He has come to assist
In dispelling the mist
That clings to thought at its birth.
Through a long series of such doggerel verses the composition proceeded; and I thought, how meaningless the pæans, if this were all that opened the gates of literary Fame! I turned away from the sight of this sordid injustice and looked for the first time out upon the level shores of the island that stretched on either side of these sanguinary stairs. And I was surprised to find them full of men and women of look and figure and dress nearer the normal; they were evidently toilers with the hands; for they were muscular in frame and tanned by the weather. They formed, indeed, a wholesome contrast to these priests and worshippers of fame.
A longing to be amongst them seized me, a kind of homesickness to be with the toilers of the field again. Sneekape could scarcely restrain me from trying to leap the parapet; he showed me the jackal-haunted chasm that I would fall into and the impossibility of crossing it. He got the canoe in to the lowest step; nor had we so far to slither down; for the tide had risen; and in a few minutes we were seeking a place to land. At the risk of our lives we managed to get on the beach and were soon in the midst of the crowd.
They were the slaves and artisans of Kloriole; and, as it was now evening, they had finished their day’s labour and were engaged in the usual recreation of the country, listening to or making songs and ballads. It was a babel rippled with snatches of melody. I could catch no intelligible phrase, nor could Sneekape help me much; for they did not write or print their productions, and they composed them in the popular dialect.
Just as the westering sun was tinging the zenith with gold, one ballad seemed to run like wildfire through the clustering singers, and at last was caught up and chanted by the whole multitude. It had a fine symphonic oscillation, and the bodies of the group and the movements of the great sea of heads swayed with the waves of its sound. At last a cry rose above it and spread until it extinguished the fire of song: “To the temple!” and I saw raised on the shoulders of two stalwart artisans a feeble-looking child with an over-developed head and outstanding eyes. The multitude began to move round a cliff and then along a path that wound hither and thither up the hill. They kept chanting the song till they reached another and far greater porch of the temple on its landward side. With huge crowbars they pried open the doors and burst into the vast edifice. It was niched from floor to dome with innumerable shell-formed recesses, gaily painted and ornamented; and into most of these were thrust, often jammed, a dozen or more mummies with labels and printed sheets liberally stuck over them; peering to the back of them I could see that most of those behind the front row were falling to dust, their sheets all yellow with age. It was often difficult to distinguish mummy from mummy or dust from dust; and there was throughout the building, large though it was, a smell as of a charnel-house; the movements and breath of the crowd seemed to shake out the forgotten atoms of the famous dead.
These, Sneekape explained, were the embalmed bodies and productions of the successful worshippers of fame, preserved to immortality. I saw in some of the niches dusty forms of priests move, most of them greybeards, and read the yellow sheets in the dusk, or rake for them in the commingled dust. These, I was told, were the scholar-priests who tried to arrange and furbish the fretwork of dusty death. But it seemed to me that they helped even more than the trampling multitude to distribute the remains of mortality into the atmosphere and the lungs.
The priests and their followers shot scornful glances at the rudely surging mob; but without effect. Then they raised their paper lashes that had made the worshippers on the stairs writhe with pain; but they sounded feeble and childish against the noise of the chanting crowd; and their strokes seemed to have no more effect than if applied to the billows of the sea. The singing multitude swept on up the long aisles of the edifice, and with a crash the adamant arabesque that hedged in the shrine of the deity fell before it. The brawny arms of the bearers perched the child on the altar, and the priests, cowed and silent, had to accept him as one destined to be sustained at the expense of the temple and at death to be placed in the niches of immortality. Under the goad of fear, they had to leave their obeisances and fulsome adulation before their favourites who had been admitted up the flights from the sea into the precincts of the deity, and give all their ceremonial eulogy to this illegitimate bantling of fame. In comparing the new object of their adoration with those from whom they now turned, I could see little difference either in grace or intelligence. Those who had been admitted by the recognised ascent were most of them flabby boys or youths, fattened by luxury and robbed by vanity of the little native intelligence they had had; a few were old men in their dotage, whose every foolish word and act was caught up by acolytes and recorded.
I turned to Sneekape for an explanation. We had kept close together, lest the jostling crowd should do us harm in the worship of their bantling. His face was puckered up in a derisive smile. “This is the result of their devotion to what they think fame. Their literary art has become child’s play, an exercise in what they call style. These priests and acolytes, who have wrung out of the anguished labour of the common people this gorgeous temple and its endowments, have gradually formulated into exact rule all the points of poem or prose that would admit a writer to the shrine as a sharer in its sustenance and glory. It can be almost automatically decided what is worthy of eternal fame and what is not. They pride themselves on this mathematical precision. Of course this means the exclusion of all idea or fact or utility from the literature; all that is required is the form, and if that comes up to the recognised standard and conforms to the rules which we saw the candidates at the bottom of the stairs continually consulting, then the writer is raised flight by flight to the shrine. The compositions have come to be empty and meaningless; their chief merit is that they have a kind of melody. They must be according to the received convention.