Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

“Yet did he feel unhappy in that the ecclesiasts could still wage secret war against him in the hearts of the women and thus in every household. At any moment the rebellion might break out, and, though he could crush it, once it became open, he never felt safe from the weapon of the assassin or fanatic. I, the still-degenerate Noola, came to his aid, when he pleaded with me; and I manufactured the spiritual mechanism of the country for him to control as he pleased. He banished the priests and substituted an automatic priesthood and service such as might be completely at his beck. It was an easy matter for me to invent the various machines, musical, ceremonial, marionettic, and locutory. I saw that some such spiritual control over men was needed, if universal peace were to be attained on the earth. I still believed that peace was the true aim of human civilisation, and that this could be reached only by such warlike forces and such spiritual authority in the hands of a single governor or council of governors as would make rebellion seem an impossibility and a farce to every reasoning mind.

“I have been utterly disabused of all such thoughts. Such peace can mean nothing but universal stagnancy of mankind. There is no advance, no life without struggle and competition. I could have invented after years of work such a weapon of war as would have enabled a man to master the world and keep it cowering in fear. I could have extended my mechanical religion so as to control the thoughts and beliefs of all men. But what was the advantage, if the ruler grew worse? It was only to connect all the spiritual fountains of the earth with this tainted source, and thus to keep them for ever impure. I saw his unbounded power gradually sap the will and the morality of the monarch. He sank into dissipation and debauchery. He made the whole of Broolyian art and religion and morality coarse and vulgar. The women grew more pampered and fat and licentious; the men became hypocrites and laggards. In the court there was nothing but display, vulgar accretions of gaudy uniforms and of jewels of all kinds. In the country there was increasing degradation and misery. It was patent to the eyes of those who were not blinded by the possession of power or the shadow of power. The only thing that saved the nation from collapse was its frequent war expeditions. They hated the water passage to other islands, but they delighted in the excitement of conflict, and they came back fewer in numbers, slimmer in figure, and more active in habit. You might have expected the women to preponderate in the population, because of the war drain on the men. But perhaps you have noticed that amongst the children and youth, it is our own sex that has the best of it in numbers; whilst fat old women are seen everywhere, old men are seldom seen. A warlike community ever recuperates by means of the physiological fact that, where only young and vigorous soldiers are the fathers competing for the love of the young women, who are few and somewhat pampered, there is a predominance of male births. It is this prevention of old age amongst men by the sharp sickle of war along with the seclusion and delicacy of the women that keeps the community from complete effeminacy and ultimate extinction. Broolyi is the exile asylum of all the passion for militarism in the archipelago, and the internecine wars of the exiles reduce their numbers and yet keep them active; their hatred of the sea saves the other islands from conquest by them. Their great heroic age was the reign of a woman who had been expelled from my own land for her warlike passions. She overcame their nausea for oceanic expeditions by training most of the boys like a coast population to take delight in boats and ships, and it was only the jealousy of the other women that prevented Broolyi from mastering the whole of the archipelago. She ever fostered her desire of revenge on her original country, and at last led an army of vengeance against it; but she was again and again repulsed with ease. In the disfavour of defeat the Broolyian women accused her of witchcraft in drawing away the affections of the young men from them, and had her put to death. Degenerate though I have grown, I never nurtured one thought of retaliation for my exile; and even had I, I should never have been so foolish as to imagine that I could have carried it out. She must have been mad or drunk with passion to attempt such a thing. When she died Broolyi sank back into the even tenor of quarrel and civil war. Alas, that I should have been the means of stirring it again to warlike ambition for mastery! It was my mistaken ideal of universal peace by means of universal and omnipotent authority. I have come to the conclusion that all government is but giving the monopoly of opportunity to one set of robbers in order to save the nation from the ravages of most others. It is worse for the higher natures of the governing than for those of the governed; and I have recanted my heresies.

“How weary I grew of the pomp and show of the court, of the dreary round of war and dissipation! I would have given the world for exile into solitude; and yet I dared not secede from the monarch and his following. I had shown myself too resourceful to be allowed to go free in the island. The king never would have believed that I was at rest and only desirous of rest.

“But the inevitable conclusion came. Lapped in the luxurious security of unquestioned power, he grew careless; thinking that every mind in the island was tuned to his key, hatred to him had grown silently in the hearts of many. At the most unexpected place and moment it blazed out, and he fell by the hand of an assassin. He had meant to establish a dynasty, but his children all fell with him; and the nobility elected his successor from amongst themselves, one of the mildest and most characterless. I saw that this was my opportunity, and I pleaded with him that I might be sent into exile and solitude; and, in order to make him feel sure that I could not be plotting against him, I asked that I should be near the garrison that watches the island of anarchists. Here I have rested these many years, working out my spiritual purification in sorrow and regret. I have climbed higher in soul than I had ever thought to reach; and yet clouds of anger at times float across my nature and mar my power of vision. I am not worthy to return to my own land. Ah, that I were! And what hope is there of any such return for me, the outcast, the degenerate?”

He fell again into self-inwrapt reverie. His thoughts had gone back to that land of mystery whence he had come, and vain was it for me to attempt to follow them. I must wait. And I thought I saw my way to bring about my purpose.

