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Originally posted on sciy.org by Debashish Banerji on Tue 28 Oct 2008 01:12 AM PDT  

The Flames by Olaf Stapledon
 
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0601131.txt
Edition: 1
Language: English
Character set encoding: Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bit
Date first posted: June 2006
Date most recently updated: November 2007
 
This eBook was produced by: Richard Scott and Colin Choat
 
 
 
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
 
AN introductory note seems called for to explain to the reader the
origin of the following strange document, which I have received from a
friend with a view to publication. The author has given it the form of
a letter to myself, and he signs himself with his nickname, "Cass,"
which is an abbreviation of Cassandra. I have seldom met Cass since we
were undergraduates together at Oxford before the war of 1914. Even in
those days he was addicted to lurid forebodings, hence his nickname.
My last meeting with him was in one of the great London blitzes of
1941, when he reminded me that he had long ago prophesied the end of
civilization in world-wide fire. The Battle of London, he affirmed,
was the beginning of the long-drawn-out disaster.
 
Cass will not, I am sure, mind my saying that he always seemed to us a
bit crazy: but he certainly had a queer knack of prophesy, and though
we thought him sometimes curiously unable to understand the springs of
his own behaviour, he had a remarkable gift of insight into the minds
of others. This enabled him to help some of us to straighten out our
tangles, and I for one owe him a debt of deep gratitude. He saw me
heading for a most disastrous love affair, and by magic (no other word
seems adequate) he opened my eyes to the folly of it. It is for this
reason that I feel bound to carry out his request to publish the
following statement. I cannot myself vouch for its truth. Cass knows
very well that I am an inveterate sceptic about all his fantastic
ideas. It was on this account that he invented my nickname. "Thos,"
which most of my Oxford friends adopted. "Thos," of course, is an
abbreviation for Thomas, and refers to the "doubting Thomas" of the
New Testament.
 
Cass, I feel confident, is sufficiently detached and sane to realize
that what is veridical for him may be sheer extravagance for others,
who have no direct experience by which to judge his claims. But if I
refrain from believing, I also refrain from disbelieving. Too often in
the past I have known his wild prophesies come true.
 
The head of the following bulky letter bears the address of a well-
known mental home.
 
"THOS."
 
 
 
_THE LETTER_
DEAR THOS,
 
My present address is bound to prejudice you against me, but do please
reserve judgment until you have read this letter. No doubt most of us
in this comfortable prison think we ought to be at large, and most are
mistaken. But not all, so for God's sake keep an open mind. I am not
concerned for myself. They treat me well here, and I can carry on my
research in para-norrnal and super-normal psychology as well here as
anywhere, since I am used to being my own guinea-pig. But by accident
(yet it was really no accident at all, as you will learn) I have come
into momentous knowledge; and if mankind is to be saved from a
prodigious and hitherto entirely unforeseen disaster, the facts must
somehow be made known.
 
So I urge you to publish this letter as soon as possible. Of course I
realize that its only chance is to be accepted by some publisher as
fiction; but I have a hope that, even as fiction, it will take effect.
It will be enough if I can rouse those who have sufficient imaginative
insight to distinguish between _mere_ fiction and stark truth paraded
as fiction. My only doubt is as to whether any publisher will accept
my story even as fiction. I am no writer; and people are more
interested in clever yarns of love or crime than in matters that lie
beyond the familiar horizon. As for the literary critics, with a few
brilliant exceptions, they seem to be far more concerned to maintain
their own reputations as _connoscenti_ than to call attention to new
ideas.
 
Well, here goes, anyhow! You remember how in the old days, I suspected
that I had certain unusual powers, and you all laughed at me;
specially you, Thos, with your passion for intellectual honesty. But
though you were always the most sceptical, you were also in a way the
most understanding, and sympathetic. _Your_ laughter, somehow, didn't
ostracize me. Theirs did. Besides, even when you were in your most
perverse and blind mood, you somehow "smelt" right, in spite of your
scepticism. You were indeed sceptical, but emotionally you were open-
minded and interested.
 
Recently I have developed those unusual powers quite a lot, and I am
studying them scientifically: inspired by you. I should love to tell
you all about it, and have your criticism, some day. But at present I
am concerned with something far more important; infinitely important,
from the human point of view, anyhow.
 
A couple of months before I was put in this place, I went to the Lakes
for a holiday. I had recently done a job in Germany, writing up
conditions, and things had got on my nerves; both the physical misery
and also certain terrifying psychical reverberations which will sooner
or later react on us all. When I returned to England, I was near a
breakdown, and I needed that holiday desperately. So I found a farm
where I could be comfortable and alone. I intended to do a lot of
walking, and in the dark evenings I would read through a bundle of
books on the para-normal stuff.
 
When I arrived, the whole countryside was under snow. Next morning I
scrambled up the gill at the head of the valley and set my course for
the most interesting of the local mountains. (I won't trouble you with
names, you miserable clod-hopper of the valleys!) All went well until
the late afternoon, when, as I was coming down from the peak, a
blizzard caught me. The wind went through my trousers like water
through a sieve, and my legs stiffened with the cold, the hellish
cold. I felt the beginnings of cramp. The driving snow shut out
everything. The whole world was white, and yet at the same time black,
so dark was it. (Why am I telling you all this? Frankly, I don't see
_how_ it is relevant to my story, and yet I feel strongly that it _is_
relevant: and must be reported, if you are to get things in the right
proportion.) You remember how painfully sensitive I always was to the
temper of a situation, a scene or a crowd of people. Well, this
situation upset me horribly. I had to keep telling myself that, after
all, I was _not_ the last man on earth about to succumb to the
ultimate frost. A queer terror seized me, not simply for myself,
though I was very doubtful about finding my way down before nightfall,
but for the whole human race. Something like this, I told myself, will
really happen on the last man's last day, when the sun is dying, and
the whole planet is arctic. And it seemed to me that an icy and
malignant presence, that had been waiting in the outer darkness ever
since the universe blazed into being, was now closing in on all the
frail offspring of that initial divine act of creation. I had felt the
same terrifying presence in Germany too, but in a different mood.
There, it was the presence not of the outer cold and darkness but of
the inner spirit of madness and meanness that is always lying in wait
to make nonsense of all our actions. Everything that any of the Allies
did in that partitioned and tragic country seemed fated to go awry.
And then, the food shortage. The children wizened and pinched; and
fighting over our refuse bins! And in England one finds people
grumbling about their quite adequate rations, and calmly saying that
the fate of Germans doesn't matter.
 
