The following piece appeared in the “Epiphany” column of The Wire magazine, June 2009.

I’m not sure if it’s all the time I used to spend in zendos, but when I find myself in a modern American symphony hall, I usually treat these highly coded and uptight environments as an invitation to focused attention. Once everybody shuts up and the music starts, I sit as still as possible, sans the usual pint, and devote myself to listening, with mind and heart in as much sync as I can muster. This attitude, which can often be as worthwhile as the music itself, really comes in handy when the pieces performed are not the usual warhorses, but the sort of “challenging” and unfamiliar modern and contemporary works I can appreciate in recordings but often find tough to engage while I am writing or puttering around the house.

And so it was that I settled with rapt passivity into my orchestra seat for the San Francisco Symphony’s first performance of Ligeti’s monstrous 1965 Requiem earlier this year. After a tasty baroque bonbon conducted by the Symphony Chorus director Ragnar Bohlin, Michael Tilson Thomas took the tiller, offered a few words of gentle warning, quoted Rilke, and dove into twenty-five minutes of supreme apocalyptic weirdness.

Said to be partly inspired by the composer’s own reactions to the Holocaust, during which his entire family save his mother was killed, Ligeti’s Day of Wrath melts historical horror into an underworld of universal and sometimes impish dread. The ominous drift of the opening Introidus, with a bit of Gyoto monk-worthy growling from the basses, soon splintered like some shuddering ice crystal planet into the mountainous chromatic clouds of the Kyrie. Twisted into skeins of galactic dust, the massed human voices became a fractal dance of dissolution and dynamic crystalization, the perpetual solve et coagula of Ligeti’s justly celebrated micropolyphony. The fluctuating lines and hair-splitting intervals that make up the music’s twenty separate contrapuntal parts transformed the hall into an organic underworld of half congealed aethyrs, so tricksy and difficult for the chorus to pull off that a number of singers sported tuning forks.

I am not the most intellectual or analytic listener. Whenever the opportunity affords itself, I go for transport. Give me a keening emotion, an exotic evocation, an entrancing drone, a psychedelic arabesque, and I am outta here. Within minutes, the disturbing immensity of Ligeti’s sound world lifted me out of my seat. As the usual Cartesian coordinates of melody, harmony, and pitch became lost in a chromatic atmosphere at once irridescent and opaque, all familiar reference points—the concert hall, the singers, the city beyond—seemed to melt into a claustrophobic and towering soundscape incarnation of Pascal’s infinite spaces. Even the hair on the back of my neck came to attention, as I submitted to an onimous undertow of awe.

Somewhere during the Kyrie this transport became epiphany, a far rarer occurrence in my lexicon of listening. Instead of acting as a drug or a dreamlike trance, the Requiem became a mirror of the act of listening itself. Music melted into sound, sound into an almost tactile polyverse of now now now. The hall became a stage where the self that witnesses the waveforms of musical material realizes its own identity as a vibrating wave of attention. My whole body became an ear, jolts of energy tickled my spine, and the rhetoric of apocalypse—which means, of course, revelation—bloomed into a stark and impersonal unveiling of music as such—not the 20th century abstraction of “absolute music,” but the luminous roar of organized sound as a fundamental dimension of reality and meaning. This got me so tripped out that, when the hotshot Argentine pianist Martha Argerich took on Ravel’s G-Major Piano Concerto after the intermission, I could barely relate. The piece was sparkling, her playing was rich with confidence and wit, and the crowd was in love, far more than they had been with Ligeti. But the music sounded to me like a wurlitzer organ cranking away in a carnival while the aftershocks of some stellar catastrophe faded in the far atmosphere.

Reflecting on this experience later, I realized that my epiphany could be boiled down to the simple Pavolovian fact that, like millions of earthlings, I first encountered Ligeti’s eerie choral micropolyphany in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. A passage of his Kyrie is associated with the inky black monolith whose appearance heralds and may actually trigger breakthroughs in human consciousness. Coupled with Kubrick’s images of chilly sublimity, Ligeti’s sounds have become another sort of extraterrestrial artifact, a literally otherworldly chorus composed equally of angels and aliens. Ligeti, of course, did not especially care for this exposure, and he also spent six years trying to pry some compensation out of MGM for their unauthorized use of his music. Nonetheless, Kubrick’s appropriation can only be seen as a kindness of mutual infection. The film not only exposed millions of people to real-deal experimental music—in effect squeezing pop exoticism out of a product of the intellectual elite—but also trained the minds of movie goers like me to map the more obvious imaginative transports of visual media onto the incorporeal vectors of intensely novel music.

A pop fusion of “cosmic” sounds and images all too often becomes a kind of kitsch, from New Age poofery to space-age bachelor pad soundtracks to the comic-book pulp of 70s prog. (Not to say I don’t dig kosmiche kitcsch.) But this sometimes cartoony excess should not obscure the subtler ways that Ligeti’s Requiem engages the extraterrestrial imagination, and that can account, beyond the monolith association, for its enormous evocative power.

Ligeti himself often used spatial metaphors to describe his work, forcing us to imagine a kind of parallel world capable of housing such music. We are impelled by imaginative necessity to speak of masses, crystals, tapestries, fractals. Discussing the way his rigorous contrapuntal structure is submerged inaudibly in his music, Ligeti himself spoke of the “very densely woven cobweb” of his choral writing. In the manner of the imagination, this image triggers another: a childhood dream described by the composer, in which Ligeti finds himself entangled in a giant web, along with various insects and decaying pieces of junk. In the dream, he became a captive witness to the gradual transformation of what Philip K. Dick would recognize as the “tomb world,” as the insects struggled to free themselves from the perpetually shifting web, like human voices that wake us as we drown.

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CURATED SERIES at HILOBROW: PINAKOTHEK by Luc Sante | INTO THE VOID by Charlie Jane Anders | WE REABSORB & ENLIVEN by Matthew Battles | BRAINIAC by Joshua Glenn | BLDGBLOG by Geoff Manaugh | WINDS OF MAGIC by James Parker | ROBOTS + MONSTERS by Joe Alterio | FEEDBACK by Joshua Glenn | 4CP FTW by John Hilgart | FANCHILD by Adam McGovern | BOOKFUTURISM by James Bridle | 4CP FRIDAY by guest curators

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CREDITS: Art by Sheldon Moldoff and Charles Paris. Batman #130, 1960.

SIMILAR HILOBROW SERIES: SUBSUPERMEN — Golden Age heroes who didn’t make the grade | MEET THE L.I.S. — John Hilgart discovers “implicit superheroes” concealed within comic-book mastheads | 4CP FRIDAY — themed comic-book detail galleries, curated by admirers of John Hilgart’s 4CP project | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM — 25 writers on 25 Jack Kirby panels | ANNOTATED GIF — Kerry Callen brings comic book covers to life | CHESS MATCH — a gallery of pulp fiction chess games | COMICALLY VINTAGE — that’s-what-she-said vintage comic panels | DC — THE NEW 52 — an 11-year-old reviews DC’s new lineup | FILE X — a one-of-a-kind gallery of “X” pulp paperback covers | SECRET PANEL — Silver Age comics’ double entendres | SKRULLICISM — they lurk among us

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HiLobrow is pleased to present the twelfth installment of our serialization of H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook. New installments will appear each Friday for 24 weeks.

“If this is pulp fiction it’s high pulp: a Wagnerian opera of an adventure tale, a B-movie humanist apocalypse and chivalric romance,” says Lydia Millet in a blurb written for HiLoBooks. “When the World Shook has it all — English gentlemen of leisure, a devastating shipwreck, a volcanic tropical island inhabited by cannibals, an ancient princess risen from the grave, and if that weren’t enough a friendly, ongoing debate between a godless materialist and a devout Christian. H. Rider Haggard’s rich universe is both profoundly camp and deeply idealistic.”

Haggard’s only science fiction novel was first published in 1919. In September 2012, HiLoBooks will publish a beautiful new edition of When the World Shook, with an introduction by Atlantic Monthly contributing editor James Parker. NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDERING!

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LAST WEEK: “‘Behold! There are the stars as I engraved them from my foreknowledge, upon this chart, and there those two great planets hang in conjunction. Daughter Yva, my wisdom has not failed me. This world of ours has travelled round the sun neither less nor more than two hundred and fifty thousand times since we laid ourselves down to sleep. It is written here, and yonder,’ and he pointed, first to the engraved plates and then to the vast expanse of the starlit heavens.”

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One diversion we did have. About eleven o’clock a canoe came from the main island laden with provisions and paddled by Marama and two of his people. We seized our weapons, remembering our experiences of the night, but Marama waved a bough in token of peace. So, carrying our revolvers, we went to the rock edge to meet him. He crept ashore and, chief though he was, prostrated himself upon his face before us, which told me that he had heard of the fate of the sorcerers. His apologies were abject. He explained that he had no part in the outrage of the attack, and besought us to intercede on behalf of him and his people with the awakened god of the Mountain whom he looked for with a terrified air.

We consoled him as well as we could, and told him that he had best be gone before the god of the Mountain appeared, and perhaps treated him as he had done the sorcerers. In his name, however, we commanded Marama to bring materials and build us a proper house upon the rock, also to be sure to keep up a regular and ample supply of provisions. If he did these things, and anything else we might from time to time command, we said that perhaps his life and those of his people would be spared. This, however, after the evil behaviour of some of them of course we could not guarantee.

