A Dweller on Two Planets, by Phylos the Thibetan

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

Re: A Dweller on Two Planets, by Phylos the Thibetan

Postby admin » Tue Apr 09, 2019 11:22 pm

CHAPTER XVI. THE VOYAGE TO SUERN

Before us lay a pleasure trip during which we should travel many thousands of miles. We proceeded slowly when we came above the base of the huge bulk of Pitach Rhok, the mighty mountain, and ascended somewhat, so that we should be on a level with its high point. When at the place, nothing would suit the company except a stop on the summit, and together we all placed foot in the snows on the pitach, which thing was done chiefly to please Anzimee, who said that the place was very interesting on account of what had there happened to me.

Then, again, we were under way, descending from the higher altitudes in order to better view the thickly inhabited, though mountainous, country beneath us, between Pitach Rhok and east Poseid.

At the approach of sunset a dull roar arose to the ear, and soon the long white shore of old ocean flashed beneath a moment, and in a little time was fax behind, with the waters, lead color in the twilight, beneath, behind, before and on both sides, no land in sight, and over one thousand miles east the country of Necropan. Without going at a full rate of speed, we could not expect to be above that land in less than two or three hours. But as it would be dark ere reaching it, we slackened speed to an hundred and fifty miles per hour, closed the deck and went into the salon, where incandescent lamps lit up the darkening night-glooms.

A trip by vailx could never prove so monotonous as a journey in even the fastest of ocean steamships so often is to-day. The variety of scenery, the wide views possible, for altitude was dependent wholly on pleasure, the external cold being unheeded by people who sat in a parlor warmed by means from Navaz and furnished with air of the proper density by the same Night-Side forces--all this tended to prevent ennui. Then too, the rapid transit changed the aspect of things beneath so fast that the spectator looking back-wards gazed upon a dissolving view. As an aside, the currents derived from the Night-Side of Nature permitted the attainment of the same speed as that of the diurnal rotation of the earth, e. g.: supposing we were at an altitude of ten miles, and the time the instant of the sun's meridian; at that meridian moment we could remain indefinitely, bows on, while the earth revolved beneath, at approximately seventeen miles every minute. Or, the reverse direction keys could be set, and our vailx would speed away from where it was meridian on the surface beneath, at the same almost frightful rate, frightful to one unused to it, as my reader is now, but one day will not be, if, as I hope, he or she will live to see vailxi rediscovered. Nor need the life be a very long one ere then.

While we had such preventives of ennui, we lacked not commoner means of enjoyment. We had our naima, in the mirrors and vibrators of which our friends, however distant, could appear in image of form and of voice, lifesized and with undiminished vocal volume. The salons of the great passenger vailxa had libraries, musical instruments, and potted plants, amongst the flowers of which birds similar to the modern domestic canary darted about.

At about the tenth hour it was reported that Necropan was beneath, and at this surprising information, because at the speed I had ordered, we should have been at least six hours longer in coming to that country, I enquired of the vailxman his reason for increasing speed without orders. No good reason being given, I severely reprimanded the conductor, and ordered that a descent be made to terra firma, in order that we might travel by day over the Wasted Land, as our word Sattamund may be translated, which is the Sahara desert of to-day. This great wade some of our party had never seen, and to allow them the privilege we settled down to spend the night on an elevated ridge, high enough to be above malarious influences, for we were near where modern Liberia lies.

"The proud bird--The Condor of the Andes,
That can sail thro' heaven's unfathomable depths,
Or brave the fury of the northern hurricane
And bathe his plumage in the Thunder's home,
Furls his broad wings at nightfall, and sinks down
To rest upon his mountain crag.

Though we called it Sattamund, or the Wasted Land, yet it was not such an and region then as it is now. Water, if not as abundant as it was in Poseid, was abundant enough to give a wealth of tropical trees of the hardier sorts, sufficient at least to hide the nakedness of the slopes and hills of that old seabed. There were even a few saline lakes there, broad and blue, and it was around these that the population was centered. But the same dread catastrophe that overtook fair Poseid laid its terrible hand upon Necropan, and its beauty of verdure went out from the land, because the geological changes withdrew all the water from the surface, and hid it so that only artesian augers could find it. The same mighty throe rent the rocks through and through in Southwest Incalia, and to-day there is in that arid region scenery most fantastic, weird past the power of my pen to describe, where flows the Rio Gila, the Colorado, and Colorado Chiquita. But I will reserve the description, and when it is given it shall be in other words than mine, so that thou and I, my friend, shall together have the pleasure of enjoying a fine word-painting.

In Poseid and Suern, and wherever civilization extended its scepter, it was the universal law, and mankind's pleasure to obey the heavenly mandate which the general accordance with the solar life spirit taught us required the planting, instead of careless rejection, of O seeds of goodly flower or fruit, for shade, for beauty, for utility, wherever it chanced that a favorable spot offered, either in the habitats of man or in the untrodden wilderness. Indeed, in such trips as our party was then taking, it was a matter of religious significance to take great quantities of seeds and to scatter them from the vailx-decks at nightfall, both as an offering to Incal, as His sublime symbol set in the west, and also that the dews of night might insure germination, and this ceremony was also held to be an acknowledgment of the Goddess of Increase, Zania. Thus the wilds came to bloom as the rose; and to-day the world is heritor of that sowing of seed; the indigenous cereals, the wheat, for the origin of which many ingenious but insufficient theories have been put forth, and the varieties of palms that make the tropics famed for the grace of their cocoas and dates, and every genera of the Chamaerops. And these things are because man, woman and child found pleasure in that olden time in "planting seed by the wayside." Go thou and do likewise, that the waste places may become full of beauty and be a joy forever. All hail to Arbor Days, which fulfill the injunction of Christ; they will surely make a return, and some an hundred fold. A small pocket now and then will hold many a seed for planting, and though thou heedest not its sort, so that it be goodly, yet the Father hath said, "It shall bring forth after its kind."

THE STORM

The morning dawned clear and cloudless and was altogether so delightful that we essayed scarcely any forward progress, moving slowly in order that the deck might be uncovered and the company allowed to sit out in the fresh air and warm sunshine.

Down below, a couple of thousand feet at most, we saw, through good glasses, various forms of . human, animal, bird and plant life; and sounds came up to us in drowsy, musical monotone, as our vailx hovered above. Towards evening the winds began to blow, rendering it unpleasant to remain so near the ground. The repulse-keys were set, and presently we were so high in the air that all about our now closed ship were cirrus clouds, clouds of hail held aloft by the uprushing of the winds, severe enough to have been dangerous had our vessel been propelled by wings or fans or gas reservoirs. But as we derived from Nature's Night-Side or, in Poseid phrase, from Navaz, our forces for propulsion as well m for repulsion, or levitation, therefore our long, white, aerial spindles feared no storm, however severe.

As the windows, being frosted over, obscured our view, and as the night promised furious weather, we had recourse to books, music and to conversation with one another, and, through the naim, with our friends at home in faraway Poseid. No authority had Murus (Boreas) over the currents from Navaz. The evening had not far advanced when it was suggested that the storm would most likely be heavier, and the wind wilder nearer the earth, and so the repulse-keys were set to a fixed degree, making nearer approach to the ground than was desirable impossible as an accidental occurrence. We might, if it were generally agreeable, take advantage of our privilege and enjoy the sensation of being in the midst of the storm, ourselves safe and under full speed,

"And brave the fury of the Northern hurricane."

The partial novelty might make us sleep better, when, the evening passed, we should have gone to our staterooms. I, therefore, approved the plan, and gave orders to the conductor to descend to a height of about twenty-five hundred feet. Down we dropped. Our lights were made low in order to produce a partial gloom, the better to enjoy the full fierceness of the tempest, and we sat near the windows where we could hear, if not see. To the eye, naught would have appeared outside save entire blackness; to the ear, the loud beating of the rain upon the metal shutters was plainly, delightfully apparent. Against the sharp points of prow and stem the wind howled and shrieked like an army of demons. At times when the vailx was struck, broadside by some counterblast, it would careen and tremble, but it kept on its way, determined as a thing of life. The experience was enjoyable, if not entirely novel, for it spoke to us of the power of man over matter, and taught us of the things of God, Incal to us, Master of all things and of ourselves, who by Him had this authority over the elements. When the sensation had become monotonous the lights were increased to proper brightness; again we turned to books and games and music, as we once more sought the upper regions of the atmosphere, which were quieter compared with those of the half-mile plane.

Anzimee and a girl companion sat apart from the rest of the company in a retreat formed of flowering vines draped across one corner of the main salon. In a short time she came from her nook to where I sat, wrapped in meditative obliviousness. Touching my shoulder as she came close, she said:

"Zailm, thou dost sing; it would please me if thou wouldst take thy lute and come to where Thirtil and myself have chosen seats, and sing to us."

She bent over my shoulder, blushing slightly, looking so altogether lovely that I simply sat and gazed in silent appreciation of her beauty.

"Come, Zailm, wilt thou?"

I arose promptly enough when I saw a shade of disappointment cross her face, as she interpreted my silence to mean unwillingness, and I said:

"Lo, Anzimee, I am but too pleased to comply, but how could I move?"

Unsuspiciously, she asked:

"Move? and why not?"

"Hast thou ever seen a bright bumming bird," I replied, "which, poised at a flower beside thee, kept thee still, almost afraid to breathe, lest it be alarmed to flight? Even so I could not move, lest--"

"There, there now! If I were not used to reading one's earnestness or other emotions in the eyes, I would say thou art a sad flatterer. But, come."

"What shall I sing, little friend?" I asked of Thirtil, a demure, sweet little maiden, an art student, half-serious, half-frivolous in temperament.

"Oh, dost ask me? Well, something, something," with a mischievous glance at Anzimee, "from thy heart!" she laughingly replied.

Anzimee blushed, but made no other sign, merely dropping her long lashes as I looked at her, while I said, "Truly! Then from my heart-this" (a popular favorite, by the way):

"Ere the heart can know its own,
Ere the doubts of life are o'er,
Love in our hearts must have grown
To the heights of heaven's shore.
Truly, love is sought in vain
In other place than in the heart;
True love always hath its pain,
When from purity we part.
May we cease from every strife,
While in lovely verse enshrining
Incal's blessing in our life;
With His peace it e'er entwining.
So is melody divine,
When the music of the soul;
'Tis betrothing thine and mine,
While the centuries unroll.
Yet our hearts are young and gay,
Seeking ever fairest bowers
Where shall bloom from day to day,
All the beauty of the flowers.
There is one of all the rest,
That alone for me is blooming;
Deep the tendrils in my breast,
Find forever their entombing.
Shall I pluck it while in bloom,
Ready for the gardener's gleaning?
Could I take forever home
What, unto me, is no dreaming?
Yea, beloved, we shall rejoice
In His blessing evermore;
List'ning to the gentle voice,
That as One--we do adore."

Thus it was within the vailx, song and pleasure; without was the storm, risen up after us. Into the teeth of the furious gale plunged our long spindle, giving no sign exteriorly, even had any one been there to see, of the light and warmth, laughter and song, of the human freight and songbirds within its staunch shell, amidst the flowers, a drifting bit of the tropics, safe from boreal blasts. No sign, save only the gleam of the crimson fore and aft lights.

Image

While the others retired for the night to their various staterooms, I remained in the vacated salon until the announcement was made to me that we were above Suernis. No landing could be made, however, in the face of a gale blowing eighty miles an hour, such an attempt would have resulted in being dashed to pieces the instant we reached the ground.

In order that we might be wholly out of the range of the influence of the storm, I gave directions to rise above the level of the disturbance, if such a region of calm existed within reach, and there set the keys so as to stop all propulsion. Receiving this order, the conductor augmented the repulsion force by means of the levers of degree, and we rose steadily up, up, up--above the clouds, above the rush of the hurricane, into a clear, calm atmosphere, intensely cold, almost thirteen miles from the earth's surface. Could we have had a view unobstructed by stormclouds, we were just about high enough to afford us a horizon of three hundred and fifty miles. Soon after this order I went to my room to bed. With the morning the storm had not decreased in fury; and occasional flurries in the air above us proved that the storm-area on the surface must be of vast extent. The cold outside was too intense to consider, even for an instant, the opening of the deck; the sky was almost black in the depth of its blueness; the sun, shorn of much of its dazzling brightness, appeared strangely dim, and the stars were visible. The steady motion of the air-dispensers as their wheels and pistons worked to maintain the interior air at a normal pressure was painfully apparent in the awful stillness, while the fizz of the air escaping through the fine crevices around the windows and edges of the deck made such a noise that I ordered the setscrews tightened and the ventilator pipes opened. Had the frost not hindered vision through the windows and, with the clouds, prevented a view of the earth's surface, a sight most peculiar would have been presented. The view toward the extended horizon would have made the apparent union of earth and sky seem almost on a level with us; but directly beneath, the fun separation from the solid globe would have seemed, not like a ball but like a huge bowl, ornamented with landscape scenes in its interior. As, however, we could not see, our songs, our reading, and our conversation went on, whilst the very faint beams of Incal, coming through the frosted glass, were supplemented by the some knowledge which gave us heat and air and position, to defy the cold and the rarefaction and gravitation--knowledge of Navaz.

At home in Poseid there was no storm, but Menax, at the naim, told us that the weather office anticipated one, the one of which we at that moment awaited the abatement. We waited until the sun set in the west and came in sight in the east twice.

Several times the Saldu appeared at the end of the salon, seeming in the mirror of the naim as real and present as if, in verity, a third of the globe did not separate us. Once, only, she spoke, and then in a whisper to me, as, I stood near the naim:

"When, my lord, wilt thou be at home? A month? 'Tis long, 'tis long!"

A report of even the smallest events of our trip was furnished the news office, and was printed upon the discs of the public vocaligraphs, to use a word of modem sound, and long before any landing was effected by us on the soil of Suernis our fellow countrymen were acquainted with the story of our enforced suspension between heaven and earth while biding the abatement of the storm. Speaking of the vocaligraph leads me to remark that the social superstructure of Poseid was maintained upon the broad basis of equitable laws laid down by the great Rai of the Maxin-time through the influence of free speech as made and molded by church and school, and expressed through the millions of vocaligraphs the three rendering secure the integral homes which, aggregated, formed the nation.

At last the storm king withdrew his forces and the time had come for our descent. Down we swept from the vault of heaven, into Ganje, capital city of Suern.

Hast thou ever been in the ancient and long-deserted city of Petra of Seir? That very peculiar city at the foot of Mount Hor, a city hollowed from the living rock? Quite likely not, for the followers of Mahomet make it hard to visit the place. But if thou hast read thereof, then thou hast some idea of Ganje, in old Suerna, built in the cliffs of the river banks.

Such details as embrace the manner of our reception are too trivial to fill this record. Suffice it that it was suited to the friendly international relations of Suern and Poseid, and to my station and rank as a high deputy. Rai Ernon was far less interested in the vase and in the other gifts of gold and gems, than in the captive Saldani whom the tokens commemorated, particularly in the Saldu, Lolix the Rainu. I was startled at the monarch's close knowledge of the whole affair in all its details, and of my sickness and other incidents which were not matters of public note; but I betrayed no such feeling, since it was but momentary and passed as soon as recollection of Ernon's wonderful occult powers came to me.

Speaking of the Saldui, but especially of Lolix, he said:

"I did not send the Chaldeans unto Gwauxln as objects of lust, neither as a retributive punishment, that by exile from their native Chaldea they might atone to Suern for their fathers, sons, brothers, or husbands who worked harm to Suernis. No, doubtless they were not more blameable than is a tiger which hath a similarly destructive nature, but by the laws of Yeovah we find that ignorance of the law never exempts a wrongdoer from penalty. Law says in regard to sin: 'Thou shalt not.' And the penalty lies alongside, inexorably, and is dealt out unsparingly for disobedience. Law, therefore, appears not to be retributive, but educational. Having felt the punishment, no one, either man or animal, is apt to try the error twice out of curiosity. Nature makes no penalty easy, saying: 'When thou hast learned, then the punishment shall be more severe.' If a babe fell over a cliff, its death would be the result, though its innocence knew nothing of sin, just as surely as a knowing man might meet the same fate deliberately. Now the Chaldean women needed to learn that conquest, bloodshed and pillage is a sin. The Chaldean nation needed a lesson also. It received it, in the death of its prize soldiery. But such examples need finish; a diamond in the rough is surely a diamond, but how much doth the lapidary increase its beauty and value! Not to release unto them those women was to that nation what the faceting is to a gem. Thinkest thou not that I am right?"

"Even so, Rai," I responded.

For several days we remained in the capital, and during this time were escorted over it by no less a person than Rai Ernon himself.

It was a strange people, the Suerni. The elder people seemed never to smile, not because they were engaged in occult study, but because they were filled with wrath.

On every countenance seemed to rest a perpetual expression of anger. Why, I pondered, should this thing be? Is it a result of the magical abilities they possess? By what seems to us of Poseid mere fiat of will these people appear to transcend human powers and set at naught the immutable laws of nature, though it can not be said that Incal has not limited them as surely as He has limited our chemists and physicists. The Suerni never lift their hands in manual labor, they sit at the breakfast or the supper table without having previously put upon it anything to eat, or elsewhere prepared a repast; they bow their heads in apparent prayer, and then, lifting up their eyes, begin to eat of what has mysteriously come before them--of wholesome viands, of nuts, of all manner of fruits, and of tender, succulent vegetables! But meat they eat not, nor much that is not the finished product of its source, containing in itself the germ for future life. Hath Incal exempted them from His fiat as Creator of the world, which all men suffer, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread?" It is less onerous, certainly, on those who walk His paths, or even those who partly do so, and whose rule of life is continence. Such are more powerful, have occult powers that no eater of meats can ever hope to attain, but surely they are not wholly exempt; it must be somewhat toilsome to perform such magic feats as these. None ever got something for nothing. These people gaze upon the foes who come to menace them in their homes--and they are not!

"It passed o'er
The battle plain, where sword and spear and shield
Flashed in the light of midday--and the strength
Of serried hosts is shivered, and the grass,
Green from the soil of carnage, waves above
The crushed and moldering skeleton."

What Poseida could do these things? Rai Gwauxln, Incaliz Mainin, but no more, at least none known to the public even by repute. But no man of all Atl had ever witnessed much display of such power on the part of either, and with the masses it was mere repute. I was favored beyond most Atlanteans in this respect.

I noticed in our visits in and about the capital a thing which cast a shadow over me,, that his people did not love Ernon, however much they respected him and feared his power. That the Rai was aware of my knowledge of this dislike was obvious from his conversation.

"Ours is a peculiar people, prince," he said to me. "During many years, centuries even, it hath had to reign over it rulers come from the Sons of the Solitude. Each and every one hath striven to train his subjects so as to fit some future generation for initiation, as an entire people, into the mysteries of the Night-Side of Nature, deeper than thy people of Poseid have ever dreamed of going. To this end moral codes have been insisted upon as a coefficient of tuition in operative magic. But the endeavor hath never produced the end sought; only here and there hath an individual arisen and progressed; soon every one of these hath fled away from the less energetic people and gone to the solitudes, to become one of the 'Sons' of whom thou mayst have heard; generically we term these students' 'sons; specifically we would have to refer to them as 'sons' or 'daughters,' for sex is no bar to occult study."

It had long been a matter of interest to me to learn all I could of this band of Nature students, Incalenes, as they were sometimes called, from Incal, God, and "ene," to study. Thousands of years later, in the time of Jesus of Nazareth, these were called "Essenes." But Atla, which possessed such a wealth of literature, had, with a single exception, no books on the subject. In that exception, a little volume printed in ancient Poseidonic, the details were very meager; yet its perusal had been of great interest to me. As I now listened to Rai Ernon, my interest was reawakened, and I thought I might one day become a candidate for admission to the order, if--but that "if" was of a large size. If the study renders the student so wrathful in soul as I see the Suerni are, then I will have nothing to do with it. The seed was planted, however, and grew a little when I learned that the angry gloom was not due to occult study, except in the sense that the lower nature was rebellious against the purity of the study and cast up the mud of anger, rendering turbid the clear waters of the soul. It grew still more when the Rai remarked later on that "the girl Anzimee would one day be an Incalenu." But the growth was not great in that olden time; it was reserved for a life to come, when: decades upon decades of centuries had flown, till now!

