 CHAPTER IX OF LIMONORA, THE ISLAND OF PROGRESS BY GODFREE SWEVEN This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. UMELEFA These hulls 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 limonorns could drink in its medicating breath. Here in the vast hull they could 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 elementary than any could they 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 a rainbow fluctuation in the sun. There was a milky way of jeweled pinnacles, and around were strewn fire-flashing constellations of jewel minarets and domes. Several centers of varied roof and aspiring form led the eye by their incompleteness to some great center, and soon it rested calmly on the vast, yet ever-broken 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 neighboring 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 here would be sacrilege. When night fell, the stars in the heavens held spirit communion with this their brother. This was Umalipha, or the jewel of immortal longings. My first visit to Umalipha is engraved upon the record of my past, for it was one of my first expeditions under the guidance of Thairiel. 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 son 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 colored 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 Port Collis, and we found ourselves in a spacious entrance hall, its roof a moving ornery of the sky of night, its walls lit pictures of the ocean around framed in leaving sections of the sea alive with sea denizens, its floor a tidal beach of sand, soft yet firm, where on 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 colored as the rainbow. It was the index hall, for here were marked the name and number and situation of every chamber in Ume Lofa, 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 limonoran might see with his own eyes and hear explained by one who knew, every modification in the tissues that a longer or shorter time span 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 direction 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 would 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 elementary shuljourn in Umelefa, and whether he would have to remain longer or have a certain atmosphere introduced into a 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 Umelefa 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 the sanitary sense within them like a whip or gold which would not let them rest till the evil element was swept out. It was a daily occurrence to meet some islander herring post-hace 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 lastitude or the absence of 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 goat of ache flew to Umelefa 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 counsel 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 sensitive 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 neighbor. 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 Lyman Orans laughed at the absurdity of Western civilization 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 civilization. The medical counselor 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 had counsel and a special section of the human system to explore, besides having a mastery of the whole. It was this division of labor 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 limonora to childhood, and were then as mild and innocuous as scarletina 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 age by the medical knowledge of the parents or pro-parents, and it was the rarest occurrence to have to resort to the deeper knowledge of the medical counsel, 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 limonora, 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 a 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 sufferer spent and unexhilarated. It was no fever, but only a langer 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 specialist discovered concerning it. It could not be fatal, they assured me, for no epidemic had been fatal to limonorans for many centuries. It only meant the loss of a valuable portion of the time of working. In the other islands, the wing-scouts brought the news. It swept half the population 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 in 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. Limonorans 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 traveling 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 through the ether, unclaimed by any planetary center. It was out of such waves 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 internal 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 the 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 nine 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 refved of the elements that invited and fitted any disease germ seldom suffered in any serious degree from them again. Soon by their new electromicroscopes or chlyrolins they were able to classify the infinitely minute foods of these infinitely minute pastures 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 chlyrolins combined photography with electromicroscopy 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 debris 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 exhausta discreta, 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 neutralize the poisonous qualities of the bacterial debris. Last of all by their vimolins or photoelectric analyzers, they found the exact food which attracted each form of microbe to the tissue and nourished them there. And they experimented electrochemically till they knew the element that, combining with this bacterial food, would neutralize 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 the last conditions which would give them the victory in the struggle for existence and would enable them to grow so rapidly and luxuriously as to choke all neighbors, and their old science of earth culture set them on the way to a true medical science. They had watched with their chlyrolins the selective processes of the roots of each weed, and by various analyzers 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 they were 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 civilization 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 chlyrolins and vimolins 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 this was 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 demoralizing 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 demoralization 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 debris that the minute organisms threw off. They invented still more powerful chryrolins, 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 centers. 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 specialize for the medical casts 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 chryrolins, they found that, as the brain or nerve centers 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 neighbors, just like a lapse into criminality and Western civilization. It was the symptom of possible disease with all its power of contagion. The sense of active vitalization, what we call the spirits, was the barometer of the sanitary, moral, and intellectual atmosphere, and every limonoran was keenly sensitive to all its changes. In Omelifa it was impossible to conceal the source of the degeneration. The specialized families of the medical council knew were 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 muddy my senses their bodies were as opaque as my own, except for a certain pollucid 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 vanings underneath and detect every nervous or muscular effort. Their magnetic sense could tell them whether thought or emotion was developing in the centers 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, nonexistent to my senses except under the microscope. Hence it was that each limonoran 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 neighbor, 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 curative power in their very presence. With their chlyroans and vimolans and other aids to the senses the medical sages could detect the slightest char 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 the Lymanoran, and he was hardly ashamed of its appearance and alarm-less 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 centers 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 at an atmosphere of the special elements which would nourish the degenerate cells and also those that would destroy the microbes. Only as a last resort was surgery used and the part laid open to the local application of reagents against the hostile organisms. The rudor and older forms of evil, passion, envy, malice, hatred, jealousy, contempt, vanity, rarely appeared to grow in men and women at that advanced stage of their civilization. 