THE LILARAN
HAVING finished our survey of Oolorefa, my mind returned to the
observatory for Lilaroma, which I had seen growing in miniature under
the modeller’s hand and music. It seemed to me a strange romance that
citizens of this beautiful island lived amid everlasting snow and
ice tens of thousands of feet above their fellows. How could those
who were accustomed to the conditions and privileges I saw around me
bring themselves to surrender it all and live the lives of hermits
amid antarctic rigours? Thyriel reminded me of the glacial cold of the
southern land from which their ancestry had come; but this did not
wholly satisfy me. The long centuries of life in a new zone had changed
their powers and tastes, and it must be a great sacrifice to live in
a climate so different as was the glacier region of a mountain. My
curiosity was roused, and I resolved to observe and know for myself
at the earliest opportunity. I could see the observatory now perched
on the gleaming shoulder of the mountain above the circle of the
storm-cone, and every day I turned my eyes upwards I grew more eager to
inquire into the conditions of life in so different a temperature.
It happened that the next department of the civilisation of the island
that had to be studied by me in our educational development was
Lilarie, or the science of island-security. We were handed over to one
who belonged to the Lilamo, or families specially absorbed in this
section of practical knowledge, and were told to choose our mode of
ascent, car flight or wing flight, or either of the two instantaneous
methods of transit. We preferred one of the two last, so he decided on
the wire-line or aërial method for our first ascent. We were enclosed
in a casing, shaped like a shuttle and rounded and sharpened to a point
at each end; it lay slightly inclined on a close web of wires, which
sloped up to the mountain-top. The door was closed and made secure,
but, as our shuttle car was made of transparent irelium, we could
see on all sides. It was then drawn slightly upwards into a complete
enclosure of wires, each of which touched it at some point. When our
guide saw that we were all ready, he pressed a button, and we shot
up at incredible speed. The whole sky and earth and sea fell from us
in an instant. I closed my eyes in alarm. No sooner had I done so
than the whizzing sound which accompanied our flight ceased and in a
moment we were at our destination, close to the peak of Lilaroma. Our
shuttle car slid into another groove and rested; the door opened, and
I stood amid the eternal snows. I could see the great buildings of
Rimla and Oomalefa and Oolorefa like minute soap-bubbles gleaming in
the sun far below. We had travelled these tens of thousands of feet
with the ease and swiftness of lightning; for it had indeed been the
lightning that had borne us up. Along this cylinder of wires so great
an electric power could be sent that it seemed to undo the force of
gravitation. Distance was almost annihilated by this mode of transit.
It outdistanced sound, if not light too, in its magic motion.
As soon as I began to reflect, I was astounded to find the cold not
merely bearable, but deprived of its bitter penetrativeness. My heart
bounded with exhilaration; every tissue of my body seemed elastic and
full of spring. I could account for these sensations by the atmosphere
of these heights, but how was I to explain the mild temperature of
this snow region? When puzzling over the problem, I began to notice a
haze of half-glowing light like the shimmer of heat over the surface
of the earth at blazing noon. It seemed at first to be an optical
illusion coming, I thought, from the suddenness of my transference from
the plain to such a height, but its unsteady gleam moved so uniformly
that I soon saw it was outside of me. Yet it did not intercept my view
of the snow and ice around. They fascinated me by their splendour of
whiteness, but there was a warmth, a pallid glow over them that was
quite unwonted. Our guide felt my mental interrogation, and pointed
out that we had stepped from the shuttle car on to a movable platform,
which would soon bring us to the observatory; over this platform was an
electric covering, that protected us from the outer air and radiated
heat in all directions. He showed us the snow melting on all sides of
our platform in form corresponding to it, and, as it moved along the
steep, the dark honeycombed square of snow moved with us. There was
above and on every side of us an electric field produced by unseen
circuits of wires; and these fields gave out heat falling short of
light.
