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Title: Limanora
the island of progress

Author: Godfrey Sweven

Release date: July 20, 2025 [eBook #76533]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1903

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76533

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIMANORA ***

BY GODFREY SWEVEN

RIALLARO: THE ARCHIPELAGO OF EXILES
12°. $1.50
LIMANORA: THE ISLAND OF PROGRESS
12°. $1.50

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
New York and London

LIMANORA

THE ISLAND OF PROGRESS

by

GODFREY SWEVEN

Author of “Riallaro, The Archipelago of Exiles”

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1903

copyright, 1903
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

Published, June, 1903
The Knickerbocker Press, New York

PREFACE

I T was long before our strange guest could be induced to continue his
narrative. He had seemed to hesitate as he approached the close of his
sojourn in the outer islets of the archipelago. He several times postponed
the story of his exit from it in the projectile. And for months he left his
history hanging in air, and the strange coffin in which he had been confined
executing its parabola from his yacht.
There was some excuse for his delay, for the winter had fled, and the
birds and the flowering trees around us gloried again in song and colour. He
grew restless as the days lengthened, and could not bear to settle in our
shelter by the fiord. All that we saw of him for months was his occasional
flight from precipice to precipice above the sombre green of the bush. It
was as easy for him to flit from knoll to knoll as it was for us to leap a
ditch. He had regained his old bird-like gait, that to us was noiseless. What
he fed on came to be a puzzle, for he seldom joined us now in our meals;
and the old semi-transparency came into his face.
Weeks and weeks together none of us would see him. Where he went
we knew not, nor had we the heart to follow him and trace his whereabouts.
Now and again he would join one or another of us at our work, and indicate
the direction in which we should tunnel or dig for the richer layers of wash-
dirt. His instinctive sense of the presence of gold beneath the surface of the
earth seemed to us in our blind groping miraculous. We never found him
mistaken in his indications. But we felt it a kind of desecration to ask him to
condescend to such base and trivial pursuits as the research for wealth. At
times his absence was so prolonged that we thought he had vanished back
to the ring of mist, whence he had come. But a great storm always brought
him to our huts again.
The summer waned into autumn, and the days began to narrow down.
Blasts from the south grew keener; and his flight from us was more

circumscribed. We saw him almost daily. When the winter nights began, he
gave himself up again to memory. He drew towards us in sympathy, and
there were in his narrative fewer and fewer reserves. His English became
fuller and more exact, though time and again he stumbled over thoughts too
subtle to transfuse into so rough and materialistic a language. Our own
interpretations of his descriptions must often have been mistaken, we are
certain, and many passages we have had to omit because of manifest
ambiguity or mistiness of expression.
godfrey sweven.

CONTENTS

chapter page

preface iii
glossary vii
I.— my awakening 1
II.— my education 15
III.— sleep, rest, and flight 25
IV.— hermitry 35
V.— journey to the valley of memories 51
VI.— fialume 63
VII.— leomarie 88
VIII.— rimla 99
IX.— oomalefa 112
X.— the firla, or electric sense 133
XI.— a catastrophe 149
XII.— oolorefa 162
XIII.— the lilaran 174
XIV.— choktroo 192
XV.— the duomovamolan or cosmophone 219
XVI.— their heaven and their hell 230
XVII.— my education continued 244

postscript 283
BOOK II 287

GLOSSARY

ailomo—The astrobiological families.
airolan—A sensometer, or instrument for finding the personal
equation of a man.
alclirolan—Radiographic cinematograph; an instrument
combining microscope, camera in vacuo, and electric power.
alfarene—Oxygen shrub.
ammerlin—Historoscope.
ciralaison—Museum of terrors.
clevamolan—Combination of telescope and makrakoust, or
distance-hearer.
climolan—Earth-sensor.
clirolan—Instrument that combines electro-microscopy and
photography.
clirolanic—Infinitesimally microscopic.
corfaleena—Vacuum-engine car.
doomalona—The hill of farewells.
duomovamolan—Instrument that interprets the music of the
cosmos.
erfaleena—Anti-gravitation flight-car.
faleena—Ship of the air.
farfaleena—Electric faleena.
farosan—Aroma-recorder.
fialume—The valley of memories.
filammu—The will-telegraph.
firla—The electric sense.
firlalain—The firlamaic department of Oomalefa.
firlamai—The arts of the electric sense.

firlamaic—Belonging to the arts of the firla.
firlaman—A musical instrument that appeals to the firla.
floramo—The botanical families.
floronal—The tree of life.
fraloomiamo—The families of pioneers that imagine and
represent the distant future.
germabell—A tree with fruit that makes the muscles and
cartilage more elastic.
idlumian—Electric steriliser.
idrolan—Observer and magnifier of electric impulses.
idrolinasan—Machine-reporter of the thoughts and feelings
and words of an assembly.
idrosan—Recorder of electric impulses and sensations.
idrovamolan—Instrument for at once seeing and hearing at
great distances.
ilarime—Edifice devoted to the arts of smell, taste, and
sound combined.
imanora—Centennial review of the civilisation and its
progress.
imataran—The focusser of history.
inamar—Instrument for splitting up light into its
constituents.
inasan—Recorder of luminous impressions.
inolan—Measurer of light.
irelium—Iridescent metal applicable to all manner of
purposes by the Limanorans.
labramor—Alloy of irelium that sponges up and retains
electricity.
labrolan—Instrument for drawing electricity from the air and
the clouds.
lavidrolan—Camera-telescope.
lavolan—Revealer of the inner tissues and mechanism.
leomarie—The science and art of earth-seeing.
leomo—The families of earth-seers.
leomoran—The earth-perforator.
lenta—The minutest division of time in Limanora.
lilamo—The families that watch the security of the island.

lilaran—The storm-cone.
lilarie—The science and art of island-security.
linamar—The analyst of sounds.
linasan—Recorder and reproducer of sounds.

linoklar—Spectroscopic analyst and recorder of vapours.
loomiamo—Families of pioneers who imagine and represent the
links that connect the present with the distant future.
loomiefa—The theatre of futurition.
manora—Decennial review of the progress made by the people.
margol—Electric instrument for blending or reducing the
strength of perfumes, flavours, and sounds.
minella—Edifice for formula-machines.
mirlan—Life-lamp for revealing and recording internal
processes for the use of the eye, the ear, and the electric sense.
molta—The Limanoran measure of infinitesimal length.
monalan—Electrical distance-analyst.
mornalan—Time-telescope.
narolla—Dream-stimulants.
ooaran—Psychometer.
ooaromo—Psycho-physiological families.
ooloran—The sonarchitect.
oolorefa—The hall of sonarchitecture.
oomalefa—Halls of nutrition and medication.
oorolan—Instrument for transforming form and colour into
melody.
pirakno—Machine for drawing electricity from space.
piramo—The meteorological families.
rimla—The centre of force.
salosan—The gustagraph.
sarifolan—Instrument that interprets for sight, hearing, and
the electric sense the graphic records of the mirlan.
sarmolan—Cosmic barometer.
sidralan—Biometer.
sidralmo—Bio-chemical families.
sidramo—The chemical families.
terralona—The edifice of outlook into heaven and hell.
thinamar—Visualiser of sound.

tirleomoran—Electric earth-perforator.
tremolan—Electric clock indicating the changes of
electricity in various parts of the island.
trevamolan—Graduated modifier of sound.
vamolan—Makro-mikrakoust.
vimolan—Photo-electric analyser.

ERRATA
Page 31, line 6. For “resistent” read “resistant.”
Page 93, line 16. For “maintained” read “maimed.”
Page 155, line 2. For “I that felt” read “I had felt.”
Page 211, lines 13 and 17. For “somnifractive” read
“somnifactive.”
Page 230, line 3. For “onwonted” read “unwonted.”
Page 348, last line. For “rareity” read “rarity.”
Page 369, line 12. For “amosphere” read
“atmosphere.”
Page 377, line 5. For “its” read “it.”
Page 440, line 17. For “we the saw” read “we saw
the.”
Page 465, line 8 from bottom. For “thought” read
“through.”

LIMANORA

BOOK I
The Outer or Material Civilisation

CHAPTER I
MY AWAKENING

I OPENED my eyes in a world no feature of which I could recognise.
Everything around me was of the most dazzling beauty. The walls and
vaulted roof of the room where I lay gleamed like mosaic-work of lit
jewellery. The floors were duller, and yet shone with a coloured radiance
like that in a dew-belled meadow under the light of the slant-rayed forenoon
sun. The light broke up in innumerable points and corners of the roof into a
magnificent display of prismatic colours, moving and changing every
minute. Yet, with all the marvellous iridescence, there was sufficient shade
in the vault and walls to check the fiery oppression of the sun. I had dreamt
of such fairy palaces; but the dream had ever been abortive or glanced off
into something hideous or appalling. Here was architecture as unlike
anything I had seen upon earth as a dream, and yet it had a grace that no
dream had ever caught.
Nor did I know the material of which this room was formed. It seemed
like ice, yet was never changed by the fire of the sun. It was capable of
being moulded into the most delicate lace-work, and yet could be made as
massive as marble walls of Eastern palaces that were built for both pleasure
and siege. It was in portions as transparent as glass, and in others frosted
with wondrous pictures. And how were those countless domes and arches
and arborescent columns produced with such ease? How were those airy
galleries hung? How were those fragrant fountains poised so nicely that an
infant’s finger seemed capable of overturning them? Even the gently
moving curtains had the same crystalline character as the walls, now frosted
as by the artist of our winter-mornings, again goldenly dim, or rainbow-
hued.
There was a spaciousness that reminded me of the colonnaded aisles of
our great cathedrals. Was I resting in one of the temples of the island? Was I
being consecrated for sacrifice? And yet the dainty warm nooks, the close-
hung curtains, and graceful tapestries so broke the awe and loneliness of the
place as to make me feel that it was a chamber for a solitary. And I could

look out upon the fields and forests and the far-stretching sea; for every foot
of wall had in it some transparency that with its landscape stood like a
picture framed in the frosted tracery around it. I seemed never to reach the
limit of these varied perspectives and distances. I sank back exhausted on
my perfumed couch, then slowly recovered by aid of the sweetness that met
my every sense. The fragrance that filled the room was like that of finest
garden flowers, and kept changing from one lovely variety to another, never
cloying the sense. Around, too, from unseen sources, floated sweet music,
that now swelled into a chorus, and again fell into angelic softness. Then a
new sensation came to me; with every breath I seemed to draw in a subtle
nourishment and stimulation to my senses; every minute added to the
renewal of my strength. And, to increase my delighted bewilderment, I
gradually felt a new sense appealed to; every nerve in my body seemed
exhilarated, and I felt capable of heroic actions. Some magnetic influence
was raying towards me through the atmosphere, and a dormant electric
faculty seemed to be awakened in my mind and in my body, producing the
effect of intoxication without its stupor or the numbing of the moral powers.
It was like a beautiful dream without the helplessness of the dreamer. I felt
no delirium or voluptuous languor from the excitement of the senses. It all
led to spiritual vigour, that would have made the body its prompt ally.
My renewed energies turned my mind to my strange surroundings. I
wondered where the beings were who had built this wondrous palace, and
were now doubtless playing upon my senses. Was it all a dream? And had I
never been shot into the sea with Noola? It seemed as if my inmost thoughts
were at once communicated to my watchers; for from some direction, out of
some niche or doorway I had not noticed, moved softly a figure, that, in its
muscular breadth, large head, and springy gait, reminded me of Noola.
Upon the face a smile shone out of unfathomed depths of thought and
sympathy, and yet the lips were close as if to forbid speech. It was enough
to rest and gaze at the beautiful expression of the face with its intensity of
love and pity in the eyes. But the features had not that symmetry of outline
which we call beauty in Europe; and the form was not “divinely tall.” The
whole of the attraction lay in the upraying of the soul into the face. It was
like gazing into the limpid waters of a lake; I tried to give speech to my
emotions, but the hand rose gently to the lips in a gesture that commanded
silence, then waved over me, and, as I looked, I fell into a deep and
dreamless sleep.

I knew not how long I had been unconscious; for when I woke I seemed
to be a new man; every faculty tingled with energy; health glowed through
my tissues; I wandered from niche to niche, from arcade to recess; I
climbed the lofty galleries and raised the curtains, shaking the sweet
perfumes from them as they swung in the air; I ran from transparency to
transparency with the delight of a child, and gazed through each at the ever-
varying landscapes that stretched outwards to the sea. Music, distant and
entrancing, floated around me in the air, with variations and cooling bars of
silence, so that it made a subtle ether circumambient rather than a definite
impression on the senses. Under such conditions what could not I do in life?
I remembered the old weariness and despair that used to cling around me
like a shirt of Nessus even in the morning when I was refreshed with sleep,
and the clogging humours that used to retard my most generous or most
energetic action. In my former life I had moved in a clammy viscous
medium that dragged back my most eager faculties. Now I was built of air,
and stirred lightly as air.
What was it that had accomplished this strange transformation? I had
not felt so in the other islands of the archipelago or even on its seas. I had
not been so exhilarated at my first awaking. How had this great change
come about? Or was it but momentary, to pass away like other intoxications
and leave exhaustion and ache? I began to be puzzled and to feel the return
of the thought that it was perhaps only a dream after all. How was I to test
the matter?
Surely I could not have thought aloud. Yet here from somewhere or
other was moving across the floor the figure that had appeared after my first
trance. I was so awestruck by the noiseless flash of the approach that I
could make no sign of welcome. What could I say to a being who came so
near to what we consider in the old world the supernatural? As soon as my
thoughts touched upon the state of my mind and the circumstances that
surrounded me, my host (should I call him so?) appeared. And, though my
senses, I thought, had acquired preternatural acuteness, not a sound had I
heard of his entrance or of his footsteps across the chamber.
He seemed to know the perplexity of my thoughts again, for he
advanced with so airy a grace that my eyes were fascinated by the ease of
the motion. And his words came almost like music; I scarcely considered
what he was saying, so beautiful were the tones and manner in which it was

said. “Come, and I shall tell you what has occurred,” was what I
understood. It was in the primary or simplest vocabulary of Limanora, the
vocabulary that Noola had taught me.
He led me by a covered but transparent way into a vaulted chamber, that
seemed to the other as a cathedral to a chapel; for it was pillared and
galleried and aisled with the most transcendent art. But I was too interested
in the story he had to tell to give way to my passive enjoyment of the scene.
He motioned me to ascend with him a platform that rose above us in a lofty
recess at one brightly sunlit corner of the building. I saw him lean back, and
feared that he would fall to the floor; but with his motion the rich mosaic of
the platform opened, and a rest rose to meet his body which was of the
same alabaster-like texture as the curtains and seemed to shape itself to
every curve and bend of his figure. He stretched out his hand towards me,
and before I knew what he had done I was resting, in an attitude not far
from the upright, on a soft machine like his own. He showed me how to
control this by a knob under my right hand, and then together we flew to the
ceiling and back, wheeled round, swung gently in the air, or remained still.
It moved like a thing of life in sympathy with every desire; a slight change
of the position would relieve any part of the body and yet leave all the rest
supported; any kind of motion was accomplished on changing the screw
that lay in the knob. I afterwards investigated the mechanism, and was
amazed at its simplicity; a few levers, cunningly mastering all the various
combinations of motion, turned on or off the force needed for the necessary
changes. After a few hours’ experience of it, I could find no comparison in
nature but the couch of air on which the albatross seems to rest as it moves.
I afterwards found that a nice management of compressed air was the secret
of this wonderful rest that was neither couch nor chair. As soon as we
ceased to use it, it disappeared as suddenly as it had risen. This accounted
for the complete absence of the furniture that impedes free motion in our
European houses and made me think as I awoke in my chamber of our great
cathedrals with their free floor space.
There in mid-air we lightly hung as if resting on wings; he seemed to
know my anatomy and the points of greatest pressure in any attitude, and
controlled both machine-rests with such adroitness that we swung hither
and thither, changing slowly from the recumbent to the erect attitude or
back again, finding every few minutes a different point of view of the

chamber or of the landscapes that could be seen through the walls. But I
soon grew oblivious to the beauty that stole through every sense; my whole
consciousness was absorbed in watching the play of the intelligence on his
face and listening to his narrative. I missed many of the links in his story,
even though he contrived to put most of it into the primary and secondary
vocabularies, and, where he was compelled to go beyond them, put so much
of his thoughts into his features that I could almost have gathered it from
them. But I saw the drift of the story, and, when it was over, pieced the
fragments together and found, when afterwards I knew the language and the
civilisation better, I had missed little of the real meaning. I give it, then, as
if it were in his own words, although my intelligence seemed to stumble at
every step in it.
“You wonder at your hospitable reception. But you will not wonder
when you know the change in the condition of our knowledge since Noola
was exiled. He was unhurt by the ricochet of the missiles on the beach. In
the darkness they were ill-aimed, and, though they struck in sand, they were
shattered by the impact and recoiled from the shingle underneath. He
disentangled himself from the wreck and rescued you. But soon the
watchers by the storm-cone were down on the beach and carried you to our
house, whilst they led your comrade to another. You were each examined by
the wise men and the medical families. Your faculties and emotions and
tendencies were all tested, and their various strengths measured by means
of the different kinds of cerebrometers whilst you slept. Since Noola was
exiled a hundred years ago, our knowledge of the brain and the nerves and
their various functions has been applied in the most practical way to the art
of living. Every curve and convolution of the controlling instrument of the
body has its value and meaning tabulated. Every action, thought, and
emotion has had its physical symbol and locality fixed; and the minutest
change in the strength of any one of these points in the brain or in the
nervous system can be discovered by applying one of the cerebrometers.
You will know what these are some day; but it is enough to say that they
can measure, by means of a delicate apparatus controlled by electricity, the
amount of force that exists in any living tissue; there is a separate kind for
each portion of the brain and each nerve section of the trunk, and it will
move only when near that portion or any living tissue that has similar
properties and powers. Our own magnetic sense, which has greatly
developed since Noola’s banishment, can roughly gauge the relative

strengths of the various faculties and emotions in any man; and it is deeply
thrilled when any thought or passion is energising in his nature. But it
cannot accurately measure the strength, as these instruments can. We can
absolutely trust them, in testing the character of any human being.
“Noola fully expected to be thrust back, unless he came across his own
relations and friends, to whose pity and sympathy he might appeal. He
trembled in alarm when he was led to the chamber in which he was to be
tested. But it was found that, though his humanity had not progressed in the
lines or with the rapidity that the Limanorans have developed since his
departure, all the atavistic taint had disappeared from his nature, and the
weak elements of his system, love, pity, tenderness, sympathy, had greatly
strengthened. He could no longer by any possibility side with the warlike
and revengeful in human nature.
“But even if he had only kept the evil qualities in abeyance, in the state
they showed before his exile, we should have let him return; for with his
strong desire to keep pace with our advance and his regret for his
retrogression, he would have gladly submitted himself to our new creative
surgery. Our increased knowledge of the functions and constitution of the
brain and nervous system enables us to reduce or excise any portion that
interferes with the development of the individual. And we can also
stimulate or retard the activity of any part by placing the patient in any of
our medicated atmospheres specially adapted to his circumstances, and
making him breathe in the element required by his system.
“Noola is now supremely happy in the confidence that he is to be
allowed to remain. Every defect in his system has been tested and
measured, and he knows how far he has fallen behind our race. He would
have accepted any conditions, and in order to overtake us is willing to enter
upon a new education,—the abbreviation of the slow and painful advance
of many ages into the hurried pace of a few years. He wishes, though three
hundred years of age, to become a child again and return to his first century.
But his long and painful self-discipline in Broolyi has shortened the
process; and he will soon be able to keep step with his old comrades. He
will be aided in every way by the wise men, some of whom will give their
best wisdom and energies to him. All the physical arts we have will be
brought into play to shorten his term of probation, our creative surgery and
medicine, our arts for the development of tissue and nerve, our magnetic

arts for the development of the senses, and our ethical arts for the
development of the spiritual sensitiveness.
“For yourself he has pleaded, and, though our wise men have
recognised that you are thousands of years in the rear of our civilisation,
and have confirmed their recognition by scientific measurement of the
forces and elements in you, they have consented to let you remain and to
take your education in hand. It seems an almost impossible task to contract
thousands of years into tens; but they do not despair; for our system of
education has already accomplished this for children born amongst us, and
you have a nature peculiarly open to our educational influences. You have
first of all the passion for progress as strongly in you as in any of ourselves;
and this is the prime essential of our ethics and civilisation; to it all other
passions must yield; from it flows all that subdues the material world and
gives dominance to the spirit, and makes for righteousness. But with it often
go pride and arrogance. In you was found strongly developed the desire to
treat all good men as equals, whatever difference of capacity or position or
possessions might seem to separate them from you. Had you had even the
slightest tinge of contemptuousness or hauteur in you, you would have been
sternly repelled. To contemn is the mark of an incurably savage nature, a
nature incapable of true knowledge of itself and of its relations to life. From
these two desires come purity of thought and life, the love of peace, respect
for the rights of others and reverence for what is fine in their personality,
and absolute transparency of nature. This last we ever take to be the shortest
and truest test of a progressive character, the love of truth and simplicity,
complete harmony of word and act with the inmost thought. As long as a
man or a nation lacks this, there can be no real advance; what seems
advance is but a mirage of fame or glory. Accuracy of vision and of
prevision is the first condition of true progress. It was one of the first things
that Noola saw in you, and the first reason he urged for your retention; you
had no desire to conceal your thoughts, so closely did they tally with your
life; you had an overwhelming passion for truth and for the truthful.
“There was no need to distrust his assertions for we all felt how genuine
he had become; and even sick and unconscious as you were, our magnetic
sense told us that his description of you was correct. But it has become the
custom to test scientifically the nature of every inhabitant of our island
every week, and also at every crisis in his nature or in the history of the

community, in order that any incipient defect may be at once remedied, and
that drastic applications may never be needed. A complete survey of your
character and faculties and corporeal system was the first step towards your
admission into the community. Everything had to be known, in order that
your education should be mapped out. And the cerebrometers gave us a
favourable report of you. Your body and your working faculties are far in
the rear of ours; you lack transparency of tissue, ethereality of motion; the
material side of you is earthy and ponderous. These elements of
retrogression we shall never be able to eject wholly from your system; but
we shall be able to modify them, and in your children and your children’s
children the body will keep pace with the spirit. The forwardness of your
emotions, of your soul, is what has drawn us to you; you love the ideal and
imaginative more than any but one section of our community; and you have
an intermixture of the finer spiritual elements such as we have either lost or
never had amongst us. We hope to graft your nature upon one of the
divisions or castes of our race and so produce in the next generation a
variety that we need. Your retention has thus been justified by the highest
morality of our civilisation. We never take any step without reference to the
ultimate aims of our progress: so to improve the breed that our posterity
may feel nearer to the highest life in the universe.
“Your education has indeed already begun. We have assumed from your
highly disciplined and progressive spirit that you would be willing to
submit to those medical methods that shorten the already abbreviative
process of education. It is true that these make an enormous drain upon the
physical strength for a time; and we prefer the ordinary spiritual methods of
training. But you have gained from the open-air employments in which you
have passed your life great stores of bodily health and vigour. You are still
but a child. The period of childhood and tutelage extends with us to the
thirtieth, sometimes to the fiftieth, year, that of youth to beyond the
hundredth. At the time that other men are preparing to die the natural death
of old age, we are just beginning to feel what it is to live.
“And from some ancestral cause you are developed beyond your years
in some of our ethical lines. You have reached a humility before the living
forces of the universe which is the primary mark of the true governor of the
world. How you have attained so rare a virtue amidst the pretentious
barbarity of civilisation it is not easy to conceive. There worldliness and

arrogance inherit the earth, though there are not signs wanting that they feel
the approaching triumph of its true heirs and mask as the meeker virtues. In
older times they were not ashamed to show themselves as they really were;
for those were the days of glorified highwaymen who seized the throne of
the world. Conquest is nothing but successful brigandage on a large scale,
veneer it over with diplomacy and historical fame as you will. But for
centuries there has been an uneasy feeling abroad that the humble must
come to their rights some day; and so the gilded brigands have allied
themselves with a religion of the meek and despised, that they may
hoodwink mankind into acquiescence in their ancient dishonesty.
“We banished all the makings of monarchs, aristocracies, and great men
at the purifications of our people. We could see no difference between these
and the worst criminals except one of degree. We measured their skulls and
brains by the rough, unscientific methods we used to have, and found in
them almost no difference from those of murderers and thieves; and
comparing them with the skulls of savages and of our own far-back
ancestry, we found that in the case of both heroes and criminals the cause of
their likeness to each other was their recoil upon the footsteps of the past,
and away from the line of human progress which leads towards harmony
with the higher laws of the universe.
“Happily for you every trace of such arrogance and contempt and
ambition is absent from your system. You have nothing merely mimetic in
you; you live unashamed and truthful in presence of all that the world is
capable of being. It is one of the surest signs of fear of threatening
annihilation that a species has to simulate the appearance or the modes of
life of another. Hypocrisy in the human race, like mimicry in the kinds of
animals and plants, is the brand of feebleness and the omen of coming
decay and subjugation. We use truth and sincerity as one of the most inward
of tests of a strong and healthy nature. In the olden days, as in all large and
mixed civilisations, it was difficult to distinguish the imitation virtue from
the real, and when it was discovered it was easy to pardon it and even
accept it as a virtue amid the universal effort at simulation. But when we
had swept out the survivals of primitive and savage times and the atavistic
returns to them, we found that every need of mimetic virtue had
disappeared. The slightest taint of unreality or falsehood in any of our
community is as offensive as carrion; we rise in a body and have it

removed. And we have as keen an enjoyment of sincerity and truthfulness.
Your loyal character at once attracted us to you; we felt that all germs of
moral disease would lose their virulence within its influence, as germs of
physical disease lose theirs in sunshine.”

CHAPTER II
MY EDUCATION

T HE strain on my attention had been extreme as I tried to follow his
explanations. It was not merely the words that were unfamiliar, but the
very manner of the thoughts. I had not felt how exhausted my tissues
were growing, or how soothing was the influence of the perfumes and soft
music. I had been deeply moved by the joy of my acceptance by this strange
community and by the profound truths woven into the fabric of its
civilisation. Imperceptibly the mist of dreams stole over me. I was not even
conscious of the gesture of his hand. I thought that I had fallen back again
into the darkness of Western civilisation, and yet that my Limanoran
guardian was silently hovering round me, protecting me amid the horrors of
the reality. I seemed to be present at a court scene, where the monarch and
his ablest statesmen and soldiers were welcoming a hero back from a
victorious campaign that had added a great province to the kingdom. There
were shoutings and huzzas without, whilst within strains of triumphant
music alternated with bowings and ceremonies from the gorgeously robed
officials. In some strange way I thought that it was I who was being lauded.
Conscious of the tens of thousands left dead upon my battle-fields, I loathed
it all; for by some soul-magic, perchance my Limanoran influence, the
hearts of eulogists and courtiers were laid bare before my eyes, all (there
was not an exception) black with envy and designings; the king himself was
sick of me and my honours, even as he showered them on me. I knew the
pitfalls and intrigues prepared for me; I saw the whole mass of humanity,
both lacquered and tattered, that was now cheering, hiss and groan at me as
I fell; and I turned away from the applauding crowd and looked into the
homes of my dead soldiers, and I heard the weeping and despair of the
widow with her orphans and the mother bereft of her children in their
prime. Here the depths of sorrow were its surface too. What was there to my
credit in the book of time?
Then with sudden transformation I saw the crowd swaying like billows
before the wind; every inch of space on the floor of the vast cathedral was

filled with an adoring multitude, tears falling from the eyes of every up-
turned face. What could not be done with a mass of humanity so filled with
passion for the highest! None too large were the vaulted aisles and nave for
the tremulous thunder of the anthem. It seemed as if the dome of the
sanctuary would open and the Deity would reveal Himself to His rapt
suppliants. Then the music died away and silence magnetised the people
and drew down the influence of heaven upon them. And it was I that was in
the pulpit, seeming a feeble and sinful thing beside this divinely inspired
multitude. Could I do aught but still their quivering hearts?
With sudden impulse my voice rang out in the cadences of the great
organ as I raised their thoughts to the cross over the altar where hung the
One who was rejected and despised of men. I painted the poverty and
neglect and scorn of the life of the Man of Sorrows. They wept as I bent
their thoughts to the weary mission of this lofty spirit amongst men, and His
despair as He saw them turn in contempt from Him. The death of torture
that marked the close of His sojourn here was as nothing to the crucifixion
of the spirit that He bore each day from the cold neglect or the supercilious
sneer with which His message was met. None but lowly fishermen would
accept His divine teachings. And never a murmur issued from His lips.
Heart-broken and martyred in soul, the crown of thorns was a fit close to
His career. I seemed to hold the great assemblage in the hollow of my hand.
The sound of weeping rose, while with love and adoration they gazed on
the crowned agony as it hung on the cross.
Then I blessed the people and left the pulpit, my heart hard and dry
within me, when an alien sound broke upon my ear from the farther end of
the great aisle. A commotion arose, and before many minutes the whole
mass of worshippers had joined in the passionate discord. There was a
conflict about some centre that was moving upwards from the door. Before
I could regain the pulpit, a bruised and bleeding body had been raised above
the sea of heads upon a cross against one of the huge pillars. A cry of
execration rose from the whole church. It was useless to attempt
interference, for my voice could not be heard in the tumult. In a few
minutes the insults and buffetings had accomplished their work; the
wounded, bleeding head sank upon the breast of the figure on the cross; his
spirit had fled. It was a preaching reformer of the town, who was accounted
a madman for his enthusiasm. He had fallen into some controversy and had

shown his opponents the gross and material nature of their worship,
insulting to a Deity who was pure spirit; he had prophesied the downfall of
all their gorgeous churches and ceremonials, and the substitution of silent
reverence within the temple of the heart. They had taken his prophesy as an
insult to the Christ and His church. Fleeing to the sanctuary to be safe from
the furious attack of the crowd, they had followed him and with a few
hurried words had enlisted the worshippers within against the blasphemer.
And this had been the result.
As I looked at the blood-stained features, there seemed to gather round
the head a halo of light as of a crown of thorns. I was struck with a strange
resemblance and glancing back at the altar, saw the faces were the same.
This passionate devotion to a dead Christ had found Him in living form and
had crucified Him again.
I was appalled at the thought of all the centuries having passed for
naught. Not one step upward had been made. No nearer were the multitude
to recognising their Saviour when He came in the form of living man. There
seemed to be nothing to live for, if this were the end of the agonising toil of
the ages.
How sweet it was when I awoke to find it was but a dream, and that I
was not in Christendom but in Limanora! I was alone, but there was the
sense of comradeship around me. I found afterwards that the wise men of
the medical caste had been electrising portions of my brain as I lay asleep.
It was the beginning of my education, which was to go on even in sleep,
moulding dreams that should modify my whole nature. Perhaps the most
important part of the growth of the spirit is during the hours of rest, when
the past or future may enter the vacant mind. My imagination had been sent
out on its travels into my past and had found its way into the heart of
Western ambitions and hypocrisies. Thus the wise men had perceived by
their electric sense the dreams that had oppressed me, and they drew from
them the master-sorrows of my past.
Half of the success of education depends upon the most intimate
knowledge of the history of the soul to be educated, a knowledge more
intimate than the soul itself can have; else the educator will be alarmed and
defeated by the surprises of survivals or resurrections. It is not the history of
the mere incidents of life, of even spiritual life, from birth that is needed,

but the unrecorded history of the mental and emotional tissues of a
countless ancestry. And no annals could reveal this so well as the dream-
flashes of the night. They are brief as the tremors of lightning, but they
illuminate a midnight world, a glimpse of which is as great as an
inspiration. “Night is the confessional of the unknown”; “Sleep unburies the
dead”; “Dreams kaleidoscope the vanished past.” These are three of their
world-old sayings, which were striking at first, but after I knew their exact
science of somnology, became as commonplace to me as they were to the
Limanorans.
This science, like all their sciences, was practical and but the other side
of an art; it was one of the most helpful auxiliaries of education. It had
classified all types of dreams, and found the inner test of truth in them.
Though seemingly capricious, to these medical wise men not a dream
occurred but had its significance in the life of the individual. They could
touch any section of the brain tissue into dream-activity during sleep by
means of their magnetic and electric probes and stimulators; they could feel
by their own electric sense all that was flashing through the corridors of
sleep; and, with their electrographs could take an exact image of every
portion of the dream.
Dreams, they held, made men children again, with their souls upon their
skins, so absolutely transparent did they render the nature, so free from
convention and the mask of policy. And what was best of all, the shadows
of the past, at times of the primeval past, answered to their call and played
upon the mind during sleep. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of” was
a saying of our own far-seeing dramatist’s which often came into my mind
as I looked into their somnology. Into the making of our bodies and our
brain-tissues go elements from all the ages of our human and animal past,
ages buried beyond the reach of history or speculation. They enter subtly
into the tissue of our life, though we are all unconscious of the process. And
these elements are the stuff that goes to the making of dreams as well. But
in the dream-world there is no central personality, no will to control or
transform, no mask to wear, no power to conceal. We are ofttimes ashamed
of our dreams because they are so unconsciously naked in their savagery or
even animality.
Nor is it an uncommon or unnatural thing that dreams foreshadow
incidents in the after-life of the individual; for they bring into play elements

in his nature that he has never been conscious of and whose existence he
would stoutly deny. Then, when the favouring circumstance or set of
conditions brings these elements into action, he is startled to remember how
close the long-forgotten dream had come to the unimagined reality. If only
he had known how much it had meant, as it entered on the theatre of sleep
and then vanished, he might have been forewarned and have avoided the
opportunity for its reappearance on the stage of life.
And the Limanoran medical sages had taken advantage of this prophetic
provision of nature. They systematically tested every fibre and cell of the
brain of each individual they had to educate and develop, and without
hesitation or error found out every possibility of his nature. They tested and
tabulated the results of every electric stimulus and every dream that
followed it, and by this means had a complete natural history of all his
ancestral past. No revolution could happen in the state of any Limanoran,
nothing of what we mean by conversion. It has sometimes been said in the
science of the West that there are two brains or physical organs of soul in
every man, and this explains the strange actions and reactions, conversions
and recoils that so often occur in life. But it is far truer that there are a
hundred brains in every man, and that his brain is composed of elements out
of all his ancestry, even his far-back animal ancestry; and it all depends on
the stimulus which of those brains or ancestral brain-elements will come
uppermost. The Limanorans had millions of sun pictures of their own exiles
and of the various peoples of the rest of the world in innumerable attitudes
and situations, and with expressions on their faces unconsciously worn; and
they could point out in each the predominating animal. In going over the
memories of the men and women I had known I could recall times when the
look of some animal had come out strongly on their faces. I had had, to my
misfortune, much acquaintance with the serpent nature, the most
predominant in an unwisely progressive civilisation like that of Western
Europe where convention and custom and law become the opportunity and
the mask of characters fallen far into the rear of progress. When laggard
natures are not monasticised and prevented from breeding, a progressive
people get overrun with hypocrisy; under convention and custom and law
they take shelter and there is no power that can drive them out; the finer
phases of civilisation, industry, art, learning, speculation, morality, religion,
become their nesting-ground. At last the serpent nature is accepted as the
type, provided there is not too fatal a sting in it. The religious legends

mirror this serpent-like development. The serpent is the spirit of evil which
caused their degeneration from the godlike. The serpent they see
everywhere, even when it has disappeared from their own land. Their
greatest successes in any sphere are by means of serpent-like subtlety,
whilst they still profess to worship the ideal of truth and candour abandoned
by them in the far past. In practice it is the qualities of the serpent they
embody and develop; in theory they worship its foe and conqueror.
The Limanoran sages explain this reappearance of animal natures in
human civilisations and individuals by showing how the elements of all
exist in infinitesimal germ in the most primitive form of animal life; as this
crept up the scale, certain elements grew stronger and led to new species
still retaining the others in subordination; at each higher and higher division
of the vital way the elements became more vigorous and more distinct in
their characteristics; it is therefore traces of the higher animals that are most
apt to appear in man. And the only means of ridding these of their
retrogressive influence is to make the newer and higher spiritual qualities
more dominant. The first rule of a civilisation that means to advance in
reality and not in mere appearance is to monasticise all atavistic natures and
prevent them from handing on their retrogression to a posterity; the second
is to encourage only the higher and more spiritual features of those that
remain.
It took many months to examine and catalogue my powers and
tendencies. I often awoke unconscious or with a confused recollection of
the dreams they had stimulated and recorded. The first few were most
distinct, and seemed to follow me when I waked with the reality and
perspective of life. But I could not interpret them; they seemed fanciful and
capricious, and when I puzzled over them, yielded nothing. And yet, when I
saw my dream-confession and autobiography, I was startled with the truth
of its great features; thoughts that I had never uttered to mortal ear were
there; words that had been spoken in the secrecy of confidence far off in my
village home were recorded; actions light and insignificant had their due
place, and seemed to have new and infinite meaning in their new setting. So
circumstantial were the details of much of my past life and character that I
could not but accept the rest as absolute truth. And what a strange array of
facts it was! Parts of my immediate ancestral history I knew, more I had
conjectured, some I could never have guessed at; but here it was spread out

as on a map, with every new advance or retrogression any progenitor had
accomplished or suffered. I seemed to see my inner nature photographed
and by the light of a magic-lantern.
At first, when I saw it stand out detail after detail in lifelike truthfulness,
I felt in the presence of some supernatural power. But when I came to know
the methods they had employed, it seemed as simple as a child’s puzzle.
Every conclusion had been reached in the most scientific way. All the
minutiæ of every dream had been faithfully recorded and microscopically
examined. Then they were tabulated and compared with the most untiring
industry. And out of the shapeless mass had come by the aid of their logical
methods or dream-tests the clear, unquestionable truth. Their brilliant, but
by no means reckless, imaginations did the rest, evolving order and
lifelikeness out of seemingly barren and confused facts. It is true, they did
not make any attempt at the chronology of the past; they had been able only
to group the facts in great spaces of time, and in a certain order of
development. Their minute knowledge of the evolution of life, and
especially of human life, gave them the framework for this grouping. I was
astonished at the quickness of their work, when I considered the fulness of
the natural history of my mind and character; it seemed as if they should
have taken years and not months to investigate with such care every atom
and cell of the tissue of my brain.

CHAPTER III
SLEEP, REST, AND FLIGHT

I COULD not but surrender myself into the hands of men whose wisdom
seemed to me to approach omniscience; and this I was the more inclined
to do that I felt, instead of exhaustion from their operations on my brain
during sleep, the greatest sense of exhilaration I had ever experienced in my
life. They acted on the principle of giving complete rest to one set of nerves
and tissues by stimulating the others. They could produce the deepest sleep
in all the brain- and nerve-centres by gathering the life-energy that remains
during sleep into one minute point, which they stimulated by magnetism.
They smiled at the clumsy methods of resting that Western civilisation
had adopted, the awkward, unyielding beds and chairs and sofas, and the
wasteful and futile attempts at exercise that were meant to give rest. Ages
ago they had banished dancing and all corybantic amusements as
extravagant waste of tissue, destroying a hundred cells or nerves for every
one that they saved or invigorated. All frantic and violent exercise
encouraged the animal part at the expense of the progressive: it mangled
and rent the delicate tissues of the brain and heart, and sent the currents of
sustenance into the muscles and bones of the legs and arms. The riding and
hunting and athletics of the aristocracies only helped the animal to persist,
and clearly identified their ancestry with the conquering nomad hordes that
swept down on the peaceful plains and destroyed primitive civilisations.
Exercise, they held, should help, on the one hand, to increase the store of
energy to be transformed into the higher elements, and on the other to rest
the spiritual forces and faculties.
Rational rest was one of the great secrets of the prolongation of life.
There was a latent passion in living things for rest: and this rose to its
highest in man. To balk it was to shorten the career of all the powers. And
they had set themselves to understand this passion and the methods for its
satisfaction as one of the first duties of an advancing people. They knew
that there never could be any complete rest for a living system short of
death. Even in the soundest sleep the functions proceeded, though feebly,

and there was a misty consciousness of existence; else it would lapse into
annihilation. They realised that they must provide for many gradations of
rest between the edge of death and the borderland of full activity. Nor
should any portion or element of the human system go long without its
period of rest and its period of exercise.
On these principles they built their methods of alternating rest and
activity, all duly subordinated to their great aim,—the advance of the higher
nature. The only reason for muscular pursuits was that the intellect and the
imagination might be relaxed and the higher energy reinforced. Even the
loftiest thought resulted in certain waste products, that, if left to accumulate,
would soon clog and stifle it. This waste must be carried off by reposeful
exercise of the lower and more physical organs. All the lower elements
which remain to mingle with those of a higher plane after they cease to be
needed as regenerators of energy grow at once poisonous and must be
removed by exercise.
For many months I occupied one of their beds, half hammock, half
framework, made of soft, flexible stuff that looked like metal, yet yielded
like down. These beds were hung not only at the four corners, but along the
two sides, so that the body lay in a kind of groove; yet, by a second series of
rests, the material was kept from contact with the sides of the body or from
any pressure upon it. Within this groove was laid an air-cushion of still
softer and more elastic material, which fitted itself to every irregularity of
the body and to its various changes of position. The pillow was of the same
soft network, and so shaped as to fit the head. I afterwards found that
through the whole fabric of the pillow passed a mild current of positive
electricity, that drew the energy from the nerve-centres of the head, and
soothed every tissue to rest. The framework of the lower portion of the bed
was charged with the mildest currents of negative electricity, and thus the
circulation and the life were kept up, however deep might be the sleep. The
sense of exhilaration and replenished stores of energy with which I rose
each morning was enough to make me enamoured of life. Day by day I
grew lighter in step, and seemed to walk and rest on air. It was the grosser
particles of my system that were being withdrawn from it by this nightly
process of rest. I gained energy and lost weight till I felt that I could soon
rise on wings. I noticed before long that I had acquired the tripping, elastic
gait that I had remarked in Noola. My movements and footfall came to

leave almost no impression on my senses, and I could have played the ghost
with appalling effect in the superstitious atmospheres of my native land. I
did not seem to grow much smaller in bulk; yet in a year or more I must
have weighed one half what I did when I arrived. Whether they applied
some other degravitating process to my bones and tissues besides the
magnetic sleep I never ascertained. But they had the power of reducing their
own weight considerably in a few moments. It seemed as if their bones
were hollow like those of birds; for I could lift even the largest of them with
my one hand; and they had some reserve store of an element lighter than air
in their bodies, which they could increase and distribute over their system at
will. When they were asleep I found I could raise them as lightly as a
feather, but when awake they could, whether by muscular effort or by some
other process of their bodies, prevent me lifting them even the fraction of an
inch from the ground. They seemed able at a thought to increase their
weight tenfold, and though they had wonderful strength of muscle, I am
certain that was not all, for I observed they made little use of it on such
occasions.
It can be easily imagined then how little friction of the body there was
during sleep; indeed, they never moved whilst resting, for there was no
need of relieving the tension of any part. I enjoyed still more another kind
of rest they had; it was half chair, half bed, and consisted of an incline of
the softest netting made out of their usual metal and in such a way that the
body could not collapse when loosed in sleep. Even pleasanter was the
swing-sleep; here a huge magnet kept the supple incline gently swaying
whilst at the same time it drew the blood from the head. The float-rest was
as pleasing; in this the head rested on a floating pillow whilst two air-
cushions stretched along one side of the body and supported it on a network
held between them. But the most complete of all rests was that in which the
Limanorans were supported in the air by a cloud of sweet-scented and
wholesome gas blown from innumerable jets with steady power; electric
fences kept it from spreading into the atmosphere around. I never reached
that power of reducing myself in weight so that I could enjoy this rest. It
needed fine skill of poise to climb to this bed and remain there, and I was
ever afraid of falling.
The same physical incapacity prevented me from reaching the most
graceful and soothing of all their combinations of exercise and repose. This

was the wing-rest. I had often seen the albatross, as it followed in the wake
of our yacht, swoop down and float up the curves of the wind without
apparent effort, its broad wings motionless but for occasional adaptation,
like sails, to the changes in the strength or direction of the breeze. I had
never expected to see human beings master this bird-power over the air; but
it became the commonest sight in the breezes of the dawn and the sunset to
see old and young of both sexes in Limanora fasten great wings to their
arms and feet, and, charging their small wing-engines with new stores of
energy, sail up underneath the chameleon clouds, and float hither and
thither like spirits of the storm. This was part of their night’s rest and their
morning’s exercise; and they used to descend from it with heightened
colour in their cheeks and the look of profound repose in their eyes. The
long training they had had from youth in the management of their wings
and in gauging the force and current of the winds had made their skill and
knowledge habitual, if not instinctive. They could shut their eyes and rest
their intelligence as they floated up and down the levels of the breeze; their
wings seemed to be at peace. I can find no analogy in my own experience
for their delight in the swift-curving movement but my youthful enjoyment
of skating before the wind for miles over clear ice. It was a gladness merely
to watch them sport amid the rays of the growing or lessening sun. Often
would they time their movements to some rhythm, and flash through
intricate evolutions like rooks in the evening air. Again half of them would
fold their wings and be borne by the other half with a speed and lightness
almost as great as when flight was unburdened. All mere earthly
amusements and exercise had ceased when the secret of flight had been
mastered.
For generations their biologists, anatomists, and physicists had studied
the wing-power of animals with a view to the practical mastery of it for the
Limanorans themselves. Their chief guide towards the analysis was the
study, not of birds or insects, but of the bat. They measured the force of the
strong chest muscles that enabled it to move its wings with such rapidity;
this could be done to a nicety by means of their refined instruments for
gauging latent power, whether in tissue or nerve or muscle. They calculated
the number of beats it could make in a minute. They measured the spread of
the wings and the weight of the body. Thus they came to an almost constant
equation of wing-power to size and weight. The physicist and mechanic
were then called in; but they would have been helpless without the new

metal, irelium, and their power of concentrating great power into small
space. This metal was extracted by a process from common earth, but could
also be found pure some miles down in the earth. It was perhaps the first
essential to the rapid advance of their civilisation because of its extreme
lightness and strength, and still more its wonderful flexibility and elasticity
when mixed with certain proportions of other substances. It could be made
into the most delicate membrane, fine as gauze and yet tough and resistant
as leather. It formed the material of their most massive engineering works,
and of their lightest draperies and garments. Nothing could surpass its
adaptability to all purposes of civilisation.
It was out of this that they were able to make their wings which seemed
so fragile and yet could bear the force of the wildest storms. It would stand
stiffly on its framework against the strongest pressure, and yet could be
expanded balloon-wise from within. The only means of disabling these
wings was perforation by a hard, sharp point. This could never occur in the
air except from the beak of a bird; and then they could still use their spread
as a parachute to break their descent. Another quality this metal had was its
transparency, and their flight was somewhat concealed from the sight of
gazers below by the colour they took from their atmospheric surroundings;
it was difficult to distinguish them from a floating cloud or a darker patch of
grey or blue sky. The wings could be easily folded or expanded, so flexible
was the material; and, when the Limanorans landed from their flight,
scarcely a minute elapsed before the huge sails, framework and all, had
been furled and had disappeared in the ordinary outline of their bodies.
And these bodies differed as much as their natures from those I had
been accustomed to see. They were short and squat; and this, with their
broad chests, great heads, and long arms, would have led Europeans to call
the Limanorans gnomes. Muscles and bones that in other men had been of
little importance had grown into what we should have called abnormal size
and strength. But after I had met the power of their eyes and felt the beauty
of the natures that shone in their faces, their bodies seemed to me the
normal garment of the highest human spirits; and I came to understand the
high purpose of every change they had brought about in their forms and
features. Without their broad chests they could never have had such
expansible lungs or such powerful heart-action essential to easy flight, as
well as to the lightning sweep of their thoughts and energies and the rapid

advance of their civilisation. The pulse could be seen in many parts of the
body, it was so strong; and its beats were twice as frequent as in my own.
The great heat of summer was to them little inconvenience; they could
thrust their arms into what seemed to be boiling water without shrinking;
and they could bear a degree of cold far below the lowest temperature I had
ever felt, for the high temperature of their bodies made them capable of
enduring far greater extremes of climate than any race I had ever known or
heard of. But their breathing was much less frequent than mine; they
seemed to take in enormous draughts of air at each inspiration and to retain
stores of it in their system. They continued at their ease in difficult
atmospheres and exertions long after I had begun to pant and gasp for
breath. The spaces within their bodies that had once been wholly filled with
the organs of digestion and discharge had evidently been largely utilised for
their marvellous expansion of lungs and heart.
Another purpose that their huge chests served was to bear the strain of
the great muscles that controlled their arms, and of the powerful engines
that, strapped on to them, gave the strong and swift beat to their wings.
Their arms were moulded on lines of similar strength; for they had to bear
the strain of the forward stroke of the wing, whilst also having to
manipulate by means of the long and sinewy fingers its great folds in the
backward sweep; and, when more expanse was needed during calmer
weather or when resting in the sky, the arms had to thrust out and to bear
long rods that in their turn bore expansions of the wings like the studding-
sails of a ship. The thumb of each hand was kept free for the management
of their breast and shoulder-engines; and it had become by exercise more
vigorous and more flexible than the ordinary human thumb. In each armpit
was carried a small engine that could be used either as subsidiary to the
great breast-engine or for the partial or complete furling of the wings.
Beside it was a storage-battery, in which could be generated by the
movements of the arm more electricity to supply the central power, thus
enabling them to extend their flight through long periods. If they became
tired they could expand and inflate their wings with a gas made much
warmer by the heat of their bodies than the surrounding atmosphere; then
throwing themselves on their backs they could rest or rise in the air as on a
balloon.

