CHAPTER XXXVII

NOOLA

AFTER many difficulties and delays I reached the garrison on the western

shore of Broolyi, where it faced Kayoss. I delivered my pass to the

commandant, and was accommodated with shelter and food. The soldiers

were not communicative; but after a few days I encountered in my

wanderings on the beach one of the strangest men that I had ever seen,

and he opened up vistas into the history of the islands. He was short in

stature, but so light and springy was he in his gait and tread, I almost

thought that he never touched the earth; he seemed to skim along its

surface. He had a broad chest and great muscular development of the

shoulders that singularly contrasted with his bird-like progress. His

head was large for the body, but finely proportioned. It was the face,

however, that most attracted me. It seemed almost to speak to me as I

passed; it carried the soul in the depths of the eyes and in the whole

expression. This soul, I felt after one glance, was a beautiful thing,

marred only by some deep sorrow that draped it in everlasting

melancholy. There was a heaven of pity and regret doming the nature, one

could see in the sheen of the eyes and the strange translucence of the

features. I was drawn magnetically to this new type of manhood; and yet

I shrank from speech with him, his nature seemed so majestic and

overawing.

I asked in the garrison concerning him, but all I could find out was

that he was an exile from the city, and that he was kept under

surveillance. It had been at his own request that he had been settled

opposite the Isle of Anarchy. Finding that there would be nothing done

to prevent my speaking to him and that he knew Aleofanian, I addressed

him in reverent words the next time I met him, and we were soon fast

friends. We met daily and wandered on the shore, and both of us seemed

to find unfailing consolation in the ever-varying music of the sea, as

it tided along the beach, and answered to the moods of sky and wind and

current like a sensitive instrument. To me it had ever been a thing of

life that sang and quivered to my every impulse and change of spirit. To

be away from it was to be forlorn and widowed, and out of the reach of

pity and sympathy. To him it seemed to fill the same large space in

life. His thoughts were stimulated and made sublime by its rhythm; his

whole existence was fuller and more musical in that wider sense of the

word which applies it to the movements of the worlds on the face of

night. I soon discovered that he was the engineer who had centralised

and mechanised their religion for the Broolyians, and set them on the

way of fulfilling the object of their existence and of establishing

universal peace by universally annihilative war. He confessed that he

had not been sorry to leave the capital and give up the petty ambitions

with which he had been fired for a time. It would have meant but little

effort on his part to perfect his explosive and master the whole island

for his own purposes; but a look into the future had shown him how

absurd was the ideal the Broolyians pretended to hold up to themselves,

how impossible it would be by any homœopathic means, such as they

proposed, to cure humanity of its everlasting feuds. He fell into

despair and let the new king do as he would; and now in his solitude and

meditation the love of his older past had come back on him, and he

longed to see his native land, his paradise, again.

He had asked to be exiled to the garrison that watched Kayoss, in order

that the sight of that wretched community might keep his ambitions down.

There on the island opposite (and he pointed across the strait) lived

the anarchic exiles from the islands of the archipelago. As he uttered

the word “live” he smiled wearily. They lived but a few days after they

were landed, for they came to violent feud, and strife and bloodshed

ended the tragedy of trying to exist without government before the

animal was dead in man. He raised his eyes suddenly, and he pointed to

the opposite shore. On it moved a human being. That was the survivor of

the last shipment to Kayoss. The garrison had never had any trouble.

Within twenty-four hours after the anarchists were out of their fetters

and free on shore they had found weapons against one another. They

divided up into conspiracies and fought, and before many days were over,

two or three remained too maimed and wounded to fight. When they

recovered, they fought for the mastery, and one remained sorely

stricken, often to die, sometimes to recover only to become a maniac.

Such was the state of the wretch whom we now saw gesticulating on the

beach. There never could be anarchism on this earth till the wild beast

had died out of the human breast, and man was ready for flight to purer

spheres. It was but poison in the existing state of mankind. A little of

it did not do much harm. Its best cure was to give it full scope, for it

soon killed off all existences within its reach and itself with them.

As he rose to this climax, his transparent face began to cloud and grow

turbid. There was not that clearness of depth in the eyes which had so

drawn me to him. His nature seemed to become shallow and tempestuous,

more like the men of Broolyi and those I had known in the old western

world. But it was not for long; he drew himself up with a sharp gesture

of self-scorn, and then there settled upon him a silence and a

melancholy that resisted my efforts to overcome. He grew quite

unconscious of what I said, and, walking back towards his hut, left me.

It was useless to attempt intercourse with such self-inwrapt thoughts.

For days I saw how purposeless would be all speech; his figure was

bowed, his face was bent with grief, his eyes were fixed on the earth. I

had never witnessed such tearless sorrow in human form. I persevered in

my silent reverence for him, and at last the cloud lifted. He stood

erect one day in the sunshine, and on my approach, he smiled answer to

my greeting. All the dark and troubled appearance of his face had

vanished, and his eyes and his complexion seemed to show the depths of

his nature again with perfect limpidity. I was soon in sympathetic

converse with him. There still rang through his utterances a note of

sadness and regret. It reminded me of the undertones of so many

folk-songs that wail with the reminiscence of lost ideals. How wearily

it sounded, as it echoed through the depths of his meaning! It was as if

his words fell from the stars quivering with the emotion and thought of

the spheres in their everlasting rhythm. Out of infinity into infinity

their wisdom seemed to pass. There was no limit to their depth of

suggestion.

From his words there gradually developed the story of his life, with

reservations that I could by no questioning or interest penetrate.

“Many leaden-footed years ago,—brief in the tale of my own life, long

and slow taken by themselves,—I drifted on to the eastern shores of

Broolyi, and fell into the hands of Nunaresha, one of the most powerful

and ambitious nobles in the country, who was then endeavouring to get

the ruling monarch dethroned and to have himself elected in his place.

He saw before many moons had fruited and died that he had in me a

godsend for his designs. Oh, the misery of it! I listened to his

flattering proposals, and supplied him with the instruments to carry

them out.” The thought overcame him; the words died away on his lips,

and his consciousness seemed to ebb into unknown depths of sorrow. I

kept a reverent silence, and the thought of his broken story tided

upwards again into words. “Ah me! the memory of my atavistic folly

weighs my whole being down, when it comes upon me. Out of my warlike

forefathers of hundreds of generations before had come into my nature

some taint of their military passions and ambitions. For several

hundreds of years it lay dormant. The wise observers of my country had

seen it in me from my birth, and had surrounded me with such conditions

as would keep it in abeyance, if not deprive it of all living force.

Unhappily the profession of chemist and engineer, for which I was found

on examination of all my faculties to be best fitted, opened up to me a

vista into the destructive forces that permeate the universe, and the

marvellous power over them that our own chemical knowledge gave. This

and my growing acquaintance with the myriads that inhabit the earth and

with the consequent scope for military ambition roused the sleeping

devil in me. I passed my time in the analysis of the destructive

elements in nature, in the manufacture of explosives, and in devising

plans for their concentration against an enemy, although it was a

fundamental maxim of our commonwealth that no member of it should ever

harbour evil thought against the life of a fellow-being. Innumerable

gentle and indirect methods were applied for my cure; but it was all in

vain. My ancestral passion was roused like an unquenchable fire. I could

see the sorrow over me in the faces of the community. At last, without

their ever having come to formal resolve, I was placed in a boat with my

share of the wealth of the island in precious metals, and blown far out

to sea in the direction of Broolyi.

