Limanora

CHAPTER VIII
RIMLA

IN studying the practical aims and issues of earth science, I was taught to manage their apparatus, and to interpret every tremor in the earth’s crust and every indication of the instruments. I had already been taught to make their apparatus, for my physical discipline had begun several years before I was admitted to Fialume. It was in fact one of their primary maxims that muscular exercises should go on contemporaneously with intellectual and spiritual pursuits, that no citizen should be allowed to neglect for even a day the development of the body, intimately as the soul was interwoven with it. As soon as I was thoroughly tested and put through my course of probation, the training of my muscles was begun, and along with the magnetic moulding of my brain-tissues went the development of the force-tissues of the body and the powers of my senses. But no one was permitted to enter their great practical university or workshop till he had become a certain devotee of the race. The mysteries and arts and crafts which gave the nation its peculiar powers could not be communicated to anyone who might by some change become an alien. It was thus that many years of residence in Limanora passed before I was admitted to one of the marvels of the island, the great valley of Rimla.

I well remember the evening of my initiation. The night work was as a rule done by the younger men and women of the community; the elders took their turn at the machinery by day, as they had to husband sleep during the hours of darkness and silence. I had often wondered whither went my proparents at a fixed hour every day; they vanished in the distance as the sun began to wester, and they returned at evening with high colour in their cheeks and the look of having used their muscles with a will. Their physical life seemed to take new impetus from these expeditions.

One day on their return they told me that I was to be admitted to Rimla, which they explained to mean the centre of force. The mature judgment of the community had decided that I could now be fully trusted. My practical and muscular education was to begin. I was to set out that evening with a band of young workmen who kept the first watch of the night.

The sun had scarcely set when my escort arrived; and, as with my slow powers of locomotion I could not be expected to keep up with them, I was placed in one of their flight-cars. I had no companion, for the whole band flew in front and drew the car by some magnetic power unseen; and it was so light-hung and so balanced by wings and domes and parachutes that it seemed capable of being the sport of every wind. Over the central ridge of the island we swept towards a distant slope of Lilaroma. Suddenly underneath me in the growing darkness there shone out in a deep broad valley a vast dome of light, transparent enough to reveal the flitting shadows underneath it. It seemed the laboratory of a world. Innumerable streams flashed under its upper edge; they sped from the summits of the surrounding hills, or across the gorges from other and more distant ranges. I had seen as we flew hundreds of noble aqueducts spanning the valleys with their arches and columns, some of them thousands of feet up the slopes of Lilaroma. All the waters which the great mountain gathered from the clouds of heaven made their way towards this marvellous domed valley. At its mouth there was a deep gorge, whether artificial or natural was not clear to me then; and through the chasm leaped a river mightier than any I had ever seen; it seemed to be on its way to the sea, but I could not trace its course farther than its massive gateway out of the valley. Underneath the dome I could see vast wheels of irelium move at all levels; they seemed so fragile that a pebble thrown at them would break them; yet each turned spindles of enormous power, which moved swifter than lightning. I soon saw that all the intricate machinery was sheathed in casings of their translucent metal, along which flowed a slow, glutinous stream of some liquid that dripped through perforations on all points of friction.

As we alighted, night fell, and the titanic crystal workshop gleamed with a soft radiance that seemed to come from no centres, but was diffused everywhere in the manner of the sunlight or the atmosphere. It was like a vast ice cave of the Arctic circle lit by brief and splendid summer. Fairy-like yet vast, it seemed a fabric of some dream-world; but the splash and hiss of the forceful waters and the unresting motion of the machinery made it all real enough. The noises were by no means deafening; they were subdued and musical with a halo of mysterious whisper like the sounds of nature on a bright day of summer. Nor was the sight bewildering to the eyes; there was too much symmetry in it to perplex and dazzle.

