EVER and again there overshadowed the spirit of the race a cloud, a foreboding, that contrasted deeply with their usual exhilaration. The intervals between its appearances were often long, occasionally brief. At first I could not understand the cause of it; for I was still in pupillage and had not yet developed the sympathetic magnetism that ultimately made me a member of the race. But, when it recurred once or twice, I began to see that it followed the passions of Lilaroma, and that the families of the Leomo were least affected by it and most active whilst it lasted. Another concomitance was the subsequent importance of the questions connected with interstellar migration.
The discovery of the infinite and invisible life of unorbed space, not only infinitesimal but highly organised, lessened the gloom of these beclouded periods, and made the Limanorans less feverish in their astronomic and volitational researches. They felt that the divorce of the higher and lower energies of their human system, commonly called death, was no annihilation of their entity, no closure of their career of development, but only an incident in it, that took the further history of their higher energies out of the reach of the grosser terrestrial senses. They had no need, they felt, to reach out frantically towards some other world. They had lost all fear of death, and all thought of it as the end of their evolution. Still upwards would they climb through higher stages of existence, in spite of the loss of that grosser stepping-stone which we call the body. Knowing how full the interstellar infinities are of vital energies and organisms, and knowing too how the body began a new, though perhaps lower, career at death, they were certain that the vitality and spiritual energy that left it on dissolution, a far loftier and more highly organised entity than the divorced terrene elements, would still exist and still develop. The whole encyclopædia of their scientific knowledge was opposed to its annihilation, and the discovery of the vital fulness of space left no other alternative than that it was thither the spiritual energy of the human personality escaped at death.
Yet there lingered a tinge of gloom at the time of any overwhelming spasm in the heart of the great mountain; and the Leomo bated not a jot of their activity at such periods in combating the once-dreaded catastrophe. For they had no definite knowledge of the future pace of their evolution, once the two types of energy in them should be divorced; and they had as a firmly grasped fact their development as they existed upon their island, and the increasing swiftness of its pace as the years went on. They had ever been a people readier to accept a bird in the hand than two in the bush, although they might be fairly confident of their skill in bird-catching. This very preference for facts had helped them to abandon the promises of faith that their old religion had so lavishly held out to them, and to accept the attitude of patiently waiting for light. So now, when their science had found the light and they had every prospect of opening communication with the intelligences that lived just outside of their unaided ken, they would rather wait upon the solid earth till they saw as solid fact to rest on in their flight from the earth.
They were eager, therefore, to postpone for some generations or ages yet the catastrophe they feared. They had had far back in their history a dim sense of the wrecking power of Lilaroma and its connection with the volcanoes in their old antarctic home. Their more recent earth-science had made the twilight prophecy into a clear fact. In an early geological age of the earth the continent round the south pole had sent a broad outlier far north through the southern ocean; it had indeed stretched close up to the equator. This they knew as soon as they began to study the natural history of Limanora and of the archipelago around it. Not merely were the birds of the same or kindred species with those of their old home, but many of them had long preserved the memory of the former bridge between the two; as the ancient expedition that brought the ancestry of the Limanorans sailed across the intervening ocean, flights of the birds they were familiar with were seen making for their new home, and some of them fell on the decks or settled occasionally on the rigging of their ships. Their unscientific and superstitious ancestors took this as an omen of success; they thought that these birds had been sent from heaven to direct their course, and they steered straight in the line of their flight. The successful result confirmed them in their superstition for many ages after they had landed on their tropical isles.
