THE FUTURE HISTORIAN
SO sombre a phenomenon as the effacement of an ancient and brilliant civilization within the lifetime of a single generation is, fortunately, known to have occurred only once in the history of the world. The catastrophe is not only unique in history, but all the more notable for having befallen, not a single state overrun by powerful barbarians, but a half of the world; and for having been effected by a seemingly trivial agency that sprang from the civilization itself. Indeed, it was the work of one man.
Hiram Perry (or Percy) Maximus was born in the latter part of the nineteenth century of “the Christian Era,” in Podunk, the capital of America. Little is known of his ancestry, although Dumbleshaw affirms on evidence not cited by him that he came of a family of pirates that infested the waters of Lake Erie (now the desert of Gobol) as early as “1813”—whenever that may have been.
The precise nature of Hiram Perry’s invention, with its successive improvements, is not known—probably could notnow be understood. It was called “the silent firearm”—so much we learn from fragmentary chronicles of the period; also that it was of so small size that it could be put into the “pocket.” (In hisDictionary of Antiquitiesthe learned Pantin-Gwocx defines “pocket” as, first, “the main temple of the American deity;” second, “a small receptacle worn on the person.” The latter definition is the one, doubtless, that concerns us if the two things are not the same.) Regarding the work of “the silent firearm” we have light in abundance. Indeed, the entire history of the brief but bloody period between its invention and the extinction of the Christian civilization is an unbroken record of its fateful employment.
Of course the immense armies of the time were at once supplied with the new weapon, with results that none had foreseen. Soldiers were thenceforth as formidable to their officers as to their enemies. It was no longer possible to maintain discipline, for no officer dared offend, by punishment or reprimand, one who could fatally retaliate as secretly and securely, in the repose of camp as in the tumult of battle. In civic affairs the deadly device was malignly active. Statesmen in disfavor (and all were hateful to menof contrary politics) fell dead in the forum by means invisible and inaudible. Anarchy, discarding her noisy and imperfectly effective methods, gladly embraced the new and safe one.
In other walks of life matters were no better. Armed with the sinister power of life and death, any evil-minded person (and most of the ancient Caucasians appear to have been evil-minded) could gratify a private revenge or wanton malevolence by slaying whom he would, and nothing cried aloud the lamentable deed.
So horrible was the mortality, so futile all preventive legislation, that society was stricken with a universal panic. Cities were plundered and abandoned; villages without villagers fell to decay; homes were given up to bats and owls, and farms became jungles infested with wild beasts. The people fled to the mountains, the forests, the marshes, concealing themselves from one another in caves and thickets, and dying from privation and exposure and diseases more dreadful than the perils from which they had fled. When every human being distrusted and feared every other human being solitude was esteemed the only good; and solitude spells death. In one generation Americansand Europeans had slunk back into the night of barbarism.
The craze for flying appears to have culminated in the year 369 Before Smith. In that year the aëroplane (a word of unknown derivation) was almost the sole means of travel. These flying-machines were so simple and cheap that one who had not a spare half-hour in which to make one could afford to purchase. The price for a one-man machine was about two dollars—one-tenth of a gooble. Double-seated ones were of course a little more costly. No other kinds were allowed by law, for, as was quaintly explained by a chronicle of the period, “a man has a right to break his own neck, and that of his wife, but not those of his children and friends.” It had been learned by experiment that for transportation of goods and for use in war the aëroplane was without utility. (Of balloons, dirigible and indirigible, we hear nothing after 348 B. S; the price of gas, controlled by a single corporation, made them impossible.)
From extant fragments of Jobblecopper’sHistory of Inventionit appears that in America alone there wereat one time no fewer than ten million aëroplanes in use. In and about the great cities the air was so crowded with them and collisions resulting in falls were so frequent that prudent persons neither ventured to use them nor dared to go out of cover. As a poet of the time expressed it:
With falling fools so thick the sky is filledThat wise men walk abroad but to be killed.Small comfort that the fool, too, dies in falling,For he’d have starved betimes in any calling.The earth is spattered red with their remains:Blood, flesh, bone, gristle—everything but brains.
With falling fools so thick the sky is filledThat wise men walk abroad but to be killed.Small comfort that the fool, too, dies in falling,For he’d have starved betimes in any calling.The earth is spattered red with their remains:Blood, flesh, bone, gristle—everything but brains.
