form as it
fell on her own expanded wings, and preserved me from breaking
my head on the roof of the pyramid from which we had ascended.

"I see," she said, "that your trials are in vain, not from the
fault of the wings and their appurtenances, nor from any
imperfectness and malformation of your own corpuscular system,
but from irremediable, because organic, defect in your power of
volition. Learn that the connection between the will and the
agencies of that fluid which has been subjected to the control
104of the Vril-ya was never established by the first discoverers,
never achieved by a single generation; it has gone on
increasing, like other properties of race, in proportion as it
has been uniformly transmitted from parent to child, so that,
at last, it has become an instinct; and an infant An of our
race wills to fly as intuitively and unconsciously as he wills
to walk. He thus plies his invented or artificial wings with
as much safety as a bird plies those with which it is born. I
did not think sufficiently of this when I allowed you to try an
experiment which allured me, for I have longed to have in you a
companion. I shall abandon the experiment now. Your life is
becoming dear to me." Herewith the Gy's voice and face
softened, and I felt more seriously alarmed than I had been in
my previous flights.

Now that I am on the subject of wings, I ought not to omit
mention of a custom among the Gy-ei which seems to me very
pretty and tender in the sentiment it implies. A Gy wears
wings habitually when yet a virgin- she joins the Ana in their
aerial sports- she adventures alone and afar into the wilder
regions of the sunless world: in the boldness and height of her
soarings, not less than in the grace of her movements, she
excels the opposite sex. But, from the day of her marriage she
wears wings no more, she suspends them with her own willing
hand over the nuptial couch, never to be resumed unless the
marriage tie be severed by divorce or death.

Now when Zee's voice and eyes thus softened- and at that
softening I prophetically recoiled and shuddered- Taee, who had
accompanied us in our flights, but who, child-like, had been
much more amused with my awkwardness, than sympathising in my
fears or aware of my danger, hovered over us, poised amidst
spread wings, and hearing the endearing words of the young Gy,
laughed aloud. Said he, "If the Tish cannot learn the use of
wings, you may still be his companion, Zee, for you can suspend
your own."

