Chapter I: Discoveries (1)

WHAT 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 their eye, and the unseen rays had yielded most of their secrets to them. In their lavolans or vacuum-energy mirrors they had traced the characteristics of the torrents of energy which tore away from the negative pole of their batteries. And now they had to face a new form of radiant energy, the product of these negative streams and of the irelium which they struck. Experimenting with it in their lavolans they found it different from its parent energy; by passing through the irelium it had grown indifferent to the power of magnetism. This peculiarity enabled them to investigate the inner nature of magnetism; for on the two sides of an irelium sheet they had the same electric rays acting differently towards a magnet; on the one side they could be deflected by it, on the other they went on their way as if it were not there. The difference was also used in producing a new kind of electric motor, governed by an irelium film which closed or opened a channel of magnetic influence. A third useful application of the discovery was a new irelium-covering for the head and the body, that milked the east wind of its deleterious qualities. And a fourth was an apparatus for finding by the aid of a magnet the stuff of irelium with greater certainty in their lava-wells.

But the discoveries that flowed from this were still more important. By further experimentation they found another type of radiant energy that behaved in a similar way towards gravitation. In a vacuum formed within a vessel of an alloy of irelium it ceased to obey the force of gravity; but as soon as it had passed through the side of the vessel, it gave full heed to the force. Within a few months after this had been discovered, there had been invented a faleena that fell or rose according as the new rays were intercepted by a film of the irelium-alloy or were allowed free passage _in vacuo_. The energy in mass drove the car on indifferent to the earth’s influence, or at the will of the guide brought the erfaleena, as they called it, gently sloping downwards at any angle required to the surface of the globe. A pioneering book at once developed the results of this discovery and invention. It showed how a way was now opened to other stars. For this new radiant energy was found to stream in and past the earth’s atmosphere in vast currents. The denser the medium, the more was it absorbed and lost, so that in the earth and the atmosphere it seldom or never manifested itself. Hence the long ages of scientific investigation before it was discovered. By means of these currents, which evidently set through space in definite directions, they would be able to guide their new anti-gravitation faleena to any point in the interstellar ether, and be able to keep up the supply of force that would drive it. And when they approached a new world they could by means of their new machinery bring its force of gravitation to bear on the car and so hasten its flight; and they would be able to hover over the atmosphere by means of the alternating movements of their engine, till they could find out its conditions, and see whether it would be safe to land on it or not. What they wanted yet was the evolution of their physical system in the direction of living in ether or in various atmospheres indifferently. It pointed out to the physiological families the way that would lead in this direction; and it showed how, though it would take countless ages, it was yet within the scope of their humanity.

For their knowledge of the constitution of the universe the discovery of these two forms of radiant energy proved to be of great importance. They were able to find out the relationships of gravitation, electricity, the dark rays of the inamar, the negative rays of the lavolan, light, heat, and the two new types of energy. And by means of the similarities and differences found to exist between any two of them they were enabled to resolve the molecules of any element into their constituent atoms, and thus to reveal the characteristics of the fundamental ether. They felt that they were at last in the immediate presence of the medium which filled space, and they invented an apparatus isolating the ether from all the forms it enters into, so that it became manifest under their magnifiers to several of their senses. In it they were able to make any one of the forms of energy move and play. From it they were able to mould many of the terrene forms of latent energy, and they hoped to mould most of the others with which they were familiar.

One of the most immediately practical results that came from the discovery of these two modes of energy was another kind of engine, which almost doubled their store of force in Rimla. The main form of it took advantage of the radiant energy that showed indifference or obedience to gravitation according as it played in a vacuum or through an alloy of irelium into the air. The new rays lifted a piston _in vacuo_, and by an automatic arrangement they passed through a film of the alloy and then allowed gravitation to pull them and the piston with them back into its first position; the rapid alternations drove magnetic machinery which produced and stored up electricity. Another form of the new engine used the difference between the conduct the other newly discovered radiant energy displayed towards magnets when it played in a vacuum vessel of irelium, and when it had issued through the vessel’s filmy side.

