Now, that our specialisation had begun, we were put wholly under the care of Thyriel’s parents and family. I still returned to the home of my proparents, but spent the hours of training with the Leomo. There had evidently been discovered in the preliminary investigation of my faculties some especially suited to the pursuit of earth-seeing. From the beginning of my journeys to Fialume I had been attached to this family of earth-seers, and the result confirmed the decision; my tastes all developed in this same direction, and the more I penetrated into the mysteries of the science and craft, the more deeply interested in it I became. Every day, under the guidance of my new friends, I listened to the voices of their ancestors stored up on irelium tablets; for these tablets, when placed in a voice instrument, reproduced the exact sounds which had engraved the letters upon them. Their written alphabet was in fact a natural one; the letters were the forms produced by the sounds themselves when uttered by an instrument that blew upon loose particles of irelium arranged on a vibrating disc of the same metal. By a simple process the particles, when they took their form, were permanently fixed to the disc, which then became an everlasting record, easily read by any Limanoran; or, when placed in the voice instrument, speaking the words into his ear. This voice instrument was a kind of organ, whose minute keys and stops were easily controlled by the ridge of letters. I ever preferred to listen to the records of the past instead of reading them; for I never attained great facility in deciphering the letters because of my own long familiarity with the English alphabet and writing. But Thyriel could read the tablets with great ease; I came to prefer her reading to the sound of her ancestors’ voices although these gave fuller meaning to the ideas they communicated, and it was pleasant to feel that she was listening with me and not tiring her throat. Our minds seemed to become one, as we sat silent and motionless with ears intent on the statue of some one of her forefathers. There was a strong magnetism from the dead minds gradually welding our souls together.