Limanora the island of progress
in these designs that the younger members of the architect families
were engaged; thus they learned their art and developed their creative
instincts.
Under some cupolas which we visited we found experiments on new designs
for the large public buildings, and to these the wisest members of the
families were applying their century-tried skill. As we approached any
such chapel, we could hear the most elaborate and entrancing music,
for the design in such cases was labyrinthine, and needed the noblest
artistic faculties to select and develop it. The executive musical
talent displayed and the talent of extemporaneous composition and
modification would have been called genius in European communities; but
this people had no word corresponding to the quicksand of meaning this
word covers in Christendom. They knew the origin and growth of each
faculty, even when exceptionally developed, too well to attribute it
to an indefinable something which nature had somehow conferred upon a
chance-chosen individual. They knew as exactly the causes that produced
given effects in the human system as they could calculate the forces
of the inanimate world, and had no belief in the power of nature to
give to human work by some caprice more value than it deserved and
that deranged all calculation. This criticism I brought down on me
from my guide when I expressed amazement at the beauty of the music
and the resulting design in one chapel, and attempted to translate
the word “genius” into Limanoran. Such expressions, he persuaded me,
are but the half-articulate escape-valves of wide-mouthed ignorance;
they mean no more than a confession of blindness and incapacity, and
should be rapidly rejected by every progressive civilisation. The
musical and designing power of this particular Limanoran belonged to
most in his family of his own age, and was merely the stage the art of
sonarchitecture had reached in its development on the island. Wherever
a nature especially adapted to the double art was found it was imported
into the family to reinforce it.
In spite of the dissertation, I could not but listen, entranced by the
intricate splendour of the music; and my eyes were riveted on the
growing design within the receiver of the Ooloran. Yet when finished
and tested it was found inadequate to the artist’s new conception of
the utilities of the ultimate edifice. It was shaken again into dust
before I left the workman, and its faults were noted and corrected in
the score of music which he had before him. He had been years on this
single design, which he had been moulding and improving every day; and
he hoped soon to find a form that would be strikingly new and in every
feature adapted to the purpose of the building.
I could well understand now that the new Oomalefa was no work of magic;
but I was still unable to see how its vast proportions could have been
shifted from its place of fabrication to its ultimate site. Thyriel
led me to a new structure which had just issued from the central
sonarchitect; and the master-workman bade me lean upon it; huge though
it was, it shifted before my weight and I fell. It was as light as if
made of silk, and we two could lift it from the floor. This explained
the ease of rafting the great edifices through the air; but how did
they resist the winds that blew, or the impact of wave and storm? I
was led to a wall of Oolorefa itself; and I was bidden to raise one
low parapet of it; not the application of my greatest strength could
move it. My guide then waved what seemed to be a magnet above it, and
bade me try again; it rose in my hands and my muscular effort landed me
on my back. He showed me how the foundations of their buildings were
powerful magnets, and how the fabric would be torn to pieces before
it could be hoisted off them unless an equally powerful magnet was
applied in another direction. I now understood the strength of their
structures before winds and the rapid disappearance of Oomalefa after
the earthquake.
But I had seen only one department of Oolorefa, that which consummated
the work of the rest. One branch of the sonarchitect families was
specially charged with experimentation on the materials for building.
Irelium was the general name for the metallic combination of elements
best suited to the state of civilisation they had reached; but there
were innumerable modifications and grades of it, and there were more
being discovered every day. We entered one magnificent building, and
there found a dozen or more workmen, each isolated in a transparent
chamber and busy with some combination of irelium and one or other
of the stellar metals. Every star or series of stars had its own
predominant and characteristic element or amalgam of elements; and
it was a main duty of one of the chemical families of the island
to examine every star for its new element and to find something
corresponding to it in terrene matter. This section of the people
studied with the most anxious care the products and the results of the
leomorans; they visited almost hourly the mouths of the lava wells and
watched the spectroscopic recorders of the fumes that rose out of them;
for they seldom failed to find at one time or another some constituent
of the interior of the earth corresponding to any new stellar element
or metal recently discovered. Whenever it was found in any leomoran
a chamber for its deposition was constructed and the clirolan was
specially adapted to the preservation of all of it that issued out of
the bowels of the earth. These new metallic constituents were called
by the name of the stars in which they predominated, and were at
once put into the hands of the sonarchitect families to be tested
for structural utilities. It was thus irelium had been discovered,
and thus they hoped to find materials still more plastic to their
purposes. Already they had so modified their new metal by amalgamation
with other stellar metals that they had fitted it to functions no
metal had served before; it could be made flexible or tough, light or
heavy, transparent or opaque, malleable or brittle, soluble before
heat or water or electricity, or resistent to any or all of them; it
was difficult to say what quality they could not impart to it; and
here I could see the workmen testing new combinations in order to find
new qualities or new grades of a quality already found. I stood and
watched one who was trying an amalgam of a new stellar metal called
vanelium with gold; he had already attempted to combine it with iron,
silver, copper, irelium, and found it in each case either impossible or
useless; but the reactions had pointed him to gold as its natural ally;
and now, having found the two combine with ease, he was exhausting
the various possibilities of combination in different proportions,
and after submitting the new amalgam to his tests, was recording the
results. It gave a marvellous toughness and elasticity to gold, so
that, when beaten thin enough for a breath to raise it in the air, it
could not be torn except by sudden and great mechanical force. Another
workman near him was testing the effect of electricity on the various
grades of the new amalgam and recording the results minutely. In each
of the crystal chambers there were at hand supplies of all the forms of
energy that might be needed, such as heat, cold, pressure, electricity.
Each workman was isolated in order that the elements he used might not
interfere with the experiments of his neighbour; but his workshop was
transparent, that he might beckon for help at any moment, or exhibit
to his fellows the result of any experiment without modifying the
conditions or breaking the continuity.
A third branch of these families dealt with the adaptation of the new
amalgams to the various structural necessities of the community; they
found out which form or grade would resist the disintegrating influence
or the power of water or of electric force; they tested what shape
would best suit each grade, solid or hollow, cylindrical or spheral,
cubic or rectangular, thin or thick, curved or rectilinear. Another
branch devoted itself to the means of making the various metals or
amalgams cohere either temporarily or permanently. A fifth studied the
adaptation of the new discoveries to tools and machines and to the
invention of new mechanical forms that would bring out their greatest
utilities. To go through all the departments of this vast architectural
workshop would need a week’s rehearsal. To my first view it seemed
bewildering in its complexity of specialisation; but after closer
acquaintance it became simplicity itself, in fact the only plan that
nature itself could have pointed out.
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.