Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

I had not long to wait for a specimen. A female islander sailed into the eating-shop with an elevation of her nose and chin that would have annihilated a less impudent man than my fellow-traveller. I sat in my corner and watched. She assumed the most complete oblivion of our existence, although we sat right in front of her. A minute had elapsed before any one of the attendants had perceived her entrance. She answered his eager and servile inquiries as to her wishes by freezing silence; she still held her nose in the air far above mere terrene interests. He offered her a seat, and after a time she bent her rigid frame and majestically rested. He then retired into the background crushed. When she had settled her dress and airs, a trumpet note of the loudest, most contemptuous kind recalled him to her side, and he knelt down before her and apparently begged her pardon and the knowledge of her wishes; she ordered like a drill sergeant. When the food and drink came, there was a comparative lull; nothing but the sound of her instruments and jaws for five minutes.

Sneekape outswaggered her; he paraded with proud strut from side to side of the shop and trumpeted his orders into general space till the whole of the attendants buzzed round him like a swarm of bees, leaving the high-toned engulfer of viands in solitary state. Even the clatter of her plate and spoon seemed to subside. It was as when a rooster in full crow in the middle of the barnyard on a sudden hears another crow more lustily within a few yards of him; with wings depressed and feeble strut he collapses and seeks a safe corner; whilst the partlets range around the newcomer. He knew the human nature he had to deal with, that coarse, swaggering fibre of would-be aristocracies that is on one side bully and on the other craven. There was an almost subdued tone of appeal in the lady’s voice when she next addressed the shopman; and she sidled out worsted and crestfallen.

There was a buzz of interest around us as we inquired our way to the main town, and traversed it. The story of Sneekape’s lordly airs and voice had preceded us. Great court was paid us by those who were evidently members of the trading class, whilst the labourers assumed a peculiar rigidity of body, their usual method of showing respect to a superior. The few of the lordly class we came across passed us by with a prolonged stare that seemed as if it would investigate the internal machinery of our bodies.

We had not got far into the streets of the town, when an elaborately arrayed flunkey gleaming in purple and gold stopped us with a servile genuflection and besought us in the name of Soma and Sama Deloorna, the latter of whom had met us in the eating-shop, to do them the honour of resting at their house. We had nothing else to do, and Sneekape in his most lordly manner bade the lackey lead the way.

We entered a fortified courtyard, surrounded by low houses, evidently the dwelling-places of the menials of the household. Across it, we reached a showy portal whose doors opened with a suddenness that was overawing. We were bowed in from lackey to lackey through a gloomy and pompous hall, and were at last ushered into a great room that was almost grotesque in its equipment. Everywhere were sculptured or painted forms of men and women in their burial-dress, the ghastly, lustreless gaze of the dead upon their faces. Around each were gathered what were evidently the favourite relics of the original, here a hunting-whip, there the skins or feathers of wild animals, here a skull mounted as a drinking cup, there the mummified feature of some animal or human being. It was a great museum of the dead, perhaps the ancestry of the household. Above each figure was stuck what seemed a heraldic emblem, wreathed in the folds of some white cloth, brocaded with gold; and in front of it what might be a little altar, a shallow cup on it that steamed and smoked with smouldering fragrance.

After a delay of an hour or more our hostess entered with great bustle and retinue. She apologised, so I was afterwards told, for not having shown in the shop the courtesies of Foolgar to so distinguished strangers. It was Sneekape she meant; for she turned to him and bowed and smirked and acted most graciously to him in her majesty. She was not massive; yet the performance was like that of an elephant condescending to a minuet. My companion was equal to the occasion, and trumpeted forth as lordly apologies, bowing as graciously. He began with distant references to his far-back ancestry, astutely introducing some of the most distinguished names of Riallaro; he made large draughts on his imagination, he afterwards acknowledged to me, when he was elevating himself at the expense of the Foolgarians by showing me how he laughed at them. For she too had entered on the imaginative task of out-ancestoring him. The contest was evidently a very keen one; for the two bridled up to new hauteur at intervals. I did not understand the conversation; yet I could see the drift of it in the gestures and interplay of emotion on the faces.

It ended in another victory for my guide, as I could see by the obsequious manner in which she now treated him, in spite of the presence of her menials who had come to announce the approach of her lord. This great red-headed lout bent himself low before each of the funereal figures on the one side of the room as he came up. I afterwards learned that these were his ancestors. Then with a stiff majesty that ill suited his swollen pompous figure he approached us and bowed. He was the coarsest specimen of humanity I had ever seen. If he was proud of his ancestry it was difficult to understand how there could be any reciprocity in the feeling, should their spirits be conscious. He had a huge, ill-cut chasm for a mouth, even larger than Sneekape’s, and the thick lips would never fulfil their original purpose of concealing the amorphous, unsightly teeth and the processes of salivation and speech,—two processes that were ever in foamy, spluttering contest. He would insist on stretching the slit to its full elasticity by wearing a sickly, patronising smile; and the rusty-red hair sprawled over various sections of his face, and failed to conceal what it might have concealed with advantage. The sections it left exposed to view were measly with freckles and new artistic patterns in terra-cotta.

Still he held himself with the personal vanity of an Adonis; and it would not be hard to conceive him dying of love of his own reflection, like Narcissus in the myth. Yet he was so substantial that the process would have to be spread over years, if not centuries.

He knew Aleofanian, and he prelected to me with the condescension of a god on the greatness of his ancestors. It was the dreariest infliction I had ever borne; but he would allow no interruption, and with considerable diplomacy he turned the flank of Sneekape’s endeavours to try a fall with him. He had me all to himself; whilst his wife abased herself before my companion, he made up for the abasement by a truly pavonine strut and spread of his feathers.

Amongst the few items of fact that floated on the torrent of his imagination were these: the name of the island was, translated, the Land of Lofty Lineage, and there were none amongst them whose ancestry did not trace back to some god; their history covered myriads of centuries; and no race on the face of the earth or even in the heavens above could compare with them in ancientness or nobility; ah, they were the most unfortunate of men, so lonely in their majestic isolation, there being none in the universe with whom they could deal on an equal footing.