CHAPTER XXXVIBROOLYI
DURING the latter part of our conferences Blastemo had fallen silent; his oaths and wild exclamations had first grown less frequent and then ceased. When I looked to find the cause of the break in the torrent, I laughed to see the rubicund face blanched, and instead of the usual militant boldness of the expression a tremulous light in the eye. Sandy Macrae at a gesture from me helped him below and we saw no more of him for days, and heard nothing either but long-intervalled groans of agony. For the wind had freshened ahead, and, as something or other had disturbed the compasses, we could not tell whether we were keeping our course or not. We steered by the sun; and, as we had not our pilot to correct us, we had gradually shot far past our destination, and a current had carried us away to the east.
Before daybreak on the third day our lookout called our attention to a strange object on the horizon all gleaming white. At first the captain thought it was an iceberg wandered into these tropical regions, but as the sun forged up towards the rim of sky the ever-shifting tints that it threw over the vault revealed to him that it was a snow-peak on whose top lay a wreath of white filmy wool like a cloud. As the sunlight strengthened, they saw the wool-festoon float out like a pennon, tinged with the scarlet and gold of the dawn. The stars grew dim and winked out. The day broadened into a glare, and still the peak stood firm with its pennant of steam.
I was called, and I knew what it was they had been watching. It was the mystery of mysteries, the Isle of Devils, that was thrusting up its snow-peak into the sky. I bade Burns steer straight for it, and the wind that still blew fresh from the north-west was with us. The gleaming cone grew loftier and more beautiful in its outline, and past noon we could see the cloud-turbaned peaks that flanked it begin to show beneath its radiance. Still we pushed on, and, as the sun shot his western shuttle through his great web of rays, and we could see the land darken at the roots of the peak of snow, a strange circumstance occurred. There came over the heavens a glossy look as if we were moving under a dome of crystal closer to us than the azure of the sky. It was an occurrence I had noticed once or twice before, but I could get no satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. It was like the glitter of the sky on a morning of keen frost, that is just about to be followed by a tempest of rain; and what made it stranger was that the crystalline dome vanished as suddenly as it had come. The stars came out with a precipitance that alarmed us. We had not time to recover from our terror when a shout rose from the bow, “Breakers ahead.†We had but a few moments to bring her round and lower the sails, and together the sea and the wind struck us with a thud and made the ship stagger. I thought she would go to the bottom, she heeled with such suddenness and shipped such a mass of water. The masts broke like reeds, and the yards thundered down upon the deck.
In the midst of the commotion I saw Blastemo rush towards me over the wreckage, the pallor gone from his face. It was now livid with terror. He looked for a moment to the horizon, and then to the smooth sea that lay on either side of the tornado. He seized me by the arm and in a hoarse whisper begged me to hurry away from the accursed peak that still shone clear over our stern. Within half an hour we were in as peaceful an atmosphere and sea as we had had; not a trace of the storm or of the troubled water was to be seen. Even the long roll of billows with which we had run so long had vanished. As we cleared away the wreckage, our guest lay down exhausted on the deck. In a whisper of terror he told me the same story as I had heard from other islanders. None of them had ever been able to approach the Isle of Devils; every ship that had made the attempt had been disabled and blown off. This had been the case for long centuries, although there was a dim tradition that their ancestors had come from it in vessels. The shock seemed to have driven out his sea-sickness to some extent, and he kept by the man at the wheel till we were out of sight of the snow-peak. Before he left the deck he gave such instructions as to the route that no mistake could be made again.
Even this would not satisfy him, and in spite of his recurrent pallidity he returned to his post in the morning and watched every point on the horizon to see that we should not deviate as we did before. In three more days of light winds and calms we came in sight of a land that filled him with almost uncontrollable delight. He recognised its first dim outline upon the horizon as his own. As we approached it, its sierra rose boldly into the heavens, though rarely to the line of perpetual snow. Great ranges of mountains seemed to divide it into isolated corners, and jutted into the ocean in beetling precipices that forbade too close approach to the angry snarl of their surf. It was in every feature of it the home of warlike tribes bastioned against mutual peace and intercourse. I was much amused, therefore, to hear Blastemo break into an invocation to his fatherland as the home of all that was noble and peace-loving. He repeated its name again and again with eulogistic epithets, “noble, pacific Broolyiâ€; and, seeing us stand by unenthusiastic, he tried to rouse us by explaining that the name meant Isle of Peace, for the inhabitants were engaged in converting the whole archipelago to its doctrine of peace; they were the great missionaries of the gospel of peace to a world given over to war and mutual hatred. The confused swell near the iron-bound coast relieved us of the need of reply; for he quietly collapsed and sought a recumbent posture below.
