THE VOYAGE CONTINUED
“A NEIGHBOURING island, which Blastemo called Fanattia, he would not
hear of our visiting; for there were gathered all the mad quixotists of
the archipelago; any who thought that some special kind of food, or
drink, or clothing, or gesture, or ceremony, or manner was ruinous to
both body and soul, and sacrificed all the other interests of life to
its destruction or abolition, were landed here and allowed to fight it
out like scorpions in a bottle. God pity any poor shipwrecked stranger
who fell into their hands! it was seldom that he was not torn limb from
limb by rival charlatans or the parties of conflicting shibboleths. They
were all threatened with famine; for what one grew or manufactured from
the fruits of the earth another detested as bad for the human system and
did his best to destroy; one thought tubers poisonous and fruits good;
another held the reverse opinion; and the violence of their enthusiasm
would not let either rest till he had destroyed his neighbour’s crops,
all for the good of that neighbour’s soul; one thought a solid food,
made out of any products of the earth, destroyed the sense of duty;
another thought that liquid food made from them dulled the senses, the
portals to the soul; impelled by his zeal neither could stop short of
destroying all that his neighbour manufactured. The result was that
there was never any food, either liquid or solid, to be found, and the
miserable creatures had to subsist on anything they could pick up on the
beach. It was the same with garments and gestures, with attitudes and
manners and tones of voice. There was not anything that could not find a
hostile critic, and the critic had at once to show his hostility in the
most violent crusade, that could not cease till the thing or the
believer in it was driven out of existence.
“There were other groups of islands near, on which Blastemo advised us
not to land; one was a group occupied by exiles who cultivated religion
apart from morality; another was occupied by exiles who devoted
themselves to imagination and let conscience decay; the inhabitants of a
third sank all human methods and thoughts in the interests of political
party. This was the worst class of monomaniacs in the whole archipelago.
They were in the most degraded condition, and were constantly burning or
torturing out some wretched minority, just as the Meskeetans and
Coxurians did. They paid little attention to the amenities of life. As
long as they still had islets to which they could exile their dissenters
they had not been so venomous as these two peoples. But recently they
had become unbearably offensive in their manners and their attacks on
strangers, and everyone now avoided their shores. The God-wise, as the
religious monomaniacs called themselves, had grown licentious and even
obscene; they had developed the most disgusting and beastly habits from
the idea that they knew the will of God and could dispense with the
common rules of morality and decency, those ‘badges of mere earth-born
natures.’ The worshippers of beauty had grown callous in their cruelty.
Squeamishly sensitive about their own feelings, they condemned any
dissentient amongst them, or any alien whom they found, to the most
excruciating tortures; every man who had anything abnormal in his face
or features or gait was given to the death-men. The federators of
humanity were the most dishonest and corrupt and quarrelsome of all;
they held that other considerations, moral, political, religious, were
as nothing compared with party organisation; and they had ultimately
come to feel all bonds dissolved but those of party, and to hound down
everyone who advocated anything, however noble or great or even decent,
that was outside of the party programme; no wonder they had grown so
offensive in their personal habits, so cruel in their relations to the
rest of mankind. It was useless asking any of these peoples for
supplies, they were so improvident; nay, it was dangerous approaching
their shores with such a property as the _Daydream_.
“There were other groups of islands that were too small and barren or
too much out of our course to think of visiting. There was the
art-religion group with Calocosm or the isle of art-popes in the centre
of it; their inhabitants were most intolerant and quarrelsome. Not far
from it is the isle of Cryptia, where the dwellers spend most of their
time in mystic ceremonies and parades, dressed in the most fantastic
garments, and carrying the most ludicrous paraphernalia of office; their
ceremonies are performed in dark caves dimly lit, and, in order to
impress the imagination, mimic in absurd fashion the wild feasts and
rites of savages; they believe in a religion without a god, without the
religious or moral spirit; a religion that is nothing but ceremonial. In
an opposite direction lies a group that is given up to medicomaniacs;
its central island, called Fidikyoor, has all the ailments of humanity
in full force; and yet the islanders can, if they will, cure any disease
they like by the mere act of belief. The other islands in the group have
each its system of therapeutics: one cures by blowing in the face,
another by spitting in the face, a third by striking on the cheek.
