I felt solitary and forlorn as I heard her ecstatic descriptions and resolves, and thought upon my incapacity to understand them. In a moment she knew my dejection, and realised how forgetful she had been of me and of her surroundings. She at once threw off her imaginative trance of magnetic enjoyment, and determined to keep pace with my advance. It was a slow and weary path I had to travel; but her cheerful encouragement prevented despair. Through the years between I was able by dint of constant and vigorous practice to concentrate into my eyes and into the back of my head much of the magnetic power and receptiveness that had existed before in my body, but in a diffused condition. I was at last able to go with her and appreciate the stellar imaginings which the flashing firlamans excited. There was another majestic arcade, in which Limanoran artists themselves joined in sublime firlamaic music. On my first visit to it, many years after my introduction to Oomalefa, I was appalled to see human beings stand like Joves flashing long tongues of lightning or flame from their eyes or fingers; they seemed to stand unscathed in a fiery furnace, or rather to weave and plait and mould the flames as if they had been threads of some plastic material. Had I come here during my early novitiate in the island, I should have fled in terror as from dreams of hell realised. There in the midst passed the artist like a dark shuttle through a loom of lightnings as he wove them into an ever-changing web of living colour. For a time I could not control my terror, as I looked to see him shrivelled to ashes. At last through my reason I managed to calm myself into feeling that he was the master and creator of this display and that the dreadful tongues of flame and swift meteors which rose and vanished around him were unstinged and innocuous. Then began to creep into me a sweet sense of some magnetic harmony, stirring my mind to contemplation of the mighty forces of the world. I seemed to know the voiceless majesty of time, as if vast ages were crushed into moments; I followed our orb as it swept away from the immense concentric circles of flame wheeling round the core of whirling fire; I saw it mass into an eye of passion fixed in gaze upon the mother star it had left; alone it travelled into space tied like an infant still by magnetic threads to the parent sun; out into the infinite it yearned to rush seeking life and souls to nestle in its bosom; yet never would the unseen mother cord give way. Out and out flamed the earth into immeasurable space and the wild longing was calmed; the tempests of fire lulled and fell; the luminous billows ceased to rear their crests or toss their fiery spindrift; a dull, still-glimmering crust imprisoned her torrid heart; the conflagrations burst forth in wider and wider intervals. At last she wooed the germs of life from the wandering infinities to rest for brief spaces on her bosom.