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Gaddis: Starting Out with Programming Logic & Design Test Bank

Chapter Seven

MULTIPLE CHOICE
1. What is the famous saying among computer programmers that refers to the fact that computers
cannot tell the difference between good and bad data?
a. Garbage input, garbage output
b. Garbage in, garbage out
c. Garbage output is from garbage inputted
d. Garbage out is from garbage in
e. None of the above

ANS: B

2. The purpose of the __________ is to get the first input value for the validation of a loop.
a. GIGO
b. Read
c. Priming read
d. Write
e. None of the above

ANS: C

3. Designing a program to avoid common errors is called _________________ programming.

a. Defensive
b. Direct
c. Defective
d. Detective
e. None of the above

ANS: A

4. _______________ happens when an input operation attempts to read data, but there is no data
to read.
a. No data
b. Error reading
c. Input error
d. Empty input
e. None of the above

ANS: D

5. Input ______________ is commonly done with a loop that iterates as long as an input variable
contains bad data.
a. Check
b. Validation
c. Examination
d. Priming
e. None of the above

©2013 Pearson Education, Inc. Upper Saddle River, NJ. All Rights Reserved.
Gaddis: Starting Out with Programming Logic & Design Test Bank Chapter Seven 2

ANS: B

6. _______________ is sometimes the term used for input validation.

a. Input error
b. Error trap
c. Input trap
d. Data error
e. None of the above

ANS: B

7. In addition to using loops to validate data, _____________ can also be used to validate data.
a. String Function
b. Real Function
c. Integer Function
d. Boolean Function
e. None of the above

ANS: D

8. Which of the following is not a check for data accuracy?

a. Salary within the allowable range
b. Time measurements
c. ZIP codes in correct format and valid
d. All of the above are checks for data accuracy
e. None of the above

ANS: D

9. Which of the following is not an input validation error type?

a. Empty input
b. Incorrect data type
c. Inaccurate data
d. All of the above are input validation error types
e. None of the above

ANS: D

10. What is the first step to use in detecting data type mismatch errors?
a. Read the input as a string
b. Convert to the desired data type
c. Determine whether it can be converted
d. Display error message
e. None of the above

ANS: A

11. The priming read is placed _________ the loop.

a. Inside
b. Before

©2013 Pearson Education, Inc. Upper Saddle River, NJ. All Rights Reserved.
Gaddis: Starting Out with Programming Logic & Design Test Bank Chapter Seven 3

c. Below
d. Inside and before
e. Inside and below

ANS: B

12. Which of the following statements is true about this Boolean expression?
score < 0 AND score > 100
a. This expression is true for numbers between 0 and 100.
b. This expression is true for numbers greater than 100.
c. This expression is true for numbers less than 0.
d. This expression would never be true.
e. None of the above

ANS: D

13. What type of function can be used to see if the password entered has the minimum number of
characters?
a. Mathematical
b. Boolean
c. String
d. Trigonometric
e. None of the above

ANS: C

14. If, when asked for a date of birth, the user enters a future date, this error should be caught by a
____________ check.
a. Date
b. Time
c. Day
d. Reasonableness
e. None of the above

ANS: D

15. Accepting February 29 in only a leap year is a check that is done by a ___________ check.
a. Date
b. Day
c. Month
d. Calendar
e. None of the above

ANS: A

16. Which of the following library functions could be used to validate the length of a string?
a. random
b. isString

©2013 Pearson Education, Inc. Upper Saddle River, NJ. All Rights Reserved.
Gaddis: Starting Out with Programming Logic & Design Test Bank Chapter Seven 4

c. length
d. toUpper
e. None of the above

ANS: C

17. Which of the following library functions could be used to validate that the correct data type was
input for an amount of money?
a. isInteger
b. isString
c. toLower
d. isReal
e. All of the above

ANS: D

18. Which of the following library functions could be used to simplify the process of string
validation?
a. length
b. toUpper
c. isReal
d. isInteger
e. None of the above

ANS: B

TRUE/FALSE
1. True/False: An input validation loop is sometimes called an error handler.

ANS: T

2. True/False: If the user provides bad data as input to a program, the program will correct the
data and produce output.