With falling fools so thick the sky is filledThat wise men walk abroad but to be killed.Small comfort that the fool, too, dies in falling,For he’d have starved betimes in any calling.The earth is spattered red with their remains:Blood, flesh, bone, gristle—everything but brains.
With falling fools so thick the sky is filled
That wise men walk abroad but to be killed.
Small comfort that the fool, too, dies in falling,
For he’d have starved betimes in any calling.
The earth is spattered red with their remains:
Blood, flesh, bone, gristle—everything but brains.
The reaction from this disagreeable state of affairs seems to have been brought about by a combination of causes.
First, the fierce animosities engendered by the perils to pedestrians and “motorists”—a word of disputed meaning. So savage did this hostility become that firing at aëroplanes in flight, with the newly invented silent rifle, grew to the character of a national custom. Dimshouck has found authority for the statement that in a single day thirty-one aëronauts fell from the heavens into the streets of Nebraska, the capital of Chocago, victims of popular disfavor; and a writer of that time relates, not altogether lucidly, the finding in a park in Ohio of the bodies of “theWright brothers, each pierced with bullets from hip to shoulder, the ears cut off, and without other marks of identification.”
Second in importance of these adverse conditions was the natural disposition of the ancients to tire of whatever had engaged their enthusiasm—the fickleness that had led to abandonment of the bicycle, of republican government, of baseball, and of respect for women. In the instance of the aëroplane this reaction was probably somewhat hastened by the rifle practice mentioned.
Third, invention of the electric leg. As a means of going from place to place the ancients had from the earliest ages of history relied largely on the wheel. Just how they applied it, not in stationary machinery, as we do ourselves, but as an aid to locomotion, we cannot now hope to know, for all the literature of the subject has perished; but it was evidently a crude and clumsy device, giving a speed of less than two hundred miles (four and a half sikliks) an hour, even on roadways specially provided with rails for its rapid revolution. We know, too, that wheels produced an intolerable jolting of the body, whereby many died of a disease known as “therapeutics.” Indeed,a certain class of persons who probably traveled faster than others came to be called “rough riders,” and for their sufferings were compensated by appointment to the most lucrative offices in the gift of the sovereign. Small wonder that the men of that day hailed the aëroplane with intemperate enthusiasm and used it with insupportable immoderation!
But when the younger Eddy invented that supreme space-conquering device, the electric leg, and within six months perfected it to virtually what it is to-day, the necessity for flight no longer existed. The aëroplane, ending its brief and bloody reign a discredited and discarded toy, was “sent to the scrap-heap,” as one of our brightest and most original modern wits has expressed it. The wheel followed it into oblivion, whither the horse had preceded it, and Civilization lifted her virgin fires as a dawn in Eden, and like Cytherea leading her moonrise troop of nymphs and graces, literally legged it o’er the land!
In the nineteenth century of what, in honor of Christopher Columbum, a mythical hero, the ancients called the “Christianera,” Africa was an unknown land of deserts, jungles, fierce wild beasts, and degraded savages. It is believed that no white man had ever penetrated it to a distance of one league from the coast. All the literature of that time relating to African exploration, conquest, and settlement is now known to be purely imaginative—what the ancients admired as “fiction” and we punish as felony.
Authentic African history begins in the early years of the twentieth century of the “era” mentioned, and its most stupendous events are the first recorded, the record being made, chiefly, by the hand that wrought the work—that of Tudor Rosenfelt, the most illustrious figure of antiquity. Of this astonishing man’s parentage and early life nothing is certainly known: legend is loquacious, but history is silent. There are traditions affirming his connection with a disastrous explosion at Bronco, a city of the Chinese province of Wyo Ming, his subjugation of the usurper Tammano in the American city of N’yorx (now known to have had no existence outside the imagination of the poets) and his conquest of the island of Cubebs; but from all this bushel of fable we get no grain of authenticated fact. The tales appear to bemerely hero-myths, such as belong to the legendary age of every people of the ancient world except the Greeks and Romans. Further than that he was an American Indian nothing can be positively affirmed of Tudor Rosenfelt before the year “1909” of the “Christian [Columbian] era.” In that year we glimpse him disembarking from two ships on the African coast near Bumbassa, and, with one foot in the sea and the other on dry land, swearing through clenched teeth that other forms of life than Man shall be no more. He then strides, unarmed and unattended, into the jungle, and is lost to view for ten years!
