Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

The next day, on landing again, they encountered some of the slaves, who were plundering the houses, and who fled as the sailors approached. They followed one up, and saw him enter the huge building, which they found to be the prison. They saw him take the keys and open the various cells; and out poured his imprisoned fellows. They heard from one prisoner of my incarceration, and then discovered my dungeon and led me out into the sunshine.

As Burns came to this point in his narrative, I remembered my fellow-prisoner, Noola, and I hurried them off to look for him. They returned with him none the worse for his long fast. He did not complain of hunger. He had, I could see, a fund of sustenance to draw upon unusual in the human bodies I had been accustomed to. We persuaded him to try some of our restorers; but he took them with none of the eager appetite that I had shown. It was manifest that he had a physical constitution altogether different from ours.

He asked us how it was that Burns had been allowed to set us free. He listened with equanimity to the explanation, but, when he heard of the slaves, he started in alarm, and bade us hurry to our ship. It was not long before we were on board, and, as it was full tide, the Daydream was now able to get from her anchorage and make out into the open sea.

When he saw us safe out of the harbour, he settled down and told me the meaning of his sudden fear and advice. “These slaves inhabit the interior of the island in myriads, and, under the whips of their overseers, do all the work that this military community needs. They are so shamefully treated that, if ever the bonds break and they rise in rebellion, they show no mercy, and make no distinction in their fury. The opening of the prison doors meant that the slave population was about to revel in crime and bloodshed. They will crowd down uncontrolled from all parts of the country, and fill the city with a ravaging, plundering mob. Had we remained till they were in force, we should have had no chance of escape; we should have perished in the general hate of all but their own kin.

“You ask me why so powerful and so military a people should ever permit such an outbreak. It is because they are cowed by a greater fear, that of the plague. You have perceived how low the tide has been, and how hot the sun. The mud upon the shore of the harbours, when it is laid bare by the waters and exposed to an exceptionally hot summer, breeds a plague that sweeps through the ranks of the Broolyians. There is no means known of stopping its ravages, no cure for it. Once seized by it no man can last more than one day; and once dead the body putrefies and spreads the contagion far and near. All the citizens flee to the heights, to be out of reach of the pestilence. There and there alone can they have any chance of survival, and then only if no one bears with him the seeds of the terrible disease. It is piteous to see the cowardly stampede of these bold warriors. The slaves know the meaning of the flight; it is their carnival; they are untouched by the plague; they can move with impunity amongst the rotting dead bodies or the putrid mud.

“It is a strange example of the revenge that a law of nature takes upon those who outrage it. Long ages ago the war-loving exiles, who were landed upon Broolyi, subdued its gentle inhabitants, but so wore them down by driving them as slaves that they almost died out. Their place had to be supplied; for the masters had become accustomed to freedom from manual and sordid employments, and nothing could persuade them to give up their weapons and swaggering military employments and put their hand to the plough or the hatchet. They had to send emissaries out in all directions to steal, borrow, or buy slaves. Peaceful and often highly civilised islanders were kidnapped and battened down in the holds of the fallas in order that they might not resort to mutiny or attempts at escape. In these foul dens oftentimes men and women who had been accustomed to the delicacies of civilisation were penned; and they suffered the horrors of an unclean, putrid dungeon and of a rough sea passage. By the close of the voyage half the captives had to be thrown overboard dead or next door to death. Those that survived were proof against the diseases that originated in such nests of contagion. When the shipload had been disembarked, the filth of the voyage was washed into the harbour, and the germs of a new plague took up their abode in the mud at the bottom, dormant for long years, and then, when the favouring conditions came, a hot summer and a series of low tides, rising into the air and filling the neighbourhood of the shore. It is one of these plagues that has emptied the city.

