They set themselves vigorously to turn this new knowledge into art, and trained themselves, and still more their children, in eye-power till it became an instinctive habit to use it. After a time they came to see that the power was not one but manifold; the sleep-inducing effect was only an elementary application of it. A further development was a soothing influence upon the nerves that never went as far as sleep. Then the medicative powers of the eye were raised in the families of medicists into capacities which seemed to me almost preternatural. A more widely diffused specialisation of the new function was eye-language. Long-continued emotional dialogues would proceed in companies where I could not hear a sound, and at the end Thyriel would tell me the intricacies of the interplay of thought and emotion. It is true they could not easily communicate any unspiritual fact, needing some concrete image, unless they employed the code of eye-signals which every Limanoran learned; this combined the motions of either eye and magnetic impulses of various kinds and degrees, and contained several thousand words and phrases. I had so much to learn in the island that I had not time to master more than a few of the simpler combinations, so that I was often bewildered in their silent assemblies. But for a long time what seemed to me most marvellous was that intimate and facile converse went on when the two friends were at considerable distances from each other; when occupied in this they kept alternately turning the back and the face. This was due to the receptive magnetic faculty being in the back of the neck and the active one being in the eye. The eye was receptive in only a secondary degree, so that when the magnetic impulse was weakened by distance, the eye could not interpret it, and the back had to be turned in order to catch its full force. To see two men or women standing a mile or two apart and wheeling back and front every minute, and that, too, in alternating harmony as if they had been two sympathetic toys, at first would have made me laugh but for my wonder; and when the intercourse was rapid they looked like two whirling dervishes; but I grew accustomed to the sight, and soon began to feel with the people themselves that it was a most dignified feature of their life. For a time it seemed almost beyond nature that they could communicate even emotions and impulses at such a distance; for it was only emotions and impulses, and not facts, that passed, as the motions of the eye were not apparent except within comparatively short spaces. Yet there were electro-magnifiers which, affixed to their firla on the back of the neck, enabled them to feel the faintest impulse from a distance and interpret it, and a modification of the vimolan, used like spectacles, reduced the sense-numbing power of distance a thousand-fold; they could see by means of these electro-optical instruments the minutest movement many miles off.