During the next great period of discovery the Sidramo superseded this use of alfarene by a more rapid method of concentrating air. As usual they followed up the steps of the Floramo, and created what the botanical families had found in nature. The use of great pressure in the manufacture of the sustenant globules in their final form suggested the track they should take; and the immense accumulation of energy in Rimla and the rapidly increasing faculty of concentrating it on any point or purpose gave them the requisite power. They came to reduce air to liquid, and finally to solid and permanent, form. And, following up the lead of this discovery, they applied greater and greater pressures, and were at last able to transform with ease and without danger any element into gaseous, liquid, or solid form. They contracted the slow processes, that in terrestrial nature covered myriads of ages, into a few minutes or hours, and thus again multiplied indefinitely their vast treasures of power in Rimla. A pioneering production, the book of elemental transformations, foreshadowed the discoveries to which this would lead. Ether, it was shown, would be transformed into any desired substance, as soon as its constituents and formation were found out. Even modes of motion, like sound and light and electricity, would, with this vast expansion of the possibility of compression, and the growing power of amalgamating and concentrating forms of energy, come to be bottled up in liquid or solid form for any required period. A block of latent sound or latent light or latent electricity would be as common as a block of ice. Another pioneer, the book of abbreviation of geological time, opened up a second vista of power that the discovery pointed out. Nature took geological ages to perform most of her processes; but in great passions she accomplished as much in a few minutes. The safe imitation of these creative and destructive paroxysms was certain to be one of the conquests of Limanoran posterity. For the actual concentration of power in Rimla was as nothing compared with what it would be in the future. Now they were able to contract the work of years into minutes; then would they be able to leap in one moment across geological ages. Time was the inertia of realisation and creative power. The whole drift of their civilisation was towards the mastery of finite periods of time. Years were to them what minutes had been to their ancestry; to their far posterity geological ages would be as brief as years were to them. Swifter and more swiftly would they eliminate from their creative processes the reluctant element of time, and feel that they were pacing in the footsteps of eternity.