When the tornado had passed and left its huge contribution to the snows of the peak, the lilaran was stopped, and the electric energy used in it was rapidly run over the white slopes that now obliterated every trace of the great groove and railway on which the storm-cone moved. In a few minutes the outline appeared, and soon the whole circlet was cleared of its encumbering snows. So the weight that pressed on the roofs of the observatory and the drifts that kept the light from its walls melted before the electric snowplough. The storm had not vanished an hour before all on the peak of Lilaroma was as it had been when we arrived, except for the greater purity of the snow on its shoulders. Beneath, the brush of the tempest had swept out all traces of the plague that the physicians had not got rid of, and the atmosphere was clearer and more exhilarating. So calmly and fearlessly had the whole danger been met that there had even been leisure in the midst of the turmoil to discuss this great waste of natural power. It took them as many days as the tornado lasted hours to generate and store in Rimla all this energy which was now falling useless, or rather mischievous, upon the face of the ocean. Could they not yoke the cyclone as they had yoked the billows and the winds, the rivers and the snows, the lightnings and the central fires of the earth? There was nothing impossible to a people who had tamed the raging of the volcano and the earthquake. The difficulty was the very greatness of the force. Any machinery they might erect would be trampled to pieces by the brute power of the giant they yoked. Here was a problem worthy of their most imaginative men, of their most inventive faculties.