The Jewel of Seven Stars/Chapter 16

Powers--Old and New

The time wore away, wondrous slowly in some ways, wonderfully quickly
in others. To-day, in the new-found joyous certainty of the return of
my love, I should have liked to have had Margaret all to myself. But
this day was not for love or for love-making. The shadow of fearful
expectation was over it. The more I thought over the coming experiment,
the more strange it all seemed; and the more foolish were we who were
deliberately entering upon it. It was all so stupendous, so mysterious,
so unnecessary! The issues were so vast; the danger so strange, so
unknown. Even if it should be successful, what new difficulties would
it not raise. What changes might happen, did men know that the portals
of the House of Death were not in very truth eternally fixed; and that
the Dead could come forth again! Could we realize what it was for us
modern mortals to be arrayed against the Gods of Old, with their
mysterious powers gotten from natural forces, or begotten of them when
the world was young. When land and water were forming themselves from
out the primeval slime. When the very air was purifying itself from
elemental dross. When the "dragons of the prime" were changing their
forms and their powers, made only to combat with geologic forces, to
grow in accord with the new vegetable life which was springing up
around them. When animals, when even man himself and man's advance
were growths as natural as the planetary movements, growths as
natural as the planetary movements, or the shining of the stars.
Ay! and further back still, when as yet the Spirit which moved on
the face of the waters had not spoken the words commanding to come
into existence Light and the Life which followed it.
Nay, even beyond this was a still more overwhelming conjecture. The
whole possibility of the Great Experiment to which we were now pledged
was based on the reality of the existence of the Old Forces which seemed
to be coming in contact with the New Civilization. That there were, and
are, such cosmic forces we cannot doubt, and that the Intelligence,
which is behind them, was and is. Were those primal and elemental forces
controlled at any time by other than that Final Cause which Christendom
holds as its very essence? If there were truth at all in the belief of
Ancient Egypt then their Gods had real existence, real power, real force.
Godhead is not a quality subject to the ills of mortals: as in its
essence it is creative and recreative, it cannot die. Any belief to the
contrary would be antagonistic to reason; for it would hold that a part
is greater than the whole. If then the Old Gods held their forces, wherein
was the supremacy of the new? Of course, if the Old Gods had lost their
power, or if they never had any, the Experiment could not succeed. But
if it should indeed succeed, or if there were a possibility of success,
then we should be face to face with an inference so overwhelming that
one hardly dared to follow it to its conclusion. This would be: that the
struggle between Life and Death would no longer be a matter of the
earth, earthy; that the war of supra-elemental forces would be moved
from the tangible world of facts to the Mid-Region, wherever it may be,
which is the home of the Gods. Did such a region exist? What was it that
Milton saw with his blind eyes in the rays of poetic light falling
between him and Heaven? Whence came that stupendous vision of the
Evangelist which has for eighteen centuries held spellbound the intelligence
of Christendom? Was there room in the Universe for opposing Gods; or if
such there were, would the stronger allow manifestations of power on the
part of the opposing Force which would tend to the weakening of His own
teaching and designs? Surely, surely if this supposition were correct
there would be some strange and awful development--something unexpected
and unpredictable--before the end should be allowed to come. . . !
The subject was too vast and, under the present conditions, too full of
strange surmises. I dared not follow it! I set myself to wait in patience
till the time should come.
Margaret remained divinely calm. I think I envied her, even whilst I
admired and loved her for it. Mr Trelawny was nervously anxious, as
indeed were the other men. With him it took the form of movement;
movement both of body and mind. In both respects he was restless, going
from one place to another with or without a cause, or even a pretext;
and changing from one subject of thought to another. Now and again he
would show glimpses of the harrowing anxiety which filled him, by his
manifest expectation of finding a similar condition in myself. He would
be ever explaining things. And in his explanations I could see the way
in which he was turning over in his mind all the phenomena; all the
possible causes; all the possible results. Once, in the midst of a most
learned dissertation on the growth of Egyptian Astrology, he broke out
on a different subject, or rather a branch or corollary of the same:
"I do not see why starlight may not have some subtle quality of its own!
