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THE TOURIST LOST IN MID-OCEAN IS MYSTERIOUSLY INTRODUCED INTO INTERMERE, AND MEETS THE FIRST CITIZEN AND OTHER CHIEF OFFICIALS.

I.

THE MISTLETOE.

The Mistletoe, staunch, trim and buoyant, steamed across the equator under the glare of a midday sun from a fleckless sky, and began to ascend toward the antarctic circle.

Three days later we came in sight of a great bank of fog or mist, which stood like a gray wall of stone across the entire horizon, plunged into it and the sun disappeared—disappeared forever to all except one of the gay and careless crew and passengers.

For days, as was shown by the ship's chronometers, we steamed slowly on our course, surrounded by an inky midnight, instinct with an oppressive and fearsome calm. As we approached the fortieth parallel of south latitude a remarkable change set in. The deathly calm was suddenly broken by the rush of mighty and boisterous winds, sweeping now from one point of the compass, and then suddenly veering to another, churning up the waters and spinning the Mistletoe round and round like a top.

In the midst of the terror and confusion, heightened by the unheeded commands of the officers, a glittering sheeny bolt, like a coruscating column of steel, dropped straight from the zenith, striking the gyrating Mistletoe amidships.

There was a deafening report, the air was filled with serpentine lines of flame, followed simultaneously by the dull explosion of the boilers, the hissing of escaping steam, the groaning of cordage and machinery, the lurching of the vessel as the water poured in apparently from a score of openings, a shuddering vibration of all its parts, and then, amid cries and prayers and imprecations, the wrecked vessel shot like a plummet to the bottom.

I felt myself being dragged down to the immeasurable watery depths, confused with roaring sounds and oppressed with terrors indescribable and horrible. The descent seemed miles and miles. Then I felt myself slowly rising toward the surface, followed by legions of submarine monsters of grotesque shapes and terrifying aspects.

With accelerated motion I approached the surface and, shooting like a cork above the now calm sea, fortunately fell upon a piece of floating wreckage. Looking upward as I lay upon it, I saw the blue sky and the brilliant stars far overhead. The fierce winds and inky darkness and blackness of the night were disappearing beyond the northeastern horizon.

I tried to concentrate my scattered thoughts and piece out the awful catastrophe that had befallen the ship and my companions, but the effort was too great a strain and I ceased to think—perhaps I ceased to exist.

I seemed to be passing through a vague twilight of sentient existence. Thought was rudimentary with me, if, indeed, there were any thoughts. They were mere sensations, perhaps, or impressions imperfectly shaped, but I remember them now as being so delightful, that I prayed, in a feeble way, that I might never be awakened from them. And then gradually the senses of sight, hearing, and full physical and mental existence returned to me.

At length I was able to determine that I lay on something like a hammock on the deck of a smoothly gliding vessel. Turning my head first to the right and then to the left, I imagined that I was indeed in Paradise, only the reality before me was so infinitely more beautiful than the most vivid poetic descriptions I had ever read of the longed for heaven of endless peace and happiness. But this could not be the Paradise of the disembodied souls, for I realized I was there in all my physical personal being.

I was sailing through a smooth, shimmering sea, thickly studded with matchlessly beautiful islands. They lay in charming profusion and picturesque irregularity of contour on the right and the left, each a distinct type of beauty and perfection. I could make out houses and gardens and farms and people on each of them.

Looking to the right I saw what appeared to be a mainland with majestic and softly modulated mountains and broad valleys, running from the distance down to the sands of the seashore. Above the mountains shone the unobscured sun, but not the burning orb I had known of old in the lower latitudes. It kissed me with a tenderness that was entrancing, filling my weakened frame with new life.

The breezes toyed with my tangled and unkempt locks, fanned my brow and whispered such things to me as did the zephyrs when I stood upon the threshold of guileless boyhood.

Finally I was able to frame a consecutive thought, in the interrogative form, and it was this:

"Where am I? Is this the Heaven my mother taught me to seek?"

I had as yet seen no one aboard the ship, or whatever it was, although I had heard the hum of what seemed to be conversation from some point beyond the line of vision. Again I silently repeated my mental question.

As if in response to my unuttered query, a being, or a man, of striking and pleasing appearance came to my side and laying his hand softly on my forehead, addressed me in a tongue at once familiar but wholly unknown, as paradoxical as that may sound.

I remained silent and he again addressed me.

I did not feel disconcerted or awed by his appearance and said: "I speak French and German imperfectly; English with some fluency."