This was how they modified the climate up in these glacial regions
and made it even sweeter and healthier than the purified atmosphere of
the Limanoran plateaux below. They had done much for the climate of
the lower levels; by daily casting their electric shuttles through the
atmosphere they brought its impurities to the earth, its particles of
dust and minute living organisms; but as more of these crowded in again
from the outlying regions of air, the electric shuttles would have to
ply ceaselessly in all directions in order to keep the lower strata
pure. In those mountain altitudes the air was naturally sterilised to a
large extent; few organisms could persist in so keen a medium; and the
constant use of electric walls and roof for modifying the bitterness of
the cold swept every trace of bacterial life into the snow. Hence the
purity of the air we breathed up there and the buoyancy of the soul.
The body seemed no clog upon the spiritual functions, and the magnetism
that came from the heavenly bodies uniting with that of the earth had
free play upon our minds, stimulating them to lofty flight. I no longer
wondered why the Lilamo had no aversion to life at this altitude.
They passionately loved it. It was, indeed, being drunk without wine,
without self-abandonment, without waste of tissue.
They kept strict rein on this intoxication, ethereal though it was;
for, like all their race, they had severe practical issues before them.
Daily each of them returned to the less volatile and less pure air of
the lower levels in order to check excess of buoyancy and to reinforce
the graver purposes of life by consultation with the elders and wise
men. They had in their hands an important phase of the well-being and
continuance of their race. They had all the foes of human life, as it
existed amongst the Limanorans, to fight off, whether seen or unseen.
The tornadoes that swept across these subtropical regions, the climatic
strata that drifted from other lands or realms of space, the bacterial
swarms bringing plague in their train, the lower-planed human life
which might swoop down on their shores from the archipelago around
them,--all these had to be watched and directed past Limanora. Any one
of these evils might in a few hours or days sweep out the civilisation
that had taken long centuries to develop and leave them all their steps
to retrace. Eye-tense vigilance was needed to watch for any sign of
their approach, and the keenest invention to prevent their advance when
observed.
I had not long to wait for evidences of the great services the Lilamo
did to their country. Thyriel and I were led by our guide into the
various divisions of the observatory. We inspected the innumerable
testing and controlling machines without fully understanding their
intricate and often subtle arrangements. Had we not been acquainted
with Rimla and Oomalefa and Oolorefa, we should have been bewildered or
even awestruck. As it was we were amazed at the refinement of purpose
in the apparatus, approaching almost to human intelligence; but we saw
that a mere novice would have deranged most of it, so nice were the
adjustments.
Our attention had been especially arrested by the electric indicator or
tremolan. It contained a complete chart of the electric variations of
every point of the island throughout every day in the year. This had
been compiled and drawn up from the observations of several centuries,
and marked the differences between periodical and temporary, regional
and narrowly local, terrestrial and planetary variations. Every day the
instrument was set like a clock to all the electric changes which they
expected to occur periodically on that day. Each of these, indicated at
every point of the map, represented an electrically uniform locality
of the island with which it was connected. The superintendent of
the tremolan for any section of the day specially studied all the
unclassified variations which had occurred at the corresponding hour of
the same day and period of time. He knew every change in the position
of the earth or in the movements of the stars that might affect the
electricity of the atmosphere at any moment during his watch. Along
with him there was a sky-watcher, who used one of their marvellous
reducers of distance and magnifiers to scan the sky and the whole
horizon, and reported every new appearance which broke the uniformity
of the sky-line. In an adjoining chamber with transparent partitions
a third observer was stationed with his ear at a makro-mikrakoust or
vamolan, that gathered in the slightest sounds at the distance of even
hundreds of miles and magnified them for the listening sense applied
to it; it also indicated approximately the distance of the source of
the sound by an automatic calculator. This was a kind of eavesdropper
that could pick up whispers on the orb of the earth, just as their
astronomical instruments could catch the faintest gleam in space
myriads of miles beyond the scope of the eye. In another crystal-walled
apartment stood a fourth watcher, who used an instrument that was to
his electric sense what the telescope is to the eye and their vamolan
was to their ear. With this idrolan he swept the sky for new and
unclassified electric impulses; and the faintest and most distant
indication, quite unrecognisable by his unaided sense, was magnified
ten thousand-fold; at the same time the distance of the source was
roughly measured and indicated.