But the careful observation and the science of later times cleared up the mystery. For a period they had taken it as a proof of the similarity of nature all over the world, when they found so much of the fauna and flora like those of their old home. But at last it began to strike cautious observers that certain birds disappeared during their summer season and reappeared in their winter. Classification soon separated the migratory from the localised, and the modifications of the species that they had been accustomed to in their old home from those that were quite new to them. This passed from the birds to the other animals, and thence to the flora. After the observer had done his work of classifying all the animal and plant life, scientific thought entered in and found the causes of both the similarities and the dissimilarities between the new or tropical and the old or antarctic. After many ages the migration of birds lessened; for few returned in the winter, and as the climate became cooler through process of time, most species preferred to remain the summer long. Then, when an expedition went back to the ancient home of the race in the south, all trace of cultivation and cities had vanished underneath the everlasting snows, and the southern summer was found to be as severe as their ancient winter had been. The increasing rigours of the new climate to the south had reduced the mass of the bird-migrations.
The expedition followed the long-charted route of the feathered travellers, and on its return sounded the depths and tested the seas and their fauna the whole way. When the investigators had reached the close of their labours, it became patent to them that their voyage had been along the coast of a buried continent that had had its northernmost point not far to the north of Lilaroma. Their soundings along the line of bird-route were ever the shallowest, and at points on it, if they left its direction, they suddenly dropped into the deepest of oceans. A mountain-range, sometimes broken into immense precipices and forested along its slopes, had evidently margined the lost continent on its west and had stood the siege of the encroaching ocean through geological ages, till the slow catastrophe of subsidence had sent it under the victorious march of its enemy. Here and there it left a barren rock or a volcanoed isle like a buoy to mark where its wreckage had been submerged. Everywhere on the bird-line they found a shallow-ocean flora and fauna; if ever they sounded or dredged or fished or dived at any distance from it, they passed into a deeply pelagic belt of life, or rather belt of death.
It dawned upon them that their old home and their new formed the extremities of the vanished continent, and that their height was one of the consequences of the submergence; the deeper the great submarine range sank, the higher Lilaroma and the lofty torch-mountains of their ancient home rose. But repeated visits to their old snow-coffined land, and the expansion of their earth science into an art, gave them farther-reaching views of the causes of this vast subsidence. The old bird-route was one of the most ancient fissure-lines in the crust of the earth. Out of it along its whole length had flowed in the earliest geological ages the oozes of lava that formed the backbone of the old continent as it rose from the sea, its most lasting bastion against the encroachments of the watery element. Here and there along the great chain of mountains, as they rose denuded of their softer rocks and stood wrinkled into cañons and gorges by the rivers that swept them clean, blazed at long intervals of time huge vents for the smouldering fires underneath. As the mountain-barrier sank and the ocean flowed over its forests that had graved into the winged species the memory of their ancestral feeding-grounds, and finally closed all the breathing-spaces of the fiery Titan beneath, his passion sought vent more and more through the torch-cones of the snow-buried southern land and through the lofty crater of Lilaroma. Expedition after expedition to their ancient home revealed the simultaneity of volcanic action in the two regions; but the greater the titanic paroxysms in the one, the less they were in the other. They were the two pulses and breathing-vents of the buried giant.
For many ages after some unknown submarine catastrophe had hedged them into their archipelago by the untraversible mill-race and the dark belt of mist, they had been unable to test the connection between their own fire-mountain and those in their old home. But they could easily imagine during the paroxysms of Lilaroma what was occurring far off in the southern snows; and when they had mastered the art of aërial flight, they resumed their expeditions to the glacial regions of the south. Every few years might have been seen, had there been mariners 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 garments. This consisted of two layers of flexible irelium-woven cloth, one of which was a conductor of electricity and the other a resister of it. The outer or conducting layer was connected with some labramor which carried a store of electricity and this combination produced a warm, healthful glow all round the body. I had gloves and cap and mask of the same construction and, when fully equipped, I could defy the most bitter cold that the upper atmosphere of the earth ever experienced.
With this armour on I looked forward with delight to our sojourn in the region of snow and ice as I watched our approach to the rough ocean-like surface of the new country. For Thyriel took the helm, now that there was needed more delicate manipulation of the faleena, and I stood in the bow and gazed at the rest of the fleet rising and falling on the wind-waves. Now and again I interpreted a signal from the faleena of the guiding elder, whilst my comrade was busy adapting the course to the caprices of the wind. But as a rule her own magnetic sense was alert enough to know what were the intentions of the other airships.