The Rai continued: "Ye of Poseid dip a little into the Night-Side, and behold! out of it ye gather forces which open the penetralia of the sea, and of the air, and subject the earth. 'Tis well. But ye require physical apparatus; without it ye are nothing powerful. Those, versed in occult wisdom need no apparatus. That is the difference between Poseid and Suernis. The human mind is a link between the soul and the physical. Every higher force controls all those lower. The mind operates through odic force, which is higher than any speed of physical nature; hence controls all nature, nor needeth apparatus.

"Now I, and my brother 'Sons' before me, have striven to teach the Suerni the laws which govern the operation of this force. Through this knowledge Yeovah leadeth His children, strength. Hand in hand with this knowledge are physical acts, powers that come early in the study. So far have they gone, hut will no farther go.

"Morality aids serenity of soul; hence it is profitable to the Incalene, above all things, to be moral. But man is an animal in his corporeal self, and the passions thereof are pleasant. Love is of twofold nature: love of God and of the Spirit, pure and undefiled, and love of sex, which may likewise be pure, though if the dominion of the animal in man be over it, and so not so that of the human, it shall cause the man to sin, for then it is lust. I have sought that the Suerni may know the law,, that they maybe the masters, not the creatures, of circumstance. But because they know a few things of magic, and in the greater feats were aided by the 'Sons' dwelling amongst them, lo, they are content. And behold! they rebel against punishment on account of the lustful nature they do indulge, and curse me mightily because I exact obedience to the law, and penalty for the infraction thereof; and they curse my brother 'Sons' who do aid me, therefore is their wrath which it hath so troubled thee to witness. My people do things strange in thy sight, O Poseida, yet have no -wisdom why it is so, and work their wonders heedless of Yeovah. Wherefore they are a brood of sorcerers, and do not work white magic, which is beneficent, but black magic, which is sorcery. It shall work them exceeding woe. I would, O Zailm of Poseid, have taught these my people faith, hope, knowledge and charity, which same make pure religion undefiled. Have I not done well? Gwauxln, my brother, have I not done well?"

Rai Ernon was sitting in the salon of the vailx, and now addressed Gwauxln of Poseid, whom I saw in the naim as I looked around.

"Verily thou hast even so, my brother," said Gwauxln.

For some moments the noble ruler was silent, and I could see teardrops falling occasionally from beneath his closed eyelids. Then he opened his eyes and began a most touching apostrophe to, and in some sort against, his people.

"Oh, Suernis, Suernis! I have given up my life for thee! I have striven to lead thee into Espeid (Eden) to teach thee of its beauties, and thou wouldst not! I have tried to make thee van of all nations and thy name synonym with justice and mercy and love of God, and how hast thou requited me? I would be as a father to thee, and thou didst curse me in thy heart! Keener than knives is ingratitude! I would have led thee to the heights of glory, but thou wouldst rather lie in wallow of ignorance, like swine, content to do what are marvels to other people, but thyself all ignorant of their import. Thou art an infidel, ingrate race, believing not in Yeovah, content to live by the little thou knowest, too slothful to learn, more ungrateful to Yeovah than to thy Rai! O, Suernis, Suernis, thou hast cast me off and made my heart to bleed! I go. From thy midst the 'Sons' go also, a mournful band of disappointed men. And thou shalt become few where thou art many, a derision before men and a prey to the Chaldeans; yea, thou shalt dwindle and shalt wait until the centuries--even ninety centuries, are fled into eternity. And in that day thou shalt suffer until the time of him who shall be called Moses. And of them it shall be said, 'They are the seed of Abraham.' And behold, even as now the Spirit of God is abroad in the land, immanent in the Sons of the Solitude, and ye do mock It, so in a remote day shall His spirit become manifest and shall incarnate as the Christ, and so shall the perfect human glow with the Spirit, and become First of the Sons of God. Yet shalt thou even then know Him not, but shalt crucify Him; and thy punishment shall go down the ages until that Spirit comes again in the hearts of those who do follow Him, and finds thee scattered to the four winds! Thus shalt thou be punished! From now until then shalt thou earn thy bread by the sweat of thy face. Thou shalt no more have the regal power of defense, lest thou use it for offense. I will no more restrain thee. My people, oh, my people! Ungrateful! I forgive thee, for thou canst not know how I love thee! I go. Oh! Suernis, Suernis, Suernis!"

At the last word the noble ruler's voice lowered to a murmur, and he buried his tearful face in his hands and sat bowed in silent grief, except for a sigh of sorrow which once or twice he uttered. Several Suerni had heard his words, and these now left the vailx very quietly and went to the city.

"Rai ni Incal."

I turned to the naim as these words were uttered, and noted that a great shade of sadness rested upon the face of our own Rai, Gwauxln, as he looked upon Ernon--like himself, an Adept Son.

"Rai ni Incal, mo navazzamindi su," which being translated, is, "To Incal the Rai; to the country of departed spirits he is gone!"

Startled I looked around at the Suern Rai, who still sat silent as before, in the same position. I spoke to him, yet he gave no sign. Then I bent and gazed through his fingers into his fine gray eyes. They were set, indeed, and the breath of life was fled. Yea, verily, he had gone, even when he said "I go."

"Come unto me, Zailm," commanded Gwauxln.

I went to the naim and stood waiting.

"Are thy friends all within the vailx?"

"Even so, Zo Rai."

"Take then thy guards and seek the palace of Rai Ernon. Call upon his ministers to come before thee and tell them that their Rai is deceased. Tell them that thou wilt take his body in charge and carry it unto Poseid. Amongst the ministers are two elderly men and sedate; these are Sons. They are of that body of disappointed men who go forth from Suernis according to the words of Ernon. These two will know that thou speakest truth when thou sayest that Ernon of Suern hath left his Raina in my hands to govern as I shall decide is most wise. But the others will not know and the Sons will leave to thee the telling of the facts. Great shall be the anger of them that are not Sons, so that they shall try to destroy thee by their terrible power, disliking to be told that they are deposed from authority. Nevertheless, this do and fear not; be of good cheer, for how shall a serpent bite if it hath lost its fangs?"

When, according to these orders, I had the court before me, I spoke as directed by the Rai. It was received with a courteous smile by the two who by their demeanor I recognized as the Sons of the Solitude. But by the others great anger was shown.

"What! and thou, Poseida, offerest us such indignity? Our Rai is dead? We are pleased! But we, not thou, will attend to the funeral rites. As to the government of Suern, we laugh with scorn! Begone! We are our own masters. Leave us our ruler, and thou, dog, leave this country!"

For reply I repeated with emphasis the assertion of my authority. I confess to having felt an inward fear when the brow of one of these never-smiling men clouded with intense anger, as he pointed his finger at me, and said:

"Then die!"

I did not outwardly shrink, though half expecting to perish on the spot. Neither did I feel any death tremor, though the menace, ever before fatal, was not withdrawn. Gradually the minister's fury gave place to surprise, and he dropped his arm, gazing at me in amazement. I ordered my guards to manacle and take him to the vailx. Then I said:

"Suern, thy power is fled. Thus said Ernon. He hath said that henceforth thou shalt earn thy bread by the sweat of thy face. Over this country Poseid shall rule. I, special envoy of Gwauxln VII, Rai of Poseid, do depose all ye that are here from rulership, except those two who offered not scorn but courtesy. While they remain, which will not be long, I will make them governors over Suern. I have spoken."

Indeed, I had spoken, and that, to so great an extent, unauthorizedly. I was in an agony of doubt lest Rai Gwauxln should rebuke me. But I would not reveal my real weakness to these ingrates. Instead, I took a roll of parchment and wrote from memory the form of commission of governors of provinces in Atla, appointing one of the Incaleni to the office. This I sealed with my name as envoy extraordinary, following that of Gwauxln as Rai, using red ink, for which I sent a messenger to Anzimee at the vailx. My reason for appointing one of the Sons as Governor was that only one would serve. The other chose to ask passage to Caiphul in my vailx. Then, giving the Governor his commission, a document which he received with the remark, "Thou art a man, indeed, not longer a boy;"--words which, though so kindly meant, fell on heedless ears at the time, for as I made my return to the vailx I felt actually heartsick at what I feared had been the acme of indiscretion on my part. I called for Rai Gwauxln, and when he responded I told him what I had done. He looked grave, and said merely the words:

"Come home."

Imagine now my distress. Not reprimanded, nor commended, but without any explanatory clue whatever, I was ordered home. Then it was that I sought Anzimee, and having found her in her stateroom I told her all the story. Our Rai was known to be one who could be severe in his punishments, although these took the form of disgrace meted out, as public dismissal from office for being unworthy of trust. Anzimee was very pale, but said hopeful words:

"Zailm, I see not but that thou didst right well. And yet, why was our uncle so gravely reticent? Let me give thee a potion; lie here on this couch, and take what I give thee."

She poured a few drops of some bitter drug, put in a little water, and handed the cup to me to drink from. Ten minutes later I was asleep.

Then she left the room and, as I afterwards learned, called her royal uncle to the instrument, where she laid the case before him. He was troubled at the effect of his words upon me, an effect. not intended, as he told her, and one which would never have occurred if he had not at that time been engaged in solving the very abstruse political problem presented by the new aspect of affairs through the decease of Rai Ernon. What further he said was: "Be not worried because Zailm is called home for no purpose of punishment, since I am well satisfied and called him for quite another reason."

I slept for hours, and when I at last awakened, Anzimee, sitting beside me, told me all that Gwauxln had said. As it was then nearly night, I concluded to go to my own room and prepare for the evening repast. On the way I met the Son who was going to Caiphul with us. To this person it seemed a great novelty to travel as he was then doing, although his remarks on the subject were few.

It was, as I reflected upon it, something of a novelty to be piercing the air at the rate of seventeen miles each minute, a mile above the earth. I tried to fancy how it would seem to one like my passenger to be doing this thing; but after five years of familiarity with it as a means of travel, I had poor success in attaining a sense of his feelings concerning the experience.

As we traveled westward the sun seemed to remain as it was when we left Ganje, for its speed, or that of the earth, rather, was the same as our own. We had been on the way for five hours and had covered considerably over half of the distance home, the whole journey being something like seven thousand miles. The remaining two thousand miles would occupy some three hours for transit, a length of time which seemed to my impatient desire so long, that I paced the floor of the salon in very fretfulness. I have seen, since the days of Poseid, a time when a vastly slower progress would have seemed swift, but then the past had a veil obscuring it so that comparison was impossible--

"Man never is, but always to be blest."
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: A Dweller on Two Planets, by Phylos the Thibetan

Postby admin » Tue Apr 09, 2019 11:27 pm

CHAPTER XVII. RAI NI INCAL--ASHES TO ASHES

On a bier in front of the Holy Seat, by the eastern face of the Maxin-Stone in the Incalithlon, lay all that was of the earth, earthy of Ernon of Suernis. In the triangle were gathered a few witnesses asked by Rai Gwauxln to be present, and over all shone the mysterious light which required no fuel, nor for its tall taper any human keeper. High above, hung the white stalactite ceiling, casting down from its many points the radiance of the lights which no one could see from below.

"Close his eyes, his work is done."

Beside the restful form stood Mainin, the Incaliz, his hand on the shoulder of the dead Rai. After the mighty organ had sounded a mournful requiem, Mainin made the funeral speech, saying:

"Once more has a most noble soul known earth. How hath it treated him who gave his life to the service of its children? Verily, Suerna, thou hast done a deed which shall clothe thee in sackcloth and ashes for aye! Ernon, my brother, Son of the Solitude, we bid thee adieu in great sorrow of soul; sorrow not for thee, for thou art at rest; but for us left behind. It shall be until many years ere we know thee again incarnate. As for this, thy poor clay, over it we will say final words, for it hath done its work and is committed to Navazzamin. Ernon, brother, peace be with thee evermore."

Again the mighty organ played in solemn sadness, and while attendants raised the bier upon the cube of the Maxin, the Incaliz raised his hands to heaven and said:

"Unto Incal this soul, unto earth this clay."

The body, bound with light bands to the bier, was raised with it to an erect posture, trembled a moment in that position, and fell forward into the Maxin. There was no flame, no smoke, not even ash left behind the instantaneous disappearance of body and bed.

The funeral was over. As we who abode in Caiphul turned to depart, we. saw that which no man then living had ever before beheld in the Incalithlon. Back of us, in the auditorium, stood groups of grey-habited men, cowled like monks of Rome. There seemed great numbers of them, collected in groups of seven or eight amongst the maze of stalagmite pillars which supported the roof. As we gazed, these men faded slowly from sight, until over four score of Caiphalians seemed indeed small in number in the vast hall where so recently had been hundreds of Incaleni, Sons of the Solitude in astral form, gathered at the funeral of their brother. Yea, verily, had the Sons come to witness the impressive ceremony where all that was mortal of their dead fellow was restored to the keeping of the elements of nature.

"But no man knows that sepulcher,
And no man saw it e'er,
For the angels of God upturned the sod
And laid the dead man there."
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: A Dweller on Two Planets, by Phylos the Thibetan

Postby admin » Tue Apr 09, 2019 11:31 pm

CHAPTER XVIII. LE GRAND VOYAGE

Rai Gwauxln directed me to attend at Agacoe ere resuming my vacation trip, although it was all arranged previously to the funeral of Ernon that my action in Suern was to his satisfaction.

When I obeyed the Rai, which was almost immediately, for we were all ready to resume our journey, Gwauxln, in the presence of his ministers of state affairs, tendered me the position of Suzerain over the land of Suern. I was vastly surprised, yet felt that I might accept and in conducting the affairs of that country render good service. But the fact that I was yet an undergraduate at the Xioquithlon made me hesitate. At last I spoke, saying:

"Zo Rai, I am sensible thou hast done thy servant a great honor. Nevertheless, my liege, feeling that I have not thus far acquired the full knowledge I desire, being yet but a Xioqene, I ask thy permission to refuse the office."

Gwauxln smiled, and said:

"Even so. But the governor thou didst appoint shall execute thy duties for the three years intervening--the four years, I would say, since I would not that thou shouldst study at all this year--and thereafter thou shalt legally assume active duties. I have an object in this besides mere form; I believe that that man who hath an object, a direct goal, in view, is more likely to win success than one without. It is a good stimulus. I do therefore appoint thee Suzerain over Suernis, and dismiss thee to thy journey of pleasureable recreation with thy friends as soon as thou shalt sign thy name to this document. That is well written, though thy hand shakes a little because of thy nervousness. Be calm." This last he said as, trembling slightly, I wrote the desired signature.

--------

Once more we were on our travels.

Anzimee, the elf, persisted in calling me "My Lord Zailm" when she had learned the story of my imminent suzerain duties.

Our course was again eastward, although now farther south, for we did not propose to visit Suernis this time, but intended to proceed instead to our American colonies, as in the original route we had planned to do after leaving Suernis.

We crossed equatorial Necropan (Africa), then the Indian Ocean and the present East Indies, but then colonies of Suern called Uz, then onward above the wide Pacific, still eastward.

"Umaur! the coast of Umaur!" was the cry that called our little company to the windows to look at a dark, serrate line that bounded the eastern horizon. It was the distant range of the Andes, appearing almost on a level with our vailx, which, two miles high above the ocean, shot towards the hazy, black line. Below was the broad mirror of the blue Pacific, apparently waveless because so far beneath us.

Umaur, land of the Incas in a far later day. Umaur, where in eight centuries more they must find a refuge who should be so fortunately fated as to escape from Poseid, ere, "Queen of the World" no more, she sank beneath the waves of the, Atlantic. Eight centuries, whose lapse would see the proud Atlantean become so corrupt that his soul no more reflected the wisdom of the Night-Side because, the calmness of morality being fled, the key to nature's Penetralia would have been lost, and with it his dominion over the air and the depths of the sea. Alas, poor Atl!

But Umaur lay ahead of us, and ignorant of the misdeeds-to-be of our national posterity, we in our vailx stood gazing on the coast we were so rapidly approaching, and commented upon its majestic mountain ranges as seen through the telescopes. 1 Here we beheld a land where, after thousands of years, the conquering Castilians would come, led by Pizarro, and find a race under the rule of Incas, a name preserved through the many centuries from the day when their remotest ancestors fled from sunken Poseid, calling themselves "Children of the Sun."

Image
AERIAL-SUBMARINE VESSEL, ENTERING THE WATER

Umaur was the region of the quarries of Poseid and of many of its rich mines of mineral wealth. Here, too, were vast plantations, and east of the mountains were regularly planted groves of the rubber tree, the genuine Siphonia Elastica of botany. Here also flourished the Cinchonas, as well as many other trees now indigenous to South America, colonized plants from Poseid. Until planted abroad by Atlanteans these vegetable treasures never grew outside of Poseid, and to-day the wild forests of peculiar South American trees and shrubs are the direct descendents of our regularly cultivated farm and plantation products in Umaur. In that olden time the Amazon river ran within dykes across the continent, and the trackless sylvas of Brazil were then drained areas of tilled soil, such as the adjacent territory of the Mississippi is to-day. Some day this river, "Father of Waters," in the north, will sweep unresisted, undyked, across the lowland, which, even now, its surface is above in altitude. It will do this, because these things are certain to be in the mutations of the coming centuries. It will do this, also, because history repeats itself; think not that thou shalt inherit, reincarnate the glories of Atl, and escape its shadows. All things move in cycles, but the circle is that of the screw-thread, ever around and around on a higher plane each time. But that time when these things shall come to pass, and no man be able to say nay, is yet far away on the horizon of time future, as far as is the grand recession of the Amazon on the horizon of the past.

From the great orchards and plantations and homes of Umaur, in the north of that continent, to the desert wilds of its southern parts, where one day trouble was to overwhelm me--and thence north along the eastern coasts, we took our way, leaving the doings of the millions of our colonists, the Umauri, to the imagination of the reader.

Successively we came to the Isthmus of Panama, then over four hundred miles in breadth; to Mexico (South Incalia) and to the immense plains of the Mississippi. These latter formed the great cattle lands whence Poseid drew most of its supplies of flesh-foods, and where, when the modem world discovered it, enormous herds of wild progeny of our ancient stock roamed at will. Buffalo, elk, bear, deer and mountain sheep, all offspring of the remotest ages. I regret to see them so wantonly slaughtered as they are; surely so old a stock might be spared.

To these broad valleys were to come, in later centuries, invading hordes in boats, and over the far northern isthmus where now are only vestiges of its former existence, the Aleutian Islands. They came from Asia, then, as now, to a large extent the home of semi-barbarians, except where the sway of Suernis had extended a civilizing influence by sending out the tribes which, in a later day, were to occupy so large a niche in history under the name of the Semitic ram. But the barbarians who went into Incalia, occupying the North American plains and lake regions--a future age should come which would find these hordes gone from the earth forever; and, later still, curious people digging from archaeological remains would say: "Here lived the moundbuilders."

Still farther north than this, in the present "lake region," were large copper mines, whence we obtained much of our copper, and some silver and other metals. A cold region was this, far colder than it is to-day, for it lay in the edge of the retreating forces of the glacial epoch, an epoch not over until much more recently than geologists have hitherto thought and even still think.

To the west lay what in early American days were called the "great plains." But in the days of Poseid they had a far different appearance from that which they bear to-day. Not then arid, nor very sparsely inhabited, though vastly colder in winter, owing to the nearness of the vast glaciers of the north. The Nevada lakes were not then mere dried up beds of borax and soda, nor the "Great Salt Lake" of Utah a bitter, brackish body of water of its present comparatively small size. All takes were large bodies of fresh water and the "Great Salt Lake" was an inland sea of fresh floods, bearing icebergs from the glaciers on its northern shores. Arizona, that treasure-house of the geologist, had its now marvelous desert covered with the waters of "Miti," as we called the great inland sea of that region. Verdure was on all the slopes of all the hundreds of square miles not covered with lovely bodies of water. On the shores of Miti was a considerable population, and one city of no small size, colonists all, from Atl.