Marama departed so thoroughly frightened that he even forgot to make any inquiries as to who this god of the Mountain might be, or where he came from, or whither he was going. Of course, the place had been sacred among his people from the beginning, whenever that may have been, but that its sacredness should materialise into an active god who brought sorcerers of the highest reputation to a most unpleasant end, just because they wished to translate their preaching into practice, was another matter. It was not to be explained even by the fact of which he himself had informed me, that during the dreadful storm of some months before, the cave mouth which previously was not visible on the volcano, had suddenly been lifted up above the level of the Rock of Offerings, although, of course, all religious and instructed persons would have expected something peculiar to happen after this event.

Such I knew were his thoughts, but, as I have said, he was too frightened and too hurried to express them in questions that I should have found it extremely difficult to answer. As it was he departed quite uncertain as to whether one of us was not the real “god of the Mountain,” who had power to bring hideous death upon his molesters. After all, what had he to go on to the contrary, except the word of three priests who were so terrified that they could give no coherent account of what had happened? Of these events, it was true, there was evidence in the twisted carcass of their lamented high sorcerer, and, for the matter of that, of certain corpses which he had seen, that lay in shallow water at the bottom of the lake. Beyond all was vague, and in his heart I am sure that Marama believed that Bastin was the real “god of the Mountain.” Naturally, he would desire to work vengeance on those who tried to sacrifice and eat him. Moreover, had he not destroyed the image of the god of the Grove and borne away its head whence he had sucked magic and power?

Thus argued Marama, disbelieving the tale of the frightened sorcerers, for he admitted as much to me in after days.

Marama departed in a great hurry, fearing lest the “god of the Mountain,” or Bastin, whose new and splendid garb he regarded with much suspicion, might develop some evil energy against him. Then we went back to our camp, leaving the industrious Bastin, animated by a suggestion from Bickley that the fruit and food might spoil if left in the sun, to carry it into the shade of the cave. Owing to the terrors of the Orofenans the supply was so large that to do this he must make no fewer than seven journeys, which he did with great good will since Bastin loved physical exercise. The result on his clerical garments, however, was disastrous. His white tie went awry, squashed fruit and roast pig gravy ran down his waistcoat and trousers, and his high collar melted into limp crinkles in the moisture engendered by the tropical heat. Only his long coat escaped, since that Bickley kindly carried for him.

It was just as he arrived with the seventh load in this extremely dishevelled condition that Oro and his daughter emerged from the cave. Indeed Bastin, who, being shortsighted, always wore spectacles that, owing to his heated state were covered with mist, not seeing that dignitary, dumped down the last basket on to his toes, exclaiming:

“There, you lazy beggar, I told you I would bring it all, and I have.”

In fact he thought he was addressing Bickley and playing off on him a troglodytic practical joke.

Oro, however, who at his age did not appreciate jokes, resented it and was about to do something unpleasant when with extraordinary tact his daughter remarked:

“Bastin the priest makes you offerings. Thank him, O Lord my father.”

So Oro thanked him, not too cordially for evidently he still had feeling in his toes, and once more Bastin escaped. Becoming aware of his error, he began to apologise profusely in English, while the lady Yva studied him carefully.

“Is that the costume of the priests of your religion, O Bastin?” she asked, surveying his dishevelled form. “If so, you were better without it.”

Then Bastin retired to straighten his tie, and grabbing his coat from Bickley, who handed it to him with a malicious smile, forced his perspiring arms into it in a peculiarly awkward and elephantine fashion.

Meanwhile Bickley and I produced two camp chairs which we had made ready, and on these the wondrous pair seated themselves side by side.

“We have come to learn,” said Oro. “Teach!”

“Not so, Father,” interrupted Yva, who, I noted, was clothed in yet a third costume, though whence these came I could not imagine. “First I would ask a question. Whence are you, Strangers, and how came you here?”

“We are from the country called England and a great storm shipwrecked us here; that, I think, which raised the mouth of the cave above the level of this rock,” I answered.

“The time appointed having come when it should be raised,” said Oro as though to himself.

“Where is England?” asked Yva.

Now among the books we had with us was a pocket atlas, quite a good one of its sort. By way of answer I opened it at the map of the world and showed her England. Also I showed, to within a thousand miles or so, that spot on the earth’s surface where we spoke together.

The sight of this atlas excited the pair greatly. They had not the slightest difficulty in understanding everything about it and the shape of the world with its division into hemispheres seemed to be quite familiar to them. What appeared chiefly to interest them, and especially Oro, were the relative areas and positions of land and sea.

“Of this, Strangers,” he said, pointing to the map, “I shall have much to say to you when I have studied the pictures of your book and compared them with others of my own.”

“So he has got maps,” said Bickley in English, “as well as star charts. I wonder where he keeps them.”

“With his clothes, I expect,” suggested Bastin.

Meanwhile Oro had hidden the atlas in his ample robe and motioned to his daughter to proceed.

“Why do you come here from England so far away?” the Lady Yva asked, a question to which each of us had an answer.

“To see new countries,” I said.

“Because the cyclone brought us,” said Bickley.

“To convert the heathen to my own Christian religion,” said Bastin, which was not strictly true.

It was on this last reply that she fixed.

“What does your religion teach?” she asked.

“It teaches that those who accept it and obey its commands will live again after death for ever in a better world where is neither sorrow nor sin,” he answered.

When he heard this saying I saw Oro start as though struck by a new thought and look at Bastin with a curious intentness.

“Who are the heathen?” Yva asked again after a pause, for she also seemed to be impressed.

“All who do not agree with Bastin’s spiritual views,” answered Bickley.

“Those who, whether from lack of instruction or from hardness of heart, do not follow the true faith. For instance, I suppose that your father and you are heathen,” replied Bastin stoutly.

This seemed to astonish them, but presently Yva caught his meaning and smiled, while Oro said:

“Of this great matter of faith we will talk later. It is an old question in the world.”

“Why,” went on Yva, “if you wished to travel so far did you come in a ship that so easily is wrecked? Why did you not journey through the air, or better still, pass through space, leaving your bodies asleep, as, being instructed, doubtless you can do?”

“As regards your first question,” I answered, “there are no aircraft known that can make so long a journey.”

“And as regards the second,” broke in Bickley, “we did not do so because it is impossible for men to transfer themselves to other places through space either with or without their bodies.”

At this information the Glittering Lady lifted her arched eyebrows and smiled a little, while Oro said:

“I perceive that the new world has advanced but a little way on the road of knowledge.”

Fearing that Bastin was about to commence an argument, I began to ask questions in my turn.

“Lord Oro and Lady Yva,” I said, “we have told you something of ourselves and will tell you more when you desire it. But pardon us if first we pray you to tell us what we burn to know. Who are you? Of what race and country? And how came it that we found you sleeping yonder?”

“If it be your pleasure, answer, my Father,” said Yva.

Oro thought a moment, then replied in a calm voice:

“I am a king who once ruled most of the world as it was in my day, though it is true that much of it rebelled against me, my councillors and servants. Therefore I destroyed the world as it was then, save only certain portions whence life might spread to the new countries that I raised up. Having done this I put myself and my daughter to sleep for a space of two hundred and fifty thousand years, that there might be time for fresh civilisations to arise. Now I begin to think that I did not allot a sufficiency of ages, since I perceive from what you tell me, that the learning of the new races is as yet but small.”

Bickley and I looked at each other and were silent. Mentally we had collapsed. Who could begin to discuss statements built upon such a foundation of gigantic and paralysing falsehoods?

Well, Bastin could for one. With no more surprise in his voice than if he were talking about last night’s dinner, he said:

“There must be a mistake somewhere, or perhaps I misunderstand you. It is obvious that you, being a man, could not have destroyed the world. That could only be done by the Power which made it and you.”

I trembled for the results of Bastin’s methods of setting out the truth. To my astonishment, however, Oro replied:

“You speak wisely, Priest, but the Power you name may use instruments to accomplish its decrees. I am such an instrument.”

“Quite so,” said Bastin, “just like anybody else. You have more knowledge of the truth than I thought. But pray, how did you destroy the world?”

“Using my wisdom to direct the forces that are at work in the heart of this great globe, I drowned it with a deluge, causing one part to sink and another to rise, also changes of climate which completed the work.”

“That’s quite right,” exclaimed Bastin delightedly. “We know all about the Deluge, only you are not mentioned in connection with the matter. A man, Noah, had to do with it when he was six hundred years old.”

“Six hundred?” said Oro. “That is not very old. I myself had seen more than a thousand years when I lay down to sleep.”

“A thousand!” remarked Bastin, mildly interested. “That is unusual, though some of these mighty men of renown we know lived over nine hundred.”

Here Bickley snorted and exclaimed:

“Nine hundred moons, he means.”

“I did not know Noah,” went on Oro. “Perhaps he lived after my time and caused some other local deluge. Is there anything else you wish to ask me before I leave you that I may study this map writing?”

“Yes,” said Bastin. “Why were you allowed to drown your world?”

“Because it was evil, Priest, and disobeyed me and the Power I serve.”

“Oh! thank you,” said Bastin, “that fits in exactly. It was just the same in Noah’s time.”

“I pray that it is not just the same now,” said Oro, rising. “To-morrow we will return, or if I do not who have much that I must do, the lady my daughter will return and speak with you further.”

He departed into the cave, Yva following at a little distance.