In slow or ordinary flight, or when the wind was not high, they could
steer themselves rudely by manipulating the outer folds of their wings with
their fingers. But if they wished to fly swiftly, or in some other direction
than the wind would bear them, they could push out a tail-like membrane of
irelium from between the feet and move it hither and thither by the sinewy
power of the heels. The great toe of each foot was also much developed by
long use for stretching out and managing the wings; it had become more
like a thumb, capable of seizing and manipulating cords or membranes. It
was this, added to the lightness of their bodies, that gave them their springy
gait, and made them seem when they walked as if they scarcely touched the
ground; they could skim like a bird close to the earth by using only the
outer folds of their wings and the tip of the great toe for propulsion.
Much though my weight was reduced, and ardent though I was in my
attempts to come up with their mastery over the air, I was seldom able to do
more than quicken my pace in running and rise in short, clumsy, laboured
flights on their wings like a callow nestling fallen from its nest. I was soon
exhausted by my efforts, even when aided by my ultimately deft
management of the breast-engine and the shoulder-engines; for my lungs
were short of compass, my heart soon beat too rapidly for the strength of its
tissue, and my arms and fingers and great toe soon grew weary of the work
they had to do. Nothing but the selection and adaptation of my ancestry
could have made me capable of progressing physically to their level. Their
past had been a rapid and deliberate process of adjustment to new and
higher ideas of life, one of the main aims being this new mode of
locomotion in order to give them command of a sphere that other men had
abandoned to the birds and insects; for it was but one of the corollaries of
the great purpose of their existence, which was to master or eject the
grosser elements of their system, that they might rise into a more ethereal or
spiritual life. By the power of flight they seemed to gain independence of
the earth, greater freedom of movement, and an approach to that
frictionless, untrammelled motion through limitless space which thought
gives a foretaste of.

CHAPTER IV
HERMITRY

F LIGHT was one of their best methods too of achieving complete
solitude. One of the early discoveries of this people in the art of progress
was that, where men are too much or too long together, they confirm
each other’s faults and clog advance; the weaker and more superficial
ambitions get the mastery and force energy into mistaken directions. The
risk of this grew less as the individual grew older; for he receded farther
and farther from the ancestral stages of life through which he must pass in
youth and early manhood; and he came to have less desire and less need for
intercourse with his fellows. Complete love of solitude and capacity for
solitude were two of the signs of the perfecting of the individual life;
thereafter death, the rending of the veil that divides the seen from the
unseen, was the most natural step in development, and scarcely needed
effort. They held solitude as much one of the essentials of noble life as
society; and the latter needed no stimulus; by nature and beginnings man
was a social animal, but only some strong impulse would make him seek
the companionship of his own thoughts. The final triumph of life was to be
able to be confidently alone, to stand with the highest man can think and
feel against the herded universe. Under the stimulus of the more physical
and primary passions it is the universal instinct to flock together. The baser,
the more destructive feelings are gregarious.
To ensure periods of solitude for each member of the community, every
man and every woman had a separate house, as soon as the powers were
mature. One of the horrors of the past out of which they had come was the
intrusion of friends and relatives every hour of the day, and the irritating
sense of the continually watchful eyes of servants or slaves. Only by
seeking the wilds could one find real solitude. In all human communities
there are endless opportunities for social intercourse; opportunities for
solitude are artificial. Life was arranged in Limanora with a view to
allowing and securing as frequent and as long solitudes as were consonant
with the progress of the race. On the most prominent point of every house

there was the representation of two climbing flowers; and if these hung
drooping, colourless, and apart, everyone knew that the occupant desired
seclusion; if they flushed with rose, stood up to the sun, and twined round
each other, then was it known that human converse was permissible, if not
desired.
There was indeed sufficient magnetic communion of spirit among all
the people to touch into life at intervals the love of that definite and open
intercourse so native to the human system. This inborn social faculty might
be trusted to prevent the love of loneliness from severing all ties. There
were daily public duties that brought everyone into the knowledge and sight
of his fellow-men, the rota of physical exercise at the centre of force, the
flight-drill, the general meeting of the community, and the medical review.
And every day and almost every hour of the day communion of spirit could
go on in the magnificent baths, in the halls of recuperation, and in the valley
of memories. There was no lack of occasion to draw the Limanorans
together.
But the other duty to the higher self was sacredly guarded and fostered,
especially in the earlier stages of life. One of the greatest blunders they had
to correct in their former civilisation had been gregarious education. Large
families had been one of the consequences of a half-developed humanity,
more kin to the animal world than to the spiritual. The lower a living thing
is in the scale of life the more prolific it is, the more devoted to the mere
function of keeping its species alive. Unicellular organisms perpetuate their
existence by continual fission. Microbes become massive in their effects by
the countless myriads each is capable of producing. The higher the
organisation, the less is the energy that can be spared for generation, and the
more capable is the offspring when matured of ensuring its own survival, of
rising above and managing the laws of nature. Civilisation has not advanced
far when it acts by masses and needs masses to keep it going. Then mere
subsistence and procreation are the only purposes and functions of most
life. To feed, to reproduce, to die, that is their history.
The Limanorans looked back to that stage of their development with a
shudder, so far in the mists and darkness of animalism did it seem. Now one
man of them was more able to do battle with nature and her fecundity and
her catastrophes than a hundred thousand of that olden time, and not one
hundred-thousandth of the generative power was needed. Then but a poor

fraction of the life-energy could be given up to education. The offspring had
to be trained in masses or have no training at all. The parents were too busy
earning the means of life to mould their families, and had too many children
to give heed to the character of the individual. All the offspring were
handed over to professional trainers, who managed them in the mass, and
who had to work by the methods of nature with its myriad children through
the law of the survival of the fittest. They had to be handled like armies, and
the stricter the discipline, the better the result was supposed to be; and
where the people were counted in masses and moved in masses the better it
undoubtedly was for the survival of the state. Schools and universities were
a necessity of that far-back stage of civilisation; they were the drill-
sergeants of civil life, dragooning the young and their ideas into accordance
with the prevailing and accepted type. Too much independence of character
or thought or manner would have broken the ranks and endangered the
existence of the commonweal. But the chief purpose of life on the world,
the progress of the species, was ignored in this devotion to mere persistence
of the species. All variant germs and elements that nature supplies in every
individual it brings forth were smoothed down or annihilated into
uniformity. The type persisted from century to century unchanged. Only by
stealth or by audacity did any new or alien element succeed in modifying
the species; and when it did succeed the modification was as often
retrograde as progressive. Therefore, in order to be secure from variation,
public opinion punished all habits that would lead to independence of
character or thought or feeling.
As soon as the great exilings had been completed, the Limanorans
recognised that the best chance of swift progress was the selection and
preservation of the finest variants in their character and thoughts. They
therefore abolished the profession of teacher, that manufacturer of
uniformity, and all schools and universities, hot-beds of convention,
worship of antiquity, and retrogression. They by no means abolished
education; they recreated it, intensified it, and made it the chief function of
the community. The whole time and energies of the parents, or, as the case
might be, of the proparents, were given up for a period of from fifty to
seventy years to the training and moulding of each child. Nothing was left
to nature or haphazard. And every new tendency or faculty that was
discovered in the pupil was recorded and reported to the council of sages. It
was discussed by them, and, if judged to be hostile to the progress of the

race, the parents were assisted in eradicating it; if manifestly progressive,
every means was taken to make it grow; if doubtful in its results, it was
submitted to the community, and their instincts soon brought them to a
decision. Thus it was that their world was being continually renovated.
Never was an idea or method of action rejected simply because it was new.
Every opportunity of advance was seized and tested. Every suggestion of a
new direction of progress was investigated and followed out till it was seen
to be impracticable.
And, to prevent emphasising the old and outworn or reviving the past,
the young were isolated from one another; for, as the embryo records in its
growth the stages of animalism through which terrestrial life passed
upwards from the unicellular to the complex human organisation, so the
immature periods that come between infancy and full manhood record
human development, prehistoric as well as historic. The long ages of
primitive futility in presence of the powers of nature are abbreviated into
the helpless years of infancy. Prehistoric savagery shows itself in various
traces in the rebellious, adventure-loving, omnivorous phase of boyhood.
The first stages of civilisation appear in the early years of puberty; its later
stages in the approach to full manhood. The imperfect past ever springs up
like weeds amid the growth of the new life, and will choke it if encouraged.
And nothing, they held, gave such persistence to the evils and imperfections
of the past, thus appearing in early life, as the gregariousness of youth.
Nothing had done so great a wrong to the race, or had so hindered its
progress, as their former education system with its schools and universities.
To throw men in the immature stages of their life into close intercourse was
to confirm their immaturities, to encourage atavism, to make the past
tyrannise over the future. As long as their old system continued, their
civilisation was enslaved to the times that were gone, and imagination
deified the world as it had been.
Next to their exiling policy, their educational reform was one of the
most important starting-points of their new and swiftly progressive
civilisation. I was astonished at the length and frequency of my isolations
during the period of my training. For years I saw few or none but the two
proparents to whose care I had been handed over, even after I had been
introduced to other sections of the community. In the process of my
advance towards Limanoran habits and powers, I was often left for days

together to my own thoughts, and yet in the presence of some supervising
power that seldom made itself definite to any of my senses or even to my
mind. Throughout these intervals of solitude, I felt continual suggestion of
noble thought and emotion come to me from my surroundings, the divine
music that rang so softly and variedly amid the silences, the deep meaning
of the arts that filled every corner of my life, the magnetic energy that rayed
forth from unknown centres upon my spirit. The finest impulses of my
nature became dominant in me at these times and grew in strength. I came
to recognise the power that such solitude gave to character. Without it I
should have inclined to become the echo of my tutors, even though they
were ever impressing upon me the necessity of thinking and acting for
myself. They were so noble, so far above the men and women I had met or
heard of or read of that it was a hard task not to fall down and worship
them.
Once I had the misfortune to question the benefits of prolonged
seclusion. I urged the praises of friendship so common in the literature of
my country, and spoke with great fervour of the pleasures of social
intercourse, the keen emulation on the path of development it stirred, and
the wide influence which the finest characters had. I painted in glowing
colours all that refined society might become,—the witty Parisian salons of
the eighteenth century, the artistic circles in the fifteenth-century Italian
republics, the brilliant association of thoughtful men in some of the London
literary sets of the nineteenth century. What could be nobler than such
intellectual brilliancy of intercourse as is recorded in the biographies of the
great men and beautiful and refined women of the West! Then I turned to
the happiness of children and youth together in the gardens or woods or on
the shores of the ocean, and their sadness when they moped alone in their
rooms or at their books. Companionship was the very life of childhood and
youth. Did not solitary musings even in maturity produce morbid self-
introspection? The intercourse, even with superiors and elders, was
somewhat unwholesome for the young spirit,—it crushed spontaneity and
naturalness and confidence in one’s inner self.
I worked myself up to a climax of eloquence, and thought that I had
demolished all possibility of defence of their system. But I had succeeded
only by ignoring the vices and weaknesses of society. These wise men
quietly and almost unconcernedly took me behind the gaudy theatrical

curtain of the world, and smiled to think how like their old social ideals had
been to those I had described, and to see the same vanity and posturing in
European refinement as in their own evil past. They mourned over my
blindness of mind in failing to look through the gorgeous transparency at
the tawdry vulgarities behind. Following it through many forms and stages
of life, animal and human, they showed me the law of social intercourse;
not the highest but the lowest emotional and moral level of a herd or circle
do the natures and minds of its members ultimately reach, however lofty the
aspirations of some of them may be. A company in which free utterance is
the rule is soon mastered by base interpretation of the noblest lives, and it is
to guard against the effects of this hydrostatic law of ethics that churches
and temples have been erected. There the awe of a higher power and the
conventions of worship conceal the inevitability of the law, and save the
shyer natures for brief periods from the evil influence of the bold. The most
masterful religions have always provided permanent refuges for the finer
spirits who dread conflict with the unscrupulous wit or power of the world,
and who know how in a struggle of speech or action or even pure thought
the wielder of the fouler weapons wins. It has been the rule throughout
civilised history that the greatest characters, if they cling to moral principle,
at last withdraw into solitude partial or complete, and become the sages of
the world; if they remain in action and succeed, the necessity for further
success drives them to accept the moral level of the lowest they have to
struggle with; for if immoral men of less intellectual power overcome them,
defeat means to them ultimate exhaustion of the soul; nothing bleaches the
faculties and reduces them to the common level like failure after failure.
However great a hero may be to begin with, success in action closes his
moral career, whilst failure closes his intellectual. To die in his first great
victory is the truest happiness that can befall him.
In fact the Limanorans came ages before to see that all public life with
its competitions and ambitions, social, artistic, political, military, meant the
triumph of cunning or force; it meant the retrogression to the nakedest
savagery hidden underneath the gewgaws of civilisation. No real advance
could be made by any form of humanity so long as its ablest spirits were
drawn into the furious struggle for glory, in which the cruellest and most
audacious cunning was bound to win. The founders of new religions and
new philosophies have been strong spirits who saw the foul imbroglio
before them in public life and shrank back from it. The first aim of the

Limanorans, when once they had rid themselves of their more degenerate
brethren, was to abolish this contest of might and cunning, and turn their
stronger spirits to the true progress of themselves and their race. And little
difficulty was experienced in accomplishing this most fundamental reform;
the island had been purged of the furiously ambitious, of all who longed for
the naked palæstra of civilised savagery. They knew better than most men
how much of the essence of life was competition, how necessary to all
progress was the struggle for existence, how fundamental was the law of the
survival of the fittest. But they realised vividly that nature unguided often
chose false directions, that the struggle may be in a myriad various arenas
that differ greatly from one another in nobleness or baseness, that the law if
left to itself might lead to the survival of the fiercest or cunningest or basest
according to the conditions that were to be fitted. The will of man could
work on the conditions, so elevating the struggle and leading the law to a
nobler issue. They did not, they could not, put an end to the struggle. What
they did was to withdraw it from false grounds and false aims, and guard it
from any appearance of the lower nature, sensuality, cunning, or force. The
competitive energy in every Limanoran’s nature was bent towards his own
future and the future of his race, and strove to surpass the past, if it were
great and noble, and to cast it out, if it were base and threatened to reappear.
To strive upwards, to help the whole people to progress, these were the aims
that transformed the everlasting struggle and the ever-working law.
This revolution in existence accomplished, and public life having in
consequence vanished, there ceased all need of social display, of
conversational fireworks, and of tact in managing men either singly or in
masses. The object of gregarious education disappeared at once. As long as
the coarse and selfish struggle called public life was the highest sphere, they
knew the youth had to be trained for it, its methods and aims had to be
adopted, and schools and universities were a necessity, as miniature
reflections of the greater world. In order to succeed in life they had to be
rolled together and tumbled against one another like pebbles in a stream till
they had taken the conventional smoothness of outline and similarity of
sheen; they had to learn to keep the wild beast in their hearts and the silken
courtier in their manners, to cloak untruth and hypocrisy in an appearance
of brilliancy or wisdom, to make grasping selfishness seem almost divine
love, and brutal cruelty and arrogance the most dazzling refinement. It was
painful to read the flashy lies and stabs in the dark that went for wit, and the

cruel intrigue and showy falsehood that went to the making of history, in
those old times. Even the friendship of the foremost was but a piece of
acting; little trust could be put in it; it served its purpose and was abandoned
as soon as it failed to impress the dupes. And solitaries then seemed useless,
moping self-analysers; they made no history and they were soon forgotten.
No parents could afford to let any one of their children thus lose his life;
and, however gentle and meditative he might be by nature, he must be
thrust into the cruel struggle of school and university in order to acquire
hardness and brilliancy; however virtuous and noble in purpose, he had to
prepare for the arena of polished scoundrelism.
As soon as these conditions of competition ceased, education in masses
had to cease too; it must be a miniature of the general life and a preparation
for it. At a distance and in a haze it seems as if the immature in their sports
were leading a life of primitive and happy innocence; but innocence often
accompanies untamed passion and fierce emulation. The appearance of
simplicity comes from their ignorance of the advance of the world. Nothing
did the Limanorans so shudder at as the chance of perpetuating the methods
and habits of this early and undeveloped stage throughout later life. What
their associative education in former times had done for them was to
confirm the vices of savagery under the gloved conventions that civilised
life demanded, and to destroy the simplicity for ever. Solitary training under
the supervision of sages, they soon found, had the reverse effect; it
confirmed the naturalness and spontaneity, and swept out the inclination to
intrigue and arrogance and cruelty.
There was a childlikeness in their natures that gave great beauty to their
faces; and this they retained through the longest life and the most absorbing
work. If there was one quality more than others which marked them as a
race, it was their gentle and trustful outlook upon life, their naïve candour
and transparency of character, their simple wonder and delight over any
new discovery or invention. They never grudged the quiet admiration any
word or action deserved. They never assumed that tone of superiority or
sophistication, which, coming as it does from envy, jealousy, or malice,
mars all praise or blame. They were children to one another in the limpidity
of their life. And so their features, which had not often the attractions of
regularity, had come to be transfigured by this single-heartedness; however
old and experienced and wise they might be, all possessed this divine

beauty of childhood. Sailors and backwoodsmen, men who have to spend
long periods of their lives in comparative solitude, away from the
sophistications of crowded life, often reveal traces of this childlike beauty
of nature and expression. And it was this peculiar educational system and its
long intervals of solitary meditation that kept the Limanorans children,
simple and ingenuous, till the day each vanished in the ether.
What deprived these isolations of bitterness was that one never felt
lonely nor abandoned by his fellows during them. In a moment, there could
be communication in thought or magnetic sympathy with his dearest
friends, and within a brief space they would be at his side. They often
resisted the associative impulse, through fear that it might be but the return
of the old immaturity in disguise; and they knew that friendship was ever at
call, and that all true solitudes deepened the current of life.
As I came to feel the spirit of their existence, these arguments grew self-
evident; I saw how all-important to progress were these intervals of
isolation. They had studied with the minutest care and ultimate shuddering
the features of their old civilisation, and they had found that the worst of
them came from the associative principle in the training of youth. Atavism
became their greatest horror; in the breast of every child born into civilised
life an embryo savage is born, and this had been vitalised and fostered by
sympathy with what was savage in companions and schoolmates. Under
their old school and university systems the age of training was that which
corresponded to the military stage in the development of man; and boys
were for ever fighting, girls ever encouraging to fight; emulation became
fierce rivalry and hatred. A crude stage of the past was confirmed and
perpetuated through life by constant association in the time of life that stood
for it. That was why their leisured classes had so devoted themselves during
peace to the wilder sports of the hunting stage of mankind, whilst they were
ever itching for war that their sons might distinguish themselves. That was
why they had indulged so often in breaches of the marriage bond, and
outraged the monogamy that they professed to revere; the minds of the
youth had been inflamed by the free proximity of the sexes before the
passions had been mastered, before the polygamous and unmoral stage of
their career had been passed through. And education, instead of checking
the perpetuation of these immaturities, encouraged it. Teachers had come to
pride themselves in the development of these savage stages of boyhood and

girlhood, and called the weaknesses by euphemistic names, pluck, pride,
grace. The young men and women were taught to glory in them. And thus
evil became eternal. In more primitive life, there had been of necessity a
wiser method of training. There were no large centres of population where
their youth was massed in schools and universities. Families wandered or
rested by themselves; and the hardships of existence ensured the survival of
the few that were fittest. These few had from their earliest years to join their
elders in their pursuits, and they learned in such society to pass rapidly
through the primitive stages of man’s development, emulating the skill of
their betters and following them with modesty and reverence. In the later
industrial and centralistic ages the youth had to be massed educationally,
and by the mutual encouragement of sympathy came to glory in their
immaturities as perfections, and desired to prolong the savage stage of their
life into later years. They judged their elders by false and atavistic standards
and so lost their modesty and reverence. It was only an occasional wave of
lofty feeling issuing from some inspired poet or prophet that raised one
generation above the preceding. For centuries and centuries they stood still
or retrograded. Crimes were sanctified in war and politics; the evil past
became a fetich; impetuosity, anger, hatred, revenge, falsehood, lust, were
tricked out in the apparel of virtues, and made the aims and the glories of
the leisured. It was the associative method of education that produced such
results. And, after the great purgation of the race, they were amazed to see
how blind they had been. Would any civilised parents agree to send out
their child into the wilderness there to spend the educable period of life
amongst savages, primitive in their instincts and habits, even if the savages
had the most persuasive and influential missionaries amongst them who
would change them in a few years into civilised beings? Yet this was what
their ancestors had been doing when they concentrated youth in schools and
universities.
Never before the age of twenty-five were the Limanoran youth allowed
any freedom of social intercourse, and then only for brief periods and under
the supervision of sages. And if there was any sign of atavism apparent in
them at their first draught of social life, back they were sent into isolation,
that their character might be strengthened, and the stage of peril passed.
Even when socially enfranchised, their first companions had lived beyond
their fiftieth year. By that boundary-line, it was held, all the risk of atavism
had passed, and all the chances and possibilities of the character had been

discovered and provided for. It was not till the seventy-fifth year that
anyone was supposed to be fit for parenthood; for then, though the faculties
and powers still went on improving even till death, most of them had
reached the maturity of self-control and intersubordination; then reason had
begun to be master, and all the stages of the development of man before the
final purgation of the race had been traversed.
Only a few years before this epoch in their lives were they permitted to
look into the deeper mysteries of existence. They thought it one of the
strangest pieces of inversion, if not desecration, to place religious ideas, as
we did, before the youngest. Nothing but evil could come of such an
attempt. With the Limanorans it was the final initiation into life to acquaint
their grown men and women with the sublimest thoughts and doubts and
emotions on the purpose of existence; it was the copestone of their
education; after all the field of knowledge had been traversed by them and
all the reverences had been instilled into them, the last reverence was
revealed to them. Then and not till then were they capable of realising its
fulness. Communicated in childhood or early youth, before the powers were
mature, before the animal and savage stages of development had been gone
through, it could end only in gross familiarity or gross superstition; the
noblest and most inward of thoughts and emotions would be misunderstood.
What was it that had made their old religions so stagnant, so obstructive to
all advance, but this mistaken principle of attempting to teach the holiest
and deepest ideas to the young! It made their ancestors cleave to crude
superstitions as if divine and refuse to give up any item of their childish
ideas of them. So thoroughly are the sources of our youthful impressions
lost in the mists of the past that any connected with reverence seem to come
from the divine eternity beyond birth.

CHAPTER V
JOURNEY TO THE VALLEY OF MEMORIES

O NE of the things this people feared most was enslavement to the past;
and I was encouraged to strip my mind of all sentiment connected with
the life I had led before my arrival and all superstitious devotion to the
historic. Bury the dead past, was one of their primary maxims. Nor would
they permit religion or any other conservative element to hallow tradition.
The world is well quit of what it has been, was another of their sayings.
They seemed to look upon the past as a fierce pursuer ever ready to
overtake and strangle them. Out and away from it were they ever hurrying.
It was the dark shadow over existence. And into the future, into the future
and the sunshine, they cut their way through the thick tangle of life.
I was much surprised, then, after I had been admitted to the full
confidence of my proparents, to hear them refer with pleasure, if not joy, to
what seemed nothing but a glorification of the past. The name Fialume
came repeatedly into their conversations with each other till at last it roused
my curiosity. There was something imaginative in the ideas connected with
it; it never rose to their lips without bringing into their eyes a beautifully
piteous expression that bordered almost on the ecstasy of joy. They saw that
they had piqued my curiosity; and before I had asked them they gave me
the information I desired. The word, Fialume, translated, meant “the valley
of memories.” It was the great library and university of the island. There the
second stage of education was largely passed. If by the age of fifty all
superstitious veneration of the past had been eradicated from the nature of
the new citizen, he was led to this valley day after day, month after month,
until he had seen the career of the race, and had grown familiar with the
steps of its development; he learned to shudder at the darkness out of which
it had come, and to watch with joy the growing light and the fleeing
shadows as it neared the present. Thus did he learn true gratitude for what
he was, and true reverence for the future towards which they were all
striving. I was not yet fit to enter the precincts of the valley. I had still too
much of that anguished yet exquisite homesickness for my own past to be

trusted with insight into a past that might seem great to me. And yet my
probation would be shorter, as my buried world was so different from
theirs; there would be less danger of superstitious reverence awaking in me
for any of their old stages or antiquated institutions, and no danger of Ayala
stirring my idolatrous devotion. This new word puzzled me, they saw. And
they explained that it was but the older name for the same valley; it meant
“the resting-place of the untrammelled.” In fact, their great library and
university was their graveyard too.
Years passed in happy renovation of my whole being, body and soul. As
I looked back I began to shudder at the past out of which I had come, its
low ideals, and its still lower planes of living; it seemed centuries behind
me and not mere years; it had grown into a murky cloud on the far horizon.
I could see how often I had been on the verge of despair or disease and
began to know the blindness and ignorance that had been almost the air I
breathed. I shrank in horror from all I had been; for I could examine the
poor fabric of it almost microscopically now. There was little fear indeed of
my ever longing for what I had left behind me.
Thus at last there came the supreme moment that I had laboured for. I
was to be permitted to visit Fialume. I shall never forget the day. I had
swept out of my mind analogies for their great graveyard from the doleful
surroundings of death to which I had been accustomed in my native land,
the long train of mourners, the ghastly hearse with its burden of mortality,
the unkempt grass of the place of tombs, the dreary wait beneath the
unsympathetic sky; and then the rattle of the clods upon the coffin-lid, and
the frantic effort to drive from the soul the thought of the gradual corruption
of the body and the final residue of skull and bones. Years though I had
been in Limanora, I had never heard of a funeral. Indeed deaths were as rare
as births in a community that had striven to avoid the lavish waste of nature,
and had so studied the human frame as to know how to arrest decay of its
powers and to give every individual full possibility of developing himself
and through himself his race. The reckless and indiscriminate bearings and
dyings of the old world were no advance on the course of the animal or
even the vegetable sphere; the higher the organisation the fewer the young
and the greater the care of them. But man in other lands had still, with all
his thought and foresight, the extravagant method of nature, and had
increased and multiplied without stint in order that an occasional exception

might help by favouring conditions to lead the race onwards and perhaps
upwards. Thousands of Alexanders and Cromwells, of Mahomets and
Socrates, of Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares had lived and died
unknown, because they had not been born into the circumstances which
fitted their peculiar faculties. This people had seen that the method of nature
was haphazard, if not heartless, that the rate of progress could be
indefinitely accelerated if every child that was born were born with a
definite purpose, and his life were guarded and extended till that purpose
was fulfilled. They meant every act of generation for a definite advance.
Birth and death were in the hands of the race and not of chance, and thus it
was that I had never seen or heard of obsequies during the many years of
my probation.
So my difficulties were solved by my guardians before we set out for
the national place of tombs. Yet my curiosity was as active as before. This
was the beginning of a new epoch in my new life. How could its wonders
surpass those of the past years! And I was all eagerness to study the past
history of this noble race, to study the gradual ascent to the height they had
now reached.
The whole atmosphere was jubilant as we rose into its upper levels and
thrilled with light and electricity; even unseen living forms from other stars
mingled with the sunlight that supplied so much for the support of our
being. There was not a cloud to mar the purity of the ether, inspired with
wandering breaths of wind. We rose joyous and bright under the gleam of
the sun, I alone having my exhilaration somewhat dashed by the
consciousness of my laggard gait; for my limbs were not yet light enough,
my arm and leg muscles not strong enough, to accomplish any but the
briefest journey upon wings, and that in the most awkward and shambling
way. I was borne in one of their faleenas or weight-transference flies; it was
one of the smallest, yet I had room to move about freely in the car in spite
of the baggage of the troop. It was not unlike a huge tropical butterfly that I
had admired in a case in one of our museums; the car was long and narrow
and pointed like a boat at either end; from each side stretched out wings that
were enormous beside the body they carried; and these, rainbow-hued,
seemed to fill the whole air through which we passed with a solid gleam, so
quickly did they shuttle up and down; aft extended slantwise two great
antennae-like shafts that moved hither and thither to defeat the baffling

puffs of wind and so direct our flight; along the keel lay the engine that
produced the beat of the wings, silent and motionless as if it were but a
shaft that strengthened the framework. There was no vibration, in spite of
the great speed of the faleena. A huge awning, so high above us as to be out
of reach of the wings at their fullest stretch, seemed to hold us easily aloft at
whatever level we desired, and to let us gently down whenever the wings
beat slowly enough to be seen as they moved up and down. It was in one of
these slow movements that I discovered the principle of these sails; they
were made of the wonderful metal, irelium, and had its properties of
lightness, tenuity, and strength; I had noticed as they flashed solidly through
the air that there was an alternation in the flash of greater or less sheen; I
now saw that each wing consisted of two fine plates of open scroll-work
sliding over one another back and forth; in the upward stroke the holes were
open so that the air passed easily through, and the whole expanse looked
like a delicately reticulated fan; in the downward stroke the upper plate so
slid over the lower that the apertures of both were completely closed, and
the wing formed a solid sheet of metal. I afterwards saw how simply this
was accomplished. The under irelium network had but one motion, that on
the hinges attached to the side of the car, but it had grooves on its fore and
aft edges; into these, corresponding projections on the upper network fitted,
moving in them easily by means of small half-hidden wheels; this upper
plate was attached to independent hinges on a long rod that was drawn back
and forth about half an inch by a connection with the driving engine; its
motion, however, was completely controlled by the ligatures that drew the
wing upwards and downwards, so that they should ever be in harmony, and
the closing of the pores should occur only at the beginning of the downward
beat, and their opening only at the beginning of the upward beat. The effect
to the eye was very beautiful; the transparency of the metal let the coloured
light of the sky shine through it even when solid; but when reticulated the
azure seemed to form into a flashing loom of the finest lace. I could not
cease gazing at the ever-shifting lights that played through the embroidery
of the wings. It was pleasing to the ear as well: for the whirr and creak that
usually accompany the flight of great birds and the movement of machinery
were used up as undertones to a grand but simple musical march that
seemed the very spirit of the beat of the wings.
For a time these sights and sounds held me entranced, so that I was
scarcely conscious of our ascent. When the power of the charm had freed

my senses, I looked down, and my heart leapt into my mouth; eagles being
swept from the island by the blast of the storm-cone appeared to me as flies
crawling over the sun-glitter of the houses below or on the snows of
Lilaroma. I shrank back breathless at the sight, and imagined myself falling
down this heart-sickening distance. Then the almost irresistible desire to
throw myself into this abyss came over me, and I clutched at the framework
of the car that I might not yield to this feeling.
I had forgotten my companion for the time: one glance at her drove the
terror from my mind. I saw the beauty of the benignance that shone upon
her face, and my spirit nestled in her protecting smile that had interpreted
aright the horrors of my thoughts. I was not merely thankful that I had not
been alone with my terrible longing: I could almost give my life up to this
being who swept out my fear by the loving-kindness of her glance. My
guardians had been unwilling to trust me alone in the faleena, even though
the engine and the machinery were simple enough to have been managed by
a child. So they sent with me Thyriel, who, I long afterwards found, had
been selected by the sages as my spiritual twin as soon as they had tested
my past history, my faculties, and my possibilities. None other in the whole
community was so fitted to stimulate my best qualities, to be preferred by
me as intimate friend and comrade or, if passionate emotions followed the
same direction as friendship, to mate with me as parent or proparent, when
full maturity had been reached. This I came to know only when all had
fallen out as they had anticipated and desired. We were both allowed our
full option and free will in our spiritual approaches and agreements: we
were not forced into each other’s company, only when opportunity for
mutual protection or confidence came were we paired for the venture.
Everything issued as they had planned just as if we had had no free choice
in the matter, and yet our impulses felt as free as if we had been the only
living organisms in the universe. We chose with a passion that would not be
denied; we were willing in our freedom of attraction to surrender life and all
to each other.
This flight was one of the first great adventures on which we were
together, and it is graven upon my very heart. Thyriel, O Thyriel, I await
thee with soul weary of waiting! What are the years now but centuries
without thee? I am alone but for God and thee. It is the only consolation of

my soul that thou risest ever towards God and livest in God, and that I rise
and live with thee.
It is exquisite pain (and delight too) for me to tell of that flight into the
ether; for then I first realised how incomplete was the sum of my existence
without this being. She was so gentle and yet so strong, so full of eager
sympathy and yet so vigorous of character. She knew every weak point in
my system, and bent herself to correct its weakness or protect me from its
effects without making me conscious of her sacrifice. With power that I
could not but acknowledge as the superior of mine, she played the
companion and equal. I could have worshipped her almost as a divinity; but
she modestly bent herself to my level, and veiled her superiority in her
childlike playfulness. I shrank in fear from the implied familiarity, and
could not bring myself to recognise except intellectually the common
humanity and the difference of sex. For years I felt too much adoration to
pass into love. It was indeed long before I could admit myself capable of
her friendship. But gradually she led me to put more confidence in my
powers, and to recognise the superiority of some of them. My intellectual
admiration took a warmer glow that soon fused our intercourse into the
most devoted friendship. So braced were we by our mutual help in our
common pursuits that we seemed helpless, the one without the other. Yet the
sense of sex was not stirred for years after the bond between us had grown
inseverable.
It was this flight that first awakened me to the wealth of her nature and
her immeasurable power and desire of self-sacrifice. Like her people, she
had none of the statuesque beauty or moulded regularity of feature that has
swayed the thoughts and passions of European sex; but the spirit that shone
through made the face divine. I rested almost as in a dream, as I felt the
benignance of her soul; and before long I was able to look calmly over with
her at the increasing depths of light through which we had come. Below us
we saw valley and hill pearled with the gleam of wide-scattered houses; we
could see the flash of streams and rivers as they broke through the darkness
of forests or fell in snowy cascades; and around the coast the sea spun for
the black fringe of rock a moving thread of surf. Around us rose the
carolling of many voices to the gates of heaven. Song after song, anthem
after anthem, burst forth from the various groups of our comrades. Buoyant
were they as thistledown, revelling in the pure serenity of the upper air. For

very joy I could have thrown myself among them and joined the harmony
of their flight; but her glance was upon me, and I returned to thoughts of
prudence.
She showed me why we had risen so high into upper air far above most
of the Limanorans who were flying with us. These faleenas could not adapt
themselves to the varying winds as the human figure and arms could when
managing wings. They had to rise into the regions of calms or of steady
winds, in order that they might float by power of sail down to their
destination. What seemed a mere awning acted in two ways; it served as
aëroplane to steady the whole structure in the air and as parachute when it
began to descend; and could be inflated with heated air, to help the wings in
raising the faleena upwards. She pointed out in the far distance below us a
gleaming line that marked the valley towards which we were voyaging, and
then looking at a height-gauge that hung beside her steering-seat and at a
wind-gauge that stretched over the side of the car, she decided by a brief
calculation that we had reached the proper key-place of the arch we were
making in our journey, and that we should by changing our course wing our
way with ease down to the desired goal. She touched a notch in the side of
the car and above there sounded a flute-like note, that, varying in strength
and pitch, made no disharmony with the music of the wings. I looked up
and there I could see the awning gradually collapse; it had bulged
downwards, I had noticed, in a strange way; the tenseness of its curves
disappeared, and as we began to fall, it became concave, and broke the
velocity of our descent.
The wings still plied with bewildering swiftness of beat, and forced us
onwards as we shortened our distance from the earth. We still could hear the
music of our comrades, but so softened by the long space between that I
could have imagined it the spheral harmony of orbs which circle round the
throne of God. But I could see them, dim flakes of light in the azure as they
outdistanced us, the few laggards that had skimmed above us for a short
time still showing the outlines of their forms, yet rapidly lessening into star-
specks. I was gazing out at them with the exhilaration of the outlook and of
the ether in my blood, when the wings suddenly began to labour with short,
irregular beat. I glanced at Thyriel. She kept her face unmoved, as she
examined the engine beside her and the various keys and wheels and hinges
of the machinery. I took courage, for she looked quite unconcerned, yet I

could see that she had not discovered the cause for the uneasy motion of the
wings. She told me that she would have to examine the outside, but that I
might keep my mind at peace, for there was no danger. She adjusted her
wings and dived from the side, then rose to our swiftly descending faleena,
and by the strength of her muscles seemed to stay the descent, while she
looked at all the gearing of the sails from below. Then she climbed into the
car, and began to work at a small pump in the forepart. I ran to help her, and
in a few minutes I felt the faleena buoyant again and holding its own
against gravitation; we had refilled the balloon of the awning enough to
keep her afloat. Thyriel stopped the engines and let the sails lie lazily out on
the same plane as the car, then she fastened a cord to the bow and, having
adjusted her wings again, seized the cord and leapt over. I saw her purpose:
she was towing the maimed faleena through the air, still at a great height
from the earth. We were near enough, however, for me to see as I looked
over the danger we had escaped. We had been falling upon a group of
pinnacled and serrated rocks that would have gored our vehicle and
endangered my life. Moreover, we were still a long way from Fialume.
Thanks to the cessation of our music, the attention of the distant
aëronauts was drawn to our laboured flight. It was not half an hour before
we saw them hastening back to meet us like a swarm of butterflies; and in a
few minutes more they were beside us. I watched their evolutions in the air
with absorbed delight; and ere I knew what they were about, they each held
a cord from the bow of our faleena, and Thyriel was on board with me
directing our flight. How loud their chorus sounded now that they were
near! They timed the beat of their wings and the straining of their cords to
it, and we sped on our downward way even more quickly than before. I did
not know till long after how great was the danger out of which I had
escaped. Yet I was conscious of my comrade’s courage and that to her I
owed much. It brought us closer together in spiritual friendship, and we
seemed to feel ourselves singled out of mankind for mutual confidence.

CHAPTER VI
FIALUME

I WAS revelling in the thought of our comradeship and in the exhilaration
of the motion through the air, when the chorus began to soften. It sounded
far off, like the echo of an echo, and out of the distance rang notes of
welcome. Our company burst out of their low tones of pleading into loud
triumph and joy. Then came the whispered softness of their former song;
answered softly as if from the hollows of the earth. This swelled again into
welcome, and the air rang with notes of joy.
My eyes followed our route; and beneath us I saw a huge valley forested
to the ridge on either side and spanned with a glittering roof that turned the
light of the sun into myriads of many-coloured gems. Over the cliffs or in
through the olive-green or blossoming trees swept streams with rainbowed
cascades, covering the vast dome with spray till it seemed an arch of ice
that melted in the sun. We made for the entrance of the gorge, out of which
fumed and fretted through gates of pinnacled rock a milky torrent. Borne on
mighty pillars of limpid metal rose a great archway; and this enclosed lesser
semicircles spanning the various roads that led into the wild tropical
scenery of the dale. I never saw such an impressive spectacle beneath
human roof. Cataract rose above cataract in the centre. On all sides fell
miniature cascades, or rose fountains that sent in wayward clouds their
breaking water-spears and flags. The flowers and shrubs and trees of every
climate under heaven seemed to be collected here, and to blend in
marvellous harmony of colour. Cool winds blew from hidden sources
wafting the fountain-spray or the odours of the flowers about us. The
beating rays of the sun were softened by the stream-cooled dome; and out
of some cave or hollow in the far distance came the murmur of entrancing
music.
We had descended and passed far within the wondrous structure before I
could recall my senses from their bewildered enjoyment of the scene. Then
I saw that our company had parted in various directions, vanishing in
groups or pairs, round a verdant cliff or into some overarching bower. I was

left alone with Thyriel. The sudden loneliness of the vast valley-hall made
me feel the delight of having her spirit to lean upon. In spite of the
companionship of the flowers and the close ranks of the forest, I felt the
great spaces of the valley solitary because of the loftiness of the roof, like
the arch of night making space seem more vast than under the warm,
indefinite sky of noonday. Bewildered and alone, my thoughts sought the
shelter of friendship.
Not long had I felt this consolation when both of us were in the shadow
of a nobler and more mature personality. He came I knew not whence, and
the suddenness of his appearance added to the awe I felt at once for his
character. He was, I was certain, one of the sages of the community, so
deeply had the centuries engraved their experience upon his face and spirit.
There seemed to come from him even before he spoke or recognised our
presence a benign and godlike influence, and I knew at once the greatness
of his soul. There were the lines of long struggle and complete self-mastery
upon the countenance like the curved stratification and cleavage of the older
rocks. He had not to speak before I had surrendered myself entirely to his
guidance. He who had seen so many hundreds of years pass over the earth
and learned all the lessons they had to teach was the natural master of two
such novices in life as we were. For I now felt that, however superior
Thyriel was to myself in instincts and development and beauty of soul, she
was completely overshadowed by this spirit of centuries.
Yet when he spoke to us we felt that he had still the elasticity of youth
about him; he had in his words and actions the rapid recoil of healthy
tissues that have a long career before them yet, and in his faculties and ideas
there was still the unlimited capacity of development. After explaining that
he was to be the interpreter of this house beautiful for us, he led us by a
maze of paths through the blossom and the verdure to an open space, from
the centre of which rose a noble flight of steps flanked by porticoes and
colonnades. These we ascended, resting at times on broad platforms, and
looking out on the fairy scene that more and more unfolded itself to our
eyes.
At last we stood on the highest platform, not many hundred feet from
the gleaming roof. He touched a spring here and there, and out of the
tessellated floor came rests that moved automatically with the movements
of the head and eyes; wherever I gazed as I reclined thither my rest wheeled

round. This I afterwards discovered was managed by hidden springs in the
groove in which the head rested. These were rests of observation, and the
purpose was to allow of the whole energy and consciousness being directed
into one channel, that of vision. The numberless easy methods of rest and
motion that this people used would have certainly induced sloth and luxury
but for their inherent energy of nature. To them these methods were but
economisers of the time and power which might be spent on less routine
work.
I soon saw that the valley ran more than a score of miles into the heart
of the mountains, its deepest hollows rising now by easy gradations, again
by bold platforms of rock far above the level on which we rested. For the
dome, I could now see, consisted not of one span whose top ran
horizontally along the ridges of the valley, but of hundreds of spans that
rose arch above arch up the slope of the mountain. There was something in
the terracing of the valley, too, that suggested the hand of man. Nature’s
work had been supplemented and rounded by noble art. There was
regularity in irregularity, statuesque beauty amid wild grandeur. Human
thought had utilised the massive ideas of nature. The scene would have
overawed the spirit and made it solitary, but for the familiarity of minor
features moulded by human imagination that had not geological ages and
forces at its disposal.
In amongst the greenery of the forest stood on lofty pedestals what I
took for memorial statues of the dead, with features so like to life in every
minute line and curve and even graining of the skin, that I marvelled at such
waste of human energy and imagination. My guide soon saw my mental
question, and showed me that they were the dead themselves. The moment
after every trace of life had gone from the body it was ireliumised by an
ingenious process; for every atom of tissue and cell there was substituted
one of irelium, and thus no decay could approach it; it would retain for
untold centuries the form and expression of the vanished man down to the
minutest detail. As we passed farther back into the valley I noticed a
difference in the appearance of the statuesque dead; they had not the hues
and expression of the living, but were leprous white, as if hewn out of
marble with infinite care. I appealed to Oolmo, my guide, and he told me
that these were their dead as they had been preserved before the age of
irelium and the discovery of the process that rapidly changed living tissue

into this metal. At that period the body used to be buried for years in
stalactitic caves, where the percolation of the liquid gypsum turned it after a
time into a calcareous statue.
These caves ran into the mountain at the head of Fialume, and were now
used for converting traceries and forms too delicate to work in marble into
white stone. They made a beautiful contrast in ornamentation to the
rainbow-hued limpidity of irelium. The process had been too long and slow
for the petrifaction of the dead. And about the same time as the method of
extracting irelium from the rocks had been discovered, the careful study of
the petrifactive methods of nature had led to the new and rapid process of
immortalising the form and features of those who had passed from life.
From our movable rests I could never have seen what all these statues
were. I would have said that this was the island’s great gallery of sculpture.
But there were other things that Oolmo pointed out to us before he led us
round this vast hall of his ancestry. He showed us far back in the recesses of
the valley up the slope of the mountain what looked in the distance like a
great settlement of some burrowing animal. This was the oldest burying-
place of the island, where had been laid in apertures in the rock the urns that
contained the ashes of the dead; for they had brought the practice of
cremation with them in their primitive migration from the south. Then
followed a period of superstition and recession, in which the priests taught
the sacredness of the human form and its final resurrection and when they
buried the bodies deep in the earth beneath the urned rock recesses. A
period of reaction against religion followed, and sanitation became one of
the first essentials of the new scientific era. It was feared that plagues would
come from this old burying-place on the side of the mountain, if the
percolating waters brought the corruption of the rotting corpses down into
the valley. It was resolved that the remains of their ancestors should be dug
up and removed to a mound made for them on a level with the sea. Then it
was found that almost all the bodies had become stone white as snow, for
the calcareous percolations that came along the surface of the rock down
the hill had done their work, and an accident in digging up one of the lower
row of graves revealed the marvellous stalactitic caves underneath. There
had been a movement towards a return to the practice of cremation, but it
was stopped at once by this discovery. The caves became the natural

burying-place, and out of them the dead were brought and erected in the
valley when they had turned into stone.
After we had viewed the whole scene from our platform under Oolmo’s
direction, he bade us enter a car that had sprung up at his touch. It seemed
made of gossamer, and I was afraid to enter it, till I felt the toughness and
strength of its material. It floated rather than ran round the valley above the
tops of the tall trees. I could see no wheels, and there were no rails for them
to travel on if it had had them, nor had it any wings or sails like our faleena.
At last I saw that it was hung by a transparent cord of metal from some
moving force in the dome that to me was invisible. It was an electric car,
and electric currents bore it aloft and swept it along with lightning rapidity.
But a touch of Oolmo’s finger broke the circuit and stopped it in a moment.
I was not long held by this new wonder, for beneath and around
stretched the great graveyard, that seemed a harmony of forest, wild, and
garden. We rested at intervals of a few miles on the lofty platforms,
descending the flights of steps at times to view the statuesque dead and their
surroundings. Here and there we came across groups of young men and
young women intently listening to strange voices that seemed to issue from
some hidden being within the statued dead. These were students, and the
sounds were the voices of the dead, treasured up on fine tablets of irelium,
which could either be read or made to re-utter their recorded words. To me
the silent bowed figures of the living seemed the lifeless, the whispering
dead seemed the living. It was a piece of necromancy, I felt at first; and, but
for my questioning intellect, I should have shrunk back in fear. It is true, I
could not see the lips of the erect figure move, and when I gazed long
enough some tremor of the eyelid would betray the life of the listener; but
for the first few minutes the illusion was complete, and all the surroundings,
the stillness, the far echo of wailing music, the sombre trees, seemed to
confirm it. Every new group we encountered produced the same eerie
feeling.
But we passed on; and the joy which filled the spaces of the great valley
buried the sense of death. It was the least funereal scene I had ever
witnessed; for along the paths and wide tree-arched avenues went bands of
carollers singing songs of triumph and gladness, the air was sweet with the
perfume of flowers, and masses of varied colour broke the olive darkness of
the groves. The world was at once jubilant and harmonious.

