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creatures of wisdom was not that of plants or animals, or even of
crystals; it was that of the earth. Constantly growing as the
planet approached the sun, they as steadily shrank as she
departed to aphelion. This was not growth and decay, but the rise
and fall of an eternal bosom. It is probable, too, that this is
one of the reasons why Atlas neglected the higher kingdoms; they
had learned to grow, but on wrong lines, and it was too late to
endeavour to correct the error.
These gardens were the principal places of working. It was
hardly possible to pass from one place to another without coming
upon one of them, so cunningly were they distributed; and in
every garden would be found, joyful and noble, parties of workers
intent on their beloved task. The passer-by would gladly join one
of such parties, engage in the work for so long as he wished, and
then proceed upon his private business. In these same gardens
too, were salvers and goblets always filled with Zro, and after
toil, refreshment fitted the workers to return to labour.
Now of these workings in the gardens strange tales are told.
It is said that the inhabitants falling to repose were visited in
sleep by incubi and succubi (whatever the nature of these may be,
and I by no means concur in the opinion of Sinistrari), and that
they welcomed such with eagerness. Nay, darker legends tell of
infamous commerce and intercourse with demons foul and malicious,
and pretend that the power of Atlas was devilish, and that the
catastrophe was the judgement of God. These mediaeval fables of
the debased and perverted phallicism miscalled Christianity are
unworthy even to be refuted, founded as they are on hypotheses
contrary to common sense. Nor would they who knew themselves
masters of the earth have deigned to degrade themselves, and
moreover to vitiate their whole work by commerce with inferiors.
If there be any truth whatever in these stories, it will then be
more easily supposable that the Atlanteans aspiring to journey
sunwards to Venus, might invoke the beings of that planet, should
it be possible for them to travel to us. And that this is impos
sible, who can assert? On the theory of the Magicians, power
increases as the sun is approached, the inhabitants of Earth
being more highly infused with the magical force of Our Star than
those of Mars, and they again more than those of great Jupiter,
gloomy and disastrous Saturn and Uranus, or Neptune lost in star-
dreams. Again, the powers of each particular planet may, nay,
must be wholly diverse. So fundamental a condition of existence
as the value of g being vastly various, must not the inhabitants
differ equally in body and in mind? What lives on the minute and
airless Moon can be no inhabitant of what may hide beneath the
flaming envelope of the sun, with its fountains of hydrogen
flaming an hundred thousand miles into the aether. And surely so
wild an ambition as that of Atlas would not have been held by
beings so wise and powerful for so many centuries had they not
either a sure memory of coming from Mars, or some earnest of
their eventual departure to Venus. Man does not persist in the
chimerical for more than a few generations. Alchemy achieved
results so startling and so beneficial to humanity at large--one
need only mention the discovery of zinc, antimony, hydrogen,
opium, gas itself--that the original ideals were changed for
others more limited and more practical--or at least more
immediately realizable.
Nor is this view unsupported by testimony of a sort. "Great
and glorious, rays of our father the Sun", says one of the poets
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