I accompanied her as far as the mouth of the cave, as did Tommy, who all this time had been sitting contentedly upon the hem of her gorgeous robe, quite careless of its immemorial age, if it was immemorial and not woven yesterday, a point on which I had no information.

“Lady Yva,” I said, “did I rightly understand the Lord Oro to say that he was a thousand years old?”

“Yes, O Humphrey, and really he is more, or so I think.”

“Then are you a thousand years old also?” I asked, aghast.

“No, no,” she replied, shaking her head, “I am young, quite young, for I do not count my time of sleep.”

“Certainly you look it,” I said. “But what, Lady Yva, do you mean by young?”

She answered my question by another.

“What age are your women when they are as I am?”

“None of our women were ever quite like you, Lady Yva. Yet, say from twenty-five to thirty years of age.”

“Ah! I have been counting and now I remember. When my father sent me to sleep I was twenty-seven years old. No, I will not deceive you, I was twenty-seven years and three moons.” Then, saying something to the effect that she would return, she departed, laughing a little in a mischievous way, and, although I did not observe this till afterwards, Tommy departed with her.

When I repeated what she had said to Bastin and Bickley, who were standing at a distance straining their ears and somewhat aggrieved, the former remarked:

“If she is twenty-seven her father must have married late in life, though of course it may have been a long while before he had children.”

Then Bickley, who had been suppressing himself all this while, went off like a bomb.

“Do you tell us, Bastin,” he asked, “that you believe one word of all this ghastly rubbish? I mean as to that antique charlatan being a thousand years old and having caused the Flood and the rest?”

“If you ask me, Bickley, I see no particular reason to doubt it at present. A person who can go to sleep in a glass coffin kept warm by a pocketful of radium together with very accurate maps of the constellations at the time he wakes up, can, I imagine, do most things.”

“Even cause the Deluge,” jeered Bickley.

“I don’t know about the Deluge, but perhaps he may have been permitted to cause a deluge. Why not? You can’t look at things from far enough off, Bickley. And if something seems big to you, you conclude that therefore it is impossible. The same Power which gives you skill to succeed in an operation, that hitherto was held impracticable, as I know you have done once or twice, may have given that old fellow power to cause a deluge. You should measure the universe and its possibilities by worlds and not by acres, Bickley.”

“And believe, I suppose, that a man can live a thousand years, whereas we know well that he cannot live more than about a hundred.”

“You don’t know anything of the sort, Bickley. All you know is that over the brief period of history with which we are acquainted, say ten thousand years at most, men have only lived to about a hundred. But the very rocks which you are so fond of talking about, tell us that even this planet is millions upon millions of years of age. Who knows then but that at some time in its history, men did not live for a thousand years, and that lost civilisations did not exist of which this Oro and his daughter may be two survivors?”

“There is no proof of anything of the sort,” said Bickley.

“I don’t know about proof, as you understand it, though I have read in Plato of a continent called Atlantis that was submerged, according to the story of old Egyptian priests. But personally I have every proof, for it is all written down in the Bible at which you turn tip your nose, and I am very glad that I have been lucky enough to come across this unexpected confirmation of the story. Not that it matters much, since I should have learned all about it when it pleases Providence to remove me to a better world, which in our circumstances may happen any day. Now I must change my clothes before I see to the cooking and other things.”

“I am bound to admit,” said Bickley, looking after him, “that old Bastin is not so stupid as he seems. From his point of view the arguments he advances are quite logical. Moreover I think he is right when he says that we look at things through the wrong end of the telescope. After all the universe is very big and who knows what may happen there? Who knows even what may have happened on this little earth during the aeons of its existence, whenever its balance chanced to shift, as the Ice Ages show us it has often done? Still I believe that old Oro to be a Prince of Liars.”

“That remains to be proved,” I answered cautiously. “All I know is that he is a wonderfully learned person of most remarkable appearance, and that his daughter is the loveliest creature I ever saw.”

“There I agree,” said Bickley decidedly, “and as brilliant as she is lovely. If she belongs to a past civilisation, it is a pity that it ever became extinct. Now let’s go and have a nap. Bastin will call us when supper is ready.”

That night we slept well and without fear, being quite certain that after their previous experience the Orofenans would make no further attempts upon us. Indeed our only anxiety was for Tommy, whom we could not find when the time came to give him his supper. Bastin, however, seemed to remember having seen him following the Glittering Lady into the cave. This, of course, was possible, as certainly he had taken an enormous fancy to her and sat himself down as close to her as he could on every occasion. He even seemed to like the ancient Oro, and was not afraid to jump up and plant his dirty paws upon that terrific person’s gorgeous robe. Moreover Oro liked him, for several times I observed him pat the dog upon the head; as I think I have said, the only human touch that I had perceived about him. So we gave up searching and calling in the hope that he was safe with our supernatural friends.

The next morning quite early the Lady Yva appeared alone; no, not alone, for with her came our lost Tommy looking extremely spry and well at ease. The faithless little wretch just greeted us in a casual fashion and then went and sat by Yva. In fact when the awkward Bastin managed to stumble over the end of her dress Tommy growled at him and showed his teeth. Moreover the dog was changed. He was blessed with a shiny black coat, but now this coat sparkled in the sunlight, like the Lady Yva’s hair.

“The Glittering Lady is all very well, but I’m not sure that I care for a glittering dog. It doesn’t look quite natural,” said Bastin, contemplating him.

“Why does Tommy shine, Lady?” I asked.

“Because I washed him in certain waters that we have, so that now he looks beautiful and smells sweet,” she answered, laughing.

It was true, the dog did smell sweet, which I may add had not always been the case with him, especially when there were dead fish about. Also he appeared to have been fed, for he turned up his nose at the bits we had saved for his breakfast.

“He has drunk of the Life-water,” explained Yva, “and will want no food for two days.”

Bickley pricked up his ears at this statement and looked incredulous.

“You do not believe, O Bickley,” she said, studying him gravely. “Indeed, you believe nothing. You think my father and I tell you many lies. Bastin there, he believes all. Humphrey? He is not sure; he thinks to himself, I will wait and find out whether or no these funny people cheat me.”

Bickley coloured and made some remark about things which were contrary to experience, also that Tommy in a general way was rather a greedy little dog.

“You, too, like to eat, Bickley” (this was true, he had an excellent appetite), “but when you have drunk the Life-water you will care much less.”

“I am glad to hear it,” interrupted Bastin, “for Bickley wants a lot of cooking done, and I find it tedious.”

“You eat also, Lady,” said Bickley.

“Yes, I eat sometimes because I like it, but I can go weeks and not eat, when I have the Life-water. Just now, after so long a sleep, I am hungry. Please give me some of that fruit. No, not the flesh, flesh I hate.”

We handed it to her. She took two plantains, peeled and ate them with extraordinary grace. Indeed she reminded me, I do not know why, of some lovely butterfly drawing its food from a flower.

While she ate she observed us closely; nothing seemed to escape the quick glances of those beautiful eyes. Presently she said:

“What, O Humphrey, is that with which you fasten your neckdress?” and she pointed to the little gold statue of Osiris that I used as a pin.

I told her that it was a statuette of a god named Osiris and very, very ancient, probably quite five thousand years old, a statement at which she smiled a little; also that it came from Egypt.

“Ah!” she answered, “is it so? I asked because we have figures that are very like to that one, and they also hold in their hands a staff surmounted by a loop. They are figures of Sleep’s brother—Death.”

“So is this,” I said. “Among the Egyptians Osiris was the god of Death.”

She nodded and replied that doubtless the symbol had come down to them.

“One day you shall take me to see this land which you call so very old. Or I will take you, which would be quicker,” she added.

We all bowed and said we should be delighted. Even Bastin appeared anxious to revisit Egypt in such company, though when he was there it seemed to bore him. But what she meant about taking us I could not guess. Nor had we time to ask her, for she went on, watching our faces as she spoke.

“The Lord Oro sends you a message, Strangers. He asks whether it is your wish to see where we dwell. He adds that you are not to come if you do not desire, or if you fear danger.”

We all answered that there was nothing we should like better, but Bastin added that he had already seen the tomb.

“Do you think, Bastin, that we live in a tomb because we slept there for a while, awaiting the advent of you wanderers at the appointed hour?”

“I don’t see where else it could be, unless it is further down that cave,” said Bastin. “The top of the mountain would not be convenient as a residence.”

“It has not been convenient for many an age, for reasons that I will show you. Think now, before you come. You have naught to fear from us, and I believe that no harm will happen to you. But you will see many strange things that will anger Bickley because he cannot understand them, and perhaps will weary Bastin because his heart turns from what is wondrous and ancient. Only Humphrey will rejoice in them because the doors of his soul are open and he longs—what do you long for, Humphrey?”

“That which I have lost and fear I shall never find again,” I answered boldly.

“I know that you have lost many things—last night, for instance, you lost Tommy, and when he slept with me he told me much about you and—others.”

“This is ridiculous,” broke in Bastin. “Can a dog talk?”

“Everything can talk, if you understand its language, Bastin. But keep a good heart, Humphrey, for the bold seeker finds in the end. Oh! foolish man, do you not understand that all is yours if you have but the soul to conceive and the will to grasp? All, all, below, between, above! Even I know that, I who have so much to learn.”

So she spoke and became suddenly magnificent. Her face which had been but that of a super-lovely woman, took on grandeur. Her bosom swelled; her presence radiated some subtle power, much as her hair radiated light.

