AWDYOO
HE saw at last that I had little sympathy with the part he had assumed;
and with a wily insight and versatility he snaked himself round into a
confidential conversation on our next step. He told me that he was glad
we had come off so well-laden with provisions; for he wished to avoid
the next islet in the chain, Awdyoo, or the isle of journalism; it was
the foulest place on the earth, and no one ever landed there who could
avoid it.
It was the quarantine station, whither all the scribo-maniacs were
deported. Every island but Aleofane had used it as an asylum for those
who were afflicted with the desire to address their neighbours in
writing or type concerning their neighbours’ affairs and characters. In
Aleofane the government controlled and utilised the morbid state of mind
for the advantage of the governors. In other islands it was lamented and
guarded against as one of the foulest of contagious diseases; once it
had taken root in a community, they knew there was no eradicating it
except by the most wholesale exile. It generally caught the meanest and
most malignant natures, too, and turned them into moral sewers. They
would not let the affairs of their neighbours alone, and stirred up
every mud pool until it became offensive; and, when they could not find
anything in the shape of scandal or foible or quarrel, they had to
manufacture; so they filled the citizens’ minds with lies about each
other, and with cues of attack or offence. They fomented bad blood, and
infected the whole community with every spiritual disease that could
possibly approach it. There was no lunacy that Riallaro so greatly
feared as that of journalism, it was so disgusting and so swiftly
spreading an epidemic of the mind. Every man who was touched with it
came to fancy himself absolved from all laws of courtesy, honour, and
morality; he assumed that he was practically omniscient, and whosoever
dared to question this assumption had to be pursued to the death with
his most envenomed and deadliest weapons, malice, slander, ridicule,
misrepresentation, impudence, lies. They had all agreed at a conference
many centuries before that there were no such dangerous madmen, and that
their mental disease spread more quickly than a plague. They had
therefore fixed on Awdyoo, one of the most isolated of the islets, as
the hospital for this epidemic; and whoever showed any symptoms of it in
any island was deported thither.
The place had become a complete pandemonium in these centuries. The
inhabitants had substituted physical means of attack for their old
spiritual weapons, for every one of them had grown so thick-hided from
perpetual attack of the others that the foulest charges fell lightly on
them. They laughed to scorn the most irritating slanders and lies and
banter and mimicry, the favourite methods of their journalism. So, to
relieve their feelings, they had to translate their moral and
intellectual warfare into physical. And the weapons they used were the
physical equivalents of their old journalistic methods of attack; they
had great air-guns, from which they shot various mixtures more or less
glutinous; if they found someone they wished to parasite, it was butter;
if they had a rival or neighbour to quarrel with and blacken, it was
ink; other preparations were paste variously coloured and
stench-generative, filth highly granulated with pebbles, and the extract
of cuttlefish mingled with the poisons of various plants and animals.
Their missiles were not absolutely lethal; they were only noisome and
inconvenient until washed off. They were made into minute pellets with a
hard gelatine shell, so that they made no commotion in the olfactory
nerves till broken. Even those they wished to honour were incommoded by
the streams of butter that soon streaked their clothes and face. Honour,
flattery, from them was almost as little desired as their hostile
attacks; and it was one of the islands which no one visited unless under
a stern sense of duty or the incitement of some heroic mood or from
accident. Yet they were thoroughly convinced that they were the arbiters
of all reputation in the world. If they laughed, mankind trembled and
were sick. If they threatened, the orb shook. If they approved,
posterity accepted their verdict and threw up their caps in applause. A
nod or a frown from them had as great effect as a thunder-storm or an
earthquake. Their fiat was immortal, even though they should immediately
contradict it, as they generally did. Their respect for principles and
facts and truths continued as long as these continued to support their
conclusions and beliefs; and then the alliance was broken; they
considered that no loyalty was due to things that were disloyal; it was
a case, then, of internecine warfare; veiled in great professions of
respect and devotion for the enemy, if only it would cease to be
hostile. Their treatment of persons was based on the same ideal of
rights; omnipotence was not to be trifled with; omniscience was not to
be questioned.
What was their religion? It was the Veiled Ego. They believed that the
only true way of making divine was by mystification. Hide the average
personality under namelessness and mystery, and you give it the
attributes of godhead; its utterances, however feeble, gather strength
from the secrecy of their source, and seem to come from the mouth, if
not from the heart, of mankind. The primary article of their creed was
this: a voice from behind any veil, however tawdry or foul, becomes the
voice of the people; and the voice of the people is the voice of God.
