The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-lytton — Read

I confess that my conversation with Aph-Lin, and the extreme coolness / with which he stated his inability to control the dangerous caprice of / his daughter, and treated the idea of the reduction into a cinder to / which her amorous flame might expose my too seductive person, took away / the pleasure I should otherwise have had in the contemplation of my / host's country-seat, and the astonishing perfection of the machinery / by which his farming operations were conducted. The house differed in / appearance from the massive and sombre building which Aph-Lin inhabited / in the city, and which seemed akin to the rocks out of which the city / itself had been hewn into shape. The walls of the country-seat / were composed by trees placed a few feet apart from each other, the / interstices being filled in with the transparent metallic substance / which serves the purpose of glass among the Ana. These trees were all in / flower, and the effect was very pleasing, if not in the best taste. We / were received at the porch by life-like automata, who conducted us / into a chamber, the like to which I never saw before, but have often on / summer days dreamily imagined. It was a bower -- half room, half garden. / The walls were one mass of climbing flowers. The open spaces, which / we call windows, and in which, here, the metallic surfaces were slided / back, commanded various views; some, of the wide landscape with its / lakes and rocks; some, of small limited expanses answering to our / conservatories, filled with tiers of flowers. Along the sides of the / room were flower-beds, interspersed with cushions for repose. In the / centre of the floor was a cistern and a fountain of that liquid light / which I have presumed to be naphtha. It was luminous and of a roseate / hue; it sufficed without lamps to light up the room with a subdued / radiance. All around the fountain was carpeted with a soft deep lichen, / not green (I have never seen that colour in the vegetation of this / country), but a quiet brown, on which the eye reposes with the same / sense of relief as that with which in the upper world it reposes / on green. In the outlets upon flowers (which I have compared to our / conservatories) there were singing birds innumerable, which, while we / remained in the room, sang in those harmonies of tune to which they are, / in these parts, so wonderfully trained. The roof was open. The whole / scene had charms for every sense -- music form the birds, fragrance from / the flowers, and varied beauty to the eye at every aspect. About all was / a voluptuous repose. What a place, methought, for a honeymoon, if a Gy / bride were a little less formidably armed not only with the rights / of woman, but with the powers of man! But when one thinks of a Gy, so / learned, so tall, so stately, so much above the standard of the creature / we call woman as was Zee, no! even if I had felt no fear of being / reduced to a cinder, it is not of her I should have dreamed in that / bower so constructed for dreams of poetic love.

The automata reappeared, serving one of those delicious liquids which / form the innocent wines of the Vril-ya.