Land Under England

by Joseph O'Neill

  So far, I had not only got no clue as to how I might start my search for my father, but I had not got even an inkling as to how I could get such a clue. I had let my emotions get the better of me and had allowed the atmosphere of the schools to produce such a state of fear and confusion in my mind that I had learned nothing.

  They would certainly send me to the schools again, in order to expose me to their atmosphere. I should get no choice in that, but, if I kept cool, there was no reason why I should not turn the visits to my own advantage.

  The teachers were the only persons with whom I had been able to communicate, and they were more likely to supply me with information than anybody else. The imparting of knowledge was their province, and, in giving it, they might possibly drop some hint that might set me on the right track. I must face their atmosphere and overcome it, so as to get all the information that I could get from them and learn everything that I could about the system and the powers of their people.

  I sat up and looked round me. For a moment the hope came to me that my father might also be in this enclosure. Then the absurdity of the thought was clear to me. They would not have brought me to any place where he was, since they did not wish me to meet him.

  Still, I looked round eagerly. The place was full of sleeping men. Others were getting up or lying down. No one that I could see could possibly be my father. He would have towered over them. I put the hope of seeing him resolutely from my mind. My task would not be as simple as all that, and the fostering of foolish illusions would not help me.

  I got up, made for the washing-room through which I had come before my sleep, and, finding a place vacant, had a bath. The room was full, but no one appeared to take the slightest notice of me. They could not have been entirely unobservant of my movements, however, for, while I was taking my bath, my guide appeared, as if he had been informed of my being awake. He made no sign of recognition beyond standing near me while I dressed, but, when I was ready, he led me to the eating-place in which I had eaten before. There we got somewhat similar food to that of the previous day, and, after the meal, we set out again.

  When we left the eating enclosure, I stopped and asked my guide where he was taking me. If he had answered that he was taking me to some place other than the schools, I think that I would have tried to change his plans, so keyed up was I in my resolution, but his message came at once:

  “To the higher schools.”

  I had little hope that I could get any more information from him, since I had already had experience of his refusal to have any communication with me, except the minimum needed for his task as guide. In spite of this, I asked him what they did in these schools. As I expected, he made no answer.

  It was as if he was aware of me to the extent of the circle of his particular task as guide, and had answers given him to that extent for me, but that, the moment I went beyond the radius of that circle, he ceased to be aware of me or of my questioning.

  It was his business to take me to certain places. He was in contact with me to that extent only.

  However, I did not trouble myself about this, as I had had little hope of getting any information from him. My hopes in this respect were now all centred on the schools.

  As it happened, the very first school that I visited on that second day supplied me with information about the geographical framework of their country.

  We reached this school after about ten minutes’ walk between silent enclosures along paths that were empty except for occasional automatons. It was a dreary city to traverse, but my mind was now busy with other matters besides its longings for the noise and traffic of ordinary humanity. It was nerving itself up to meet the impact of the atmosphere that I expected to find in the schools.

  I was perfectly calm, ready to resist with all my strength, but quite cool and collected. Then we went into the school, and I felt like a man who expects another step of a stairs in the darkness and finds none.

  There was no atmosphere beyond that to which I had by now become accustomed in all the gatherings of that people, certainly nothing special that I needed to draw upon special resources to meet.

  I felt relieved and more confident.

  Then I remembered that, in the schools that I had already seen, as well as on the ship, the influence that I feared had made itself felt very gradually, only after I had been some time in the midst of the people. I determined to watch closely for its first appearance now.

  The school itself was the usual type of enclosure, and, when we went in, there was, in the first section of it, a group of pupils of about sixteen years of age standing round a teacher.

  When my guide brought me up to the group, I noticed that, compared with the faces of the children I had seen on the previous day, the faces of these pupils had been dehumanised. They were more concentrated, but they were emptier, less aware of me, more vacuous in expression and yet more definitely powerful in a fixed, staring sort of way.

  The teacher was of the same type as those I had seen in the other schools, but perhaps more concentrated in expression. When I came up to the group, he was at once aware of me, as if he had been informed that I was to be shown his methods, for he immediately sent me a silent message that this was a class of pupils who were later intended to be in charge of food distribution throughout the country, and who were now being trained in the knowledge needed for that particular task, as well as in the conveying of thought without speech. He then turned away from me and evidently required one of the pupils to use me as the object of his efforts.

  The lad, a boy of about fourteen or fifteen, came near me, fixed me with his eyes, and tried to communicate with me. Still there was no sign of any crowd-influence emanating from the group. I decided, therefore, to let my mind lie as open and passive as possible, so as to receive the boy’s message, while at the same time watching for other influences that might be lurking around me. The message began to come through to me, but only in fragments.

