CHAPTER XXIAWDYOO
HE saw at last that I had little sympathy with the part he had assumed; and with a wily insight and versatility he snaked himself round into a confidential conversation on our next step. He told me that he was glad we had come off so well-laden with provisions; for he wished to avoid the next islet in the chain, Awdyoo, or the isle of journalism; it was the foulest place on the earth, and no one ever landed there who could avoid it.
It was the quarantine station, whither all the scribo-maniacs were deported. Every island but Aleofane had used it as an asylum for those who were afflicted with the desire to address their neighbours in writing or type concerning their neighbours’ affairs and characters. In Aleofane the government controlled and utilised the morbid state of mind for the advantage of the governors. In other islands it was lamented and guarded against as one of the foulest of contagious diseases; once it had taken root in a community, they knew there was no eradicating it except by the most wholesale exile. It generally caught the meanest and most malignant natures, too, and turned them into moral sewers. They would not let the affairs of their neighbours alone, and stirred up every mud pool until it became offensive; and, when they could not find anything in the shape of scandal or foible or quarrel, they had to manufacture; so they filled the citizens’ minds with lies about each other, and with cues of attack or offence. They fomented bad blood, and infected the whole community with every spiritual disease that could possibly approach it. There was no lunacy that Riallaro so greatly feared as that of journalism, it was so disgusting and so swiftly spreading an epidemic of the mind. Every man who was touched with it came to fancy himself absolved from all laws of courtesy, honour, and morality; he assumed that he was practically omniscient, and whosoever dared to question this assumption had to be pursued to the death with his most envenomed and deadliest weapons, malice, slander, ridicule, misrepresentation, impudence, lies. They had all agreed at a conference many centuries before that there were no such dangerous madmen, and that their mental disease spread more quickly than a plague. They had therefore fixed on Awdyoo, one of the most isolated of the islets, as the hospital for this epidemic; and whoever showed any symptoms of it in any island was deported thither.
The place had become a complete pandemonium in these centuries. The inhabitants had substituted physical means of attack for their old spiritual weapons, for every one of them had grown so thick-hided from perpetual attack of the others that the foulest charges fell lightly on them. They laughed to scorn the most irritating slanders and lies and banter and mimicry, the favourite methods of their journalism. So, to relieve their feelings, they had to translate their moral and intellectual warfare into physical. And the weapons they used were the physical equivalents of their old journalistic methods of attack; they had great air-guns, from which they shot various mixtures more or less glutinous; if they found someone they wished to parasite, it was butter; if they had a rival or neighbour to quarrel with and blacken, it was ink; other preparations were paste variously coloured and stench-generative, filth highly granulated with pebbles, and the extract of cuttlefish mingled with the poisons of various plants and animals. Their missiles were not absolutely lethal; they were only noisome and inconvenient until washed off. They were made into minute pellets with a hard gelatine shell, so that they made no commotion in the olfactory nerves till broken. Even those they wished to honour were incommoded by the streams of butter that soon streaked their clothes and face. Honour, flattery, from them was almost as little desired as their hostile attacks; and it was one of the islands which no one visited unless under a stern sense of duty or the incitement of some heroic mood or from accident. Yet they were thoroughly convinced that they were the arbiters of all reputation in the world. If they laughed, mankind trembled and were sick. If they threatened, the orb shook. If they approved, posterity accepted their verdict and threw up their caps in applause. A nod or a frown from them had as great effect as a thunder-storm or an earthquake. Their fiat was immortal, even though they should immediately contradict it, as they generally did. Their respect for principles and facts and truths continued as long as these continued to support their conclusions and beliefs; and then the alliance was broken; they considered that no loyalty was due to things that were disloyal; it was a case, then, of internecine warfare; veiled in great professions of respect and devotion for the enemy, if only it would cease to be hostile. Their treatment of persons was based on the same ideal of rights; omnipotence was not to be trifled with; omniscience was not to be questioned.
