Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

Sneekape gave a long, low, strident note thrice repeated, different only in the interval between the sounds from a night-bird’s cry I had heard. Again he gave it. And before long I could hear a step rustle in the fallen leaves and dead herbage; a short grace note as of another bird, and my companion darted forward under the shadow. A moment’s peering into the darkness, and I saw a human figure, half-naked, but with head enveloped in some helmet that looked like a diver’s. The two disappeared together through the gloom-clustered foliage. And I had time to look aloft at the gleaming slopes of the great cone, scarred with dark zones and the track of the cinerative sleds. Fire and frost were the artists that carved this wonder of sheen and gloom. And even as I gazed the lustre of the overhanging pall flashed, and a light dust fell upon my hands and face. Another dark encaustic lay along the slope of the argent cone. The cloud that canopied the peak was rent with fulminant volley and a thin veil suffused the landscape for a moment; again the stars etched the darkness with their keen light, and the upper slopes of Klimarol were coagulate gloom. Its pall rose after a time and revealed the alabaster of the cone sloping to the stars unblemished. The tesselation and veining of the snow had vanished into spotless marble.

My companion returned, and, to overcome my fear of the volcanic showers, he told me that never was there so good an opportunity of seeing behind the scenes. The overseers had taken refuge in some caves lower down the slopes; the outburst had alarmed them, and the slaves had encouraged their fears, though they knew from long experience of the mountain that such an ejection relieved the tension of its heart, and none would follow for at least twenty-four hours. Thus they got rid of their repulsive work and the lash for a few brief breathing-spaces. He was in league with them and could get them to throw off the yoke at any time. They would lay down their lives for him; he alone gave them a consolatory future.

I rose and followed him, and our feet were clogged with the fresh mud of the mingled ash dust and rain. A few moments more and we were seated in a sled full of fallen branches and leaves and shooting over the snow at great speed, a pine torch flaring at our rear and bronzing the unsmirched gleam on either side of our track. To look down into the snow-lit gloom of the abyss we were deepening every moment appalled me. I crept to the front of the car and found a great chain attached that cut by the fire of its swiftness a black line through the pallor of the slope. Half-way up there shot out of the gloom and into it again a sled like our own laden to the lip and guided by half-naked cresset-headed slaves; and behind it in the snow-gleam I could trace a dark line parallel to that made by our chain.

Almost before I could withdraw my thoughts from the new subject, we had surmounted the edge of the mountain cup and in a few minutes were landed on the sulphurous platform that fringed it within. A foul stench was in our nostrils that gave Avernian shapings to my inward fears. Down into the pit of everlasting fire I seemed to look; a breath of wind fitfully lifted the turban of steam and smoke that hid the central furnace, and I could catch suggestive glimpses of a molten lake clogged with ever-thickening ever-cracking congelation of liquid rock. Only for a moment, and then all was grey steam again lit from within with fire that seemed to threaten conflagration.

It was long before my eyes could find their way amid the mingled gloom and flash and twilight. But at last I could discern inside the lips of the fiery mouth the desolation of a great city. The cyclopean blocks of lava that made its walls were heaved and split as if they had been the missiles of giants. Yet amid their rupture and dissilience and beneath the sulphurous spume that streaked and sicklied their sombre outlines with lichened yellow, I could discern the features of the magnificent past. Here and there the fragments of great domes still stood propped by their own ruins or soldered by new streams of molten rock. Mighty walls rose up above the now solid torrents of lava that had flowed along their base. It was the strangest sight; vast sculptured figures standing to their necks in new rock, like mammoths from their graves of century-vanishing ice. Mythic animals or monsters from a long-buried past, some with half-human faces, looked out untroubled from their bed of stone upon the seething hell beneath them, whence had issued sea on sea of terrene fire to curd in massy base around their feet. Tall columns lay imbedded in sulphurous ash; others stood broken and vitrified by the dash of some fiery billow. Statues rested half sunk in a shallow inlet of once-molten stone. Great temples still showed the tracery of their mullioned windows and the marvellous fretwork of their walls and roof beneath the glassy yellow of their incrustation. It was as if a city of noble giants had been crushed into fragments and then preserved in amber. Even beside the tremendous forces of this mighty vent of subterraneous passion the ruins showed immense.

Amid them skulked large-headed human figures that with their oily nakedness gleamed bronze at times in the palpitant light of the central furnace. But for these I could have wished to explore the cyclopean fragments of a great civilisation of the past. But I feared the iron-barred eyes that flashed so savagely from beneath the huge visors. I knew that these headpieces were to protect the eyes and tender parts of the slaves from the fall of ashes and other red-hot ejections from the bowels of the mountain. Yet in the darkness and lurid gleamings they showed like gnomes or monsters of the earth, and I could not rid my mind of shrinking.

