Limanora the island of progress
generosity of nature than to beat off vast bodies of embattled peoples
frantic with hunger and reckless of life, led by the keenest skill
and fieriest ambition of the archipelago. They could better avoid all
destruction of life in the one case than in the other,--one of the
duties of their civilisation, even though a subsidiary one.
The Piramo were thus essential to the progress of the race; their
growing knowledge of the conditions that governed the climate as well
as the passing weather saved in a day as much power as the use of such
an instrument as the pirakno at first could add to Rimla in a year. And
the scene of the labours of the Piramo was every year more and more
extended to the extra-terrene; meteorology became in its investigatory
and experimental department more and more cosmic, and often overlapped
astronomy, astrobiology, and astrophysics, and aided them; more
and more did they find their problems questions of magnetism or
electricity. In the interstellar spaces must be sought the sources of
the greater disturbances of season and climate and the pirakno grew
every year of more and more importance, as they traced the magnetic
influences around the earth back into the infinite fields of space.
About this very time they invented an instrument of great delicacy,
which foretold the vaster tracts of magnetism into which the earth was
swinging, and measured the increase. It depended for its principle
and basis on the intimate relationship between electricity and light,
on the effect of magnetism upon light and upon electric radiation
from the negative pole in a vacuum. They had noticed for some time
that the light from any meteor or luminous body outside the sphere of
influence of the earth never reached the instruments of the observers
on the edge of the atmosphere quite true, and that the aberration
differed at different times. By means of various experiments they
came to the conclusion that the aberration was due to magnetism in
the extra-terrene spaces. Their new instrument, which they called a
sarmolan, they sent out into the ether beyond the earth’s atmosphere
and beyond the influence of terrestrial magnetism; and, as it received
beams of light from any one heavenly body towards which it had been
directed, it recorded the amount of this body’s deflection from the
straight course. They preferred to turn it to the moon or to Venus or
Mars; for then they were sure that the deflecting masses of magnetism
lay within immediate range of the earth. This sarmolan turned out to be
for cosmic changes of climate what the barometer is for daily or hourly
changes of weather. Whenever it recorded violent deflection, it meant
that the earth was approaching an exceptionally vast tract of magnetic
influence, and that there would be great and frequent disturbances for
months, if not for years, in the regularity of the earth’s seasons and
climates, or at least of those of one zone. It warned the Limanorans to
get ready their piraknos and all other instruments they had for drawing
and imprisoning for their own use the electricity from the atmosphere
and the spaces above it. It was in short their cosmic barometer
foretelling changes in climate years ahead. It eased the minds of the
Piramo and set free half their energies for other investigations, as
soon as it had proved itself a true prophet. Later improvements in it
measured the distance of the supermagnetised region of space from the
earth, and thus indicated the exact year and sometimes even the month
and the day when the series of climatic perturbations were likely to
begin. What had been guesswork before, made just before meeting the
phenomenon itself, was now reduced to predictive law; and they looked
forward to the time when by recording, classifying, and mapping the
variations and regions of cosmic magnetism they would be able to get
at the cause of its unequal distribution in interstellar space. Nay,
when they had charted the great drifts and currents of varied energy
that the earth encountered as its universe swung through space, they
might have ready for their future voyagers to other worlds a full
cosmography, which would instruct them in the kind of oceans and
torrents they would have to breast, the types of energy they would
have to accustom their systems to, and all the risks and dangers they
would have to meet. And, when their knowledge of the conditions and
regions and tracks in the boundless space they might have to traverse
was fairly rounded and complete, then some slight adaptation of their
sarmolan would be to them their cosmic compass.
There was evidence in other discoveries too that this hope was not so
utopian as it seemed at first, that at least not countless centuries
would pass before they might be able to fulfil it. One especially,
that of the Floramo or botanical families, quickened their expectation
far beyond the mere flight of fancy. It was a new sublimation of a
vegetable extract, which seemed to give their lungs free play when
there was little or no air to breathe. They had used for ages the
fruit of what they called the floronal or tree of life for giving new
vigour to the organs and especially to the nerve-tissues; they still
continued to use it, even though the chemical families had analysed it
and found all its constituents, and then reproduced a mixture that had
most of the revivifying qualities of the fruit. The tree grew only in
marshy districts, and they had reserved an obscure and rarely visited
corner of the island for its culture and for the culture of plants
and trees like it. There was another tree growing only in the cooler
zone half-way up the mountain, and preferring shallow and poor soil to
root in, whose fruit gave extreme flexibility to the more muscular and
cartilaginous tissues, and especially to those in the chest; if taken
inwardly or through the pores, muscular exercise became more easy, and
breathing became deeper and slower or quicker as the will directed.
