I soon saw that the valley ran more than a score of miles into the heart of the mountains, its deepest hollows rising now by easy gradations, again by bold platforms of rock far above the level on which we rested. For the dome, I could now see, consisted not of one span whose top ran horizontally along the ridges of the valley, but of hundreds of spans that rose arch above arch up the slope of the mountain. There was something in the terracing of the valley, too, that suggested the hand of man. Nature’s work had been supplemented and rounded by noble art. There was regularity in irregularity, statuesque beauty amid wild grandeur. Human thought had utilised the massive ideas of nature. The scene would have overawed the spirit and made it solitary, but for the familiarity of minor features moulded by human imagination that had not geological ages and forces at its disposal. In amongst the greenery of the forest stood on lofty pedestals what I took for memorial statues of the dead, with features so like to life in every minute line and curve and even graining of the skin, that I marvelled at such waste of human energy and imagination. My guide soon saw my mental question, and showed me that they were the dead themselves. The moment after every trace of life had gone from the body it was ireliumised by an ingenious process; for every atom of tissue and cell there was substituted one of irelium, and thus no decay could approach it; it would retain for untold centuries the form and expression of the vanished man down to the minutest detail. As we passed farther back into the valley I noticed a difference in the appearance of the statuesque dead; they had not the hues and expression of the living, but were leprous white, as if hewn out of marble with infinite care. I appealed to Oolmo, my guide, and he told me that these were their dead as they had been preserved before the age of irelium and the discovery of the process that rapidly changed living tissue into this metal. At that period the body used to be buried for years in stalactitic caves, where the percolation of the liquid gypsum turned it after a time into a calcareous statue. These caves ran into the mountain at the head of Fialume, and were now used for converting traceries and forms too delicate to work in marble into white stone. They made a beautiful contrast in ornamentation to the rainbow-hued limpidity of irelium. The process had been too long and slow for the petrifaction of the dead. And about the same time as the method of extracting irelium from the rocks had been discovered, the careful study of the petrifactive methods of nature had led to the new and rapid process of immortalising the form and features of those who had passed from life.