Reader, dost thou remember a promise given in previous pages, wherein I looked forward to a treat in scenic depiction, saying it was from another pen than mine? I redeem it now, for already the geologist is after me for having declared Arizona the scene of a lake or inland sea so vast as Miti, and so recently as twelve thousand years ago. I am reminded that he has decided from evidence afforded by erosion and weathering of the rocks in that amazing region, that while the Arizona desert was undoubtedly a lake or a seabed since the paleozoic time when it was the site of a shallow ocean, nevertheless that lake was certainly "of an age older than the Pliocene, being probably in the Cretaceous epoch." My friend, no. Those gorges and stupendous canons are not merely the gradual product of time and water and weather. Per contra, they are of sudden formation, the rending and cracking apart of the strata in a similar, but on a far more vast scale than the volcanic outburst at Pitach Rhok, described in the first chapter of this history. The Arizona wonders and the gorge of the "'Grand Canon of the Colorado" were the result of an awful dance of the solid crust of the globe. Even now the lava beds of the rectangle between the parallels 32 deg. and 34 deg. north latitude and 107 deg. to 110 deg. longitude west from Greenwich, in the Mt. Taylor and Mt. San Francisco region, have few parallels on earth as regards size. All over this hideous work of destruction, when the sea Miti had fled away into Ixla (Gulf of California) the rains and torrents of eleven thousand winter seasons, and the desiccating, powdering influences of as, many torrid summers have smoothed and chiseled and wrought the ruptured, ragged surfaces into yet more fantastic shapes, and claimed the whole work as its own, denying the hand of Pluto as the major worker. And the geologist seems to have admitted the claim, and placed the lake time far back, in order to allow a sufficient term for the execution of the gigantic work. And it is not so, for I saw that lake, only twelve thousand years ago. But now for the literary treat; it is taken from a very modern pen, but it is so faithfully descriptive of the appearance of the region to-day that I desire to enjoy its perusal with my readers. The words are those of Major J. W. Powell, U. S. Army:

"The canon walls are buttressed on a grand scale, and deep alcoves are excavated; rocky crags crown the cliffs, and the river rolls below. * * * The sun shone in splendor on the vermilion walls, shading into green and gray where the rocks were lichened over; the river filled the channel from wall to wall. and the canon opened like a beautiful gateway to glory. But at evening, when the sun was going down and the shadows were settling in the canon, the vermilion gleams and roseate hues, blended with tints of green and gray, slowly changed to brown above, and black shadows crept over below-then it seemed the shadowy portal to a region of gloom. Lying down we looked straight aloft through the canon cleft and saw that only a little of the blue heaven appeared overhead--a crescent of dark blue sky with but two or three constellations peering down upon us. I did not sleep for some time, as the excitement of the day had not worn off. Soon I saw a bright star that seemed to rest on the very verge of the cliffs overhead. Slowly it seemed to float from its resting place on the rocks, out over the canon. At first it appeared like a jewel set in the brink of the cliff, but as it moved out I almost wondered that it did not fall. In fact, it did seem to descend in a gentle curve, as though the sky, in which the stars were set, was spread across the canon, resting on either wall, and swayed down by its own weight. The star appeared to be really in the canon, so high were the battlemented walls. The morning sun was shining in splendor on their painted faces. The salient angles were as if on fire, and the retreating angles buried in shade; the rocks, red and brown, blazed from their setting of deep gloom below, but above all was vermilion fire. The light above, made more brilliant by the bright-tinted rocks, and the shadows below, made more gloomy by the somber shades of sunlessness, increased the apparent depth of the awful canons, and it seemed a long, long way up to the world of sunshine--and was a mile!"

Even the wide waters of the Miti, set about with towering peaks in the olden days, beautiful as a dream, were not more grand and glorious than these awful gorges come to take their place.

From the city of Tolta, on the shores of Miti, our vailx arose and sped away north, across the lake Ui (Great Salt) to its northwestern shore, hundreds of miles distant. On this far shore arose three lofty peaks, covered with snow, the Pitachi Ui, from which the lake at their feet took its name. On the tallest of these had stood, perhaps for five centuries, a building made of heavy slabs of granite. It had originally been erected for the double purpose of worship of Incal and astronomical calculations, but was used in my day as a monastery. There was no path up the peak, and the sole means of access was by vailx.

--------

In the neighborhood of twenty years ago, more or less, counting from this Anno Domini 1886, an intrepid American explorer discovered the famous Yellowstone region, and while on the same expedition went as far west as the Three Tetons, in Idaho. 1 These mountain triplets were the Pitachi Ui, of Atl. Professor Hayden, having arrived at the base of these lofty peaks, succeeded, after indefatigable toil, in reaching the top of the greater peak, and made the first ascent known to modern times. On its top he found a roofless structure of granite slabs, within which, he said, "the granite detritus, was of a depth indicating that for eleven thousand years it had been undisturbed." His inference was that this period had elapsed since the construction of the granite walls. Well, the professor was right, as I happen to know. He was examining a structure made by Poseid hands one hundred and twenty-seven and a half centuries ago, and it was because Professor Hayden was once a Poseida and held a position under the Atlan Government, as an attache of the government body of scientists stationed at Pitachi Ui, that he was karmically attracted to return to the scene of his labors long ago. Perhaps knowledge of this fact would have increased the interest he felt in the Three Tetons.

Our vailx alighted upon the ledge without the temple of Ui just as nightfall came on. It was very cold there, so far north, and at such an altitude. But the priests within the heavy, well-built edifice never suffered cold, for Atla, drawing upon Navaz, had Night-Side forces at its call. The primary cause of our visit was our desire to pay devotion to Incal as He arose next morning. All night the brilliant beams of light from our ruby-colored lanterns flashed the tidings, to such Poseidi as might look our way, that a royal vailx was in the region. Next morning after sunrise our vessel lifted and departed for the east, that we might visit our copper mines in the present Lake Superior region. We were conducted in electric trams through the labyrinths of galleries and tunnels. When we were about to leave, the government overseer of the mines presented each of our company with various articles of tempered copper. To me he gave an instrument, similar to the modern pocket-knife, which I retained to the day of my death, and always valued highly on account of its extra fine temper, which kept a keen edge, good enough to shave with, and rarely required to be sharpened. The Poseidi were adepts in this now lost art of copper tempering. In return I gave the overseer a nugget of native gold. He asked me whence it came, and when I told him, remarked:

"Any specimen from the famous mine at Pitach Rhok will be highly prized by an old miner like thy servant, more especially as it is presented by the discoverer of the mine himself."

Thus had the mine, found by me when an obscure lad, returned riches to the pick and shovel which had rendered it famed throughout the civilized world.

After taking counsel among ourselves, we decided not to make the farther northern trip, for every one of us had seen the Arctic icefields at least once, while some of us had been there several times. Instead, we concluded to remain in Incalia for a week longer, and spend the eleven days thereof in visiting, more at our leisure, the great territory where, although of course we did not know it, the Anglo-Saxon was one day to found the glorious American Union. History is said to repeat itself; I believe it does. Certainly races follow in the track of preceding races, and as the most important and populous part of all the North American colonies of Poseid had its habitat west of the great chain now known as the Rocky Mountains, so also the grandeur of America will be upheld by the western and southwestern States of the American Union.

Man likes pleasant places to live in; he likes those lands where Mother Nature is amiable and laughs with abundant harvests upon slight provocation; man likes to live in a fruit-land, and where shall he find anything more to his mind than this same southwest and west of the Incalia of yore? Along the ocean shore and back to the Sierra Nevada mountains is the region where, under Poseid dominion, lay a province not second in beauty to the lake region along the shores of Miti. And it bar, retained its fair charm, while that of the other has given place to drifting sands and cactus and the mesquite, and has tenantry of the Moloch lizards, rattlesnakes and prairie dogs. It is no more the

"Union of lakes and union of lands"

that it was in that olden time.

When we finally left Incalia, that we might return home to Caiphul, the last of our colonial lands visible was the coast of Maine, for we journeyed eastward, then south.

For change we decided to forsake the realms of the air for those of the deep where the shark is king. Like all vailx of the class to which it belonged, ours was constructed for both aerial and submarine service, the plates of the sliding deck and the other movable parts of the hull being capable of very close approximation by means of setscrews and rubber washers.

To settle straight down into the ocean would be too much like a landing on terra firma. But being at a height of two miles, more or less, the conductor was directed to gradually reduce the repulsion current, thus diminishing our buoyancy so as to bring us into the water ten miles distant from where the slant commenced. He was further ordered to do this while maintaining a speed which would, though very slow for a vailx, be really swift, that is, he was to cover ten miles in as many minutes.

When we struck the water at this rate of progress the shock which the entering needle experienced was sufficiently great to cause its inmates to stagger, and little exclamations were made by the ladies.

As soon as we entered the water the repulsion was made nil, and its opposite, a degree of attraction greater than that of water to the terrestrial center of gravity, was set up, whereby we were enabled to sink to a considerable depth, despite the air contained in the vessel. The lights outside the windows were started, our speed modified to suit the element, and then we all gathered in the salon by the windows, darkness within and the waters lit without, enabling us to see curious tribes of Neptune which crowded about the strange illumination in their midst.

While thus engaged and while listening to the delighted words of an enthusiastic ichthyologist, I heard a familiar voice in the darkness. I knew it for that of my father Menax, and accordingly went to the naim. He could not see me because I stood in darkness, but I could see him in the great mirror, for at home he was in the light and his image was so transmitted, so that I saw not only himself, but his immediate surroundings, just as a person outside a lighted window at night beholds everybody and thing in the interior, himself unseen.

"My son," said the prince, "thou shouldst not have allowed thy love of novelty to cause thee to act so unwisely as thou didst in entering the ocean at even the slow rate of a ven (mile) per minute. I fear that thou hast a vein of reckless daring in thy nature which will some day bring thee misfortune. Incal punishes the reckless by allowing His broken laws to exact their own penalty. Be cautious, Zailm, be cautious!"

After the submarine experiences had become tedious, the opposite course of a rapid but graduated augmentation of repulsion was imparted to our vailx--a procedure not dangerous, as the other had really been--and soon our long spindle shot out of the water like some great bubble, then rose to where the raz, or repulse indicator, was set for its government, only a few hundred feet above the surface of the ocean. There, putting aside the closed deck, we sat in the bright sunshine and enjoyed the pleasant ocean breeze, which blew in the same southern direction in which we were going. Desiring to reach home by the next day, when the afternoon grew cool we closed the deck, arose high in the heavens so as to lessen atmospheric resistance and made the quickest speed we could towards the south. This, I should remark, was not nearly so great--as either an eastern or western course would have allowed. Thus, traveling either due east or due west, we could proceed at the rate of a degree of longitude every four minutes. But north or south we cut the earth's currents, and just in proportion as a vailx-course deviated from east to west, in that proportion was its speed lessened, until going due north or south we could only travel at the comparatively slow rate of some hundred miles each hour.

We saw that if we traveled home by the straight course, we would not reach Caiphul under two days, and, having set our desires on reaching it by the next morning, the prospective delay was so tedious that we decided to run in on an angle. That is, we would head our vailx: southeast for the Necropan coast, thence southwest for Caiphul, and though the extra distance would be several thousand miles, the increased speed attained would allow us to reach our destination in time to take our breakfast at home.

Beautiful Caiphul,
There's no place like thee;
Queen of Atlantis
And Queen of the Sea.

_______________

Footnotes:

168:1 NOTE--When thy science shall, like Poseid, approach Nature from its Godward side; when, instead of ascending to that key-force of all Nature, the Odic force, from a synthesizing of environing phenomena, thou shalt look from Odicity adown all the river of Energy, then wilt thou have all that Poseid had (being thyself Poseid returned), even its vailx, its naim, and its telescopes. Not such crude instruments as thine are, were the telescopes of Atl. Not the most remote star which sends a beam of faintest light across the depths of space, but that star could be brought so near to us in seeming, that had so minute an organism as a leaf been lying on the "ground" of the star, it were visible to our eyes. Dost thou refuse credence? Con this proposition: that light in not alone a reflection or refraction of force from a substance, but is a prolongation of every substantial form, for as much as only One Substance exists, though many are the dynamic variations thereof, these are mistaken by thee for different substances. There is but ONE SUBSTANCE: Light from Arcturus, let us say, is the prolonged substance of that star. Machine-made electricity is, per contra, unimpressed, formless force. One can be made to reinforce the other--the Formless to acquire the image of the Formed. Dost now see principle of our telescopes? Thy mind jumps far to the van, and I hear thee ask, 'Is Mars inhabited? Is Jupiter? Is Saturn, Venus?" Ah! my friend, I will not answer yea or nay, for when the Poseid view of Nature reappears on earth, thou wilt KNOW. Seek and ye shall find; but seek correctly. Walk the cruciform Way.

173:1 The Three Tetons we situated in northwestern Wyoming, but Wyoming as a territory was not in existence at the time referred to, haying been formed in 1868 from parts of Idaho, Dakota and Utah. A small part of Yellowstone Park is in Idaho.--Kings Hand-book of United States.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: A Dweller on Two Planets, by Phylos the Thibetan

Postby admin » Tue Apr 09, 2019 11:32 pm

CHAPTER XIX. A WELL-MET PROBLEM

Work awaited me upon my return to Caiphul, work to which I might attend without harm to my delicate health, in fact rather tending to its improvement, furnishing a proper degree of mental stimulus, without involving any of the severe tension of study.

On the day of my arrival home, Menax said to me in a way which set me to thinking:

"I understand that the people of Suern have lost the power which they have hitherto had of providing themselves with food by seeming magic. It must be a terrible problem to them how to meet the cravings of hunger."

Whether Menax designed these words for the purpose of arousing me to a sense of my duties in the premises or not, I had at the time no idea. But I pondered the situation very earnestly. It occurred to me that these people had few if any cultivated fields like our own; that they probably had no adequate knowledge of the arts of husbandry, tillage and like requirements, and, finally, that they were not possessed of muscles trained to effort. In fact they must be, in all matters of this sort, a kind of overgrown children. The more I dwelt on the problem, the more startling the situation seemed. I saw that they would, for at least a year, require to have provision made for them. They would also have to be taught the methods of agriculture, horticulture, and care of cattle, sheep and other useful domestic animals. Later, it would be necessary to teach them such other arts as mining, spinning and metal working. In fact, here was an entire nation of eighty-five millions of people coming to school to me for tuition in the arts of life. As the full force of the position came to my realization, it staggered me. Ah, poor me! I fell upon my knees on the greensward of the gardens and prayed to Incal. As I arose I turned and found Gwauxln regarding me with a most peculiar glance. His face was as grave as possible, but his splendid eyes were full of laughter.

"Dost thou feel equal to the task?" he queried.

"Zo Rai," I replied bravely, "thy son is hard pressed. Equal? Yea; if Incal will give me guidance."

"Well said, Zailm. Thou shalt call upon the resources of Poseid to aid thee, and they shall be at thy service."

Not to be prolix, the schools were established, the food and raiment stations were placed in given districts, and the people of Suern, the great peninsula of modern Hindustan, with parts of Arabia, were taught the means of comfortable self-preservation and dependence upon their knowledge. Not all of this was done, that is to say, supervised by me, but the initiation of it, and during three and a half years the practical work of it was conducted by me and my vice-suzerains. Perhaps I was not grateful to Incal; perhaps I never thought a second time, in these days of prosperity, of the prayer of the moneyless and unknown youth upon Pitach Rhok. But perhaps I did, too. I rather think that I was never for one moment forgetful of that morning and its vows. Yet, it is a strange fact that human nature may swerve aside from what it knows to be the undeviating line of right; may be keenly conscious of every infraction and still be able to feel that it has been true to its vows. Moral lapses are the most frequent, those sins which are not strictly direct infractions of communal equities but rather of the Magdalen type. Strange, also, is it that mankind is seldom lenient to the victims, though generally quite sparing of censure for the real criminal. There can be no true justice in a decision on any subject in the world until, in crimes of this sort, equal penalty is meted regardless of sex. Does my proposition seem too sweeping? Consider then this: human justice is a system; if it be faulty in only one particular it is faulty in all things, since justice means perfection, and that is not perfection which hath a blemish.

In the history of the Judaic race the later records of the deserving portion of the people of Suernis may be found. Verily, my people, we have seen glory together and long suffering. We have stood together since before the age that is, and that which passeth, was! My seed of strong, effort was sown in fallow soil, and it returned more than a hundred fold. The end is not yet; the harvest is not garnered, nor the Chosen People come yet into their reward for the Great Tribulation since Ernon of Suern ceased to strive for them. The way was long, but, they shall come at last from out the desert they entered so long ago, and Yeovah will give His children rest!

As Rai Ernon had said, the Saldee general never returned to his native land. He wandered about the city, little noticed by the people, and made his chief abiding place at the vailx of a certain Poseid commissary stationed with others at Ganje.

One day, having become quite friendly with the latter, the Salda asked that his friend give him the pleasure of an ascent into the air; he had never experienced a ride on a vailx and was desirous of so doing. At the time the commissary was busy, and promised to do as requested on the morrow. Accordingly, after dinner next day, which meal was served on the open promenade deck of the vailx, the ascension was made. The general had taken too much strong wine and was rather unsteady in his motions. One of the party was a Suerna who had been one of Rai Ernon's counsellors. The general stalked to the taffrail of the vailx to look down into the nether air. Standing near was the Suerna. Neither liked the other, and the Salda, also excited by wine, became quarrelsome. The Suerna, the same, by the way, who had been so amazed by the failure of his occult powers when he made his attempt to kill me, gave the general a sly push, and he fell against the rail. Being heavy, his weight bent it so as to cause a still further loss of balance and he fell over the side, catching the rail with both hands in a very agile manner. Here, unable to raise himself, he hung, calling for help in an agony of terror. The Poseid captain was not a bad man, but he was somewhat stupid, as a result of a fall on his head, and while able to give satisfaction as a commissary, he was not able to rise higher than some such subordinate position. He had, previous to his injury, been a talented man, and was even yet an inventor of some small note. This was a talent that did him small service now, however, because so many others outranked him in the same direction. He had finally come to be a lunatic on the subject, and was ever seeking to utilize force or to economize power. While the captain was standing in stupid indecision, the Suerna stepped in and pushed him aside, himself grasping the terrified Salda by the arm. The next instant the ex-counselor and the Salda general were swinging, whirling towards the earth, over a mile below. Then the Poseida looked over at them as they fell and, his mind all occupied with his favorite mania for invention, exclaimed.

"What a waste of force! If only they could fall on some mechanism adjusted to raise a weight!" How it happened, the commissary never knew, he averred, and for lack of witnesses, together with his obvious stupidity, the court excused him.

When I learned of the event it was through the governor, whom I had appointed, who reported having relieved the captain from command of his vailx and commissarial office, and the placing of another Poseida in his place. The Salda was the father of Lolix, and I thought it well to break the news as gently as possible to her. How was I astounded, after having done, so, to hear her calmly say:

"Prithee, how doth this concern me?"

"Why, thy father--" I began, when she interrupted me with:

"My father! I am glad. Shall I, who love courage, feel aught but displeasure at his cowardice in the face of death, wherefore he was moved to cry out in terror like a child? Faugh! I call no coward father!"

I turned away entirely horrified, silent for lack of words to express my feelings. Perceiving my action, Lolix came to me, and resting her small, white hand on my arm, looked up into my face, so that my gaze was directly into her glorious blue eyes.

"My Lord Zailm, thou seemst offended! Is it so? Have I said aught to cause thee offense?"

"Gracious gods!" I exclaimed. Then remembering a former estimate of mine, that the Saldu was only a child in certain respects, I said:

"Offended me? Not so, Astiku."

Then she slipped her hand through the bend of my arm and walked beside me. This little experience was the beginning of a longer one which, while very sweet for a length of time, yet culminated in anguish there in Atlantis and, phoenix-like, arose from the ashes of the dead centuries, only a few short years ago. Verily, "the evil that men do lives after them."

Because it was so very obvious that her heartlessness was only that of undevelopment, I was not disgusted with Lolix. I reproved her, indeed, but instead of turning away in unreasoning wrath at its existence, I sought to induce a perception of the enormity of such an offense as cruelty of heart.

According to the custom of her people, Lolix wooed me to wed her. Of course I could not accede, pleasant though it -was to have this beautiful girl doing her best to win my regard. I could not, while I loved Anzimee. Of this love for my sweet, womanly little sister, I never told Lolix, disliking possible contingencies. But I did worse--I told her an untruth, for I said that the Poseid law forbade marriage with those of alien birth.

"Never an exception?" queried Lolix.

"Never one. Death is the penalty."

