Limanora the island of progress
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.
CHAPTER IX
OOMALEFA
THESE halls of nutrition and medication were situated on a great
promontory extending miles into the sea. It had been ledged and
bastioned with lava walls, and round the gleaming edifice ran a balcony
or rocky platform, which broke the fury of any ambitious billows that
might threaten the crystal translucence of the walls. Here, overlooking
the sea, the Limanorans could drink in its medicating breath; here in
the vast hall could they take that restful exercise which is the first
essential of all life; here they could commune with their own souls
or with the stars and listen to the ever-changing rhythm of the waves
as they broke into spray or climbed to the rocky wall beneath. They
considered this chamber of the ocean and the stars as more medicant
and alimentary than any they could make with human hands; hence it was
that they had thrown out this great projection into the sea, where they
could spend most of their hours of nutrition.
Along its highest ridge ran a series of the noblest buildings that
ever met my eye, unlike all other edifices I had ever heard of in
style of architecture and method of grouping, but resembling in their
bewildering variety and inherent symmetry the gleaming clusters of
night. Countless points of fire aimed at the heavens from spires and
towers which shone with rainbow fluctuation in the sun. There was a
milky way of jewelled pinnacles; and around were strewn fire-flashing
constellations of jewel minarets and domes. Innumerable centres of
varied roof and aspiring form led the eye by their incompleteness
to some great centre; and soon it rested calmly on the vast yet
ever-broken and changing dome that like a snow-clad mountain-ridge
mastered every spirit that was drawn to it. Alone this galaxy of
clustered starry forms stood out above the sea, undwarfed by any
neighbouring land and masterful over the billows below it. A true
temple was it even in the presence of the universe of suns that
stretched out into endless night. Within it surely might the spirit of
man feel no unholy doubts of its immortal destiny or of its kinship
with the divine. Pure and noble orison might here be raised to the
Maker of the makers of this shrine; all trivial and mean thoughts would
here be sacrilege. When night fell, the stars in the heavens held
spirit communion with this their brother. This was Oomalefa, or the
jewel of immortal longings.
My first visit to Oomalefa is engraved upon the record of my past, for