The increase and concentration of force in their island was one of the great subordinate aims of their civilisation. For they knew that the greater the power they had command of the more rapidly could they advance towards higher and higher goals. Greater force meant greater dominion over nature and her secrets and laws; and this implied accelerated speed in progress. It had been one of the primitive blunders of their civilisation, as it still was of all other civilisations, to imagine that extended empire over men meant a true development of humanity; wide sovereignty was mere artificial change of the locality and application of the forces of mankind, without increasing them; it was but a reshuffling of the cards (to use your similes), with all the honours in one hand instead of being distributed over all; it was merely political and not real. Any gain that might come from the concentration of power and wealth was wasted on increased war-material and military expeditions for retaining or subduing territories and peoples, on futile and routine administration, and on growth of court splendour and luxury. The pursuit of the sanguinary phantom of power over other men had to be for ever abandoned before any real human advance could be made. Empire over the powers of nature was the primary condition of full development of human possibilities, and every tissue of their wonderful brains was strained to its utmost for the rapid extension of this sway. A new addition to the stores of the centre of force, a new source of energy, was therefore ever hailed by them as the warranty of a leap upward and onward into the future.

The invention of these new engines, then, had no slight significance as events in their history. And the assurance of more and more rapid progress was increased by a discovery of the chemic families in the same direction. They had used coal for the generation of heat before they had left their primeval home around the south pole. But in their more tropical archipelago they found no coal-beds, the islands having originated in volcanic and coral formation; and the climate made the use of such a concentrated fuel unnecessary; it was warm even in winter, and it supplied fruits and cereals which needed little cooking. The forests of the islands had furnished whatever fuel had been required for hundreds of generations, and outside of Limanora they were still sufficient for all purposes. But the centre of force had recalled the great heat they used to have from coal, and the Leomo, in their probings of the earth, had ever been on the outlook for beds of the old fuel. Recently they had found thin strata of it, but so deep in the earth that it was of little value to them.

But a discovery by the Sidramo, or chemic families, made them reconsider this decision and try to invent some form of the leomoran, which would cut and send with ease to the surface of the earth the coal they had found. The Sidramo had experimented with it in various lines. They had made the steam from it give power as they had seen it give power to the _Daydream_ and her Broolyian imitations. But so large a proportion of the latent energy in it had been lost in the process that they turned their researches in other directions. Before long they found that, when the coal was placed in a chemical solution containing comparatively common and cheap elements, electric power was largely generated. And following up their discovery the Sidramo were soon able to draw electricity from any of the rocks of the island. Once having had their attention applied to such problems, they made a number of them surrender their secret; by surrounding one common rock, _e. g._, with a certain solution they brought from it heat alone. But the discovery most important for the development of the race was that which brought electric power directly from the rocks and even from the earth. For this increased the possible store of force in Rimla enormously. And there was no limit to what they might use there for the advancement of civilisation.

Within a few days of this discovery the Piramo or meteorological families had applied the lavolan to one of their long-unsolved problems, the extraction of magnetic power in large quantities from the air. They had been already able to draw from the thunder-clouds their electricity, and make them pass harmless. And by means of personal effort and the magnetism of the body they were able when high up in the rarer regions of the atmosphere to recharge their little shoulder-engines for driving their wings. But in the lower air they had failed to draw electricity from any but thunder-clouds in any quantity. They based a new apparatus called pirakno on the lavolan and its discoveries, and with this they were able to draw magnetism from even the gentlest breeze. They increased its size and capacity, and soon could give a daily supply of new power to the centre of force. Nor did this deprive the air of the island of its exhilarant quality; for the more they took from it, the more seemed to flow in from surrounding space. But, when the east wind blew, they found the inflow of magnetism too much for their smaller piraknos; only the larger could cope with it; and then the store of power in Rimla received enormous additions.