Legend and myth now reassert their ancient reign. In that memorable decade, as we know from the ancient author of “Who’s Whoest in Africa,” the most incredible tales were told and believed by those who, knowing the man and his mission, suffered insupportable alternations of hope and despair. It was said that the Dark Continent into which he had vanished was frequently shaken from coast to coast as by the trampling and wrestling of titanic energies in combat and the fall of colossal bulks on the yielding crust of the earth; that mariners in adjacent waters heard recurrent growlsand roars of rage and shouts of triumph—an enormous uproar that smote their ships like a gale from the land and swept them affrighted out to sea; that so loud were these terrible sounds as to be simultaneously audible in the Indian and Atlantic oceans, as was proved by comparing the logs of vessels arriving from both seas at the port of Berlin. As is quaintly related in one of these marine diaries, “The noise was so strenuous that our ears was nigh to busting with the wolume of the sound.” Through all this monstrous opulence of the primitive rhetorical figure known as the Lie we easily discern a nucleus of truth: something uncommon was going on in Africa.
At the close of the memorable decade (circa“1919”) authentic history again appears in the fragmentary work of Antrolius: Rosenfelt walks out of the jungle at Mbongwa on the side of the continent opposite Bumbassa. He is now attended by a caravan of twenty thousand camels and ten thousand native porters, all bearing trophies of the chase. A complete list of these would require more pages than Homer Wheeler Wilcox’s catalogue of ships, but among them were heads of elephants with antlers attached; pelts of the checkered lion andthe spiny hippopotentot, respectively the most ferocious and the most venomous of their species; a skeleton of the missing lynx (Pithecanthropos erectus compilatus); entire bodies of pterodactyls and broncosauruses; a slithy tove mounted on a fine specimen of the weeping wanderoo; the downy electrical whacknasty (Ananias flabbergastor); the carnivorous mastodon; ten specimens of the skinless tiger (Felis decorticata); a saber-toothed python, whose bite produced the weeping sickness; three ribnosed gazzadoodles; a pair of blood-sweating bandicoots; a night-blooming jeewhillikins; three and a half varieties of the crested skynoceros; a purring crocodile, or buzz-saurian; two Stymphalian linnets; a skeleton of the three footed swammigolsis—afterwards catalogued at the Podunk Museum of Defective Types asTalpa unopede noninvento; a hydra from Lerna; the ring-tail mollycoddle and the fawning polecat (Civis nondesiderabilis).
These terrible monsters, which from the dawning of time had ravaged all Africa, baffling every attempt at exploration and settlement, the Exterminator, as he came to be called, had strangled or captured with his bare hands; and the few remaining were so cowed that they gave milk.Indeed, such was their terror of his red right arm that all forsook their evil ways, offered themselves as beasts of burden to the whites that came afterward, and in domestication and servitude sought the security that he denied to their ferocity and power. Within a single generation prosperous colonies of Caucasians sprang up all along the coasts, and the silk hat and pink shirt, immemorial pioneers and promoters of civilization, penetrated the remotest fastnesses, spreading peace and plenty o’er a smiling land!
The later history of this remarkable man is clouded in obscurity. Much of his own account of his exploits, curiously intertangled with those of an earlier hero named Hercules, is extant, but it closes with his re-embarkation for America. Some hold that on returning to his native land he was assailed with opprobrium, loaded with chains, and cast into Chicago; others contend that he was enriched by gifts from the sovereigns of the world, received with acclamation by his grateful countrymen, and even mentioned for the presidency to succeed Samuel Gompers—an honor that he modestly declined on the ground of inexperience and unfitness. Whatever may be the truth of these matters, he doubtlessdid not long suffer affliction nor enjoy prosperity, for in the great catastrophe of the year 254 B. S. the entire continent of North America and the contiguous island of Omaha were swallowed up by the sea. Fortunately his narrative is preserved in the Royal Library of Timbuktu, in which capital of civilization stands his colossal statue of ivory and gold. In the shadow of that renowned memorial I write this imperfect tribute to his worth.