Mirrikh, or, A Woman from Mars/Chapter 20
CHAPTER XX.
MY SECOND JOURNEY TO MARS.
Was there something wrong?
Was I alone, of all those who had inhaled the gas before me, proof against its powers?
I thought so then.
Thus far I had experienced absolutely no change in my sensations.
I turned to Ah Schow and told him to ask Padma what the matter was; but, strange to say, Ah Schow did not seem to hear.
I spoke louder—louder still—I shouted. It had no effect whatever upon my servant.
They stood there looking at me; and then, to my utter amazement, I was looking at myself. There I was lying upon the stone floor beside the altar, in the precise spot where Maurice had lain before me. I saw the two lamas approach, lift me up and carry me to the trap. I saw them put me head first into the shute; I saw myself disappear like a flash. And yet I solemnly affirm that so far as my own consciousness went, I was precisely the same George Wylde I had been before.
I was a man; a living man, with every atom of my personality perfect; every member of my body, every stitch of my clothing intact; yet when I spoke, no one heard; when I moved about I seemed to pass directly through the forms around me. Already I had forgotten Padma’s injunction. I had not fixed my thoughts upon my body. How could I be expected to do so when to me it seemed as though I were in my body still?
My first thought after the disappearance of my body, was one of curiosity to know how the flood was progressing. I thought of the big tree in the courtyard beneath which I had passed through that strange experience with Walla, and instantly I was there.
Now for a moment terror seized me, for the courtyard was a lake; the water was pouring over the wall in torrents. But I soon perceived that I was no longer as I had been. I seemed to float above the water, and when I thought wonderingly of what was beyond the wall, I rose higher. I could look over it, and my eyes rested upon a vast sea, extending in every direction.
“Will it never end?” I thought. “Is there more still to come? What is its source? Has it not been exhausted yet? Would that I were at this wonderful Dshambi-nor.”
Suddenly I seemed to shoot through the air with incredible swiftness, and before I could at all realize the situation, I was approaching those distant mountain peaks which had seemed so far away. The next I knew I was among them, hovering above a lake into which water was pouring from another lake at a higher level. At the outer edge of this upper lake, between two precipices, I perceived a wall made up of rough stones, in the middle of which was a yawning gap with the water rushing through. Then I comprehended exactly what had occurred.
I looked down into the water. It formed no obstacle to my vision. I could see that the bottom of the lake was strewn all over with small objects made to represent the human head in profile. There were thousands upon thousands of them. Many were of gold, others of a black, dirty substance, which I instantly knew had once been glittering silver, now changed by the action of the water; but by far the largest number were of stone.
“What are these? How came they here?” I asked myself.
The answer came to me, not in words, but by an inward consciousness which it seemed impossible to question, and I knew that they were the offerings of an ancient race which had vanished thousands upon thousands of years before many of our western thinkers are willing to admit the earth existed; cast into the lake to propitiate the spirit believed to hold its waters in check. I knew also, by the same mysterious sense, that it was this race which had built the dam, the vaults beneath the lamasery and the strange shute into which I had seen my body go.
Still thinking of these things, I suddenly found myself in motion again, and before I knew it was back in the courtyard; passing directly through the temple wall, which offered no more resistance than so much air; I was in the underground chamber once more.
Here matters had changed. The water lay six inches deep upon the floor, and Padma was in the act of inhaling the gas. He was alone save for the lama upon whom the lot had fallen. Suddenly I saw his body sink into this man’s arms and another Padma rise beside it, appearing as a whitish cloud emanating from the region of the spleen, but quickly taking on the old lama’s familiar form and floating away.
I watched him as he vanished through the solid walls of the chamber and then turned to look at what was left behind.
The lama was dragging the body towards the trap into which the water was now pouring in a steady stream. He had tied a cloth tightly over the mouth and nostrils; in another instant he threw it down and it was gone.