What was their religion? It was the Veiled Ego. They believed that the only true way of making divine was by mystification. Hide the average personality under namelessness and mystery, and you give it the attributes of godhead; its utterances, however feeble, gather strength from the secrecy of their source, and seem to come from the mouth, if not from the heart, of mankind. The primary article of their creed was this: a voice from behind any veil, however tawdry or foul, becomes the voice of the people; and the voice of the people is the voice of God. Every man of them, therefore, had become a god; and it was his object to bring the rest of the world to worship at his shrine, or sheet, behind which he ever concealed himself. He believed it was only a matter of time, when the whole universe would fall at his feet. Meantime his fellows on his own island had to be subdued to the true faith; and his whole time was spent in warfare and the invention of new forms of attack, especially of ambush. He was filled with complete faith in the righteousness and ultimate triumph of his cause, and was ever asserting that truth will prevail, at the very moment that he was manufacturing fiction and stench pellets for the conversion of his neighbours and the salvation of their souls. By truth he meant his own deliverances. For the gist of his creed was this: “There is no god but I, veiled under We, the essence and sum of all created beings; and I, veiled under We, is his prophet.”
I had become so deeply interested in his account of Awdyoo, and he in his narrative, that we had not noticed a dark band round the horizon broaden and gradually obliterate the islets. A cold effluence from it had crept over us to the effacement of our compass and landmarks. The mist soon closed and shut out the sun and sky, and then we knew not where we were or whither we headed. We dared not move lest we should drift far from both land and our course. We had only to throw ourselves passively into the bottom of the canoe and await a change. Sneekape was evidently much moved, and did not add to my cheerfulness by telling me that these mists were frequent and long around Awdyoo; and that they were brought about by the everlasting hail of gelatinous missiles that rayed forth stench when burst.
Two nights fell upon us starless, like the walls of a prison, and still the mist rose not. Our provisions would not last many days; but we felt that the boat and the sea were drifting under us, or that the mist was floating swiftly over us. It must have been about midday, when my companion started from his prostrate position, and put his hand to his nose. “It’s Awdyoo,” he exclaimed with bated breath. He knew it by the indescribable medley of smells that floated over the islet as from a thousand chemical factories, and he fancied that their repertory of missiles must have greatly enlarged since his last approach to it. There was a new variety in the fetid redolence of the atmosphere. If all the putrescent waters and heaps of the world, all its assafœtida and noisome plants, and all its polecats and skunks, had been gathered into one centre, and all the exhalations from them turned into one nozzle, the result would have been aromatic and balmy beside this mephitic stench. It was not alone the nose that it invaded, but every sense and pore of the body; the whole of our human system seemed to be mastered by the olfactory section of it. We longed for one sniff even of the crater of Klimarol.
Gradually the sense of smell got partially paralysed, and a smart grating sound shivering through the framework of our canoe recalled our mental force to eyes and ears. The current was bearing us over a sand-bank, and we could see a dim, low line as of land beyond. We rose in frenzy to our oars, and pushed off; and the current bore us past several tongues of land, and then, it seemed, out into deep water. We spent hours in the struggle before it succeeded. Happily the veil was close drawn over the whole scene. But it was now near noon, and the strength of the midday sun began to penetrate the thick gossamer of floating moisture. In a brief time the whole pall lifted, and we saw the island lying at a safe distance, yet near enough to show us the inhabitants and their occupations. It looked as if they had all hung out a very dirty washing to dry; for there flapped in the light wind, that had rent the veil of mist, hundreds of long sheets that had once been white. Out from behind them peeped the nozzles of air-guns and of men and women, and back and forward darted various forms of familiar animals, whose appropriate noises we could still hear in the distance. My companion explained, with a smile at my mistaken conjecture, that these sheets were their entrenchments, behind which they were nameless and secret, that on them they printed threats and challenges and abuse for the benefit of rivals and enemies; and when anyone approached they poured forth a shower of stench pellets upon him, or chased him in the disguise of some animal.
One by one they saw us; and a howl of execration rose from them and gathered force as they collected into a crowd. There was evidently great excitement; we had still one long spur of land to pass, though happily at a distance. They galloped with all their following and their artillery towards it. It was a narrow escape for us. We had just shot past it into deeper water, when they arrived at its point and set their guns in order. The pellets fell short; but as they struck the water they broke and infected the air with putrescence. One unfortunately touched the gunnel and bespattered Sneekape; and he acknowledged that they must have invented some new odours surpassing for their strength and noisomeness. Yet, as the current and wind drifted us out of the reach of the raining stenches, it was almost a pleasure to have only the offensive fetor of my companion’s hair and clothes near me. We lowered the islet into a thin line by distance; then we could see them scatter like insects to their various sheets; and night sheltered us soon with its cool neutrality of perfume. My odorous mate had dipped himself again and again into the sea and wrung himself out, till at last only a faint reminiscence of the polecat hung about him. It was faint enough to let me listen to his diverting chatter as we drifted. He assured me that the current would bear us of itself to the next islet in the chain.