This was another falsehood, for in Poseid the death penalty was never inflicted, it being forbidden by the law of the Maxin book.

"Well, then, it matters nothing. Thou art young and strong, and of good courage and handsome. Wherefore I love thee. If the law forbid, it is all the same. None but ourselves need know."

The last barrier was fallen. Conscience slumbered. Thoughts of Anzimee were put aside as one would shun an accusing angel. Did I think of Pitach Rhok and my days of sinlessness? Or of the mysterious stranger whom I had heard in awe in the first of my life at Caiphul? Yea, I thought of these things. I thought of Incal, and I said:

"Incal, my God, if I am about to do wrong in thy sight, in disregarding the laws of society and marriage, smite me dead ere I sin."

But Incal smote, not then, but afterwards through the ages. He smote not then; conscience slept the sounder, but passion awoke.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: A Dweller on Two Planets, by Phylos the Thibetan

Postby admin » Tue Apr 09, 2019 11:33 pm

CHAPTER XX. DUPLICITY

The year during which I was not permitted to study passed quickly and uneventfully, except that complications deepened on account of Lolix. My affection for Menax became almost reciprocally as great as his love for me, which was limitless. But I did not tell him that which, heavier and yet heavier, weighed upon me as time lapsed, the secret affair with Lolix. To have done so would have been best, yet I dared not, for it would have lost me all that I most prized. At least I so feared then.

As time went on I began to query my position. Did I love this beautiful girl? Not as I loved Anzimee. "O, Incal, my God, my God!" I moaned in anguish of soul. Conscience slept yet, but stirred restlessly. The fact that Anzimee was my adopted sister did not prevent her becoming my wife, for the law of consanguinity was not violated. But my own acts barred the way.

My scheme to domicile Lolix in a palace on the far side of Caiphul from Menaxithlon was successfully carried out without exciting the suspicion of any one, not even arousing the jealousy of Lolix. Duplicity, duplicity!

Then I wooed Anzimee unrestrained by the presence of her who would have been a dangerous factor had she even suspected that the daughter of Menax was not my sister by the ties of consanguinity. But my days began to be filled with fear, for I had sown dragon's teeth; the denouement of such affairs as have evil for a guide is invariably sorrow and bitterness. Suppose Lolix did not tire of me, and I had neither the heart nor the will to do anything to cause her to do so, nature-laws were ever liable to cause a revealment of the facts which would be fatal to my hopes; and though I often cried in agony of soul that I was an unhappy wretch, conscience still slept.

But mine was not a character to be deterred from my resolves by danger. If I was engaged in a game of skill with the Evil One for opponent, I would play to the best of my ability. So I determined to be rid of Lolix, a determination that was late, for the fruit of our sin was come and a home secretly provided, for I would do no murder. These plans were carried out, all fortunately, as I thought, without any man being the wiser. But how to be rid of the really lovable woman, Lolix. Only a year remained ere I would enter examination for my diploma at the Xioquithlon. If successful, I meant to ask Anzimee, whom I knew loved me in return, to be to me all that the honored name of wife conveyed.

At evening, or of an afternoon, nothing pleased Anzimee better than to walk alone, or with Menax or myself through the palace gardens, under the spreading palms and festoons of flowering vines which canopied all the walks, forming long, cool tunnels of green, gemmed with Flora's most radiant hues. From the breaks in these verdant walls we could see the mimic lakes, hills, cliffs and streams, and beyond these could look out over palace-capped, vine-draped Caiphul and its half thousand hills, large and small. Walking amidst such scenes by the side of her who was so dear, is it strange that my soul was at such times eased of something of its burden of sin and woe?

So long did I defer action in the case of Lolix that I came to fear to take any course except to let events order their own settlement. Yea, I lost confidence in my ability to solve the dangerous problem, fearful lest I should make a bad matter worse. Thus the days slipped by and the examination ordeal was close at hand. Neglect Lolix I did not, could not, nor had I desire to do so. Very often I was with her; indeed, with a strange blindness to the wrong involved, I divided my leisure between Lolix and Anzimee. I sometimes feared that Mainin, Gwauxln, or perhaps both, knew of my secret. They did, too, for their occult vision was too keen to allow them not to know the facts. But neither made any sign, not Mainin, for he cared not how much secret evil went on, as we shall see ere long. Nor Gwauxln, not because he, like Mainin, did not care, but because he was merciful and knew that karma had more dreadful punishment in store than any man could possibly inflict, and his mercy forebore to add to my penalty. So the cancer remained hidden from public gaze, and I knew not that the noble ruler was a sad spectator of my misdeeds. I do not wonder at his sad demeanor when with me as manifested in the last year of my studies.

Anzimee had postponed the time of her examination in Xio until the year in which I was to graduate, and hence the festivities which always followed the examination as a mark of rejoicing over the success of those who received diplomas, included her in the honorable list, for she had passed with high credits.

A dinner was given by the Rai to the successful contestants, and this feast inaugurated an extended season of high social dinners, balls, parties, concerts and theatrical performances, all in the same honor., Anzimee, arrayed in a robe of grayish silk, with her heavy coils of dark hair fastened apparently by a lovely rose, and upon her shoulder a pin of sapphires and rubies, was presented by Gwauxln at the state dinner to the new Xioqi as the "Ystranavu," or "Star of the Evening." This was a social distinction akin to the modem "Queen of the Ball."

Knowing that Rai Gwauxln would lead his niece to the table and be her escort, I took Lolix, as I had a right to do, for I was a graduate and the possessor of a diploma, and all such might choose a companion, who might or might not be a graduate. Lolix, for my sake, had studied hard during the last three years, and was now in her second year at the Xioquithlon, to which she went from the lower schools. I was growing proud of the girl, and felt most tenderly towards her; indeed, I would have been a most despicable person had I not, after her sacrifice for me. Several times I found Gwauxln looking intently at me--I sat not far from him--and once, as he passed me after the feast, he murmured sadly:

"Oh, Zailm, Zailm."

As may be imagined, this address did not increase my peace of mind. But that night passed without any further disquiet, as so many others had done.

As I walked with Lolix in the great hall of Agacoe, I remarked the many glances of admiration bestowed upon her beauty by the many gentlemen we met, nobles of high degree. She had indeed grown to have a loveliness of face and figure, and best of all, of character, which was no longer heartless, but very gentle since her sad experience of secret motherhood and consequent disbarment from its innocent joys, since the child might not be known as hers. She had had offers of honorable marriage find refused them, knowing even as she did so that the fact of their proffer was a proof of my having spoken falsely when I told her that the laws of Poseid forbade our marriage. But her love for me, if it suffered, was faithful and knew no lessening. And she kept the secret well and the more closely for my sake, wretch that I was! As I looked upon her, I felt that she was very dear to me. But Anzimee was more so, and therefore the hideous tragedy went on. I knew that from love of me Lolix had first repressed heartless remarks, then taken an interest in relieving suffering for its own sake, and so had become transformed from a beautiful thorn tree to a glorious rose of womanly loveliness, with few thorns indeed. Had I really any conscience deserving the name, that I did not come out before the world and take Lolix as my wife after all this boundless love for me? No, not in Poseid. Conscience had not slept; it had never been existent; it was yet to be born, and grow in a later time. Thus did the nemesis of judgment still withhold her stroke.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: A Dweller on Two Planets, by Phylos the Thibetan

Postby admin » Tue Apr 09, 2019 11:35 pm

CHAPTER XXI. THE MISTAKE OF A LIFE

Comparison is good mental exercise. It is due to the reader and to myself, as well as to Anzimee and Lolix, to indulge a present mood prompting me to make an analytical comparison of these two women.

What was it that fixed so unalterably my desire to wed Anzimee and not Lolix? Both were gentlewomen, the first by nature, the second by--yes, by nature also. I was, however, about to ascribe the sweet charity of Lolix to the perception on her part of the misery she would feel, placed in like situation with those who suffered in very fact. But the ability to so perceive could arise only from its existence in her nature. No, it was her nature finally developed. Both women were refined, intelligent, and both were beautiful, though of types m widely variant as a blush rose and a white lily. Anzimee was a born daughter of Atl; Lolix was one by adoption. A small difference, surely, since both were in full accord and equally sensitive to, the good, the beautiful and the true, in the polished refinement of erudite Poseid. Truly, the relations between Lolix and myself were wrong, but she was not on that account less dear to me, nor was my regard for her less tender and loving. Her companionship had become a part of my life. If I had a sorrow or was despondent, she interposed her sympathy and cheered me. My anxieties were also hers; my joys her joys. In everything but name she was my wife. Then why did not I acknowledge the fact before mankind? Because karma ordered otherwise. I loved Anzimee also. Through this love, karma operated to annul its own tendencies to espouse Lolix. And the mode of this operation was exhibited in my recognition of Lolix as possessed of every requisite to make me happy except in her one lack, that of psychic perception of the relation of the finite to the infinite. Absurd? No. That my soul craved such an ability on her part, and found it not, but did find it in Anzimee, was evidence of the growth of the frail seedling of interest in. the occult life of the Sons of the Solitude, which had been somewhat matured by the words of Rai Ernon of Suern, years before. Sayest thou that if a little such interest worked such error in life that deep interest would make for the losing of the soul, wherefore thou wilt have none of it? Not so. It was the not being true to the ideal at that time gained, true with all my soul, that did the mischief, just as in the myth of Lot's wife, she had never been turned to salt had she obeyed, not curiosity, but the higher injunction.

Lolix had no dimmest perception of this psychic link between the things of earth and the things of infinity. I had; I knew Anzimee had; wherefore I ordered my life so as to include her and exclude Lolix, whereby I did both them, myself and my conception of God (which is but a redundant expression, for no one finite can injure Infinity) a fearful injustice. But karma lay in wait for the evil of my life, demanded payment--and got it, every jot; no words can paint the suffering of the expiation. I scarcely propose to try and shall rest content if a realization of some part of it shall deter others from sin through the certitude that there is no vicarious expiation for evil done, and no escape from its penalty.

The Law of the ONE reads: "Except a man overcometh, he shall not inherit of My life; I will not be his God, neither shall he be My son." There can be but one way to such overcoming, the ever-recurrent plungings into material incarnation, until the errors of the personal will are at-oned to the Divine Will. There can be no vicarious undoing, 1 and soon will I show why. Another can not do thy breathing for thee. Reincarnation, the ever-recurrent prisoning of the soul in fleshly bodies, is but expiatory, is but penalty. If in His Name ye are become free, if in that Way ye have overcome, and in place of being slaves to are masters over desire, ye have undone sin. Then is there no more incarnation for you in the prison of this death, miscalled life. There is no other Way; the Great Master pointed none.

In expiation of my dark past I must needs return into the world, thy world of sin, sorrow, sickness and pain, and disappointed longings for the peace that passeth understanding. Is not my twelve thousand and more years of further wanderings in the far land of this world, far from my Father's house, and feeding on the husks called joy, suffering the fevers, pains and disappointment of hopes, enough of expiation? Yet for a little while longer I must and, impelled by love, willingly do serve Him. Some souls shall have even more than I, if they turn not. Which will ye? Will is the sole Way to esoteric, or occult Christian knowledge. Whosoever will, shall have Eternal Life. But the will to overcome must replace our will of desire, as the fresh air replaces the exhalations of our lung. As the atmosphere is around about us, and, inhaled, becomes our breath, so the Will of the Spirit is around us and, entering into the heart that hath determined to strangle into submission the serpent, suffers us not to know defeat. But I, and Lolix, refused this Breath, and unwilling, turned away. Oh! the horror, the pain, of those lost ages, lost with her! But refound by us both, in--overcoming. I am sorry to admit that such moral obliquity could ever have warped my character, even twelve thousand years ago! Will is the only Way to Christ.

Is it not an appalling contemplation, to think that, having determined to put Lolix away and to install Anzimee in her place by honorably wedding her before mankind, I was able to calculate upon my knowledge of Lolix and to depend upon her acquiescence in keeping my secret because of her unselfish love for me? Monstrous! I knew that Lolix did nothing by halves. Having given herself to me, she would not expose my iniquity, even though I rejected her for another; society had no reproach for a woman betrayed.

In pursuance of my plan, I proposed to obtain the spoken affirmation of the love that had long been confessed by the demeanor of Anzimee. Then I would tell Lolix all, reserving nothing, and throw myself on her mercy. Even after these many, many centuries, when--Laus Deo!--reparation is at last complete, I look at the record of this part of my life when I was Zailm, and wonder that the very confession does not scorch holes in the paper upon which it is written. Moral turpitude is a fearful thing, for, though conscious of its being sinful, I was but dimly aware of the hideous blackness of my action.

Canst thou dissociate, reader, thy horror at the one action sufficiently to take interest in the recital of my profession of love made to Anzimee, after I had hidden from my own sight the evil of my life? It may be almost futile to try; yet it is possible to forget anything out of sight, at least to such a degree.

"That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain."

More especially is it easy to smile when the evil is in such a fax, far past tense, is atoned, and the villain is one no longer. Thou wilt pardon me if I hint the Way of at-onement. Of all my thousands of years of my many lives, to which in this history I can but briefly allude, I draw for thee one lesson that the weary pilgrimage hath taught me, and in my soul I pray thee heed it. For I am longing for my release, when I may go out into the blessed realms that mine eyes have seen, mine ears heard, and myself been amidst, with Him who openeth and no man shutteth, and shutteth and no man openeth. So this know, and these things; so long as any that read my words turn aside, and will not to know and do His Way, so long do ye keep me out of my part in the Great Peace, until His spirit shall cease to strive with thee, or hinder thee. I am working and sacrificing that ye may know that Way; and tread it. Yet some of you will, even at the finality, be of them that, denying Him, are by Him denied. Out of all the glorious systems of worlds, only Earth denieth, for acknowledging Him by words and crying, "Lord, Lord," they yet hate one another in their serpent-dominated hearts. Think not that I use any figure of speech when I say "serpent"; microscopists know better. "He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit have Life everlasting." They that are alive have crucified the flesh with its affections. Some will close the eye and the ear to my message I have of Him. By that shall the seed of Eternal Life be closed out of their souls, and they shall die. 1 But so many as in all things turn unto the Way shall in no wise be cast out. He said it who is true. Keep thy lamps trimmed and be wise, not foolish virgins.

_______________

Footnotes:

188:1 NOTE. See foot note on page 236

190:1 NOTE--in this connection read the last age of this book, which closes the history given of a Life redeemed upon His Cross.--Ed.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: A Dweller on Two Planets, by Phylos the Thibetan

Postby admin » Tue Apr 09, 2019 11:36 pm

CHAPTER XXII. ZAILM PROPOSES

My mind was filled with the question which I made paramount, how to phrase my proposal of marriage to Anzimee. Such occupation of thought is common to all lovers, of every race and nation, where matchmaking is not conducted by the parents.

Having set my time for the momentous inquiry, I sought Anzimee. The information that she was absent at Roxoi palace one of the three set apart for the Rai, but seldom used by him, was rather perturbing. Lolix resided at Roxoi, and had done so ever since the time when I secured her transference from Menaxithlon. But I was not altered in my purpose of seeing Anzimee; so, while journeying across the city, forty miles to Roxoi, I pondered the new situation. I knew that the two girls were friends, and this fact seemed likely to complicate matters. Arrived at Roxoi, I found Anzimee in the gardens, seated near a cascade that tumbled over a fairy-like cliff into a mammoth dewdrop of a lake. She was alone. As I came near she inquired, in a surprised tone:

"Where is Lolix?"

"Where?" I repeated. "I know not. I was told that she was with thee."

"And 'twas truth. But she took my vailx and went away, saying that she would go and get thee, that we three might have a little outing together."

I thought rapidly. To Menaxithlon was forty miles across the city due south. The vailx must therefore take nearly or quite as many minutes going in that direction, and the same returning. Eighty minutes. That would be long enough.

Seating myself beside Anzimee, I took her hand in mine. I had often done the same before, and even clasped her about with my arm, but in a distinctly brotherly way. Now the simple touch of the fingers was electric in effect, and she could at once detect the intensity of excitement which possessed me. The fine language I had intended to use was lost, and instead of trying to regain it I said merely:

"Anzimee, would words deepen thy certainty of my love for thee? I can not command them; but I ask thee, little girl, to be my wife!"

And for reply she answered in phrase as brief:

"Zailm, be it so!"

What followed the reader may imagine; thine own fancy will please thee best, for surely the picture is not hard to draw.

When Lolix returned, I had departed, nor this hastily, for she had been delayed in coming back, so that three hours had elapsed since her departure.

I knew that few things were more certain than that Anzimee would confide her joy to Lolix. But I had no misgivings, for I felt every confidence that Lolix would not betray our secret, however terrible the blow might be for her to bear. As I anticipated, Anzimee told the story of my avowal, and of her acceptance of me. When the whole was related, Anzimee said that her friend looked at her a moment, then fell fainting to the floor. When she had been revived, she seemed so calm that even Anzimee did not question her statement that the swoon was due to nervousness. This was at the eventide. Anzimee, filled with happy feelings, saw her friend in bed, dismissed the attendants, soothed her to sleep, and came home. These facts I did not learn until next day. I thought it best to have an interview with Lolix at once, and so experience all the pain and have done with the anguish of it. Deluded mortal!

I went to Roxoi, and going into the Xanatithlon, awaited Lolix, to whom I had sent word that I desired to see her there. She came. Fully ten years seemed to have passed over her since I saw her last. Worn. and pale, with great dark rings under her glorious blue eyes, into which the tears flooded as she caught my quick gaze. Poor girl! But what could I do? that was my thought. I was even a little conscience smitten but very little, for the scales of sin were thick and very numbing to the soul.

She spoke first:

"Oh, my love, my love! Why hast thou done this? Thinkest thou I shall live? I have for long known that no law existed to bar our union, and have waited for thee to do what was right, confident that the day would soon come when thou wouldst ask me to share thy proud name. But--O Incal! my God! my God! " she exclaimed, bursting into a flood of tears, that were as quickly repressed. Then in a calmer voice, full of piteous heartache, she went on:

"Zailm, I love thee too well, even now, to chide thee! I am thine to do with as thou wilt. I gave thee my life long ago. I gave thee my babe, and thou didst place it in a home where no man might suspect its parentage. Zailm, I have done more also--there was another that--that--O Incal, forgive me! I sent it in to Navazzamin, that it might not accuse thee, Zailm! And now, I, whom thou hast called thy 'blue-eyed darling,' I, who love thee more than I do life, am by thee put aside! O God! Why am I made to suffer thus? Why thus stricken?"

She broke into a storm of agonized weeping, and I sought not to stay the flood, knowing that sometimes tears are a blessed relief. Had she loved me thus? Fool! not to have known it from her actions, which spoke louder than words possibly could. My heart smote me now indeed, and I prayed, prayed to God for forgiveness, and I prayed to her. Too late! Conscience came forth at last, born to smite, sprung like Minerva, full-armed for the combat.

When Lolix had recovered calmness, she said, in such heartbroken tones as had never fallen on my ears before:

"Zailm, I forgive thee. Not even now will I betray thee, since whom I once love I will love till death; afterwards, also, if love survive the grave. If thou art come to say the parting word, so be it! But leave me now, for I am almost crazed! Yet remember, my darling, that if thy new life be not happy, though I pray Incal it may be, that there once beat a heart for thee warmer, more loving, perchance truer, than I fancy thou'lt find that of thy new love. I shall not live long to be a shadow over thy peace. Kiss me once as thou wouldst if I were thine own wife in the sight of the world, as I am in that of Incal, and having died, thou wert about to confide my clay to the Unfed Light."

With these words she stopped, arisen and come before where I sat, and placed her arms around me, drawing me into a embrace. A moment thus, then her lips, chill as those of one who keepeth company with Death, met mine in one long, sobbing kiss! She released her clasp, stood an instant, and was gone. So she left me. Long I sat in the midst of the flowers in the great conservatory at Roxoi.

"The blossoms blushed bright--but a worm was below,
The moonlight shone fair--there was blight in the beam;
Sweet whispered the breeze but it whispered of woe,
And bitterness flowed in the soft-flowing strewn."

