All glorious and serene the star sailed now, aglow with endless radiance and sunny warmth. Its path was toward the sun.
Regan dreaded the winter and its dangers. Ahead was storm, cold, earthquake, Jupiter.
The elf men, the new race, had begun to be insubordinate; they were as fond of demolishing as were the bird men of building. They often, from mere caprice, tore down magnificent structures when they were left unprotected.
“But nothing is too much trouble to endure now that you are here, Rondah!” Regan said. “Until you came the star was dark!”
“And Earth was dark! It is not the sun which lightens human hearts!” answered Rondah.
CHAPTER XVII.
“NOT RONDAH, WHO HAS NO STRENGTH!”
The great storm when the star turned, the accompanying disaster, the horror of convulsion, the sunless years—these were troubles which Regan wished he could avert. With Rondah he often wondered whether they might not spend the winter in the Sun Island.
In dreamy luxury the months and years passed on. Rondah was happy and took no note of time; it was for cycles, no need to measure it by hours, no death ahead. Regan was busy with great schemes. With the ideas of his mammoth earth built upon the little star turned into realities, the planet became a paradise of beauty.
Deputations were sent around the length of the continent to found cities on the broad inland plains and have dwellings prepared for the time when there should be no more winter. These colonists knew that the winter sleep would separate them entirely from each other, but they cared nothing for that. It was no more than that two forests were miles apart. Their somnolence was with the whole star, a part of it. The bird people, now engrossed with and ambitious for Regan’s plan of improvement and commerce, coined gold into beautiful, shiny, clinking money, and were sorry that they must leave the pleasant occupation and desist from their architectural amusements until Jupiter dawned. They had no other dread of their winter sleep.
Among other experiments, they set several thousand small and crowded pods into a new and fertile field. They saw that the withering or uprooting of one of these destroyed its vitality, and the backwardness meant a thirty-three years’ sleep for its occupant.