Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

In some islands Sneekape and his fellow-panders were publicly proclaimed as enemies of the state, and, if at any time they were discovered there, were liable to be hunted down like vermin. In Tirralaria their offence was not felt so deeply. For the leisurely, pleasure-loving life precipitated a larger proportion of female children than of males. The freedom of intercourse between the sexes removed all special premiums on the passion; there could be nothing illicit in love; there was no bond and no law to dare or break. And thus they held there was nothing of intoxication in amorous intercourse; there was no more stimulus to it than there was to eating; it had become commonplace; and lasciviousness was as rare as gluttony, if not as miserliness in a state that had no money. As a rule, though there were no bonds, no state authorisations of permanency in the unions, they were more constant than in a monogamous community; and as there was in most years plenty of food to be got for nothing and parents could at their option retain their children or hand them over to the temple of female advisers, there was no check on the growth of the population. They were not sorry then that some of the women should elope with the Figlefian emissaries; in fact it relieved the drain on the supply of food and left fewer to suffer from any famine that might occur. There was indeed no compulsion on their women any more than on their men to stay on the island. And those who did follow Sneekape or any other of his libertines went with their eyes open; they now knew the capricious fate of a Figlefian seraglio. It was only the young fools amongst them that now allowed themselves to be decoyed. As a rule, they were handsome women who were flabby from adulation, and most of them had only the hectic beauty of weakness and ill-health; and these soon died off amid the rigours of Figlefian prostitution. Few ever returned from their escapade.

It was clear that they winked at Sneekape’s mission, and rendered it as easy as possible, whilst he hoodwinked himself into the belief that it was his personal attractions that removed its difficulty. The high value that he placed on his face and figure, and especially on the hypnotism of his eyes and tongue, laid him open to any trap that an astute schemer would set for him; his vanity rendered him as foolish as a coot, whilst it at the same time made him think that he was a heaven-born diplomat and intriguer. For the morbid natures of the sickly and weak-willed he had manifest attractions; he could practically mesmerise these feebleminded beauties and make them follow him wherever he would, and he prided himself on these conquests with bantam-like gestures and crow. The strong-willed women were too wholesome in mind and too astute to be influenced by his flatteries or his hypnotising glances. They entertained a certain amused scorn of his vanity, his amorous advances, and his adulation.

During the day Garrulesi and his friends showed me great attention and descanted on the glories of their state. Whilst other communities had elevated the means towards happiness into an end they were already at the goal; they did not trouble themselves about the future, but enjoyed the present; they did not fidget 364 days that they might rest on the 365th, with the chance of dying before it came; they loved the bird in the hand better than ten thousand in the bush. The fools of the world, the most of men, chased the elusive to-morrow or wailed the vanished yesterday, till to-day had run its sands. Between two phantom worlds, the one dead, the other to be born, they let the present run, a rosary of tears or prayers. The moment was the only capital that men could be sure of; what folly to hide it in a stocking for that which may never be, to lose the reality in grasping at the shadow! The Tirralarians had based their whole life and civilisation on the maxim that neither the past nor the future is theirs to deal in. Time is but the flight of a moment between two midnights; all else is a dream; out of a dream we issue; into a dream we vanish; how vain to spend our only sleepless present as a lethargic past or an uncreated future!

And, as I walked about with them, I felt that there was something strikingly ephemeral in their existence. The only members of the community that thought of anything but the immediate hour were the advisers of the people; and even they were satisfied with but the outlook of a season; they tried to secure nature a chance of repairing the ravages a dislawed people might do her in gratifying their appetites with her products; they saw that the trees and bushes were not so broken down or pillaged of seed that they could not restore their vital powers; they watched over the recuperative faculty of a climate that though sub-tropical yet needed the husbanding of the trees and other growths.

It was indeed like talking with children from a cross between the barbaric past and the coming millennium, as I encountered and conversed with these ragged philosophers. In the opportunities of their civilisation they were not one step in advance of the savage of ten thousand years ago; in their mental and lingual outfit they were the equals of the subtlest and most advanced of nations. All day their life through, they sharpened their wits in argument, or discussion, or dream. They had had nothing to do but talk for centuries; and their power of rhetoric or argumentation was the accumulated legacy of a hundred generations. They had no books or art, for they had deliberately destroyed or abolished the professions that worked in them. But they had almost overcome the results of such a defect by the keenness of their memory and the potency of their imagination. Though they professed to live in the moment, their minds swept through all time and space. Without infinity of past and future, of stars above and beyond, the present would have been an intolerable prison-house. The energy that was no longer used in muscle and framework and the processes of digestion concentrated in the brain. They counted it no blemish on the perfection of idleness to dream for ever waking dreams or keep the tongue in perpetual motion. They did not harass themselves with imaginary cares and thus waste the tissue that went to the enjoyment of complete living. If disease or famine came, why then they died and there was an end of it. But what could it profit them to anticipate such evils? They could not by thinking and acting and forerunning sorrow and harassment add a moment to their years or postpone the arrival of the inevitable end.

