CHAPTER XXXVTHE VOYAGE CONTINUED
“A NEIGHBOURING island, which Blastemo called Fanattia, he would not hear of our visiting; for there were gathered all the mad quixotists of the archipelago; any who thought that some special kind of food, or drink, or clothing, or gesture, or ceremony, or manner was ruinous to both body and soul, and sacrificed all the other interests of life to its destruction or abolition, were landed here and allowed to fight it out like scorpions in a bottle. God pity any poor shipwrecked stranger who fell into their hands! it was seldom that he was not torn limb from limb by rival charlatans or the parties of conflicting shibboleths. They were all threatened with famine; for what one grew or manufactured from the fruits of the earth another detested as bad for the human system and did his best to destroy; one thought tubers poisonous and fruits good; another held the reverse opinion; and the violence of their enthusiasm would not let either rest till he had destroyed his neighbour’s crops, all for the good of that neighbour’s soul; one thought a solid food, made out of any products of the earth, destroyed the sense of duty; another thought that liquid food made from them dulled the senses, the portals to the soul; impelled by his zeal neither could stop short of destroying all that his neighbour manufactured. The result was that there was never any food, either liquid or solid, to be found, and the miserable creatures had to subsist on anything they could pick up on the beach. It was the same with garments and gestures, with attitudes and manners and tones of voice. There was not anything that could not find a hostile critic, and the critic had at once to show his hostility in the most violent crusade, that could not cease till the thing or the believer in it was driven out of existence.
“There were other groups of islands near, on which Blastemo advised us not to land; one was a group occupied by exiles who cultivated religion apart from morality; another was occupied by exiles who devoted themselves to imagination and let conscience decay; the inhabitants of a third sank all human methods and thoughts in the interests of political party. This was the worst class of monomaniacs in the whole archipelago. They were in the most degraded condition, and were constantly burning or torturing out some wretched minority, just as the Meskeetans and Coxurians did. They paid little attention to the amenities of life. As long as they still had islets to which they could exile their dissenters they had not been so venomous as these two peoples. But recently they had become unbearably offensive in their manners and their attacks on strangers, and everyone now avoided their shores. The God-wise, as the religious monomaniacs called themselves, had grown licentious and even obscene; they had developed the most disgusting and beastly habits from the idea that they knew the will of God and could dispense with the common rules of morality and decency, those ‘badges of mere earth-born natures.’ The worshippers of beauty had grown callous in their cruelty. Squeamishly sensitive about their own feelings, they condemned any dissentient amongst them, or any alien whom they found, to the most excruciating tortures; every man who had anything abnormal in his face or features or gait was given to the death-men. The federators of humanity were the most dishonest and corrupt and quarrelsome of all; they held that other considerations, moral, political, religious, were as nothing compared with party organisation; and they had ultimately come to feel all bonds dissolved but those of party, and to hound down everyone who advocated anything, however noble or great or even decent, that was outside of the party programme; no wonder they had grown so offensive in their personal habits, so cruel in their relations to the rest of mankind. It was useless asking any of these peoples for supplies, they were so improvident; nay, it was dangerous approaching their shores with such a property as theDaydream.
“There were other groups of islands that were too small and barren or too much out of our course to think of visiting. There was the art-religion group with Calocosm or the isle of art-popes in the centre of it; their inhabitants were most intolerant and quarrelsome. Not far from it is the isle of Cryptia, where the dwellers spend most of their time in mystic ceremonies and parades, dressed in the most fantastic garments, and carrying the most ludicrous paraphernalia of office; their ceremonies are performed in dark caves dimly lit, and, in order to impress the imagination, mimic in absurd fashion the wild feasts and rites of savages; they believe in a religion without a god, without the religious or moral spirit; a religion that is nothing but ceremonial. In an opposite direction lies a group that is given up to medicomaniacs; its central island, called Fidikyoor, has all the ailments of humanity in full force; and yet the islanders can, if they will, cure any disease they like by the mere act of belief. The other islands in the group have each its system of therapeutics: one cures by blowing in the face, another by spitting in the face, a third by striking on the cheek.
“Nearer to Coxuria lay two groups that were the natural complements of each other. One group had as its centre Theophane, and the inhabitants all believed that they had but to elect one of their number by ballot in secret meeting in order to make him a god, who whilst he lived could converse with the gods and get from them the absolute truth of all existence. The president of each island might be the most consummate liar in the archipelago, and yet all he said whilst president was taken as divine revelation of the truth; and everyone who believed or professed to believe in anything that disagreed with it was promptly brought to his bearings by the most effective and summary punishments. So there was perfect unanimity of belief in these communities. But the numbers in each isle had become so small that every man expected some day to have his most manifest fiction accepted during his period of office as the most undeniable truth. Over against them lay another group that had as its centre Antidea; its islands agreed in vehemently denying the existence of all gods; but each had its own particularly unpleasant way of affirming its creed. The people were virulently intolerant, hating most of mankind because most believed in some deity or other. They asserted so firmly and confidently that they had found absolute truth on this matter of gods that, had a theopath landed on their shores, they would have burned him in order to save his soul from the grovelling superstition.
