A Modern Utopia | Page 6

is Utopia, with its sister mate, the Moon. It is a
planet like our planet, the same continents, the same islands, the same
oceans and seas, another Fuji-Yama is beautiful there dominating
another Yokohama--and another Matterhorn overlooks the icy disorder
of another Theodule. It is so like our planet that a terrestrial botanist
might find his every species there, even to the meanest pondweed or the
remotest Alpine blossom....
Only when he had gathered that last and turned about to find his inn
again, perhaps he would not find his inn!
Suppose now that two of us were actually to turn about in just that
fashion. Two, I think, for to face a strange planet, even though it be a
wholly civilised one, without some other familiar backing, dashes the
courage overmuch. Suppose that we were indeed so translated even as
we stood. You figure us upon some high pass in the Alps, and though
I--being one easily made giddy by stooping--am no botanist myself, if
my companion were to have a specimen tin under his arm--so long as it
is not painted that abominable popular Swiss apple green--I would
make it no occasion for quarrel! We have tramped and botanised and
come to a rest, and, sitting among rocks, we have eaten our lunch and
finished our bottle of Yvorne, and fallen into a talk of Utopias, and said
such things as I have been saying. I could figure it myself upon that
little neck of the Lucendro Pass, upon the shoulder of the Piz Lucendro,
for there once I lunched and talked very pleasantly, and we are looking
down upon the Val Bedretto, and Villa and Fontana and Airolo try to
hide from us under the mountain side--three-quarters of a mile they are
vertically below. (Lantern.) With that absurd nearness of effect one gets
in the Alps, we see the little train a dozen miles away, running down
the Biaschina to Italy, and the Lukmanier Pass beyond Piora left of us,
and the San Giacomo right, mere footpaths under our feet....

And behold! in the twinkling of an eye we are in that other world!
We should scarcely note the change. Not a cloud would have gone from
the sky. It might be the remote town below would take a different air,
and my companion the botanist, with his educated observation, might
almost see as much, and the train, perhaps, would be gone out of the
picture, and the embanked straightness of the Ticino in the
Ambri-Piotta meadows--that might be altered, but that would be all the
visible change. Yet I have an idea that in some obscure manner we
should come to feel at once a difference in things.
The botanist's glance would, under a subtle attraction, float back to
Airolo. "It's queer," he would say quite idly, "but I never noticed that
building there to the right before."
"Which building?"
"That to the right--with a queer sort of thing----"
"I see now. Yes. Yes, it's certainly an odd-looking affair.... And big,
you know! Handsome! I wonder----"
That would interrupt our Utopian speculations. We should both
discover that the little towns below had changed--but how, we should
not have marked them well enough to know. It would be indefinable, a
change in the quality of their grouping, a change in the quality of their
remote, small shapes.
I should flick a few crumbs from my knee, perhaps. "It's odd," I should
say, for the tenth or eleventh time, with a motion to rise, and we should
get up and stretch ourselves, and, still a little puzzled, turn our faces
towards the path that clambers down over the tumbled rocks and runs
round by the still clear lake and down towards the Hospice of St.
Gotthard--if perchance we could still find that path.
Long before we got to that, before even we got to the great high road,
we should have hints from the stone cabin in the nape of the pass--it
would be gone or wonderfully changed--from the very goats upon the
rocks, from the little hut by the rough bridge of stone, that a mighty
difference had come to the world of men.
And presently, amazed and amazing, we should happen on a man--no
Swiss--dressed in unfamiliar clothing and speaking an unfamiliar
speech....
Section 4
Before nightfall we should be drenched in wonders, but still we should

have wonder left for the thing my companion, with his scientific
training, would no doubt be the first to see. He would glance up, with
that proprietary eye of the man who knows his constellations down to
the little Greek letters. I imagine his exclamation. He would at first
doubt his eyes. I should inquire the cause of his consternation, and it
would be hard to explain. He would ask me