His rejoinder was in English: "You speak English, but are not an Englishman except by partial descent. You are an American. Not a native of the eastern portion of the continent, but from west of the range of mountains which separate the Atlantic seaboard from the great central valley of the continent. You are from the tributary Ohio valley, and are, therefore, better fitted to comprehend what you will be permitted to see and hear, than the average habitant of the eastern seashore, especially of its great cities."

You can possibly imagine, in a faint way, my unbounded surprise to be thus addressed by one who was more than a stranger to me.

"You asked yourself two questions. I will answer the first: You are in Intermere."

"And where is Intermere?"

"It lies at your feet and expands on every hand about you. Let that suffice.

"No, this is not the Heaven to which your mother taught you to aspire. It is a part of your own planet, inhabited by beings sprung from the same parent stock as yourself, but differing from all other nations and peoples; a people who are many steps nearer to the higher and better life, and is, by comparison, the Paradise or Eden that masks the gateway of the true Heaven, in a sphere beyond in the great Universe."

He motioned to some one, and two persons appeared with refreshments.

"Partake," he said, "and renew your exhausted physical and mental powers."

The proffered refreshments and cordials seemed to be the acme of the gustatorial dreams of my former life: the suggestion of other things, yet unlike them. After I had partaken, a new life thrilled every nerve and fibre of my physical being and pulsated through every mental faculty.

I arose from my recumbent position and was conducted forward upon the softly carpeted deck and presented to a score of others who received me with every token of marked respect, unkempt and bedraggled as I was. They were men of unusual physique, a composite of the highest types of the human race I had ever seen or read of. Each possessed a distinctive mien and personality, as individuals, yet presenting a harmonious whole, taken collectively.

Xamas, as I afterward learned to know him, when I saw him presiding as First Citizen over this wonderful people, said to his fellows:

"This is Giles Henry Anderton, a citizen of the interior of the great Republic of North America. I have fathomed him and know that he is worthy our respect and considerate treatment. He has dreamed longingly of the things whereof we know, and which he has never even recognized as a possibility. It will be our mission to show him the grand possibilities of human life before we restore him to his kindred and friends.

"Not understanding that Nature had lain all treasures worth possessing in lavish profusion at his feet in his own land, and guided by merely commercial instincts, he sought for paltry gold in distant lands and seas, and, escaping the vortex of death, has been placed in our hands for some great purpose. He will be addressed in the English tongue until it is determined whether he is to be admitted to ours."

This was spoken in a language absolutely unknown to me, and not a word of which I was capable of framing, and yet I understood it as fully as though spoken in English. So great was my amazement that he should know my nativity, my name, my hopes, my ambitions and my purposes, I could scarcely reply to the salutations extended to me.

"Do not be surprised," said Xamas, reading my inmost thoughts, "at what I say, nor need you ask how I became possessed of your history. All that will be made plain to you hereafter."

Turning to one who stood near, he said: "Conduct Mr. Anderton to my apartments and see that he has proper 'tendance and is supplied with suitable clothing."

With that I was conducted below to a charming suite of apartments lying amidships, bathed, was massaged and shaven by an attendant, as lofty of mien as Xamas himself, and furnished with clothing suitable to the company with which I was to mingle, not more unlike the workmanship of my American tailor than his would be unlike the handiwork of his French, English or German fellow-craftsmen, and yet so unlike all of them as to fit perfectly into the ensemble of the habiliments of my new friends.

The ship, or Merocar, as I subsequently learned was its general designation, was a marvellous affair, unlike any water craft I had ever seen. Its length was fully one hundred and fifty feet, and its greatest breadth thirty, gently sloping both to stem and stern, where it rounded in perfect curves. The upper, or proper deck, extended over all. The lower deck was a succession of suites and apartments, richly but artistically furnished, opening from either side into a wide and roomy aisle. All the work was so light, both the woods, and the metals, that it seemed fragile and unsafe, but its great strength was shown by the fact that none of its parts yielded to the weight or pressure upon it.

There was not a mast, a spar nor a sail on board. The light and richly wrought hammocks swung on lithe and polished frames, apparently intended to sustain the weight of fifty pounds, yet capable of sustaining five or ten times as much. They were unprotected by awnings. Sunlight rather than shade was apparently the desideratum.

In some unaccountable way the long and lithe Merocar was propelled at any desired rate of speed, and was turned, as on a pivot, at the will of the man who acted as captain, pilot and engineer. There was no steam, no furnace belching black volumes of smoke, no whirr of machinery, no strain or creaking as the craft shot, sometimes swiftly, sometimes slowly, through the rippling water. Even motion was not perceptible to the physical senses.

