Land Under England

by Joseph O'Neill

  The hopelessness of my position and of my search was becoming so clear that my mind began to evolve plans of escape.

  The thinking out of these plans was probably of some help as an outlet for my thoughts, but it brought little real relief to my mind, since I could not imagine any scheme that would have the remotest chance of success.

  The more I considered my position, the more it seemed to be that of a rat caught in a trap—the only possible action being to dash myself against the bars, with the chance that, if I did so, I should be worsening my father’s position, if it was one that could be worsened.

  It might be thought that, the longer I was free to go round the city, the better chance there was that my presence there might, in some way, come to the knowledge of my father, and enable him to come to me or communicate with me. But the more I had seen of these people, the more clearly I knew that there could be no foundation for such a hope, since no one could convey any knowledge to my father without the will of the State, and the chances of his coming across any traces of me, even if he were in a condition to do so, were practically non-existent.

  Such was the mood in which I began my visits to the industrial compounds, a mood of cold despair which was justified by events, since during all my visits to these compounds I learned, as I had expected, nothing that was of the slightest use to me.

  If they had had anything new or striking to show, it might, by rousing my professional curiosity, have afforded me some relief of mind by taking my thoughts off my position. But my first sight of their works showed me that, unlike the schools, they had nothing that could interest a modern scientific worker.

  Not that there were not things in them that might have interested a man in a normal mood. There were, in fact, such sights and occurrences, some of them most poignant in their appeal to the common feelings of humanity.

  One of these pathetic things was the attention and care lavished on the waterclocks—those relics of ancient days, by which, though they have lost the alternating rhythm of night and day, these people still measure time, after the Roman mode, spacing it into periods of twenty-four hours’ duration and combining these units of “days” into months and years, on the model of the Julian calendar. In this way the Masters of Knowledge have attempted to set some sort of ebb and flow in the continuity of a tideless time which would have been insufferable, even to minds such as theirs, if it had not been divided up and made bearable by a series of marks and limits, such as are supplied by the ebb and flow of diurnal, seasonal, and annual rebirths of nature on earth.

  While, however, such pitiful human relics were still existent here and there amongst them, there was little else that could stir me to a feeling of our common humanity, or make it worth my while to chronicle the details of the days I spent in visiting the different parts of their settlement.

  Compared to the occupations of people on the upper earth, the occupations of these people are few, and their range of tools correspondingly small. In that city, for instance, although it was, I understood, the chief centre of population of the country, the only large industries that I saw were woodwork, metalwork, the weaving of cloth, the making of earthenware, the preparations of the various oils and fats, and other essential industries such as the building of boats and ships. Everything was done in an elementary way with the tools and methods used by the Romans on the upper earth two thousand years ago. They have still no power other than that supplied by mechanics, and their mechanics are of the most elementary type.

  Their appliances may be summed up as the lever, the inclined plane, the wedge, the pulley, and simple combinations of these. Beyond that they have not gone, and every process that I saw in their factory compounds and industrial enclosures was carried out solely with tools based on such combinations, without any development on the type of tool used for similar purposes in Ancient Rome.

  The contrast between the primitive nature of their work here and the remarkable developments I had seen in the schools was astonishing. There, I had been as completely out-ranged in power as they would be if they could be introduced to the works of one of our great industrial concerns on earth. Here, there was so little of note that the only value my visits to their compounds had for me was that they gave me information as to the lay-out of the city, which I thought might possibly be of use if I should attempt to escape.

  I discovered that it was divided into half a dozen great compounds, each of which was assigned to a particular trade, and was a separate unit, to the extent that it supplied all the needs of its group of workers in so far as these could be supplied from its area.

  The distributive group, for instance, is placed in the neighbourhood of the harbours, and occupies all that quarter, with the exception of a small quarter near the great harbour set aside for the governing class.

  The woodworkers are grouped in a series of compounds along the shores of the Central Sea, since the wood on which they work is rafted down by water from the forests along the shores of the lake.

  The groups that make cloth and earthenware, and articles made from these, are situated in the centre of the city, as are the groups that deal with preparations for food-stuffs. The compounds of the ironworkers, on the other hand, are situated some distance behind the other settlements, in the neighbourhood of the coal-and iron-mines that lie at the foot of the range of mountains that forms the southern barrier of that land.

  In all cases the compounds contain not only separate sections for the various types of processes needed to work up the raw material, but also full accommodation of communal kitchens, eating-places, sleeping-places, baths, and gymnastic fittings for the whole of the staff.

  Each of the great compounds is under the control of a manager, who is at once an expert in the particular industry and a man with a controlling will, and under him or her there are subordinate officers of a similar type in charge of each section.