We know that other lights have special forces. The Rontgen Ray is not
the only discovery to be made in the world of light. Sunlight has its
own forces, that are not given to other lights. It warms wine; it quickens
fungoid growth. Men are often moonstruck. Why not, then, a more subtle,
if less active or powerful, force in the light of the stars. It should
be a pure light coming through such vastness of space, and may have a
quality which a pure, unimpulsive force may have. The time may not be
far off when Astrology shall be accepted on a scientific basis. In the
recrudescence of the art, many new experiences will be brought to bear;
many new phases of old wisdom will appear in the light of fresh discovery,
and afford bases for new reasoning. Men may find that what seemed empiric
deductions were in reality the results of a loftier intelligence and a
learning greater than our own. We know already that the whole of the
living world is full of microbes of varying powers and of methods of
working quite antagonistic. We do not know yet whether they can lie latent
until quickened by some ray of light as yet unidentified as a separate
and peculiar force. As yet we know nothing of what goes to create or
evoke the active spark of life. We have no knowledge of the methods of
conception; of the laws which govern molecular or foetal growth, of the
final influences which attend birth. Year by year, day by day, hour by
hour, we are learning; but the end is far, far off. It seems to me that
we are now in that stage of intellectual progress in which the rough
machinery for making discovery is being invented. Later on, we shall have
enough of first principles to help us in the development of equipment
for the true study of the inwardness of things. Then we may perhaps arrive
at the perfection of means to an end which the scholars of Old Nile
achieved at a time when Methuselah was beginning to brag about the number
of his years, perhaps even when the great grandchildren of Adam were
coming to regard the old man as what our Transatlantic friends call a
'back number.' Is it possible, for instance, that the people who invented
Astronomy did not finally use instruments of extraordinary precision;
that applied optics was not a cult of some of the specialists in the
Colleges of the Theban priesthood. The Egyptians were essentially
specialists. It is true that, in so far as we can judge, the range of
their study was limited to subjects connected with their aims of government
on earth by controlling all that bore on the life to follow it. But can
anyone imagine that by the eyes of men, unaided by lenses of wondrous
excellence, Astronomy was brought to such a pitch that the true orientation
of temples and pyramids and tombs followed for four thousand years the
wanderings of the planetary systems in space. If an instance of their
knowledge of microscopy is wanted let me hazard a conjecture. How was
it that in their hieroglyphic writing they took as the symbol or
determinative of 'flesh' the very form which the science of to-day,
relying on the revelations of a microscope of a thousand powers, gives
to protoplasm--that unit of living organism which has been differentiated
as Flagellula. If they could make analysis like this, why may they not
have gone further? In that wonderful atmosphere of theirs, where sunlight
fierce and clear is perpetually co-existent with day, where the dryness
of earth and air gives perfect refraction, why may they not have learned
secrets of light hidden from us in the density of our northern mists?
May it not have been possible that they learned to store light, just as
we have learned to store electricity. Nay more, is it not even possible
that they did so. They must have had some form of artificial light which
they used in the construction and adornment of those vast caverns hewn
in the solid rock which became whole cemeteries of the dead. Why, some
of these caverns, with their labyrinthine windings and endless passages
and chambers, all sculptured and graven and painted with an elaboration
of detail which absolutely bewilders one, must have taken years and years
to complete. And yet in them is no mark of smoke, such as lamps or torches
would have left behind them. Again, if they knew how to store light, is
it not possible that they had learned to understand and separate its
component elements? And if these men of old arrived at such a point,
may not we too in the fullness of time? We shall see! We shall see!
"There is another matter, too, on which recent discoveries in science
throw a light. It is only a glimmer at present; a glimmer sufficient to
illuminate probabilities, rather than actualities, or even possibilities.
The discoveries of the Curies and Laborde, of Sir William Crooks and
Becquerel, may have far-reaching results on Egyptian investigation. This
new metal, radium--or rather this old metal of which our knowledge is
new--may have been known to the ancients. Indeed it may have been used
thousands of years ago in greater degree than seems possible to-day. As
yet Egypt has not been named as a place where the discovery of pitchblende,
in which only as far as is known yet radium is contained, may be made.
And yet it is more than probable that radium exists in Egypt. That country
has perhaps the greatest masses of granite to be found in the world; and
pitchblende is found as a vein in granitic rocks. In no place, at no
time, has granite ever been quarried in such proportions as in Egypt
during the earlier dynasties. Who may say what great veins of pitchblende
may not have been found in the gigantic operations of hewing out columns
for the temples, or great stones for the pyramids. Why, veins of pitchblende,
of a richness unknown in our recent mines in Cornwall, or Bohemia, or
Saxony, or Hungary, or Turkey, or Colorado, may have been found by these
old quarrymen of Aswan, or Turra, or Mokattam, or Elephantine.
"Beyond this again, it is possible that here and there amongst these vast
granite quarries may have been found not merely veins but masses or
pockets of pitchblende. In such case the power at the disposal of those
who knew how to use it must have been wonderful. The learning of Egypt
was kept amongst its priests, and in their vast colleges must have been
men of great learning; men who knew well how to exercise to the best
advantage, and in the direction they wished, the terrific forces at their
command. And if pitchblende did and does exist in Egypt, do you not
think that much of it must have been freed by the gradual attrition and
wearing down of the granitic rocks? Time and weather bring in time all
rocks to dust; the very sands of the desert, which in centuries have
buried in this very land some of the greatest monuments of man's
achievement, are the evidences of the fact. If, then, radium is divisible
into such minute particles as the scientists tell us, it too must have
been freed in time from its granite prison and left to work in the air.
One might almost hazard a suggestion that the taking the scarab as the
symbol of life may not have been without an empiric basis. Might it not
be possible that Coprophagi have power or instinct to seize upon the
minute particles of heat-giving, light-giving--perhaps life-giving--
radium, and enclosing them with their ova in those globes of matter
which they roll so assiduously, and from which they take their early
name, Pilulariae. In the billions of tons of the desert waste there is
surely mingled some proportion of each of the earths and rocks and metals
of their zone; and, each to each, nature forms her living entities to
flourish on those without life.
"Travellers tell us that glass left in tropic deserts changes colour,
and darkens in the fierce sunlight, just as it does under the influence
of the rays of radium. Does not this imply some sort of similarity
between the two forces yet to be identified!"
These scientific, or quasi-scientific discussions soothed me. They took
my mind from brooding on the mysteries of the occult, by attracting it
to the wonders of nature.