Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

The thought made me shudder, as I looked back into the flood, for there doubtless had been the grave of myriads. How could any merely human fingers cling here when the waves were high, or the wind lashed them into fury? Out in the open I could see the fins of sea-monsters glance in the sun; there was the fate of the fallen climbers; there were the scavengers and mortuary vaults of the feebly ambitious dead that yielded to their destiny and fell; there was the reason why the sea around was not one vast gehenna.

We were strong with exposure and exercise, our cuticle hardened and thick; and yet we were wounded and torn by our upward efforts. We were now almost sea-creatures from our life in the briny air and the splash of the billows; and so, perhaps, it was that the man-eaters below let us alone when we fell back into the waters; at any rate they swam far off from us, as if they would have no dealings with such strangers.

At length we reached the upper margin of the sea’s domain, and sat down, weary and faint, to let our blood harden on our wounds in the sun. Around us stood a crowd of pale and shadowy forms, their long hair matted or tressed over their shoulders, vague distance in their eyes, and something that looked like a pen in their right hands. They fingered our clothes and hair in a dreamy way, and sighed, and looked, and sighed again. Then one or another would retire into the background and seat himself on one of the steps, where others too, I now saw, were seated in an attitude of meditation. They gazed into the sky, and then looked intense; they ran their thin white fingers through their long hair; then they consulted slips of paper, on which were evidently printed rules for their guidance; they threw their heads wildly about; their eyes seemed ready to burst from their sockets; they rose and flung their arms aloft; they whirled around and danced at imminent risk of falling back into the sea. Then I saw them settle into a stupor; their lips moved and mumbled as if in sleep; they awoke, and over a sheet that they held in their left hands their pens flew. These performances went on for almost an hour till everyone around us had settled down to his pen and paper.

Sneekape whispered with a contemptuous smile that this was inspiration. They had been waiting, probably months, for a new subject, and our arrival had set them all poetically adrift. They had each hope of rising another flight up the steps of fame, borne on the pinions of a new ecstasy.

We rose to look at the frenzied bevy of poets. And now I saw that across the head of the flight, on which we were, ran a lofty arabesque fence of adamant with a narrow gate in the middle most elaborately bolted and padlocked. Inside it stood in an attitude of attack a serried array of lank forms, clothed in vestures that were splendidly formal, some holding scissors on the end of long poles, others bearing in one hand dirty, long-handled brushes, and, in the other, pots streaked with some black and greasy fluid, a third set swinging censers alight, and a fourth carrying huge inflated bags on their backs. They looked, a scowl or a sneer on their villainous low brows, upon the writhing romancers on the other side of the adamant scrollwork. Half of them were boys with a low type of face that indicated more bravado than intelligence, more flippancy than wit; of the others some had more years and more truculence, and a look of envy and malice in their eye; the rest were men bowed by years and despair of life, and on their faces was a look as of pity and reminiscence.

This was the lower ring of acolytes of the great temple of Literary Fame, Sneekape whispered to me; there were four divisions of them, as I could see by their implements, and these were the snippers, the defacers, the burners, and the windbaggers, as their Kloriolean names might be translated. They had a mean and somewhat soiled shrine of Fame on the left side of their rocky platform, and here relays of them kept up continual worship, burning on the altar imaginative productions that they caught.

My attention was drawn to the other side by negotiations going on there. Some of the wild-haired youths, who had evidently finished the result of their frenzy, had come up to the scroll-fence and were haggling and bargaining with one or other of a group of sleek business-like men within it. These were called the propagators, my companion said, and their function was to supply the means for floating any new product of the fancy towards the priests and the worshippers of the temple of Fame. I saw that most of the pale youths returned to their seats on the steps with a look of baffled eagerness in their eyes. They touched and retouched their sheets and wearily erased and inserted with their pens. A few succeeded in getting paper-floats with their complement of gossamer thread and other apparatus from the propagators. And with the gleam of proud achievement in their looks they prepared to attach their writings to them and set them afloat. But most of the literary kites refused to rise, and when thrown up into the air fell heavily back into the sea and either sank or were torn under by the devouring monsters. A few of more prosperous and cheerful appearance approached the windbaggers; I watched one of them: aided by his propagator, he got some coin or valuable transferred through the interstices of the fence into the hidden palm of one of the sack-bearing acolytes, and before long he had his kite afloat, dancing upon the puff of wind that issued from the nozzle of his ally’s bag. The other acolytes made fierce lunges at it with their scissors, or brush, or censer. Amongst those that managed to float, one had its thread early snipped and fell over the parapet; another sank, heavy from the foul effacement from an ink-brush; another caught fire and was burned in a censer. Two succeeded in running the gauntlet and floating higher; but at the next enclosure they succumbed to the attacks from behind it. The owners of these were admitted within the fence by which we stood; and I saw the proud smile on their faces. One of them was persuaded to join the group of acolytes, and, when he donned the vestments, he seemed to lose his old and picturesque personality and take on the truculence of his new companions. The other turned away from them with a weary but ambitious face and climbed up the long flight towards the next barrier.

As I looked upwards I now perceived that there was a barrier, with a crowd of acolytes and propagators on the one side and a diminishing crowd of suppliants on the other, at the head of every flight. The strange thing was that, as the distance increased, the size and sleekness of each fence-divided bevy increased too, till up at the porch of the temple, priests, propagators, and poets looked fat and almost bloated; they reclined on rich couches, and were surrounded with the luxuries that would fit an outdoor tropical existence. It was little wonder that the thin, pale faces of the candidates below looked up with such longing to that Olympus and Elysium in one. Sneekape pointed out to me on each adamant barricade the meaning of the scrollwork; he translated the letters; the announcement ran: “None enter the mighty temple as gods but by this ascent.”

In the middle of the explanation we were startled by a wild cry and a rush of the crowd around us to the right-hand parapet. We ran in the same direction, and, hearing a fierce, gruntling noise, looked over and saw one of the long-haired tribe being devoured by jackals. To keep candidates for fame back from the land approach to the great stairs, an iron-barred enclosure ran its whole length on both sides, and in this lived a number of wild beasts, fed upon young poets and other seekers of glory. The priests and propagators saw that the supply was kept up. It was not long before the victim had completely vanished and his comrades sat down with a new and stirring topic in this suicide for fame. Perchance their wild sympathy with him might produce such a poem as would open the gate for them. They were soon all absorbed in their new inspiration.

In looking from one to another bowed figure, I saw a sheet flutter near the parapet; I took it up and handed it to my companion. He laughed and said it was evidently the young suicide’s bid for fame; the verses had rhythm and meaning like this: