KLORIOLE
THE gauntlet of stenches that we had run stifled us into deep and long
sleep. The sun was far up the sky when we awakened, and its heat seemed
somehow to have subdued the traces of Awdyoo to a faint, though pungent
and offensive, odour. We looked ahead and astern. The current was much
slower; some undercurrent in the opposite direction must have been
dragging it back. All trace of land had vanished behind us. But there
was either a cloud or the top of some hill on the sky-rim to which the
canoe was drifting. We fell into stupor again; and, when I stirred to
life, the stars were keen as stiletto points above us. I lay staring at
them till they became eyes that spoke to me of the deep night and the
infinite abysses wherein they were moved to tears. A warm breath
softened the distance between us and soothed my senses.
I must have been asleep again, dreaming that they had a language of
their own full of intensity of meaning, and that they bade me approach
them without fear; for the sunlight was around me, as I seemed to fall
from them with prosaic suddenness into the still fetid reminiscences of
Awdyoo.
At the moment of awakening there dropped upon me as I lay what seemed at
first almost an emanation from the gleam of heaven. I raised my head and
found that a white, bird-shaped float was lightly resting on the bottom
of the canoe. I lifted it and saw that it was covered with written or
printed characters. I handed it to my companion, who was also awake,
and, as he read, he burst into a derisive laugh. It was a love-poem, he
explained, written in the fulsome conventional language of Kloriole, as
he called the island we were approaching. He translated a few lines into
Aleofanian with a sneer:
Deity and sex combined,
Godlike despot of the mind!
Look on our eternal fate,
Ere the ages antedate
All that we shall be in death,
Mingling souls in fleeting breath.
God and woman, make me god;
With thy glances starlight-shod
Slay me; for I would be slain;
Slay me once and yet again;
Slay me with thy deadly kiss;
Sweet such apotheosis!
Let not mercy stay thy hand!
We shall never understand
All the god that in us lies
Till from death our spirits rise,
Never know what might we own
Till through space we wing alone
On from orb to orb of night,
Shedding our creative light;
Whilst our mortal worshippers
Watch from world to universe.
Free my spirit from afar,
Thou my love’s own avatar!
I was bewildered by the strange medley of love and religion and
mysticism. Sneekape saw the perplexity in my eyes, and with a gross
laugh tore the kite of love to pieces and flung them into the sea. He
expressed the greatest contempt for such feeble mystifications of the
delights of the senses. I confessed that I had not much sympathy or
admiration for such performances; they were, like buffoonery and wit, a
mere trick of the mind; it was generally lame thought that needed such
rhyme and verses as crutches; learn the hobbling gait early enough, and
you could go on to infinity. It was not at his contempt, then, that I
felt disgusted; it was perhaps at the petty sneer that accompanied its
expression.
In order to cast out the loathing, I began to wonder whence the missive
came. I looked back, and right above us loomed a great hill crowned with
a massive building, and up to the gigantic porch climbed innumerable
flights of steps cut into the living rock. Scattered over the
balustrades and niches and recesses that ornamented the upward course of
the stair stood or sat many beings fantastically dressed and looking up
either to the sky or to the edifice that broke the azure. Some were
floating what seemed paper kites; others were watching their flight, as
they rushed before the wind or fell like falling stars into the sea or
behind the hill, or vanished into the blue distance. I knew then whence
had come the amatory lyric that had butterflied into our canoe.
It was the marvellous ascension of the steps that struck me most. They
seemed to dwarf by their broad spacing and their number the enormous
building that crowned the height up which they clambered. How puny
seemed the men and women that moved about their upper flights. I could
see that they were human beings; but that was all. Even half-way up it
seemed a lark’s flight into the blue. It wearied the imagination to
count the gradings between; still more to think of the ascent, or the
long years that must have passed in chiselling out this daring work of
ambition.
The lowest flight had its knees in the ocean, and as we approached we
could see the verdant sea-hair float and fall across the rising wave or
shimmer in the ripple. For a hundred steps or more the sea in its tides
or its passions claimed dominance and left the record of its conquests.
