New Lands | Page 2

For he deals in
nightmare, not on the planetary, but on the constellational scale, and the
imagination of one who staggers along after him is frequently left
gasping and flaccid.
Now he has followed "The Book of the Damned" with "New Lands"
pointing incidentally to Mars as "the San Salvador of the Sky," and
renewing his passion for the dismayingly significant "damned --"
tokens and strange hints excluded by the historically mercurial
acceptances of "Dogmatic Science." Of his attack on the astronomers it
can at least be said that the literature of indignation is enriched by it.
To the "university-trained mind" here is wildness almost as wild as
Roger Bacon's once appeared to be; though of course even the layest of
lay brothers must not assume that all wild science will in time become
accepted law, as some of Roger's did. Retort to Mr. Fort must be left to
the outraged astronomer. If indeed any astronomer could feel himself
so little outraged as to offer a retort. Lay brethren are outside the
quarrel and must content themselves with gratitude to a man who
writes two such books as "New Lands" and "The Book of the Damned";
gratitude for passages and pictures--moving pictures--of such cyclonic
activity and dimensions that a whole new area of a reader's imagination
stirs in amazement and is brought to life.
BOOTH TARKINGTON.

NEW LANDS PART I CHAPTER ONE
LANDS in the sky--
That they are nearby--
That they do not move.
I take for a principle that all being is the infinitely serial, and that
whatever has been will, with differences of particulars, be again--
The last quarter of the fifteenth century--land to the west!
This first quarter of the twentieth century--we shall have revelations.
There will be data. There will be many. Behind this book, unpublished
collectively, or held as constituting its reserve forces, there are other
hundreds of data, but independently I take for a principle that all
existence is a flux and a re-flux, by which periods of expansion follow
periods of contraction; that few men can even think widely when times
are narrow times, but that human constrictions cannot repress
extensions of thoughts and lives and enterprise and dominion when
times are wider times--so then that the pageantry of foreign coasts that
was revealed behind blank horizons after the year 1492, can not be, in
the course of development, the only astounding denial of seeming
vacancy--that the spirit, or the animation, and the stimulations and the
needs of the fifteenth century are all appearing again, and that requital
may appear again--
Aftermath of war, as in the year 1492: demands for readjustments;
crowded and restless populations, revolts against limitations,
intolerable restrictions against emigrations. The young man is no longer
urged, or is no longer much inclined, to go westward. He will, or must,
go somewhere. If directions alone no longer invite him, he may hear
invitation in dimensions. There are many persons, who have not
investigated for themselves, who think that both poles of this earth have
been discovered. There are too many women traveling luxuriously in

"Darkest Africa." Eskimos of Disco, Greenland, are publishing a
newspaper. There must be outlet, or there will be explosion--
Outlet and invitation and opportunity--
San Salvadors of the Sky--a Plymouth Rock that hangs in the heavens
of Servia--a foreign coast from which storms have brought materials to
the city of Birmingham, England.
Or the mentally freezing, or dying, will tighten their prohibitions, and
the chill of their censorships will contract, to extinction, our lives,
which, without sin, represent matter deprived of motion. Their ideal is
Death, or approximate death, warmed over occasionally only enough to
fringe with uniform, decorous icicles--from which there will be no
escape, if, for the living and sinful and adventurous there be not San
Salvadors somewhere else, a Plymouth Rock of reversed significance,
coasts of sky-continents.
But every consciousness that we have of needs, and all hosts,
departments, and sub-divisions of data that indicate the possible
requital of needs are opposed--not by the orthodoxy of the common
Puritans, but by the Puritans of Science, and their austere, disheartening,
dried or frozen orthodoxy.
Islands of space--see Sci. Amer., vol. this and p. that--accounts from the
Repts. of the Brit. Assoc. for the Ad. of Sci.--Nature, etc.--except for an
occasional lapse, our sources of data will not be sneered at. As to our
interpretations, I consider them, myself, more as suggestions and
gropings and stimuli. Islands of space and the rivers and oceans of an
extra-geography--
Stay and let salvation damn you--or straddle an auroral beam and
paddle it from Rigel to Betelgeuse. If there be no accepting that there
are such rivers and oceans beyond this earth, stay and travel upon
steamships with schedules that can be depended upon, food so well
cooked and