Limanora

CHAPTER XI
A CATASTROPHE

BUT long years divided my first visit to Oomalefa and my admission to Firlalain. I saw that there were certain vast sections of Oomalefa that I was led past; massive portals showed their rank, but the number on them defining the age at which entrance was possible warned us off, and allegorical pictures adorning their arches figured the decay of tissue and cell that would result in the youthful body from too early admittance. Any curiosity Thyriel or I could have felt was repressed by these ominous symbols; for this people never relied on mere authority. Their strongest prohibitions were in the form of graphic appeals to the reason, and only where these could not impress youthful natures sufficiently were the emotions involved; the influences of any special indulgence upon the human system were represented in living form, which, looked at through a medium magnifying them ten thousand-fold, stirred the heart of all the more deeply.

We saw in a moment that we were unfit to enter Firlalain, and we passed on into the vast series of baths wherein the Limanorans could rid their bodies of obstructive or noxious elements. Here was every grade of temperature endurable by their tissues: for every grade there was a separate swimming-pool in which they could exercise themselves; and every hour automatic machinery driven by force from Rimla sent the contents of each pool into one of the lava wells, where in a few moments the water and all the débris thrown off from the bathers’ bodies vanished in fire. These baths were so arranged that not more than two should be empty together, and at the general entrance were seated two medical counsellors, who measured and tested the state and temperature of the body, and showed graphically what would be the effect of entering each bath of the series to which the state of the bather restricted him.

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

Every Limanoran of an age to be admitted to Oomalefa resorted several times a day to each of these three kinds of baths. First came a magnetic bath, in which every organ and tissue was stimulated to throw off its débris towards the pores. Then came the swim in one or more of the pools, in order that all this rejected part might be washed off. After this came the solar bath, which penetrated into the superficial channels of the body and swept away all bacterial life that might be nocuous. The last stage was the ethereal bath, which was enjoyed in solitude and could be endured by any but the mature for only a few minutes; the exhilaration and tenuity of atmosphere were too great for unaccustomed lungs, and I could see the heads of the bathers thrust out at short intervals to take a breath. But long practice made the older Limanorans enjoy the buoyancy of the pure medium for hours. It was indeed one of the hopes of the race that they would be able at last to breathe the interstellar ether with greater ease than the air surrounding their own earth.

It was in these baths I first came to see the marvellous grace and plasticity of their garments. They were outside of all my previous experiences and conceptions, and seemed so natural that I took them for a part of their material outfit like their hair. It had never entered into my mind to question whether they laid them aside in sleep or not. Perhaps it was owing to the beauty and animation of the countenance, when they spoke or even looked, that I had not paid any attention to their dress except to see how it never impeded their movements either in flight or in work, and how it varied with the individual, and never with the sex or age or profession; it belonged to the childhood of the world to regiment men in the minor details of life. Now I saw in the baths that the vesture did not need to be laid aside in other elements than air. It was made of some fine and flexible stuff woven out of irelium threads, plastic to the shape, yet capable of stiffening out when the wearer sent an electric wave through it from the electro-generator he always bore under his right arm. This process at once shook out every drop of water from it, when he issued from the bath or the sea. It was so porous that it seemed fragile, and yet it could bear great strains. Through its pores passed with ease the water or air or ether that was to influence the body underneath; and along its threads passed with ease any magnetism the wearer wished to feel. In certain lights it was almost transparent, yet with such a play of rainbow colors that it seemed a living fence against lights and shadows. In the darkness it shone with dazzling radiance as soon as the electric current flowed into it. At the will of the wearer it could be, like a magic garment of invisibility, black as midnight, yet in daylight could reveal every grace and tint of the limbs it covered, clinging closely like an outer epidermis to the body. Nor was it ever laid aside except to be replaced by a new vesture, and that was every few days; for all germs and débris that adhered to it or obstructed its pores could be destroyed and got rid of by the electric current the wearer had control of. It was on my first visit to Oomalefa that I came to know these things, as it was then that I first donned a like vesture, and was taught its properties and the ways of managing it and the minute electro-generator that went with it.