We moored our canoe between two pillars cut in the rock, and attempted
to ascend. But it was a work of extreme difficulty and danger. Each step
had been smoothed into a slope by the feet of ages of climbers and by
the action of the waters; and the lubricant green, wherewith the waves
velveted them, made footing almost impossible. We slid and tumbled back
into the sea a dozen times, and each time we made effort to scale the
flight it became harder from the growing burden of water in our clothes.
At last one of the native climbers farther up indicated the sides of the
steps, where they were but roughly cut out of the rock. Swimming along
to the right side, we found there was almost the sierraed roughness of
nature. We could just catch some of the sharp points, and, by means of
these, and at first almost prostrate, we hauled ourselves over the sleek
garden of the tide. Then, finding the weed less silken and the rock less
jagged, we crept on our knees up many steps; and when we looked back we
saw traces of our own blood upon them. Then we looked into the notched
rock before us and saw the dark bloodmark of generations that had gone
before us stained deep into its texture. This lower portion of the
marvellous staircase was indeed hieroglyphed and pictured with human
lifeblood.
The thought made me shudder, as I looked back into the flood, for there
doubtless had been the grave of myriads. How could any merely human
fingers cling here when the waves were high, or the wind lashed them
into fury? Out in the open I could see the fins of sea-monsters glance
in the sun; there was the fate of the fallen climbers; there were the
scavengers and mortuary vaults of the feebly ambitious dead that yielded
to their destiny and fell; there was the reason why the sea around was
not one vast gehenna.
We were strong with exposure and exercise, our cuticle hardened and
thick; and yet we were wounded and torn by our upward efforts. We were
now almost sea-creatures from our life in the briny air and the splash
of the billows; and so, perhaps, it was that the man-eaters below let us
alone when we fell back into the waters; at any rate they swam far off
from us, as if they would have no dealings with such strangers.
At length we reached the upper margin of the sea’s domain, and sat down,
weary and faint, to let our blood harden on our wounds in the sun.
Around us stood a crowd of pale and shadowy forms, their long hair
matted or tressed over their shoulders, vague distance in their eyes,
and something that looked like a pen in their right hands. They fingered
our clothes and hair in a dreamy way, and sighed, and looked, and sighed
again. Then one or another would retire into the background and seat
himself on one of the steps, where others too, I now saw, were seated in
an attitude of meditation. They gazed into the sky, and then looked
intense; they ran their thin white fingers through their long hair; then
they consulted slips of paper, on which were evidently printed rules for
their guidance; they threw their heads wildly about; their eyes seemed
ready to burst from their sockets; they rose and flung their arms aloft;
they whirled around and danced at imminent risk of falling back into the
sea. Then I saw them settle into a stupor; their lips moved and mumbled
as if in sleep; they awoke, and over a sheet that they held in their
left hands their pens flew. These performances went on for almost an
hour till everyone around us had settled down to his pen and paper.
Sneekape whispered with a contemptuous smile that this was inspiration.
They had been waiting, probably months, for a new subject, and our
arrival had set them all poetically adrift. They had each hope of rising
another flight up the steps of fame, borne on the pinions of a new
ecstasy.
We rose to look at the frenzied bevy of poets. And now I saw that across
the head of the flight, on which we were, ran a lofty arabesque fence of
adamant with a narrow gate in the middle most elaborately bolted and
padlocked. Inside it stood in an attitude of attack a serried array of
lank forms, clothed in vestures that were splendidly formal, some
holding scissors on the end of long poles, others bearing in one hand
dirty, long-handled brushes, and, in the other, pots streaked with some
black and greasy fluid, a third set swinging censers alight, and a
fourth carrying huge inflated bags on their backs. They looked, a scowl
or a sneer on their villainous low brows, upon the writhing romancers on
the other side of the adamant scrollwork. Half of them were boys with a
low type of face that indicated more bravado than intelligence, more
flippancy than wit; of the others some had more years and more
truculence, and a look of envy and malice in their eye; the rest were
men bowed by years and despair of life, and on their faces was a look as
of pity and reminiscence.
