Limanora the island of progress

civilisations, to imagine that extended empire over men meant a true development of humanity; wide sovereignty was mere artificial change of the locality and application of the forces of mankind, without increasing them; it was but a reshuffling of the cards (to use your similes), with all the honours in one hand instead of being distributed over all; it was merely political and not real. Any gain that might come from the concentration of power and wealth was wasted on increased war-material and military expeditions for retaining or subduing territories and peoples, on futile and routine administration, and on growth of court splendour and luxury. The pursuit of the sanguinary phantom of power over other men had to be for ever abandoned before any real human advance could be made. Empire over the powers of nature was the primary condition of full development of human possibilities, and every tissue of their wonderful brains was strained to its utmost for the rapid extension of this sway. A new addition to the stores of the centre of force, a new source of energy, was therefore ever hailed by them as the warranty of a leap upward and onward into the future. The invention of these new engines, then, had no slight significance as events in their history. And the assurance of more and more rapid progress was increased by a discovery of the chemic families in the same direction. They had used coal for the generation of heat before they had left their primeval home around the south pole. But in their more tropical archipelago they found no coal-beds, the islands having originated in volcanic and coral formation; and the climate made the use of such a concentrated fuel unnecessary; it was warm even in winter, and it supplied fruits and cereals which needed little cooking. The forests of the islands had furnished whatever fuel had been required for hundreds of generations, and outside of Limanora they were still sufficient for all purposes. But the centre of force had recalled the great heat they used to have from coal, and the Leomo, in their probings of the earth, had ever been on the outlook for beds of the old fuel. Recently they had found thin strata of it, but so deep in the earth that it was of little value to them. But a discovery by the Sidramo, or chemic families, made them reconsider this decision and try to invent some form of the leomoran, which would cut and send with ease to the surface of the earth the coal they had found. The Sidramo had experimented with it in various lines. They had made the steam from it give power as they had seen it give power to the _Daydream_ and her Broolyian imitations. But so large a proportion of the latent energy in it had been lost in the process that they turned their researches in other directions. Before long they found that, when the coal was placed in a chemical solution containing comparatively common and cheap elements, electric power was largely generated. And following up their discovery the Sidramo were soon able to draw electricity from any of the rocks of the island. Once having had their attention applied to such problems, they made a number of them surrender their secret; by surrounding one common rock, _e. g._, with a certain solution they brought from it heat alone. But the discovery most important for the development of the race was that which brought electric power directly from the rocks and even from the earth. For this increased the possible store of force in Rimla enormously. And there was no limit to what they might use there for the advancement of civilisation. Within a few days of this discovery the Piramo or meteorological families had applied the lavolan to one of their long-unsolved problems, the extraction of magnetic power in large quantities from the air. They had been already able to draw from the thunder-clouds their electricity, and make them pass harmless. And by means of personal effort and the magnetism of the body they were able when high up in the rarer regions of the atmosphere to recharge their little shoulder-engines for driving their wings. But in the lower air they had failed to draw electricity from any but thunder-clouds in any quantity. They based a new apparatus called pirakno on the lavolan and its discoveries, and with this they were able to draw magnetism from even the gentlest breeze. They increased its size and capacity, and soon could give a daily supply of new power to the centre of force. Nor did this deprive the air of the island of its exhilarant quality; for the more they took from it, the more seemed to flow in from surrounding space. But, when the east wind blew, they found the inflow of magnetism too much for their smaller piraknos; only the larger could cope with it; and then the store of power in Rimla received enormous additions. For ages they had been testing the amount of magnetism in the air at various heights and temperatures and various times of day, month, and year, and recording the results of their investigations. They were now able to decide from these and from their experiences of the pirakno that irregular changes in the weather were due chiefly to magnetic influence. They saw that the tremendous storms which every few years swept the earth had their origin in exceptional inflows of cosmic magnetism. During the history of man since he had come to self-consciousness and to the habit of recording his own movements, there had been many sudden and temporary climatic changes, that had led to vast displacements of the inhabitants of the earth. A series of severe winters in the north and in the temperate zone would strip the trees and fields of all frugiferous qualities, and drive the animals of the chase away to the south in search of food. And the races of man had to follow them. So in the tropics a series of droughts would destroy half the chances of life, and