In a moment it was gone and she was smiling and jesting.

“Will you come, Strangers, where Tommy was not afraid to go, down to the Under-world? Or will you stay here in the sun? Perhaps you will do better to stay here in the sun, for the Under-world has terrors for weak hearts that were born but yesterday, and feeble feet may stumble in the dark.”

“I shall take my electric torch,” said Bastin with decision, “and I advise you fellows to do the same. I always hated cellars, and the catacombs at Rome are worse, though full of sacred interest.”

Then we started, Tommy frisking on ahead in a most provoking way as though he were bored by a visit to a strange house and going home, and Yva gliding forward with a smile upon her face that was half mystic and half mischievous. We passed the remains of the machines, and Bickley asked her what they were.

“Carriages in which once we travelled through the skies, until we found a better way, and that the uninstructed used till the end,” she answered carelessly, leaving me wondering what on earth she meant.

We came to the statue and the sepulchre beneath without trouble, for the glint of her hair, and I may add of Tommy’s back, were quite sufficient to guide us through the gloom. The crystal coffins were still there, for Bastin flashed his torch and we saw them, but the boxes of radium had gone.

“Let that light die,” she said to Bastin. “Humphrey, give me your right hand and give your left to Bickley. Let Bastin cling to him and fear nothing.”

We passed to the end of the tomb and stood against what appeared to be a rock wall, all close together, as she directed.

“Fear nothing,” she said again, but next second I was never more full of fear in my life, for we were whirling downwards at a speed that would have made an American elevator attendant turn pale.

NEXT WEEK: “I suppose the fluid was water, but to me it tasted more like strong champagne, dashed with Chateau Yquem. It was delicious. More, its effects were distinctly peculiar. Something quick and subtle ran through my veins; something that for a few moments seemed to burn away the obscureness which blurs our thought. I began to understand several problems that had puzzled me, and then lost their explanations in the midst of light, inner light, I mean. Moreover, of a sudden it seemed to me as though a window had been opened in the heart of that Glittering Lady who stood beside me.”

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, E.M. Forster, Philip Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. In May 2012, we will publish Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague; in June, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”); in July, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt; in September, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook; in October, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins; and in November, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: You are reading H. Rider Haggard’s When The World Shook. Also read our serialization of: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague | Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail and “As Easy As A.B.C.” | Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt

READ: HiLobrow’s previous serialized novels, both original works: James Parker’s The Ballad of Cocky The Fox (“a proof-of-concept that serialization can work on the Internet” — The Atlantic) and Karinne Keithley Syers’s Linda Linda Linda. We also publish original stories and comics.

Mexican poet and author ROSARIO CASTELLANOS (1925–74) wielded mad intellectual superpowers in a nation not always noted for nurturing progressive feminist ambiente. Her semi-autobiographical 1957 novel Balún-Canán (translated as The Nine Guardians) unveils salient and sordid details of class hatred and racialized loathing particular to the Chiapas region of Mexico. Her elegiac 1962 novel Oficio de Tinieblas (The Book of Lamentations) documents Tzotzil resistance to Mexican hegemony over indigenous Maya communities in the same region. Her poetry — a good place to begin is the 1972 collection Poesía no eres tú; Obra poética: 1948-1971 — forces readers to rethink the self/other dichotomy. As a thinker, she tolerated no fools and left writers from a misogynistic philosophical tradition — like Schopenhauer, Weininger, and Simmel — emasculated and reeling. Her brutally smart and engaging essays on women and the rhetoric of savagery (among other topics) are better-written and at the same time more complex than the essays of Kristeva and Irigaray; the best collection in English, which features an insightful introduction by Maureen Ahern, is A Rosario Castellanos Reader (1988). Castellanos was a true 20th-century Mexican bombshell; I’d like to see Univision and Televisa get into a bidding war to film a telenovela of her life and work.

***

On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Miles Davis and Tom T. Hall.

READ MORE about members of the Postmodernist Generation (1924-33).

Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal…
– H.P. Lovecraft, The Tomb (1917)

La Belle Époque, a beautiful term for a Beautiful Age, as Light and Understanding replace Fear and Superstition, and Science and Art join hands in unholy matrimony and set out to discover the world anew. Trains become underground worms burrowing through the city, displacing medieval graves in the name of modernity; the Aéro-club de France send men into the heavens, amazing the public; Muybridge proves horses fly too and wins a bet; Edison floods the world with light; biologists discover germs and defy Death; botanists grow tropical plants in Parisian glass-houses and affront Nature with hot-house orchids; the phonograph and the cinema fold Time and Space for the masses. And for some reason bicycles become rather popular. The world was getting smaller every day and the discoveries were getting bigger every week. How very diverting it all was…

In the land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither suffering nor death.
– H.P. Lovecraft, The White Ship (1920)

During the period we now call the fin-de-siècle, worlds collided. Ideas were being killed off as much as being born. And in a sort of Hegelian logic of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, the most interesting ones arose as the offspring of wildly different parents. In particular, the last gasp of Victorian spirituality infused cutting-edge science with a certain sense of old-school mysticism. Theosophy was all the rage; Huysmans dragged Satan into modern Paris; and eccentric poets and scholars met in the British Museum Reading Room under the aegis of the Golden Dawn for a cup of tea and a spot of demonology. As a result of all this, certain commonly-accepted scientific terms we use today came out of quite weird and wonderful ideas being developed at the turn of the century. Such is the case with space, which fascinated mathematicians, philosophers and artists with its unfathomable possibilities.

Outside of sheltered mathematical circles, the trend began rather innocuously in 1884, when Edwin A. Abbott published the satirical novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions under the pseudonym A. Square. In the fine tradition of English satire, he creates an alternative world as a sort of nonsense arena to lampoon the social structures of Victorian England. In this two-dimensional world, different classes are made up of different polygons, and the laws concerning sides and angles that maintain that hierarchy are pushed to absurd proportions. Initially, the work was only moderately popular, but it introduced thought experiments on how to visualise higher dimensions to the general public. It also paved the ground for a much more esoteric thinker who would have much more far-reaching effects with his own mystical brand of higher mathematics.

In April 1904, C.H. Hinton published The Fourth Dimension, a popular maths book based on concepts he had been developing since 1880 that sought to establish an additional spatial dimension to the three we know and love. This was not understood to be time as we’re so used to thinking of the fourth dimension nowadays; that idea came a bit later. Hinton was talking about an actual spatial dimension, a new geometry, physically existing, and even possible to see and experience; something that linked us all together and would result in a “New Era of Thought”. (Interestingly, that very same month in a hotel room in Cairo, Aleister Crowley talked to Egyptian Gods and proclaimed a “New Aeon” for mankind. For those of us who amuse ourselves by charting the subcultural backstreets of history, it seems as though a strange synchronicity briefly connected a mystic mathematician and a mathematical mystic — which is quite pleasing.)

Hinton begins his book by briefly relating the history of higher dimensions and non-Euclidean maths up to that point. Surprisingly, for a history of mathematicians, it’s actually quite entertaining. Here is one tale he tells of János Bolyai, a Hungarian mathematician who contributed important early work on non-Euclidean geometry before joining the army:

It is related of him that he was challenged by thirteen officers of his garrison, a thing not unlikely to happen considering how differently he thought from everyone else. He fought them all in succession – making it his only condition that he should be allowed to play on his violin for an interval between meeting each opponent. He disarmed or wounded all his antagonists. It can be easily imagined that a temperament such as his was not one congenial to his military superiors. He was retired in 1833.

Mathematicians have definitely lost their flair. The notion of duelling with violinist mathematicians may seem absurd, but there was a growing unease about the apparently arbitrary nature of ‘reality’ in light of new scientific discoveries. The discoverers appeared renegades. As the 19th century progressed, the world was robbed of more and more divine power and started looking worryingly like a ship adrift without its captain. Science at the frontiers threatened certain strongly-held assumptions about the universe. The puzzle of non-Euclidian geometry was even enough of a contemporary issue to appear in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov when Ivan discusses the ineffability of God:

But you must note this: if God exists and if He really did create the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions in space. Yet there have been and still are geometricians and philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely, the whole of being, was only created in Euclid’s geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity… I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world?
—Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamzov (1880), Chapter 34 Part II.

Well Ivan, to quote Hinton, “it is indeed strange, the manner in which we must begin to think about the higher world.” His solution was a series of coloured cubes that when mentally assembled in sequence could be used to visualise a hypercube in the fourth dimension of hyperspace. He provides illustrations and gives instructions on how to make these cubes and uses the word “tesseract” to describe the four-dimensional object.

The term “tesseract”, still used today, might be Hinton’s most obvious legacy, but the genesis of the word is slightly cloudy. He first used it an 1888 book called A New Era of Thought, and initially used the spelling tessaract. In Greek, “τεσσάρα”, meaning “four”, transliterates to “tessara” more accurately than “tessera”, and -act likely comes from “ακτίνες” meaning rays; so Hinton’s use suggests the four rays from each vertex exhibited in a hypercube and neatly encodes the idea “four” into his four-dimensional polytope. However, in Latin, “tessera” can also mean “cube”, which is a plausible starting point for the new word. As is sometimes the case, there seems to be some confusion over the Greek or Latin etymology, and we’ve ended up with a bastardization. To confuse matters further, by 1904 Hinton was mostly using “tesseract” – I say mostly because the copies of his books I’ve seen aren’t entirely consistent with the spelling, in all likelihood due to a mere oversight in the proof-reading. Regardless, the later spelling won acceptance while the early version died with its first appearance.

