RIALLARO
THE ARCHIPELAGO OF
EXILES
BY
GODFREY SWEVEN
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1901
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COPYRIGHT, 1901
BY
=G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS=
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
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[Illustration]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION. THE MYSTERIOUS SHOT 1
I.— RESURRECTIONS 8
II.— RIALLARO 15
III.— LANDING 22
IV.— THE LANGUAGE 26
V.— ALEOFANIAN SOCIETY AND RELIGION 35
VI.— ALEOFANIAN DEVOTION TO TRUTH 39
VII.— SOCIAL CUSTOMS 52
VIII.— ABSTINENCE 58
IX.— THE ORGANISATION OF REPUTE 68
X.— THE CHURCH AND JOURNALISM 76
XI.— THE BUREAU OF FAME 99
XII.— FREEDOM AND REVOLUTION 107
XIII.— IMPRISONMENT AND ESCAPE 117
XIV.— THE VOYAGE TO TIRRALARIA 122
XV.— TIRRALARIA 139
XVI.— SNEEKAPE 146
XVII.— THE MIDNIGHT ASCENT AND FLIGHT 177
XVIII.— MEDDLA 190
XIX.— WOTNEKST 199
XX.— FOOLGAR 217
XXI.— AWDYOO 237
XXII.— JABBEROO 244
XXIII.— VULPIA 251
XXIV.— WITLINGEN AND ADJACENT ISLANDS 255
XXV.— KLORIOLE 267
XXVI.— SWOONARIE 286
XXVII.— FENERALIA 292
XXVIII.— THE VOYAGE AND THE WRECK 297
XXIX.— NOOKOO 303
XXX.— THE VOYAGE TO BROOLYI 308
XXXI.— MESKEETA 312
XXXII.— COXURIA 320
XXXIII.— HACIOCRAM 328
XXXIV.— SPECTRALIA 332
XXXV.— THE VOYAGE CONTINUED 350
XXXVI.— BROOLYI 359
XXXVII.— NOOLA 376
POSTSCRIPT 419
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RIALLARO
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[Illustration]
RIALLARO
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INTRODUCTION
THE MYSTERIOUS SHOT
“DEAD, for a ducat, dead,” roared Somm, as he shouldered his gun and
rushed to the beach. Nothing had come within reach of shot all afternoon
till, in the thickening twilight, a flash of broad wings in the distance
awakened our camp. “A wounded albatross,” shouted both my companions, as
they peered through the shuttling grey of the evening, and watched the
south wind, still wild with the force of storm, shepherd some baffled
creature of wings up towards our nestling-place. “Some still stranger
bird,” I thought, as we seized our guns and ran to the edge of the
cliff. The sudden descent of night checked further question; and as the
winged thing gleamed along the face of the precipice, three shots echoed
across the sound, and, in a lull of the fitful gusts, we heard a dull
plunge in the water far below.
It seemed but a few minutes till we met Somm in the rocky hollow that
was the harbour for our boat; he had rowed out and back, and was leaning
over some dark object that lay in the stern. Not a sign of feather or
anything that gleamed was there about it. It was the form of a human
being, apparently dead. We bore it up through the bush with the tender
care that diggers are wont to give to the corpse of a comrade. Our
burden was so light that we expected to look upon a thin, emaciated
body. But, as we laid it in the flicker of our hut fire, we were amazed
to see the rounded form and ruddy cheeks of the dead stranger.
We stripped him of his wrapping,—a strange muslin-like transparent
toga,—and searched for the gunshot wound. Except for one broad bruise,
there was no mark on the body. And then it began to dawn upon us that
this had nothing to do with the flashing wings, or our shots, that we
were guiltless of human blood. It was a case of drowning, but not yet
dead. And we set to work to draw the clogging water from his heart and
lungs. Slowly the breath began to come and the blood to circulate. The
bosom heaved and we felt ourselves in the presence of another and a
stranger human soul. What he was, whence he came, whirled through our
minds in silence. Faint and in need of rest he manifestly was. We poured
some stimulant down his throat and laid him on one of our rude beds of
manuka and fern. We saw him fall into a deep and healthy sleep. And dawn
was already threatening the east with flickering light when we went into
the open and drew a long, sweet breath.
