From our movable rests I could never have seen what all these statues were. I would have said that this was the island’s great gallery of sculpture. But there were other things that Oolmo pointed out to us before he led us round this vast hall of his ancestry. He showed us far back in the recesses of the valley up the slope of the mountain what looked in the distance like a great settlement of some burrowing animal. This was the oldest burying-place of the island, where had been laid in apertures in the rock the urns that contained the ashes of the dead; for they had brought the practice of cremation with them in their primitive migration from the south. Then followed a period of superstition and recession, in which the priests taught the sacredness of the human form and its final resurrection and when they buried the bodies deep in the earth beneath the urned rock recesses. A period of reaction against religion followed, and sanitation became one of the first essentials of the new scientific era. It was feared that plagues would come from this old burying-place on the side of the mountain, if the percolating waters brought the corruption of the rotting corpses down into the valley. It was resolved that the remains of their ancestors should be dug up and removed to a mound made for them on a level with the sea. Then it was found that almost all the bodies had become stone white as snow, for the calcareous percolations that came along the surface of the rock down the hill had done their work, and an accident in digging up one of the lower row of graves revealed the marvellous stalactitic caves underneath. There had been a movement towards a return to the practice of cremation, but it was stopped at once by this discovery. The caves became the natural burying-place, and out of them the dead were brought and erected in the valley when they had turned into stone. After we had viewed the whole scene from our platform under Oolmo’s direction, he bade us enter a car that had sprung up at his touch. It seemed made of gossamer, and I was afraid to enter it, till I felt the toughness and strength of its material. It floated rather than ran round the valley above the tops of the tall trees. I could see no wheels, and there were no rails for them to travel on if it had had them, nor had it any wings or sails like our faleena. At last I saw that it was hung by a transparent cord of metal from some moving force in the dome that to me was invisible. It was an electric car, and electric currents bore it aloft and swept it along with lightning rapidity. But a touch of Oolmo’s finger broke the circuit and stopped it in a moment.