Breathlessly I watched him, for I knew that his time had come. It did not seem to disturb him, however. He closed the trap and wading to the altar removed the plug from the golden tube and inhaled the gas, restoring the plug before he raised himself again. Once more that mysterious process was repeated. The body of the lama sank to the floor with a splash, but his spirit—I questioned these mighty facts no longer—rose up and soared away, leaving me the sole occupant of that gloomy vault.
Now one might reasonably suppose that by this time I would have found leisure to think of my own body, but I had not done so yet. The fact is I was enjoying a delicious sense of freedom—a sensation too delicious to be disturbed.
I thought, instead, of Maurice. I desired to see him, to speak to him, to know where he was and what he was about.
Then like a flash that chamber vanished and I was repeating my former experience—I was floating among the spheres.
Sun, moon and stars innumerable were all about me, each in its proper form and place; each following its own proper motion; all of which I was, as before, in some measure able to grasp.
Was I moving?
I certainly was and with incredible rapidity; yet as I directed my eyes toward Mars, which hovered a dull, reddish globe of light above me, it seemed at a distance vast beyond all computation. It was only when I looked beyond it and caught sight of Orion and great Sirius that I comprehended something of the immensity of space. Then Mars seemed so near that I felt I had only to reach out my hand and touch it, while aeons of time lay between myself and the Dog Star. My brain reeled—I was grappling with problems comprehensible only to the Divine essence — the Lord, God Almighty, who holds countless suns and worlds without end in the hollow of his hand.
Then a voice spoke.
“Beware, George! Fix your thoughts upon your friends, lest while contemplating mysteries too deep for your natural mind, you sever the life cord and return to your proper sphere of usefulness no more!”
Now may God keep the memory of what I beheld at that instant ever green!
But why do I say it? There can be no lapse of time so great, no depth of space so vast, as to prevent me, when the time comes that this mortal body of mine is laid down to dust, from seeking out that face!
Beside me floated a female form beautiful beyond all telling, clothed in loose garments of fleecy whiteness; her face close to my face, her eyes looking into my eyes, her thoughts so intertwined with my thoughts that I knew them and knew that she knew mine.
“Who are you—some bright spirit sent to guide me?” I asked, with a strange inward speech of which I can give no proper description, except to say that I gave utterance to no audible sounds.
Nor were such necessary. Not only did she understand me, but I had as little difficulty with her answer. After a second it was as though we were talking as mortals talk, yet this I knew was not actually the case.
“I am your soul’s mate to all eternity, George,” she said. “For many years I have been with you in spirit. I laid down the material when you were but a child.”
“You are then a spirit?”
“I am. It was I who spoke with you in the courtyard through the mediumship of the girl Walla.”
“Then it was true?”
“Not only true, but more than that. Since your first meeting with that girl I have been able, in a sense, to make you feel my presence. It was I who looked at you out of her eyes, George, when you thought you loved her; when I ceased to look, your love was transformed almost to hatred. These, however, are things which you cannot comprehend.”
“So little do I comprehend that though I accept them as facts now, I shall reject and doubt upon my return to earth.”
“It is so. Yet they will leave their impressions. George, you are mine, I am yours. No power can keep us apart in eternity; though God alone knows when our souls shall be united in the realm of spirit. To me, however, this matters little, for to me as a spirit, time has no existence, but to you—for you can now never forget me—the time may seem long.”
“But how—by what power did you speak to me through the lips of the girl?”
“By the power of mind over mind. As a hypnotizer handles his lucide, so I handled Walla. Her consciousness was for the time obliterated. It was I who spoke.”
“Incomprehensible; but now I cannot doubt. Let us change the subject. Will you tell me your name?”
“Not now—it is not permitted—call me Hope.”
“Hope of the hour when I shall see you always?”
“That is it. You recognize my power over you, I perceive.”
“I feel as I never felt before in the presence of anyone, man or woman. It is not love as I have experienced love. It is rather a sense of completeness. I feel as if before I saw you I was but a fragment. I feel”
“Stay! You do not know yet the true conjugal feeling.”
