The winged caravan continued on its way for nearly forty-five minutes, and we saw arriving, as if to meet it, the conical roofs and crystal platforms of the Selenian metropolis. The rapid evolution of the telescope was moderated with the movement of the general halt, and it was revealed to us that the powerful mass to which we have made allusion in our considerations of the architecture of lunar races was their temple. It was not permitted to us, any more than to the Vespertilios to penetrate the mysteries of that religious enclosure.
The young Selenian females harnessed to the doves disappeared thereinto; then the leader of the ceremony; and then the principal group leaders. The other Selenians flew off in all directions; and yet it was necessary to believe that the ritual was not entirely complete, for throughout the time when we were able to follow the Moon above the horizon, groups of the premier race brought offerings of crustaceans, fruits of conical form bright with a thousand colors and foodstuffs whose form we could not determine, on crystal trays, which were accept by the elect at the balustrade of the temple. None of those whose offerings were accepted, however, went inside, either because they were unworthy, although their offerings were not, or because they were not initiates, or because the interior of the temple was only accessible to superior officers and priests.
As for the Vespertilios, they remained torpid and grounded in the surroundings, perhaps to rest from the unusual fatigues of the religious ceremony; neither their fatigue nor their relative weakness had been spared.
The Moon, almost at that moment, was lost in the vapors of our horizon.
Let us stop here; other revelations have clarified other mysteries for us, and in due course we shall present our remarks on the race of Beavers and our conjectures on their religion, which seems to us to present some similarities to that of the Sabeans.
Eighth Fragment: LUNAR HARMONIES
Given these numerous observations, several times renewed by the honorable and eminent men I have named, we are already able to describe here, at least in part, the moral condition of the Selenians; for, in the same way that the material details of that world have been revealed to us through the lenses of our telescope, through those material details, if I might put it thus, the secrets of the moral world have been revealed to philosophical eyes. But it seems to us that perhaps the moment has not yet come to proceed in a complete manner with that interpretation.
For one thing, the people of our own world will already have enough difficulty recovering from the amazement caused by these important discoveries, and we are hesitant for the moment to mingle with those irrefutable material details other details that will not have in the eyes of everyone the same degree of certainty as in ours; and when I think of it, I thank God from the bottom of my heart for permitting, in the interests of science, that these observations could be made at the Cape of Good Hope, to which all the scientists in Europe might soon flood; for if I had written what I am writing today in the depths of some distant country, my voice and those of my fellow observers would have been stifled by the incredulous clamors of ignorance, and no one would have wanted to take the trouble to verify the veracity of our story. Eternal thanks be rendered, therefore, to divine Providence, which has doubtless played a large part in all of this.
We shall therefore only deliver to the public the whole of our moral inductions when people are already familiar with that new material world, and we have completed our observations. Then, recovered from the initial stupefaction, quite natural in a world that encounters a differently ordered one, the people of Earth, with a better appreciation of what might appear to them at first to be problematic or bizarre in the constitution and customs of the Selenians, will follow us more easily and will even assist us in our laborious investigations.
Then again, it must also be said, in matters of a moral order, it has always been more difficult for humans to arrive at the same unity of views as in the establishment of facts or material phenomena; and that difficulty we have encountered ourselves in approaching the Selenian moral world. As we advanced further in the exploration of that world, three of us strove by way of interpretation to arrive at an understanding of the moral world: the honorable Dr. Bruce, Captain Muller and Herbert Holms had established from the earliest days three imposing theories, essentially different from one another, it is true, but which all three founded on arguments difficult to combat, and on considerations as elevated as they are ingenious. That will not astonish intelligent men habituated to seeking the reason of things; they know that it is only after difficult groping, after many bold hypotheses, that one finally arrives at the discovery of the truth.
As the initially isolated and confused details were slowly classified in a harmonious assembly, however, the various theories of our colleagues also gradually came together and arrived at a state bordering on unity.
The moment has not yet come, as I have just said, to deliver that vast and conscientious labor to the public; you will understand with what powerful emotion, what continual palpitation must have presided over that extraordinary task of the edification of a new moral world in accordance with a new material world; you will understand, in such an unusual—I might even say unprecedented—situation, a few preoccupations could even have afflicted grave and cool-headed men, and that pages written at a moment when the calculation is only made with a vague feverish excitement, need to be reviewed with calm and collection.
While waiting, therefore, until we can deliver that work to the meditations of the thinkers and philosophers of our globe, in order that they can comment on and discuss them, we shall, by way of introduction, extract from the journal of the honorable Herbert Holms a few pages inscribed at the highest point of a noble religious sentiment. They are, in any case, a victorious response to the prejudice so fatally spread by the philosophy of the eighteenth century against men devoted to the exact sciences, who are always assumed to be drawn at an equal pace into the profundities of science and the darkness of atheism.