There were alternative garments, that they wore under different conditions. One, almost as plastic as the ordinary vesture, but armoured by electricity against the inroads of excessive cold, was worn when they ventured up into the higher regions of the air or beyond; for it enabled them to keep up the natural temperature of the body as they flew. Another was as well suited for protection against extreme heat. It consisted of an asbestine double wall of irelium, within which was kept up a constant current of cold air by means of a minute apparatus worked by their wings and arms; and, if they could get moisture from the atmosphere to run between the two textile folds, it was at once frozen. Such an arrangement was necessary in their adventurous experiments in the bowels of the earth or under the blazing eye of the sun. The most beautiful and most convenient of all their vestures was one which looked and felt like a film of white cloud; I would have said that it was woven of the misty fleeces that caught and rent themselves on the lesser peaks of Lilaroma. It was indeed no distant mimicry of this; for though it could be thrown loosely round the figure in the most graceful forms like a toga, and seemed as thin and fragile as gossamer, it consisted of a treble fabric: between two transparent films, fairly delicate as if woven by a spider on a windless dawn, moved in cloud-like purity and dimness the airy vapour of some liquid that shone as silvery and warm as moonlight. Its purpose was to conceal and yet to reveal the general contour and movements of the body; to sift the strength of the sun’s rays as they fell in their purity from heaven, and yet to pass as much of their curative power through it as the skin needed; to cling to the limbs, and yet to impede them no more than a fleece of cloud would.

It was as I was studying the texture and the beauty of these garments that there happened the first approach to panic I had yet witnessed among this calm-eyed people. There had been a stillness as of ill-bridled tumult in the atmosphere all day. My proparents had moved restlessly abroad from daybreak, and all the Leomo were on the wing husbanding every minute with feverish clutch. We were sent in squadrons to different parts of the island, and many new leomorans were set to work in unaccustomed corners of the mountain, yet there was a look of baffled intelligence in every face. I had felt there was an undeciphered portent overshadowing their life. Thyriel and I had worked at two new leomorans and watched them till they wielded their brush of smoke across the sky. We had done all that we could and were sent out to Oomalefa to uncloud our troubled minds.

The excitement of this new sphere had removed from our thoughts all ominous shadows and we were as innocently absorbed as primitive men of the woodlands in the wonders now opened to us; but silence had fallen upon the gambolling swimmers, and the hush awakened us from our new dream. We felt the foundations of the building tremble and quiver like a panic-stricken beast. Up the translucent walls clicked a huge rent, and slowly the liquid in the baths hissed and vanished. A tumultuous muffled cannonade rolled beneath us. The crystal roof crackled and snapped like ice-rafts that groan and toss before a sudden flood. The chink widened into a chasm, and through it we could see the ocean seethe in turbulence and revolution. Up through the roof whizzed the wings of the alarmed bathers, and as the jarring and detonation grew, I stood knowing not whither to turn. All I could do was to bid Thyriel follow her mates. More awful came back the reverberations from the domes, and Thyriel’s face was pale and her lips set, but she did not move. Finally she bade me follow her to that end of the gallery farthest from the chasm in the walls, a raised platform whence the swimmers dived. There she placed me with my back to hers, and ran a rope under my arms. Before I knew what she was about, I was off my feet; she was running at full speed up the rising platform and with a sudden jerk we were in the air. I heard the beating of her wings, and lay still lest I should baffle her purpose. I lay on my back between her wings, and shuddered as I saw their points broken against the lips of the chasm. A deep-mouthed clangour filled my ears; and for a moment my eyelids fell in palsied terror. When I raised them and looked down, the vast crystal of Oomalefa had vanished and the great promontory stood gaping, with the surf hissing and baying as it leapt over the upper surface.

I felt that Thyriel was almost exhausted, and thought of detaching myself from the rope which bound me and leaping into the ocean; but the idea had not quite grown into resolve when I saw her wings beat slower and knew that we were hovering over the solid land. In a moment we were standing side by side, she exhausted, I supporting her with my arms. It was not long before she recovered herself, for her attention had been awakened by a startling appearance out in mid-ocean. A high peak rose beyond the cleft and scarred promontory where there had been only waves before, its head turbaned with steam and smoke. It was still shouldering the sea to right and left with hiss of lava tongue and splash of cinder shower. We could not speak for alarmed wonder, and mingling with mine there was deep sorrow over Oomalefa vanished. What had become of it I could not tell. Thyriel roused herself and, divining my thoughts, led me to the steps which had once given entrance to the starry portal. She stooped and lifted in her hand some of what seemed to me fine-sprinkled snow, that covered every inch of rock. It was irelium dust. Once the cohesion of the great edifice had been overcome by the shocks of the earthquake, it fell not into fragments or huge blocks, but into its constituent atoms. Nothing, I thought, could ever replace the wondrous palace of delights that I had only begun to know.

I felt saddened beyond recovery, as we turned homewards, over the ruin of such magnificence and so great hopes. Thyriel’s dejection, I discovered, was retrospective. She mourned over the failure of Leomarie, the earthquake art of her family and friends. They had thought that they could anticipate and prevent all the grumblings and revolutions of Lilaroma, and this outbreak had shown the imperfection of their knowledge and the limits of their art. Though but a novice, I could see that something was yet wanting to make them masters of the crust of the earth. For the first time for many generations their foresight had failed. They had known that there was disturbance beneath the mountain, but they had been unable to fix its centre, which was far out at sea. The inflow of the waters had baffled the power of their mountain-cupping instruments, and the rapidly generated steam had rent the crust in the line of Oomalefa; and until the slow-trickling lavas and the swift-belched ashes had sealed the lips of the chasm again, there was danger, they knew, of the whole island exploding. How they were to prevent or even anticipate such cataclysms was a problem that weighed upon every member of the family and saddened every leisure moment.