“I do not, I admit it. My wife”
“Your wife! Do not use the word. I am your wife. As man and wife we were created from the beginning. Your unhappy companion, had she found her heart’s proper resting place, would have been a different woman. Marriage, my love, is an ordinance so holy that the Divine nature alone can fully comprehend it. In the Divine the male and female, the positive and negative of spiritual force, are truly united. With mortals this is seldom granted; with disembodied spirits it may be called into existence at will in a certain sense, but many who in the world have been unhappily mated, do not will it—they fear, and their fear prevents. But in the Divine it is a mighty force, the creative power calling into being the myriads of immortal souls with which the universe is filled.”
“As I said before, I hear, I comprehend dimly, I believe instinctively—but I shall forget.”
“Would you taste in some slight measure the ineffable bliss of a true conjugal union? That, my love, will be something which you can never forget.”
“Most gladly!”
Then in an instant I was alone!
Alone? No, not alone! I was complete!
No words can do my feelings justice. A strange sensation of duality had come over me. I felt that there were two of us, and yet that I and the woman were mysteriously one.
But I could not see her—nor did I wish to see her. She seemed to be inside of me—it was rapture unspeakable to know that she was there.
I could hear her speak; I addressed her—she answered. She was mine, I was hers. Her soul was in my soul, her thoughts truly my thoughts. I was a man, and I knew that I had been but a fragment of a man before.
“George, I am here. You know me now. No length of time so long before we are thus finally brought together that you will forget.”
“Never! Never! Never leave me, my beloved! I cried. “Remain in my soul forever! I have no wish now to go back to earth!”
But no sooner had I given utterance to this sentiment than she was at my side again, smiling sadly.
“Oh, you must not say that,” she said. “Your life work has but begun. Do not think that this experience has been accorded you without a purpose. Nothing is without a purpose. Marriage is most grossly misunderstood by you mortals. It is to be your work to write of this and other strange experiences through which you are passing, so that those who care to read may know something of the truth.”
“Come to me again!” I cried. “That taste of bliss makes me long for more! Come, my love—my wife!”
She shook her head and smiled.
“Not again, George. You have other duties to perform, as I have said. As it is your life cord was almost severed—you can see it there behind you, trailing like a silver thread.”
But I had already seen it and did not even turn to look. I begged and pleaded until she bade me desist with a certain positiveness of manner which I did not altogether fancy. This she seemed to understand.
“You see,” she said, “there is not true harmony between us yet; there cannot be until you have crossed the border. The veil still divides us, George.”
“Can you not tear it aside and show me the spirit world?”
“No—oh no! That cannot be.”
“But if I am a spirit, why not?”
“You are not a spirit in the word’s full sense. Let that silver cord be severed and you would quickly see the spirit world, but that would be a calamity.”
“Why a calamity?”
“It is a calamity for any man to leave earth life with his work unfinished. But I must now leave you. George, my love, my husband, my soul’s true mate, I go, but I shall come once again. Farewell!”
She vanished like meadow mist before the rays of the rising sun, and I was alone.
Yet I felt her near me. I knew the sense of her presence now—nor has that knowledge ever left me—I knew that she was near me then, that her thoughts were impressing themselves upon my soul.
“Think of Maurice,” she seemed to say; and immediately I thought of Maurice.
Had my planetary journey been prolonged for a purpose?
I do not know, but this much is certain, on the instant, when obeying that inward voice, I fixed my mind on Maurice, I stood at his side!
For me space had been obliterated. If it was all true and Maurice was on Mars, then was I also on Mars. I could see Maurice, but I instantly perceived that he was powerless to see me.
It was Maurice and it was not Maurice.
The person I stood beside was dressed in a long gown of blue satin, belted in at the waist and beautifully embroidered with flowers in their natural colors, but the face, though it bore some resemblance to my friend, was as the face of my mysterious acquaintance at Panompin. Like Mr. Mirrikh’s face, half yellow, half black; yet inside of that body—and I seemed able to look inside without the slightest difficulty, I could see another man, perfect in every particular. This was Maurice De Veber as I knew him—there was no change.