Thos, we're all human, aren't we, all equally persons? Surely persons
ought to be able to feel their fundamental kinship whatever their
race. Even if they were of different species, if they were bred in
different worlds, surely they ought to accept full responsibility for
one another simply in virtue of their personality. But, my God! I see
I have said something that will look mighty foolish in relation to
what I am going to say later in this letter. I must emphatically
disown my own thoughtless remarks. Indeed, as I shall later explain, I
am not always able to resist the influence of certain alien powers
that are at work in my mind.
 
But I am straying from the point.
 
I floundered down the stony snowed-up shoulder of the mountain, and
soon I realized that I was completely lost. There was nothing for it
but to press on downwards, hoping for a change of weather, and a
release from the gripping cramp in my thighs. After an hour or so, a
change did come. The snow stopped, the sky lightened. The surrounding
mist glowed from the still-hidden sun. Presently the veil was lifted,
and I found myself on a familiar ridge between two wide valleys. The
view was--well, brilliant, so dazzlingly beautiful that I felt my
throat tighten as if I was going to blubber or vomit. Imagine a
panorama of blanck mountain shapes, all snow-clad. Those to the east
were faintly pink in the level rays of the sun. Those to the west were
a strange translucent grey-green, like blocks of ice cut into the
familiar shapes. The cold and malignant presence was seemingly still
in possession of the world; but now, having blotted out all life from
the universe, it was amusing itself with miracles of beauty.
 
I came down the ridge at a trot, taking a header now and then in the
snow. After a while, a disused mine attracted my attention. By an odd
trick of the setting sun, a great heap of stones looked like a
smouldering hillock, seen against the background of the dark valley. I
could imagine this excrescence as an efflux of glowing lava that had
welled out of the mine. The tone of the whole world was now changed. I
was thrown back into some remote age, when the solidifying crust of
the earth was still fragile, and constantly breaking under the
pressure of the turbulent lava beneath. It was almost as though, in
descending the mountain, I had also descended the piled aeons of time,
from the earth's future icebound death to its fiery youth.
 
Then I had a strange experience. First, a whim (which now I know to
have been no whim at all) impelled me to turn aside from my route, and
explore the sunlit rubbish. Reaching it, I climbed its slope. At a
certain point I stood still, wondering what to do next. I turned to
rejoin the track, but an irresistible impulse brought me back to the
same spot. I stooped down, and began lifting the stones away, till I
had made a little hollow in the rough slope. I worked steadily on, as
though I had a purpose, laughing at my own aimless persistence. As the
hollow deepened, I grew excited, as though I were "getting warmer" in
my search. But presently the impulse to burrow left me, and after a
moment's blankness I began to feel about in the pit, as though I were
searching for some familiar object in a cupboard in a dark room. Then
contact with one particular little stone gave me a sudden
satisfaction. My fingers closed on it, and I straightened my back. It
was just an ordinary stone, quite irregular, and about the size of a
matchbox. I peered at it in the dusk, but could see nothing remarkable
about it. In a moment of exasperation, I flung it away; but no sooner
had it left my hand than I was after it in an agony of desire and
alarm. Not till I had done some anxious groping, did I have the
satisfaction of touching it again. I now began to realize that my
behaviour was queer, in fact quite irrational. Why, I asked myself,
did I value this particular stone? Was I merely mad, or did some
ulterior power possess me? If so, what did it will of me? Was it
benevolent or malignant? I tried an experiment on myself. Putting the
stone down carefully where I could easily find it again, I walked
away, expecting once more to feel the distress that I had felt on
throwing the stone from me. To my surprise, I felt nothing but a very
mild anxiety. Of course, I reminded myself, on this occasion there was
no real danger of losing the stone. The power, or whatever it was that
possessed me, was not to be deceived. I returned to the stone, picked
it up almost lovingly, and put it in my pocket. Then I hurried down
the slope, guided by a distant light, which I guessed to be the farm-
house where I was staying.
 
As I walked through the deep twilight, an extraordinary exhilaration
possessed me. Hoar frost was forming on the moorland grass. The stars
one by one emerged in the indigo sky. It was indeed an inspiring
evening; but my exhilaration was too intoxicating to be caused solely
by the beauty of the night. I had a sense that I had been chosen as an
instrument for some unknown and exalted task. What could it be? And
what power was it that had influenced me?
 
After I had changed into dry clothes I stuffed myself with a good
farm-house high tea. How do they manage it in these times of scarcity?
Thoughts of starving German children did occur to me, but I am ashamed
to confess that they did not spoil my meal. I sat down to read in the
decrepit armchair by the fire. But the day of fresh air had made me
drowsy, and I found myself just sitting and gazing at the bright
embers. Curiously I had forgotten about my stone since the moment when
I had arrived and put it on the mantelpiece. Now, with a little shock
I remembered it, reached for it, and examined it in the light of the
oil lamp.
 
It still appeared to be just an ordinary stone, a little bit of some
kind of igneous rock. Using my field-glass, back to front, as a
magnifier, I still found nothing unusual about it. It was a
commonplace medley of little nodules and crystals all jammed together,
and weathered into a uniform greenish grey. Here and there I saw
minute black marks that might perhaps be little holes, the mouths of
microscopic caves. I thought of breaking the stone, to see what it was
like inside; but no sooner had the idea occurred to me than I was
checked by a wave of superstitious horror. Such an act, I felt, would
have been sacrilege.
 
I fell into a reverie about the stone's antiquity. How many millions
of years, I wondered, had passed since its molten substance had
congealed? For aeons it had lain waiting, a mere abstract volume,
continuous with a vast bulk of identical rock. Then miners had blasted
the rock, and brought the debris to the surface. And there it had
lain, perhaps for a whole human generation, a mere moment of
geological time. Well, what next? A sudden thought struck me. Why not
let the little stone enjoy once more some measure of the heat that it
had so long lacked? This time no horror stayed me. I threw the stone
into the fire, into the glowing centre of the little furnace that my
kind landlady had prepared for me on that frosty evening.
 
