Limanora the island of progress
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