“Then go,” he answered. “Go forth to a deeper experience—the experience of the darkness from which we have learned our wisdom.”
He paused, watching me.
My calm was gone. I was to get another respite, another chance of regaining life. My heart was thumping.
He read my thoughts, and began to answer them.
“No,” came his message, “do not think that you can escape, or that you can stay away from us and live.
“No man can escape from the territory of our State without our sanction, and no man of human breed can live permanently alone in the darkness and remain as you are. Such a man must either die in madness or seek refuge in the depths of life, as we have done.
“Under that sun, of which your mind is so full, men may live as you do. Here in the darkness men cannot do it. Your sun may give some sort of fusion to the shifting mass of little tendencies which you call emotions, feelings, thoughts. The darkness will not do so. It will disintegrate the man who cannot fuse himself into a unity. All that you will learn from the outer darkness and the inner darkness that it releases.”
He paused, staring at me, then went on:
“Perhaps you will choose to die in the darkness rather than reintegrate.
“Perhaps you will merely disintegrate. Then we shall reintegrate you, if we can find you.
“Sheltered by our civilisation, you have seen nothing of the causes of it, only the results, which you do not yet understand. Go, therefore, and discover, through your own experiences, why you must be as we are.”
“That I will never discover,” I said. “I will never come back to be absorbed.”
“You will be forced to, but not by us. You will be absorbed, whether you come back or not.
“If you do not return to us, the forces of darkness will absorb you—disintegrate you and absorb you.
“Do not think that you are to be left to die—thrown to the powers of darkness.
“Whenever you come to a settlement of the people, they will supply you with the necessaries of life, but they cannot supply you with more than that. They can only help you with external things. They cannot help you to face the powers of darkness, since you are not one of them. That struggle is a struggle of the soul that you must wage alone.
“No other man can help an isolated soul. Now, go.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Search Begins
I LEFT THE ENCLOSURE of the Master of Knowledge with a feeling of liberation and exhilaration that seems pathetically ludicrous to me now, when I remember the slightness of the grounds I had for it and the experiences that followed. Yet it was natural at the time that there should have been a great swing round, in my mind, from fear to relief.
Before my visit to the Master I had been a prisoner, with a sentence of madness or death not merely hanging over me, but about to fall. Now I had got another respite. The doom had not been averted, but it had been postponed. Not merely that, but I was free to go through the land and use my own efforts to try to attain my two objectives—the discovery of my father and the finding of some exit by which he and I could escape.
What if my respite arose from the belief of the leaders of the people that I had no chance whatever of gaining my ends?
They were the masters of all the knowledge or wisdom that had been accumulated to deal with the problems of their land, and they must be in a good position to judge of my chances of success. But even they could not be sure. They understood the difficulties and risks of my task, but how could they understand fully the resources that an individual man, brought up to rely on his own powers, could draw upon to overcome obstacles and attain his ends?
In any case, my task was there to be tackled, clear and straight in front of me. I had no choice. I had come down to this world to rescue my father, and I was at last getting a chance to begin my attempt.
I could not complain of my luck so far. I was, indeed, luckier than my foolhardiness had deserved. I might have met with any fate. I might have found a people who would have murdered or enslaved me. I might have succumbed to any of the other dangers that beset me. I had come through all that without loss or maiming so far, and now, even though the knowledge of the country and the people that I had gained was not such as to aid me materially in my search, I had, nevertheless, some conception of the nature of my task.
It is true that that knowledge was, in a sense, perhaps more paralysing than ignorance. At least, it might have been so to a mind differently constituted from mine. The people that I had to deal with were as monstrous as the land they dwelt in. Even though I had received gentle treatment from them, it would in one sense, and that a very profound one, have been less desolating for me to have fallen into the hands of the lowest and most ferocious type of savage.
No horror of torture or ill treatment, short of death itself, could be as disastrous to the mind of a man of the upper earth as the environment in which I found myself; and on the upper earth there is always hope of rescue, of the arrival of help, of some normal means of escape. Here there was no contact with another human being, no hope of rescue, little chance of escape, unless, by a miracle, I could find some exit other than the river by which I had been carried into the Central Sea.
I knew that looking for such an exit in so great a space was like looking for a needle in a bundle of straw. I might go on until the end of my life, if they allowed me, or for centuries, if I had them, without finding any such exit, even if one existed. Nevertheless, the rebound had come in my heart.
As I walked out of the enclosure I was full of hope. I was at least free to try, to use my own powers, to see what I was up against and measure my strength with the strength of the forces of darkness. My own initiative was back with me again. That absence had been heavy on my spirit, making heavier still the fate that had been coming towards me—that absence of all power of action.
I was not like my mother; that smile of hers on the evening of my father’s disappearance—it had wrung my heart, the patience of it. I was different. I must go out into the open, on my own, spend my trouble in action, even if the action led nowhere in the end—die in action, if it failed.
