Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

“One good thing, however, came from it by accident. It was long discussed what was to be done with the enemies of property, theoretical and practical, the socialists and the thieves. A solution was furnished by one of the most machiavellian of the diplomats; it was to give them as much as would be their share were the wealth of the state divided, and to deport them to one of the largest and most fertile islands of the archipelago, Tirralaria. It was hailed as the salvation of the state. Many ships, therefore, were prepared, and the enthusiastic believers in socialism and the thieves were put on board, and safely disembarked in their new domain, with the threat that, if any of them attempted to land again in Limanora, they would be at once put to death. Two attempts were made to return; but they were beaten off. The expeditions in each case consisted of the better class of socialists, who felt the grinding tyranny of socialism, in which the bad are put on the same footing as the honest and conscientious. They were each too small to force a landing on any other island; nor would their fellow-islanders allow them to come back to Tirralaria. They could not live always in fallas; and they vanished from the archipelago. It is the current tradition, whence it comes I know not, that they burst through the circle of fog into the outer ocean, and sailing eastwards got footing on the western shores of America; but it is so many centuries ago when either secession occurred that the story is as dim as a dream of our infancy.

“The experiment was successful for Limanora, and supplied the new political formula of all reform. The state was well rid of knaves without doing them any wrong. Some of the worst blood of the community had been drawn, and yet the system had not been weakened to any great extent. The worst of the criminal and improvident part of the population had been expelled; and it seemed to optimists as if the Limanoran millennium were about to appear. Alas for human hopes! Though the virtuous section of the people had had their hands greatly strengthened, there were still the more gilded forms of vice to cope with. Ambition and love of war, sensuality and falsehood, were rooted in the hearts of the nation that had seemed to be purified. In order to gain their ends the ambitious were ever appealing to force and stirring up civil war, till at last it became unbearable by the peace-loving majority, who put into office sympathisers with their view of life and demanded expurgation of the loathed pugnacity. All who were warlike or ambitious in their nature or who had come of warlike or ambitious ancestry were deported to Broolyi; and you have seen the result of their civilisation.

“The hypocrites and the sensual were as eager as any to see the appeal to force finally extruded. They thought they would have it their own way when the swaggering, hectoring, military men were gone; but the licentious soon found themselves isolated. Their sins more readily found them out. Their outrages on what was honest in domestic life roused more sweeping and clamorous condemnation. The soldiers and bullies had had in their natures a side that was close to their own vice, and indulged in the amorous passion to licence, when their combativeness or ambition did not occupy the stage of their minds. They had had a sympathy for the lechers, and often protected them when public opinion had risen against them, knowing that they themselves at times stood in need of similar protection; and, though the lechers felt more kin to the hypocrites in their often demure or sly and crawling temptation of women, they found these anything but allies. In fact the machiavellis joined the hue and cry against them, and had them all carefully picked out of the community and deported with their share of the wealth of the state to Figlefia.

“The net was drawing round the hypocrites and liars, though they thought they were making themselves supreme in the nation. The honest and loyal and true element had grown predominant; and before a century had passed, the false had followed after the lechers; they were exiled with their belongings to Aleofane. Unlike the socialists and thieves, these last three sets of exiles made no attempts to return, or to enter into alliance against their old island. They found too great scope for their respective vices in their new countries to desire to leave them. They have prospered according to their own lights, and delude themselves into the belief that they have ideals far beyond those of their original land; Broolyi, as we have seen, sets up peace as its motive and religion, Figlefia matrimony and domestic life, and Aleofane truth. They each carried away with them so large a share of the wealth of Limanora that they long believed her too poor to be worth robbing. So they let her alone. Individuals for a time made efforts to land; but they were taught a severe lesson; and, since the invention of the storm-cone, all such attempts have been abandoned, and the central island is usually spoken of as the Land of Devils. Each of these now ancient nations adopted the principle that had led to their independence, and deport alien elements to other and smaller islands of the archipelago. One large group they call their lunatic asylum; thither they send everyone who is so fanatical in his enthusiasm for an idea or social theory, so extreme in his development of any alien vice or virtue as to be a danger to the state or to the peace of the community. Each island is given up to one type of monomaniacs; and it is an agreement on the part of the three great commonwealths to adhere to the classification of crazes. It is thus that they have been able to remain stable and united. The deportation policy has been their salvation, for it is the quixotic enthusiasts and crotchety extremists that constitute the greatest danger to the solidarity of a state; but in spite of their great advantages and the adoption of this method of state expurgation, they have not advanced in these thousands of years, during which they have occupied their islands.