Round the group of great fire-cones we coasted, keeping clear of their smoke-brush and dust-vomit; for the wind was off the land and bore their ejections miles out to sea and high into the air. Across the icy plains, ridged and hummocked by pressure from the higher land beyond, we flew, once rising high enough to get a glance over the passes of the great mountain-barrier, whence the torrents of ice slowly found their way to the coast. Beyond I could discern, even with my undeveloped eye-power, level plains stretching to the horizon, plains which indicated water underneath; and upon them the direction of the furrows and hummocks revealed whither the mass of the sea beneath flowed towards some narrow exit, overlapping and playing leapfrog in its eagerness to escape the pressure from behind.
But the habits of this almost land-locked sea had no immediate interest for us, and we soon turned and made before the wind for a valley that lay sheltered between the mountain-chain and the group of torch-cones. Within a brief time we had all our faleenas secured, and the multitudinous rings of the leomorans they carried deposited in caves ready for the coming operations. Then the elder who led the expedition took his airship, and with it we saw him circle round the individual volcanoes and reconnoitre the inroads of the sea. He had, we knew, already seen the dangerous proximity of one new crater to the low coast that divided the group of fire-hills from the galloping waves.
Manifestly expedition was demanded. For he returned with great swiftness; and all was soon bustle and preparation in the camp, although it had settled down for a rest. The word was passed round that, if the wind changed and whipped the racing billows to their raid, a high tide might find its way into the new crater and undo the local work of Limanoran civilisation. The fleet was at once in the air with the engines ready to be placed; and within two hours the winds and the waves, the magnetism of the earth, and the electricity of the air had been yoked to the great power-machines. Then the rings of the leomorans were attached, and the stores of energy brought to bear on them; before long we could see at a dozen different points high up the side of the cone brushes of black smoke bending before the wind. Between the new low crater and the old lofty one a score of new vents for the explosive energy of the fires underneath had been worked into the crust of the earth ere the wind had changed round into alliance with the waters. The molten rock which had oozed from the dangerous cone at the edge of the sea had sealed its mouth before the ocean leapt into it. In order to make the seal more secure a sluggish river of lava was directed down the slope from several leomorans, and sent over the lips of the exposed crater. After every sign of the offending cone but a low hummock had disappeared under the molten invasion, bastions were drawn all along the coast beneath it in the manner familiar to Limanora.
When this fortification of the mountain was finished and the strain upon our muscles and nerves, and especially upon our eyes, was relieved, we had leisure to look about us. The sight that met our view, as we looked down the slopes of the mountain, was deeply impressive. The flow of the red-hot rock from the mouths of our lava-wells had melted the glacial concretions for hundreds of yards beyond the margins of the molten currents, and laid bare the ruins of a great city that had evidently been buried in ice and snow since the lowering of the temperature had made the climate unbearable by men of civilised nurture and habits. The steam rising from the neighbourhood of ice and fire had covered the disentombed secret from our vision whilst we were working, and as the wind fell that had swept the veil aside for a moment, the marvellous sight was again curtained over, and we began to think that it had been but a waking dream.