exterminate one-third of the dwellers inland. As a rule the agony there led to no displacement of nations, so passive and fatalistic are they by nature near the equator; but in times when some new religious idea had broken the spell of fatalism, the first goad of starvation drove hordes to search for food in other zones. Oftentimes there has been a simultaneity in the meteorological severity, partly due to a universal influx of interstellar magnetism, but still more to the fact that the earth and the planetary system to which it belongs have swung into a region of space that is exceptionally barren of all life-impetus. At such periods came those wide-spread migrations of the dwellers on the globe that made new eras in history. It was one of those cosmic disturbances of climate that sent the Arabs out of their deserts, a flaming portent along the shores of the Mediterranean with their newly reformed religion, the creed of Mahomet, and at the same moment flung the Saxons against the northern frontier of Charlemagne’s empire, and the Danes on the coast of Britain. So, earlier, in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era, the Huns burst from the east like a torrent, and again and again swept all before them in the west, whilst simultaneously the Goths broke in from the north across the boundaries of the Roman empire. Later, in the ninth century, the Danes and Normans broke away from the north again and again, and plagued Europe with their piratical energy in the very period when the Magyars were migrating from the east to the west. And it was only the closer packing of the continents, and the consequent military organisation of European nations that checked these displacements in later centuries, though there were refluxes towards the east, as in the crusades. But the cosmic meteorology of the earth took different effect in the same direction, when plagues mowed down their millions of victims from east to west; where wide-spread displacements are impossible, there must be decimation by some cosmic means in order to let the light into the overpopulated regions. Another escape-valve was found for the pressure of those periods of temporary climatic change, when the western peoples were driven over the oceans to find a home. Emigration then came to mean transference of masses across the sea, at first to America, where there were other but weaker civilisations to be overcome, afterwards to lands and islands that were either empty or occupied by a few scattered savages. It was their circle of mist that saved the archipelago of Riallaro from the effect of these vast displacements of population. When every acre of land on the earth shall have been filled with its complement, and human forethought and ingenuity are still unequal to the sudden changes of cosmic meteorology, then famine and plague will be the only means of relieving the pressure. The Limanorans had no fear of such effects in their own island, except indirectly. For they had complete command of their own birth-rate and death-rate, and kept the numbers commensurate with all the purposes of their existence. Climate was to them as plastic as any material or force of nature, and the unexpected in meteorology was gradually becoming unknown. But they had a strong indirect interest in all inbursts of the cosmic. For the peoples of the other islands, the descendants of their ancient exiles, were as ready victims as ever to what seemed the caprices of the seasons and the years. And the frustration of the consequent movements involving the interests of the Limanorans absorbed more of their time and reserve energy than they desired. A violent tornado would obliterate the products of a year over the whole archipelago, and the fear of starvation would goad the inhabitants into expeditions in search of food, sometimes even towards the isle of devils. Again, hungry microbes, the spawn of some plague-stricken world, would float into the earth’s atmosphere and find new soil on the islands; and the dwellers would die so quickly that there was no time or room on their circles of earth for sepulture. Into the sea the festering dead would be thrown by the thousand, each bearing its myriad germs of contagion; the very fish that fed on them would die of the plague and bear its microbes to every shore; the currents and the winds, if left to their own bent, would sweep down the foul nests of contagion on the Limanorans; and it would take them weeks of superhuman effort to prevent the bacterial spawn from settling in their systems, and to cleanse the adjacent seas of all taint. The effort to prevent these disasters often wasted their store of force and checked their advance. It seemed to them therefore more economical of their energy to help in dispelling the original evil or making it swerve towards other oceans. For a time they considered it to the interests of their progress to save the whole archipelago from the irruptions of interstellar magnetism or bacterial life. But even this was found to have serious disadvantages. Unbroken prosperity surcharged the leaders of the other islands with conceit, and made them lose their fear of the central isle and resume their projects for its conquest; or it deluged them with population, which, whenever nature grew economical again, was driven to foreign means for its sustenance, and, at times, goaded by hunger, made in military wise for the isle of devils. Yet these alarms and dangers were more infrequent and more easily repelled than when the more ambitious of the archipelago were driven by the spur of famine and disaster to incursion. And, though for a brief period the Limanorans allowed an occasional tornado or plague to devastate the islands of hostile neighbours, they came to the conclusion that it needed less of their energy to repel an occasional hive of enemies impelled by narrowing limits or the lessening