This was by far the most attractive group of chambers for us. Not only
could we test the wonderful instruments for ourselves; but we could
examine by aid of magnifiers the graphic results of their observations
automatically recorded as if by photography. We could minutely study
the flight of sea birds not visible to the naked eye. The babel of
sounds that went on in the cities of the archipelago quite beneath the
horizon we could hear like a great roar beside us when we placed the
sonoscripts in the sound-magnifier; and with the aid of its analyst
we could unravel the sounds by repeating them slowly. Though I had
not my electric sense sufficiently developed to feel the differences
in the starry impulses when the electrographs were placed in the
electro-magnifier, I could distinguish their differing degrees of
force, and I could see how much Thyriel appreciated the fine shades of
variety in the impulses.
We were engaged in testing the electric records, when we could see the
observer of the tremolan bustling from table to table and map to map,
whilst his pupil watched the indicator. His excitement spread into the
adjoining chambers, and their occupants, leaving their instruments
to assistants, came to his aid. There was an inexplicable electric
disturbance on the north-east shore of the island; the field in that
direction was agitated. They ran to the idrolan and turned it to the
north-east; at once they knew that some seven or eight hundred miles
off there was advancing at a rapid rate a great wave of electric
disturbance. We all recognised a growing sultriness of heat in the
profound calm of the atmosphere even at those icy heights. No time was
to be lost. All the members of the Lilamo were called up, and in a few
minutes were assembled in the observatory.
It was resolved to turn the whole force available in the island into
the storm-cone, and especially into that part of it which could shoot
masses and streamers of electric energy out to great distances in
the atmosphere. Other indications of an approaching tornado soon
appeared. The great telescope discovered a vast cloud of birds on
the horizon, and the sea greatly agitated by shoals of fish beneath
them. The vamolan analysed the sounds made by the birds and revealed
that they were not all of one species; sea birds small and great
were predominant; but there was no lack of land birds, insect-eaters
chiefly, and a few great flesh-eaters, vultures, hawks, and falcons.
The Lilamo knew in a moment what this meant. Myriads of microbes were
afloat in the air in front of the storm, and the sky in the van of the
cloud of birds was obscured by the mass of insect life battening on
the unseen plague. The fish had gathered to eat the clotted life that
dropped into the ocean, and the sea birds had assembled in pursuit
of the fish. It was a striking sight, this great moving internecine
slaughter and feast. Seated at a clevamolan, or combination of
telescope and makrakoust, we were present at the scene, though hundreds
of miles off. We could see the swoop of the vultures down on the land
birds, too busy with their banquet of insects to foresee their own
fate, the water boiling with the leap of the fish and the dive of the
sea birds, and the air turbid with the flash and glimmer of wings; at
the same time we could hear the war of jubilance and dismay, the wild
cry of foretasting appetite, and the still wilder death-shriek; and
round and through the clangour like an atmosphere moved the dull hum of
happy glutted insect life. It sickened us and we had to cover our eyes
and ears to shut out the carnage. We had forgotten that we had been
using the clevamolan, and were glad to find that we could leave it and
return to the ordinary powers of our senses; there was a speck on the
horizon, which might be a boat at sea for anything our eyes could make
out; whilst to our hearing there was the profoundest calm.
Everything was ready for the concentration of our millions of
horse-power in the direction of the north-east, when a new but by no
means unexpected phase of the phenomenon occurred. Word came up from
the north-east shore that a plague had broken out amongst the dwellers
in the district, and that the medical wise men had been summoned to
their help. The Lilamo had already given warning that something of this
kind might be expected in that quarter, and the physicians were by
this time removing all the Limanorans in the north-east to Oomalefa.
So dense a cloud of insects was not there without the attraction of
superfluous bacterial life. Not always was a tornado thus heralded and
vanguarded by a winged army, but when it was, it meant the migration
under magnetic impulse of clirolanic plague-swarms from some favourite
breeding area.