Some days after, when the lava had sufficiently cooled to leave portions of the defrosted slope open to the light of heaven, we revisited the scene. Several broad streets and great squares had been unburied; and the architecture revealed how artistic and how advanced in mechanical contrivances the people that built them had been. A thick covering of volcanic dust and ash had plastered them over, so that it was difficult to move on foot amongst the ruins now that the moisture of the melting ice had mingled with it. After clearing the débris from the doors we entered some of the houses that had not lost their roofs, and there was evidence of hasty flight; on the floors and couches were strewn pellmell the contents of boxes and cupboards and wardrobes, half of them still stiff with the ice that the adjacent streams of lava had been unable to melt. The evacuation of this luxurious city had evidently occurred during some great outburst of the volcano which had threatened its existence. But the climate had grown rigorous before the catastrophe; for in every house and every room there were elaborate apparatus for heating, and most of the clothing lying about was of fur or of thick, warm stuffs, and when we dug beneath the coating of volcanic ash, we found in places accumulations of ice which must have taken years to freeze. Layer after layer of dirt and rubbish had been embedded by the preservative frost; and, had we cared to cut through the stratified ice, we might have counted the years, or perhaps centuries, through which this heap had accumulated.
For several visits we could find no human body, though we came across one or two carcasses of emaciated animals that had evidently lived amongst the ruins till the last vestige of fodder had disappeared under the volcanic layer or the accumulating ice. But at last in a back lane, probably inhabited by slaves, we penetrated into a low house whose roof had crashed in under the weight of the falling dust, and there we saw a scene that moved us to tears. The mummied body of a little child prepared for burial lay upon a bier and over it was stretched the corpse of the mother; she could not tear herself away from the last relics of her dead baby, and in returning to rescue it, or to weep over it, had been overwhelmed by the falling roof; the frost of centuries had kept off the finger of decay, and this Niobe and her child had remained like sculptured stone. We covered the bodies gently with the volcanic mud there as they lay, and left the frost to work its petrifaction again, for we had not the heart to disturb the scene. Here amongst the proletariate of this luxurious people there was evidence of that maternal transport which had showed the path of ethical development and exaltation to the Limanorans, and was destined to raise the energies of our world into higher and higher forms. This, we knew, was but the terrestrial type of an altruistic law which was working throughout the cosmos, and making every centre of energy that had more than the average give of its more to those centres that had less.
All in our power was now done to relieve the pressure of the subterranean fires that were threatening to burst the ancient fissure; and all too that could be done to ward off the batteries of the ocean. Then were we sent in different directions to inspect and report on the state of the ice-cliffs that beetled over the waves. We hovered for days about the rocks and their glaciers and the universal observation was that the coast was rapidly subsiding; since the last visit of the Limanoran messengers its line had sunk many yards; marks that had been made far above the reach of the waters were now washed by the break of the higher billows. Thyriel and I were sent to a loftier bluff which extended for almost a mile between shelving beach and shelving beach just underneath the site of the buried city.
After inspecting the higher parts of it for days and measuring the height of the old marks above the farthest reach of the waves, a windless day, on which the ocean lay as if frozen, gave us opportunity of following the cliff at its lowest sea-margin. For half a mile or more nothing exceptional met our eyes. Then suddenly we came upon a great chasm in the rock where a soft intermediate stratum had mouldered away into sand before the everlasting battery of the waves. Over it a great dome of ice was stretched, which was ever being thickened by the climbing spray of the billows as they broke into it. The entrance into this cave was somewhat low and narrow, and a jagged rock in the centre of it churned the angry waters into milky foam. We saw that this feature would make the opening invisible under its veil of spray on all but days of perfect calm.
We were afraid to enter lest the sea should rise and imprison us, so we called some comrades to our aid, and they brought a light faleena that was made to serve the double purpose of air-boat and water-boat. Then Thyriel took flight from above, and with the impetus we bore ourselves and the boat through one of the passages past the jagged tooth of rock. As we settled upon our faleena and looked up, the sight that met our eyes took our breath away. The sun was shining brilliantly, lighting up the dome of ice with such power as to make its whole thickness transparent. Through it in every direction thick as motes in a sunbeam were strewn human bodies, wrapped and mummied as in death. Some lay on their sides with the head pillowed on the arm; and as the face was uncovered, we could see the features as clearly as if we stood in the chamber where they lay. The frost had kept the flesh and the tints of it uncorrupted. We could almost have sworn that they breathed as they slept, yet in the case of most it must have been the sleep of thousands of years.
