I have spoken of their gods; but they would have held it profanity so to speak. They had been polytheists in prehistoric times, and the missionaries who had introduced monotheism had been astute enough to take the best of their deities and find them in the qualities of the one. The generations of subtle divines that came between had solved all the difficulties of having many deities rolled into one, so that the Aleofanian mind found it no sacrilege to deify a dead hero or erect a shrine to one of their prehistoric deities, whilst they persecuted to the death anyone who dared to deny the unity of godhead. Just as there were myriads of stars and but one cosmos, so, they said, there were innumerable manifestations of the deity and but one god. They were ashamed of the polytheism of their ancestors, and as converts to the true faith would have no slur upon it. Men might have no creed if they pleased; but if they had a creed, it must be in one god and his religion. Their theologians had discussed for centuries the manner in which the various old gods and new saints coalesced into one; but none of them had the folly to deny the unity. There had been and still existed a score or more of theological schools, each of which agonised over the stupidity and unreasonableness of the rest in their explanation of the unification. The dominant school used to roast or rack their heresies out of their opponents; they still roasted and racked, but only socially and politically; the spirit was as true to zeal for the one faith, only the method had changed. And their library shelves groaned with volumes of anathemas reasoned or unreasoned.
They prided themselves on their perfect command of reason; they could adapt it to any purpose, so skilled had they become in its use. And they assumed as a first principle of conduct that they had reached the final truth on all things in earth or heaven. Only reason could teach truth; and they alone of all people in the world had mastery of reasoning. The common beliefs of the nation were therefore absolute truth; and each acted on the maxim that what he persuaded himself of was unconditioned truth. Amongst a less subtle people this would have meant continual quarrel; but with them the ambiguity of their language stepped in as peacemaker. A disagreement never came to anything serious; it was always found to be a misunderstanding of words.
They had no need to state this syllogism to themselves; it was at the foundation of their conduct and beliefs. They scorned the art, the literature, the philosophy of all other peoples as poor trivial monstrosities, permissible, of course, in a world of variety like ours, but ridiculous in the extreme. It was useless for a stranger like myself to criticise them and their civilisation; I was only wasting my breath and affording them occasion for laughing at my inordinate vanity.
CHAPTER VII
SOCIAL CUSTOMS
THE first time that I went to a high-rank social entertainment of theirs, I broke into a hearty laugh at the spectacle as I entered; but I came to regret my imprudence. There were the select of the marble city, including the royal family, turning Catherine-wheels round the room in pairs to the sound of quick music; even fat old dowagers with bombasted breeches on kept up the frantic exercise, the perspiration pouring from their brows. It was a large room lit with hundreds of lamps, and round it again and again each pair had to roll, and as I looked at the stately nobles and dames head downwards my thoughts turned back to the street arabs of my native land and their cry, “Stand on my head for a penny,” and I burst again into a laugh. My guide and introducer ignored the first; but at the second he turned round on me with questioning surprise. I was soon sobered, and turned away to smother my amusement. Another friend came up to greet me, and he at once burst into loud admiration of the scene. “Was it not noble? It was the finest flower of all art to see the most beautiful and high-blooded of men and women letting their souls forth in harmony, glowing with colour and life; surely this was the sight of sights; it was the very poetry of motion; what grace! what beauty and roundedness of calf! was it not joy to see the fair twinkling feet in the air, and in a moment so the solid floor again, pair with pair? It was indeed the music of the spheres, this revolution of the extremities round the centre of gravity; it was a copy of the motion of the great universe, sex with sex in unison pointing alternate head and feet to the zenith. Where else in the world could such a spectacle be seen?”
I acknowledged with as much gravity as I could command that I had never seen anything like it. And I must concede that after a time the whirl of bodies, as the music quickened, half intoxicated my judgment and made me almost long to join in the general somersault; the rhythm of so many feet and heads flying through the air fired my blood to fever heat, and as I looked on, my sense of the absurdity of the scene entirely disappeared; I became a partisan of the exercise and could see nothing but grace and harmony in it. I felt almost ashamed of my burst of laughter, though afterwards, when I retired to my hostelry and cooled down, the sense of incongruity returned, and I laughed heartily at the memory of haughty aristocrats standing on their heads, and the legs of shrivelled dowagers revolving like spokes of a wheel.
I found on inquiry that a considerable portion of their youth was spent in acquiring ease at this indoor exercise. Women especially gave the best of their days and nights to “fallallaroo,” the name by which they called this art of rhythmical gyration, for they found it was their best means of ingratiating themselves with the promising young men; and most of the resolves to marry were formed in the meetings for fallallaroo. It was said by some physicians to produce certain common diseases, but the gilded society held that it was productive of health; they knew so from their own experience. Even the old men and women with grey hair and shrunken shanks kept up the exhausting exercise, for to leave it off was universally considered the sign of approaching age. It had been introduced by a monarch who had suffered from vertigo and St. Vitus’s dance, but tradition had hallowed it and poetry had surrounded it with romance. And now it would have been like tearing up the roots of society to abolish it.
Another custom that was considered almost sacred tried my nerves still more. The men usually wore a bamboo behind their right ear, and whenever they were at leisure, and as often when they were not, they would take it out and fill one end with the dried leaves of a vile plant called kooannoo, not unlike a coprosma, and in smell pure assafœtida, and lighting it, stick the other end into one of their nostrils. Every expiration of breath sent forth a cloud of smoke and every inspiration drew some of it in; but they had grown so expert in the practice that they could always prevent it getting into the mouth or the throat, even when they were talking vigorously. The smell was something intolerable, and reminded me of burning heaps of rubbish and manure. In their more candid moods and when they were not themselves engaged in the practice, they acknowledged the likeness, especially on going into the lower quarters of the city; for there, in order to produce the fashionable flavour and smell, the kooannoo-sellers were accustomed to steep broad leaves in mire for a time, and drying them make them up as kooannoo; nay, some of the poor, when they could not afford to buy the leaf, openly stuck pieces of dried earth into their bamboos and lit them, and many of them adhered to the practice when they were better off, preferring the flavour and smell to those of the fashionable leaf.