an idea. Though the various states acknowledged various forms of
government, free institutions were beginning to preponderate; popular
assemblies increased in power; republics soon became general; the
democracy to which the most enlightened European politicians look
forward as the extreme goal of political advancement, and which
still prevailed among other subterranean races, whom they despised as
barbarians, the loftier family of Ana, to which belonged the tribe I was
visiting, looked back to as one of the crude and ignorant experiments
which belong to the infancy of political science. It was the age of envy
and hate, of fierce passions, of constant social changes more or less
violent, of strife between classes, of war between state and state. This
phase of society lasted, however, for some ages, and was finally brought
to a close, at least among the nobler and more intellectual
populations, by the gradual discovery of the latent powers stored in the
all-permeating fluid which they denominate Vril.

According to the account I received from Zee, who, as an erudite
professor of the College of Sages, had studied such matters more
diligently than any other member of my host's family, this fluid is
capable of being raised and disciplined into the mightiest agency over
all forms of matter, animate or inanimate. It can destroy like the flash
of lightning; yet, differently applied, it can replenish or invigorate
life, heal, and preserve, and on it they chiefly rely for the cure
of disease, or rather for enabling the physical organisation to
re-establish the due equilibrium of its natural powers, and thereby
to cure itself. By this agency they rend way through the most solid
substances, and open valleys for culture through the rocks of their
subterranean wilderness. From it they extract the light which supplies
their lamps, finding it steadier, softer, and healthier than the other
inflammable materials they had formerly used.