For ages they had been testing the amount of magnetism in the air at various heights and temperatures and various times of day, month, and year, and recording the results of their investigations. They were now able to decide from these and from their experiences of the pirakno that irregular changes in the weather were due chiefly to magnetic influence. They saw that the tremendous storms which every few years swept the earth had their origin in exceptional inflows of cosmic magnetism. During the history of man since he had come to self-consciousness and to the habit of recording his own movements, there had been many sudden and temporary climatic changes, that had led to vast displacements of the inhabitants of the earth. A series of severe winters in the north and in the temperate zone would strip the trees and fields of all frugiferous qualities, and drive the animals of the chase away to the south in search of food. And the races of man had to follow them. So in the tropics a series of droughts would destroy half the chances of life, and exterminate one-third of the dwellers inland. As a rule the agony there led to no displacement of nations, so passive and fatalistic are they by nature near the equator; but in times when some new religious idea had broken the spell of fatalism, the first goad of starvation drove hordes to search for food in other zones. Oftentimes there has been a simultaneity in the meteorological severity, partly due to a universal influx of interstellar magnetism, but still more to the fact that the earth and the planetary system to which it belongs have swung into a region of space that is exceptionally barren of all life-impetus. At such periods came those wide-spread migrations of the dwellers on the globe that made new eras in history. It was one of those cosmic disturbances of climate that sent the Arabs out of their deserts, a flaming portent along the shores of the Mediterranean with their newly reformed religion, the creed of Mahomet, and at the same moment flung the Saxons against the northern frontier of Charlemagne’s empire, and the Danes on the coast of Britain. So, earlier, in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era, the Huns burst from the east like a torrent, and again and again swept all before them in the west, whilst simultaneously the Goths broke in from the north across the boundaries of the Roman empire. Later, in the ninth century, the Danes and Normans broke away from the north again and again, and plagued Europe with their piratical energy in the very period when the Magyars were migrating from the east to the west. And it was only the closer packing of the continents, and the consequent military organisation of European nations that checked these displacements in later centuries, though there were refluxes towards the east, as in the crusades. But the cosmic meteorology of the earth took different effect in the same direction, when plagues mowed down their millions of victims from east to west; where wide-spread displacements are impossible, there must be decimation by some cosmic means in order to let the light into the overpopulated regions. Another escape-valve was found for the pressure of those periods of temporary climatic change, when the western peoples were driven over the oceans to find a home. Emigration then came to mean transference of masses across the sea, at first to America, where there were other but weaker civilisations to be overcome, afterwards to lands and islands that were either empty or occupied by a few scattered savages. It was their circle of mist that saved the archipelago of Riallaro from the effect of these vast displacements of population. When every acre of land on the earth shall have been filled with its complement, and human forethought and ingenuity are still unequal to the sudden changes of cosmic meteorology, then famine and plague will be the only means of relieving the pressure.

The Limanorans had no fear of such effects in their own island, except indirectly. For they had complete command of their own birth-rate and death-rate, and kept the numbers commensurate with all the purposes of their existence. Climate was to them as plastic as any material or force of nature, and the unexpected in meteorology was gradually becoming unknown. But they had a strong indirect interest in all inbursts of the cosmic. For the peoples of the other islands, the descendants of their ancient exiles, were as ready victims as ever to what seemed the caprices of the seasons and the years. And the frustration of the consequent movements involving the interests of the Limanorans absorbed more of their time and reserve energy than they desired. A violent tornado would obliterate the products of a year over the whole archipelago, and the fear of starvation would goad the inhabitants into expeditions in search of food, sometimes even towards the isle of devils. Again, hungry microbes, the spawn of some plague-stricken world, would float into the earth’s atmosphere and find new soil on the islands; and the dwellers would die so quickly that there was no time or room on their circles of earth for sepulture. Into the sea the festering dead would be thrown by the thousand, each bearing its myriad germs of contagion; the very fish that fed on them would die of the plague and bear its microbes to every shore; the currents and the winds, if left to their own bent, would sweep down the foul nests of contagion on the Limanorans; and it would take them weeks of superhuman effort to prevent the bacterial spawn from settling in their systems, and to cleanse the adjacent seas of all taint. The effort to prevent these disasters often wasted their store of force and checked their advance. It seemed to them therefore more economical of their energy to help in dispelling the original evil or making it swerve towards other oceans. For a time they considered it to the interests of their progress to save the whole archipelago from the irruptions of interstellar magnetism or bacterial life. But even this was found to have serious disadvantages. Unbroken prosperity surcharged the leaders of the other islands with conceit, and made them lose their fear of the central isle and resume their projects for its conquest; or it deluged them with population, which, whenever nature grew economical again, was driven to foreign means for its sustenance, and, at times, goaded by hunger, made in military wise for the isle of devils.