My guides and companions tripped lightly and fearlessly through the labyrinth of movement till they reached an edifice underneath the dome more elaborate and majestic in its beauty than the noblest of Gothic cathedrals; its towers and spires and pinnacles seemed to aspire to the very stars as we looked up, and yet the loftiest of them failed to reach the zenith of the vast diaphanous roof. Towards this building radiated the moving network of spindles and axles that the flashing water-wheels turned, and out from it passed great transparent tubes of metal, woven together fantastically into a forest of gigantic trees and flowers. Nothing of this arabesque of movement marred the colossal symmetry of all beneath the crystal canopy. The church-like building was the shrine of force. In it we found one of the wise men of the elders seated on a high throne; and beside him stood muscular forms ready to do his behests. He laid his hand on a key-board of innumerable keys, each of which was marked with some hieroglyphic. The attendants scattered to various points along the mosaic floor, and watched the working of the labyrinth of wires and tubes. At the touch of the master the whole edifice vibrated, and a sound as of the most sublime orchestration filled the vault. We saw countless wheels and pistons move and flash beneath their transparent metal sheaths, and along each tube, now lit as with starlight, we could watch the rush of vapours or liquids towards their destination in the various factories and houses in the valley and along the mountain-side.

It was one of the masters of physical force who manipulated the keys. He was controlling and harmonising the vast power that was concentrated in Rimla, and, instead of the demoniac jarring of the engines and machinery which I had been accustomed to in the industrial centres of other lands, the sounds of the marvellous vault made sweet concord that ever varied with the transference of power from purpose to purpose. He was the pointsman of the numberless railroads of energy, and at the same time the musician of the titanic workshop. His will disciplined and guided both the generation and the distribution of all the force of the island. Our troop took the place of that which had been on guard through the sunset and twilight, and separated in pairs throughout the valley, each pair taking under its charge one section of the labyrinthine movement. My comrade, Ooriel, the cousin of Thyriel, was a youth of splendid build, the strength of his upper limbs seeming almost bovine, his shoulders and arms not too large for his size, yet giving the impression of gigantic power. I soon saw how much he could do. We were to inspect the generators of force underneath the dome. He first led me to the various streams which came leaping down the slopes and cliffs. One of them from some cause only to be ascertained at the cone of Lilaroma was swollen into a yellow torrent that threatened to overflow its lava banks and flood the valley. In a moment he saw the danger, and rushed to the wing-dam dividing the upper course and controlling the amount of water which should flow down to its various wheels and the amount which unused should find its way to the great exit. He found that the separating barrier had lost its automatic motion through the sudden increase of the overflow and the intrusion of a huge boulder that had come down like a battering-ram upon it. He set me to guide the machinery and power that moved the dam to suit the strength of the current, and then, fixing a narrow irelium shield in the bottom of the channel, he leapt into the torrent. The shield, I could see, keeping erect just above him, shed the stones and boulders to this side and that. Thus protected he raised a huge hammer which he had taken with him and by three or four well-directed blows split the obstacle into half a dozen pieces; he then bent down and removed them out of the way, and suddenly I felt the steering-gear begin to work, and saw the dam swing round into the channel leading to the centre of force, whilst the bulk of the torrent found its way into the exit, which was deeper and broader. The danger was past; but a moment’s hesitation, either in order to bring up the heavier tools or to call other assistance, would have ruined many of the great works upon the levels below and stopped the whole of the operations of Rimla for several days.

Ooriel shook the water from his garments as he leapt out, and in a few minutes he was on his way with me to the other brooks, cascades, and conduits which gathered the aqueous forces of Lilaroma into this valley of power. Not a drop that fell from the tributary clouds about the head of the mountain but did its work for this singular people; the moisture-lifting power of the sun, and the force of gravitation that fought with it were alike made the servants and yoke-fellows of the Limanorans.