Every man of them, therefore, had become a god; and it was his object to
bring the rest of the world to worship at his shrine, or sheet, behind
which he ever concealed himself. He believed it was only a matter of
time, when the whole universe would fall at his feet. Meantime his
fellows on his own island had to be subdued to the true faith; and his
whole time was spent in warfare and the invention of new forms of
attack, especially of ambush. He was filled with complete faith in the
righteousness and ultimate triumph of his cause, and was ever asserting
that truth will prevail, at the very moment that he was manufacturing
fiction and stench pellets for the conversion of his neighbours and the
salvation of their souls. By truth he meant his own deliverances. For
the gist of his creed was this: “There is no god but I, veiled under We,
the essence and sum of all created beings; and I, veiled under We, is
his prophet.”
I had become so deeply interested in his account of Awdyoo, and he in
his narrative, that we had not noticed a dark band round the horizon
broaden and gradually obliterate the islets. A cold effluence from it
had crept over us to the effacement of our compass and landmarks. The
mist soon closed and shut out the sun and sky, and then we knew not
where we were or whither we headed. We dared not move lest we should
drift far from both land and our course. We had only to throw ourselves
passively into the bottom of the canoe and await a change. Sneekape was
evidently much moved, and did not add to my cheerfulness by telling me
that these mists were frequent and long around Awdyoo; and that they
were brought about by the everlasting hail of gelatinous missiles that
rayed forth stench when burst.
Two nights fell upon us starless, like the walls of a prison, and still
the mist rose not. Our provisions would not last many days; but we felt
that the boat and the sea were drifting under us, or that the mist was
floating swiftly over us. It must have been about midday, when my
companion started from his prostrate position, and put his hand to his
nose. “It’s Awdyoo,” he exclaimed with bated breath. He knew it by the
indescribable medley of smells that floated over the islet as from a
thousand chemical factories, and he fancied that their repertory of
missiles must have greatly enlarged since his last approach to it. There
was a new variety in the fetid redolence of the atmosphere. If all the
putrescent waters and heaps of the world, all its assafœtida and noisome
plants, and all its polecats and skunks, had been gathered into one
centre, and all the exhalations from them turned into one nozzle, the
result would have been aromatic and balmy beside this mephitic stench.
It was not alone the nose that it invaded, but every sense and pore of
the body; the whole of our human system seemed to be mastered by the
olfactory section of it. We longed for one sniff even of the crater of
Klimarol.
Gradually the sense of smell got partially paralysed, and a smart
grating sound shivering through the framework of our canoe recalled our
mental force to eyes and ears. The current was bearing us over a
sand-bank, and we could see a dim, low line as of land beyond. We rose
in frenzy to our oars, and pushed off; and the current bore us past
several tongues of land, and then, it seemed, out into deep water. We
spent hours in the struggle before it succeeded. Happily the veil was
close drawn over the whole scene. But it was now near noon, and the
strength of the midday sun began to penetrate the thick gossamer of
floating moisture. In a brief time the whole pall lifted, and we saw the
island lying at a safe distance, yet near enough to show us the
inhabitants and their occupations. It looked as if they had all hung out
a very dirty washing to dry; for there flapped in the light wind, that
had rent the veil of mist, hundreds of long sheets that had once been
white. Out from behind them peeped the nozzles of air-guns and of men
and women, and back and forward darted various forms of familiar
animals, whose appropriate noises we could still hear in the distance.
My companion explained, with a smile at my mistaken conjecture, that
these sheets were their entrenchments, behind which they were nameless
and secret, that on them they printed threats and challenges and abuse
for the benefit of rivals and enemies; and when anyone approached they
poured forth a shower of stench pellets upon him, or chased him in the
disguise of some animal.
One by one they saw us; and a howl of execration rose from them and
gathered force as they collected into a crowd. There was evidently great
excitement; we had still one long spur of land to pass, though happily
at a distance. They galloped with all their following and their
artillery towards it. It was a narrow escape for us. We had just shot
past it into deeper water, when they arrived at its point and set their
guns in order. The pellets fell short; but as they struck the water they
broke and infected the air with putrescence. One unfortunately touched
the gunnel and bespattered Sneekape; and he acknowledged that they must
have invented some new odours surpassing for their strength and
noisomeness. Yet, as the current and wind drifted us out of the reach of
the raining stenches, it was almost a pleasure to have only the
offensive fetor of my companion’s hair and clothes near me. We lowered
the islet into a thin line by distance; then we could see them scatter
like insects to their various sheets; and night sheltered us soon with
its cool neutrality of perfume. My odorous mate had dipped himself again
and again into the sea and wrung himself out, till at last only a faint
reminiscence of the polecat hung about him. It was faint enough to let
me listen to his diverting chatter as we drifted. He assured me that the
current would bear us of itself to the next islet in the chain.
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