Yet these alarms and dangers were more infrequent and more easily repelled than when the more ambitious of the archipelago were driven by the spur of famine and disaster to incursion. And, though for a brief period the Limanorans allowed an occasional tornado or plague to devastate the islands of hostile neighbours, they came to the conclusion that it needed less of their energy to repel an occasional hive of enemies impelled by narrowing limits or the lessening generosity of nature than to beat off vast bodies of embattled peoples frantic with hunger and reckless of life, led by the keenest skill and fieriest ambition of the archipelago. They could better avoid all destruction of life in the one case than in the other,--one of the duties of their civilisation, even though a subsidiary one.

The Piramo were thus essential to the progress of the race; their growing knowledge of the conditions that governed the climate as well as the passing weather saved in a day as much power as the use of such an instrument as the pirakno at first could add to Rimla in a year. And the scene of the labours of the Piramo was every year more and more extended to the extra-terrene; meteorology became in its investigatory and experimental department more and more cosmic, and often overlapped astronomy, astrobiology, and astrophysics, and aided them; more and more did they find their problems questions of magnetism or electricity. In the interstellar spaces must be sought the sources of the greater disturbances of season and climate and the pirakno grew every year of more and more importance, as they traced the magnetic influences around the earth back into the infinite fields of space.

About this very time they invented an instrument of great delicacy, which foretold the vaster tracts of magnetism into which the earth was swinging, and measured the increase. It depended for its principle and basis on the intimate relationship between electricity and light, on the effect of magnetism upon light and upon electric radiation from the negative pole in a vacuum. They had noticed for some time that the light from any meteor or luminous body outside the sphere of influence of the earth never reached the instruments of the observers on the edge of the atmosphere quite true, and that the aberration differed at different times. By means of various experiments they came to the conclusion that the aberration was due to magnetism in the extra-terrene spaces. Their new instrument, which they called a sarmolan, they sent out into the ether beyond the earth’s atmosphere and beyond the influence of terrestrial magnetism; and, as it received beams of light from any one heavenly body towards which it had been directed, it recorded the amount of this body’s deflection from the straight course. They preferred to turn it to the moon or to Venus or Mars; for then they were sure that the deflecting masses of magnetism lay within immediate range of the earth. This sarmolan turned out to be for cosmic changes of climate what the barometer is for daily or hourly changes of weather. Whenever it recorded violent deflection, it meant that the earth was approaching an exceptionally vast tract of magnetic influence, and that there would be great and frequent disturbances for months, if not for years, in the regularity of the earth’s seasons and climates, or at least of those of one zone. It warned the Limanorans to get ready their piraknos and all other instruments they had for drawing and imprisoning for their own use the electricity from the atmosphere and the spaces above it. It was in short their cosmic barometer foretelling changes in climate years ahead. It eased the minds of the Piramo and set free half their energies for other investigations, as soon as it had proved itself a true prophet. Later improvements in it measured the distance of the supermagnetised region of space from the earth, and thus indicated the exact year and sometimes even the month and the day when the series of climatic perturbations were likely to begin. What had been guesswork before, made just before meeting the phenomenon itself, was now reduced to predictive law; and they looked forward to the time when by recording, classifying, and mapping the variations and regions of cosmic magnetism they would be able to get at the cause of its unequal distribution in interstellar space. Nay, when they had charted the great drifts and currents of varied energy that the earth encountered as its universe swung through space, they might have ready for their future voyagers to other worlds a full cosmography, which would instruct them in the kind of oceans and torrents they would have to breast, the types of energy they would have to accustom their systems to, and all the risks and dangers they would have to meet. And, when their knowledge of the conditions and regions and tracks in the boundless space they might have to traverse was fairly rounded and complete, then some slight adaptation of their sarmolan would be to them their cosmic compass.