We consulted together over the strange occurrence, and determined to
search the fiord for traces of the winged thing that flashed out at our
shots. Before we had gone far, we found a pair of huge fans that had
drifted into one of the frequent channels amongst the rocks. They were
not of feathers, but of some strong, transparent, and almost weightless
material that did not wilt in the sun or the wet. We lifted them, and
there hung by them dragging in the water filmy strings like the long
tentacles of a medusa. We cut them adrift, and bore the strange
wing-like floats up to our cliff. Each of them seemed to move on a pivot
with ease, and almost rose on the gentle breeze into which the storm had
now died. After full examination of them, we laid them far back in the
cavern, which we used as our storehouse and larder, and thought no more
about them.
We cooked and ate our morning meal, and then spread out over the bush
that overlooked the waters of the sound, forgetful of the stranger whom
we had left in one of our huts. We were in search of gold, and, having
found faint traces of it on the small, fan-like beaches that intervalled
the sheer precipices on our side, we had been prospecting several months
for the alluvial pocket or the reef from which the glittering specks had
wandered down. The following week we were rewarded with success; but, as
we have no desire to have our noble solitude disturbed by the noise of a
frenzied, gambling crowd,—we are but woodmen and sealers and
photographers to the outside world when it intrudes in the shape of
tourists,—I shall not mention at present the name of the New Zealand
fiord in which we live.
I was working up a watercourse, panning the sand and dirt that lay in
the crevices and occasional levels, at times startled by a weka that
impudently slid through the undergrowth and eyed me close at hand, or by
the harsh call of the kea, as it flew from some resting-place and
circled in the air. Rudely awakened from my absorption, I looked out on
the marvellous scene that lay at my feet; precipice towered over
precipice, often forest-clad from base to summit. Almost sheer below me
slept the waters of the sound, landlocked as if it were a lake. Only the
indignant cry of the kea, or the weka’s raucous whistle, or the echo of
a distant avalanche ever broke the silence of this solitary land. Never
did it cease to throw its shadow on my thoughts or stir their sense of
beauty or their sadness.
Absorbed in contemplation of its sublimity, I sat for a moment on a rock
that rose out of the bush. I almost leapt from it, startled; a voice,
unheralded, fell “like a falling star” through the soundless air. I had
heard no footstep, no snap of trodden twig or rustle of reluctant
branch. My senses were so thrilled with the sound that its purport shot
past them. There at the base of the rock stood the strangest figure that
ever met my eyes.
It was the sea-trove we had left sleeping in the hut—a small, well-knit
frame like that of a north-country Englishman; but folded though it was
in the slender gauzy garment we had unwound from it the night before, I
felt conscious of a radiance that seemed to rid it of its opaque
substantiality; it was as if lit from within; the face was luminous and
clear, like the star-limpid waters of the fiord at night. My eyes were
drawn to search the depths; yet the veil of flesh and blood still hid
all but the aurora-like flashings of thought and feeling that swept in
and out across the features. There was the play of some strong inward
tumult, the revival, I soon found, of long-dead memories. I sat dumb as
a stone, too much moved to break the silence, too much awed by the face
to know what to say. It seems that my face too, with its weather-beaten
vigour of northern life, had stirred the nature of the stranger to its
depths; a long-forgotten existence had surged up in him from the
darkness of the past, and he was recovering it feature by feature. I
have often watched the conflict of cloud and wind, of light and gloom,
across the torn azure of night’s infinity before the coming of a
tempest; but the sight did not approach in intense magnetism the dizzy
chase of shadow and gleam across this singular countenance.
At last the turmoil had passed its crisis. The memories had fallen into
array. And, in slow but passionate northern English strangely shot with
silvery rhythm, I was asked what country this was and whether I was not
an Englishman. My palsy of speech vanished. And the familiar words,
uttered though they were in new accents, led me back into the common
world of question and answer. I found it was the Britain of a generation
ago he knew, before the colonies of the Pacific had focussed her new
spirit of enterprise, or transmuted their golden dreams. He remembered
the mining fever of Australia, but it was news that it had smitten New
Zealand too.
