Ooriel shook the water from his garments as he leapt out, and in a few minutes he was on his way with me to the other brooks, cascades, and conduits which gathered the aqueous forces of Lilaroma into this valley of power. Not a drop that fell from the tributary clouds about the head of the mountain but did its work for this singular people; the moisture-lifting power of the sun, and the force of gravitation that fought with it were alike made the servants and yoke-fellows of the Limanorans. They refused to waste the energy that nature gave them so freely. This I saw more fully illustrated as I followed Ooriel. Having inspected all the forms of stream-power, he sped round to the side of the valley nearest to the western shore of the island; there in a great cave or hollow in the rock, brilliantly lit, I saw myriads of wires and cables concentrating from all westward directions on an immense block of labramor or irelium alloy. This, he explained to me, was the great electric storage-battery of the waves. From the north-west and the south-west came the chief storms and currents that broke on the shores of the island; and underneath the beetling cliffs of lava erected on the western shores they had a line of long, lofty caves running some hundreds of feet underneath into the land; in these huge vanes and water-wheels were hung from the roofs and the higher portions of the sides; and the waves as they ran in and out beat their paddles and made them whirl with lightning swiftness. The motion thus communicated was turned by their electro-generators into currents of electric force which found its way by the network of wires and cables that I saw into this enormous storage-battery. In another series of caves they cooped up the water of the full tides by means of gigantic dams and sluice-gates, and this during ebb drove huge wheels and turbines and thus sent the power of the moon into their treasure-house of power. Every storm that ruffled the surface of the ocean, every current that swept past their shores, every ebb or flow of their tides added its quota to the energy accumulated in their electric treasury, a far more wonderful concentration of wealth than any Sindbad’s valley or Golconda. Here was ready to the hand of man power greater than all that the nations and the generations had ever been capable of.