Farther and farther into the valley we flashed in our lightning car, and
even my inexperienced eye could see the change in the erect dead. Many of
the figures were taller; the attitude was often overbearing and arrogant, and
the expression was generally mean or cunning or truculent like so many
European faces when surprised in unconscious repose. The farther we
receded, the more familiar the forms and features seemed to become, so like
were they to the normal human beings of our Western world. Animalism,
sensuousness, rapacity, vindictiveness, cruelty, fanaticism grew more and
more frequent, the nearer to the primitive graveyard we approached. At last
on the faces of the dead that had been dug out of their old tombs there was
the manifest touch of the ape, the tiger, the wolf, or the snake. I shuddered
to see withal the regularity of the features and the stature and grace of the
figures. They came nearest of all to the ideal beauty and the haughty
bearing of aristocratic Europe. It scarcely needed the explanation of Oolmo
to see that the body had then been developed at the expense of the soul.
Underneath the handsome and generous outlines lurked the beast that had
entered into the making of ancestry. Splendid animals they had been; and,
as our interpreter explained, given up to war and field sports and at intervals
debauchery, or to the over-reaching of trade and money-making, or to the
subtleties and falsehoods of political life. They belonged to the age just
before the great emigrations. As we took our way back on the other side of
the valley, I could notice how rapidly these lordly animal forms
disappeared, and yielded to the compact little figures, irregular features, and
divine expression of face I had grown accustomed to in the Limanorans.
The dead were grouped in families and in order of time after the epoch
of exiling, and a student could trace the growth of a talent or virtue. But
many of the family groups were small; the line had suddenly ceased. In
these I could see after a time an occasional evidence of atavism in the size
or the sensuousness of the form, and the interpreter explained how on the
appearance of this recession the right of having posterity had ceased, or
expatriation had occurred. The general sense of the unfitness of an
individual for fatherhood or motherhood was too strong in the community
to need any expression in public resolve. Those who felt this great
misfortune fall upon them knew that their race must be cut off; and they set
themselves to eradicate the desire of family life. If they could not eradicate
it and at the same time make effort to subdue their retrogressive tendency,
they had to go into exile. At first action on the part of the community had

been needed. Now this expurgative policy worked almost automatically and
without friction.
When we had taken a comprehensive view of Fialume, we entered
another faleena, which had been substituted for our disabled car. We shot
farewell glances at Oolmo and were off in the air before I had well
disentangled my thoughts from the last sight. Below us receded the massive
archways of the door and the foaming streams at the entrance of the valley.
The jubilant music began to grow dim, and the dome shone softly in the
colours of the sunset. I thought we were to be alone on our return journey,
and began to question Thyriel on some of the mysteries of the day. She had
not much light to throw on them, for she was herself a novice in life. But of
a sudden like a flock of homing pigeons a band of our comrades broke out
into the level sunlight from the mouth of Fialume; and along with them
other bands that streamed east and north and south. Before long the western
train had overtaken us, and their voices rang like carolling at heaven’s gate.
They saw our faleena land in safety at the house of my proparents, and then,
joined by Thyriel, they streamed away through the twilight sky, ever
breaking off into more and more widely separated groups till they were lost
across the horizon, or in the darkness of some distant valley.
Week after week, and at last day after day, we took our path through the
azure to Fialume. For several years under the direction of Oolmo we
became acquainted with the history of Limanora, and saw the gradual
development of the civilisation and of the human form and faculty. We
came to feel how naturally ends followed means chosen in the mind and
frame of man, as in the plant creation and in the other animals. We saw how
creative had been this community, not in the arts merely, but in that art of
all arts, human nature. They had moulded generation after generation to
higher and ever higher purpose. How poor and subsidiary seemed all the
sciences when compared with this great practical science, the knowledge to
mould man into any required form, to bend his energies ever upwards!
Every week there grew upon us the consciousness that there was no more
plastic material in the whole world than the human soul, when it had
reached a certain stage of development.
Oolmo traced for us each new faculty and power and virtue to its
starting-point, and showed us how feeble it was to begin with, and how
rapidly it grew when once artificial effort was turned upon it. At first it was

the physical powers that he drew our attention to; in family after family, for
example, he showed us how the capacity of flight had been acquired, and
how the human frame had gradually become adapted to it; the body grew
lighter, the shoulder and breast muscles stronger, the bones hollower, the
arms longer, and the legs shorter, with greater strength at the heels.
He acknowledged that there was something peculiar in Limanora that
made this adaptation easier; a magnetism seemed to come from the earth
that made the force of gravitation less; there was also something more
exhilarating in the atmosphere and climate that differentiated it from all
other lands. This explained why I had so rapidly acquired the tripping,
noiseless gait I had so admired when first I saw Noola. There had been a
time in the history of the earth when the human body was so light and agile
in proportion to its size that a few coincidences in nature, as, for example,
the increase of swift land and tree enemies, would have made it ultimately
winged. That was the geological epoch, when, after a period of great
contraction and increase of density (the period of the huge saurians and
other monsters of the prime), the orb had, through volcanic explosions
within it and the impact of myriads of aërolites on its crust, expanded its
texture and partially volatilised its internal elements. Since then it has been
cooling down within, and thus growing less in size, though losing none of
its mass; this can be seen in the twistings and foldings of the rocks and the
enormous wrinkles on its surface. The result has been that animals, and men
with them, have been growing heavier for their size. The possibility of man
becoming a flying race has passed away. Land and sea animals have no
longer the chance of developing into birds of the air; and even some of the
tribes of winged things have almost surrendered their prerogative of flight;
nothing but embryo and unused wings remain to them. It is only in
exceptional spots like Limanora, where the magnetic conditions and the
spongy nature of the interior of the earth lessen the force of gravitation, that
men could ever acquire the power of artificial flight with any ease. By dint
of the application of enormous force, and of inventive mechanical power,
men in other lands may master the art of aërial voyaging; but it will never
become an accomplishment of the individual; there will be too much strain
and stress for it ever to grow a pleasant mode of travel.
Thus Oolmo flashed light upon the past and the future as we traversed
the groves of Fialume. We grew familiar with the great forces of the

universe, and their bearing upon the problems of mankind, and gained the
true perspective of existence. I felt that Europe was but standing still,
reform herself and advance in science and art and civilisation as quickly as
she might. European man himself was not progressing, but only the external
results of his individual efforts. It would take ten thousand years for the
huge nations of Europe to make the step upwards that these islanders made
in a day. Material progress meant nothing to the Limanorans unless it meant
also the progress of the men themselves in capacity, in power of attaining
higher and higher goals.
Year by year I came nearer to the special purpose of my education. As
we passed over the family groups of the island, and learned their sciences
and arts, both Thyriel and myself began to feel drawn to one branch of
investigation above all others. Every family had a special department of the
civilisation assigned to it, and for generations it had cultivated this. To
prevent narrowness of view in its members, and to enable all to understand
the value and purpose of the work of each, a long tract of their youth was
devoted to a bird’s-eye view of the departments of human knowledge and
progress. And, that no section of life might be left at the mercy of accident,
there worked with the representatives of every family one or two
supernumeraries. Thus new blood was introduced, for the alien was
generally chosen from a family not even distantly connected, and had such
a nature and temperament as would be likely to lead to marriage and to the
best results in posterity.
There was one family grove to which I was specially drawn. The faces
of the dead seemed to me exquisitely beautiful; the natures that shone
through their petrified bodies attracted me with tenfold power. Every day as
I entered Fialume I felt inclined to bend my steps thither, and the close of
the day generally found me amongst them. Oolmo tried with some
amusement to himself to break me of the habit, which yet grew stronger and
stronger. And Thyriel showed the same tendency. Perhaps one feature which
gave great attraction to the place was its seclusion; it was almost the only
family grove that had not two or three studying the records. Here we were
generally left to our own companionship; for Oolmo had often to go when
we arrived there; and, with our common tastes, we found the time far too
short.

At last I came upon the explanation. We were studying the growth of
some feature through the generations, and I had remarked to Thyriel how
like she was to this family in character and appearance, when suddenly the
foliage parted near where we stood and disclosed three figures, two of
whom seemed to my undiscriminative eyes facsimiles of the last of the
group which had been ireliumised. The feeling of worship was aroused in
me, for I felt in them the beautiful nature of Thyriel, and besides this the
atmosphere of years and experience mellowing it and making it seem loftier
and more divine. The third was different and yet as noble, and when I gazed
into her face I found the solution of a problem that had begun to perplex
me, the source of those characteristics of Thyriel which made her different
from the two others and from the family group. The last was her mother; the
other two were her father and aunt. This was the treasure-house and
sleeping place of her ancestry. Her own relationship had instinctively drawn
her to it, and my natural kinship with her had attracted me there.
We were now to begin the special study which was to make us useful
working members of the community, filling our own places in it, and
serving its great and final purpose with our own labour and thought. Many
years would we have to spend in this secluded grove mastering the
knowledge and achievements of this family. Its distinctive name was
Leomo, which meant earth-seers, and its department was the study of the
crust and inner movements of our orb. It was one of the peculiarities of all
Limanoran science that it was art too; nothing was lost; every investigation
or discovery or law had practical issue; and it was the duty of the
investigator to find out how his work bore upon the progress of the race to
its final aim. As I saw farther and got deeper into this study I discovered
that much which had seemed purely speculative was most practical and
relevant to the purpose of the race. A shallow view would have rejected
nine tenths of it as useless application of the energies, as mere fancy
thinking. The wider my knowledge, the more my admiration of the far-sight
of these investigators grew. They seemed to me to have almost the gift of
prophecy as they looked at the facts they accumulated and the conclusions
they tried to draw.
It was easy to follow them for every generation had reduced the
ancestral writings and thoughts and achievements to the briefest available
form, and indexed all that previous generations had done. It was the duty of

every new student of a family, after he had finished his general education
and seen the advances made in other branches, to bring all his ancestors’
researches and suggestions into relation to these, and to place a brief
account of them on record in the latest phraseology and scientific light, so
that any alien student might read or hear with understanding. There was
thus in every family grove a summary of all that was known or achieved in
its department of science or life. And this great graveyard was also the
library of the race, so classified and summarised and indexed that any man
could take a complete survey of its contents in a few years. There was the
living index, too, available in every grove. Anything that was obscure could
be at once explained by the representatives of the family. Besides these
there were families whose duty it was to supervise the relationships of the
various sciences and branches; they could point out to the investigators how
far their work tended to overlap or interfere, what was futile in their efforts,
what directions had still to be taken and what paths to be traversed. They
permitted no piece of work to be wasted; everything was correlated by them
to the purpose of the race and to its contemporary efforts. The boundary-
lines of the various departments were defined and mapped by them. They
were the organisers of research, the dividers and economisers of intellectual
labour.
But they themselves had their separate functions and duties. Some had
the faculty of order exceptionally developed; and they were the classifiers
of the community and of the work of the community. Others had the logical
powers in especial vigour; and they followed out the philosophy of the race,
the correlation of the ideas and of the lines of reasoning. A third group
consisted of those with a dominant imagination; these looked into the
future; they performed some of the functions of imaginative writers in
Europe, sketching out imaginary routes for the race and for each family into
the unknown; but they also covered a much wider field; they put into form
and expression schemes and projects such as European men of action of the
most romantic careers have often attempted to carry out, but have seldom
been able to put into words; these were not allowed to interfere with action,
but the ideas, plans, and romances they invented and put into shape were
tested and accepted or rejected by the practical men whose sphere they
touched. Imagination, it was held by the Limanorans, was apt to be a futile,
if not mischievous, faculty through want of its being ranged on the side of
utility; and yet, if trammelled and yoked to the necessity of practice in the

individual, it came to be stifled. They specially cultivated it in these
families in order that it should have full scope and development, but took
care, by ranging these families with those that superintend the purpose and
progress of the race, that their romances should have full relevancy to the
goal of all their efforts. Many of the projects and ideas which seemed at
first the most fantastic were found after many generations to be sound and
most possible of realisation.
One of the striking features of the civilisation was the complete absence
of a literary class or profession or group of families. They smiled at the
“pure frippery” of European literature, which used imagination as a mere
means of entertainment. It seemed a complete inversion of the natural order
of things to make that faculty which was the prerogative of everyone who
could speak, and the servant of the highest purpose of life, into a special art
to suit the pleasure of the idler hours. They held that the man who had
thought a thing out could express it best. So they trained up every citizen to
the fullest power of lucid and final expression. In their language, so perfect
was it, there was one best way of saying a thing; and everyone who knew
the language aright and understood the thing could find this best way. Style
as a matter of mere expression they laughed at as linguistic trickery; the
force and life of everything lay in the idea, and the expression grew out of
that and was a part of it, as the colour was a part of the flower. It was only a
clumsy and inchoate language that could admit of style or literature as a
special art; and it was trifling with one of the most divine faculties to
prostitute it to the entertainment of leisure hours; it was to class imagination
with the arts of the mimic, the buffoon, and the juggler.
Art for art’s sake, one of the latest creeds of the writers of Europe, was
to them almost blasphemy. It made the garment of ideas, the garb of human
progress, into a separate entity, and the servants of God into the tailors of
human folly, the dress more than the figure it clothed and the body more
than the soul. Literature without the intensity of the loftiest purpose of the
race was but a tinkling cymbal. Expression was the gift of nature to every
civilised man, and woe to the race that neglected it in any of its individuals,
the race that should divorce it from its ideas, that let the men who write
filch the glory of those who think!
Like strong beliefs had they about the profession of teaching as separate
from parenthood and investigation. It meant disloyalty on the part of most

citizens to their most immediate duties. Who could develop the instincts of
youth and be so deeply interested in his future welfare as those who were
bound to him by the ties of nature? And then, when he had matured and
needed the wider education, who could give it him so well as those who
were most familiar with its special objects and themes? If he was to follow
the art and knowledge of some other family, the sooner he went under the
tutelage of its representatives after his intellectual life began the better. The
only portion of their youth that the young men and women could spend with
profit under others than their parents or proparents was the period of
general knowledge, of summarising the results of the whole past. The
representative of one of the supervising families alone could give with ease
a survey of the whole field of knowledge and art and action. They and they
alone were in any way an approach to the profession of teaching, and they
were saved from the petrifying influence of pedagogy by their wider duties
in correlating the sciences and arts, the fields of knowledge and action.
Thus reason and the emotions were kept from getting benumbed by the
vanity of a too easy superiority. The beings they pitied most in the world
were the despot and the professional teacher; for these get buried in
unreality before the life is out of them, and are so unquestionably supreme
that nothing but what is pleasing to their minds dare approach them. They
fall out of relation to truth, and it is difficult for them ever to regain that
wholesome fear of contradiction and that shyness before destiny which
constitute the essence of sanity; they have to become intolerant. The
schoolmaster soon becomes intellectually barren; the despot soon falls the
victim of luxury and of illusion. For the sake of the grown men and women
who might be sacrificed to it, as well as of the children and youth, they
abolished the profession of teacher. Individual training was the only true
foundation of a sound progress. Two might be permitted to form a
companionship in education and study, just as two might form the
friendship of marriage; but that was only when the periods of possible
atavism had been safely traversed. Nor must they be wholly given up to
their comradeship; the parental influence and solitude must continue to
govern their lives.
Thyriel and I had become educational companions and friends; but
every item of our education was supervised without our noticing or feeling
galled by it. There was no prying into details; but every change in our
character and every stage in our training was tested at the periodical

investigation of the citizens. Our parents or proparents took the keenest
interest in all that we did and all that we tended to become.
Now, that our specialisation had begun, we were put wholly under the
care of Thyriel’s parents and family. I still returned to the home of my
proparents, but spent the hours of training with the Leomo. There had
evidently been discovered in the preliminary investigation of my faculties
some especially suited to the pursuit of earth-seeing. From the beginning of
my journeys to Fialume I had been attached to this family of earth-seers,
and the result confirmed the decision; my tastes all developed in this same
direction, and the more I penetrated into the mysteries of the science and
craft, the more deeply interested in it I became. Every day, under the
guidance of my new friends, I listened to the voices of their ancestors stored
up on irelium tablets; for these tablets, when placed in a voice instrument,
reproduced the exact sounds which had engraved the letters upon them.
Their written alphabet was in fact a natural one; the letters were the forms
produced by the sounds themselves when uttered by an instrument that blew
upon loose particles of irelium arranged on a vibrating disc of the same
metal. By a simple process the particles, when they took their form, were
permanently fixed to the disc, which then became an everlasting record,
easily read by any Limanoran; or, when placed in the voice instrument,
speaking the words into his ear. This voice instrument was a kind of organ,
whose minute keys and stops were easily controlled by the ridge of letters.
I ever preferred to listen to the records of the past instead of reading
them; for I never attained great facility in deciphering the letters because of
my own long familiarity with the English alphabet and writing. But Thyriel
could read the tablets with great ease; I came to prefer her reading to the
sound of her ancestors’ voices although these gave fuller meaning to the
ideas they communicated, and it was pleasant to feel that she was listening
with me and not tiring her throat. Our minds seemed to become one, as we
sat silent and motionless with ears intent on the statue of some one of her
forefathers. There was a strong magnetism from the dead minds gradually
welding our souls together.
Yet there was nothing personal or emotional in our studies. For years
they were chiefly historical, watching the growth of earth-science through
the generations, seeing the share that each member had in its development.
How little they knew of it even up to the time of the exilings! The earliest

ancestors groped amongst barren facts and their classifications. They named
the rocks and the elements of the rocks, and speculated on the order of their
formation; they told the story of the growth of glaciers in the original
Antarctic land from which their ancestors had migrated, and tried to explain
the origin and development of the strange archipelago in which they lived.
But they saw no practical application of the resulting theories: even when
they knew the stratum and its trend, they often failed in their directions as to
where certain minerals would be found in it.
Still the strides made by the family both in the knowledge and its
application were marvellous, since the island had been purified and the true
purpose of their civilisation was known. An instrument that I had grown
accustomed to during the previous or general stage of my education enabled
me now to see at a glance the improvements of each age or generation. It
was the ammerlin, which might be translated historoscope. It focussed for
the eye and ear any periods of the past. The whole pageant of some section
of the history of any man, science, or object could be flashed
stereoscopically in a few minutes on a dark surface, whilst all the sounds
that accompanied the scenes would be reproduced in any required pitch and
tone. It was one of the duties of the students and representatives to take
numberless sun pictures and sound pictures of all the important scenes in
the life of the family and in the development of their science and art and
instruments. In order to reproduce any scene, the two long strips of irelium
that contained the series of momentary pictures of it were made to rotate as
swiftly as they had rotated when receiving the impressions, and the sun
pictures being transparent, light and magnifying glasses threw them life-
size on a wall opposite the spectator; the lightning movement produced the
full effect of action in life; and, as all the tints of the scene had also been
impressed on the strips, there was nothing wanting to produce the illusion
of life but the voices and the sounds. These, too, had been taken on an
irelium strip and this, when placed in a voice instrument, added all that was
needed to make the whole scene live. It was the duty of the students in each
generation to single out the most striking and representative series and have
them ready mounted in the instruments, that any new scholar might in a few
days take a bird’s-eye view of the whole development of the family. Thus
was I enabled to sit and study the past as if I had been a contemporary and
eye-witness of it. The very music that accompanied and harmonised each

act and scene was faithfully reproduced as loud or as low as I desired. I had
but to touch a certain spring in the historoscope, and raise or lower the tone.
It was little wonder that we so rapidly covered the history of the family
and its achievements. By means of the work of former students we were
able to avoid all the mistakes and unessential details of the route they had
traversed; and Thyriel’s friends pointed out every pitfall that edged the road,
every by-path that led only into the darkness or into some inextricable
labyrinth. Our steps were watched with infinite care; for, with all the
knowledge and skill we had already acquired, we were but infants on the
threshold of a universe of darkness. What was twilight in the future to our
guides was to us midnight blackness. That was no science, they held, which
did not flash light upon the gloom before us; and their whole efforts were
bent on turning every fact and law into a prophecy and every student into a
foreseer as well as a seer in his own science. The limited faculties of man
fenced in by narrow bounds the future into which it was possible for them
to see; but they were ever extending these bounds and creeping towards the
infinite.
It took but a few years to master the recorded lore of the Leomo, the
work of our predecessors had made it so easy, and it was an epoch in our
existence when we began the practical part of our training. We were by no
means done with Fialume, but less time was now devoted to its historical
and theoretical studies. I well remember the morning when our guardians
and guides informed us we were fit to see the practical applications of the
science throughout the island. Taking some new apparatus, they embarked
me in a kind of faleena which had been invented since I came to the island.
The families of imagination had long ago suggested it, and one of the
families engaged in the development of methods of flight had just
succeeded in perfecting its mechanism and making it easy to manage. This
aërial car had no wings, but rose by means of the many vacuum tubes which
were the most important part of its impelling machinery. A powerful electric
engine created and destroyed the vacuums many hundred times a minute.
Each tube sucked in the air ahead and expelled it with great violence at the
stern of the car. Both actions aided in propelling the faleena. The result was
that, though not so graceful as the old winged car, it went with much greater
swiftness. Indeed, laden though we were, we kept pace easily with the flight
of my companions and guides through the air; and its parachute attachments

obviated any risk, even if all the tubes should by accident become
ineffective. Its chief disadvantage was that it could not rise out of the denser
air of the lower atmosphere, and at the same time keep up its great speed.
The old style of faleena, or farfaleena, as it was called, to distinguish it from
its new rival, the corfaleena, was still kept in use for higher journeys, and
the flight-families set themselves the problem of inventing a means of
propulsion through space without the aid of air. One dealt with the
possibilities of electric currents, and experimented on the method of
alternating attraction and repulsion, using the repulsion in the rear of the car
and the attraction in front. Another dealt with the possibilities of the rays of
light that were ever traversing space, experimenting on their power of
starting machinery in vacuo and keeping it in rotation. A third made effort
to test the capacities of the ether, which was the basis and medium of all
things, a more difficult and problematical path of investigation, yet one not
to be abandoned without certain proof of its impossibility; for many
apparently insoluble problems had been solved in a manner that made
incredulity hide its head.

CHAPTER VII
LEOMARIE

A S I was attached to Leomarie or the science of earth-seeing, I did not
follow up their experiments in the building of air-cars; I only saw the
results when at last they came out perfect from their hands, and greatly
admired the easy and swift action of their corfaleena. Over the hills and
valleys and plains we flew close enough to see what was going on upon the
earth below. Again and again we passed over long wisps of steam or
columns of dense smoke. I conjectured that the steam indicated the heat
wells like that which penetrated the rock near the house of my proparents,
and supplied every chamber with heat or power as required. It went down
some miles into the crust of the earth, and could be closed or opened at will
by a huge lever worked by the steam it emitted itself. The denser brooms of
smoke I took to indicate the sinking of their artesian power wells by the
leomoran.
For I had seen ours being mined; I had seen the entrance of the great
irelium tube into the earth, ring within ring, and its slow but inevitable work
from day to day and week to week. The principle of this leomoran or earth
perforator had been found by investigation of the anatomy and method of
work of the pholas or rock-boring shell, partly chemical, partly mechanical.
The edge of the lowest ring was like a sharp-toothed file that, as it rotated
by means of power applied from the centre of force, wore its way gradually
into the rock, the ridges of the file being as hard as the diamond. An inner
ring-file was attached to it on the inside, and between the two was let down
a certain chemical compound, which by the friction of the files produced
little explosions in the rock below and thus quickened the process. Other
ring-files followed in the same way. Another chemical compound, differing
according to the character of the rock to be attacked, was let down in the
space within the concentric rings, and rapidly decayed the rock so that it
ascended like a column of thick black smoke. After all the ring-files were at
work, the leomoran needed little guidance; for by an application of the
principle of the spectroscope, its use of the chemicals according to the

nature of the rock became automatic. As soon as the volatilised mineral that
ascended out of the rings changed its character, the beams of light that
passed through it changed the spectrum; and the new spectrum influenced a
certain solution that controlled a thread, and this thread set free a stream of
the proper chemical compound down the leomoran.
A still more striking use of the spectrum was the linoklar or
spectroscope analyst and recorder. It analysed the vapours that ascended
from the tubes, and recorded their spectra on a moving strip of irelium that
was guided by the descent of the leomoran into the earth. Thus anyone
could see what strata were passed through in any given time and the extent
of the strata. But the linoklar did much more than this; whenever it struck
any vein that had the much-desired irelium in it in any quantity, its
spectrum released a spring which opened a small tube; through this
streamed the irelium vapour into a cavity of the earth, where by means of a
purifier it deposited only the pure metal. There was less demand for the
other metals, gold, silver, platinum, tin, copper, iron. But there was also an
arrangement for separating and depositing their volatilised forms in other
cavities. Thus they were able to have more than they required of the metals,
and especially of irelium, the most precious because the most adaptable of
all.
I was now to see a further development of these mining instruments. We
winged our way to a part of the coast which was farthest from the
surrounding islands and most easily protected from invaders by the storm-
cone. I noticed the exceptional lowness of the sandy beach, as shelving as
that on which I had originally landed; there were none of the great bastions
of rock which, moulded with such symmetry of terrace and escarpment,
barred off all landing on the island. We directed our course far up the
mountain and alighted on a rocky platform overlooking the sea. The new
apparatus had been sent after us in a faleena and was now placed in
position. A cylinder was erected on the ground and attached by machinery
to wires and pipes that had been laid from the centre of force. But this was
unlike the old leomoran in having the mouth tightly closed, and I soon saw
the principle on which the new perforator was to work. The air was
exhausted in the cylinder, and then a powerful stream of electricity was
made to pass through a piston constructed of innumerable wires which kept
moving with lightning rapidity over the surface of the rock at the bottom.

The success of the experiment soon manifested itself; for, as soon as a
spring was touched, a valve that separated the end of a projecting tube from
the air-tight cylinder was opened, and out streamed a dense column into the
atmosphere above. The spring was afterwards managed automatically so
that as soon as the red-hot electric piston had eroded enough of the rock and
volatilised it, the valve sprang open, and the moment the vapour and smoke
had all escaped, it was shut, and the air was immediately exhausted.
We returned day after day to the place and found that the new
perforator, or tirleomoran as it was called, worked with ten times the
swiftness of the old instrument. The chief objections to it were that the
metal vapours were denser and more offensive, and that the irelium
cylinders had to be oftener renewed because of the great friction and the
intensity of the electric heat. The one was obviated by a longer smoke-tube
and an application of a vent of wind from the storm-cone; the other was
obviated by longer cylinders and refrigerative packing between two of their
layers of irelium. But the strangest result—strangest for me at least—was to
come. The tirleomoran descended miles beyond the usual force well into the
crust of the earth, at a great rate of speed, and I soon saw preparations for
some change. Great channels of their usual metal were laid down to the
beach, and irelium barriers erected in the sea along the shelving shore from
bastion to bastion. By the greater rapidity of the descent, the increase of the
proportion of their favourite metal, and the ease with which the electric
current volatilised the material below, our guides judged that they had
reached rock that was already molten. Before long there began to ooze out
of the smoke-tube a red-hot stream, that trickled its way down the slope.
Then the air-tight lid was burst off the cylinder, out of it came the electric
piston on a wave of red-hot lava, and down the channels the thick stream of
molten rock flowed till it reached the barriers in the sea. There with vast
columns of steam it cooled and solidified, forming a new and stronger
rampart to check the inflowing fire. Day after day we found that the beach
was disappearing, and in its place, when the steam cleared, we could see
that the great gap in the bastion-works of the island was filled up.
This was the first of their lava wells I had seen. Its operations explained
to me the massive symmetry of the rocky shores and the cyclopean terraces
and shoots down the mountain-sides, that had, I thought, been either
chiselled by tens of thousands of years of slavish labour, or laid by the

hands of a race of giants now vanished from the earth. This little people was
itself the Vulcan that turned the bowels of the world into smelting-works
and used the mighty forces lying underneath the crust of our orb with the
ease of a smith at his forge. What had the Limanorans to fear from invaders
with even the mightiest war-engines that had ever been invented? They had
made themselves fortifications which would outlast the attacks of any
human invention. When the beetling circle of precipices was complete
around their island who could land troops, even if they evaded the blast of
the storm-cone? To the Limanorans themselves the height of their shores
was no disadvantage; in fact it gave them easy starting-points for their wing
expeditions; they could plunge from the jutting cliffs into the air and so gain
impetus for their flight.
Thus had they been able to destroy that spirit of militarism which, after
a certain stage, is the implacable foe of true progress. It is based on two of
the most childish and most primitive of forces in the human breast,
combativeness and the passion for display. Hence the impossibility of
stamping out the contagion. Ever and anon in the former history of the
island the age of peace seemed to have begun; but marauders from abroad
would land and stir the instinct of brigandage and make an army and a
military leader necessary. Thenceforward again all the arrangements of the
community were made subordinate to the ambition of the soldier. An
intrusion of savagery and brute force, however veiled in glory and the
panoplies of civilisation, is irresistible by the powers of peace. Only slow
and silent conquest of the armed power brought back progress in peaceful
arts again, again to be maimed and thrown back from some external
accident. Not that they ever pretended that they could eject struggle out of
their life, but they did aim to raise the plane of conflict and competition.
Never could this people have entered on the rapid development of their
powers without their lava ramparts and their storm-cone to keep off all
occasions of militarism.
These lava wells had still other uses. Out of their flow were made the
rock foundations on which the houses of this people were built. It puzzled
me for years to know how they succeeded in making their immense
platforms and terraces out of the hardest trap. Their mansions stood out
from the precipices and cliffy sides of the mountain on isolated plateaus that
gave the inmates free view on every side and free circulation of air around.

They rose picturesque and romantic from the top of lonely rocks, like the
castles of the Rhine, dominating the whole locality. Down the rocky
foundations poured at times torrents of water from the sluice-gates of the
mountain, cleansing or cooling the surroundings; yet never was there any
danger for these everlasting ramparts.
Another use to which these lava wells were put was to modify the
temperature. They were generally opened and let flow in the coolest months
of winter, and the red-hot cascades falling into the sea heated it to such an
extent that the climate of the whole island was mellowed and tempered.
From the wells far up the slope of the mountain the lava flow had been so
guided and moulded that immense channels had been made down to the
edge of the cliffs, with sides as lofty as the precipitous shores themselves.
Down these were shot in summer great avalanches of mountain snow right
into the ocean, so tempering the strength of the summer heat.
But these were only subsidiary uses of the tappings of the central earth
fires. Their main and original purpose was to relieve the perturbations of
Lilaroma. It was one of the chief duties of the Leomo to watch over the
destiny of their island, which was volcanic in its origin, though it had been
greatly added to in former ages by the coral insect. Lava-streams had
overspread the coral, and then the myriads of minute architects had thrust
out their structures farther and farther into the sea and thus the lowlands had
been broadly extended, while the red-hot layers of lava added massiveness
to the body of the island. Yet it was continually shaken by earthquakes and
threatened with partial if not complete disaster. It was the function of
Leomarie to watch the approach of these earthquakes and guard against
them. The Leomo had the most delicate instruments for recording every
tremor of the earth’s crust. They had also thermometers and electrometers
down their heat wells and lava wells, and these automatically recorded at
the surface every variation of the heat and magnetism of the earth. They had
classified through many centuries all the preliminary and concomitant
circumstances of earthquakes, and had found and formulated certain causal
relations amongst them. Thus the minutest symptom of change in the
records made by their instruments roused them to watchfulness. They were
soon able to tell in what direction the explosive materials were
accumulating and how far below the surface of the earth; then, when they
had fixed with more or less definiteness the time they had to spare, they

began sinking lava wells right into the perturbed lake of fire. The vent acted
as safety-valve; the shakings of the island ceased as the steam roared forth,
and the molten rock began to yeast down the side of the mountain. All
danger was past for another period of time. Again and again throughout the
past ages the Leomo had saved the island from the ravages of earthquake
and uncontrolled lava-streams from the crater of Lilaroma. Never did they
intermit their vigilance or cease to advance their knowledge of the earth and
its habits and laws. It seemed to me at first that nothing could occur in the
crust of our planet which they would not foresee. I came afterwards to
know the limits of Leomarie, and the reasons why they pushed almost
feverishly forward to further knowledge. They were ever afraid that
something unforeseen might occur and threaten the stability of their land
and the progress towards the nobler life.
Once in the dark ages before the great exilings an appalling disaster had
occurred which ploughed deep into the consciousness of the people the
necessity for the development of this earth science. Their central city stood
upon a great plateau up the slope of Lilaroma. Within recorded memory
there had been no great outburst from the mountain; and the inhabitants
travelled fearlessly up to its rim and down the bowl of its crater. At times
there had been slight spittings of ashes and once or twice a new fumarole or
hot spring or even lava fountain had opened at some point on the mountain
slope; but these were all at a distance from the bustling, luxurious city; and
most of them had awakened slight notice. The volcano indeed had been
practically quiescent since the great migration from the Antarctic regions
and the sealing of the archipelago by the circle of fog. The citizens were
keeping one of their annual feasts, and were lapped in luxurious ease and
pleasure. They had been exhilarated by a long period of prosperity and a
recent victory over the savage clan that inhabited one of the adjacent
islands. The country people and a number of hermits living in lonely parts
of Limanora had been alarmed by various premonitory symptoms, sultry
clouds turbaning the head of Lilaroma, tremors in the earth more and more
threateningly repeated, great and unaccountable disturbances in the sea, and
a hot, heavy, brooding atmosphere around the whole island. Some of them
came to the city and warned the revellers to be prepared for some
catastrophe; but they were waved aside as dreamers, mere superstitious
disturbers of life and its traffic. Half the city was gathered together in the
central market-place to see a great spectacle, when the earth shook beneath

them. They fell on their faces and cried to their gods; but it was in vain. The
market stood upon a plateau high above the rest of the city, overlooking the
ocean. Like a cap this platform was blown into the air, and all the pleasure-
seekers vanished like smoke. Out on the sea and here and there on the land
a rain of dust fell mingled with minute pieces of human flesh; but never was
any one of the gathered thousands found; and as if to obliterate the traces of
her ghastly work, the mountain sent down a broad stream of lava, which
filled up the gulf where the market-place had been, and sealed up the dust-
buried city, preserving it for after-ages like a fly in amber. Those who
escaped destruction fled, some to distant parts of Limanora, some to other
islands; but all were buried for centuries in grovelling superstition. It was
out of the hermits and the country people that a new nation was built up,
which set itself as a first duty to establish Leomarie, that it should not be
taken unawares by any repetition of this great catastrophe. Nor has it ever
recurred, although there have been many premonitory symptoms. The lava
wells or vents eased the labours of the internal fires and saved the island.
Their new and deeper wells, driven by the tirleomoran, and reaching the
internal fires, gave them greater sense of security. Irelium floats were let
down which would not be injured by the great heat, and these,
communicating with an indicator at the mouth, told of every disturbance in
the surface of the lake of fire. All the indicators were connected with the
centre of force, and automatically recorded there all they had to tell. The
same system of centralised record placed the various indications of the
climolans or earth-sensors at every moment ready to the hand of the Leomo.
These climolans were down every force-well and told every variation in the
heat, the density of the air, the kind of vapour, the magnetism, and the
movement of the crust of the earth. No change in the earth below the island
down to a distance of thirty or forty miles (the latter the greatest depth they
had reached) was neglected. Every indication was properly tabulated and
classified, and year was compared with year and month with month, till the
meaning and importance of every change were exactly known. The furthest
records of the past, as well as those more recent, were daily consulted in
order to find the generalisation that would fit any new symptom. The
Leomo felt daily the pulse of Lilaroma as a doctor would that of his most
valued fever patient. They knew that they had the fate of the race in their
hands, and no indication was of too little importance for them to consider.
What would all the strivings and labours of the nation come to if any laxity

on their part should allow such a volcanic catastrophe to recur as had
destroyed the capital of old?

CHAPTER VIII
RIMLA

I N studying the practical aims and issues of earth science, I was taught to
manage their apparatus, and to interpret every tremor in the earth’s crust
and every indication of the instruments. I had already been taught to make
their apparatus, for my physical discipline had begun several years before I
was admitted to Fialume. It was in fact one of their primary maxims that
muscular exercises should go on contemporaneously with intellectual and
spiritual pursuits, that no citizen should be allowed to neglect for even a day
the development of the body, intimately as the soul was interwoven with it.
As soon as I was thoroughly tested and put through my course of probation,
the training of my muscles was begun, and along with the magnetic
moulding of my brain-tissues went the development of the force-tissues of
the body and the powers of my senses. But no one was permitted to enter
their great practical university or workshop till he had become a certain
devotee of the race. The mysteries and arts and crafts which gave the nation
its peculiar powers could not be communicated to anyone who might by
some change become an alien. It was thus that many years of residence in
Limanora passed before I was admitted to one of the marvels of the island,
the great valley of Rimla.
I well remember the evening of my initiation. The night work was as a
rule done by the younger men and women of the community; the elders
took their turn at the machinery by day, as they had to husband sleep during
the hours of darkness and silence. I had often wondered whither went my
proparents at a fixed hour every day; they vanished in the distance as the
sun began to wester, and they returned at evening with high colour in their
cheeks and the look of having used their muscles with a will. Their physical
life seemed to take new impetus from these expeditions.
One day on their return they told me that I was to be admitted to Rimla,
which they explained to mean the centre of force. The mature judgment of
the community had decided that I could now be fully trusted. My practical

and muscular education was to begin. I was to set out that evening with a
band of young workmen who kept the first watch of the night.
The sun had scarcely set when my escort arrived; and, as with my slow
powers of locomotion I could not be expected to keep up with them, I was
placed in one of their flight-cars. I had no companion, for the whole band
flew in front and drew the car by some magnetic power unseen; and it was
so light-hung and so balanced by wings and domes and parachutes that it
seemed capable of being the sport of every wind. Over the central ridge of
the island we swept towards a distant slope of Lilaroma. Suddenly
underneath me in the growing darkness there shone out in a deep broad
valley a vast dome of light, transparent enough to reveal the flitting
shadows underneath it. It seemed the laboratory of a world. Innumerable
streams flashed under its upper edge; they sped from the summits of the
surrounding hills, or across the gorges from other and more distant ranges. I
had seen as we flew hundreds of noble aqueducts spanning the valleys with
their arches and columns, some of them thousands of feet up the slopes of
Lilaroma. All the waters which the great mountain gathered from the clouds
of heaven made their way towards this marvellous domed valley. At its
mouth there was a deep gorge, whether artificial or natural was not clear to
me then; and through the chasm leaped a river mightier than any I had ever
seen; it seemed to be on its way to the sea, but I could not trace its course
farther than its massive gateway out of the valley. Underneath the dome I
could see vast wheels of irelium move at all levels; they seemed so fragile
that a pebble thrown at them would break them; yet each turned spindles of
enormous power, which moved swifter than lightning. I soon saw that all
the intricate machinery was sheathed in casings of their translucent metal,
along which flowed a slow, glutinous stream of some liquid that dripped
through perforations on all points of friction.
As we alighted, night fell, and the titanic crystal workshop gleamed
with a soft radiance that seemed to come from no centres, but was diffused
everywhere in the manner of the sunlight or the atmosphere. It was like a
vast ice cave of the Arctic circle lit by brief and splendid summer. Fairy-like
yet vast, it seemed a fabric of some dream-world; but the splash and hiss of
the forceful waters and the unresting motion of the machinery made it all
real enough. The noises were by no means deafening; they were subdued
and musical with a halo of mysterious whisper like the sounds of nature on

a bright day of summer. Nor was the sight bewildering to the eyes; there
was too much symmetry in it to perplex and dazzle.
My guides and companions tripped lightly and fearlessly through the
labyrinth of movement till they reached an edifice underneath the dome
more elaborate and majestic in its beauty than the noblest of Gothic
cathedrals; its towers and spires and pinnacles seemed to aspire to the very
stars as we looked up, and yet the loftiest of them failed to reach the zenith
of the vast diaphanous roof. Towards this building radiated the moving
network of spindles and axles that the flashing water-wheels turned, and out
from it passed great transparent tubes of metal, woven together fantastically
into a forest of gigantic trees and flowers. Nothing of this arabesque of
movement marred the colossal symmetry of all beneath the crystal canopy.
The church-like building was the shrine of force. In it we found one of the
wise men of the elders seated on a high throne; and beside him stood
muscular forms ready to do his behests. He laid his hand on a key-board of
innumerable keys, each of which was marked with some hieroglyphic. The
attendants scattered to various points along the mosaic floor, and watched
the working of the labyrinth of wires and tubes. At the touch of the master
the whole edifice vibrated, and a sound as of the most sublime orchestration
filled the vault. We saw countless wheels and pistons move and flash
beneath their transparent metal sheaths, and along each tube, now lit as with
starlight, we could watch the rush of vapours or liquids towards their
destination in the various factories and houses in the valley and along the
mountain-side.
It was one of the masters of physical force who manipulated the keys.
He was controlling and harmonising the vast power that was concentrated
in Rimla, and, instead of the demoniac jarring of the engines and machinery
which I had been accustomed to in the industrial centres of other lands, the
sounds of the marvellous vault made sweet concord that ever varied with
the transference of power from purpose to purpose. He was the pointsman
of the numberless railroads of energy, and at the same time the musician of
the titanic workshop. His will disciplined and guided both the generation
and the distribution of all the force of the island. Our troop took the place of
that which had been on guard through the sunset and twilight, and separated
in pairs throughout the valley, each pair taking under its charge one section
of the labyrinthine movement. My comrade, Ooriel, the cousin of Thyriel,

was a youth of splendid build, the strength of his upper limbs seeming
almost bovine, his shoulders and arms not too large for his size, yet giving
the impression of gigantic power. I soon saw how much he could do. We
were to inspect the generators of force underneath the dome. He first led me
to the various streams which came leaping down the slopes and cliffs. One
of them from some cause only to be ascertained at the cone of Lilaroma was
swollen into a yellow torrent that threatened to overflow its lava banks and
flood the valley. In a moment he saw the danger, and rushed to the wing-
dam dividing the upper course and controlling the amount of water which
should flow down to its various wheels and the amount which unused
should find its way to the great exit. He found that the separating barrier
had lost its automatic motion through the sudden increase of the overflow
and the intrusion of a huge boulder that had come down like a battering-ram
upon it. He set me to guide the machinery and power that moved the dam to
suit the strength of the current, and then, fixing a narrow irelium shield in
the bottom of the channel, he leapt into the torrent. The shield, I could see,
keeping erect just above him, shed the stones and boulders to this side and
that. Thus protected he raised a huge hammer which he had taken with him
and by three or four well-directed blows split the obstacle into half a dozen
pieces; he then bent down and removed them out of the way, and suddenly I
felt the steering-gear begin to work, and saw the dam swing round into the
channel leading to the centre of force, whilst the bulk of the torrent found
its way into the exit, which was deeper and broader. The danger was past;
but a moment’s hesitation, either in order to bring up the heavier tools or to
call other assistance, would have ruined many of the great works upon the
levels below and stopped the whole of the operations of Rimla for several
days.
Ooriel shook the water from his garments as he leapt out, and in a few
minutes he was on his way with me to the other brooks, cascades, and
conduits which gathered the aqueous forces of Lilaroma into this valley of
power. Not a drop that fell from the tributary clouds about the head of the
mountain but did its work for this singular people; the moisture-lifting
power of the sun, and the force of gravitation that fought with it were alike
made the servants and yoke-fellows of the Limanorans.
They refused to waste the energy that nature gave them so freely. This I
saw more fully illustrated as I followed Ooriel. Having inspected all the

forms of stream-power, he sped round to the side of the valley nearest to the
western shore of the island; there in a great cave or hollow in the rock,
brilliantly lit, I saw myriads of wires and cables concentrating from all
westward directions on an immense block of labramor or irelium alloy.
This, he explained to me, was the great electric storage-battery of the
waves. From the north-west and the south-west came the chief storms and
currents that broke on the shores of the island; and underneath the beetling
cliffs of lava erected on the western shores they had a line of long, lofty
caves running some hundreds of feet underneath into the land; in these huge
vanes and water-wheels were hung from the roofs and the higher portions of
the sides; and the waves as they ran in and out beat their paddles and made
them whirl with lightning swiftness. The motion thus communicated was
turned by their electro-generators into currents of electric force which found
its way by the network of wires and cables that I saw into this enormous
storage-battery. In another series of caves they cooped up the water of the
full tides by means of gigantic dams and sluice-gates, and this during ebb
drove huge wheels and turbines and thus sent the power of the moon into
their treasure-house of power. Every storm that ruffled the surface of the
ocean, every current that swept past their shores, every ebb or flow of their
tides added its quota to the energy accumulated in their electric treasury, a
far more wonderful concentration of wealth than any Sindbad’s valley or
Golconda. Here was ready to the hand of man power greater than all that
the nations and the generations had ever been capable of.
And the winds had been made as much the slaves of this people as the
waves; for another great cavern that we visited was the storehouse of the
energy of the winds. In every gorge and pass and gully around Lilaroma up
almost to its crater had been erected immense windmills, which as they
revolved generated electricity; this found its way from all points by massive
cables buried in the earth to the conservator of energy in this second cave.
Ooriel tested the wires to see that they were not leaking anywhere and
tested the batteries for faults, and finding everything in good order, we
passed into a third power treasury in the rock. This was vastest of all; for
into it there poured the energy of the power-wells which was not needed by
the private houses spread over the face of the island. As soon as the head of
steam was shut off from the machinery or the tubes of any mansion, its
whole force was turned upon an engine near the mouth of the well, which
kept generating electric force day and night. The accumulation of energy in

this cave of the wells would have been enough to supply ten times the
power that Europe had ever used in her industries.
In order to round off our tour of inspection, Ooriel led me to another but
smaller cave which had just been fitted up with storage-batteries. This was
the cave of the sun. For generations it had been contended that most of the
power from the sun’s rays was lost, even when they reached the earth; and
the inventors had at last worked out the problem of its utilisation. I had
noticed as I flew over the country in a faleena vast gleaming spaces
sparkling like gigantic diamonds in the sunlight. These were the reflectors
which collected the sunbeams and concentrated their heat and light into
power. Upon the slope of Lilaroma they utilised the miles of snow surface
and gathered their gleam into a few heat-engines that sent the generated
electricity into Rimla.
Vast as the force was which in these various ways was bent into the
service of this people, there seemed still to be the need of increasing it.
Never a week passed without some facilitation of the collection and
distribution of energy by an improvement in the machinery. The mechanic
families were ever busy competing with one another in invention and
practical application of some principle or idea, and the pioneering families
who rode imagination to the verge of practicability marched ahead of them,
mapping tracks and highways into the unknown future. One proposal was to
utilise the magnetism of the earth as a new source of energy, and already
one of the mechanical families was far on the way to its realisation. Another
that was near at hand was the use of the expansion of their liquefied and
solidified air for purposes of power. One plan somewhat farther off from the
realm of practicability was the utilisation of the primal ether by means of its
compression and expansion. Yet they were working at it in full hope of
finding a solution of the problem at some unexpected turn of their
imaginative road into the darkness. They had achieved so much that they
had almost boundless faith in their ultimate power to solve all problems
presented to their minds. They would face the death of the whole race
sooner than the thought of ceasing to push forward into the night that
encircled life.
My mind was almost paralysed at the thought of the vastness of the
power controlled in this centre of force; but it explained to me the ease with
which they could drive their leomorans miles and miles through the solid

crust of the earth, the power they had over the volcanic fires of Lilaroma,
the strength of the blast they could send far out to sea from their storm-
cone, and the general facility with which they could control and use even
the most titanic forces of nature. I did not wonder now that they were the
masters rather than the servants of nature, especially when I saw that by the
strength and nicety of their machines they could concentrate all this
tremendous force upon any single point or distribute it over a wide area at
the striking of a key on the great key-board of forces. I have seen one of the
masters of energy turn the whole current from the ten thousand services it
was doing throughout the island upon the making of a diamond; so
enormous was the temperature it generated in a few moments that a piece of
carbon, submitted to the heat and pressure, came forth a magnificent jewel,
gleaming and sheening in the light. But this was for no silly purpose of
personal ornamentation; it was meant for the friction edge of a leomoran
down where it bit into the rock. It was the easiest thing in the world for this
people with all the concentration of power they had at their call to follow
nature in her most occult or tremendous processes. There was not a metal
they could not produce with their high temperatures and enormous
pressures. It is true that all other operations had to be stopped in order to
transmute rapidly common materials into gold, irelium, or diamonds; but it
could be done, and they had no need to dig into the bowels of the earth like
other men for the more precious metals and crystals which had accumulated
there in the volcanic or chemical past.
It was one of their commonest sayings that no science which was not
creative was worthy of the name. True, there were often long tracts of
scientific investigation that seemed entirely barren; and many of their
researches seemed to lead nowhither. But when I inquired more minutely I
found that the investigators had realised many of the practical applications
of the discovery when once they should reach it. They regarded as futile all
abstract inquiries which had only a distant and unforeseen chance of ending
in something useful. Even their astronomy had a keen eye to the
possibilities of their future; it led not only to a deeper knowledge of the
living heart of creation, and to a wider enjoyment of the pleasures of
imagination and faith, but to the purposes of the immediate life; it gave
them immortal forms for their art and especially their architecture; it
moulded or suggested their divinest music; it brought into even their
physical life influences unlike those of the earth, and they hoped with full

faith that through this they might catch the wandering thoughts or voices of
the beings of other worlds and at last reach the power of emigration from
star to star.
Their most creative science was chemistry; for this had reached the
secrets of nature’s most mysterious processes, and had imitated and
generally abbreviated the workings of her great laboratory. The Limanorans
did not need to grow the plants and trees that used to produce their food.
Agriculture had ceased to be necessary for them except as a part of
landscape-gardening. The elements and combinations that used to be
extracted from their harvests in order to support and exhilarate life could be
created directly in the chemical laboratories. Everything needed as diet was
drawn straight from the earth without the long process of growth and
culmination. They had the prime factors of sustenance in unlimited quantity
and purest form with the minimum of labour, and they could give to these
the exact quality and refinement which would bear them straight to the
various tissues or cells of the body without the need of its offensive
chemical processes. Most of the chemistry of life-sustenance was
accomplished before the food entered the human system, and the space and
energy of the body that had before gone to the alimentary processes of life
were now free for other and higher functions. Pharmacy and chemical
science combined to create all that the constitution required not only for its
support and frictionless continuance, but for its progress towards longer life
and more ethereal texture. Their medicine had ages before passed the crude
stage of mere cure of disease. They laughed at the idea of the science as
merely therapeutic: it must be creative. The inter-relations of the higher and
lower elements of the nature were unremittingly studied in the case of every
member of the community, and every means of change in them that would
lead to the ennobling of Limanoran humanity was carefully prescribed.
I was led through their food factories and grew deeply interested in their
processes of analysis and combination. They seemed never to have any
hesitation about the exact quantity of each element and the exact
temperature and pressure needed to produce any given kind of sustenance.
One of the most singular departments of these factories was that in which
they had yoked the infinitesimal plant and animal life of the universe to the
chemicalisation of their food and medicine. They knew how to utilise all the
life they could come across, however microscopic, and here under their

marvellously powerful magnifying instruments I could see the minutest of
all life enslaved to their purposes. Nothing could surpass the exactitude
with which they had defined the functions and spheres of these mysterious
beings invisible to the naked eye. Each had its own department of industry.
No one of them interfered with the other. It was life put to its best purpose
of sustaining the noblest life. When I saw the huge irelium tubes bearing out
the results in aërial or vaporous form, I grew anxious to test the effects at
the other end of them. At my own request I was taken one day to Oomalefa,
the great series of public halls and baths which formed the chief centre of
associative life in the island. I had not known of the institution before; for I
was still too little advanced in physical nature to be clear of the inner
chemical processes needed for nutrition, and it had not been thought
necessary to show me a section of their public life in which I could have no
special share. But, now that my own eagerness for knowledge had brought
me to the stage of education which demanded insight into this institution,
they were willing that I should inspect it and see all its peculiar features.