Hinton also promises that when the visualisation is achieved, his cubes can unlock hidden potential. “When the faculty is acquired — or rather when it is brought into consciousness for it exists in everyone in imperfect form – a new horizon opens. The mind acquires a development of power.” It is clear from Hinton’s writing that he saw the fourth dimension as both physically and psychically real, and that it could explain such phenomena as ghosts, ESP and synchronicities. In an indication of the spatial and mystical significance he afforded it, Hinton suggested that the soul was “a four-dimensional organism, which expresses its higher physical being in the symmetry of the body, and gives the aims and motives of human existence.” Letters submitted to mathematical journals of the time indicate more than one person achieved a disastrous success and found the process of visualising the fourth dimension profoundly disturbing or dangerously addictive. It was rumoured that some particularly ardent adherents of the cubes had even gone mad.

He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidian, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.
– H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (1928)

Hinton’s ideas gradually pervaded the cultural milieu over the next thirty years or so – prominently filtering down to the Cubists and Duchamp. The arts were affected by two distinct interpretations of higher dimensionality: on the one hand the idea as a spatial, geometric concept is readily apparent in early Cubism’s attempts to visualise all sides of an object at once, while on the other hand it also becomes a kind of all-encompassing mystical codeword used to justify avant-garde experimentation. “This painting doesn’t make sense? Ah, well, it does in the fourth dimension…” It becomes part of a language for artists exploring new ideas and new spaces. Apollinaire was amongst the first to write about the fourth dimension in the arts with his essay Les peintres cubistes in 1913, which veers from one interpretation to the other over the course of two paragraphs and stands as one of the best early statements on the phenomenon:

Until now, the three dimensions of Euclid’s geometry were sufficient to the restiveness felt by great artists yearning for the infinite. The new painters do not propose, any more than did their predecessors, to be geometers. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Today, scientists no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been led quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term: the fourth dimension. [...]
Wishing to attain the proportions of the ideal, to be no longer limited to the human, the young painters offer us works which are more cerebral than sensual. They discard more and more the old art of optical illusion and local proportion, in order to express the grandeur of metaphysical forms. This is why contemporary art, even if it does not directly stem from specific religious beliefs, none the less possesses some of the characteristics of great, that is to say religious art.

Whilst most suited to the visual arts, the fourth dimension also made inroads into literature, with Apollinaire and his calligrammes arguably a manifestation. Gertrude Stein with her strikingly visual, mentally disorienting poetry was also accused of writing under its influence; something she refuted in an interview with the Atlantic Monthly in 1935: “Somebody has said that I myself am striving for a fourth dimension in literature. I am striving for nothing of the sort and I am not striving at all but only gradually growing and becoming steadily more aware of the way things can be felt and known in words.” If nothing else, the refutation at least indicates the idea’s long-lasting presence in artistic circles.

Some critics have since tried to back-date higher dimensions in literature to Lewis Carroll and Through the Looking-Glass, although he was, by all accounts, a fairly conservative mathematician who once wrote an article critical of current academic interest in the subject entitled Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1873). As a side note, Hinton once invented a game of three-dimensional chess and opined that none of his students could understand it, so perhaps Carroll would have appreciated that.

If anything, the connection between Carroll and hyperspace was the other way round, and the symbolic language employed by Carroll – mirrors, changing proportions, nonsense, topsy-turvy inversions and so on – were picked up by later artists and writers to help prop up their own conceptions of the fourth dimension, which as we can see, was starting to become a bit of a free for all. Marcel Duchamp, for instance coined the rather wonderful phrase “Mirrorical return” in a note about the fourth dimension and the Large Glass.

In the same period that Hinton’s ideas of the fourth dimension were gaining currency among the intellectuals of Europe our “secret sense, our sixth sense” was identified by neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington in 1906. Proprioception, as he called it, is our ability to locate where a body part is when our eyes are closed – in other words, our ability to perceive ourselves in space. And yet the sixth sense means something completely different to us nowadays, associated with another fin-de-siècle obsession; mediumship – the ability to perceive things in the same space but different dimensions. It is worth noting that in those days, scientists – real, respected, working scientists – apparently looked towards spiritualist mediums for experimental evidence. At the same time, Hinton’s cubes were used in séances as a method of glimpsing the fourth dimension (and hopefully a departed soul or two.) Hinton himself published one of his very first articles on the fourth dimension with the sensational subtitle “Ghosts Explained.” In defence of the era’s more eccentric ideas though, so much was explained or invented in so very few years, that it must have seemed only a matter of time before life’s greatest mysteries were finally solved. In any case, the craze over a mystical fourth dimension began to fade while the sensible sixth sense of proprioception just never really caught on.

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
- H.P. Lovecraft, The Street, (1919)

By the late 1920s Einsteinian Space-Time had more or less replaced the spatial fourth dimension in the minds of the public. It was a cold yet elegant concept that ruthlessly killed off the more romantic idea of strange dimensions and impossible directions. What had once been the playground of spiritualists and artists was all too convincingly explained. As hard science continued to rise in the early decades of the 20th century, the fin-de-siècle’s more outré ideas continued to decline. Only the Surrealists continued to make reference to it, as an act of rebellion and vindication of the absurd. The idea of a real higher dimension linking us together as One sounded all a bit too dreamy, a bit too old-fashioned for a new century that was picking up speed; especially when such vague and multifarious explanations were trumped with the special theory of relativity. Hinton was as much hyperspace philosopher as scientist and hoped humanity would create a more peaceful and selfless society if only we recognised the unifying implications of the fourth dimension. Instead, the idea was banished to the realms of New Age con-artists, these days reappearing updated and repackaged as the fifth dimension. Its shadow side however proved hopelessly alluring to fantasy writers who have seen beyond the veil, and bring back visions of horror from an eldritch land outside of time and space that will haunt our nightmares with its terrible geometry, where tentacles and abominations truly horrible sleep beneath the Pacific Ocean waiting to bring darkness to our world… But still we muddle on through.

What do we know… of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos.
– H.P. Lovecraft, From Beyond (1920)

“Lillie and kitchens were natural enemies,” recalled psychologist and industrial engineer LILLIAN MOLLER GILBRETH (1878-1972)’s eldest son. “She hated them and they retaliated. Stoves burned her, ice picks stabbed her, graters skinned her and paring knives cut her.” So why was Gilbreth tapped to design an efficient kitchen for the 1929 Women’s Exposition? She and her husband Frank Gilbreth (both pictured above) were well-known advocates of scientific management. Unlike Frederick Winslow Taylor and other efficiency experts who sought only to speed up workers, the humane and kindly Gilbreths were interested in motion reduction: Lillie’s psychological bent — she held the first degree granted in industrial psychology — was directed toward ensuring that workers accepted and enjoyed their newly rationalized work. When her husband died in 1924, she had ten children living at home; the youngest was two. (Though Lillian thought the book made light of a vital subject, Cheaper by the Dozen recounts how the Gilbreths applied their time-and-motion study expertise to the domestic sphere.) No one wanted to hire a woman to rationalize a factory, so Gilbreth reinvented herself as a management consultant on women’s issues such as homemaking, cooking, department store and office work. The kitchens she designed solved problems in the same way she had tackled factory inefficiences: micromotion films of kitchen work, reorganizing and redesigning for fewer motions and less fatigue, and a suggestion of an experimental, cooperative spirit in the workplace. Gilbreth’s cooking skills didn’t matter.

***

On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Bob Dylan and Joseph Brodsky.

READ MORE about members of the Psychonaut Generation (1874-83).

HiLobrow is pleased to present the tenth installment of our serialization of Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and his follow-up story, “As Easy as A.B.C.”). New installments will appear each Wednesday for 12 weeks.

With the Night Mail follows the exploits of an intercontinental mail dirigible battling the perfect storm. Between London and Quebec we learn that a planet-wide Aerial Board of Control (A.B.C.) now enforces a technocratic system of command and control not only in the skies but in world affairs, too. A follow-up story, “As Easy As A.B.C.,” recounts what happens when agitators in Chicago demand a return of democracy: The A.B.C. sends zeppelins armed with sound weapons to subdue not the agitators, but a mob who would destroy them! With the Night Mail is set in 2000, and it first appeared in 1905; 2012 marks the centennial of the first publication of “As Easy As A.B.C.”

In June, HiLoBooks will publish a beautiful new edition of With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), checked against the 1909 first published edition (Doubleday), with an Introduction by science fiction author Matthew De Abaitua, and an Afterword by science fiction author Bruce Sterling. SUPPLIES ARE LIMITED! CLICK HERE TO ORDER YOUR COPY.
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LAST WEEK: “In the utter hush that followed the growling spark after Arnott had linked up his Service Communicator with the invisible Fleet, we heard MacDonough’s Song from the city beneath us grow fainter as we rose to position. Then I clapped my hand before my mask lenses, for it was as though the floor of Heaven had been riddled and all the inconceivable blaze of suns in the making was poured through the manholes.”

ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12

Chicago North landing-tower was unlighted, and Arnott worked his ship into the clips by her own lights. As soon as these broke out we heard groanings of horror and appeal from many people below.

‘All right,’ shouted Arnott into the darkness. ‘We aren’t beginning again!’ We descended by the stairs, to find ourselves knee deep in a grovelling crowd, some crying that they were blind, others beseeching us not to make any more noises, but the greater part writhing face downward, their hands or their caps before their eyes.