As soon as it was thus known that the bacterial couriers of the storm
had reached the shores of Limanora, the electric forces of the lilaran
were brought into play, and we could see lightnings belch forth which
seemed to make the north-east atmosphere and ocean glow. Swiftly the
shoals of fish were gathered close to the bastions of the coast, for
masses of insects were falling every moment into the water. Soon we
could see our lightnings reach as far as the insect darkness and the
bird cloud. The air cleared and the surface of the sea was covered
with death. Away to the west screamed and shrieked the survivors of
the winged army. Then could we see the pitchy midnight of the coming
tempest moving stealthily towards us; and its heralds howled and
shrieked through every crevice of our mansion. It was bearing right on
Lilaroma.
How could that battering-ram of heaven’s fury be turned aside or
evaded? It seemed to me that nothing but death and destruction were
before us. I had already seen a tropical cyclone level a gigantic
forest clean as a mower would clear his swath in his breast-high corn.
What could man do in presence of so terrific a force but hide in holes
of the rocks? The thought of those noble buildings levelled with the
dust mingled sadness with my fear and shook all cowardice from it.
What was the immolation of animal existence which I had just witnessed
compared to the destruction of all this people had done? I felt as if
the torch of the world’s salvation were about to be extinguished.
There was no sadness or languid inaction of despair about the other
inmates of the observatory. All was bustle and joyous effort for a
time as in veterans quivering with the passion of battle. Every man
had his duty and place; and every woman was there, too, in the ranks
of champions. We could now see the nucleus of the storm just above the
horizon, a mass raven-black. At once the whole power of the island was
concentrated in the electric charge of the lilaran; and a long tongue
of flame shot straight for the dense cloud. As if by magic the whole
atmosphere was in a moment ablaze with lightnings. The sea was cloven
into billows of raging foam, and seemed itself to aid in the hellish
pyrotechny. It shot forth great tongues of purple flame, yet fled with
reared crest from the strokes of the storm-flail. Slowly the lilaran
moved its lightning-thrust away to the east. Then half the island power
was put into the blast of the storm-cone; and we could see the war
of elements and the thunderous scowl of the tempest shift round the
circle of the horizon, instead of bearing down on us. For hours the
roar of the lilaran went on. The edge of the tornado struck us, and
the building shook and swayed. Hail pelted its sides; rain and snow
blinded our outlook; we could see not one inch outside for the gloom.
Yet within, all was radiant and calm. They knew that the centre of
the tornado had passed many miles to the east, and that its trailing
skirts could do no harm to anything in the island. Even if it had
come straight on Lilaroma, they had given a vent to its fury so many
leagues out to sea that its force would have been largely spent before
it reached the shore. It was a yearly occurrence, this throttling of a
tornado from the tropics; for these great electric disturbances made
straight for the loftiest peak within their reach, drawn by their polar
complement, the masses of electric energy which played within the heart
of Lilaroma.
One of the ordinary duties of the Lilamo was to milk the great mountain
of its electricity, in order that it should offer less attraction to
cloud and storm. Every night, especially during the season of tempests,
I could hear the roar of the energy out of the earth, and, if I
looked up to the shoulders of the mountain, I could see at a hundred
points the purple streamers flicker in the wind like living, moving
flame-flowers growing out of the soil. When needed, this escaping
energy was collected and sent down to Rimla for storage and was another
of the numerous sources of power that that treasury of force drew upon.
When the tornado had passed and left its huge contribution to the snows
of the peak, the lilaran was stopped, and the electric energy used in
it was rapidly run over the white slopes that now obliterated every
trace of the great groove and railway on which the storm-cone moved.
In a few minutes the outline appeared, and soon the whole circlet was
cleared of its encumbering snows. So the weight that pressed on the
roofs of the observatory and the drifts that kept the light from its
walls melted before the electric snowplough. The storm had not vanished
an hour before all on the peak of Lilaroma was as it had been when we
arrived, except for the greater purity of the snow on its shoulders.
