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

/> people respecting the world from which you came, unless, on
consideration, I give you permission to do so. Do you consent
to this request?"

28"Of course I pledge my word, to it," said I, somewhat amazed;
and I extended my right hand to grasp his. But he placed my
hand gently on his forehead and his own right hand on my
breast, which is the custom amongst this race in all matters of
promise or verbal obligations. Then turning to his daughter,
he said, "And you, Zee, will not repeat to any one what the
stranger has said, or may say, to me or to you, of a world
other than our own." Zee rose and kissed her father on the
temples, saying, with a smile, "A Gy's tongue is wanton, but
love can fetter it fast. And if, my father, you fear lest a
chance word from me or yourself could expose our community to
danger, by a desire to explore a world beyond us, will not a
wave of the 'vril,' properly impelled, wash even the memory of
what we have heard the stranger say out of the tablets of the
brain?"

"What is the vril?" I asked.

Therewith Zee began to enter into an explanation of which I
understood very little, for there is no word in any language I
know which is an exact synonym for vril. I should call it
electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold
branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific
nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism,
galvanism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have
arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies, which has
been conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and which
Faraday thus intimates under the more cautious term of
correlation:-

"I have long held an opinion," says that illustrious
experimentalist, "almost amounting to a conviction, in common,
I believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that
the various forms under which the forces of matter are made
manifest, have one common origin; or, in other words, are so
directly related and mutually dependent that they are
convertible, as it were into one another, and possess
equivalents of power in their action."

29These subterranean philosophers assert that by one operation of
vril, which Faraday would perhaps call 'atmospheric magnetism,'
they can influence the variations of temperature- in plain
words, the weather; that by operations, akin to those ascribed
to mesmerism, electro-biology, odic force, &c., but applied
scientifically, through vril conductors, they can exercise
influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an
extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics. To all
such agencies they give the common name of vril. Zee asked me
if, in my world, it was not known that all the faculties of the
mind could be quickened to a degree unknown in the waking
state, by trance or vision, in which the thoughts of one brain
could be transmitted to another, and knowledge be thus rapidly
interchanged. I replied, that there were amongst us stories
told of such trance or vision, and that I had heard much and
seen something in mesmeric clairvoyance; but that these
practices had fallen much into disuse or contempt, partly
because of the gross impostures to which they had been made
subservient, and partly because, even where the effects upon
certain abnormal constitutions were genuinely produced, the
effects when fairly examined and analysed, were very
unsatisfactory- not to be relied upon for any systematic
truthfulness or any practical purpose, and rendered very
mischievous to credulous persons by the superstitions they
tended to produce. Zee received my answers with much benignant
attention, and said that similar instances of abuse and
credulity had been familiar to their own scientific experience
in the infancy of their knowledge, and while the properties of
vril were misapprehended, but that she reserved further
discussion on this subject till I was more fitted to enter into
it. She contented herself with adding, that it was through the
agency of vril, while I had been placed in the state of trance,
that I had been made acquainted with the rudiments of their
language; and that she and her father, who alone of the family,
30took the pains to watch the experiment, had acquired a greater
proportionate knowledge of my language than I of their own;
partly because my language was much simpler than theirs,
comprising far less of complex ideas; and partly because their
organisation was, by hereditary culture, much more ductile and
more readily capable of acquiring knowledge than mine. At this
I secretly demurred; and having had in the course of a
practical life, to sharpen my wits, whether at home or in
travel, I could not allow that my cerebral organisation could
possibly be duller than that of people who had lived all their
lives by lamplight. However, while I was thus thinking, Zee
quietly pointed her forefinger at my forehead, and sent me to
sleep.


Chapter VIII.


When I once more awoke I saw by my bed-side the child who had
brought the rope and grappling-hooks to the house in which I
had been first received, and which, as I afterwards learned,
was the residence of the chief magistrate of the tribe. The
child, whose name was Taee (pronounced Tar-ee), was the
magistrate's eldest son. I found that during my last sleep or
trance I had made still greater advance in the language of the
country, and could converse with comparative ease and fluency.