“Between the medicomaniacs and the theopaths lay a mediating group called Dirtethos; here lived the exiles that counted sin and crime as a mere aberration of intellect or of digestion; their religion was a matter of food and medicine. If a man stole from his neighbour, then all the rest of his neighbours came to sympathise with him in his misfortune whilst the victim was left in deserved neglect. If anyone got into the habit of telling lies, then, poor fellow, he had to go to bed and be nursed; his stomach was out of order. If anyone murdered his mother or his wife or his friend, he had to go to a hospital and get soothed, and his relations and acquaintances rushed to console him in his temporary sickness; it was sad indeed to have such an overflow of blood to the head. If one should outrage all recognised traditions and rules of morality and legality, then his friends spent their days and nights with him reasoning him out of his sad mistake; he was the hero of the hour; his victims were forgotten. An incorrigible criminal was sent to the university, where, by sympathy and lectures, he had his chance of recovering his tone. There he held receptions, to which the most important people of the island were honoured in being invited; here he discoursed with them on the methods of his crimes and lapses, and spoke of his past as if it were a piece of ancient history of a foreign nation; everybody conversed with him on it with the impartiality of philosophers or the whispered consolations of bosom friends; his teachers mourned with him over the hard lot of humanity which condemned poor mortals like him to such mental aberrations. This group Blastemo considered the worst of the lunatic settlements of the archipelago; no locality was so dangerous for the stranger or the shipwrecked mariner.
“By his advice we steered for the island of Grabawlia, where those who had a mania for finance dwelt. When we landed, the people did not crowd around us as they had done in the other islands; they hovered off like vultures waiting a solitary swoop. But we soon discovered, as one after another approached us and explained his benevolent intentions, that we were about to be exploited. Pilot-financiers always preceded the great man who wished to make the negotiation. They brought no goods for us to see; they only spoke of them as procurable, showing us samples that were very attractive in their appearance. They stirred our appetite or our curiosity in the most astute way. When any transaction was about to be completed, in would come some bustling islander, offering a better price for the goods and loudly declaring that he was being robbed in not getting his opportunity; it was no genuine market that gave special favours to special buyers, and gradually the price was raised till we had to give an enormous sum for everything we bought. We had also to buy by samples; for it was asserted that the mass of goods could not be brought down to the beach till they were bought. Some of the superfluities that we had on board they decried, but said that they would be glad to sell for us. They did not care for them; but if they were offered very cheap they might take them off our hands to oblige those who had bought so much from them. When they had beaten our price down to little or nothing, some newcomer would press forward and offer similar goods at a lower price. At last they got our surplus practically as a gift.
“When we had completed our negotiations and thought we had bought enough stores and fuel to last several months, we went off to the ship, and the goods began to arrive in fallas. They were in boxes or well-covered bundles. Not till we had sailed did we find on opening our purchases that half of them were rotten or worthless, and that in the boxes that contained the fuel, stones filled half the space.
“These Grabawlians had the foundations of their houses of gold. They would not let one coin of the precious metal pass out of their hands if they could help it. They were the great barterers of the archipelago, and took the goods of one island to trade off for the goods of another, and wherever they could they got gold as the net result, till their island was filled with the metal. We had seen that they were half-starved, the only flourishing feature of their faces being their nose, which protruded over their lips, and gave a foxy appearance to their faces. They starved themselves to get more gold. They lied and cheated that they might add even one coin to their heap. Again and again were they found by their neighbours famishing; nor would they give any of the treasures, on which they lay dying, to pay for the food that was brought to them. They were always in dread of pirates and freebooters, for ever and again through the centuries some warlike people bore down on them and carried off the accumulations of ages. Blastemo himself acknowledged that it was no infrequent thing for his island to pick a quarrel with them and rob them in war of their savings. They were the milch-cows of the archipelago. Their gold was a mere encumbrance to them. It was better to be distributed again.
“After all the useless stores and the stones out of the fuel had been thrown overboard, we calculated that we had remaining enough to last for a month or six weeks. We were about to make again for Broolyi, when a boat from Tirralaria informed us that you were intending to reach Figlefia and embark there. When off that island awaiting orders, a slave in a canoe came off in the darkness and bade us sail for the uninhabited side of the island if we would save you from destruction; and he indicated the bay where we ought to anchor that night. We were doubtful; but we carried out his instructions. And the result is that we have you now with us.”
Burns showed considerable agitation over their adventures and over my return. I had interrupted him with many a question which had broken the even flow of his narrative and lessened his emotion as he proceeded. He and the others evidently expected an account of my wanderings; but I was too much excited, too rent with conflicting melancholy and joy, to accede fully to their request; and I gave them but a rough outline of all I had done and suffered. The scars had not yet healed in my spirit; the thoughts over life that my experiences had stirred in my breast were too crude and sorrowful to find consolation in utterance; so I paced the deck for days in solitary meditation.
Nothing could keep me long from the problem of problems, the central mystery of the archipelago. What was that land which the inhabitants of the various islands never had long out of their thoughts, but which they so carefully avoided in speech? When forced to mention it, they pretended to shudder at it as an island of devils. None of them seemed to have visited it or to have had any personal knowledge of it for many centuries. Their fear of it had crystallised into myths of horror. For ages they had made fitful attempts to approach it, and failed, and at last a fence of impenetrable darkness and terror held them far off from it; and the fear that paralysed every energy, if ever their ships came within sight of its shining peak on the far horizon, had taken permanent shape in their traditions and stories of the isle of devils. What it really was had faded into twilight, and the veil of the supernatural had finally shut it out from human view. It was useless to attempt analysis of the pictured curtain of tradition. The fabric would vanish in the process instead of revealing its original texture. Once and once only had I seen the pure sheen of its highest snow-clad mountain above the rim of the sea; and at the sight I resolved to reach it, cost what it would. I looked forward to our visit to Broolyi with no special interest except as preparatory for the great expedition. I would say nothing of it to Blastemo or his countrymen, lest they should discourage my men or otherwise stand in my way. Nor would I confide at first in my comrades, not indeed till I had seen my way clearly, and got all my methods of preparation mapped out. They set my absorption down to my past adventures, and I kept my own counsel whilst I inquired into the conditions of my problem and found the possibility of a solution.