SWOONARIE
MY fellow-voyager lay down to sleep as soon as the field of night above
us broke into its myriad flowers. I could not sleep for the thought of
that wretched miniature of the great world; I could not forget the
suicide and his poem, the wild ecstasies of the neophytes, the poor
little dropsical-headed poet of the people left to weep and starve in
the gorgeous temple, or the murky fissure of the dead with its mortuary
vultures. Wearied out at last with the sombre thoughts, and in spite of
the heaving of the canoe, I fell asleep at the paddle; and chaotic
medleys of all I had just seen made new visions that wakened me in
terror to feel ostracised and forlorn under the eyes of infinity; and it
was as cheerless to sleep as to wake with this nightmare of the world
and its ambitions pressing in upon me.
The long night span itself out into a thread of dreams and reveries; at
times it was hard to distinguish between the vision of sleep and the
vision of waking, so closely did they twilight into each other. Even
when the cold gleam of daybreak shimmered over the waves it was
difficult to unravel the tangle of dream and thought; pictures, half
real, half unreal, filmed over my senses; the very air, as the sun
languished into sight from behind his sultry curtains, became dreamful,
the wind and sea fell, and a trance-like silence filled the dome of sky.
We had passed into a charmed sphere. Languor welled through me till I
dropped my paddle and stretched along the bottom of the canoe, floating
on the surface of sleep.
My companion I found trying to waken me. He was steeped in drowsiness
himself; but the grating of the boat on some bank had roused him; he
could not get to land without help. In a sluggish, half-vegetative state
I got up, and we seemed to paddle through an unending series of shallows
that entangled the canoe. The exercise at last broke our torpor, and
with a few vigorous strokes we reached land.
It lay so low, as far as eye could reach, that the sea in tempest must
take possession. Yet we saw human beings move in the distance. At first
we thought that they were cattle grazing, so slowly and spasmodically
did they trail along and so low did they bend their heads.
We got on shore. Only vigorous movement kept us out of the comatose
state that threatened us every moment. We saw men and women stretched on
the sand; but we could not get them to take any notice of us, and we had
strong desires to drowse prostrate too. We struggled on over the opiate
plain, till at last we found the ground rise gently. Our limbs
quickened, our senses began to grow nimble, and when we were high enough
to look out over the island and the sea, we had completely recovered
from our lethargy.
We reached a cluster of dilapidated huts, that turned out to be mere
roofings of pits dug in the earth. Men and women were working here and
there, but paid little attention to us when we spoke to them. Sneekape
at last found one who looked up, as he was addressed in Aleofanian; and,
after a long series of vigorous efforts and questionings, he left off
his slumberous style of digging and answered in droning, far-off tones
that sounded like the echo of muffled bells. There was a somnolent look
in his great cow-like eyes, covering what might have been depths of
intelligence and emotion, or what might have been nothing at all. We
followed him to a bench outside of his rooftree, and we sank down on it
with a sense of seeming collapse.
After a space our senses shook off their torpor and drew themselves
together, and we found in slow and measured question and answer that he
had no desire to know us or be known by us; he was too busy upon a vital
problem to feel any interest in other matters. It was this we discovered
on much inquiry: whether worms could be taught to do all the
agricultural operations of a farm; they were the ploughers, manurers,
sowers, and harvesters; but they were all these at once; he had been
experimenting for years to get them to divide their various operations
over the appropriate seasons. He seemed harassed that we had interrupted
him in attempting to fence off his ploughing worms from his harvesters.
There was just one link wanting, and when he found it he would reform
the agriculture of the world.
We had to leave him to his problem; he sank into it as into a pit of
sleep. We noticed as we passed along his domain that there was not a
green blade or shoot to be seen anywhere; his workers had evidently
harvested the estate.
The next man we came across was too busy hedging round his shadow to
attend to us. It gave him infinite trouble. If only he could fix it down
and get it secured in a net, he could make his fortune by exporting it
to equatorial climates, to cool down the temperature and reduce the
glare.
Everyone we met was absorbed in some problem, and had no time to spare
for idle questions like ours. They were ready enough to talk about their
experiments and discoveries; but anything else was futile; they at once
dropped from consciousness, and no effort could awaken them. We always
tried to get at their favourite project in order to lead them on to the
information we required. We laid siege to dozens without avail; any
divergence from their great scheme at once hypnotised them.
One was engaged in an attempt to exhaust the atmosphere in order that
the pure ether might descend upon the world and make them capable of
flight. Another was busy upon a rope-making machine that would twist
light into strands so that men might draw the sun nearer when they
needed more heat and light, or make out of the beams of any star a rope
ladder whereby they might climb to it. A neighbour of his was just on
the point of discovering a crucible that would extract silver from the
lustre of the stars. One had invented a shovel that could level all the
mountains into plains, if only he had the force for it, and he was
attempting to organise a company to supply the force. Another had made a
machine that would tunnel to the centre of the earth; and he was about
to form an association for working it; he said that one result alone
would enrich them beyond dreams: they could make a market for the
precious metals near the centre of the earth, where they would have
greatly increased weight. His neighbour was in the way to discover
antigravitation, by which they might be able to do what they liked with
the stars and the universes. The next man we met had a scheme for the
annihilation of all intoxicants throughout the world; and to induce men
to agree to it he would supply ailool, their favourite narcotic,
instead; the world needed sleep, not excitement.
Other projects and inventions that were in hand, we found, were: to
teach spiders to make all the garments men needed, and ants to be
providers for the human race; to mass insect-power in order to drive
engines; to yoke birds together for aërial navigation and carriage; to
utilise the waste breath of men for turning windmills; to run a road
back through time as through space, that we might eject our worst faults
from our ancestors; to distil the divine essence out of the ether in
order to supply it in bottles to religionists all the world over for
ceremonies and miracles; and to drive a conduit back into the age when
the gods were present in the world, so as to deliver direct inspiration
from them at a few pence a gallon.
We got weary of attempting to extract any piece of information available
for our purpose. There was not a scheme but had only one link wanting to
make it a success. I had been at first inclined to pity these men and
women,—their lives seemed so pathetically futile,—but I changed my
emotion when I saw that, however long they had been at their project,
they never lost the brightest hopes of it; they were the happiest of
mortals, so absorbed in their one thought, that care and sorrow could
not approach them. Nature gave them enough in most years to support
them; and when famine came they ate their opiate, ailool, and stretched
themselves upon their narcotic plain. The vultures were their sextons
and did the rest.
Sneekape never ceased to sneer at them or find food for petty laughter
in their enthusiasms and absorption. Before we left them I felt the
keenest envy of their happy unconsciousness of the stings of time.
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