Shikasta

by Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit

  As I reached the plain of the desert and ran forward I could feel the sands trembling under me. I staggered on, shouting and calling to them, but they did not hear me, or if they did, could not move. When I came up to their little outcrop, a whirlpool had formed not far away, and I jumped up onto the rock they stood on, and shouted, Rilla! Ben! They stood shivering like dogs that have got wet and cold and did not look at me, but stared at the liquefying whirling desert. I shouted, and then they turned vague eyes on me but could not recognise me. I grabbed them and shook them, and they did not resist. I slapped their cheeks and shouted, and their eyes, turned towards me, seemed to have in them the shadow of an indignant, What are you doing that for? But already they had turned to stare, transfixed.

  I climbed around so that I stood immediately in front of them. "This is Johor," I said, "Johor, your friend." Ben seemed to come slightly to himself, but already he was trying to peer around me, so as to watch the sand. Rilla, it seemed, had not seen me. I took out the Signature and held it up in front of their staring eyes. Both sets of eyes followed the Signature as I stepped downwards, and they followed. They followed! - but like sleepwalkers. Holding up the Signature and walking backwards in front of them, I reached the desert floor, which was quivering everywhere now, with a singing hiss of sound, and I shouted, "Now follow me! Follow me!" continuously moving the Signature so that it flashed and gleamed. I walked as fast I could, first backwards, and then, because I could see the terrible danger we were in, with the beginnings of vortexes everywhere around us, I turned myself half sideways and so led them forward. They stumbled and they fell, and seemed all the time drawn by a need to look back, but I pulled them forward with the power of the Signature, and at last we stood on the firm slopes of the mountain. There they at once turned and stood staring, clutching each other. And I stood with them, for I was affected, too, by that hypnotising dreadfulness. Where we had come stumbling to safety was already now all movement and shifting subsidence: as far as we could see, the golden sands were moving. And we stood there, we stood there, for I was lost as they, and we were staring at a vast whirlpool, all the plain had become one swirling centrifuge, spinning, spinning, with its centre deep, and deeper and then out of sight. Some appalling necessity was dragging and sucking at this place, feeding on the energies, the released powers, and I could not pull my eyes away, it seemed as if my eyes themselves were being sucked out, my mind was going away, draining into the spin - and then from the sky swooped down a black screaming eagle, and it was warning us: Go... o... o... Go... o... o... Go... o... o... and the clattering rush of its wings above my head brought me back into myself. I had even dropped the Signature, and I had to scramble and search for it, and there was its gleam under some rocks. I had to shake and slap and wake Ben and Rilla, and again move the Signature back and forth in front of their eyes to charm them away from their contemplation of the sands. Above, the eagle that had saved us swung in a wide circle peering to see if we were indeed safely awake, and then, when it knew we were watching, turned its glide so that it was off towards the east, where the ground climbed from the level of the sands, up into scrubland, grasses, low rocks, safe from the deadly plain which it was essential for us to get away from as soon as we could. Ben and Rilla were passive, almost imbecile, as I shepherded them on, the eagle showing the way. I did not try to talk to them, only wondered what to do, for we were walking in the opposite direction from the borders of Zone Six with Shikasta, which was where we all had to go. But I followed the eagle, I had to. If he had known enough to rescue me from my trance, then I must trust him... and after hours of stumbling heavy walk, beside my two dazed companions, the great bird screamed to attract my attention, and swung away leftwards in a deep and wide arc, and I knew that that was where we must make our way. And we travelled on all that day, until evening, trusting in the bird, for I did not know where we were. Rilla and Ben were talking a little now, but only clumsy half-phrases and random words. At night we found a sheltered place, and I made them sit quietly beside me and rest. They slept at last, and I got up and climbed to a high place where I could look back over the scrub of the plateau to the desert. Under the starlight I saw a single great vortex, which filled the whole expanse: the spine of the rocky ridge had been sucked down and had gone entirely. Nothing remained but the horizons-wide swirl, and the sound of it now was a roar, which made the earth I stood on shake. I crept back again through the dark to my friends and sat by them until the dawn, when the eagle, which was sitting on a high peak of rock, screamed a greeting to me. There was an urgency in it, and I knew we must move on. I roused Ben and Rilla, and all that day we followed the bird, through the higher lands that surrounded the sand plains, which we were working our way around. We could not see them, but we could hear, always, the roaring of the enraged and compelled earth. Towards evening I recognised where we were. And now I was thinking that I was late with my tasks on Shikasta, and that it was most urgent and necessary for me to get back to them. But I could not trust Ben and Rilla yet, to be alone. As they walked they kept turning their heads to listen to that distant roaring like a sea that keeps crashing itself again and again on shores that shake and tremble, and I knew that left alone they would drift back to the sands. I could not leave them the Signature: they were not reliable. After all, I had nearly lost it, and compared to them, my senses had been my own. I called up to the eagle that I needed its help, and as it circled above us, asked it to shepherd Ben and Rilla onwards. I held the Signature in front of them again, and said that the bird was the servant of the Signature, and they must do exactly what it told them. I said I would see them again on the borders of Shikasta, and they must not give up. Thus exhorting and pleading, I impressed on them everything I could, and then went on by myself alone, fast. I looked back later and saw them stumbling slowly forward, their eyes raised to the glide and the swerve and the balance of the eagle, who moved on, on, on, in front.