“Doubtless by the help of the forces my countrymen have control of, I

drifted towards this island, and came to be received by Nunaresha. He

almost at once raised me to the position of trusted adviser. He accepted

every device I invented for his purposes, and supplied me with the

material I required. I gave him such power over explosives that he felt

himself almost invincible. He subdued his quarrelsome baronial

neighbours with the greatest ease, and by the help of his explosive

catapults made his friends throughout the island supreme over their

districts. His influence was soon predominant, and the feeble intriguing

monarch was deposed and Nunaresha chosen in his stead. He spared neither

friend nor foe in order to attain to unquestioned despotism. The

baronial castles were demolished by the new force, and all were drawn

into his court by its attractions and its concentration of power. The

barons became the mere parasites and flatterers of the new king.

“Yet did he feel unhappy in that the ecclesiasts could still wage secret

war against him in the hearts of the women and thus in every household.

At any moment the rebellion might break out, and, though he could crush

it, once it became open, he never felt safe from the weapon of the

assassin or fanatic. I, the still-degenerate Noola, came to his aid,

when he pleaded with me; and I manufactured the spiritual mechanism of

the country for him to control as he pleased. He banished the priests

and substituted an automatic priesthood and service such as might be

completely at his beck. It was an easy matter for me to invent the

various machines, musical, ceremonial, marionettic, and locutory. I saw

that some such spiritual control over men was needed, if universal peace

were to be attained on the earth. I still believed that peace was the

true aim of human civilisation, and that this could be reached only by

such warlike forces and such spiritual authority in the hands of a

single governor or council of governors as would make rebellion seem an

impossibility and a farce to every reasoning mind.

“I have been utterly disabused of all such thoughts. Such peace can mean

nothing but universal stagnancy of mankind. There is no advance, no life

without struggle and competition. I could have invented after years of

work such a weapon of war as would have enabled a man to master the

world and keep it cowering in fear. I could have extended my mechanical

religion so as to control the thoughts and beliefs of all men. But what

was the advantage, if the ruler grew worse? It was only to connect all

the spiritual fountains of the earth with this tainted source, and thus

to keep them for ever impure. I saw his unbounded power gradually sap

the will and the morality of the monarch. He sank into dissipation and

debauchery. He made the whole of Broolyian art and religion and morality

coarse and vulgar. The women grew more pampered and fat and licentious;

the men became hypocrites and laggards. In the court there was nothing

but display, vulgar accretions of gaudy uniforms and of jewels of all

kinds. In the country there was increasing degradation and misery. It

was patent to the eyes of those who were not blinded by the possession

of power or the shadow of power. The only thing that saved the nation

from collapse was its frequent war expeditions. They hated the water

passage to other islands, but they delighted in the excitement of

conflict, and they came back fewer in numbers, slimmer in figure, and

more active in habit. You might have expected the women to preponderate

in the population, because of the war drain on the men. But perhaps you

have noticed that amongst the children and youth, it is our own sex that

has the best of it in numbers; whilst fat old women are seen everywhere,

old men are seldom seen. A warlike community ever recuperates by means

of the physiological fact that, where only young and vigorous soldiers

are the fathers competing for the love of the young women, who are few

and somewhat pampered, there is a predominance of male births. It is

this prevention of old age amongst men by the sharp sickle of war along

with the seclusion and delicacy of the women that keeps the community

from complete effeminacy and ultimate extinction. Broolyi is the exile

asylum of all the passion for militarism in the archipelago, and the

internecine wars of the exiles reduce their numbers and yet keep them

active; their hatred of the sea saves the other islands from conquest by

them. Their great heroic age was the reign of a woman who had been

expelled from my own land for her warlike passions. She overcame their

nausea for oceanic expeditions by training most of the boys like a coast

population to take delight in boats and ships, and it was only the

jealousy of the other women that prevented Broolyi from mastering the

whole of the archipelago. She ever fostered her desire of revenge on her

original country, and at last led an army of vengeance against it; but

she was again and again repulsed with ease. In the disfavour of defeat

the Broolyian women accused her of witchcraft in drawing away the

affections of the young men from them, and had her put to death.

Degenerate though I have grown, I never nurtured one thought of

retaliation for my exile; and even had I, I should never have been so

foolish as to imagine that I could have carried it out. She must have

been mad or drunk with passion to attempt such a thing. When she died

Broolyi sank back into the even tenor of quarrel and civil war. Alas,

that I should have been the means of stirring it again to warlike

ambition for mastery! It was my mistaken ideal of universal peace by

means of universal and omnipotent authority. I have come to the

conclusion that all government is but giving the monopoly of opportunity

to one set of robbers in order to save the nation from the ravages of

most others. It is worse for the higher natures of the governing than

for those of the governed; and I have recanted my heresies.

“How weary I grew of the pomp and show of the court, of the dreary round

of war and dissipation! I would have given the world for exile into

solitude; and yet I dared not secede from the monarch and his following.

I had shown myself too resourceful to be allowed to go free in the

island. The king never would have believed that I was at rest and only

desirous of rest.

“But the inevitable conclusion came. Lapped in the luxurious security of

unquestioned power, he grew careless; thinking that every mind in the

island was tuned to his key, hatred to him had grown silently in the

hearts of many. At the most unexpected place and moment it blazed out,

and he fell by the hand of an assassin. He had meant to establish a

dynasty, but his children all fell with him; and the nobility elected

his successor from amongst themselves, one of the mildest and most

characterless. I saw that this was my opportunity, and I pleaded with

him that I might be sent into exile and solitude; and, in order to make

him feel sure that I could not be plotting against him, I asked that I

should be near the garrison that watches the island of anarchists. Here

I have rested these many years, working out my spiritual purification in

sorrow and regret. I have climbed higher in soul than I had ever thought

to reach; and yet clouds of anger at times float across my nature and

mar my power of vision. I am not worthy to return to my own land. Ah,

that I were! And what hope is there of any such return for me, the

outcast, the degenerate?”

He fell again into self-inwrapt reverie. His thoughts had gone back to

that land of mystery whence he had come, and vain was it for me to

attempt to follow them. I must wait. And I thought I saw my way to bring

about my purpose.

One day we had again grown intimate in our conversation, and he had

become familiar enough to ask me whence I came. I told him how I had

crossed the circle of fog with my yacht, and he asked me how I had

resisted the magnetic forces and sea currents that so effectually fence

in this sub-tropical archipelago. I described the _Daydream_. At first

he could not realise that she could move swiftly without the help of

wind or current or oar; but, when the thought of steam power propelling

her came on his mind, it took full possession of it. He made sure that I

could force her right in the teeth of a storm, and then his face was

illumined with joy and hope.

The next day he was all eagerness to know the construction of her

engines and her mode of propulsion; and, having satisfied himself that

she had ten times the power of the largest falla driven by oars, he

surrendered his inner thoughts to me. He now saw a way by which he might

return to his dear native land, and he described to me the singular

means his countrymen employed for hedging off intrusion and expelling

members of their community that are alien to its main purpose. Round the

shoulders of their central peak, Lilaroma, runs, on an enormous

scaffolding, what they call the storm-cone; it is a huge trumpet-shaped

instrument with its wide end turned on the horizon, and out of it is

blown from the centre of force in the island a blast that, when

concentrated on any point, has the power of a tornado; nothing propelled

by oars or sails has hitherto been able to resist the artificial

hurricane. By night it moves slowly around the horizon, and, if its

blast encounters any object floating on the surface of the ocean,

however small, it brings all its force to bear on it till the resistant

material flees before it. It produces a local tempest, and the intruder

either sinks or escapes before the blast. There is no record in the

archipelago of any falla or human being having ever reached the shore of

Limanora by sea; and though the long tradition of this tornado

barrier-to-all has ended in a more complete, because a spiritual,

barrier, that of superstitious fear, the storm-cone never ceases its

vigilant blast.