CHAPTER IX
OOMALEFA

T HESE halls of nutrition and medication were situated on a great
promontory extending miles into the sea. It had been ledged and
bastioned with lava walls, and round the gleaming edifice ran a balcony
or rocky platform, which broke the fury of any ambitious billows that might
threaten the crystal translucence of the walls. Here, overlooking the sea, the
Limanorans could drink in its medicating breath; here in the vast hall could
they take that restful exercise which is the first essential of all life; here they
could commune with their own souls or with the stars and listen to the ever-
changing rhythm of the waves as they broke into spray or climbed to the
rocky wall beneath. They considered this chamber of the ocean and the stars
as more medicant and alimentary than any they could make with human
hands; hence it was that they had thrown out this great projection into the
sea, where they could spend most of their hours of nutrition.
Along its highest ridge ran a series of the noblest buildings that ever met
my eye, unlike all other edifices I had ever heard of in style of architecture
and method of grouping, but resembling in their bewildering variety and
inherent symmetry the gleaming clusters of night. Countless points of fire
aimed at the heavens from spires and towers which shone with rainbow
fluctuation in the sun. There was a milky way of jewelled pinnacles; and
around were strewn fire-flashing constellations of jewel minarets and
domes. Innumerable centres of varied roof and aspiring form led the eye by
their incompleteness to some great centre; and soon it rested calmly on the
vast yet ever-broken and changing dome that like a snow-clad mountain-
ridge mastered every spirit that was drawn to it. Alone this galaxy of
clustered starry forms stood out above the sea, undwarfed by any
neighbouring land and masterful over the billows below it. A true temple
was it even in the presence of the universe of suns that stretched out into
endless night. Within it surely might the spirit of man feel no unholy doubts
of its immortal destiny or of its kinship with the divine. Pure and noble
orison might here be raised to the Maker of the makers of this shrine; all

trivial and mean thoughts would here be sacrilege. When night fell, the stars
in the heavens held spirit communion with this their brother. This was
Oomalefa, or the jewel of immortal longings.
My first visit to Oomalefa is engraved upon the record of my past, for it
was one of my first expeditions under the guidance of Thyriel. The beauty
of her spirit dawned upon me as the day passed; afterwards I came to see
that it was everything that my own needed, but at the time I could not
reason out the nature of my feelings. She grew upon me as the day upon the
night, and when we parted it was as if my sun had set; helpless and
stumbling, my spirit groped for the guiding dawn again; I was forlorn,
reaching out for my other half in a lonely universe.
Her presence doubtless coloured all the scenes through which I passed,
yet they were enough of themselves to impress my mind. We alighted on
the mainland and made our way out towards the archway which spanned
the root of the promontory. The weight of our bodies as we stood upon a
certain spot swung up the transparent portcullis, and we found ourselves in
a spacious entrance hall, its roof a moving orrery of the sky of night, its
walls lit pictures of the ocean around framed in living sections of the sea
alive with sea-denizens, its floor a tidal beach of sand, soft yet firm,
whereon the sea ever seemed to cream and retreat. It had all the beauty and
the freshness of the shore beneath the starred night when the tide is making.
The next chamber we entered was as vast, and was as many-coloured as
the rainbow. It was the index hall; for here were marked the name and
number and situation of every chamber in Oomalefa, and underneath each
name was shown in graphic experiment the effect of the different medicated
atmospheres upon the various tissues of the human body. Complete
reproductions of the bones and muscles, the flesh and blood, the cells and
nerves and coatings were here enclosed and the transformations pictured in
the transparent sections of the walls. An expert from the family having the
manufacture of each atmosphere under its charge stood by and guided and
explained the process. It was a physiological laboratory, in which every
Limanoran might see with his own eyes and hear explained by one who
knew, every modification in the tissues that a longer or shorter time spent in
any chamber would produce.

Twin with this hall was that of measurement and consultation. Here
every entrant had all his important organs and tissues tested scientifically,
and was then told the atmospheres which would best suit the development
of any or all of his parts and faculties. He stated the chief purpose of his
existence, and consulted the experts on the directions that would best lead
to it. He was told of any defect in his organic functions and advised how it
could be remedied. After this consultation he could return to the hall of
experiment and see with his own eyes the effect of the various atmospheres
upon the unseen portions of his system. Then he was permitted to enter the
halls of nutrition and medication, and choosing those which he specially
needed that day spent the time required in each. He found exit again by the
hall of measurement, and there another testing revealed whether he had
been successful in his alimentary sojourn in Oomalefa, and whether he
would have to remain longer or have a certain atmosphere introduced into
his sleeping-chamber in his own mansion.
Every Limanoran except the young and undeveloped had as the result of
attention to health in past ages what they called the conscience of the
health. This put them on the alert the moment any function was disordered,
and off they went to Oomalefa to consult the medical families on the exact
nature of the derangement, its locality, and the diet or treatment that would
restore to complete health. Few or none of full maturity but would feel this
sanitary sense within them like a whip or goad which would not let them
rest till the evil element was swept out. It was a daily occurrence to meet
some islander hurrying post-haste for consultation and medication, and I
came at last to be ashamed of the lethargy which would let me remain inert
under some decay of nerve or tissue in its primary stages until it had
resulted in ache or pain. The feeling of lassitude or the absence of the sense
of the full tide of life made me rush in fear and trembling to the hall of
consultation. In my former existence I had had the embryo of this sanitary
conscience in the pains or prostration accompanying disease, but then the
warning generally came too late. Now I was sensitive to the slightest
derangement of any tissue or part of my system and without the goad of
ache flew to Oomalefa to find the remedy; otherwise I felt that I was doing
wrong to my future and my posterity and to the future of the whole race.
Even the actual present of the people was affected; the slightest disorder of
my constitution seemed to weigh upon the spirits of my companions and
friends, for they believed there was contagion in every disease. As strongly

did they hold that there was a contagion of health, and would not allow any
member of their medical families or council to approach a citizen even in
consultation unless the healer was himself whole in every atom of his
constitution. To be sound in body and spirit was as sanative of the
derangements of others as any active remedy.
Every citizen was taught enough of the medical science of the island to
know what was wrong in himself or his neighbour; for every citizen was a
possible father or mother; and for parenthood a thorough and practical
acquaintance with the laws of health and the causes and cures of the
commonest diseases was a first essential. The Limanorans laughed at the
absurdity of Western civilisation in allowing men and women to generate
and bring up children with no more knowledge of their constitution than if
they were mere animals. Still oftener they mourned that so much human
generation in the world was left to the chance dictates of caprice, and that
most medicine and education were only blind groping in the dark. That
nothing should be done on mere authority was one of the first principles of
their civilisation.
The medical councillor knew that he had a keen critic in every citizen;
and he had to justify and make clear every process he recommended, in
order that faith in him might remain clear. His sole advantage was his fuller
and deeper knowledge and the faculty he had acquired from long familiarity
with the questions and problems he had to deal with. Each member of the
medical families and council had a special section of the human system to
explore, besides having a mastery of the whole. It was this division of
labour that caused their science of the human tissues to advance so swiftly.
Not a moment of their work was lost.
I had thought at first that a people so healthy and vigorous and devoted
to such wholesome ways of life had no need of medical science; but I soon
saw that their general sanativeness demanded a more advanced science and
art than the rude quackery of Western medicine. All the worst diseases of
maturity in Europe, fevers, consumption, diphtheria, rheumatism,
indigestion, and the rest, were relegated in Limanora to childhood, and were
then as mild and innocuous as scarlatina or measles or whooping-cough;
they had become the enemies of unformed tissues, and found little to batten
upon even in them. Generally they were checked in their first stage by the
medical knowledge of the parents or proparents, and it was the rarest

occurrence to have to resort to the deeper knowledge of the medical
council, rarest of all where childhood was concerned.
I rushed to the conclusion that the medical families would have nothing
to investigate but the development of the tissues and organs and faculties as
they existed in Limanora; but I was disabused of this idea by the occurrence
of an epidemic in the island not long after I arrived there. It took the form of
dream-disturbed sleep, which held the faculties in its grasp beyond the
usual number of hours of rest. The patients tossed and moaned and
imagined horrors of the past of humanity and animalhood as still occurring
in their lives. It abridged the hours of consciousness, and left the sufferers
spent and unexhilarated. It was no fever, but only a languor that attacked the
imaginative faculties and made them morbid and secretive in their
activities. My brain-tissues were perhaps not fine enough to be attacked by
it, and I escaped; but I was greatly distressed to find that Thyriel had been
touched by the epidemic. My anxiety led me to know all that the specialists
discovered concerning it. It could not be fatal, they assured me; for no
epidemic had been fatal to Limanorans for many centuries. It only meant
the loss of a valuable portion of the time of working. In the other islands,
the winged scouts brought the news, it had swept half the populations into
the grave; but so vigorous and healthy were the various tissues of our
people that no disease could produce anything but a temporary
derangement.
By means of their skilful surgery they soon isolated under the
microscope some specimens of the living organisms that produced the
disease; they experimented with all the elements and their combinations and
saw what encouraged them, what attenuated them, and what killed them. It
was not long before every trace of the microscopic creature had vanished
from the island; there remained only the knowledge and the antidote that
would enable their outposts or messengers through the sky to resist its
attacks, should they ever encounter it again. Limanorans who were sent on
missions out of the country had to be made epidemic-proof by inoculation
against known diseases before setting out. But it sometimes happened,
especially to scouts into the higher regions on the outskirts of the earth’s
atmosphere, that they brought back with them symptoms that were new, and
a new disease and a new microbe had to be added to their medical lists. It
was explained to me that our solar system was travelling every moment of

its existence into new regions of space; and as it moved it passed from time
to time through swarms of minute and attenuated life which had been left
myriads of ages before in its tracks by some diseased member of another
system. This microscopic life was in its own special way immortal, and
could subsist on the scattered material life that floated though the ether
unclaimed by any planetary centre. It was out of such waifs of life peopling
space that a new world made a new beginning in vital history; as soon as it
cooled down sufficiently, after creative collision and separation, to allow of
individual existence upon it, myriads of these microscopic inhabitants of
space took possession of it, and began again the struggle of life which was
the universal law of infinity, and meant the ascension of all energy through
higher and higher circles.
Disease was but a form of this eternal struggle for existence; it was the
attempt of invisible lower forms to master the higher human tissues and
make them their feeding-ground. The original enemies of man, the wild
beasts, were subdued or tamed or driven forth into the deserts as soon as
savage life was passed. Then began the fiercer contest for the possession of
his own cells and tissues and organs. Enemies that he could not see
migrated out of the surrounding elements into his system as soon as it
became delicate enough to stir their appetite, and for ages there were no
weapons against them; chance now and again offered one; but generally he
groped about in his frantic ignorance for anything that would ease the pain
from these gnawing foes within him. Out of this rose by slow steps a kind
of quackery they called the science of medicine; but the conflict still
remained unequal; the invisible enemies had the best of it, and they were
ever being recruited by new enemies out of space, which bred new and
more appalling plagues. Not till it was found that the newer these settlers
were the more virulent were their ravages was there any chance of a real
science of medicine arising from this everlasting agonism.
The first beginnings of a true science appeared in the attempts to deplete
the soil by setting tamed and exhausted specimens of their foes to feed on it.
A soil once reft of the elements that invited and fitted any disease germs
seldom suffered in any serious degree from them again. Soon by their new
electro-microscopes or clirolans they were able to classify the infinitely
minute foods of these infinitely minute pasturers on the human tissue. Their
microscopes, enormously though they had added to the power of human

vision into the atomic world, had been unable to advance beyond the
discovery and complete classification of the invisible organisms. Their
clirolans combined photography with electro-microscopy in such a way that
every change in the systems of their minute foes was recorded; they were
able to see the elements taken from the human system absorbed and sifted
of their nutritive powers, and the débris or manure ejected and left to poison
the human tissues; it was not the presence of the organisms themselves, or
even their destruction of essential elements that generally produced the
disease, but the accumulation of the exhausted excreta, clogging the various
functions. At first medical science satisfied itself with cultivating feeble and
underbred germs, and turning them loose on the human body in order to
make them exhaust the elements which attracted their kin. Next they
discovered the chemical combination that, introduced into the body, would
neutralise the poisonous qualities of the bacterial débris. Last of all by their
vimolans or photo-electric analysers they found the exact food which
attracted each form of microbe to the tissue and nourished them there; and
they experimented electro-chemically till they knew the element that,
combining with this bacterial food, would neutralise its attraction and yet
leave the body as efficient and healthy as before; in short, they could
prescribe the antidote to every disease that had ever enfeebled any portion
of their system. Diseases were nothing else than the infinitesimal life of
space fixing itself, after an eternity of detachment and attenuation, upon a
living soil fat with the elements of attraction and nourishment and yet too
feeble to hold out against its ravages. They drew an analogy from their old
agriculture; weeds were nothing but plants finding at last the conditions
which would give them the victory in the struggle for existence and would
enable them to grow so rapidly and luxuriantly as to choke all neighbours;
and their old science of earth culture set them on the way to a true medical
science. They had watched with their clirolans the selective processes of the
roots of each weed, and by various analysers had found the combination of
elements in the soil and air by which it overcame its rivals; they then
discovered the special component which, uniting with its food, would
deprive the weed of its nutritive powers. Thus were they able to encourage
or discourage on any soil any growth they might select. But agriculture had
been completely superseded by their later chemistry. The best thing it had
left to their civilisation was the cue it gave by analogy to their true science
of therapeutics.

How minute and detailed was their study of the infinitesimal life of the
universe, I could not have imagined without having seen it in practice. They
had advanced so far with their clirolans and vimolans that they were now
discovering a still more infinitesimal world which was parasitic on
microscopic life. There had been elements and effects at times discoverable
in their therapeutic problems that disturbed the certainty of their
conclusions and solutions. Again and again their foresights had been
mistaken, their calculations thrown out. Most often was this the case on the
borderland of the moral world. They had known in their own far past
history, and in the more recent history of the other islands of the
archipelago, the demoralising effect of epidemics and plagues, especially of
a new and vigorous type. For a time the people who came within the
influence of the disease seemed to return almost to savagery. And yet every
plague differed slightly from every other in its moral results. One made the
whole population thieves; another made them liars; a third stirred up a fury
of lust; a fourth delivered over the soul to despair of life, and a fifth to
disloyalty and intrigue. When once their attention was called to this
widespread demoralisation after an epidemic, they began to watch the effect
of individual illnesses on the mind; and in every case there were results,
emotional, moral, or intellectual, that were not to be accounted for by mere
weakness of the body or irritation of the nerves, or by the poisonous débris
that the minute organisms threw off.
They invented still more powerful clirolans, which revealed an intensity
of life they had not imagined. The disease germs brought into the human
system still more minute parasites that at once attacked the brain and the
nerve-centres. In one disease these invisible vermin preferred one set of
brain-cells, in another they preferred another. The therapeutic families
engaged in the investigations were only just coming to classify these moral
and intellectual parasites of the disease germs. Nor had they yet been able
to discover any cure for these but the sympathetic proximity of strong and
noble minds. The look from the eyes of some of their greatest doctors, even
the touch of their hands, seemed to drive the living evil forth, or at least to
attenuate and enfeeble it. The mind of the patient rose triumphant in the
presence of one of these wise and healing personalities. It had been for ages
the traditional maxim of polity that only the loftiest and most advanced, as
well as most sympathetic natures should be allowed to specialise for the
medical castes, or marry into the medical families. None were allowed to

nurse the sick but the beautiful souls of the community; their mere presence
seemed to strengthen the fainting heart in the struggle for life. As the mind
grew strong, the ravages of the disease lessened. For now with their more
powerful clirolans they found that, as the brain or nerve-centres acquired
strength, the parasitic, invisible life took its way back to its original hosts
and preyed on them. It was indeed one of the maxims of their community to
keep the system of every individual at its highest point of vitality. A loss of
exhilaration in any citizen was marked at once by his neighbours, just like a
lapse into criminality in Western civilisation. It was the symptom of
possible disease with all its power of contagion. The sense of active
vitalisation (what we call the spirits) was the barometer of the sanitary,
moral, and intellectual atmosphere, and every Limanoran was keenly
sensitive to all its changes.
In Oomalefa it was impossible to conceal the source of the
degeneration. The specialised families of the medical council knew where
to apply their investigatory instruments. Even with their own eyes and ears
and electric sense they could often detect the exact nesting-place of the
intrusive microbes; for though to my muddy senses their bodies were as
opaque as my own, except for a certain pellucid light which illuminated the
skin and made the complexion so beautiful, the processes of life seemed an
open book to their acute observation. Their hearing could detect any change
in the normal beat of the heart and even the passage of the blood in the
veins, which, Thyriel has told me, sounded like the liquid rhythm of
mountain-rills. Their eyes could see through the skin the delicate veinings
underneath and detect every nervous or muscular effort. Their magnetic
sense could tell them whether thought or emotion was developing in the
centres or passing along the nerves. The very casing of the brain seemed to
them to be semi-transparent, and they were conscious, though dimly, of the
movements of even the finer tissues, non-existent to my senses except
under the microscope. Hence it was that each Limanoran had an isolated
dwelling-place for himself. It would have been impossible for him to find
rest or sleep close to the living and unresting functions of another human
system; and it was only the rhythm of the movements and sounds of all the
organs and processes which made proximity to one another tolerable. I have
often seen Thyriel in raptures over the noble harmony of a healthy and
virtuous personality; to her ear the pulsations and other sounds were like a
majestic piece of music; to her eye the rush and hurry of the vital processes

were not unlike the motions of the starry system of night; whilst the
exhilaration through the electric sense from the speeding thoughts and
emotions of a sound mind in a sound body was at times ecstatic. The nobler
the soul that she was conscious of in her neighbour, the keener was her
enjoyment of proximity. It was this that made only the purest and greatest
minds in the healthiest bodies admissible to the medical families or council.
There was a curative power in their very presence.
With their clirolans and vimolans and other aids to the senses the
medical sages could detect the slightest jar in the rhythm of the system and
locate it with the greatest ease. Having located it, they knew the parasite
that had begun to multiply and clog the organ or tissue or function, and the
treatment that it required. Every moral fault had its corresponding disease
and infinitesimal parasite they held; and so rapidly could the minute
organisms increase and so impalpably and easily could they migrate from
human being to human being that the contagion of vice was a thousand
times more appalling in its ravages than that of mere physical disease.
There was great trepidation when any ailment attacked the body of a
Limanoran, and he was heartily ashamed of its appearance and alarmed lest
it should spread, or lead to its natural consequence, moral degeneracy; but,
if the parasitic attack was found to be on one of the higher centres of life,
the alarm was great and wide, for it was far more subtle in its insidiousness
and omnipotence. The patient was at once quarantined and only the noblest
of medical sages could break his isolation. All the powers of his mind and
of the minds of his nurses and medical attendants were concentrated on the
offending tissue, and strong thermoelectric aids were applied to it, so that it
should soon regain its old vitality and drive the intruders out. In the
chamber was kept up an atmosphere of the special elements which would
nourish the degenerate cells and also of those that would destroy the
microbes; only as a last resort was surgery used and the part laid open to the
local application of re-agents against the hostile organisms. The ruder and
older forms of evil—passion, envy, malice, hatred, jealousy, contempt,
vanity—rarely appeared in grown men and women at that advanced stage of
their civilisation. They had become diseases of the immature periods of life,
when the soul was passing through the primitive phases of the development
of mankind. They were the ailments of childhood and youth; and hundreds
of the Limanorans now grew up without once experiencing any one of
them. When they did appear, isolation was the first step; and the parents or

proparents could generally cope with the moral disease without having
recourse to a medical family or to Oomalefa. Every traditional method of
cure was applied most vigorously, for they shrank from the thought of
leaving any seed of the contagion in the system to germinate at some later
and more dangerous period of life.
When the home circle was unable to detect the exact character of the
disturbing influence, the young patient was brought under the gaze and the
tests of the medical families. If their clirolans and vimolans failed to
identify the parasitic evil, they tried their magnetometers, which were so
delicate as to indicate the first beginnings of mental or moral disorder. By
means of another magnetic instrument they were able to extract portions of
the microbic débris, and then with their photo-electric analysers or vimolans
they separated its various elements and saw what moral evils had entered
into the system. They had the physical equivalents and results of every form
of guilt and crime, and thus in its very inception a moral taint could be
detected and cured before it had time to appear in the words or conduct of
the patient. Most often this taint was due to some ancestral weakness of
tissue inviting the swarms of parasitic microbes through which the earth is
for ever passing. On the first signs of lowering vitality the pedigree of the
patient was consulted for the record of the retrogressive tendencies of his
forefathers, and not till the possibilities of atavism were exhausted were the
other tests resorted to.
It was on the basis of these two coincident causes, degeneration of
tissue and microbic life in the atmosphere, that they were able to explain the
strange contemporaneity of revolutions, panics, wars, religious revivals, and
widespread outbreaks of crime or immorality in various parts of the earth.
The planetary system as it sweeps through space cannot help passing
through vast oceans of living microscopic matter which have drifted from
other universes geological ages before in their unresting migration from
infinity to infinity, and which lead a feeble death-in-life till they meet with
fit atmospheres, such as will make them strong and teeming. For new-born
worlds, just ready for the settlement of life upon them, this is a blessing; but
for those having upon them highly developed organised life it is too often a
curse. Every nation or tribe where civilisation has become enfeebled by
luxury or immoral systems of polity or domestic manners becomes the prey
of the new swarm, which multiplies and spreads itself on a fat and

unexhausted soil with the swiftness of a long unsated appetite. The people
rise in epidemic fury, and every institution suffers from the madness. In
different ages the frenzy takes different forms, but there is a striking
simultaneity in these outbreaks all over history; and only this intrusion of
cosmic infinitesimal life on the weakened higher centres of the human
system can explain it fully. None but the peoples who have ordered their
existence on the moral laws of the universe and thus kept the tissues strong,
solid, and unyielding can resist the plague-like mania. The result of these
epidemics was in the end, they held, a benefit to humanity; for they swept
away most of the tainted life from the earth and left the healthier
constitutions able for another advance in intellectual power or in morality.
The Limanoran medicists were ever testing and analysing the atmosphere of
the earth for these intrusive emigrants from other worlds; vigorous and
healthy though their systems were, some chance minute stranger might find
a lodgment in them, and cause much derangement before he could be got
rid of. Ethics, psychology, history, and ethnology were as important to their
medical investigations as physiology, anatomy, and chemistry.
With all this extension of medicine into regions that seemed to me, a
man of Western civilisation, the most remote from it, there had been a
gradual contraction of the sphere of surgery. The hacking and hewing of the
human frame to get rid of some intrusive organism seemed to them as
barbarous as the butchering of animals for food. Brilliant operations they
thought the confession of failure in previsional and preventive medicine.
They would have considered it a disaster, if not a crime, to let any disease
proceed so far unobserved as to need the excision of the part affected. Even
when, by an accident, a bone was fractured, they could light up the whole
sphere of the accident and see exactly how to get the sections or fragments
to meet again. Then, keeping the limb or organ at rest, they concentrated all
the energy of the patient’s body and mind and the curative influence of their
own presence upon it. They sent the nutritive powers of circulation and
nerve-energy into it by application of their various electric instruments,
some of which combined the effect of exercise and the effect of heat. In a
few days, sometimes in a few hours, the junction was complete, and only
rest and a medicated and nutritive atmosphere were needed to make the
tissue as sound as before.

One of their newest instruments and the most effective for the
avoidance of surgical operations was the alclirolan, a combination of
microscope, camera in vacuo, and electric power. It could by means of a
swiftly moving film, on which fell electric light through a vacuum, take a
picture of the life-processes within the living body, however minute. Then
by means of magnifiers and brilliant light they could throw from this film a
moving picture on a screen, so enormously enlarging the process of any part
of the body that even a novice could see at a glance what was healthy and
what was diseased or obstructed. It was this alclirolan that made the study
of physiology in the living body simple enough for the very youngest. It
was by this that they were able to supplement the experimental hall at the
entrance to Oomalefa, and to show in process the effect in actual human
bodies of disease, microbes, and remedies. Every minute process of the
various organs and tissues of the body and of the brain was reproduced
marvellously magnified on the walls. There was no new medicine but was
tested and had its effects on the various parts of the body revealed by this
new method. There was no new disease or microbe but gave up its secrets
to this instrument.
The only surgery they had was creative, like all their other sciences and
arts. It had to do chiefly with the capacity of the skull. The appearance of
epilepsy in some of their ablest men and families ages before had pointed
the way. Their knowledge of the localities and tissues of the brain, along
with the semi-transparency of their skulls and the advantages their
alclirolan had introduced, gave them complete command of everything that
was proceeding within the head. They could by their electric apparatus light
up the tissues and see what part was growing and pressing upon the
containing bone. They therefore learned to trephine the epileptic sufferers
and thus relieve the oppressed locality of the brain. From this practice and
the growing knowledge of the great purpose of life they passed into the
stage of creative surgery. For imperfect tissue perfect was substituted. Man-
grafting had become the most important branch of surgery. They could
modify and even create new faculty or organ or tissue by grafting what they
had made on to the part of the infantile system which needed it. A child to
be devoted to a special pursuit which needed some faculty exceptionally
developed had his skull enlarged in its early and plastic stage over the
portion of the brain that was the material equivalent and instrument of the
faculty; and when most of the energies of life began to pour into his pursuit

the tissue had room to grow. If a combination of exceptional faculties were
needed in any profession or pursuit, protuberances in various parts under
the hair or even on the brow could be perceived on looking closely. So nice
had this creative art become that the most delicate and minute trephining
could be accomplished without the patient knowing much about it; the
operation was generally finished and the wound healed whilst he slept.
Their bodies had great recuperative powers, and the means applied were
wonderful in their rapidity of working. The hand of the operator, too,
manipulated the part under a huge microscope that magnified the tissues ten
thousand-fold. In fact they had all kinds of modifications of the microscope
that would fit even internal investigations; one reflected the part in the
manner of the reflecting telescope, and turned microscopes of great power
on the reflected image. They had surgical modifications of their clirolans
and vimolans so that they could examine permanent moving pictures or
analyses of the tissues to be investigated. Nothing could escape their
methods of finding out defects in the human system. However deep the
organ or tissue to be examined might be in the body, it flashed out its forms
and processes upon their irelium sheets as they moved. By moving these
photographic records rapidly underneath their microscopes the
physiological processes of life could be reproduced and examined;
stationary, each moment of the processes could be slowly investigated.
Their photo-electric instruments could light up and make transparent any
stratum of tissue desired, whilst keeping the rest in shadow or dark outline.

CHAPTER X
THE FIRLA, OR ELECTRIC SENSE

T HEIR physiology had no longer any need of anatomy or vivisection as
its foundation and starting-point. Besides the alclirolans, they had their
mirlans or life-lamps, as they called them; and these enabled them to
watch any process of the human body and see how it changed under the
treatment they applied. These life-lamps appealed not only to their eyes and
ears, but to their electric sense. They isolated the magnetic force as well as
the sounds and appearance of any section of tissue, and took graphic and
permanent record of it, as they did of the changes in form or texture or
sound. Every kind of tissue in any organ or limb had its normal magnetic
equivalent measured in terms of the personal equation of force and beat of
the heart. The slightest deviation from this at any time of the day or month
would at once challenge attention and lead to microscopic investigation.
They enlarged the electrograph, the phonograph, and the photograph of the
point indicated and were thus able to examine under the sarifolan every
infinitesimal atom of it in all the aspects which appealed to their sight,
hearing, and electric sense. Their sarifolan magnified and interpreted for
these investigative senses the graphic record of their mirlans, as the
microscope magnifies for the sight. I could see and hear the movements and
processes in the tissue, but the electric effect was to me as general as a
shock from a galvanic battery; I could not detect anything definite or
measurable. But the Limanorans, though they had something of our
diffusion of electric sense, had also in the back of their necks a localised
sense that responded to the faintest magnetic influence and measured
roughly its amount and its changes in kind and degree. The delicate nerve-
centre there, which might have been the remains of a backward-looking
eye, had developed with them into a most sensitive collector of electric
vibration in the air or in any section of matter; and in every atom, whether
organic or inorganic, they declared there was ever some electric wave
motion; in some it was too faint to affect their firla or electric sense, but
then their delicate instruments for magnifying it, like their mirlans, made it

manifest to their senses and definable. It was to my general feeling of
magnetism what the muscular sense in my fingers was to my diffused sense
of touch. It had taken many generations to develop, and in their children it
never appeared till they had reached the close of youth; but part of their
education was directed towards making it more sensitive and useful as a
power for measuring force. A former generation of their medical
investigators had long noticed and studied the effect of the concentration of
will-power through the eye upon the back of the neck of one who sat in
front of them; although the patient could tell nothing by means of his five
senses of such an effort being made behind him, he generally turned round.
Experiment after experiment proved that there was a force communicated
through the intervening space to some sensitive spot on the back of the head
or neck, and they knew that relics existed of what seemed once to have been
an eye in that region. They came to the conclusion that this must have a
closer connection with the higher brain-centres than any part of the body
except the eye, and bent their whole attention upon its nature. They soon
defined it as a localised electric sense and by practice made it as keen at
least as the sense of touch in the fingers. They were at last able to define the
direction of an electric influence and to note its changes of force, and, after
several generations, their firla, as they called it, came to rank next to sight
and equal to hearing in the analysis and investigation of the phenomena of
the universe.
Corresponding to this electro-receptive sense, they had also cultivated
the magnetic force of the eye. They had long known and investigated the
exact relationship of light and electricity, and they could at any moment and
place transform the one into the other. They had also observed ages before
that even the commonest and weakest human eye had a faint luminosity in
absolute darkness, and that any exertion of the will or passing wave of
passion greatly increased it. Beside this fact they put the open secret that
men of strong will and character differed from their fellows in the power of
the eye, not only over human beings but over animals, and also the fact that
the long-known plaything, mesmerism, had the eye as its chief organ. They
came to the conclusion that the will was on its physical side a magnetic
force, and that though most of its play was through the sense of touch, the
muscular energies, and the voice, the eye was its highest and best channel.
This inference was strengthened by noticing that amongst animals the
fiercest-willed and most predatory could paralyse their victims by the

exercise of some optic power, and as they prowled through the night, they
had a perceptible glitter in their eyes that shone in the dark like lamps. They
applied themselves to a minute and systematic investigation of the subject,
and soon had instruments which would respond to the faintest ocular
exercise of the will. They could measure any increase in the magnetic
power of the eye; and before long it was observed that the subjects they
experimented on grew rapidly in optic magnetism as they practised, and
came to have a perceptible sheen in their eyes when they stood in the
darkness. These men and women were found to have rapidly increasing
power of sending anyone to sleep by gazing at him. At last all doubt
vanished as to the new latent faculty which lay in the eye.
They set themselves vigorously to turn this new knowledge into art, and
trained themselves, and still more their children, in eye-power till it became
an instinctive habit to use it. After a time they came to see that the power
was not one but manifold; the sleep-inducing effect was only an elementary
application of it. A further development was a soothing influence upon the
nerves that never went as far as sleep. Then the medicative powers of the
eye were raised in the families of medicists into capacities which seemed to
me almost preternatural. A more widely diffused specialisation of the new
function was eye-language. Long-continued emotional dialogues would
proceed in companies where I could not hear a sound, and at the end
Thyriel would tell me the intricacies of the interplay of thought and
emotion. It is true they could not easily communicate any unspiritual fact,
needing some concrete image, unless they employed the code of eye-signals
which every Limanoran learned; this combined the motions of either eye
and magnetic impulses of various kinds and degrees, and contained several
thousand words and phrases. I had so much to learn in the island that I had
not time to master more than a few of the simpler combinations, so that I
was often bewildered in their silent assemblies. But for a long time what
seemed to me most marvellous was that intimate and facile converse went
on when the two friends were at considerable distances from each other;
when occupied in this they kept alternately turning the back and the face.
This was due to the receptive magnetic faculty being in the back of the neck
and the active one being in the eye. The eye was receptive in only a
secondary degree, so that when the magnetic impulse was weakened by
distance, the eye could not interpret it, and the back had to be turned in
order to catch its full force. To see two men or women standing a mile or

two apart and wheeling back and front every minute, and that, too, in
alternating harmony as if they had been two sympathetic toys, at first would
have made me laugh but for my wonder; and when the intercourse was
rapid they looked like two whirling dervishes; but I grew accustomed to the
sight, and soon began to feel with the people themselves that it was a most
dignified feature of their life. For a time it seemed almost beyond nature
that they could communicate even emotions and impulses at such a
distance; for it was only emotions and impulses, and not facts, that passed,
as the motions of the eye were not apparent except within comparatively
short spaces. Yet there were electro-magnifiers which, affixed to their firla
on the back of the neck, enabled them to feel the faintest impulse from a
distance and interpret it, and a modification of the vimolan, used like
spectacles, reduced the sense-numbing power of distance a thousand-fold;
they could see by means of these electro-optical instruments the minutest
movement many miles off.
The most striking manifestation of their active electric faculty was to be
seen only in a few Limanorans, who would have been in the primitive ages
leaders of masses either as orators or as warriors. These had such power of
eye that they could bend others to their purpose without the utterance of a
word. It was not greater genius or nobility of thought or strength of
character that made them so much more influential than their fellows, but
sheer magnetic force of will. With evil motives or depraved minds, they
would have been dangerous to the whole community: as mere war leaders
or beasts of prey they would have been exiled; but with beneficent purpose
and a deep-ingrained sense of the ultimate aim of their whole civilisation,
they were of great power on the side of progress. They were the organisers
of the community, the captains of industry. They managed and directed the
various services in which all the citizens had to take part so that there
should be no superfluous issue of commands, no friction, or even
consciousness of direction. They were in complete sympathy with all the
people, binding them into a unity of discipline; and their magnetism of will,
applied through the eye, served but to stir the love of service and duty to
enthusiasm. In an age of semi-savagery, or of revised savagery such as the
military ages of Europe were, some of them would have been great
conquerors, combining many peoples and vast territories for a few years in
order to sate their ambition or love of glory. As it was, the equal

development of their other powers and the universal dominance of the
moral aim of the race made their wills innocuous.
It was the same with the other manifestations of human magnetism,
which in defective or half-developed civilisations played so maleficent a
part. That power of voice and speech which could sway mobs to evil in
such communities was in Limanora the endowment of every citizen. The
electric tone quivered and rang in every voice I heard; it was like the
sweetest music, drawing the soul to it. The fascination of personality, which
so often in Western women, even where they have no beauty or grace,
proves the ruin of dozens of men, belonged to both sexes in Limanora and
to every citizen. It was a powerful, diffused magnetism ever attracting its
opposite without revealing its secret even to its possessor. There was to me
something very winsome in most of them, even when saying and doing
nothing; and in Thyriel, although my intellect told me she was not what
Europeans call beautiful, this became ravishing. Her personal magnetism
was overpowering, even when she was silent and stood at a distance, and in
rude times of ignorance would have been set down to witchcraft.
All these investigations and results I learned as clearly as if I saw them
with the eye, in the firlamai or division of the electric sense, one of the vast
halls of Oomalefa. Here were all the instruments needed to develop the firla
or aid it, and all those by which it sought deeper into the secrets of nature.
Off the hall ran corridors and arcades, which were to the firla what picture
and sculpture galleries are to the ocular imagination, supplying it with noble
and pleasurable excitation, as the music domes touched the aural
imagination. They had their passive firlamaic arts of beauty as well as their
active. In one vast arcade they could sit and feel with their firlas the electric
harmonies of any given tract of air or earth or ocean, the harmonies that
play as it were on the surface; this was equivalent to gazing at landscapes,
real or pictured, with the eye. In another there was firlamaic sculpture; in
this were gathered the noblest achievements of their electric artists, who
strove to concentrate into some definite form varied magnetic materials so
as to stir the imagination through the firla to thoughts of the titanic
harmonies of the universe. They gave this form beauty for the eye as well;
but that was not the primary aim; the gazers, as they sat, preferred to turn
their backs to the work; for then through the firla their imagination was
thrown into an attitude of placid meditation which seemed to have before it

some great spheral harmony of the stars. In a third series of lofty corridors
there was continually proceeding what might be called firlamaic music. In
two or three it was entirely instrumental. Great firlamans or electric organs,
at each end of one corridor I entered, flashed out what was to me the most
appalling medley of lightnings; the gleams crossed and interwove and
changed mass and form as if it were a dance of meteors, now slow and
stately like a minuet, again swift and brilliant and dazzling as if the stars of
heaven had joined the lightnings in a bewildering yet harmonious ballet. At
first I was stunned and blinded; but soon I felt dimly the ecstasy apparent in
my neighbours. Their eyes gleamed with joy; to me some of them seemed
almost in a delirium; they were unconscious of their immediate
surroundings, for I spoke to Thyriel and received no answer, and her motion
through the hall as we started to leave it was somnambulous. She told me
afterwards that, though her firla was only in its infancy, she felt drawn up
into the heavens as in a trance; she seemed to feel the worlds move around
her and attract her into their spheral chant; her imagination dealt with
interastral forces as with playmates from eternity; she leapt vast ages every
moment, and spanned in a stride spaces which seemed to her common
powers infinite. She would not rest till she could enjoy this macrocosmic
orchestra to the full as her parents did; she would not let a day pass without
such practice as would develop her firla to the utmost. I felt solitary and
forlorn as I heard her ecstatic descriptions and resolves, and thought upon
my incapacity to understand them. In a moment she knew my dejection, and
realised how forgetful she had been of me and of her surroundings. She at
once threw off her imaginative trance of magnetic enjoyment, and
determined to keep pace with my advance. It was a slow and weary path I
had to travel; but her cheerful encouragement prevented despair. Through
the years between I was able by dint of constant and vigorous practice to
concentrate into my eyes and into the back of my head much of the
magnetic power and receptiveness that had existed before in my body, but
in a diffused condition. I was at last able to go with her and appreciate the
stellar imaginings which the flashing firlamans excited.
There was another majestic arcade, in which Limanoran artists
themselves joined in sublime firlamaic music. On my first visit to it, many
years after my introduction to Oomalefa, I was appalled to see human
beings stand like Joves flashing long tongues of lightning or flame from
their eyes or fingers; they seemed to stand unscathed in a fiery furnace, or

rather to weave and plait and mould the flames as if they had been threads
of some plastic material. Had I come here during my early novitiate in the
island, I should have fled in terror as from dreams of hell realised. There in
the midst passed the artist like a dark shuttle through a loom of lightnings as
he wove them into an ever-changing web of living colour. For a time I
could not control my terror, as I looked to see him shrivelled to ashes. At
last through my reason I managed to calm myself into feeling that he was
the master and creator of this display and that the dreadful tongues of flame
and swift meteors which rose and vanished around him were unstinged and
innocuous. Then began to creep into me a sweet sense of some magnetic
harmony, stirring my mind to contemplation of the mighty forces of the
world. I seemed to know the voiceless majesty of time, as if vast ages were
crushed into moments; I followed our orb as it swept away from the
immense concentric circles of flame wheeling round the core of whirling
fire; I saw it mass into an eye of passion fixed in gaze upon the mother star
it had left; alone it travelled into space tied like an infant still by magnetic
threads to the parent sun; out into the infinite it yearned to rush seeking life
and souls to nestle in its bosom; yet never would the unseen mother cord
give way. Out and out flamed the earth into immeasurable space and the
wild longing was calmed; the tempests of fire lulled and fell; the luminous
billows ceased to rear their crests or toss their fiery spindrift; a dull, still-
glimmering crust imprisoned her torrid heart; the conflagrations burst forth
in wider and wider intervals. At last she wooed the germs of life from the
wandering infinities to rest for brief spaces on her bosom. Night brought
peace to her, and the stars with their cool and unimpassioned rays bred
within her through the ages gentle thoughts and a love of teeming life; they
quenched her superficial fires, and, binding chains of magnetic power
around her, drew her out into spaces of infinity beyond the scorching flame
tongues of her fervid mother. Life born and nursed in the cold interstellar
tracts teemed on her breast. Back she sprang again into the warmer rays of
the mother orb, breaking the stellar bonds, and life leapt from sea to air and
crawled upon the new-won lands in monstrous forms. Last came the
strangest monster of all, erect like a bird, yet wingless, first swinging from
tree to tree, then skimming the plains upon the backs of fellow-beasts he
had mastered: man, the portent of God, had come. Slowly he grew and
slowly sloughed off his beast habits. Prehistoric time focussed into a
moment. First came tyranny and war as moulders of his spirit; then they

became monsters, barring his way to the divine. Great monarchies and
empires flew by like a lightning flash; thousands of years with their events
or somnolences passed swift as a dream. Stronger grew reason in man’s
brain, the love in his heart; divine influences surrounded him, watching the
dawn of the new power of thought and nursing the growth of the spirit in
him. Then out of the darkness came the historic ages of this island’s
progress towards diviner light, and rushed in a flash across my brain.
Then I awoke from this ennobling dream, swift and beautiful as a trance
made up of moments, each of which contained an eternity. The electric song
of the history of our world had ceased, and my spirit fell like a meteor from
heaven, out of the exhilaration and the ecstasy. Never before had I felt as if
my life was that of a god watching from above the flight of time. I scarcely
knew that the darkness around me had suddenly turned into daylight and the
web of lightning flashes had vanished; I was led from the arcade by Thyriel
as in a dream. When we reached the gallery which overlooked the ocean
and I turned my eyes to the dome of heaven, I was conscious that a new
glory had come into my life. Dim though my conception of the electric song
of creation had been, I realised with joy what a vast universe had been
added to the possibilities of my life by the discovery of this new sense and
of the sublime things I might perceive through it. I would not be behind
Thyriel in the cultivation of the magnetism in my system, but would enter
with redoubled ardour on the practice of my firla.
It was thus too I came to understand the passion they had for Firlalain,
as this section of Oomalefa was called. The young were not allowed to enter
it, lest it should act as a narcotic on their sense of duty to the ultimate aim
of their civilisation. Not till they had gained full mastery of themselves, and
especially of their appetites and passions, were they admitted, and even then
it was with a caution which showed the greatness of the risk they incurred.
The delights of the new sense were apt to grow intoxicating, and there had
been at one time a fear of some becoming magnetic drunkards, who would
spend their days in Firlalain besotted with indolent enjoyment of the
exhilarating flight through the realms of fancy, and heedless of the health
and interests of their other tissues. Once they had reached maturity, there
was no such fear; and no curb was then set upon their liberty to enter these
halls of electric harmony.

After they had come to that stage of life when the walls of their blood-
vessels began to lose flexibility, it became almost a duty to frequent
Firlalain. The stimulus given to the currents of life by the mere physical
influence of the electricity was enough to overcome the growing rigidity of
cell and tissue; but the rush of thought and fancy gave the whole nature
such impetus that the torrent of the blood through its channels induced the
plasticity of youth again. They had other methods of postponing the
approach of old age; they could withdraw from the walls of the various
vessels of the body the accumulation of lime and other hardening elements;
there were several chambers of diet the atmosphere of which neutralised the
increase of salts and carbons in the body, and other medicinal chambers
which could bring off by the pores any deleterious or obstructive matters
forming in any of the tissues; but Firlalain was the most effective postponer
of that stage of life when yearnings come into the heart for final and
complete rest, for it flooded the whole being with new impulse and new
energy. Most of all was the great stellar arcade frequented by the old in
order to drive off the ennui of existence; a feeling which indicated the
gradual calcarescence or induration of the brain and heart-tissues. Here any
region of the starry night they chose could be made to concentrate its
magnetic influence upon their firla. A man might take a new tract and new
blending of imaginative impulse every day of life for centuries and yet not
exhaust the limit of variety; for the stars moved through infinite space as the
earth moved, but in different directions, and ever new universes or worlds
were coming within the range of the Limanoran electric sense.
I shall not easily forget my first experience of this astral gallery. Along
it at intervals were placed great electroscopes and magnetic magnifiers, that
gathered in electric influences from various portions of the heavens. Almost
every seat was occupied by one of the older inhabitants of the island, and as
they sat with the focus of the huge instrument resting on their neck their
faces seemed almost to have a halo round them, so brightly did they beam
with ecstasy. Their eyes were closed, and I would have said that each was
dreaming some dream of glory which inundated his being, had I not seen
their eyes open for a moment as we passed, in consciousness of the world
around; the vision came to their waking imagination. Then I looked up
through the great magnifying domes and saw the stars and constellations
mass upon the face of heaven, and huge spheres concentrating upon
themselves the sheen of some starry circle.

Thyriel led me to one vacant seat, and before I turned my back to the
magnetic lens, I gazed upwards and saw the Southern Cross pouring down
its silver arrows. I had not sat there long before a thrill came upon me
which spread throughout my system; my pulse fluttered like a bird in
contending storms; every nerve began to throb with expectation and delight;
I could have created worlds in my ardour; sublime thoughts swam in from
eternity upon my soul; I had the mother passion within me which would
have moulded nobler spirits than my own. At last I felt the currents of my
existence centre upon one realm of space and was conscious of countless
life around me which struggled and mounted upwards. I felt my nature
drawn to higher levels than any terrene existence I had ever known. I
seemed to breathe with difficulty the diviner airs of greater purpose, and yet
there were strains of discord from lower types of being revealing gradations
in the new universe. Some orbs were already on the path of decay; and on
them the higher life was succumbing to the weakened vitality. Others had
just attained to life; and on them had settled migrants from other spheres,
whose elevating powers they had exhausted. Some were flitting like ghosts
about their mother suns with but a thin ethereal life now darting between
atmosphere and solid crust. Only one planet in each system was passing
through the climax in its history, and near it my rapture became too great to
bear; my veins seemed on the point of bursting with the fulness of life; my
soul was dragged above my natural level, till the physical bonds which
fettered me were about to break, and I was glad to be attracted to other
circling orbs that with coarser but stronger magnetism drew me to them.
The median point of balanced joy was reached when, resting between two
spheres, I felt their magnetic currents neutralise each other, and yet the
higher influence of the new system raise the pulsing of my spirit. As full
bliss was it when, darting from system to system, I experienced the power
of life that dwelt in each, and felt the varied types of existence mingling
their magnetic thought with mine; I could feel the struggling of worlds up to
their goal thrill through my spirit; on the underside it was like the wail of
one who has abandoned the upward conflict and plunged into the waters of
oblivion; on its upper side it was like the fervour of souls who see through
mists of life the elysium they have yearned for. I was conscious of the
infinite tragedy being enacted upon each orb, and yet not near enough to see
what destiny awaited it. I was drawn within the eddy of a new and loftier
ambition; my spirit perceived stages of being within its reach, yet beyond

all it had known; and it throbbed with new eagerness to rise above itself.
Nothing could be more rapturous than the consciousness of this system
beyond system, each with its own type of life and stage of spiritual aim,
each with its peculiar medley of magnetic influence, each drawn into its
own vortex of emotion and energy.
A touch on my hand broke the spell, and I was down on earth again,
exalted, yet knowing the contrast. It was Thyriel, who would remind me of
my duty to my own being and to the state. I arose and moved out with her
but she knew the ecstasy too well to break in on my dream, and led me out
to the sea arcade, where I could hear the low rippling melody of the waves
beneath and the faint music of the world of air. I turned my eyes up to the
azure, and seemed to tread amongst the orbs that veiled their silver radiance
in the blaze of noon. Out of my life, I am sure, the exaltation never wholly
vanished. I had been among the living fountains of eternity. I had moved
conscious of the birth of worlds, and known the throb that is a myriad of
ages. Was this not to be kin with God, to know the all-grasping passion of a
moment of divine life? Ever and again the greatness of the memory flamed
out into conflagration within me, and I was then in the mood to make or
conquer worlds; and never wholly out of my blood died the exaltation I had
felt.

