The Mouthpiece of Zitu

by J. U. Giesy

That place was ready to receive it as Croft knew from several trips he had taken to it, in one of his swiftest motors. A stone power-house had been erected, the penstocks were in place. Diverting gates were prepared to turn the stream into them at the proper moment, and send it roaring through the turbines in the pits. Telling Robur to send men into the mountains to cut poles, and giving him a model of insulators to be made of glass, Jason loaded the sections of his dynamo upon his fleet of transports and set forth again on his journey to the hills.

Thereafter for two weeks he toiled and sweated, thankful at least for the fact that in Tamarizia labor was plentiful, and regulated by government control in regard to wages, carefully estimated on a living scale, so that the dissatisfaction and continual strikes of earth were unknown. The condition enabled him to command what workmen needed, and rest assured of a steady advance in the projects he undertook.

More than once in that long, hot fourteen suns, Robur drove out to inspect the progress made and marvel, and report the insulators being turned out in satisfactory shape, and the poles coming down from the hills on creaking motor trucks. Croft gave him drawings to guide him in setting up a line of power poles across the desert from Himyra toward the mountains, and at night, when his weary workmen were sleeping, plunged into the task of devising Tamarizia's first electric lights. At first he confined his plans to small-sized arcs, intending to give public demonstration before he went on with the attempt to devise incandescents for inside use.

Coal was coming down from the vein he had discovered by now in quantity sufficient to use in the copper smelters, and he decided to gain his carbons, from this, converted into coke. After several nights of intensive working, he pushed aside his finished plans and drew a long breath of relief. The thing was done.

Croft's eyes flashed. This enlightenment of a people and a nation was becoming well-nigh an obsessing delight in his brain. It partook almost of the nature of creation despite the fact that he knew those things he was producing were but crude copies of familiar things he had formerly known as concomitants of life. For, as he had said to Robur, and to Zud, and to Naia herself, he was a man—was human in all his impulses and feelings regardless of the marvelous control of the spirit he had learned, and he thrilled with a personal satisfaction in the success of each new endeavor, the wonder each new product of his scheming excited in other brains.

From Robur he learned that Gaya had returned to the palace, bringing Naia with her for an indefinite stay. That, indeed, was in accordance with his plans. For so soon as he had realized that Gaya meant to throw the girl and himself into a closer association, as he did after the conversation he had heard between the two women, he had purposely meant to be absent from Himyra himself when the woman he loved arrived.

Croft would not have been either where or what he was had he been devoid of a vast psychological knowledge. And deep as were his own emotions, strong as was his own impulse to indulge a desire for Naia's closer presence, yet in all he did at that time he followed a deliberately mapped-out course for the accomplishment of his purpose.

During those days, as her words to Gaya had shown him very clearly, Naia of Aphur's mental condition was one of vague unrest. And the principle cause of that unrest was, as Croft knew, himself.

The new estrangement between them, her act in returning his betrothal jewel in so dramatic a manner, those subsequent excursions into the unknown world of the astral plane which he had brought about, and which she was as yet unable to consider other than as vagaries of a sleeping brain, had induced within her a state of introspection which, even more than his immediate presence, he felt sure must serve his purpose best.

She had cried out in a sympathy seeking confusion to the wife of his friend, that she had sought him that day in the mountains, as a sort of test—a means of convincing herself if her visioning were false or real. She had admitted that, even despite her former reluctance to consider a possible mundane love between Croft in his present body and herself, he had appealed to her that day in his physical form and strength. And she had complained that he had not kept the promise given by his astral form to hers, to return to her so again; had confessed that she had sought for a renewal of those two former meetings, had tried to repeat her "dreams."