ANS: F

3. True/False: Programs should be designed such that all input is inspected before it is processed
and bad data is discarded.

ANS: T

4. True/False: The priming read is needed when a pretest loop is executed.

ANS: T

5. True/False: Often a Boolean function can be used to validate data.

©2013 Pearson Education, Inc. Upper Saddle River, NJ. All Rights Reserved.
Gaddis: Starting Out with Programming Logic & Design Test Bank Chapter Seven 5

ANS: T

6. True/False: The empty read is not an obvious input error and is a difficult one to handle.

ANS: F

7. True/False: The practice of anticipating errors that can happen while a program is running and
designing the program to avoid those errors is called defensive programming.

ANS: T

8. True/False: Checking for accuracy of data, even when the user provides the right type of data,
is part of input validation.

ANS: T

9. True/False: Checking for reasonableness of data is programmatically impossible.

ANS: F

10. True/False: When using string input validation it is wise to use the library function to convert the
input to upper case or lowercase so case-sensitive string comparisons can be made.

ANS: T

11. True/False: Input validation is not needed if the program is well designed.

ANS: F

12. True/False: Most programming languages do not provide library functions that can be used for
input validation.

ANS: F

FILL IN THE BLANK

1. An error trap can be performed by a(n) ____________________ validation loop.

ANS: input

2. __________ programming is the practice of anticipating errors that can happen while a program
is running.

ANS: Defensive

3. The acronym ___________ is used by programmers to refer to the fact that computers cannot
tell difference between good and bad data.

©2013 Pearson Education, Inc. Upper Saddle River, NJ. All Rights Reserved.
Gaddis: Starting Out with Programming Logic & Design Test Bank Chapter Seven 6

ANS: GIGO

4. The input operation that is performed just before a validation loop is known as the _________.

ANS: priming read

5. The _________________ occurs when the user presses the ENTER key without typing a value
for an input operation.

ANS: empty input

6. Using a ________________ function many times would simplify the long compound Boolean
expression that is used by a validation loop.

ANS: Boolean

7. To validate if the input data is a valid integer, use the __________ library function.

ANS: isInteger

8. An input validation that accepts strings in mixed case would have incorporated a case-
__________ string comparison operation.

ANS: insensitive

9. The string _________ function plays a role in the string’s validity when a minimum number of
characters are required to be entered.

ANS: length

10. A _________ loop could be used to validate input instead of using the priming read.

ANS: posttest

11. When a payroll program verifies that no value greater than 168 is entered for the number of
hours worked in a week, it is performing a ___________________ check.

ANS: time measurement

12. After the string is read it is determined if it can be converted to the desired data type in a
_____________ error.

ANS: type mismatch

13. When a loop rejects any input except the strings “yes” and “no” then it is performing a case-
___________ comparison.

ANS: sensitive

14. Programs that contain a priming read have a _________ loop.

©2013 Pearson Education, Inc. Upper Saddle River, NJ. All Rights Reserved.
Gaddis: Starting Out with Programming Logic & Design Test Bank Chapter Seven 7

ANS: pretest

15. The integrity of a program’s output is only as good as the integrity of the program’s ________.

ANS: input

16. When ____________ data is entered by the user, the program should at least ask the user to
confirm that he or she intended to enter it.

ANS: unreasonable

17. When the user enters a U.S. Address, the value entered as the ________ should be checked to
verify that it is both valid and in the correct format.