They refused to waste the energy that nature gave them so freely. This I saw more fully illustrated as I followed Ooriel. Having inspected all the forms of stream-power, he sped round to the side of the valley nearest to the western shore of the island; there in a great cave or hollow in the rock, brilliantly lit, I saw myriads of wires and cables concentrating from all westward directions on an immense block of labramor or irelium alloy. This, he explained to me, was the great electric storage-battery of the waves. From the north-west and the south-west came the chief storms and currents that broke on the shores of the island; and underneath the beetling cliffs of lava erected on the western shores they had a line of long, lofty caves running some hundreds of feet underneath into the land; in these huge vanes and water-wheels were hung from the roofs and the higher portions of the sides; and the waves as they ran in and out beat their paddles and made them whirl with lightning swiftness. The motion thus communicated was turned by their electro-generators into currents of electric force which found its way by the network of wires and cables that I saw into this enormous storage-battery. In another series of caves they cooped up the water of the full tides by means of gigantic dams and sluice-gates, and this during ebb drove huge wheels and turbines and thus sent the power of the moon into their treasure-house of power. Every storm that ruffled the surface of the ocean, every current that swept past their shores, every ebb or flow of their tides added its quota to the energy accumulated in their electric treasury, a far more wonderful concentration of wealth than any Sindbad’s valley or Golconda. Here was ready to the hand of man power greater than all that the nations and the generations had ever been capable of.

And the winds had been made as much the slaves of this people as the waves; for another great cavern that we visited was the storehouse of the energy of the winds. In every gorge and pass and gully around Lilaroma up almost to its crater had been erected immense windmills, which as they revolved generated electricity; this found its way from all points by massive cables buried in the earth to the conservator of energy in this second cave. Ooriel tested the wires to see that they were not leaking anywhere and tested the batteries for faults, and finding everything in good order, we passed into a third power treasury in the rock. This was vastest of all; for into it there poured the energy of the power-wells which was not needed by the private houses spread over the face of the island. As soon as the head of steam was shut off from the machinery or the tubes of any mansion, its whole force was turned upon an engine near the mouth of the well, which kept generating electric force day and night. The accumulation of energy in this cave of the wells would have been enough to supply ten times the power that Europe had ever used in her industries.

In order to round off our tour of inspection, Ooriel led me to another but smaller cave which had just been fitted up with storage-batteries. This was the cave of the sun. For generations it had been contended that most of the power from the sun’s rays was lost, even when they reached the earth; and the inventors had at last worked out the problem of its utilisation. I had noticed as I flew over the country in a faleena vast gleaming spaces sparkling like gigantic diamonds in the sunlight. These were the reflectors which collected the sunbeams and concentrated their heat and light into power. Upon the slope of Lilaroma they utilised the miles of snow surface and gathered their gleam into a few heat-engines that sent the generated electricity into Rimla.

Vast as the force was which in these various ways was bent into the service of this people, there seemed still to be the need of increasing it. Never a week passed without some facilitation of the collection and distribution of energy by an improvement in the machinery. The mechanic families were ever busy competing with one another in invention and practical application of some principle or idea, and the pioneering families who rode imagination to the verge of practicability marched ahead of them, mapping tracks and highways into the unknown future. One proposal was to utilise the magnetism of the earth as a new source of energy, and already one of the mechanical families was far on the way to its realisation. Another that was near at hand was the use of the expansion of their liquefied and solidified air for purposes of power. One plan somewhat farther off from the realm of practicability was the utilisation of the primal ether by means of its compression and expansion. Yet they were working at it in full hope of finding a solution of the problem at some unexpected turn of their imaginative road into the darkness. They had achieved so much that they had almost boundless faith in their ultimate power to solve all problems presented to their minds. They would face the death of the whole race sooner than the thought of ceasing to push forward into the night that encircled life.

My mind was almost paralysed at the thought of the vastness of the power controlled in this centre of force; but it explained to me the ease with which they could drive their leomorans miles and miles through the solid crust of the earth, the power they had over the volcanic fires of Lilaroma, the strength of the blast they could send far out to sea from their storm-cone, and the general facility with which they could control and use even the most titanic forces of nature. I did not wonder now that they were the masters rather than the servants of nature, especially when I saw that by the strength and nicety of their machines they could concentrate all this tremendous force upon any single point or distribute it over a wide area at the striking of a key on the great key-board of forces. I have seen one of the masters of energy turn the whole current from the ten thousand services it was doing throughout the island upon the making of a diamond; so enormous was the temperature it generated in a few moments that a piece of carbon, submitted to the heat and pressure, came forth a magnificent jewel, gleaming and sheening in the light. But this was for no silly purpose of personal ornamentation; it was meant for the friction edge of a leomoran down where it bit into the rock. It was the easiest thing in the world for this people with all the concentration of power they had at their call to follow nature in her most occult or tremendous processes. There was not a metal they could not produce with their high temperatures and enormous pressures. It is true that all other operations had to be stopped in order to transmute rapidly common materials into gold, irelium, or diamonds; but it could be done, and they had no need to dig into the bowels of the earth like other men for the more precious metals and crystals which had accumulated there in the volcanic or chemical past.

