CHAPTER XXXVIINOOLA
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 theDaydream. 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 theDaydreamwould 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 theDaydream, 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, theDaydreamwas 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 theposseof 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 theDaydream? 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 theDaydreamfly. 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.