Limanora the island of progress
as swiftly as they had rotated when receiving the impressions, and the
sun pictures being transparent, light and magnifying glasses threw them
life-size on a wall opposite the spectator; the lightning movement
produced the full effect of action in life; and, as all the tints of
the scene had also been impressed on the strips, there was nothing
wanting to produce the illusion of life but the voices and the sounds.
These, too, had been taken on an irelium strip and this, when placed in
a voice instrument, added all that was needed to make the whole scene
live. It was the duty of the students in each generation to single out
the most striking and representative series and have them ready mounted
in the instruments, that any new scholar might in a few days take a
bird’s-eye view of the whole development of the family. Thus was I
enabled to sit and study the past as if I had been a contemporary and
eye-witness of it. The very music that accompanied and harmonised each
act and scene was faithfully reproduced as loud or as low as I desired.
I had but to touch a certain spring in the historoscope, and raise or
lower the tone.
It was little wonder that we so rapidly covered the history of the
family and its achievements. By means of the work of former students
we were able to avoid all the mistakes and unessential details of the
route they had traversed; and Thyriel’s friends pointed out every
pitfall that edged the road, every by-path that led only into the
darkness or into some inextricable labyrinth. Our steps were watched
with infinite care; for, with all the knowledge and skill we had
already acquired, we were but infants on the threshold of a universe
of darkness. What was twilight in the future to our guides was to us
midnight blackness. That was no science, they held, which did not flash
light upon the gloom before us; and their whole efforts were bent on
turning every fact and law into a prophecy and every student into a
foreseer as well as a seer in his own science. The limited faculties of
man fenced in by narrow bounds the future into which it was possible
for them to see; but they were ever extending these bounds and creeping
towards the infinite.
It took but a few years to master the recorded lore of the Leomo, the
work of our predecessors had made it so easy, and it was an epoch in
our existence when we began the practical part of our training. We
were by no means done with Fialume, but less time was now devoted to
its historical and theoretical studies. I well remember the morning
when our guardians and guides informed us we were fit to see the
practical applications of the science throughout the island. Taking
some new apparatus, they embarked me in a kind of faleena which had
been invented since I came to the island. The families of imagination
had long ago suggested it, and one of the families engaged in the
development of methods of flight had just succeeded in perfecting
its mechanism and making it easy to manage. This aërial car had no
wings, but rose by means of the many vacuum tubes which were the most
important part of its impelling machinery. A powerful electric engine
created and destroyed the vacuums many hundred times a minute. Each
tube sucked in the air ahead and expelled it with great violence at the
stern of the car. Both actions aided in propelling the faleena. The
result was that, though not so graceful as the old winged car, it went
with much greater swiftness. Indeed, laden though we were, we kept pace
easily with the flight of my companions and guides through the air;
and its parachute attachments obviated any risk, even if all the tubes
should by accident become ineffective. Its chief disadvantage was that
it could not rise out of the denser air of the lower atmosphere, and
at the same time keep up its great speed. The old style of faleena, or
farfaleena, as it was called, to distinguish it from its new rival,
the corfaleena, was still kept in use for higher journeys, and the
flight-families set themselves the problem of inventing a means of
propulsion through space without the aid of air. One dealt with the
possibilities of electric currents, and experimented on the method
of alternating attraction and repulsion, using the repulsion in the
rear of the car and the attraction in front. Another dealt with the
possibilities of the rays of light that were ever traversing space,
experimenting on their power of starting machinery _in vacuo_ and
keeping it in rotation. A third made effort to test the capacities
of the ether, which was the basis and medium of all things, a more
difficult and problematical path of investigation, yet one not to
be abandoned without certain proof of its impossibility; for many
apparently insoluble problems had been solved in a manner that made
incredulity hide its head.
CHAPTER VII
LEOMARIE
AS I was attached to Leomarie or the science of earth-seeing, I did not
follow up their experiments in the building of air-cars; I only saw
the results when at last they came out perfect from their hands, and
greatly admired the easy and swift action of their corfaleena. Over the
hills and valleys and plains we flew close enough to see what was going
on upon the earth below. Again and again we passed over long wisps of
steam or columns of dense smoke. I conjectured that the steam indicated
the heat wells like that which penetrated the rock near the house of my
proparents, and supplied every chamber with heat or power as required.
It went down some miles into the crust of the earth, and could be
closed or opened at will by a huge lever worked by the steam it emitted
itself. The denser brooms of smoke I took to indicate the sinking of
their artesian power wells by the leomoran.