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. The hundreds of Lyman Orans now grew up without once experiencing any one of them. When they did appear, isolation was the first step, and the parents or pro-parents would generally cope with the moral disease without having recourse to a medical family or two to Melufa. 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. Even 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 Chliroans 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 debris, and then with their photoelectric analyzers 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 forever 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 adivism 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 immortality 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-like life till they meet with fit atmospheres, such as will make them strong and teeming. For newborn worlds, just ready for the settlement of life upon them, this is a blessing. But for those having upon them highly developed organized life it is too often a curse. Every nation or tribe where civilization 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 centers of the human system can explain it fully. Even but the peoples who have ordered their existence on the moral laws of the universe and thus kept the tissue 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 Lymanoran metasists were ever testing and analyzing the atmosphere of the earth for these intrusive immigrants from other worlds. Vigorous and healthy though their systems were, some chance minute stranger might find allodgement 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 civilization, 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 do them as barbarous as the butchering of animals for food. Brilliant operations they thought the confession of failure in provisional and preventative medicine. They would have considered it a disaster, if not a crime, to let any disease proceed so far and observed as to need the excision on the part affected. Even when by 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 eclurolin, a combination of microscope, camera in vacuole, 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 eclurolin 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 Umelefa, 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 marvelously 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 and 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 of their eclurolin had introduced, gave them complete command of everything that was preceding 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 refine 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 onto 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 this pursuit the tissue had room to grow. If a combination of exceptional faculties were needed in any profession or pursuit, protrubences 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 refining could be accomplished without the patient knowing much about it. The operation was generally finished and the wound healed wilfully 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 tissue's 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 chlyrolins and vomolins 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 irrelium 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 movement of the processes could be slowly investigated. Their photoelectric instruments could light up and make transparent any stratum of tissue desired, whilst keeping the rest in shadow or dark outline. The furla, or electric sense. Their physiology had no longer any need of anatomy or vivisection as its foundation and starting point. Besides the alkyrolins, they had their mirror-lens or life-lamps, as they call them, and these enable 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, any time of the day or month, would at once challenge attention and lead to microscopic investigation. They enlarged the electrograph and the phonograph, and the photograph of the point indicated and were thus able to examine under the serifolin every infinitesimal atom of it in all the respects which appealed to their sight, hearing, and electric sense. The serifolin magnified and interpreted for these investigative senses the graphic record of their mirror-lens, 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 Lymanorans, though they had something of our diffusion of electric sense, had also in the back of their necks a localized sense that responded to the faintest magnetic influence and measured roughly its amount and its changes in kind and degree. The delicate nerve center there, which might have been the remains of a backward-looking eye, had developed with them into a most sensitive collector of electronic 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 mirror-lens, 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 ones to have been an eye in that region. They came to the conclusion that this must have been a closer connection with the higher brain centers than any part of the body except the eye, and bent their whole attention upon its nature. They soon defined it as a localized 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 notice change 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 most 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 will and most predatory could paralyze 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 could 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 practiced, 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 train 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 meditative powers of the eye were raised in the families of metasists into capacities which seemed to me almost preternatural. A more widely diffused specialization 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 Thaeriel would tell me the intricacies of the interplay of thought and emotion. It is true they could not easily communicate any spiritual fact, needing some concrete image, unless they employed the code of eye signals which every limonoran 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 marvelous was that the intimate and facile converse went on when the two friends were at a considerable distance from each other. When occupied in this they kept alternating 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 second 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, that 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 the 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 electromagnifiers which, affixed to their furlough on the back of the neck, enabled them to feel the faintest impulse from a distance and interpreted, and a modification of the Vimalan, used like spectacles, reduced the sense-numbing power of distance a thousandfold. 