“Nearer to Coxuria lay two groups that were the natural complements of
each other. One group had as its centre Theophane, and the inhabitants
all believed that they had but to elect one of their number by ballot in
secret meeting in order to make him a god, who whilst he lived could
converse with the gods and get from them the absolute truth of all
existence. The president of each island might be the most consummate
liar in the archipelago, and yet all he said whilst president was taken
as divine revelation of the truth; and everyone who believed or
professed to believe in anything that disagreed with it was promptly
brought to his bearings by the most effective and summary punishments.
So there was perfect unanimity of belief in these communities. But the
numbers in each isle had become so small that every man expected some
day to have his most manifest fiction accepted during his period of
office as the most undeniable truth. Over against them lay another group
that had as its centre Antidea; its islands agreed in vehemently denying
the existence of all gods; but each had its own particularly unpleasant
way of affirming its creed. The people were virulently intolerant,
hating most of mankind because most believed in some deity or other.
They asserted so firmly and confidently that they had found absolute
truth on this matter of gods that, had a theopath landed on their
shores, they would have burned him in order to save his soul from the
grovelling superstition.
“Between the medicomaniacs and the theopaths lay a mediating group
called Dirtethos; here lived the exiles that counted sin and crime as a
mere aberration of intellect or of digestion; their religion was a
matter of food and medicine. If a man stole from his neighbour, then all
the rest of his neighbours came to sympathise with him in his misfortune
whilst the victim was left in deserved neglect. If anyone got into the
habit of telling lies, then, poor fellow, he had to go to bed and be
nursed; his stomach was out of order. If anyone murdered his mother or
his wife or his friend, he had to go to a hospital and get soothed, and
his relations and acquaintances rushed to console him in his temporary
sickness; it was sad indeed to have such an overflow of blood to the
head. If one should outrage all recognised traditions and rules of
morality and legality, then his friends spent their days and nights with
him reasoning him out of his sad mistake; he was the hero of the hour;
his victims were forgotten. An incorrigible criminal was sent to the
university, where, by sympathy and lectures, he had his chance of
recovering his tone. There he held receptions, to which the most
important people of the island were honoured in being invited; here he
discoursed with them on the methods of his crimes and lapses, and spoke
of his past as if it were a piece of ancient history of a foreign
nation; everybody conversed with him on it with the impartiality of
philosophers or the whispered consolations of bosom friends; his
teachers mourned with him over the hard lot of humanity which condemned
poor mortals like him to such mental aberrations. This group Blastemo
considered the worst of the lunatic settlements of the archipelago; no
locality was so dangerous for the stranger or the shipwrecked mariner.
“By his advice we steered for the island of Grabawlia, where those who
had a mania for finance dwelt. When we landed, the people did not crowd
around us as they had done in the other islands; they hovered off like
vultures waiting a solitary swoop. But we soon discovered, as one after
another approached us and explained his benevolent intentions, that we
were about to be exploited. Pilot-financiers always preceded the great
man who wished to make the negotiation. They brought no goods for us to
see; they only spoke of them as procurable, showing us samples that were
very attractive in their appearance. They stirred our appetite or our
curiosity in the most astute way. When any transaction was about to be
completed, in would come some bustling islander, offering a better price
for the goods and loudly declaring that he was being robbed in not
getting his opportunity; it was no genuine market that gave special
favours to special buyers, and gradually the price was raised till we
had to give an enormous sum for everything we bought. We had also to buy
by samples; for it was asserted that the mass of goods could not be
brought down to the beach till they were bought. Some of the
superfluities that we had on board they decried, but said that they
would be glad to sell for us. They did not care for them; but if they
were offered very cheap they might take them off our hands to oblige
those who had bought so much from them. When they had beaten our price
down to little or nothing, some newcomer would press forward and offer
similar goods at a lower price. At last they got our surplus practically
as a gift.
