Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

I had occasion to go soon after to my cabin, and I found him pacing the floor in wild agitation. The sound of the clashing arms and the shouts and groans reached him even here, and he saw, though dimly, through the thick glass of the port-hole the swaying masses and the give-and-take of the combat. His blood was in ferment, and he pleaded with me to put him on shore, that he might join in the struggle. It maddened him to hear the clangour and not be in the midst of the fray. He confessed that he had not looked closely or long enough to know who were the combatants or what was the right or wrong for which they fought. All he knew was that it was near the capital and his own district, and his desire to keep the peace was overwhelming everything else in him. I refused to listen to his petitions, fearing that by landing him we might draw the fury of either side or perhaps of both upon us. We sped on and soon melted the uproar into a confused hum and shut out the sight that so fevered his blood.

Our next experience was as exciting. We shot past the cape that like a sheltering arm curled round the great harbour of the island, and a city spread upwards from it bastioned to the roofs. And what a commotion filled every parapet and wall and street! Never had such a craft been seen in these waters; and our fame had spread before us. Every movement of the Daydream, since she had approached the island, had been messengered to the city. Banners and trophies swung in the breeze. Wild music made the air a hoarse discordant pæan. Bells rung, gongs sounded, shrill pipes shot skirling blasts into the ear of heaven. Marchings and countermarchings of squares and rectangles of blue and green and scarlet humanity made a moving tartan of the shore. The chromatropic effect was as harassing to the eye as the clangour to the ear. Puffs of acrid smoke obscured the air at intervals. At a distance it was alarming. What would it be near at our hand? The whole armed population was evidently in motion. Our guest, mad though he was with excitement, managed to reassure us, and, taking from his cabin a small blue-green and red pennon, flung it out from our poop. The effect was instantaneous. The commotion ceased. The troops wheeled and marched inland, and soon only the ununiformed crowd were left to watch us as we swept up to an anchorage within a breastwork of the harbour.

The night fell, and silence shed its sleep upon the many-coloured, myriad-noted world. With the morning returned the bustle and skirl and brazen echo of a warlike community. Everything, as we looked out to the shore, seemed to move to disciplinary rhythm. I went to the royal levee with Blastemo, and, after he had prelected to the courtiers and the king in a language that I did not understand, I was addressed from the throne in Aleofanian. I could see from the speech that my fireship had deeply impressed the community and especially the governors of Broolyi, but their warlike purpose and employments were veiled in eulogies of their mission of peace. Peace was the ideal and prayer of their inmost souls, and this fireship of mine would enable them to fulfil it the sooner. It was difficult to disentangle this from the labyrinth of ceremonies and gestures, verbiage and oaths, that seemed to form the very heart of Broolyian civilisation. Every climax reached by the monarchic eloquence we heard echoed outside of the palace by the roll of drums and the air-splitting shrill of pipes. The whole life of the community seemed to move to machinery that centred in the court.

This I afterwards found was no mere metaphor or fancy. The next day was their great festival of the week, and the people crowded into the temples to worship the gods. None worked or were supposed to work. I went with Blastemo first to one sacred building and then to another; and I was struck with the fact that everything seemed to proceed as by clockwork, the music, the sermon, the genuflections of the priest. “You are right,” said my guide. “And I will show you how the whole thing is worked.”

He took me to an enormous hall behind the palace. It was like a huge factory, so full was it of machinery, all in motion. It was, indeed, he assured me, a religion factory, one of the grandest institutions in the world. This controlled all the services in the temples of the island. He took me to one great machine that had on a capacious barrel all the litanies of the year. At the moment we came up it was started by the controller of religious services, who sat in a recess of the inner hall of the king’s palace. We heard a prayer to the god of peace most painfully and articulately intoned. I did not understand the words, but I could make out from the tones in which they were uttered the changes of meaning and spiritual attitude. It was marvellous, the solemnity of the effect, provided we shut our eyes; there was such majesty in the volume of the sound and in the elocutionary variations of the tone; one might have imagined a vast assembly pouring forth in unison a submissive appeal to heaven. In the temple the clack and shuttling of the machinery were not heard; instead of it there was an automatic priest magnificently clothed, bowing and posturing to suit the word. It was only a wax figure containing clockwork controlled by this great litany machine, but the effect was like life, or rather much more impressive. There was none of the hawking and hemming of the human priest, none of his awkward pauses and blowings of the nose, none of the clumsy gestures or inability to dispose of the hands; and the voice rang out through the great buildings with a bell-like clearness and naturalness that would have made the human voice seem bathos. How feeble and tremulous, I remembered, buzzed the voices of the priests I had heard intoning in the cathedrals of Europe! I felt almost ashamed of the memory.