As I spoke with him, he seemed to be dragging his language out of the
depths of sleep. His words and recognition of my meaning came half
reluctantly. And through them wove fitfully hints and after-gleams of
some intervening existence that had reached a higher plane than that of
his youth. The ethereal ring would come into his voice, the translucent
look into his face, and then vanish before the touch of those lower
terrene reminiscences. Yet even amidst them there would appear at times
the tremulous appeal of human pathos. As our words approached the
memories of his childhood, they sounded from his lips like the funeral
bells of a village folded in mist. The grosser humanity that seemed to
come back to him from a buried past grew shadowed and mournful with
piteous thoughts. There sighed out of his lost youth a winter wind that
sounded through the crevices of ruined cities and over uncounted graves.
It took weeks for us to reach more familiar intercourse; and this
alternation of a common and ethereal humanity in him continued to break
the magnetism that often seemed about to bind us. We came from the same
district of the North, although he evaded all questions as to the
locality; and I came to know by instinct the topics to avoid with him.
He would listen by the hour to stories and descriptions of the dales and
hills; but he never permitted a reference that would fix his native
place or time. One serious difficulty at first was his refusal of all
our ordinary food; he would not touch the flesh of animal in any form,
and we had to give up to him all our meal and flour and lentils. But, as
we saw him at times grow faint, we introduced some of our animal soups
into his food—for he refused all food that needed the use of teeth. A
singular change seemed to come over him from this time; he began to grow
more like our muscular, carnal humanity, and his moods of limpid
ethereality were rarer and briefer. Thereafter he seemed to lower
himself more to our plane of thought and life, though even then he rose
long flights above us. Why he stayed with rough miners like us so long,
when he might have shone in the most brilliant circles of Europe, was a
mystery; but it became clear at a later stage. He worked with me and had
a marvellous power of revealing the secrets of the rocks and the crust
of the earth; like the fabulous divining rod he knew what metal lay
below, and how far we should have to seek for it; and ten thousand times
over he repaid all that his living cost. We offered him his share of our
partnership; but our proposal was ever smiled aside as if it came from
children in some childish play. He seemed to look years beyond our point
of view.
How deep the debt we owe him when we think of all he taught us! Beside
it all else sinks into nothingness. And there is no way in which we can
vent our gratitude to him but by telling his story to other men as he
told it to us. We could have spent all our days as well as all our
nights in listening to him. But it was only now and then he fell into
the mood of reminiscence. And so great a value did we attach to his
every word that after each conversation or monologue we retired into our
storehouse cave and wrote it down. We did our best to give his own
language and form, but memory is treacherous, and we felt at each
attempt that we had marred the beauty or nobleness of his utterances by
phrases of our own or by the tinge of our personalities. He followed no
sequence of time or circumstance; for he spoke as his own spirit or our
themes moved him. But out of our rough jottings we have pieced together
the following narrative, most of it our representation at the moment of
his speech, some of it from the distant memory of incidental talks with
him in the bush, when we were far from paper or pen. It is as close an
approach to his very words as our love and reverence have been able to
achieve.
GODFREY SWEVEN,
THEODORE SOMM,
CHRISTIAN TROWM.
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CHAPTER I
RESURRECTIONS
GOD, God! how Thy past clings to us like shadows, turn we as we may
forever to the sunrise! Out of the night and from beyond it come forms
that seem buried below the reach of grave-desecrating memory; they plead
with us and claim us as their kin, and all the nobleness we have
laboured after succumbs to the witchery of their piteous appeals.
It was indeed pathetic to see his face as he struggled with a
past that had been dead for a generation. He thrust it from him
and it would return. He reached out for dim features of it he
had loved, and they eluded him. At last came out of the wreckage
of dreams the solidarity of life and law.
How tyrannous the bond of nature is! What love my mother bore me, and
how the memory of it wells over the desert of my youth! Had she lived, I
never could have broken with my European life. It is maternal love that
binds age to age. A torrent of inborn feeling wakes in me for the old
graveyard where she lies overlooking the sea. I know she is not there,
and yet I could kiss the dear earth that covers her ashes. From her I
drew all that was best in me; to her, only a fisherman’s daughter, I
looked for every thought that controlled me in boyhood. My father, the
earl’s son, disowned for his lowly love and marriage, was only a phantom
to me, honoured but unreal; for he died soon after I was born. Nor could
I ever own the churlish stock that thrust him forth for loyalty to a
peasant. Often did the crabbed old grandsire try to woo me from the
sea-smelling hut to his great castle; as often was his pride wounded by
refusal. What had I to do with a race still savage in its adherence to
caste, and incapable of seeing the beauty of a character apart from
position? All my being belonged to the gentler, more civilised nature of
my mother; I was obstinately democratic in my sympathies, hating even
the shadow of primeval aristocracy that rests upon childhood and youth.
