Land Under England

by Joseph O'Neill

  I was shaking with excitement. That had certainly been music. Even if I must swim, I would not abandon my vessel. I still had the stout trailers that I had tied round the “mast” when I was towing the boat out of the lake, and, if I had to swim to get to the island, I could hold one of these, so as to tow the vessel after me. If I failed to reach the shore, I should still be able to get back to the vessel with this rope.

  All the time I was listening eagerly in the hope of hearing the music again. But there was no sound.

  Ah! My vessel was turning away from the shore. The backward wash of the current had caught it, and it was beginning to drift out again.

  I waited no longer, but seized the end of one of the trailers, sprang into the water, and began to swim strongly towards the island. At first I seemed to be making headway. Then the pull of the bowl began to drag me back.

  After I had swum about thirty strokes, I saw that I should be swept past the island by the race of the water. I put out all my strength, and, for a few moments, seemed to make progress again. Then I saw that it was no use. Do what I would, I could not keep the bowl from being dragged away by the current. I was being swept past the island.

  I began to get out of breath, and my strokes grew feebler. I had now to choose between abandoning the boat, or giving up all hope of reaching the island. The music might have been merely the fantasy of a weary mind. It seemed hardly credible that it could have been real.

  I couldn’t afford to abandon the bowl and leave myself stranded on an island that might be merely a festering swamp of reptiles. Now I was actually passing the point of the island. It was quite near. If I let go the trailer, I might reach it, On the other hand, I was tired, and might be swept away by the current and lose both vessel and land.

  I was round the point. Then, suddenly, I found myself being carried towards the shore. My vessel passed me, stranded, and was just moving off again as my feet touched ground. It had not yet tautened the rope, however, and I held on to it. Then, for a moment, I thought that it would pull me out to sea. I tautened my body and jerked strongly backwards. The bowl resisted, then gave and came round with a spin. I pushed through the water without much difficulty. The ground under my feet was even, and not too sloping. I got to the shore, and hauled in the bowl.

  I looked round. There was nothing in view but a steep shore that came down from a still steeper incline of land.

  I began to work the bowl up the shore, pushing and hauling. It was heavy, but I managed to get it sufficiently high up to ensure its not being carried away by a rush of water.

  All the time I kept watching and listening. No sound came to me, however, and I could see little except the shore and the water.

  I began to climb up the bank. Near the top its slopes were covered with trailing growths.

  At the top I looked round me. Then I stood staring, hardly believing my eyes.

  Not more than a mile away, close into the shore, a ship was lying—an extraordinary looking vessel that seemed to be nearly a hundred feet long. It was no illusion. She was certainly there—standing high out of the water, and festooned with lights. I thought I could see figures moving on the decks, but she was too far away to make them out clearly.

  For a few moments I stood staring, then I rushed towards her.

  I ran across a sort of plateau, rushed down a slope that fell from it towards the shore, and found myself plunging through a swamp. I didn’t wait to see whether it was passable or clear of snakes or other reptiles, but plunged right through it. Once I sank up to the knees, but I pulled myself out again and ran on.

  I couldn’t see the ship now, as some rising ground, on the other side of the swamp, hid her from my view.

  As I ran, I hallooed, in the hope that, if the men had landed on the island, they might hear my shouts, but there was no answer. Then I was through the swamp and up the side of the slight incline beyond which I had seen her lying.

  She was still there, standing out clearly under her lights and the lights from above—a long double-decked vessel, standing at least twelve or fourteen feet high out of the water, from her waterline to her top deck. I could see her decks clearly, and, on the upper one, a stern cabin. She had neither masts nor funnels, yet she was undoubtedly a ship made by civilised men, though not like our ships—more like the pictures I had seen of Roman galleys.

  I stared at her, fascinated. I had only one idea now—to get to her! I had found the Romans, probably found my father!

