As soon as I began to reflect, I was astounded to find the cold not merely bearable, but deprived of its bitter penetrativeness. My heart bounded with exhilaration; every tissue of my body seemed elastic and full of spring. I could account for these sensations by the atmosphere of these heights, but how was I to explain the mild temperature of this snow region? When puzzling over the problem, I began to notice a haze of half-glowing light like the shimmer of heat over the surface of the earth at blazing noon. It seemed at first to be an optical illusion coming, I thought, from the suddenness of my transference from the plain to such a height, but its unsteady gleam moved so uniformly that I soon saw it was outside of me. Yet it did not intercept my view of the snow and ice around. They fascinated me by their splendour of whiteness, but there was a warmth, a pallid glow over them that was quite unwonted. Our guide felt my mental interrogation, and pointed out that we had stepped from the shuttle car on to a movable platform, which would soon bring us to the observatory; over this platform was an electric covering, that protected us from the outer air and radiated heat in all directions. He showed us the snow melting on all sides of our platform in form corresponding to it, and, as it moved along the steep, the dark honeycombed square of snow moved with us. There was above and on every side of us an electric field produced by unseen circuits of wires; and these fields gave out heat falling short of light. This was how they modified the climate up in these glacial regions and made it even sweeter and healthier than the purified atmosphere of the Limanoran plateaux below. They had done much for the climate of the lower levels; by daily casting their electric shuttles through the atmosphere they brought its impurities to the earth, its particles of dust and minute living organisms; but as more of these crowded in again from the outlying regions of air, the electric shuttles would have to ply ceaselessly in all directions in order to keep the lower strata pure. In those mountain altitudes the air was naturally sterilised to a large extent; few organisms could persist in so keen a medium; and the constant use of electric walls and roof for modifying the bitterness of the cold swept every trace of bacterial life into the snow. Hence the purity of the air we breathed up there and the buoyancy of the soul. The body seemed no clog upon the spiritual functions, and the magnetism that came from the heavenly bodies uniting with that of the earth had free play upon our minds, stimulating them to lofty flight. I no longer wondered why the Lilamo had no aversion to life at this altitude. They passionately loved it. It was, indeed, being drunk without wine, without self-abandonment, without waste of tissue.