Chapter XXXVII: Noola (2)

“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 the _posse_ of 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 the _Daydream_? 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 the _Daydream_ fly. 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.

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POSTSCRIPT TO RIALLARO

Our narrator vanished as abruptly as his story broke off here. Just when our curiosity had been whetted to its keenest we were left with the broken thread. We had noticed him hanging back from the account of his intercourse with Noola. His tissues had grown less transparent as he had proceeded with his description of the various islands. He had become accustomed to our food, and seemed to approach nearer to our common humanity. We came to take greater liberties with him, and even urged him to proceed with his narrative. We had become so interested in it that we would willingly have abandoned our pursuit of gold for days, if only he could have been induced to continue by daylight. The glimmer of our lamp or the dancing glow of our fire threw his face into shadow, and seemed to give him confidence; and even when storm and rain drove him in from the bush he resisted our persuasions as long as daylight lingered. He would lie so still that we were often afraid that he had died or fallen into a trance.

As he came to his story of Noola’s exile, this reluctance increased even when the flickering shadows of the lamp or fire sheltered him. Our rough methods of trying to bring him to book only made him shrink farther into himself, and had it not been for the prolonged and stormy spring I fear that we should never have reached the natural close of his story, his exit from Riallaro. With his last word came bright sunshine and clear weather; and he disappeared as abruptly as he had come.

GODFREY SWEVEN.

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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that:
was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_);
was in bold by is enclosed by “equal” signs (=bold=)
had extra character spacing by “plus” signs (+stretched+).
○ The use of a caret (^) before a letter, or letters, shows that the
following letter or letters was intended to be a superscript, as
in S^t Bartholomew or 10^{th} Century.