CHAPTER XI
A CATASTROPHE

B UT long years divided my first visit to Oomalefa and my admission to
Firlalain. I saw that there were certain vast sections of Oomalefa that I
was led past; massive portals showed their rank, but the number on
them defining the age at which entrance was possible warned us off, and
allegorical pictures adorning their arches figured the decay of tissue and cell
that would result in the youthful body from too early admittance. Any
curiosity Thyriel or I could have felt was repressed by these ominous
symbols; for this people never relied on mere authority. Their strongest
prohibitions were in the form of graphic appeals to the reason, and only
where these could not impress youthful natures sufficiently were the
emotions involved; the influences of any special indulgence upon the
human system were represented in living form, which, looked at through a
medium magnifying them ten thousand-fold, stirred the heart of all the
more deeply.
We saw in a moment that we were unfit to enter Firlalain, and we
passed on into the vast series of baths wherein the Limanorans could rid
their bodies of obstructive or noxious elements. Here was every grade of
temperature endurable by their tissues: for every grade there was a separate
swimming-pool in which they could exercise themselves; and every hour
automatic machinery driven by force from Rimla sent the contents of each
pool into one of the lava wells, where in a few moments the water and all
the débris thrown off from the bathers’ bodies vanished in fire. These baths
were so arranged that not more than two should be empty together, and at
the general entrance were seated two medical counsellors, who measured
and tested the state and temperature of the body, and showed graphically
what would be the effect of entering each bath of the series to which the
state of the bather restricted him.
Far more important than these water baths were the baths of ether, baths
of magnetism, and solar baths, in which any portion of the body or the
whole of it could be submitted to the purified forces of the world. From the

ethereal baths all terrene elements were exhausted, and there remained the
pure medium of life beyond our atmosphere, the divine air which spiritual
beings breathe. Nothing so raised the power of the mind over the body or
the part of the body immersed in this. It partially and for the time being
dematerialised the part, withdrawing its earthy tendencies, and giving it an
exhilarant atmosphere in which it acquired new life and energy, and resisted
the encroachments of lower parasitic life. The two other kinds of baths had
somewhat the same effect, but were less powerful than this. Magnetism
allowed the ether a more direct influence than either water or air; it
concentrated the force of the purer medium on any point. The solar baths
had been used from time immemorial. It had been one of the earliest
discoveries of their science that the lower organisations and microscopic
forms of life that battened on the human frame lost vitality in the full beams
of the sun. Later their investigators had found that solar radiance dispelled
the vapours and terrene elements which floated in the air, clinging invisibly
to bodies and forming the feeding-ground of quickly generative microbes. It
purified by its energy all that it came into contact with, and in short allowed
the ether which was its medium freer play. For generations sunshine had
been one of their most successful curative agencies and was now used to
reinforce and stimulate human life and energy. The rays of the sun,
blanched to some extent of their heat and excessive force, were
concentrated in rooms made wholly of transparent irelium, or upon irelium
glasses of various shapes and forms to suit the part of the body to be
subjected to their influence. These were their solar baths; but their whole
system of life was one continuous solar bath: for every corner of their
houses both public and private was laid open to the sun’s influence from
dawn to twilight, and this stored up in the atmosphere of the rooms and
halls forms of energy which during the night gave ease and exhilaration to
those who slept. They fully realised that it was not merely heat and light
they got from the sun, but subtle energies, a fine aroma from the diviner
medium that filled the interstellar spaces.
Every Limanoran of an age to be admitted to Oomalefa resorted several
times a day to each of these three kinds of baths. First came a magnetic
bath, in which every organ and tissue was stimulated to throw off its débris
towards the pores. Then came the swim in one or more of the pools, in
order that all this rejected part might be washed off. After this came the
solar bath, which penetrated into the superficial channels of the body and

swept away all bacterial life that might be nocuous. The last stage was the
ethereal bath, which was enjoyed in solitude and could be endured by any
but the mature for only a few minutes; the exhilaration and tenuity of
atmosphere were too great for unaccustomed lungs, and I could see the
heads of the bathers thrust out at short intervals to take a breath. But long
practice made the older Limanorans enjoy the buoyancy of the pure
medium for hours. It was indeed one of the hopes of the race that they
would be able at last to breathe the interstellar ether with greater ease than
the air surrounding their own earth.
It was in these baths I first came to see the marvellous grace and
plasticity of their garments. They were outside of all my previous
experiences and conceptions, and seemed so natural that I took them for a
part of their material outfit like their hair. It had never entered into my mind
to question whether they laid them aside in sleep or not. Perhaps it was
owing to the beauty and animation of the countenance, when they spoke or
even looked, that I had not paid any attention to their dress except to see
how it never impeded their movements either in flight or in work, and how
it varied with the individual, and never with the sex or age or profession; it
belonged to the childhood of the world to regiment men in the minor details
of life. Now I saw in the baths that the vesture did not need to be laid aside
in other elements than air. It was made of some fine and flexible stuff
woven out of irelium threads, plastic to the shape, yet capable of stiffening
out when the wearer sent an electric wave through it from the electro-
generator he always bore under his right arm. This process at once shook
out every drop of water from it, when he issued from the bath or the sea. It
was so porous that it seemed fragile, and yet it could bear great strains.
Through its pores passed with ease the water or air or ether that was to
influence the body underneath; and along its threads passed with ease any
magnetism the wearer wished to feel. In certain lights it was almost
transparent, yet with such a play of rainbow colors that it seemed a living
fence against lights and shadows. In the darkness it shone with dazzling
radiance as soon as the electric current flowed into it. At the will of the
wearer it could be, like a magic garment of invisibility, black as midnight,
yet in daylight could reveal every grace and tint of the limbs it covered,
clinging closely like an outer epidermis to the body. Nor was it ever laid
aside except to be replaced by a new vesture, and that was every few days;
for all germs and débris that adhered to it or obstructed its pores could be

destroyed and got rid of by the electric current the wearer had control of. It
was on my first visit to Oomalefa that I came to know these things, as it was
then that I first donned a like vesture, and was taught its properties and the
ways of managing it and the minute electro-generator that went with it.
There were alternative garments, that they wore under different
conditions. One, almost as plastic as the ordinary vesture, but armoured by
electricity against the inroads of excessive cold, was worn when they
ventured up into the higher regions of the air or beyond; for it enabled them
to keep up the natural temperature of the body as they flew. Another was as
well suited for protection against extreme heat. It consisted of an asbestine
double wall of irelium, within which was kept up a constant current of cold
air by means of a minute apparatus worked by their wings and arms; and, if
they could get moisture from the atmosphere to run between the two textile
folds, it was at once frozen. Such an arrangement was necessary in their
adventurous experiments in the bowels of the earth or under the blazing eye
of the sun. The most beautiful and most convenient of all their vestures was
one which looked and felt like a film of white cloud; I would have said that
it was woven of the misty fleeces that caught and rent themselves on the
lesser peaks of Lilaroma. It was indeed no distant mimicry of this; for
though it could be thrown loosely round the figure in the most graceful
forms like a toga, and seemed as thin and fragile as gossamer, it consisted
of a treble fabric: between two transparent films, fairly delicate as if woven
by a spider on a windless dawn, moved in cloud-like purity and dimness the
airy vapour of some liquid that shone as silvery and warm as moonlight. Its
purpose was to conceal and yet to reveal the general contour and
movements of the body; to sift the strength of the sun’s rays as they fell in
their purity from heaven, and yet to pass as much of their curative power
through it as the skin needed; to cling to the limbs, and yet to impede them
no more than a fleece of cloud would.
It was as I was studying the texture and the beauty of these garments
that there happened the first approach to panic I had yet witnessed among
this calm-eyed people. There had been a stillness as of ill-bridled tumult in
the atmosphere all day. My proparents had moved restlessly abroad from
daybreak, and all the Leomo were on the wing husbanding every minute
with feverish clutch. We were sent in squadrons to different parts of the
island, and many new leomorans were set to work in unaccustomed corners

of the mountain, yet there was a look of baffled intelligence in every face. I
had felt there was an undeciphered portent overshadowing their life. Thyriel
and I had worked at two new leomorans and watched them till they wielded
their brush of smoke across the sky. We had done all that we could and were
sent out to Oomalefa to uncloud our troubled minds.
The excitement of this new sphere had removed from our thoughts all
ominous shadows and we were as innocently absorbed as primitive men of
the woodlands in the wonders now opened to us; but silence had fallen upon
the gambolling swimmers, and the hush awakened us from our new dream.
We felt the foundations of the building tremble and quiver like a panic-
stricken beast. Up the translucent walls clicked a huge rent, and slowly the
liquid in the baths hissed and vanished. A tumultuous muffled cannonade
rolled beneath us. The crystal roof crackled and snapped like ice-rafts that
groan and toss before a sudden flood. The chink widened into a chasm, and
through it we could see the ocean seethe in turbulence and revolution. Up
through the roof whizzed the wings of the alarmed bathers, and as the
jarring and detonation grew, I stood knowing not whither to turn. All I could
do was to bid Thyriel follow her mates. More awful came back the
reverberations from the domes, and Thyriel’s face was pale and her lips set,
but she did not move. Finally she bade me follow her to that end of the
gallery farthest from the chasm in the walls, a raised platform whence the
swimmers dived. There she placed me with my back to hers, and ran a rope
under my arms. Before I knew what she was about, I was off my feet; she
was running at full speed up the rising platform and with a sudden jerk we
were in the air. I heard the beating of her wings, and lay still lest I should
baffle her purpose. I lay on my back between her wings, and shuddered as I
saw their points broken against the lips of the chasm. A deep-mouthed
clangour filled my ears; and for a moment my eyelids fell in palsied terror.
When I raised them and looked down, the vast crystal of Oomalefa had
vanished and the great promontory stood gaping, with the surf hissing and
baying as it leapt over the upper surface.
I felt that Thyriel was almost exhausted, and thought of detaching
myself from the rope which bound me and leaping into the ocean; but the
idea had not quite grown into resolve when I saw her wings beat slower and
knew that we were hovering over the solid land. In a moment we were
standing side by side, she exhausted, I supporting her with my arms. It was

not long before she recovered herself, for her attention had been awakened
by a startling appearance out in mid-ocean. A high peak rose beyond the
cleft and scarred promontory where there had been only waves before, its
head turbaned with steam and smoke. It was still shouldering the sea to
right and left with hiss of lava tongue and splash of cinder shower. We
could not speak for alarmed wonder, and mingling with mine there was
deep sorrow over Oomalefa vanished. What had become of it I could not
tell. Thyriel roused herself and, divining my thoughts, led me to the steps
which had once given entrance to the starry portal. She stooped and lifted in
her hand some of what seemed to me fine-sprinkled snow, that covered
every inch of rock. It was irelium dust. Once the cohesion of the great
edifice had been overcome by the shocks of the earthquake, it fell not into
fragments or huge blocks, but into its constituent atoms. Nothing, I thought,
could ever replace the wondrous palace of delights that I had only begun to
know.
I felt saddened beyond recovery, as we turned homewards, over the ruin
of such magnificence and so great hopes. Thyriel’s dejection, I discovered,
was retrospective. She mourned over the failure of Leomarie, the
earthquake art of her family and friends. They had thought that they could
anticipate and prevent all the grumblings and revolutions of Lilaroma, and
this outbreak had shown the imperfection of their knowledge and the limits
of their art. Though but a novice, I could see that something was yet
wanting to make them masters of the crust of the earth. For the first time for
many generations their foresight had failed. They had known that there was
disturbance beneath the mountain, but they had been unable to fix its centre,
which was far out at sea. The inflow of the waters had baffled the power of
their mountain-cupping instruments, and the rapidly generated steam had
rent the crust in the line of Oomalefa; and until the slow-trickling lavas and
the swift-belched ashes had sealed the lips of the chasm again, there was
danger, they knew, of the whole island exploding. How they were to prevent
or even anticipate such cataclysms was a problem that weighed upon every
member of the family and saddened every leisure moment.
For some days the Leomo were busy with the wreckage of the outbreak.
I was attached to the section that had to inspect the lava wells, gauge the
amount of molten matter which had oozed from each, repair every clirolan
or other instrument that had been deranged, and replace those submerged.

The urgency of the occasion excused us from the regular duties and
pleasures of the day. All our ablutions and essential exercises were
performed in the private mansions. Most of the hours not spent in sleep
were devoted to the tasks made for us by the new exigency. The excitement
removed the monotony and burden of the work, and almost before we knew
that there was so much to do it was done. New wells were sunk and new
clirolans fixed wherever the overflow had choked or sealed the old. The
instruments of even the most distant section of the island were put into their
best working order.
Then we were free to scatter to the winds and to follow our old delights.
Thyriel set herself with renewed eagerness to teach me the art of flight, and
I attained the power of describing an easy curve from a shoulder of
Lilaroma down to the plain. Again and again in her new desire to master
flight with me seated between her wings, she carried me up to some jutting
platform of the mountain: and then she showed me how to work the wing-
engine with ease. I could keep level with my starting-point for a few
minutes, but after that I had to let myself glide down the parabola of the air.
I was too heavily weighted by gravity and the inertia of my muscles to rise
as she did.
There were many secrets of their flight that I soon understood. The
curious construction of the wings, formed as they were of two sliding
membranes, I have already described. What I had taken for a mere rudder
was a large series of small screws that gave forward motion to the flight.
The engine that whirled them round as they churned the air was of great
power, and without them the flight would have been but slow and clumsy. It
was through inability to manage this engine that I was so long in mastering
even the rudiments of the art.
I progressed greatly that day, and would have progressed more but that
the lesson was abruptly broken off. In each new air voyage to a higher
sally-point she bore me farther round the mountain towards the great plain
that stretched to the south. When we reached our last flight platform, and I
had descended, my glance shot over the countless centres of industry and
investigation that stippled the rolling downs. It was a noble sight, and I
could have long rested in the gaze: but an unwonted gleam drew my eyes to
the precipitous coast. There on a vast new promontory which ran out miles
into the sea was gathered such a galaxy of jewelled domes rainbow-lit by

the sun as I could not have conceived even from my remembrance of
Oomalefa and its marvellous architecture. Thyriel’s eyes had also been
riveted by the spectacle. “It is a new Oomalefa,” she burst forth. I could not
believe it; how could such a palace of wonders be reconstructed in so short
a time? There were only a few thousand mature Limanorans; and if they
had been all engaged on such a structure night and day it would have taken
many busy years to rear it. I took it for a mere illusion. The position of the
sun and some unusual commotion in the sea had produced it by reflection
and refraction. It was but a bubble of the imagination bred by some
abnormality in our eyes upon our memory of Oomalefa and the grief of our
minds at its evanishment.
So I argued. But Thyriel was silently decided in her dissent. We could
take no more interest in our aëronautics, nothing could keep our gaze from
that radiant orb resting, gigantic, on the beach. As the sun declined the
facets of the new jewel shimmered with living sheen: now it was a city of
burnished gold, again it was a myriad of lambent flames aspiring to the
centre of fire: now a thousand rainbows weaving and unweaving
themselves, again uncounted stars clustered and heaped in restless silver, or
wintry thistledown of swarming snow. Surely it was but an army of will-o’-
the-wisps lit in the marsh fumes that the gaping sea had sent forth. Yet as I
gazed it grew in my mind that this sparkling halo had a fixed centre; there
was symmetry in the refulgence and in the recurrence of colour and sheen.
It could not be illusion; we were both transfixed like sculptures in eternal
gaze.
The flash of wings broke the completeness of the glory and our spell.
Above the transplendent spectacle fluttered a snow-storm of ariels; the sun
shot a fiery gleam through a rent cloud, and across his silvery beams danced
and played these winged motes. The beauty of the sight moved us almost to
tears. We knew that this was no phantom joy; our fellows were aloft in the
air hymning the glory of a new creation. Soon Thyriel had persuaded me to
start with her towards the new palace of wonders. We had not got half-way
when I felt my arms weary and my flight dragging towards the plain. She
would not leave me to trudge across the uneven earth; before I could argue
she had me safely nestling between her wings as they beat the air upwards
from the low knoll on which we had alighted. She no longer laboured under
her burden, as she had done in her first attempt some days before; yet I felt

that she grew tired, and made her land upon a hill a few miles from the new
Oomalefa. After a rest I was able on my own wings to curve down towards
its flight of new-rocked steps and its scintillant portal.
We entered, and all was joy and music. Up underneath the new domes
flitted the happy artists putting the final touches on the tinted translucence
of the irelium walls. The plan was more elaborate and yet simpler than the
old Oomalefa. The beauty of it was more overwhelming to the imagination
of the eyes. I could not have conceived two structures more unlike from
their larger architecture down to their minutest detail of ornament, and yet
so adapted to the one purpose. The halls of medication and sustenance, the
galleries of the magnetic sense, the baths, the arcades, and the sea balconies
were all complete, yet as different from those that had gone to dust as
Western architecture from Oriental. New instruments and apparatus, new
indexes and tests were there at work. Not a detail had been neglected; but
the rocky platforms over the sea were broader, and when we flew into the
air and looked at it from above we could see that the promontory stretched
farther into the sea and was broader both on its surface and at its base; and
strange to say, it had as its outermost point the new peak that the eruption
had thrown up in the ocean. It was conjectured by the Leomo, I soon knew,
that this line, now sealed up as it was and with its lava vent at its outer
extremity, would be freer from terrene paroxysms than any other portion of
the island marge. This was where my proparents and the rest of the earth
artisans had been engaged so busily during these days; they had been
guiding the lava flow along the line of rent out through the sea to the great
beacon which the outburst had raised; and the dash of the waves had cooled
and congealed each layer as it flowed and curdled from the new peak to the
shore of the island.

CHAPTER XII
OOLOREFA

B UT by what magic had this wondrous jewel group of domes and spires
and minarets grown upon the platform within these few alternations of
sun and dark? From my own experience of bastioning the shore I was
able to understand the rapidity with which the foundations had been laid.
My wonder grew all the more at the marvellous piece of art that now stood
upon them; every detail was so complete and so beautiful. The giant forest
aisle of Cologne Cathedral, the mosaic splendour that had overawed me
within St. Peter’s, the statued frost-work of Milan, seemed to me tawdry
beside the colossal domes with their jewelled magnificence and the infinite
variety in simplicity of the labyrinth of arcades and galleries and arches. Yet
those were the fruits of a thousand years’ faith and work; this was the
product of a few days. The more I thought of it, the more bewildered I was.
Thyriel divined my thoughts and saved me from my perplexity. “You
have never seen the Ooloran,” she exclaimed. I asked her what it was. I
could see that the word might be translated sonarchitect. Her description of
it, though lucid as usual, did not convey to my slow thoughts a full idea of
the instrument; and we got permission to visit Oolorefa, or the hall of
architecture, the following day.
In the multiplicity of wonders throughout Limanora I had failed to
notice this great edifice, although it stood on a level, symmetrically cut
plateau, commanding all the region in which were gathered most of the
exceptionally great and magnificent structures of the island, and was but
one of a series of gleaming palaces which crowned the points of the rocky
spurs of Lilaroma. In each palace was concentrated some one of the
services that the new civilisation had to offer to the progress of the race. I
had visited a few of them, and it was part of the programme of my
education to make me spend such space and time in each as the desire or the
necessity arose in my life; but it had never struck me to inquire how the
marvellous buildings had arisen. Nor, though I had noticed the frequent
change of outward shape and ornamentation of parts of the mansion of my

proparents, had I ever had leisure or curiosity to find out the reason or
source of the transformations. It was delightful to see the growth of the
building and to remove into the new parts; and as silently and invisibly the
sections we had left vanished. I had never time to grow tired of one
chamber or set of chambers before another was ready for me. It was like the
growth of a palace of dreams; but I soon accepted it as one of the magic
habits of the island, a natural feature of my life, never rousing query and
seldom awakening even thought. So much of new and striking was crowded
into the days and months and years that large portions of the civilisation had
to pass uncommented on and ultimately unnoticed.
With the same wonder with which in later life we begin to watch the
marvellous workings of the functions of our bodies I entered on my new
investigation. As we approached Oolorefa it seemed to me that we had
made a mistake and come to the wrong building; for it rang with the most
entrancing music and I thought that it must be the cathedral of the island. It
had one vast central dome surrounded by countless cupolas, and as we
skirted the edifice I heard underneath each of these smaller roofs sweet
melodies sounding too low to be heard beyond its partition walls and almost
drowned in the thunderous diapason of the central dome. These I took for
chapels and fanes subsidiary to the great temple, round which they
clustered.
We entered and I was amazed to find under what I had thought to be the
temple of the island a great mansion, but dwarfed by the height and size of
the temple roof. The fence enclosing it had just been shaken to dust by their
new electric process for the atomising of irelium. What was to be done with
the new structure? It was walled in by the giant cupola, and could not
possibly be removed. The thought was beating about in my mind, but
ceased before a sudden crash; I looked up and there, one complete and
evenly cut quadrant of the dome had vanished, and the bright sun shone in
undimmed by any medium. I again noticed something going on around us.
Great flanks like the sides of a ship were fitted to the bottom of the new
building, and along them underneath were adjusted huge floats. Wings were
then attached to either side, and a strong wing-engine was placed in the
body and two rudder-engines in the after-part of the raft. They were rapidly
charged with electricity, the floats were exhausted of their heavier air, and
up rose the whole structure through the huge aperture in the dome; and I

could see its pilots guide it this way and that through the air to fit the
unequal and varying wind that blew, till at last it disappeared round a
shoulder of Lilaroma. I had run out of Oolorefa to watch the flight of the
great mansion on its aërial raft, and when it went out of sight I returned,
reflecting with a sigh of relief that this explained the magic growth of the
house in which I lived; the additions had arrived and been fixed and adapted
to the purposes of human habitation while I was sleeping or absent on my
daily pursuits.
I was startled when I got back to find the dome complete again and
preparation being made for constructing some other irelium shell. The
fence-work had been raised. By its wall stood the key-board of a gigantic
organ-like musical instrument, the other half of which was so arranged
within the new framework that the whole volume of its sound should bear
upon whatever the fence enclosed. A huge bell mouth opened out into the
chamber; and I soon saw that out of this issued a snow-storm of irelium
particles which floated lightly in the air. A peal of music rang out from the
instrument, and I saw the dust motes settle rapidly into a symmetrical
figure, that minute by minute grew into a gigantic nautilus shell. The
musician who sat at the key-board watched the snow-whirl within and the
magical rise of the walls. I perceived that the bar of music was repeated
again and again, with gradual ingrafting of variation as the shell-like walls
bent over. At a certain point where the whorl began to incurve backwards
the strain completely changed and reminded me of a fugue. Back and forth
it shot its monotonous shuttle of sound. I was spellbound by the cradling
melody and the sinuous flexure of the vast conch. The completion of the
process and the cessation of the music broke the spell, and I pressed near to
ask explanations and to see the result. Some enchanter’s power must surely
have drawn in the floating particles to the thin curves of the structure and
held them there; for the motes continued to float unattracted, but in sparse
and sparser cloud; and at last they ceased to move, and settled on the fence,
dimming its translucence. I felt the metal floor grow first hotter and hotter,
and then cooler and cooler till it was ice-cold. Within a fraction of an hour
the whole process was complete; the fencing walls were shaken to dust, and
there stood the gigantic nautilus perfect in its grace, clear as crystal but for
the frostwork of nautilus patterns all over its surface. It was a new
experiment in form for a winged ship of the air, and as I stood the wings
were added and the engines put on board. The navigators embarked; a

smaller quadrant of the dome crashed aside; and out by the aperture floated
this huge air-bubble rainbow-lustrous in the sun.
Thyriel led me to the vacant space whence the airship had been
launched; and there I was shown how powerful magnets made the snow-
storm sweep so rapidly downwards and held the irelium dust in position,
once it had taken shape. Then the alternate floors were exhibited to me, one
emanating heat which melted the new structure into a permanency, and
another that reduced the temperature below freezing-point and completed
the architectural process by chilling the metal. There were other floors easy
of substitution by means of leverage and the application of great force; as
one was withdrawn, another was run into its place. One was suited for one
chemical process, another for another. A second set were for applying to the
walls of the new structure different forms or grades of electricity. A third set
could infuse into them various kinds of concreting fluids to make them
cohere when the heating and chilling process was likely to fail. This was the
great Ooloran that I had come to see, and only the most skilled musician
and architect was allowed to sit down at the key-board.
In order to show me the part that music took in this swift architecture, I
was led round the circle of sub-chapels, that I had seen surrounding the
great dome. In these were employed the various draughtsmen of Oolorefa.
In the first we entered the experimenter was engaged in seeking the most
beautiful form for a new mansion which was to be placed up amongst the
snows of Lilaroma; it would have to withstand great gusts of wind and at
times heavy drifts of snow; it would also have to bear a variety of high
temperatures within in order to protect the dwellers from the bitterness of
the night. The building was meant for those who had to watch the storm-
cone and keep it in perfect working order. The draughtsman was using a
miniature Ooloran, and deftly sounding various musical notes, and
sometimes songs into its irelium dust whirlwind; but there was always one
predominating note, meant to introduce into each experiment a feature that
had been before tested and found suitable. He fixed his experiments by
means of his small movable floors, and then placed the resulting forms in
order along a shelf, attaching to each the score of music which had
produced it. It was like a collection of toy observatories. Within a
neighbouring compartment of like transparent walls another artisan
submitted each of the models to the influences of stress and strain, of heat

and cold, of snow pressure and tornado violence that the ultimate and full-
sized mansion would have to undergo. One succumbed to the heat, another
to the severe cold, a third to an avalanche from above, a fourth to a gust of
wind. He marked the flaw in each and the influence that had brought it out,
and handed the model back to the draughtsman, who at once corrected the
note or notes in the score of music which symbolised the flaw. When the
result of the experimentation was complete, the score of the music and the
miniature fabric were sent to the central dome; and in less than an hour the
huge mansion was on its winged raft speeding towards its destination far up
the great mountain-slope.
I was led through the whole series of experimenting chapels; in each
was there a miniature sonarchitect producing test forms for special purposes
under the skilled hands of creative workmen and their pupils. In most of
them new designs were being produced for private houses; for of these was
needed the greatest variety, as each islander had his home renewed so
frequently. I could not have conceived that so many different forms could
be created for the same purpose; indeed the number seemed to be limited
only by the possible combination of notes of music and the need of adapting
each design to habitation and the habits of the dwellers. The skill of the
artist lay in the selection of the proper forms out of the multitude he daily
evolved, and in their adaptation to the necessities of Limanoran life. It was
in these designs that the younger members of the architect families were
engaged; thus they learned their art and developed their creative instincts.
Under some cupolas which we visited we found experiments on new
designs for the large public buildings, and to these the wisest members of
the families were applying their century-tried skill. As we approached any
such chapel, we could hear the most elaborate and entrancing music, for the
design in such cases was labyrinthine, and needed the noblest artistic
faculties to select and develop it. The executive musical talent displayed
and the talent of extemporaneous composition and modification would have
been called genius in European communities; but this people had no word
corresponding to the quicksand of meaning this word covers in
Christendom. They knew the origin and growth of each faculty, even when
exceptionally developed, too well to attribute it to an indefinable something
which nature had somehow conferred upon a chance-chosen individual.
They knew as exactly the causes that produced given effects in the human

system as they could calculate the forces of the inanimate world, and had no
belief in the power of nature to give to human work by some caprice more
value than it deserved and that deranged all calculation. This criticism I
brought down on me from my guide when I expressed amazement at the
beauty of the music and the resulting design in one chapel, and attempted to
translate the word “genius” into Limanoran. Such expressions, he persuaded
me, are but the half-articulate escape-valves of wide-mouthed ignorance;
they mean no more than a confession of blindness and incapacity, and
should be rapidly rejected by every progressive civilisation. The musical
and designing power of this particular Limanoran belonged to most in his
family of his own age, and was merely the stage the art of sonarchitecture
had reached in its development on the island. Wherever a nature especially
adapted to the double art was found it was imported into the family to
reinforce it.
In spite of the dissertation, I could not but listen, entranced by the
intricate splendour of the music; and my eyes were riveted on the growing
design within the receiver of the Ooloran. Yet when finished and tested it
was found inadequate to the artist’s new conception of the utilities of the
ultimate edifice. It was shaken again into dust before I left the workman,
and its faults were noted and corrected in the score of music which he had
before him. He had been years on this single design, which he had been
moulding and improving every day; and he hoped soon to find a form that
would be strikingly new and in every feature adapted to the purpose of the
building.
I could well understand now that the new Oomalefa was no work of
magic; but I was still unable to see how its vast proportions could have been
shifted from its place of fabrication to its ultimate site. Thyriel led me to a
new structure which had just issued from the central sonarchitect; and the
master-workman bade me lean upon it; huge though it was, it shifted before
my weight and I fell. It was as light as if made of silk, and we two could lift
it from the floor. This explained the ease of rafting the great edifices
through the air; but how did they resist the winds that blew, or the impact of
wave and storm? I was led to a wall of Oolorefa itself; and I was bidden to
raise one low parapet of it; not the application of my greatest strength could
move it. My guide then waved what seemed to be a magnet above it, and
bade me try again; it rose in my hands and my muscular effort landed me on

my back. He showed me how the foundations of their buildings were
powerful magnets, and how the fabric would be torn to pieces before it
could be hoisted off them unless an equally powerful magnet was applied in
another direction. I now understood the strength of their structures before
winds and the rapid disappearance of Oomalefa after the earthquake.
But I had seen only one department of Oolorefa, that which
consummated the work of the rest. One branch of the sonarchitect families
was specially charged with experimentation on the materials for building.
Irelium was the general name for the metallic combination of elements best
suited to the state of civilisation they had reached; but there were
innumerable modifications and grades of it, and there were more being
discovered every day. We entered one magnificent building, and there found
a dozen or more workmen, each isolated in a transparent chamber and busy
with some combination of irelium and one or other of the stellar metals.
Every star or series of stars had its own predominant and characteristic
element or amalgam of elements; and it was a main duty of one of the
chemical families of the island to examine every star for its new element
and to find something corresponding to it in terrene matter. This section of
the people studied with the most anxious care the products and the results of
the leomorans; they visited almost hourly the mouths of the lava wells and
watched the spectroscopic recorders of the fumes that rose out of them; for
they seldom failed to find at one time or another some constituent of the
interior of the earth corresponding to any new stellar element or metal
recently discovered. Whenever it was found in any leomoran a chamber for
its deposition was constructed and the clirolan was specially adapted to the
preservation of all of it that issued out of the bowels of the earth. These new
metallic constituents were called by the name of the stars in which they
predominated, and were at once put into the hands of the sonarchitect
families to be tested for structural utilities. It was thus irelium had been
discovered, and thus they hoped to find materials still more plastic to their
purposes. Already they had so modified their new metal by amalgamation
with other stellar metals that they had fitted it to functions no metal had
served before; it could be made flexible or tough, light or heavy, transparent
or opaque, malleable or brittle, soluble before heat or water or electricity, or
resistent to any or all of them; it was difficult to say what quality they could
not impart to it; and here I could see the workmen testing new combinations
in order to find new qualities or new grades of a quality already found. I

stood and watched one who was trying an amalgam of a new stellar metal
called vanelium with gold; he had already attempted to combine it with
iron, silver, copper, irelium, and found it in each case either impossible or
useless; but the reactions had pointed him to gold as its natural ally; and
now, having found the two combine with ease, he was exhausting the
various possibilities of combination in different proportions, and after
submitting the new amalgam to his tests, was recording the results. It gave a
marvellous toughness and elasticity to gold, so that, when beaten thin
enough for a breath to raise it in the air, it could not be torn except by
sudden and great mechanical force. Another workman near him was testing
the effect of electricity on the various grades of the new amalgam and
recording the results minutely. In each of the crystal chambers there were at
hand supplies of all the forms of energy that might be needed, such as heat,
cold, pressure, electricity. Each workman was isolated in order that the
elements he used might not interfere with the experiments of his neighbour;
but his workshop was transparent, that he might beckon for help at any
moment, or exhibit to his fellows the result of any experiment without
modifying the conditions or breaking the continuity.
A third branch of these families dealt with the adaptation of the new
amalgams to the various structural necessities of the community; they found
out which form or grade would resist the disintegrating influence or the
power of water or of electric force; they tested what shape would best suit
each grade, solid or hollow, cylindrical or spheral, cubic or rectangular, thin
or thick, curved or rectilinear. Another branch devoted itself to the means of
making the various metals or amalgams cohere either temporarily or
permanently. A fifth studied the adaptation of the new discoveries to tools
and machines and to the invention of new mechanical forms that would
bring out their greatest utilities. To go through all the departments of this
vast architectural workshop would need a week’s rehearsal. To my first
view it seemed bewildering in its complexity of specialisation; but after
closer acquaintance it became simplicity itself, in fact the only plan that
nature itself could have pointed out.

CHAPTER XIII
THE LILARAN

H AVING finished our survey of Oolorefa, my mind returned to the
observatory for Lilaroma, which I had seen growing in miniature under
the modeller’s hand and music. It seemed to me a strange romance that
citizens of this beautiful island lived amid everlasting snow and ice tens of
thousands of feet above their fellows. How could those who were
accustomed to the conditions and privileges I saw around me bring
themselves to surrender it all and live the lives of hermits amid antarctic
rigours? Thyriel reminded me of the glacial cold of the southern land from
which their ancestry had come; but this did not wholly satisfy me. The long
centuries of life in a new zone had changed their powers and tastes, and it
must be a great sacrifice to live in a climate so different as was the glacier
region of a mountain. My curiosity was roused, and I resolved to observe
and know for myself at the earliest opportunity. I could see the observatory
now perched on the gleaming shoulder of the mountain above the circle of
the storm-cone, and every day I turned my eyes upwards I grew more eager
to inquire into the conditions of life in so different a temperature.
It happened that the next department of the civilisation of the island that
had to be studied by me in our educational development was Lilarie, or the
science of island-security. We were handed over to one who belonged to the
Lilamo, or families specially absorbed in this section of practical
knowledge, and were told to choose our mode of ascent, car flight or wing
flight, or either of the two instantaneous methods of transit. We preferred
one of the two last, so he decided on the wire-line or aërial method for our
first ascent. We were enclosed in a casing, shaped like a shuttle and rounded
and sharpened to a point at each end; it lay slightly inclined on a close web
of wires, which sloped up to the mountain-top. The door was closed and
made secure, but, as our shuttle car was made of transparent irelium, we
could see on all sides. It was then drawn slightly upwards into a complete
enclosure of wires, each of which touched it at some point. When our guide
saw that we were all ready, he pressed a button, and we shot up at incredible

speed. The whole sky and earth and sea fell from us in an instant. I closed
my eyes in alarm. No sooner had I done so than the whizzing sound which
accompanied our flight ceased and in a moment we were at our destination,
close to the peak of Lilaroma. Our shuttle car slid into another groove and
rested; the door opened, and I stood amid the eternal snows. I could see the
great buildings of Rimla and Oomalefa and Oolorefa like minute soap-
bubbles gleaming in the sun far below. We had travelled these tens of
thousands of feet with the ease and swiftness of lightning; for it had indeed
been the lightning that had borne us up. Along this cylinder of wires so
great an electric power could be sent that it seemed to undo the force of
gravitation. Distance was almost annihilated by this mode of transit. It
outdistanced sound, if not light too, in its magic motion.
As soon as I began to reflect, I was astounded to find the cold not
merely bearable, but deprived of its bitter penetrativeness. My heart
bounded with exhilaration; every tissue of my body seemed elastic and full
of spring. I could account for these sensations by the atmosphere of these
heights, but how was I to explain the mild temperature of this snow region?
When puzzling over the problem, I began to notice a haze of half-glowing
light like the shimmer of heat over the surface of the earth at blazing noon.
It seemed at first to be an optical illusion coming, I thought, from the
suddenness of my transference from the plain to such a height, but its
unsteady gleam moved so uniformly that I soon saw it was outside of me.
Yet it did not intercept my view of the snow and ice around. They
fascinated me by their splendour of whiteness, but there was a warmth, a
pallid glow over them that was quite unwonted. Our guide felt my mental
interrogation, and pointed out that we had stepped from the shuttle car on to
a movable platform, which would soon bring us to the observatory; over
this platform was an electric covering, that protected us from the outer air
and radiated heat in all directions. He showed us the snow melting on all
sides of our platform in form corresponding to it, and, as it moved along the
steep, the dark honeycombed square of snow moved with us. There was
above and on every side of us an electric field produced by unseen circuits
of wires; and these fields gave out heat falling short of light.
This was how they modified the climate up in these glacial regions and
made it even sweeter and healthier than the purified atmosphere of the
Limanoran plateaux below. They had done much for the climate of the

lower levels; by daily casting their electric shuttles through the atmosphere
they brought its impurities to the earth, its particles of dust and minute
living organisms; but as more of these crowded in again from the outlying
regions of air, the electric shuttles would have to ply ceaselessly in all
directions in order to keep the lower strata pure. In those mountain altitudes
the air was naturally sterilised to a large extent; few organisms could persist
in so keen a medium; and the constant use of electric walls and roof for
modifying the bitterness of the cold swept every trace of bacterial life into
the snow. Hence the purity of the air we breathed up there and the buoyancy
of the soul. The body seemed no clog upon the spiritual functions, and the
magnetism that came from the heavenly bodies uniting with that of the
earth had free play upon our minds, stimulating them to lofty flight. I no
longer wondered why the Lilamo had no aversion to life at this altitude.
They passionately loved it. It was, indeed, being drunk without wine,
without self-abandonment, without waste of tissue.
They kept strict rein on this intoxication, ethereal though it was; for, like
all their race, they had severe practical issues before them. Daily each of
them returned to the less volatile and less pure air of the lower levels in
order to check excess of buoyancy and to reinforce the graver purposes of
life by consultation with the elders and wise men. They had in their hands
an important phase of the well-being and continuance of their race. They
had all the foes of human life, as it existed amongst the Limanorans, to fight
off, whether seen or unseen. The tornadoes that swept across these
subtropical regions, the climatic strata that drifted from other lands or
realms of space, the bacterial swarms bringing plague in their train, the
lower-planed human life which might swoop down on their shores from the
archipelago around them,—all these had to be watched and directed past
Limanora. Any one of these evils might in a few hours or days sweep out
the civilisation that had taken long centuries to develop and leave them all
their steps to retrace. Eye-tense vigilance was needed to watch for any sign
of their approach, and the keenest invention to prevent their advance when
observed.
I had not long to wait for evidences of the great services the Lilamo did
to their country. Thyriel and I were led by our guide into the various
divisions of the observatory. We inspected the innumerable testing and
controlling machines without fully understanding their intricate and often

subtle arrangements. Had we not been acquainted with Rimla and Oomalefa
and Oolorefa, we should have been bewildered or even awestruck. As it was
we were amazed at the refinement of purpose in the apparatus, approaching
almost to human intelligence; but we saw that a mere novice would have
deranged most of it, so nice were the adjustments.
Our attention had been especially arrested by the electric indicator or
tremolan. It contained a complete chart of the electric variations of every
point of the island throughout every day in the year. This had been compiled
and drawn up from the observations of several centuries, and marked the
differences between periodical and temporary, regional and narrowly local,
terrestrial and planetary variations. Every day the instrument was set like a
clock to all the electric changes which they expected to occur periodically
on that day. Each of these, indicated at every point of the map, represented
an electrically uniform locality of the island with which it was connected.
The superintendent of the tremolan for any section of the day specially
studied all the unclassified variations which had occurred at the
corresponding hour of the same day and period of time. He knew every
change in the position of the earth or in the movements of the stars that
might affect the electricity of the atmosphere at any moment during his
watch. Along with him there was a sky-watcher, who used one of their
marvellous reducers of distance and magnifiers to scan the sky and the
whole horizon, and reported every new appearance which broke the
uniformity of the sky-line. In an adjoining chamber with transparent
partitions a third observer was stationed with his ear at a makro-mikrakoust
or vamolan, that gathered in the slightest sounds at the distance of even
hundreds of miles and magnified them for the listening sense applied to it; it
also indicated approximately the distance of the source of the sound by an
automatic calculator. This was a kind of eavesdropper that could pick up
whispers on the orb of the earth, just as their astronomical instruments
could catch the faintest gleam in space myriads of miles beyond the scope
of the eye. In another crystal-walled apartment stood a fourth watcher, who
used an instrument that was to his electric sense what the telescope is to the
eye and their vamolan was to their ear. With this idrolan he swept the sky
for new and unclassified electric impulses; and the faintest and most distant
indication, quite unrecognisable by his unaided sense, was magnified ten
thousand-fold; at the same time the distance of the source was roughly
measured and indicated.

This was by far the most attractive group of chambers for us. Not only
could we test the wonderful instruments for ourselves; but we could
examine by aid of magnifiers the graphic results of their observations
automatically recorded as if by photography. We could minutely study the
flight of sea birds not visible to the naked eye. The babel of sounds that
went on in the cities of the archipelago quite beneath the horizon we could
hear like a great roar beside us when we placed the sonoscripts in the
sound-magnifier; and with the aid of its analyst we could unravel the
sounds by repeating them slowly. Though I had not my electric sense
sufficiently developed to feel the differences in the starry impulses when
the electrographs were placed in the electro-magnifier, I could distinguish
their differing degrees of force, and I could see how much Thyriel
appreciated the fine shades of variety in the impulses.
We were engaged in testing the electric records, when we could see the
observer of the tremolan bustling from table to table and map to map, whilst
his pupil watched the indicator. His excitement spread into the adjoining
chambers, and their occupants, leaving their instruments to assistants, came
to his aid. There was an inexplicable electric disturbance on the north-east
shore of the island; the field in that direction was agitated. They ran to the
idrolan and turned it to the north-east; at once they knew that some seven or
eight hundred miles off there was advancing at a rapid rate a great wave of
electric disturbance. We all recognised a growing sultriness of heat in the
profound calm of the atmosphere even at those icy heights. No time was to
be lost. All the members of the Lilamo were called up, and in a few minutes
were assembled in the observatory.
It was resolved to turn the whole force available in the island into the
storm-cone, and especially into that part of it which could shoot masses and
streamers of electric energy out to great distances in the atmosphere. Other
indications of an approaching tornado soon appeared. The great telescope
discovered a vast cloud of birds on the horizon, and the sea greatly agitated
by shoals of fish beneath them. The vamolan analysed the sounds made by
the birds and revealed that they were not all of one species; sea birds small
and great were predominant; but there was no lack of land birds, insect-
eaters chiefly, and a few great flesh-eaters, vultures, hawks, and falcons.
The Lilamo knew in a moment what this meant. Myriads of microbes were
afloat in the air in front of the storm, and the sky in the van of the cloud of

birds was obscured by the mass of insect life battening on the unseen
plague. The fish had gathered to eat the clotted life that dropped into the
ocean, and the sea birds had assembled in pursuit of the fish. It was a
striking sight, this great moving internecine slaughter and feast. Seated at a
clevamolan, or combination of telescope and makrakoust, we were present
at the scene, though hundreds of miles off. We could see the swoop of the
vultures down on the land birds, too busy with their banquet of insects to
foresee their own fate, the water boiling with the leap of the fish and the
dive of the sea birds, and the air turbid with the flash and glimmer of wings;
at the same time we could hear the war of jubilance and dismay, the wild
cry of foretasting appetite, and the still wilder death-shriek; and round and
through the clangour like an atmosphere moved the dull hum of happy
glutted insect life. It sickened us and we had to cover our eyes and ears to
shut out the carnage. We had forgotten that we had been using the
clevamolan, and were glad to find that we could leave it and return to the
ordinary powers of our senses; there was a speck on the horizon, which
might be a boat at sea for anything our eyes could make out; whilst to our
hearing there was the profoundest calm.
Everything was ready for the concentration of our millions of horse-
power in the direction of the north-east, when a new but by no means
unexpected phase of the phenomenon occurred. Word came up from the
north-east shore that a plague had broken out amongst the dwellers in the
district, and that the medical wise men had been summoned to their help.
The Lilamo had already given warning that something of this kind might be
expected in that quarter, and the physicians were by this time removing all
the Limanorans in the north-east to Oomalefa. So dense a cloud of insects
was not there without the attraction of superfluous bacterial life. Not always
was a tornado thus heralded and vanguarded by a winged army, but when it
was, it meant the migration under magnetic impulse of clirolanic plague-
swarms from some favourite breeding area.
As soon as it was thus known that the bacterial couriers of the storm had
reached the shores of Limanora, the electric forces of the lilaran were
brought into play, and we could see lightnings belch forth which seemed to
make the north-east atmosphere and ocean glow. Swiftly the shoals of fish
were gathered close to the bastions of the coast, for masses of insects were
falling every moment into the water. Soon we could see our lightnings reach

as far as the insect darkness and the bird cloud. The air cleared and the
surface of the sea was covered with death. Away to the west screamed and
shrieked the survivors of the winged army. Then could we see the pitchy
midnight of the coming tempest moving stealthily towards us; and its
heralds howled and shrieked through every crevice of our mansion. It was
bearing right on Lilaroma.
How could that battering-ram of heaven’s fury be turned aside or
evaded? It seemed to me that nothing but death and destruction were before
us. I had already seen a tropical cyclone level a gigantic forest clean as a
mower would clear his swath in his breast-high corn. What could man do in
presence of so terrific a force but hide in holes of the rocks? The thought of
those noble buildings levelled with the dust mingled sadness with my fear
and shook all cowardice from it. What was the immolation of animal
existence which I had just witnessed compared to the destruction of all this
people had done? I felt as if the torch of the world’s salvation were about to
be extinguished.
There was no sadness or languid inaction of despair about the other
inmates of the observatory. All was bustle and joyous effort for a time as in
veterans quivering with the passion of battle. Every man had his duty and
place; and every woman was there, too, in the ranks of champions. We
could now see the nucleus of the storm just above the horizon, a mass
raven-black. At once the whole power of the island was concentrated in the
electric charge of the lilaran; and a long tongue of flame shot straight for the
dense cloud. As if by magic the whole atmosphere was in a moment ablaze
with lightnings. The sea was cloven into billows of raging foam, and
seemed itself to aid in the hellish pyrotechny. It shot forth great tongues of
purple flame, yet fled with reared crest from the strokes of the storm-flail.
Slowly the lilaran moved its lightning-thrust away to the east. Then half the
island power was put into the blast of the storm-cone; and we could see the
war of elements and the thunderous scowl of the tempest shift round the
circle of the horizon, instead of bearing down on us. For hours the roar of
the lilaran went on. The edge of the tornado struck us, and the building
shook and swayed. Hail pelted its sides; rain and snow blinded our outlook;
we could see not one inch outside for the gloom. Yet within, all was radiant
and calm. They knew that the centre of the tornado had passed many miles
to the east, and that its trailing skirts could do no harm to anything in the

island. Even if it had come straight on Lilaroma, they had given a vent to its
fury so many leagues out to sea that its force would have been largely spent
before it reached the shore. It was a yearly occurrence, this throttling of a
tornado from the tropics; for these great electric disturbances made straight
for the loftiest peak within their reach, drawn by their polar complement,
the masses of electric energy which played within the heart of Lilaroma.
One of the ordinary duties of the Lilamo was to milk the great mountain
of its electricity, in order that it should offer less attraction to cloud and
storm. Every night, especially during the season of tempests, I could hear
the roar of the energy out of the earth, and, if I looked up to the shoulders of
the mountain, I could see at a hundred points the purple streamers flicker in
the wind like living, moving flame-flowers growing out of the soil. When
needed, this escaping energy was collected and sent down to Rimla for
storage and was another of the numerous sources of power that that treasury
of force drew upon.
When the tornado had passed and left its huge contribution to the snows
of the peak, the lilaran was stopped, and the electric energy used in it was
rapidly run over the white slopes that now obliterated every trace of the
great groove and railway on which the storm-cone moved. In a few minutes
the outline appeared, and soon the whole circlet was cleared of its
encumbering snows. So the weight that pressed on the roofs of the
observatory and the drifts that kept the light from its walls melted before the
electric snowplough. The storm had not vanished an hour before all on the
peak of Lilaroma was as it had been when we arrived, except for the greater
purity of the snow on its shoulders. Beneath, the brush of the tempest had
swept out all traces of the plague that the physicians had not got rid of, and
the atmosphere was clearer and more exhilarating.
So calmly and fearlessly had the whole danger been met that there had
even been leisure in the midst of the turmoil to discuss this great waste of
natural power. It took them as many days as the tornado lasted hours to
generate and store in Rimla all this energy which was now falling useless,
or rather mischievous, upon the face of the ocean. Could they not yoke the
cyclone as they had yoked the billows and the winds, the rivers and the
snows, the lightnings and the central fires of the earth? There was nothing
impossible to a people who had tamed the raging of the volcano and the
earthquake. The difficulty was the very greatness of the force. Any

machinery they might erect would be trampled to pieces by the brute power
of the giant they yoked. Here was a problem worthy of their most
imaginative men, of their most inventive faculties.
Not a year had passed before a trial was made, and within a decade the
machinery was complete for storing the energy of the tempests. An
immense cave was hollowed out in the rocks of Lilaroma, and its mouth
was extended out into the ocean for miles by means of lava bastions. In it
was placed enough of the alloy called labramor, or electricity sponge, to
take in trillions of horse-power of electric force. At first cables containing
millions of wires were floated out towards the coming tornado and electric
fields were raised in the air to tap the energy of the blackness. This was
continued afterwards to some extent; but it was found that, if only the
clouds were electrically tapped, most of the current transmitted itself to the
receivers in the cave by means of the water of the ocean. It was thus
unnecessary to float out towards the storm more than one cable, so binding
to the shore a great raft which held up many labrolans or electricity milkers
towards the blackening sky. They acknowledged that they lost by this
water-transmission much of the energy emitted from the clouds; for the
ocean bore it away in all directions; but they got as much of it as they
needed to fill their storehouse, and they killed the cloud monster; at least it
floated away across the horizon blowing a mere gale that could do no havoc
except upon the careless and unforethinking.
One of the most singular effects of this new contrivance was to rid the
sea in the neighbourhood of the island of its teeming life and to precipitate
to the bottom the matter that floated in the water. For weeks after, we could
see the rocks or streaming weeds in the depths as clearly as if it were an
ocean of air. Its emerald or azure had vanished, and white light poured
down into the hitherto unfathomed hollows and valleys. There could we see
the dead denizens sway idly with the forests of marine vegetation and here
and there the bulk of some monster lay tangled in the herbage. Only by
degrees and after some months did the colour and opacity return to the
waves and the myriad life stream from other regions into the void. The
currents that swept past the coasts bore down the suspended particles from
other seas; and with them came new fish and their parasites.
Until these came a new danger to the health of Limanora threatened. A
few days after the tornado, the precipitated organisms began to rise to the

surface of the water and underneath the hot sun to form breeding-grounds
for the dangerous microbes of the air. Up against the bastions of rock beat
the stench of the living death. A plague threatened for a brief time; but they
were not a people to remain passive in presence of such a danger, even
though they could easily prevent its worst results by remedial measures.
They sank the dead organic masses again by means of a charge of
electricity, and then the deeper currents that brushed their shores swept the
corruption into the great valleys of the ocean-bed, there to be embalmed for
geological ages hence.
They regretted that they should be the instruments of this great waste of
life before it had fulfilled the purpose of its stage of development; but their
regret was tempered by the thought that it was a low and feeble stage, that
an infinity of such existence would not weigh in the balance with one day’s
advance of a single Limanoran, and that the energy set free by this
wholesale dissolution of organisms was still ready for other embodiments in
the universe. The worst effect they feared was upon their own natures; to
destroy life or deal with it frivolously was one of the worst offences against
their humanity, for it introduced into the mind a brutalising element.
Respect for life in all its forms was one of the truest tests of a civilisation,
they held.
And the Lilamo were, almost as much as the physicians, imbued with
reverence for human life and with the sense of the importance of preserving
it and giving it the longest opportunity in the individual to gain its highest
possibility. They had to protect their race from all external foes. They had
therefore to study climatic changes and watch the sanitary conditions of the
island. Sanitation meant primarily the expulsion of all hostile clirolanic life
and the prevention of all conditions that would attract it or form its
breeding-ground. They were especially interested in the magnetic and
electric peculiarities of Limanora and of the section of the globe in which
they lived; for these affected not only the health and spirits of the people,
but the amount of minute life that harboured in the earth or floated in the
atmosphere. They could by an increase of these elements rid an
unwholesome district of its unhealthy conditions; and yet the inhabitants of
it could not remain whilst the process of purification was going on. Too
much magnetism or electricity in the earth or air would endanger the
nervous balance of the human frame. The test instruments in the lava wells

were frequently examined to find the electric state of any section of the
island; and one central electrometer was constantly recording the electric
state of the atmosphere in all parts of it. Thus were they able to recharge by
means of their apparatus whatever localities were found defective, and tap
those that had a superfluity; and over the country at night the flame-like
streamers lit up the darkness here and there. But this occurred at rare
intervals, for it was only in certain conditions of the sun that the earth
sponged up more electricity than was good for the highest life upon its
surface.
The storm-cone as a rule was enough for sanitation. By its wind force it
could drift all dangerous clouds of moisture or of bacterial life past
Limanora. By its electric-darting powers the heart could be squeezed out of
storms before they struck the shores. It regulated the rainfall, depositing the
contents of clouds by day far out upon the sea and by night upon the
thirsting land. Sultry blacknesses that would otherwise float past with only
stifling effect were tapped, first for their electricity and then for their rain.
Storms of dust that now and again darkened over the circle of fog could be
precipitated into the ocean partly by electricity, partly by the blasts of the
storm-cone. The atmosphere was kept singularly pure and free from
deleterious germs or particles, and few nights passed without a drenching
shower cleansing the whole lower portion of the island. The peak of
Lilaroma drew to it like a magnet all the masses of moisture that collected
within many hundred miles of it; and a little manipulation would break
these up into refreshing night showers that swept its slopes and the plateaux
and levels below; and, in order to prevent the destructive floods that this
might produce in the rivers, the shoulders of the mountain and its deep
valleys bristled with great forests which sponged up the falling moisture
and let it down gently from hour to hour into the bastioned channels.
Climate was to this people as much a matter of management as food and
its production. They could modify it to fit any change in the conditions or
necessities or purposes of life. To be at the mercy of the forces of nature
was a state of existence in what they now considered their barbarous past. It
was only the unforeseen that had them at a disadvantage; and the
unforeseen was to them now only the cosmic. As the planetary system
shifted through space, it had to encounter conditions and modes and degrees
of energy and life that nothing short of omniscience could anticipate; but

they were beginning to master the secret of many of those unexpected
changes of condition. The astro-sciential families had been classifying for
centuries the symptoms that accompanied these in the appearance of the sun
or of one or other of the planets. With their innumerable delicate
instruments for recording and analysing the electric, magnetic, luminous,
and heat-vaporous state of distant space, they could see afar off the
beginnings of cosmic disturbances and anticipate their ultimate direction;
and in many cases they could guard Limanora against the more patent and
destructive effects of magnetic and electric storms and of great waves of
heat or light.
Yet there was much to master in the new cosmic conditions that from
time to time beset the earth or the planetary system. Some seemed to arise
so suddenly that no observation could have anticipated them. Especially
was this the case with living drift, into shoals of which the universe struck,
the spawn of undeveloped worlds. Hence came new diseases so widespread
as to be plagues. These generally evaded the fine instruments of the astro-
scientist, till they had reached the very atmosphere of the earth; for in the
interstellar spaces they led so meagre a life and were spread so thinly and
widely that they scarcely intercepted the light or other forms of energy from
the sun or other systems. Yet the imaginative families and the inventors
were struggling towards some more delicate instrument, which would
observe and record the presence of interstellar material life.

