Land Under England

by Joseph O'Neill

  Unless my father were a fugitive, he could not be here. He could only be in one of the settlements. I had fully understood all that before. I must hurry on to the nearest settlement.

  This people always travelled by water, except in the settlements themselves or their immediate neighbourhood, where they had to go to their fungi farms or spider compounds, or where they had well defined paths lit by phosphorus. The difficulty of travelling by land did not arise for them. There was no need for them to keep the settlements near one another. But they were making me travel by land where there were no paths, nothing but sticky, invisible slime, with a sparse covering of some sort of trailing growth that impeded me even more than did the slime. They were going to show me what it was like to live without them in the darkness.

  I went on, wondering when I should get to a settlement. Luckily the ground, though slimy, was not much encumbered. Twice snakes slid from my feet in curves of greenish light. Otherwise there was no sight or sound. The travelling here was of another sort altogether from my journey through the higher lands beyond the great cliff and the river. There the lands had been lit up everywhere by phosphorescent growths—countless ground fungi, big phosphorescent trees. Here there was nothing of that. Either the fungi hadn’t been there, or they had used them up, made the land a desert and never replanted it.

  Up above, also, the sky-lights had been vivid and frequent. Here there were none.

  My watch had been returned to me with my other property. It had run down, and I had no idea what the time would have been on the earth above me, but, when I was dressing, I had set it going at 2.26, the point where it had stopped, partly for the mere pleasure of hearing and seeing it going again, but partly also because it would supply me with a measure of time. For a long time, after I had begun my journey, I didn’t think of looking at it, but after I had been going, as I thought, for many hours, I remembered it. I looked by the light of the phosphorescent ball. It was 4.38. Making allowance for the time I had taken to come through the city to the verge of the dark lands, I had not yet been two full hours on the journey! I couldn’t believe it. I put the watch to my ear in the belief that it had stopped, but its ticking came to me loud and insistent. It was working properly. It was then that I first realised how timeless is the thing that we call Time—that purely relative mode —a matter of feeling and not of spatial or temporal divisions. Taken away from the motions of the earth and the moon and the sun, it loses all external reality, and takes on something dreadful in its stead. That was the discovery that began to seize me—the thought that one moment of the so-called time of earth can hold for the individual the whole of eternity, if his feeling is infinite enough to produce it.

  According to my watch, it took me something over eighteen hours from the beginning of my journey to reach the nearest settlement. In fact, it took me so long a time, in intensity of endurance and the despair that arose from the realisation of the hopelessness of my task, that I was many years older by the time I saw the first signs of human habitation. It was a fungus farm, and, when I saw the luminous space made by it, my heart began to pound against my ribs with excitement. There were two men working among the fungi, and, when I saw them, I began to cry out to them, as if they were ordinary men. In my misery I had forgotten. They must have heard me, for, in that silent world, the noise of my shouting sounded like the hooting of a siren, but, if they did, they made no sign, but went on with their work mechanically.

  I didn’t waste any more time on them, but hurried on. I was on a firm piece of ground now, and in front of me a path began, lit by phosphorus. I turned to it, and ran along it towards the cluster of enclosures, the lights of which showed in front of me.

  There was a man standing in the middle of the path with a globe of phosphorus in his hand. When I came up to him, he looked at me with empty eyes, as if he didn’t see me, but he turned and walked beside me when I went on. I was worn out with fatigue and hunger and thirst, and I hoped that he was a guide to bring me to a place of food and rest. He led me into an enclosure where a man of a higher grade sat under two soft globes of light. I went forward, and stood staring at him with eyes that blinked under the unaccustomed light. He stared at me, reading my thoughts. Then, as if to satisfy himself that he had read them aright, he sent his message: “Why have you come here?”

  “I need food and rest,” I answered wearily.

  “You cannot have used up all your food,” came the answer. “You got food supplies for a long time when you were leaving the city. Also, you cannot need so soon to come to a settlement to rest. You could rest anywhere. Why, then, have you come here?”

  I made no answer. There was no answer to make. Even if I could explain my feelings to him, it would be useless to do so. At last I understood fully the sentence that had been passed on me.

  I had been outlawed: deeper still, I had been excommunicated. I was to be kept alive, so that I might be shaped by the darkness, as they had been shaped by it. I thought that they had given me no contact, no communion. Now I knew that they had given me much communion, the shelter of their civilisation, of the circle of light and comfort that they had made against the darkness. The giving of their dress to me had been a symbol of their acceptance of me. The return of my own clothes and all my belongings had been their formal act of withdrawal of recognition. I had refused to come into communion, as they understood it. I had wanted to have the advantage of what they had won for men here below, without paying the price they had paid. They would not allow me to do that. I could either remain myself or become one with them, but I could not do both. I had chosen to remain alone, and they had taken away their contact with me and given me back all that I had when I came to them.

  I turned and left the enclosure and went into the darkness. I was alone. I had left my own people on the earth. I had refused to be one with these people on whom I had intruded. Now I was alone, alone without vision or sound or touch with anything that lived and moved, alone in the darkness.

