Prolegomenon
"Our world has lately discovered another: and who will assure us it is the last of his brothers, since the demons, the Sibyls and we ourselves have been ignorant of this till now?""Nostre monde vient d'en retrouver un autre: et qui nous rêpond si c'est le dernier de ses frêres, puisque les dêmons, les sibylles et nous avons ignorê cettui-ci jusqu'à cette heure?"—Montaigne.
"Our world has lately discovered another: and who will assure us it is the last of his brothers, since the demons, the Sibyls and we ourselves have been ignorant of this till now?"
"Nostre monde vient d'en retrouver un autre: et qui nous rêpond si c'est le dernier de ses frêres, puisque les dêmons, les sibylles et nous avons ignorê cettui-ci jusqu'à cette heure?"—Montaigne.
"There is," says August Derleth, "an element of the unnecessary about even the most apparently needed introduction."
What with that element, and what with my own experience, as a reader, with introductions, it was my intention to write nothing in the species of a foreword to this my narrative of those amazing adventures and discoveries in which Milton Rhodes and I so unexpectedly and so suddenly found ourselves involved. I thought that I would most certainly have set down in the account itself everything that I should wish to write upon the subject.
But, now that my manuscript is finished, and now that the time draws on apace when it is to be placed in the keeping of our valued friend Darwin Frontenac, by whom, when the period fixed upon has elapsed, it will be given to the world, I feel that there are some points anent which it would be well to say a few words.
In the first place, apropos of the shortcomings, of which, in some instances, I am painfully sensible, of this work when viewed through the glasses of the literary artist, I may say in extenuation that this is the first book that I have ever written—and certainly, by the by, it will be the last.
Whether the fact that this is an initial venture in authorship excuses my deficiencies as a craftsman with pen, paper and words I can not say; but, at any rate, it is an explanation.
Furthermore, far outweighing (so it seems to me) any artistic desiderata, is this: the following narrative does not come to you from any secondhand source or from any source even farther removed; it is written by one who was an eye-witness of, and an actor in, the scenes, adventures and discoveries described in it—an actor that, I do assure you, would at times have given much to be some place else.
Also, in the writing of this book, I placed above all other things the endeavor to attain the utmost accuracy possible; the style was, therefore, in a great measure, left to take care of itself. With old Anatomy Burton, though very likely he quoted,[2]I can say:
"I write for minds, not ears."
Too, more than once when disposing of difficulties obtruded upon me by the noncoincidence of thought with words, have I had in mind this observation of Saint Augustine:
"For there are but few things which we speak properly, many things improperly; but what we may wish to say is understood."
And, similarly, when reminding myself that I had not set out to produce a work of art but merely to put down upon paper a plain and straightforward account of actual happenings and discoveries, many a time did I think of these words of John Stuart Mill:
"For it is no objection to a harrow that it is not a plough, nor to a saw that it is not a chisel."
And so it should be no objection to this my account of our discovery of another world that it has not the charm of Dante'sHellor the delicate beauties of Kipling'sGunga Din.
In the second place, I wish that I could say more about that mysterious phenomenon the firedrake, Saint Elmo's fire, or whatever it should be called, light-cloudlet, light-cloud, light-mass, light-ghost—sometimes it looks like luminousmist—but I know no more at this date about the origin of that most remarkable manifestation than I did after seeing the first "ghost," nor does Milton Rhodes himself, and Milton Rhodes, as everybody knows, is a scientist.
Of course, if people were like Trimalchio in theSatyriconof Petronius (and many people are) authors or scientists would not need to bother their heads about explanations, conjectures, theories, hypothesis or such sort when telling about strange phenomena or events; for, when some matter was being expounded by one of his guests, a gentleman by the name of Agamemnon, Trimalchio disposed of the whole business in this simple and summary fashion:
"If the thing really happened, there is no problem; if it never happened, it is all nonsense."
But, in the present instance—not to the Trimalchios, of course, but to any person with an iota of the scientific spirit in his encephalon—the fact is the very converse of this; for, if the firedrakes, the light-clouds, did not "happen," there would be no problem at all.
The Trimalchios, I have no doubt, would at once put the stamp of their approval upon this statement, which I lift fromHudibras:
"But what, alas! is it to usWhether i' th' moon men thus or thusDo eat their porridge, cut their corns,Or whether they have tails or horns?"
"But what, alas! is it to usWhether i' th' moon men thus or thusDo eat their porridge, cut their corns,Or whether they have tails or horns?"
"But what, alas! is it to usWhether i' th' moon men thus or thusDo eat their porridge, cut their corns,Or whether they have tails or horns?"
