Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

“Through the ages, then, the stage of life at which the talent for such work is found has been growing lower and lower; and now mothers watch anxiously in the cradles for the lisping of numbers; they record the most infantile chatterings and send them forth as mystic compositions; and these priests, who are also interpreters, profess to find in them the most profound wisdom. I have not heard yet of a babe in arms being admitted to full literary fame; but the day is evidently near when only sucklings and idiots will have any chance of success amongst guardians who adopt such ideals and such mechanical rules, and who profess to find depth of thought in what comes only from the lips. The truth is that the priests and propagators desire to keep the whole emoluments of the temple for their own benefit. Mere children will never interfere with their power or their allotment of fame. When they grow up into youth, they either vanish or are absorbed into the priestly ranks, and the guardians, those that have the fame of old age, vote themselves the most lucrative and elevated posts. For themselves they keep their loftiest eulogies, their wildest devotion; they form mutually admiring and advancing groups; they have no praise for those who will not praise them or be likely to praise them. This habit has spread as a contagion right down the flights of the ascent. No wind is lent to raise a float unless the service is sure to be repaid. All the middle-aged about the temple or the steps are priests, acolytes, or propagators. Children and old men are the subdeities of fame, almost as easily managed as unseen gods, and as easily disposed of. The literature has reached the level of first or second childhood; it is an exercise in the art of saying nothing in the most melodious or mystic way, and in the conventional form. Creation and criticism have both become ceremonial, automatic arts, that have been switched off from the influence of the imagination and every other faculty of the soul. Vacuity veiled in mystery is what those long-haired candidates we left on the sea-flight have not learned and cannot learn, and they must remain there or leave; unless they acquire the other great art, that of interflation or mutual windbagging.

“It is the natural development of a community in which one half are creators and the other half critics by profession. The latter absorb the reality of power and luxury and fame; the former get the shadow. The critics pretend to worship creation; they are the gods, for they have the omniscience; they give the rules and the ideals that are thought divine; to their fiat the others have to bow. They have enslaved the intelligence of the island and are gradually stifling it, that there may be as little chance of outbreak as might come from beasts. Such popular riots as we have seen to-day make them tremble for their power and privileges. The uneducated people, trained in nothing but to worship what the priests of fame profess to adore, feel at times the old musical and imaginative instincts surge up in them, and they rush in rhythmic passion to immortalise the singer who has resuscitated the old nature in them. They are supposed not to know what literature or song is; but they have caught the contagion from the singing in the temple and on the stairs, and they encourage their offspring to attempt ambitious literary flight from the cradle upwards; for is it not something to be the parent of a subdeity of Fame? Amongst them alone is the true sense of natural song unobliterated; and occasionally in their dialect some native, untaught genius gathers its music round an old memory or emotion, and the result is a lyric that sets their whole buried natures on fire; no priestly power can repress the volcanic outburst, and a new idol is set up in the temple.”

We saw the people retire and find their way down to the lower levels as the night fell. We followed and found shelter till the morning. Not long after daybreak they filed away to their tasks in the fields and the workshops, and the incident of the previous day was evidently forgotten.

After a meal Sneekape led me over a spur of the hill to a rising ground that commanded a deep valley into which the sun never seemed to come, so filled with shadow and gloom was it, so walled off from the world of light.

We serpentined down half-way into it till our eyes grew accustomed to the obscurity; and then I could discern figures like the scholar-priests moving about at the bottom of a fissure filled with bones and yellow shreds of parchment or some other stuff that could withstand the weather. Some were turning over and raking this graveyard and some were intent upon yellow fragments they had found.

This was the valley of dead ambitions and dead literature. Into this the literary kites that had their threads cut by the snippers generally fell. Hither were brought the dusty remains of the mummies that had decayed with their writings past recognition in the niches of the temple. It was the charnel-house of the great sanctuary. Here were half the scholar-priests trying to find intelligible relics of the past, that they might by resuscitating them place their treasure and themselves in some higher niche.

And Sneekape closed his explanation with a sneer. “Here they toss most of the infants of fame who are not astute or worldly enough to enter the ranks of the ecclesiastics. The child we saw enthroned on the altar yesterday will be starved out, and, if he does not escape and return to his slave-mother to sink into happy obscurity, his bones will soon be found in this gehenna. The people, though they continue to sing his songs, will utterly forget him; and this the priests knew well, when they ceased their resistance yesterday.”

I looked down to the ghouls that battened below us on the hideous past; I looked up to the great edifice that dominated the island; and I remembered the vaunting inscriptions that decorated its interior. “Here dwell the immortals”; “Who enter here never die”; “The gaze of all men is upon us”; “The centre of the universe.” The valley of death and oblivion was the natural complement of this hill of arrogance and self-righteousness.

My companion laughed at the sharp antithesis, and wished to go down into the valley of dry bones to enjoy the folly of the rakers and the readers. In gloom and dejection I climbed the spur again and fled down to the beach. It was too ghastly a comment on the whole civilised world to linger over. If only I could wipe it from the mind! The mortal dust of the immortals clung to my nostrils and throat. Heedless of the danger I plunged into the sea, and was soon on board the canoe. Sneekape did not wish to lose me, and was beside me before I could raise the paddle. As we got into the current again and swept past and away from the islet, we could see the stairs still crowded with the candidates and the priests absorbed in their pursuit of fame; and not one of them turned to see us drifting away. It was almost the time of stars before we had our last glimpse of Kloriole. The cupolas of the temple still threw its glory back upon the sun from beneath the horizon till it was difficult to tell them from the golden light on the domed billows.