The captain-pilot-engineer did not tug at a wheel in his railed-in apartment, elevated a few feet above the center of the upper deck. He placed his hand upon the table before him and it shot forward with incredible speed; he touched another point and it stood still, without jar or vibration. A movement of the hand, and the prow of the Merocar swept gracefully from north to east in less than its length, to pass between two beautiful islets or round some sharp promontory. Hundreds of other Merocars, differing in size and form, were visible.

How they were propelled was so incomprehensible to me that I attributed it to supernatural agencies. I learned that it was a simpler process than the utilization of oars, or sails, or steam, which the progenitors of these mariners had abandoned before the days of Tyre and Sidon and Memphis and Thebes.

Rejoining the company, I endeavored to carry on a conversation with them, but I fear I made little headway, so deeply was I absorbed in the wonderful panorama that lay before me.

Raising my eyes from the shimmering, island-studded and beauty-bestrewn sea to the blue above, I uttered an ejaculation of surprise at what I beheld. There I saw "the airy navies" of which Tennyson had written under the spell of an inspiration which must have been wafted from this unknown land, but marred by the hostile environments of his own.

Every quarter of the heavens disclosed graceful barques sailing hither and thither, passing and repassing each other, gathering in groups, filled with people, many of them holding mute communications with my companions, as though friend were talking with friend, without utterance, sign or gesture.

"I am beyond the confines of earth," I said to Xamas. "This is a higher and spiritual sphere, and I am not Giles Henry Anderton, but his disembodied spirit."

"You are at fault. You are within the mundane sphere, but with a people infinitely in advance of yours—a people who, by evolutionary processes, have unlocked a large proportion of the secrets of Nature and the Universe, and turned them to ennobling ends, not to selfish purposes. These facts will come to you in time, and you will be convinced.

"See," he continued, "the city is slowly coming into view across the horizon."

My glance followed to the point indicated, and I saw a city of ineffable magnificence, softly rising from the bosom of the deep, as though obedient to the wand of a master magician.

Soon I could see that it swept around the broad semicircle of the bay, many miles in extent and artistically perfect in contour, the land rising gently from the strand into a grand and massive elevation, cut into great squares and circles, and crowned with noble buildings, great and small, in a style of architecture which embraced all the beauties and none of the blemishes of European and American creations. It was the full and perfect flower of the crude buds of other lands.

For a time my companions remained silent as I contemplated the entrancing scene and drank in its beauties. Then Xamas interrupted me:

"Yesterday the allied armies of the Western Nations entered the capital of China, and are now bivouacked in the Forbidden City, from which the Empress, Emperor and Court have fled."

I shook my head incredulously:

"When I sailed from New York six months ago there was no thought of war between any of the Western Nations and the Chinese Empire. Russia may have invaded one of its provinces by way of reprisal. That is a possibility."

"Great events focus and transpire within six months. What I tell you is true. The hostile standards of England, Russia, Germany, France, Japan, and your own Republic, which has departed from its wise traditions, flout the Yellow Dragon in the precincts of his own citadel and temple. Is not this true, Maros?" turning to one who looked the prophet and seer.

"Aye, indeed, and the best loved of this man's kindred fell in the assault. He will know if I am permitted to name him."

"Shall he be permitted?"

"Freely."

"Albert Marshall, a sergeant of Marines, your playmate and foster brother, the next beloved of your mother, the son of her deceased sister; your mother reared him as her own son, and she knows, as yet, nothing of the disaster which has befallen you nor the loss of her foster son. He was of your own age, and like you tall, athletic and vigorous, with fair hair and complexion and blue eyes, the very counterpart of yourself—a man fit for a higher destiny than butchery."

"O Albert! O unhappy, stricken mother!" I cried in agony.

"Revered sir, I believe your words. They are absolutely convincing. Tell me how you came into possession of this strange information."

"In time; but be patient. Lament not for the dead; sorrow not for the living. We must presently debark. Come to my garden tomorrow. It lies within the shadow of the Temple of Thought, Memory and Hope. My home is unpretentious, but you will be welcome. There is need that you should come. Tomorrow your mother will be apprised of the death of your kinsman; almost simultaneously will come rumors of your shipwreck. She must be assured of your safety within twenty-four hours, if you hope to meet her again."

"But how can I com——"

"Peace, patience; sufficient unto tomorrow is the labor and issue thereof."

The Merocar gently ran into its slip, and we debarked, Xamas carrying me to his home in a vehicle of strange design and mysterious power of propulsion.