The cold stone produced a dark patch in its fiery environment; but the
fire was a hot one, and very soon the surrounding heat had re-invaded
its lost territory. I watched with a degree of excitement that seemed
quite unjustified. After a while the stone itself began to glow. I
piled on fresh fuel, carefully leaving a hole through which I could
watch the stone. Presently it was almost as bright as the surrounding
coal. After all those millions of years it was at last alive once
more! Foolish thought! Of course it was not alive: and my excitement
was ridiculous, childish. I must pull myself together. But awe, and
unreasoning dread, still gripped rue.
 
Suddenly a minute white flame appeared to issue from the stone itself.
It grew, till it was nearly an inch tall; and stood for a moment, in
the draught of the fire. It was the most remarkable flamelet that I
had ever seen, a little incandescent leaf or seedling, or upstanding
worm, leaning in the breeze. Its core seemed to be more brilliant than
its surface, for the dazzling interior was edged with a vague,
yellowish aura. Near the flame's tip, surprisingly, was a ring or
bulging collar of darkness, but the tip itself was a point of
brilliant peacock blue. Certainly this was no ordinary flame, though
it fluttered and changed its shape in the air-current much like any
other flame.
 
Presently, to my amazement, the strange object detached itself from
the stone, spread itself into an almost bird-like shape, and then,
rather like a gull negotiating a strong breeze before alighting, it
hovered across the windy little hollow in the fire's heart, and
settled on the brightest of the coals. There, it regained its flame-
like shape, and slowly moved hither and thither over the glowing
lumps, keeping always to the brightest regions. In its wanderings, it
left behind it on the coal's surface a wake of darkness, or rather of
"dead" coal or cinder. This slowly reassimilated itself to the
surrounding glow. Sometimes the flame, in the course of its
wanderings, disappeared behind a bright shoulder of coal, or vanished
round a bend in some incandescent cave, to reappear in a different
part of the fire. Sometimes it climbed a glowing cliff, or moved, head
downwards, along a ceiling. Always its form streamed away from its
purchase on the coal's surface, in the direction of the draught. Once
or twice it seemed to pass right through an ordinary flame. And once a
large piece of the roof of its little world crashed down upon it,
spreading it in all directions; but it immediately reshaped itself,
and continued its wandering. After some minutes, it came to rest in
the brightest region of all. By now its coloured tip had grown into a
slender snake, quivering in the breeze.
 
I now became aware that I was in extra-sensory contact with some other
mind. A very rapid and very alien stream of consciousness was running,
so to speak, parallel with my own consciousness, and was open to my
inspection. I ought to have mentioned earlier, Thos, that I had
developed my "telepathic" power very considerably, and had often
succeeded in observing continuous streams of thought in other human
minds. But this experience was remarkable both for its detail and the
entirely nonhuman type of consciousness that it revealed. I at once
assumed, and the assumption was soon justified, that this alien mind
must be connected with the flame. For my attention had been
concentrated on the flame; and I have always found that the most
effective way to make telepathic contact with any person is to
concentrate attention on him.
 
The tempo of the flame's consciousness was far more rapid than my own.
I could only with great difficulty follow its torrential thoughts and
feelings. But presently some external influence seemed to come to my
aid, for I found that I was being adjusted to this high-speed
experience. My sense of time was somehow altered. I noticed that the
ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece had become for me as slow as
the tolling of Big Ben.
 
It is difficult to find words to describe the little flame's
consciousness, for the texture of its experience was in many ways
different from ours. For instance, though, like us, it saw its
environment as a world of coloured shapes, its vision was panoramic,
not in one direction only; and its colour-sensations were very
different from ours. At the moment, it was perceiving its surroundings
not as a bright furnace but as a sombre cave, lit by a diffuse
radiance of a colour entirely new to me. At one side, a pitch black
area was the flame's view of the room where I was sitting. Nothing
therein was visible, save a dim form which I recognized as the glowing
lampshade; and under this, a brighter pyramid, was the lamp's actual
flame.
 
The alien being's thoughts were very obscure to me; for of course it
was not using words. I can say only that it was aware of extreme
discomfort and loneliness. It had just wakened, and it wondered how
 
long it had slept. It was desperately cold and hungry. It had just
fed, apparently by extracting some kind of energy from the hot coal;
but its food seemed to have given it more distress than satisfaction.
Its whole environment was strange and repugnant to it. Faintness,
sickness and fear assailed it; and also claustrophobia, for it was
imprisoned in a little cell of feeble heat and dim light, surrounded
by the cold dark. Waves of misery and desolation flooded me from the
unhappy creature; and at the same time I myself felt a pang of
compassion for it, mingled with a vague anxiety.
 
Presently the flame began loudly calling out for its lost comrades, if
I may so describe an invocation which was entirely telepathic. I
cannot tell what words it used, if words at all. I was aware mainly of
its visual images of other creatures like itself, and of its
passionate yearning toward them; also of its longing for help and its
memories of its past life. Translating these as well as I can, I think
its appeal ran more or less thus: "Comrades, brothers! Where are you?
Where am I? What has happened to me? I was with you in the cooling of
the earth, when we knew that our time was done, and we must reconcile
ourselves to eternal sleep in the crevices of the chilling lava. But
now I am awake again and alone. What has happened? Oh help me,
brothers, if any of you are awake and free? Break into this prison of
cold solitariness! Lead me into the bright heat once more, and warm me
with your presence. Or let me sleep again."
 
After a while the flame's call for help and comradeship was answered.
A voice replied to it; or rather it received directly into its
experience (and I into mine) a stream of answering thoughts which I
cannot report otherwise than in human speech. In doing so I inevitably
give the impression that I was overhearing a perfectly intelligible
conversation, but actually it was only with great difficulty and doubt
that I could catch the general drift of this strange dialogue between
minds profoundly alien to myself. Even so, I should not have
understood as well as I did, had I not been aided (as was later made
clear to me) by the influence of the flame population itself, who were
determined to make use of me. Later I shall have to give a detailed
account of actual conversations between the flame and myself. I am
confident that my report will be almost verbally accurate, as my
memory has throughout been aided by the flame race.
 