105
Chapter XXI.


I had for some time observed in my host's highly informed and
powerfully proportioned daughter that kindly and protective
sentiment which, whether above the earth or below it, an
all-wise Providence has bestowed upon the feminine division of
the human race. But until very lately I had ascribed it to
that affection for 'pets' which a human female at every age
shares with a human child. I now became painfully aware that
the feeling with which Zee deigned to regard me was different
from that which I had inspired in Taee. But this conviction
gave me none of that complacent gratification which the vanity
of man ordinarily conceives from a flattering appreciation of
his personal merits on the part of the fair sex; on the
contrary, it inspired me with fear. Yet of all the Gy-ei in
the community, if Zee were perhaps the wisest and the
strongest, she was, by common repute, the gentlest, and she was
certainly the most popularly beloved. The desire to aid, to
succour, to protect, to comfort, to bless, seemed to pervade
her whole being. Though the complicated miseries that
originate in penury and guilt are unknown to the social system
of the Vril-ya, still, no sage had yet discovered in vril an
agency which could banish sorrow from life; and wherever
amongst her people sorrow found its way, there Zee followed in
the mission of comforter. Did some sister Gy fail to secure
the love she sighed for? Zee sought her out, and brought all
the resources of her lore, and all the consolations of her
sympathy, to bear upon a grief that so needs the solace of a
confidant. In the rare cases, when grave illness seized upon
childhood or youth, and the cases, less rare, when, in the
hardy and adventurous probation of infants, some accident,
attended with pain and injury occurred, Zee forsook her studies
and her sports, and became the healer and nurse. Her favourite
106flights were towards the extreme boundaries of the domain
where children were stationed on guard against outbreaks of
warring forces in nature, or the invasions of devouring animals,
so that she might warn them of any peril which her knowledge
detected or foresaw, or be at hand if any harm had befallen.
Nay, even in the exercise of her scientific acquirements there
was a concurrent benevolence of purpose and will. Did she learn
any novelty in invention that would be useful to the
practitioner of some special art or craft? she hastened to
communicate and explain it. Was some veteran sage of the
College perplexed and wearied with the toil of an abstruse
study? she would patiently devote herself to his aid, work out
details for him, sustain his spirits with her hopeful smile,
quicken his wit with her luminous suggestion, be to him, as it
were, his own good genius made visible as the strengthener and
inspirer. The same tenderness she exhibited to the inferior
creatures. I have often known her bring home some sick and
wounded animal, and tend and cherish it as a mother would tend
and cherish her stricken child. Many a time when I sat in the
balcony, or hanging garden, on which my window opened, I have
watched her rising in the air on her radiant wings, and in a few
moments groups of infants below, catching sight of her, would
soar upward with joyous sounds of greeting; clustering and
sporting around her, so that she seemed a very centre of
innocent delight. When I have walked with her amidst the rocks
and valleys without the city, the elk-deer would scent or see
her from afar, come bounding up, eager for the caress of her
hand, or follow her footsteps, till dismissed by some musical
whisper that the creature had learned to comprehend. It is the
fashion among the virgin Gy-ei to wear on their foreheads a
circlet, or coronet, with gems resembling opals, arranged in
four points or rays like stars. These are lustreless in
ordinary use, but if touched by the vril wand they take a clear
lambent flame, which illuminates, yet not burns. This serves as
an ornament in their festivities, and as a lamp, if, in
107their wanderings beyond their artificial lights, they have
to traverse the dark. There are times, when I have seen Zee's
thoughtful majesty of face lighted up by this crowning halo,
that I could scarcely believe her to be a creature of mortal
birth, and bent my head before her as the vision of a being among
the celestial orders. But never once did my heart feel for this
lofty type of the noblest womanhood a sentiment of human love.
Is it that, among the race I belong to, man's pride so far
influences his passions that woman loses to him her special charm
of woman if he feels her to be in all things eminently superior
to himself? But by what strange infatuation could this peerless
daughter of a race which, in the supremacy of its powers and the
felicity of its conditions, ranked all other races in the category
of barbarians, have deigned to honour me with her preference? In
personal qualifications, though I passed for good-looking amongst
the people I came from, the handsomest of my countrymen might have
seemed insignificant and homely beside the grand and serene type
of beauty which characterised the aspect of the Vril-ya.

That novelty, the very difference between myself and those to
whom Zee was accustomed, might serve to bias her fancy was
probable enough, and as the reader will see later, such a cause
might suffice to account for the predilection with which I was
distinguished by a young Gy scarcely out of her childhood, and
very inferior in all respects to Zee. But whoever will
consider those tender characteristics which I have just
ascribed to the daughter of Aph-Lin, may readily conceive that
the main cause of my attraction to her was in her instinctive
desire to cherish, to comfort, to protect, and, in protecting,
to sustain and to exalt. Thus, when I look back, I account for
the only weakness unworthy of her lofty nature, which bowed the
daughter of the Vril-ya to a woman's affection for one so
inferior to herself as was her father's guest. But be the
cause what it may, the consciousness that I had inspired such
108affection thrilled me with awe- a moral awe of her very
imperfections, of her mysterious powers, of the inseparable
distinctions between her race and my own; and with that awe, I
must confess to my shame, there combined the more material and
ignoble dread of the perils to which her preference would
expose me.

Under these anxious circumstances, fortunately, my conscience
and sense of honour were free from reproach. It became clearly
my duty, if Zee's preference continued manifest, to intimate it
to my host, with, of course, all the delicacy which is ever to
be preserved by a well-bred man in confiding to another any
degree of favour by which one of the fair sex may condescend to
distinguish him. Thus, at all events, I should be freed from
responsibility or suspicion of voluntary participation in the
sentiments of Zee; and the superior wisdom of my host might
probably suggest some sage extrication from my perilous
dilemma. In this resolve I obeyed the ordinary instinct of
civilised and moral man, who, erring though he be, still
generally prefers the right course in those cases where it is
obviously against his inclinations, his interests, and his
safety to elect the wrong one.


Chapter XXII.


As the reader has seen, Aph-Lin had not favoured my general and
unrestricted intercourse with his countrywomen. Though relying
on my promise to abstain from giving any information as to the
109world I had left, and still more on the promise of those to
whom had been put the same request, not