Limanora the island of progress

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