ANS: ZIP code

18. You should design your programs in such a way that bad ____________ is never accepted.

ANS: input

©2013 Pearson Education, Inc. Upper Saddle River, NJ. All Rights Reserved.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
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.
There was a great statesman at the helm of affairs, the ablest
monarch that had ever been selected by the council of wise warriors.
He saw his opportunity. He happened to have one of the most
original and inventive engineers as his right-hand man for the
manufacture and superintendence of war material. This latter had
landed on the shores of Broolyi they knew not whence. In these
islands they ask no questions but accept what the gods send them.
The two together elaborated the existing religious system. The
dogma that the divine influence was altogether irrespective of the
channel or priest had thoroughly soaked into the natures of the
worshippers from the sermons of the preachers; and it was easy to
turn the flank of the doctrine by showing that automatic priests
would have least effect of all upon the religious elements that came
through them. They would be completely neutral like the air or the
ether through which the gods influenced the minds of men.
There was some talk of rebellion when the system was changed;
but most of the priests were too manifestly disreputable or
characterless to bring much influence to bear. They were banished to
the islands that were occupied by the non-moral religionists, and
were never heard of more. The women were only too glad to see
the services conducted in order and decency, whilst the men saw
with pleasure the rotten finances taken up by the state. It was one
of the most peaceful and natural changes that ever occurred; and
now the temples were filled with men as well as women. The music
was splendid, the ceremonies solemn, the discourses worth listening
to. It cost far less. It was absolutely controlled by the state, and all
throughout the island had the same spiritual fare.
I suggested to Blastemo that there was surely great monotony in
having the same thing year in, year out, every festival. He laughed
at my simplicity. The monarch and the engineer had fully provided
for that feature of human nature which makes it weary of mere
repetition. The finest imaginations of the country were employed in
writing discourses; the best musicians spent most of their time in
composing the hymns and songs; the finest theatrical talent and the
most devout minds combined to make new ceremonies and services.
That was the reason there was not standing room in most of the
temples of the country. Everything was under the eye of the king
and his wise warriors. It was one of the most effective disciplines
that ever state had had in its hands; the state-organised church of
Aleofane was not to be compared to it. The souls of the community
were regimented like their bodies.
I was silenced; but any doubt of the efficacy of the institution was
not dissipated when I heard that it was still comparatively new. The
monarch had not long since died, and the engineer was still living. It
had still to be tested by time, and the attraction of novelty had not
yet worn off. Yet I had to acknowledge that it was a most effective
method of ridding a state church of irregularities and keeping a
strong hand over the minds of the community. Whether it would
allow the civilisation to advance was another question. Originality
would soon be a thing inconceivable in the island, if it were not
already completely dead. Peace in the spiritual world had been
reached, but at the expense of all new thought or individuality of
character.
When I heard that the inventor of this automatic worship was still
alive, I felt eager to see him, certain as I was that he must be a man
of remarkable powers; but I found great difficulty in getting
Blastemo or anyone else to tell me about him. Since the election of
the new monarch, I ascertained by sundry hints, he had been in
exile. Where he was imprisoned I could not find out. His great
capacity and his ever-advancing thought had manifestly aroused the
jealousy of the new occupant of the throne. Hence, I conjectured, it
was that the new arts of war had grown abortive, promise though
they once did to go far towards the ideal of absolute destructiveness
which would lead to universal peace. I saw that he or someone else
had introduced an explosive, which might, with improvements, have
made as effective a means of war as European gunpowder. It had
enabled the last king to batter down the fortress-mansions of his