I saw the source of his hope and told him of our encounter with the

storm-cone and the result, fearing that he did not understand all the

conditions; but, after ascertaining that we had sail set, and that the

tornado caught us broadside, his face bore a smile that implied complete

mastery of the problem. He showed me that, if the sails had been down

and the bow had been pointed right to the storm-cone, the ship could

have easily held her own against the blast; but, that we might not be

too sure of the result and might not introduce a whole shipload of

intruders into the island, he would invent a method by which we two

alone should reach its shore. It was this. He intended to make two

wooden, water-tight shells in the shape of a fish with sharp snout and

directing tail; into these, as we got close to a shelving beach, we two

would enter. The lids would be sealed so as to let no water in; and then

the sailors of the _Daydream_ would shoot them from two huge catapults

of his, so that they would plunge into the sea, and speeding through the

water, would rise to the surface, and float into the shallows close to

the sand.

I could see the feasibility of the plan, and entered gladly into it, for

at last I perceived a chance of reaching his mysterious fatherland. As

he had agreed to take me for his comrade, he began to teach me his

native language. He told me he could not give me more than the rudiments

and framework. The niceties of it and the great vocabulary come only in

long years of familiarity. It was constructed on the principle of

assigning the easiest words to the commonest and easiest things and

ideas. It grew in difficulty and perplexity in the higher spheres of

thought and investigation. The names for the familiar objects and needs

of human beings were monosyllabic, and each expressed some essential or

striking quality or feature of the thing either by means of the nature

of the sound or by resemblance to some other but abstract word. The

verb, or as he called it, the energy-word, and the adjective or

quality-word, were generally dissyllabic, the former by means of the

affixing, the other by means of the prefixing, of one of many different

sounds or letters. Half of each of these sets of extension elements were

vowels, the other half consonants. They were phonetic alternatives; the

consonantal was meant as neighbour to a vowel sound, and the vowel as

neighbour to a consonantal. For example: “kar” meant “dust”; “karo”

meant “to reduce to dust”; “okar,” “having the essential qualities of

dust.” “Tri” meant “sea-water”; “trim,” “to use sea-water”; “atri,”

“salt and liquid like sea-water”; “trik,” “to plunge into sea-water”;

“itri,” “dipped in sea-water.” There was no difference in form between

the adjective and the adverb, and there were only two kinds of

relational words or words that showed the connection between ideas or

things or energies or qualities that we brought into relation. Our

prepositions and conjunctions would be included under the one type; the

same particle or kin-word might be used to express the affinity between

two of the simplest words for concrete objects and two such complex

ideas as are given in sentences. The other kind of relational word was

what they called their pointer and seemed to stand for our pronoun. It

pointed out some object or idea already mentioned or to be mentioned, in

order to show its relation to other objects or ideas, or pointed out the

relation of the energy-word or of the quality or of the object to some

personality. These kin-words or pointers consisted each of two letters;

there were some hundreds of them, and their number was ever growing as

new relationships grew out of a more complex civilisation or out of

advancing investigation and discovery. There were no separate words of

one letter, all the letters being monopolised by the prefixes or

affixes.

The subtones or slight variations of the common sounds were utilised to

express various shades of meaning; as for example, time was expressed in

the verb by a modification of the sound of the affix, whether

consonantal or vocalic. “Lo karō ti rak” meant “I reduce this rock to

dust”; “Lo karō ti rak,” “I shall reduce this rock to dust”; “Lo karōō

ti rak,” “I reduced this rock to dust.” Accent on the affix was used to

express stage of action, beginning, in process, or complete; or rather

lack of accent expressed the second, sharp accent the first, and full

accent the last. Pitch was employed to express attitude of mind to the

action; the higher tones giving various shades of determination or

order, the lower, various kinds of uncertainty or question, and the

full, ordinary tones expressing the different phases of assertion or

surety.

Transferred or metaphorical meaning was indicated by the use of a

variation in the vowel sound of the noun. “Kăr” with long, broad vowel

is “dust”; “Kăr” with short vowel implies the sporadic ideas that float

in a civilisation or community or period or mind; and all the various

grammatical and sense modifications of the original concrete noun were

applicable to the new noun with the transferred sense.

The grammatical framework of the language was so simple that I mastered

it in a few days. A few more days sufficed to get familiar with what

they called the infant’s vocabulary, all the concrete words for common

things, like earth, rock, sea, sky, food, arm, hand, head, light, fire,

smoke, cloud. What made this easier was that words for things that had a

close resemblance or connection in action had the same consonantal sound

but different vowels, or the same vowel and one consonantal variation;

“foresight” was “lum”; “fore-energy” was “lim”; “rum” was “gravitation,”

“rim,” “force”; “lul,” “smoke,” “lil,” “cloud.” When I passed to the

youth’s vocabulary of less concrete words or words with metaphorical

applications, it was more difficult, partly because the vocabulary was

larger, partly because the differences were subtler; but I was greatly

aided by the universal and primary law of their tongue, that the same

sound should not stand for more than one meaning or shade of meaning;

whenever a word tended to acquire a new sense, a new modification of the

form was deliberately invented and adopted. Thus there were none of the

ambiguities and shifting senses that make all other languages and

especially the European like a quagmire or quicksand. One of the more

important annual functions of the community as a whole was language

sanitation.

It is one of the greatest mistakes of European civilisation to let words

take their own course, the most dangerous source of spiritual epidemics.

In them lurk foul thoughts and suggestions that spread their moral

contagion as soon as the child comes into contact with their inner

meanings. Nothing is so pernicious, so obstructive of progress, as the

virus of uncleansed words. They let out on new ages moral diseases that

have been forgotten. In them contagious germs adhere to the nooks and

corners for generations as in old houses. Even the fallacies that cling

to the human mind from the many and shifting senses of words are bad

enough, but worse is the opportunity they give for villains to palter

with them. Nothing is easier than in our old civilisations to betray the

innocent; language with its chameleon nature can fit itself to every

atmosphere and light; it gives the readiest shelter to dishonesty and

error. Unpurified, undefined, it is the quaking bog in which half the

souls that are born into the world are irrecoverably lost.

Ages ago his countrymen had taken their language in hand, and swept out

of it all foul suggestion. Now their chief task was to prevent

ambiguities and double or shifting meanings from creeping into words and

making them the cloaks of dishonest purpose, the stumbling-blocks of the

still feeble human soul. There were linguistic specialists whose duties

were to watch the use of words by the community and note down those that

were changing their signification. They had also to invent new words to

fit the new meanings, and to lay the results of their investigations

before the meeting of the whole nation. Whatever were unanimously

adopted became at once a part of the language; and for those that were

rejected the experts had to bring forward other suggestions.

The result was that their language was as limpid as their own thoughts;

and it was kept musical too. After the linguists had made out lists of

suggested substitutes, they submitted them to the imaginative men and

the musicians; through this ordeal, and that of the meeting of the

people, none but noble words could pass; and for words that had to cover

new ideas in some department of science or art the linguists had to

consult with the scientists or artists. This people thought no trouble

lost that was spent on ennobling the garment of thought and the

master-element of music and imaginative work. “All is false, if words

are uncertain,” “Language is the ether of thought; it interpenetrates

all existence,” were two of their favourite maxims. Another that was

often on the lips of Noola was: “Take care of the words, and the

thoughts will take care of themselves.”

