“As you will,” I replied, returning to English, “we shall be glad to see what you have to show us.”
Signor Davelli rose up at the word and invited us to [120] ]follow him. He went up the stair by which we had come down the day before, and led us to the platform on which we had first seen him. He told us briefly that his sojourn here was in fulfilment of a purpose to which he and certain others of his fellowship were pledged. That they were all acting in concert and that certain of them were leaders, and that each leader had command of a station such as this, of which there were several in different parts of the world. That it was essential to the work that it should be carried on from regions far removed from the haunts of men, at least of civilised men, for they could repel the interference of savage races without endangering the fulfilment of their purpose. He went on to tell us that in this station of his he had two classes of work to do, one class consisting of intellectual work of a high order, and affecting more directly the fulfilment of the common purpose, the other class consisting of merely mechanical work, affecting the routine of life and its conditions here. “The men,” he went on to say, “who carry out the former are of high and independent mental faculties and rank accordingly; these men you have seen to-day. The men who carry out the latter are of a very acute capacity to receive and execute instructions, but have no originating power of [121] ]conception or design. These are they whom you saw yesterday. Their work is mainly the making of our food and clothes, and the construction of our means of locomotion, and of the machinery by which the work is done. That machinery is designed and executed in model at the other end of the valley by the other men in the intervals of their more important work. That work, however, you cannot understand until you become better acquainted with us.”
We had now reached the platform, and we saw the men at work just as we had seen them the day before. Signor Davelli uttered a single word which I did not understand, and on hearing it the men turned, and then followed for a very few minutes the same sort of pantomimic action which I had already seen and have described. Then they resumed work.
Signor Davelli then took us to the works and invited us to observe the construction of the various machines in use.
I must not, however, run the risk of tiring you by any minute account of them here. Let it suffice to say that there was a much higher degree of mechanical skill exhibited in their construction than I have ever seen anywhere before or since, and that besides there was much that suggested the application of chemical [122] ]and electrical science in a manner greatly in advance of anything that is commonly known; and further that there were certain complicated arrangements of prisms and mirrors which indicated as I thought some use of the agency of light which was quite new to me and which I did not understand. One set of machines proved to be used for the manufacture of the compressed food which we had already found so effective. Another set of much simpler construction carried it away and stored it when made. Yet another set was used for the manufacture of that invisible paint, the use of which had so astonished me. These last were the machines which attracted my curiosity most of all, and which implied not only a use which I did not comprehend of agencies which I recognised, but the existence of other agencies of which I knew nothing at all. I observed, however, as carefully as possible and I made, later on, very full notes of what I did observe, and I shall be happy to communicate these to our men of science in whose hands they can hardly fail to become of much practical value. I need hardly say that I asked a good many questions about this last set of machines, but somehow I got very little information. Whether Signor Davelli was unwilling to explain, or whether there was something in the process which I [123] ]was incapable of understanding, I am not quite sure. All I could get from him was that there are some rays at either end of the spectrum which are not visible, and that it is possible to treat some substances so as to cause them to reflect these rays only, just as other substances reflect only the yellow or only the red. But from a word or two which he spoke, I suspect inadvertently, I gathered that the rays he spoke of, which are invisible to us, were visible to him, and differed as much from yellow, red, or blue, as these from one another.
We now crossed the platform to the place where the cars were being painted. I perceived as soon as I came upon the spot that the cars were built at one level, and then raised by machinery to another level at which they were painted, and that when painted they were raised to a third level. Along each of these levels they were moved by rollers of quite simple construction. Yesterday I had only seen those on the second level; those on the first were too low to come within the field of my view, and those on the third were invisible.
On this third level, however, one was to-day visible. As I afterwards learned, Signor Davelli had caused it to be left unpainted. It was otherwise finished. He caused it now to be rolled along to the extremity of [124] ]the platform, which ended to the southward in a sheer precipice of some hundreds of feet. There was a ledge to keep it from rolling over. Signor Davelli led us to this car and invited us to enter it.
