CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Great Wall
I REMEMBER no more until I was awakened to be put ashore. I must have slept a long time, for, when I came up on deck, I found that we were running into the harbour of the city.
As the Central Sea is, according to my calculations, at least three hundred miles in length between the northern cliffs and the city, I must have made up during the voyage for a good deal of the sleep and rest that I could not get during my wanderings in the barren lands.
In any case I felt immensely refreshed and invigorated—completely renewed, in fact—and in a condition to face whatever awaited me, not merely with a stout heart, but with a strong body and a strong mind to carry out the resolves of my will.
It was a good thing that it was so, for I was soon to be put to a test that needed all my powers of resolve and endurance.
However, I had better narrate events in the order of their happening.
Before I left the ship, I got a meal in the common room. Then when I had finished I was brought to the commander.
Whether this man, or indeed the ship, was the same as the commander, or the ship, that had first brought me to the city, I don’t know, but, when I was brought before him, the commander showed no sign of recognition. Nor did he send me any message with his mind.
The presentation of me to him was obviously some formality that had to be gone through before I left the ship, for, after he had looked at me for a moment with his intense concentration of vision, I was taken ashore.
During the time I had been on the ship or on the boat that first captured me, I had not had any communication with anybody, beyond the gestures with which they beckoned to me to do what they wanted.
From the “silence” of both the commander who captured me and the commander of the guardship I took it that my outlawry still held, and that whatever was going to happen to me in the city was to be a continuance of the same sort of treatment that I had been receiving since I left the city, or a sequel of the same type. I was confirmed in this opinion by the fact that though, while I slept, they had cleaned and actually mended my clothes for me, they had not again given me their clothes, but had left me to dress in what remained of my own. Their cleaning and mending of them was due, I realised, not to any desire to make things better for me, but to their inherent objection to lack of cleanliness or order.
I knew pretty clearly, therefore, when I was going ashore, that I would almost certainly be called upon to endure some severe struggle, yet, owing to the fact that my mind and my will had emerged without a fundamental defeat from the dreadful journey in the darkness, I now faced this coming ordeal with a good heart.
If I had been in the hands of some human captors on the upper earth, I should have been dealt with in such a way that my physical nerves would not have been strengthened to meet any subsequent ordeal, but, just as in the cleaning and mending of my clothes, so in the treatment of my body this people always acted, as long as I was actually in their custody, after the fashion of the highest type of community.
Indeed, the contrast between their respect for the living body, and all the things pertaining to it, and their total lack of respect for the privacies and rights of the mind, was the thing that astounded me most during the whole period in which I was in contact with their civilisation.
Hitherto they had, after the first attempt of the ship’s commander on my mind, refrained from invading it, except in so far as I allowed them to read my thoughts. It seemed unlikely that they could any longer continue to do so, unless they intended once more to banish me to the darkness. The latter seemed unlikely, since, if such had been their intention, it would not have been necessary to bring me back to the city. It was probable, therefore, that I was now to undergo an ordeal worse than any that I had experienced—one that would possibly leave my mind in such a condition that, whether they absorbed me or failed to do so, the experience would either kill me or leave me an imbecile or a lunatic.
These were the thoughts that crossed my mind as I went up the gangway and followed a guide along the quay.
We went by the same route that I had taken on my first visit to the city, and we ended at the same place—the enclosure of the Master of Knowledge.
When I was brought into the inner enclosure, he was sitting with his back to two globe-lights, that shone in my face as I stood before him.
As his eyes dwelt on me with their intense, passionless fixity, I felt that that timeless, motionless gaze could numb me to its will if the mind behind it decided to do so.
He was at the moment not exerting any power over me beyond that necessary to read my thoughts. Finally his message came:
“I see that, though you know our powers, you are still determined to resist becoming one of us.”
“That is so,” I answered. “I will not, and cannot, give myself up to you.”
“Yes,” came the message. “You believe that if you go back to the darkness you will die, yet you are willing to die rather than be absorbed. You know that we can shatter your mind and what you regard as your individuality; nevertheless, in spite of all that you have gone through in the darkness, you are determined, if we shatter your mind, that it shall remain shattered, rather than that we should be allowed to remake and heal it.”
“That is true,” I answered. “You have read my mind fully, and nothing will ever change it. You will gain nothing by keeping me here. You may kill me, but you cannot absorb me. Unless you intend to kill me, or make me an imbecile or a lunatic, you should let me go free.”
“You mean,” came the message, “that we should let you leave our land, so that you may try to find the road by which you came here, or the road by which our fathers came here, and so return to your own country.”
“Yes,” I said. “That is what I mean.”
“And then?” came the query.