It was little wonder then that I found it easy to master the primary

stages of this most translucent language. The stage of full manhood and

the stage of the wise, I could see from a few illustrations he gave me,

had difficulties and subtleties that could be mastered only by long

acquaintance; and it was not till I had been many years in Limanora that

I came to understand them; for, though the vocabularies were constructed

on the most symmetrical and clear plan, they had as many words as all

the languages of Europe put together. Most of them stood for ideas or

elements that were beyond European thought or discovery, or for ideas

that were, many of them, fagoted together under a single word in our

Western languages. No idea, no shade of an idea was without its own

word. Half the false starts of European civilisation or science or

philosophy were due to misunderstandings caused by the number of

meanings that attach to single words. European controversies and

discussions are interminable owing to this fertile source of fallacy and

of shifting ground. I was not surprised at the small progress made by

both old and modern civilisations after I saw the trouble the Limanorans

took to purify and define their words, and the ease with which one could

master the most difficult thought expressed in their limpid language. As

I tell you my story now in your own and my native tongue, I feel as if I

wandered in a dream through a land of mists that are ever shifting and

deceiving. I have often to abandon the attempt to explain to you the

noblest of the Limanoran ideas. At other times I have to translate clear

expressions into muddy, uncertain words, or to resort to makeshifts

that, I fear, give you but little notion of the originals. As I talk

with you in your English tongue, I seem to be moving amid illusions and

phantoms. How unmelodious it all sounds! A language like the Limanoran

needed no poets; it was poetry itself, so musical was every word and

every combination of words, so bright and strong, so suggestive and

harmonious every idea that needed expression in it. When an Englishman

is able to choose the musical words of his language and put them

together with rhythmic harmony expressive of the inner harmony of the

ideas, he is canonised as a linguistic saint, a poet. The Limanorans

were poets by virtue of their language and their nature and training,

and it is like passing into the most commonplace of prose to express

even their commonest words and ideas in the most poetical English.

Little though Noola taught me, I was enamoured of it, and could scarcely

keep from crooning the words to myself, like the lilt of an old song.

And every sentence seemed to be as melodious as the separate words. I

tried to form discordant combinations, but, on presenting them to my

tutor, I found that they bore no sense; they were impossible

combinations of ideas. Especially was the harmony of sound predominant

in the higher stages of the language. The commonest description of even

the most difficult scientific investigation sounded like a noble blank

verse poem. To speak in English again, much though it brings back out of

my oldest past, is to walk in fetters.

Before Noola was satisfied that I could make myself understood in

Limanoran, and just as he had perfected his plan for our projection into

the beach waters of his native land, we had aroused suspicion in the

garrison by our long colloquies. They watched our every movement. Nor

did I allay their fears by my assurance that we were about to attempt a

landing on Kayoss by sea. We were seized and sent to the capital to be

dealt with by the king and his council. Long debate and threatening

civil war delayed the decision, but I am certain that the result would

have been condemnation to death in the end, for the whole country was

honeycombed with suspicions and fears of plots; and executions of

suspects occurred every day.

But the unexpected rescued us. We lay in our prison cells, weary, half

expectant, half wishing more delay. Our food was thrust in to us day

after day through a small aperture in the iron doors of our pitiless

stone-walled dungeons. At first we heard through the narrow iron-railed

slit that served as a window the hurry and bustle of the city, like the

sound of a distant torrent. One day it seemed to grow less and less, and

at last it ceased. The silence was oppressive and ominous. Next morning

the wicket aperture in our door did not open. All day we were without

food. We wondered what had occurred. Four days threw their twilight into

our cells, and not a sound of human voice approached us. I felt my

hunger pass from the gnawing stage into languor and collapse. I sank on

my reed pallet unable longer to pace my floor. I swooned rather than

slept when twilight thickened into gloom. I knew that a few days at most

must end the alternations of collapse and consciousness. I dreamt that I

was back in the old fishing village in my mother’s hut on the cliff; and

her voice sounded sweet in my ears, as she welcomed me home at night. I

thought that I fell asleep in it and that the morning had come. I

remembered that my comrades were to call me and that we were to start

early on a long fishing excursion. I moved uneasily, half conscious that

I ought to rise and see if the dawn had broken; and then it seemed to me

that the hum of voices sounded in the distance. “It is my friends,” I

said; a loud rattle and clang, I thought, must be their volley of stones

on the roof and windows to waken me. Then I heard their Scotch accents

beside me. I must awaken. With an effort I rose and jumped from my bed.

The cold of the prison floor brought me to consciousness. There beside

me was my captain, Alec Burns, with some of his men. I sank back on my

pallet in a swoon after a sign of recognition. They applied

restoratives, and in half an hour, though faint and weak, I was able to

totter out on the arms of two of my sailors into the passage and thence

into the sunshine. Under an awning I lay panting back into life, and

nursing and liquid sustenance gave me appetite, and made me strong

enough to walk alone.

I asked Burns for an explanation of all that had occurred. The royal

officers were about to seize the _Daydream_, he discovered, and he was

intending to put out to sea in the night. He had got up steam and was

about to heave the anchors, but he found that she had grounded, as it

was low tide. As her screw moved, the water gave forth an unbearable

stench. He stopped her and the fetid odour disappeared. In the morning

he looked out to the city, and saw the streets and the ramparts

completely deserted. Not a being moved anywhere. All day the same

death-like stillness prevailed. No boat moved in the harbour; no soldier

appeared on the battlements; not a sound of marching or of military

music was heard. It might have been a city of the dead. The following

day opened with the same experience. They pulled on shore, and the

streets echoed empty to their step, as they walked up from the beach.

They knocked at doors, but received no answer. They entered houses, and

passed through them unmolested, unchallenged. At last the explanation

forced itself upon their senses. In one house they could not proceed for

the fetor that met them at their entrance; and in the next lane they saw

dead bodies strewn, as if cast from the windows, in some places heaped

high above the earth. It was a city of the unburied dead, and no living

creature was to be seen to bury them.

The next day, on landing again, they encountered some of the slaves, who

were plundering the houses, and who fled as the sailors approached. They

followed one up, and saw him enter the huge building, which they found

to be the prison. They saw him take the keys and open the various cells;

and out poured his imprisoned fellows. They heard from one prisoner of

my incarceration, and then discovered my dungeon and led me out into the

sunshine.

As Burns came to this point in his narrative, I remembered my

fellow-prisoner, Noola, and I hurried them off to look for him. They

returned with him none the worse for his long fast. He did not complain

of hunger. He had, I could see, a fund of sustenance to draw upon

unusual in the human bodies I had been accustomed to. We persuaded him

to try some of our restorers; but he took them with none of the eager

appetite that I had shown. It was manifest that he had a physical

constitution altogether different from ours.

He asked us how it was that Burns had been allowed to set us free. He

listened with equanimity to the explanation, but, when he heard of the

slaves, he started in alarm, and bade us hurry to our ship. It was not

long before we were on board, and, as it was full tide, the _Daydream_

was now able to get from her anchorage and make out into the open sea.

When he saw us safe out of the harbour, he settled down and told me the

meaning of his sudden fear and advice. “These slaves inhabit the

interior of the island in myriads, and, under the whips of their

overseers, do all the work that this military community needs. They are

so shamefully treated that, if ever the bonds break and they rise in

rebellion, they show no mercy, and make no distinction in their fury.

The opening of the prison doors meant that the slave population was

about to revel in crime and bloodshed. They will crowd down uncontrolled

from all parts of the country, and fill the city with a ravaging,

plundering mob. Had we remained till they were in force, we should have

had no chance of escape; we should have perished in the general hate of

all but their own kin.

“You ask me why so powerful and so military a people should ever permit

such an outbreak. It is because they are cowed by a greater fear, that

of the plague. You have perceived how low the tide has been, and how hot

the sun. The mud upon the shore of the harbours, when it is laid bare by

the waters and exposed to an exceptionally hot summer, breeds a plague

that sweeps through the ranks of the Broolyians. There is no means known

of stopping its ravages, no cure for it. Once seized by it no man can

last more than one day; and once dead the body putrefies and spreads the

contagion far and near. All the citizens flee to the heights, to be out

of reach of the pestilence. There and there alone can they have any

chance of survival, and then only if no one bears with him the seeds of

the terrible disease. It is piteous to see the cowardly stampede of

these bold warriors. The slaves know the meaning of the flight; it is

their carnival; they are untouched by the plague; they can move with

impunity amongst the rotting dead bodies or the putrid mud.

