The afternoon sunlight indeed soon revealed to our eyes, as we settled on the slopes, an immense stage that shot out of the ravine on the mountain-side. It was, I could see, the natural theatre of the island, cut out by other than human powers. And from side to side the gentlest whisper would carry, yet without recoil; while the sound of the moving stage, as it rolled forth, rose along the tiers and without break or repercussion died away into the open sky above our heads. It must have been here, I thought, that the architects of Limanoran buildings had learned the acoustic secrets of nature. Never a sound was lessened or confused in passing to the farthest corner of any of their vast halls. Nor was it from any mechanical contrivance underneath the roof, but simply from the shape of the enclosure. Nature had formed this valley into a perfect theatre, in the highest tier of which not one listener could miss the smallest sound. Yet by a singular contrivance, by means of which a globe of irelium was kept over the stage, every sound was tenfold magnified lest the merest whisper should escape, whilst every hearer had at hand a margol, which would soften sounds that carried too loudly to the ear. Another strange effect of this irelium shell was that it magnified to the eye everything upon the stage a hundredfold; it acted as a powerful microscope, so that each spectator was far nearer to the inner structure of any object than mere human eye-power could bring him. We had not to wait long for the purpose of these preparations. There entered upon the stage two figures that underneath the globe seemed gigantic beside the bodies of Limanoran men and women. They had Limanoran outlines, but transmuted into something more ethereal than aught I had seen. There was a grace of form and a beauty of face beyond any of those around me on the slope of the hill. And even to my eyes, untrained and limited as they were in their powers, there was a transparency in the tissue of their bodies which revealed the movements of their organs; I saw their hearts pulsate, and the currents of the blood move quicker or slower along their veins as they walked or stood still. We could even watch the effect of their emotions in their systems, and the excited or tranquil movement of thoughts in the tissues of their brains. The impulses that travelled along their nerves from brain to hand or foot, and the reports that kept journeying from the various senses to the nerve-centres, seemed all to be made plain to us; and seemed the work of a magician, so marvellous was it, so far above mere human achievement.