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 Lymanorans, 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. This 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 civilization they were of great power on the side of progress. They were the organizers 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 civilizations played so maleficent a part. That power of voice and speech which could sway mobs to evil in such communities was in Lymanora 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, belong to both sexes in Lymanora and to every citizen. It was a powerful, diffused magnetism that 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 sane and doing nothing. And in Thayeriel, 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 furlum eye or division of the electric sense, one of the vast halls of Umelefa. Here were all the instruments needed to develop the furlum 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 furlum what picture and sculptured galleries are to the ocular imagination, supplying it with noble and pleasurable excitation, as the music domes touch the oral imagination. They had their passive furlamic arts of beauty as well as their active. In one vast arcade, they could sit and feel with their furlust the electric harmonies of any given tract of air or earth or ocean, the harmonies that played as it were on the surface. This was equivalent to gazing at landscapes, real or pictured, with the eye. In another there was furlamic 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 fearless two 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 furlough their imagination was thrown into an attitude of placid meditation, which seemed to have before it some great sferral harmony of the stars. In a third series of lofty corridors they're continually preceding what might be called firmalic music. In two or three it was entirely instrumental. Great furlamans 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 interwoven and changed mass and form as if it were a dance of meteors, now slow and stately like a minuet, against 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 neighbors. 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 Thairiel 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 furla 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 sferal chant. Their imagination dealt with the interastral forces as with playmates from eternity. She leapt vast ages every moment, and spanned in astride 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 furla to the utmost. I felt solitary and forlorn as I heard her aesthetic, description, and resolves, and thought upon my incapacity to understand them. In a moment she knew my dejection, and realized 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 furlemans excited. There was another majestic arcade, in which Lymanoran artists themselves joined in sublime furlamic music. On my first visit to it, many years after my introduction to Omelefa, 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 plate and mold the flames as if they had been threads of some plastic material. That I come here during my early noviet in the island, I should have fled in terror as from dreams of hell realized. 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 color. For a time I could not control my terror, as I looked to see him shrivel 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 round 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 traveled into space tied like an infant still by magnetic threads to the parent's son. 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 to a measurable 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 spendrift. A doll, still glimmering, crushed, imprisoned her torrid heart. The conflagrations burst forth in wider and whiter intervals. At last she wooed the germs of life from the wandering infinance 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 tracks 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 one 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 planes upon the backs of fellow beasts he had mastered. Man, the poor tent of God had come. Slowly he grew and slowly sloughed off his beast habits. Prehistoric time focused into a moment. First came tyranny and war as molders 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 are some nullances past swift as a dream. Stronger grew reason in man's brain, the love in his heart, divine influences surrounded him, watching the dawn of 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 divine or light, and rushed in a flash across my brain. When 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 Thairiel 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 realized 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 Thairiel in the cultivation of the magnetism in my system, but would enter with redoubled a door on the practice of my furla. It was thus too I came to understand the passion they had for Furlalian, as this section of Umilepha 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 civilization. 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 had spent their days in Furlalian 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 Furlalian. 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 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 neutralized 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 Furlalian 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 cellular arcade frequented by the old in order to drive off the ennui of existence, a feeling which indicated the gradual calcorescence 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 furlough. A man might take a new tract and new blending of imaginative impulse every day of life for centuries, and not yet 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 limonoring 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 this being. Had I not seen their eyes open for a moment as we passed, in consciousness of the world round, 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. Thiriel 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 at 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 adore, sublime thoughts swam in from eternity upon my soul. I had the mother of passion within me which would have molded nobler spirits than my own. At last I felt the currents of my existence center upon one realm of space, and was conscious of countless life round me which struggled and mounted upwards. I felt my nature draw to higher levels than any terrain 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's sons, but with 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 fullness of life. My soul was dragged above my natural level. Telephysical 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 balance joy was reached when, resting between two spheres, I felt their magnetic currents neutralize each other, and yet the higher influence of the new system raised 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 thrilled 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 fervor of souls who'd see through mists of life the Elysium they have yearned for. I was conscious of the infinite tragedy being inactive 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 raptuous than the consciousness of this system beyond the 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 Thirell, who would remind me of my duty to my own being and to the state. I rose 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 on 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 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. END OF CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI OF LIMONORA, THE ISLAND OF PROGRESS BY GODFREE SWEVEN This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. A CATASTROPHY But long years divided my first visit to Omelipha, and my admission to Fair Lalyan. I saw that there were certain vast sections of Omelipha that I was led past. Massive portals showed their rank, but the numbers on them defining the age at which entrance was possible warned us off, and allegorical pictures adorned 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 nature 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 media magnifying them ten thousand fold stirred the heart of all the more deeply. We saw in a moment that we were unfit to enter Fair Lalyan, and we passed on into