Limanora the island of progress
there to see them, the strangest of all flying things, beings in human
form, winging their way through the air southwards or northwards. At
first the bands were large and well equipped in order to guard against
all risks. But in time they grew bolder, and companies of half a dozen,
or even three or four, ventured on the long flight to the south. At
last the families of earth-scientists were entrusted with the task,
and sent their messengers to report on the conduct of the antarctic
volcanoes.
These reported that, if ever those southern vents should close, no
application of the art of Leomarie could save Limanora, or indeed the
archipelago around, from disastrous explosion. The circular current
with its belt of mist had shown that this was the thinnest crust and
the weakest point on the whole line of fissure; and if the sea broke
into the volcanoes of the other extremity, the steam generated from
the percolating water would make for the archipelago and blow it to
dust. Recent messengers to the south had found dangerous developments
in the regions of snow and ice. Where it lay in the line of the ancient
fissure, the land was rapidly subsiding; and that was exactly the
locality of the southern volcanoes. If the walls of their craters
should sink so low that the waters of the ocean could make breaches in
them, then would the final catastrophe occur to Limanora.
Whilst the last decennial review was proceeding, and high hopes were
rising in the breasts of all that a few generations would see the race
independent of the fear of terrestrial cataclysms, their minds were
jerked from the future into the present. Our torch-cone suddenly broke
into a great column of steam, and a fine dust fell upon the island.
There had been no preliminary warning and little had been put in
readiness, although the Leomo had been uneasy for weeks as they noticed
the spasmodic action of their earth-sensors. The heat and the magnetism
in their lava-wells had been rapidly changing their degree every few
hours. But this had occurred in previous periods without any recorded
effect above the surface of the earth. They had therefore only kept
more zealous watch without resorting to more than the usual relieving
action.
Now the whole people were called to their assistance, and the
concentrated power of Rimla was turned on to the boring of vents. On
every side of Lilaroma leomorans were busy, and soon the imprisoned
lava and steam escaped by a thousand exits. But a new method was
adopted by the Leomo. They shipped in huge faleenas of the newest
and most powerful type a number of earth-perforators, and along with
them a large quantity of machinery that would enable them to use the
wasting energies of the southern elements. Amongst others Thyriel and
myself had to manage and steer one of the great aërial cars, for it was
chiefly members of the Leomo that manned the expedition.
High we rose above the archipelago, before we attempted to cross the
mist-ring. Below us we could see the Limanoran houses and buildings
gleam rainbow-hued like bubbles on the beach of an ocean. Higher still,
and the various isles of the archipelago crept closer together in the
perspective, a handful of emeralds cast upon a plain of azure. Our eyes
wandered over the scene and saw how it was set in its dull-white milky
ring, a narrow and impenetrable hedge that cut this little world off
from the sight of its fellows upon earth.
Through a cloud we shot that drenched and freshened our gleaming car,
then followed the fleet southwards across the circular thread drawn
round the nest of islets. We were out in the wider spaces of the world
again, and our home receded into a speck on the horizon. Over the waste
of waters we sped, a great grey plain flecked with white. At first I
lost my cool confidence in this trackless wilderness; but fearlessness
returned to me as I saw the face of Thyriel bent now on the Limanoran
modifications of the compass, and again on the rest of the fleet to
the right and left of us. The lumona or sun-compass and the ularema or
sun-chart were our trusty guides by day, even if we had lost sight
of our companions at any time; our track had been marked out for us
on our sun-chart of the heavens and we could not fail to know where
we were, even if clouds should obscure the face of the great orb. If
only a few straggling rays managed to reach the face of the instrument,
indistinguishable though they might be to our sense of warmth or of
light, they affected its delicate apparatus; it told us their exact
direction and angle, whilst another face told us the exact point of the
day, and of the north and south line. There was needed no calculation
to find the region where we were, the lumona did it for us; and it kept
tracing our course, as we accomplished it, by means of an indicator on
our ularema or day-chart.
Once I had been instructed by Thyriel in the management and guidance
of the airship, she lay down to rest; and I was alone beneath the
oppressive paleness of the vault. I dared not look over the side lest
the sight of the grey wilderness far below me should make my head swim.
Only once did I look up; and the sense of limitlessness numbed me.
Now and again I glanced quickly at the rest of the fleet. But I was
too fearful lest something should go wrong to turn my eyes away from
the tracer of the lumona as it moved upon the sun-chart, or to take
my nerve-power from my hands as they grasped, the right the governor
of our flight-power and the left the rod of the steering-gear. As the
hours flew and nothing untoward occurred, I relaxed the tension of my
system and enjoyed the glide of the ship and sang to the beat of its
wings. The sense of solitude passed as I felt the magnetic sympathy of
my comrades in the other cars thrill me and my spirits rose with the
exhilaration of the heights through which we travelled.
