Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

The thought took him up into regions whither ordinary mortals evidently could not follow. The gross features were as near transfiguration as they could ever be. I was glad to be ignored or, at least, unaddressed, during his reverie on the solemn grandeur of his solitude in the universe, glad to feel I was too insignificant for his lofty notice. He strutted with a low, cooing chuckle as if he were superintending the hatching of a world.

Sneekape jerked him out of his trance as with a lasso. He used an epithet which, he afterwards told me, implied in these islands the obliteration of ancestry, what would be considered nihilism in Foolgar. It was like a whip-stroke to the bovine frame. He writhed as if stung. His persecutor followed up the interjection with a stream of eulogy of his own ancestors, piling in heroes and gods, till the lineage overshadowed all mortal heraldry. The keeper of the great ancestral museum and saint-shop, in which we were, fell at the feet of his braggart visitor, prostrate. He had been outboasted, and grovelled before this surpassing artist in heraldic imagination and in the vulgarities on which he so prided himself.

He gave us a retinue wherever we went throughout the islands, and fêted us every day, till we grew sick of his unwholesome attentions. He looked as if he would lick the ground over which Sneekape walked. A man with so great a lineage and such lordly airs and voice must be made much of.

Sneekape had still a wicked twinkle in his eye. He gave the gorgeous servants of our host a high-sounding embassy to return with, and then led me away through by-lanes into an unpretentious, if not squalid, section of the town. We stopped before what I would have called an ancient temple; it looked outside as if worn by the weather of centuries, and it was clothed with their filth too. It had upon its pediment a huge inscription in letters of gold, and this, according to Sneekape’s interpretation, meant: “Honour thy forefathers; they circulate in thy veins and guide thy life; there is no godhead equal to theirs.” A feeling of solemnity crept over me, as we stepped into the antique portico of what was the oldest shrine of ancestry worship in the archipelago. All round there were evidences of primitive customs and relics of olden times; and, in spite of the filth and dust of ages, worshippers in rich robes knelt or moved about with anxious looks upon their faces. I supposed that they were waiting for admission to the inner temple, though they had a skulking gait, seemed to try to avoid recognition, and had their hoods drawn over their faces. Every few minutes men with villainous low brows, whom I took from their official robes to be attendant priests, came out of the great folding-doors and had conference with one or other of the hooded figures in confidential whispers.

My curiosity was deeply excited; for the service was evidently proceeding; even in the street as I approached the building I could hear the hubbub of adoration, and when the door opened the babel of voices suppliant or hortative burst upon our ears in deafening tumult. Sneekape approached an attendant and after much haggling, during which I saw several times the half-concealed passage of coin from palm to palm, he seemed to succeed in his requests. We were soon threading our way along devious and dark passages; I stumbled frequently; but, after escaping many risks of accident, we found ourselves again outside of a door that smothered the devotional riot within; and in another moment we had plunged into the tempestuous ocean of devotees.

It was some time before I collected my wits sufficiently to observe the centre of the scene; it was a huge priest in official robes standing in a raised pulpit with two subordinates seated beside him writing in books and a bevy of acolytes buzzing hither and thither around the dais. He was shouting almost continuously with stentorian lungs that must have needed the full capacity of his huge chest to contain. He had a hammer in his hand and with this he pointed in various directions throughout the congregation as he exhorted or chided, besought or encouraged; and ever and anon a sounding blow of the mallet on his desk would still the babel for a moment, while the buzzing acolytes rushed hither and thither bearing new documents or inscriptions that were evidently portions of the sacred writings.

