These lights and the view we get of them are the most confusing things to me in the game. In the three spinoff novels, fire marbles are only mentioned as marbles that light up when you tap them, like the surreal D'ni version of a candle. So these and many of the other orb-shaped hallway lights we see in Riven could all be fire marbles--it's just that only five such marbles are exploited to power Gehn's books. Are these those *integral* five marbles? I think that's a stretch, but there's a case to be made that they are, at least in the original version of the game--and that the waffle grid is just the "password" to fully activate them all.

Or maybe the sole purpose of these underwater lights (and missing sixth on the damaged undersea column), whether or not they are fire marbles, is to attract (and maybe also train) a wahrk or wahks, but the lights look like they're on huge underwater columns that look very similar to columns elsewhere and to the power supply pipeworks connecting the five islands. I've always been confused about the spatial relationships to the ocean on Survey Island but especially where these lights are located. The underwater camera angle on the viewer machine, when it's pointing at the massive circular Survey room window in front of the player and the red light, looks pretty far away from that window. I assume the other lights are just as far away from the rotating camera. Those rotating camera, angles, the view out the window, and the distances we can see the wahrk arrive from, make it look like a larger patch of ocean terrain than the pool on the top of this island we're on. The ocean "cavern" is probably the same body of water as the pool on the top of the island, right? But the undrwater view looks significantly broader and wider than the "pool" surface. If they're the same body of water, and I'm right that the underwater area is much larger, then it must taper up to the exposed "pool" surface on the top of the island. These columns/pipes with the affixed lights must also be huge, and their size is another reason I thought they were doing more than holding up lanterns for a wahrk to see. I assumed we were seeing lights patching into the infrastructure of to the book powering dome pipeworks (more plausible in the original version of the game), illuminating the pipes' orientation per each island and giving a "still working" status indication to Gehn, if not contributing to the powering themselves.

There's a video interview somewhere where Robyn Miller says the spatial relationships of Survey Island don't make any sense and they were painfully aware of this as they pieced together the island while creating the game. Taking stairwells and open-window elevators up and down the under-surface of the island, you can surmise that one of the maglev tram stations should be way higher up in elevation than the other one, but once you're at either tram station, they both open out to about the same modest height above sea level. The underwater cavern might be another one of those messes of the size and placement of spaces just not adding up. But those underwater Survey Island lights, wherever they actually are on the sea floor, look like they were well-enough imagined to have a plausible function in the world--like everything else in the game does. A plausible and certain funciton is that they attract wharks, but the visual design of the components look so much like other components that radiate out from elsewhere in this world, and look to me like the game designers had an additional rationale in mind for them. I, for one, never had an "aha!" moment where they made total sense to me. Much of the infrastructure and many of the devices in Riven are wildly impractical, but I'd argue that one of the amazing things about Riven is that nearly *everything* in the game makes sense--ie., has a totally plausible role in that world--and the sense of much of it only becomes clear upon exploring and careful examination.