nobles in the country and drive them to settle round the court and
abandon their continual little internecine wars. Under his successor,
the makers of the explosive had lost its true secret; and the baronial
castles were rebuilding, in spite of the threats of royal displeasure.
This was the meaning of the battle we had seen before arriving at
the harbour; two nobles were settling a quarrel in the old way,
heedless of royal power or judicial courts. Whilst I was in Broolyi I
saw hundreds of quarrels that were settled by duels. The Broolyians
had no control over their tempers, and during the reign of the
explosive they had given free play to them, as they knew that the
result would be no risk of life, but only to property in settlement
before the law-courts. It was like living over a gunpowder magazine,
and I avoided intercourse with these spitfires. Indeed, it was difficult
to conduct without hitch the commonest conversation with
Blastemo, now he had returned to his native fire-damp of an
atmosphere. Nothing but isolated residence in fortified keeps with
miles of morass or mountain or forest between them could ever
insure peace amongst such a people. To think that the name of their
country was “Isle of Peace,” and that the great object of their
worship was the god of peace!
One day I heard of another community off the farther coast of
Broolyi; it was said to exist without government or institutions of any
kind. My curiosity was excited, and, though on inquiry I found that it
was the exile asylum of the archipelago for all who were plagued
with the craze of anarchism, I resolved to see the island for myself.
They could not laugh me out of my determination, and I at last
procured a royal passport that would pass me over the intervening
districts in safety. For the rest I was to look after myself if I ventured
over the channel that lay between the islands. None of the
Broolyians would ever risk their lives in that den of wild beasts,
Kayoss. It had been chosen because of its proximity to the most
warlike people in the archipelago; and, if any of the inhabitants
attempted to leave it, the Broolyians were authorised to shoot them
down. A garrison was regularly established over against it for the
purpose.
I set out, glad to be free from the harassing ceremonial of a
military, machine-like, and yet most capricious-tempered community;
but it was a long and difficult journey, from castle to castle, over
mountain and through forest, often delayed by some local imbroglio
or the jealousy of neighbouring barons. Nothing but the
magnificence of the scenery could compensate for the petty
annoyances that retarded my passage. Everywhere I could see that
the military commonweal was founded on slave labour. The ground
was tilled and the operations of common life were conducted by men
of a different race and climate from the oath-compelling fire-eaters
that ruled the island; and over them stood overseers with whips to
urge their industry. It was a sorry sight; and when I looked into the
faces of the workers, I could distinguish the wreckage of nobler
natures than were to be found in Broolyian breasts. The foreheads
were larger, the skulls more capacious; the eyes were full of a shy
melancholy that seemed to shrink from investigation; they had not
the huge lower jaws of their masters, or the cavernous mouths, or
the red hair. They were now but beasts of burden, and their limbs
were muscular and heavy and their footsteps dragging and torpid;
but there was romance lurking in the refined lineaments and the
occasional grace that shone out here and there amongst them.
Whence they had come and what was their fate I could not
ascertain. That they were not natives I could see; and that it was
inferiority of will rather than inferiority of intellect or imagination or
civilisation that had led to their enslavement to the fiery-willed
Broolyians I could easily conjecture from the ruins of their past that
peeped out through the labour-clotted masks of their rustic or
artisan life.
I had to disguise my interest in them in order to get through the
country. Any sympathy or pity would have roused the savage wills of
their masters and sacrificed my hopes of the future, if not myself, to
the exaggerated Broolyian ideas of rebellion and the punishment it
demanded. Whenever I could, I lay in the shelter of some tree or
coppice, and watched the movements of these interesting relics of a
subjugated civilisation. Perhaps I might be able to do something for
them when I gained a higher platform of vantage.
 CHAPTER XXXVII

