Our next visit was to this. One department of it printed off the long strips of parchment with fictitious records of lineage, the earlier part of it in ancient letters and language and stained with the marks of age. Another department manufactured images, and artistically chipped, cracked, and sullied them into true relics of antiquity. It was indeed difficult to distinguish the old models from the new imitations; and I was not surprised to hear that the buyers of the brand-new pedigrees held their heads as high as those who had to pay ten times as much for a well-known ancestry and titles. The priests alone knew the difference, and it was their interest to keep it secret, and preserve the skill in distinguishing true from false as a trade mystery. Sneekape told me afterwards that it was the rarest of all privileges to get admission to the factory of lineage. He had great personal influence with one of the chief priests and considerable pecuniary influence over the subordinates. We were both sworn to secrecy over the sacred writings and by ceremonies that were meant to overawe us. I cannot say that I felt much inclined to reveal anything I saw, so ordinary did it seem to me.
What impressed me most deeply was the auction in the temple. I had never encountered any instance so bold and unconcealing of a practice, common to all peoples, yet usually hidden under a thousand different fine names and subterfuges. The scene engraved itself upon my memory, the priestly auctioneer crying up his goods, and the wild, dark-faced assembly of bidders, loudly competitive. I was soon led to understand that it had been an auction to be remembered even by a people accustomed to such scenes. The ancestry had been that of one of the most famous families in the archipelago, a family of statesmen, reformers, divines, and philanthropists, once of enormous wealth, now reduced to what was comparative poverty in that age of luxury. There was attached to the title and lineage the condition that the purchaser should marry the only female representative, a beautiful and gentle-hearted young girl; and the condition had this time given enhanced value to the pedigree. It drew bidders from all portions of the archipelago; but amongst them it soon came to be generally whispered about that no one had any chance against two notorious corsairs of Broolyi, who had lately retired from the overt pursuit of their profession with huge fortunes and bought great estates and castles in the island. The hooded figures in the portico had been the sellers hovering about, awaiting the result. At first the other bidders kept up the running; but the price soon overleapt the resources of all but the two pirates, who had each a force of his old sailors and followers ready to carry out what his purse might not be able to do. I had seen the conclusion of the matter as far as the temple was concerned; but the true conclusion had to be reached by the aid of knives in the open air. I protested against the fate of the young lady, who would have to pass her life with her piratical purchaser; but Sneekape and his friends on the islands only laughed at such a mistaken view of a provision of nature. Krokya (the successful corsair) had paid his full price; never had any lot had such a good market; the old family was set on its legs again; the girl was supremely happy; for she would have everything that money could purchase; and her husband, though he still had interests in several piratical craft that were doing a handsome business in the archipelago, had thoroughly reformed, and, having settled down to the life of a respectable citizen, was worthy of the best pedigree he could purchase. He would now move about with his head high in the most aristocratic circles of the best islands, and where could any girl find a better match? Her people, it seems, held high festival over the result of the auction; for, although they had bartered away the good name of the family, they had restored its fortunes. What nobler thing could religion have done for ancestors than to provide them with an organised and respectable means of raising the family out of the slough of poverty and misfortune, and attaching themselves to a new and successful family? The church had shown itself a true philanthropist in thus acting as intermediary between ancestried poverty and ignoble wealth.
