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source of heat, yet the deeper we go beneath the crust of the earth, the
greater is the increasing heat, being, it is said, found in the ratio of
a degree for every foot, commencing from fifty feet below the surface.
But though the domains of the tribe I speak of were, on the higher
ground, so comparatively near to the surface, that I could account for a
temperature, therein, suitable to organic life, yet even the ravines and
valleys of that realm were much less hot than philosophers would deem
possible at such a depth--certainly not warmer than the south of France,
or at least of Italy. And according to all the accounts I received, vast
tracts immeasurably deeper beneath the surface, and in which one might
have thought only salamanders could exist, were inhabited by innumerable
races organised like ourselves, I cannot pretend in any way to account
for a fact which is so at variance with the recognised laws of science,
nor could Zee much help me towards a solution of it. She did but
conjecture that sufficient allowance had not been made by our
philosophers for the extreme porousness of the interior earth--the
vastness of its cavities and irregularities, which served to create free
currents of air and frequent winds--and for the various modes in which
heat is evaporated and thrown off. She allowed, however, that there was
a depth at which the heat was deemed to be intolerable to such organised
life as was known to the experience of the Vril-ya, though their
philosophers believed that even in such places life of some kind, life
sentient, life intellectual, would be found abundant and thriving, could
the philosophers penetrate to it. "Wherever the All-Good builds,"
said she, "there, be sure, He places inhabitants. He loves not empty
dwellings." She added, however, that many changes in temperature and
climate had been effected by the skill of the Vril-ya, and that the
agency of vril had been successfully employed in such changes. She
described a subtle and life-giving medium called Lai, which I suspect
to be identical with the ethereal oxygen of Dr. Lewins, wherein work all
the correlative forces united under the name of vril; and contended that
wherever this medium could be expanded, as it were, sufficiently for the
various agencies of vril to have ample play, a temperature congenial to
the highest forms of life could be secured. She said also, that it was
the belief of their naturalists that flowers and vegetation had bee