There was plenty of accommodation for two or three people. There were easy benches and couches, and there were three boxes with distinctive marks like numbers on the lids. At the end of the car which was furthest from the ledge, the inside end, there was a great deal of machinery, but not of such a size as I should have expected considering the size of the car. This machinery consisted of two batteries resembling galvanic batteries in many ways, but the stuff used up in work was not fluid but solid; it consisted of large squares of matter, which I think was wholly or mainly metallic. The batteries were connected with a strong round bar, made, as I thought, of some sort of metal[Footnote 3] ] running through the car and supporting a pair of huge paddles, or wings, one on each side of the car. At each end of the bar were certain little wheels and cranks, devised not so as to cause the paddles to revolve, but so as to give them a wing-like motion. At the forward part of the car were several vessels of a form which suggested a chemical apparatus for generating gas. [125] ]And on each side of the car, constructed and placed with an evident view to balance or trim it, were two balloons, which seemed absurdly small in view of the size of the car. These were connected with the chemical apparatus just mentioned, and were filled by it, when occasion required, with a gas vastly lighter than hydrogen.
Signor Davelli, Jack, and I entered the car, and the Signor took a bottle of liquid out of one of the numbered boxes and poured it into one of the vessels. Then in all the vessels there seemed to be a sound like boiling, and presently the balloons became inflated and raised the car very gently and quite evenly. When we had been thus lifted to a height of about a hundred feet from the platform, he put on a dark-looking pair of gloves and laid hold of a strong thick wire, which I had not seen before, which was fastened to the bar which I had supposed to be of metal on the side further from where I sat. This wire he connected with the batteries of either end, and immediately took off the gloves. Presently the paddles began to move with a wing-like action, driving the car straight forward through the air. All this time we were still rising slowly, but when we had attained a high degree of speed Signor Davelli turned the key of a valve which [126] ]communicated with both balloons and they presently collapsed, the action of the paddles being now sufficient both to sustain us and to urge us forward. The motion was easier than that of any conveyance that I had ever yet travelled in. The seat on which Signor Davelli sat was placed so that with one hand he could turn the key of the valve, and with the other grasp either of two handles, by one of which he managed the batteries, and by the other of which he changed at need the direction of the paddles. I perceived, upon looking more closely, that the key of the valve was fixed at the intersection of two tubes shaped like a T, one at right angles to the other, the horizontal tube joining the balloons and the perpendicular tube connected with the vessels from which the sound of boiling still proceeded.
After we had gone, as I thought, a few miles, Signor Davelli changed the direction of the paddles and swept round in a longish curve, until the forward part of the car was turned to our starting point. When we had travelled about half way back he turned the valve again and refilled the balloons, and then he stopped the paddles and we lay floating in the air, rising very slowly and gently. Then he bade me look to the west and say if I saw anything. I could see nothing at all, [127] ]the day was quite cloudless. Then he bade me look downward, but still to the west. Then I saw a shadow, as I thought, of a great bird, but I could see no bird to cast the shadow. The sun was now declining a little, and he bade me turn and look downward again, but now to the east. Then I saw the shadow of our own car, and although the point of view was not the same, there was no room to doubt but that the other shadow was cast by a car like ours. The moment I saw the likeness my old Welsh experience came with a flash to my mind. These were just the same queer sort of shadows that I had seen long ago at Penruddock the day James Redpath had disappeared; yes, and surely the evening before the day we reached the valley, the evening of the day that we lost poor Gioro I had seen just the same sort of shadow. And—— Could it be? Yes, it surely was—the dreadful face that I recognised yesterday was no other than James Redpath’s own! How it was that I did not identify him before I do not know, but now I knew very surely that I had seen himself indeed. Such was the tumult of mixed feelings that now took possession of me that although we moved rapidly forward again until we had passed quite over the valley and then wheeled round once more, I took no notice of our movements until I found that we were [128] ]descending to the spot where we had started, the front of the car facing southward as before. I looked at Signor Davelli, and I read in his face an expression of gratified pride and a strong sense of power. There was nothing repulsive in his aspect now, at least nothing repulsive to me. I felt also that I was being somehow dominated by his will, and that I was not altogether unwilling that it should be so. I felt certainly some remnant of the horror with which I had looked yesterday on his face and the faces of his men, but I was conscious that my horror was rapidly merging into simple wonder. I felt something of the sort of awe which the suspected presence of the supernatural produces in most minds; but the feeling which dominated for the present all other feelings in me was a devouring curiosity. Just then the sacred allegory of the Fall passed before my mind rather as if presented than recalled. In my mind’s eye I saw the very Tree itself which was to be desired to make one wise, and the legend written under it—