  All these officers evidently had orders to show me everything, for they gave me free access to their works, and answered my questions in so far as they grasped them. In most cases, however, they were so restricted in their radius of thought that they could have little communication with me.

  In the very first industrial compound I visited I had experience of this. It was a woodworking compound, and, when I went into the first section of it, I found men sawing logs with a most elementary type of saw—a thing with straight teeth stretched in a curved frame, to which it was attached like a string to a bow.

  The commandant who was in charge of the section was standing beside me, and, in order to try to get into some sort of contact with him, I began to explain to him that, if the men used saws with cross teeth, instead of the ones with straight teeth that they were using, the blades would not get stuck constantly, as theirs were doing. He stared in front of him with a fixed stare, as if he hadn’t heard me. I began all over again, more slowly, but my second attempt to get his attention for my explanation was no more successful than the first. He was there merely to get the work done, and any discussion about the improvement of the tools was outside the range of his attention.

  It was the same in most of the other cases where I tried to discuss tools or methods.

  It is possible, of course, that in the case of these industrial foremen, with whom I failed to establish contact, one reason, at least, for their lack of understanding of me was that their minds could not grasp my method of speech and were themselves too feeble to communicate with me by thought-transference, except in the simplest matters closely affecting their work. Whatever the reason was, I could make little contact with them—not even as much as I had made with the teachers, who were at least able to communicate to me views of the State, and meet my answers and objections.

  The only gain, indeed, in my change of centres, was that the atmosphere which I had found so perturbing in the schools was not as powerful in the industrial compounds, as if the higher grades felt the urge of that primeval fear more poignantly than the less vital types.

  In all oth
er respects the workers were on an entirely lower plane, as regards either interest or information, than the teachers.

  The sight of the craft-workers in the first industrial works, indeed, gave the last blow to any faint hope I might have retained of being able to use my further respite to obtain any information that could be of use to me.

  One result of this complete destruction of my hopes was that my mind settled down still more to its fatalist calm. Since there was nothing else to do, I forced myself to take an interest in their works and processes, and, although they were of an elementary type, I succeeded, to some extent, in doing so.

  When, for instance, after my visits to the woodworking compounds, they brought me to the compounds for the working of metals, I found myself sufficiently interested to occupy myself with an objective examination of their machines and processes.

  One reason, perhaps, was that these compounds resemble more closely our ironworks, since they have large blast-furnaces for the reduction of the various ores, and these gave me an illusion of home associations.

  Apart from this, however, the sight of the automaton workers carrying out their various tasks in the glare of the great furnaces had a horrible grandeur of its own, with its suggestion of damned souls working in a state of stupefaction in the glare of penal fires, and I have still a vivid memory of that strange sight.

  I will not trouble the reader with the details of their metalwork, since these could be of interest only to specialists.

  There was, however, one incident that impressed me profoundly during my first visit to these latter works.

  I was examining one of the larger furnaces in the ironworkers’ compound when two automatons came in with the dead body of a woman. It was the first dead body I had seen, and the sight of it in the works surprised me. Then they fed it into the furnace, and I realised that they were using it for fuel as if it were a barrow of lignite!

  I should have been sufficiently hardened by now, but I confess that this sudden revelation of the lack of respect of these people for the last remains of their dead came as a shock to me. It was as if the desecration of the body that had been carried out in life had been perpetuated in death.

  When I spoke to the foreman about it, however, he did not understand what I was trying to convey to him, and, thinking that I was merely asking for information about fuel supplies, he informed me that all the workers in a compound, from the highest to the lowest, served, on death, as fuel for the furnaces of the compound, if it had furnaces, and that all furnaces had, as part of their fuel supplies, the dead bodies of its people who lived within a fixed radius of their site, so that in this way the dead of the whole city and its neighbourhood were apportioned out in death, as in life, to the service of the State.

  As I listened to him explaining how the slavery of this people is continued on into death, I saw that it was no use trying to get him to understand the feelings which his words were producing in me, and, instead, I fell to wondering whether, under the profound crisis of death, and the pangs that some people suffer when dying, there is not, between the two slaveries which this race has to undergo, a moment before death in which some of them, at least, wake up from the hypnotic sleep in which they have spent their lives, and for a brief interval revert to normal human beings. Does the deep unchanging situation, inside which they shelter themselves, fall away from them at death? Do they stare, with feelings similar to those I felt, at the empty masks round them? Do they call out against the isolation in which they find themselves, or try miserably to remember what had become of their lives since last they had individual consciousness as little children?