This was the lower ring of acolytes of the great temple of Literary
Fame, Sneekape whispered to me; there were four divisions of them, as I
could see by their implements, and these were the snippers, the
defacers, the burners, and the windbaggers, as their Kloriolean names
might be translated. They had a mean and somewhat soiled shrine of Fame
on the left side of their rocky platform, and here relays of them kept
up continual worship, burning on the altar imaginative productions that
they caught.
My attention was drawn to the other side by negotiations going on there.
Some of the wild-haired youths, who had evidently finished the result of
their frenzy, had come up to the scroll-fence and were haggling and
bargaining with one or other of a group of sleek business-like men
within it. These were called the propagators, my companion said, and
their function was to supply the means for floating any new product of
the fancy towards the priests and the worshippers of the temple of Fame.
I saw that most of the pale youths returned to their seats on the steps
with a look of baffled eagerness in their eyes. They touched and
retouched their sheets and wearily erased and inserted with their pens.
A few succeeded in getting paper-floats with their complement of
gossamer thread and other apparatus from the propagators. And with the
gleam of proud achievement in their looks they prepared to attach their
writings to them and set them afloat. But most of the literary kites
refused to rise, and when thrown up into the air fell heavily back into
the sea and either sank or were torn under by the devouring monsters. A
few of more prosperous and cheerful appearance approached the
windbaggers; I watched one of them: aided by his propagator, he got some
coin or valuable transferred through the interstices of the fence into
the hidden palm of one of the sack-bearing acolytes, and before long he
had his kite afloat, dancing upon the puff of wind that issued from the
nozzle of his ally’s bag. The other acolytes made fierce lunges at it
with their scissors, or brush, or censer. Amongst those that managed to
float, one had its thread early snipped and fell over the parapet;
another sank, heavy from the foul effacement from an ink-brush; another
caught fire and was burned in a censer. Two succeeded in running the
gauntlet and floating higher; but at the next enclosure they succumbed
to the attacks from behind it. The owners of these were admitted within
the fence by which we stood; and I saw the proud smile on their faces.
One of them was persuaded to join the group of acolytes, and, when he
donned the vestments, he seemed to lose his old and picturesque
personality and take on the truculence of his new companions. The other
turned away from them with a weary but ambitious face and climbed up the
long flight towards the next barrier.
As I looked upwards I now perceived that there was a barrier, with a
crowd of acolytes and propagators on the one side and a diminishing
crowd of suppliants on the other, at the head of every flight. The
strange thing was that, as the distance increased, the size and
sleekness of each fence-divided bevy increased too, till up at the porch
of the temple, priests, propagators, and poets looked fat and almost
bloated; they reclined on rich couches, and were surrounded with the
luxuries that would fit an outdoor tropical existence. It was little
wonder that the thin, pale faces of the candidates below looked up with
such longing to that Olympus and Elysium in one. Sneekape pointed out to
me on each adamant barricade the meaning of the scrollwork; he
translated the letters; the announcement ran: “None enter the mighty
temple as gods but by this ascent.”
In the middle of the explanation we were startled by a wild cry and a
rush of the crowd around us to the right-hand parapet. We ran in the
same direction, and, hearing a fierce, gruntling noise, looked over and
saw one of the long-haired tribe being devoured by jackals. To keep
candidates for fame back from the land approach to the great stairs, an
iron-barred enclosure ran its whole length on both sides, and in this
lived a number of wild beasts, fed upon young poets and other seekers of
glory. The priests and propagators saw that the supply was kept up. It
was not long before the victim had completely vanished and his comrades
sat down with a new and stirring topic in this suicide for fame.
Perchance their wild sympathy with him might produce such a poem as
would open the gate for them. They were soon all absorbed in their new
inspiration.
In looking from one to another bowed figure, I saw a sheet flutter near
the parapet; I took it up and handed it to my companion. He laughed and
said it was evidently the young suicide’s bid for fame; the verses had
rhythm and meaning like this:
Sea-borne strangers, whence are ye?
We have nought but sorrow here;
Fate hath made you fancy free;
Fly this fame-envenomed sphere!
Hell-born torture would be bliss,
Soul-ecstatic, matched with this.
Ye have never known the care
Lives within a heart like mine;
Spirit palsied with despair,
Anguish past all anodyne,
Follow me where’er I flee.