"But what, alas! is it to us
Whether i' th' moon men thus or thus
Do eat their porridge, cut their corns,
Or whether they have tails or horns?"
But the light in that other world is not the only problem to the solution of which I wish that I had something to offer. There are many problems. Here is one: the "eclipses." These are sometimes truly awful.
For instance, just imagine yourself in a forest dense and mysterious, and, furthermore, imagine that one of those fearful carnivores the snake-cats, is stealing toward you, stealing nearer and nearer, watching for the chance to spring; imagine yourself in such a pleasant pass as that, and then imagine a sudden and total extinction of the light (which is what, for want of a better word, we call an eclipse) so that you yourself and everything about you are involved in impenetrable darkness. How would you like to find yourself in such a place as that and have that happen to you? Well, as you will see in its proper pages, that is just where we were, and that, and more too, is just what happened to us.
Andthatwill give you an idea of what I mean when I say an eclipse can sometimes be awful indeed.
Why the light at times quivers, shakes, fades, bursts out so brightly, or why, slowly or all of a sudden, it ceases to be at all, is certainly an extremely curious and most mystifying business.
But
"To them we leave it to expoundThat deal in sciences profound."
"To them we leave it to expoundThat deal in sciences profound."
"To them we leave it to expoundThat deal in sciences profound."
"To them we leave it to expound
That deal in sciences profound."
A possibility has occurred to Rhodes and me that is by no means conducive, what with the care and labor that I have expended in the endeavor to be accurate in the writing of this true history, to any feeling of happiness on my part. My companion in adventure and discovery is, however, pleased to entertain the idea that it would certainly be "funny." Funny?
That possibility is simply this: so very strange is the story which I tell in the pages that follow, many a reader may be disposed to set the whole thing down as fiction! And, indeed, many a reader may do just that!
Fiction, forsooth!
Well, if any one actually is of that opinion or belief when he has finished reading this book, all I can say is that I wish such a one had been with us there on that narrow bridge, the yawning black chasm of unknown profundity, on either side, when the angel and her demon so suddenly appeared there directly before us!
I have an idea that, if he had been there, he would have wished, and have wished as hard as he had ever wished anything in his life, that the whole business would turn out to be fiction or nightmare!
"Why then should witlesse man so much misweeneThat nothing is but that which he hath seene?"
"Why then should witlesse man so much misweeneThat nothing is but that which he hath seene?"
"Why then should witlesse man so much misweeneThat nothing is but that which he hath seene?"
"Why then should witlesse man so much misweene
That nothing is but that which he hath seene?"
But I must hasten to bring this introduction to a close. Already I have exceeded the space that I had allotted for it, without even mentioning a number of things that I had in mind, and without having yet set down that which especially brought me to the decision to write anything prolegomenary at all.
And, now that I come to it, I feel hesitant. But this will not do.
In my whole narrative, there is, I am sure, but one single allusion, and that most brief—namely,Amor ordinem nescit—to my own heart-tragedy; and, as that allusion, even, is involved in obscurity, I will in this place and incontinently make it clear, and I do it by writing this:
I would rather have, though it were but for one single hour, Drorathusa as My Only than have for a lifetime any other woman I have ever known.
You will, I have no doubt, smile when you read this; you may think Eros has put me into a state very similar to the one in which the poor wight found himself of whom Burton wrote:
"He wisheth himself a saddle for her to sit on, a posy for her to smell to, and it would not grieve him to be hanged if he might be strangled in her garters."
Well, that busy little imp Venus's son (and he's as busy in that other world as he is in this) enjoys getting men and women into just such states of mind and heart. He moved even the rather cold-hearted Plato—I mean the great philosopher, not one of the poets so named, the philosopher who banished poets and Love himself from his Republic—the little imp moved evenhimto write:
"Thou gazest on the stars, my Life! Ah! gladly would I beYon starry skies, with thousand eyes, that I might gaze on thee!"
"Thou gazest on the stars, my Life! Ah! gladly would I beYon starry skies, with thousand eyes, that I might gaze on thee!"
"Thou gazest on the stars, my Life! Ah! gladly would I beYon starry skies, with thousand eyes, that I might gaze on thee!"
"Thou gazest on the stars, my Life! Ah! gladly would I be
Yon starry skies, with thousand eyes, that I might gaze on thee!"
And I would rather have this heart-tragedy mine—have loved and lost Drorathusa—than never to have seen my lady.
"The heart has its reasons," says Pascal, "that reason can not understand."
Swiftly now the time draws on, on towards that final journey which Milton Rhodes and I are to make, and to make with glad hearts, that journey from which there is never to be a return, that journey back to another world, a world where there is no sun, no moon, no skies, no stars—a world where there is neither day nor night.
Vale.William Barrington Carter