As it was, the Limanorans were able to watch all that was going on in the islands around them. During their leisure hours, when it was their duty as well as their pleasure to relax the mind, they would sit and observe the life of what they called their menagerie. To them, indeed, the whirling eddy of existence with its ambitions and crimes, its luxury and misery, in the archipelago around seemed little more than the antics of monkeys or the internecine appetites of wild beasts. The scenes were generally amusing in the ape-like vanities and mimicries they exhibited. Sometimes they were offensive and even repulsive in their filth or brutalities. How beings formed like themselves could endure the grossness of their luxuries and the falsity and hollowness of their most admired social displays was to them a bewildering problem. Even the best of these islanders were as far behind the Limanorans in true human qualities as they thought themselves in advance of apes. The daily observation of these creatures so humanly endowed and yet so foul and blind in act was often too much to bear for any length of time; the most repulsive scenes were those of what was considered high life, of courts and courtly circles, of rulers and leaders of act and thought. “Who can bear the horror of their intrigues and hypocrisies, their cruel trampling of the fallen, their hideous fawning on the successful, their insolent pride and intolerance of the weak!” I often heard exclamations like this from the lips of the watchers as they turned away from the idrovamolan with a shudder. The combination of ape and bully, of reptile and vapourer was, in the thoughts of this people, the lowest depth to which human nature could fall; and it was the usual and most envied form in the high social life of most of these islands. The barbarism and ignorance of the poor and downtrodden marked a less retrograde phase of humanity. The sight of the posturings and scrapings, the insolence and spaniel manners of the higher classes served every day to deepen the horror of exile and to frighten every Limanoran from anything that would lead even to the slightest retrogression. Had it not been for this wholesome effect upon their minds, they would have long ago abandoned the custom of watching this beast spectacle of retrograde and showy civilisation, so much pain mingled with their amusement at it. They knew that their pity was vain; for it would take unremitting effort for thousands of years to raise these peoples to the Limanoran level, if the Limanoran missionaries had not in the meantime been dragged down to the lower level; and these thousands of years could be better spent in attaining higher and higher ideals in their own life. The task, they knew, was as hopeless as if these descendants of their degenerate exiles should attempt to drag the lower animals up to their stage of human development, and this irremediable nature of their state added to the pain of the observers.