NOOLA

A FTER many difficulties and delays I reached the garrison on the

western shore of Broolyi, where it faced Kayoss. I delivered my
pass to the commandant, and was accommodated with shelter and
food. The soldiers were not communicative; but after a few days I
encountered in my wanderings on the beach one of the strangest
men that I had ever seen, and he opened up vistas into the history
of the islands. He was short in stature, but so light and springy was
he in his gait and tread, I almost thought that he never touched the
earth; he seemed to skim along its surface. He had a broad chest
and great muscular development of the shoulders that singularly
contrasted with his bird-like progress. His head was large for the
body, but finely proportioned. It was the face, however, that most
attracted me. It seemed almost to speak to me as I passed; it
carried the soul in the depths of the eyes and in the whole
expression. This soul, I felt after one glance, was a beautiful thing,
marred only by some deep sorrow that draped it in everlasting
melancholy. There was a heaven of pity and regret doming the
nature, one could see in the sheen of the eyes and the strange
translucence of the features. I was drawn magnetically to this new
type of manhood; and yet I shrank from speech with him, his nature
seemed so majestic and overawing.
 I asked in the garrison concerning him, but all I could find out was
that he was an exile from the city, and that he was kept under
surveillance. It had been at his own request that he had been settled
opposite the Isle of Anarchy. Finding that there would be nothing
done to prevent my speaking to him and that he knew Aleofanian, I
addressed him in reverent words the next time I met him, and we
were soon fast friends. We met daily and wandered on the shore,
and both of us seemed to find unfailing consolation in the ever-
varying music of the sea, as it tided along the beach, and answered
to the moods of sky and wind and current like a sensitive instrument.
To me it had ever been a thing of life that sang and quivered to my
every impulse and change of spirit. To be away from it was to be
forlorn and widowed, and out of the reach of pity and sympathy. To
him it seemed to fill the same large space in life. His thoughts were
stimulated and made sublime by its rhythm; his whole existence was
fuller and more musical in that wider sense of the word which
applies it to the movements of the worlds on the face of night. I
soon discovered that he was the engineer who had centralised and
mechanised their religion for the Broolyians, and set them on the
way of fulfilling the object of their existence and of establishing
universal peace by universally annihilative war. He confessed that he
had not been sorry to leave the capital and give up the petty
ambitions with which he had been fired for a time. It would have
meant but little effort on his part to perfect his explosive and master
the whole island for his own purposes; but a look into the future had
shown him how absurd was the ideal the Broolyians pretended to
hold up to themselves, how impossible it would be by any
homœopathic means, such as they proposed, to cure humanity of its
everlasting feuds. He fell into despair and let the new king do as he
would; and now in his solitude and meditation the love of his older
past had come back on him, and he longed to see his native land,
his paradise, again.
He had asked to be exiled to the garrison that watched Kayoss, in
order that the sight of that wretched community might keep his
ambitions down. There on the island opposite (and he pointed across
the strait) lived the anarchic exiles from the islands of the
archipelago. As he uttered the word “live” he smiled wearily. They
lived but a few days after they were landed, for they came to violent
feud, and strife and bloodshed ended the tragedy of trying to exist
without government before the animal was dead in man. He raised
his eyes suddenly, and he pointed to the opposite shore. On it
moved a human being. That was the survivor of the last shipment to
Kayoss. The garrison had never had any trouble. Within twenty-four
hours after the anarchists were out of their fetters and free on shore
they had found weapons against one another. They divided up into
conspiracies and fought, and before many days were over, two or
three remained too maimed and wounded to fight. When they
recovered, they fought for the mastery, and one remained sorely
stricken, often to die, sometimes to recover only to become a
maniac. Such was the state of the wretch whom we now saw
gesticulating on the beach. There never could be anarchism on this
earth till the wild beast had died out of the human breast, and man
was ready for flight to purer spheres. It was but poison in the
existing state of mankind. A little of it did not do much harm. Its best
cure was to give it full scope, for it soon killed off all existences
within its reach and itself with them.
As he rose to this climax, his transparent face began to cloud and
grow turbid. There was not that clearness of depth in the eyes which
had so drawn me to him. His nature seemed to become shallow and
tempestuous, more like the men of Broolyi and those I had known in
the old western world. But it was not for long; he drew himself up
with a sharp gesture of self-scorn, and then there settled upon him a
silence and a melancholy that resisted my efforts to overcome. He
grew quite unconscious of what I said, and, walking back towards
his hut, left me. It was useless to attempt intercourse with such self-
inwrapt thoughts.
For days I saw how purposeless would be all speech; his figure