  I began to run again. The thought of danger never occurred to me. I was much too excited at the moment. My one thought, as I ran, was that I had at last found men; for there could be no doubt, at this distance, that the figures that I saw were really men.

  What strange rational monsters I had unconsciously expected in this underworld, I cannot tell, but these were men. And not merely men, but civilised men, not savages.

  I was so relieved at the sight of them that I began to shout for sheer joy. They were looking towards me, as if they were trying to locate the source of the shouting. I waved my arms to them. There was no answering signal. I shouted again. No answer came back. I was on the point of entering the water, to swim off to the vessel, when I saw a boat being lowered.

  As the men swung over the side of the vessel I could see their figures—small slim men, dressed in some sort of jackets or tunics, under which their legs seemed to be bare. I could not hear any voices, but the last man who got in was evidently in command, for, when he sat in the stern of the boat, the others began to row.

  As the boat came near, I thought that its occupants must be boys. They were certainly not full man’s size. Indeed they looked more like slim girls than big boys, their shoulders and waists were so small. They were rowing with a perfect co-ordination. Evidently they were excellently trained. Very disciplined also, for no man was speaking.

  I listened and watched with intense excitement. In the silence I could hear the sound of the oars in the rowlocks. The men were moving with the regularity of machines.

  I took in every little detail. The boat was clinker built, and the oars were attached by some sort of straps to the rowlocks. The men were rowing as we row—by pulling the oars towards them.

  The boat was now running in to the shore beside me, and the face of the man in the stern was becoming clear.

  I stared at him with intense eagerness. I saw a small face, so impassive that it might have belonged to a lay figure, but it was the face of a European—unquestionably it was the face of a European—with very regular features, extremely delicately cut—a feminine face.

  His was the only one I could see, as the men who were rowing had their backs to me, and, as the boat ran in to the shore, I kept staring intently at him, smiling and waving my arms. He took no notice of me, but stared in front of him, as impassive as a mummy.

  As the boat touched ground, I caught hold of the bow in my eagerness. At the same moment the two men who were nearest to me, at the bow, jumped out, and took me by an arm each, without any salutation. I stared at them, surprised by their sudden movement. They weren’t looking at me. They were staring in front of them, as they laid hold of me—not at me, but through me!

  Their eyes were so large that the light seemed to run through them from side to side, but they were fixed and staring, absolutely devoid of expression, even of the expression of an imbecile; for an imbecile looks at you, but these men looked straight in front of them as if they were unaware.

  If they hadn’t caught hold of me, I couldn’t have known whether they had seen me at all or not. If this were discipline, I had never seen such automatic discipline.

  I felt suddenly chilled. A touch of apprehension caught my mind.

  They were urging me into the boat, but they were doing it gently, although firmly. I didn’t resist, but stepped in. The men followed, and directed me in silence to the seat nearest the stern-seat. The man sitting in the stern-seat was facing me, his knees touching mine. I bowed to him, and smiled. He seemed not to see me. His eyes w
ere looking through me, as if I were invisible!

  I stared at him, considerably taken aback by his extraordinary attitude to me. His delicately cut face was of an earthy fawn colour under that light, but it was entirely devoid of expression—as blank as if it were carved in wood. His eyes, which were large and slightly protruding, with very dilated pupils, had the same absolutely empty stare as the eyes of the men who had seized me. As I looked at him, the thought occurred to me that these men behaved like some primitive peoples, who pretend at first not to be conscious of strangers. If this were so, then presently he would speak to me, ask some questions, come to sufficient consciousness at least to look curiously at me.

  I settled myself in my seat, and waited patiently. The men pushed off the boat, and began to row to the ship. The man still made no sign that he was conscious of my existence. I began to get a feeling of foreboding. As I watched him, I knew that my first surmise was wrong. This was no primitive man who looked through me as if I weren’t there. There was something fundamentally wrong in the whole situation.

  I wanted to speak, but couldn’t. I was being frozen into immobility by the look on the man’s face, by the look that I knew was on the faces of the men who were rowing behind my back.

