A stranger from a neighbouring island, whom I had met in my first hostelry, explained to me the histrionic character of the first few days’ experience and the reality of the last. He took me in hand, and under his guidance I visited one of their provincial cities. Here I saw men and women of the same race as the marble citizens crawling in filth and starvation, prostrate in a magnificent temple before the sleight-of-hand and the mesmerism of the priests. They were bound in the chains of superstition and ignorance, and they were encouraged to do little else than procreate and multiply; for to pauperise by religion was the first rule of the Aleofanian government, and to enslave the soul by pauperism and ignorance was its corollary.
Yet in a cave outside of the town we witnessed from our hiding-place awful and mysterious rites of a revolutionary propaganda proceeding. We saw thousands of the ignorant peasants and artisans getting initiated. And when the ceremony was finished we almost burst into laughter over the pathos as the agitators gathered round a fire and gorged. My guide had evidently something to do with this rising revolution; and he was so enraged to find that an agent from the communistic island of Tirralaria had crept in amongst the revolutionists. The heavens confound his impudence and cant! What he and his beggarly crew from the isle of thieves wanted was to divide the plunder of another island. They had communised Tirralaria into a cipher. Of the wealth that they had counted by thousands, when they landed there, naught remained but the nothings. The growth of the dummy citizen or cipher in the denominator had made Tirralarian property a vanishing point. The game of this Garrulesi was not to establish socialism in Aleofane, but to socialise its property into Tirralaria.
After his burst of anger I tried to elicit more about this socialistic community. Tirralaria was a large island, I got to know, into which had been tumbled some centuries ago a few thousand socialists with considerable wealth to their share. They had increased to tens of thousands, and their wealth had gone down to little more than a shirt to each back. After the besom of a tornado or a famine or a plague had swept the island the population soon reached high-water mark again; every square yard of the soil was littered with a stronger and lazier humanity. The island stank of humanity miles to leeward. There was scarcely room enough for graves, let alone beds. The lubberly and oleaginous let themselves out as mattresses; and so the space was economised, and another increase was possible. The unclean rogues, they never washed, unless they chanced to get hustled off the edge of the island into the sea. The description contrasted so strongly with the rose-coloured picture that I had heard drawn by the socialist agent in the cave that I determined to see for myself.
As we wandered through the forests of the island my guide told me of two saviours that had landed on the coasts of Aleofane and become the protectors of the poor. One refused to resort to the tricks of the charlatan, and, deserted by his followers, perished at the hands of the aristocracy, who then adopted his tenets and worked them into an elaborate hypocrisy. The other, learning by his fate and bettering the jugglery of the marble citizens, put heart and drill into the poor who flocked to his standards, and led them to victory. He seized the throne, but, flattered by the old aristocracy into belief in his own divinity and into desertion of the cause of the poor, he vanished in pomp, luxury, and corruption.
By dint of persistent inquiry I got him to explain his hints about the island from which the ancestors of all of them had come. It was called Faddalesa, or the isle of devils, because of the appalling phenomena they encountered whenever they attempted to return to it. It had, he acknowledged, been called Limanora, or the island of progress; but for thousands of years that name had lapsed. And on the shores of now one island and again another strangers had landed. But as they were wealthy, and taciturn, no questions were asked, and their descendants had vanished into the ranks of the aristocracy. It was many centuries since any had come, though it was generally supposed in the archipelago that I had come from the central island with my fireship. I saw the mistake that they had made would serve my new resolve to make for this mother isle; and I left it unchallenged in their minds.
In the great northern harbour of Aleofane I came across the same filth and a similar rich temple; but I also found clearer evidence of underground revolution approaching consummation. And for the sake of my fireship and its powers of helping on the movement I was initiated into the mysteries of one of their societies. The socialistic agent, Garrulesi, insinuated himself into my acquaintanceship; and for the sake of being able to return with him to his home I endured his eloquence on the perfection of the altruistic life. Competition was the bane of the human race; and its only products were poverty and disease and unhappiness. It was responsible for property, and the only crime was property. Was it not monstrous that one man should taboo what another man needed! Obliterate property, and you wipe out crime too. How gentle and amenable and humane was the true commonweal, where neither property nor class existed! No law was needed, no law could persist. Every natural instinct and passion of the human breast was allowed the fullest scope. There was indeed no further stage to reach; need of progress, of effort was passed. Man under such a rule had become all that he might be, and he felt that whatever is is right. Evil and darkness had fled before the light of primitive happiness, and existence had become the throne of God.
As he dilated on the nobleness of Tirralarian civilisation I saw his eye flicker and his colour change. A stranger had passed. He told me that we were being watched. He wished me to take refuge in Tirralaria with my fireship if anything occurred. But I had promised it to my guide and fellow-traveller. He showed one flash of anger. But it vanished at once. He led me to the shore and pointed out his falla or ship. In it he would hang round the coasts for me, and he indicated an unfrequented point, whither I could flee and find safety on board his ship. He offered to take off to my crew any message that I desired to send; I might instruct it to come to Tirralaria for me after it had been to the isle of dogs. I wrote in English, and sent my orders to my comrades, knowing that the language would be safe from his prying.