For I had seen ours being mined; I had seen the entrance of the great
irelium tube into the earth, ring within ring, and its slow but
inevitable work from day to day and week to week. The principle of
this leomoran or earth perforator had been found by investigation of
the anatomy and method of work of the pholas or rock-boring shell,
partly chemical, partly mechanical. The edge of the lowest ring was
like a sharp-toothed file that, as it rotated by means of power applied
from the centre of force, wore its way gradually into the rock, the
ridges of the file being as hard as the diamond. An inner ring-file
was attached to it on the inside, and between the two was let down a
certain chemical compound, which by the friction of the files produced
little explosions in the rock below and thus quickened the process.
Other ring-files followed in the same way. Another chemical compound,
differing according to the character of the rock to be attacked, was
let down in the space within the concentric rings, and rapidly decayed
the rock so that it ascended like a column of thick black smoke. After
all the ring-files were at work, the leomoran needed little guidance;
for by an application of the principle of the spectroscope, its use of
the chemicals according to the nature of the rock became automatic. As
soon as the volatilised mineral that ascended out of the rings changed
its character, the beams of light that passed through it changed the
spectrum; and the new spectrum influenced a certain solution that
controlled a thread, and this thread set free a stream of the proper
chemical compound down the leomoran.
A still more striking use of the spectrum was the linoklar or
spectroscope analyst and recorder. It analysed the vapours that
ascended from the tubes, and recorded their spectra on a moving strip
of irelium that was guided by the descent of the leomoran into the
earth. Thus anyone could see what strata were passed through in any
given time and the extent of the strata. But the linoklar did much
more than this; whenever it struck any vein that had the much-desired
irelium in it in any quantity, its spectrum released a spring which
opened a small tube; through this streamed the irelium vapour into a
cavity of the earth, where by means of a purifier it deposited only the
pure metal. There was less demand for the other metals, gold, silver,
platinum, tin, copper, iron. But there was also an arrangement for
separating and depositing their volatilised forms in other cavities.
Thus they were able to have more than they required of the metals, and
especially of irelium, the most precious because the most adaptable of
all.
I was now to see a further development of these mining instruments.
We winged our way to a part of the coast which was farthest from the
surrounding islands and most easily protected from invaders by the
storm-cone. I noticed the exceptional lowness of the sandy beach, as
shelving as that on which I had originally landed; there were none of
the great bastions of rock which, moulded with such symmetry of terrace
and escarpment, barred off all landing on the island. We directed our
course far up the mountain and alighted on a rocky platform overlooking
the sea. The new apparatus had been sent after us in a faleena and
was now placed in position. A cylinder was erected on the ground and
attached by machinery to wires and pipes that had been laid from the
centre of force. But this was unlike the old leomoran in having the
mouth tightly closed, and I soon saw the principle on which the new
perforator was to work. The air was exhausted in the cylinder, and then
a powerful stream of electricity was made to pass through a piston
constructed of innumerable wires which kept moving with lightning
rapidity over the surface of the rock at the bottom. The success of
the experiment soon manifested itself; for, as soon as a spring was
touched, a valve that separated the end of a projecting tube from the
air-tight cylinder was opened, and out streamed a dense column into
the atmosphere above. The spring was afterwards managed automatically
so that as soon as the red-hot electric piston had eroded enough of
the rock and volatilised it, the valve sprang open, and the moment
the vapour and smoke had all escaped, it was shut, and the air was
immediately exhausted.
We returned day after day to the place and found that the new
perforator, or tirleomoran as it was called, worked with ten times
the swiftness of the old instrument. The chief objections to it
were that the metal vapours were denser and more offensive, and
that the irelium cylinders had to be oftener renewed because of the
great friction and the intensity of the electric heat. The one was
obviated by a longer smoke-tube and an application of a vent of wind
from the storm-cone; the other was obviated by longer cylinders and
refrigerative packing between two of their layers of irelium. But
the strangest result--strangest for me at least--was to come. The
tirleomoran descended miles beyond the usual force well into the crust
of the earth, at a great rate of speed, and I soon saw preparations for
some change. Great channels of their usual metal were laid down to the
beach, and irelium barriers erected in the sea along the shelving shore
from bastion to bastion. By the greater rapidity of the descent, the
increase of the proportion of their favourite metal, and the ease with
which the electric current volatilised the material below, our guides
judged that they had reached rock that was already molten. Before long
there began to ooze out of the smoke-tube a red-hot stream, that
trickled its way down the slope. Then the air-tight lid was burst off
the cylinder, out of it came the electric piston on a wave of red-hot
lava, and down the channels the thick stream of molten rock flowed till
it reached the barriers in the sea. There with vast columns of steam it
cooled and solidified, forming a new and stronger rampart to check the