Limanora

CHAPTER XIII
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.