Who can quench my agony?
Through the dawn-flushed arch ye came;
Bright new worlds are shining there,
Worlds dispassionate of fame,
Gloryless as they are fair.
Oh! to tenant freshly born
Some new star beyond the morn!
Ah! new life is stale as old,
Outlook dull as memory,
Death an idiot’s tale half-told,
Hell’s own caravansary.
God, if thou hast in thy breast
Love or pity, let me rest!
Nothingness, I thee implore,
Rid me of this vacuous dream,
Let me fade and be no more,
Be the phantom that I seem!
Sweet Oblivion, let me light
In annihilative night!
There was a loud, coarse laugh behind the barrier over this pessimistic
effusion and its baptism of blood, and what made it sound stranger was
that it rose from the midst of pæans and hosannahs over the poem that
had borne the other aspirant up to the second arabesque. The echo
sounded even to the porch; for the priests seemed to move and listen as
in a dream. I was eager to see the production that had stirred such a
commotion in the ranks of the guardians of fame; and Sneekape managed to
get a copy for me, and translated it into Aleofanian; it must have
suffered in the change; for it was difficult to see the superiority. It
ran in rhythm and sentiment thus:
Ye are only the van
Of the army of man
That is marching over the sea.
Ye would seek to attain
The immortal fane
Of the glory that is to be.
No mightier god
Has ever trod
The crust of the quaking earth.
He has come to assist
In dispelling the mist
That clings to thought at its birth.
Through a long series of such doggerel verses the composition proceeded;
and I thought, how meaningless the pæans, if this were all that opened
the gates of literary Fame! I turned away from the sight of this sordid
injustice and looked for the first time out upon the level shores of the
island that stretched on either side of these sanguinary stairs. And I
was surprised to find them full of men and women of look and figure and
dress nearer the normal; they were evidently toilers with the hands; for
they were muscular in frame and tanned by the weather. They formed,
indeed, a wholesome contrast to these priests and worshippers of fame.
A longing to be amongst them seized me, a kind of homesickness to be
with the toilers of the field again. Sneekape could scarcely restrain me
from trying to leap the parapet; he showed me the jackal-haunted chasm
that I would fall into and the impossibility of crossing it. He got the
canoe in to the lowest step; nor had we so far to slither down; for the
tide had risen; and in a few minutes we were seeking a place to land. At
the risk of our lives we managed to get on the beach and were soon in
the midst of the crowd.
They were the slaves and artisans of Kloriole; and, as it was now
evening, they had finished their day’s labour and were engaged in the
usual recreation of the country, listening to or making songs and
ballads. It was a babel rippled with snatches of melody. I could catch
no intelligible phrase, nor could Sneekape help me much; for they did
not write or print their productions, and they composed them in the
popular dialect.
Just as the westering sun was tinging the zenith with gold, one ballad
seemed to run like wildfire through the clustering singers, and at last
was caught up and chanted by the whole multitude. It had a fine
symphonic oscillation, and the bodies of the group and the movements of
the great sea of heads swayed with the waves of its sound. At last a cry
rose above it and spread until it extinguished the fire of song: “To the
temple!” and I saw raised on the shoulders of two stalwart artisans a
feeble-looking child with an over-developed head and outstanding eyes.
The multitude began to move round a cliff and then along a path that
wound hither and thither up the hill. They kept chanting the song till
they reached another and far greater porch of the temple on its landward
side. With huge crowbars they pried open the doors and burst into the
vast edifice. It was niched from floor to dome with innumerable
shell-formed recesses, gaily painted and ornamented; and into most of
these were thrust, often jammed, a dozen or more mummies with labels and
printed sheets liberally stuck over them; peering to the back of them I
could see that most of those behind the front row were falling to dust,
their sheets all yellow with age. It was often difficult to distinguish
mummy from mummy or dust from dust; and there was throughout the
building, large though it was, a smell as of a charnel-house; the
movements and breath of the crowd seemed to shake out the forgotten
atoms of the famous dead.