CHAPTER XIV
CHOKTROO

T HE Lilamo were usually occupied in these sanitary duties, but at times
the other section of their defence of Limanora claimed their attention. I
had had good reason to know the force of the lilaran, or storm-cone, in
my attempt to arrive in the island. Had it not been decided to permit our
entrance, our perseverance would have failed of the attainment of our
object.
I was soon to witness a marvellous display of the defensive and
repulsive powers of the storm-cone. For some years after the first period of
my novitiate and my partial admission to privileges as a citizen with which
this period ended, there had been observed throughout the archipelago a
movement which spread with considerable rapidity. It was one of the
amusements of the Limanorans to watch the comedy of life upon the other
islands through the idrovamolan, or instrument for distance seeing and
hearing, which they had fixed high up the mountain. On a floating strip of
irelium, that could be projected far into the sky, scenes beneath the horizon
could be mirrored and watched through this instrument and through other
instruments for reducing distance. The sounds, too, that rose from the scene
re-echoed from the under-surface of the floating mirror, and could be
magnified by the makrakoustic part of the idrovamolan into their original
volume. A rarer and more difficult instrument was one which combined
with this power of seeing and hearing at a great distance that of noting the
magnetism working in a community even under the horizon.
Recently they had found that they could dispense with the floating
mirror and reflector. The ether was their transmitter of all they wished to see
or hear at a distance. Through it passed electric waves from even
immeasurable distances, whilst the sky itself formed a sufficiently complete
mirror for reflecting whatever was occurring under the horizon. By recent
discoveries and inventions they were enabled to transform electric impulses
into the scene or sound that gave them out into the surrounding air. Their
new instruments would tap the occurrences at any point on any given line or

in any given direction. They were now independent of any artificial medium
for their knowledge of the outside world. The receivers of their new
idrovamolan were every moment recording and analysing whatsoever
occurred along the line in which it was directed; and its transformers were
constantly translating the electric records into the forms or sounds which
originally sent out the impulses; it was so constructed as to prevent the
confusion of waves that came from different points on the route, for it
moved with the swiftness of light or, if required, with that of electricity.
These new modifications gave them hope that they would soon be able to
see and hear much of what goes on in universes which, though invisible, yet
transmit luminous and electric waves sufficiently strong to affect their
telescopic instruments, and that the straggling rays of light or electricity
might be transformed into the scenes and sounds which gave them birth.
As it was, the Limanorans were able to watch all that was going on in
the islands around them. During their leisure hours, when it was their duty
as well as their pleasure to relax the mind, they would sit and observe the
life of what they called their menagerie. To them, indeed, the whirling eddy
of existence with its ambitions and crimes, its luxury and misery, in the
archipelago around seemed little more than the antics of monkeys or the
internecine appetites of wild beasts. The scenes were generally amusing in
the ape-like vanities and mimicries they exhibited. Sometimes they were
offensive and even repulsive in their filth or brutalities. How beings formed
like themselves could endure the grossness of their luxuries and the falsity
and hollowness of their most admired social displays was to them a
bewildering problem. Even the best of these islanders were as far behind the
Limanorans in true human qualities as they thought themselves in advance
of apes. The daily observation of these creatures so humanly endowed and
yet so foul and blind in act was often too much to bear for any length of
time; the most repulsive scenes were those of what was considered high
life, of courts and courtly circles, of rulers and leaders of act and thought.
“Who can bear the horror of their intrigues and hypocrisies, their cruel
trampling of the fallen, their hideous fawning on the successful, their
insolent pride and intolerance of the weak!” I often heard exclamations like
this from the lips of the watchers as they turned away from the idrovamolan
with a shudder. The combination of ape and bully, of reptile and vapourer
was, in the thoughts of this people, the lowest depth to which human nature
could fall; and it was the usual and most envied form in the high social life

of most of these islands. The barbarism and ignorance of the poor and
downtrodden marked a less retrograde phase of humanity. The sight of the
posturings and scrapings, the insolence and spaniel manners of the higher
classes served every day to deepen the horror of exile and to frighten every
Limanoran from anything that would lead even to the slightest
retrogression. Had it not been for this wholesome effect upon their minds,
they would have long ago abandoned the custom of watching this beast
spectacle of retrograde and showy civilisation, so much pain mingled with
their amusement at it. They knew that their pity was vain; for it would take
unremitting effort for thousands of years to raise these peoples to the
Limanoran level, if the Limanoran missionaries had not in the meantime
been dragged down to the lower level; and these thousands of years could
be better spent in attaining higher and higher ideals in their own life. The
task, they knew, was as hopeless as if these descendants of their degenerate
exiles should attempt to drag the lower animals up to their stage of human
development, and this irremediable nature of their state added to the pain of
the observers.
Had the habit of watching the comedy of their menagerie been given up,
the Lilamo would have still had to observe the enactment of history in the
surrounding islands. It was part of their duty of defence to anticipate all
armaments against Limanora; and they had discovered that there was
unusual excitement amongst the various peoples since the arrival of the
Daydream in their waters. It was evident that this formed an epoch in the
history of the archipelago. The Lilamo reported the movements of the
portentous smoke-pennoned ship which sailed in the teeth of all winds like
their own ships of the air. What was to prevent it approaching Limanora in
spite of the force of the storm-cone? The thought brought the first trace of
fear into the breasts of this people; for, once a foreign element had been
able to force its way into their midst, how could they prevent moral
contamination and swift retrogression? Their advance would crumble away
in a few centuries, nothing but their material progress being likely to
survive the incursion of barbarism.
It was imperative that new measures of defence be adopted. It was then
that the forces of Rimla had been enormously increased, thus making it
possible for most of its energy to take the electric form in the storm-cone.
With this they would be able to repel the new monster with so much metal

in its bosom; they would play with it as with a toy on the water. All my
wanderings had been narrowly watched, my landing in Aleofane, my escape
from it, my sojourn in Tirralaria and ascent of Klimarol, my companionship
with Sneekape and my scorn of him, my sympathy with the refugees in
Nookoo, and my friendship with Noola. Nothing escaped their attention,
and my character was analysed in the most minute way by deductions from
the details of my conduct. It was decided that, if I showed eagerness and
persistence enough, I should be allowed to land with Noola; but that my
fire-ship and my men should be blown off from the coast.
Since then the affairs of the archipelago had been observed as narrowly
as before, and especially the wanderings and history of the Daydream. As I
expected, it passed finally into the possession of Broolyi, and the new ideas
and methods it brought into the warfare of this isolated zone of the world
made an era in its history. A great military organiser had arisen; and he had
by the potency of his will moulded Broolyi into a unity which with the help
of new fire-ships built on the model of my yacht had brought the other
islands into subjection. Even the aristocratic and refined Aleofane with its
subtle government and all-powerful central institutions had to bow its neck
to the yoke. This strange romance had been enacting for more than a
decade; and the Limanorans had been watching it, at first with amusement,
and afterwards with resolution and clear purpose. They knew the whole of
this subjugative process was based on hypocrisy and injustice and
bloodshed, but it was not worse than the methods of political existence it
displaced; it only meant the substitution of one vicious ideal for others as
vicious. There would be more movement and activity for a time, but as soon
as the masterful will had vanished, there would be a quick return to the old
lazy luxury in the few and lazy misery in the many. It had cost multitudes of
lives, and would cost many more before the military mania had burned
itself out; but of what worth were most of those lives to themselves or to the
world? They succeeded, where they did succeed, only in sustaining
themselves wretchedly and perpetuating a strain of existence that was, if
changed at all, tending downwards. The new spectacle was more
sanguinary, but not one whit more dismal than the ones the Limanorans had
witnessed for many generations. The misery was irremediable, the standard
of existence was so low. To fence it off like a plague was all that could be
done.

When I sat down to the idrovamolan I soon discovered the master of
this transformation scene. I heard in Broolyi from all the entrenched camps
and the towns loud huzzas and cries of “Long live Choktroo!” Turning the
line of sight to the capital, the conflagration of cries which swept the
crowded streets soon led my eye to the centre of the far-reaching magnetic
thrill, the square of the imperial palace. There I saw step out on a balcony
and bow to the enthusiastic populace a little firm-set figure that seemed to
awaken memories in me. I strengthened the power of vision in order to
examine the face more keenly, and, as a great burst of “Long live our
emperor! Long live Choktroo!” kindled and blazed athwart the city, the
identity of the little conqueror broke upon my consciousness.
It was my cabin-boy, Jock Drew, whom I had rescued from a life of
degradation, if not ultimate infamy, in his native village. His father, the
local chimney-sweep, a man of vigorous but small physique, had
succumbed to the fate of so many of his trade, and swept his throat hourly
with the fiercest of whiskey. His mother, a brave, strong little peasant girl,
had died early of the effort to master this thirsty piece of humanity that had
been tied to her, and his vice. The boy had the maternal lines in his nature,
strong will, great courage, and fiery passion. It stirred my pity to see him
struggle with such a mean destiny, doubtless to sink hopelessly into the
ditch. He had been shielding himself from the temptation that his drunken
father set before him by living in a world of penny romance. His
imagination was strung to its highest pitch by the gory pages of his hard-
won treasures. When he heard of my proposed expedition to the other side
of the world, he came and pleaded for even the most menial position on
board the Daydream. I was only too eager to rescue him from the hideous
fate before him, and engaged him as cabin-boy.
After he came on board, some of the men were inclined to patronise
him, and, when he resisted their approaches and grew sulky, to apply a
rope’s end to him. I had to stand between him and them, even though I saw
that in the end he would have the best of the quarrel; for he was strong of
build and violent in temper, and only controlled himself, I could see, that he
might have the surer and more complete revenge. He was a solitary, musing
boy, and I thought to draw him from his solitude by interesting him in
scientific and philosophical books; but he returned with the greater gusto to
his penny series of lives of the great pirates, robbers, warriors, and

conquerors. The only section of the Daydream’s library which could seduce
him from his loved studies was that containing history and adventures. The
crew, as was natural, held the studious little recluse too cheap; and
occasionally felt the sting of his tongue when they bantered him; but his
melodramatic manners and attitude, copied from the coloured
representations of his heroes in his favourite series, laid him open again to
their laughter and scorn. His mind was unwholesome with brooding over
gory achievements and tremendous ambitions. He often uttered absurd
boasts and gave himself airs that were incongruous with his minute figure
and menial position, and Jock Drew ceased to be the butt of the ship only
when I was present; but he never ceased to read and meditate. The laughter
of his shipmates drove him more and more into his books and into himself.
Later on in the voyage he extended his reading to books on naval
architecture and the management of the steam-engine, and at last would
spend hours assisting the engineer below. He came to know every part of
the machinery and every secret of its construction and management. Indeed,
the chief engineer acknowledged that in case of his illness he had an able
successor on board. The guns and all the ironwork of the ship drew his
attention next, and he came to be respected for his practical knowledge of
every part; when anything needed mending, it was he who was ultimately
called in to give advice or aid. Slowly he rose to be the real master of the
Daydream, even though he continued to be laughed at for his heromimic
airs and his occasional boasts. He had by his reading and studies made
himself essential to every man on board, and his strong will exacted
outward respect, if not obedience to him, in return. It was strange to see the
revolution in the ship’s crew during their voyaging about the archipelago.
When I came on board again, I saw that, though they continued a semblance
of their old bantering, they had in their hearts begun to bow before the boy
of twenty. The very gall of their scorn and of his menial position had driven
him into this slow but striking revolt.
And here I saw the result. His boyhood, neglected and beaten, had given
the cunning and worldly wisdom and concentration of power that belong in
most to late maturity. The strength that had lain dormant for so many
centuries in his mother’s peasant race had gathered in him like a torrent.
The hard conditions of his youth had reined in the wildness and animality
which had run riot in his father’s debauchery. Hundreds of such masterful
natures, finding no sphere in their native locality to give scope to the long-

dammed-up powers of their race, waste themselves in chafing against their
petty surroundings and die with the reputation of miniature devils. The
focussed energy of two long-suppressed races had in this case found its
career and scope, and a diabolic conflagration was the consequence in this
isolated region of the world. The race of Jock Drew had never before
blossomed; now that it had found the fit soil, it had flowered portentously.
The misfortune was that his ill-moulded youth and his favourite reading
had left him naked of morality. He was not in this respect much worse than
the people whom he misled into war or than those whom he subjugated. He
had only more concentrated will and energy and a keener appreciation of
the means that would best satisfy his appetite for power. The complete
suppression of the desire through thousands of years of his peasant ancestry
made its ultimate manifestation on finding freedom of action all the more
tremendous. It grew with growing self-confidence; and confidence grew
with success. His bearing wholly altered during the wanderings of the
Daydream before I had abandoned her. He had grown erect and threw his
great chest out and held his large head up till he overawed his persecutors.
Seeing him only in a sitting position or looking only at his bust one would
have guessed him to be of lofty stature. Yet like his father and mother he
never rose above five feet in height; and as his face filled up with good fare
and the knowledge of his own powers it grew handsome and calm, seldom
showing the fierce brute slumbering underneath. His wonderful self-control
and reserve held him silent in circumstances where speech or action would
have revealed his innate folly or animality, and he learned the power of such
reserve, allied with sudden and decisive action, over the wills of others; he
saw that it throws an air of mystery round the individuality. So he refrained
from action till he had complete control of the circumstances and had
gathered such resources into his hands as would astonish his rivals or
enemies; silently, unscrupulously, he got to know the cards they held in
their hands, whilst he concealed his own under seeming inaction; then with
a sudden and unnerving move he threw all his forces upon them and
demoralised them. I had watched the method in the little intrigues and
conspiracies on shipboard, and I knew when I observed him through the
idrovamolan that he was the same Jock Drew, only more developed by his
astonishing successes.

He had found his opportunity when the Daydream finally anchored in
the chief harbour of Broolyi. There was much need of government after the
plague; the monarch and his family had fled and finally perished; and the
two rivals for the position were almost equally matched. There was prospect
of a long civil war. The wiser and stronger counsellors set up a republic, but
this was only a feeble stop-gap. The flames of civil war burst out in spite of
it.
Jock arrived at this stage of their history, and joined the staff of the
competitor for the throne who held the capital and the key of the public
treasury. He rapidly became prime adviser in the camp, and as soon as he
had attracted confidence in himself and his character he set his method to
work. He led an army out to attack the enemy, and completely routed them
by the suddenness of his action; he had led one half of his troops straight
out to meet the forces opposed to him, but he had sent the others round by a
secret path into their rear, and they burst simultaneously upon the enemy.
The surprise broke the spirit of the attacked and they fled in rout.
With wily stratagem he incited other officers to rival him, and took care
that they went out under disadvantageous conditions. They failed, and their
failures led to loud demands for Choktroo, as he came to be called. He now
got command of the whole of the resources of the state, and used them for
the making of guns and other surprises for the enemy. Meanwhile he
allowed the enemy to think that his party was wholly demoralised by
defeats, and they crept up towards the walls of the city in their excess of
confidence. He knew by his spies in their camp how vainglorious they had
become; but he allowed their bravado to rise to the pitch of foolhardiness,
and then, his preparations being made, he opened fire upon them, from all
sides. So complete was the rout, that the enemy disappeared from the
country around and took refuge in distant castles and forts.
His name grew into a power of itself, rousing enthusiasm wherever he
appeared and greatly terrifying his opponents. It was then that there began
the most striking part of his career. All the brave and able generals who
during the civil war had come up from the ranks were completely in his
power. He sent them out to master castles or detachments of the enemy, but
with such imperfect forces or supplies as would render them inactive. Their
individual talents snatched occasional small victories, but as a rule they
only prepared for ultimate victory by raising entrenchments and scouring

the country around. Whenever he discovered that in any part a general was
about to be successful in spite of his disadvantages, he hurried thither and
led the troops to victory. If the feebleness of an officer anywhere seemed
about to ensure defeat he marched reinforcements to his aid and turned it
into success. Whenever he suffered defeat himself, he always managed to
represent it as a brilliant success marred by the incompetence of some other
general. At last he grew weary of the guerrilla warfare and resolved that it
should end. So he withdrew his troops from siege-work and allowed the
rebels to gather confidence and to mass again. He sent several generals
against them with small armies. Their defeats gave the enemy still greater
boldness. They ventured nearer to the capital; and when they were defiling
through a pass he appeared on the heights with his guns. The two sections
of his army closed the mouths of the pass, and the finest array the rebels
had ever shown was shattered. The castles and forts soon surrendered. With
one acclaim Choktroo was elected emperor, and the candidate whom he was
supposed to be helping vanished from the scene.
His boyish reading had made him as much of an actor as he was by
nature an organiser. Before long the whole people of Broolyi were adoring
him as a god. Their passion was glory; and in him they had found the
incarnation of glory. No piece of work in the state so minute but, if
successful, he claimed as his own, even should it have been centuries old.
No act of his own but, if unsuccessful, he found a scapegoat for. He was
mean enough to steal and eavesdrop in his own household; he was bold
enough to outlie the foulest of his minions, to outface the most manifest
exposure of his crimes. He even dared to assume the rôle of divinity. He
ringed himself round with mystery and ceremonial, and when he did appear
in public made the appearance impressive by its display. He knew the effect
of silence, and cheapened neither himself nor his words. He organised the
state on military lines and made it centre in his personality.
He soon had exhausted the treasury and the resources of the country in
the civil war and in his public displays. Nor could he keep up his glory long
in inaction, even though it was an inaction of mystery. He must soon go to
war beyond the bounds of the island. There he could shine, there he could
get all the supplies he needed; but he had to keep up the farce the nation had
played for centuries of professing to keep the peace, for he had adopted the
title of the Prince of Peace. He had to make it appear that his wars were

forced on him by his neighbours, and for this invented an elaborate system
of diplomacies which enabled him to pick a quarrel and yet seem to have it
thrust upon him.
His first quarry was Aleofane; for it was the wealthiest island in the
archipelago. For years he kept up a show of alliance with it, till he had his
fire-ships ready, built under his direction on the model of the Daydream. He
racked his dominion to make guns and all kinds of firearms. When the
expedition was complete, he made a demand of Aleofane that had show of
reason and yet could not be complied with. It was refused, and his fleet was
outside the capital before it could make preparation. He sent some of his
ships to the other side of the island to land troops, and as these marched up
by land he disembarked the rest under protection of his guns. The first battle
decided the war. He dethroned the monarch of Aleofane and annexed the
island to his dominions, setting up a viceroy, with a strong force to support
him.
He drew new troops from the ranks of the people for service in other
islands. He impoverished those nobles who refused to join his court or his
staff. He broke the spirit of all who would not adore him, and he drained by
taxation the resources of the country.
With still larger armies and larger fleets he swept conquering over the
whole archipelago, till every people bowed before him. Those who
distinguished themselves in his wars or in his service he elevated to new
distinctions and titles. Those who died in his wars he beatified. With great
ceremony he would raise all the dead on one of his battle-fields to the rank
of sub-divinities, till his heaven was as crowded as his court. He did not
obliterate the old religions; but he overshadowed them, and his policy kept
subject to him the passion for glory in life and deification after death that
lurks in every human bosom. The active and the romantic were strung up to
enthusiasm by the magnetism of his name. Most thought it was his
personality which set their blood throbbing, but it was only that his deeds
and his histrionic power of magnifying them worked on their imaginations.
How wild their fervour I could scarcely have realised had I not observed it
with my own senses.
He had to keep moving and victoriously moving if his magnetism were
not to vanish. When his empire included all the islands in the archipelago

but the Isle of Devils in the centre, there was nothing for it but to attempt its
conquest. We heard him bluster out his favourite bombastic phrases, learned
from his penny romances and biographies. “Heaven is our ally, and who on
earth can stand against us? Is it not our mission, the mission of a god, to
chase all devils from the earth? Our last conquest shall be hell, and its
denizens shall die by fire and sword.” Utterances and proclamations like
this fired the imaginations of his soldiers, and they would have laid their
lives down at the moment for this fire-eater. What he had boasted or
threatened before, he had done, or had by astute fiction persuaded his
followers that he had done; and what limit was there to his deeds? If he said
that he would scale the heavens, they were certain he would do it. The
thought fused them into a unity and chased out of their breasts the panic
which the mere mention of the central isle produced.
He had not the traditional and hereditary ague-fit to overcome in his
blood, yet there was a new sinking of the heart when he thought of his task.
He had to reassure himself by wild rhodomontade, as he superintended the
building and armament of an enormous fleet and the concentration of the
largest army the archipelago had ever seen. He could not pick a diplomatic
quarrel with his new victim; yet he must have at least the semblance of a
cause in order to put heart into his followers. He announced that he had sent
envoys to the Isle of Devils to open intercourse with it, but they were not
allowed to approach. Again and again had he tried this pacific measure, but
no heed had been given to him. Let vengeance be upon the heads of so
churlish and unjust a people! How could such poltroons and men-haters be
allowed to cumber the earth?
I watched the great fleet put out from Broolyi with its streamers of
smoke. We could have heard the acclamations almost with the unaided ear;
they rent the sky when Choktroo went on board his own fire-ship, which
was thrice the size of the largest of the others, and thrice more brilliantly
caparisoned. He passed with his favourite silent and self-absorbed look on
his face through the applauding crowds on to a raised platform in the stern,
reserved for him and his staff. Arrived there he paced silently with his chin
resting on his folded arms. He knew what an impression of godlikeness this
made on the crowd. Small though he was in stature, he doubtless seemed to
his followers and the people on the shore to take gigantic proportions.

I was amazed to see so little perturbation amongst the Limanorans. They
seemed to watch the whole scene as if it were a comedy. On the fleet
steamed, and yet there was perfect calm in the community; only the Lilamo
were at their posts on the peak of Lilaroma. The rest were peacefully seated
at the idrovamolans or busy with their usual avocations. I knew the
destructiveness of the great cannon that Choktroo had prepared, and the
distance they would carry. On this point indeed I had been consulted some
months before. I knew, too, how this people shrank from every act that
would involve the loss of a human life. How were they to repel this great
armament without whelming it in the ocean and drowning a large
proportion of those in the ships? Thyriel could throw no light on the
problem; we were both too young to be taken into the confidence of the
wise men or to know their designs. I could do nothing but watch the fleet
and then pass to my daily duties.
A night passed, and at dawn we could see the islands of smoke lie black
on the horizon; the ships themselves had not appeared. Choktroo evidently
knew that it was useless to conceal the expedition or its object from this far-
seeing people under the darkness of night. It was too well known
throughout the archipelago how penetrative was their gaze. He meant to
make his attack by day. Soon the funnels and the masts broke the sky-line.
Yet there was not a sound from the storm-cone. The slight wind had fallen;
everything favoured the invader. He could see through the translucent air
every feature of our island and almost every movement of its inhabitants as
soon as we could discern the human beings on board his ships with the
naked eye. Were they getting drawn into some gigantic trap? This thought
evidently occurred to the leader of the armament, as it occurred to me, for
the fleet lessened speed. I could see Choktroo, at a loss what to do, on his
poop consulting with his officers, who could help him little. Still the storm-
cone stood silent on the mountain-peak.
The bold step had to be taken; the order was given for advance. The
smoke again streamed in the rear of the fleet, and I could see the gunners
prepare for action and the sailors and soldiers set the boats ready for
launching. What had happened to the Lilamo? Were they all asleep? Was
the progress of the island at last to be trampled under the feet of this brutal
soldier and his forces? The fire-ships were almost within cannon-shot of the
shore; there puffed out the preliminary whiff from the side of Choktroo’s

steamer and the ball fell with a roar into the ocean between. Another five
minutes and matters would be past remedy. Yet there was perfect calm
among the Limanorans. I controlled my excitement and watched the fleet.
Everything was bustle on board, and when I sat down to the idrovamolan all
sounds were jubilant and boasting. This Isle of Devils was at last to have
her master. This proud isolation was at last to be broken. Such exclamations
I could hear from the gunners as they loaded and ran out their guns.
All was silence, for all was ready for the word of command. Choktroo
paced his poop in scarce-controllable glee. His thoughts were doubtless
stretching out beyond the fog circle to the countries he had left behind him
with his boyhood, other worlds for him to conquer. His arms were folded
and his eye was turned inward; he knew that the whole expedition was
awaiting his nod. Soon he stopped stone-silent and stiff, as if to give the
decisive word. I waited the action, but he still stood moveless. I looked over
the ship; there was his staff awaiting his beck as if petrified. Every man was
at his post, but not a muscle moved; the eyes stared as if they belonged to
the dead. My glance took in the other ships; all were as silent and still as the
grave. The whole armament seemed turned to stone.
Then there fluttered down upon the vessels human figures that I
recognised as of the Lilamo. In a moment a Limanoran pilot stood at the
helm of each fire-ship; and as if by nature the whole fleet turned
majestically round and made for the shelving beach of a low uninhabited
island underneath the horizon. On and on they sped straight for the shore,
round whose margin not the least fringe of surf whitened. Through the
idrovamolan I could hear the grating keels as they struck the sand and
pebbles at full speed. The crash seemed to awaken the crews and the
soldiers, who rubbed their eyes as if roused from a dream. Before them the
bows of their ships were burrowing themselves in the blown sand of the
beach; but already I could see the pilots winging their way through the sky
back to Limanora.
There was a silent power in the lilaran which I had not investigated: its
power of magnetism. This it could exercise several miles off; but it grew
feebler with the distance. In this aspect, then, the lilaran could not be used
as a weapon of defence far from the shore of Limanora. If, however, there
was a mass of iron or like magnetisable metal in the ship that contained its
victims, its power had been discovered to be as great far as near. It was only

recently that they had so far developed their personal power of arresting the
consciousness by sudden sleep-petrifaction as to be able to exercise it at a
distance. This they accomplished by material aids to the magnetic faculty.
The sudden flashing of brilliant objects before the eyes and the use of
powerful magnets had been found to intensify the somnifactive power of
the eye and the magnetic sense. This led them to make experiments with the
concentrated power of magnets all brilliant with irelium jewels. The result
was that they found the somnifactive power to reside even more in things
than in persons. They tried it through the lilaran on Limanorans of the most
powerful will at the farthest corner of the island, and found it to be the more
effective the more power they concentrated and the more iron or metals of
similar quality were near the patient.
This result had been reached about the time they had come to see that
the invasion of their island by Choktroo was inevitable without some other
than the mere wind-power of the lilaran. Step by step the Lilamo brought
their new weapon to perfection; at any moment they could concentrate the
forces of Rimla into this faculty of the lilaran. They experimented on
Limanorans in boats out at sea, and finally could tabulate the magnetic
powers at various distances. This explained to me the flashings I had often
seen on the horizon and had taken for an effect of the idrovamolan; but they
were too near the surface of the sea for that. This explained the perfect calm
with which the Limanorans watched the approach of Choktroo’s expedition
and the thrilling keenness of the flashes that swept over his fire-ships.
I watched for many days the effect of this great blow upon the nature
and fortunes of my old cabin-boy. Over his immediate staff and army he
was able to regain his full sway as soon as they recovered from the shock;
but his power over the other islanders was completely shaken. Bodies of
them launched the boats from the steamers and made off for their own
islands before the leaders were aware of their intentions. The moment
Choktroo realised the position he turned his still uninjured guns in the
direction of the sea and commanded all issue from the beach where his
ships were buried. For wholesome example he sank several boats which had
almost got out of his reach. Then he set his army to dig canals around one
of his fire-ships; but no sooner was she ready for floating than the whole
force of the lilaran was turned in her direction; the waves rose and a single
night’s surf completely undid the labour of days. The ship was as deeply

embedded as ever; and her sisters had almost disappeared beneath the sand-
dunes. The weight of metal in them shortened the process of burial.
It was clear that nothing could be done to save the expedition or bring
its material back to Broolyi. Before many days we saw the soldiers embark
somewhat sadly in the boats and find their way across the ocean to the
adjacent islands. Piecemeal the whole army retraced its steps to Broolyi.
It was not likely that Choktroo would allow this slur to rest on his fame
and eat into his power like rust, for there was clear evidence that his
influence over even the Broolyians had greatly suffered. By means of his
advertising and his histrionic abilities he had brought them to believe that
he was invincible; they now began to feel that he had the same limitations
as themselves: he was powerless against the magic of the Isle of Devils. All
his wiles were needed to check the spread of panic and distrust. He first of
all minimised the defeat in his proclamations, and before many months
were over he had come to speak of it as a victory marred by the invincible
powers of nature. He had been quick to recognise the similarity of the
phenomenon to that we had experienced in the Daydream when running the
gauntlet of the fog circle, and he sent out party after party to explore the
ring of mystery and to come back with tales of its magical powers of
inducing sleep. Thus was he soon able to convince the archipelago that the
failure of his great expedition was due, not to the inhabitants of the Isle of
Devils, but to the forces of nature. He had in his own eye and will great
mesmeric power, and by practice was able to develop it into something that
he could exercise at pleasure. Then he made public exhibition of his
capacity in the various islands. He threw numbers into mesmeric sleep, nor
would he or could he release them from its thrall. They became his willing
slaves and lived only to please him. A milder form of mesmeric fascination
he used in order to rivet his despotism on his armies. He would address
sections of them with bombastic self-glorification of his deeds and powers
and with flatteries of them and their glorious courage. His personal
magnetism worked upon them as they gazed at him, and by the close of his
speech he had them enthralled to his will.
It was not long before he was feared as a magician by all who did not
mesmerically worship him; and tens of thousands were eager to do the most
wicked and shameful deeds, if only he bade them. Yet he dared not shrink
from another fall with the inhabitants of the Isle of Devils; else even this

preternatural fascination that he exercised might vanish. For years he racked
the wealth of the islands and built an enormous fleet of still more powerful
fire-ships, and armed it with still more powerful guns. To supply the funds
for the expedition, those who were not trained fighting men became slaves,
who toiled for him all but their few hours of sleep. Rebellion against this
galling and impoverishing despotism was slowly forming in the breasts of
the people. Many of them were disappearing mysteriously. They had
betaken themselves to unapproachable caverns like Nookoo, and my
dreamer of Swoonarie was arming them with his plague-pellets. A few more
months and revolution would have broken out against the despot, and he at
least would have perished; but the expedition sailed in all its pomp, again
deeply impressing the imaginations of the islanders. This time he had taken
precautions against the somnifaction of his army by means of a sleep-
expelling drug. Every man was furnished with a dose of it to take as soon as
they came near the dreaded isle. The Lilamo had been busy for some time, I
had seen; but the Limanorans were as unconcerned at this approach as at the
former one. What new defence had they? I could see no more preparation
than there had been on the previous occasion. The calm which prevailed
reassured me; yet soon I grew restless with the fear that this fire-eating
cabin-boy with the mystery in his eyes would sully the shores of Limanora
with his vulgar ambitions.
My fear became alarm as I saw on the horizon the smoke of the fleet
and heard through the idrovamolan the shout of triumph rise from the army
when the peak of Lilaroma had burst on their view. I could see each man
drink his drug; and I thought that all was lost. Suddenly there came a roar
from every ship; and I could see that it accompanied a plume of steam that
escaped from the sides. The boiler of every fire-ship had evidently been
punctured; and soon I could see that it cost those on board unceasing effort
to keep afloat. The soldiers were about to take to the boats when a deeper-
mouthed roar numbed every other sound. It was the lilaran at work, and the
whole fleet soon vanished over the horizon before its compulsive blast.
The puncturing had been accomplished by submarine action. The
Lilamo had sent through the waters their floating batteries, which by nicely
adjusted weights lay beneath the surface right on the track of the fleet. The
electric cables by which they were secured could shift them hither and
thither; and through them immense force could be applied, sending a volley

of keen darts up towards whatever iron there was above them. These darts
had entered the hulls of the ships just beneath the water-line and made their
way into the iron of the engines; one or other told on the boilers and
disabled the ships. The electric floats were unseen by the expedition, and
the wounding of the fleet was as mysterious and magical as the sleep had
been on the previous attempt. Panic seized on every soldier and sailor, and
they thanked their gods when the blast of the lilaran hurried them to the
shelving beach of a low island and they heard the keels grate on shingle and
sand. They scrambled on shore through the surf and found shelter from the
wind behind the mounds that covered the former fleet or under their gaunt
ribs or sides.
But a new panic overcame them when they discovered that their leader
was gone and could nowhere be found. Then it was remembered that in the
worst of the storm which blew from Lilaroma a giant bird had swooped
down towards his ship and rested for a moment on the platform, where he
stood in solitary meditation, and as suddenly soared up again. It was two
messengers of the Lilamo who had been sent in one of their bird-shaped
airships to make an end of these warlike expeditions. They had alighted
beside Choktroo, and by the powerful means they commanded had sent him
into a deep sleep in spite of his drug; they tossed him into their airship and
in a few moments were high in the azure rushing before the blast of the
lilaran. Away they fled with him all day and all night across the belt of fog,
and having reached the outer world they let him down still tranced on the
shore of a lonely coral islet of the Pacific close to a group inhabited by a
savage and warlike tribe. Choktroo had their instincts and ambitions; let
him master the savages when he awakened. A wild beast could do no harm
amongst wild beasts.
His memory and example haunted the archipelago like an evil dream for
generations. Some thought that he had been borne aloft to heaven by a
messenger of the gods, and worshipped him as divine; his cruel tyranny and
wars goaded on his worshippers to wild fury of injustice and slaughter.
Others who were keener of brain and had perceived the earthly character of
their leader and his purposes were incited to like ambitions. The romance of
his life was glorified in verse and prose by every new school of literature
and fired the imaginations of boyhood to warlike exploits. War, piracy,
plunder came to be the favourite forms of dishonesty in the archipelago. It

was marvellous how much the peaceful and obscure suffered from the
romance of this cabin-boy’s adventures.
But no man of the islands dared again to approach the Isle of Devils.
Even he whom so many of them reputed a god had been unable to break in;
and the mishap to the last fleet had been more bewildering than that to the
first. Magical powers were possessed by the inhabitants of this island
without a doubt; there seemed to be no limit to their transcendence of the
order of nature. Evil they were, and the fear of them the Broolyians had to
endure in patience. Nor did it grow less from generation to generation.
Fancy never let the stories of the defeat of the great Choktroo rest; they
gathered to them features more and more terrible to contemplate. A halo of
dread and mystery is far more effective as a fence against human intrusion
than a halo of sanctity or even divinity. It cows the miscreant and the brute
in the human breast. The duties of the Lilamo in repelling the attacks of
men would vanish for hundreds of generations.
For Choktroo, his fate was a romantic contrast to that of his fame.
Reports were brought in by the idrovamolan or by flying messengers who
had ventured over the belt of fog. He was rescued by the neighbouring tribe
before he starved on the barren islet, only to be threatened with sacrifice to
one of their gods. A missionary who had some influence over the heathen
arrived at the moment of sacrifice and saved him. After learning their
language he worked his way by intrigues and assassinations and what they
thought magic up to the headship of the tribe. When he had made himself
secure in his power over them, he built a great fleet of war-canoes, and,
after mastering the groups of islands within range and enlisting their
warriors and canoes in his service, he set sail southward for some land they
knew not of. South and then east the fleet made way, his followers still
unalarmed. At last appeared the circle of mystery on the horizon. He gave
the word to row forward into it; but, before the command had reached the
outermost of the canoes, he was hurled from his platform into the sea, and,
as he rose to the surface, he was promptly speared by his own immediate
staff. Round swung the heads of the canoes by one simultaneous impulse.
Their chief had become a madman to think of entering that belt of mystery;
and away they paddled for very life; nor did they cease their frantic efforts
till the dark cloud had sunk beneath the horizon.

CHAPTER XV
THE DUOMOVAMOLAN OR COSMOPHONE

T HOUGH the Limanorans calmly pursued their regular employments
during these attempts at invasion, I had myself felt the uneasy spiritual
atmosphere that precedes and presages turmoil. None but the Lilamo
were engaged in preparation for defence; yet during all the years every
spirit was tense and giving out its energy in sympathy to this section of the
people. There was a palpable loss of nervous power in the community, for
they knew that by accident some joint in the arrangements might fail to
work and all the defence miscarry. Not till the bold disturber of their
progress was finally disposed of did the tension or the leakage of nerve-
energy cease. To be absorbed in mere war was to them the hades of human
society, and to have again sealed up their island from the intrusion of
degenerate souls was a happy epoch in their history.
While the whole community quivered with inward jubilance, two
momentary dangers threatened it: it might take some time to recover its
equilibrium; and its thoughts and interests, narrowed by the necessity of
defence against this threat from below, might be long in rising to the true
cosmic level. Some exceptional stimulus was needed to raise their lives and
aims, some appeal to the spirit, which would set them free from the
trammels of earth and all deteriorative excitement. Such liberation had been
by no means uncommon in their past, but no occasion for it had occurred
since I had entered on my novitiate, except in the case of individuals and
families; then I had been too busy with my training or too distant from the
household concerned to notice it.
Now it was to be a national purification of the nature, and I was to share
in it. Would this be a religious ceremony, a day of humiliation and prayer,
such as I had often witnessed in my old home after great national disasters
or during plague or famine? I had seen no churches or temples, no signs of
religious service, no acts of private worship. I had never heard anyone
speak of gods or priests or expiations. Was this at last to be the revelation of
the inner shrine, into which I had never been able to penetrate?

I had not long to wait for the solution of my problems. Purposes here
moved to conclusions with lightning swiftness, and when one impulse
stirred the people, there was needed no heralding to mass them in the
desired place. I found myself drawn with my proparents and Thyriel and her
household towards a massive building that stood upon a peak far up the
slopes of Lilaroma. There was no need of road or steps to it; wings made
the wide air the highway. Yet were there great terraces ramparting the sides
of the peak, and from the highest seawards there was a marvellous flight of
steps which, when the clouds hid Lilaroma, seemed to lead up into heaven.
I had often seen the edifice gleam high in the setting sun, yet there were so
many temple-like structures on the shoulders and peaks of the giant
mountain that it had ceased to excite inquiry. Now as we flew towards it its
titanic proportions and jewelled beauty seemed to dominate all the lower
world. The building, the most striking that I had ever seen, raised an
enormous circular dome of crystal to the sky, and around this were
innumerable smaller structures, which elsewhere would have bulked huge
to the eye. As we drew nearer, I saw that each crystal cupola, instead of
crouching low upon the terrace as I had thought at first, rose upon a lofty
and massive tower of great strength. What I had taken for smaller and
higher terraces and bastions were the walls of towers and square citadels
that seemed built to outlast the wars of Titans. Solid lava they were of
extraordinary thickness. There was nothing here of that slenderness and
delicacy which had made me compare their other buildings to lace-work.
The terraces and flight of steps I had seen from below were but the outer
flanks of the layer on layer of foundations laid upon the plateau to save the
structure from all but the deepest-sourced tremors.
As we entered the mighty portal, I felt that no storm or earthquake could
move it. It seemed a city sculptured out of the solid rock; but, as soon as we
were in, the sense of this massiveness vanished and the whole appeared as
we looked up fairy-like and gossamer. In any one of the vast temples
nothing but a film seemed to separate us from the azure sky. In the smaller
towers we gazed up a dark shaft roofed by a circle of sky, and the very stars
shone out upon our vision by day, so palpable was the column of darkness
above us.
We soon settled in our hanging rests under the great central dome.
Around us were thousands hung in mid-air in different attitudes of rest. Yet

the building sounded empty, so vast was it and so silent were all. The
slightest whisper rang across its great untrammelled spaces with the
sharpness of a word beside us. Not a column or beam or ornament broke the
harmonious simplicity of the spacious circle from vault to floor, from side
to side. Everyone by instinct kept still; for the mere rustle of a wing
appalled by its far-reaching effect. We even held our breath lest the sound
should break the colossal stillness. To me it seemed for a time frozen
silence.
I soon perceived that there was no effort in the self-repression of my
neighbours’ movements. They were entranced, their heads erect as if
catching the echo of some far-off music. To me there was as deep stillness
as before. I listened intently, but felt no change except a slight exhilaration;
an electric influence was pulsing around. To the electric sense in them some
great harmony was appealing. Yet there was more than this; for their eyes
were fixed intently on the dome. I looked up and felt awestruck. There on a
scale that seemed to match the sky of night I saw enacting the evolution of a
universe. In the blue vault a great sphere of glowing vapour was whirling
round; from it sprang off huge concentric rings, that one after the other,
themselves became whirling spheres ablaze with the intensity of white heat.
Step by step a system of earths revolving round a central sun was
developed. On one as it cooled we could see life appear and grow varied,
then fade away and finally vanish. Before the last tragedy had closed,
another had taken up the strain of existence, had run its course upon the
globe, and a third had stepped into the ranks of life-bearers. The torch of
generation was passed on from orbit to orbit, the central luminary ever
dimming its fires, till at last the system wheeled on through darkness,
seeming to have no purpose in the universe; but just as the last light
flickered and began to vanish from the surface of the sun, out of the
darkness seemed to rush another dead universe; through the eternities the
two had been approaching nearer and nearer, drawn by their common doom.
In a moment they had crashed together and out of the collision came a mist
of fire, that soon by whirling in space became again another and a larger
sphere of glowing vapour.
How impressive was this reincarnation of worlds! Deeper and deeper
the scene sank into the spirit, as the electric thrill which accompanied the
earlier steps of the process passed into dim-echoing music, translating all

we saw into sounds. A singular feature of their music was that it was never
produced in the same room in which it was to be listened to. The machinery
and the orchestra drown by their clack and clamour the soft footfalls of
harmony that are the only true spirit of music; this was their reason. They
had a contrivance in every large room, a huge-mouthed tube by which
inflowing music was softened or strengthened and which could if need be
raise a whisper into a thunder-peal; in this was a series of keys or stops, by
which any sound coming through it could be modulated. One key could
make the apparatus soundproof by filling its throat with a pledget of a
peculiar fibrous metal they had. One series could wring out the harshness of
any sound till it became soft as a much-reverberated echo. A second
magnified any sound, however soft, to the required loudness and volume,
and the whole was controlled by a minute key-board which could be held in
the hand and moved to any part of the room.
In this vast auditorium I could not see where the key-board was
managed; but he must have been a poet-musician who manipulated it, so
delicately did the volume of sound adapt itself to the mood of those who
watched the growth and decay of worlds. Now it swelled with the collision
into thunderous harmony; again as a crisis approached in the tragedy it fell
to the low music of far-echoing nature-sounds. At times this marvellous
opera of universes died away to my hearing; yet my neighbours lay in
trance as if still catching harmonies that mastered the soul. I knew nothing
but the vague electric thrill that passes through the nature at some great
thought. Harmonies as colossal touched their electric sense as those which
before had come through their hearing. I longed to follow them into those
spheres of melodious being that were still beyond me.
I came afterwards to know the astronomic family that had arranged
these wonderful effects upon the soul through the various senses, and I saw
the mechanism by which they were contrived. Its simplicity was what
struck me most, when I remembered how complicated were the sensuous
modes of appeal to the spirit. Out of innumerable sonoscripts and
electrographs impressed by the world of stars upon their records, they had
selected those that would fit together and raise the souls of the listeners to
the sublimity of seeing the infinite cosmos.
This daylight representation of the music of the spheres was but a
prelude to a more impressive effect as night fell. By some ingenious

mechanism the immense dome was changed; instead of a semi-opaque
crystal, on which could be enacted a mimic evolution of systems, there slid
into its place an enormous lens, which gathered the sky ten thousand
thousand times magnified into the focus of a smaller lens; and upon this
was turned another magnifier, which threw upon some light-bearing film in
front of us a picture of the sky a million million times the size of what
appeared to the unaided eye. Here we saw enacting the infinite tragedy of
the cosmos. We could turn aside and view the azure above us strewn with
its silver eyes, and the contrast raised the soul to unknown heights of
sublimity. In the picture the worlds lived and moved, and the number of
those that filled the spaces behind was past all counting; we seemed to have
drawn as near to some of the golden centres of systems as lightning flight
from the beginning of our earth would have brought us.
And what gave transcendent sublimity to the scene was the strange
music that accompanied it. By means of the duomovamolan, a marvellous
instrument which reversed the processes of Oolorefa, we heard the harmony
that the worlds made in their motions. As they moved across our lens and
round and across one another, their movements, enormously magnified,
awakened such harmony of sounds as never embodied soul had heard. Their
flight and their magnetism affected an irelium film in such a way that the
complicated lines and curves and figures produced upon it translated
themselves into the music which would have produced these figures in the
ooloran. This people had long practised architecture by music in Oolorefa
before they thought of attempting the reverse process and converting form
and colour into melody; but once thought of, it was soon accomplished, and
the oorolan was the result. The shadowy figures which any melody
produced could be made themselves to reproduce it.
From the use of this little instrument it came to be seen that their
telescopes could by a little modification and addition be made to tell out in
music the scenes they witnessed and recorded. Step by step the astronomic
families advanced till at last they reached the wonderful duomovamolan, or
cosmophone, which, facing the heavens unbrokenly for generations, stored
up the music of the spheres in their various changes. It was this instrument
we heard as we gazed into the hitherto unfathomed depths of night. The
worlds themselves in their motion played upon it, and through it upon our
souls. No human thought could have conceived the marvels of harmony that

rang through the great auditorium. We felt as if we had been present at the
creation of the universe and our thoughts ranged through infinite space. A
dream of the most tremendous kind was being enacted before our waking
senses. How poor seemed the whole long history of life upon our earth!
Thought was the only element in us akin with infinity or like to last through
eternity, the thought that could thus span the abysses between the systems
of worlds and comprehend these cosmic melodies still ringing in our ears.
When the treasured-up music of the spheric movements of the past
ceased, the night itself, the very sky we were contemplating began to stir
fresh harmonies through the lenses of the subsidiary towers. We gazed, and
the stars in their silver motions, motions unnoticed by the naked eye, told
their tale in sweet harmony. These new symphonies were simpler than the
operas of creation and decadence that we had been listening to and, after
those titanic effects, seemed almost monotonous, so few complications had
they. They soothed the souls lost in the sublimities of infinite space and
time and we came gentlier down to the earth on which our life was cast. We
still trod on air, our heads were still amongst the stars, but the earth was
near us and counted as one of the myriad worlds.
As night swung towards the mid-vault, the music faded and seemed to
sound from far valleys. At last it sank into a lullaby, the lullaby of slow-
moving constellations. Sleep came on me by unconscious, scarce-heard
footfalls, and through its magic portal the universe of dreams appeared.
Amongst the stars I flew, never-resting, eager to visit and know all. Here I
communed with beings so like me and yet so far above me that I yearned to
remain with them; but on I had to speed. Then I rested on a world still
dominated by the rudimentary stages of life-energy, and so repulsive were
the sights and sounds there that I fled shrieking from it. Next came a sphere
so filmy and translucent I scarcely knew how it persisted in tiding the
storms of space; yet here, too, was life, life so noble, so immaterial, that I
felt ashamed of my body and its sensuous methods of knowledge; so
ethereal were the beings there that the common forces of gravitation and
attraction seemed to have no power over them; so far below them did I feel
myself to be in the process of evolution that I had not the heart to remain.
Away into space I winged, till a dark orb drew me towards it, shone on by
suns of the most fantastic and ill-omened colours. Here, too, was a
manhood not unlike that of earth, yet so sinister that it seemed an orb of

devils; the forms were graceful; the faces had a beauty of their own, but
shone with such evil meaning that they fascinated like snakes; amongst
them I could recognise the great conquerors and monarchs and warriors and
colossal criminals whose faces or the representations of whose faces I had
seen upon earth; war and pillage were their occupations; cunning and force,
hypocrisy and arrogance, were their weapons. In horror I fled from the sight
of their internecine passions and into the depths of the night I sped on. So
varied was the constitution of the orbs that I approached, so marvellous the
range of the kinds of beings inhabiting them, that my mind seemed to sink
under the task of imagining them. Everything was in transition, there was
no rest for any form of energy in the cosmos. On it must sweep towards a
higher transformation or a lower. I saw beings that seemed to be the very
acme of creation, so beautiful and noble were they, so purged of all
grossness and materiality; yet ever beyond them I found some form they
looked up to and yearned to reach. Below me I could see on endless orbs
lower and lower kinds of energy receding into darker night, yet ever
pressing upwards, step by step. What an eternity of ascent was before them!
Looking up, my soul was drawn to some great centre my eyes could not
discern; the exhilarant force seemed to give me wings finer and nobler than
those of my body. With infinite longing I left my material part behind
floating slowly in space. A trance came upon me as I flew upwards with
lightning speed and I swooned with the ecstasy of final achievement.
Then I awoke, still lying in my pendulous rest. Morning had broken and
the cosmic strains had died away. This dream-flight had been but the climax
of the purification. Such music, such electric impulse had been poured
about us as we slept, that our spirits could not but accomplish these
imaginary voyages through space and time. Without this sublime uplifting
into the diviner realms of ether our souls might have fallen back to the
mean purposes and ambitions of earth induced by the fears of the invasion
and the necessities of its repulse. Now we walked like angels amongst men,
a wall of eternity separating us from the gross needs of war and defence. We
were again on the upward path that leads towards the highest, and, purified
and ennobled, were eager again for the immediate duties of life.
Such purifications of the soul occurred amongst the community as a
whole whenever any influence tended to drag it down to a lower plane.
Their eyes were drawn downwards; they had again to be turned to the goal

of all energy. Victory over such a conqueror as Choktroo had to be given its
due insignificant proportion in the results and aims of life, else it might
atavise some of their spirits and bring to life ambitions buried for long ages.
One night’s voyage amongst the infinities was enough to throw human
conquests, however great they might seem, into pettiness and oblivion.
Thus the evil spirit such events might raise was exorcised, and yet the
sensuous power of the music by which the exorcism was achieved was
evaded. Mere music, such as I had been accustomed to hear with luxurious
passion in my old home, would have let our spirits, after raising them to the
heights of ecstasy, fall crashing into the world of commonplace as soon as it
ceased; but this cosmophonic harmony permanently soothed and elevated
the embruted soul. It implanted thoughts so high that it seemed sacrilege to
return to any lower plane.