“Doubtless this planet has not, like ours, merited wrath, or at least celestial disfavor, for God appears to have lavished upon it means of harmony and peace. After so many scrupulous observations of the majority of the Lunarians of three races, on their customs and their mores, it is evident that the race that dominates, and enjoys all the advantages, has only obtained that domination by intelligence. On our planet too, it is doubtless intelligence that dominates, but that domination is only maintained by a difficult struggle, which singularly diminishes the pleasures and advantages of domination, for God, in giving all of us the same physical organization, has wanted to create hereby for our planet a fecund means of expiation, an incessant case of lacerations and sufferings, that apparent equality naturally leading humans to the deadly belief that everyone on Earth ought to have an equal share of wellbeing and happiness. In the Selenian world, however, in order to avoid any attempt at usurpation, God has been able to separate the three classes and indicate to each one its immutable destiny.
“To one, he refuses the wings that he grants to the other two, in order to make it understand the abasement to which it is condemned. To another, he grants wings, but does not permit it to rise as high as the class of predilection. At the same time, he grants its members double the strength accorded to the Selenians, in order that they should comprehend that they ought not to work and take trouble for themselves alone.9
“It is truly a great and ingenious idea to have established the power and superiority of races on the greater or lesser faulty of flight. To begin with, one wonders why God, after having inspired the inhabitants of the Earth with such a powerful attraction to that enterprise, has not facilitated their means of following it, but after the first cry of plaint and desire that escapes before reason and philosophy have spoken, one comprehends the motives of divine wisdom. If God had given wings to us, who, in expiating great faults, must inhabit this vale of tears, our life would doubtless have been a perpetual attempt to escape this accursed planet, to which we have been so justly deporte
d. To be sure, we would not have been able to cross the atmospheric barriers, but our life would have gone by, no longer on the ground but in the ambient air, which might not have entered into the designs of divine Providence. Thus, O my Lord, everything that you have done on Earth as on the Moon, as on all the other worlds that we do not know yet, you have done well.
“In the first place, the race of savage Vespertilios, who often come to attach the Selenians’ dwellings, appear to contradict that benevolent intention of Providence, but that contradiction disappears, if one considers that the race in question was never very dangerous to the Selenians, who have expelled it from all the places they want to occupy, and are always certain of repelling it advantageously when they have taken the precaution of organizing a defense, the principal care of which they confide to the Vespertilios. Those wars—or, rather, skirmishes—cost the Selenians no more blood than jousting and passes of arms once cost knights, and one can affirm that the struggle with the savage Vespertilios is only regarded by the Selenians as a perilous distraction, as hunting bears and wild boar is for our great lords, with the difference that in order to flush out one of those animals and force it to engage in battle, our hunters sometimes have to tire themselves out for days on end, while the savage Vespertilio always comes to offer himself to the Selenian hunt.
“The providential mission of the savage Vespertilio appears to us, in addition, to have been, by forcing the Selenians always to remain on the defensive, to hasten the development of architectural art and all the industrial arts attached thereto, thus fecundating the genius of civilization. It is also necessary to add that in stealing the Selenians’ children, they maintain among them a certain equilibrium of population.
“Then again, what perfect harmony the various lunar creations have with the places they are destined to occupy! Thus, when we observe the savage Vespertilios in their horrible retreats, where the ground is covered with rocks and lava debris, rent by the craters of extinct volcanoes, we always experience a profound impression resulting from those somber but harmonious accords; whereas the Selenians, with their great silky wings, tend incessantly to get closer to the heavens, whose almost always light hues mingle and melt marvelously with the gray-blue of their wings.
“One cannot admire too much the infinite foresight of God in the astonishing phenomenon of the formation and condensation of vapor; in fact, here is a globe submissive to excessive alternations of heat and cold; sometimes the Sun darts its burning rays vertically upon this ground, sometimes the most intense chill extends over its surface, for fourteen days a heat greater than the equator, for fourteen days a cold more extraordinary than that of the polar regions; in brief, everything seems contrary to the existence of animate beings.
“Well, Providence harmonizes everything: it makes immense mountains surge forth, to which it gives circular form; it hollows out profound valleys, placing high mounds at their center in order that the Selenians can establish themselves there during the planet’s long nights, the warm vapors escaping from the flanks of the mountain warm the atmosphere and fall as dew as radiation causes them to lose the gaseous form. The plain is flooded, the waters rise, the land is invaded, the inferior habitations are attained, everything disappears; but the beings that have to live in the depths of the valleys are amphibious, their cabins are heavy and have nothing to fear from the effects of currents; they can sleep tranquil while their fields are fertilized; the water keeps rising, always rising, but the Selenians on top of their rocks can contemplate tranquilly the sea that surrounds them, swelling continuously, for they know that God has assigned them a height that it can never attain.