But it might at least lead somewhere. I had got into their land without their knowledge. Where a man could get in, he might get out, even if, in the end, my way led up that tunnel, against the torrent. There might be a way over the mountain it ran under—over some mountain. There must be some way round the land beyond the cliff through which I had come down.
When I left the Master of Knowledge, the guide took me to the bathing-enclosure and, after that, to the eating-room. When I had eaten and was ready to go, he brought me into a little cell off the bathing-chamber and there, to my joy, I found my clothes and my outfit complete. Nothing had been taken away or injured. They were giving me back all my own things.
My joy at seeing and touching them would hardly be credible to a man living under normal conditions on the upper earth. It was as if I had suddenly made contact with human life again.
I took up each article of clothing and fingered it with delight. I took the things out of the knapsack, every one of them, and handled them as a miser might handle his gold. A flood of memories and associations poured over me. I felt my hands trembling.
I saw the Wall again in the May sunlight, the masses of flowers, the country lying below, the little farms under the haze of heat. I heard the barking of dogs, the lowing of cattle, the cries of the children at play, the sound of the carts on the country roads. They were all in my own clothes, in my knapsack, in the absurd little things that it held, and the courage that came back to me at the sight and the touch of these familiar things—how could it be credible to a man on the upper earth?
Immediately I began to lay my plans for escape. My head was suddenly full of them.
First to be considered was the circumstance in which I would have to work—the fact that the life of this people was a coastal one based on the Central Sea, and that that sea was not fresh water but salt wat
er. As it was formed by the great river that had carried me through the tunnel under the northern cliff, it looked as if that river must itself be merely an underground branch of the seas of the upper earth. That might be an important factor or it might not, but it was in some way encouraging to the mind to think that the Central Sea was fed from the upper earth. If its waters did not come from some leakage in the ocean floor on earth, it would be difficult to account for its two characteristics—namely, that it was flowing salt water and that it supported life abundantly. Water that has not had some sort of contact with the sun, and been vitalised even indirectly by its rays, could hardly support life. At least it could hardly produce life with the fertility with which that great water produced and sustained it.
It is true that, in the higher ranges of the mountains down which I had descended, I had found a rich vegetable life and some forms of higher life, but these regions are apparently watered by rain that comes through the upper surface and vitalised by some rays of a nature not known to me —rays probably generated by the sunlight, and so strong that they can pierce through the upper crust of the earth.
The same forces to a lesser extent sustained vegetable life on the lower lands. But the main body of life existed in the Central Sea and on its shores. Its abundance of fish was the chief food-supply of the people. The serpents and lizards that lived on its shores and swamps formed a large part of the remainder, and the people cultivated the fungi and the various sea-weedy vegetables to give variety to their dishes and counteract the effects of a preponderant fish diet.
This, then, was the geographical framework in which I had to work.
The eastern shores, as far as I could gather during my visits to the schools, were, except at their southern end, a tumble of precipitous rocks and mountains, with little food-supply and only a sparse population of fishermen and snake-hunters. On the western shore, however, there was a fairly broad strip of land between the lake and the impassable cliffs that, they had said, bar all exit to the west. Along this, the settlements of the people were scattered, wherever there was a sufficient supply of fresh water from the hill-streams, and a sufficient food-supply to make each group self-supporting and at the same time capable of exporting its quota to the chief settlement.
All of this I had gathered in a variety of ways during my stay in the city. Now, as I was getting ready for my journey, I kept turning it over and over in my mind.
When I had bathed, eaten, and dressed in my own clothes, I came out of the eating-house with the guide, along a road that led through the enclosures of the distributing grades, and so past the outer settlements to the north-western boundary of the “city.” There we stood on the edge of a plateau looking out on dark lands that stretched away to the west and north.
For a few moments we stood there. Then he pointed to the northward and turned and left me. Once again I was alone.
“Again alone!” The thought seemed an absurdity. I had never been anything else. Ever since I came, he, or someone exactly like him, had been with me at all times, except when I slept, yet I had never had the slightest contact with him or them. I didn’t even know whether the man who brought me to the boundary of the city was the same man or one of many that had guided me before, so similar are all these people to one another in shape, size, and lack of all distinguishing mark either in body or personality. When he left me, I felt no loss of companionship, since there had been none, not even such as the lowest form of animal would have given. An insect or some other entirely alien creature might possibly have given me as little. It could certainly not have given me less, and, though I was now leaving the chief human settlement of that land to go out into the darkness of the empty spaces, I believed that I could experience scarcely worse effects from the most appalling loneliness of its barren lands than I had done from the total lack of all contact amongst its people. I had, indeed, very little understanding of what confronted me.