When I first saw him I shouted his name aloud, but now finding that I could not make my presence known, I contented myself with simply looking at him and surveying his surroundings which were, of course, of the highest interest, for then I had not the slightest doubt that I was actually on the planet Mars.
Maurice was sitting upon a chair made of reeds plaited together, in a room of considerable size where there was a couch, also of plaited reeds, but no other furniture save an extra chair or two. He was smoking an odd-looking cigar; its shape was a perfect crescent, and instead of the odor of tobacco, it sent up with the smoke a most delicious perfume.
Now it seemed to me that it was morning and that Maurice had just arisen from the couch, where he had been sleeping all night with his present clothes on. With the same ease I comprehended that this was the way people slept here; that they did not remove their clothing at night as we do, because their dress hangs perfectly loose upon them, and the daily bath is a universal custom. Thinking then of the naked men I had seen in my previous vision, it came to me that this was not the same country Maurice had first entered, but another where the manners and customs were different. At that instant my ears caught a burst of strange music outside, at which he sprang up and went darting through the door. It was a harmony of many sounds precisely such as we heard that rainy night in the ruined tower, when Mr. Mirrikh afterward came through the shawl in sections, scaring me almost out of my wits.
I followed Maurice, coming out upon a broad lawn bordered by great trees, all of species wholly strange to me, but not at all unlike the trees of temperate latitudes on earth. Beyond the trees was an open space—a public square apparently, where an immense crowd of people had assembled. On the other side of the square rose a great temple. Nothing in comparison with the structures seen in my previous vision, but still far larger than any building on earth.
Instinctively I floated away from Maurice and found myself inside this temple. As with everything else, I seemed to grasp its purpose at a glance, and knew that here people worshiped one God; a God all-powerful, executing His will through the instrumentality of myriads of ministering spirits. Many statues, superbly cut in snowy marble, stood beneath the great dome overshadowing the vast interior. They were representations of men and women once prominent in the social affairs of these people, whose spirits were supposed still to have the interests of the nation in charge.
Before each statue was a little altar, and upon most of the altars lay offerings of fruit and beautiful flowers.
That prayers to God, and consultation of the spirit guides sent in answer, constitute the religion of this race, was likewise impressed upon me. Forms, ceremonies, all the tricks and devices of priestcraft aiming at personal dominion are unknown here.
One God and all creation united with him in a harmonious desire to work His will; from the mightiest spirit of spheres celestial, to the humblest germ invisible even beneath the most powerful glass the ingenuity of man can devise.
Out again in the square the music called me now, and I knew that it was not instrumental but the production of the human voice.
The vast throng stood facing a choir of a hundred youths and as many maidens, who occupied a semicircular platform ranged around a sort of pulpit. Now for the first time I had a good view of these Martians, and saw that, except for the strange blackness about the face, the men were just the same as the men on Earth, and the nature of this discoloration I was now able to comprehend at a glance.
The faces of the women were perfectly fair, so with the boys; some of the young men exhibited the blackness, others younger did not, but no such thing as beards could be seen. The blackness, then, was the sign of virility, and really, when one comes to think of it, was no more disfiguring than a beard.
They were singing, and such amazing singing! From those two hundred human throats issued every sound capable of being produced by the finest orchestra ever gathered together. How they did it I do not pretend to say, but I could hear the notes of violins, flutes, flageolets, cornets and instruments innumerable, even to the bass viol and the boom of the big bass drum.
Again I was at Maurice’s side. He was watching and listening.
Presently a man ascended the rostrum, and bareheaded, beneath those broad spreading branches, began to address the multitude. Intense grew my interest when I perceived that this man was Mr. Mirrikh. He announced that he would continue his lecture upon the manners and customs of the planet Earth.
And he spoke well. For fully fifteen minutes I listened. It seemed to be one of a series of lectures describing his earth journey. The point upon which he particularly dwelt was the gross ignorance in which the inhabitants of our planet were plunged concerning spiritual laws; our general disbelief in the existence and importance of such laws, extending even in many instances to a total denial of the existence of spirit and a spiritual world.
