“We tried to persuade the ambassador to sell us provisions, but he was so eager to persuade us of his infallibility and the finality of the new number of the beast that he could not listen to our requests. The world had been waiting for this number so long that it could not afford time for anything now but the contemplation of it, and if only we would consider the method by which the high-priest had come at it, we would see that the universe was saved. He had counted all the words in the Thribbaty version of the sacred book, and all in the Slapyak version, and added them together for a divisor; and for a dividend he had counted all their letters and added them together and multiplied the sum by the number of divisions in the book; what he got he divided by the number of words, and thus he found the new number. What was more important was that he had prophesied this before he had reached the result by arithmetic.
“Having got at the number, he had interpreted it in as original and infallible a way. He had taken the number of strokes needed to make any one letter of their alphabet as the numerical rendering of it, and in this manner he had translated the whole alphabet into numbers. He thus found that the new number stood for the name of his chief antagonist; if taken numerically, it indicated that this enemy of his and of the sect he represented would descend into Hades at the end of the world, whilst the high-priest himself and his sect would ascend into heaven; and the end of the world, he announced from other signs in the lettering of the sacred book, was next year.
“Blastemo told us that every time he had approached the island the world was to come to an end the following week or month or year; so, in order to test the high-priest, we sent off a message by his envoy offering to buy the surplus provisions of the island that would not be needed after the date he gave for the collapse of all things. A negative answer came back; and, as the storm had moderated, we lifted our anchor and left.”
CHAPTER XXXIV
SPECTRALIA
“AS we sailed off, Blastemo entertained us with stories of the groups of islands that lay near at hand, and especially of one that lay away off to the north nearer the sunset than Coxuria and the other islands of religion. It was the place of ghosts, where the supernatural can have things to itself without the intrusion of sceptical worldliness and common-sense. It lies almost within the ring of mist that encircles the archipelago, and it is dominated by twilight when it is not midnight. The inhabitants have an invincible fear and hatred of the sun, and especially the rising sun; and if he ever dares to show his shameless face without a cloud they raise a dust that makes him like the eye of a drunkard. In order to avoid the impudence of his glances most of them used to live, and one section of them still lives, in cellars underground, sleeping there by day, and following their avocations out-of-doors by night. Mariners in that region land fearlessly when the sun shines, but avoid its shores during times of cloud and darkness, lest they should be taken for spirits and bodily enshrined for the purposes of worship. To be retained either as a resident or as an object of investigation or reverence was a fate to be shuddered at, for it was considered one of the worst wards for lunatic exiles. Hither were deported all who were incurably persuaded that they and they alone had direct communication with the other world. There was something uncanny about the conduct of everyone who found his way thither; in his eye shone the gleam of insanity, a reflection from the baleful light of hell.
“Another feature of the island, as of all the theopathic group, was its rank sectarianism. Almost every man was his own sect. There was a rough classification of them by travellers into ‘antiquated ghost-seers’ and ‘modern ghost-seers’; but none would acknowledge allegiance to any classification. They all believed in spirits, or disembodied beings, who visited their island; beyond that resemblance ceased. Most of the older Spectralians, however, believed only in ghosts of ancient lineage, who had the stately ways of olden times, who seldom condescended to speak or communicate their thoughts, and who looked mutely piteous or minatory on their appearance for a few seconds and then vanished. The more recent exiles, having had a tinge of modern science, laughed at these fantastic monstrosities of a primitive age and insisted on the logical outcome of supernaturalism. Every human being had a ghost, and when death thrust it out of its body it hung about its old locality and tried to make itself manifest, now to one sense, again to another, but most frequently to hearing. It had been a custom of former spirits to address themselves chiefly to the eye; but that was in the silent old times when men preferred striking and acting to speaking. Now that the tongue had become the chief organ of action, it would be obviously absurd for the world of spirits not to adapt itself to the new ways; and so it was now to the ear that they addressed themselves, and seldom to the eye. And, whereas they had been ridiculously limited by ghostly conventions and could appear only in solemn guise at midnight by tombs and in abandoned chambers of castles or in rooms where murder had been done, now they were free to make themselves heard when and where they pleased, or rather when and where their corporeal clients and patrons pleased. There had evidently been a great war of liberation in the region of ghosts, a sort of French Revolution, that had thrown off the shackles of old and absurd convention from their limbs, if such a mode of speech were permissible. Now there was infinite variety in the world of the disembodied as in the world of common things. They all kept shop, as it were, and were ready to serve any who approached them in the due and proper way.
“There was in fact a small section of these modernists who prided themselves on their superior modernity and held that they could take a spirit out of its living body as easily as a pea out of its pod; for, they said, there are really two spirits in every human body, the detachable and the undetachable; the former it is that expatiates, the world over, in dreams and holds communion with worlds whereof the senses know nothing; the other is the workaday spirit that with observation and reason carries out the practical functions of daily life. They plumed themselves upon having thus solved all the problems of existence, that have puzzled mankind so long, by this simple device of two labels or classifications for the contents of the human body or vessel. They were even proud that the rest of the archipelago counted them no less mad than the other Spectralians, whom they scorned; it was the true sign of superiority in mental power, wisdom, and modernity to be called mad by other men.
“They despise the ancient ghost-seers for their old-fashioned ways and the funny old castles and rickety houses they build for their friends and clients from the other world. To think of going to the expense of putting up tumble-down buildings in order to woo spirits into them, a kind of ghost-trap, is to them the most laughable of proceedings; but the old fellows never lose faith in their creaky ghost eelpots, and go about as solemnly as ever they did making the walls of their castles chinky, the passages draughty, the rooms full of dark corners, and the halls like vaults for the dead. It is amusing to see them loosening the footboards of the corridors and stairs in order that they may creak and start and flap as soon as the shadows fall. They always hang old tapestries and sheets at odd draughty corners to rustle and lift in the blackness of the night; and they put a rooster handy outside of every cobwebby old castle they erect to give the word when their clients should be off. For themselves, they spend most of their nights there. The early part they pass in reading the most ghostly and blood-curdling books they can find in the archipelago and stuff into the dirty old libraries. These are the religious literature and litanies of the ghosts. It is a proper rule in every faith that the worshipper should get his mind into the due receptive and inspired attitude before attempting to approach the shrine; only thus can they see and hear the objects of their worship. Hours do they consume in reading the pious literature of ghosts, and then every nerve is on the alert, and every sense awake for the footfalls of their friends from the other world. The passages begin to creak, the tapestries to flop and rustle, the doors, that they have left ajar for their clients, to slam. They know that the spirits of the mighty dead are then approaching them; their eyes flame out of their heads; and with a gleam like lightning the expected apparition flashes over the line of their vision.