The Natural Sun
Announcements about our sun and its natural conditions
- Chapter 27 -
Private houses and communal settlements upon the first Sub-equator
Concerning private dwellings, except for the larger scale, these more or less resemble your round garden kiosks, except for the proportionately much higher and more pointed roofs. They are not as open as the dwellings of the middle belt, but enclosed in solid walls through which sufficient light penetrates due to transparency of their green material.
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What is their size and what do their interiors look like? In size, they are large enough to easily accommodate a fairly large Earth building inside, although they are rarely higher than your average tower i.e. just the walls, whilst the roof sometimes reaches three times the height of the walls.
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Towards the eastern side there is a door approximately the size of your city gate. This is not at ground level and has ten stepped levels leading to it.
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Before the door there is a kind of balcony through which a few steps lead to the door. The shelves and the balcony is covered by rooves on fairly massive square pillars.
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On entering, after crossing another small interior balcony, one descends down a small staircase between two artistic rails on diamond edged multi-cornered columns.
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From this interior balcony, a fairly spacious gangway, supported from the floor by sturdy hexagonal white pillars, runs along the entire wall. It too has a simple rail. Simple there, means something of taste, even i.e. not decorated with notable paintings or engravings.
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Beyond this walkway, there follows several circles of pillars, reaching from the floor to the roof-joists they carry. These pillars are quite massive with an average circumference often between six and eight metres.
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There are circular, comfortable, soft-cushioned benches at their base.
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Around the central pillar also a spiral staircase leads right up to the attic and over it through a roof trapdoor to the so-called roof-gallery which is there called the observatory, (in accordance with its purpose rather than literally). This gallery too is enclosed elegantly with a rail of miniature columns and is itself roofed, although such roofing is not included with the high plateau observatories, the reason being that even upon the sun it is much cooler there than in the lower regions.
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There are usually several tables in fours around the pillar benches in the shape of flat dishes around each pillar, resting on pillar type supports.
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Beneath the gangway around the entire circular wall there are roomy benches like your sofas for resting on after work. Here is where meals are eaten.
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From the number of tables you will gather that there are numerous families in such a house, numbering about a hundred persons.
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There is a splendid wardrobe in the background with as many drawers as there are occupants. These drawers have their names on them, enabling everyone to store their physical and spiritual needs.
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The physical necessities are a few garments and certain tools
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For their spiritual requirements there is a type of picture book wherein people record all kinds of experiences and views. When a person has accumulated a certain number of experiences and outlook books, they hand them in to the fraternities of their membership. There they are carefully perused. The useful part is entered into a general register and the rest crossed out.
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Whereupon the contributor receives his books back corrected, so-to-say, entering the commendable approvals in a new book which is then the house priority book, whilst the source diaries are destroyed.
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The women folk have to do likewise, carefully recording their experiences and views and then also, like the men keeping a proper priority book.
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The tribe elder of a house then also keeps a register where all the house priority books of males and females are summarised. For this general book he has a fairly large trove behind the round-way into which none besides the tribe elder may look and with which he checks out all the other priority books from time to time.
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Therewith we have the character and outfitting of a dwelling upon the northern belt.
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The dwellings are similar in the southern belt, except for rounded instead of pointed roofs. The pillars are round too as distinct from the square ones, these being the only differences.
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You will gather that the southern belt dwellings are bigger due to the bigger humans.
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You can know that the inhabitants of both belts pick the most prominent spots for their dwellings. Knowing that, we can now move to the cooperatives.
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The latter does not consist of a single building, but relative to area, sometimes a hundred or even a thousand buildings. These are not of uniform size and style but related to their purpose.
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There is always amidst such cooperatives a main building which is also the biggest and highest among them.
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This building is rectangular with a lofty tower on each comer. It is roofless for unobstructed views. Such a building often has a length of up to two kilometres by your measure, but is only a hundred metres wide, whilst its height sometimes reaches three hundred metres with a roof higher by at least half, of dark red colouring and light violet walls. The tower walls are light green.
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These are not closed-off walls like those of the dwellings but for lighting, feature one hundred metre-high windows of four metres width on every side at regular intervals, the reason also for non-transparent walls. The windows are not open but are like your "gothic" style, with a type of elastic but transparent and multi-coloured glass and lock out external air.