One thing he succeeded in doing. He drove my mother, by dint of threats,
expostulations, and reasonings, to send me for a few years to one of the
large English public schools. And this period was the purgatory of my
life, such despotisms and persecutions demonised over the unconforming
nucleus of my character. And, when summer came, her love, the uncouth
sympathy of the fishermen, the rhythmic sea, and the steadfast foreheads
of the cliffs cooled the fever of my wronged spirit. Only the
persistence of the old fire-eater with his instinctive valuation of the
still savage virtues of his caste could keep her from yielding to my
never-ending entreaties. Not till palsy shut the gates of his expression
did she take courage to resist his influence, and let me remain with her
and solitude as my teachers.
A few years more and his iron spirit left its long-dead tenement. His
title and mansion and great estates were thrust upon me. But I refused
to acknowledge the position except so far as to divide the revenue
amongst the poor. What did I or my mother need more than we had? Why
should we leave our lowly friends, and our comradeship with the sea?
What good purpose could it serve to spend these vast sums every year on
personal enjoyment that would be none to us? We stayed in our little
dwelling perched in a nook of the cliffs, and I followed my ancestral
calling over the ever-moving element that had nursed me. Courage and
lowliness and love of mankind sank deeper and deeper into my system.
Books and thought and the ever-changeful waves tutored my spirit and
widened the issues of life. I began to feel strangely dissatisfied with
all that was called civilisation, seeing how far it fell short of
justice and truth and liberty. I was harassed with my own destiny and
even more with that of mankind. How could I better my thoughts by
heaping the responsibilities of lucre upon them? The everlasting
antagonism between our longing for rest and our need of labour goaded me
as it did all others. And how was change of sphere or multiplication of
financial cares to effect a truce? No; it seemed to me, in my youthful
romancing, that the possibility of cure lay not in increasing the
desires and their means of satisfaction, but in reducing the needs. The
denominator in this poor fraction of the universe called human life was
more plastic than the numerator. What was the acquisition of wealth and
influence but the insertion of ciphers in our little decimal of
existence? What could the world do for the inborn sickness of the human
spirit?
If the rest was to be found, it was in primitive conditions of life,
perhaps in some obscure tribe that lived close to nature and had never
heard an echo of our western world. With the restless nomadic instincts
of boyhood and youth passionate within me, I longed to set forth on a
voyage of discovery into seas untraversed. The sea-ferment stirred my
Scandinavian blood. To rove untrammelled, to meet sudden storms and
dangers, to hold intercourse with pure human souls fresh from God’s hand
and unstained with the duplicities of luxurious grasping races—this was
the dream of my early years. But my mother would not stir from the loved
shore of her girlhood or the grave of the husband who had died too young
to shatter her romance. And she was a comrade from whom I could not
part. Year after year had bound us closer together, and, before manhood
had unloosed the reins of my will, her forty years and locality—a
stronger influence in her sex—had riveted down their fetters upon her
spirit.
But ah, God! there came a time——
The surge of memory was too great for him. He would not let the
tears come and he fled out into the woods. We saw no more of him
for days. Nor could he approach the subject but with wild
resurgence of sorrow that choked up speech. But by hint and
inference we were able to mosaic together the history of this
tempest that swept through his life. His mother had died not
long after he had attained his majority, and his grief palsied
his energies for almost a year. But driven to the net and the
sea again by sheer fatigue of brooding, youth reflooded his
veins with the old passions and ideals, and the flame in his
blood mastered grief. Then came the thought that the wealth he
had repelled so long might enable him to fulfil the dream of his
boyhood, and to reach some land untainted by the vices of
Europe. And the discovery that part of his heritage was a yacht
driven by the marvellous new power of steam, that laughed at
wind, and wave, and current, made him as one possessed.