I went silent. For the moment I had forgotten my father. Now I knew that I should have to return for him, if they set me free and I found a way to the upper earth. What was more, I knew that I should have to return for him with as great a strength as I could gather, in order to rescue him from this people. That would mean invasion for them and the break-up of everything. They could not set me free on such terms, and I could accept no others.
“Your mind has grasped the position clearly,” came his message. “If you must come back for the man that was your father, you cannot be allowed to go, since it might mean great trouble for our people.”
“It would probably mean complete destruction for your State,” I answered, “since our people are many times more numerous than yours, and their weapons of war are much more destructive. It is possible that, if I were to tell the story to the Government of my own people, they would think me mad and do nothing to help me; but I might be able to gather together a band of daring men who would come with me, and, with our deadly weapons, would destroy your State unless you surrendered my father.”
“You believe all that you are saying,” came back his message, “though it seems strange. The man you call your father would resist your attack on us with all his powers, yet you would come and take him away by force.”
He stopped and watched me fixedly.
“I see,” he said, “that you are in doubt. If you could be sure that the man you seek would resist your attack on this State, and, if necessary, die to defend it, you would not come back.”
“No,” I said. “If I could only be assured of that I certainly would not come back; but how can I be certain, unless you let me meet my father, and, even if you did let me meet him, perhaps even then I should not be certain.”
He stared past me with his clear vacuous stare.
I stood watching him, hardly daring to breathe. Could it be possible that he was considering letting me meet my father?
His gaze came back to my eyes, and stared through them into my mind.
“Yes,” came his message, “I have decided to let you meet the man that you still think of as your father. When you have
met him, you will at least know how foolish are your plans about him. Perhaps, even, when you have met him, you will consent to be absorbed.”
My heart bounded with joy. I could hardly believe that I had got his message aright.
“Tell me!” I cried. “Tell me! Have I got your message aright? Will you let me meet my father?”
“I will send you to where he is now,” came the message. “The guardship will bring you.”
“You mean now? At once?” I pressed. “You mean that you will now—immediately—send me to my father?”
The message came back this time with extraordinary force and clearness.
“Yes. Now. Immediately. I will send you, not to your father, since there is no longer such a person, but to the man that has taken the place of the person who was your father.”
The emphasis of the distinction between the man I wanted to see and the man I was to see was so great that it imprinted itself on my mind. Yet my subconscious self refused to grasp it. I was in a whirl of joy that made it impossible indeed for me to assimilate anything.
The Master had beckoned to one of the men, and was giving him orders silently. Then he willed me to follow him.
I went, hardly knowing whether I was walking or flying. The sudden change from the tension of fear and the resolve to endure, with which I had entered the enclosure, to this state of ecstasy was so great that my mind was almost unhinged by it.
As I walked beside my guide back to the vessel, I kept talking to him, to myself, to everybody I met. I made the most fantastic gestures. In our world of upper earth I should have excited smiles and ridicule. Here I didn’t attract the slightest attention. My guide didn’t seem to hear me or notice my excitement. I didn’t care. I went on talking and gesticulating to him and to myself.
Already I saw my father and myself on the high mountain down which I had first come, nearing the heap of ashes through which I had tumbled, when I fell through the trapdoor in the Roman Wall. I saw my father’s face gradually growing more and more conscious under the influence of my voice and the nearness of upper earth.
I saw the two of us emerging into the sunlight and shading our eyes from its incredible brightness. Then I would look at him and see the sudden return of knowledge to his eyes, hear him call me by name, hear us laughing and shouting and running over the green grass.
It will be clear from this specimen of my imaginings that I was not in my right senses when I got to the ship. Nor did I recover them during the whole of her voyage northward.
I had no idea where the ship was bringing me, and at first I pestered everybody with questions as to how long it would take us to get there. Needless to say, nobody answered me. If I caught a man by the arm, he detached himself, as if he were detaching his coat from a thorn that had caught it, without violence, but without according me the slightest recognition.
When I tried to get to the commander of the vessel, I couldn’t find him.
As we were now working up against the stream, the ship was going much more slowly than she had done on the other two journeys, which were downstream. If I had been able to eat or sleep, I shouldn’t have felt the journey so long, but I could do neither, and the result was that the journey, which probably did not take quite two days, seemed to me to last a week.
One thing became clear to me after a while—that we were making for the great cliff barrier, or the land that lay under it. Otherwise the journey could not, I calculated, have lasted such a dreadful length.
I drew one bit of consolation from this—that when I had got my father we should have less distance to travel to get to the road that would lead us home.
It was in this mood that I first saw the great Wall.
I had been tramping the deck impatiently, trying to stare into the darkness ahead, when I saw, away on the right, a row of dim lights up on a height. Then the vessel turned gradually and made towards them at a slower pace.
