There was, they felt, a noble isolation or apartness of spirit in their old men and women which raised them above common humanity, and made the human body seem an incongruous garment for their soul. They lived above the demands of their corporeal energies rather than in them or by them. In the young the two seemed blended together; it was difficult often to distinguish in them the movements of the two types of energy. But in the old, though the corporeal had been raised and etherealised, it seemed to hang on the skirts of the spiritual and try to drag it down; it bore its earthly origination more manifestly on it in comparison with the nobler refinement of the spiritual. And the longer they lived, the stronger the contrast became, till at last nature herself seemed to demand their eternal divorce. Euthanasia at a certain stage in the development of Limanoran life came to be not so much a privilege as a holy duty. To liberate the higher energy from its alliance with the lower, to die, was but the next and most natural stage in the evolution of the life. Even the family, who would feel the bereavement most in the loss of their wise help and guidance, acquiesced gladly, feeling that the liberation must mean a nobler career for the released spiritual energy. Thus it was that on Doomalona they used the music of creation; they gave utterance to their feeling that death was not dissolution but creation, that the retrogression of the body was an advance for the higher energy, the truer self. The sense of decay or degeneration was quite absent from their thoughts. It was a triumphal farewell; for they were convinced that for the liberated it was the noblest deed of all to die, the very crown of all their life. CHAPTER IV AN EPIDEMIC THOUGHT by thought I ejected my old view of death from my mind. I could not forget the scene of triumph which had been enacted on the hill of farewells; and the chanting that rilled through it haunted my imagination, bringing a sense of satisfaction, if not joy. I got into the habit of winging my exercise-flights towards Doomalona. I was there with Thyriel when dawn struck the world into gladness and music. There were we together to see the flaming picture the set of sun drew on Lilaroma. No platform on the island so caught the inspiration of the coming or departing orb. None, I came to feel, was so fitted for the hegira of earth-weary souls. No such launching-ground was there for the voyage through infinity. As I frequented it in my leisure moments, there grew into my system the sense that death was not so much an end as a beginning, not a dissolution, but a birth and perhaps a forgetting. More and more was the idea of it a nucleus of delight; and the old melancholy and sorrow, making it a burden and a terror for the mind, disappeared.