The emotion rose into terror when I heard sullen cries and shrieks rise on every side from the petrified fragments of the past. Over the rim of the mountain cup shot another of their funeral sleds filled with figures that showed sombre against the heaven beyond; and in the hand of each was a huge thong with knotted end. My companion started, and seizing me by the elbow pulled me in under the shadow of a tower that still rose gigantic out of the new rock. I could see by the occasional flash from the upper cloud what consternation had taken him. For a time he could scarcely command breath to speak—a striking thing in this superfine master of language. I crouched with him for a few minutes in the darkness, and at last he hoarsely whispered in my ear, “It is the overseers, and we shall be caught!”

We skulked from pillar to wall, from wall to buried figure, ever in the shadow, till we had reached a deep fissure in the hardened lava, out of which streamed a sulphurous vapour. We were glad to lie there panting for a time; and, as we looked out over the steaming abyss, we saw the visored slaves flying with groans and yells to their work. Some thrust bars into gleaming lava, and then taking great hammers smote the metal into shape upon clanking anvils. Some melted the snow from the rim of the crater and poured it into channels between beds of well-dug earth that showed green buds just shooting above the surface; others gathered fruit from plants that had matured in this immense forcing-house; whilst others laid mould deeply over the warm rocks and mixed with it the débris from below. Here it was that the lazzaroni of Tirralaria had their luxuries produced; this was the huge workshop of the island; without it the lapses of nature left to herself would long before this have let the race fall into the inane. It was slave labour, and that under the most cruel régime, that kept this anarchic society alive. Here the rigours of the law had gathered into one great clot of blood, leaving the masters in idleness and lawlessness.

We were not long left to conjecture how the thongs stimulated the products of nature. Across the abyss I heard a wild shriek, and a stalwart overseer stood in the glow of the red-hot lava with lash again uplifted. But the slave had evaded it before it fell. We saw the wretch speed to the lip of the fire-lake, the knout-holder following, though at a distance. Something exceptional was about to occur, for all the rest, slaves as well as overseers, raised their heads and let their instruments fall to the ground. Their gaze followed the swift feet of the refugee. Nearer and nearer he came to the crag that overlooked the lake of fire. Still the pursuer shouted to him threats. A flash from the hidden fires lit up the cracked and seamed edges of the chasm, whilst a wind moved aside the curtain of steam and let the canopy above gleam luridly. When the sulphurous cliffs and the upper clouds seemed to glow with the light, the hurrying figure came to the edge of a yellow precipice, and with the impetus of the rush hurled itself far over the molten lake; we saw it turn head over heels and then vanish. It was the work of a moment, and my guide clutched me and drew me on with a whisper hoarsened by alarm: “Flee for your life.” I rushed after him as he made for the lip of the crater towards the eye of the wind, for I heard a low thunder beneath our feet, and a louder rumbling behind us. Wearied though I had been by my night’s climb I felt my limbs light as thistledown. The wind was rising against us, yet we seemed to leap from fragment to fragment, from rock to rock heedless of its force. The thunder grew behind us, and seemed to quicken the pace of my guide. We reached the rim in safety and crouched in the snow underneath it. And looking up we saw the whole heavens lit, and away in the direction of the ruined city a fire outlined on sepulchral black. It was the passion of the mountain finding new vent. We crept down over the snow, sometimes sliding hundreds of feet in a moment over its smooth and glistering surfaces, till we reached the vegetation. The morning had begun to break, so my guide quickened his pace and hid in the densest of the thicket.

Once safely covered, he seemed to get the command of his terror. He lay for a time panting and unable to speak. But, when his throat had recovered enough from its parched state to be the channel of sound, he whispered: “We must get out of this; they know that we are on the crater, and they will pursue us as soon as the eruption is over; they will track us in the snow with ease. We must double back through the forest and then downwards to the shore. We must defeat their scent.” He fell again panting to the ground, his face pallid and drawn. It must have been exceptional consternation that had so dread an effect. I let him recover again, and then asked him what it all meant. In a low, hoarse tone he whispered: “It was the slave’s vengeance. They know that if they plunge a body of some mass into a certain boiling caldron of liquid lava, the mountain will regurgitate it. This wretch knew in any case that he would die in taking revenge for the lash, and he felt perhaps that a plunge into the boiling fire would be the quickest and the fullest vengeance. His pursuer would perish before he turned and reached the rim of the crater. The rest who were nearer it would run the risk of being overwhelmed, for the wind would carry the ash cloud directly over their heads.”