Everything bent to his new idea. He gathered his old comrades
and playmates together, and he went with them to master the
whole craft of the steam-engine and the screw; they learned
every item of the marine engineer’s trade; and each he set to
gain skill in some special part. He travelled himself from
university to university, from laboratory to laboratory in order
to master the best that was known in the physical sciences. He
fitted out his yacht with the apparatus and material that would
be needed for repairing any part of her, furnished her with
everything that would enable him to pass years away from
civilisation and to gain influence over the wild races he might
encounter. Nor did he fail to collect for her a library of the
finest books, not only imaginative and scientific, but
pertaining to the arts. And, when all was ready and his
machinery and crew had been tested in brief voyages north and
west across the winter and summer Atlantic, he bade farewell to
his hut upon the shore and the loved graveyard on the hill and
set out to seek adventure and a land of primitive simplicity in
untravelled seas.
How our blood surged with delight as we swept away to the south under
full sail and head of steam! The ridged currents of the main, the
wind-curled summits of the great billows only made our hearts to tingle.
We were out free with God’s elements, our friends; no rumour of cruelty
or injustice or bitter grief to harass our spirits. Young, bold,
well-mated, bound by the ties of common tastes and common traditions,
nothing seemed to us too difficult to attempt.
Round the old cape of storms, down into the latitude of icebergs, we
easted till we hailed the coasts of Australia. In her towns and cities
we learned from traders and sailors all we could of the islands that lay
in the Pacific. Much of romance, much of dim rumour based on fact
vitiated their tales and yet drew us on with magnetic power. Past New
Zealand with her sombre fiords and the argent glory of her mountains we
swept, gleaning from her sealers and whalers still more of the mysteries
of the dim Pacific world we were about to see. Our blood coursed quicker
in our veins as we touched the first palm-fringed atolls of the coral
belt. And every new island we reached we seemed to get closer and closer
to the centre of the primitive world we desired to visit.
For through the narratives that we heard of the wonders of the great
Pacific archipelago there ran an undercurrent of reference to some
mystic region that had deeply impressed the imaginations of all
frequenters of this tropical sea, whether natives or foreigners. The
islanders would scarcely speak of it and a curtain of superstition hung
round it unlifted. Even Europeans spoke of it with bated breath.
But the more they evaded my questions, the more was I roused to get at
some definite knowledge. From island to island we sailed in quest of the
direction of this strange mirage of the sea. At times I concluded that
it was but a religious myth, a hades invented by the priests or by the
crude imagination of early worshippers to account for the misery of man
and to define the destiny of his wilder nature. Then would come some
hint that pointed to physical fact as its basis.
After weary, half-baffled investigation, I seemed to find a certain
nucleus of reality. There lay away to the south-east of Oceania, out of
the track of ships, an enormous region of the Pacific sealed by a ring
of fog that had never lifted in the memory of man. Ships had sailed into
it and never come out again; canoes that had ventured too near had been
sucked in by the eddies that circled round it, and never been seen
again. Above it there flashed strange lights that dimmed the stars and
the play of gleaming wings seemed at times to rise far above it and
vanish. To some islanders it was the refuge of the souls of their dead;
to others it was the home of the demons who issued half-seen,
half-unseen to torture them with plague and storm and disaster.
When I had discovered the direction in which it lay and defined its
position on my chart, we ran back to the coast of New Zealand for coal
and other supplies that would last me months, if not years. All ready, I
summoned my staunch comrades who formed the crew and told them the bent
of my enterprise, laying stress upon its dangers and uncertainty. Not
one flinched, perhaps because their lives lay all in the future; none
had left wife or sweetheart behind, none was old enough to have fixed
ambition or a desire of settled existence. The sea had bred in them
through their long ancestry a love of its mystery and its many-voiced
dreams. None but imaginative natures had attached themselves to me in
youth. And on board, during their long periods of rest, it was romance,
and poetry, and other books of imagination they read. Not one of them
had escaped the lotus-breathing air of these dreamy archipelagoes. Not
one of them but loathed the thought of western life with its mean
ambitions and falsities. Anything was better than the labyrinth of
disease and wrong and crime wherein they must lose their way in old
Europe. Even without such considerations, there was enough loyalty to
their old comrade and leader to make them follow him wherever he would
go. A cheer ended our conference, and we weighed anchor to a new chant
with the refrain “Heave ho! let’s seek the secret of Riallaro.”
[Illustration]
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