Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

I had become deeply interested in the story in spite of myself. And, without noticing the distance we had travelled through the groves and orchards, I found before he stopped that we had rounded a great promontory and come suddenly upon a large settlement; for crowds moved or lay about the shores and under the fruit trees. I could see no temples or houses. But before long we came upon a succession of holes in the earth roofed with fallen trees and withered branches, or fragments dragged from the ruins of a former temple that we found afterwards in the forest. The race was again becoming troglodytic; and with my fine, sparrow-headed guide, I could see no fate before it but a complete though gradual return to aboriginal barbarism. The only things that stemmed the downward current were two: the retention of slave labour in Klimarol, and the periodical famines that cleared out the weaklings. But the survivors were ever becoming feebler and idler, and it was growing more and more difficult to fill up the gaps in the ranks of the slaves.

As we returned, the critic had by talking and explaining and slandering so worked himself into full confidence that I was now deeply attached to him. I knew that he had no more affection or loyalty to me or to any other human being than a cat. But, as he purred and made himself comfortable over the débris of his criticism of others, he gave out a certain amount of magnetism that seemed to make the intercourse close and fervid. It is the substitute in the amorous for friendship or love, and can be turned on or off with almost mechanical precision. The only safeguard against it amongst its victims is the vanity that accompanies it and makes it a desultory wanderer in its desire for further conquests.

He assumed that I was now a devoted admirer of him and his powers; and perhaps he put down my silence to moroseness or scant acquaintance with the language. At any rate he needed no key-word or question to start him on a new track. He had in fact now come to the subject for which he had been all along preparing the way; and it was amusing to see the ambushes and underground works by which he attacked it. Long before his mines reached the ramparts of the subject I saw his aim. He evidently knew that I was the owner of the new marine monster that had appeared in the waters of the archipelago, and he was anxious to secure my help for a great seraglio raid that he had planned for the repopulation of his island—which he let me indirectly know was called Figlefia, or the island of love. It was their efforts in the cause of humanity that had thinned their numbers, and a noble race would soon vanish unless some means were devised for introducing new blood. It had a great mission in the world: to leaven mankind with mutual affection and a lofty ideal of human rapture. Only by such a stock, inoculated with the nobleness of passion, could the world be turned from its evil ways. Preaching could not do it; propagandism was barren of permanent effect; absorption by conquest was a chimera. The only way to save the world was by stocking it with new blood. This was taking advantage of the path of nature. She worked by generation and crossing of breeds in order to get at the hardier race that would withstand the new conditions of new times. Figlefia was a great experimental nursery. Scions were introduced from all the races and stocks of the world and grafted on the Figlefian race. The finest women that could be found were brought to the island, experiments were made, and the finest results were carefully preserved and nurtured to plant out in other regions of the earth. They were trained in the noblest doctrines of love and sent forth to propagate them through the nations and to introduce amongst them a newer and better breed that might make the race of man advance at an ever accelerated rate. The Figlefians had struck on the only true method of improving mankind and of covering the planet with the finest human stock it could support; and perhaps in some future age, when they had renovated all the nations of the earth, they would send out new breeds to the other planets and systems. It was indeed the noblest scheme that this orb had ever experienced.

Meantime their efforts for the good of the species had stinted their numbers, and new grafts were needed for their experiments in cross-breeding. The nursery of mankind needed replenishing. It was useless introducing sires, for the Figlefians were the finest on the globe. All that was needed was new dams that the great experimental method for the conversion of the world might proceed. There was no religion like that of the improvement of the human race; and no such improvement could there be as by the Figlefian scheme of cross-breeding and defertilising the failures. Did not my heart burn within me as I listened to the mighty creed? Did not I feel that the world, if not the universe, was getting reborn? Did I not desire to join in the great experimental method of progress?

I felt that he was coming close to his chief object, for he blinked his beady eyes and wagged his sage little head and looked unutterable things at me; he tried his strongest hypnotism on me and would hedge me round with him as the two select of the world; he shot his most magnetic influence into his words; he was bent on finally and completely chaining me to him by his fascinations. The upshot of it was that I would be serving the whole human race if I should lend him my wind-compelling or wind-defying ship to run half a dozen voyages through the islands in order to recruit the great nursery of mankind. He had the women selected and persuaded to leave with him if only he had the rapid means of conveying them. He had his own ship lying off the coast of Tirralaria awaiting his orders; but it was slow and wind-obeying, and it might be years before he restocked Figlefia by her means.