“It is a strange example of the revenge that a law of nature takes upon

those who outrage it. Long ages ago the war-loving exiles, who were

landed upon Broolyi, subdued its gentle inhabitants, but so wore them

down by driving them as slaves that they almost died out. Their place

had to be supplied; for the masters had become accustomed to freedom

from manual and sordid employments, and nothing could persuade them to

give up their weapons and swaggering military employments and put their

hand to the plough or the hatchet. They had to send emissaries out in

all directions to steal, borrow, or buy slaves. Peaceful and often

highly civilised islanders were kidnapped and battened down in the holds

of the fallas in order that they might not resort to mutiny or attempts

at escape. In these foul dens oftentimes men and women who had been

accustomed to the delicacies of civilisation were penned; and they

suffered the horrors of an unclean, putrid dungeon and of a rough sea

passage. By the close of the voyage half the captives had to be thrown

overboard dead or next door to death. Those that survived were proof

against the diseases that originated in such nests of contagion. When

the shipload had been disembarked, the filth of the voyage was washed

into the harbour, and the germs of a new plague took up their abode in

the mud at the bottom, dormant for long years, and then, when the

favouring conditions came, a hot summer and a series of low tides,

rising into the air and filling the neighbourhood of the shore. It is

one of these plagues that has emptied the city.

“The strange thing about this Broolyian fever is that its symptoms and

horrible effects are those that the slaves experienced in the loathsome

sea passage. The fever-smitten feel a sinking of the heart as in

homesickness; this alternates with wild fury against wrongs that are in

their case purely imaginary. They think that they are in darkness and

filth and chains, unable to escape, in utter despair of life. They

cherish a madness for liberty, which wears out their bodies and brings

such exhaustion that they sink rapidly. Their faces and bodies grow red

as with rage, then pale as with sea-sickness, then yellow with loathing.

They come to nauseate living, and would gladly put an end to their

tortures by suicide; yet their hearts again beat wildly as if clutching

at life. Before the passion has collapsed and their energy has sunk,

they become putrid in their limbs, till they shudder at the sight of

their hands and feet. The microscopic life, that sprang into being in

the holds of the slaving fallas, and that festers in the mud of the

fore-shores, having drawn all the sufferings and feelings of the

captives into it, communicates them to the people that wronged them. The

survivors of the enslaved and their descendants are for ever inoculated

against it. At every outbreak of the epidemic the slaves escape and hold

high festival in the city, all the fiercer and more degraded in their

orgies from the state in which they and their ancestry have been kept.

In their drunken carousals they come to blows, though many escape back

to their native land. When the summer has passed, some of the soldiers

venture into the suburbs, and with threatening missiles force those that

have remained alive to bury the dead, and to cleanse the city and

prepare it for their masters. All settles back into its old state. New

slave raids are organised to fill the places of those that have

vanished; new horrors take place, and new germs are deposited in the

mud.”

There was the light of pity in the eyes of the narrator. I could hear

his voice quiver and sound plaintive, although he gave but the barest

outline of the history. He was filled with the vision, I thought, of the

vanity of human life and its pursuits. I could see from some words that

fell from him soon after that memory had brought up to him the dire

chimeras that had led him from his native paradise; he saw the

bootlessness of war, and the awful vengeance it works out upon the

combatants; he realised the monstrous nature of tyranny and its recoil

upon the tyrants; he felt how illusory, how mocking was the human ideal

of luxurious ease. The faults that had banished him from Limanora had

been burned out of him by caustic experience; his nature had grown

purified by that long solitude which had brought wisdom again. He hoped

the evil in him had been long subdued; but would his native land take

him back? He despaired; he knew of no precedent; all who had been exiled

had finally vanished. He hoped, for he felt how drastic his purification

had been, how bitter his repentance. Yet the rapid advance of their

thought and civilisation threw him back again into fear; he felt like a

man put on shore at the head of a rapid and having to find his way on

land and through jungle after the boat, as he saw it speed down the

torrent.

I tried to draw him from the harassing turmoil of his emotions and

thoughts by questions on the meaning of phrases that he had used to me.

He had often spoken of the practice of banishment for moral or

constitutional weaknesses. Would he explain to me its character and

extent? I showed great anxiety to know how it worked.

After a time my eager interrogations drew him from the painful inner

conflict, and, with one of his comprehensive and benignant smiles, that

seemed to light up his whole being, he began: “It is a matter of very

ancient history. It is indeed thousands, I might almost say, tens of

thousands of years since it was first adopted; for it was a deliberate

adoption on the part of our ancestors in Limanora. Long generations

before, the idea of progress had fixed itself into our civilisation as

its true aim. How to make the human system, both spiritual and physical,

advance rapidly was the problem discussed year after year, age after age

by our wisest men and women. All others were counted trivial or

auxiliary. It seemed mere folly to look after the progress of our

domestic animals with so much care and science as we did, and leave the

human species to the assistance of accident. Our diseased kine and

horses and fowls had to die off without transmission of their weakness

to posterity. Only the finest breeds were paired or allowed to hand on

their frames and powers. Every care was spent on the study of their

anatomy and on the development of their best and most useful qualities.

Whatsoever the Limanorans desired to do with these animals they did. If

any feature of their bodies or natures or characters seemed worthy of

development, it was soon developed, and a new species was established.

What gross disloyalty to the destiny of man to let him drift when he was

doing so much for his humble servitors in the animal world! A generation

or two of discussion awakened our ancestors to the folly of their

inaction. The cry of reform arose, and the feelings of the whole nation

were aroused by the enthusiasts for progress in human breeding.

Hereditary disease and the tortures it inflicted on the innocent were

used to wing their arrows of eloquence. At last there grew up in the

community an instinct as peremptory as conscience, condemning the

marriage of men and women who had transmissible diseases. Public opinion

passed into a moral sense in one or two generations, and, before a

century had gone, all the diseases that tended to pass from parent to

child had disappeared from every class but the poorest.

“Then did it begin to dawn upon the consciousness of our ancestry that

the worst of all diseases had, though mitigated in virulence, been still

left to fester in the human system. What was the use of curing the body,

if the spirit were left to gather to it and transmit foul thought and

emotion? The educated and responsible classes came to feel that the true

problem was yet unsolved; nay, that, though they had purified their

systems of hereditary diseases, the poor and neglected and improvident

still nursed them and propagated them in the meaner suburbs of the town

and in the poverty-stricken districts and villages of the country.

Reformers applied their enthusiasm to educating the proletariat, and it

seemed at first as if Limanora were about to be transformed. The annual

bill of criminality was reduced, and many of the artisans and labourers

learned the lesson of providence, and rose into the class of the

well-to-do. Most of these soon admitted the physiological truths of

heredity into their system as part of their conscience, and if they had

disease of the lungs or heart or brain or nerve, they kept from marriage

and generation, lest it should be transmitted.

“But there still remained the foul social fringe of the community,

dabbled in the mire of improvidence, pauperism, hereditary disease, and

criminality, and this was the part of the population that increased most

rapidly still. It was an eating cancer in the body of the state. Its

members refused education for themselves and their children, or, if they

took it, used it as a new and refined weapon against their

self-restraining, law-abiding neighbours, or against the commonweal as a

whole. The true source of all the infection of the state was still

uncleansed. The medical rulers who had managed affairs so well for

several generations were unable to come at this incurable plague-spot.

What was to be done? The most drastic remedies were proposed, and had

their various advocates. The exterminators were never anything but a

small party, because of the general sense of humanity in the people. The

mutilators became more influential, especially amongst the party that

attached themselves to the doctors; but they never approached the really

practical sphere of politics. Both continued mere parties of theorists,

ridiculed and sometimes abhorred and execrated.