was bowed, his face was bent with grief, his eyes were fixed on the
earth. I had never witnessed such tearless sorrow in human form. I
persevered in my silent reverence for him, and at last the cloud
lifted. He stood erect one day in the sunshine, and on my approach,
he smiled answer to my greeting. All the dark and troubled
appearance of his face had vanished, and his eyes and his
complexion seemed to show the depths of his nature again with
perfect limpidity. I was soon in sympathetic converse with him. There
still rang through his utterances a note of sadness and regret. It
reminded me of the undertones of so many folk-songs that wail with
the reminiscence of lost ideals. How wearily it sounded, as it echoed
through the depths of his meaning! It was as if his words fell from
the stars quivering with the emotion and thought of the spheres in
their everlasting rhythm. Out of infinity into infinity their wisdom
seemed to pass. There was no limit to their depth of suggestion.
From his words there gradually developed the story of his life, with
reservations that I could by no questioning or interest penetrate.
“Many leaden-footed years ago,—brief in the tale of my own life,
long and slow taken by themselves,—I drifted on to the eastern
shores of Broolyi, and fell into the hands of Nunaresha, one of the
most powerful and ambitious nobles in the country, who was then
endeavouring to get the ruling monarch dethroned and to have
himself elected in his place. He saw before many moons had fruited
and died that he had in me a godsend for his designs. Oh, the
misery of it! I listened to his flattering proposals, and supplied him
with the instruments to carry them out.” The thought overcame him;
the words died away on his lips, and his consciousness seemed to
ebb into unknown depths of sorrow. I kept a reverent silence, and
the thought of his broken story tided upwards again into words. “Ah
me! the memory of my atavistic folly weighs my whole being down,
when it comes upon me. Out of my warlike forefathers of hundreds
of generations before had come into my nature some taint of their
military passions and ambitions. For several hundreds of years it lay
dormant. The wise observers of my country had seen it in me from
my birth, and had surrounded me with such conditions as would
keep it in abeyance, if not deprive it of all living force. Unhappily the
profession of chemist and engineer, for which I was found on
examination of all my faculties to be best fitted, opened up to me a
vista into the destructive forces that permeate the universe, and the
marvellous power over them that our own chemical knowledge gave.
This and my growing acquaintance with the myriads that inhabit the
earth and with the consequent scope for military ambition roused the
sleeping devil in me. I passed my time in the analysis of the
destructive elements in nature, in the manufacture of explosives, and
in devising plans for their concentration against an enemy, although
it was a fundamental maxim of our commonwealth that no member
of it should ever harbour evil thought against the life of a fellow-
being. Innumerable gentle and indirect methods were applied for my
cure; but it was all in vain. My ancestral passion was roused like an
unquenchable fire. I could see the sorrow over me in the faces of the
community. At last, without their ever having come to formal resolve,
I was placed in a boat with my share of the wealth of the island in
precious metals, and blown far out to sea in the direction of Broolyi.
“Doubtless by the help of the forces my countrymen have control
of, I drifted towards this island, and came to be received by
Nunaresha. He almost at once raised me to the position of trusted
adviser. He accepted every device I invented for his purposes, and
supplied me with the material I required. I gave him such power
over explosives that he felt himself almost invincible. He subdued his
quarrelsome baronial neighbours with the greatest ease, and by the
help of his explosive catapults made his friends throughout the island
supreme over their districts. His influence was soon predominant,
and the feeble intriguing monarch was deposed and Nunaresha
chosen in his stead. He spared neither friend nor foe in order to
attain to unquestioned despotism. The baronial castles were
demolished by the new force, and all were drawn into his court by its
attractions and its concentration of power. The barons became the
mere parasites and flatterers of the new king.
“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.
Transferred or metaphorical meaning was indicated by the use of a
variation in the vowel sound of the noun. “Kăr” with long, broad
vowel is “dust”; “Kăr” with short vowel implies the sporadic ideas
that float in a civilisation or community or period or mind; and all the
various grammatical and sense modifications of the original concrete
noun were applicable to the new noun with the transferred sense.
 The grammatical framework of the language was so simple that I
mastered it in a few days. A few more days sufficed to get familiar
with what they called the infant’s vocabulary, all the concrete words
for common things, like earth, rock, sea, sky, food, arm, hand, head,
light, fire, smoke, cloud. What made this easier was that words for
things that had a close resemblance or connection in action had the
same consonantal sound but different vowels, or the same vowel
and one consonantal variation; “foresight” was “lum”; “fore-energy”
was “lim”; “rum” was “gravitation,” “rim,” “force”; “lul,” “smoke,” “lil,”
“cloud.” When I passed to the youth’s vocabulary of less concrete
words or words with metaphorical applications, it was more difficult,