  It was a description of the land, the shape and size of it—the things that, as an officer engaged in the transport of supplies, the boy would need to know in order to perform his task properly.

  It was also one of the things that I most wanted to know, since information as to the shape and size of the country, and the extent of its population, would be most important to me, both in my effort to find my father and my plans for escape. I was, therefore, very anxious to aid the pupil as far as possible in the conveying of his knowledge to me, but, in spite of all my efforts to make my mind passive and receptive, I was still too wary of the atmosphere to offer a free passage to his thoughts. The result was that, for a while, I got little of his message, until at length the teacher intervened and began to help him, by reinforcing his powers of transmission in some way through the addition of his own. It is possible also that the passive resistance that my mind had been keeping up may have lessened. Whatever the reason, the message began to come through more clearly, and, in a short time, I gained geographical information that I could not have gathered in any other way.

  The sum of it was that their country is a deep valley that lies between mountains which support the roof of the land on all sides. In the middle of the valley the Central Sea runs along its whole length, until at this end of the valley it narrows into a great river that flows under the mountains behind the city. This Central Sea is salt water, and the main source of their food, since in it live most of the creatures from which they get meat and fish, and also most of the edible plants. On the land, fungi grow, which are also used as food, and some plants that have come up from the sea to the land and now can live wherever there is sufficient water.

  Their settlements are all placed on the western shores of the Central Sea, and occur, at intervals where there is fresh water all along that shore, up as far as the great cliff that bounds the sea to the north.

  All transport between these settlements is done by water, and it is the business of the directors of transport to see that each settlement has sufficient supplies
of all necessaries, and that its surplus in any stuff is transferred to other settlements that need it. It is also their task to keep an exact census of the supplies available, and to inform the Masters of Knowledge, so that they may adjust the population of children in such a way that there may not be more population than the valley could feed.

  There was much similar information of a more detailed type. The city itself is ringed round with food supplies from the great snake compounds, the waters of the Central Sea, and the big fungus farms. The other settlements had, in general, food supplies in their own neighbourhood, but the region along the great Wall that guards the gap between the northern cliff and the eastern mountains was a barren one, for which a supply of food had always to be arranged.

  I have given the summary of this lesson, partly to show the manner in which the pupils were trained in the schools for their particular avocations, but partly also because of the information contained in it.

  I was particularly interested in the existence of a Wall that guarded a pass in the north, but, though I wished to get more information about it, I thought it better at the moment not to ask questions that might show my mind, even though I thought it quite probable that the teacher was reading it like an open book.

  I left the school in a more confident mood.

  The next school to which I was brought was one of a similar type, but, as it was one for the training of higher workers in the great woodwork compounds, there was little information given in it that was of any use to me or that would be worth giving in detail. Neither was there any serious interference with me from the group magnetism.

  It was the same in most of the other schools that I saw on that second day.

  I was extremely anxious to get some knowledge of the methods of shaping the minds of the pupils, but I found them difficult to grasp owing to the fact that all the work was done in silence, through thought transmission.

  I was able to get a certain amount of information, through the interception of the silent messages, but it was detailed instruction in the direction of various crafts—of considerable interest to a person in a normal condition, but of little use to me.

  The last school that I visited was, however, of a different type, and in it I not only got information about their system, but felt once again, very strongly, the mysterious force that I had learned to fear.

  This school was one for the shaping of teachers, and, when I went into it, I found four young men and three young women seated round a man with a face of such concentrated power and intelligence that I thought at first that I was in the presence of a Master of Knowledge, or of one very close to the Masters in power.

  The group seemed to be doing nothing, but, when I came near, the man’s mind suddenly swept on to mine, like a searchlight, and the next moment I was aware that I had come inside the radius of an intense discharge of thought. So great was the power with which the thought was transmitted that it seemed to me that not merely was I receiving it, but that I had entered into the man’s mind and was myself thinking the thoughts that were being created in it, as they were being shaped. There was no question here of my letting myself become completely passive and receptive in order to receive his message. It was impregnating my mind with such force that it seemed to me that, even if I wished, I could not resist it.

  If I had been in the mood of the previous day, I believe that I should have taken fright, because of the power of the man, but my mind had by now settled down to measure everything calmly, and it received his thoughts willingly and clearly, contenting itself with watching their effects and holding itself ready to resist any invasion of my personality.

  At first I felt no sense of intrusion, nothing but a stream of clear message, though I realised that the message was being especially directed towards me, and saw that the purpose was the impregnation of my mind with their point of view.

