MORE THAN A YEAR AFTER THE FOREGOING: AMONG ROCKS.
My guide has absconded and I am at a loss to comprehend what the last four entries signify, in particular the previous two, which, were they not clearly indited in my own hand, would suggest the gibberish jottings of a dotard, drunkard or dizzard. Can I, in a moment of sublimity (which the Eternal Omniscience may wreak upon whom he listeth) have achieved that logopandocy whose Genesistical root Cromwell’s latinist sectary agrees was split at Babelon, and I hold to be the concluding Revelation of the Holy Ghost operant through mankind generally, and myself especially? And have I since, like an overstrained athlete, lapsed so far below my best achievement as to find its memorials incomprehensible? Did I indeed, when fevered with ague on a foggy island in that wide marsh, write dialects of the tongues of the Cherubim and Seraphim? I doubt. I doubt. However cryptogrammed I am certain that a sentence of the archangelic tongue would twang my discernment with some resonance of pluterperfect Pythagorean jubilee, and these syllables, omnivowelant and omniconsonant, evoke a strangely familiar dulness. No water here, but I suck the dew which distillates between the fibrils of my cloak.
SOME YEARS AFTER THE FOREGOING: A NAMELESS TOWN.
I can describe this place but have no word for it. The speech of the people is so sing-song-sibilant that my ear cannot divide one syllable from another, nor detect the least root of any tongue, ancient or modern, within the recorded frontiers of Europe, Asia, Africa and those twin Columbias so unjustly cartographed and mappamundified as Amerigo Vespucciland. Their writing is no aid to understanding them, for it is hieroglyphical. The figure man I can easily distinguish, but always with some variant, viz. a hat, or the male member more protruberant, or the leggs a-jigging, or the posture prone, so that when I lay my finger on a figure and tilt my head and raize my eyebrows interrogatively, my host makes a sound which is each time completely novel. Maybe they do not use verb, adjective or adverb forms, but make a different noun for the same thing when it is differently engaged or favoured. We too use different noun-names for a man when he is of social rank, or tumescent, or gymnastickal, or dead. E.g. You are a presiding magistrate, you are a fornicator, you are a comedian, you are a corpse.
If the language of this people is indeed a linking of modified qualified nouns it is closer to my Logopandocy than any I have encountered. Do they speak the language used by Adam and Eve before Babel? No. Or if not no, they speak but a parcel of it, for the omnipotent Power who furnished us with these speech-tools of throat, tongue, roof of mouth, teeth and lips, must naturally have provided a language which, like a mighty choir, used these to the full; and though I could easier convey the jabber of these townsfolk by musical notation than by alphabet, their noise is all in the treble register.
The town covers a space of forty-four square miles, enclosed by a low earth embankment of no defensive value at all, but more of that anon. It is the rich metropolis of no nation, standing in a desert where three trade-routes meet, but industry and irrigation have given it an aspect that would keep me here, did pleasure and not a great enterprize drive me. In the early morning I climb up to the citadel, the only building with stone walls. It contains neither arsenal nor garrison, but is employed as a communal warehouse by the paper manufacturers. From here the town is a mass of trees and gardens with almost no houses to be seen, and I gaze across them at the distant but majestic mountains and wonder which divides me from my goal. As the heat of the day increases the dust of the plain beyond the rampart rizes up in a great cloud like a wall with nothing seen above it but the tips of a few snowy peaks. And then I descend to the town spread cool beneath the trees. But here again the names of things defeat me, for can they be called trees which lack bark, branches, twigs and leaves? The stems, though as tall as great elms, are pale, smooth and nearly translucid. A grove of five or six share the one root, but above ground slant and taper away from each other, each supporting a single great scrolled and ferny frond which casts a mild green shadow. Since it never rains here the groves are refreshed by melted mountain snow, brought hither through an aqueduct branching into slender canals floored with copper, furnished also with sluices which divert pure streams into every grove and garden. I have calculated there are no less than 2,000 places in the stone-paved streets and squares where iced water may be obtained free, sprouting freshly from fountains or served by ladles from earthenware reservoirs. These waterworks also contain bream, trout, eels, crayfish and prawns which are the best of their diet, adding savour to vegetables resembling oak, cedar and pine trees, but only a few inches high, and which must be softened by steaming in goblets of perforated bronze. The main manufactures of the place are saddles, swords, satin, silk, but paper most of all, every texture and thickness of paper from translucent tissue to waterproof-stout. Which brings me to their architecture.
Each building is founded on a well-paved stone platform containing a deep cellar. Above this, on a frame of poles, stands a pavilion with paper walls and roof. The visitor does not perceive their flimsiness at first as the women and children, especially in the poor districts, delight to paint these structures with the patterns of mosaic, and marquetry, and glazed tile inlay, so the town appears the richest in the world, though lacking that regularity and symmetry which exalts the architecture of Europe.
Soon after I arrived here a watcher on the citadel’s single tower sounded a great gong which was repeated and re-echoed through every garden and grove. Quickly, but without panic, the squares and streets emptied as the citizens repaired to their homes, where they raized a stone in the foundation, descended to the cellar and sealed themselves in. My host pressed me to join him, but from curiosity I refused and went to my vantage point on the citadel where I sat crosslegged, the only man above ground. Presently, with a thunder of steady hooves, enters a band of tartar cavalry, ferociously visored, armoured and bannered, followed by a tribe of their women and children pushing great carts. The horsemen then ride in circles raizing a great yellyhoo, sounding horns and banging drums while their followers fill the carts with food from the market, goods from the workshops and such furniture and treasures as remain in the houses. The citadel was not attacked, though I was stared upon. My experience of men is, that the worst of them will seldom pester he who remains quiet, unafraid, keeps his weapons hid and offers no violence. When the carts were filled the cavalry set fire to the buildings and departed. The entire metropolis was burned to its foundations in a matter of minutes, after which the plundered citizens emerged and with great stoicism started sweeping away the cinders. I wondered at first why the invaders had not raided the cellars where the rich citizens store the best of their property; but realized this would delay the rebuilding of the city for a long time, giving the tartars less to plunder when they returned, which they do about twice a year. This style of warfare is therefor as civilized as ours. The only folk who lose everything by it are without riches stored below ground, and these folk, who belong to every country, are accustomed to losing. I have now seen the city raided three times, and always by the same tartar tribe. If these predators keep other plundering tribes from the place, then the whole region is more like a European state than the difference of language suggests.
Since the quantifying faculty of numbering and measuring is different from the naming faculty, I hoped that my skill as a geometer might make me useful and admired here, and so it proved. After witnessing the town’s great conflagration I measured the platform for a house in my host’s garden, which nobody was busy upon, and drew on a great scroll of good, smooth paper the plans and perspective elevations of a noble and symmetrical palace in the style of Whitehall, London, and which, using the local methods, could be erected in a few hours at the cost of a few shillings. I offered this to my host, who received it with expressions of pleasure which I could not doubt, and when I made designs for other buildings, drawing upon the memory of my extensive travels, and presented them to my host’s colleagues and neighbours, they also laughed heartily and gave me gifts; so that I believed that in a week or two a nobler style of architecture would prevail, and the whole city have an aspect combining the best features of Aberdeen, Oxford, Paris, Florence, Venice and Imperial Rome. I found later, however, they had no conception of what my outline meant, for they filled between them with tincts of coloured water, very skilfully, producing patterns which they attached to standing screens, frequently upsidedown. I have been here too long, but have yet to find a suitable guide who can guess where I am going.