I looked round at the sea of faces upturned in worship, and I thought I had never seen such a villainous collection outside of a criminal court. It was little wonder that the priest had to exert himself so frantically, if he were to make any religious impression on such a crowd. Their countenances belied them if they did not stand sorely in need of his exhortations. The officiant was now ready with another portion of scripture, an inordinately long scroll; and around in niches behind him had been placed by the acolytes a row of mild-faced images that I took to be a collection of minor deities, evidently of one family; for there was a strong likeness in the countenances of all of them. Again the tumult of devotion rose; I felt scared by its importunacy and reflected that no god would dare to disregard such a deafening invocation; but the priest’s voice rose above it like thunder in a tempest. He appealed to them in bovine tones and with postulant gestures; he exhibited his script and read portions aloud for their benefit; he turned back to the images and seemed to laud them to heaven; and ever and again he jerked out some appeal to the assembly, gesturing wildly with his mallet; and responses to his litany came now from one worshipper and now from another. As the scene proceeded, the service seemed to narrow itself to three officiants, the priest in his pulpit and two somewhat lordly-looking worshippers, whose faces I could not at first see. The interchange of appeal and reply was like a fusilade, so rapid and sharp was it; and ever and anon the acolytes held up an image, or raised the long strip of manuscript in the air. The suppressed excitement in the assembly grew intense. Not a sound was heard but the voices of the three officiants, that of the priest in the pulpit predominating.

A crisis was evidently approaching, the threefold litany crackling out upon the blank silence like thunder on the depth of midnight. I was conjecturing what would be the climax, when the mallet rapped with a sharp click on the desk, and the acolytes bore off the images and the manuscript. One of the response-givers turned around and his face was dark and troubled as a tumultuous sea under the shadow of a cloud. With excited gestures and rising intonations the worshippers bustled out; a fierce quarrel was manifestly on foot, there being, I could see, two contending sects present; face turned to face with darkening scowl and arrested threat. Religious fervour had changed into virulent bigotry; and the narrow space within the temple seemed to accentuate the suppressed volcanic fire, to judge by the fierce, dark faces all hieroglyphed by the passions of a murderous past; there was bloodshed in store for the two divisions of the church. We did not follow them; but before long we could hear in the neighbourhood the furious cries of a sanguinary contest with a fringe of feminine wailing and screeching.

Sneekape drew me aside, and, when the crowd had thinned off, we went into what seemed a huge warehouse in the rear of the temple. Here were great rows of images and countless rolls of manuscript; and the attendants were taking from the hands of hooded figures other images and rolls. My guide took me into a still corner, and told me that this was a pedigree pawnshop we had entered, and that the scene we had just witnessed was an auction of ancestors. The great temple of ancestral worship had been poverty-stricken till it had recognised the signs of the times and ceased to prohibit with its ban the secret but long-established traffic in lineage throughout the island and archipelago. The ever-progressive extravagance and impoverishment of old families had led to its necessary consequence, an ancestry exchange, where for a consideration a new favourite of fortune could acquire an ancestry with its good name and titles and its resultant social position and prestige. It is true the commodity was encumbered with a few stones of human flesh in the shape of a daughter of the family whom the newly enriched or his son had to marry, or in the shape of a son to whom he had to give his daughter in marriage; but there was discount for that, and he could soon get clear of the encumbrance by divorcing it to some other island. There was generally a higgling of the market according as there was more supply or more demand all over the archipelago. The mothers and fathers of the old families prided themselves on their bargaining skill; they drew from the aspirant the more coin, the more they disparaged himself and his forefather; if they could make him out a blackguard, so much the better bargain could they drive. Most romantic stories were told of great fortunes being made out of such a sale through the employment of detectives, who found out the scoundrelism of the buyer’s past.

The church had for centuries considered the traffic as a desecration of the ancestral worship that it cherished, and frowned upon it; and the consequence was that it was itself sunk in poverty and neglect. But a generation before, a great ecclesiastical genius arose, who saw the possibilities of the practice, and blessed it instead of cursing it. He organised it into a regular business over which the priests presided. He established the famous ancestral pawnshop behind the ancient temple and extended its operations through the whole archipelago. At first the priests kept the commerce semi-private so as to save the feelings of the old families; but most of these latter had no compunctions about the haggling for a price and pressed the church officials more and more eagerly and openly to make a good bargain for them. After a time the business became so large and open that an auction was established in the temple; and bidders gathered from all parts of the archipelago. The growth of commerce and the rise of new families to wealth at first overtook the supply and then out distanced it. An old family name and pedigree was one of the dearest of commodities and re-enriched impoverished households. Still some of them shrank from the publicity of the auction and pawnshop of ancestry and came thither with their proposals hooded and unrecognisable. The church and then the individual priests grew rapidly in wealth; and their increasing taste for luxury demanded larger and still larger income. They established agencies in the other islands, and at last, to meet the demand, set up a great pedigree factory.