“At last there came a great religious reformer who spent his whole

energies on the pauper and criminal skirts of society. He took up the

altruistic motive and element in human nature, and set it in complete

antagonism to the egoistic and individualistic. He connected it with the

idea of God, and taught it as the utterance of the Deity. At first he

implied that the utterance was given through all nature, but, forced on

by his more superstitious followers, he had finally to announce himself

as the special mouthpiece of this divine doctrine. The whole country was

soon in a blaze, and great was the fervour of the proletariat. Their

millennium seemed to have come. They marched about in great bands

celebrating his praises. Many of them had their dormant powers stirred

to eloquence. Even the ruling classes looked with favour on the

movement, and some of the well-to-do joined in it.

“Then came the inevitable demand for practical doctrine that arises in

the career of every successful prophet. What was he going to do for the

poor and oppressed? What was to be the permanent solution of the

problems of pauperism and criminality? The state, it was true, allowed a

pittance to all who were completely stranded and appealed to its

officers; but there was the brand of disgrace on the dole; every man or

woman who took it slunk away from the sight of others. How was the world

to be regenerated, if the horror of charitable mechanism was not to be

removed? There could be no millennium without stern facing of this

problem.

“He took the plunge. He declared for equal division of the wealth of the

country. His mission soon became a crusade against, not merely the

wealthy, but the well-to-do. All goods were to be held in common. No

more was there to be inequality of position or possession. Property was

a sin, to be prosperous and provident a crime, the crime of theft from

the poor. The only possessions they should allow to be treasured up were

the spiritual wealth in the garner of God. Beyond death there lay the

only property that was worth having, happiness and serenity in the

divine dwelling-place. No man should be allowed to appropriate or lay up

other treasure. God would look after His own here; and none should want.

It was the rankest folly, if not blasphemy, to save or hoard worldly

treasure against the needs of the future.

“One or two of the prosperous amongst his followers came and laid their

money at his feet; but most turned away from him, when they heard him

shatter at a word all they had toiled for night and day during their

weary lifetime. He denounced them as faithless and worldlings, unworthy

to have followed in his footsteps.

“The governing classes took alarm and watched his movements with every

precaution against outbreak; but the _posse_ of converted highwaymen and

brigands guarded him; and it was said that not a few secret murderers

were in the band. They feared that he might be assassinated, and that

his followers might then be left to the tender mercies of the law. He

elevated their lives for the time by the religious fervour he infused

into them. Whosoever saw them spoke of them as new men. It is true that

he had adopted their own practical creed, antagonism to property, and

had thus attached them to him by bonds of community; but he sublimated

it, and, as long as the throb and transport lasted, raised them to

something that seemed his own religious platform.

“There were symptoms of dissension in some, when they came to see that

the world was not transfigured, whilst others, who had low, vulpine

natures to begin with, sneaked round his camp to see where they could

betray to their own profit. These latter, the rich hypocrites and

machiavellis hired as assassins. The fall of their saviour under the

blow of a midnight dagger at first paralysed the new enthusiasts; but

soon there came the full revenge of all martyrdoms. The doctrine that

had to be met by the knife of the assassin was surely strong. Many of

the ardent youth of the governing classes looked into it and found it

noble. They and some who had been secret followers of the popular leader

openly espoused his faith, and put themselves at the head of the

bewildered proletariat.

“The nation was suddenly involved in civil war. It was clear that the

one side had nothing and the other everything to lose. If the new

socialists won, then the rich and the governors would be reduced to the

ranks; all they had gained through long generations would have to be

surrendered for division. It was worth a struggle. Indeed, it must be a

struggle for very life. Their worldly cunning came to their aid. Most of

them were above the mean resources of treachery, were noble in every

sense of the word, and refused to listen to anything but open combat.

But the foxy diplomats suborned one of the youthful leaders and made him

their agent in the camp of the enthusiasts; they sent their hirelings in

to join the enemy. There was in the first battle a bold front offered by

the socialists; but the traitors deliberately gave way and fled, and

soon the raw half-disciplined artisans and labourers were in rout. The

converted thieves returned to their plunder, and the poverty-stricken to

their misery.

“Then a strange thing happened. To turn the flank of the new religion

the gilded classes adopted it, and began to worship the martyr as

divine. The more sincere of his followers were satisfied with the

change, and settled down to their old life of discontent or content. The

world took shelter under the beliefs of this hater of the world. His

creed was emasculated of its socialism and altruism in deed, but was

accepted in word. It became the symbol of all that was gorgeous and

tyrannical. Magnificent temples rose for its worship; and in them

haughty priests officiated. He who had been the apostle and prophet of

the poor became the god of the rich and powerful. The new religion had

left the nation not much better than it had been.

“One good thing, however, came from it by accident. It was long

discussed what was to be done with the enemies of property, theoretical

and practical, the socialists and the thieves. A solution was furnished

by one of the most machiavellian of the diplomats; it was to give them

as much as would be their share were the wealth of the state divided,

and to deport them to one of the largest and most fertile islands of the

archipelago, Tirralaria. It was hailed as the salvation of the state.

Many ships, therefore, were prepared, and the enthusiastic believers in

socialism and the thieves were put on board, and safely disembarked in

their new domain, with the threat that, if any of them attempted to land

again in Limanora, they would be at once put to death. Two attempts were

made to return; but they were beaten off. The expeditions in each case

consisted of the better class of socialists, who felt the grinding

tyranny of socialism, in which the bad are put on the same footing as

the honest and conscientious. They were each too small to force a

landing on any other island; nor would their fellow-islanders allow them

to come back to Tirralaria. They could not live always in fallas; and

they vanished from the archipelago. It is the current tradition, whence

it comes I know not, that they burst through the circle of fog into the

outer ocean, and sailing eastwards got footing on the western shores of

America; but it is so many centuries ago when either secession occurred

that the story is as dim as a dream of our infancy.

“The experiment was successful for Limanora, and supplied the new

political formula of all reform. The state was well rid of knaves

without doing them any wrong. Some of the worst blood of the community

had been drawn, and yet the system had not been weakened to any great

extent. The worst of the criminal and improvident part of the population

had been expelled; and it seemed to optimists as if the Limanoran

millennium were about to appear. Alas for human hopes! Though the

virtuous section of the people had had their hands greatly strengthened,

there were still the more gilded forms of vice to cope with. Ambition

and love of war, sensuality and falsehood, were rooted in the hearts of

the nation that had seemed to be purified. In order to gain their ends

the ambitious were ever appealing to force and stirring up civil war,

till at last it became unbearable by the peace-loving majority, who put

into office sympathisers with their view of life and demanded

expurgation of the loathed pugnacity. All who were warlike or ambitious

in their nature or who had come of warlike or ambitious ancestry were

deported to Broolyi; and you have seen the result of their civilisation.

“The hypocrites and the sensual were as eager as any to see the appeal

to force finally extruded. They thought they would have it their own way

when the swaggering, hectoring, military men were gone; but the

licentious soon found themselves isolated. Their sins more readily found

them out. Their outrages on what was honest in domestic life roused more

sweeping and clamorous condemnation. The soldiers and bullies had had in

their natures a side that was close to their own vice, and indulged in

the amorous passion to licence, when their combativeness or ambition did

not occupy the stage of their minds. They had had a sympathy for the

lechers, and often protected them when public opinion had risen against

them, knowing that they themselves at times stood in need of similar

protection; and, though the lechers felt more kin to the hypocrites in

their often demure or sly and crawling temptation of women, they found

these anything but allies. In fact the machiavellis joined the hue and

cry against them, and had them all carefully picked out of the community

and deported with their share of the wealth of the state to Figlefia.

