I was quite prepared to believe Sneekape when he said that the archipelago translated the name of the island differently from the inhabitants; it was the Isle of Busybodies. The gradual discovery of the true nature of the people made me glad to escape. We went off without notice one midnight in our canoe, which we had well provisioned some days before.
CHAPTER XIX
WOTNEKST
THERE was an island near that carried the belief in the potency of law to a still more insane pitch. I had heard of people with new-born legislative functions thinking that they could accomplish anything they desired by merely passing a law. Revolutionary fervour even in the West had worked wonders with the human power of self-delusion. But the story of the isle of Wotnekst or Godlaw, as it might be translated, roused my curiosity. I could not believe that there existed outside of lunatic asylums a people so far gone in hallucination.
Much against the will of Sneekape we were driven by the current and the wind right upon a lonely beach of the island. As it was evening, I persuaded him to camp on the shore for the night. Before we were fully awake in the morning we were surrounded by a crowd of the most tattered and slovenly men and women I had ever seen, and this after I had been in Tirralaria. There was a wild, fanatic light in their eyes that warned us to humour their fondest freak. They stood between us and the margin of the sea where our boat was beached, and we saw that they meant to shepherd us inland, whether as prey or guests we could not tell. Sneekape made the best of a bad bargain and, after taking a slender meal of what we had left from supper, he marched away from the shore and I followed. The tatterdemalions began to move too.
It was one of our pieces of good fortune that my companion, though he had never made an expedition to the island, because of its lack of attractive quarry, had amongst his many accomplishments acquired a smattering of its language from some of the descendants of those who had escaped from it. For they had not long before passed a law that their language should be and was the universal language of the world; they had long enough suffered from having to learn the languages of barbarians and foreigners, in order to have intercourse with them; they would suffer the indignity no longer; other men must learn Wotnekstian; and in fact it was their true, natural, or mother tongue, and they had forgotten it only through their negligence; it was time that they picked it up again, and they would have no trouble in doing so, once the auxiliary series of laws was passed for enabling foreigners to learn the language in a day. They should like to know how any man could fail to learn it once the legislature of Wotnekst had taken the matter in hand and passed the necessary laws. They should like to know what Nature had been doing all these centuries in letting the native tongue of the earth fall into desuetude in so many nations. Nature knew well that Wotnekst was the primitive source of all mankind and had remained the leading country of the earth and the model for men to follow. It had been foremost in legislation and had shown the way to the whole world; for legislation was the supreme factor of life.
I heard the loud and threatening eloquence, and though I did not understand the import of it I knew from its tone that I had better keep silence. I sheltered under the knowledge of Sneekape, and watched him negotiate and cringe and flatter. I afterwards discovered that it was his knowledge of the language, meagre though it was, that saved us from terrors they did not attempt to define. Sneekape knew their general reputation in the archipelago as a feeble folk too loquacious to do any harm. Yet he showed by his cowering and fawning look that he was not quite sure what might occur; and the more he spanielled them the louder and more arrogant they grew. It was then I knew by instinct that they were cowards, attempting to hide their cowardice and drive courage and boldness out of the hearts of possible assailants. Once Sneekape took in the situation, he changed his attitude and adopted their loud voice and swaggering gait. He was, as I had seen, a master of effrontery and fanfaronade. But his change of rôle was too sudden to impress them; and they had gathered confidence and impetus from the torrent of their own blustering and rhodomontade and from their growing numbers as they approached the town. They outbrassed the insolence and swagger of Sneekape, and he cut but a poor figure for the rest of the march to our destination.
We could not see the houses for a long time; and when we came amongst them we still looked for the town ahead of us. The hovels were so squat and mean and filthy that we could not imagine human beings living in them; but we soon stopped before one that was conspicuous for having been built as a penthouse to the ruin of what had once been a considerable edifice. We were informed that this was the capital, the very centre of the civilisation and power of the world, and that what we saw around us was the greatest city on the face of the earth. The filthy kennels were the town, and this pigsty was the residence of the government.