We ran north along the wild scene of sheer cliffs. Solitary bird haunts waist-deep in the sullen billows, monstrous toothed jaws angrily churning the waters that ebbed and flowed across them, hollow-sounding caves that echoed to the splash and boom of the sea and to the screams of disturbed flashes of winged life, varied the monotony of the adamant bulwark of nature. A note of everlasting war between land and sea sounded hoarse along the shore, and ever as we approached there rang out the wild challenge of the torn and recoiling waves. The marks of the unending warfare of centuries lay in the reefs and outlying fragments of rock that chafed the waters as they flowed. It was indeed a conflict of Titans, whose chief ally and source of power was Time. Round great headlands we swept that mocked and baffled the high-flashing onslaught of the immortal enemy. How many generations of men had wailed into life, grown, fought tooth and nail, and lapsed into the grave, since these browbeaten cliffs had begun to outface the passions of their restless foe!
We rounded one foreland more colossal and overhanging than any; but its fantastic shapes held us only a moment, for beyond, the land rapidly fell into a broad valley, and there two embattled bodies of men were busy hacking and hewing each other. Their armour clashed under the strokes, fierce shouts issued from those that were hurrying from the rear, and a minor undercurrent of sound was a medley of wails and groans. The crew were soon all on deck absorbed in the new spectacle. Even Blastemo had recovered and ascended. He looked on from a modest hiding-place in the rear; but, as soon as we saw him, we burst into a roar of laughter, remembering his recent eulogies of peace and of the pacific nature of his countrymen. He knew what we meant, and slunk below again.
I had occasion to go soon after to my cabin, and I found him pacing the floor in wild agitation. The sound of the clashing arms and the shouts and groans reached him even here, and he saw, though dimly, through the thick glass of the port-hole the swaying masses and the give-and-take of the combat. His blood was in ferment, and he pleaded with me to put him on shore, that he might join in the struggle. It maddened him to hear the clangour and not be in the midst of the fray. He confessed that he had not looked closely or long enough to know who were the combatants or what was the right or wrong for which they fought. All he knew was that it was near the capital and his own district, and his desire to keep the peace was overwhelming everything else in him. I refused to listen to his petitions, fearing that by landing him we might draw the fury of either side or perhaps of both upon us. We sped on and soon melted the uproar into a confused hum and shut out the sight that so fevered his blood.
Our next experience was as exciting. We shot past the cape that like a sheltering arm curled round the great harbour of the island, and a city spread upwards from it bastioned to the roofs. And what a commotion filled every parapet and wall and street! Never had such a craft been seen in these waters; and our fame had spread before us. Every movement of theDaydream, since she had approached the island, had been messengered to the city. Banners and trophies swung in the breeze. Wild music made the air a hoarse discordant pæan. Bells rung, gongs sounded, shrill pipes shot skirling blasts into the ear of heaven. Marchings and countermarchings of squares and rectangles of blue and green and scarlet humanity made a moving tartan of the shore. The chromatropic effect was as harassing to the eye as the clangour to the ear. Puffs of acrid smoke obscured the air at intervals. At a distance it was alarming. What would it be near at our hand? The whole armed population was evidently in motion. Our guest, mad though he was with excitement, managed to reassure us, and, taking from his cabin a small blue-green and red pennon, flung it out from our poop. The effect was instantaneous. The commotion ceased. The troops wheeled and marched inland, and soon only the ununiformed crowd were left to watch us as we swept up to an anchorage within a breastwork of the harbour.
The night fell, and silence shed its sleep upon the many-coloured, myriad-noted world. With the morning returned the bustle and skirl and brazen echo of a warlike community. Everything, as we looked out to the shore, seemed to move to disciplinary rhythm. I went to the royal levee with Blastemo, and, after he had prelected to the courtiers and the king in a language that I did not understand, I was addressed from the throne in Aleofanian. I could see from the speech that my fireship had deeply impressed the community and especially the governors of Broolyi, but their warlike purpose and employments were veiled in eulogies of their mission of peace. Peace was the ideal and prayer of their inmost souls, and this fireship of mine would enable them to fulfil it the sooner. It was difficult to disentangle this from the labyrinth of ceremonies and gestures, verbiage and oaths, that seemed to form the very heart of Broolyian civilisation. Every climax reached by the monarchic eloquence we heard echoed outside of the palace by the roll of drums and the air-splitting shrill of pipes. The whole life of the community seemed to move to machinery that centred in the court.