It was Pirolo who came to our rescue. He climbed the side of a surfacing-machine, and there, gesticulating as though they could see, made oration to those afflicted people of Illinois.

‘You stchewpids!’ he began. ‘There is nothing to fuss for. Of course, your eyes will smart and be red to-morrow. You will look as if you and your wives had drunk too much, but in a little while you will see again as well as before. I tell you this, and I—I am Pirolo. Victor Pirolo!’

The crowd with one accord shuddered, for many legends attach to Victor Pirolo of Foggia, deep in the secrets of God.

‘Pirolo?’ An unsteady voice lifted itself. ‘Then tell us was there anything except light in those lights of yours just now?’

The question was repeated from every corner of the darkness.

Pirolo laughed.

‘No!’ he thundered. (Why have small men such large voices?) ‘I give you my word and the Board’s word that there was nothing except light—just light! You stchewpids! Your birth-rate is too low already as it is. Some day I must invent something to send it up, but send it down—never!’

‘Is that true?—We thought—somebody said—’

One could feel the tension relax all round.

‘You too big fools,’ Pirolo cried. ‘You could have sent us a call and we would have told you.’

‘Send you a call!’ a deep voice shouted. ‘I wish you had been at our end of the wire.’

‘I’m glad I wasn’t,’ said De Forest. ‘It was bad enough from behind the lamps. Never mind! It’s over now. Is there any one here I can talk business with? I’m De Forest—for the Board.’

‘You might begin with me, for one—I’m Mayor,’ the bass voice replied.

A big man rose unsteadily from the street, and staggered towards us where we sat on the broad turf-edging, in front of the garden fences.

‘I ought to be the first on my feet. Am I?’ said he.

‘Yes,’ said De Forest, and steadied him as he dropped down beside us.

‘Hello, Andy. Is that you?’ a voice called.

‘Excuse me,’ said the Mayor; ‘that sounds like my Chief of Police, Bluthner!’

‘Bluthner it is; and here’s Mulligan and Keefe—on their feet.’

‘Bring ’em up please, Blut. We’re supposed to be the Four in charge of this hamlet. What we says, goes. And, De Forest, what do you say?’

‘Nothing—yet,’ De Forest answered, as we made room for the panting, reeling men. ‘You’ve cut out of system. Well?’

‘Tell the steward to send down drinks, please,’ Arnott whispered to an orderly at his side.

‘Good!’ said the Mayor, smacking his dry lips. ‘Now I suppose we can take it, De Forest, that henceforward the Board will administer us direct?’

‘Not if the Board can avoid it,’ De Forest laughed. ‘The A.B.C. is responsible for the planetary traffic only.’

‘And all that that implies.’ The Big Four who ran Chicago chanted their Magna Charta like children at school.

‘Well, get on,’ said De Forest wearily. ‘What is your silly trouble anyway?’

‘Too much dam’ Democracy,’ said the Mayor, laying his hand on De Forest’s knee.

‘So? I thought Illinois had had her dose of that.’

‘She has. That’s why. Blut, what did you do with our prisoners last night?’

‘Locked ’em in the water-tower to prevent the women killing ’em,’ the Chief of Police replied. ‘I’m too blind to move just yet, but—’

‘Arnott, send some of your people, please, and fetch ’em along,’ said De Forest.

‘They’re triple-circuited,’ the Mayor called. ‘You’ll have to blow out three fuses.’ He turned to De Forest, his large outline just visible in the paling darkness. ‘I hate to throw any more work on the Board. I’m an administrator myself, but we’ve had a little fuss with our Serviles. What? In a big city there’s bound to be a few men and women who can’t live without listening to themselves, and who prefer drinking out of pipes they don’t own both ends of. They inhabit flats and hotels all the year round. They say it saves ’em trouble. Anyway, it gives ’em more time to make trouble for their neighbours. We call ’em Serviles locally. And they are apt to be tuberculous.’

‘Just so!’ said the man called Mulligan. ‘Transportation is Civilisation. Democracy is Disease. I’ve proved it by the blood-test, every time.’

‘Mulligan’s our Health Officer, and a one-idea man,’ said the Mayor, laughing. ‘But it’s true that most Serviles haven’t much control. They will talk; and when people take to talking as a business, anything may arrive—mayn’t it, De Forest?’

‘Anything—except the facts of the case,’ said De Forest, laughing.

‘I’ll give you those in a minute,’ said the Mayor. ‘Our Serviles got to talking—first in their houses and then on the streets, telling men and women how to manage their own affairs. (You can’t teach a Servile not to finger his neighbour’s soul.) That’s invasion of privacy, of course, but in Chicago we’ll suffer anything sooner than make crowds. Nobody took much notice, and so I let ’em alone. My fault! I was warned there would be trouble, but there hasn’t been a crowd or murder in Illinois for nineteen years.’

‘Twenty-two,’ said his Chief of Police.

‘Likely. Anyway, we’d forgot such things. So, from talking in the houses and on the streets, our Serviles go to calling a meeting at the Old Market yonder.’ He nodded across the square where the wrecked buildings heaved up grey in the dawn-glimmer behind the square-cased statue of The Negro in Flames. ‘There’s nothing to prevent anyone calling meetings except that it’s against human nature to stand in a crowd, besides being bad for the health. I ought to have known by the way our men and women attended that first meeting that trouble was brewing. There were as many as a thousand in the market-place, touching each other. Touching! Then the Serviles turned in all tongue-switches and talked, and we—’

‘What did they talk about?’ said Takahira.

‘First, how badly things were managed in the city. That pleased us Four—we were on the platform—because we hoped to catch one or two good men for City work. You know how rare executive capacity is. Even if we didn’t it’s—it’s refreshing to find any one interested enough in our job to damn our eyes. You don’t know what it means to work, year in, year out, without a spark of difference with a living soul.’

‘Oh, don’t we!’ said De Forest. ‘There are times on the Board when we’d give our positions if any one would kick us out and take hold of things themselves.’

‘But they won’t,’ said the Mayor ruefully. ‘I assure you, sir, we Four have done things in Chicago, in the hope of rousing people, that would have discredited Nero. But what do they say? “Very good, Andy. Have it your own way. Anything’s better than a crowd. I’ll go back to my land.” You can’t do anything with folk who can go where they please, and don’t want anything on God’s earth except their own way. There isn’t a kick or a kicker left on the Planet.’

‘Then I suppose that little shed yonder fell down by itself?’ said De Forest. We could see the bare and still smoking ruins, and hear the slag-pools crackle as they hardened and set.

‘Oh, that’s only amusement. Tell you later. As I was saying, our Serviles held the meeting, and pretty soon we had to ground-circuit the platform to save ’em from being killed. And that didn’t make our people any more pacific.’

‘How d’you mean?’ I ventured to ask.

‘If you’ve ever been ground-circuited,’ said the Mayor, ‘you’ll know it don’t improve any man’s temper to be held up straining against nothing. No, sir! Eight or nine hundred folk kept pawing and buzzing like flies in treacle for two hours, while a pack of perfectly safe Serviles invades their mental and spiritual privacy, may be amusing to watch, but they are not pleasant to handle afterwards.’

Pirolo chuckled.

‘Our folk own themselves. They were of opinion things were going too far and too fiery. I warned the Serviles; but they’re born house-dwellers. Unless a fact hits ’em on the head, they cannot see it. Would you believe me, they went on to talk of what they called “popular government”? They did! They wanted us to go back to the old Voodoo-business of voting with papers and wooden boxes, and word-drunk people and printed formulas, and news-sheets! They said they practised it among themselves about what they’d have to eat in their flats and hotels. Yes, sir! They stood up behind Bluthner’s doubled ground-circuits, and they said that, in this present year of grace, to self-owning men and women, on that very spot! Then they finished’—he lowered his voice cautiously—’by talking about “The People.” And then Bluthner he had to sit up all night in charge of the circuits because he couldn’t trust his men to keep ’em shut.’

‘It was trying ’em too high,’ the Chief of Police broke in. ‘But we couldn’t hold the crowd ground-circuited for ever. I gathered in all the Serviles on charge of crowd-making, and put ’em in the water-tower, and then I let things cut loose. I had to! The District lit like a sparked gas-tank!’

‘The news was out over seven degrees of country,’ the Mayor continued; ‘and when once it’s a question of invasion of privacy, good-bye to right and reason in Illinois! They began turning out traffic-lights and locking up landing-towers on Thursday night. Friday, they stopped all traffic and asked for the Board to take over. Then they wanted to clean Chicago off the side of the Lake and rebuild elsewhere—just for a souvenir of “The People” that the Serviles talked about. I suggested that they should slag the Old Market where the meeting was held, while I turned in a call to you all on the Board. That kept ’em quiet till you came along. And—and now you can take hold of the situation.’

‘Any chance of their quieting down?’ De Forest asked.

‘You can try,’ said the Mayor.

De Forest raised his voice in the face of the reviving crowd that had edged in towards us. Day was come.

‘Don’t you think this business can be arranged?’ he began. But there was a roar of angry voices:

‘We’ve finished with Crowds! We aren’t going back to the Old Days! Take us over! Take the Serviles away! Administer direct or we’ll kill ’em! Down with The People!’

