Once the safety-line was passed and we were assured of food sufficient to maintain our people, other troubles faced us; and I am not sure that the next ten years was not really our most dangerous period. Had Nordenholt lived, things would perhaps have been easier for us; but the difficulties besetting us were implicit in the nature of things and I question if he could have exorcised them entirely. We had, on the one side, a mass of manual labourers whose intelligence unfitted them for anything beyond bodily toil; while on the other hand we had supplies of physical energy from the atomic engines which made the employment of human labour supererogatory. Yet to leave the major part of our population entirely idle was to invite disaster. The development of the atomic engine had at one blow thrown out of gear the nicely-adjusted social machinery devised by Nordenholt; and we had to arrange almost instantly vast alterations in our methods of employment. It was under the pressure of these conditions that we became builders of great cities. Nineveh and Thebes were our first sketches; then came Atlantis, our main power-station which we built on Islay; after that we erected Lyonnesse and Tara, fairer than the others, for we learned as we wrought. Then, as I began to grope toward my masterpiece, I planned Theleme. And, last of all, the spires and towers of Asgard grew into the sky. Once the cities had been planned, we employed a further contingent of labour in constructing huge roads between them, gigantic arteries which cut across the country like the Roman ways in earlier centuries, arrow-straight, but broader and better engineered than anything before constructed. Our building materials were new. The introduction of atomic energy gave us electric furnaces on a scale undreamed of before; and we were able to produce a glassy and resistant substance which can be made in any tint. It is of this that Asgard is constructed; and I believe that no weather conditions alone will wear it down. * * * * * As I sit here at my desk, I see outstretched before me the panorama of Asgard, the concrete embodiment of our Fata Morgana, so far as that vision could be made real in stone. It is not the City of our dreams, I admit; yet in its beauty there is a touch of wonder and of mystery that makes it kin to that builded phantom of our minds. None of our cities shall ever bear the name of Fata Morgana, which was the mother of them all. There shall be no profanation of that castle in the air. Instead we have given to our cities titles which link their material splendours to the more ancient glories of myth and tradition; Asgard and Lyonnesse, Tara and Atlantis, Nineveh, Thebes and Theleme.