KARMA DISPOSES

That night the banns of my coming marriage with Anzimee would be announced by the Incaliz Mainin in the great temple, for in cases of high social rank it was customary thus to add extra formality to the publication. If, during the ceremony, a death was to occur within the Incalithlon, custom decreed that one entire year must elapse before consummation of the marriage rites. In any event one month must pass after the banns, which were in consequence declared immediately following the engagement. For reasons of his own, Mainin the Incaliz desired that Anzimee should not wed any one; but as he had no authority over and but little acquaintance with her he kept silent respecting his wishes.

At the proper hour, Anzimee and myself stood before Mainin the Incaliz, within the Holy Seat. By our side was Rai Gwauxln and Menax, the five of us being the cynosure of the eyes of a great audience.

In a clear, slow voice, the Incaliz began an invocation to Incal. But in the midst of this service, a woman glided quickly across the triangle of the Place of Life, in the center of which was the Maxin. It was Lolix. She was as faultlessly attired as it was her pride always to be. Apart from the awful blaze in her eyes I saw nothing extraordinary in her appearance. But to have stepped into the Place of Life was an impermissible thing, and the act centered all eyes upon her. It meant an appeal to the authority of the Rai.

"What wouldst thou?" asked Gwauxln. "Zo Rai, in Salda, my native land, it was the custom to allow either sex to woo the other in marriage. I wooed this man, the Astika Zailm, ignorant that he loved my friend--how could I know? And now, I pray thee, deny the banns, is thou hast a right to do."

"Woman, I am sorry for thee! But the customs of Salda are not those of Poseid. I grant not thy prayer,"

I had felt a numbing terror lest at fast my crime was to be revealed. But the fear faded as the slender, graceful figure of Lolix turned and was swallowed up in the audience. Then the interrupted banns were renewed. When Mainin said to Anzimee:

"Thou dost declare it thy wish to wed this man?" she replied:

"I do."

"And thou, dost thou declare it to be thy wish to wed this woman?" To which I said: "Even so, Incal not preventing." As I made answer the proceedings were the second time interrupted by Lolix, who again came into the Place of Life, but this time as hurriedly as if pursued. Opposite the Unfed Light she stopped, and said:

"Incal will prevent! See, I come to wed thee now, Zailm, and here! The God of departed souls shall be our Incaliz, this dagger our wedding proclamation, banns and all!

I ought to have prefaced the narration of the questions put to Anzimee and myself by explaining that after the invocation by Mainin, that person, Anzimee and myself, and the Rai with Menax, had left the Holy Seat and had gone into the Place of Life, so that Lolix now stood close beside me. As she spoke of the dagger her words were calm, but rapidly uttered--it was the calmness of insanity! Crazed by the course I had followed, Lolix stood there, her glorious blue eyes filled with the light of madness. With her last words still upon her lips, she struck at my breast with the keen weapon. I warded the blow with my arm, which was pierced through by the forceful stroke. As she drew it out with a wrench, blood spurted over the granite floor. At sight of this she uttered a frightful shriek, saying:

"Mad! Mad! MAD!!!" and with one bound sprang to the center of the Place of Life, where she stood by the cube of the Maxin.

Anzimee swooned; Menax stood as if petrified, gazing at my flowing blood, while Gwauxln, pale but calm, spoke to a guardsman near:

"Arrest the maniac!"

The order of the Rai attracted the attention of Lolix, who said to the approaching soldier:

"No, no, arrest not me. I was mad, but I am not. Whosoever shall touch me, him will I curse, and then die in the Maxin."

Being superstitious, the guardsman paused, for he dared not touch her, neither disobey the Rai. In his terror he turned to the latter and began to make excuse.

"Silence!" thundered Gwauxln. Then in gentle tones he said to Lolix: "Woman, come to me."

"Not so, Zo Rai! At this place beside the Maxin no one under the law may offer me violence. Here, then, I stay!"

Speaking thus, Lolix rearranged her slightly disordered turban, folded her arms, and then leaning back against the Maxin-cube, gazed calmly at the Rai. He made no motion, but looked first at her, then at me. Lolix, though still near to the Maxin, had assumed an erect position, no longer touching the cube.

Incaliz Mainin had stood quietly by during the excitement. He now said:

"Aye, Astiku from Salda, there thou shalt stay, indeed, even longer than thou thinkest!"

He had spoken very calmly, even softly, gazing the while at the unhappy girl. When he turned towards the Rai, he saw a look of horror on his face, and hurriedly looked away again, finishing the reading of the banns. I scarcely heard him, being engaged partly with my bleeding arm, and partly with Anzimee, who, but partially recovered, and still half fainting, leaned against me for support. When the ceremony was completed, Rai Gwauxln, placing a hand on each of our heads, said: "Not only a year must elapse ere ye may wed, but much longer! Zailm, I do forgive thee thy sins so far as it is mine to forgive, the human laws thou hast broken. As for thy partner in wrong, never mind."

Then turning to Mainin, the Incaliz, he sternly said:

"Because of thine accursed deed, thou and I are forevermore strangers! Now I know thee for what, alas. thou art."

Having spoken in this, to his hearers, enigmatical and startling language, Gwauxln left the Incalithlon. Mainin also left. Menax, become curious regarding the unhappy cause of all this trouble, spoke to her as she stood by the Unfed Light. She neither answered nor moved. I approached near to her and said gently:

"Lolix?"

Still no answer nor movement. I touched her silken bodice, but received a shock which startled me like an unexpected blow! Her corsage was as rigid as stone. I touched her hand; it, too, was cold and stiff. Her face, even her wavy brown tresses, were alike rigid. Not only was she dead, but actual rock! Like one in a dream, too much stunned to be horrified, but still possessed of a strange curiosity, I rapped with my knuckles on the various thin edges presented by folds in her robe, and heard them sound with a metallic clink. I grasped a finger; it broke off, and then in a sudden wave of awful living horror I dropped it upon the stone floor; it broke into fragments like any fragile bit of rock. Still were the golden tresses, with which I had so often caressingly played, of the old lovely color. Her complexion, her blue eyes, even, were of the same natural hue they had been in life, but for all that her body was stone and her soul was forever fled! Her pretty foot, showing from beneath the hem of tier robe, was not only as the rest, stone, but it was petrified fast to the stone pavement on which she stood. At last I realized all. This hideous deed was the work of 'Mainin in that instant he looked at Lolix in speaking to her. He had prostituted his occult wisdom, and for this had Gwauxln cursed him. Lolix's flesh and blood and raiment had been transmuted into solid stone. This petrification was all that remained of poor, wronged, forsaken Lolix, a perfect statue which, if suffered by man to remain, might stand during the many centuries, till even stone at last crumbled to dust.

The awful meaning of it all came home to me at last. Was I primarily responsible for it? In that moment I knew that I was, knew that the murder was on my soul, as well as on that of Mainin, who had never found that opportunity, at least except by me.

Even in her temporary insanity Lolix had been true to me. Not one word had she spoken to involve me. If Gwauxln knew, and I was aware that he did, he gave me free pardon so far as human law was concerned. For the broken laws of Incal he could not extend pardon, that was become karma, and lay a weary width of desert sands of sin to scorch my feet in the passage I must make across them ere ever I could tread the narrow way of attainment. The long atonement was before me. I gazed on the mute form of the girl I had so fondly loved, and loved yet, until Menax, who had become aware of the awful occurrence while I stood stupefied, but on whom the main effect was a desire to leave as soon as possible, pulled me by the sleeve:

"Come, Zailm; let us go home."

Giving one last remorseful look, I obeyed. Lovely Lolix. Her voice was still in death, and that through me! As remorse surged over my soul, I thought that I would now be glad to ask Anzimee to release me, confess all to her, and with her consent make Lolix my honored wife; but it wag forever too late in that life thus to make reparation. No more could the tender glance of love flash on me from those starry eyes of blue! No more would my weary head nestle down on tier shoulder, while with gentle caress she chased away my darker musings with a mild and gentle sympathy. Ah, ye gods! what had I lost? My life, that had seemed complete, and as a sphere like unto the full moon, was come, like that orb when it rises late at night, to seem torn and but half of itself, wrecked and ragged, careening through the night-time of existence.

Anzimee knew nothing of the awful reality; she had been too much stunned by the sudden knowledge of her friend's insanity. She must not know, if it were possible to prevent her learning of it. We went to our carriage and, solemn the one, stunned the other, and wildly remorseful the third, got in and went home to Menaxithlon. Home? I felt that the peace of hone was no more mine! Life had become a desert over which stalked the skeletons of despair, regret and sorrow; overhead a moonless sky, underfoot in the night a howling waste of sand, blown hither and thither by curbless winds. Lolix was gone, Anzimee would never be mine, as I felt in prophetic forecast of soul, and so, with bowed head, I sat in the midst of the desert of my days and let the phantoms dance about and mock me, unheeded.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: A Dweller on Two Planets, by Phylos the Thibetan

Postby admin » Tue Apr 09, 2019 11:46 pm

CHAPTER XXIII. A WITNESS BEFORE THE CRIMINAL

States of mind, of feeling and of intuition are the only real things that exist. Jesus, although the Son of God, and John and Paul were all Sons of the Solitude; Hegel, Berkeley, Sterling, Evans; all real theosophists and all real Christians, are becoming Sons, and are in accord with those peerless nature-students of old when they say, "Spirit alone is real; all else is illusion."

If a man think himself ill, he will become so; if, per contra, he is cheerful under even the most adverse circumstances, he will not see that the world about is full of gloom; nor is it. 'Tis only in himself, and he can change the world all into gall and bitterness for himself, although it be all a song for others.

Image

For weary weeks I wandered about, stupidly, a leaden load of grief weighing on my soul, a feeling of dull despair which would have crazed a less well-balanced temperament. Had Lolix felt thus for even a little while? If so, and I knew she felt worse, if that were possible, God pity the bright, sweet and beautiful girl who had so suffered through me! I was tempted to suicide, tempted to sneak out of the back door of life, and I often felt of the edge of the razor-keen knife given me by the Incalian mining superintendent--how long before? Four years, really; four years? Four centuries, for aught I knew by my feelings. I stood by the Maxin in the long afternoons when I was alone in the temple. Or did I but dream that I did this? Aye, it was a dream of tortured sleep, for no one had admittance to the Incalithlon (except the Incala) on any other occasion than on days of worship or of special ceremonies, and then the edifice was always thronged. Anzimee crossed my desert at times, but though she spoke, and caressed me, and strove to arouse me, it was in vain; all her efforts fell like a ray of sunlight on the inky lusterless pools sometimes seen in deep forests. Left all alone with my remorse, for their unavailing efforts seemed to my friends more productive of harm than of good, and therefore they ceased them, I took my private vailx, and, to shut off all possible communication with the world, removed from it the naim. Then, no one witting my intentions, I slipped away in the night-time. I wandered then through the realms of the air, sometimes so high above the earth as to be in almost entire darkness, where the Nepthian Ring was visible and where even the air generators and heat furnishing apparatus were scarcely able to keep the air in the vailx dense and warm enough to support my miserable life. Or, equally alone, equally in darkness, I made my vailx seek the depths of the sea where phosphorescent fish would have mistaken my craft for a larger brother, had I ever cared to light up. But my soul was dark, and of what avail was it to illuminate the vailx when, with eyes to see, I saw not? So bitterly keen was my horrible anguish of soul that at last the body of clay lost its power to hold Me, and I arose above time and earth, and remained in that state for what seemed an endless period. No light appeared to be in the awful blackness, neither any warmth, but a darkness as of death, a coldness as of the grave. No person crossed my path; no sound was heard, save dull, muttering groans. But at length flashes of red flame leaped athwart my vision, then went out, leaving the gloom more wholly black than before. Horrid hisses, as of giant serpents, assailed my ears now; awful pain seemed dissolving my very soul. At last my nerves failed to respond to the racking agony, and sensation failed. Numbness seized upon me, and I exclaimed: "Is this death?" But only echo answered. The hisses had ceased; all was silent. Suddenly I felt a deep dread of the horrible solitude, so dark and cold, vet in which, somewhere, I could see a little light, that but seemed to render the intense darkness more smothering. I called aloud; reverberating echoes alone answered. I shouted and shrieked in wild terror. But in all the vast glooms around no sound save my own replying, reflected tones came again. The knowledge that my confines were limited came to me from the fact that my voice was sounded back to me after what seemed ages between utterance and return. With this knowledge came the sense that I was free to go, and I arose from the place where(in I stood as if I was endowed with wings, and I fled faster than thought. Tall cliffs I found in the glooms, and ever and anon peaks shone out in the glare from some flaming pit, that no creature was anywhere to be found; I was in a very universe of solitude. Alone, oh, alone! The awful, horrible despair that then seized upon me caused me to wail in more than mortal pain. My eyes were dry and my soul as if crushed. Despair so frightful held me for its own that I longed to perish. Vain wish. Then I remembered that I had an earthly body; to find even that would he some solace. On lightning lines I sped to it, to find it cold and lifeless save for a small glow of magnetic light in the plexus of the heart nerves and another in the medulla oblongata. But beside it I found, O, Incal! I found Lolix, weeping, praying to our God to restore--me. She did not seem aware that I had come, but sought me in the cold body of earth. Then I knew that I had been reminded of my corporeal self by that fond woman's soul pleadings. Such pleading, such anguish, I could no longer endure. I stood beside her, I touched her. Then she looked up and saw me. She looked long at me; then at my body. And then: "Zailm, is it thou? My love, my love. Oh, clasp me, ere I fall!"

She fell forward upon my breast, and in that time the body of me disappeared, and also all things, save the sandy waste where we then found ourselves together. . . . Then, before our horror-stricken gaze came a little babe, so tender in age it seemed just born. It was able to come to us, however, and it could utter wailing speech, which smote our ears like cries of mortal agony! It was dripping with blood, and its eyes were as those of a dead infant. With an awful shriek of anguish Lolix cried:

"O Incal, my God, my God! Have I not suffered enough but that my dead, my murdered babe should come to smite my soul! Zailm! Zailm! See! See! See our baby girl, murdered by me, for thy sake!"

My heart seemed to stop beating in its fearful woe, and I stood paralyzed, gazing at the little one as it stretched its hands gory with the blood of untimely birth, and raised its glazed, eyes--to me! Then I stooped and took it into my arm, holding it close, trying to warm its poor, cold little body, and I wept, aye, at last I wept great tears of real value, because shed for another. With a voice choked with anguish, I said: "Lolix, thy sin is on my head, because done for me! Let Incal have mercy on me, if He will!"

Image

Then a glorious radiance broke over the scene, and the Cross Bearer was beside us as we stood, clasping each other and our child. He whom I had seen by the moonlit fountain, years before, stood by us again. On His breast shone a Cross of Fire, which leapt or fell again in waves of undulating, living Light. He spoke:

"Lo! Thou hast called upon the Most High for mercy. Because unto that little child thou hast shewn mercy, thou shalt receive it. Thou hast come unto Me, and I will give thee rest. Yet, it shall not abide with thee until the day of the Great Peace entereth into thy overcoming heart. Therefore, in a far day, thou shalt garner e sorrowful harvest of woe, and repay all thou art indebted. When thou art come again, also she with thee, and again are ready to go into Navazzamin, ye will find yourselves free of earth forever. Then, having received, thou shalt give. He that causeth another to sin causeth that other's and his own feet to slip and to turn from My way. He must at-one his heart to Me first, then go again into the field of woe, yet not in a body of flesh but of spirit. And he must find his victims and struggle with them till he turn them back from whence he led them. Thus taketh he on his own back their burden he made them to place there. Then shall he carry it for them until they, following his spirit-counsels to their souls, are come unto Me. And I will take that burden, that shadow, and it shall cease, for I am the Sun of Truth. Can a shade exist in sunlight? Can any pile shadows on the sun? Neither can any pile sins upon Me, and burden Me. That little one I will take unto Me; thou hast offended it, and it shall be as a millstone on thy neck, casting thee into the sea of earthly woe; yet ye shall escape, for thou hast thy name in the Book of Life. But now, rest! And My daughter, rest!"

I found myself in my body, unable to recall anything I had passed through. But I was aweary and I slept. Nature came to the rescue of my tired soul, and for days I was in fever, which passed into a coma, and from that I awoke, weak but well. Still, I was in a waking dream. And I dreamed that I was in the Incalithlon at Caiphul.

"O, the agony! O, sin's bitter cost!"

But at last I went back to Caiphul, after weary weeks in which I was lost to my people, aye, months, three of them. Back to my home. As I passed through the palace I met officers and ladies of the court, and attendants, to all of whom I had been a friend and who so regarded me. They now gazed blankly at me, but spoke no word of greeting. Was my life known at last to a horrified world? No. This was not the reason of the strange demeanor of the people. I was unexpected, was supposed to be dead. During the hundred days of my absence, Menax, with Anzimee, had concluded that I was dead, had perhaps taken my own life. It were happier for me had they thought aright as to the first part of the matter.

Now I was come home, resolved to be open and frank in my relations with those whom I loved best on earth. I would confess my evil ways to them, and implore forgiveness. Once again--too late! Menax, long a sufferer from an affection of the heart, thinking me dead because I had not come to him nor to Anzimee, had not survived the shock which this belief caused him. I was told that for some weeks he was gone to Navazzamin. I dreaded to ask after Anzimee lest here, too, some terrible news awaited me.

In my misery I wandered about the city, and ere long found myself by the great temple. A little door stood open and no one was near, so I entered by it, careless that admittance was denied all but Incali. I hoped to find in this sacred shade some relief. No one seemed to be within, and I wandered about until I stood in the triangle of the Place of Life. There, forgetful for the moment, I gazed reverently on the Unfed Light. Then I passed around to the other side of the quartz cube and--O God! there stood Lolix, still and cold! My very brain reeled. I went to her, and found her the same as when I looked last on her dear form, stone, only stone! How many years was it since then? A whole life may crowd into a day's length and centuries pass in a few weeks. O Lolix, Lolix, my accuser! In blank numbness of mind I laid my hand on her cold form, and shuddered at the chill, yet bent and looked into the eyes which saw me not, and kissed the dumb lips which made no response.

"Yet she would not speak, though he kissed in the old place the quiet cheek."

In her hand was a roll of red parchment; I ventured to remove it and look at its contents, if indeed it had any writing upon it. It had, and I read:

"Because this statue is record of a despicable crime, I, Gwauxln, Rai of Poseid, do forbid its removal until I grant permission. Let it stand a silent witness before the criminal."

With a shudder I replaced the roll in the stony grasp, and almost fainted at the hollow rattle which it made as I did so. Was I that criminal? Not The one. But I felt as if I was. I would go to Agacoe and ask permission of the Rai to remove her of whom he knew I was fondest, but had lacked the courage or decision to say so to the world. Aye, circumstances made her more precious to Zailm than Anzimee was. I turned to leave that I might go to Agacoe. But I was startled when, on turning, I found myself facing Rai Gwauxln, gazing sorrowfully upon me. Startled only, for nothing surprised me any more nor ever gave me real terror. Ere I had spoken he said: "Yes, thou hast my consent to remove her."

I felt no wonder at his anticipation of my request, although I noted the fact; indeed, it was deep gratitude which I experienced instead. I was muscular, and at once acted upon the permit. I took one long, last look into the deep blue eyes, and at the face, which seemed almost to smile as I bestowed a sobbing kiss upon the calm lips. Then I lifted her from the granite floor. The one foot that was exposed to view beneath the hem of her stony robe broke off at the ankle, just above the straps of her dainty sandal, as I lifted the slight but now heavy body. Then I raised her higher, and yet higher, to the top of the cube of the Maxin, and let her drop forward against the Quenchless Light.

"Kiss her and leave her; thy love is clay."

As she touched the Maxin-Light site instantaneously disappeared, with no more disturbance of the tall taper than comes from the flight of darkness when the morning sun lights up the valleys. Calmly the Quenchless Light stood, unchanged as ever. As I turned away, I saw the little foot, whereon sparkled the sapphires and diamonds of the sandal strap-buckle, my gift! I succeeded in detaching the little remnant unbroken, but instead of putting it also in the Maxin-Light, I wrapped it in my mantle, glad that I had a token, even if it was only a stone foot.

I could not bring my courage to the point of asking my sovereign about Anzimee. No, I feared his possible and not unreasonable scorn. I would seek her and find if she also were dead, like Menax. If so, I resolved to take the first opportunity--the morrow might favor me, as it was the beginning of an Incalon or Sun-day of general worship--and return to the temple, where I would bathe away my physical self in the unwavering flame of the Unfed Light.