There was evidence in other discoveries too that this hope was not so utopian as it seemed at first, that at least not countless centuries would pass before they might be able to fulfil it. One especially, that of the Floramo or botanical families, quickened their expectation far beyond the mere flight of fancy. It was a new sublimation of a vegetable extract, which seemed to give their lungs free play when there was little or no air to breathe. They had used for ages the fruit of what they called the floronal or tree of life for giving new vigour to the organs and especially to the nerve-tissues; they still continued to use it, even though the chemical families had analysed it and found all its constituents, and then reproduced a mixture that had most of the revivifying qualities of the fruit. The tree grew only in marshy districts, and they had reserved an obscure and rarely visited corner of the island for its culture and for the culture of plants and trees like it. There was another tree growing only in the cooler zone half-way up the mountain, and preferring shallow and poor soil to root in, whose fruit gave extreme flexibility to the more muscular and cartilaginous tissues, and especially to those in the chest; if taken inwardly or through the pores, muscular exercise became more easy, and breathing became deeper and slower or quicker as the will directed. A third low plant or shrub, which grew only on the highest altitudes of Lilaroma, and had its roots generally in the soil underneath a layer of snow, had been found recently to have in its tissues, and in a concentrated form in its nuts, great stores of oxygen. For ages it had been considered a poisonous plant, and avoided; for within a considerable radius of it breathing had always been more difficult than at a distance from it; it had therefore been eradicated from all parts of the cone frequented by the Limanorans. It had no beauty of form, often grew low like a lichen or moss, and could remain under the snow for years without perishing. It had thus been neglected and in fact seldom observed in its growth; whilst its nuts had been thought to be as poisonous as the plant itself. But recently an avalanche from one of the little-visited slopes of Lilaroma had uncovered a hollow, in which one of the Floramo had found a bird, emaciated and unable to fly, yet still alive; and beside it were the remains of a number of these poison plants and particles of many of their nuts. It had evidently been imprisoned many weeks, if not months, and its only food had been the obscure and offensive snow-bush, stunted, scabrous, and without green or leaf.

The Floramo became deeply interested in the phenomenon, and gathered many specimens of the shrub from the top of the mountain. They fed the bird till it became plump, and then shut it up in one of their irelium vacuum-chambers with only the nuts to peck. There they watched it from day to day, and saw that as long as it fed on the nuts it continued vigorous and lively, even though it began to lose its rounded outlines again. They soon closed their experiment, and set the winged creature free to fly whither it would, satisfied that there could be only one logical conclusion with regard to the plant. They saw that its nature was to lay up stores of oxygen in all its tissues, and they called it alfarene or the oxygen-shrub. It was this treasure in it that enabled it to live so long beneath vast accumulations of snow and ice; it was this feature of its life that made it when open to the air so exhaust the oxygen for yards around it that men found it difficult to breathe beside it; it was this that, when it became the food of the bird, enabled it to live and breathe so long away from the air. It was the outcome of long ages of selection up in those difficult altitudes, where nothing could live under the snow without this power of storing up oxygen. And its nuts, too hard and innutritious except for hunger-driven birds to attack, concentrated round the seeds an extraordinary amount of this oxygen-stuff; and by means of this, when underneath the pressure of the snows the husk broke, the seeds were able to support themselves and develop into plants away from the vital air.