This I afterwards found was no mere metaphor or fancy. The next day was their great festival of the week, and the people crowded into the temples to worship the gods. None worked or were supposed to work. I went with Blastemo first to one sacred building and then to another; and I was struck with the fact that everything seemed to proceed as by clockwork, the music, the sermon, the genuflections of the priest. “You are right,†said my guide. “And I will show you how the whole thing is worked.â€
He took me to an enormous hall behind the palace. It was like a huge factory, so full was it of machinery, all in motion. It was, indeed, he assured me, a religion factory, one of the grandest institutions in the world. This controlled all the services in the temples of the island. He took me to one great machine that had on a capacious barrel all the litanies of the year. At the moment we came up it was started by the controller of religious services, who sat in a recess of the inner hall of the king’s palace. We heard a prayer to the god of peace most painfully and articulately intoned. I did not understand the words, but I could make out from the tones in which they were uttered the changes of meaning and spiritual attitude. It was marvellous, the solemnity of the effect, provided we shut our eyes; there was such majesty in the volume of the sound and in the elocutionary variations of the tone; one might have imagined a vast assembly pouring forth in unison a submissive appeal to heaven. In the temple the clack and shuttling of the machinery were not heard; instead of it there was an automatic priest magnificently clothed, bowing and posturing to suit the word. It was only a wax figure containing clockwork controlled by this great litany machine, but the effect was like life, or rather much more impressive. There was none of the hawking and hemming of the human priest, none of his awkward pauses and blowings of the nose, none of the clumsy gestures or inability to dispose of the hands; and the voice rang out through the great buildings with a bell-like clearness and naturalness that would have made the human voice seem bathos. How feeble and tremulous, I remembered, buzzed the voices of the priests I had heard intoning in the cathedrals of Europe! I felt almost ashamed of the memory.
With a whirr and a click the litany machine stopped, and the processional machine took up the tale. There was more noise and clang in this, for more force had to be applied; a hundred or more processions of marionette acolytes and priests through the various temples of the island were impelled by it. There was a manifest rhythm in its motions, almost like the sound of a stately minuet. I saw these processions afterwards; and nothing could exceed the solemnity of the motions of the man-like fantoccini. I never saw such an impressive ceremonial; every step, every gesture was in harmony; there was no unseemly merriment in the eyes or conversation on the lips of the youthful figures; and the chanting was so noble and beautiful, filling as it did the whole vast edifice with its mournful, or jubilant sound. The service was well through before I had come into the religion factory, and the only other machine I saw at work was that which produced the music. It was in an adjoining hall, which was filled with thousands of pipes of the most varied size and construction. There sat the musician, and the whole building trembled as the keys were struck. It was intolerable; the groaning and thunder it produced made the very tips of our ears to shake. But when delivered by tubes or wires into the vast temples of the country, nothing could surpass the softness and harmony of the volume of sound.
One large edifice served for the central section of the town; it was spacious enough to contain every man, woman, and child that lived in the district. Each suburb had a smaller temple, yet large enough to dwarf the cathedrals of England. I was deeply interested in them, and every weekly festival I visited one or more of them. I was especially anxious to hear the sermon or prelection. The lay-figure rose and moved his eyes and lips and his arms and body to suit the words that were uttered. The whole of the audience was too distant from it to distinguish the movements; and the wax lifelessness of the face, which I made out when, after the service, I approached it, could not have been seen by any of the worshippers, so far aloft was it perched in a pulpit on the farthest wall. The tones reached every ear in the huge edifice, and their modulation and expression were perfect. I conjectured that the sermon had been spoken into some recorder before, and that this reproduced it by machinery on some diaphragm in each church, and that over the diaphragm was fixed some instrument inside the lay-figure for multiplying many times the volume of the sound.
The illusion was complete. I never heard oratory so impressive, or religious service so solemnly performed. The sermon was, Blastemo told me, a discourse on peace as the aim of all mankind. It painted the horrors of war, and brought out in contrast a portrait of the man of the millennium, who would have his passions so under control that nothing would rouse him to anger or strife. It closed with a vindication of the warlike policy for reaching this great ideal. Nothing but continual and effective warfare would make men afraid to quarrel or bring their quarrel to issue. The ebullience of the passions of the world was to be mastered by fear. When they had brought warfare to the perfection of destructiveness, all wars would cease; terror of death would be the universal guiding motive of communities and individuals. Then would the god of peace have voice through the whole world, for he would have his mentor in every human breast in every assembly, the knowledge that any strife must end in the annihilation of all those who take part in it. The peroration was fervid in its appeal to the worshippers to pursue warfare till it should be absolute in its annihilative power.
