But from time immemorial in the radium land fragments, nodules of a grayish or brownish mineral, were picked up and their nuclei were later revealed to be pure radium (they called it Luxto), and from these by an accident—still retained in the tradition of the people as a heavenly bestowed revelation or miracle—the power of transmutation was learned.
Mr. Link, we had already suspected this, as you know, but when I actually learned it from the lips of Ziliah—the love-dazed Ziliah—I verily doubted my existence for a moment. In connection with the whole complex, so to speak, of wonders, it produced a half vertiginous feeling hard to describe. Ziliah’s story was in this wise:
“A long, long, long, time ago, after a long darkness in the Stationary Sun, a terrible storm broke over Radiumopolis. The thunder, the lightning flashes, had never before been heard or seen, and there roared through the air an awful, destructive wind. It upset houses, blew over part of the Capitol, razed the trees; and then amid the thunder and the lightning, in a downrush of air, came a stranger, a little man strangely dressed in white with a black cap, and he had a dark face. He stayed with the people and taught them many things, but only to the rulers, the older men, the men of the council, would he teach the secret of making gold. He took them away with him on a journey westward to the radium country. They were absent many days and when they returned they were in rags, and their faces were pale, and haggard, but their hands and their pockets were filled with lumps of gold. The little stranger left as he had come in another awful storm. He went upward in a whirlwind and rode like a ghost through fearful gusts and disappeared in a roar of thunder and blaze of light, and a circle of flame descended from his feet and burnt a deep hole in the ground, as anyone can see to this day, below the hill in the snake pasture. But that wasn’t all. He carried away with him the beautiful daughter of the Head Man and she never was seen again.”
“Why,” exclaimed Hopkins, when I repeated the legend, “it’s a clear case again of Alice Hatton and the Devil, though in that case Old Nick left nothing behind him but a bad smell:
“Now high, now low, now fast and now slow,
In terrible circumgyration they go—
The flame colored belle and her coffee faced beau!
Up they go once and up they go twice!
Round the hall! Round the hall! And now up they go thrice.
Now one grand pirouette the performance to crown,