My first visit to the great building, which they called Terralona, or millenarium, was not long after the final repulse of Choktroo. Into the younger and less purified hearts of the community the idea of warlike glory had returned with some force, even though we realised intellectually how shallow and false and retrograde it was. The introduction to what I might call the heaven of the race ought to have come naturally later in life, when we had passed completely out of pupilage and assumed the full duties and privileges of maturity; but it seemed necessary to erase from our emotions this atavistic taint that the appearance of Choktroo and his expeditions had begotten in us. The national purification had succeeded in making earthly ambitions seem insignificant, but as we settled down again to our pursuits the awe that the cosmophone had bred in us grew fainter. The world narrowed into a prison-house, and our daily duties forced a recoil to a wider sphere of ambitions, such as we had seen out in the archipelago in the masterful wars so lately witnessed. It was time, indeed, that some of us were brought into the presence of the immediate ideals of the race towards which they were as a whole struggling. We were now to enter upon a new epoch of our existence and to know the wider heaven in which our own special pursuits took their orbit. We were thereafter to drink at the purer fountains of inspiration, to know the rewards of all our struggles, the possibilities that lay within the reach of a measurable number of years.