This was the cemetery of that ancient people which had built the city lately found. Doubtless this ice-crust in which their graves had been cut had once stood securely miles away from the coast; and in it they thought that their dead would be safe for all time. But, as the shore sank, the glacial crust ceased to be a plain and slid downwards along the increasing slope to the ocean; and, before many years could pass, this hyaline resting-place of the dead would be launched into the sea and be swept by the storms and tides into warmer airs and currents, which would release the bodies from their beautiful petrifaction, and give their elements to the ravening powers of the waters, or the microscopic corruption of invisible life. In fact on our return voyage we flew over several icebergs that were floating catacombs. On the surface of one we discerned the pallor of a mummied face, just released by the strong rays of the sun from its ancient rigidity, and the still stony garments shining through their pellucid covering.
We could almost decipher through the milky blueness of the ice-dome, when the sun shone most brightly, the inscriptions on the tablets lying beside these forgotten dead. But the winds began to dirge within this strange diaphanous mausoleum; and even the waters seemed to move around the cave with suppressed sob. We thought the sounds ominous, and, rising high up into the roof of the cave, close to the dead that had slept there so like life for so many centuries, we poised ourselves and, taking aim, dashed through the narrow entrance, while our comrades without drew the faleena out by the cord with which they had held it securely. Later in the day, as the calm continued, the guiding elder sent others into the cave and they secured one of the most elaborately hieroglyphed tablets. Those of us who had most recently studied in the valley of memories were able to trace much resemblance between the language of the inscription and the ancient Limanoran tongue; and when we returned to our island, it afforded one of the clues by which we were able to unravel the history of this ancient antarctic people. They were the descendants of those whom the northwards migration had left to their fate amid the growing rigours of the southern winter. After the departure of these who founded the colonies of Riallaro and became the ancestry of the Limanorans, the wealthier classes had evidently abandoned themselves to pleasure and luxury within their splendid and superheated dwellings, whilst the proletariate, though growing more vigorous, and venturing far out upon the ice and the ocean on fishing and furring expeditions, fell deeper and deeper into the contempt of semi-slavery. Loyalty to their masters and ignorance still kept them unrebellious in their growing embrutement, till the volcanic catastrophe solved the problem of their future relationships. Whither the survivors had gone, when the outburst of the subterranean fires drove them forth, no one could say; doubtless the peasant fishermen and hunters took the effeminate caste in their rough boats over the sea to some warmer climate; probably, if the expeditions survived the storms and billows of the broad ocean, they landed on the coasts of South Africa or on those of South America and introduced an alien civilisation and more complicated problems amongst the primitive peoples of those isolated regions.
Before we left, we had to investigate the shores of the inland sea for evidence of subsidence, resting on them for a period whilst we punctured the slopes of the mountains, in order to give a new direction to the pressure of the fires upspringing from below. When all the leomorans that were needed had been placed in position and got into working order, not more than half of the expedition were required to attend to them. The others, and amongst them Thyriel and myself, were allowed to wander over the shores of the gulf or sea, everywhere finding abundant evidence that the whole neck of land which divided it from the ocean, high though it still was in the lofty mountain-barrier, was rapidly subsiding, and would ultimately succumb to the batteries of the besieging elements. This might take many centuries, but that the huge volcanic range would be submarine within measurable time was obvious. Had the rate for even a decade of years been constant, we could easily have calculated the number of centuries that would elapse before the great catastrophe; but the amount of subsidence varied from period to period, increasing and then decreasing. The most alarming change had occurred since the last visit of the Leomo to their old home. Square miles that had been low-lying land some few years before were now encrusted with marine ice; and lofty precipices were perceptibly lower.