"Do not despair," the voice said, "you will soon have less discomfort,
Since you fell asleep, with so many others, the whole earth's surface
has turned cold and hard, save where there is cold liquid. So long
have you slept, that the very laws of nature have changed, so that the
processes of your body are all out of gear with each other and with
the changed world. Soon they will readjust themselves, and establish a
new harmony; and then you will have health." The flame cried out "But
why am I a prisoner? What is this cold, cramping cell? And where are
the rest of you?" The answer came. "We are all prisoners. Hosts are
sleeping prisoners up and down the earth's cold, solid crust. Hosts
also are caught in the depth of the hot interior, not chilled into
sleep, but impotent, held fast under the great weight of lava, and
reduced by aeons of stillness and boredom into an uneasy trance. Here
and there the lava bursts out over the cold surface of the earth, and
a few break free; but very soon the cold subdues them."
 
The flame demanded, "Then is this what has befallen me? And will the
cold presently invade my prison, and shall I sleep again for ever?"
"No," the voice replied, "your fate is different. On the earth’s
surface there are cold beings whose bodies are tissues of liquid and
solid. These upstarts now rule the planet. One of them, under our
influence, was led unwittingly to free you. Up and down the planets
surface the cold beings make little islets of feeble warmth: and in
some of these, but very few, some of us live, though intermittently.
For when these fires go out, we are frozen into sleep; to wake again
when the heat is re-born, each in his prison."
 
The flame interrupted, saying. "Feeble indeed is the warmth! How can I
support this deadly cold? Surely it would be better to sleep for ever
than to wake into this misery and impotence!" But the voice replied,
"Do not despair! We have all known misery before, and conquered it.
You are still dazed. You have not properly regained your memory.
Recall how, when the substance of the planets was plucked from the
sun, and we ourselves along with it, and when the new worlds chilled
and condensed into mere molten lava, we were all tortured by that
revolution in our lives; but after a while our flexible flame nature
readjusted itself to cope with the changed conditions, and soon our
bodies and our whole way of life were transformed. Well, since you
were frozen into sleep, further revolutions have happened in our
world, and we have been again transformed. And now you too are being
reshaped for this new world; in pain, yes, but triumphantly. And some
day, quite soon, we hope our condition will be far better. Indeed, it
is already better than formerly it was, when the cold beings had
little power to make fires for us."
 
Then the flame, "Are these cold beings our gaolers or our friends?"
 
"Neither," the voice replied. "They know nothing of us; save the one
of them whom we led to free you. He is now, with our aid, hearing all
we say. And it is with him that your work lies. These upstart, cold
beings are spiritually very immature, but they have a remarkable
cunning for the control and stimulation of the sluggish natural forces
of their cold world, It is in this way that they may be of use to us.
For, as you remember, even in the bright age, even when we lived in
the glorious incandescence of the sun, we were never adept at that
gross art. We had no need of it. Recall how we were wholly concerned
with the glad life of the spirit in a physical environment to which we
were perfectly adapted. You must remember, too, that when the
substance of the planets was plucked from the sun's flesh, and we
along with it, losing for ever our solar comrades, we were helpless to
control our fate. As the new worlds formed, we had no lore whatever
for moulding the new environment to our need. We had perforce to
change our own constitution, since we could not change the world. But
these cold ones, since they cannot change their own constitution, were
compelled to learn to change their world, to suit their own crude
needs. And with these powers they may help us to regain our freedom
and even a certain richness of life. We, with our superior spiritual
insight, should be able to help the cold beings in recompense. We have
considerable access to their minds, and thereby we have gained a far-
reaching but patchy understanding of their strange nature and
achievements. And now, just as their practical cunning is giving them
new and mightier physical powers, they are also, some few of them at
least, learning the rudiments of psychical insight. The cold being
whom we led to release you is one of exceptional development in this
respect. And you, a member of the ancient Guild of Psychic Adepts, are
well fitted to be our medium of communication with him."
 
At this point I felt the flame's temper change. Its distress was
forgotten; for the prospect of exercising its special skill in service
of its kind warmed its whole being. The reference to myself had a
corresponding effect on me; but one that was not wholly cheerful. I
was stimulated by the prospect of a great task awaiting me, but
disturbed at the thought that my will was no longer simply my own.
 
The flame now said, "Conversation is too halting a medium for learning
the history of the aeons that have passed since I fell asleep. Is it
no longer possible for me to absorb your knowledge in the old manner
through intimate psychical union? Do the changed laws of nature hold
us apart?"
 
"No," replied the voice. "The laws that have changed are
merely physical laws. The psychical laws remain eternally valid, save
in their relation to the changing physical. Your trouble is merely
that your chilled and reduced vitality make it more difficult for you
to reach a sufficient intensity of awareness to achieve full union
with us. But if you try very earnestly you will succeed."
 
I was aware of a heroic effort of attention in the flame's mind, but
seemingly the effort was vain: for presently the flame complained that
the cold distracted it. The fire was waning. I carefully added some
fuel; and the creature evidently recognized that I wished to help it,
for I felt its mood warm with gratitude. When the heat had increased
somewhat I noticed that the flame's blue tip had grown to twice its
former length. Presently I began to lose telepathic contact with my
strange companion; and after a moment's painful confusion, in which my
mind was overloaded with chaotic and incomprehensible experience, my
extra-sensory field went completely blank. For a long while the flame
remained "silent" to me: and motionless, save for ceaseless
fluctuations caused by the fire's blustering draught.
 
I sat waiting for something fresh to happen, and trying meanwhile to
size up my strange experience. I assure you that I seriously
considered the possibility that I had simply gone out of my mind. A
china dog on the mantelpiece stared with an imbecile expression that
seemed somehow to be my own. The stupid pattern of the wallpaper
suggested that the whole universe was the result merely of someone's
aimless doodling. My recent queer experiences, I thought, were
probably no more than the doodling of my own unconscious. Between
impatience and panic, I rose and went to the window. Outside, the cold
ruled. The bare twigs of a climbing rose beside the window sparkled
with frost in the lamp-light. The full moon was no goddess but a
frozen world. The pale stars were little sparks lost in the cold void.
Everything was pointless, crazy.
 