  If there is such an interval under the pangs of death for these people, the ordeal of dying must be greater than on earth. I was never able to discover whether this is so or not, for, although there are special enclosures for the sick in each compound, and I was shown through these, I never saw anybody dying, and the patients I saw in the sick-wards differed in no respect in appearance or look from the others.

  As hypnotic treatment and suggestion play a most important part in their curative processes, it is probable that, in the great majority of cases, they are able to drug the dying into a hypnotic state deep enough to prevent their awaking to individual life, even under the pangs of death.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Battle Without a Morrow

  AFTER I had visited the wood and metal enclosures, I was brought to a variety of other industrial compounds which it would be tedious to describe in detail, since there was no scientific interest to be found in them.

  In pottery, for instance, in which one might have expected these people to excel, since the Roman pottery of the Empire was excellent, I could not see that they had even been able to retain the competence of their ancestors.

  It was the same in other branches akin to this. If, for instance, they ever knew how to make glass, they must have forgotten the art, for I saw no sign of any glass, either in use or in the making. Spectacles are, of course, unknown to them as they were to the ancient Romans.

  Their cloth-making I found somewhat more interesting, mainly because the material from which they make cloth is necessarily different from ours, and the processes by which they make it had therefore some novelty.

  The material from which they make their very fine cloth is the silk stuff spun by great spiders of the same size and type as the lassoing brutes that I had met in the higher lands. They breed these in captivity for this purpose, and keep them in enormous iron enclosures.

  Their coarser cloth is made from two types of fibre, one got from the bark of a certain bush that grows freely there, and the other from long stalks, like seaweed rods, that grow in marshy ground. The latter are the chief source of their coarser cloth, and are treated somewhat like flax with us, being pulled up by the roots, then steeped in water, dried on hot stones, beaten heavily with clubs, loosened into fibres, and combed.

  The spinning of the fibre is entirely in the hands of women, and the sight of the work in the spinning compounds affected me strangely. Like all the other industrial processes of these people, it is done in an elementary way, by hand. The women use a cane distaff and a wood spindle, so that, from the point of view of processes, there is little difference between their method and that of our own women spinners in the “out-by” farms.

  It was the combination of this resemblance in working methods with the difference of expression and atmosphere in these under-earth women that moved me.

  One of the most joyous memories of my childhood had been the sight of the women in the “out-by” farms chatting and laughing so merrily at their work that it was an intense joy to watch them, and the sight of these female automatons, with their dead faces, drawing down the raw material from the distaff, jamming it into the notch of the spindle, and turning the spindle, hurt sharply, through the contrast between their inhuman mechanism of movement and expression and the joyous associations I had with spinning at home.

  It was the same with the weaving. Here again I found that the work was entirely in the hands of women, and was done in a primitive way, with simple hand-looms, as I had seen it done in far-out villages of the North Country. There were differences, since the weaving of these underground women is carried out from below upwards and their shuttles are not two-sided, with the result that they have to be turned round each time, so that the point may come in the direction of the throw, but the close resemblance of the work to that which I knew as a boy was sufficient to rack my mind through its associations.

  For some reason or other the sight of these women seemed to bring closer to me the doom that had fallen on that race than the sight of the men automatons had done in the other enclosures.

  When I left the compounds of the cloth-making industry, I felt as a man might feel who had been shown some peculiar form of madness into which he himself would soon be thrust.

  Next to the compounds of the cloth-makers I found those for the making up of the materials into garments.

 
There is little for me to record of these enclosures, as the garments of these people are of the simplest type, and the pieces of cloth are woven to the right size at the beginning, so that they can be worn with small alteration; but, again, the associations were painful, since the women were working with thimbles, scissors, and needles that differed little from those used by my mother, and the sight of these beings, with their blind, unseeing faces, working with these familiar things, brought back a flood of memories.

  One would have expected that, since all the rest of their humanity had been sacrificed to their work, the women would be absorbed in it. The contrary was the case.

  They have been so completely sacrificed to their work that they are in a profound sense nonexistent apart from it, since their active existence is in evidence only through their act of work, yet the effect produced by the individual workers on the onlooker is that they have no more contact with the work, or awareness of it, than they have with the other human beings round them.

  It was not that they did not perform their various tasks with thoroughness and efficiency. In that respect, I could not see any sign of defect or unevenness such as one finds amongst workers with us. It was rather that in their work, as in their life, there was no connection between themselves and their task, as if they are unaware of it, unaware of effort, unaware of their own action or of any process arising from themselves.

  This double isolation made me realise more fully than before the gulf into which they had fallen, and to realise it all the more because I had been under the illusion that, in the case of the skilled workers, the concentration on their work, aroused by their absorption in it, would take the place, to some extent at least, of the individuality and human joy that they had lost.