“The strange thing about this Broolyian fever is that its symptoms and horrible effects are those that the slaves experienced in the loathsome sea passage. The fever-smitten feel a sinking of the heart as in homesickness; this alternates with wild fury against wrongs that are in their case purely imaginary. They think that they are in darkness and filth and chains, unable to escape, in utter despair of life. They cherish a madness for liberty, which wears out their bodies and brings such exhaustion that they sink rapidly. Their faces and bodies grow red as with rage, then pale as with sea-sickness, then yellow with loathing. They come to nauseate living, and would gladly put an end to their tortures by suicide; yet their hearts again beat wildly as if clutching at life. Before the passion has collapsed and their energy has sunk, they become putrid in their limbs, till they shudder at the sight of their hands and feet. The microscopic life, that sprang into being in the holds of the slaving fallas, and that festers in the mud of the fore-shores, having drawn all the sufferings and feelings of the captives into it, communicates them to the people that wronged them. The survivors of the enslaved and their descendants are for ever inoculated against it. At every outbreak of the epidemic the slaves escape and hold high festival in the city, all the fiercer and more degraded in their orgies from the state in which they and their ancestry have been kept. In their drunken carousals they come to blows, though many escape back to their native land. When the summer has passed, some of the soldiers venture into the suburbs, and with threatening missiles force those that have remained alive to bury the dead, and to cleanse the city and prepare it for their masters. All settles back into its old state. New slave raids are organised to fill the places of those that have vanished; new horrors take place, and new germs are deposited in the mud.”

There was the light of pity in the eyes of the narrator. I could hear his voice quiver and sound plaintive, although he gave but the barest outline of the history. He was filled with the vision, I thought, of the vanity of human life and its pursuits. I could see from some words that fell from him soon after that memory had brought up to him the dire chimeras that had led him from his native paradise; he saw the bootlessness of war, and the awful vengeance it works out upon the combatants; he realised the monstrous nature of tyranny and its recoil upon the tyrants; he felt how illusory, how mocking was the human ideal of luxurious ease. The faults that had banished him from Limanora had been burned out of him by caustic experience; his nature had grown purified by that long solitude which had brought wisdom again. He hoped the evil in him had been long subdued; but would his native land take him back? He despaired; he knew of no precedent; all who had been exiled had finally vanished. He hoped, for he felt how drastic his purification had been, how bitter his repentance. Yet the rapid advance of their thought and civilisation threw him back again into fear; he felt like a man put on shore at the head of a rapid and having to find his way on land and through jungle after the boat, as he saw it speed down the torrent.

I tried to draw him from the harassing turmoil of his emotions and thoughts by questions on the meaning of phrases that he had used to me. He had often spoken of the practice of banishment for moral or constitutional weaknesses. Would he explain to me its character and extent? I showed great anxiety to know how it worked.

After a time my eager interrogations drew him from the painful inner conflict, and, with one of his comprehensive and benignant smiles, that seemed to light up his whole being, he began: “It is a matter of very ancient history. It is indeed thousands, I might almost say, tens of thousands of years since it was first adopted; for it was a deliberate adoption on the part of our ancestors in Limanora. Long generations before, the idea of progress had fixed itself into our civilisation as its true aim. How to make the human system, both spiritual and physical, advance rapidly was the problem discussed year after year, age after age by our wisest men and women. All others were counted trivial or auxiliary. It seemed mere folly to look after the progress of our domestic animals with so much care and science as we did, and leave the human species to the assistance of accident. Our diseased kine and horses and fowls had to die off without transmission of their weakness to posterity. Only the finest breeds were paired or allowed to hand on their frames and powers. Every care was spent on the study of their anatomy and on the development of their best and most useful qualities. Whatsoever the Limanorans desired to do with these animals they did. If any feature of their bodies or natures or characters seemed worthy of development, it was soon developed, and a new species was established. What gross disloyalty to the destiny of man to let him drift when he was doing so much for his humble servitors in the animal world! A generation or two of discussion awakened our ancestors to the folly of their inaction. The cry of reform arose, and the feelings of the whole nation were aroused by the enthusiasts for progress in human breeding. Hereditary disease and the tortures it inflicted on the innocent were used to wing their arrows of eloquence. At last there grew up in the community an instinct as peremptory as conscience, condemning the marriage of men and women who had transmissible diseases. Public opinion passed into a moral sense in one or two generations, and, before a century had gone, all the diseases that tended to pass from parent to child had disappeared from every class but the poorest.