Another World: Fragments from the Star City of MontalluyahLumley, Benjamin
Science
Another World: Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah
Lumley, Benjamin
Utopias
Sometimes in moments of despondency she saw the beautiful form of an
angel radiant with light, who spoke to her in soothing tones, and
entreated her to be patient, assuring her that her sufferings were
ordained for a good end, and that by patience and the sweetness of her
nature, she would attain the power of casting from her the torments she
endured, and that after doing much good during her mortal career she
would, when her time came to quit the world, be placed high amongst
myriads of angels. She said that whenever urged by despair to relieve
herself from her pains by a desperate course, this bright and beautiful
angel would stand before her and pour words of consolation and hope into
her ear.
In relating the incidents of her supposed dream, her whole manner was so
different from the former state of excitement, to which her friends had
been accustomed, that all saw she was perfectly rational, although
relating as a dream what had occurred during twenty-two years of her
actual life. It seemed as though all the time that had elapsed since she
was four years of age belonged as it were to another and differently
constituted brain; and that she had now resumed the thread of her life
from the time when she was four years old, the period of the first
accident.
When the husband and child were brought to her she knew them not, though
she had some vague notion of having seen them in her dream. The husband
prayed her to return to him: she said she was not his wife, and could
not accept him as a husband; that she felt no love for the child, and
could not even like it as a playmate. She recollected her parents when
they were twenty-two years of age, and could not understand how they
could be so much changed.
In all her occupations and amusements she acted as a young child, but
she gradually increased in understanding, and in sixteen years after her
recovery she became a most accomplished person, without, however,
possessing the varied talent of former times. She lived seventy-two
years after the trance (in all ninety-eight years) now a short life with
us; but never, till the day of her death, could she understand that she
had lived during the twenty-two years which filled up the space between
the first and second accidents. Strange to say, during that interval, no
one had suspected that her brain was affected. Nearly the whole period
had elapsed before the commencement of my rule, or the evil would have
been detected and remedied, not by confining the patient and driving her
into madness, but by gentle means.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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