  For a moment I got a wild idea that these men were not living men at all, that I had come to a world of ghosts; “living dead” was the thought that came into my mind as I stared at the empty eyes that looked straight through me as if they didn’t see me, but were caught in some pre-occupation or life that shut out from their vision the world of men. Yet these men could not be mere ghosts. I had felt their hands on my arms.

  I turned and looked at them. Their faces were flesh and blood. In spite of that inhuman stare, they were men. In front of us the ship was there clear to see. The boat was firm under me.

  They were men—human beings like myself. I would not allow them to paralyse me by their immobility. I would submit to the silence no longer. Whatever was to happen, I must break the spell.

  I looked back at the man in the stern. Once again I felt the compulsion of his silence. I wrenched myself out of it, and threw my head back. My voice burst forth:

  “I come in peace,” I said loudly, in Latin.

  The moment I spoke, I felt as if I had committed an indecency! I stared shamefacedly but expectantly at the man. What was going to happen?

  Nothing happened. He didn’t make the slightest sign of having heard me, not even by the flicker of an eyelid or the faintest movement of the head!

  I turned round to the others. The man nearest me was looking straight in my direction, but he, too, was looking through me. There was no sign in his eyes that he had heard me either!

  I turned back, and stared at the man in the stern in consternation.

  My mind shrank back from the fear that was invading it, and began to try to fashion human explanations of the inhuman situation that confronted it.

  Perhaps this world was one in which the human beings lacked some of the senses of men on the upper earth. Perhaps these men were completely deaf and blind, but had some other sense that enabled them to find exact direction.

  Then I thought that that could not be the explanation. The man sitting opposite me was like a delicate statue moulded by a Greek, and with all the natural restraint of a Greek. He could not be a human monstrosity that had neither sight nor hearing. That colourless monochrome face was yet the face of a man. Even those eyes—— No! No! It must be some extreme discipline that had imposed on these men the logical conclusion of the discipline which soldiers have to bear, even on the upper earth. Probably they were soldiers or marines—subjected to a discipline that had gone to insane extremes. On the vessel there would be higher-grade men—officers, the commander, the captain—these would surely be different.

  I looked round. The vessel was looming up over me. The next moment we were alongside. She was even larger than I had thought, and I could see, along her sides, banks for oars—one above the other in rows. To that extent she was like the Roman trireme, as I had seen it in illustrations. These men must be the descendants of the Romans who had escaped to the underworld from the Wall—the descendants of the Conquerors of the World, these shells of men! That might explain it. The discipline of old Rome had become a madness here below a strait jacket that had killed all individuality. What was going to happen to me in so strange a world?

  One of the men went up to the side. Another put his hand on my shoulder, as a sign to me that I was to follow him. Even that recognition of my existence comforted me.

  There was a sort of rope-ladder hanging down. It led, not to the top deck, but to the first deck, about half-way up. The man passed through this and I followed, and found myself in a sort of corridor at the end of which there were two men standing.

  My guide went down the corridor, past the men, who stood staring into vacancy as if they hadn’t seen us. Beyond the corridor was a wide space, but I had no time to look about me, for my guide went down a hatchway.

  As I descended, I got a glimpse of places for oarsmen—benches placed behind one another in oblique tiers. Then I was in a long, low-roofed cabin, lit by rows of globes that hung down from the roof.

  The cabin was full of men. Some sat at a long table, eating: others sat or lay on bunks round the walls, but there was no murmur of talk, no sound but the slight movements of the eating men. None of them paid the slightest attention to our entrance, or to one another. Each was acting as if he were alone! Each seemed to be unaware of the others, or of anything outside himself—unaware even of the food that he was eating!

  Had the strain of the journey turned my brain? Could this world, that I thought I saw, be real, or was I the victim of some extraordinary dream? Had I eaten or drunk some strange drug?