“And on their planet, even among those who admit the existence of a life after death, my friends,” he shouted, “there is but little knowledge and still less desire to attain to wisdom in matters spiritual. There men are satisfied to leave such things to priests whose mission, it appears, is to terrorize the ignorant, to distort and suppress such few facts as they possess; to load down their barbarous worship with senseless forms and ceremonies, until all knowledge of the Divine principle is obliterated, and all freedom of thought crushed. Even among the few enlightened minds existing on this planet a singular condition of affairs obtains; for these are for the most part men steeped in selfishness who strive to conceal rather than promulgate spiritual truth. Not that individual minds do not exist whose enlightenment in a sense approaches ours; but they are as grains of sand in the desert, and powerless to make themselves heard or their influence felt.”
All this, and much more, I heard him say, and to my ears every word came in plain English, yet I seemed to know that he was not speaking my language, but that it was my inner consciousness which understood.
“But if I remain here I shall see nothing of Mars,” I suddenly reflected, and the desire to comprehend something of the nature of the planet became intense.
I looked at Maurice, whom for the time being I had forgotten, and I now perceived what before I had failed to observe—Maurice was not alone.
There, beside him, stood a young woman of superb figure and sweet, gentle countenance. At first I thought she must be a spirit, for I became inwardly conscious of a certain harmonious blending of soul between them; but I soon perceived that she was still in the material body, and I knew also that already Maurice recognized this harmony; that he loved her, that she loved him.
Then my desire to be off reached an intensity no longer to be resisted, and I found myself floating over a vast city made up of the same low buildings previously observed, with here and there a temple or some public edifice thrown in.
Presently I was beyond the city and moving over forest and plain; all very beautiful, but in no essential particular differing from similar scenes on earth.
Soon I came to water—it was red. I looked above me—the clouds, of which there were but few, also had a reddish tinge.
I floated above the water with the same electric rapidity. It was a land-locked sea, extending to a vast distance on either side of me, but its width was not great, and soon I had left it behind and was passing above a densely wooded country, more tropical in appearance than the land first seen.
Here I perceived, scattered through the forest, small groupings of huts of conical shape, made of branches and thatched, in and about which were people of widely different appearance from Mr. Mirrikh and his audience. They were small of stature and entirely naked; the color of their skin was a dirty brown; their foreheads were low and retreating, exhibiting little more intelligence than the Bushmen of Africa—scarcely as much.
Passing beyond this vast forest I came to another sea, and beyond that again to a beautiful country of great extent inhabited by a people similar to those whom I had seen at first.
Floating upon the seas I saw ships innumerable; they were not large, without sails, and seemed to be propelled by electricity. Animals of many kinds I saw also; nearly all differed from the animal forms of earth, and for me to attempt to describe them would only have the effect of adding to the ridicule which this part of my narrative is sure to call down upon my unfortunate head.
Soon I had passed over this stretch of country and another narrow sea lay before me, beyond which I perceived a more barren land; rather Arctic in appearance; this passed, vegetation ceased, and I found myself floating above immense plains buried beneath ice and snow.
I knew that I must now be nearing the Martian poles and my curiosity had become intense, when suddenly I heard that gentle voice again:
“Beware, George! You are going too far, your life cord is being strained beyond endurance. Fix your thoughts upon your body without delay!”
It was a bitter disappointment to me, but I could not disobey.
I closed my eyes and thought of that body which I had seen thrown into the shute with as little ceremony as if it had been a meal sack.
Instantly the wondrous scene was obliterated and all consciousness left me.
The next I knew I was experiencing precisely the same sensations one feels when recovering from a fainting fit.
“Wylde! Wylde! Wake up! Wylde! Wylde! Speak to me, for God’s sake!” some one was shouting in my ears.
It was the Doctor’s voice.
I was surrounded by utter darkness lying upon a couch as hard as stone.