Anzimee was not dead, however, but had not yet learned of my return. I found her, the sign of her great sorrow in her fine gray eyes, which, as we met, rested on me in a bewildered stare. Then, with one long sob, she fell into my outstretched arms in an unconscious condition. Poor little girl! I held her, I clasped her close to my heart, and while I kissed her pale lips, her black-ringed eyes, her sunken cheeks, my tears fell on her face like rain, the first tears my fevered physical eyes had shed through all my agony of soul. At last she awoke from her faintness only to experience a long sickness, in which her pure spirit came near bursting its earthly casket and, after several weary weeks, finally left her to consciousness. When she was again moving about in her old quiet way, and although frail was able to endure the recital, I sat down in the Xanatithlon in the seat where Menax and I had sat so long before. Then I drew the slight form down upon my knees and, with my arm about her, told her all the sad story of Lolix and the miserable flight from Caiphul which I had made to escape the memory of it-alas! how unsuccessfully. No one can run away from self. The after the unrestrained confession, I asked her to forgive me. For some time she said nothing, but her arm stole around me, so that we clasped each other. At last she spoke:

"Zailm, I do forgive thee--from the depths of my soul I do! Thou art but mortal. If thou hast sinned, do so no more. I do not wonder that thou shouldst have loved that sweet woman."

At this I drew forth the memento of Lolix, which I had carried with me, despite its weight, and without a word handed it to her.

"This is her foot? O Lolix! I loved thee, also! Zailm, give me this. I would keep it in memory of my friend."

Then I spoke: "Anzimee, my wife, for thou art to be mine, the world knoweth it, thou hast forgiven me. So hath thine uncle, our Rai. But it is yet some months ere we may wed till death. Hence I will go forth into Umaur, in the region where men are not, even in the south part, for in Aixa are certainly mines, and in the sandy deserts there will I find gold. Not that I want gold, for I, have millions, aye, three million teki, and much other wealth; but all that the earth will yield it is good for Poseid to have. I go, because I fear I cannot he in Caiphul and refrain from being always with thee. In Umaur I can see thee, and bear thee, and love thee, dear, for I shall not this time remove the naim, so that it will be much as if I were here. Therefore, kiss me, sweet one, a fond farewell, and I will be gone when the evening falls. Incal be with thee, and His peace overshadow thee!"

It was two thousand miles from Caiphul to that part of the Umaur coast nearest which I desired to go inland. But, thinking of Anzimee, the distance was passed unheeded until we lay above the region where now the geographies mark the great niter-bearing desert of Atacama. It was desert then as now. We found on prospecting its deepest sands, near to the base of the Andes, that these were rich enough in gold to justify myself and men in setting up the electric generator of water. This was an instrument containing several hundred square yards of metal plate surface arranged in banks like the gills of a fish, the whole encased in a tight metal box. An air current entering at one end of the case had to traverse every inch on both sides of the plate ere it touched the farther end. As each plate was made and maintained very cool by Navaz forces, the result was rapid deposition of moisture from the atmosphere. In the example cited the generator was of the largest portable size, and the flow of water condensed by it was about a quart every minute, quite enough with which to do a considerable amount of mining in the economical way in which our mining machinery used water.

I had brought a horse from Poseid, and after mining arrangements were attended to, and the men placed at work, I had the animal made ready, and taking a case of mineral locators--light instruments operated by something similar to what would nowadays be called a pile la clanche--hence not Night-Side electricity--instruments used for determining the location of mineral deposits on the principle of the electrometer--and with food enough for several days, I set out to prospect for valuable minerals. I also took a small, easily portable naim, so as to maintain communication with the rest of the world. I soon left this latter instrument in a cache, intending to get it when I came back, for I had not gone above five miles ere discovering that the instrument had been rendered useless by the loss of its vibrator. Where I had lost this essential I did not know, but I concluded not to go back after it. The loss, though no small annoyance, was a relief to my horse, for it reduced his burden by a number of pounds, no small matter, considering that I had a rifle, which I will not now describe, different though its principle from any modern weapon, in that its propulsive force was electricity, my mining tools, my packages of dates and nuts for food, my polar compass, pocket photographic apparatus, and a small generator, with, lastly, my bedding and my own weight.

That night I was far away, and the next evening found me over a hundred miles from the camp. As the sun sank low I found myself riding along the bottom of a deep arroyo. 1 At a little distance I saw the mouth of what appeared to be a small cavern. This might do nicely to camp in over night and provide shelter. My horse was well trained and would stay for hours within whistling distance of the place where I left him. So I dismounted and bidding him remain near, went into the cavern. It seemed like a long tunnel, and without going further, I returned to my steed and took off his saddle. Then I laid under it the food I had brought for myself; for the animal there was abundance of grass growing about. The tools I also put under the saddle and, taking my electric rifle, was about to return to the investigation of the cave, when my horse pleaded for water, and as the ravine was a dry creek I proceeded to give him drink and take some myself. The. creek bed was of smooth, cement-like rock, with numerous depressions shaped much like buckets. Beside one of these I set the generator, and soon the hole was full of water, cool and refreshing. I watered my grateful animal at this, and drank from the spout of the instrument myself. How good the fluid seemed! As I placed the generator, still running, back beside the hole, I little thought how I would need it soon, and be unable to get it.

I found the bottom of the cavern to be of the same rocky character as the bed of the arroyo. I knew it was not mineral bearing, but my curiosity was aroused and I concluded to go to the end of the tunnel. In my pocket I had a small lighting battery and incandescent bulb, and when it grew dark in the cave by reason of my distance from the entrance, I used this to illumine my pathway. For fully half a mile I found the cave to open on before me. At that point I stopped, overcome by surprise. In all that region I had not seen a sign of human presence, recent or ancient, until now. But before me, only partially exposed, stood a house, presenting its comer and part of two heavy walls of basalt. I dropped my lumen in my surprise, and it broke on the rocky floor, extinguishing the light. But it was not altogether dark about me, for daylight filtered in from some source.

Long I stood there in that gloomy cavern, gazing upon the ruined house. Whence had come its builders, and in what forgotten age? Where had they gone? Was this but a solitary building, or were there others hidden in the sands of the plain near by, but not uncovered? Conjecture had here full play, for in all the annals of Poseid, covering decades of centuries with concisely written records, no mention was made of any people, civilized, or even savage, having had inhabitants in this "No Man's Land." The only tenable conclusion was that I now gazed upon the relic of some people so ancient as to antedate even Poseid's forty centuries. At length I crossed the cave's short width in order more closely to examine this remnant of the dim past, a past forgotten even when Poseid was young. In the side of the building nearest to me was a doorway through the smooth, finely chiseled basalt blocks forming the wall. Partly ajar swung a door, apparently formed of a single slab of basalt about six inches thick by the proper proportions otherwise. Impelled by curiosity, I stepped into the room, which was easily done without disturbing the door from the position it had so long occupied. My reason greatly disliked the admission that even a stone structure should so long have withstood the effects of time; but it was only thus explainable, so I dismissed conjecture for the time.

I found the three dimensions of the interior apparently equal, and about sixteen feet every way. There was but the single door to give entrance. Excepting two parallel openings in the roof, formed by placing a stone of less width by a span on either side of the opening it would otherwise have filled, there was no break in the solid masonry. The floor, which was thinly covered, by I found to be made of granite, the jointure of which was as perfect as that of the walls--not a sheet of paper could have been slipped between any two blocks. After exploring thus far, I leaned against the wall, near enough to the door to touch it without change of place, and letting my gaze rest on the barred grating in the ceiling, gave myself to reflection. How cold and gloomy it seemed in that lonely room, relic of a bygone age, forgotten by even so old a race as ours. The solid construction, the simple severity of its plan, all forcibly brought to mind the descriptions given of prisons in Poseid in ante-Maxin days. Was it the solitary example of building skill of its constructors in which I now stood, or was it one of a collection forming a buried city? How this particular building came to be clear of sand in its interior was easy to see. The rain waters had percolated through the shallow soil above, and had run through the crack which I have mentioned as giving light to the cavern. A part of the flow had gone outside, thus exposing two sides of the corner of the house; the rest of the water, running on the flat roof, had entered through the grating. Seeping thence through the sand in the room it had carried it out of the door standing open at the side.

Satisfied with my reflective study, I began to think of returning to the open air, and to my horse. As I turned to pass out, curiosity impelled me to swing the ponderous door on its hinges, if I had strength. Expecting that much effort would he required, I gave force to the action. Alas, for my superficial examination of the slab. I had observed no sign of a lock of any sort, and did not imagine any existed. Hardly any effort was needed to swing the deceitful door, and it went to with such quickness that I lost my balance and fell against the wall, striking my head so severely as to render me unconscious. When I recovered I found the door shut and securely locked. In my cursory notice of it I had not seen that instead of a simple slab it was made of the plates of stone, separated at the edges by a segment of a third plate, forming thus a hollow space between the outer surfaces. In that space there was concealed an arrangement of bolts and bare of stone, working on the gravity-drop principle and releasing the locking-bolts when the door shut tight to place. The ends of these, four in number, then shot into recesses in the wall, and the door was securely locked.

Being of a calm disposition, given to reliance on my scientific knowledge, the discovery that I was imprisoned did not discompose me in any great degree. Instead, I sought for some means of withdrawing the bolts. But none existed. I now thought in dismay that I had, not a single tool with me with which to dig out of this gloomy prison. I then sat down to reflect on the situation. The longer I pondered, the more terrifying the aspect of things became. First, not a soul knew of my whereabouts. As I had no naim, my place could not be determined except by tracking me; this would prove impossible, because I had followed the beds of watercourses, long stretches of which were bare rock. I would not be missed for three days yet, as I had said that I expected to be gone for a period twice as long, and three days more than I had already been absent, ere I proposed to return. No; there was no hope of escape, and now I realized how true were the words of Rai Ernon of Suern when he told me that a Poseida depended for his very life on his being surrounded by the creations of his knowledge in the realm of natural physics.

The food which I had brought with me was with my horse and outfit, as far beyond my reach as the stars. It might be that they would finally search for me and find my horse. But no, he would not be apt to remain three or four days alone in that awful wilderness; he would wander, perhaps go back to the vailx. But he would leave no trail to give a clue to my prison, for he would go as he came, over an unyielding, rocky stream bed. Hunger pangs again suggested that I had no food; not even had I any water. Hope still remained, for was not Incal my protecting Father? How futile this, my hope! God, Incal, Brahm, call the Eternal Spirit what thou wilt--verily doth heed the needs of His children, but those needs which to the child seem to be uppermost, are not always so adjudged by the Eternal One. He operates through His children, whether human or angelic ones, making each one interdependent with all others, and thus men or angels may have for helpers each other, or perhaps only some animal brother. God noteth a drowning mariner, but unless some brother be there to rescue, he may physically perish. He tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb, but generally only through the fact that self interest, or it may be some higher emotion, as pity, is aroused in the mind of beholding man. Nay, it is only through the mainsprings of character, by our Heavenly Father implanted in the souls of His children, that He ever helps or saves. And this is mostly true: that the physical body must pray with muscular action if it would get an answer to its needs in physical form; the mind must pray through mental processes, and its answer, will be in mental results, while the Spirit shall pray through its spiritual nature, and receive those values which are not perceptible to the natural mind. All this; but although the mind prayeth forever, and the body doeth no work, the results, save a brother acteth, shall not be for the body. And though the Spirit pray, yet if the mind pray not also, knowledge will not come to the brain. How shall the mind pray? By being in harmony with the Spirit. And how shall it have this harmony? By control through the will of the animal body, that it infringe not the laws of that wholeness which is health.

When I sat in the cave house and prayed to Incal with my whole mind, yet, as I could not pray with my muscles, no release would come for the body, neither food nor drink. I might on the mental plane, have influenced Rai Gwauxln to understand my predicament; this, to him, would have been clairvoyance; but this I could not while the enemy who had aroused my curiosity to work my ruin intercepted all such clairvoyant messages; more especially I could not, being ignorant of the proper method. It would have been mere chance that Gwauxln would have been influenced by my mental tension of distress undirected by my knowledge. Meanwhile, unaware of how to use such powers, I dismissed thoughts of any possibility of escape in that direction. But I would pray to Incal. So I knelt on the cold, cruel floor, and prepared to invoke His aid. As I uttered His name I heard a musical laugh, albeit mocking, a sound which thrilled me with that dread terror which every man and woman has sometime felt, either in childhood days of in later life, that chill which shivers the senses when listening to some weird tale of horror, told by the fire's open grate, while the Storm King rocks the very foundations of the ground.

Turning, and arising from my knees, I beheld the Incaliz of the Great Temple in Caiphul.

"Wherefore didst thou start at beholding me, as if thou hadst looked on a demon?"

To this question I could vouchsafe but one reply, that my sudden fright must have been from beholding him in that manner, since I was not accustomed to seeing men go about like ghosts, disembodied, yet not seeming to be so.

I felt a great joy at his coming, for I then believed that Incal had answered my yet unspoken petition for mercy by sending Mainin to my aid. And yet, why should I still be possessed by that unaccountable fear, the fear which overcame me upon first seeing him? I knew in the moment after its utterance that it did not arise from the cause attributed, his method of advent to my prison, because I knew that as a Son of the Solitude he possessed the power to lay aside the gross body of earth as one would an overcoat and project himself to any desired place. I knew as I looked upon him that his corporeal self was in a trance sleep, thousands of miles away in Poseid. I had no such power to project myself, else it had been easy for me to let Rai Gwauxln know of my danger; at least, unknowing of Mainin's interference, I thought so. But as Incal had sent the Incaliz to me all was surely well.

The priest doubtless read my thoughts, for he said that he had become aware of my unpleasant predicament through Incal, and had come to assist me to escape. He must, however, leave me until he could get aid to me by dispatching a vailx from Caiphul. It would not take long, and meanwhile I must be of good cheer. And then he disappeared as he had come, and I was again alone, awaiting his promised return with a feverish anxiety not to be expressed in words. Hours passed, and he came not, nor any other. Hours grew into days, three days, and he came not, neither came any succor. The pangs of hunger, terrible as they had become, were as nothing compared to my thirst. Once more the daylight ceased to filter through the grating overhead and the crevice leading to the upper ground. I had worn the ends of my fingers to rawness trying to release the bolts of the door; had sounded every inch to see if it did not contain a secret spring that would let loose some part of the prison wall. But fate had no such kindness in store for me. Seven times the light had gone out above me, marking seven nights since Mainin's visit.

Several times my torture of hunger and thirst had rendered me wildly delirious, with lucid intervals. In one of these lucid moments of comparative calm, as I lay moaning on the sandy floor, feebly calling on Incal for help, I heard the same low laugh that had heralded Mainin's first appearance. The sound fired me with temporary strength, and I sat up. I would have cursed the Incaliz for his long absence, which had meant so much suffering for me, had I not feared that in his anger he would leave me there to die. I no more felt for him the reverence I had ever felt, for I was certain now that he was not what men thought him. And I would have therefore cursed him, because of my inward sense that great as was his esoteric knowledge, and the fact of his being recognized as a Son, that none the less he was black hearted and an abomination in the sight of Incal, and that in him the Sons of the Solitude were deceived as the very elect. That I did not denounce him to his face was due to the fast-vanishing hope that he might still be induced to help me escape.

This time he came with changed manner. Now when he spoke, his first words were in mockery of my appeals to the great Father of Life.

"Hal Much good may it do thee to cry unto Incal or any helper. God! There is no God. 1 Bah! how blind men are to pray to such empty ideals as their fancies name 'God!' Men of Poseid say Incal is God; men of Suernis say Yeovah, and they of Necropan say Osiris. What madness and idiocy!"

Here I sat more erectly, and regarded him a moment before asking if he were not afraid so to blaspheme Incal and to deny his Maker.

"Thinkest thou, Zailm, son of Menax, that I should do as I have if I thought any God existed? Is it news,--aye, it is news to thee that I should desire to achieve the ruin of her called Anzimee--that I came from a former life on earth, aye! many of them, filled with hatred of her who always heretofore hath caused me to be exposed to the laws of man? She can not now, for in the Book of Fate I do not find it so written, so that either it is not there, or else I have lost my power to read fate, a thing I think not likely. But I will, through thee, wring her heart to the depths, so that she shall cry out in anguish of soul! What hath Anzimee done to me? Not as Anzimee, but as a powerful woman and seeress, ere she was born in the earth as Anzimee. I follow her in vengeance. To wring her soul in agony I compassed the death of Menax, against whom personally I had no cause; I have almost done the same for thee, yet have I naught against thee. I it was that did work upon thy curiosity that thou here mightest find thy death. I had hoped to hinder thy confession of thy life-sin with Lolix unto Anzimee. Then, after thou shouldst have met thy death, and then been found by me, I would have gotten so much the greater misery for her out of the public exposure of thine iniquity, for I had all the proofs well in hand. But that scheme is foiled; I care not overmuch; thy death will occasion her much torture. For that purpose also was Lolix: led to do as she did, and thou also with her, so long ago, for I lay My plans long ahead, being gifted with vast power of forpiercing the future. For that same end shall the Rai be brought low, and at the last she who is the object of my chiefest wrath shall not know good from evil, so that her name shall be a scorn in the mouths of the people. Revenge is sweet, Zailm, sweet!"

My horror and my weakness together made it impossible for me to do aught but sit and stare in. silent helplessness, even had any corporeal body been before me upon which to act.

"Thou art aghast at my iniquity? I am too old to fear failure, and am beyond the reach of the laws of men, at last. No man, nor all the men on earth, could deprive me of life or liberty. I have long known a secret which prolongs life many times the common length; 'tis a secret won from the deeper Night-Side of Nature. One day shall come when a Poseid shall know these secrets. 'Twill be a sad day for it, I rejoice to think! I was old, old, when Gwauxln of Poseid thought me a boy with himself; so also thought the Sons of Solitude, for I was cunning in concealment. So think they yet. I--yes, I will tell thee, for thou art even now as one who is dead. I have worked for three centuries in this present body. Said I not that I am old? I have counteracted the good done by Ernon of Suern, so that he died of a despairing heart. I do thus that I may, if possible, wither all the hopes of humankind, turn them down from the infinite path, down to demonhood, death and destruction. Ernon worked to the exaltation of mankind; I to its depression; so we came in conflict, and I won. And why knew he not my hand? Because I have ever worked in the dark, kept my own counsel, and obtained mastery over the evil hosts which are not human, never were, and never will be. And against Workers in the dark can no Son of Light prevail, for both work on the animal nature of man, which, having no light of guidance, taketh the first offered support, thus favoring Workers in the Dark. But enough. So much would I not tell thee were it not that thou wouldst not have much power thereby over me--ME, understand--wert thou alive instead of practically dead. Thinkest thou now I can have belief in a God? Bah! If God exists, I fear not; yet let Him punish!" 1

And now a fearful, glorious and wonderful sight appeared. The night had come while Mainin thus confessed to me and gloried in his apical crimes, and called upon Incal to punish if He existed. In the total darkness of the prison, which, being physical gloom, could not veil the form of Mainin, there appeared that which struck terror to both our hearts, albeit terror of different sorts. A human form, which yet was not of earth, surrounded by a blinding white light, stood before us. Was this Incal? Had He of a verity accepted the rash challenge of the criminal priest? Upon His countenance rested a calm but awful expression, though not of anger or any human emotion. For an instant the wondrous eyes gazed upon me, then turned to Mainin. He then spoke, calmly, musically, and while I listened all my pain left me, though the words were of fearful import:

"To feel
The perfect calm o'er the agony steal."