This child was singularly handsome, even for the beautiful race
to which he belonged, with a countenance very manly in aspect
for his years, and with a more vivacious and energetic
expression than I had hitherto seen in the serene and
passionless faces of the men. He brought me the tablet on
which I had drawn the mode of my descent, and had also sketched
the head of the horrible reptile that had scared me from my
friend's corpse. Pointing to that part of the drawing, Taee put
31to me a few questions respecting the size and form of the
monster, and the cave or chasm from which it had emerged. His
interest in my answers seemed so grave as to divert him for a
while from any curiosity as to myself or my antecedents. But
to my great embarrassment, seeing how I was pledged to my host,
he was just beginning to ask me where I came from, when Zee,
fortunately entered, and, overhearing him, said, "Taee, give to
our guest any information he may desire, but ask none from him
in return. To question him who he is, whence he comes, or
wherefore he is here, would be a breach of the law which my
father has laid down in this house."

"So be it," said Taee, pressing his hand to his breast; and from
that moment, till the one in which I saw him last, this child,
with whom I became very intimate, never once put to me any of
the questions thus interdicted.


Chapter IX.


It was not for some time, and until, by repeated trances, if
they are to be so called, my mind became better prepared to
interchange ideas with my entertainers, and more fully to
comprehend differences of manners and customs, at first too
strange to my experience to be seized by my reason, that I was
enabled to gather the following details respecting the origin
and history of the subterranean population, as portion of one
great family race called the Ana.

According to the earliest traditions, the remote progenitors of
the race had once tenanted a world above the surface of that in
which their descendants dwelt. Myths of that world were still
preserved in their archives, and in those myths were legends of
a vaulted dome in which the lamps were lighted by no human
hand. But such legends were considered by most commentators as
allegorical fables. According to these traditions the earth
32itself, at the date to which the traditions ascend, was not
indeed in its infancy, but in the throes and travail of
transition from one form of development to another, and subject
to many violent revolutions of nature. By one of such
revolutions, that portion of the upper world inhabited by the
ancestors of this race had been subjected to inundations, not
rapid, but gradual and uncontrollable, in which all, save a
scanty remnant, were submerged and perished. Whether this be a
record of our historical and sacred Deluge, or of some earlier
one contended for by geologists, I do not pretend to
conjecture; though, according to the chronology of this people
as compared with that of Newton, it must have been many
thousands of years before the time of Noah. On the other hand,
the account of these writers does not harmonise with the
opinions most in vogue among geological authorities, inasmuch
as it places the existence of a human race upon earth at dates
long anterior to that assigned to the terrestrial formation
adapted to the introduction of mammalia. A band of the
ill-fated race, thus invaded by the Flood, had, during the
march of the waters, taken refuge in caverns amidst the loftier
rocks, and, wandering through these hollows, they lost sight of
the upper world forever. Indeed, the whole face of the earth
had been changed by this great revulsion; land had been turned
into sea- sea into land. In the bowels of the inner earth,
even now, I was informed as a positive fact, might be
discovered the remains of human habitation- habitation not in
huts and caverns, but in vast cities whose ruins attest the
civilisation of races which flourished before the age of Noah,
and are not to be classified with those genera to which
philosophy ascribes the use of flint and the ignorance of iron.

The fugitives had carried with them the knowledge of the arts
they had practised above ground- arts of culture and
civilisation. Their earliest want must have been that of
supplying below the earth the light they had lost above it; and
at no time, even in the traditional period, do the races, of
which the one I now sojourned with formed a tribe, seem to have
33been unacquainted with the art of extracting light from gases,
or manganese, or petroleum. They had been accustomed in their
former state to contend with the rude forces of nature; and
indeed the lengthened battle they had fought with their
conqueror Ocean, which had taken centuries in its spread, had
quickened their skill in curbing waters into dikes and channels.
To this skill they owed their preservation in their new abode.
"For many generations," said my host, with a sort of contempt
and horror, "these primitive forefathers are said to have
degraded their rank and shortened their lives by eating the
flesh of animals, many varieties of which had, like themselves,
escaped the Deluge, and sought shelter in the hollows of the
earth; other animals, supposed to be unknown to the upper world,
those hollows themselves produced."

When what we should term the historical age emerged from the
twilight of tradition, the Ana were already established in
different communities, and had attained to a degree of
civilisation very analogous to that which the more advanced
nations above the earth now enjoy. They were familiar with
most of our mechanical inventions, including the application of
steam as well as gas. The communities were in fierce
competition with each other. They had their rich and their
poor; they had orators and conquerors; they made war either for
a domain or an idea. Though the various states acknowledged
various forms of government, free institutions were beginning
to preponderate; popular assemblies increased in power;
republics soon became general; the democracy to which the most
enlightened European politicians look forward as the extreme
goal