It happened, too, that on this particular night the sarmolan or cosmic barometer had been getting out of order; but its watchers did not think it called for immediate attention; the morning would be time enough to put it right. Its indicator thus lay tongue-tied and misleading, when it should have been violently agitated. Tamarna and Omirlo had no warning of the approaching magnetic tornado. The hour before dawn the pirakno moved as regularly and quietly as at that point of the night when the magnetic tide is at its lowest ebb, the point when sleep is deepest and death is most frequent. They had just seen that every part was moving without friction and fully coping with its work; and Omirlo felt that he could leave his mate for a brief space and consult the sarmolan-watchers. He had been gone but a few minutes when he heard a loud crash behind him, and at the same moment he noticed that the first beams of the sun had struck across the levels of the sea. He turned and saw a flash from the place where, he thought, the pirakno stood. Flying back in trepidation, he found the machine as he had left it, but it had stopped. At first he could not see Tamarna; but on searching he saw her form lying on the ground close to the pirakno, hidden by one of its cranks. He touched her temples and left side, and saw that life had fled. The crank had come upon her as she lay, and bruised her body; the sight of this completed his despair; he felt that the last hope of her recall had vanished. Yet he knew how much the medical elders could do, and there arose in his mind a flicker of hope. He wasted no time on lamentation, for there moved in him the carefully trained consciousness that all such abandonment to emotion was an offence against the progress of the race. They considered that every occurrence of life demanded as much concentration of energy and thought as a shipwreck, or the incidents of a battle, or anything that we in the West would call an alarming emergency. As grief or despair or fear used up the power that should be spent on action, emotion was strictly reined in at such a moment; the instinct was to call the whole resources of the nature to action.