  Suddenly I knew what it meant to be alone—the thing that I had never really known. I was looking down into a bottomless gulf. My head was reeling. I musn’t look down into those depths. It was like the dreams in which I used to find myself suddenly standing on ropes that led across vast gulfs, staring, paralysed, downward, unable to move backward or forward.

  I must pull myself together. Even on the earth, I had heard of people who had gone mad the moment they realised that they were lost—irretrievably lost.

  I must not do that. I had been living on the surface, in the skin, without knowledge or understanding-pitting myself against things that I didn’t understand. I began to hurry on to get away from them.

  I felt my lips moving. I began to pray, dumbly, without sound, without thought. For the first time since I was a little child, I prayed with my whole life poured into my prayer.

  I blundered into something and caught hold of it. It was a sticky bole, the trunk of some sea-weedy growth, a slim, oily thing. I put my arms round it, and clung to it. I thought I could feel a heart beating in it—beating strongly. Then I knew that it was the echo of the beating of my own heart coming back to me from it. I laid my head against it.

  The storm that had shaken me was passing. Peace was coming back to me, but I was weary —dreadfully weary. I slid to the bottom of the tree and lay with my head close against it.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Phantasms

  WHEN I AWOKE, it was no longer pitch dark. A pale, dim light was coming from above. I looked round me. I was on sloping ground covered with trailing growths. I stood up. I was stiff, and my body ached, but I was refreshed by my sleep. On my right hand, lower down, I saw something that looked like the Central Sea. On my left, the slope on which I was standing seemed to mount gradually, but the light was too dim for me to see far.

  I felt hungry. I had eaten nothing since I left the city. I took the food they had packed for me out of my knapsack, and began to eat. It was slabs of snake-flesh, prepared with some sort of seas
oning to preserve it. They had also put a large skin bottle of some sort of liquor into my knapsack. I took a drink. It was a thin, sharp liquor, like rather sour wine, but it satisfied me. I put the rest of the food and drink back into my sack and strode up the slope towards the left.

  Thus began my second day’s quest in the darkness.

  The light was not so dim that I could not walk fairly quickly. The ground was slimy under my feet and clogged my steps somewhat, but not sufficiently really to hamper my going. My mind was cold and steady. Its hysteria of the previous day had arisen from the loss of its foolish illusions. As I plodded on now, I surveyed the new situation calmly.

  The salient facts were that, while I had the freedom of the barren lands, and the darkness and dimness that lay over them alternately, I had no other freedom or access to any other place. There was only one thing that I could attempt in these lands. I could search for an exit from them into regions beyond the territory of this people. Search for my father was out of the question. He could hardly be in these lands, unless he were an outlaw; and, if he were, I should not be likely to come across him except by accident. This narrowed the radius of my plans.

  The lands on which I found myself ran northward, between the Central Sea to the east and the barrier of mountains to the west. Behind me, the city and the southern mountains barred all progress. My possible action was, therefore, narrowed down to a northward journey, and a search of the mountains that ran northward on the western boundary. Somewhere in these mountains there must be a gap through which I might escape into regions outside the range of that people, perhaps even into higher lands, through which I might get back to the earth.

  I decided, therefore, to strike westward towards the mountains, and search them for gaps or paths leading upward.

  The chief obstacle in putting such a plan into operation was, of course, the darkness. If there had been sufficient light to show me the outlines of the mountains, that I knew to lie to the westward, I could have made for them, and worked systematically along them, returning to the settlements along the sea only when my food-supplies fell short. The difficulty was to keep direction, so that I might not find myself going round in circles. For this purpose it was important to get to the mountains while the light lasted, and I put that before me as my immediate object.

  As I could not see any outlines of mountains, and the Central Sea was also dark, I had to rely for direction largely on the upward trend of the land. I kept upwards, therefore, as far as possible.

  It would be tedious to describe in detail the journey I made on that second day, since it consisted of a dreary series of ascents and descents of foothills that began near the settlement that had refused me admittance.

  Luckily for me, the light held, and enabled me at least to see whether, through the ascents and the descents, there was a steady upward movement. I felt quite confident that there was, and, though the ground for the most part was barren and stony, with no food-supply and no sign of life except an occasional snake, I climbed on with steady courage.

  I had a sufficient food-supply for several days. There were streamlets coming from the mountains, and, as long as I had food and water, I did not see that I was running any serious risk.

  On the other hand, I was under no illusions as to the nature of my task, or the slightness of my chances of success. I had no doubt that I should be able to reach the mountain barrier, unless there was an impassable gulf running along the whole of the western boundary, but, when I had reached the mountains, I knew that I should probably find bleak slopes of rock, on which no man could live long without food-supplies. If that were not so—if the mountains in fact led to fertile regions either beyond them or on their own higher slopes—the Masters of Knowledge would not have given me an opportunity to attempt to climb them. They did so only because they knew that I should be tied to their settlements by the need to return to them regularly for provisions.

  However, I had no way out of that difficulty. If I could not get over the western mountains or through them, I should have to get through or over a similar mountain barrier or cliff barrier in the north, if I were to regain my freedom.