The voice was like my conception of the tones of Incal, as He said:

"I shall not, O Mainin, enumerate thy crimes--thou knowest them every one. Thou hast been fellow with the Sons, and they taught thee all they knew, and of Me thou learnedst more than they could teach, aye, centuries agone. I knew thy way; I knew its evil, yet interfered not, for thou art thine own master, even as all men are self-masters; few, alas, are faithful! But thine altitude of wisdom, prostituted to selfishness, to sin, to crime, more utterly than any other man hath dared, is thy destruction. Thy name meaneth 'Light,' and great hath thy brilliancy been; but thou hast been as a light adrift on the seas, a lure to death of all them that follow thee, and these have been myriad. Thou hast blasphemed God, and jeered in thy soul, saying, 'Punish!' but thy day was not come. Wherefore thou wert let go unrebuked. It made thee bold, and thou wouldst go on, even now. But lo! Anzimee thou shalt not harm, for she is handmaiden of Christ, even mine own daughter in service. Thou hast well merited the penalty, and because thou hast knowingly dared it, lo! now shall it be dealt out to thee. I would it were avertible. But thine is one out of a myriad of cases, more heinous because thou art wise, not ignorant. But as thou art an ego, a ray from my Father, and now give out no more light, but darkness only, I will cut thee off for a season, for thou shalt neither destroy more of my sheep, nor be let to leave unexpiated the evil thou hast done. It were better for thee couldst thou cease to exist. But this may not be of an ego. I can but suspend thee as a human entity and cast thee into the outer darkness to serve as one of the powers of nature. Get thee behind me!"

The High Priest had stood the picture of an awful terror, numbed beyond thought of escape, which indeed was not possible, for the Judge was Man, and more than Man finite--was MAN INFINITE, even CHRIST.

Now, however, as the Son of Light ceased to speak, Mainin uttered a howl of mingled terror and defiance. At this dread sound the Christ stretched forth His hand, and instantly Mainin was surrounded with a glowing flame which, on disappearing, revealed also the disappearance of the Demon Priest.

Thus had Mainin sinned, perverting his noble wisdom to evil and to sowing the seeds of sin, on and in the hearts of unsuspecting weaklings of humanity. He had sown and Suern was to reap, and through Suern, the world. But for this moving he himself was blasted from the Book of Life by a curse from the Son of Man.

Even those unfamiliar with any but the material aspect of nature, can find no difficulty in comprehending the destruction of the life of a man whose corporeal body was in far away Caiphul, when they consider that the earthly frame is no mom an essential of the real man than the cocoon is a part of the butterfly, although in either case these things are essential to physical life.

Terrified by the awful sight of the blasting, I sank on my face on the floor. From this position I was bidden to arise by the Christ, who said:

"Such is the fate of the wholly selfish man. Fear not for thine own safety, for I blast not thee; neither worship me, but my Father who sendeth me. I am reached unto the perfection of the Seventh Principle and am Man, also the Son of Man, yet more than any man, for I am in the Father and the Father is in me. But all men who will may follow me and be by me in the Kingdom, for are we not all children of One, our Father? I am He, Christ; that which I am, the Spirit of every man is. The penalty visited upon Mainin was not annihilation, which can not be; neither was it the death which is transition, but the death which liveth no more as human life, but is out for a season into the outer darkness of devildom. Behold, I speak, yet having ears, thou hearest not, neither comprehend. But thy hearing shall come to thee, and thou shalt know, and shalt lead my people. And lo! thou shalt lead them in a day to thee yet afar off. But now thou shalt go no more to Atl to live there, neither be seen of Anzimee any more, until she hath gone from Earth twice and come again, and shall be called Phyris. Lo! I have said that these things should come to pass, and did prophesy unto thee in that city called Caiphul, and thou heardst me, yet heeded not. But now thou wilt heed me, for I speak great words of GOD,--and the world is His. Yet now no man knoweth me; but in a far day I will come again, yea! I will enter in and dwell as a perfect human soul, and make that Man first fruit of them that sleep the sleep which is change, so that by me he shall be exalted above Death. Then shall men get them up, and mock me, being unbelievers, and shall crucify me, yet shall I, that am become Jesus the Christ, not be harmed, but mine earthly house only. And they shall be forgiven, for they will not know what they do. 1 Peace I give unto thee. Sleep!"

_______________

Footnotes:

208:1 NOTE.--A deep, narrow ravine.

215:1 Psalms lxiii, 1

217:1 NOTE.--"The fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'"

220:1 St. Matthew, xii, 23.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: A Dweller on Two Planets, by Phylos the Thibetan

Postby admin » Tue Apr 09, 2019 11:49 pm

CHAPTER XXIV. DEVACHAN

Obedient to this command I slept. When I awakened I was yet in the prison, but all the suffering, all the tortures of hunger and thirst that I had endured were gone. Nothing seemed strange to me, not even when I arose and found that behind me, as a shell, remained the poor clay casket which had suffered so keenly under the pangs of starvation. All was as natural in seeming as are things in vivid dreams. I thought of Anzimee, and wondered if she, too, felt as happy as I did at that moment. I prayed that she might. Then I thought of the words of Him who called Himself the Son of Man, and wondered what manner of being He was. His talk had, for the most part, been unmeaning to me; yet from it I understood that I was dead; that Anzimee would see me no more until after what dimly seemed an eternity, and not then as Anzimee, nor would I then be Zailm; yet I felt no regret over this long prospective separation. And in that time this Son of Man would have come again to the world, and left work for His brethren, the children of our FATHER, who in doing this work would be following after Him, and would become as Himself, in so far as to be disenthralled from time and from earth, and have all things, life and death. Yet, dimly understanding all this, I comprehended not its perfect fullness, for my natural mind was not able to grasp its spiritual meaning.

This, then, was Navazzamin, and I was what men call dead. It was much different from my concepts, as taught me by the priests of Incal, because it apparently differed not at all from earth-life, so far as I had as yet experienced. Perhaps it would if I were now to go and pass through the Maxin-Light. To do this would not be suicide, because I was already dead. No, it would purge away the earthiness which possibly prevented my finding the real Navazzamin which had been taught me. Would Anzimee and all others of my loved ones come hither some day, and, should we meet and know each other here? Oh! it must be so, it must be so!

Filled with these reflections I stepped to the door, forgetting that its lock had previously prevented my exit. Only when it opened at my touch did I remember that it had defied every previous effort. Lightly I stepped away down the tunnel until I came to the daylight and to my saddle and tools, and yes, my horse, faithful animal! He was eating of the grasses, and evidently made the overflowing waters at the generator his headquarters. Leave him? Not if I could avoid it! I was free at last! I looked around at the dry washes lying under the open sky, with their eroded monuments of clay, capped with wild pampas plumes. How gracefully these nodded in the light breeze, seeming to say, "Free now, free!"

Then I went to my horse, to take him, forgetful that being dead I could not need such transportation. But he seemed not to see me, or to know my presence. This was a difficulty. I was used to conquering difficulties, but this was one where I was at a low what to do. I sat down and looked at the hand. some animal. The longer I looked, the more perplexed I became. At last I got up in a sort of exasperation and talked very earnestly to the animal. No effect! Of course not! The more I talked, the more contented the horse became, as if he felt that I was near, and was satisfied. Finally I started away intending to leave him, since I could in no way influence him. This had great effect! The farther I got the more uneasy he became, as I was able to see, until at last he lifted up his head and neighed loudly. Once, twice, thrice, and then he started after me in a wild gallop! When he reached me he grew easy; but as I went rapidly onwards he followed. He was awake to a sense of my presence, though he could not see, feel or hear me. My mind was wholly occupied in getting this faithful servant to the camp. So, feeling no fatigue, nor hunger nor thirst, nor any sensation of the physical life, I walked clear into camp, all those miles, with that horse following contentedly after! When we reached the camp the vailx was there, but only two of the men, the others having gone in search of me, since I was now overdue in my arrival, thank to Mainin. These men, like the horse could not see me, but unlike him, neither could they sense my nearness. My utmost efforts were entirely unsuccessful, and although I stayed for two days, until the search was over and the men had returned to the vailx, to obtain further orders from Caiphul, I was unsuccessful still. One of the hunters was still out, and when he came back I spoke to him. He could not see me, but my presence affected him strangely. So I spoke again and again, till at last he sat down trembling by my desk in the salon of the vailx. A paper and a pen and ink were on this, and I said to the man: "Use that pen." To my partial surprise, he use it, but seemed in a deep sleep the while and mechanically wrote: "Use that pen." An idea occurred to me, and uttered words which had no connection of meaning, every one of which he wrote just as I spoke it. This was encouraging, so I next said: "It is I, even Zailm, who say these things; I am dead. Go home to Caiphul." Of my body and its where about I said nothing, feeling that it was properly entombed. But what I spoke in dictation was all written, not that the medium heard, but for the time I was the controlling intelligence of his body. The others took the message and hid it, and when the writer had come out of trance they asked him what he had written. But he denied having written anything. This seemed to satisfy them, the man was so obviously honest in his denial. So they went and gathered the equipage and animals into the vailx, and prepared to leave for Caiphul. Their action satisfied me, so. that I thought no more of them, but began to wish I was at home. I reflected that I had left the disability of the flesh in the cave-house, hence I ought to be able to go here or there, as had Mainin. I would try it. So I said to myself: "I would be at home, at Agacoe, where is the Rai, and he will be able to see me, and know all things of this matter."

With this utterance all things changed, and I found myself in the palace of Agacoe. But neither Gwauxln nor Anzimee, who was there also, were seemingly able to see me, more than the man in the vailx had been. What was this thing called death, this barrier? Was death indeed the threshold between two conditions, communication to and fro being impossible, as futile to attempt from my side as from the other? I had thought Gwauxln able to penetrate this barrier. But alas! I found myself not more able to obtain his recognition then that of the others. I knew he could see those who put off their fleshly shells in order to travel as Mainin had done, and resume them at will; why then not see me? Death perhaps meant more even than putting aside the body. Long I stood there, wondering at this thing called death. As I stood by Gwauxln's side, having abandoned the attempt to impress him with a knowledge of my presence, a human shape came into the apartment. Shape? It seemed as real as any of the courtiers sitting by the arch of the doorway. None of these latter appeared aware of the new arrival; except the Rai, no one beside myself saw him, but continued their talk regarding the sudden death of the Incaliz Mainin, and disposal of his body in the Maxin-Light on the previous afternoon. I had been dumfounded at the strange resemblance of the new arrival to myself, but I was immeasurably amazed to hear the Rai exclaim:

"What! Zailm dead! Dead?"

An attendant, hearing this exclamation, but seeing only the sovereign, hastily went to him enquiring his pleasure. As he approached he passed directly through the form which Gwauxln had addressed by my name! Neither the human shape nor the attendant seemed aware of the remarkable occurrence, but the Form, smiling, in reply said:

"Aye, Zo Rai; I am Zailm, but not dead, except in that I am free of earthly restraint."

Confused, almost stupefied by these happenings, I sank on a divan near me. Gwauxln could see what purported to be me was indeed a very image of me in looks, speech, memory of events, in fact really was the psychic counterpart of my life and self, but he could not see me. Mystery, aye mystery! How many had death to reveal to me? I had left in the Umaur prison a material image of myself; was it possible that there also existed an intermediate counterpart of both my material body and myself, which yet retained certain gross forms of life lost by me, making it visible while I was invisible? But as Gwauxln was a Son of the Solitude, why was he unable to perceive both my astral and myself? He was not unable, but would not allow me to know his ability. The reason, plain to me now, but not then, briefly is:--That a person in dying is separated into psychic elements which, not to be too detailed in the statement, are threefold, earthly, psychic and spiritual. Of these the highest is the I Am, the ego. The others are those above mentioned as spoken to by Gwauxln, and as left in the prison. Now, the ego seeks an exalted level; the "shell' stays in the earthly conditions until the body, finally dissolved, is "dust to dust." The exalted or egoic state is one of isolation. As spoken in Biblical records, 1 a medium can go to it, but the ego, after a little while, cannot return to earth, nor know anything earthly save those extremely tense mental-spiritual states of one or many individuals who reach out for the things of God. And these things are not earthly. This is real mediumship. The genuine medium rises to the necessary height, but the ego can not descend to earth, can not deny the law of progress, except during a limited period after the transition called death, and then it is not retrogression. A medium is like an aneroid barometer, able to indicate the degree of ascension above the ocean of water, or of spirit. But he must be present on the level; the level cannot descend to him. Hence it is that one in dying is a traveler to that bourne whence none return. There is no return of the departed, except through physical rebirth and reincarnation. I leave thee to find out that this is not transmigration of souls, for the latter postulates rebirth in lower animal form as a punishment for sin; such a thing can not be. Retrogression is impossible, and the whole notion is but a corrupt falsity of conception, founded upon the misunderstood truth of reincarnation, whose successive rebirths are invariably progressive.

To return to the Rai and his determination not to see me. Gwauxln knew that I was not yet come into the proper state, and feared to interrupt my progress. Hence he would not allow my "shell" to influence him, so far as I could determine. Having, however, by the contact of his supersensitive nature perceived the fact of my demise, he sought further, and though his actions denied to me that he saw me, yet he put into operation forces to the end that I should presently be ready for him to come to me. But not until my mundane life was faded would he do so; not until I was gone forth into the "undiscovered country" of Navazzamin. Then he came, and the meeting was one of simple joy, of unaffected grace, between two souls equal before God, not in status of acquired wisdom, for in that Gwauxln was vastly above me, but in that equal brotherhood of the Spirit which I wish now reigned an earth. It shall yet do so, for the Cross Bearer said, "Ye are all Children of one Father!" Behold, it is so!

When Gwauxln was come unto me, the sphere of earth was in nowise brought with him. To have carried earthly conditions with him would have been to remand me to earth, and have rendered me palpable injustice. No ego ever is permitted, by the very laws of its being, to go back to earth except a wrong thing is thereby suffered. The selfhood of an initiate may project itself into devachan, but the dweller in devachan (heaven) can not go again to earth till it be born again therein. Indeed! why does the soul leave earth after the grave? It is because in devachan it assimilates the fruits of active earth-life. Right here is the explanation of the written Word of God: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, no device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest." 1 True it is that in the grave is nothing done. In the following pages much will seem to indicate my "doings" between the grave and the cradle. But observe that the whole of earth was become a perfect blank to me. The soul can not return save it re-embody in rebirth. To call it back is to came revulsion of this process, and reassociation with the astral-shell which the ego left behind at the decease of the body. Such reassociation revives the astral whereupon action and reaction take place between it and the ego, much to the detriment of the latter. All I "experienced" was only the fruits of what I had done; I could do no new thing, think no new thought, experience nothing not in itself the expression of something done ere I came through the grave. And in this rearrangement and crystallizing of my past earth life, time cut no figure. The realness of it was; but the reality of vivid dreaming; time had no part in that which was already done.

It lay in the power of the Rai to recognize me, but he would not, that I might not suffer ham. It similarly lies in the power of all forceful mediumistic natures (generally) belonging lug to the sect called "Spiritualists" to do likewise. These media can recall the departed, but at what dread cost to the departed ego, and reacting upon the medium to the latter! I say no process of Nature as ordered by our Heavenly Father may be lightly interrupted; every such act carries penalty proportionate to the understanding of the culprit; never light, and often of fearful weight. Had I remained to see, I would have seen Gwauxln, Son of the Solitude, go forth in his own astral shape, after retiring his corporeal to his secret chamber, that no harm might come to the body while he was away. And the shell-Zailm would I have seen go with him to the Incalithlon, and there should I have seen the Rai cause it to pass into the Unfed Light. But of all men on earth only the trained eyes of a Son could have seen what then happened. The "shell" would not have emerged from the Maxin nevermore. What was this? Why destroy it? So that it might not go forth in the earth and impress sensitives such as the vailx-man whom I had impressed in Umaur, and whom my "shell" might otherwise continue to impress. Thus might have resulted much trouble, for this astral of mine was but faithfully repeating my final words ere I parted company with it, when it said to Gwauxln, there in Agacoe, "I am not dead." It was even then like all other shells, its double composite nature only holding together during the limited period it could draw sustaining magnetism from my recently closed earthly correspondence.

In some cases such sustenance in sufficient for ages, in others, centuries, years, days, or even minutes, according to the earthward-turning, or the spirit-turning sympathies of the decedent. The astral is only vivified force, bearing the image in all respects of its ego, the I AM. Even prophecies made by "returned spirits," prophecies which come true after years, perhaps are but the impressed foresight of the ego at the moment of departure. It for an instant sees into vast future depths of time. And this glimpse in imprinted on its astral-shell. It is psychic form. If the phenomena set in motion by man are of that intensely vital created by Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, then just as long as a believer of any one of these religious systems adheres, that long, but no longer the "shells" of these prophets will continue their derived existence. It is psychic force which is their controlling lever, formed force. It is this same force which holds the stars to their orbits, and the atoms to theirs. It is vital, and dual, being positive and negative. To separate the force or "fire element" of the ancients (ancients to thee, not to me), was to cause the focus for such an Unfed Fire as the Maxin, and in later ages, in Israel the power in the Ark of the Covenant, alike with the Maxin, fatal to life. These focus points are portals whereinto the entire concourse of lesser forces of nature are absorbed upon contact. These foci are also the sole residence of the much sought "universal solvent" of the alchemists; needless to say that as some of these alchemists have been Sons of the Solitude, that therefore they have had the wonderful "solvent" to serve them.

Equally apparent must it be why the secret has remained carefully concealed. These foci are very auricles of the heart of the Universe, hence any sort of formed force meets here its Omega. Consequently when Gwauxln caused my astral to pass into the Maxin, he returned to the sum-undivided of cosmic force a quantity no longer of use to the formed world. On a very small scale indeed the medulla oblongata of the brain is such a focus, a maxin-point, where positive and negative meet. Were it not so, life would be impossible; destroy this maxin of the body, even by a needle thrust, and vitality instantly ceases. But enough. Gwauxln came to me, who could not go to him. Those not initiates do often thus rise in their sleep to their friends, but they fail at the point of not knowing how to do so voluntarily.

As one great point of my work is to explain these mysteries, I may spare yet a little space in rendering clear, past all mistake, how it is that those on earth can acquire the power of going to their friends beyond the Divide, but never these last come back to earth.

The barometer on a calm day registers at sea level a definite degree of air pressure, and at one mile above the sea, on the side of a mountain, let us say, the mercury in the tube has "fallen" to another definite but less degree. This is in both cases due to air pressure. If now one desire to have the pressure existing at a mile's height, will he go up to it, or will he. bring that altitude down to himself? In storm weather the barometer "falls" also, the air is less dense, meteorological changes have taken place which in effect have brought the high aerial altitudes, i. e., the conditions prevailing in high altitudes, down to the lower level. But thus has a storm been created; superior conditions have forced one. So it is that by the exercise of superior force a medium at a "spiritualistic seance" can bring back or down a soul which had gone on through the grave; but it will give rise to a psychic storm, and these are exceedingly costly occurrences. The Witch of Endor created such a storm when she forced Samuel down to earth again. Beware, O ye mediums! If thou art, friend, a human "spirit barometer," thou mayest rise to thy friends, but never, as thou valuest soul's peace for thee, or for them, seek to bring them down to thy "circles."

Those who seek only the exciting part of this history will do well to omit perusal of the greater part of Book I, and leave it to the reader who seeks the reason and lemon of my life record, and how I am able to depict scenes past by more than twelve thousand years ago.

Through the crime of Mainin the Incaliz, I had been forced to seek my psychic plane, and because I was I, and am I, that plane is more or less one of isolation. That is to say, it was peopled with the children of my fancy, my experiences, my hopes, longings, aspirations, and my conceptions of persons, places and things. No two people see in the same way the same world. To Anzimee, with her knowledge, the world could not have seemed the same as to Lolix, who saw from another, and in some ways lower, standpoint, while to neither was it the same as to the wise minister, Menax; and with all three the view of life was different from that held by Gwauxln.

So also the heaven, the devachan, of one person is filled with his concepts of life, while that of his neighbor on either side--so to speak, is peopled with other peculiar mental properties. Now the state after the grave, and his or her knowledge, aspirations and trusts of life is the condition of harvest, where no one acts, but where the rewards of action in the preceding life axe paid; it is the land of Lethe, where is no pain, sorrow, sickness or agony, for these earthly conditions begun on earth, and they perforce must be finished on earth. So karma decrees. Heaven is passive, not active, and results of knowledge are there assimilated by the soul; that is, made so that the new birth is like the succeeding page of a business ledger--all of the old lives, with the last added in. I hope I have not been prolix. I have not, if I have given a clear comprehension of what the relation really is between earth and heaven, and that the latter is to the former as the resting time of night is to the activity of the day. Let none suppose that the devachan of one that hath committed earth-binding errors, and must by these bonds again reincarnate, is anything like the great Life wherewith are crowned those who are faithful unto the death of that serpent in the heart, animal lusts. The words can well portray mere devachan, they are powerless to depict that Life. Finite can never compass Infinite. Then let the Infinite into thy hearts.