I was deeply impressed by the whole performance; never did it approach to that bathos which, I remembered, had so often marred the services in even the greatest cathedrals and churches of the various divisions of Christianity. There was no halting in the oratory, no feebleness of voice, no ridiculous straining of the nervous or muscular power. There was no hitch in the processions or ceremonies, nothing pinchbeck or tawdry or mean. The music was noble, and in its softening and shading as fine as the massing of tens of thousands of human voices, there was no discord, no jar. The effect of the whole was uniform, deep, and abiding.
Yet I could not get out of mind the cogs and wheels and keys of the religion factory, the workmen moving about seeing that the machinery was well oiled and that it worked without chance of breakdown, the solitary performer sitting at the keyboard, and the king’s minister in the royal recess grinding out the service. I expressed my feelings to Blastemo as we walked away, and he warmly defended the method of his country. They had had in the past a priesthood attached to the various temples, but it had been found that their lives so differed from their teachings that the people laughed at the whole of religion as a farce. The performances and discourses were so feeble or extravagant or grotesque that the buildings were deserted as a rule, or, if one was frequented, it was by a wild crowd of enthusiasts stirred by some mad preacher to a crusade against law, order, or progress. The church and religion had grown a scandal. Women were the only regular worshippers, and they were in the hands of unscrupulous priests, who used them against the aims and ideals of the government and the community. The state tried for a time the effect of adding to the creed a dogma that the religious efficacy of the services was quite independent of the character of the priests; it came direct from heaven, and the pollution of the vessel or channel did not mar the divine influence. It was all in vain. It did not bring the men to church; and it only hurried on the degeneracy of the priesthood. The church became the nest of all the unclean and revolutionary characters in the community. Again and again it threatened the safety of the state by instilling a rebellious spirit into the women, and through them into the youths of the nation during a serious war with a neighbour. Something had to be done. There were the grand old temples; there was the litany of the state religion consecrated by long generations of worshippers; and yet the institution was but a lurking-place for the indolent and voluptuous and hypocritical and rebellious in masculine breasts. The endowments had fallen into a hopeless state. The finances were quite inadequate. The worshippers would not support their own services.
There was a great statesman at the helm of affairs, the ablest monarch that had ever been selected by the council of wise warriors. He saw his opportunity. He happened to have one of the most original and inventive engineers as his right-hand man for the manufacture and superintendence of war material. This latter had landed on the shores of Broolyi they knew not whence. In these islands they ask no questions but accept what the gods send them. The two together elaborated the existing religious system. The dogma that the divine influence was altogether irrespective of the channel or priest had thoroughly soaked into the natures of the worshippers from the sermons of the preachers; and it was easy to turn the flank of the doctrine by showing that automatic priests would have least effect of all upon the religious elements that came through them. They would be completely neutral like the air or the ether through which the gods influenced the minds of men.
There was some talk of rebellion when the system was changed; but most of the priests were too manifestly disreputable or characterless to bring much influence to bear. They were banished to the islands that were occupied by the non-moral religionists, and were never heard of more. The women were only too glad to see the services conducted in order and decency, whilst the men saw with pleasure the rotten finances taken up by the state. It was one of the most peaceful and natural changes that ever occurred; and now the temples were filled with men as well as women. The music was splendid, the ceremonies solemn, the discourses worth listening to. It cost far less. It was absolutely controlled by the state, and all throughout the island had the same spiritual fare.
I suggested to Blastemo that there was surely great monotony in having the same thing year in, year out, every festival. He laughed at my simplicity. The monarch and the engineer had fully provided for that feature of human nature which makes it weary of mere repetition. The finest imaginations of the country were employed in writing discourses; the best musicians spent most of their time in composing the hymns and songs; the finest theatrical talent and the most devout minds combined to make new ceremonies and services. That was the reason there was not standing room in most of the temples of the country. Everything was under the eye of the king and his wise warriors. It was one of the most effective disciplines that ever state had had in its hands; the state-organised church of Aleofane was not to be compared to it. The souls of the community were regimented like their bodies.