  My guide brought me over to one of the bunks and left me. I sat down and looked round the cabin. It was no dream. It was as clear and real as any room I had ever been in; hard and real— quite bare, except for the tables and benches or couches, and clean, very clean. It was the product of a very definite standard of civilisation. But for the demeanour of its occupants, I would have thought myself in the cabin of a European ship; I would have been feeling full of joy at finding myself in the presense of so highly organised a civilisation. But this thing that I had come to was more hideous than the lowest form of savagery!

  I stared round at the men. Could the minds behind these masks be the minds of men—the minds of sane men? If not, into what inferno had I fallen?

  Yet they were eating daintily. Their movements, though queerly automatic, were not ungraceful. It could not be possible that insane men could have produced this highly organised life.

  I looked at the food. There were large dishes along the middle of the table, containing assortments of foods like hors d’oeuvre. The men took morsels out of the dishes with their fingers and ate them quite daintily.

  I looked at the food. Most of it was pale stuff that looked like preparations of fungoid plants or the sea-weedy growths that I had met already, but there was meat, too—pale meat like serpent flesh or the flesh of slugs or lizards. Strange though it was, the sight of it was comforting. Men who cooked their food and served it as these men did could not be altogether inhuman. Somewhere there must be a connection between them and ordinary humanity.

  Two men came into the cabin, came straight up to me, and took me by the arms. I got up. They were leading me out of the cabin. I should soon know my fate.

  I was brought along a corridor, up two short flights of stairs, and out on a deck. I looked round. We were on the top deck near the stern of the vessel. There was a structure at the stern with a curtain drawn across it. We had come up beside it, and, as we stood in front of it, the curtains parted in the middle and revealed a man sitting at a little table. He was sitting with his back to a lamp that flung its light full in my face. I looked at him, then straightened up, astonished. What I had expected I don’t know—another of the “living dead,” I suppose. What I got was very different—
an eagle-like face with an intensity of life so concentrated that I felt almost as if I had received the impact of physical force. I stared at the man. The eyes were vacuous—extraordinarily vacuous— yet penetrative like searchlights, and they were turned on me in a fixed, paralysing stare.

  For the moment I was completely dumbfounded. The eyes were not hostile or angry, but their effect was more frightening than that of the eyes of a tiger about to spring. They seemed to hold and dominate me with an almost sickening effect. I was being overpowered! Stunned! Then I realised that I was also being invaded. The man’s eyes had entered my mind. His mind had entered mine, and was searching it.

  It would be impossible for anyone who has not experienced it to understand the sense of violation that I felt when I found another mind in possession of mine, overpowering it, seizing my will, laying hands on my personality. The recoil was so great that for a moment my mind shook itself free of him.

  Looking back now at that moment, I believe that in it my fate was decided. If the outrage had been less, the recoil not sufficiently strong, I should have foundered, as a person, there and then. If my first reaction had even been fear instead of anger, I should have probably been overpowered. But my only feeling was anger. There was in my mind something akin to nausea, but it was not the nausea of fright but of disgust and rage.

  So great was the recoil, that the man drew back as if I had been on the point of hitting him. I had an insane desire to spring on him. I moved forward, met suddenly with some strange force, and stopped. The man’s power had reasserted itself and checked me.

  The next moment it had hurled itself against my personality. This time, however, I was ready for it. Every force of my mind and every nerve of my body were strung up to meet it, and I took its spring with the full weight of my powers. I felt my eyes glaring into the eyes that gripped mine. I don’t know how long our eyes were locked in that struggle, but to me then it seemed an eternity. Time had ceased. Everything had ceased, except those eyes that tore at me. I could feel waves of some strange power pouring over me. I was giving way. The thing was again entering my mind. The outrage was about to happen again. I shook with hatred and disgust. All fear left me. I would die rather than give way. Straightway my mind sprang upward. Some force seemed to rush to its aid from the depths of my personality. It was as if my soul had come into action and flung into the contest powers greater than my own.