CHAPTER XXVI
SWOONARIE
MY fellow-voyager lay down to sleep as soon as the field of night above us broke into its myriad flowers. I could not sleep for the thought of that wretched miniature of the great world; I could not forget the suicide and his poem, the wild ecstasies of the neophytes, the poor little dropsical-headed poet of the people left to weep and starve in the gorgeous temple, or the murky fissure of the dead with its mortuary vultures. Wearied out at last with the sombre thoughts, and in spite of the heaving of the canoe, I fell asleep at the paddle; and chaotic medleys of all I had just seen made new visions that wakened me in terror to feel ostracised and forlorn under the eyes of infinity; and it was as cheerless to sleep as to wake with this nightmare of the world and its ambitions pressing in upon me.
The long night span itself out into a thread of dreams and reveries; at times it was hard to distinguish between the vision of sleep and the vision of waking, so closely did they twilight into each other. Even when the cold gleam of daybreak shimmered over the waves it was difficult to unravel the tangle of dream and thought; pictures, half real, half unreal, filmed over my senses; the very air, as the sun languished into sight from behind his sultry curtains, became dreamful, the wind and sea fell, and a trance-like silence filled the dome of sky. We had passed into a charmed sphere. Languor welled through me till I dropped my paddle and stretched along the bottom of the canoe, floating on the surface of sleep.
My companion I found trying to waken me. He was steeped in drowsiness himself; but the grating of the boat on some bank had roused him; he could not get to land without help. In a sluggish, half-vegetative state I got up, and we seemed to paddle through an unending series of shallows that entangled the canoe. The exercise at last broke our torpor, and with a few vigorous strokes we reached land.
It lay so low, as far as eye could reach, that the sea in tempest must take possession. Yet we saw human beings move in the distance. At first we thought that they were cattle grazing, so slowly and spasmodically did they trail along and so low did they bend their heads.
We got on shore. Only vigorous movement kept us out of the comatose state that threatened us every moment. We saw men and women stretched on the sand; but we could not get them to take any notice of us, and we had strong desires to drowse prostrate too. We struggled on over the opiate plain, till at last we found the ground rise gently. Our limbs quickened, our senses began to grow nimble, and when we were high enough to look out over the island and the sea, we had completely recovered from our lethargy.
We reached a cluster of dilapidated huts, that turned out to be mere roofings of pits dug in the earth. Men and women were working here and there, but paid little attention to us when we spoke to them. Sneekape at last found one who looked up, as he was addressed in Aleofanian; and, after a long series of vigorous efforts and questionings, he left off his slumberous style of digging and answered in droning, far-off tones that sounded like the echo of muffled bells. There was a somnolent look in his great cow-like eyes, covering what might have been depths of intelligence and emotion, or what might have been nothing at all. We followed him to a bench outside of his rooftree, and we sank down on it with a sense of seeming collapse.
After a space our senses shook off their torpor and drew themselves together, and we found in slow and measured question and answer that he had no desire to know us or be known by us; he was too busy upon a vital problem to feel any interest in other matters. It was this we discovered on much inquiry: whether worms could be taught to do all the agricultural operations of a farm; they were the ploughers, manurers, sowers, and harvesters; but they were all these at once; he had been experimenting for years to get them to divide their various operations over the appropriate seasons. He seemed harassed that we had interrupted him in attempting to fence off his ploughing worms from his harvesters. There was just one link wanting, and when he found it he would reform the agriculture of the world.