I was surprised at the agonies the young men underwent in learning the loathsome habit, such nausea and pallor and misery overspread their whole frame; and it was only by the loss of all delicacy of smell and taste that they at last mastered the loathing and qualms; no refined senses could live within reach of the smoke. It was undoubtedly one of the acts of heroic stoicism on the part of the nation; they assured me that it was one of their disciplines for the subjugation of the body. But it acted, as most of their disciplines did, in an altruistic way; it had destroyed the fine sensations of the kooannooers themselves; but their neighbours, who had not learned, and especially women, suffered daily the agonies of disgust. And the agonies were undergone without a murmur, nay, with a smile upon the face, for the practice was almost universal amongst the highest class and in the royal family.
The origin was difficult to get at. But it seems that in some past age a number of the younger sons of aristocratic families had gone out in search of adventure; and during a period of great straits they had learned from a tribe of savages to eat and burn kooannoo in order to subdue the pangs of hunger. When they got food at last, they felt proud of an accomplishment that they had learned with so much agony, and, as they had ceased to suffer from it, they brought it home with them amongst other practices copied from the wild men. Their wonderful adventures made them the fashion; and all the youths set themselves to copy this, the most striking of their habits, counting it as the truest mark of manliness and courage. Having acquired it with so much suffering and difficulty, they would not easily give it up when it had ceased to disgust them. When kooannooing, they could sit silent with dignity whilst others talked; and it gave them a certain semblance of superiority to others, as they kept the red in their cheeks whilst others around who did not use the bamboo grew pale and sick. They felt masterful and heroic as they kooannooed, like the voyager who can resist the approach of sea-sickness when his fellows succumb. So the habit carried with it a certain overbearing rudeness and want of consideration for others. Generation after generation of youth had come to count it as the distinctive mark of manhood; and having learned the practice with great suffering they could not forego the sense of triumph over those who had not learned it; they were the braves of the nation; not to bamboo was a sign of womanliness and delicacy of feeling; and men who indulged such refinement and weakness ought to be disciplined along with the women; they were intolerant with their fine sensations; the world would not be worth living in if they had their way; it was time something was done to bring them into order. And these kooannooers felt most heroic and manly as they followed their loathsome practice. And most of the women endured their stinking breath and clothes and the agonies of nausea and headache in silence, or rather with the pretence that the habit was most delightful. There was something in what they said, that it soothed the men and put them into better humour; for when a kooannooer had a bamboo in his nose he wore a self-complacent smile; he felt manly and superior without the expenditure of any effort; his vanity was flattered. Of course a number who did not bamboo showed that the leaf acted as a poison and slowly sapped the health. But scientific kooannooers replied that small doses of the poison killed nothing but the germs of disease. They bambooed for the good of the public; they were the national sanitarians and fumigators. It showed how patriotic they were, when they persevered in the practice, though they knew that it tended to destroy the germ of manners as well as of diseases. These kooannooers were the most self-denying of philanthropists.
CHAPTER VIII
ABSTINENCE
“WHY should they refrain from the gifts that God in His goodness had bestowed on them?” Thus argued a party of gilded youth with me as they polecatted the air of a gorgeous room with their bamboos. My senses had so far resisted the paralysing fume and its nausea that they were able to fumble about amongst arguments. And I tried to break their backs with their own rod. “Why did the Aleofanians abstain so rigidly from God’s good gift, the juice of the grape?” “You have got the stick by the wrong end,” they laughed. And the bell-wether of them took up the tale. “God’s gift is transformed into poison by fermentation—” “And so is kooannoo by fire,” I broke in. “But pyranniddee” (so they called their intoxicating spirit) “is seductive; kooannoo is repulsive; the one will master the strongest man; the other has to be mastered.” I acknowledged the correctness of his distinction, but urged that all pleasures and pains in time suffer transmutation into their opposites; a habit, that in its nascence is pleasing, becomes loathsome in its supremacy, and one that is hard to learn gratifies the vanity, if not the senses, when mastered; the stoic rampant revels in his stoicism and goes to all lengths with it; the epicurean has soon skimmed the cream of his luxuries and has to suppress all his other natural needs and desires like a stoic that he may still the violence of his overgrown appetites or give them some hard-won novelty; I envied the stoic his epicurean enjoyment of his victory over life and passion; I pitied the epicurean wallowing in the world, that sty of desire, all its best and most luscious things trampled under foot. “But we have chosen a plant to bear whose fumes must ever demand resolution—” I unhinged his sentence with, “Yes, in those who cannot indulge in it.” “You speak truly,” he said, “and therein lies the nobleness of the choice; it is the great philanthropic plant; it is for the discipline and maturation of others that kooannooers sacrifice their finer sensations.” This discussion would have fallen into a scramble of wits; for it was hard by any means to get the better of the subtlety of this people. So I held my peace. And as I listened, I learned and admired. They were too wise and virtuous to tope and guzzle and carouse. They would not steep their senses in sottish oblivion. They would have no dealings with a poison that sapped the will and made the human system all throat and liquid fire. Who would turn his inwards into a chemist’s alembic, his skull into a vat?
I had heard eloquence like this in my own country and cowered before the tornado; I knew there could be no safety but in flight.
They were indeed a most ascetic people in all but the use of words. I tried in the first two or three hostelries to obtain a little wine; but the attempt had such a paralysing effect on mine hosts that I had to refrain. Anything that even smelt of fermentation was a horror. It is true I had seen many wine-presses and distilleries in the lower part of the town. But, it was explained, their products were meant for the shops of chemists and for use in the preservation of fruit and museum specimens. No freeman was allowed to touch the accursed thing; only criminals and bondsmen were permitted within the walls of these factories of the Stygian fluid, and then only under superintendence of government agents, who commanded the position from smell-proof view-points afar, lest even a whiff of the Tartarean brew should reach their nostrils.
I now understood why these Aleofanians when analysing the character of their neighbours always introduced, as the climax of the latter or depreciatory part of their analysis, devotion to museums and to fruit-preserving; and in the nearest approach I had seen two make to a quarrel, the one hurled at the other the epithet “Olekloman,” or museumist, and got in reply, “Poolp,” or fruit-preserver, whilst both reddened as if stung. No house in the marble city was without a large room devoted to natural history; every man was an enthusiastic collector of biological specimens, and in this room there were long rows of shelves of scarabæan bottles, each filled with some clear liquid in which floated a bug or centipede or some small parasite. They were as enthusiastic orchardists, and generally spent a third of the year in bottling the fruits of their trees. Autumn was the time of their most uproarious festivals and maddest junketings. This sober, staid, and abstinent people broke loose like bacchanals. The fruit they indulged in, they explained, fermented within them.