Yet my guardians set themselves to bring out my latent electric sense or firla. After much practice and the application of many stimuli I began to feel impulses more keenly even when they came from a distance: the back of my neck grew more and more sensitive, so that I would wheel round instinctively when anyone looked at me from behind. There was almost hope that I should, after many years’ practice, come to distinguish the different kinds of emotion with which anyone, though unseen, might look at me; and I could produce by a concentration of will-force in the eyes a certain luminosity, noticeable when I stood in deep darkness. My power of sight was greatly strengthened by this new electric faculty that the eyes acquired. I began to raise my eyelids before the penetrative glance of a Limanoran, or even the full majesty of the sun; but never could I hope to reach their analytic power of vision. Their senses were distinguished from those of the rest of mankind by intellectuality, and were, I thought, not merely the observers and reporters of the mind, but its outlying parts or functions. The eye especially seemed to do what through its means reason and experiment might have done. At a glance a Limanoran would tell to an inch the distance of any object, and was not far wrong in his estimate of the space between the earth and any star when its rays reached his eye. He could distinguish one ray from another by its colour or colour-constituents and by its magnetic affinities. What he had learned in the use of the inamar or spectroscope in the lava wells and in the fusion of metals in Rimla had come to be a visual instinct. With scarcely a minute’s hesitation he would tell the predominant elements in any one of the heavenly bodies. Doubtless the firla had something to do with this analytic power. One of their imaginative pioneering books held out the by no means remote possibility of catching symptoms of the life which, they knew well, filled the dim worlds above.