  I found Ranee with a group she had saved from the whirlpools not far from the frontier. I asked if I might travel with her, so that I could make contact as I had to, and she agreed. So I went on with her. Her charges were as stunned, as lost to their selves, as poor Ben and Rilla. But they did seem slowly to improve, while Ranee talked to them in a low steady compelling voice, as a mother talks a child up out of a nightmare, soothing, and explaining.

  INDIVIDUAL EIGHT

  Her type and situation were endemic on Shikasta, repeating themselves over and over again, and this had been so ever since inequalities of position, and expectation, first appeared. Because females were at risk, needed help during the time their offspring were small (I repeat obvious facts, since basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked), because of this dependency of women, they have at all times found themselves in positions where they had no alternative but to become a servant.

  A noble word.

  A noble condition.

  In Shikasta a race dominant in one epoch may be subservient in the next. A race or people in a condition of slavery in one time or place may within a few decades become master of others. The roles of the females have adjusted accordingly, and whenever a people, a country, a race, is down, then its females, doubly burdened, will be used as servants in the homes of the dominating ones.

  Such a female, often to the detriment of her own children, whom she may even have to abandon, may be the prop, the stay, the support, the nourishment of an entire family, and perhaps for all of her life. For her working life, for such a servant may be turned out in old age without any more than what she came with. Yet she may have been the bond that held the family together.

  An unregarded if not despised person, someone at least considered inferior, and thought of not so much as an individual as a role - a servant: but this female in fact being the centre of a family, "its point of balance - it is a situation that has been re-created over and over again, in every time, every culture, every place...

  The example of it that was my concern occurred in an island at the
extreme west of the Northwest fringes. It had been, for centuries, a poor place, much exploited by other countries.

  A family priding itself on its "blood," but without much money, employed a poor girl from the village. Because of economic conditions, marriage was never easy on the island, but the reason this girl did not marry, never even considered it, was that she was emotionally absorbed into the needs of this family by the time she was fifteen. She cleaned the house - a large one - did the cooking, and looked after the children as they were born. She worked as hard as any slave ever did, and accepted low wages, because she knew the family was not rich, and because she had never been taught to expect much - and because she loved them. She would spend a month's wages on a toy for a child or a dress for a loved little girl.

  Several times mother and father quarrelled, and separated: then she looked after the children, held things together until the parents were united again.

  The children, five of them, grew up while she grew old. They left home and the island for other countries. The two now old parents were in a large house, increasingly rickety, alone, with nothing in common but memories of having had a family. They decided to emigrate. One evening they told their servant, who had now been working for them for fifty years, that her services were no longer needed.

  They took off, leaving her to clean and lock up the house, which was to be sold, and walk back to the village where she now had no tie but a widowed sister, who grumblingly offered her a home. The servant had nothing at all, only her clothes, and these were mostly cast-offs given her by the family.

  It took months for her to understand what had happened to her. She had never seen herself as exploited, as badly treated. She had loved the family, collectively and as individuals, and their lives had been her life. They had not loved her, but she believed they had, "in their way." She had often thought them careless, thoughtless: but they had charmed her, delighted her! A kiss from one of the little girls, a smile from "the lady" and "I don't know what we would do without you!" - this had seemed enough.

  She was numbed, low in spirits, and subject to crying fits "for no blessed reason I can see."

  The sister gossipped indignantly about the treatment of her sister. A young woman in the village who had aspirations to journalism wrote up the story, and it appeared in a local newspaper, and was later reprinted in a big newspaper on the neighbouring island.

  The servant was brought even lower by these events. She dreaded that the family might think her ungrateful.

  She received a reproachful letter from the parents, now on an island where it was sunny, and where because of economic conditions, servants were plentiful. Her distress became known in the village. The same young woman who had written the article, and who saw a possibility that her promising career might be halted, discussed the matter with a lawyer. The sister, hearing of this, went to her own lawyer: the island was famed for its litigiousness, like all areas that have been kept poor and exploited by others.

  The servant found herself being snarled and growled and wrangled over, while she remained passive, not knowing what had happened or how.

