THE MAGIC CARPET.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13727, 18 April 1908, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE MAGIC CARPET.

BY TOHUNGA.

The Easter holidays are with us, and a tumultuous multitude let loose from school —from the minor school where you sit in rows and wonder at the slowness of Time to the major school where you sit as you like and wonder at the swiftness of Time —is having us good a time as it can, fearless of the weather. Some have gone to Wellington and some further South still some to Rotorua and to Okoroire and to Te Aroha and to every other wateringplace in the province ; and some are camping and some are picnicking and some are boating on the wide gulf water.',. For distance is not what it was once upon a time, but can be put behind one at the rate of hundreds of miles daily, even upon our local railways and upon our local coasting vessels. Vet the Magic Carpet is still what it was. To the traveller of Arabian Nights and to the traveller of Modern Days nothing of that has altered or ever can. Yon can get to London by rail and steamer in a. month, and may soon get there in a fortnight or even in a week; but though a flying-ship should tarry you there in a day or in an hour, the Magic Carpet is swifter still for those who possess it. They mount it after dinner from an easy-chair, perhaps, and with a filling of their pipe, and they say to themselves "London," and hey, presto! they are there. They stand by the Exchange and look up at the seated statue before it, and wonder what it is called ; they look across at the grim grey walls' of the Bank and casually wish they had the gold in it ; they put, up their umbrella to a passing cab, and in a. moment are inside ajid off to the eating-house down Fleet-street., where there is nothing sold but beef-steak pie, and where you can get pies a-s hot and fresh a!, midnight as at noon. And as you move jerkingly along in the great stream of traffic that halts and moves like a machine at the semaphoring of the crossways police, you see a stalwart countryman towering" red-cheeked and stodgily above the alert, and dwarfish Londoners; and you sit again on your Magic. Carpet and say the name of the [dace where you were .born; and in an instant London is no more, but, you are home again in the old shires where there is little progress, but where the nation breeds men a.nd whence the new nations swarm. Did it. ever occur to you, by the way, how little the towns count to the persistent life of a '.'--how little the great cities count in the new lands? They open their mouths and swallow millions, but they give little in return—for in the towns vitality fails, and the instinct of living passes"away in a fever of unrestSome day, of course, when they have made wide streets, and abolished many-storeyed buildings, and ended the smoke nuisance, and generally restored fresh-air conditions and when adequate transit systems bring townsmen in from far-stretching suburbs every morning and pour them back to gardened dwellings every night, things will be different, and the men of the towns may he physically as vigorous as well as mentally keener' than the men of the country* But, in the meanwhile, palls of smoke smother vitality, and the breathing of over-breathed air chokes mankind. But about the Magic Carpet! It is woven of the imagination and the memory, and of the tales of travellers and of the pictures of painters and of the lettered pages of vivid writers. Some have only a shoddy carpet, while others have one worth a" king's ransom, but nobody human is without one altogether. Even the animals may carry such carpets within the brains of which we know so little—for does, not the. cow strive to return to the place, where she calved, and cannot the horse find his way in the dark over the track which he must surely picture in his mind? And. when the eagle pines in captivity, for what is it longing? And when the dog stirs in his sleep, do we not say that he dreams? Only to Man it ha's been given to see with "the Imagination scenes which in body were never visited, to wander freely over the world, to move to and fro in Time, and even to |

roam godlike among the stars. • Behind all the universal love of story, of history, of travellers' tales and writers' romancing is the unconscious knowledge that thereby we add to the incomprehensible power of the Magic Carpet, which is the most precious of all pergonal possessions. More than this : the unconscious \ instincts within us drive us ever to action and experience for the same most potent reason. For to the sitter on the Magic Carpet the Past, and even the Future, are as the Present, just as the uttermost ends of the earth and the furthermost corners of space are very near. These Easter Holidays will take many a man and woman far afield, will see them speeding by train and steamer, by tramcar and motor-car, and bicycle and horsed vehicle, by yacht and motor-boat and afoot, to seek new scenes and changed environment.. But even on their travels they can outstrip their own journeying if they will; they can pass ahead of themselves with ease; they can see the Andes lift snow peaks beyond Rangitoto, or look down njw>n the holiday-making at Manly, or upon the solemnity of an English (lood Friday and the glad rejoicing of a Russian Easter. That is the Magic Carpet--the vehicle of the mind ; the wings of thought; the great white horse Aldebaran, by which the Arab rode to the seventh heaven and back while a jug of water was falling to the ground. Without this Magic Carpet humanity would be impossible, all our hopes and all our fears as though they never were. ft ha.s borne dreamers to the spiritual world and shown them Paradise and Hades; it

\ lias swept patriots up until they saw their j country stretching free and happy on the one hand, enslaved and wretched on the oilier; it has given migrating nations glimpses of the i'a.r lands they sought, so that they tore their roots from the old soil and dared the strange and terrifying; it has shown inventors their ideas completed, artists their dreams attained, explorers the view from distant Pisgahs they never lived to reach. And it has given to men knowledge of the chaotic Past through which the Present, came to them, and knowledge of the luminous Future towards which they struggle on. If you come to sum it all up, you will realise the value of the Magic Carpet and how immensely rich are those who possess it in its highest form. Yet it isn't for sale; it can neither be bought nor sold, whatever the considerations. You can buy a motor-car that will travel 60 miles an' hour, and may soon be able to buy an airship that will travel 600. But you can't buy a Magic Carpet. You have that with which you were endowed by the Creator, and which has been made better or worse by your own treatment of it— only that and none other, even though you are a multi-millionaire. Charles the King could buy French adventuresses and sell the. honour of England, but he could not buy the Carpet of Bunyan the Tinker any more than he could buy the respect of "an honest man or the love of a true woman. And so to-day you need not envy those who own motor-cars and can afford the time and the money to make the grand tour, if you will only practise the living of your own Magic Carpetthat, in a breath, will take you to Lhassa the Forbidden or to where the Trojans haul in triumph the Horse that is to ruin Troy. And some day it may he—for who knows anything of the mysteries of the stale we call Being—that by this Magic Carpet we may actually transport ourselves as now we only seem to, when we may close our eyes and bend our wills, and see before us 'not the London that we knew of old. nor the London that we have read of. but London and its people as they actually are. And we may not only see, but speak to and converse with, mind to mind," loved ones far distant—for "there are mine things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in our philosophies." Which opens up a wider and vaster question, yet one not as necessarily fantastical as before the invention of wireless telegraphy.