My heart began to beat wildly. I had never seen one of their settlements so high. They were always on the flat, but this one looked like a fortress. Now the lights of a harbour were beginning to show in front of us, down on the flat, but, up above it, the ring of lights was getting clearer, as if there was a real town on a hill. There were certainly lights, one above another, along a line that stretched from west to east.
Then I saw a dark mass showing up between the lights.
I was looking at a cliff wall with lights shining through openings in it. Lower down, there were the lights of a settlement on a plateau over the harbour.
The words of a pupil in the school flashed into my memory: “The great Wall in the gap through which our fathers came down here!” This was the great Wall—the cliff with the lights in it was a wall!
Already, as we came nearer, it seemed to me that it was not a cliff. I thought I could see masses of masonry on its surface around the lights.
I had reached the frontier! Perhaps my father had never got past it.
If he had come down by that way, he might have remained there, perhaps in a sort of imprisonment, perhaps as a hostage, perhaps because he had been a soldier and they were using his former experience for the garrisoning and defence of the Wall. That was probably it. They were using his special aptitudes. They used each person’s aptitudes. He was probably one of the commanders in charge of the defence of the Murus. He would naturally take up such a task, if he accepted their State, and, if he had accepted it and taken up that task, he might not be willing to come with me.
Still it was hardly credible that he could wish to remain in this darkness.
These people were not the Romans he had dreamt of. They were a monstrous, almost incredible distortion of the great idea that was Rome. It was not possible that he could wish to stay with them, if he were awakened from the trance into which they would have thrown him, and it was hardly possible that the shock of meeting me would not rouse him, even if he were in some hypnotic state.
He could not be like the others. He had been handled too late, and the effect on him could not be like that on people who had been changed when they were in the plastic stage. Perhaps he was hardly changed at all. These people could not understand a person like my father. They would have had no experience of the effect of their hypnotic rearrangements on the mind and personality of matured adults. They might be completely mistaken in their calculations.
As these thoughts poured through my mind, the ship was running into the harbour—a circular one, with good quays, like the harbour in the other city, though it was much smaller.
We were turning so as to come alongside the quay on the right hand. The place was well lighted by globes on pillars.
I went over to the starboard side of the vessel forward, and began to scan the quays eagerly….
The vessel was now being brought alongside. I hurried back to the stern deck, to the cabin of the commander. He would need to see me before I left the vessel, and I wanted to be as near him as possible, so that there would be no delay.
At the same time I kept watching the quay for any sign of a tall figure. There was still nobody there, however, except the automatons who were waiting to moor the ship. Then a man with a commander’s face passed me, going along the quay to the right.
I stared at him for a moment. It was probably our commander who had gone up the gangway amidships and gone ashore.
I cried out to him: ‘‘Commander! Commander!” He turned and looked at me. Then a man behind me took me by the arm and led me away from the side of the vessel, down the hatchway, and into the guardroom. There he put me on a couch, and made me understand in some way that I must stay there.
I sat as patiently as I could on that couch, waiting; but I couldn’t keep my body quiet. I was trembling with excitement, and I kept crossing and uncrossing my legs and arms, and moving my body from side to side. Even my teeth kept up a tattoo, the lower ones against the upper, in the effort of my body to get into action.
All the time I watched the door.
Nothing happened, h
owever. Men came and went, and I thought that each was the messenger for me. Then, as nobody paid attention to me, I decided that they had forgotten me, or that this was not the place, after all, where my father was.
Hardly had I come to one conclusion when I jumped to another. They were persuading my father to refuse to see me. They were working on him with their hypnotic tricks, to make sure that, even if he did see me, he would be completely under their control, and would ignore or repulse me.
When at length the messenger did come for me, he had to come up to me to attract my attention. I had my eyes fixed on the floor, brooding over plans as to what I would do to baulk their attempts to keep us apart.
At the sight of him, all my doubts fled. I had now only one idea again. I would see my father in a few minutes.
I passed the man going out of the room, rushed up the stairs and across the deck to the gangway. Two men intercepted me, and took me by the arm. I tried to shake them off, but they held me firmly. Then I saw that I was being brought to the deck-cabin of the commander. I began to hurry. Perhaps my father was waiting there for me. The curtains parted. There was only the commander sitting in his chair.
“Are you going to take me to my father?” I cried out to him.
“There is no such person,” came the answering message, “but you are now to be brought to the person that you have been sent here to see.”
He looked steadily at me for a moment with his staring gaze. Then the men led me away to the gangway.
A man was waiting for me on the quay, and, when I came out, he beckoned to me and walked away to the right. I followed him.
The fixed gaze of the commander had somehow steadied me, and I no longer rushed along impatiently. It was not that the eagerness in my mind was any the less—it was, on the contrary, now at fever heat—but that it had got so great that it had fixed my body into a sort of frozen calm. This had happened to me under the stare of the commander, as if his will had fixed and set the tension of my body.
Land Under England Page 22