The flash of wings broke the completeness of the glory and our spell. Above the transplendent spectacle fluttered a snow-storm of ariels; the sun shot a fiery gleam through a rent cloud, and across his silvery beams danced and played these winged motes. The beauty of the sight moved us almost to tears. We knew that this was no phantom joy; our fellows were aloft in the air hymning the glory of a new creation. Soon Thyriel had persuaded me to start with her towards the new palace of wonders. We had not got half-way when I felt my arms weary and my flight dragging towards the plain. She would not leave me to trudge across the uneven earth; before I could argue she had me safely nestling between her wings as they beat the air upwards from the low knoll on which we had alighted. She no longer laboured under her burden, as she had done in her first attempt some days before; yet I felt that she grew tired, and made her land upon a hill a few miles from the new Oomalefa. After a rest I was able on my own wings to curve down towards its flight of new-rocked steps and its scintillant portal. We entered, and all was joy and music. Up underneath the new domes flitted the happy artists putting the final touches on the tinted translucence of the irelium walls. The plan was more elaborate and yet simpler than the old Oomalefa. The beauty of it was more overwhelming to the imagination of the eyes. I could not have conceived two structures more unlike from their larger architecture down to their minutest detail of ornament, and yet so adapted to the one purpose. The halls of medication and sustenance, the galleries of the magnetic sense, the baths, the arcades, and the sea balconies were all complete, yet as different from those that had gone to dust as Western architecture from Oriental. New instruments and apparatus, new indexes and tests were there at work. Not a detail had been neglected; but the rocky platforms over the sea were broader, and when we flew into the air and looked at it from above we could see that the promontory stretched farther into the sea and was broader both on its surface and at its base; and strange to say, it had as its outermost point the new peak that the eruption had thrown up in the ocean. It was conjectured by the Leomo, I soon knew, that this line, now sealed up as it was and with its lava vent at its outer extremity, would be freer from terrene paroxysms than any other portion of the island marge. This was where my proparents and the rest of the earth artisans had been engaged so busily during these days; they had been guiding the lava flow along the line of rent out through the sea to the great beacon which the outburst had raised; and the dash of the waves had cooled and congealed each layer as it flowed and curdled from the new peak to the shore of the island. CHAPTER XII OOLOREFA