I stood and looked round. Behind me the “city” lay silent, inconspicuous, invisible, except for the dim lights that glimmered faintly behind the nearest enclosures. In front of me the land stretched dim and mysterious, with dots of phosphorescent growths glimmering here and there through the darkness. On my right I knew that the waters of the Central Sea stretched away to the northward, but there were no gleams of light in the vault above me, and I could only guess that the sea was there, and that the three dim lights that moved over it were the lights of vessels. To the left a space of dim luminosity, that I guessed to be a cultivated field of fungi, broke the darkness at some distance away. Otherwise I could see nothing.
I stood peering into the darkness and thinking out the best way of tackling the job that lay before me. My mind was full of concentration and yet full of irrelevancies. I thought absurdly of Tom, the owl that my father had given me for a present on my sixth birthday, and that used to come to him when he hooted. If Tom were here now, he could help me to track him in the darkness. The absurd idea made the darkness feel familiar, the problem not much more difficult than a similar task on earth. My father was in this land. That was certain. He was somewhere—perhaps quite near me. How to find him? That was the first problem. How to begin? If I could only have discovered what was his grade or condition! But they had told me nothing, except that they had “transformed” him and “absorbed” him. The Master of Knowledge had said that he was willing to be absorbed, happy. If that were so, I felt that I could safely assume that they were using him in some condition where his will could be exercised. What such a condition might be, it was not so easy to guess. They would hardly make a stranger the head of one of their settlements, or put him in command of a ship. He would have been useless in a factory or farm, and it was unlikely that they would entrust an outsider with the post of teacher, no matter how completely he had given himself up to them. What, then, could he be?
Unless I could get some clue to the question of my father’s probable position, it would be difficult to imagine where he would be likely to be found. Possibly in the city which I was leaving; but, if he were in the city, I should have little chance of ever finding him. They would make sure of that. Nor would there be any chance of his becoming aware of my presence. I knew that also. I had ceased to import into their world the circumstance of the upper earth. The city was so great an assemblage of people that, even if I had been allowed to search it for him, I should have had little chance of finding him, unless I had most unlikely luck in my search. In any case, all that was over and done with. It was clear that I had no longer the liberty to look for him in the city. I was being sent out of it because these people believed that, in the shelter of its comforts, I would never learn to understand the need for their system. I was not free to return to the city. I was only free to wander through the country and the smaller settlements of their people. It was quite possible that my father was in one of these smaller settlements, and, if he were, there would certainly be a much better chance of my meeting him, or of his meeting me, during my visit to such a settlement, than of our meeting in the chief town.
My best plan, therefore, seemed to be to go along the shores of the lake, from colony to colony of this people, to search each settlement for my father and also to use each settlement as a centre from which to explore the country at the back and the possibility of finding some way out over the cliffs or the mountains.
With these plans, I started on the second stage of my wanderings with a feeling that was almost one of gaiety. The making of definite plans again, the feeling of my own clothes and my own knapsack, the sense of freedom, all gave me a confidence which was as unfounded as it was short-lasting. I had not gone half a mile before I discovered this.
The ground on which the city stands is a wide, low plateau of firm, dry land that came to an end a short distance from the point where I started on my journey. When I descended from this plateau I found the ground slimy and slippery underfoot, and almost completely dark. There were few fungoid growths, and, apart from these, no phosphorescence, and, although
I had my electric torch, I found the going slow and difficult. In a little while my torch went out and I had to stumble on, in a darkness that was almost complete, over ground that would not have been easy even under a good light.
They had put into my knapsack some phosphorescent balls, of the type they use as lanterns on dark paths. I took one of these and held it in front, but, in that darkness, its light was too feeble to do more than prevent my falling over obstacles that lay in my path. There was an occasional fungoid growth that lit the way with a dim point of light, but I began at last to realise the conditions that I was going to be up against as I went forward, groping, my phosphorus ball held in front and my feet dragging through invisible slime.
Before I had been an hour on the journey I understood still better the nature of the ordeal to which I was being subjected. In this darkness I could see nothing, discover nothing, learn nothing, except the one thing that the Master wanted me to learn, namely, that I could not do without the help of the people. If I reached a settlement, they would supply me with food and other necessaries whenever I needed them, but these things were to be supplied to me only so that I might be enabled to live through such suffering as would hand me over to them, broken and defeated, to do with as they wished. Perhaps they had treated my father to the same lesson before they had absorbed him. Again I began to think of the eyes of my white rabbit as it lay under the stoat.
Before my guide had left me I had asked him how far it was to the nearest human habitations, but he had, as usual, made no answer. I began to wonder how far it could be. A long way off, probably, and all the time spent in travelling to it would be mere waste—waste of time and strength, since my father would not be anywhere in this outer darkness, and, if he were, I could not find him. And there could be no exit here on these barren lowlands, only up in the mountains— wherever they were.
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