“The net was drawing round the hypocrites and liars, though they thought

they were making themselves supreme in the nation. The honest and loyal

and true element had grown predominant; and before a century had passed,

the false had followed after the lechers; they were exiled with their

belongings to Aleofane. Unlike the socialists and thieves, these last

three sets of exiles made no attempts to return, or to enter into

alliance against their old island. They found too great scope for their

respective vices in their new countries to desire to leave them. They

have prospered according to their own lights, and delude themselves into

the belief that they have ideals far beyond those of their original

land; Broolyi, as we have seen, sets up peace as its motive and

religion, Figlefia matrimony and domestic life, and Aleofane truth. They

each carried away with them so large a share of the wealth of Limanora

that they long believed her too poor to be worth robbing. So they let

her alone. Individuals for a time made efforts to land; but they were

taught a severe lesson; and, since the invention of the storm-cone, all

such attempts have been abandoned, and the central island is usually

spoken of as the Land of Devils. Each of these now ancient nations

adopted the principle that had led to their independence, and deport

alien elements to other and smaller islands of the archipelago. One

large group they call their lunatic asylum; thither they send everyone

who is so fanatical in his enthusiasm for an idea or social theory, so

extreme in his development of any alien vice or virtue as to be a danger

to the state or to the peace of the community. Each island is given up

to one type of monomaniacs; and it is an agreement on the part of the

three great commonwealths to adhere to the classification of crazes. It

is thus that they have been able to remain stable and united. The

deportation policy has been their salvation, for it is the quixotic

enthusiasts and crotchety extremists that constitute the greatest danger

to the solidarity of a state; but in spite of their great advantages and

the adoption of this method of state expurgation, they have not advanced

in these thousands of years, during which they have occupied their

islands.

“In after ages it was a matter of regret to the advancing Limanorans

that they had not monasticised the exiles. It was useless, they knew, to

adopt what you are thinking of, a missionary system. No propaganda,

however successful, ever did more than send the old beliefs and habits

below the surface to reappear in the new generations. Conversion through

the intellect or the feelings is only skin deep. By no known process can

the century-long growth of civilisation or virtue be abbreviated into a

few days or months or years. Selection in breeding and complete change

in environment are the only true missionaries, and with many races even

these are powerless, so deep has the virus of moral retrogression sunk

into their natures. The best propagandist for them would be complete

monasticism. The men of my day felt deep sorrow for the world that their

ancestors had not sent the sexes of the deported to different islands,

and guarded against the mutual approach by keeping three or four navies

in the seas between, till the socialists, the warlike, the sensual, and

the false had died out. It would have meant the greatest vigilance and

the devotion of a large section of the people to naval pursuits for

almost a century; but it would also have meant the disappearance of this

obstacle to the progress of the world, this element of danger in the

archipelago. The evil was irremediable by my time, for any attempt to

remove it would mean conquest and bloodshed. And it had become not

merely a maxim of state but an instinct born in every Limanoran that

conquest and bloodshed are more than futile, are ruinous, that they

destroy the higher nature of the conqueror or destroyer. To enter on

such a course as would lead to the extermination of these vicious

communities would be to sow again in our own the seeds of still greater

evils. Nothing but the silent obliterative process of nature could

justify itself to my countrymen.

“There was another reason that will perhaps seem to you more practical.

It was that they had by no means finished their process of expurgation.

No longer had great bodies to be deported. But from age to age an

individual nature even in the most carefully bred and trained showed

atavistic vice or weakness; and, when every means had failed to cure it,

the individual had to be exiled; and one of these islands was his

natural home, to which it would be no inhumanity to carry him; for there

would he find choice spirits and natures akin to his own.

“This was my case. I had an ancestry that had in long ages gone by shown

warlike proclivities, but in so subordinate and unobtrusive a way that

they had not been banished. In the intervening generations their

pugnacity had by means of selection and environment wholly disappeared;

but, by some accident of nature or miscalculation on the part of the

Limanoran sages who had chosen my parents and surroundings, the taint,

that had seemed dead, reappeared. In spite of all remedies and care, I

grew more pugnacious, more eager to excite my neighbours to war. I

devoted my talents to the invention of weapons and war material. I made

myself at last so obnoxious that no alternative was left. I was exiled

to Broolyi, and there have I spent the long years since in efforts to

burn the tainted spot from my nature.”

The cloud had fallen upon him again, as he approached this part of his

story. He persevered to the end; but so heavy lay the sorrow over his

past upon him that it was keen anguish to speak further of it. I left

him to his thoughts and went on deck.

I was surprised to find that we were close to the shore, and that on it

stretched out a large and handsome city. I looked up to the great

mountain that overbrowed it, and I seemed to recognise an outline with

which I was familiar; could it be Nookoo? The name brought back my

subterranean agony. The light streamer of mist that floated over its top

showed it to have inner fires. The memory seemed almost dreamlike, and

perhaps the unfamiliarity of some of the details was owing to our being

on the other side of Figlefia, the side I had not seen.

Noola followed me on deck, and I conjectured that a subject like this

might distract his thoughts and dispel his cloud. I called his attention

to the land, and asked him if he knew it. It was Figlefia; but he seemed

to be astonished at something in the scene. His eye was fixed on the

city. I had never seen it before, and noticed nothing unusual in its

appearance; but he saw with his keener and farther power of vision that

no life was stirring in it. Another city of the dead was here. The

dwellers could not be buried in sleep under the flashing scrutiny of

noon. The ship’s glasses could not help him to solve the difficulty; nor

could his recollection of the history of the island; he had never heard

of such devastating plagues in Figlefia as he had witnessed in Broolyi.

It had slavery; but the slaves did not come such a distance, and were

used as sailors and oarsmen in the passage over-sea. It was women that

the lechers had mainly kidnapped, and it was these would have their

revenge; but he had never heard of any efficient retaliation on the part

of their seraglios.

It could not be an ambuscade to seize the _Daydream_? He alone would

venture on shore; he would not hear of my joining him on his first

excursion. When he got to land, I could see him move cautiously about

the streets and then return still alone to the beach. He rowed off, and

invited me to return with him.

It was one of the strangest scenes I had ever witnessed; for I had,

because of my illness and haste of embarkation, seen little of the

plague-stricken streets of the capital of Broolyi. The magnificence of

the buildings and the luxury of the interiors of the houses contrasted

with the loathsomeness of the rotting corpses. In every house lay some

dead, generally in the midst of the most splendid tapestries and the

most luxurious couches and seats; the spraying fountains of scent were

now unable to overcome the stench of the dead hands that had set them

flowing; but Noola observed that it was only in the houses of the lawful

wives that the dead lay, men, women, and children. The seraglios were

empty, except for here and there the stripped corpse of a man. The

beautiful slave-women had all vanished; and there was not one of the

male slaves amongst the dead.

When he had mentioned this to me, in a flash there came upon me the

remembrance of my saviour from the wreck of the falla and my guide into

the subterranean depths of Nookoo. It was, I saw in a moment, the

ingenious missile he had told me of that had accomplished this carnage

of the lecherous tyrants. The microbic globule in the hands of the women

of Swoonarie had swept the Figlefians from the face of the earth. The

infection had spread from each adulterer to his wife and household. How

and whither the slaves had escaped it was impossible to find out. There

was not a sign of life in the whole plague-stricken city. Doubtless his

antiseptic armour and antidote had been found a success. Whether he and

his people would follow up the victory by advancing with his

death-dealing missiles against the other islands of the archipelago

remained to be seen. That their old lethargy would overcome them when

they returned to Swoonarie was the more probable result. They would be

satisfied to have completed the revenge for the wrongs of ages, and to

have freed their women who had been kidnapped, and the narcotic

atmosphere of their native island would make them rest and postpone the

dream of universal conquest. It was unlikely that they would occupy the

island of Figlefia or the caverns of Nookoo, that had been their

salvation by giving them energy; for there were too many agonised

memories to lead them to rest there. Their own lotos-eating isle would

draw the slave exiles back irresistibly, and hold them within it for

ever as with bonds of iron.