These, Sneekape explained, were the embalmed bodies and productions of
the successful worshippers of fame, preserved to immortality. I saw in
some of the niches dusty forms of priests move, most of them greybeards,
and read the yellow sheets in the dusk, or rake for them in the
commingled dust. These, I was told, were the scholar-priests who tried
to arrange and furbish the fretwork of dusty death. But it seemed to me
that they helped even more than the trampling multitude to distribute
the remains of mortality into the atmosphere and the lungs.
The priests and their followers shot scornful glances at the rudely
surging mob; but without effect. Then they raised their paper lashes
that had made the worshippers on the stairs writhe with pain; but they
sounded feeble and childish against the noise of the chanting crowd; and
their strokes seemed to have no more effect than if applied to the
billows of the sea. The singing multitude swept on up the long aisles of
the edifice, and with a crash the adamant arabesque that hedged in the
shrine of the deity fell before it. The brawny arms of the bearers
perched the child on the altar, and the priests, cowed and silent, had
to accept him as one destined to be sustained at the expense of the
temple and at death to be placed in the niches of immortality. Under the
goad of fear, they had to leave their obeisances and fulsome adulation
before their favourites who had been admitted up the flights from the
sea into the precincts of the deity, and give all their ceremonial
eulogy to this illegitimate bantling of fame. In comparing the new
object of their adoration with those from whom they now turned, I could
see little difference either in grace or intelligence. Those who had
been admitted by the recognised ascent were most of them flabby boys or
youths, fattened by luxury and robbed by vanity of the little native
intelligence they had had; a few were old men in their dotage, whose
every foolish word and act was caught up by acolytes and recorded.
I turned to Sneekape for an explanation. We had kept close together,
lest the jostling crowd should do us harm in the worship of their
bantling. His face was puckered up in a derisive smile. “This is the
result of their devotion to what they think fame. Their literary art has
become child’s play, an exercise in what they call style. These priests
and acolytes, who have wrung out of the anguished labour of the common
people this gorgeous temple and its endowments, have gradually
formulated into exact rule all the points of poem or prose that would
admit a writer to the shrine as a sharer in its sustenance and glory. It
can be almost automatically decided what is worthy of eternal fame and
what is not. They pride themselves on this mathematical precision. Of
course this means the exclusion of all idea or fact or utility from the
literature; all that is required is the form, and if that comes up to
the recognised standard and conforms to the rules which we saw the
candidates at the bottom of the stairs continually consulting, then the
writer is raised flight by flight to the shrine. The compositions have
come to be empty and meaningless; their chief merit is that they have a
kind of melody. They must be according to the received convention.
“Through the ages, then, the stage of life at which the talent for such
work is found has been growing lower and lower; and now mothers watch
anxiously in the cradles for the lisping of numbers; they record the
most infantile chatterings and send them forth as mystic compositions;
and these priests, who are also interpreters, profess to find in them
the most profound wisdom. I have not heard yet of a babe in arms being
admitted to full literary fame; but the day is evidently near when only
sucklings and idiots will have any chance of success amongst guardians
who adopt such ideals and such mechanical rules, and who profess to find
depth of thought in what comes only from the lips. The truth is that the
priests and propagators desire to keep the whole emoluments of the
temple for their own benefit. Mere children will never interfere with
their power or their allotment of fame. When they grow up into youth,
they either vanish or are absorbed into the priestly ranks, and the
guardians, those that have the fame of old age, vote themselves the most
lucrative and elevated posts. For themselves they keep their loftiest
eulogies, their wildest devotion; they form mutually admiring and
advancing groups; they have no praise for those who will not praise them
or be likely to praise them. This habit has spread as a contagion right
down the flights of the ascent. No wind is lent to raise a float unless
the service is sure to be repaid. All the middle-aged about the temple
or the steps are priests, acolytes, or propagators. Children and old men
are the subdeities of fame, almost as easily managed as unseen gods, and
as easily disposed of. The literature has reached the level of first or
second childhood; it is an exercise in the art of saying nothing in the
most melodious or mystic way, and in the conventional form. Creation and
criticism have both become ceremonial, automatic arts, that have been
switched off from the influence of the imagination and every other
faculty of the soul. Vacuity veiled in mystery is what those long-haired
candidates we left on the sea-flight have not learned and cannot learn,
and they must remain there or leave; unless they acquire the other great
art, that of interflation or mutual windbagging.