“The Sun appears, and everything is reborn with its light. The mists dissipate, the vapors remain condensed by heat in the depths of their craters, the sky becomes pure and serene; the atmosphere arms up, the waters in the valley evaporate and refresh it; the earth is laid bare, the inhabitants of the valley depths emerge from their long sleep and spread out into their fields to harvest the plants that grow under the benevolent influence of the Sun, and the civilized Vespertilios come to receive from their hands the fruits of the earth and everything that is destined for the nourishment of the Selenians. Fatigue comes with the end of the day, and when the Sun sinks gradually over the horizon, and they only receive the light reflected by the Earth—which, for them, is fixed in the sky—sleep doubtless comes to take possession of them, and it in the mildness of repose that they await the fine season.
“Everywhere, in sum, what a constant imitation of nature! Their habitations always affect a conical form, in imitation of their mountains; in imitation of birds, they clave the air with their wings, and sojourn for a long time beneath the waters in imitation of fish—if, that is, fish exist in their waters, which Major Muller formally denies for reasons too long to deduce here, but which he intends to develop in a paper addressed to the Royal Society.
“Finally, to all the natural and social advantages that God had accorded to the Selenians, he has added the greatest favor of all, the one without which all the others would only be fragile toys with which to go to sleep on the edge of the abyss; God, as we believe that we have sufficiently proven, has revealed himself to the Selenians, with the result that after having enjoyed their planet, the Selenians have the hope of enjoying an even superior felicity in the bosom of the Creator; and it seems that, in order to heighten in their estimation that unappreciable advantage, God has placed beside them a miserable race, given to a criminal idolatry, of whose terrible punishment the Selenians are aware.
“And yet, in spite of all these means of happiness, the general impression resulting for us from our long observations is that the Selenians are not happy. We have often seen one isolating himself in space and staying there for a long time; then the details of attitude and physiognomy evident indicate, if not desolating thoughts, at least a profound melancholy. In fact, the life of the Selenians, which leaves all industrial labor to the domesticated Vespertilios, and even all the cares of educating their children, must often be vulnerable to ennui.
“Perhaps that apparent sadness, which we believe that we have seen, was only a pious ecstasy, a hymn of love and gratitude sung in the depths of the heart; it is quite natural to think, however, that the cause of the melancholy comes from an ardent desire that presses the Selenians to arrive at the eternal enjoyment that God reserves for his creatures of predilection, and that it is God himself who has put into the Selenian heart that violent and sometimes dolorous attraction. It is thus that we see among ourselves a few men heaped, by exception, with all the joys that our planet can give, and yet who suffer more than all others in their mystical ardor, so fearful has divine wisdom been that this passage through the worlds might not be taken seriously by its creatures, and in order that they should never forget that the present life of those worlds, however happy its makes us, is merely a road to the veritable life, the eternal life.
“Nevertheless, and in accordance with the conviction that God does nothing without a motive, it is permissible for us to believe that the great discoveries of which we have just provided the prelude will not have the unique result of satisfying a vulgar curiosity, and that they will actively favor the progress of morality and civilization; it is permissible to think that in allowing us to know new worlds and their means of happiness, God has wanted to lead us to a softening of the rigors of our exile.
“That is a hope that might be considered bold, but which does not appear to us to be unworthy of divine wisdom and mercy, which appears to us, above all, to be in harmony with the great and immutable law of progress.”
Joseph Déjacque: The Future World (or, The Humanisphere)
(1899)
Mutual liberty is the common law.
Émile de Girardin10
And the earth, which was dry, became green again,
and all were able to eat its fruits, and to come
and go without anyone saying to them:
Where are you going? You cannot go this way
.
And the little children picked flowers, and brought
them to their mother, who smiled at them sweetly.
And there were neither poor nor rich, but everyone
had the things necessary to their needs in
abundance, because they all loved and aided
one another as brothers.
(Words of a Believer)11
And right away, the Earth has changed its physiognomy. In place of the marshy wounds that devoured its cheeks shines an agricultural down, crops gilded by fertility. The mountains seem to aspire frenziedly the fresh air of liberty, and sway their fine plumage of foliage over their souls. The deserts of sand have given way to forests populated by oaks, cedars and palm trees, which spread underfoot a thick carpet of moss, a soft verdure speckled by all the flowers fond of cool shade and clear streams. The craters have been muzzled; their devastating eruptions have been silenced, and useful course has been given to those reservoirs of lava.
Air, fire and water, all the elements with destructive instincts, have been tamed, and, now captive under the gaze of humans, obey their slightest whim. The sky has been scaled. Electricity bears humans on wings and transports them in the clouds alongside aerial steamboats. It allows them to travel in a few seconds distances that would require entire months to cross on the backs of heavy marine vessels.
The Humanisphere Page 9