partly because the vocabulary was larger, partly because the
differences were subtler; but I was greatly aided by the universal
and primary law of their tongue, that the same sound should not
stand for more than one meaning or shade of meaning; whenever a
word tended to acquire a new sense, a new modification of the form
was deliberately invented and adopted. Thus there were none of the
ambiguities and shifting senses that make all other languages and
especially the European like a quagmire or quicksand. One of the
more important annual functions of the community as a whole was
language sanitation.
It is one of the greatest mistakes of European civilisation to let
words take their own course, the most dangerous source of spiritual
epidemics. In them lurk foul thoughts and suggestions that spread
their moral contagion as soon as the child comes into contact with
their inner meanings. Nothing is so pernicious, so obstructive of
progress, as the virus of uncleansed words. They let out on new
ages moral diseases that have been forgotten. In them contagious
germs adhere to the nooks and corners for generations as in old
houses. Even the fallacies that cling to the human mind from the
many and shifting senses of words are bad enough, but worse is the
opportunity they give for villains to palter with them. Nothing is
easier than in our old civilisations to betray the innocent; language
with its chameleon nature can fit itself to every atmosphere and
light; it gives the readiest shelter to dishonesty and error. Unpurified,
undefined, it is the quaking bog in which half the souls that are born
into the world are irrecoverably lost.
Ages ago his countrymen had taken their language in hand, and
swept out of it all foul suggestion. Now their chief task was to
prevent ambiguities and double or shifting meanings from creeping
into words and making them the cloaks of dishonest purpose, the
stumbling-blocks of the still feeble human soul. There were linguistic
specialists whose duties were to watch the use of words by the
community and note down those that were changing their
signification. They had also to invent new words to fit the new
meanings, and to lay the results of their investigations before the
meeting of the whole nation. Whatever were unanimously adopted
became at once a part of the language; and for those that were
rejected the experts had to bring forward other suggestions.
The result was that their language was as limpid as their own
thoughts; and it was kept musical too. After the linguists had made
out lists of suggested substitutes, they submitted them to the
imaginative men and the musicians; through this ordeal, and that of
the meeting of the people, none but noble words could pass; and for
words that had to cover new ideas in some department of science or
art the linguists had to consult with the scientists or artists. This
people thought no trouble lost that was spent on ennobling the
garment of thought and the master-element of music and
imaginative work. “All is false, if words are uncertain,” “Language is
the ether of thought; it interpenetrates all existence,” were two of
their favourite maxims. Another that was often on the lips of Noola
was: “Take care of the words, and the thoughts will take care of
themselves.”
It was little wonder then that I found it easy to master the primary
stages of this most translucent language. The stage of full manhood
and the stage of the wise, I could see from a few illustrations he
gave me, had difficulties and subtleties that could be mastered only
by long acquaintance; and it was not till I had been many years in
Limanora that I came to understand them; for, though the
vocabularies were constructed on the most symmetrical and clear
plan, they had as many words as all the languages of Europe put
together. Most of them stood for ideas or elements that were beyond
European thought or discovery, or for ideas that were, many of
them, fagoted together under a single word in our Western
languages. No idea, no shade of an idea was without its own word.
Half the false starts of European civilisation or science or philosophy
were due to misunderstandings caused by the number of meanings
that attach to single words. European controversies and discussions
are interminable owing to this fertile source of fallacy and of shifting
ground. I was not surprised at the small progress made by both old
and modern civilisations after I saw the trouble the Limanorans took
to purify and define their words, and the ease with which one could
master the most difficult thought expressed in their limpid language.
As I tell you my story now in your own and my native tongue, I feel
as if I wandered in a dream through a land of mists that are ever
shifting and deceiving. I have often to abandon the attempt to
explain to you the noblest of the Limanoran ideas. At other times I
have to translate clear expressions into muddy, uncertain words, or
to resort to makeshifts that, I fear, give you but little notion of the
originals. As I talk with you in your English tongue, I seem to be
moving amid illusions and phantoms. How unmelodious it all sounds!
A language like the Limanoran needed no poets; it was poetry itself,
so musical was every word and every combination of words, so
bright and strong, so suggestive and harmonious every idea that
needed expression in it. When an Englishman is able to choose the
musical words of his language and put them together with rhythmic
harmony expressive of the inner harmony of the ideas, he is
canonised as a linguistic saint, a poet. The Limanorans were poets
by virtue of their language and their nature and training, and it is like
