Vast as the force was which in these various ways was bent into the service of this people, there seemed still to be the need of increasing it. Never a week passed without some facilitation of the collection and distribution of energy by an improvement in the machinery. The mechanic families were ever busy competing with one another in invention and practical application of some principle or idea, and the pioneering families who rode imagination to the verge of practicability marched ahead of them, mapping tracks and highways into the unknown future. One proposal was to utilise the magnetism of the earth as a new source of energy, and already one of the mechanical families was far on the way to its realisation. Another that was near at hand was the use of the expansion of their liquefied and solidified air for purposes of power. One plan somewhat farther off from the realm of practicability was the utilisation of the primal ether by means of its compression and expansion. Yet they were working at it in full hope of finding a solution of the problem at some unexpected turn of their imaginative road into the darkness. They had achieved so much that they had almost boundless faith in their ultimate power to solve all problems presented to their minds. They would face the death of the whole race sooner than the thought of ceasing to push forward into the night that encircled life. My mind was almost paralysed at the thought of the vastness of the power controlled in this centre of force; but it explained to me the ease with which they could drive their leomorans miles and miles through the solid crust of the earth, the power they had over the volcanic fires of Lilaroma, the strength of the blast they could send far out to sea from their storm-cone, and the general facility with which they could control and use even the most titanic forces of nature. I did not wonder now that they were the masters rather than the servants of nature, especially when I saw that by the strength and nicety of their machines they could concentrate all this tremendous force upon any single point or distribute it over a wide area at the striking of a key on the great key-board of forces. I have seen one of the masters of energy turn the whole current from the ten thousand services it was doing throughout the island upon the making of a diamond; so enormous was the temperature it generated in a few moments that a piece of carbon, submitted to the heat and pressure, came forth a magnificent jewel, gleaming and sheening in the light. But this was for no silly purpose of personal ornamentation; it was meant for the friction edge of a leomoran down where it bit into the rock. It was the easiest thing in the world for this people with all the concentration of power they had at their call to follow nature in her most occult or tremendous processes. There was not a metal they could not produce with their high temperatures and enormous pressures. It is true that all