“When we had completed our negotiations and thought we had bought enough
stores and fuel to last several months, we went off to the ship, and the
goods began to arrive in fallas. They were in boxes or well-covered
bundles. Not till we had sailed did we find on opening our purchases
that half of them were rotten or worthless, and that in the boxes that
contained the fuel, stones filled half the space.
“These Grabawlians had the foundations of their houses of gold. They
would not let one coin of the precious metal pass out of their hands if
they could help it. They were the great barterers of the archipelago,
and took the goods of one island to trade off for the goods of another,
and wherever they could they got gold as the net result, till their
island was filled with the metal. We had seen that they were
half-starved, the only flourishing feature of their faces being their
nose, which protruded over their lips, and gave a foxy appearance to
their faces. They starved themselves to get more gold. They lied and
cheated that they might add even one coin to their heap. Again and again
were they found by their neighbours famishing; nor would they give any
of the treasures, on which they lay dying, to pay for the food that was
brought to them. They were always in dread of pirates and freebooters,
for ever and again through the centuries some warlike people bore down
on them and carried off the accumulations of ages. Blastemo himself
acknowledged that it was no infrequent thing for his island to pick a
quarrel with them and rob them in war of their savings. They were the
milch-cows of the archipelago. Their gold was a mere encumbrance to
them. It was better to be distributed again.
“After all the useless stores and the stones out of the fuel had been
thrown overboard, we calculated that we had remaining enough to last for
a month or six weeks. We were about to make again for Broolyi, when a
boat from Tirralaria informed us that you were intending to reach
Figlefia and embark there. When off that island awaiting orders, a slave
in a canoe came off in the darkness and bade us sail for the uninhabited
side of the island if we would save you from destruction; and he
indicated the bay where we ought to anchor that night. We were doubtful;
but we carried out his instructions. And the result is that we have you
now with us.”
Burns showed considerable agitation over their adventures and over my
return. I had interrupted him with many a question which had broken the
even flow of his narrative and lessened his emotion as he proceeded. He
and the others evidently expected an account of my wanderings; but I was
too much excited, too rent with conflicting melancholy and joy, to
accede fully to their request; and I gave them but a rough outline of
all I had done and suffered. The scars had not yet healed in my spirit;
the thoughts over life that my experiences had stirred in my breast were
too crude and sorrowful to find consolation in utterance; so I paced the
deck for days in solitary meditation.
Nothing could keep me long from the problem of problems, the central
mystery of the archipelago. What was that land which the inhabitants of
the various islands never had long out of their thoughts, but which they
so carefully avoided in speech? When forced to mention it, they
pretended to shudder at it as an island of devils. None of them seemed
to have visited it or to have had any personal knowledge of it for many
centuries. Their fear of it had crystallised into myths of horror. For
ages they had made fitful attempts to approach it, and failed, and at
last a fence of impenetrable darkness and terror held them far off from
it; and the fear that paralysed every energy, if ever their ships came
within sight of its shining peak on the far horizon, had taken permanent
shape in their traditions and stories of the isle of devils. What it
really was had faded into twilight, and the veil of the supernatural had
finally shut it out from human view. It was useless to attempt analysis
of the pictured curtain of tradition. The fabric would vanish in the
process instead of revealing its original texture. Once and once only
had I seen the pure sheen of its highest snow-clad mountain above the
rim of the sea; and at the sight I resolved to reach it, cost what it
would. I looked forward to our visit to Broolyi with no special interest
except as preparatory for the great expedition. I would say nothing of
it to Blastemo or his countrymen, lest they should discourage my men or
otherwise stand in my way. Nor would I confide at first in my comrades,
not indeed till I had seen my way clearly, and got all my methods of
preparation mapped out. They set my absorption down to my past
adventures, and I kept my own counsel whilst I inquired into the
conditions of my problem and found the possibility of a solution.
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