After this explanation and defence of the system, I was anxious to return to the temple and watch another auction; and as a large number of small pedigrees were to be sold, the scene was sure to be interesting and varied. To me it was from one point ludicrous, from another sad. The officiant priest, evidently using phrases that he had used thousands of times before, stirred the competitive eagerness of the audience. “Here we have one of the finest commodities I have ever submitted in this temple; look at the length of the pedigree; roll it out before the gentlemen; show them the great names that occur in it; call out the lateral connections of the family with the greatest families of the archipelago. Now, gentlemen, let us have a bid; the opportunity will never recur; I have clients behind here in the pignorative warehouse who have been pressing me to submit it to private sale; why, I could have sold it twenty times over since the family put it into my hands; but I determined that the public, my old and faithful clients, should have the first offer. A hundred pounds! Come, come, you are joking. Let us begin with two hundred. You think this is a pedigree from the isle of socialists. I tell you it is from the greatest country in the archipelago, from Aleofane. Now look at the images of the ancestors. Here is one who alone is worth the money. He has got the lineaments of a god, and his life is written in the annals of the country. Just hold up this image to the gentlemen. This, you can see, is the face of a philosopher, thought in his every wrinkle, wisdom in the stoop of his shoulders, lofty meditation in the gaze of his brooding eyes. Pass on to the next in the row; who cannot see in his bold front, stern mouth and chin, and high cheek-bones the lines of a successful warrior? Victory is written over his face and mien; and, if you look into the features, you will see in the scars upon his face the map of his innumerable battlefields. Now, gentlemen, you can never be ashamed of a lineage like this. What! Only ten pounds more! No, no; I must have twenty-pound bids. And the lady who owns this lineage is a goddess in beauty and gait. Why, if I were not so old, I would unfrock me of my priesthood, and bid for the pedigree myself, so fair and so divine is she. No, no, it would be sacrilege to let it go for such a paltry sum.” I could make out some of this now from his gestures, aided by my knowledge of the temple and its trade; and Sneekape eked out my conjectures by his running translation. The pedigree was knocked down for coin equivalent to our thousand pounds to a chimney-sweep who had made a fortune by extracting some valuable chemical from the soot. Now that he had a pedigree and an estate, he became a transmuter of fire-products, and he afterwards moved in the best social circles of the archipelago. My guide slily drew me up towards the images and manuscript as they passed out, and showed me that they had been amongst the most recent production of the factory. Where the priests got the divine lady attached to them, he said he could not explain. Perhaps this was their method of disposing of undowried, unancestored girls. It revealed at least the source of the vast and increasing wealth of the temple.
Up till this experience of mine, I had thought that they had no public religion; each household, it had seemed to me at first, had its own, and worshipped its ancestors with the usual outward devotion and inward freedom. They cared little for the character of those they worshipped, whether good or bad, and called only that divine in them which fitted their own desires and passions. There were amongst them all the evils of inbreeding, intensified by its being in the sphere of religion; they were tortured with morbidity and other diseases of the spirit, such as a sort of moral epilepsy, and spiritual anæmia. The worst malady amongst them was that which made them seem insane to the other inhabitants of the archipelago,—intellectual wry-neck and tip-nose; they could never look at any thing or person without getting their perspective twisted by a vision false or true of some far-back past; they were ever craning their necks back to an ancestry generally fictitious, or lifting their noses high above someone who did not trouble himself about whether he had any or not.
My guide had neither the conscience nor the honour to feel any scruples about taking advantage of their weakness. He trumpeted and strutted in a more and more lordly and vulgar way, till the Foolgarians, armoured though they were in genealogies that reached farther back than the creation, licked the dust off his feet. If they had not been such mean bullies and parasites themselves, I should have been sorry for them, so heartlessly did he trample upon their most sacred treasures and feelings. His ancestral references were as fictitious as most of theirs; but they were magnificent lies, brazened out irrespective of human weaknesses. Poor, lank body though he had, he managed to give it an appearance of volume by bulging his chest and raising his nose in the air and stamping his feet on the ground; and by some means I never discovered he changed his low nasal voice into a bovine trumpet-note, with which he outbullied the loudest lineage braggartry of the Foolgarians. The meaner side of human nature was gratified to see these pompous pretenders and bullies biting the dust before one of their own kin and revealing so plainly how natural to them was the other side of their nature, cowardice and fawning. He was their supreme god for a day or two.
Yet he knew that the charm would not work long, and that, when they discovered how like he was to themselves as an artist in genealogical fiction, they would turn and rend him. He chose the very top of the wave of devotion, and we made a triumphal exit, our canoe full of all manner of dainties and luxurious foods. To the last they kept their cringing attitude. Long after we had shot over the bar and put to sea, we could discern their bodies bending to the ground as in an act of worship.
Sneekape laughed loud, when we had got out of earshot and eyeshot. I did not join in the outburst; the spirit of coarse mockery and triumph by means of deceit was even worse than the mixture of bullying and grovelling we had just seen. He was evidently much surprised and tried to explain the jest to me. He said that these islanders were the butt of the archipelago; the meanest laughed at them for the lordly airs they assumed, and when his people were in lack of a good laugh or jest, they organised an expedition to Foolgar, taking with them some comedian, who would by his outlording their lordliness bring all to the dust-kissing stage of fawning. It was the happy hunting-ground of practical jokers, and they seldom failed to raise some good game, so mad were the islanders with the itch for ancestry. The usual translation of its name throughout the archipelago was the Isle of Snobs.
