The Professor had been well within the mark in stating that the breadth
of the island was not less than eight miles. By sundown I must have
covered thirty miles at least and encamped for the night by the side of
a swift and narrow stream. I had still the low hill to cross which the
Professor had spoken of as a mountain. In a flat country such as Thule,
all hills are mountains.
The Professor's mistakes in regard to time and distance interested me a
good deal. I could understand that they rendered him professionally
unsuitable for the practical work of the Central Office and that they
probably helped to debar him from the post which he desired in the Inner
Office. It may be, perhaps, that one cannot have an over-development in
one direction without a compensating defect in another. The Professor
showed the same anxiety to conceal his want of time-sense that an
engine-driver might show to conceal his colour-blindness. After all,
instances of this want of time-appreciation are common enough among my
own people in dealing with the past. One knows the vagueness with which
the ordinary man assigns a fact to the sixteenth or seventeenth
century--a fact which in reality belongs to the eighteenth. The further
back we go the more vague we become. It is difficult for us to realise
that the difference between the tenth and eleventh centuries is a
difference of a hundred of those very years which we are now living. So
far as the present was concerned, the Professor's time-appreciation was
clear and accurate enough. He never forgot the hour at which he should
take his pills or his siesta in the sun. Watches were unknown in Thule,
but there was a clock in every room, and all clocks were wound and
synchronised electrically from the Central Office.
I had never been able to persuade the Professor to tell me where the
Central, Outer, and Inner Offices were domiciled. I guessed at first it
would be where I saw that shaft of smoke ascending when I landed at the
island, but afterwards I saw several other similar smoke columns and
assigned them to subterranean factories of some kind. But in the course
of my day's ramble I came upon many other features that interested me. I
reached a long stretch of fields in which a veritable army of the second
class was at work. Each field was numbered and seemed to have its
separate gang. Each gang was in the charge of one first-class being. As
a rule he lay in the sun with one hand removed from the boot and covered
with a rubber glove. In this hand he held a thick rod some three feet in
length which seemed to me to be made of aluminium. His quick and
watchful eyes surveyed the whole of the field, and every now and then he
called out an order to some individual labourer. The order was in every
case instantly obeyed. In every one of these fields I was challenged by
the overseer with a loud "Who are you?" I replied as the Professor had
directed me and showed my pass. I was then allowed to go on unmolested.
I may even say that I was treated with kindness. One of these beings had
water fetched for me that I might drink. Another, astounded by the
distance which I had covered on foot, offered to provide four labourers
with a litter to carry me, and seemed surprised to find that I really
preferred walking. In many of these fields there was grain ready for
harvest--of the same kinds, I think, as we have in our country, but with
the ears much larger and heavier and of a very dwarf-like habit. I found
barley and oats full grown standing scarcely six inches above the
ground.
Beyond these cultivated fields was a gently undulating plain, not unlike
common land I have seen in England. The bracken was near waist-high, and
often I had to force my way through a tangle of bramble and gorse. This
part of the country seemed to be entirely deserted, and with no one to
direct me I steered by the sun. After some miles of this I came upon a
small clump of elm trees and stretched myself in the shade for food and
rest.
As I lay asleep I felt a gentle touch upon my shoulder, and opening my
eyes I saw one of the first-class beings. I judged him to be one of the
overseers, for from one of his big loose boots an aluminium rod
projected.
"Who are you?" he said.
I showed him my credentials. He seemed satisfied.
"Go on your way at once," he said, "and bear well to the right, for here
you are in danger."
I could not tell what the danger might be, but thought it best to take
his advice. As he trotted away from me I fastened up my pack again and
slung it on my back, and almost instantly I saw what the danger was. Out
from a dip of the land which had concealed them came a herd of about
twenty wild cattle. Their size was enormous. The leader, a white bull,
scented or sighted me and charged at once towards me. There was but one
thing to do. I gripped a low bough and easily swung myself up into the
tree, even in the moment of my activity speculating how long I should be
kept there and what would happen to the overseer who had spoken to me
and was now scarcely a hundred yards distant. The bull paced round and
round the tree, pawing the earth and striking the trunk with his great
horns. From my perch I could see that the overseer now stood still. He
had slipped one hand out of the boot and now grasped that aluminium rod.
At that moment the bull sighted him and charged him. The rest of the
herd waited huddled and motionless.
When the bull was within about twenty yards of him the overseer raised
his hand and pointed that rod towards the beast. There was a flash as of
lightning, a loud crackling sound, and the bull rolled over stone dead.
The rest of the herd turned tail and galloped off in panic. Without a
word to me the overseer replaced the rod in his boot and went on his
way.
I could understand now how one of these beings could easily control a
gang of thirty or more of the second-class labourers, and could ensure
punctual and complete obedience. Yet, grateful though I was to this
overseer, I regarded the beings of his type more with wonder than with
admiration. They were a selfish and sterile race. Their mode of walking
suggested to me too vividly things that I had seen in the great
ape-house in Regent's Park. Physically they were not, according to our
notions, to be compared with the second class whom they controlled.
Those that I saw of the second class were all men of fine stature. Their
skins were darker than the European and of a reddish brown. Their faces
were handsome, gloomy, and sombre. They seemed more akin to me than did
this four-legged thing with the monstrous head and the death-dealing rod
in his boot. But as yet I had spoken to no being of the second class. As
I passed through the cultivated fields I was all the time under the eyes
of the overseers, and deemed it inadvisable to break through the
Professor's injunctions.
I saw nothing more of the wild cattle nor of any living being until I
reached the stream beside which I camped for the night. I had been told
that on the farther side of the hill I should find a forest and beyond
the forest the dwellings of the second class and the sea.
As I lay stretched on my rug I heard beneath me a curious rumbling sound
and guessed correctly what it might be. It was commonplace enough--an
underground train taking the workers back to their homes. Commonplace,
at least, in London, but strange in the environment in which I found it.
I slept well, as I ever do in the open on a warm night, and in the
morning after a refreshing swim in the stream set out to climb the hill.