The most striking proof of the rapid subsidence was not observed till the day before our return. The shoulder of an outlier of the range pushed its way as a lofty promontory right into the gulf, its whole length and breadth being covered with glacial concretion. Some recent tempest had broken off the end of its river of ice, and at the same time a sudden subsidence of the land had left the face of its cliff a complete new section, as if shorn by a microtome. The sight that revealed itself to us as we flew round it was most impressive. City after city had evidently been built upon the broad bluff, its pleasant position overlooking the inland sea and its proximity to easy harbourage ever attracting the population back again after each cataclysm. Time after time the city had, we conjectured, been overwhelmed by the ashes of some great volcanic outburst from the range. There we could see in section the various strata of buildings one above the other, each filled with ash and dust and preserved by the power of frost. Hundreds of years must have elapsed between the destruction of one city and the building of the next, a period long enough in fact to obliterate the memory of panic and anguish from the traditions of posterity. In some houses we could still discern the signs of the stampede that had occurred one day thousands of years ago. Articles of value were half-torn from their treasuries and then abandoned; jewellery and dishes made of the precious metals were here and there held in place upon the mosaicked floors by the frozen mass of earth above them; they had evidently been seized at the first warning of the coming catastrophe and then thrown away as alarm made life dearer. In one chamber we saw the outline of the body of a man across its threshold, his hand out beyond his head clutching some receptacle of precious metals. In the space between the outer walls of two houses the body of a woman was exposed, face downwards, and beneath the bosom the form of an infant child.
How many long-forgotten tragedies might be unearthed we could not stay to discover. A little labour and we could have penetrated into these cities; the application of a leomoran would have melted the dust and ashes and brought to view the stratified life of ages before. Had we been interested in following out the existence of these far-distant relatives of the Limanorans, we could have begun with the lowest layer, and followed the evidences of civilisation up through each successive entombment, till finally the people were driven from the site by frost, a force more rigorous and potent against culture and luxury than fire. But the Limanorans had enough in the records of their own ancestry to tell them all the history that might be illuminated by such excavations. They knew that after an advance in the two or three lower strata, there would be found no progress except in luxury and the arts that contribute to luxury. And they had enough of such development in their own archipelago before their own senses, to allay any eagerness for viewing illustrations of it in ancient and dead history.
The sight was interesting and impressive, but we all had learned its lesson too well to desire further acquaintance with it. In Fialume we had studied similar histories during our pupillage; and daily could we watch through the idrovamolan the enactment of similar life in the islands around Limanora. A little apparent advance was followed by as much retrogression; the generations were as like in essence as two species of the same genus, the difference being merely superficial and unvital. It was enough to make the Limanoran heart stop in its beating to see the dreary sameness of the ages in the history of a people, as far as development of spiritual character and power were concerned. The changes and revolutions were but changes of lay-figures under the official dresses and ceremonials, or at best an expansion of the sphere of luxury. What mattered it to men that were panting after ideals they ever saw above and beyond them who were masters and who were servants or subjects in those unprogressive levels of humanity, who or how many sated their appetites or covered their skins with the rich and ceremonious raiment of dominance? The heroisms and romances, the striking turns of fortune, the world-renowned victories that made the eyes of other races blaze with wonder were all histrionic to those who knew what real development was.
This section cut through the history of ten thousand years would reveal but the same old story that they had read so often in the annals of their own far past. We turned away sick of heart, knowing the countless griefs and agonies, struggles and combats, that had gone to the making of this human stratification, and the complete futility of them all. The best that could be thought was that oblivion had buried them, and that the energy set free at the deaths of so many thousands of generations had perchance a better opportunity of rising in the scale of vitality as it wandered into other spheres than the human or the terrestrial.
It was not then without deliberate intention that our departure from the old home of the race occurred soon after the discovery of this strange frozen museum of forgotten peoples. After everything was done that could be done to divert the upward pressure of the subterranean fires from vents close to the margin of the sea, the faleenas winged their way back to the north as rapidly as they had come. No incident took place to mar the return voyage, and we were soon back at our old employments in Limanora.
