[00:00.64]Chapter eight.
[00:03.31]The college for inventors.
[00:07.52]I soon got fed up with Laputa.
[00:10.86]The people were so clever, I had no one to talk to.
[00:15.63]I waited until Laputa was hovering over a place called Lagardo,
[00:23.00]and then got myself set down on a chain in just the same way as I'd arrived.
[00:29.99]It was a relief to be on firm ground again, but I found there was a terrible famine in Lagardo.
[00:39.44]It turned out that their leaders had visited Laputa a few years before,
[00:46.28]and since then, the people had been growing all their food by the latest scientific methods.
[00:55.73]In fact, they had set up a special college for inventors, and they were sure that soon they'd be growing more food than they could eat.
[01:08.17]Unfortunately, none of these new methods was quite working yet.
[01:14.66]And so at the moment, it was only in a few old-fashioned, unscientific areas that people had enough to eat.
[01:25.09]Of course, I was very curious to visit the college for inventors, which had hundreds of rooms, and an inventor hard at work in each one.
[01:36.05]In the first room, I met a nice man whose clothes were rather burnt at the edges.
[01:42.97]He had a wonderful scheme for catching sunbeams in cucumbers and then letting them out again in cold weather.
[01:52.17]I had to lend him some money, though, because cucumbers were terribly expensive at that time of year.
[01:59.88]There were so many inventors, I can't describe them all, but I can't leave out the man trying to squash air into bricks, and the man who wanted to build houses starting off with the roofs.
[02:13.50]Oh, and there was someone else who had made a machine that wrote truly original books by putting words together in strange orders.
[02:25.36]This man was very worried in case someone stole his invention.
[02:30.63]But I promised him that although people are always stealing new ideas, I was certain no one would think of stealing this one.
[02:40.73]There was one invention that would have worked very well, except that, unfortunately, the ladies and ordinary people refused to use it.
[02:49.86]It was an invention for saving people's breath.
[02:55.40]Instead of having to speak, you carried things about to show people.
[03:01.92]You could quite often see two clever men take off their backpacks and talk for ages by showing each other the things inside.
[03:11.69]Then they'd politely help each other on with their packs again and go on their way.
[03:19.12]The college had a marvelous school, too, where the boys and girls learned things by eating slices of bread with their lessons printed on it.
[03:29.92]I'm afraid the children were very difficult though.
[03:34.92]Not only did they keep on being sick, but they were always sneaking in ordinary food to eat, which stopped the invention working.
[03:46.15]I suppose I should mention the law inventors at this point.
[03:50.93]They were mostly quite crazy, but they did have one good idea.
[03:56.40]Their plan was that whenever there was a problem, someone should stamp hard on a politician's feet every day until it was solved.
[04:06.54]There were hundreds more inventors in the college, but I decided I'd be better off making my way home.
[04:15.40]It turned out there was no boat sailing for Europe for a month, so I visited the island of Glub Dubdrib while I was waiting.
[04:27.33]The people of Glub Dubdrib live very easy lives because they have found a way to make the ghosts there look after them.
[04:37.14]The governor's palace was absolutely full of ghosts, and I'm sure they were very useful.
[04:45.19]But the sadness on the poor ghosts' faces made my flesh go cold with horror.
[04:52.86]There were quite a few celebrity ghosts, so I grabbed the chance to speak to them.
[05:01.76]Aristotle, the oldest of them, was terribly grumpy and said that Mr.
[05:07.51]Newton's new theory of gravity would be out of date before we knew it.
[05:14.36]In fact, I'm afraid that nearly all the celebrities were a dreadful disappointment.
[05:23.90]As one of them said to me, being nice is an awful nuisance if you're trying to get things done.
[05:33.23]I left Glub Dubdrib to catch the ship for Lugnag, and arrived there safely after being guided by pilots through the very dangerous sandbanks that guard the harbor.
[05:49.41]When the king of Lugnag heard about me, he sent for me to come and lick up the dust in front of him.
[05:57.24]Well, I thought this was just a saying, but when I got to court, I found that anyone who visited the king really did have to crawl forward to his throne, licking the floor as he went.
[06:11.12]I was lucky, really, because they'd swept the floor.
[06:17.54]But sometimes, if the king is annoyed with someone, he will have the floor covered in dirt on purpose.
[06:26.83]If he is very annoyed with someone, he will sprinkle down poison.
[06:35.84]The strangest people I met in Lugnag were the Strauldbrugs, who can live forever.
[06:44.33]I was really amazed when I first heard about them.
[06:48.61]Why, I thought, if I could live forever, I'd spend a couple of hundred years making my fortune, and then I would learn everything about everything and give everybody lots of advice.
[07:03.46]But when I visited a Strauldbrug, I changed my mind.
[07:09.40]It was horrible.
[07:13.80]The Strauldbrugs never die, but they do get old.
[07:20.88]They lose their teeth, and their loved ones, and their memories, but they still live on and on, getting poorer and sicker forever and ever.
[07:38.92]The king of Lugnag gave me a red diamond, which I later sold for a small fortune.
[07:46.88]But I left that country very gladly.
[07:51.42]I spent 15 days on a voyage to Japan and boarded the ship Amboyna there.
[08:01.93]The Amboyna sailed with a fair wind, and on 16th April, 1710, I landed in England after many years away.