There was no sadness or languid inaction of despair about the other inmates of the observatory. All was bustle and joyous effort for a time as in veterans quivering with the passion of battle. Every man had his duty and place; and every woman was there, too, in the ranks of champions. We could now see the nucleus of the storm just above the horizon, a mass raven-black. At once the whole power of the island was concentrated in the electric charge of the lilaran; and a long tongue of flame shot straight for the dense cloud. As if by magic the whole atmosphere was in a moment ablaze with lightnings. The sea was cloven into billows of raging foam, and seemed itself to aid in the hellish pyrotechny. It shot forth great tongues of purple flame, yet fled with reared crest from the strokes of the storm-flail. Slowly the lilaran moved its lightning-thrust away to the east. Then half the island power was put into the blast of the storm-cone; and we could see the war of elements and the thunderous scowl of the tempest shift round the circle of the horizon, instead of bearing down on us. For hours the roar of the lilaran went on. The edge of the tornado struck us, and the building shook and swayed. Hail pelted its sides; rain and snow blinded our outlook; we could see not one inch outside for the gloom. Yet within, all was radiant and calm. They knew that the centre of the tornado had passed many miles to the east, and that its trailing skirts could do no harm to anything in the island. Even if it had come straight on Lilaroma, they had given a vent to its fury so many leagues out to sea that its force would have been largely spent before it reached the shore. It was a yearly occurrence, this throttling of a tornado from the tropics; for these great electric disturbances made straight for the loftiest peak within their reach, drawn by their polar complement, the masses of electric energy which played within the heart of Lilaroma. One of the ordinary duties of the Lilamo was to milk the great mountain of its electricity, in order that it should offer less attraction to cloud and storm. Every night, especially during the season of tempests, I could hear the roar of the energy out of the earth, and, if I looked up to the shoulders of the mountain, I could see at a hundred points the purple streamers flicker in the wind like living, moving flame-flowers growing out of the soil. When needed, this escaping energy was collected and sent down to Rimla for storage and was another of the numerous sources of power that that treasury of force drew upon.