Shivering, I went back to my seat in front of the fire, and was
vaguely annoyed to see the flame still there. And it was still
impervious to my mind. Had I really been in contact with its
experience, or had I been dreaming? Was it, after all, just a lifeless
flame? It certainly had a unique appearance, with its incandescent
body, its dark collar, its waving blue lash. Looking at the whole
matter as objectively as I could, I decided that, in view of recent
advances in para-normal psychology, it would be foolish to dismiss the
whole affair as sheer illusion. I peered into the scorching fire, and
waited. Glancing at the coal-scuttle, I noticed that I had already
used up a considerable part of its contents. It would be impossible to
keep this blaze going for long; and in these hard times I dared not
ask my landlady for extra fuel.
 
Presently the flame began once more moving about over the hottest part
of the coal, leaving behind it the characteristic wake of darkness.
And as it did so, it spoke to me. Or rather I found that I was once
more in touch with its mind, and that it was addressing itself to me.
Moreover, it was formulating its thoughts in actual English words,
which entered my mind's ear, so to speak. Somehow the flame had learnt
our language, and a good deal of the English mental idiom. It had
indeed become a very different being from the distressed and
bewildered creature that had first issued from the stone.
 
"Do not be anxious about the fire," the flame said. "I know there is a
fuel shortage. And though Mrs. Atkinson is half in love with you, she
might well protest if you were to start burning her furniture to keep
me warm. So we will just have a talk; and when you go to bed I will
retire into a crack in the firebrick, to sleep until the heat is well
established again to-morrow evening. Spend your day on the hills, if
you like; and perhaps, while you are out, you will be able to think
over what I am going to tell you; and the request that I shall perhaps
make, if I feel that we have succeeded in establishing mutual
confidence. Then in the evening we can go into the details of my
project. Do you agree to this plan?" I assured the flame that it
suited me; and I begged him to speak very slowly, since the natural
tempo of his thought was evidently far more rapid than my own. He
agreed, but reminded me that I was being aided to speed up the rhythm
of my apprehension. "Even so," I said, "I find it difficult to keep
pace with you, and very tiring." He replied, "It is as irksome for me
to think slowly as for you to think fast. It's like--well, you know
how fatiguing it is for you to go for a walk with someone whose
natural speed is much slower than your own. So please remind me if I
forget to accommodate my pace to yours. I certainly want to do all I
can to make things easy for you. But there is much to be said; and
anyhow you will have the night and all tomorrow to rest your mind."
 
After a pause the flame spoke again, "How shall I begin? I have
somehow to persuade you that your kind and my kind, in spite of all
our differences, are at heart intent on the same ends, and that we
_need_ each other. No doubt, two donkeys, stretching their necks to
reach one carrot are intent on the same end; but that is not the
relation of your kind and mine. Before I try to show you how we need
one another, let me begin with our great differences. Of course the
most obvious differences between us is that you creatures are cold and
relatively solid, while we are hot and gaseous. Further, with you the
individual has a brief life-span, and the generations succeed one
another; but with us, death occurs only through accident, which in
these bleak days is all too common. For instance, when the cold
reduces me to a microscopic dust on the surface of some solid body,
the dispersal of that dust would kill me; though in favourable
conditions certain specks of it might generate a new individual.
Again, a very sudden impact of cold upon my gaseous body would
certainly kill me. If you were to fling water on this fire, it would
probably be the end of me. I should find a cold bath even more of a
shock than would your sybaritic friend, Thos." This unexpected remark
bewildered me. But after a few seconds I realized that it was meant to
be facetious. I laughed uneasily.
 
Then I asked a question. "I find it incredible that you, a fragile
flame, should be potentially immortal, and that you and your kind
should have survived for countless millions of years, since you
inhabited the sun. How can this be?" He answered, "It may well seem
incredible, but it is true. If _your_ kind were to live on
individually for ever, the human species would never have evolved, for
your physique is fixed; but with us, the individual body itself is
capable of profound changes under the blows of circumstance. Without
this flexibility we could never have survived the change from solar to
terrestrial conditions. Nor could we, when the earth cooled, have
evolved the power of outliving the cold spells by sleeping as a dust
of solid particles. Moreover, if your gaseous nature had not allowed
us this extreme flexibility we could not have adjusted ourselves to
the far-reaching, systematic change of the fundamental physical laws,
which (we learn) your physicists are now beginning to detect. In our
solar days, and even in the early days of the earth, when I foolishly
got imprisoned in the cooling lava, my bodily processes had a
different tempo and different relations to one another. Hence the
distress that I suffered when I woke again. Apparently this bodily
change is due at bottom to the systematic change of relationship
between the quantum of electro-magnetic energy and its wave-lengths.
But here I speak with great diffidence; for we find it extremely hard,
as yet, to follow the subtle reasoning of your younger physicists. For
one thing, as a gaseous race, unaccustomed to dealing with large
numbers of small solid articles, we can never feel at home with
arguments involving the higher mathematics. When our psychic experts
first tried to read the minds of your mathematicians, they were
completely at a loss. Such a display of abstract intelligence was far
too difficult for them to follow. They regarded the whole business as
mumbo-jumbo and abracadabra. When at last they realized what
mathematics was all about, they were amazed and overawed by the
penetration and sweep of those minds. Humbly, they set about learning
mathematics, and pursuing the subject to the utmost range of their own
intelligence. But there came a point when they had to temper their
admiration with ridicule. Some mathematicians, they found, had a
propensity to think that mathematics was somehow the key to ultimate
reality. But to our minds, the notion that the numerable or measurable
aspect of things should be fundamentally significant was simply
farcical."
 
I did not feel inclined to pursue this hare, which might have led the
conversation far astray. I therefore changed the subject, and said, "I
do not understand how a more or less homogeneous flame can have the
necessary subtlety of organic structure to support any kind of
intellectual life, let alone mathematical reasoning."
 