Beneath, the brush of the tempest had swept out all traces of the
plague that the physicians had not got rid of, and the atmosphere was
clearer and more exhilarating.
So calmly and fearlessly had the whole danger been met that there had
even been leisure in the midst of the turmoil to discuss this great
waste of natural power. It took them as many days as the tornado lasted
hours to generate and store in Rimla all this energy which was now
falling useless, or rather mischievous, upon the face of the ocean.
Could they not yoke the cyclone as they had yoked the billows and the
winds, the rivers and the snows, the lightnings and the central fires
of the earth? There was nothing impossible to a people who had tamed
the raging of the volcano and the earthquake. The difficulty was the
very greatness of the force. Any machinery they might erect would be
trampled to pieces by the brute power of the giant they yoked. Here was
a problem worthy of their most imaginative men, of their most inventive
faculties.
Not a year had passed before a trial was made, and within a decade
the machinery was complete for storing the energy of the tempests. An
immense cave was hollowed out in the rocks of Lilaroma, and its mouth
was extended out into the ocean for miles by means of lava bastions.
In it was placed enough of the alloy called labramor, or electricity
sponge, to take in trillions of horse-power of electric force. At first
cables containing millions of wires were floated out towards the coming
tornado and electric fields were raised in the air to tap the energy of
the blackness. This was continued afterwards to some extent; but it was
found that, if only the clouds were electrically tapped, most of the
current transmitted itself to the receivers in the cave by means of the
water of the ocean. It was thus unnecessary to float out towards the
storm more than one cable, so binding to the shore a great raft which
held up many labrolans or electricity milkers towards the blackening
sky. They acknowledged that they lost by this water-transmission much
of the energy emitted from the clouds; for the ocean bore it away in
all directions; but they got as much of it as they needed to fill their
storehouse, and they killed the cloud monster; at least it floated away
across the horizon blowing a mere gale that could do no havoc except
upon the careless and unforethinking.
One of the most singular effects of this new contrivance was to rid
the sea in the neighbourhood of the island of its teeming life and to
precipitate to the bottom the matter that floated in the water. For
weeks after, we could see the rocks or streaming weeds in the depths
as clearly as if it were an ocean of air. Its emerald or azure had
vanished, and white light poured down into the hitherto unfathomed
hollows and valleys. There could we see the dead denizens sway idly
with the forests of marine vegetation and here and there the bulk of
some monster lay tangled in the herbage. Only by degrees and after some
months did the colour and opacity return to the waves and the myriad
life stream from other regions into the void. The currents that swept
past the coasts bore down the suspended particles from other seas; and
with them came new fish and their parasites.
Until these came a new danger to the health of Limanora threatened.
A few days after the tornado, the precipitated organisms began to
rise to the surface of the water and underneath the hot sun to form
breeding-grounds for the dangerous microbes of the air. Up against
the bastions of rock beat the stench of the living death. A plague
threatened for a brief time; but they were not a people to remain
passive in presence of such a danger, even though they could easily
prevent its worst results by remedial measures. They sank the dead
organic masses again by means of a charge of electricity, and then the
deeper currents that brushed their shores swept the corruption into the
great valleys of the ocean-bed, there to be embalmed for geological
ages hence.
They regretted that they should be the instruments of this great
waste of life before it had fulfilled the purpose of its stage of
development; but their regret was tempered by the thought that it was
a low and feeble stage, that an infinity of such existence would not
weigh in the balance with one day’s advance of a single Limanoran, and
that the energy set free by this wholesale dissolution of organisms
was still ready for other embodiments in the universe. The worst effect
they feared was upon their own natures; to destroy life or deal with it
frivolously was one of the worst offences against their humanity, for
it introduced into the mind a brutalising element. Respect for life in
all its forms was one of the truest tests of a civilisation, they held.
