What a wonderful land is Intermere, and what a wonderful people live and enjoy life in it to the full!
Twenty days of visiting ten of the interior provinces, bordering on the mere, was more like a dream of happiness, sight-seeing and indescribable enjoyment to me than a reality. For reasons not explained to me I was not carried into the fourteen remaining provinces, which evidently lay in all directions toward the exterior borders of the land. I rather suspect that this was because it might have enabled me to form some definite idea of the geographical location of Intermere.
What I saw and experienced I still retain as a beautiful and ineffaceable memory, but it is a picture I can not wholly reproduce or describe in anything like complete details. I can at best only give the impressions I still retain.
The delightful journey was under the direction of Karmas, the Custodian of Works and Polity, accompanied by other chief officers, and the officials of the provinces, the title and character of which had already been given me by Xamas.
They have three modes of travel: by Medocar, by Aerocar, and by Merocar. By the first you travel on land; by the second through the air; by the third on the water. While these vehicles of transportation are divided into three general classes as designated, they comprise thousands of beautiful and curious designs, upon which individual names are bestowed, as we bestow names upon our horses and our ships.
There is no preference as to the mode and method of journeying. Each of them seems absolutely perfect. There is no physical sense of motion in either, as we realize it.
They glide over the broad, smooth and perfectly kept roadways, through the depths of the ether, or along the waters, with the same imperceptible motion, and can be put to a rate of speed that makes our limited railway trains seem like lumbering farm wagons. All resistance of the elements seems absolutely overcome.
The power of propulsion was wholly incomprehensible at first, and later I was only able to learn as to its principle, and left wholly to conjecture as to its application.
Roadways, or, perhaps more properly, boulevards, interlace the whole country. They are the perfection of road-building—smooth, even-crowned, and free from dust, water or other offensive substance. The surface is like a newly asphalted street, but hard and impervious, with no depressions, cracks or flaws. The engineering could hardly be improved on. Accepting the statements made to me that the most of these highways have been in use for centuries, with few if any repairs, they may be looked on as not only permanent but indestructible.