CHAPTER XVI
THEIR HEAVEN AND THEIR HELL

T HE race returned to its daily life, purified and elevated. The danger of
intrusion upon their upward struggle had called out unwonted vigour;
and the expulsion of the grosser elements and ambitions which
threatened to accompany this had resulted in clear gain for their progress.
The pace at which they developed greatly quickened; and we felt the pulses
of the race beat with the eagerness of prevision. Every new age had
accelerated its advance till it seemed to have breasted all possibility, yet as
the step grew swifter and swifter the lightning swiftness of a far past
seemed to them but a snail’s pace. Back the darkness of the future was
pushed, and new vistas opened where the black wall of fate had seemed to
face them.
One of the most striking proofs of their advancement was to them the
rapidly developing love and power of foreseeing. They seemed to live in the
future, and that future was an ever-receding circle like the horizon ahead of
them, widening and widening as they rose above mere earth necessities. A
considerable section of their community was devoted to pioneering for the
race, exploring the possibilities of the future; and whenever there was a
danger that the energy of development would slacken the imaginations of
the youth were fired by a sight of all that they might be.
One of the chief duties of the imaginative pioneers of the race was to
prepare a vision of the time to come that would at once appeal to the
youthful fancy and fire it to renewed effort; for often in a generation a
family or individual would become so absorbed in a special pursuit that the
idea of the whole was obscured; and to prevent or obviate this false
perspective imaginative prevision was ever and again needed. An easy
bird’s-eye view of all that the race might become was the best means of
attaining this.
Another magnificent edifice was set apart for this purpose, again on the
slopes of Lilaroma, not to give outlook, but merely to draw all eyes. It was

perhaps the most impressive of the great buildings of Limanora; so vast
were its proportions that it seemed almost a city in itself; for in huge
subsidiary halls every phase of the possibilities of their civilisation was
represented. These were dwarfed by the central hall, which seemed large
enough to contain the whole of them. In it all the phases of the future were
focussed in what they called the mornalan, or time-telescope. This made the
pictures of what they might become live and move before the eyes of the
gazers, who as they gazed through one of the many thousand eye-pieces
seemed to look upon life itself in its noblest ideals.
My first visit to the great building, which they called Terralona, or
millenarium, was not long after the final repulse of Choktroo. Into the
younger and less purified hearts of the community the idea of warlike glory
had returned with some force, even though we realised intellectually how
shallow and false and retrograde it was. The introduction to what I might
call the heaven of the race ought to have come naturally later in life, when
we had passed completely out of pupilage and assumed the full duties and
privileges of maturity; but it seemed necessary to erase from our emotions
this atavistic taint that the appearance of Choktroo and his expeditions had
begotten in us. The national purification had succeeded in making earthly
ambitions seem insignificant, but as we settled down again to our pursuits
the awe that the cosmophone had bred in us grew fainter. The world
narrowed into a prison-house, and our daily duties forced a recoil to a wider
sphere of ambitions, such as we had seen out in the archipelago in the
masterful wars so lately witnessed. It was time, indeed, that some of us
were brought into the presence of the immediate ideals of the race towards
which they were as a whole struggling.
We were now to enter upon a new epoch of our existence and to know
the wider heaven in which our own special pursuits took their orbit. We
were thereafter to drink at the purer fountains of inspiration, to know the
rewards of all our struggles, the possibilities that lay within the reach of a
measurable number of years.
Up through the morning air we flew, exhilarate with the wine of healthy
life, joyous in anticipation. My proparents were with us, and explained in
answer to our inquiries the character of the building we were to visit. It
absorbed the best energies of some of the most imaginative and artistic
families of the island. They were ever forging ahead of their own work.

Like life, their art never rested. What they imagined to-day grew familiar or
even tame to-morrow. The consequence was that the inside of the edifice
was never two days alike, and the most frequent visitor never found it
monotonous. There was no such thing as a fixed paradise for any race; it
varied, it must vary, with every development or retrogression of its
members. Heaven was merely the brightest ideal that a people could
imagine for itself; and the heaven of a highly progressive race was rapidly
antiquated, and in the long flight of ages came to neighbour their hell. It is
like climbing a mountain; the shining peak we long to attain as we start
from the plains at dawn is found to be but a lower ridge of plateau which
conceals the gleam of higher snows; these again when reached are found to
be overtopped by still higher peaks. The difference is that in truly
advancing human life the process seems unending. There is no spiritual
ambition, no ideal, no creed, no ethical code, but when realised in practice
is found to reveal something higher still to long for and realise. A stationary
heaven means a stagnant civilisation.
Onwards we sped as we discussed or listened, ever nearer to the vast
pile of buildings that was our goal. We who had never been inside or known
its purpose tingled with expectation. Even our elders, we could see, were
eager and alert with anticipated pleasure. They were sure to see some new
and striking features in the fore-picture.
It was with great awe that we found ourselves within Terralona; for we
had entered the great central hall at once, without any attempt to study the
separate sections of the experiments in progress depicted in the subsidiary
halls. It was more impressive in its proportions and size than any I had yet
seen, and was dimly lit with that strange, diffusive, centreless light of which
they had command. In no one part was the light brightest, so that it was
impossible to say whence it came or how it was produced. The roof rose so
high and the walls were so far apart that we found flight easy inside; and
there were platforms all round for leaping into the air and taking flight.
Along the farther wall we could see many Limanorans hovering, like
butterflies that alight for a moment and then flit to another flower. There
were also rising to the roof hundreds of tiers of different kinds of rests.
What these were for I could not conjecture, unless they were placed for
easy flight. At length we reached that end of the building and saw that every
rest was placed so as to bring the eyes level with a large lens set in the wall.

We each mounted into one of them, and I set my face against the smooth
transparency. The sight that met me I cannot even at this distance describe.
There seemed to be miles and miles of space beyond filled with a
representation of an island which I soon recognised as Limanora; but it
seemed to be afloat in the azure of the sky, and from it a pathway of silken
threads of light led upwards to the stars, which floated within neighbourly
distance of it. Busy travellers sped up and down the climbing flightway
with a swiftness that almost obscured their form and size. It was only when
they rested at either goal that I could see their features or study their nature.
They were Limanorans, yet completely transformed. The tissue of their
bodies seemed like light itself, so transparent and filmy was it. Their wings
seemed a part of themselves, and their flight was as easy as a swallow’s.
They moved through the air like shreds of sunlight or animated snowflakes,
with power to fly up or down, often at lightning speed. In their faces were
none of the deep shadows of baffled thought or blind emotion, but they
seemed supremely happy in their enfranchisement from earth. Yet they were
but human, only a few steps removed from the humanity I saw around me.
They had still upon their faces the look of pity so frequent amongst the
Limanorans when they gazed out on the men and life of other lands; but it
was only when they gazed or travelled downwards that this took the place
of the serene calm which marked them out as sages. At times an agitation
marked their gait as they set out on the gauzy pathway of the stars. I could
feel that there was still a world beyond that which they had reached, and
that towards this they must progress with eager thought and effort.
It was the inhabitants of other stars that they were trying to emulate or
gain as friends. They could live in the intervening ether and found
movement through it rapid as thought. Their highest wishes, the subjects of
their imagination, encountered little obstacle or friction in the
accomplishment. They were evidently nearer omnipotence over the forces
around them than they had ever been. Their bodies were so much
dematerialised that they were not far from the state and texture of their
souls. Thought was not clogged with an earthy matter so different from
itself as to hold it down till freed by death. Yet I could see that there were
limits to their actions. The forces of other worlds and the conditions of
interstellar space narrowed and checked their activity. They could not yet
create; they could only transform what already existed, for there I saw one
pair, moulding a creature perfect according to their ideals and trying to

breathe life into it, and not yet could they know the centre of all being. The
path was still upwards and onwards.
Their activity was no longer restricted to the immediate confines of the
earth. Beyond and above it they soared till it became an insignificant speck
of light in the azure, busily exploring the universes that strewed infinity and
finding out the higher and ever higher life that inhabited them. I could see
them marking on their itineraries of the sky the orbs to be avoided for their
degenerate or degraded forms of life or energy. Every grade of existence
was found and indicated by brighter light or deeper shadow. They loved to
linger over those orbs whose dwellers were but a step above them, watching
their actions and thoughts and learning their higher ambitions. At a distance
they hovered over the worlds of beings many stages beyond them in the
evolution of energy, afraid lest they might be repulsed as degenerate. As
they watched, their longing study helped them to rise more rapidly in the
scale of being, and back they would come to Limanora with new thoughts
and methods and set themselves thus equipped to work out with increasing
pace their own evolution.
This vast widening of their horizon was evidently an era in their history,
it added such lightning swiftness to their rise in the scale of existence, it
gave them such power of fulfilling whatever they designed or even
imagined. Nobler and nobler ideals remained to be discovered in every
corner of the cosmos. They had only to sail out and investigate, and then,
returning with higher thoughts and ways of life, mould their being to them.
And to die,—what was it now but to slough off a trammelling form? Death
was to them an ecstasy. Every moment of advance was to them a death, a
death of the old, a realisation of the nobler and higher.
Such was the representation I watched through my optic glass; for my
proparents interpreted what I saw, and showed me the spiritual meaning of
this cosmorama of the future. The details of the living picture I had not time
to mark; nor were my guardians willing that these should distract my
attention from the central ideas; they emphasised the guiding principles of
the new life we might perhaps soon lead, and the glory of it overcame my
earth-born ambitions. What a pitiful figure did Choktroo and his armies and
fleets seem in comparison with such a life! All the great conquerors and
heroes of earth were pigmies seen in a light like this, slaves to brute

longings and ambitions. I grew ashamed of ever having harboured anything
but contempt for even the greatest career of mortal upon earth.
Nor yet were we done with our cure. The imaginative artists had filled
another and complementary edifice with living pictures of all that by means
of horror could drive us forward on the path of progress. It was called
Ciralaison, or the museum of terrors. I had often heard of it and had
imagined it as a place of unending torture, a Limanoran and rationalised
version of the hell of Christendom, and looked forward with much loathing
and curiosity to the sight of it. We were taught that this was no imaginary
place, but the too real result of all retrogression and encouragement of
atavism, and that there was nothing supernatural in it, but that it was the
natural outcome of all lapses from the existing ethical path of advance. It
was the contrivance of nature herself to prevent degeneration.
As I had read Dante’s Inferno, it was easy for me to map out the
features of Ciralaison. I knew the vices and faults they most shrank from,
and these would define their own natural punishments. As we winged our
way towards the sombre edifice, perched, strangely enough, upon one of the
most prominent spurs of Lilaroma that beetled over the sea, I let my mind
wander over what was soon to meet my eyes; pictured a place of intense
woe, full of the horrors of a mediæval place of torture: I could almost
imagine I heard the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
We entered the gloomy porch and passed into the central hall; it was
almost the exact counterpart of Terralona, except that there was no brilliant
suggestion of all that was beautiful and noble. There was the same dim
suffusion of light, the same lofty wall of lenses with rests, the same series of
flight platforms round the other walls. With some precipitancy I made for
one of the optic rounds in the wall, and the first sight I saw struck me as the
most commonplace and familiar. It was a representation of one of the foul
lanes of our Western cities. There were the gutter children, the reeling
drunkards issuing from the gin palaces, the cursing drabs behind them, the
tatters, the filth, the dilapidated buildings. It was but an unending series of
instantaneous photographs moving with great speed under stereoscopic
glasses, whilst the sounds accompanying the scene, having impressed
themselves similarly on long strips of irelium, were in one of their sound
machines reproducing themselves. It was indeed the commonest and most
repulsive of sights in the east end of any of our large towns. What

astonished me was that it should have been taken from European life; and
yet, when I gazed more attentively at it and put the sound-magnifier to my
ears, I knew that it was not European. The words spoken were in a language
I did not know, and the rags of the men and women were the rags of a
national costume I did not recognise.
I shifted my rest and lens, and I saw a rustic village, such as I had
known in my boyhood, with the toilers busy at their work. At a distance it
was a happy scene; for the men and women were absorbed in occupation
and seemed to have forgotten the evils of mankind. They were much in the
open air, which was bright with the colours of the sunlight; and the
children’s voices sounded merry at play or humming like bees from the
window of the schoolhouse. It was a picture such as city poets had often
painted as ideal and primitive happiness, yet some contrivance seemed to
analyse it all for my mind and reveal to me that it was even more repulsive
than that of the foul city lane. Not to my hearing or my eyes did this come;
but to my magnetic sense, ill-developed though it was. I felt a deadly stupor
over the whole pressing out the higher life of every rustic. Not the diseases
which often overtook them unprovided, not the poverty leaving no outlook
for their old age except reluctant and hated charity, not the constant slavery
of toil, or the meagre assuagement of its woes by a weekly booze in the
tavern, weighed upon my spirit and made me sad to look at the scene. It was
the stagnant spiritual level on which they and their children to the
thousandth generation must live, without power of perceiving the nobleness
that was above them and around them, without the chance of ever
developing the spiritual energy that was in them, without one approach to
the line of infinite progress going on throughout the universe. To stand still
or recede was the true inferno of the Limanorans.
Again I changed my optic glass and a greater sadness came to me
through my magnetic sense. I saw men and women such as I used to envy
for their respectable life, their serene comfort, and their sure grasp of both
worlds trooping into buildings for religious worship. They bowed and sang,
they genuflected and prayed, they raised their eyes to the ceiling, they
groaned and professed to pity themselves as miserable sinners; yet I could
feel they had an inner consciousness that these performances were
superfluous on their part, so comfortably worldly, so charitably godly were
they. As they rose to leave the temple, they seemed to purr and pat their

sleek stomachs in supreme self-content. Yet through the magnetic magnifier
I knew that they were in a lower circle of the inferno than the rustic slaves.
Their past stood out through many generations of ancestors exactly the
same as their present or better. Never a chance had they of progressing; they
thought they had reached perfection as far as earthly conditions would
allow. They prayed that they might be made better; but that was only as
they prayed that their sins might be forgiven when they were certain that
they had committed none, or as they prayed for guidance in their daily
duties when they knew that no one could manage them better than they.
Stagnancy was written on every feature of their faces and of their lives,
fatty degeneration of every faculty and organ necessary to development.
Their ethics, their religion, their business, their habits of life had all reached
a stage that made criticism superfluous and that knew no higher outlook.
The next scene that came through the lens was one of the most envied
of Christendom. Men and women of the highest birth and best breeding
were moving to and fro in brilliantly lit and decorated rooms, in the largest
of which the dance was proceeding. In another room a luxurious supper was
laid, varied and fine enough to tempt the eye and palate of the most
fastidious gourmand. Voluptuous music and scents filled the air; witty
conversation was stirring even the most languid faces to smiles. What could
be more perfect on earth than the enjoyment of such a scene? Yet this was a
deeper slough of hell than any I had yet viewed. The whole of life was
concentrated in the senses, the least progressive of all the organs of human
nature, the organs soonest sated with what they desire. And what a horror of
life was revealed beneath all this brilliancy! A crescendo of such pleasures
was needed to drive off ennui; and such a crescendo was not to be found.
The young still lived in hopeful mirage. The middle-aged were sick of it all.
The old sneered cynically over everything or babbled the senility of second
childhood. The vulgar consequences of vice or the entanglements of crime,
the surfeit of pleasure or the tedium of life kept most of them within one
step of suicide. Their course was ever downwards. I pitied these
magnificent voluptuaries, in all their ephemeral pursuits and aims. The
brilliancy was only an attempt to hide the ghastly grinning of death and
corruption in the reality underneath.
Another change of the point of view, and the world of fame revealed
itself in its gilded horrors. I watched the struggling poet trampled beneath

the foot of luxury and contempt, happy if only he died early in the hateful
wrestle for glory. I saw the drowning agonies of the novices in the sea of
literature, appealing in vain for help to the wealthy as they passed in barges
lulled by the rich music of flattery; here and there a frantic swimmer
clutched at help, and out again he was thrust into the depths by the minions
of literary fame. How little the rejected knew of the reality that they strove
after! I looked into the hearts of the famous and saw corrupt masses of
jealousy and hate, or hollow shells echoing the misery of life. The most
appalling sight was, not the failures in art and learning, science and
commerce, but the successes. Behind a mask of smiling prosperity and
conventional enjoyment of the world there was but a handful of dust that
bore the weary load of existence in agony.
Generation after generation came and passed through this torturing fire,
knowing not why they bore the pangs for threescore years and ten, or
whither they were borne. They seemed to improve, but only sank deeper
into the original barbarism. Here and there they picked out a name of one
long dead and worshipped it; but the shrine was empty; it was only a name,
and not the personality for which it had once stood. Behind I could hear the
spirit wailing and cursing its fate and the falsehood and hypocrisy of his
adorers. He knew the hollowness and pretence of the whole performance;
he knew that the name had become a weapon for offending and maiming
those who in their innocence were struggling for fame, as he had done, in
vain.
The deepest circle of hell was still to meet my eyes. I thought, as I was
guided to it, that it must be that of murderers and furious criminals. My
amazement grew, as I looked into the lens and saw that the actors, or I
should more truly say the sufferers, were the great of the earth, the
monarchs and statesmen and warriors, who drew all men’s eyes to them as
the masters of life. A movement on the part of my guide touched some key,
and a strange gleam of unearthly light threw out into relief the hidden
mechanism of their existence. Round everyone was a network of threads
like a spider’s web, and the controlling ends of the threads led up obscurely
into the hands of a crowd of miscreants, who lay out of sight of the
applauding mobs; when a limb or a lip or an eye seemed to move of its own
accord to the music of huzzas, it was jerked by a thread in the control of
some scowling villain who worked the movement for his own murderous

purpose. These gorgeous figures were but puppets playing a marionette-
play upon the stage of life. One or two of the strongest seemed instinct with
the breath of originality, but a still stronger light revealed adamantine
chains woven around them, and attached to these one master-chain which
disappeared into infinity; they were in the spider-web of fate. Still more
awful was the sight of their own hearts; each had a crimson-taloned vulture
gnawing the vitals, and each saw every detail of the agonising sight; nor
could he move to the right or left except to clutch at the bared heart of his
rival and torture him. Who could imagine hell more appalling than this? Yet
up the giddy approach to the seats of the mighty climbed eager competitors
for any place in this torture-chamber death or defeat might empty.
Then behind all stretched the curtain of infinity; and as it rose the ranks
of worlds and universes appeared, dwarfing into pettiness the sights that
had racked my eyes. Life and the ideals of life rose higher and higher up
through the regimented worlds, and the little inferno I had watched became
a microscopic speck on the round of existence. The shadow of their heaven
fell over their heads. The agony I had seen became but an atom in infinity.

CHAPTER XVII
MY EDUCATION CONTINUED

T HE gaze into the probabilities of the future and into the realities of the
past ejected from my system whatever of dangerous admiration I might
have felt for the career of such a military adventurer as Choktroo. In
spite of my self-control and rapidly developing reasoning faculty, there
lurked in me the same longing for power that had been so evident in my
cabin-boy. Though he had fallen so wretchedly there was a romance about
his career which appealed to something deep-seated in my spirit. I knew
what a hypocrite and scoundrel he had become in order to make his success,
yet the success seemed to condone his offences against the progress of
humanity. The lust of rule that lies in the hearts of all men had not yet been
eradicated from mine. I had advanced so far as to be ashamed of it; and I
tried to reason it down or to conceal even from myself the fact of its
existence; but my guardians knew that it was there, and they took the
necessary precautions against its growth. Thus did I pass with the whole
people through the national purification ending with a glimpse of their
heaven and their hell.
And now I was ready to re-enter on my process of education. The more
spiritual portions of my nature had been remoulded or confirmed to follow
in the true path of Limanoran development. The last purificatory process
had revealed in me the virtuous or progressive balance that ensured success
in the island. The minds of my guardians were now at rest with regard to
my spiritual future, and I was on the fair way to become one of the
community.
Still my physical constitution lagged far behind the race. Nor had I any
hope of ever making up this lost time, so much had the education of
generations and the accumulations of heredity done for them. My senses
were but feebly developed compared with those of the Limanorans; and
though they gave sensuous faculties a far lower place than the most
advanced thinkers I had ever known of in Europe, they by no means

neglected them, but considered them important instruments of progress in
the material conditions of their life.
My proparents thought it necessary that I should be brought in the
development of my sensuous perceptions nearer to their own level, now that
my love of reason was so strong as to preclude the possibility of being
overwhelmed by sensuous energy. They began with the most intellectual of
the senses, the eyesight, and by the help of magnetism, hypnotic suggestion,
and constant practice under their tuition, they soon brought me to see
farther afield and more keenly into the structure of things around me than I
had in Europe thought it possible for the human eye to accomplish. I could
perceive with the naked eye stars that I had been able to see before only
through the telescope. I began to note the changes of tissue underneath the
skull of my neighbours when any great thought or emotion stirred in them,
and could use their wonderful instruments of far and near research with
appreciation. Through these instruments faint stars appeared moons, and the
nearer planets revealed many of the secrets of their surface; whilst the
elements resolved themselves into even simpler constituents. What still lay
beyond I could not imagine, yet there were manifestly worlds, intensive and
extensive, still to be explored beyond the limits of these aids to sight.
In the life of an individual I could not expect to approach the
development of optic faculty attained by this people. This impressed itself
more deeply upon me when my guardians tried to evolve in me the
magnetic power of eye which every Limanoran had by nature. When any
one of them turned his full glance upon me, it was like encountering the
direct beams of the sun; I had to drop my eyelids in self-defence. It was this
that gave them such hypnotic power over Choktroo and his followers. Their
eye was an active exponent of the soul within as well as a passive recipient
of messages from the world without, and could concentrate into its glance
the energy of their powerful wills. Any one of these Limanorans amongst
the feebler-eyed millions of the rest of the world would have proved himself
a master-spirit. He would, with his unhesitating will and the magnetism of
his eye, have kept masses of men in check and moulded them into a unity,
and the great commanders of history would have blenched before his gaze.
From the first I had felt uneasy under the full glance of my island
friends, in spite of its kindliness and benevolence. Before I left England, I
had been supposed to have the mesmeric faculty to an exceptional degree.

Now I found it pale before those marvellous Limanoran eyes, and all the
training and physical aid my proparents could give me in this direction,
though they added greatly to my energy of will and eye, only brought out
my hopeless inferiority. I was able at last to bear their glances with ease,
and even to raise my eyes to theirs for a few seconds; but I ceased to hope
for the attainment of their ocular command or their magnetic power.
Even their passive electric sense was far beyond my possibility in many
of its ramifications. For years I had wondered why their couriers into far
regions of the sky could without any chart or landmarks find their way back
to their island home with such ease. It could not be by means of vision; for
they often went flying above the clouds to the antipodes; nor could it be by
smell; for that sense was not nearly so much developed as the others. In
some of my now more distant flights with Thyriel I discovered that they
homed by the electric sense. It had become keen in the measurements of
amounts of electricity; and every locality had its own electric possibilities,
not to speak of a certain peculiar quality in its electricity which
differentiated it from all others. One of the most important branches of their
education was the magnetography of the earth and sky. Although I never got
beyond a vague perception of differences in the degrees of electricity, it was
of some use to me in my flights to have learned the elements of this great
descriptive science. I could tell with fair accuracy how high I was above the
earth and whether I was drifting away from Limanora or towards it; for the
amount of electricity in any region varied within certain definite limits and
the conditions governing it were constant for long periods of time; these
were, roughly, the metals beneath the surface of the earth, the differences in
temperature of the strata of air above, the evaporation and chemical changes
on the earth below, and the periodicity of the influence of the sun and the
stars. Their electric charts of the sky and air were ever in process of
correction, but so slightly and gradually in each region that it was only after
long periods that the Limanoran couriers had to revise their magnetographic
knowledge; indeed it was their reports after long flights which generally led
to the minute corrections of their charts. It was the work of a few minutes
only to learn the new modifications, for their charts were exact miniature
models of that which they were intended to represent; the learner had only
to touch a spring and by the inner mechanism of the globe out would ray to
each point of it the electricities that in degree and quality belonged to the
region indicated; the member of the electric family who guided him would

explain the changes that had occurred since he last consulted the
instrument, and his own electric sense would tell him the rest.
Nor was this magnetographic training useful merely for the purpose of
pilotage through the heavenly vault. It enabled any courier to seek the
region where he would most easily recharge the little engines which he bore
with him under his arms to aid in his wing journey. Although he could
prevent the complete exhaustion of these power auxiliaries by supplying
them with some of the magnetism in his own body, it was only in
emergencies that he did this; for his own system needed electric
recuperation as well. Whenever this was required, he made for some region
of the air that he knew to be highly electric; and there he floated, whilst
with his receptive sense he drew in new stores for his own system and for
his little armpit engines. Then he went on his way rejoicing, exhilarated by
his new energy. One of the purposes of their frequent flight into
atmospheric spheres other than their own was to drink in new magnetism
from one of the great sky fountains.
When a Limanoran returned from an aërial flight there was renewed life
in him. His eyes glowed with a heightened radiancy; I could see a soft light
play about them in the dark, and this, if needed, he could make even
piercing in its brilliancy. He required no light to guide him in the deepest
night. His electric sense gathered in from the atmosphere the scattered
radiance that was hidden from my sight; and from his eyes he could emit
this electricity in the form of light. For me, who, under all their training,
was never able to develop such power over the unseen forces of the air, the
eyes of Thyriel were a guide in our flight through the night sky; and by day
so gentle a brilliance played around them it was little wonder they
fascinated and drew me ever to them. After experiencing their power, I was
not surprised at the hypnotic influence Limanoran eyes had had over the
leaders of the hostile expedition.
It did not astonish me to find that by means of their electric energy they
could move vast masses which no mere muscular force could have touched.
I had a constitution that seemed to be physically far stronger than Thyriel’s;
yet, if she had time to reinforce her store of magnetism, she could
accomplish feats of strength I could not approach. In her fragile system
there seemed to reside a giant’s energy; but this was only at times, and
especially after she had made some long journey into the regions of the air.

The tissues and fibres of her body seemed to grow tenfold stronger when
the new electric energy tingled along her nerves. In only the faintest way
was I ever able to develop my electric-receptive sense so far as to realise
what a new store meant to their physical powers.
Yet my guardians set themselves to bring out my latent electric sense or
firla. After much practice and the application of many stimuli I began to
feel impulses more keenly even when they came from a distance: the back
of my neck grew more and more sensitive, so that I would wheel round
instinctively when anyone looked at me from behind. There was almost
hope that I should, after many years’ practice, come to distinguish the
different kinds of emotion with which anyone, though unseen, might look at
me; and I could produce by a concentration of will-force in the eyes a
certain luminosity, noticeable when I stood in deep darkness.
My power of sight was greatly strengthened by this new electric faculty
that the eyes acquired. I began to raise my eyelids before the penetrative
glance of a Limanoran, or even the full majesty of the sun; but never could I
hope to reach their analytic power of vision. Their senses were
distinguished from those of the rest of mankind by intellectuality, and were,
I thought, not merely the observers and reporters of the mind, but its
outlying parts or functions. The eye especially seemed to do what through
its means reason and experiment might have done. At a glance a Limanoran
would tell to an inch the distance of any object, and was not far wrong in
his estimate of the space between the earth and any star when its rays
reached his eye. He could distinguish one ray from another by its colour or
colour-constituents and by its magnetic affinities. What he had learned in
the use of the inamar or spectroscope in the lava wells and in the fusion of
metals in Rimla had come to be a visual instinct. With scarcely a minute’s
hesitation he would tell the predominant elements in any one of the
heavenly bodies. Doubtless the firla had something to do with this analytic
power. One of their imaginative pioneering books held out the by no means
remote possibility of catching symptoms of the life which, they knew well,
filled the dim worlds above.
Their auditory powers had been far less developed than their visual, and
gave but faint hope of transcending interstellar space, and my training soon
brought me within easy distance of their hearing capacity. The range of this
faculty both at its upper and its lower limit had been considerably extended.

Sounds dangerous on account of their loudness to the inner mechanism of
ordinary ears were by means partly of strengthening the protective
cartilages and partly of a trevamolan or graduated modifier of sound, which
they constantly wore, made harmless and even gentle and enjoyable. Those
that were too faint to reach any human ear became audible to me after some
training in the use of their vamolans or makro-mikrakousts. So greatly had
these been improved along with the power of hearing that they could
discriminate the different noises of microscopic life. These vamolans in
their application of electricity to hearing could make the buzzing of an
insect sound like the roar of thunder. By modifications of them any of the
sounds heard through them could be recorded for ever.
Thus had been formed a library and museum of the phonology of
animal life. They had been able to study the records of sounds emitted by
the various species of animals and had come to know the meaning of each
sound before they had driven all but microscopic life from the island; thus
they had learned by means of the recording vamolans the language of
animals. The birds of the air I have seen follow the cries of Thyriel,
gathering around her in clouds, as she flew, until by a sudden change of
tone she would scatter the fluttering masses to the four winds. Even the fish
of the sea would rise and leap above the waves to her notes; ferocious,
devouring monsters would leave their prey and follow gently in her train.
Most of this power over the undeveloped creation was due to the record and
study of their cries; but not all. The magnetism of her personality had a
strange effect upon the wildest birds of prey: it seemed to bear with it tacitly
the lesson of Limanoran civilisation that no life was to be destroyed by
those who meant to make the best of life; there was a gentle, merciful spirit
in the glow of the eyes. I have seen her take a wounded bird to her bosom
as she flew, and, putting new life into it by the stroke of her fingers, set it
free, strong and happy.
There was a life-giving power in the tips of Limanoran fingers that
puzzled me at first. Why the mere touch should so soothe the lower creation
that the agony of their wounds would soon vanish and their cries cease
bewildered me for a time. My own pains rapidly disappeared under the
touch of my proparents. I afterwards knew that part of the active magnetism
of their system came through their fingers and they helped me to develop
this channel of influence in myself. I could at last by passing my fingers

over Thyriel’s hair or face relieve any tension of her nerves which might
have produced pain; nay, I could hear her hair crackle under my touch when
I had charged my system with much electricity. Once or twice I was able to
draw a wounded bird to me, and change by my stroke on the feathers its
cries of pain into low notes of content; but I could never draw the winged
creation to me in clouds as Thyriel did.
It was all the more surprising to me that they fenced off animal life from
their island. What might they not have done with such powers over the
lower creation? When I put my question into words, the answer was
unhesitating and unanswerable. All failures in development had to be thrust
from the path of progress; they could do nothing but clog it. If the
Limanorans had little hesitation in the case of their own flesh and blood,
they had still less when they had to deal with animals. It was quite true that
many of the more highly developed of the servants of man had nobler
natures than most of their masters, deeper loyalty, greater sincerity, truer
and more lasting courage; much might and did come from companionship
with their primitive and guilt-proof natures; but the fact that when
associated with man they were destined to serve, made such good
impracticable and rather brought out the mean and brutal tyranny of man
than helped to implant in his nature their own virtues. Even with such noble
qualities as they had it was impossible for them to overleap the many ages
their systems had lagged behind in other respects, the open offensiveness of
their grosser animal appetites and needs, their lack of that great instrument
and teacher of the brain, a fully developed hand, and the inability to foresee
beyond a few hours, days, or months. Nor could any human process prolong
their period of life and postpone their day of dissolution. It was not a good
thing for these pioneers of the human race to see the approach of death and
its agonies in a being that could not assuage or postpone it. Still less
beneficial was it to touch the carcases and reduce them to harmless atoms.
The presence of animals meant the daily obtrusion of offensive sights that
would either shock or degrade their natures. All that animals could do for
them was already done by their science or their machinery. Nothing that had
fallen so far behind in the race of life was worth the trouble of
missionaryism; for the energy that was in it had a better chance of rising
swiftly in the scale of existence by dissolution and entrance into some other
form.

None the less had they studied the language of animals when they had
had the opportunity. It belonged to the orchestration of the world, and all
the sounds of nature were of interest to them. They were in the habit of
visualising what they heard by a refined and complicated instrument which
they called a thinamar, and had long been able to translate into its
appropriate form and colour every sound, inarticulate as well as articulate.
Through long use of this instrument the tones of nature bore with them
something that appealed to their eye. I never grew expert enough in its use
to make the visualisation of sound an instinct; still less could I reverse the
process. A modification of their thinamar had enabled them to translate
sights into the symbols of sound, and by skill in using it they had come to
attach certain notes to certain sights. Thus a noble landscape would appeal
to their imagination not only through the eye, but in the form of music, and
they spoke of hearing the beauty of a star or a flower. A section of this
instrument did for complicated sounds what the spectroscope, or inamar as
they called it, did for light. Every substance, every individual living thing,
had its natural and peculiar note; and the linamar analysed what seemed to
me the simplest sound into its constituent primary notes, each of which
revealed its source. Aided by their mikrakousts and makrakousts, it enabled
the Limanorans to analyse the chemical elements of any object, whether at a
great distance from them or too minute to appeal to their senses.
Their makrakousts were instruments which by means of electric
currents and magnetism could make a beam of light transmit any sound to
its source, or make the ear gather in the same way whatsoever sounds were
filling the air at any point on its course. I knew when I saw a steady flash in
any direction that the sound of some point was getting tapped by one of
these instruments. Each had an apparatus for laying and keeping fixed its
luminous telegraph-wire along which it received and transmitted. An
application of this in the gossip-telegraph enabled them to listen to the
comedy of life as it went on in any one of the adjacent islands of the
archipelago. Their mikrakousts used the same means for gathering the faint
sounds which echoed from the clouds or through the upper regions of the
atmosphere and turning them into loud notes, which might be recorded,
analysed, and interpreted. Their magnifying power was quite equal to that
of the clirolan. Faint buzzings of insects at vast distances could be collected
and made as loud as thunder. It was even applied to cosmic sounds that
impinged on the atmospheric envelope of the earth. Mikrakoustic balloons

rose into the upper air, and after gathering whatever faint sounds wandered
thither from outside the world, were drawn back again to divulge their
secrets; eavesdroppers of the cosmos they were, and perchance in some
future age they would enable the Limanoran to listen to voices from other
worlds or even to communicate with the dwellers there. A more immediate
and practical advantage of these instruments was found in medicine. They
told in clear accents the unexpected or dangerous changes in the tissues or
organs of any man’s system. They were used in the weekly medical
inspection, which every member of the commonwealth underwent. When
the keen eye, aided by the camera-microscope, could detect nothing
abnormal in the body, the mikrakoust would tell the examiner’s ear of some
obstruction or deleterious change; he knew the normal sounds of healthy
action in every part when they were magnified thousands of times by this
instrument, and every departure from them readily caught the ear. All the
citizens were trained to use it as an aid in diagnosis, so that they might be
able to locate in the system any beginning of disease. It was part of the
training of my ear to use the mikrakoust and to interpret its physiological
revelations.
But these instruments were getting antiquated by the rapid development
of the electric sense that could, by the aid of their various electro-magnifiers
and analysers, gather in cosmic news from distances which the sense of
hearing and its aids would count infinite. Magnetic kites and balloons rose
to the uttermost fringe of our atmosphere, whither common terrestrial
influences could reach only in such faint waves as to be neutralised; there
they gathered the electric impressions and impulses coming from other
planets and even other systems. On them were recorded the varying
strengths of the waves and their direction. From these records the
astronomical families could tell what was happening of a cosmic character
in universes far out of the reach of even their lavidrolans or camera-
telescopes,—perturbations in the atmospheres of great unseen suns,
collisions between worlds that circled round them, births of new universes
from these lost systems, periodic disturbances of the routine revolutions
through the approach of some meteoric wanderer, the settlement of life on
worlds grown ripe for it, and the death of outworn stars. For many
generations had they kept and classified these reports of cosmic history and
were beginning to recognise a wide periodicity in many of them and to
draw conclusions as to the path of our universe through infinite space. It

seemed to them that there was some point far distant in the cosmos, round
which our sun and its satellites with innumerable other systems of stars
revolved, and that this point, with its satellites, had its own independent
movement. Age by age, with the aid of their idrolans or electric telescopes,
and other electric instruments, they felt that they were getting nearer and
nearer to the centre of this interwoven epicycloidal movement and were
almost convinced that it did not proceed infinitely, but that there was some
ultimate centre which had no movement round another. Their instincts told
them that this was the divine consciousness towards which all things rose in
the scale of being. They never remitted their ardour and diligence in the
development of their electric sense and of the instruments that aided it to
become a receiver of cosmic news and a recorder of cosmic history, for they
were confident that this was one of the tracks that led up through the
intricacy of the cosmos to God.
One of my greatest regrets was that my electric sense could not follow
the footsteps of these pioneers in the infinite; it had but a dim consciousness
of the reports of their instruments, and train it as eagerly and diligently as I
would, it lagged behind my power of vision and even my sense of hearing.
On this account I preferred to learn the results of their researches through
these two senses, for the electric reports were carefully translated into
appeals to the eye and the ear. I could see their wonderful discoveries in the
unknown, as they worked them into picture and mechanism, and I could
listen from day to day to the orchestration of their newly discovered spaces
and movements. What seemed at the moment an intolerable discord chimed
in with the notes which preceded or followed and formed marvellous
harmony. Not the least part of my education lay in this cosmic stimulus to
my imagination. Out of my terrestrial conditions and limits I daily rose into
spheres which seemed to me more and more divine. Sight and hearing
became noble channels of the influences of infinity, instead of gross senses.
I struggled to bring my firla up to the enjoyment of their labours, but ever
fell back hopeless.
This was especially the case when I was brought to examine and test
their monalan or electrical distance-analyst, for a fully developed electric
sense was needed to appreciate its refined analysis of impulses from far
distances. It was an ingenious application of an alloy called by them
labramor, or electricity sponge, and had the power of splitting up any

electric wave or impulse into its constituent movements. Each of these had
its own clear and distinct effect upon the firla and varied with the substance
from which the impulse came or through which it passed. All substances
and elements in the terrestrial system were classified according to their
electric impulses. Even before the Limanorans brought the firla to its high
state of sensitiveness and efficiency, they had been able to examine the stars
and other distant bodies and analyse their elements by means of this
classification and the application of their alloy, labramor. Every substance
or element had its place in their tables according as it was positive or
negative in its electric impulse towards some other substance or element;
and all its affinities, strong or weak, were tabulated. Thus when they turned
their monalan upon any distant body like a star they were able to analyse its
elements by means of these tables. Even now that their firla interpreted the
analysis of the monalan without the intervention of classifications and
tables, they had another electrically analystic instrument which appealed to
the eye; this turned the electric impulse into a flash or glow, which at once
revealed in the inamar or spectroscope the substances or elements whence it
had come.
Their lower or more material senses I was more nearly able to approach,
even though they too were highly intellectualised and were more the
servants of the spirit than of the animal part. In developing mine I had more
hope of raising myself to the Limanoran level, and yet there was less
stimulus; for I felt that they looked down upon these senses of smell, taste,
and touch because of their need of close contact with their objects; they
were the primitive senses; they were narrow and bound down to immediate
matter, and seemed poor gropers in the finite and the dark compared with
those rangers of infinity, the ear, the eye, and the electric sense. It was then
with a feeling of humiliation that I saw those lower and more finite senses
in me develop so quickly, proving me a being of a more primitive and
material type.
Yet there was no neglect of these in their education and no contempt for
them and their uses; in fact contempt was one of the vices that they had
with most pains weeded out of their systems and civilisation. They had not
merely considered that nothing in creation, if looked into scientifically, was
worthy of contempt, but that contempt was the truest symptom of crudity of
character and ignorance of reality and nature. Even if they had had any

remains of this primal savagery, they would not have felt it towards those
finite-seeking senses. They only set themselves to make them more and
more the servants of the soul, the instruments of the imagination. They
rejected the idea that the arts belonged only to sight and hearing. Their arts
of the firla were far more important and striking than any sculpture or
painting or music could be. Not merely as a variation on these and a relief
from them did they have arts that brought in the senses of smell and taste
and touch; these had their own special uses in their civilisation. All of them,
but especially smell and taste, were closely linked with memory, and
through memory with imagination. A special perfume and even a special
taste would flash before the mind a scene or fact with more vividness than
even a piece of music would.
The perfumes and tastes had been classified according to their affinity
to certain virtues and ideas and to the great deeds and scenes which best
represented them. The island was one vast flower-garden at all seasons of
the year, arranged not alone to please the eye, but to bring by the suggestion
of their perfumes the noblest virtues and deeds constantly into the mind. For
example, wherever a child or youth was being trained, the flowers
possessing certain well-known scents which were closely connected with
the finest qualities and ideas of the race shone profusely yet with striking
art. The art of the gardening family did not consist merely in arrangement of
the landscape and the varied coloration of it. The scent of every flower had
to be taken into consideration and the faint flavour or taste the seed or fruit
might produce in the air when sent adrift or bruised. The problem of no
science or art was so complicated as that of gardening in this island, it had
to take account of so many senses, seasons, and conditions of growth. They
were never done with creating and selecting new variations of flowers and
plants, and colour, scent, and taste in the vegetable world were as adaptable
in their hands as tones in the hands of their musical composers. Their task
was made comparatively easy by the great development of methods and
appliances for rapid growth and decay. They had not only complete
command of the weather and clouds and sunshine; but they could bring up
and perfect flowers in a few nights over vast areas by the use of their
streams and watering platforms and of artificial light. When the Limanorans
slept, wonders were being accomplished in colouring the landscape; for first
some of their great rivers would pour refreshing rain all over the plains; and
then the electric glow, brought close over the plants, would develop their

bloom-producing capacity. As careful were the gardeners that no withering
or dead vegetable matter should ever taint the air of the island; the moment
one set of blossoms had perfected and shown traces of decay, an electric
pruner ran in a few minutes over the whole area, and not merely cut them
off, but burnt them to dust that fell on the roots to stimulate the new growth
of the plants. As soon as the plants had passed their bloom-productive point,
an electric life-destroyer ploughed lightly through the soil in all directions;
and by the morning what had been profusely flower-coloured the day before
was brown earth, ready for the new plant-growth of next day. The slow-
growing perennials and bushes and trees occupied separate and fixed
quarters at a distance from the residences and the great centres of
intercourse, and all rampant vegetation and rotting boughs and leaves were
daily turned into good soil by the electric weed-destroyer. No decay was
ever allowed to approach the senses. Their knowledge of the secrets of the
soil made them independent of rotting or offensive manures. The particular
elements of which any kind of plant or flower robbed the soil were
accurately ascertained, and their chemistry enabled them with ease to
supply the deficiency after a crop had been removed.
The gardening family had to be familiar on the one hand with the
innermost secrets of psychology, and on the other with the last discoveries
of the more material sciences; for no one could avoid the effects of the
flowers and trees, as he could painting and sculpture, music and firlamai.
Gardening, in short, was the most public of all the arts and the most
pervasive in its results. A garden (and in Limanora there was only one vast
garden) was a great mnemonic instrument, which could play upon the souls
of the whole community at once. That it should not be in the hands of
novices, or of unwise or wrong-thoughted men and women, was one of the
prime cares of the people. Of all families those that managed the garden of
the island had to be most simple-hearted and true, most sure in their
knowledge of the human heart, and most eager to stir to what is great and
noble and humane. They were the lords of the sense of smell, one of the
most immediate portals to memory and to imagination. To have the
complete command of one out of the six dominant sense-entrances to the
soul was, they considered, the greatest of responsibilities, and no care was
neglected in selecting, purifying, and training the families of gardeners.