An attempt was made to begin “MacDonough’s Song.” It got no further than the first line, for the Victor Pirolo sent down a warning drone on one stopped horn. A wrecked side-wall of the Old Market tottered and fell inwards on the slag-pools. None spoke or moved till the last of the dust had settled down again, turning the steel case of Salati’s Statue ashy grey.

‘You see you’ll just have to take us over’, the Mayor whispered.

De Forest shrugged his shoulders.

‘You talk as if executive capacity could be snatched out of the air like so much horse-power. Can’t you manage yourselves on any terms?’ he said.

‘We can, if you say so. It will only cost those few lives to begin with.’

The Mayor pointed across the square, where Arnott’s men guided a stumbling group of ten or twelve men and women to the lake front and halted them under the Statue.

‘Now I think,’ said Takahira under his breath, ‘there will be trouble.’

NEXT WEEK: “It appeared that our Planet lay sunk in slavery beneath the heel of the Aerial Board of Control. The orator urged us to arise in our might, burst our prison doors and break our fetters (all his metaphors, by the way, were of the most medieval). Next he demanded that every matter of daily life, including most of the physical functions, should be submitted for decision at any time of the week, month, or year to, I gathered, anybody who happened to be passing by or residing within a certain radius, and that everybody should forthwith abandon his concerns to settle the matter, first by crowd-making, next by talking to the crowds made, and lastly by describing crosses on pieces of paper, which rubbish should later be counted with certain mystic ceremonies and oaths.”

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, E.M. Forster, Philip Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. In May 2012, we will publish Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague; in June, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”); in July, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt; in September, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook; in October, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins; and in November, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: You are reading Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail and “As Easy As A.B.C.” Also read our serialization of: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague | H. Rider Haggard’s When The World Shook

READ: HiLobrow’s previous serialized novels, both original works: James Parker’s The Ballad of Cocky The Fox (“a proof-of-concept that serialization can work on the Internet” — The Atlantic) and Karinne Keithley Syers’s Linda Linda Linda. We also publish original stories and comics.

Musician, comedian, actor, icon: “SCATMAN” CROTHERS (Benjamin Sherman Crothers, 1911-86) was the irrepressible embodiment of America’s racial ambiguities, contradictions and yes, its glories too. Crothers began his career as a singer in Terre Haute, Indiana where he’d meet Al Capone and John Dillinger (“If you shined [his] shoes for a dime he’d give you fifty cents and let you keep the change”); in 1937, Crothers met his lifelong wife, a white Ohioan named Helen Sullivan. The Chicago jazz scene followed, then west, where Crothers drummed for jive genius Slim Gaillard before going solo again. Post-war California really was golden: radio, television, a 1950 hit song (“Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy”) with white bandleader Phil Harris, movies, including the important blackface minstrel picture, Yes Sir, Mr. Bones (1951). Did race matter? In late 1955, Crothers, under the faux-group name “The Ramparts,” recorded “The Death Of Emmett Till,” written by black Angeleno Mrs. A.C. Bilbrew and released on the black-owned Dootone label. In 1970, Crothers’ role in Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama prefaced a decade of notable film appearances — including Ralph Bakshi’s trickster masterpiece, Coonskin (1975, below) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). In between, Crothers could voice Meadowlark Lemon (of the Harlem Globetrotters cartoon series) one year (1970-1971), perform for President Nixon and friends at San Clemente the next and, in January 1975, swap bars of “All Of Me” with fellow subversive Redd Foxx (below). How’d he do it? Perhaps Crothers’ two custom license plates explain: “BLESSD” and “I LUV ALL.”

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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Hergé, Robert Moog, Ruth Underwood.

READ MORE about members of the Partisans Generation (1904-13).

HiLobrow is pleased to present the sixth installment of our serialization of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt. New installments will appear each Tuesday for 12 weeks.

If you alone had discovered that the Earth was about to be engulfed in a belt of poisonous “ether” from outer space, what would you do? Professor Challenger, a controversial scientist whose intellectual sprezzatura may remind you of Arthur Conan Doyle’s more famous fictional detective character, assembles the adventurers with whom he’d once romped through a South American jungle (in The Lost World, published in 1912) and locks them in his wife’s dressing room. Less a thriller than a brainteaser set against a catastrophic backdrop, in this 1913 sequel Challenger & Co. inquire into the method of the mind, and the relationship of intuition to reason, even as the world ends.

“To anyone who has had the delightful experience of traveling in The Lost World with Professor Challenger the bare announcement that that brilliant and eccentric personage plays a most important part in this new tale will quite suffice. For who, having once met the Professor, would not desire to continue the acquaintance?” — New York Times (1913).

“It’s impossible to read The Poison Belt, written in 1913, and not see in its exterminating vision a shadow of the coming war that would, only slightly less effectively, destroy Conan Doyle’s world.” — Gordon Dahlquist (2012 blurb for HiLoBooks)

In July, HiLoBooks will publish a beautiful new edition of The Poison Belt, with an introduction by Radium Age science fiction scholar (and HiLobrow editor) Joshua Glenn. Afterword by Gordon Dahlquist, author of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, The Dark Volume, and the forthcoming The Chemickal Marriage.

ORDER YOUR COPY NOW!

ALL EXCERPTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12

LAST WEEK: “Despairing messages were flashing from every quarter to the great centres of learning, to the chemists and the doctors of world-wide repute, imploring their advice. The astronomers too were deluged with inquiries. Nothing could be done. The thing was universal and beyond our human knowledge or control. It was death—painless but inevitable—death for young and old, for weak and strong, for rich and poor, without hope or possibility of escape.”

At that instant, just as I took a step backwards from the telephone, the thing was on us. It was as if we were bathers, up to our shoulders in water, who suddenly are submerged by a rolling wave. An invisible hand seemed to have quietly closed round my throat and to be gently pressing the life from me. I was conscious of immense oppression upon my chest, great tightness within my head, a loud singing in my ears, and bright flashes before my eyes. I staggered to the balustrades of the stair. At the same moment, rushing and snorting like a wounded buffalo, Challenger dashed past me, a terrible vision, with red-purple face, engorged eyes, and bristling hair. His little wife, insensible to all appearance, was slung over his great shoulder, and he blundered and thundered up the stair, scrambling and tripping, but carrying himself and her through sheer will-force through that mephitic atmosphere to the haven of temporary safety. At the sight of his effort I too rushed up the steps, clambering, falling, clutching at the rail, until I tumbled half senseless upon by face on the upper landing. Lord John’s fingers of steel were in the collar of my coat, and a moment later I was stretched upon my back, unable to speak or move, on the boudoir carpet. The woman lay beside me, and Summerlee was bunched in a chair by the window, his head nearly touching his knees. As in a dream I saw Challenger, like a monstrous beetle, crawling slowly across the floor, and a moment later I heard the gentle hissing of the escaping oxygen. Challenger breathed two or three times with enormous gulps, his lungs roaring as he drew in the vital gas.

“It works!” he cried exultantly. “My reasoning has been justified!” He was up on his feet again, alert and strong. With a tube in his hand he rushed over to his wife and held it to her face. In a few seconds she moaned, stirred, and sat up. He turned to me, and I felt the tide of life stealing warmly through my arteries. My reason told me that it was but a little respite, and yet, carelessly as we talk of its value, every hour of existence now seemed an inestimable thing. Never have I known such a thrill of sensuous joy as came with that freshet of life. The weight fell away from my lungs, the band loosened from my brow, a sweet feeling of peace and gentle, languid comfort stole over me. I lay watching Summerlee revive under the same remedy, and finally Lord John took his turn. He sprang to his feet and gave me a hand to rise, while Challenger picked up his wife and laid her on the settee.

“Oh, George, I am so sorry you brought me back,” she said, holding him by the hand. “The door of death is indeed, as you said, hung with beautiful, shimmering curtains; for, once the choking feeling had passed, it was all unspeakably soothing and beautiful. Why have you dragged me back?”

“Because I wish that we make the passage together. We have been together so many years. It would be sad to fall apart at the supreme moment.”

For a moment in his tender voice I caught a glimpse of a new Challenger, something very far from the bullying, ranting, arrogant man who had alternately amazed and offended his generation. Here in the shadow of death was the innermost Challenger, the man who had won and held a woman’s love. Suddenly his mood changed and he was our strong captain once again.

“Alone of all mankind I saw and foretold this catastrophe,” said he with a ring of exultation and scientific triumph in his voice. “As to you, my good Summerlee, I trust your last doubts have been resolved as to the meaning of the blurring of the lines in the spectrum and that you will no longer contend that my letter in the Times was based upon a delusion.”

For once our pugnacious colleague was deaf to a challenge. He could but sit gasping and stretching his long, thin limbs, as if to assure himself that he was still really upon this planet. Challenger walked across to the oxygen tube, and the sound of the loud hissing fell away till it was the most gentle sibilation.

“We must husband our supply of the gas,” said he. “The atmosphere of the room is now strongly hyper-oxygenated, and I take it that none of us feel any distressing symptoms. We can only determine by actual experiments what amount added to the air will serve to neutralize the poison. Let us see how that will do.”

We sat in silent nervous tension for five minutes or more, observing our own sensations. I had just begun to fancy that I felt the constriction round my temples again when Mrs. Challenger called out from the sofa that she was fainting. Her husband turned on more gas.

“In pre-scientific days,” said he, “they used to keep a white mouse in every submarine, as its more delicate organization gave signs of a vicious atmosphere before it was perceived by the sailors. You, my dear, will be our white mouse. I have now increased the supply and you are better.”