For some days the Leomo were busy with the wreckage of the outbreak. I was attached to the section that had to inspect the lava wells, gauge the amount of molten matter which had oozed from each, repair every clirolan or other instrument that had been deranged, and replace those submerged. The urgency of the occasion excused us from the regular duties and pleasures of the day. All our ablutions and essential exercises were performed in the private mansions. Most of the hours not spent in sleep were devoted to the tasks made for us by the new exigency. The excitement removed the monotony and burden of the work, and almost before we knew that there was so much to do it was done. New wells were sunk and new clirolans fixed wherever the overflow had choked or sealed the old. The instruments of even the most distant section of the island were put into their best working order.

Then we were free to scatter to the winds and to follow our old delights. Thyriel set herself with renewed eagerness to teach me the art of flight, and I attained the power of describing an easy curve from a shoulder of Lilaroma down to the plain. Again and again in her new desire to master flight with me seated between her wings, she carried me up to some jutting platform of the mountain: and then she showed me how to work the wing-engine with ease. I could keep level with my starting-point for a few minutes, but after that I had to let myself glide down the parabola of the air. I was too heavily weighted by gravity and the inertia of my muscles to rise as she did.

There were many secrets of their flight that I soon understood. The curious construction of the wings, formed as they were of two sliding membranes, I have already described. What I had taken for a mere rudder was a large series of small screws that gave forward motion to the flight. The engine that whirled them round as they churned the air was of great power, and without them the flight would have been but slow and clumsy. It was through inability to manage this engine that I was so long in mastering even the rudiments of the art.

I progressed greatly that day, and would have progressed more but that the lesson was abruptly broken off. In each new air voyage to a higher sally-point she bore me farther round the mountain towards the great plain that stretched to the south. When we reached our last flight platform, and I had descended, my glance shot over the countless centres of industry and investigation that stippled the rolling downs. It was a noble sight, and I could have long rested in the gaze: but an unwonted gleam drew my eyes to the precipitous coast. There on a vast new promontory which ran out miles into the sea was gathered such a galaxy of jewelled domes rainbow-lit by the sun as I could not have conceived even from my remembrance of Oomalefa and its marvellous architecture. Thyriel’s eyes had also been riveted by the spectacle. “It is a new Oomalefa,” she burst forth. I could not believe it; how could such a palace of wonders be reconstructed in so short a time? There were only a few thousand mature Limanorans; and if they had been all engaged on such a structure night and day it would have taken many busy years to rear it. I took it for a mere illusion. The position of the sun and some unusual commotion in the sea had produced it by reflection and refraction. It was but a bubble of the imagination bred by some abnormality in our eyes upon our memory of Oomalefa and the grief of our minds at its evanishment.

So I argued. But Thyriel was silently decided in her dissent. We could take no more interest in our aëronautics, nothing could keep our gaze from that radiant orb resting, gigantic, on the beach. As the sun declined the facets of the new jewel shimmered with living sheen: now it was a city of burnished gold, again it was a myriad of lambent flames aspiring to the centre of fire: now a thousand rainbows weaving and unweaving themselves, again uncounted stars clustered and heaped in restless silver, or wintry thistledown of swarming snow. Surely it was but an army of will-o’-the-wisps lit in the marsh fumes that the gaping sea had sent forth. Yet as I gazed it grew in my mind that this sparkling halo had a fixed centre; there was symmetry in the refulgence and in the recurrence of colour and sheen. It could not be illusion; we were both transfixed like sculptures in eternal gaze.

The flash of wings broke the completeness of the glory and our spell. Above the transplendent spectacle fluttered a snow-storm of ariels; the sun shot a fiery gleam through a rent cloud, and across his silvery beams danced and played these winged motes. The beauty of the sight moved us almost to tears. We knew that this was no phantom joy; our fellows were aloft in the air hymning the glory of a new creation. Soon Thyriel had persuaded me to start with her towards the new palace of wonders. We had not got half-way when I felt my arms weary and my flight dragging towards the plain. She would not leave me to trudge across the uneven earth; before I could argue she had me safely nestling between her wings as they beat the air upwards from the low knoll on which we had alighted. She no longer laboured under her burden, as she had done in her first attempt some days before; yet I felt that she grew tired, and made her land upon a hill a few miles from the new Oomalefa. After a rest I was able on my own wings to curve down towards its flight of new-rocked steps and its scintillant portal.

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