They, too, had the superintendence of Ilarime, a structure devoted to the
arts of smell, taste, and sound combined. Aided by the musicians and the
chemists, they produced symphonies which appealed to all three senses and
roused the imagination to exceptional flights. The imaginative or pioneering
families frequented the halls of this great building daily in pursuit of new
stimulus to their faculty. Every chamber in it had special emotions to rouse.
A garden could have only a mingled effect upon the memory and mnemonic
imagination; Ilarime separated the effects and classified the emotions and
imaginative ideas which were to be stimulated. Anyone entering could find
out at the porch, either by looking in the index-chamber or by consulting
one of the superintendents, what hall or halls he ought to rest in. I had often
during my education to take refuge in Ilarime, when clogged in my
endeavours to advance by dulness of memory or imagination or by the
weakness of some emotion. After a time I did not need to consult a guide; I
knew what element in my soul was deficient and what emotion or memory
would stir it to activity, and by aid of the index-hall and its graphic
representation of the effect of every chamber upon the spirit I could choose
what symphony I needed. As soon as I had entered the hall that I had
chosen, I lay down on one of their hanging rests and shut my eyes. At once
the medicated atmosphere began to affect my palate, whilst the delicate
perfume entered my nostrils and my ears drank in the sweet-sounding
music. Before many minutes had passed memories of striking scents I had
witnessed or heard of or seen represented in the island began to rise in my
mind, and the emotion I needed thrilled me through; if it was heroism or
courage, I felt myself urged to deeds of valour; if it was benevolence, I was
soon inclined to rush to the help of the suffering and the poor; if it was
hope, I saw bright visions of the future.
But this exercise was too passive to be allowed for any length of time.
The imagination and emotions were apt to gain at the expense of the will
and the nervous energy by too frequent resort to Ilarime. Strenuous
endeavour was held to be one of the prime essentials of progress, not only
in the race, but even more in the individual. And, though all the prevailing
odours and tastes and sounds of the island were agreeable, the Limanorans
carried with them a small instrument, called margol, that by an adaptation
of electricity could blunt at will the acuteness of smelling and tasting and
hearing, and, on the other hand, reduce the powers of perfumes and flavours
and sounds; it acted by drying the air around the head and drawing the

moisture and heat from the nostrils, the tongue, and the ears. It was partly to
mitigate the force of smells and tastes and sounds that they always kept the
atmosphere dry and cool by day. In the margol, too, there was a
combination of chemicals and electricity which would modify any odour or
flavour to suit the taste; but if they wished to increase the strength of any
perfume or taste, they applied electric heat to the source of it, and
moistened the nostrils and the mouth. It was one of the new peculiarities of
the race that the mucous and salivary flow was under the command of the
will, and they could smell and taste with satisfaction to themselves without
the aid of moisture on the organs.
Their senses of smell and taste had become by means of their acuteness
what they were originally meant to be, the guardians of the throat and the
digestion. They told with accuracy the nature of the substances brought to
the mouth; whatsoever would be deleterious to the system was offensive. In
most civilised peoples what is grateful to the palate and the olfactory nerves
is often pernicious to some tissue of the body or some faculty of the mind.
Here the two senses were the true friends and protectors of both body and
soul; there was no seducing them or bribing them into evil or irrational
reports, so completely had they been saturated with reason.
In the medical, chemical, and alimentary families these senses were
trained to a pitch that seemed to me marvellous. By either smell or taste a
member of these families could tell the constituent elements of any
compound. A medical sage, if a man, could distinguish by the faint odour
that marked each human body whether it was losing energy or expending it,
making progress or decaying; if a woman, the sage, in order to make this
decision, had as a rule to bring in the help of taste; for it had remained from
the primitive animal stage of man’s development one of the differentiating
marks of sex that the male had more energy of smell, the female more
energy of taste; now that they had so spiritualised their senses, perfumes
formed the quickest stimulus of the masculine imagination and flavours of
the feminine. At the food vats it was always the Limanoran women who
superintended the flavouring of any compound; whilst it was the men who
had most to do with medicating the atmospheres of the chambers, and men
presided in the chemical laboratories. The historical origin of this
distinction, they thought, was on the one hand the development of the
acuteness of smell in male animals at rutting time, and on the other the

power in dams of recognising their own offspring by licking it with the
tongue. And it was a well-known maxim in their medical families that every
individual had a distinctive odour and taste. They could tell one man from
another in the dark, and even at a considerable distance; and to touch him
with the tongue was to make assurance doubly sure. The kissing that was so
common in the West as a symbol of friendship and love, like the rubbing of
noses amongst less civilised peoples, had as its origin and basis the
recognition of the individual by the taste or smell. They did not need so
close or material an investigation of the individual to have pleasant
memories of friendship aroused. Their methods and symbols of
companionship and love had become more and more spiritual with the
passion itself.
But, preternaturally acute though their senses seemed to me to be, they
would rely upon their decisions no more than the modern scientist of the
West would rely upon his. Error, they held, was ever maiming the
conclusions from reports of the senses, and they took every precaution in
recording or using their own perceptions. Accurate though their sense-
memory was, they had instruments which kept a permanent record of any
report of the senses they meant to use again. Not merely sounds and sights
did they automatically record, but perfumes, and flavours, and electric
impressions. Ages before, the inasan or recorder of light and the linasan or
recorder of sound had been brought to a high pitch of perfection; all the
colours and forms seen in nature, at whatever distance, could be kept in
permanence on irelium-plates and reproduced to the eye by the insertion of
the plates in the inasan and the reversal of the instrument. So was it with
sounds, however loud or faint; the linasan would tell out to the ear music or
speeches recorded hundreds of years before down to the minutest tone. By a
modification of these two instruments they took record of the inner
structure of things even at cosmic distances, and of sounds which seemed to
be intercepted by vast material obstructions. The development of the
recorders of the other senses had been more recent; not till perfumes and
tastes and electricity had begun to enter largely into education and the
stimulance of memory did the necessity for such instruments arise. In the
earlier times before the purgation of the race these instruments would have
been a temptation to new and epicurean vices. Now they were nothing if not
educational aids. The farosan or aromagraph enabled the gardeners to
arrange the mnemonic harmonies of flowers as mere sense-memory could

never have done; it could reproduce any subtle perfume or mixture of
perfumes that had ever been experienced in the island. The salosan or
gustagraph gave incalculable aid to the chemical and alimentary families;
without its permanencies of flavour they would have fallen into daily errors
in mingling the atmospheres of the halls of sustenance and medication and
those of Ilarime. By its aid they could recall any of the tastes which had
made substances or compounds pleasing to the palate. But it was the
idrosan or electrograph that was most needed; for the firla or electric sense
had been so recently developed that its reports as to the amount and quality
of any electric impulse were most untrustworthy. Without the aid of this
recorder they could never have compared the electric impulses of the past
with those of the present, nor could they have been so accurate in
measuring the electric powers of various substances.
They knew that the basis of all scientific advance was accurate
measurement. Their old measuring instruments had gradually been
overtaken by their own senses, and had to be replaced by others more and
more refined. In order to make sure that their senses introduced no personal
element into the reports and representations of their various delicate
measurers, they had invented an instrument which for fine adjustment
surpassed all of these. It was the airolan or sensometer, and by it the
medical families in their weekly review of every system in the community
were enabled to find the exact personal equation of each. It recorded the
upper and lower limit of the various sensations, the limit of endurance, and
the vanishing point. Although there was a great evenness in the
development of the senses in the community, there was yet considerable
variation in the delicacy of perception. One man was keenest in sight,
another in hearing, a third in the electric sense, yet there was a certain
constancy or proportion in all the senses of every man, a proportion varying
according to well-ascertained laws with the hour and the season, the man’s
age, and the temperature and health of his body. The airolan tested,
measured, and recorded the regular variations of each Limanoran’s senses,
and thus he was able to know how far he judged accurately anything he
perceived. By its aid he was able to know the exact point at which he would
need to call in any one of the various mechanical aids to the senses, the
magnifiers, or modifiers, or distance-reducers. By its means they were able
to gauge the proper mixture of colours and proper size in architecture that
would please at certain distances. By its means, too, they could accurately

measure the distance from which any electric or luminous or somniferous
impulse had come, when it struck on the senses.
It was one of the commonplaces of their policy that whatever could be
done by machinery it was waste of skill and energy to do by human labour
and thought; and instruments were generally more exact and reliable than
the senses and active powers of man, however delicately developed and
refined. Of course man’s brain and hand must still guide and superintend all
instruments and machinery, but his interference with their automatic
working was reduced to a minimum, in order that the discount for personal
equation should be as little as possible. It was not, however, so much for the
sake of accuracy of result that mechanism was substituted for human work,
as for the sake of progress. Every operation and function which could be
performed mechanically it was a slur upon human dignity to do; and at once
Limanoran humanity was relieved from the necessity, and the freed energy
was applied to other and nobler efforts towards progress.
During my education I had noticed again and again with surprise that
mathematics took no part in it. Not once had I heard the subject mentioned
by any of my guides or companions. I remembered the important place it
held in Western curriculums, and wondered how the various scientific
families could manage their abstruse formulæ and calculations without that
science. A people that laid so much stress on exactitude of research as an
essential of all scientific progress were surely lax to a degree in failing to
train their youth in the various branches of mathematics.
On having my senses tested by the airolan, the thought came uppermost
in my mind again; and my proparents at last took notice of it, perhaps as the
time had arrived for enlightening me on the subject. They led me to a vast
museum-like building, crammed with all kinds of small and intricate
machines, not unlike a kind of patent office, where the models of new
inventions are deposited for examination and comparison. There was
evident in the arrangement a careful classification according to elaboration
and delicacy. In the first section we entered there were the simplest of
machines, having a few levers and cog-wheels, and a few keys set in a key-
board; these were meant for the easier rules of calculation,—addition,
subtraction, multiplication, and division. We tested most of them and I saw
that they were infallibly accurate; never once even in the longest and most
intricate calculation was there any error. In fact, these machines had been

first invented to avoid the constant errors that vitiated important results
when novices were set to work them out. It was then found that not only did
they rid calculations of fallibility and the youth of heartless drudgery, but
they enabled the race to advance more rapidly. They set free years of life,
especially in the formative stage, that had been wasted on mere routine and
mechanical work; and, best of all, they allowed the tissues of young brains
to be less rigid. It was noted that, after the calculating machines were set to
work, the youth grew in mental and especially in imaginative power at
twice the old rate. The elders of the state were amazed at the result, prizing
as they had done the effect of arithmetic in the discipline and education of
the young; indeed, it had been with great regret that they saw the youth
relieved of so disciplinary an exercise; and they even thought of making an
exception to their usual utilitarian state-principle, and training the boys and
girls in rapid calculation, although it would be of so little use to them in
their after-lives. But a few years convinced them of the serious mistake they
had made. The pace of development so suddenly and greatly quickened in
the new generation that the result could be set down to nothing else than the
new freedom from calculations. Their own faculties and imagination
seemed stiff and almost ossified compared to the ease and flexibility of
those of their sons and daughters. Invention and discovery struck out with
unprecedented energy, and the ethical and emotional phase of imagination
grew at a marvellous pace; new ideal realms were opened out for morality
and practical thought.
The experience threw a remarkable light upon a phenomenon which had
puzzled them for generations. After the period of youth the members of the
community had to specialise; and for some undiscoverable reason those
who devoted themselves to mathematics and the working of abstruse
formulæ had been found, able though most of them were, to be the most
rigidly unreasonable in the community; they refused to admit that they
could be mistaken in any of their judgments or even opinions; nothing
would move them,—neither logical argument nor emotional appeal; they
assumed that they had found absolute truth, and refused to have
compromise. In one generation in the far past the mathematical families had
to be exiled, so serious an obstruction had they become to progress. Again
they had been completely renewed, children of the most noble-minded,
freest, and most imaginative families being substituted for the old members,
and trained to fulfil their functions; within a generation the result was the

same; these scions of the finest of the race became as narrow-minded and
obstructive as their predecessors had been. It seemed to be useless to
change the stock, and for some generations the community accepted their
conservatism and obstinacy as inevitable; they grew accustomed to smiling
at the mathematical families as “the omniscients.”
Why the true cause of this degeneracy had not occurred to such a
shrewd and logical people it is hard to say; probably because they were so
wedded by long tradition and practice to the idea that mathematics was one
of the loftiest of sciences and one of the most essential elements in
education. They doubtless refused to reconsider its claims or to abandon
their inherited reverence for it. But the discovery of the effect of the
calculative habit on the tissues of the brain at last forced them to face the
true cause of the infallibility of the mathematical families. It was their
occupation that caused their degeneracy. Men began to pity them for the
slavery in which they had been so long held and to devise means for their
liberating. The old habitual smile at the mention of their name became
sadness at the thought of what these members of the race might have
accomplished for its civilisation had they not been so frozen in their tissues
by the perpetual use of formulæ. They were amazed at their own dulness in
failing to see that men who dealt in such mechanical methods and exact
results could not but be mechanical themselves and easily fall into the fixed
mental attitude of the omniscient, and dealing with a world so unreal in its
stiff, skeleton-like outlines could not but fail in a world of conditions and
compromises.
At first the prevailing idea was that all the studies and sciences needing
exactitude of formulæ and result should be neglected by the community. On
consideration it was felt that some of the most valuable stepping-stones to
the loftier ideals of the future would be sacrificed if this were done. The
other alternative was chosen. The inventors who had made the calculating
machines were set on to find instruments which would accomplish what the
mathematicians had had to do for the community. And, one after the other,
the years had produced them. Even differential and integral calculus had
been superseded by a series of machines that with little guidance worked
out all the applications of their intricate formulæ to the sciences. As we
advanced from department to department we watched these machines at
work confirming the imaginative results of the physicists, the chemists, and

the astronomers. The mathematical families were relieved of their duties
and distributed, and every member of the scientific families was taught to
use all these formulating instruments. Their brain-energy was not
monopolised by calculations; the use of the machines was but a routine
detail in their wider intellectual life, and absorbed so little of their energy
that it seemed to have no effect on their faculties.
I was not many days in mastering the details of the formula-machines;
for I had paid some attention to mathematics in my buried life and the
memory of the subject rapidly revived. I soon came to see the wisdom of
the Limanorans in eliminating the study from their scheme of education. It
would have been the height of extravagance to waste long periods of their
lives in studying and doing what a machine could do better. It was exactly
the kind of work best done by a machine, for it had to do with a world rid of
all conditions and, mathematically speaking, perfect. The inventors were
still busy making new and simpler machines for the use of the scientists;
and, though they had to know the new mathematical formulæ needed, they
busied their brains rather with their practical application and with the
machinery that would use them. It was imagination in the practice of
mechanics rather than the mechanical use of methods and formulæ that they
were engaged on. Hence it was that they avoided the old unpracticality of
the mathematical families, and stood in no danger of thinking themselves
infallible and the only treasuries of absolute truth.
One of the most interesting departments of Minella, as this great
building was called, was that which contained the measurers of time. I was
somewhat surprised that this department should exist, for I had admired
every day the power the Limanorans had of telling to a minute fraction the
passage of time. Their sense of time seemed to me to make watches and
clocks superfluous. Even when the sky was clouded over and no heavenly
body or light to be perceived, they could tell the exact fraction of the day or
night that had passed, as I tested again and again by the watch I had brought
with me. Their knowledge of the natural signs of the time of day or year had
become instinctive and automatic through long centuries of daily use. The
position and state of the petals of flowers would at any moment by day or
night, by shine or cloud, reveal to them the time. So would the temperature
of anything they touched, or, if it were highly contractile, its size. But these
external signs were quite unnecessary. They had not to go beyond the

sensations of their own bodies to tell the time or season. They knew by the
intensity of the magnetism in them, by the acuteness of their senses, by the
amount of energy they could command.
But their experiments needed far more exactness than even their senses
could afford. Time had to be counted in their science not by mere seconds,
but by the hundred-thousandth, or even the millionth, part of a second. One
old-fashioned measurer of time was based on the length of a wave of sound
as it passed through a vessel of water. The length of the vessel contained a
round number of moltas (their smallest measure of length, perhaps about
the millionth part of an inch); the vibration in the water reflected a bright
light through a microscope and camera combined; and a photograph of the
pulsations imprinted itself on a strip of irelium that kept moving with
lightning swiftness across the focus; this strip was divided into minute
sections, each of them corresponding to a lenta or millionth part of a second
and numbered in order up to a million. A newer clock had its principle
based on the length of a wave of light in a vacuum. Another and more
convenient clock, or rather watch, consisted of an electric battery that kept a
light irelium tongue vibrating; this latter controlled a graduated mechanism
which pointed out on a face the exact lenta in the time of day that it was. It
was small enough to be carried about on the person like a watch.
A similar microscopic minuteness of division appeared in all their
weights and measures. They could weigh in their balances down to the
million-millionth part of an ounce. So with their measurement of heat and
cold; their thermometers could test ten thousand times the range of
temperature that their senses could bear, although their power of endurance
of fire and frost was to me something miraculous; their furnaces were able
to volatilise the most refractory of metals and earths; they could reproduce
the conditions of the most glowing suns, and also the temperature of the
coldest interstellar space, which, age by age, they were bringing their
frames gradually to bear with the aid of certain foods and combinations of
elements. Thus did they hope in some future age to subsist, even when they
ventured outside of the atmosphere of the earth.
All their measures were based on the decimal system, the fundamental
unit for microscopic measurements being the amount of energy in an atom
of one of their elements, and that for cosmic measurements the energy that
would bring a beam of light from the sun’s surface to the earth’s. They were

able to see at a glance the exact amount of energy in any phenomenon, to
whatever sense it might appeal, and in their minds there was ever a
common measure for all types of force. Their electrometers and
magnetometers told not merely the amount of electricity or magnetism in
any machine, material, or phenomenon, but the motive-power it would have
when applied to any purpose. They could compare at a glance, without any
elaborate calculations, the advantages to be obtained from any substance
when using it as a force, whether through the electricity or the heat or the
gravitational power to be obtained from it.
Especially useful was this common measure in dealing with the power
of light as separate from that of heat. It was of great importance to them to
know the exact amount of energy even in a beam of light which their eyes
could not perceive. For they used sunshine as one of their great curative
agencies, and the medical families were constantly experimenting on the
effect of more or less light upon the microscopic life existing in and around
the human body. One of their own new developments had been the
consciousness of light all over their skin; they could tell with eyes shut
whether it was the light of sun, stars, or moon, or an artificial light which
was falling on any part of their body; the effect, even on the mind, differed
completely in the four; the sunlight, or at least a certain amount of it, gave
exhilaration or even joy; the starshine brought contemplative melancholy;
the moonbeam mildly stirred the passions; whilst artificial light varied in its
power of exhausting brain and nerve energy with the material or element
that produced it.
Sunlight deprived of the intensity of its heat was to them one of the
essentials of life. Its bactericidal power had been scientifically proved ages
before, and a family had been set apart for testing its effects both
qualitatively and quantitatively. It was not merely a loose knowledge that
they had acquired of the antiseptic influence of sunshine. They had
measured exactly its power of depriving microbes of their deadliness in the
case of every disease; and they knew to a nicety how strong or weak it
would be needed in order to check their ravages in any constitution,
whether concentrated on a spot or diluted and spread as in a bath, how long
daily its application would be required, and how many days. It was this
family that superintended the sunbaths in their halls of medication, and
assisted the medical sages in advising as to their use. It was true that

daylight, and especially that of a sunny day, swept one third of the noxious
life out of all water open to its influence, whilst the rays of the sun bleached
most bacteria of their pestiferous tendency. Yet used indiscriminately
sunshine became itself unwholesome, because of the other forms of energy
besides light that it brought with it from the sun and the intervening spaces.
If not used with caution, it would destroy the microscopic allies of human
life in the body, rendering feeble the phagocytes that devour the virulent
microbes; it would by its great heat injure the delicate tissues of the brain,
and by its magnetism and weight press heavily on the nerves and the
circulation. It was the duty of the solometric family to rid it of its
unwholesome elements, and to indicate the exact amount and use of it that
would be beneficial in every state of the body. Another of the duties of this
family was to cultivate colonies of microbes of the various diseases and
make them harmless by means of sunlight for use in inoculations against
their own unmodified bacterial kin. One of their greatest aids in this process
was the use of the water of the sea; wherever it did not kill the bacteria
completely, it emphasised the bleaching power of sunlight over them and
rendered them the allies of the human system in its struggle against all
disease and decay. This sterilisation of disease was one of the most
important functions of the family. It was they who led the flight-gambols of
the Limanorans into the outer fringe of the atmosphere, where they might
drink in the elixir of unadulterated sunshine; their guidance and
contrivances were needed even there, in order to prevent the action of the
other energies in the light growing deleterious. Even moonlight and
starshine had their uses in the hands of this skilled family. They could
separate the deadly or poisonous elements of moonbeams to help them in
destroying bacterial life, and leave only their healthy and inspiring
tendencies; thus dealt with, the rays of the moon gave a stimulus to the
brain-tissues which worked up imaginative materials. And every star had, in
their science, its own peculiar influence, sometimes malign, more
commonly beneficial, when treated according to their wise discoveries.
Little of all this would have been possible without the inolan or
measurer of light, one of the most delicate instruments they possessed. This
was but a modification of the human eye as it had been developed in their
bodies. It magnified the impression made on the lens so that it should move
a small mirror delicately hung in vacuo; the reflection of this mirror ran
along a graduated scale on which it recorded by bleaching a point of colour,

the energy of light in the beam producing the movement. This recorded not
merely the strength of the rays of which their eyes were conscious, but that
of many octaves of light outside of the range of all human eyes. A more
modern and delicate form of the inolan used a microscopic camera as the
medium of measurement; this had accomplished new wonders in the way of
measuring the power of rays from stars out of reach of the human eye. A
third photometer, recently invented and still untested when I visited the
collection of measurers, had made use of electricity in collecting and testing
the quality and energy of beams of light.
In all of these forms of the inolan there was an arrangement for ridding
each ray of its heat and of other forms of energy before it entered the lens; a
thermometer measured the heat; and the other elements were absorbed and
analysed by a subsidiary apparatus as the beam approached the inolan.
Another modification of the apparatus had a prismatic arrangement attached
to it, not unlike their inamar, and this broke up the beam of light into its
colour components; the inolan measured each separate component, the
length of its wave, and the energy required to produce it, its camera also
recording in photographic form the metallic elements through which the
beam had passed. A more recent modification, promising great results, was
one which by means of a vacuum-lens recorded the dark beams that shone
from unseen stellar bodies through the corona of our own or other suns.
When fully developed they expected this to reveal the secrets of the darker
depths of the heavens; the systems revolving round the stars would stand
out clearly with all their elements for the investigation of the astronomic
families.
Nor did the extraordinary refinement of these instruments, that were
constantly being discovered, interfere in any way with the development of
Limanoran senses. On the contrary they stimulated advance. Every new aid
to any sense pointed the way to its improvement; and in a few years or
generations this aid was rendered almost superfluous and a new and more
delicate machine must be invented; for the combination of so many
functions in the living body rendered the observations of any one sense less
exact and trustworthy than those of a machine which had but one purpose.
Thus the evolution of the senses kept up an unending race with the
evolution of fine machinery to aid them. Even the roughest, most material,
and least specialised of all the senses, touch, had grown into something that

was most delicate in its manipulation; and one of the most important parts
of the education of my senses was to refine and develop it. They had
specialised it to an astonishing degree. The lips, especially the outer edges
of them, were able to distinguish the latent energy in any substance applied
to them; whilst a delicate fringe of hair upon the upper lip, too minute to be
seen by ordinary eyes, revealed to them the movements and character of
gases and vapours that were so faint in their impulse as to be
unrecognisable by the other senses. The measurement of force had been
raised to a high point of exactness in their huge chests and shoulders. Their
hands, within certain limits, felt temperature with the accuracy and
minuteness of a thermometer. And the prehensile and manipulative skill of
their fingers far surpassed that of the ablest European conjuror I had ever
seen. Without any intention to outwit my senses, they would do things with
their hands so swiftly that I could not follow the movements. It seemed to
me at first as if they had more joints in their fingers than other human
beings, so nimble were they; but this was not the case, although the arm had
greater scope of movement than mine; in fact it seemed to move in the
shoulder socket as in a universal joint, so freely could it revolve in all
directions. Their joints were really more padded with cartilage than mine,
so that there was more flexibility in the limbs along with greater firmness
and strength.
Their nerves were also more magnetic than those of other men,
conveying the messages to and from the brain and will-centres with far
more swiftness and certitude. Indeed, if I were to find any one point in their
systems which most differentiated them from European humanity, it was
this increased and accelerated nerve-energy. For a long time their rapidity
and ease of movement and action bewildered me; whilst I was deliberating
what was to be done, they had done all that was needed. They had
instruments for measuring the flash of thought from brain to hand and of
sensation from hand to brain, and when tested at first, the swiftness of the
message along my nerves was not one tithe of theirs, but when my
education had somewhat advanced, this disparity was reduced by half. This
advance was accomplished, not merely by practice, but by variety of diet
and medication, and by living in a more magnetic atmosphere. I was often
borne aloft into the purer air that fringes the envelope of our earth, and
there, half-asleep, I drew into my system the electric elements which went
to the quickening of my nerves. Down in the island everything that would

excite me was avoided; the muscles and the other tissues of the body were
exercised, whilst the nerves completely rested. Then they would be given
gentle exercise of their own, to strengthen and make them supple, without
unduly stimulating them. I soon began to feel the difference in the
increasing nimbleness of my limbs and could move with more celerity and
ease. The fingers were quicker to follow the eye. I grew what my old
companions would have thought unerring in my aim and would have made
a deadly shot with bullet or arrow in the wars of my native country. What
was still better, the tips of my fingers came to be powerfully magnetic both
in their appreciation of the electricity in any body they touched, and in
actively producing magnetic currents. I was even able to cause a faint flash
in the darkness by concentrating my will-power in my fingers, and waving
them in the air.

POSTSCRIPT TO LIMANORA
When he had reached this point in his narrative, a striking instance of
the result of his education occurred. It was getting towards the end of
winter, and we who had our rules of thumb for the changes in the weather
were looking for the equinoctial gales that harbinger the approach of spring.
The days were lengthening, and the light of the sun was growing clear and
strong upon our high-perched huts.
We had noticed a certain distraction in his manner, an absence of
thought or of consciousness, when he was describing the development of
his magnetic sense. And when he ceased for the night he could not rest but
paced uneasily along our platform of cliff which overlooked the waters of
the sound. The moon had begun to wane, and our weather lore bade us look
out for storms at the beginning of her next phase. I could not go myself to
rest for thinking of his strange narrative and the wonderful people he had
sojourned amongst. I sat up many hours writing out what I could remember
of his conversations and descriptions while it was still clear in my mind.
Some time after midnight I looked out and saw the silver moonshine on
the still waters below and was attracted by the beauty of the scene. I had
thought that he had retired, but I had scarcely seated myself on a projecting
boss of rock that took in one of our widest views, when his musical voice
startled me out of my reverie.
We fell into such sympathetic intercourse as the beauty of night often
stimulates in two sleepless spirits meeting under the moon. He told me that
the earth was then tremulous with suppressed passion, and that far off in his
old home in the Pacific her heart was about to break. He felt waves of
magnetic feeling pass through him, and they drew his soul back to
Limanora. He knew that the spirits he loved there were yearning for him.
For his heart quivered and throbbed with full memories of all he had known
and experienced. There was anguish in the magnetic undulance vibrating

across his being. It was not merely that a great storm was approaching; that
he had known for some days. There were human pulsations in the ether
which beat like an ocean upon his brain. That was why he could not rest. If
only he could have his wings again, he would try to respond to the call. But
it was useless with the recrudescence of his muddier humanity to attempt
return by such aërial means. I offered to go with him on the morrow to the
nearest city and charter a ship to carry us to his former home. But he would
not listen to my proposal, and bade me seek rest and sleep.
I began to feel that I was intruding on the privacy of an agonised soul,
and I bade him good-night and left him to his own thoughts.
The exhaustion of overcharged emotion soon let me drift into troubled
unconsciousness. Dream followed dream like hurrying clouds over the
moon. At dawn I woke in nightmare. The hut was shaking. I thought that I
was still dreaming. But the swish of the rain and the lashing of the tree-
branches on the roof soon made me understand. The calm of the night
before had given way to tempest; and the earth was suffering rupture.
I remembered the prediction of our guest, and rushed to his hut. He was
not there; nor could I conjecture whither he had gone. I thought he had
taken shelter in the bush from the storm. Three days it lasted, and then we
were able to go out and search the drenched forest. We followed up every
track that he had been accustomed to take. We went to all his favourite
haunts. But no trace could we find of him, though days were spent on the
search. Then we forced our way through the dense undergrowth in several
directions we had never seen him take; and at last we came upon a yawning
chasm, which had every appearance of being newly opened. The precipitous
side of the mountain had split, and a vast landslip had swept down it and
filled the bottom of the gulf. We could not resist the natural conclusion; this
was the tomb of our guest. After all his wanderings he had found
appropriate resting-place. The earth he knew so well had taken him to her
bosom.

BOOK II
The Limanorans
The Inner Life of a Self-Selected People

CONTENTS

chapter page

preface 291
glossary 295
I.— discoveries 299
II.— an accident 339
III.— death 354
IV.— an epidemic 392
V.— literature 407
VI.— inspiration 419
VII.— pioneering 436
VIII.— another threat 487
IX.— polity 507
X.— the manora and the imanora 538
XI.— ethics 554
XII.— a warning 629
XIII.— religion 654
XIV.— the last flight 694
epilogue 707

PREFACE

L ATE in the autumn, when the memory of the stranger who had told us
so many wonderful things had begun to lose its sharpness and we had
almost ceased to talk of him, we were startled by his reappearance.
We were in our tunnels, taking advantage of the dry weather to get piles
of our wash dirt out ready for sluicing in the wet season, and were working
till nightfall. On a still, fair evening, which reminded me of the night he
vanished, we were returning jaded from our long work and had just issued
from the belt of bush that fringed our clearing when the moon rose above
the peaks on the other side of the fiord and flashed a shuttle of gold across
the waters. Raising our eyes to our huts, we stopped thunderstruck. Was that
but a lunar effect on the throne-like cliff in front of them? It could not be a
spirit; we had never heard of ghosts in these new lands, nor could the belief
in them seize hold of minds so accustomed as ours were to deal with the
rougher and more material elements of nature. We shook off our trance, and
stepped forward. The sound of our footsteps made the figure move and as
he turned in the moonlight we recognised our lost friend (his apparition, we
first supposed). But he rose with his old quiet and dignified salute of
welcome, and joining us as we sat at our evening meal, we talked as if he
had parted with us only that morning. We had not the hardihood to ask him
what had become of him these long months. But I noticed that he had more
of his old semi-transparency of tissue and ethereality of hue, and in his
eyes, as he ceased from talking, there was a baffled look I had never seen
before in them. He would lapse more frequently into deep reverie. He
seemed to have gone through a lifetime of effort and suffering, and his spirit
was, I could see, weary and sore within him.
He shrank at first from all reference to his life within the circle of mist
out on the Pacific. It seemed now to be a painful memory. There was a
pathos in his tone as he spoke far keener than I had noted in it before. But

gradually I drew him into reminiscence of it when we were alone in the
bush, and he seemed after a time to find consolation in thinking and
speaking about it, especially when he talked of the spiritual side of the
civilisation in the midst of which he had lived for so many years.
In the long nights of that last winter he resumed his narrative again. He
seemed to have difficulty in finding English expression for what he had to
tell, but I encouraged him in our wanderings around the fiord to repeat and
interpret and explain what he had told us. Gradually the narrative found a
more intelligible language, and I was able to jot down notes that I
understood. I have done my best to throw them together into the form that
they ultimately found in his story as he told it to us sitting together in our
hut. But I am still puzzled and sometimes confused by many of the ideas
and feel that they have baffled my best skill to put them into our tongue.
Some of his descriptions awakened in us a sense of incredulity, and others
shook our old world of beliefs to its foundations. But we were drawn to him
by the noble and ingenuous way in which he told us all; indeed, were often
fascinated and blinded as we listened. We could not but accept his story as
the highest truth we could hear in this world, and yet we were struck dumb
by its strangeness. Much of our bewilderment we attributed to the difficulty
of understanding his strange speech, and more to our own ignorance of the
intricate problems that have troubled sages. We have kept back this latter
part of his story for a time in order that by study and care we might make it
more intelligible and more suited to the thoughts of Christendom. But we
have to acknowledge ourselves still baffled by the impossible task of
making this road through difficult regions plain and easy, and so have
resolved to issue the narrative with all its faults upon it.
godfrey sweven.

GLOSSARY

ailomo—The astrobiological families.
airolan—A sensometer, or instrument for finding the personal
equation of a man.
alclirolan—Radiographic cinematograph; an instrument
combining microscope, camera in vacuo, and electric power.
alfarene—Oxygen shrub.
ammerlin—Historoscope.
ciralaison—Museum of terrors.
clevamolan—Combination of telescope and makrakoust, or
distance-hearer.
climolan—Earth-sensor.
clirolan—Instrument that combines electro-microscopy and
photography.
clirolanic—Infinitesimally microscopic.
corfaleena—Vacuum-engine car.
doomalona—The hill of farewells.
duomovamolan—Instrument that interprets the music of the
cosmos.
erfaleena—Anti-gravitation flight-car.
faleena—Ship of the air.
farfaleena—Electric faleena.
farosan—Aroma-recorder.
fialume—The valley of memories.
filammu—The will-telegraph.
firla—The electric sense.
firlalain—The firlamaic department of Oomalefa.
firlamai—The arts of the electric sense.
firlamaic—Belonging to the arts of the firla.

firlaman—A musical instrument that appeals to the firla.
floramo—The botanical families.
floronal—The tree of life.
fraloomiamo—The families of pioneers that imagine and
represent the distant future.
germabell—A tree with fruit that makes the muscles and
cartilage more elastic.
idlumian—Electric steriliser.
idrolan—Observer and magnifier of electric impulses.
idrolinasan—Machine-reporter of the thoughts and feelings
and words of a council.
idrosan—Recorder of electric impulses and sensations.
idrovamolan—Instrument for at once seeing and hearing at
great distances.
ilarime—Edifice devoted to the arts of smell, taste, and
sound combined.
imanora—Centennial review of the civilisation and its
progress.
imataran—The focusser of history.
inamar—Instrument for splitting up light into its
constituents.
inasan—Recorder of luminous impressions.
inolan—Measurer of light.
irelium—Iridescent metal applicable to all manner of
purposes by the Limanorans.
labramor—Alloy of irelium that sponges up and retains
electricity.
labrolan—Instrument for drawing electricity from the air and
the clouds.
lavidrolan—Camera-telescope.
lavolan—Revealer of the inner tissues and mechanism.
lenta—The minutest division of time in Limanora.
leomarie—The science and art of earth-seeing.
leomo—The families of earth-seers.
leomoran—The earth-perforator.
lilamo—The families that watch the security of the island.
lilaran—The storm-cone.

lilarie—The science and art of island-security.
linamar—The analyst of sounds.
linasan—Recorder and reproducer of sounds.
linoklar—Spectroscopic analyst and recorder of vapours.
loomiamo—Families of pioneers who imagine and represent the
links that connect the present with the distant future.
loomiefa—The theatre of futurition.
manora—Decennial review of the progress made by the people.
margol—Electric instrument for blending or reducing the
strength of perfumes, flavours, and sounds.
minella—Edifice for formula-machines.
mirlan—Life-lamp for revealing and recording internal
processes for the use of the eye, the ear, and the electric sense.
molta—The Limanoran measure of infinitesimal length.
monalan—Electrical distance-analyst.
mornalan—Time-telescope.
narolla—Dream-stimulants.
ooaran—Psychometer.
ooaromo—Psycho-physiological families.
ooloran—The sonarchitect.
oolorefa—The hall of sonarchitecture.
oomalefa—Halls of nutrition and medication.
oorolan—Instrument for transforming form and colour into
melody.
pirakno—Machine for drawing electricity from space.
piramo—The meteorological families.
rimla—The centre of force.
salosan—The gustagraph.
sarifolan—Instrument that interprets for sight, hearing, and
the electric sense the graphic records of the mirlan.
sarmolan—Cosmic barometer.
sidralan—Biometer.
sidralmo—Bio-chemical families.
sidramo—The chemical families.
terralona—The edifice of outlook into heaven and hell.
thinamar—Visualiser of sound.
tirleomoran—Electric earth-perforator.

tremolan—Electric clock indicating the changes of
electricity in various parts of the island.
trevamolan—Graduated modifier of sound.
vamolan—Makro-mikrakoust.
vimolan—Photo-electric analyser.

CHAPTER I
DISCOVERIES

W HAT I rejoiced over most of all was the growth of my sympathetic
magnetism. Not merely was my firla or electric sense developing
more satisfactorily; but I was becoming rapidly conscious of the
impulses of the race. I no longer walked amongst this refined people like a
blind man amongst men who see. I began to feel the enthusiasms that
stirred them as a body, like a wind across a cornfield. I seemed to know
whatsoever of public concern was occurring without having it directly
communicated to me. I remembered in the buried life of my boyhood and
youth, the lightning-spread of a new impulse through an assembly or a
crowd; the most rational members of the mass were unable to resist it, even
though it might be irrational or vile. How like a tornado the war-impulse
bursts through a nation is one of the commonest observations in the study of
history; statesmen and kings and heroes have to bow before it, and are
swept along with it in spite of their better judgments. And as swift and
widespread is the coward-impulse that sends a defeated people cowering to
their homes. It is this unspoken magnetism, giving vent as it too often does
to the evil in the human heart, that makes the cause of progress in even
civilised races so hopeless. Through its all-leavening power success inspires
and often consecrates the diabolic, and failure damns the noblest and most
divine.
And this it was that made progress so easy amongst the Limanorans; it
became the instrument of the highest elements and thoughts in them. The
whole weight of their humanity was on the side of advance, and it was to
the better future that they ever gravitated. Everything that made for a higher
plane was an inspiration to this people.
This personal magnetism had been developed in them into a definite
faculty of their souls. They had recognised for many ages the close affinity
of mass-inspiration and the power of the individual will. It was the same
energy working along the nerves, and even, though with some dissipation,
through the space intervening between individualities. They had

investigated its nature, conditions, and methods of action in their exact
scientific way, and had identified it, as far at least as its form of energy was
concerned, with electricity. It was even less dependent on material contact
than that universal force. As they developed it in their frames, they were
able to send more and more definite impulses through considerable
distances. This was their filammu or will-telegraph, one of their most
remarkable faculties, drawn with deliberate purpose by the elders of the
race out of the chaos of mere vague influence and tendency.
Though making use of the active electric sense as channel, it was not
the same as the firla, for it implied a greater effort and outwelling of the
whole spirit. Only exceptional impulses and enthusiasms set it into full
efficiency, such impulses as entangled the whole soul in their issue. It was
no mere toy to be used for the amusement of the passing moment; dormant
it lay, if ever summoned to such a purpose. It was the faculty that in other
races and periods of history had set up men as heroes and leaders; not that
these had even been conscious of its existence in them when they began
their career; success and gathering enthusiasm in their followers gave it
strength and issue, till their mere glance seemed to command. But when
failure came, and the glamour or magnetic atmosphere rarefied about them,
their faculty vanished; for it had no means of communicating its meaning or
power.
In certain periods of exaltation every Limanoran was conscious of the
filammu or will-telegraph; he could not only receive but send emotional
impulses through long distances. The intervening air was magnetised by
their great enthusiasm or sympathy, and became a medium for transmitting
emotional or imaginative thought from mind to mind. Not yet had they been
able to send a definite piece of information by this means, unless it
represented the spiritual crisis through which the sender was passing. But in
movements that shook the whole race to its core, like Choktroo’s threat of
invasion, even those who were still in pupillage seemed to feel the
beginnings of the faculty, at least on its receptive side; secluded though they
were far from the scene of deliberation, they knew the magnitude of the
danger that threatened the life of the commonweal; the air seemed to tingle
with it, and their embryonic filammu could not help responding to the
vibration. Once awakened they were eager to bring out its latent power, that
they might feel and know the impulses which sped the race onwards as a

whole. They soon discovered that it ceased to grow or even work except
under certain conditions; they must keep step with the people, and fix their
eyes steadily on the future: they must never swerve from uprightness or
candour, never let the perfect transparency of their lives be clouded.
Such had been the conditions of the development of the filammu in the
race. In fact its indications had become unmistakable as soon as candour
and truth had become the primary virtues, and progress the watchword. And
it grew as the ideal of the nation became clearer and more imperative, and
their character more uniformly strong and noble. They also found that
something depended on the physical conditions; the atmosphere must be
free from all impurity, and the body must be supremely healthy, whilst the
magnetism of the will must have free course along the nerves. As my nature
clarified under their training and my spirit grew more at one with the
purpose of the race, I grew more sure of the stirrings of the filammu within
me. At first its indications might be explained by other and more patent
causes; I had been in an attitude of expectancy, or my reason had been
following up certain trains of thought from previous events. But after a time
there came to me thrills of emotion that were out of the range of my
immediate surroundings and thoughts. I followed them out and found that
they originated far from the locality in which I was working at the time.

Once a sudden tremor passed through my system as of some great fear;
I had not been thinking of anything but the work before me; no cloud had
come over my sky; no danger that I knew of threatened. As I was trying to
explain the emotion, it suddenly passed into longing to see Thyriel. I knew
where she had gone that day and my work had almost reached a finish, so I
adjusted a faleena, and flew quickly over the country in her direction. I soon
knew why I had come. She was pinioned by a huge rock that had just
tumbled from Lilaroma. Happily only her wings had been caught, but they
had been caught in such a way that she was wedged tightly between them
and could not free her arms and legs nor move her hands; and the boulder
was too large for her to heave up by the strength of her body, even when
magnetised by her will. When she saw this, she withdrew the magnetism
from the effort, and turned it in its full power into her filammu as she
thought of me. I was not long in disentangling her wings from their prison.

But, before I was done, her family were beside us; they too had experienced
the thrill, though more feebly than I had and at a greater distance.
Another time I had not seen Thyriel for some days; we were both busy
at our own pursuits in different parts of the island. She, as I learned
afterwards, had been set to account for a new and somewhat peculiar odour
that had recently begun to accompany the issue of vapour from a distant
lava-well. I was engaged in timing a new and intermittent disturbance on
the surface of the sea off the eastern shore, and trying to find whether it had
any relationship to an intermittent fumarole which had recently broken out
on the eastern slope of Lilaroma. I had kept watch for several days, and
could find no synchronism in their periods, although I was convinced that
there was a close connection between them, if there was not a common
cause. I was feeling baffled and somewhat downcast; when suddenly there
sprang up in me a sense of elation, if not of triumph, which continued for
the rest of the day, although I still failed to discover the connection between
the two phenomena. When I set out next day for the scene of my
observations, I was joined by Thyriel, who explained that she had finished
her task the day before and had now been detailed to assist me in mine. I
then knew the cause of my thrill of joy, and told her of it. She had at that
very hour not only discovered the source of the fumes in a new mineral that
the leomoran had touched, but found that this new deposit was
extraordinarily generative of electricity. It was this that had made her heart
leap for joy and go out towards me. She had longed for my sympathy in her
rejoicing, and unconsciously her filammu had energised in my direction.
Between us we soon saw that there was a complicated periodicity in the
alternations of my two phenomena; it needed several days’ observation to
catch the rhythm, and for that reason I had been baffled at first. Before long
I discovered the cause; as soon as a lava-well farther north had ceased to
flow, they also ceased; it was the viscous intermittance of its stream
opening and then closing two apertures below tide-line into the
subterraneous fires that had regulated the rhythm of these new vents; the
break in the lava-current, the rise and fall of the tide, and the rush of the
breakers had made it complex. And the lava had finally closed both before
it had ceased to flow.

It was at the same period that the whole race breasted back the darkness.
There came at times in their history an age of exceptional advance, that
made the preceding era seem almost stationary. Nor had they yet been able
to explain its appearance satisfactorily. It was easy enough to say that such
and such exceptional men lived then, and that they produced the
phenomenon. But that was only reasoning in a circle; they were as much a
product of the time as their fellows; whence did they get the inspiration
which spurred them on, or the plastic material in which they could work?
They would have been nothing without their conditions and circumstances.
They surprised themselves with their powers and successes, as they strode
forth into the primeval darkness and illuminated it. It all appeared very
simple when once accomplished. They had been gazing for generations into
the darkness, where now there was a blaze of light.
An imaginative pioneering book had long ago suggested that the
impulse came from outside the round of the earth. And one of the most
brilliant discoveries of this newest period of advance was a scientific proof
of this hypothesis. The great development of the filammu or will-telegraph
had made it easy, by localising the new thrill of expectation, and revealing
that it came from no terrene source. Out of what seemed the profound inane
such inspirations issued, and if they found a soil prepared for them by long
self-denial and patient outlook and industrious collection of materials, they
fertilised the period into exceptional efflorescence and fruition. Many an
impulse comes out of the blue and falls unavailing in that no nation or race
or period is fit to receive it. The profound inane, they came to see, was one
of the falsest of ideas; because no matter patent to the human sight fills it,
the interstellar space was believed to be the wilderness of the universe,
cold, bleak, inhospitable, lifeless. Now it was felt to be the home of all
supersensuous life, crowded with an energy that needed no stellar matter or
atmosphere to support it, that never appealed to any but the highest and
latest-developed senses of man. The Limanoran couriers out on the verge of
the earth’s atmosphere had been the first to feel this new flash that lit up
such a vast region of the infinite darkness; they came back inspired with
new resolution and made the first of the discoveries; they gave a magnetism
to their fellow-workers in the same line, and soon the leaven spread through
the whole people. The fervour of originality became the order of the day. To
decipher the unknown handwritings on the wall of life, to solve its hardest

problems, to make new inventions and discoveries, to push out into the
darkness that surrounds the world,—these became the ambitions of all.
Nor did the filammu of any in the island fail to thrill to the influence.
Thyriel felt before I did that there was something exceptional in the
atmosphere. But even my will-telegraph seemed to respond. I longed to go
out and conquer the unknown, to outpace the slow movements of human
discovery. At first I thought the impulse had come from Thyriel, and then
from my proparents or my teachers. And so it was with every Limanoran;
his first thought ran to his closest friend as the source of the magnetic thrill.
But after much consultation and report, the conclusion appeared that no one
in the island had originated the impulse, that all in the air had felt it
simultaneously in their filammus, and after them all down in the island had
felt it simultaneously. The truth gradually forced itself home on the
investigating families that the magnetic vibration had had its source far
beyond the limits of the earth; for they knew that from no other country or
race upon the surface of the globe could it have come.
Ages before, they had abandoned the belief in what seemed supra-
terrene influence as unscientific and leading to superstition. Faith had been
in the past so often the cue and basis of the worst of tyrannies, the
inspiration of the grossest immoralities and irrationalities, the impulse to
most retrogression. It had also, it is true, been the nurse of gentle and just
spirits. But it made them so timid that they were afraid to go forward; it
wound round the soul such a network of fears and observances that its life
was useless to the race. As soon as the final purgation of the people had
been accomplished, it was found that every citizen ceased to speak of faith,
or to use it as the basis of any work or practical step. They did not thrust it
out by any public act, nor consciously reject it, they only left off giving
weight to any of its commands or suggestions; not that they might not be
true or on the side of all that was best; but that it had so often discredited its
authority by prompting, or allowing itself to be used as the pretext for,
retrogression or baseness. They preferred to take every step in life on
ground made sure by investigation and proof that appealed to reason.
And here they were again on the limits of the unknown and vague. This
sense that was closest to the portal of the soul, their filammu, had brought
them to face an intelligence that came they knew not whence, and to stand
in the presence of an infinite darkness that flashed out at times the lightning

of noble impulse. They were by no means unwilling to listen to its report,
but gladly received it as a sure and trustworthy revelation; however dim the
region into which it was about to lead them, they were eager to follow, if
only they set each step upon solid fact. If there was anything unverifiable in
this new leading, they would soon be done with it. It now became one of the
duties of the astrobiological families to watch for these extra-terrene
vibrations of the will-telegraph, and to investigate the circumstances and
conditions.
These families had been the first to feel the new impetus to discovery,
for they were the couriers who went out to the borders of the atmosphere
and watched for signs of energy and life in the infinite beyond. Again and
again had they brought back specimens of microscopic and attenuated life,
which seemed to float in interstellar space. Again and again had they
analysed the beams of light shooting through it, but without much result.
Now they were to be rewarded for their patience. They had taken out with
them one of the new faleenas made of transparent and colourless irelium
like glass; and as an experiment they sent it up by means of electricity far
above themselves. As it rose above the limit of the earth’s atmosphere, they
saw all over its surface a strange fluorescence, which grew unearthly in its
beauty and brilliance. Rainbow colours played through its texture as if they
were threads thrown by the shuttle of some hand out of heaven. Its wings
moved at lightning pace, and yet soon it began to fall towards the earth.
Again it struck upwards, and again the prismatic weavings gave it more
brilliant life. They watched it as it rose and fell between the denser and the
rarer medium. And when finally they caught it and brought it down to earth,
upon its wings both within and without there was imprinted, not the
iridescent web that had been weaving over it, but a hieroglyph of faint, half-
distinguishable forms, some familiar, some strange, inextricably mingled.
They investigated the phenomenon, and came to the conclusion that the
faleena, in the comparative vacuum which lies on the borders of our
atmosphere, had acted with its electric motors like the lavolan, one of their
medical instruments for the inspection of the inner tissues, whilst the wings
acted like the films of a photographic apparatus, and retained a shadowed
impress of the inner structure of all the beings or forms coming between
them and the body of the car. A new world was opened up to them beyond
even their electric sense. Outside of the denser envelope of our orb the

rarefaction of space meant no longer lifeless desolation traversed only by
beams of light, electric impulses from other worlds, and the flight of
occasional meteors. Now they knew that there were ethereal beings living
in infinite space, and that their inner structure differed in density from their
enveloping material. Some of this life was manifestly minute and
attenuated, unsuited to the medium in which it floated, waiting for some fit
orb to land on. But under their powerful clirolans it was as clear that there
were highly developed organisms fitted to this element in which they swam,
organisms probably higher than any to be found on the earth, yet too
ethereal and shadowy to touch any of even the latest-evolved senses of the
Limanorans.
What possibilities this glimpse into the vast unknown opened up for
them they shrank for a time from imagining, lest they should again enslave
themselves to superstition and absurd fancy. For astrobiology they saw at a
glance there was begun a new and lofty career. Soon would they modify
and improve the lavolan to fit the conditions of interstellar space, and the
faleena, if not their own organs, for venturing far into the rarest ether. And
then what reports, what pictures of the invisible universes would they bring
before the eyes and the firlas of their fellow-islanders! How would they
ever have time to investigate and classify the genera and species that
inhabited the ether? What limit was there to the ambitions and ideals they
would be able to set before the race?
Another investigation that followed from this discovery had as its object
the nature of the new forms of energy that evidently filled interstellar space.
This was the province of the families devoted to astrophysics. They
produced apparatus for isolating each type of energy which seemed to have
full action only in a vacuum, and they experimented with it in an
innumerable variety of ways so as to find out its characteristics. The force
of gravitation had been familiar to them even in primitive ages, and had
long been investigated so as to reveal many of the qualities of its action that
were unperceived by ordinary senses. Electricity had been one of the
commonest of their phenomena, and recently a vast unknown region had
been opened up by them, lying between the verge of eye-awakening light
and the verge of firla-awakening electricity which their machines had made
plain even to untrained senses. For generations they had passed with ease in
their inamars or spectroscopes beyond the bands of colour that affected