“Yes, I am better.”

“Possibly we have hit upon the correct mixture. When we have ascertained exactly how little will serve we shall be able to compute how long we shall be able to exist. Unfortunately, in resuscitating ourselves we have already consumed a considerable proportion of this first tube.”

“Does it matter?” asked Lord John, who was standing with his hands in his pockets close to the window. “If we have to go, what is the use of holdin’ on? You don’t suppose there’s any chance for us?”

Challenger smiled and shook his head.

“Well, then, don’t you think there is more dignity in takin’ the jump and not waitin’ to be pushed in? If it must be so, I’m for sayin’ our prayers, turnin’ off the gas, and openin’ the window.”

“Why not?” said the lady bravely. “Surely, George, Lord John is right and it is better so.”

“I most strongly object,” cried Summerlee in a querulous voice. “When we must die let us by all means die, but to deliberately anticipate death seems to me to be a foolish and unjustifiable action.”

“What does our young friend say to it?” asked Challenger.

“I think we should see it to the end.”

“And I am strongly of the same opinion,” said he.

“Then, George, if you say so, I think so too,” cried the lady.

“Well, well, I’m only puttin’ it as an argument,” said Lord John. “If you all want to see it through I am with you. It’s dooced interestin’, and no mistake about that. I’ve had my share of adventures in my life, and as many thrills as most folk, but I’m endin’ on my top note.”

“Granting the continuity of life,” said Challenger.

“A large assumption!” cried Summerlee. Challenger stared at him in silent reproof.

“Granting the continuity of life,” said he, in his most didactic manner, “none of us can predicate what opportunities of observation one may have from what we may call the spirit plane to the plane of matter. It surely must be evident to the most obtuse person” (here he glared a Summerlee) “that it is while we are ourselves material that we are most fitted to watch and form a judgment upon material phenomena. Therefore it is only by keeping alive for these few extra hours that we can hope to carry on with us to some future existence a clear conception of the most stupendous event that the world, or the universe so far as we know it, has ever encountered. To me it would seem a deplorable thing that we should in any way curtail by so much as a minute so wonderful an experience.”

“I am strongly of the same opinion,” cried Summerlee.

“Carried without a division,” said Lord John. “By George, that poor devil of a chauffeur of yours down in the yard has made his last journey. No use makin’ a sally and bringin’ him in?”

“It would be absolute madness,” cried Summerlee.

“Well, I suppose it would,” said Lord John. “It couldn’t help him and would scatter our gas all over the house, even if we ever got back alive. My word, look at the little birds under the trees!”

We drew four chairs up to the long, low window, the lady still resting with closed eyes upon the settee. I remember that the monstrous and grotesque idea crossed my mind—the illusion may have been heightened by the heavy stuffiness of the air which we were breathing—that we were in four front seats of the stalls at the last act of the drama of the world.

In the immediate foreground, beneath our very eyes, was the small yard with the half-cleaned motor-car standing in it. Austin, the chauffeur, had received his final notice at last, for he was sprawling beside the wheel, with a great black bruise upon his forehead where it had struck the step or mud-guard in falling. He still held in his hand the nozzle of the hose with which he had been washing down his machine. A couple of small plane trees stood in the corner of the yard, and underneath them lay several pathetic little balls of fluffy feathers, with tiny feet uplifted. The sweep of death’s scythe had included everything, great and small, within its swathe.

Over the wall of the yard we looked down upon the winding road, which led to the station. A group of the reapers whom we had seen running from the fields were lying all pell-mell, their bodies crossing each other, at the bottom of it. Farther up, the nurse-girl lay with her head and shoulders propped against the slope of the grassy bank. She had taken the baby from the perambulator, and it was a motionless bundle of wraps in her arms. Close behind her a tiny patch upon the roadside showed where the little boy was stretched. Still nearer to us was the dead cab-horse, kneeling between the shafts. The old driver was hanging over the splash-board like some grotesque scarecrow, his arms dangling absurdly in front of him. Through the window we could dimly discern that a young man was seated inside. The door was swinging open and his hand was grasping the handle, as if he had attempted to leap forth at the last instant. In the middle distance lay the golf links, dotted as they had been in the morning with the dark figures of the golfers, lying motionless upon the grass of the course or among the heather which skirted it. On one particular green there were eight bodies stretched where a foursome with its caddies had held to their game to the last. No bird flew in the blue vault of heaven, no man or beast moved upon the vast countryside which lay before us. The evening sun shone its peaceful radiance across it, but there brooded over it all the stillness and the silence of universal death—a death in which we were so soon to join. At the present instant that one frail sheet of glass, by holding in the extra oxygen which counteracted the poisoned ether, shut us off from the fate of all our kind. For a few short hours the knowledge and foresight of one man could preserve our little oasis of life in the vast desert of death and save us from participation in the common catastrophe. Then the gas would run low, we too should lie gasping upon that cherry-coloured boudoir carpet, and the fate of the human race and of all earthly life would be complete. For a long time, in a mood which was too solemn for speech, we looked out at the tragic world.

“There is a house on fire,” said Challenger at last, pointing to a column of smoke which rose above the trees. “There will, I expect, be many such—possibly whole cities in flames—when we consider how many folk may have dropped with lights in their hands. The fact of combustion is in itself enough to show that the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere is normal and that it is the ether which is at fault. Ah, there you see another blaze on the top of Crowborough Hill. It is the golf clubhouse, or I am mistaken. There is the church clock chiming the hour. It would interest our philosophers to know that man-made mechanisms has survived the race who made it.”

“By George!” cried Lord John, rising excitedly from his chair. “What’s that puff of smoke? It’s a train.”

We heard the roar of it, and presently it came flying into sight, going at what seemed to me to be a prodigious speed. Whence it had come, or how far, we had no means of knowing. Only by some miracle of luck could it have gone any distance. But now we were to see the terrific end of its career. A train of coal trucks stood motionless upon the line. We held our breath as the express roared along the same track. The crash was horrible. Engine and carriages piled themselves into a hill of splintered wood and twisted iron. Red spurts of flame flickered up from the wreckage until it was all ablaze. For half an hour we sat with hardly a word, stunned by the stupendous sight.

NEXT WEEK: “‘The true scientific mind is not to be tied down by its own conditions of time and space. It builds itself an observatory erected upon the border line of present, which separates the infinite past from the infinite future. From this sure post it makes its sallies even to the beginning and to the end of all things. As to death, the scientific mind dies at its post working in normal and methodic fashion to the end. It disregards so petty a thing as its own physical dissolution as completely as it does all other limitations upon the plane of matter.’”

Stay tuned!

RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HiLobrow’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, E.M. Forster, Philip Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.

HILOBOOKS: The mission of HiLoBooks is to serialize novels on HiLobrow; and also, as of 2012, operating as an imprint of Richard Nash’s Cursor, to reissue Radium Age science fiction in beautiful new print editions. In May 2012, we will publish Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague; in June, Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”); in July, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt; in September, H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook; in October, Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins; and in November, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. For more information, visit the HiLoBooks homepage.

READ: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, serialized between January and April 2012; and Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”), serialized between March and June 2012.

READ: HiLobrow’s previous serialized novels, both original works: James Parker’s The Ballad of Cocky The Fox (“a proof-of-concept that serialization can work on the Internet” — The Atlantic) and Karinne Keithley Syers’s Linda Linda Linda. We also publish original stories and comics.

Scottish adventure fiction is renowned for being thrilling and funny, but the Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger stories of Scottish physician and author ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (1859-1930) are remarkable because they admix such entertaining lowbrow qualities (very much on display in Doyle’s The White Company and The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard) with a highbrow inquiry into the logic of the process of knowledge. Doyle’s characters Holmes and Challenger not only reject narrow-minded scientific materialism but demonstrate a utopian alternative: an agile mode of reasoning that relies as much upon intuition and imagination as it does upon logical analysis. As Umberto Eco and other semioticians have pointed out, Holmes rejects scientific materialism’s inductive mode of acquiring knowledge — which proceeds, by means of instruments and techniques of observation and experiment, from case/hypothesis (e.g., “These beans are from this bag,” to use the logician C. S. Peirce’s 1878 “beanbag” example), to a fact gathered as a result of observation (e.g., “These beans are white”) and thence to a law-like rule (“All the beans from this bag are white”). Nor, despite what Holmes himself often claims, are Doyle’s characters deductive reasoners; that is, they don’t proceed from law-like rule to case/hypothesis to observed fact. When confronted with a heterogeneous fact, Holmes and Challenger first reason backward, casting about in their minds for a law-like rule in order to identify the fact’s possible causes; they then take an imaginative, intuitive leap forward, challenging established paradigms and common sense with bold, creative conjectures. (Peirce named this mode of reasoning abductive.) Doyle’s animus against narrow-minded Edwardian science led him to champion Spiritualism, and it might have led him to perpetrate the Piltdown Man hoax. But let’s judge the man by his fiction, which was — along with Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysical and absurdist writings — one of the era’s truly great high-lowbrow high-wire acts.

READ: The Abductive Method | HiLobrow’s serialization of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt. BUY: HiLoBooks’ beautiful paperback edition of The Poison Belt, with commentary by Joshua Glenn and Gordon Dahlquist; proofed against the first edition.

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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Morrissey, Arthur Cravan, and Sun Ra.

READ MORE about members of the Plutonian Generation (1854-63).