Noola would not let me remain to speculate over the tragedy that had

taken place or the romance of conquest that might follow it. There was

danger for us in the pestilential atmosphere of the luxurious city. He

hurried me back to the beach; but in passing one of the ramparts he saw

some of the catapults that he had made for the Broolyians, capable of

throwing enormous weights to great distances. He had intended to return

to the Isle of Peace for two of them, as soon as he had allowed

sufficient time for the slaves to reach incapacity by intoxication and

sanguinary quarrels. This discovery obviated the expedition. He took two

of the huge machines to pieces, and sent the sailors to carry them

piecemeal to the boats. He had looked at our cannon and seen that they

would be dangerous instruments for carrying out our experiment; he had

got me to fire one of them, and decided that, though they had the power

to carry the distance he desired, they had not large enough bore to

admit of our enclosures, and to attach our cases to their balls might

lead to failure of aim, or perhaps fatal injury to the two passengers in

the missiles. When he had the catapults on board, he put them together;

then he made two cases, filled them with material equal to the weight of

a man, and shot them towards the shallower surf on the beach. They

plunged into the waters and emerged in the ripple along the shore. He

had them brought back, and found them intact. He went into one himself,

and fastened its door securely within so that no water could enter. Then

he instructed us to fire the man-missile in the same direction as the

previous shots. The result was the same, and we saw him open the lid and

walk out on the beach. Similar experiments with myself and with both of

us convinced him at last that everything was safe, and that he could

trust to the sailors to manage the affair with success.

We set out again in bright sunshine, and left behind us the deserted

city of the plague. The next day the sun suddenly clouded, and looking

up we saw that the cloud was rapidly moving over us and that it

consisted of birds. We could distinguish the flash of the individual

wings as they flickered in the sunbeams that broke through the ranks of

the great army. We could hear far off the harsh or musical cries of the

scouts and leaders, or the answering murmur of the embattled masses. At

times we could see battalions form and reform in their flight, the van

open its ranks and stretch out in long advancing line, and the rear ease

their pace in order to cover the laggards. It was a marvellous sight,

and the longer we listened the more distinctly could we hear the clang

and whizz and creak of the myriads of wings. It was the annual migration

northwards of the antarctic birds along the line of the submerged

continent; so Noola explained. A large contingent for long ages had been

inclined to settle each year on Limanora; but the storm-cone blew them

onwards till they rejoined the main body. It was the storm-cone that was

directing their flight now. He showed us how agitated were the rear

battalions, how uncertain the beat of their wings, how irregular and

shifting their formation. There we could see the strength of the blast

bear stragglers out of their course, as they jerked their wings and

uttered harsh cries; the spasmodic flash of the sunshine upon them was

enough to show that they were bearing the brunt of some propelling

storm. It took hours to clear the sky of this agitated cloud; but we set

our course by its streaming flight, knowing that whence they were blown

was our destination.

My heart bounded as I saw the face of our guide after instructing the

man at the helm. It was set with strong resolution, and the eye blazed

with the prayerful inspiration of a saint fixed upon his deity. He gazed

into the shimmering light ahead with an intensity that seemed to imply

some object dimly descried. We could see nothing, nor could we disturb

him with question. We had surrendered the whole guidance of the ship to

his discretion. On the morning after, we saw what had magnetised his

gaze; the gleaming peak of Lilaroma with its streamer of cloud upon the

distant rim of sky. He knew every inch of the shore; for, when it came

clearly into sight, he turned the ship’s head directly east, leaving the

fleckless white of the mountain on our starboard. We seemed indeed to be

steaming away from Limanora; but he knew his own purpose, and we let him

alone. Night fell, and then we veered round to the south, and faced the

still gleaming point of purity upon the horizon. Up and up it rose into

the sky as we sped on; and yet the storm had not yet burst upon us. He

evidently knew the side of the island that was least open to attack and

therefore least watched. In the dim underlight of the dark moonless

night we could discern cliffs rise and snowless levels stretch dim and

mysterious. Still no sign of the storm-cone, though we could see the

line of its passage black round the snowy shoulders of the giant peak.

On we forged as swiftly as steam could make the _Daydream_ fly. Noola

paced anxiously from bow to stern, from the look-out man to the wheel,

never relaxing his gaze into the darkness. It was a race with the

quickest thoughts upon the earth. It seemed as if we were about to

impinge upon merciless crags, we seemed so near. Still we held on with

unabated speed. We were almost under the lee of the threatening cliffs;

and I thought that in a few minutes we should shut out the sight of the

cone-path round the mountain. With the suddenness of a thunderbolt the

tornado struck us. It made the ship stagger; but everything was in

readiness, every rope and sail tied up, every surface that would impede

our progress stowed below or turned so that it should not meet the force

of the wind. We seemed to stand still; I thought that we were even

receding; but she was cutting into the storm, for the cliff in front of

us broke part of the force of it. Still the cone roared; still the yacht

made a few paces, we could see as we threw anything overboard. He knew

the conditions of the problem; he knew that the people were certain to

be long occupied with directing the flight of birds away from the

island; and he knew the section of the coast that rose highest and would

give us smooth water, blow the cone its fiercest. We took some hours to

get inside the ring of broken water; and it was still dark. He then

turned her head to the north, and soon we saw a shelving beach open out

beyond the cliff. He had the catapults ready. We were still protected by

the crags; but in a few minutes we would be out in the open, subject to

the full fury of the cone-storm. He gave direction to Burns to turn her

head inshore full speed as soon as we had run out of the shelter, and

shoot off the man-missiles. We entered our cases and fastened the lids

securely. I felt myself moved and laid in a groove that held the missile

firm. I heard the word of command from Burns; and that was almost the

last thing I was conscious of from the old world of my boyhood and

youth. My heart leapt into my mouth as I felt the concussion in starting

through the air. I seemed to be dashed with great force against

something that was cushiony, and at that moment my sense of the outer

world and of myself lapsed.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

POSTSCRIPT TO RIALLARO

Our narrator vanished as abruptly as his story broke off here. Just when

our curiosity had been whetted to its keenest we were left with the

broken thread. We had noticed him hanging back from the account of his

intercourse with Noola. His tissues had grown less transparent as he had

proceeded with his description of the various islands. He had become

accustomed to our food, and seemed to approach nearer to our common

humanity. We came to take greater liberties with him, and even urged him

to proceed with his narrative. We had become so interested in it that we

would willingly have abandoned our pursuit of gold for days, if only he

could have been induced to continue by daylight. The glimmer of our lamp

or the dancing glow of our fire threw his face into shadow, and seemed

to give him confidence; and even when storm and rain drove him in from

the bush he resisted our persuasions as long as daylight lingered. He

would lie so still that we were often afraid that he had died or fallen

into a trance.

As he came to his story of Noola’s exile, this reluctance increased even

when the flickering shadows of the lamp or fire sheltered him. Our rough

methods of trying to bring him to book only made him shrink farther into

himself, and had it not been for the prolonged and stormy spring I fear

that we should never have reached the natural close of his story, his

exit from Riallaro. With his last word came bright sunshine and clear

weather; and he disappeared as abruptly as he had come.

GODFREY SWEVEN.

[Illustration]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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------------------------------------------------------------------------

● Transcriber’s Notes:

○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.

○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.

○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only

when a predominant form was found in this book.

○ Text that:

was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_);

was in bold by is enclosed by “equal” signs (=bold=)

had extra character spacing by “plus” signs (+stretched+).

○ The use of a caret (^) before a letter, or letters, shows that the

following letter or letters was intended to be a superscript, as

in S^t Bartholomew or 10^{th} Century.