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