And the Lilamo were, almost as much as the physicians, imbued with
reverence for human life and with the sense of the importance of
preserving it and giving it the longest opportunity in the individual
to gain its highest possibility. They had to protect their race from
all external foes. They had therefore to study climatic changes
and watch the sanitary conditions of the island. Sanitation meant
primarily the expulsion of all hostile clirolanic life and the
prevention of all conditions that would attract it or form its
breeding-ground. They were especially interested in the magnetic and
electric peculiarities of Limanora and of the section of the globe in
which they lived; for these affected not only the health and spirits
of the people, but the amount of minute life that harboured in the
earth or floated in the atmosphere. They could by an increase of these
elements rid an unwholesome district of its unhealthy conditions;
and yet the inhabitants of it could not remain whilst the process of
purification was going on. Too much magnetism or electricity in the
earth or air would endanger the nervous balance of the human frame.
The test instruments in the lava wells were frequently examined to
find the electric state of any section of the island; and one central
electrometer was constantly recording the electric state of the
atmosphere in all parts of it. Thus were they able to recharge by
means of their apparatus whatever localities were found defective,
and tap those that had a superfluity; and over the country at night
the flame-like streamers lit up the darkness here and there. But this
occurred at rare intervals, for it was only in certain conditions of
the sun that the earth sponged up more electricity than was good for
the highest life upon its surface.
The storm-cone as a rule was enough for sanitation. By its wind force
it could drift all dangerous clouds of moisture or of bacterial life
past Limanora. By its electric-darting powers the heart could be
squeezed out of storms before they struck the shores. It regulated the
rainfall, depositing the contents of clouds by day far out upon the sea
and by night upon the thirsting land. Sultry blacknesses that would
otherwise float past with only stifling effect were tapped, first for
their electricity and then for their rain. Storms of dust that now and
again darkened over the circle of fog could be precipitated into the
ocean partly by electricity, partly by the blasts of the storm-cone.
The atmosphere was kept singularly pure and free from deleterious
germs or particles, and few nights passed without a drenching shower
cleansing the whole lower portion of the island. The peak of Lilaroma
drew to it like a magnet all the masses of moisture that collected
within many hundred miles of it; and a little manipulation would break
these up into refreshing night showers that swept its slopes and the
plateaux and levels below; and, in order to prevent the destructive
floods that this might produce in the rivers, the shoulders of the
mountain and its deep valleys bristled with great forests which sponged
up the falling moisture and let it down gently from hour to hour into
the bastioned channels.
Climate was to this people as much a matter of management as food
and its production. They could modify it to fit any change in the
conditions or necessities or purposes of life. To be at the mercy
of the forces of nature was a state of existence in what they now
considered their barbarous past. It was only the unforeseen that had
them at a disadvantage; and the unforeseen was to them now only the
cosmic. As the planetary system shifted through space, it had to
encounter conditions and modes and degrees of energy and life that
nothing short of omniscience could anticipate; but they were beginning
to master the secret of many of those unexpected changes of condition.
The astro-sciential families had been classifying for centuries the
symptoms that accompanied these in the appearance of the sun or of one
or other of the planets. With their innumerable delicate instruments
for recording and analysing the electric, magnetic, luminous, and
heat-vaporous state of distant space, they could see afar off the
beginnings of cosmic disturbances and anticipate their ultimate
direction; and in many cases they could guard Limanora against the more
patent and destructive effects of magnetic and electric storms and of
great waves of heat or light.
Yet there was much to master in the new cosmic conditions that from
time to time beset the earth or the planetary system. Some seemed to
arise so suddenly that no observation could have anticipated them.
Especially was this the case with living drift, into shoals of which
the universe struck, the spawn of undeveloped worlds. Hence came new
diseases so widespread as to be plagues. These generally evaded the
fine instruments of the astro-scientist, till they had reached the very
atmosphere of the earth; for in the interstellar spaces they led so
meagre a life and were spread so thinly and widely that they scarcely
intercepted the light or other forms of energy from the sun or other
systems. Yet the imaginative families and the inventors were struggling
towards some more delicate instrument, which would observe and record
the presence of interstellar material life.