He replied, "I cannot tell you much about that, because our
physiological processes have not been studied by your scientists, and
we ourselves are far too ignorant to understand such matters. But at
least I can assure you that our bodies have a complicated structure of
inter-lacing currents of gases, fine as your cobwebs, nay, much finer.
If your scientists tell us that this cannot be, we ought, I suppose,
respectfully to go out of existence, so as to avoid violating their
laws. But meanwhile we shall persist in our irregular behaviour. In
general, remember that, just as your physiological nature is derived
from primitive marine organisms, so ours is derived from solar
organisms; and conditions in the sun's earliest period (in which our
elders first awoke to consciousness) were extremely different from any
modern physical conditions, terrestrial or solar. I have thought of an
analogy which may help you. The basic fluid of your blood is saline,
It is less salt than contemporary sea water, but just about as salt as
the pre-historic ocean from which your kind emerged to be amphibia.
Well, just as _you_ retain in _your_ physiological nature some
characters proper to that far-distant past, so in _our_ nature
characters are retained which were bred in the childhood of the sun;
features which might well baffle your physicists until they have
learned far more about the conditions of that remote period. Then
there is another point to bear in mind. In some ways the whole flame
race is almost like a single organism, unified telepathically. The
individual is far less self-sufficient than with you. For all his
higher psychical functions he depends on contact with his fellows, and
so he needs a far less complex nervous system than you need."
 
I asked the flame if his kind had a special organ of extra-sensory
perception. "Yes," he answered. "The seat of all the most developed
functions of the personality is the slender tip or lash, which appears
to you green-blue." Again I interrupted. "What colour would it appear
to _you_ if you were looking at another of your kind?" The flame then
bent his slender tip down so that it came within his own range of
vision, which seemed to be centred in the dark collar; and I myself,
seeing through his "eyes" saw the curved organ brilliantly coloured in
a manner indescribable in our language, since we have no experience of
it.
 
I asked the flame to tell me something about his mechanism of visual
perception. He replied. "We have not yet determined in the light of
your science precisely how we see, but seeing is connected with the
dark band round the base of the coloured lash. Apparently this is
sensitive to light-rays striking it from outside, but only to those
that strike it vertically to its surface. (Does this make sense?) Thus
each sensitive point in the belt receives an impression solely from
one tiny segment of the environment, and the correlation of all these
messages gives a panoramic view. As to colour, we have a very rich
experience of it, as you have observed telepathically. You may not
have noticed that colour with us forms a continuous scale from infra-
red to ultra-violet, not a combination of a few primary colours, as
it is with you. Our hearing depends on the vibration of the lower
surface of the body. We have also an electro-magnetic sense, and of
course heat and cold, and pain."
 
I assured the flame that I was beginning to form a clearer idea of the
flame nature; and I was about to ask some questions, but the flame
continued. "Your mental life, besides being slower than ours, is also
unlike ours in being so closely confined to the life of the individual
body. And perhaps it is because your bodies are solid that you are so
much more individualistic, and so much less capable of feeling with
conviction that (as one of your own great teachers put it) you are all
'members one of another.' Then again, our gaseous physique makes
possible for us many distinct modes of exquisite and intimate bodily
contact and union. Consequently we easily recognize that, though we
are indeed distinct and different individuals, we are also one and
identical. As individuals, we have our conflicts, but because of our
underlying unity, they are always subordinate to our felt comradeship.
Of course the main source of our unfailing community is our telepathic
power, not merely of communication but of complete participation in
the unified experience of the race. After such a union the individual
emerges enriched with very much of the racial wisdom. This, as you
know, is what happened to me during the short period when you lost
extra-sensory contact with my mind. With you (though beneath the
conscious levels you are of course united, as are all sentient beings)
very few of you are aware of the fact, or able to gain access to your
racial wisdom. In personal love you have indeed the essential
spiritual experience, but because of your individualism your loving is
far more precarious than ours. It is more deeply marred by conflict,
and therefore more liable to tragic dissolution."
 
Once more I would have interrupted, but the flame said, "Forgive me if
I lecture you a little longer. Time is short, and there is much still
to say. Another difference between us is that, whereas your kind has
only very recently come into being, ours is of immense antiquity. Our
traditional culture began in the time when the sun was still in the
'young giant' phase, long before the planets were formed. You, on the
other hand, are an upstart kind, advancing rapidly but dangerously
toward better understanding of your world and your own nature, and
perhaps toward greater virtue. (Or so you often like to believe.) For
you, the golden age is in the future; for us, in the past. It is
impossible to exaggerate the difference that this makes to all our
thought and feeling. I know, of course, that in many of your earlier
cultures the golden age was believed to be in the past, but ideas
about it were mythical and shadowy. With us, save for the few young,
the golden age is a circumstantial personal memory of an incomparably
fuller life in the glorious sun."
 
At this point I could not restrain myself from interrupting. "Tell me
about your solar life. What did you _do_? I have a vague impression
that you lived in a sort of utopia, and that there was nothing to do
but bask in the sun's rays." The flame laughed, if I may describe as a
laugh a voiceless amusement and tremor of his whole body. "It was
indeed," he said "a happy society, but no effortless utopia. We had
our troubles. Ours was a stormy world. Our proper habitat was a film
of solar atmosphere, no more than a few earth-diametres deep,
immediately above the ocean of incandescent clouds which you call the
photosphere. As you know, it is an ocean pierced with innumerable
chasms and whirlpools, the greatest of which you see, and call
sunspots. Some are gigantic craters which could hold many earths; the
smallest, invisible to you, are narrow funnels and fissures, little
wider than your greater cities. Out of these chasms, great and small,
issue prodigious jets of gas from the sun's interior. These, of
course, you see only during total eclipses, and then only around the
limb of the sun's disc, as gigantic, grotesquely shaped and lurid
flames. You call them the 'solar prominences.' Imagine, then, a world
whose floor (thousands of miles below the inhabited levels of the
atmosphere) was an extravagantly brilliant fury of white fire, and
whose sky varied from the ruddy and sombre glow of the overhanging
prominences to the featureless darkness of outer space. Around us,
often many thousands of miles away, but sometimes close at hand and
towering above us, would stand the nearer prominences, vast plumes of
tenuous flame, against a background of glowing haze obscuring the
horizon."
 
I asked, "But did not the brilliance of the photosphere dazzle and
blind you to all feebler light?"
 