They acknowledge that records might have aided them in enhancing the happiness they had, but writing them was too much like the old chase of the mirage, the search for happiness. Who could be expected to postpone the enjoyment of a brilliant fancy or noble image for the purpose of giving it written expression? If they had had from the nervous energy of their old and futile civilisation some automatic means of having their words or thoughts recorded, then would they now have books enough to let a generation amuse and instruct those that followed. But, before many generations had gone, books would become a burden to the race; the necessity of having to read them and know them would sit like a nightmare upon every man who wished to be up to his age. Libraries crush the souls of men till they become all eyes and comment on the past; their heads are twisted on their necks till they can see only behind. The worst books contaminate the future like a foul stream. The best books become gods that tyrannise over the ages to come and bind the human spirit in irrefragable chains of minute devotion. They preserve the past only to be a fetish and slave-driver of souls. Through them the generations can lay dead fingers upon the hearts of men and frighten courage out with their stony stare and grasp. The noblest of them when deified by time grow an evil dream. Books, they found, had become the high-priests of the human spirit, and ultimately claimed communion with omniscience. Why should they, when they had abolished all privilege in earth and heaven, as far as they were concerned, leave a privileged race of human creations that would episcopate over every nascent thought or imagination or element of faith? The past was too much with them even as it was. Through heredity it fettered and lamed the footsteps of mankind. What we have done, still more what our ancestors have done, lays mortmain on what we do or have still to do. And books give the grip of a vice to this dead hand of the past. The Tirralarians grew weary of perpetuating outworn elements, and made a bonfire of their libraries. Theirs was thoroughgoing socialism that would not permit inequality of voice and influence even among the dead. Every man had his chance of moulding the future through his children and friends. Heredity gave him as strong a power of flight through the spaces of time and over the barriers of death as socialism or nature could allow. In all nations and races it needed far more strength to fight the dead past and throw off its yoke than to climb up the steep of progress. Tradition aiding heredity gave it almost omnipotence. Books, completing the yoke, gave such organisation and order and permanence to the power that it had no limit, and the young generations and young talents and thoughts were hopeless in the struggle. Through them tradition became like the snake-haired head of fable that turned all it stared at into stone; orally it is liquid or at least malleable, if not plastic; but in record it is the petrifaction of the past. Half of every life is a struggle with this gorgon, this sphinx, even when it has only the diaphanous texture of myth; but when it gathers to it the worship of past ages, it has the mystic fascination of destiny in its eyes, and there is no evading it in our threescore years and ten. We are born with the tentacles of this octopus round us, and with our growth they grow; and if they have in them the strength of past ages that literature gives, there is no spirit, however herculean, but must succumb to them; for every snaky arm that we unwind from our souls, a myriad retwine themselves about us. It is an unequal combat, this of the human present with its past; we arm the latter with weapons of such might, we are such traitors to our own happiness and our own future. The history of civilisation in any nation is but a record of the struggle of man to disentangle the coils of his past from his soul; and what makes it so tragic is that in his folly he is ever feeding the monster with his own vitals, his devotion, worship, reverence. Oh, the cruel laceration of his heart in times of revolution, when he rises to superhuman passion and resolves that he will be rid of the snaky coils! But, as the great mood begins to burn low, he finds that the hydra has only crept down on him with renewed life. To enjoy the present we must not multiply the terrors of the past by eternalising them, or brood over the dangers of the future till they become nightmares.

The rest of my day in Tirralaria had the sharp savour of epigram in it; so mean were the externals of life, so easy and opulent the thought and phraseology. Low living and high thinking was the rule amongst those whom I came to know. But I had the suspicion that these were but the floating remains of a great intellectual past come down the stream of heredity, for I saw gleam out of the eyes of most that I did not speak to the spirit of a wolf or of a sloth. Envy, malice, hatred, the passionate soul of Cain, had not vanished with the destruction of property, class, profession, literature, art. Low living without any thinking was the rule of the majority perforce; and it was these embruted elements of the nation that usually survived a famine or plague. I could see savagery loom at no distant date on the horizon of this people, for it had no means of conserving its higher elements or natures. High thinking cannot live in the sty of Epicurus; even in the higher natures it must drown in the deluge of talk.

I slung my mat with these melancholy thoughts dominating my mind and with the resolve to investigate the civilisation of the island more minutely before I left it.

I could not have slept long when a movement of my hammock awoke me to the hoarse chaos of a hundred nasal trumpets. I sat up in consternation, and through the darkness I could discern the figure of my Figlefian critic erect beside me. He waited a few seconds to let me master the situation, and then whispered in my ear: “It is time to set out if we wish to see Klimarol.” I remembered our tacit agreement, and rose after donning my rags. On getting into the starlight my wits returned to me, and I began to think how dangerous was the enterprise, especially with such an untrustworthy guide. I pleaded that I had forgotten something, and, picking up a bright shell that gleamed upon the earth, I returned to my mat and wrote upon it, as well as the darkness would allow, a brief message in English for my men, telling them to beware of Figlefia, although they might find me there should I have left Tirralaria; they should take a guide and follow me with caution. On its outer surface I scratched a word or two in Aleofanian to Garrulesi.