It was evident that these alfarene nuts were treasure-houses of oxygen; and soon they were tried by the Limanorans themselves when they flew into the upper regions of the air. At first they broke the nuts into powder, which was made into a hard but soluble paste: a small piece of this held in the mouth till it melted enabled them in their flights to breathe freely in rarer altitudes than they had ever reached before. The Floramo afterwards brought out the oxygen-storing power of the shrub more strongly by careful cultivation and selection. Within a few years they made of it a vigorous, large, and comparatively handsome tree, and its nuts grew larger and more oxygenated, so that they became a necessity for all flight into higher atmospheres. More attention was also paid to the floronal or tree of life and to the germabell or tree whose fruit produced elasticity of the muscles and cartilage. The development of all three in the direction in which they might be useful to the race quickened; the energy stored up in their fruits came to be more and more concentrated; selection of the plants, cross-fertilisation of them, special soil and feed for their roots, and special surroundings, were all-powerful in the hands of the Floramo for changing plants and trees to any purpose they had in view. They studied the tissues and habits of the species that they wished to adapt, not as an abstract and merely scientific investigation, but as one of the practical problems of their own life; they turned the clirolan on its inner and outer tissues, as they anatomised it; they watched its inner processes with the lavolan as it grew or decayed; they chemically analysed its sap in all its stages, and the various soils at its roots; then they experimented with new elements in the soil in the direction of the qualities they wished to encourage; they tried it with various degrees and hours of sunshine by day, and various amounts of moisture by night, at different stages in its growth; if they found some of the qualities that they desired in its fruit or tissues more vigorous in some other species, they fertilised its blossom with the pollen of this second plant, and from the seed raised a new species, which would fully realise their purpose. The whole of vegetal nature was plastic in their hands. And every year saw hundreds of new species.

The Floramo were the forerunners of the Sidramo or chemical families, and experimented in materials and juices and essences, which would be useful to the race in its ever-quickening advance. Often would vegetal nature reveal a compound that shortened some route through the future, and the Sidramo would then analyse the product, and find the secret of its special efficiency. The Floramo were indefatigable in that department of their work which experimented with the application of plants and their fruits and tissues to useful purposes, and every day saw some process accelerated by the results of their labours. In fact they classified the vegetal world not merely according to the structure and methods of growth and propagation, but mainly according to the particular utility of the products. The one classification was more essential to their creation of new species, the other to their discovery of purposes for which new species might be created. Like all their sciences, botany was nothing if it was not creative.

Having discovered the oxygen-storing shrub, the Floramo gave a new bent to it, applying their energies to strengthening its vitality and its vitalising powers, and to finding out the most convenient form in which to use its treasured energy. Aided by the Sidramo they were able to combine the juice of the fruits of the floronal and the germabell with the paste of the nut of alfarene into minute, to my eyes almost microscopic, globules, each of which would support one of their couriers in the ether outside of our atmosphere for several hours. At first they lost one of the vitalising elements in securing another; and even after they had been able to bind the three essences together in one form, it gave air and sustenance for only a few minutes when they tried it in a complete vacuum. But after experimenting for many months, they were able to concentrate these essences under enormous pressure and by the aid of electric stimulus into a form which would not volatilise except in the saliva of the mouth and under electric stimulus. They were also able to give their globules such electric power as would utilise the streams of magnetic energy that filled the ether. Thus the ether-couriers found them far more strengthening and sustaining just above the earth’s atmosphere than in it. One globule lasted several hours longer in a vacuum, and made breathing and the other vital functions more easy and enjoyable. Thus was opened up to them by this discovery a long vista of investigation. The new type of sustenance and oxygenation was so concentrated that the couriers into the sky could carry with them enough to serve through months.