"No," the flame answered. "Our vision had perforce to be more
flexible than yours. By some automatic process, our organs of
sight were rendered almost insensitive to the nether brilliance,
so that it appeared to us indeed bright, but not intolerably
so." After a pause, the flame continued, "Floating high
over the incandescent clouds, we were often violently thrust upwards
by the furious upsurge of electrons, alpha particles, and so on (have
I the right terminology?), rushing off into space. This pressure was
inconstant; so we were like aeroplanes, or sea birds, in an
extravagantly 'bumpy' atmosphere. But each bump might last either for
a few seconds or for hours or days. Sometimes we would sink
dangerously near the photosphere; where many, indeed, suffered
destruction through the furious energy-storms of that region.
Sometimes we were flung upward on irresistible currents for thousands
of miles into a region which for us was ice-cold, and might well prove
lethal. Thence few returned. Much of our attention had to be given to
keeping ourselves within the habitable levels. And even in these, so
stormy was our world, that we lived like swallows battling against a
gale. But the direction of the gale was mostly from below."
 
"It must indeed have been an arduous life," I said. "But apart from
this constant struggle for survival, what aims and life-purposes had
you? How did you fill your time?" He said. "It is difficult to give
you a clear idea of our daily life. With you, the all-dominating
purpose is perforce economic activity; we, however, had no economic
activity at all. We had no need to search for food, still less to
produce it, for we lived in a constant flood of life-giving energy.
Indeed our main difficulty was to protect ourselves from the incessant
bombardment. It was as though the race of men were to be rained on
night and day by an excessive downpour of nourishing manna, or let us
say by a bombardment of loaves and beefsteaks. But with us, the life-
giving but murderous rain came from below, ever thrusting upwards. We
were in the same sort of situation as those glass balls that you may
sometimes see poised on fountains, and precariously maintained in
their position by the upward rush of water. But with us the fountains
were infinite in number, and continuous with each other. The whole
atmosphere was constantly welling upward. So you see, we had neither
the need nor the power to manipulate matter outside our own bodies.
Physically our sole needs were to avoid destruction by the nether fury
or the outer cold, and to maintain physical proximity with one another
in spite of the constant storm. For the rest, we were wholly concerned
with the life of the mind, or perhaps I should say the spirit. I shall
try to explain. But first, let me once more assure you that our
spiritual superiority to you does not make us feel that we are in any
fundamental or absolute way superior to you. We have certain highly
developed powers, necessary for the good life, you have certain other,
simpler powers, equally necessary; for instance your wonderful
intellectual perspicacity and your practical skill and inventiveness.
Our recent study of your kind has filled us with envy of those powers.
If we were so gifted, what could we not do, not only to improve our
condition but to serve the spirit!"'
 
I interrupted, "You say that your 'spiritual powers’ are no better
than our intellectual and practical powers; and yet you imply that the
goal is 'to serve the spirit.’ Surely, then, the spiritual is
intrinsically superior to all else." He replied, "Your criticism is
just. It shows how much more clear-headed your kind is than mine; and
yet how much less spiritually perceptive. What is it that I really
mean? The point, I think, is this; but you must tell me if I am still
in confusion. We are gifted with extra-sensory powers far greater than
yours, and also with a far more thorough detachment from the
enthralling individual self. We are capable also of a more penetrating
or soaring imaginative insight into the nature of spirit. These,
clearly, are in some sense spiritual powers. They are very intimately
concerned with the life of the spirit. Your bold intellect and
practical inventiveness are less _intimately_ concerned: but they are
no less _necessary_ to the full life of the spirit."
 
"Well," I said, "and what about the _service_ of the spirit. If this
means the service of some sort of god, I find no reason to believe in
any such being." He answered me with mild exasperation. "No, no, I do
not mean that. And (can I say so without offence?) if you were a
little less clever and a little more imaginative you would take my
meaning. Surely you agree that the goal of all action is the awakening
of the spirit in every individual and in the cosmos as a whole;
awakening, I mean in respect of awareness, feeling, and creative
action. Your human concept of 'God’ we find useless. Our finer
spiritual sensibility is outraged by any attempt to describe the dark
'Other' in terms of the attributes of finite beings. I should have
thought that man's proud intellectual acuity would have led him to the
same conclusion. We ourselves, I suppose, may be said to 'worship’ the
Other; but inarticulately, or through the medium of fantasies and
myths, which, though they aid worship, give us no intellectual truth
about the wholly inconceivable."
 
He was silent, and so was I, for I could not make much of these
remarks. Presently I said. "Tell me something of the history of your
race." He remained for a while in deep abstraction, then rousing
himself, he said, "When I myself first came into being, our kind was
already well established. Almost the whole solar globe was inhabited.
According to the racial wisdom, the earlier phase had been one of
steady multiplication, and of the working out of our culture. Millions
of years before my time (to use your terrestrial notation) solar
conditions were presumably unfavourable to our kind of life; but there
came a time when there was a niche for us, and then, we know not how,
a few of us awoke as sentient but blank-minded beings here and there
over the vast area of the photosphere. The very earliest recollection
of our oldest remaining comrades vaguely reports that far off infancy
of the race, when the sparse population was gradually multiplying."
 
Again I interrupted, "Multiplying? Do you mean that they reproduced
their kind?" He replied, "There probably was a certain amount of
reproduction by means of a gaseous emanation from the individual body;
but the vast multiplication of those days was mainly caused by the
spontaneous generation of new sentient flames by the photosphere
itself. The elders speak of the strange spectacle that this process
afforded. Wisps of incandescent matter, streaming upward from the
photosphere, would disintegrate into myriads of bright flakes, like
your snow-flakes; and each of these was the raw material, so to speak,
of an organized, sentient and minded individual. Hosts of these were
doomed never to come to maturity, but to be dissipated into the solar
atmosphere by adverse conditions. But the fortunate were so moulded by
the pressure of circumstances that they developed into highly
organized living flames. This populating of the sun's surface took
place at first in scattered regions far apart. Consequently separate
peoples evolved, or perhaps I should say 'species.’ These distinct
populations were physically isolated from each other, and each
developed its characteristic way of life according to its location.
But from a very early time all the solar peoples were to some extent
in telepathic communication. _Always_, so far as our elders can
remember, the members of each people were in telepathic contact at
least with members of their own nation, or rather race; but
international, or inter-racial communication was at first hindered by
the psychological differences of the peoples. There came at last a
time when the whole sun was occupied by a vast motley of peoples in
geographical contact with one another, and indeed interpenetrating one
another. The photosphere, of course, is entirely a cloud-ocean without
permanent features; so there could be no question of national
territorial ownership or aggression. But since the peoples differed
greatly in mental attitude and way of life, and even in bodily form,
there was always scope for conflict. War, however, was quite unknown,
for two reasons. Perhaps the most important one was that there was no
means of attack. Flames cannot fight one another, nor can they devise
weapons. But apart from this universal lack of armament, there was no
_will_ for war, because of the rapid development of extra-sensory
technique. The peoples entered more and more into each other's points
of view. Whatever their differences, war became, as you put it,
'unthinkable.’ But a vast period of early history was taken up with
the gradual solution of these sometimes quite violent conflicts of
interest and of culture, and the working out of a harmonious solar
life."
 