“It is the natural development of a community in which one half are
creators and the other half critics by profession. The latter absorb the
reality of power and luxury and fame; the former get the shadow. The
critics pretend to worship creation; they are the gods, for they have
the omniscience; they give the rules and the ideals that are thought
divine; to their fiat the others have to bow. They have enslaved the
intelligence of the island and are gradually stifling it, that there may
be as little chance of outbreak as might come from beasts. Such popular
riots as we have seen to-day make them tremble for their power and
privileges. The uneducated people, trained in nothing but to worship
what the priests of fame profess to adore, feel at times the old musical
and imaginative instincts surge up in them, and they rush in rhythmic
passion to immortalise the singer who has resuscitated the old nature in
them. They are supposed not to know what literature or song is; but they
have caught the contagion from the singing in the temple and on the
stairs, and they encourage their offspring to attempt ambitious literary
flight from the cradle upwards; for is it not something to be the parent
of a subdeity of Fame? Amongst them alone is the true sense of natural
song unobliterated; and occasionally in their dialect some native,
untaught genius gathers its music round an old memory or emotion, and
the result is a lyric that sets their whole buried natures on fire; no
priestly power can repress the volcanic outburst, and a new idol is set
up in the temple.”
We saw the people retire and find their way down to the lower levels as
the night fell. We followed and found shelter till the morning. Not long
after daybreak they filed away to their tasks in the fields and the
workshops, and the incident of the previous day was evidently forgotten.
After a meal Sneekape led me over a spur of the hill to a rising ground
that commanded a deep valley into which the sun never seemed to come, so
filled with shadow and gloom was it, so walled off from the world of
light.
We serpentined down half-way into it till our eyes grew accustomed to
the obscurity; and then I could discern figures like the scholar-priests
moving about at the bottom of a fissure filled with bones and yellow
shreds of parchment or some other stuff that could withstand the
weather. Some were turning over and raking this graveyard and some were
intent upon yellow fragments they had found.
This was the valley of dead ambitions and dead literature. Into this the
literary kites that had their threads cut by the snippers generally
fell. Hither were brought the dusty remains of the mummies that had
decayed with their writings past recognition in the niches of the
temple. It was the charnel-house of the great sanctuary. Here were half
the scholar-priests trying to find intelligible relics of the past, that
they might by resuscitating them place their treasure and themselves in
some higher niche.
And Sneekape closed his explanation with a sneer. “Here they toss most
of the infants of fame who are not astute or worldly enough to enter the
ranks of the ecclesiastics. The child we saw enthroned on the altar
yesterday will be starved out, and, if he does not escape and return to
his slave-mother to sink into happy obscurity, his bones will soon be
found in this gehenna. The people, though they continue to sing his
songs, will utterly forget him; and this the priests knew well, when
they ceased their resistance yesterday.”
I looked down to the ghouls that battened below us on the hideous past;
I looked up to the great edifice that dominated the island; and I
remembered the vaunting inscriptions that decorated its interior. “Here
dwell the immortals”; “Who enter here never die”; “The gaze of all men
is upon us”; “The centre of the universe.” The valley of death and
oblivion was the natural complement of this hill of arrogance and
self-righteousness.
My companion laughed at the sharp antithesis, and wished to go down into
the valley of dry bones to enjoy the folly of the rakers and the
readers. In gloom and dejection I climbed the spur again and fled down
to the beach. It was too ghastly a comment on the whole civilised world
to linger over. If only I could wipe it from the mind! The mortal dust
of the immortals clung to my nostrils and throat. Heedless of the danger
I plunged into the sea, and was soon on board the canoe. Sneekape did
not wish to lose me, and was beside me before I could raise the paddle.
As we got into the current again and swept past and away from the islet,
we could see the stairs still crowded with the candidates and the
priests absorbed in their pursuit of fame; and not one of them turned to
see us drifting away. It was almost the time of stars before we had our
last glimpse of Kloriole. The cupolas of the temple still threw its
glory back upon the sun from beneath the horizon till it was difficult
to tell them from the golden light on the domed billows.
[Illustration]
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