“In after ages it was a matter of regret to the advancing Limanorans that they had not monasticised the exiles. It was useless, they knew, to adopt what you are thinking of, a missionary system. No propaganda, however successful, ever did more than send the old beliefs and habits below the surface to reappear in the new generations. Conversion through the intellect or the feelings is only skin deep. By no known process can the century-long growth of civilisation or virtue be abbreviated into a few days or months or years. Selection in breeding and complete change in environment are the only true missionaries, and with many races even these are powerless, so deep has the virus of moral retrogression sunk into their natures. The best propagandist for them would be complete monasticism. The men of my day felt deep sorrow for the world that their ancestors had not sent the sexes of the deported to different islands, and guarded against the mutual approach by keeping three or four navies in the seas between, till the socialists, the warlike, the sensual, and the false had died out. It would have meant the greatest vigilance and the devotion of a large section of the people to naval pursuits for almost a century; but it would also have meant the disappearance of this obstacle to the progress of the world, this element of danger in the archipelago. The evil was irremediable by my time, for any attempt to remove it would mean conquest and bloodshed. And it had become not merely a maxim of state but an instinct born in every Limanoran that conquest and bloodshed are more than futile, are ruinous, that they destroy the higher nature of the conqueror or destroyer. To enter on such a course as would lead to the extermination of these vicious communities would be to sow again in our own the seeds of still greater evils. Nothing but the silent obliterative process of nature could justify itself to my countrymen.

“There was another reason that will perhaps seem to you more practical. It was that they had by no means finished their process of expurgation. No longer had great bodies to be deported. But from age to age an individual nature even in the most carefully bred and trained showed atavistic vice or weakness; and, when every means had failed to cure it, the individual had to be exiled; and one of these islands was his natural home, to which it would be no inhumanity to carry him; for there would he find choice spirits and natures akin to his own.

“This was my case. I had an ancestry that had in long ages gone by shown warlike proclivities, but in so subordinate and unobtrusive a way that they had not been banished. In the intervening generations their pugnacity had by means of selection and environment wholly disappeared; but, by some accident of nature or miscalculation on the part of the Limanoran sages who had chosen my parents and surroundings, the taint, that had seemed dead, reappeared. In spite of all remedies and care, I grew more pugnacious, more eager to excite my neighbours to war. I devoted my talents to the invention of weapons and war material. I made myself at last so obnoxious that no alternative was left. I was exiled to Broolyi, and there have I spent the long years since in efforts to burn the tainted spot from my nature.”

The cloud had fallen upon him again, as he approached this part of his story. He persevered to the end; but so heavy lay the sorrow over his past upon him that it was keen anguish to speak further of it. I left him to his thoughts and went on deck.

I was surprised to find that we were close to the shore, and that on it stretched out a large and handsome city. I looked up to the great mountain that overbrowed it, and I seemed to recognise an outline with which I was familiar; could it be Nookoo? The name brought back my subterranean agony. The light streamer of mist that floated over its top showed it to have inner fires. The memory seemed almost dreamlike, and perhaps the unfamiliarity of some of the details was owing to our being on the other side of Figlefia, the side I had not seen.

Noola followed me on deck, and I conjectured that a subject like this might distract his thoughts and dispel his cloud. I called his attention to the land, and asked him if he knew it. It was Figlefia; but he seemed to be astonished at something in the scene. His eye was fixed on the city. I had never seen it before, and noticed nothing unusual in its appearance; but he saw with his keener and farther power of vision that no life was stirring in it. Another city of the dead was here. The dwellers could not be buried in sleep under the flashing scrutiny of noon. The ship’s glasses could not help him to solve the difficulty; nor could his recollection of the history of the island; he had never heard of such devastating plagues in Figlefia as he had witnessed in Broolyi. It had slavery; but the slaves did not come such a distance, and were used as sailors and oarsmen in the passage over-sea. It was women that the lechers had mainly kidnapped, and it was these would have their revenge; but he had never heard of any efficient retaliation on the part of their seraglios.