We returned day after day to the place and found that the new perforator, or tirleomoran as it was called, worked with ten times the swiftness of the old instrument. The chief objections to it were that the metal vapours were denser and more offensive, and that the irelium cylinders had to be oftener renewed because of the great friction and the intensity of the electric heat. The one was obviated by a longer smoke-tube and an application of a vent of wind from the storm-cone; the other was obviated by longer cylinders and refrigerative packing between two of their layers of irelium. But the strangest result--strangest for me at least--was to come. The tirleomoran descended miles beyond the usual force well into the crust of the earth, at a great rate of speed, and I soon saw preparations for some change. Great channels of their usual metal were laid down to the beach, and irelium barriers erected in the sea along the shelving shore from bastion to bastion. By the greater rapidity of the descent, the increase of the proportion of their favourite metal, and the ease with which the electric current volatilised the material below, our guides judged that they had reached rock that was already molten. Before long there began to ooze out of the smoke-tube a red-hot stream, that trickled its way down the slope. Then the air-tight lid was burst off the cylinder, out of it came the electric piston on a wave of red-hot lava, and down the channels the thick stream of molten rock flowed till it reached the barriers in the sea. There with vast columns of steam it cooled and solidified, forming a new and stronger rampart to check the inflowing fire. Day after day we found that the beach was disappearing, and in its place, when the steam cleared, we could see that the great gap in the bastion-works of the island was filled up. This was the first of their lava wells I had seen. Its operations explained to me the massive symmetry of the rocky shores and the cyclopean terraces and shoots down the mountain-sides, that had, I thought, been either chiselled by tens of thousands of years of slavish labour, or laid by the hands of a race of giants now vanished from the earth. This little people was itself the Vulcan that turned the bowels of the world into smelting-works and used the mighty forces lying underneath the crust of our orb with the ease of a smith at his forge. What had the Limanorans to fear from invaders with even the mightiest war-engines that had ever been invented? They had made themselves fortifications which would outlast the attacks of any human invention. When the beetling circle of precipices was complete around their island who could land troops, even if they evaded the blast of the storm-cone? To the Limanorans themselves the height of their shores was no disadvantage; in fact it gave them easy starting-points for their wing expeditions; they could plunge from the jutting cliffs into the air and so gain impetus for their flight.