With a whirr and a click the litany machine stopped, and the processional machine took up the tale. There was more noise and clang in this, for more force had to be applied; a hundred or more processions of marionette acolytes and priests through the various temples of the island were impelled by it. There was a manifest rhythm in its motions, almost like the sound of a stately minuet. I saw these processions afterwards; and nothing could exceed the solemnity of the motions of the man-like fantoccini. I never saw such an impressive ceremonial; every step, every gesture was in harmony; there was no unseemly merriment in the eyes or conversation on the lips of the youthful figures; and the chanting was so noble and beautiful, filling as it did the whole vast edifice with its mournful, or jubilant sound. The service was well through before I had come into the religion factory, and the only other machine I saw at work was that which produced the music. It was in an adjoining hall, which was filled with thousands of pipes of the most varied size and construction. There sat the musician, and the whole building trembled as the keys were struck. It was intolerable; the groaning and thunder it produced made the very tips of our ears to shake. But when delivered by tubes or wires into the vast temples of the country, nothing could surpass the softness and harmony of the volume of sound.

One large edifice served for the central section of the town; it was spacious enough to contain every man, woman, and child that lived in the district. Each suburb had a smaller temple, yet large enough to dwarf the cathedrals of England. I was deeply interested in them, and every weekly festival I visited one or more of them. I was especially anxious to hear the sermon or prelection. The lay-figure rose and moved his eyes and lips and his arms and body to suit the words that were uttered. The whole of the audience was too distant from it to distinguish the movements; and the wax lifelessness of the face, which I made out when, after the service, I approached it, could not have been seen by any of the worshippers, so far aloft was it perched in a pulpit on the farthest wall. The tones reached every ear in the huge edifice, and their modulation and expression were perfect. I conjectured that the sermon had been spoken into some recorder before, and that this reproduced it by machinery on some diaphragm in each church, and that over the diaphragm was fixed some instrument inside the lay-figure for multiplying many times the volume of the sound.

The illusion was complete. I never heard oratory so impressive, or religious service so solemnly performed. The sermon was, Blastemo told me, a discourse on peace as the aim of all mankind. It painted the horrors of war, and brought out in contrast a portrait of the man of the millennium, who would have his passions so under control that nothing would rouse him to anger or strife. It closed with a vindication of the warlike policy for reaching this great ideal. Nothing but continual and effective warfare would make men afraid to quarrel or bring their quarrel to issue. The ebullience of the passions of the world was to be mastered by fear. When they had brought warfare to the perfection of destructiveness, all wars would cease; terror of death would be the universal guiding motive of communities and individuals. Then would the god of peace have voice through the whole world, for he would have his mentor in every human breast in every assembly, the knowledge that any strife must end in the annihilation of all those who take part in it. The peroration was fervid in its appeal to the worshippers to pursue warfare till it should be absolute in its annihilative power.

I was deeply impressed by the whole performance; never did it approach to that bathos which, I remembered, had so often marred the services in even the greatest cathedrals and churches of the various divisions of Christianity. There was no halting in the oratory, no feebleness of voice, no ridiculous straining of the nervous or muscular power. There was no hitch in the processions or ceremonies, nothing pinchbeck or tawdry or mean. The music was noble, and in its softening and shading as fine as the massing of tens of thousands of human voices, there was no discord, no jar. The effect of the whole was uniform, deep, and abiding.

Yet I could not get out of mind the cogs and wheels and keys of the religion factory, the workmen moving about seeing that the machinery was well oiled and that it worked without chance of breakdown, the solitary performer sitting at the keyboard, and the king’s minister in the royal recess grinding out the service. I expressed my feelings to Blastemo as we walked away, and he warmly defended the method of his country. They had had in the past a priesthood attached to the various temples, but it had been found that their lives so differed from their teachings that the people laughed at the whole of religion as a farce. The performances and discourses were so feeble or extravagant or grotesque that the buildings were deserted as a rule, or, if one was frequented, it was by a wild crowd of enthusiasts stirred by some mad preacher to a crusade against law, order, or progress. The church and religion had grown a scandal. Women were the only regular worshippers, and they were in the hands of unscrupulous priests, who used them against the aims and ideals of the government and the community. The state tried for a time the effect of adding to the creed a dogma that the religious efficacy of the services was quite independent of the character of the priests; it came direct from heaven, and the pollution of the vessel or channel did not mar the divine influence. It was all in vain. It did not bring the men to church; and it only hurried on the degeneracy of the priesthood. The church became the nest of all the unclean and revolutionary characters in the community. Again and again it threatened the safety of the state by instilling a rebellious spirit into the women, and through them into the youths of the nation during a serious war with a neighbour. Something had to be done. There were the grand old temples; there was the litany of the state religion consecrated by long generations of worshippers; and yet the institution was but a lurking-place for the indolent and voluptuous and hypocritical and rebellious in masculine breasts. The endowments had fallen into a hopeless state. The finances were quite inadequate. The worshippers would not support their own services.