  These were the thoughts that filled my mind as I plodded upwards over stony slopes and hollows, in the dim light of that second day.

  Below, the light showed little but the nearest slopes up which I had come. Around me, it lit up dimly stony foldings, without trees or vegetation or life of any sort. In front, it showed a series of similar foldings rising gradually. Then suddenly it flared up. A cloud of spears of the Aurora sprang back and forward, and there, straight in front of me, seemingly not more than a couple of miles away, a mountain range towered upwards to the light.

  I stood and stared at it. It was barren rock, steep almost as a cliff. No vegetation grew on it. No passes pierced it. Here and there there were breaks in the precipitous walls. No wonder the Masters of Knowledge had left me free to wander!

  I did not wait to brood over the problem. I had not yet reached the mountains. When I got to them, I might find them more accessible than they seemed to be at this distance. Now that I had good light I must use it. I started again at an increased pace.

  I had kept my watch going, and, when I started, I had looked at it. According to it I had already been travelling nine hours and three-quarters since my sleep. It took me four and a half hours more to get to the real foot of the mountain barrier, but long before I had reached it I knew that there was no exit that way. It was a sloping cliff of rough rock that towered upwards thousands of feet, and presented neither gap nor foothold.

  I slept that second night in a ravine at the foot of the cliff-wall. The light had begun to fade before I reached it, but was still bright enough to show me that I might as well rest, since there was no further progress possible towards the west.

  Next day I turned my face to the northward along the cliff barrier.

  I will not burden this narrative with the details of that third day, or the days that followed it. These were days in which my mind and body were being broken into their new task, deepened and heightened in some things, lowered and emptied in others.

  If I had any illusions left as to my chances of escape before I began my search along the mountains, those days dispelled them.

  When I started my journey northward on the third day there was a little light. After four or five hours it petered out, and I tried to blunder on through the darkness, with the help of my phosphorus balls.

  It was the same on the fourth day. The darkness was complete, and I made little progress. On that day my supply of liquid ran out and I could not replenish it. I had got into a district where there were no streams. My food-supply was also running short, and I realised that I should have to get back to the lower lands as quickly as possible.

  On the fifth day I turned my back on the mountains and groped my way down the slopes again towards the Central Sea.

  So ended my first expedition to the mountains—the first of a series of such journeys.

  Sometimes the light from above shone dimly or strongly. More often I journeyed in darkness. I no longer kept any account of time, since such account would be useless, meaningless. The only times that had any meaning for me were those marked out by the fitful coming and going of the magnetic sky-lights. These latter became of extreme importance. When they shone, they showed me the landscape, sometimes dimly, sometimes with a clarity like that of full moonlight, and it was during the periods when they revealed the country to me that I discovered, bit by bit, the nature of the western boundary of that land. It was sheer cliff, or mountain-sides, so steep and slippery that no man could possibly have climbed them even in broad daylight. Every slope that I climbed, every barren upland valley, led me to the same impassable barrier, flung me back defeated to the lower lands to get food and drink.

  It might be thought that the gradual realisation of the hopelessness of such a quest would have broken my nerves and my courage. I know now that it was doing so in a fundamental way, but, at
that stage, I did not notice it. I had braced myself up for my task, tried to concentrate my mind into a single thought aimed at a single purpose.

  If they had allowed me to stay for even the briefest period in their settlements, when I visited them for supplies, it is possible that I might not have centred my whole life on this one purpose, but they never allowed me to stay beyond the few minutes needed to provide me with food, so that these visits had for me no human value, even such as they could give.

  I made them, therefore, as seldom as possible, so as not to waste my strength on journeys between the sea and the mountains. I ate sparingly, slept little while the light was available, husbanded all my resources, and kept doggedly to my search.

  As I moved northward, the mountains began to fold into valleys that ended in culs-de-sac. I worked up each of them, and, at the end of each, I turned back and went north again along the foot of the barrier, seeking for the next possible way up or out. My hands and knees were torn, my clothes in rags, but I kept myself clean—I even kept myself shaved, though my stock of razor-blades got so blunt in the end that they tore my face. I did this, not deliberately, but automatically—because I had always done it, and it was a link with my life on earth.

  For the same reason I made plans, resolutions, created for myself a mask of stoical courage and resolve, to buttress up my will. All my powers and qualities and feelings that were not necessary for my purpose must fall back into the lower regions of my subconsciousness. All the qualities and resources that I could use for that one purpose must be drawn upward, heightened, deepened, made dominant. I must become a machine, such as the men of this lower land had become, a creature with a single aim, a single idea, a mind and character pruned, stripped, cleared of all the thoughts, feelings, tendencies, and habits that were not necessary for that purpose.

  Such were my plans during those earlier days.

  In those days they remained only plans. I had not yet reached the depths in which they were to become realities. They were then only brave thoughts, make-believe schemes manufactured to keep up my courage. I was still too near the normal, too human to be able to put them into effect. I had not yet got rid of the ordinary human needs. I hungered for human fellowship, even the fellowship of the automatons. I felt starving for contact, for all the irrelevant things.