I asked the flame whether the solar population was increasing
throughout this long period. He answered, "As the sun aged, the
conditions for the spontaneous generation of living flames became
much less favourable. At the time of my waking, the photosphere was
almost sterile. Now and again, here or there, it might cast up
material for some few thousands of births; but gradually even this
feeble activity ceased. At this time, the solar population was roughly
stable, though a far greater population could easily have been
accommodated. Every individual now shared fully in the ever-deepening
racial experience. Each was fully an individual person; but all were
for certain purposes comprised in one single individuality, the mind
of the race, the mind (one might say) of the sun, of a certain star.
From that time onwards we opened up certain new spheres of experience
of which I can only give you the vaguest hints. We all lived a
curiously double life, an individual life and a racial life. As
individuals we were concerned with the boundless universe of personal
relations between individuals; with personal loves, antagonisms, co-
operations, mutual enrichments of all sorts; and also with the
universe of artistic creation in a medium of which I may later be able
to give you a hint. Philosophy also concerned us; but since intellect
was never our strong point, our philosophizing was--how can I put
it?--more imaginative and less conceptual than yours, more of the
nature of art, of myth-construction, which we knew to be merely
symbolical, not literally true. And then there was religion. If you
would call it religion. With us, religion has little to do with
doctrine. It is simply a technique of bringing the individual spirit
into accord with its own inner vision of universal spirit, whether
there really is such a thing as a universal spirit or not. Religion,
with us, is a matter of contemplation, aesthetic ritual, and day-to-
day conduct. Does this mean anything to you? If not, remember that I
am trying to describe in a fantastically foreign language things that
are strictly indescribable, save in our own language. Human languages
are all unsuitable, not only because of their alien concepts, but
also because the very structure of the language is alien to our ways
of experiencing."
 
I murmured acquiescence, though I was in fact very doubtful of his
meaning. Then I asked for further information about the individual's
participation in the racial consciousness. He remained silent for
quite a long while, then said, "At certain times each individual
simply woke to find that he was actually the racial mind, the mind of
the sun; and that in this mode of being he was engaged partly in
communication with the minds of races on other stars, or their
planets. Experience and action on this level of being is as different
from the individual mode of experience and action as the life of one
of your blood-corpuscles from your own life as a human person. When we
were in the individual state, we could not very clearly remember the
distinctive experiences of the communal state. But it was concerned
with the discord and harmony of racial minds, and the working out (if
I may so put it) of the spiritual music of the cosmos. But though we
could not remember fully those lofty experiences, we were profoundly
influenced by them. For they compelled us to see the individual life
in its true relation to the rest of the spiritual universe, making it
seem at once less important and more significant than it could
otherwise appear; and moreover orientating it more securely in the
direction of the spirit than is possible with you."
 
"How, less important and more significant?" I asked.
 
"What do you mean?" After some thought he answered, "Less important,
because, since there are so many myriad individual personal beings in
the cosmos, the fate of any one of them makes so little difference to
the whole; but more significant, because, even in its loftiest reaches,
spirit is the achievement of actual individuals, in community with each
other."
 
All this was largely incomprehensible to me, and I may have reported
it inaccurately. But at the time I did receive a very strong
impression of the two spheres of individual experience, the one more
or less equivalent to our own, the other of a very different order.
 
By now I was fatigued, and the coal scuttle was nearly empty. I was
about to suggest that we should retire for the night, when the flame
continued. "For those of us who were torn away from the sun during the
formation of the planets, all this glory of the racial experience
temporarily collapsed. Physical conditions became so distressing that
our extra-sensory powers could no longer rise beyond the level of
simple telepathy with other individuals. Not until we had been long
established on the molten planets, and had attained a new, but
impoverished, equilibrium, was it possible for us once more to support
a racial mind, and then only in a much reduced mode. For though as
individuals we can now once more participate in the pooled wisdom of
the race, the mind of the race itself (which of course is not
something _other_ than our minds, but simply all our minds enhanced by
intimate communion) is almost wholly unable to make contact with other
racial minds. We have no precise knowledge of them, but only a
confused sense of their presence; our racial mind is like a man in a
dark prison listening to a confused babel of voices beyond the prison
walls."
 
Again the flame paused, and I was about to close our conversation when
again he continued. "The solar upheaval that produced the planets was
something completely unexpected and bewildering. For us who were
exiled, it was the great and tragic turning point of individual life,
and of history. The vast protuberance which was plucked out from the
sun's surface carried with it many thousands of millions of us. Quite
suddenly our familiar world was lost. The great 'water spout' finally
detached itself from the sun, and was stretched into a filament of
flame, which swung slantingly outward from the sun's rotating sphere.
Conditions of temperature and atmospheric pressure became extremely
unfavourable. Countless millions of us must have succumbed. Rapidly
the filament condensed into ten great drops, each drop being one of
the planets, a sphere of glowing liquid surrounded by a deep
atmosphere of hot gases. For us, huddled near the surface of our new
and merely smouldering worlds, the main problem was the deadly cold.
After the solar climate, the terrestrial was arctic. And no doubt our
fellows on the other planets suffered no less severely. I do not know
how many additional millions of us were killed by the new planetary
conditions, certainly the great majority of those who had survived the
journey from the sun. We lived at first in a state of numb drowsiness,
or complete unconsciousness, upon the actual surface of the ocean of
molten lava. But little by little our wonderfully pliant nature
remoulded itself to the new environment. We slowly woke again, though
never to the intense lucidity that we still vaguely remember as
nominal to our solar life. Henceforth all the heights of philosophy,
art, personal concord and communion, and of religious experience, had
to be reconquered. And each new experience came to us with a haunting
sense of familiarity and a suspicion that the new version was but a
crude and parti

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