One day we had again grown intimate in our conversation, and he had become familiar enough to ask me whence I came. I told him how I had crossed the circle of fog with my yacht, and he asked me how I had resisted the magnetic forces and sea currents that so effectually fence in this sub-tropical archipelago. I described the Daydream. At first he could not realise that she could move swiftly without the help of wind or current or oar; but, when the thought of steam power propelling her came on his mind, it took full possession of it. He made sure that I could force her right in the teeth of a storm, and then his face was illumined with joy and hope.

The next day he was all eagerness to know the construction of her engines and her mode of propulsion; and, having satisfied himself that she had ten times the power of the largest falla driven by oars, he surrendered his inner thoughts to me. He now saw a way by which he might return to his dear native land, and he described to me the singular means his countrymen employed for hedging off intrusion and expelling members of their community that are alien to its main purpose. Round the shoulders of their central peak, Lilaroma, runs, on an enormous scaffolding, what they call the storm-cone; it is a huge trumpet-shaped instrument with its wide end turned on the horizon, and out of it is blown from the centre of force in the island a blast that, when concentrated on any point, has the power of a tornado; nothing propelled by oars or sails has hitherto been able to resist the artificial hurricane. By night it moves slowly around the horizon, and, if its blast encounters any object floating on the surface of the ocean, however small, it brings all its force to bear on it till the resistant material flees before it. It produces a local tempest, and the intruder either sinks or escapes before the blast. There is no record in the archipelago of any falla or human being having ever reached the shore of Limanora by sea; and though the long tradition of this tornado barrier-to-all has ended in a more complete, because a spiritual, barrier, that of superstitious fear, the storm-cone never ceases its vigilant blast.

I saw the source of his hope and told him of our encounter with the storm-cone and the result, fearing that he did not understand all the conditions; but, after ascertaining that we had sail set, and that the tornado caught us broadside, his face bore a smile that implied complete mastery of the problem. He showed me that, if the sails had been down and the bow had been pointed right to the storm-cone, the ship could have easily held her own against the blast; but, that we might not be too sure of the result and might not introduce a whole shipload of intruders into the island, he would invent a method by which we two alone should reach its shore. It was this. He intended to make two wooden, water-tight shells in the shape of a fish with sharp snout and directing tail; into these, as we got close to a shelving beach, we two would enter. The lids would be sealed so as to let no water in; and then the sailors of the Daydream would shoot them from two huge catapults of his, so that they would plunge into the sea, and speeding through the water, would rise to the surface, and float into the shallows close to the sand.

I could see the feasibility of the plan, and entered gladly into it, for at last I perceived a chance of reaching his mysterious fatherland. As he had agreed to take me for his comrade, he began to teach me his native language. He told me he could not give me more than the rudiments and framework. The niceties of it and the great vocabulary come only in long years of familiarity. It was constructed on the principle of assigning the easiest words to the commonest and easiest things and ideas. It grew in difficulty and perplexity in the higher spheres of thought and investigation. The names for the familiar objects and needs of human beings were monosyllabic, and each expressed some essential or striking quality or feature of the thing either by means of the nature of the sound or by resemblance to some other but abstract word. The verb, or as he called it, the energy-word, and the adjective or quality-word, were generally dissyllabic, the former by means of the affixing, the other by means of the prefixing, of one of many different sounds or letters. Half of each of these sets of extension elements were vowels, the other half consonants. They were phonetic alternatives; the consonantal was meant as neighbour to a vowel sound, and the vowel as neighbour to a consonantal. For example: “kar” meant “dust”; “karo” meant “to reduce to dust”; “okar,” “having the essential qualities of dust.” “Tri” meant “sea-water”; “trim,” “to use sea-water”; “atri,” “salt and liquid like sea-water”; “trik,” “to plunge into sea-water”; “itri,” “dipped in sea-water.” There was no difference in form between the adjective and the adverb, and there were only two kinds of relational words or words that showed the connection between ideas or things or energies or qualities that we brought into relation. Our prepositions and conjunctions would be included under the one type; the same particle or kin-word might be used to express the affinity between two of the simplest words for concrete objects and two such complex ideas as are given in sentences. The other kind of relational word was what they called their pointer and seemed to stand for our pronoun. It pointed out some object or idea already mentioned or to be mentioned, in order to show its relation to other objects or ideas, or pointed out the relation of the energy-word or of the quality or of the object to some personality. These kin-words or pointers consisted each of two letters; there were some hundreds of them, and their number was ever growing as new relationships grew out of a more complex civilisation or out of advancing investigation and discovery. There were no separate words of one letter, all the letters being monopolised by the prefixes or affixes.

The subtones or slight variations of the common sounds were utilised to express various shades of meaning; as for example, time was expressed in the verb by a modification of the sound of the affix, whether consonantal or vocalic. “Lo karō ti rak” meant “I reduce this rock to dust”; “Lo karō ti rak,” “I shall reduce this rock to dust”; “Lo karōō ti rak,” “I reduced this rock to dust.” Accent on the affix was used to express stage of action, beginning, in process, or complete; or rather lack of accent expressed the second, sharp accent the first, and full accent the last. Pitch was employed to express attitude of mind to the action; the higher tones giving various shades of determination or order, the lower, various kinds of uncertainty or question, and the full, ordinary tones expressing the different phases of assertion or surety.