I was silenced; but any doubt of the efficacy of the institution was not dissipated when I heard that it was still comparatively new. The monarch had not long since died, and the engineer was still living. It had still to be tested by time, and the attraction of novelty had not yet worn off. Yet I had to acknowledge that it was a most effective method of ridding a state church of irregularities and keeping a strong hand over the minds of the community. Whether it would allow the civilisation to advance was another question. Originality would soon be a thing inconceivable in the island, if it were not already completely dead. Peace in the spiritual world had been reached, but at the expense of all new thought or individuality of character.
When I heard that the inventor of this automatic worship was still alive, I felt eager to see him, certain as I was that he must be a man of remarkable powers; but I found great difficulty in getting Blastemo or anyone else to tell me about him. Since the election of the new monarch, I ascertained by sundry hints, he had been in exile. Where he was imprisoned I could not find out. His great capacity and his ever-advancing thought had manifestly aroused the jealousy of the new occupant of the throne. Hence, I conjectured, it was that the new arts of war had grown abortive, promise though they once did to go far towards the ideal of absolute destructiveness which would lead to universal peace. I saw that he or someone else had introduced an explosive, which might, with improvements, have made as effective a means of war as European gunpowder. It had enabled the last king to batter down the fortress-mansions of his nobles in the country and drive them to settle round the court and abandon their continual little internecine wars. Under his successor, the makers of the explosive had lost its true secret; and the baronial castles were rebuilding, in spite of the threats of royal displeasure. This was the meaning of the battle we had seen before arriving at the harbour; two nobles were settling a quarrel in the old way, heedless of royal power or judicial courts. Whilst I was in Broolyi I saw hundreds of quarrels that were settled by duels. The Broolyians had no control over their tempers, and during the reign of the explosive they had given free play to them, as they knew that the result would be no risk of life, but only to property in settlement before the law-courts. It was like living over a gunpowder magazine, and I avoided intercourse with these spitfires. Indeed, it was difficult to conduct without hitch the commonest conversation with Blastemo, now he had returned to his native fire-damp of an atmosphere. Nothing but isolated residence in fortified keeps with miles of morass or mountain or forest between them could ever insure peace amongst such a people. To think that the name of their country was “Isle of Peace,†and that the great object of their worship was the god of peace!
One day I heard of another community off the farther coast of Broolyi; it was said to exist without government or institutions of any kind. My curiosity was excited, and, though on inquiry I found that it was the exile asylum of the archipelago for all who were plagued with the craze of anarchism, I resolved to see the island for myself. They could not laugh me out of my determination, and I at last procured a royal passport that would pass me over the intervening districts in safety. For the rest I was to look after myself if I ventured over the channel that lay between the islands. None of the Broolyians would ever risk their lives in that den of wild beasts, Kayoss. It had been chosen because of its proximity to the most warlike people in the archipelago; and, if any of the inhabitants attempted to leave it, the Broolyians were authorised to shoot them down. A garrison was regularly established over against it for the purpose.
I set out, glad to be free from the harassing ceremonial of a military, machine-like, and yet most capricious-tempered community; but it was a long and difficult journey, from castle to castle, over mountain and through forest, often delayed by some local imbroglio or the jealousy of neighbouring barons. Nothing but the magnificence of the scenery could compensate for the petty annoyances that retarded my passage. Everywhere I could see that the military commonweal was founded on slave labour. The ground was tilled and the operations of common life were conducted by men of a different race and climate from the oath-compelling fire-eaters that ruled the island; and over them stood overseers with whips to urge their industry. It was a sorry sight; and when I looked into the faces of the workers, I could distinguish the wreckage of nobler natures than were to be found in Broolyian breasts. The foreheads were larger, the skulls more capacious; the eyes were full of a shy melancholy that seemed to shrink from investigation; they had not the huge lower jaws of their masters, or the cavernous mouths, or the red hair. They were now but beasts of burden, and their limbs were muscular and heavy and their footsteps dragging and torpid; but there was romance lurking in the refined lineaments and the occasional grace that shone out here and there amongst them. Whence they had come and what was their fate I could not ascertain. That they were not natives I could see; and that it was inferiority of will rather than inferiority of intellect or imagination or civilisation that had led to their enslavement to the fiery-willed Broolyians I could easily conjecture from the ruins of their past that peeped out through the labour-clotted masks of their rustic or artisan life.
I had to disguise my interest in them in order to get through the country. Any sympathy or pity would have roused the savage wills of their masters and sacrificed my hopes of the future, if not myself, to the exaggerated Broolyian ideas of rebellion and the punishment it demanded. Whenever I could, I lay in the shelter of some tree or coppice, and watched the movements of these interesting relics of a subjugated civilisation. Perhaps I might be able to do something for them when I gained a higher platform of vantage.