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The exterior of this main building is indeed imposing with its colossal size, yet it is not ostentation.
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But it is so much more splendid inside, although not quite the indescribably great splendour of perhaps the first or second category upon the main belt, but just to be taken in by itself. For regardless of whether a light has the intensity of sunlight, it can still be beautiful in itself, if only steady and peaceable. So it is also, with the interior splendour of this cooperative main building.
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The entrance also is not at ground level but in the middle of a narrow side of this building. There is a balcony also which is reached through several levels. The balcony is fairly spacious, square and roofed, resting on several square white pillars. The balcony can be passed only through a forty metre-high gate. Inside the building this balcony widens and after a forty metre forward crossing meets two rows of stairs down into the actual building.
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Between these two staircases a third part of the balcony lengthens leading to the other end of the building, forming a centre walk. Two walkways are about twenty metres high and rest on square pillars from the floor up, spaced at ten metre intervals. It goes without saying that the side as well as middle walks have most elegant railings carried by miniature light-green semi-transparent octagonal pillars.
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The balcony as well as walkway floors is covered with mosaics of the most manifold configurations and polished like your mirrors just like everything else in this building.
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Between the centre way and the two walkways runs a line of large pillars carrying both the ceiling and the roof.
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Lowermost in the building, also around these pillars are benches for resting, made of brilliant red elastic material and the benches are flanked by tables similar to those we found in the dwellings.
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In the middle of this building between the central walk and the row of main pillars there are two continuous, parallel tables running for two hundred metres around which there are plenty of loose chairs with backs.
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In place of the tables between the pillars carrying the central walk, there are big cabinets near each pillar, storing the main books, in front of which there are decorous step ladders to enable the shelves in the cabinet to be reached.
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But contrary to your assumptions these are not wooden cabinets but of a variety of red-gold whose shine exceeds anything you ever saw. The cabinets are of such delicate workmanship and so well positioned between the white walkway pillars, as in no way to detract from the architecture.
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Beneath the side walkway along the wall between every two pillars, there is another similar cabinet deep yellow in colour and of double the size of the previous ones. These cabinets running along the entire wall are the archives. In some main buildings there are over two thousand of them with each frequently holding a thousand shelves, each holding up to two thousand books per shelf. A little arithmetic indicates a quite voluminous library, but not of your folio type books, but of only up to ten pages per book, each displaying general picture-characters with such portentous contents however, that for you to describe them in your language would need a thousand folio-type books, each five thousand pages per folio.
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This will indicate how much wisdom is harboured by one of these main cooperative buildings. If however, you can take it from Me, there are up to five million of these main cooperative buildings upon this solar equator, then you may want to add up how many folios of your variety, filled with wisdom, are to be found upon these two belts.
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Yet all this wisdom does not amount to one drop compared to the wisdom of just one man inhabiting the main solar equator and this is in turn hardly a drop compared to a high priest of this belt who already takes his wisdom out of love. And his wisdom in turn is but a tiny droplet compared to the least of the little ones out of My love! Where does that put the wisdom of the perfect initiates of the heavens and where finally My own?
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In short, let us leave wisdom to its rest in the archives and examine the remaining setup of this main building for a little time.
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The ceiling consists of a threefold vault of massive solidity, which shines with a light red gold colour. The walls are an exceedingly fine, polished blue. Hanging half way down from the ceiling upon thick white ropes there are white light-spheres which, although not imbued with their own light, nonetheless through their manifold cut and fine polish, break up the light from the windows into the most manifold colours, giving the interior of the building an extraordinary look of splendour.
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The walkways along the walls are provided with continuous, cushioned benches to give rest to strollers from their excursions.
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Therewith we have the outfit of this main cooperative building except for a small door at each corner of this building, through which the towers can be accessed.
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The towers themselves have nothing to offer other than an easy staircase from storey to storey. These floors are installed to prevent the climbers becoming dizzy. To help you visualize this, think of an almost two thousand metre high tower, which internally is subdivided into twenty metres high storeys connected by railed staircases.
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Add to that an eight hundred meter circumference for this square tower and you have a small idea of what the building is like. It goes without saying that every floor is provided with three windows, as there is no wall-transparency.
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That's it! Next time we shall have a look at the remaining buildings and cast a glance at the southerly belt. Therewith we shall leave it for today!