  She wrote an incoherent letter to her former employers, full of phrases like "I didn't know anything about it!" "They did it without telling me."

  Now they took advice from a lawyer. This ought to have been Taufiq, for, properly handled, the case would have exposed a good many areas of exploitation. He would have pointed out, for instance, that this situation, the woman working for any number of years in the most intimate service of a family, only to be dismissed with as little consideration as would be given to an animal, and less, in some cases, was at that time prevalent - and he would have been able to cite a dozen countries, bringing witnesses of several races and cultures.

  A case did take place, but it was of the kind that onlookers find distasteful, embarrassing, a conflict of self-interest and dishonesties, with no real focus or point to it.

  My responsibility did not go further than the servant herself: an old friend, though of course she did not know it, and two of the sisters, who were remorseful over what had happened. They had never thought of the old servant, except in sentimental terms, since they had left home, but the newspaper article and emotionally self-pitying letters from their parents made them think again. Both were open to better influences, which I supplied, and arranged their future accordingly.

  As for the servant, her distress was acute. She felt in the wrong, and wronged. Her life with her sister was doing neither of them any good; she soon died.

  I put her in the care of Ranee, in Zone Six, for she was already game for re-entry into Shikasta for "another try."

  While engaged in these tasks, I was more and more concerned with the problems of reporting adequately: having so recently been tutor to individuals who had volunteered for service on Shikasta during its last and terrible phase, I was able to contrast their expectations and imaginings of Shikasta with the reality. Facts are easily written down: atmospheres and the emanations of certain mental sets are not. I knew that my notes and reports were being read by minds very far indeed from the Shikastan situation. I therefore devised certain additional material, to supplement my reports.

  ILLUSTRATIONS: The Shikastan Situation

  [On his return from Shikasta Johor offered the records some sketches and notes made in excess of his mandate. He believed that, as is recorded above, students of this unfortunate planet would find it helpful to have illustrations of the extremes of conduct produced by such a low concentration of SOWF. Emissary Johor tended almost to apologise for these sketches, which he admitted he had written, sometimes, for his own use, to clarify his mind, as well as to assist others. For our part, we have to point out - and we do this with Emissary Johor's full permission - that Johor had been within the Shikastan influences for some time when these sketches were made, and these are influences which conduce to emotionalism. Archivists.]

  In the extreme western island of the Northwest fringes (mentioned already in the case of Individual Eight), which, as has been said, suffered every kind of conquest, settlement, and invasion, and this over many centuries and by many different peoples, a period of poverty intensified to starvation devastated the economy, forced millions into emigration, and intensified deprivation of every sort. A certain youth found himself without work or resources. Except for one. He had been bred in a slum, but grandparents still on the land had kept milk and potatoes supplied to the family, and he had grown tall, broad, and strong. And stupid. He did not have the wits to emigrate and make a new life for himself. Because of his physique he was recruited into the army of the latest conquerors of the island, given a showy uniform, regular meals, and the prospects of travel. This army, like all those of the Northwest fringes, was much stratified and officered by the class-proud and arrogant, and he was at the bottom of it, with no hope of ever being treated any better than the ruling caste's domestic animals. For twenty years he was sent from one area of Shikasta to another, all parts of a (very short-lived) empire which was soon to crumble but was then at its zenith. The function of this victim was to police a multitude of victims. From the extreme east of the central landmass to the north of Southern Continent I, the poor wretch was set to lord it over peoples belonging to civilisations and cultures older, more complex, more tolerant, and usually more humane, than his own. He was permanently half-drunk: he had drunk too much from childhood, to forget the brutalities of his existence. He had a reddened, usually perspiring face, and a wooden look that expressed his determination never to think for himself: vestigial attempts in this direction had been at once punished, all his life. Sometimes an officer would write to his family on his dictation, and these letters would always include the words: "Here you have only to stick your foot out and the blacks clean your boots for you."

  In every country he found himself - and he never knew more about them than their names before he got there - he took every occasion to seat himself in a chair in a public place, with first one foot thrust out, then
another, a fatuous, proud, and condescending smile on his face, while some man made shadowy by poverty crouched before him, cleaning his black boots.

  He would swagger around the policed areas of cities with a comrade, two gigantic men sometimes almost twice the size of the local people, in scarlet uniforms, braid and medals everywhere, and in one country after another this red face and fatuous smile, the shouted orders and abuse, the contempt and dislike written on the face of the barbarian, became a symbol of everything that was brutal, ignorant, tyrannical. To them he symbolised empire. And when the empire crumbled, partly because of the extreme dislike the conquered felt for their conquerors, this red-faced ox would remain an image in millions of minds - to be recalled with hatred, and with fear.