  “No man now can know,’’ his thoughts ran, “the things that men suffer, when each man has to face alone the forces of darkness. We can have no experience that could give us such knowledge, since we are all one—a great body of life surrounded by a deep unchanging situation, through which the forces of darkness cannot penetrate to us.

  “We have been able to unite and to build this shelter round our people, because each man and woman has been willing to shed the outer shell of individual feelings and behaviour that would otherwise separate him from his fellows and make it impossible for him or her to become at one with all others.

  “Feeling and thought flow freely between us, as the blood flows through the body. We cannot be shaken by dark outer forces, because we are one great body, fused by one emotion, directed by one thought.

  “Our fathers had no such protection. They had no great emotion to bind them together, nothing but a multiplicity of conflicting thoughts and feelings. Instead of combining into one body against the forces that destroy man, they spent their days in attempts to face the great evils alone, and so perished.”

  He paused and stared into my eyes. I watched him closely. He was, I knew, reading my mind like an open book. I could not help that. He was not at the moment trying to enforce his will on me. Of that I was equally sure. I had no fear of him, but I was watchful and wary of attack.

  His message began to come through to me again:

  “There is a man amongst us whose life is in the same defenceless state as the lives of our fathers. His mind is in the same stage of ignorance and confusion. It is watching us, lest we should deprive it of that outer shell of individual feelings and behaviour that we have stripped from ourselves and which it calls its personality.

  “Our fathers had the same sort of belief, the same sort of confusion and fear. They too treasured something that they called their ‘individuality,1 although it consisted of nothing but a heap of different behaviours and attitudes. They valued their ‘individuality’ so much that many of them spent almost the whole of their lives trying to assert it, by taking on and putting off attitudes and behaviours.”

  Again he paused and watched me. I felt that he was reconstructing his vision of the past from the pictures that he saw in my mind. It was a strange experience to stand in front of this alien creature and have him construct what was to him a prehistoric world from my thoughts and feelings. His message was coming to me again:

  “The great destroying forces were around them and upon them, and they thought they could meet them alone, each man encased in his own little set of attitudes.

  “The powers of fear and loneliness and decay bore them down, and, in their blindness, they tried to meet them, not by fusing together into one great community, protected by a great emotion, but by occupying themselves with a heap of petty emotions and actions—things that had no real existence, obsessions about their individuality and the attitudes of other people to them.

  “In doing this, they were moved by a partial grasp of the truth. They knew that without emotion a man cannot live and face the great fear, but, having no leaders to direct their emotion, they did not know how to use it so as to attain to depth and security of life.

  “Instead, they squandered it in a variety of little ways that could only bring them sorrow and defeat in the end. So they suffered and died, having attained to nothing, some of them spending their lives in the amassing of material things, most of which they could never use: others giving themselves up to a quest of complete personal union with some friend or lover, an association which is entirely impossible between two persons.

  “The man who is with us is still in the stage in which they were. He has come to us from his own people because of such a relationship and such a quest.”

  At his last words a surge of feeling rose in me. At once he stopped.

  Knowing the incapacity of that people to get any personal reaction from the feelings of others, I knew that he was not moved in any way by the sudden effect that his message had produced on me. His purpose was a purely practical one. He had been holding up to me a mirror of my own thoughts and feelings as he r
ead them, so as to show me how futile and useless they were. That there could be any other point of view he could not understand. Yet, now that he saw that he was producing resistance, he turned aside at once from the question of personal relationships.

  “If,” he went on, “men are allowed to remain in their primitive condition, with all the thoughts and feelings that are inherited by them from their ancestors, they can never be fused together into one body that will be powerful enough to save them from disaster. It is not merely that they will remain separate, but that inevitably they will be in conflict.

  “If men are not remade in their minds, each man will think that he is the best judge of his own value and will try to enforce his judgment. The community will be torn by a crowd of petty conflicts. It cannot save itself, because in the tumult of little motives, and the jostling of little ambitions, it cannot even create itself.”

  It was strange to hear this man discussing our motives and ambitions, who himself was so devoid of personal motive and ambition that he could have no real knowledge of what he was talking about. I knew, however, what was happening. He was reading my mind, gathering knowledge of its motives and tendencies, as I might read a book, and condemning what he found in it, in his empty, indifferent way, which contained neither anger nor contempt, but was more searing than the worst form of either.

  My bitterness had not gone. Now it welled up in me again at this new revelation of my impotence, and I interrupted him.

  “You have forgotten many things,” I cried, “that your fathers knew, about the significance of the individual. Individuality does not consist of a heap of behaviours, but of a deep unity of qualities. The men of the upper earth still remember these things, and are still too significant to themselves to allow themselves to be deprived of all the things that make life worth living, in order to avoid its tumults and risks.”