the vast series of baths wherein the Lymanorans could rid their bodies of obstructive or noxious elements. Here was every grade of temperature and horrible 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 Remla sent the contents of each pool into one of the lava wells, where in a few moments the water and all the debris 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 counselors 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 terrain 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, dematerialized the part, withdrawing its early tendencies, and giving it an exilerant 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 pure 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 organizations 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 vapors and terrain 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 in to 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 irrelium, or upon irrelium gases 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 during which the night gave ease and exhilaration to those who slept. They fully realized 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 limonoren of an age to be admitted to Omelifa 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 debris 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 nocus. The last age 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 limonorans 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 marvelous 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 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 ill-relium threads, plastic to the shape, yet capable of stiffening out when the wearer sent an electric wave through it from the electrogenerator 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, 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, that was every few days. For all germs and debris that had 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 Omelefa 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 electrogenerator that went with it. There were alternative garments that they wore under different conditions. One, almost as plastic as the ordinary vesture, but armored 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 well suited for protection against extreme heat. It consisted of an abosting double wall of irrelium, within which was kept up as 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 Lila Roma. It was indeed no distant mimicry of this, for though it could be thrown loosely around 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 worn by a spider on a windless dawn. Moved in cloud-like purity and dimness the airy vapor 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 cloudwood. 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 calmer-eyed people. There had been a stillness as of ill, bridal tumult in the atmosphere all day. My pro-parents had moved restlessly abroad from daybreak, and all the Leomo were on the wing husbanding every minute with feverish clutch. They 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 felt there was an undeciphered portent overshadowing their life. Thayeriel 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 Omelifa 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 open to us, but silence had fallen upon the gambling 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 seeth 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 Thairiel follow her mates. More awful came back the reverberations from the domes, and Thairiel'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 mouth clanger filled my ears, and for a moment my eyelids fell in palsied terror. When I raised them and looked down, the vast crystal of Omelepha had vanished, and the great promontory stood gaping, with the surf hissing and bane as it leapt over the upper surface. I felt that Thairiel 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 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 cliff and scarred promontory where had been only waves before, its head turbined 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 Omelepha vanished. What had become of it I could not tell. Thairiel roused herself and, divining my thoughts, led me to the steps which had once given entrance to the starry portal. She stooped down 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 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. Thairiel's dejection, I discovered, was retrospective. She mourned over the failure of Leo-Marie, 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 center, which was far out at sea. The inflow of waters had baffled the power of their mountain cupping instruments, and the rapidly generated steam had rent the crust in the line of Omelifa, and until the slow trickling lavas and the swift belch-dashes 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, gauged the amount of molten matter which had oozed from each, repair every chlyroen or other instrument that had been deranged and replaced those submerged. The urgency of the occasion excused us from 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 chlyroens 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. Thairiel 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 Lila Roma 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 toward 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 centers 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 unwanted 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 jeweled domes rainbow-lit by the sun, as I could not have conceived even from my remembrance of Omelipha and its marvellous architecture. Thiriel's eyes had also been riveted by the spectacle. It is a new Omelipha, 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 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 of 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 Omelipha and the grief of our minds at its evanishment. So I argued. But Thiriel was silently decided in her descent. We could take no more interest in our aeronautics. Nothing could keep our gaze from that radiant orb resting gigantic on the beach. As the sun declined the facets of the new jeweled shimmered with living sheen. Now it was a city of burnished gold. Again it was a myriad of lambent flames aspiring to the center of fire. Now a thousand rainbows weaving and unweaving themselves, again uncounted stars clustered and heaped in restless silver, or wintry thistle down of swarming snow. Surely it was but an army of willow 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 center. There was symmetry in the refulgence and in the recurrence of color and sheen. It could not be an 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 snowstorm of aerials. 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 loft in the air, hymning the glory of a new creation. Soon Tyriel had persuaded me to start with her towards the new palace of wonders. We had not got halfway 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 knoll on which we had alighted. She no longer labored 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 Omelefa. After a rest I was able, on my own wings, to curve down towards its flight of new rocked steps and its sitland portal. We entered and all was joy and music. Up underneath the new domes flitted the happy artist putting the final touches on the tented translucence of the Irelium walls. The plan was more elaborate and yet simpler than the old Omelefa. The beauty of it was more overwhelming to the imagination of the eyes. I could have 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 scents, 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 on both 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 with this lava vent at its outer extremity, would be freer from terrain peroxisms than any other portion of the island Marge. This was where my pro-parents 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 waves had cooled and congealed each layer as it flowed and curdled from the new peak to the shore of the island.