It was one of their commonest sayings that no science which was not creative was worthy of the name. True, there were often long tracts of scientific investigation that seemed entirely barren; and many of their researches seemed to lead nowhither. But when I inquired more minutely I found that the investigators had realised many of the practical applications of the discovery when once they should reach it. They regarded as futile all abstract inquiries which had only a distant and unforeseen chance of ending in something useful. Even their astronomy had a keen eye to the possibilities of their future; it led not only to a deeper knowledge of the living heart of creation, and to a wider enjoyment of the pleasures of imagination and faith, but to the purposes of the immediate life; it gave them immortal forms for their art and especially their architecture; it moulded or suggested their divinest music; it brought into even their physical life influences unlike those of the earth, and they hoped with full faith that through this they might catch the wandering thoughts or voices of the beings of other worlds and at last reach the power of emigration from star to star.

Their most creative science was chemistry; for this had reached the secrets of nature’s most mysterious processes, and had imitated and generally abbreviated the workings of her great laboratory. The Limanorans did not need to grow the plants and trees that used to produce their food. Agriculture had ceased to be necessary for them except as a part of landscape-gardening. The elements and combinations that used to be extracted from their harvests in order to support and exhilarate life could be created directly in the chemical laboratories. Everything needed as diet was drawn straight from the earth without the long process of growth and culmination. They had the prime factors of sustenance in unlimited quantity and purest form with the minimum of labour, and they could give to these the exact quality and refinement which would bear them straight to the various tissues or cells of the body without the need of its offensive chemical processes. Most of the chemistry of life-sustenance was accomplished before the food entered the human system, and the space and energy of the body that had before gone to the alimentary processes of life were now free for other and higher functions. Pharmacy and chemical science combined to create all that the constitution required not only for its support and frictionless continuance, but for its progress towards longer life and more ethereal texture. Their medicine had ages before passed the crude stage of mere cure of disease. They laughed at the idea of the science as merely therapeutic: it must be creative. The inter-relations of the higher and lower elements of the nature were unremittingly studied in the case of every member of the community, and every means of change in them that would lead to the ennobling of Limanoran humanity was carefully prescribed.

I was led through their food factories and grew deeply interested in their processes of analysis and combination. They seemed never to have any hesitation about the exact quantity of each element and the exact temperature and pressure needed to produce any given kind of sustenance. One of the most singular departments of these factories was that in which they had yoked the infinitesimal plant and animal life of the universe to the chemicalisation of their food and medicine. They knew how to utilise all the life they could come across, however microscopic, and here under their marvellously powerful magnifying instruments I could see the minutest of all life enslaved to their purposes. Nothing could surpass the exactitude with which they had defined the functions and spheres of these mysterious beings invisible to the naked eye. Each had its own department of industry. No one of them interfered with the other. It was life put to its best purpose of sustaining the noblest life. When I saw the huge irelium tubes bearing out the results in aërial or vaporous form, I grew anxious to test the effects at the other end of them. At my own request I was taken one day to Oomalefa, the great series of public halls and baths which formed the chief centre of associative life in the island. I had not known of the institution before; for I was still too little advanced in physical nature to be clear of the inner chemical processes needed for nutrition, and it had not been thought necessary to show me a section of their public life in which I could have no special share. But, now that my own eagerness for knowledge had brought me to the stage of education which demanded insight into this institution, they were willing that I should inspect it and see all its peculiar features.