They took me to one of the other rings, inhabited by a still more
peculiar people, for they had no heads at all. In place of that
adornment, they had only one strong arm, at the end of which was a very
small hand. Otherwise they were like ordinary mortals, if they had been
dressed up. As it was, they were nothing but muscles, veins, and bones.
They had a heart shaped something like a transparent goose egg. They
communicated with each other by the motions of the blood within this
egg, which they detected by grasping the other fellow’s egg and feeling
the blood bubble. They had no lungs, getting their vitality by
absorption from the atmosphere. It was perfectly ludicrous to observe a
number of these queer people laughing, and they seemed to be very merry.
The ebullitions of the blood at such times was terrific, and they would
twist that one arm in the oddest manner. I forgot to say they worked
their machine, if I may use the term, on the hour-glass principle. The
blood went from one side to the other through a hole in a middle
partition, and when it all got into the lower compartment the hand would
take hold of it and turn the other side up.
But I was not really astonished until I got onto the body of Saturn.
There I found a people very much like ourselves; in fact, in appearance
they were just like ourselves; but they neither ate nor drank, and I was
much at a loss to understand how they existed, as they seemed to possess
all of the parts of a human body. Neither were they immortals; for they
were very flashy in their habits and life generally.
I saw a number of these people standing in a line. Another one had a
pump attached to a pipe that led into a pond filled with bright red
liquid. As each one came up, he would insert the nozzle of his pump
under his left arm and fill him up. I then learned that twice a day they
had their hearts filled with new blood, which was found in numberless
springs all over the surface of Saturn. By this frequent replenishing of
the system with new blood all disease was avoided.
It occasionally happens there, so I was told, that a mischievous one
would go to another part of the country and bring a little of the blood
that was pumped into the servants or black people and pour it into the
spring where the other people replenished. In that case the people who
used this tainted spring would be spotted for a while, and so would the
one who did it. As soon as the spots began to appear, by changing to
another pure spring the blemishes would gradually disappear.
There were springs for all of the different animals, which seemed
peculiar to me at first; but I learned that the different animals were
the same people trying experiments upon themselves by using different
kinds of blood.
One of the marvelous things about Saturn was the fact there was no night
there, the luminosity of the rings being such as to keep it a perpetual
day; hence the people never slept there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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