--------------

Even so I pondered, in the presence of Gwauxln, Anzimee, and the others, who either would not or could not see me, my earthly powers were departing. The power which I had a moment before possessed of seeing persons, places and things of the world seemed fast escaping me, while glorious sights and sounds replaced them, sights and sounds akin to the day dream of the life just left, except that these were real to my senses, tangible and mutually reactive. Ah, well! if those left on Death's first shore could not see me nor know my presence, nor I see them nor their presence, why not unresistingly glide into enjoyment of the peace and the new sights and things which were come in place of the old? Yea! I would. Goodbye, old life; hail to the new.

As peacefully as a dream the sight of the palace and of familiar things faded from view, and I seemed to have come into a beautiful valley, hemmed in by azure hued mountains. Before me stood a building of unpretentious exterior. Irregular in its outlines, it seemed to have been built in sections, added as more rooms became necessary. What an altogether excellent idea that was, I thought. It was formed of slabs of rock, not quarried, but naturally scaled from the ledge. In places it was three stories high, in others only two, but mainly all the rooms were on the ground floor. What sort of people lived here? Certainly people whose architectural abandon was after my own heart. I felt, ere seeing them, already friendly. Assuredly they lacked not the love of beauty, for covering the quaintly picturesque dwelling ran perennial vines, while all about lay tasteful gardens. Should I venture to intrude my presence? As I considered, a man opened a door near me and came forward. He had a very familiar appearance; where had I seen him? I had forgotten as completely as if I had never known the life which I had experienced as Zailm, the son of Menax. My senses were dominated by the feelings of boyhood, and the thoughts and ideas and simple knowledge of boyhood in the mountain home by Pitach . Rhok. As the familiar looking stranger drew close he said:

"Knowest thou me, thy father, Merin Numinos?"

While this settled the apprehension that dimly arose in my consciousness that I was alone, and therefore invisible to people, it only quenched the idea that had rapidly faded an I looked on the house of slabrock, the idea that I was dead. I no longer knew any such experience, and the knowledge of death had passed away so far as it applied to my own decease. I was filled with pleasure at the question of the man before me, and I now perceived that he was the father of my childhood's ideal, but not him whom my mother had always presented in disparaging light: she, thou knowest, did not like him. But this thought did not present itself then; I only knew that I looked on him whom I recognized as my father. I was overjoyed at finding him, and I replied: "Verily, I know thee well!" Then he asked: "Wilt thou rest?"

"Being fatigued, I will do so, and no doubt be much benefited."

Thereupon Merin Numinos led me within the great rambling house to what I must call a den, even though the name may seem inelegant. Den it was, cleanly, but so charmingly, delightfully confused and disorderly; books and specimens of rocks, and all things which a boy loves were scattered about in that inextricable litter which fills the trim housekeeper with despair. My pleasure was unbounded, for I felt that I was a boy, only a boy, and had yet to reach maturity, the unknown possibilities of which seemed to fill my whole being with pleasant anticipation of the future; I was a lad of exuberant spirits let loose in his own realm, and in this room free from fear of the orderly mother who had elsewhere always restrained me. On a bed, roughly smoothed up in one comer of the shaded room, lay a pack of books from the district library, each marked, "Pitach Rhok District 5," in Poseid characters. These were in my way, and I laid them carefully, for books were ever almost sacred objects in my eyes, on the floor, in order that I might rest on the bed. Then I laid me down to sleep upon the rude couch which had always seemed softer and easier to fond memory than any downy cushion in the Caiphalian life. Not that I knew this as I lay down, I only knew that I experienced a state of things just suited to my desires. I had no clear idea of any event of the old life in Poseid; no memory of death, nothing. All had gone like the events of some dream which we strive in vain to recall at breakfast next morning. And yet, when I came across things in the new state similar to those known and loved in the old, when I found things here such as I had been wont to dream of some day carrying to realization, then the new realities, which, after all were not new, seemed wholly satisfactory, with the added charm of achievement, though I could not recall the old.

"The whole scene which greets mine eyes,
In some strange mode I recognize
As one whose ev'ry mystic part
I feel prefigured in my heart."

Nature here, though presenting some novelties, was not different enough to excite special attention.

One day I arose and departed from the scenes of this reproduced boyhood's life. The curtain rose on things derived from the later life after leaving Pitach Rhok for Caiphul, and I found myself now in the midst of acquiring knowledge even to the great degree of a Xio-Incala, a degree greater than even any scientist of the modem world has achieved. But this phase of devachan soon passed, because, not having reached such a degree on earth, nor having even tried to do so, I had no real basis from which to draw devachanic scenes. Thus passed the time around me, sometimes with real egoii of deceased earthly persons who had worked with me intimately on earth, and so had with me to reap the results of the collaboration. At other times I was alone with my concepts, which, however, seemed as real as actual persons, for all seemed absolutely real. Lolix was here in her better aspects; but the sin of our day was held against our return to earth.

It seemed perfectly natural to meet Anzimee one night as I wandered by the shore of a sea adjacent to an artificial wilderness, where all things were arranged in harmony with my ideal solitude to which, in Caiphul's busy whirl, I had one day dreamed of taking her when we should be wed. It was sweet when we met to hear her call me "husband," and the peace after action was all delightful as I had imagined it would be.

But my pen is in advance of its proper place. To return to the den:

Without disrobing, for the air was warm, I lay down and slept. When I awoke I passed down the hallway into the garden. A change had come over. I was older; the landscape was different, and the houses were more like that which my maturer needs had painted as a necessity while I still lived near Pitach Rhok. No longer was a river in the foreground, but a broad sea with only the near shore visible. The change was correspondent with the later desires of my youth. These alterations, though startling as considered from an earthly, physical standpoint, were not startling nor even remarkable to me. What sort of life or condition was this which permitted such changes, yet did not present itself as anything extraordinary to me, the beholder? Even truth should not be told in prolix phrase, and all that can be replied now is that it wag the life after death, to be slightly paradoxical. But this is not the Great Life with God.

Was time consumed in effecting these changes, or was this an Aladdin's lamp sort of land where a rubbing out of one and an installation of another set of appearances took place instantaneously? I did not even pause to consider, for no such conjecture occurred to me. To me things were real. Is earth real? Spirit, God, is real, and the earth and universe are the fiat, or externalized ideas of God. The things of earth are words of God's great Word, speaking to us. So, too, are the things of devachan or heaven. Both are real, oppositely so, but only real within us, not without us. I sought my father, Merin Numinos, and asked: "How long have I slept?" It was no more anything but a habit of thought to ask this, for I had no other motive. That, in the process of death, habits of mind do not suffer extinction together with life's memories of events, was proven by my action on hearing my father's reply:

"Even several years hast thou slept."

"Years!" dost thou exclaim? It, was no remarkable thing to me to hear this account of a Rip Van Winklian nap. No, but my habit of mind which took pride in neatness of personal attire caused me unwittingly to glance at my raiment to see if it were not, the worse for such long wear. The allusion to several years attracted my attention, so that having found my attire presentable, though I still gazed at my clothes, it was is an absent-minded way. I said:

"Thou sayest years; also another thing, 'thou has slept, ever since; thou camest into this country.' Now, I pray thee,. have I ever been elsewhere?"

Receiving no reply, I looked up, only to meet a stare like that of a statue from my father. He evidently knew nothing, of any previous state, nor, by the very form of my question, did I know more than he.

Death was another thing, never referred to, because in the instant when promoted souls find it no more possible to impress their existence upon those left behind on earth, they recognize that they are in the midst of the change called death, of which they were perhaps apprehensive all their earthly days. As the exoteric religion then, aye, and now, also, taught but one death, the devachanee knew or conjectured no other. Hence, death to the disembodied soul was and is an unknown conception. Well, there is no such thing as death for a fact. Likewise pain and sorrow. Devachan the minor is like devachan the major (Nirvana), a state particularly referred to in Revelation xxi: 4. Now, my friend, I am not postulating an argument; I must refuse to argue, and though it savor of medieval methods, yet must I also refuse to reason with thee. It is the purpose of this history to state what I know by experience; I state no theoretical ideas. If thou wilt take any small matters left unexplained into the inner sanctuary of thy soul and there meditate over them, then will they become clear to thee, and be as the water which quencheth all thirst, if so gained. hast thou ears to hear? Then heed that counsel. I address only those who follow these pages for profit.

Am the devachanee knows of but one change, and, an that is so different, from what he was religiously taught to fear, therefore many souls entering heaven conceive at the moment of death that no death exists, and that the teachings received on earth from priests were but ecclesiastical fictions. Nor are they so far wrong, for there is no other death than the mere change from objective to subjective states of being, save the second death, spoken of in my final page. To be paradoxical, death is different because not different, so far as they can perceive, from the swift view of the life just closed, a view all souls have, however brief it be. Hence it was that I was unaware of the fiction called death when I asked the father I found there if I had not always been there.

Religion taught in that old age as it now teaches, that with death came the cessation of all earthly sorrow. This is true for a time limited by the length of the soul's sojourn in devachan. These earth-born mists do not intrude there for the reason that being earth born they must of necessity have abiding places on earth and influence only those on earth.

"The evil that men do lives after them."

Verily; and in the form of crystallized disposition to do wrong, lies in wait for their return to earth life; it is the wrongly so-called "Adamic" tendency to sin, and while the sinner is free of its power in devachan, the seed, like tares with the wheat, is ready to grow a harvest of sorrow along with the growing life of the new incarnated one; and until some good action shall atone for evil done, this evil will continue to grow. Fortunately, man hath an eternity in which to make repayment, 1 and though following God's laws and being true to right, whatever its source, the tares are little by little uprooted. A good act is the erasure of a bad, and once performed is "oft interred with the bones," thus completing the philosophy of Hamlet.

All about me were those I loved. As time seemed to lapse, I became conscious of the presence of one and another of my friends. Anzimee, Menax, Gwauxln, Ernon, Lolix without the shadow, all those and thousands more who have no name to the reader were there. They did not come; no, they were with me, each as I had conceived. These were my concepts, for they were subjective, not objective; they were my ideals, not real people; and they formed my world. It occurred not to me that they were not real. Did it ever occur to thee, reader, that the world of thy senses is the only world thou hast? That, if thou hadst no sight, smell, hearing, taste or touch, that thou wouldst have no world even though thy soul were imprisoned in a body thus dead, yet alive in a vegetative way? As the soul of each living man, woman or child, is different from every other soul, so also the world is different to every person--not the same precisely in any two cases. Now it is the record of the soul, made on imperishable mental substance, which constitutes much of the life after the grave; the record merges into a reality, and all seems equally real, just as real as when the combined senses first perceived it; in verity this after life is a reconstituted and inverted earth life, subjective now, instead of objective. My supposed friend may be a real enemy, yet if I die thinking him or her my friend, that concept is the one carried into the after life, and vice versa.

Thus, all about me were my friends. The things of my sense records, and the places, were the scenes where all these friends moved. But while I had thus my world about me, a concept of me existed in the imaged world of every friend I had. Not that I was with them, but their concept of me was with them. Thus regarding the reality of all those concepts that were non-involute, simple and easily assimilable upon being remembered from the astral record, or, so to say, memory plates of the Soul, of every incident, Small or great, simple or complex, impulse or even unconscious cerebrations. But now mark a feature of vast interest, inasmuch as it affirms what I have seemed to deny, any real association of the soul in devachan with other individual souls. Devachan would indeed be a drear heaven if the friends of mundane life were never aught but "dream faces." Dreams they are, if the incidents created in our hopes on earth, and in devachan set forth as real to all seeming, were a simple fact. But if, per contra, it were so complex that to solve its equation required the joint efforts of two souls working in harmony, then also in devachan the results of this complex act affected both these souls, and during the assimilation of its results, that is, during the crystallization of such results into traits of character, both these souls would as actually be together as ever they were on earth. If more than two people were involved on earth, so all these souls would congregate in devachan. When the process was complete, the separation came. So it happened that in one moment of assimilative experience all my concepts were only phantasms, m the persons of one's nightly dreams; the next moment wore complex, as my associates were real egoii like myself. To me all this was unknown; all seemed real, and so, perhaps, was so. But it is pleasant to feel that one works with a loved -son, lather, daughter, mother, wife or other friend; that the consequences of the more serious events of our daily lives here will bring us again together in the heaven of our hopes; that the wife thou takest to thy heart, and to whom on thy confident loving plans for the weal of thy loved ones, to realize which both thou and she must work nobly, earnestly, will come across the chasm which death spreads for thy bodies, and be with thee or thou with her, there in Navazzamin. Pleasant, that thy mother, father or other dear friend shall sometimes really be with thee there; and that together thou shalt garner thy various records, and enjoy in a seeming real that which was not on earth aught but a hope never; materialized.

In meeting Anzimee, who yet lived on earth, I met sometimes my conception of her, sometimes her own higher self. How was the latter possible? Because she so longed from me that it developed and enabled her to project her pure soul into my plane. This was not only pleasant and beneficial to her, giving her a hold upon things unseen, of which the apostle Paul speaks, but it was a holy joy to me to meet her thus; she could come to me, but I could not go back to her. There is no retrogression.

In communion with these ideals I had my reward, for nothing occurred contrary to my wish. But in experiencing this reward, I also unconsciously assimilated the value of the previous life on earth. Thus my connection with politics in Poseid had brought me in contact with men and manners, and from this contact were born schemes in which I was to have had a leading part. These schemes were now brought into the subjective state, and as such appeared to me to be in process. From these apparent actions my capacities were developed, and tests of the worth of my conceptions made. All of this resulted in making a concrete deduction which became a part of my mental being; hence in a new incarnation I would come forth to mankind possessed of phrenological organs of increased power in the handling of political and social questions. Perhaps this power would not be actively employed, owing to other tendencies being stronger; none the less the power would be augmented and ready for use upon demand. The same thing would prove true of all these souls really associated with me, both in previous-earth-and after-heaven, the results, values and summings-up of our contemporary devachan would give them new mental traits, or increase the force of their old ones, and reincarnation would reassociate us again on earth. And it has done so, else would I never have written this history for thy profit, dear reader. My education as a geologist at Xioquithlon was tested in this same subjective heaven, and from this came added ability as a geologist; in short, an intuitive knowledge of geology and desire for that study after reincarnation. Books would then serve to educe the geological bent I might manifest. I might go on with other instances of the summing-up, and arranging process experienced by those who have both the grave and the cradle between them and earth. But this will suffice to hint to the reader that truths lie here and sweeten the

"Thoughts of the last bitter hour . . .
Of stern agony, and shroud and pall."

I hope, my friend, that this effort to render death less terrifying, by relating my own experiences of it, will be fraught with success, and that these words may so sustain thee that thou shalt

"Approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dream ."

Zerah Colburn, the marvelous boy mathematician, did not acquire his knowledge in the schools of this modern age, but brought it, a legacy from the dead centuries, his past lives, his latent power was educed. I will not argue with thee, friend, that if thou hadst had a past life on earth, thou couldst "not have forgotten it, but would have brought memory of it with thee." No, I argue not. I only leave it with thine own intelligence to decide if I be not right, when thou rememberest that habits of life grow from repeated actions of boyhood, the details and every recollection of which are gone. And knowing that this is so, decide, if thou thinkest it not absurd, that actions of a life experienced century times centuries agone would be possibly recollected, more especially when all the intervals was spent on a different plane of life, whereon no single memory ever intruded, could not by the laws of God. I know whereof I speak.

-------------

At length there came a time when I cared no more for the appearance of action, nor for those concepts of persons, places, or things connected with seeming activity. Chiefly now I cared to remain in some quiet spot and listen to Anzimee, the real, not the concept, as she read to or talked with me. I slept much also. One morning I did not arise; I did not care to. I was not ill; no one ever knew illness in devachan. But I had lost all desire to see or hear more of anything. I did indeed feel languor, but not weariness. So I turned over again, facing the wall, and slept. It was the last occurrence in the last chapter of a life's long rest, which, though I knew it not, had covered twelve thousand years of the actions of men of earth. Death had never appeared in that home of the soul, for my concepts did not die, they only disappeared from the view of their creator. Even the real souls of men or women did not die. No. But when they came, one after another, to the retributive awakening at the cradle, if their lives in heaven were still associated with mine, if they had not gone elsewhere in devachan, as neighbors on earth separate and put the world between them, then they disappeared, just as my concepts disappeared when I had assimilated their value. They disappeared, because all the deeds of previous earth life had crystallized as traits of character, and they were ready for earth life again. Only myself could be conscious of my own change; I could not be conscious of theirs. I was ready for activity once more. I slept, and in this sleeping died out of that life of passivity into the waking of earth, a babe in a cradle. Born to see my Master in this life, and enter the Great Rest with him!

NOTE.--But one will come after me who shall tell thee more of the Great Deep of Life than I. Await her words.--Author.

End of Book First

_______________

Footnotes:

225:1 II Samuel, xii, 28.

226:1 Eccl. ix, 10.

236:1 Do not confuse "repayment" with "atonement." Jesus makes atonement for us with God. We can only begin to repay, when, having obtained forgiveness through Jesus, we try to Live Him. Until we consecrate ourselves to Christ, we can not have recognized that we are HIS because HE owns us. When we recognize this, then we recognize that HE owns us, and we own HIM. Then, but not until then, can we even begin to repay our karma. And if we "Go and sin no more," then HE will equalize our to karma, and we be released unto HIM, released or leased again! Karma closes for one who thus is atoned for, and his opportunity for reparation begins. For such an one no more incarnation is necessary, for hath he not the SON? And that is Eternal life. What mean I by having the Son? And by being consecrated to Christ? In this, then, only the church postulate? Nay, more, friends. The Divine is eternal, infinite. The Human is finite. When the awakened man comes to know himself, he chooses which way he shall go. The choice is the crossing of the Divine by the Human; it is ownership by the Son. which in within.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: A Dweller on Two Planets, by Phylos the Thibetan

Postby admin » Tue Apr 09, 2019 11:52 pm

SEVEN SHASTA SCENES. INTERLUDE
by Frederick S. Oliver, Amanuensis

I

If there are "sermons in stones and books in the running brooks," then is "Tchastel's" craggy pile a noble library in veritas. In it the vastness, the grandeur and the solemnity of, nature are expressed in mystic numbers carved in the eternal granite. On those stony, stratified pages Nature's students may read the doings of the gnomes, Mother Earth's treasurers. Here, too, in characters of lava, is writ Pluto's kingly record. Aye! 'tis indeed Nature's own volume, bound between covers of snow and ice; and marking the treasures thereof is a silvery ribbon whose ends hang out of the vast tome, at the north one end, at the south the other, the name of the one "McCloud" river, and of the other the "Sacramento." Again, two lesser markers are in this sublime epic, viz.: "Pitt" and 'Shasta" rivers. A volume of poems should bear poetic title; so shall this. Can we bestow one more appropriate than the aboriginal appellation, "Ieka," a name retained and used by the earliest white mer whose eyes gazed on that land, far northern California, land of romance, of gold and of adventure; retained through that intuitive recognition of eternal fitness which pioneer and trapper have ever, in all lands, exhibited toward existent nomenclature. For years the noble mountain bore, for white as for aborigine, the name it had fetched from out the night of time, as its sister peak far to the north, Mt. Rainier, retained its primal christening of "Tacoma." But, alas, for human conceit! Alas, for man's vain discontent, unable to let well enough alone! To the one snowy mount came a Russian trapper, and thereafter "Ieka" was no more on the tongues of men, unless, indeed, it was still lovingly murmured by the dusky Modoc and his savage bride. To the other glittering peak went an egotistic Englishman. His lordship found "Tacoma" so beastly savage, "doncher know," and so over its Indian appellate he tacked his own patronymic. Time evens all things and "ever is justice done." The patriotic Americanism of the Northern Pacific Railroad topographers reinstated on the company maps musical "Tacoma," tossed to rubbish the imported name, and rebuked one egotist's vanity. That "Shasta Buttes" will ever know a parallel experience is problematical; if not, 'tis perhaps as well, for American gratitude willingly concedes the privilege of nomination of this proud peak to its friend, and, in the '60s, champion of our national autonomy -------- Russia. So much for a kind of mental view, past and present, of this pride of the crags and peaks.

Image
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

PreviousNext

Return to Ancien Regime

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 5 guests