The sun had reached the western round of the sea, and swelled into a
vast ball of fire. Thyriel awoke as his rim dipped into the ocean and
at once prepared for a change of methods. She taught me how to turn on
the power of the engine into the rows of huge lamps that were meant
to search the darkness of the night. Then she brought out the alumare
or star-compass and substituted it for the lumona; she removed the
day-chart and put in its place the manularema or night-chart, adjusting
the indicator of the star-compass to its tracing.
Night fell and brought out the lamp-jewelled sides of the other
airships. They looked like a fleet of gigantic glow-worms sweeping
through the air. What we showed like to any wandering ship on the ocean
beneath us it is difficult to imagine. I myself had traversed those
solitary levels in the _Daydream_, and I tried to think how I
could have explained the strange phenomenon had I seen it from my deck.
The superstitious amongst my sailors might have taken it for a portent,
some as one from heaven, others as one from hell. The scientific would
have concluded it to be a series of fireballs travelling before an
upper current of the winds. I should have recorded it in my note-book
among the observations of meteors and other similar phenomena, and
have waited further illumination. By day we were too high to attract
the attention of anyone but the investigator of cloud-changes and
weather-signs, and we saw no sign of human life during our long
aërial voyage to the south. But away beneath us we could just descry
floating brown specks swiftly tracing their zigzag course over the grey
plain and knew them for the broad-winged albatrosses, whose flight
the Limanorans had so carefully studied for the construction and
navigation of their faleenas. For by an automatic arrangement which
brought the currents of the wind to bear upon the steering-gear, our
car now gracefully rose, and again as gracefully fell when the wind was
against it, now swept to this side, now glided to that. All that I had
to think of was the main course. On a later voyage even the steersman
was superfluous, except in a storm or violent change of winds; for a
chart was invented on which the course of the voyage was traced in the
shape of a metal groove, and in this the end of the steering-rod was
made to move. The two automatic movements governed the manipulation of
the winds and the course of the car. It was the same with the engines
that achieved the beat of the wings; the slightest change in the
opposing medium communicated itself to the electric power and modified
it. All that was needed from the occupants of the faleena was a little
attention now and again to see that the machinery was working smoothly
and solidly, and to ensure that the steering-rod adjusted itself to the
caprices of the wind.
On this, our first long aërial expedition, one of us had always to
be at the helm, although I found after a few watches that there was
needed but little tension either of muscle or nerve to keep the ship to
her course. Thyriel took the first half of the night and of the day,
and I took the other two sections. When I awoke in the middle of the
first night and took my place at the helm, the sight bewildered and
dazed me; I felt as if I had gone back again into the region of dream.
The stars seemed to throb close in upon me; I felt as if in a cosmic
confessional with myriads of world-eyes wide open to see into my heart.
I was not afraid; yet my veins throbbed in awe before this palpitation
of the cosmos. But I settled down to my task and grew conscious of
the surrounding fleet of fireflies, that even at their great distance
from me numbed my eyes with the flash of their lamps and paled the
light of the stars. Beneath me, as I looked over the bulwark, there
was nothing but the solid blackness of midnight; never had I felt so
isolated. Thoughts wove as unceasingly in my brain as the wing-beats
wove upon the loom of night. Now and again was I stirred from my
meditation by the swoop of our faleena as it breasted some great billow
of wind. So precipitous were some of those waves that my heart leapt
in my bosom, as we rose before them or slid down them. I never passed
a night of such intensity of exhilaration and thought. There was my
lifelong comrade peacefully sleeping as I watched; the infinities above
magnetised me with their sympathies, as their eyes searched me to the
heart; below me the midnight brooded silently over what I knew to be
the untracked ocean.
Day after day, night after night, we sped on, the air growing rapidly
colder, till, for the sake of my unadaptable system, we drew the
transparent oval roof over the faleena and fixed the radiator which
kept the temperature at an even level. Thereafter the stars were not so
omnipresent in their gaze; there was more of a limit to the space in
which we dwelt; and the movements of the faleena impressed themselves
less upon my senses.
At last as my watch was ending one moonless night I could see a dim
flare in the southern sky which I took for the aurora australis. But
when Thyriel gazed at it and then at the agitation of the fireflies
abreast of us, she knew it was the reflection of the great antarctic
torch-mountains. I rose at dawn and could see below us the white
glacial cliffs of the polar continent. Thyriel seemed stirred by some
emotion that I was ignorant of, but soon knew to be the recognition
of the original home of her race; there seemed to move in her blood
the ancestral yearning for the land from which they had come. She did
not shrivel up in the excessive cold as I did, but looked forward with
ecstasy to moving amid the snow and the ice, though she had seen little
of them in her own short life except around the crater of Lilaroma.
Bred though I had been in the rigorous winters of Scotland, I could not
bear the bite of the wind and had to put on one of their cold-repelling