passing into the most commonplace of prose to express even their
commonest words and ideas in the most poetical English.
Little though Noola taught me, I was enamoured of it, and could
scarcely keep from crooning the words to myself, like the lilt of an
old song. And every sentence seemed to be as melodious as the
separate words. I tried to form discordant combinations, but, on
presenting them to my tutor, I found that they bore no sense; they
were impossible combinations of ideas. Especially was the harmony
of sound predominant in the higher stages of the language. The
commonest description of even the most difficult scientific
investigation sounded like a noble blank verse poem. To speak in
English again, much though it brings back out of my oldest past, is
to walk in fetters.
Before Noola was satisfied that I could make myself understood in
Limanoran, and just as he had perfected his plan for our projection
into the beach waters of his native land, we had aroused suspicion in
the garrison by our long colloquies. They watched our every
movement. Nor did I allay their fears by my assurance that we were
about to attempt a landing on Kayoss by sea. We were seized and
sent to the capital to be dealt with by the king and his council. Long
debate and threatening civil war delayed the decision, but I am
certain that the result would have been condemnation to death in
the end, for the whole country was honeycombed with suspicions
and fears of plots; and executions of suspects occurred every day.
But the unexpected rescued us. We lay in our prison cells, weary,
half expectant, half wishing more delay. Our food was thrust in to us
day after day through a small aperture in the iron doors of our
pitiless stone-walled dungeons. At first we heard through the narrow
iron-railed slit that served as a window the hurry and bustle of the
city, like the sound of a distant torrent. One day it seemed to grow
less and less, and at last it ceased. The silence was oppressive and
ominous. Next morning the wicket aperture in our door did not open.
All day we were without food. We wondered what had occurred.
Four days threw their twilight into our cells, and not a sound of
human voice approached us. I felt my hunger pass from the gnawing
stage into languor and collapse. I sank on my reed pallet unable
longer to pace my floor. I swooned rather than slept when twilight
thickened into gloom. I knew that a few days at most must end the
alternations of collapse and consciousness. I dreamt that I was back
in the old fishing village in my mother’s hut on the cliff; and her
voice sounded sweet in my ears, as she welcomed me home at
night. I thought that I fell asleep in it and that the morning had
come. I remembered that my comrades were to call me and that we
were to start early on a long fishing excursion. I moved uneasily, half
conscious that I ought to rise and see if the dawn had broken; and
then it seemed to me that the hum of voices sounded in the
distance. “It is my friends,” I said; a loud rattle and clang, I thought,
must be their volley of stones on the roof and windows to waken
me. Then I heard their Scotch accents beside me. I must awaken.
With an effort I rose and jumped from my bed. The cold of the
prison floor brought me to consciousness. There beside me was my
captain, Alec Burns, with some of his men. I sank back on my pallet
in a swoon after a sign of recognition. They applied restoratives, and
in half an hour, though faint and weak, I was able to totter out on
the arms of two of my sailors into the passage and thence into the
sunshine. Under an awning I lay panting back into life, and nursing
and liquid sustenance gave me appetite, and made me strong
enough to walk alone.
I asked Burns for an explanation of all that had occurred. The
royal officers were about to seize the Daydream, he discovered, and
he was intending to put out to sea in the night. He had got up steam
and was about to heave the anchors, but he found that she had
grounded, as it was low tide. As her screw moved, the water gave
forth an unbearable stench. He stopped her and the fetid odour
disappeared. In the morning he looked out to the city, and saw the
streets and the ramparts completely deserted. Not a being moved
anywhere. All day the same death-like stillness prevailed. No boat
moved in the harbour; no soldier appeared on the battlements; not a
sound of marching or of military music was heard. It might have
been a city of the dead. The following day opened with the same
experience. They pulled on shore, and the streets echoed empty to
their step, as they walked up from the beach. They knocked at
doors, but received no answer. They entered houses, and passed
through them unmolested, unchallenged. At last the explanation
forced itself upon their senses. In one house they could not proceed
for the fetor that met them at their entrance; and in the next lane
they saw dead bodies strewn, as if cast from the windows, in some
places heaped high above the earth. It was a city of the unburied
dead, and no living creature was to be seen to bury them.
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.
“Then did it begin to dawn upon the consciousness of our ancestry
that the worst of all diseases had, though mitigated in virulence,
been still left to fester in the human system. What was the use of
curing the body, if the spirit were left to gather to it and transmit foul
thought and emotion? The educated and responsible classes came to
feel that the true problem was yet unsolved; nay, that, though they
had purified their systems of hereditary diseases, the poor and
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