I professed that I did not know where the Daydream was; I had come in Garrulesi’s falla, and whether she would follow or not I could not tell; but if she did I might be able to accommodate him for a voyage or two. I was not deeply impressed with his scheme, for the sufficient reason that I should be sorry to propagate the great Figlefian species, if this were a specimen of the stud. The world would soon be full of a race of feline hypocrites if he and his like were to repopulate it. And, though I had been cornered by the courtesies of the situation into promising my yacht, I prayed that she might keep far out of his reach.

He managed to close the negotiations just as we got back to the temple of the advisers of the people. The bulk of the food that had been run down by the slaves into one corner of it was gone; but Garrulesi had hidden a portion for me, and one of the inamoratas of the Figlefian sparrow had done the same for him. So we fared not ill. Our share consisted of fruits that were not unpalatable and of the flesh of some wild animal that abounded on the slopes of Klimarol. I cooked and ate and was satisfied.

I left my amorous instructor absorbed in his old occupation amongst the women, and stepped out again into the sunshine. I found Garrulesi waiting for me on the platform that overlooked the ocean. He gazed at me sadly as if at a lost sinner. He thought me wholly given over to the popinjay.

A few words put him into his most rhetorical humour. He understood my estimate of the man by the very tone of my answers to his first remarks. So he made no attack on the guest of his temple. With all his loose-jointed character and morality, he would not take advantage of my sympathy to slander one whom I plainly despised. He was too good-natured to trouble himself much about the designs or the petty gallantries of the creature. He merely scorned the unmanliness of this trifler with women, and fought shy of even speaking of him, as he would of a dunghill. In conversation with others of his countrymen who knew the Aleofanian tongue I found out what good cause he and his whole nation had to hate and persecute this Sneekape, as, they told me he was called. He was nothing but a pander for his island. The Figlefians were voluptuaries, and had been so for untold generations. They still retained something of the boldness that enabled them to subdue the aboriginal inhabitants of their island; and with this they enslaved them and kidnapped others from other portions of the archipelago. The hard fare, the brutal treatment, the stoical life of toil that these had to bear kept up their numbers and gave, in what they produced, great luxury to their masters. But the day was not far off when the slaves, hardened and emboldened by their mode of existence, would throw off the yoke of the sybarites and resume their long-lost freedom. A few of the aristocratic Figlefians had, like Sneekape, retained some of the energy and courage of their forefathers, the subjugators of the island, and either managed the work of the slaves by means of the lash or sailed out in search of new occupants of the harems. The rest were the vilest of debauchees, spending most of their time in cheating their neighbours out of the loyalty of their wives. And the whole race was ulcerous with disease, puny, though tall in frame, and periodically on the verge of madness. Its stamina was exhausted by concupiscence and debauchery. The skull was of the smallest, and most of its capacity lay in the back of it; it was like a cocoanut trying to force its way into a lemon. And the hair that covered it, as a rule, was of a dirty yellow merging into red.

They were not unhandsome, these Figlefians, with all their corrupt blood and the gleam of incipient madness in their eyes, for most of them had come from some of the finest women who could be entrapped by their emissaries throughout the archipelago. But they knew it so well that they were intoxicated with vanity; they bore themselves like coquettes, smirking and capering and continually expectant of adoration. They kept, most of them, huge seraglios to which they were ever adding. Yet their greatest rapture was to get into a neighbour’s, and especially a friend’s enclosure and decoy his most faithful or most beautiful concubine. Six days out of seven were occupied in maturing or revenging some such intrigue. They had a code of honour based upon this feature of their life, and they counted the honours of their pedigree by the number of handsome women their ancestors and they had been able to cajole; and all the women they fascinated were, in the annals of their families, handsome. The other side of their roll of honour was the number of men they had slain in these amorous adventures. To add a sharp savour to this their chief employment and amusement, they upheld monogamy to be the true and divine form of the relations of the sexes; and their preachers almost daily prelected to them on the nobleness of purity of life. Half the taste of their erotic enterprises would vanish if they were allowed to follow them up without check or secrecy. Their whole polite literature would fall to dust at a stroke if either polygamy or libertinism were made legal, customary, and religious. A legislator who passed such a law amongst them and accomplished such a reform would obliterate all the traditional wit and humour, all the smart stories they had to tell, all the gusto of their grotesque and often lewd art; life would become so vapid that there would occur an epidemic of suicide. To legalise these irregular unions that filled their seraglios would be to annihilate the purpose of their civilisation.