A third low plant or shrub, which grew only on the highest altitudes
of Lilaroma, and had its roots generally in the soil underneath a
layer of snow, had been found recently to have in its tissues, and
in a concentrated form in its nuts, great stores of oxygen. For ages
it had been considered a poisonous plant, and avoided; for within a
considerable radius of it breathing had always been more difficult
than at a distance from it; it had therefore been eradicated from all
parts of the cone frequented by the Limanorans. It had no beauty of
form, often grew low like a lichen or moss, and could remain under the
snow for years without perishing. It had thus been neglected and in
fact seldom observed in its growth; whilst its nuts had been thought
to be as poisonous as the plant itself. But recently an avalanche from
one of the little-visited slopes of Lilaroma had uncovered a hollow, in
which one of the Floramo had found a bird, emaciated and unable to fly,
yet still alive; and beside it were the remains of a number of these
poison plants and particles of many of their nuts. It had evidently
been imprisoned many weeks, if not months, and its only food had been
the obscure and offensive snow-bush, stunted, scabrous, and without
green or leaf.
The Floramo became deeply interested in the phenomenon, and gathered
many specimens of the shrub from the top of the mountain. They fed the
bird till it became plump, and then shut it up in one of their irelium
vacuum-chambers with only the nuts to peck. There they watched it from
day to day, and saw that as long as it fed on the nuts it continued
vigorous and lively, even though it began to lose its rounded outlines
again. They soon closed their experiment, and set the winged creature
free to fly whither it would, satisfied that there could be only one
logical conclusion with regard to the plant. They saw that its nature
was to lay up stores of oxygen in all its tissues, and they called it
alfarene or the oxygen-shrub. It was this treasure in it that enabled
it to live so long beneath vast accumulations of snow and ice; it
was this feature of its life that made it when open to the air so
exhaust the oxygen for yards around it that men found it difficult
to breathe beside it; it was this that, when it became the food of
the bird, enabled it to live and breathe so long away from the air.
It was the outcome of long ages of selection up in those difficult
altitudes, where nothing could live under the snow without this power
of storing up oxygen. And its nuts, too hard and innutritious except
for hunger-driven birds to attack, concentrated round the seeds an
extraordinary amount of this oxygen-stuff; and by means of this, when
underneath the pressure of the snows the husk broke, the seeds were
able to support themselves and develop into plants away from the vital
air.
It was evident that these alfarene nuts were treasure-houses of oxygen;
and soon they were tried by the Limanorans themselves when they flew
into the upper regions of the air. At first they broke the nuts into
powder, which was made into a hard but soluble paste: a small piece of
this held in the mouth till it melted enabled them in their flights to
breathe freely in rarer altitudes than they had ever reached before.
The Floramo afterwards brought out the oxygen-storing power of the
shrub more strongly by careful cultivation and selection. Within a few
years they made of it a vigorous, large, and comparatively handsome
tree, and its nuts grew larger and more oxygenated, so that they became
a necessity for all flight into higher atmospheres. More attention
was also paid to the floronal or tree of life and to the germabell or
tree whose fruit produced elasticity of the muscles and cartilage.
The development of all three in the direction in which they might be
useful to the race quickened; the energy stored up in their fruits
came to be more and more concentrated; selection of the plants,
cross-fertilisation of them, special soil and feed for their roots, and
special surroundings, were all-powerful in the hands of the Floramo for
changing plants and trees to any purpose they had in view. They studied
the tissues and habits of the species that they wished to adapt, not
as an abstract and merely scientific investigation, but as one of the
practical problems of their own life; they turned the clirolan on its
inner and outer tissues, as they anatomised it; they watched its inner
processes with the lavolan as it grew or decayed; they chemically
analysed its sap in all its stages, and the various soils at its roots;
then they experimented with new elements in the soil in the direction
of the qualities they wished to encourage; they tried it with various
degrees and hours of sunshine by day, and various amounts of moisture
by night, at different stages in its growth; if they found some of the
qualities that they desired in its fruit or tissues more vigorous in
some other species, they fertilised its blossom with the pollen of this
second plant, and from the seed raised a new species, which would fully
realise their purpose. The whole of vegetal nature was plastic in their
hands. And every year saw hundreds of new species.
The Floramo were the forerunners of the Sidramo or chemical families,
and experimented in materials and juices and essences, which would
be useful to the race in its ever-quickening advance. Often would
vegetal nature reveal a compound that shortened some route through the
future, and the Sidramo would then analyse the product, and find the
secret of its special efficiency. The Floramo were indefatigable in
that department of their work which experimented with the application
of plants and their fruits and tissues to useful purposes, and every
day saw some process accelerated by the results of their labours. In