The three were silent for a time. It was Mark again who spoke first.
'I should have thought,' he said, 'that it would have been a good move from their point of view to put those lights out.' He looked up at the blue-white globes, shimmering unharmed in the rocky roof. 'The confusion would just about put paid to our defence: they'd be almost certain to break through somewhere.'
'Several reasons,' Gordon explained. 'For one thing they're not easy to break. They may look like glass, but they're tough. And, for another, these pygmies are more scared of the dark than any kid. It's just about the worst kind of bogey to them. Maybe you didn't realise it, but they've spent all their lives under these lamps, and that's tied up with the third reason. It'd be sacrilege to bust them. Their lives depend on them, and they all but worship them.' At Mark's look of inquiry he amplified: 'They're symbols of Ra—you remember, he was holding one in that carving. If they break one, they are insulting him. If they break several, he is so angry that he sends darkness to plague them. According to Mahmud they are so used to light that they can't think of darkness as being just an absence of it, but they fear it as a concrete something by which Ra manifests displeasure. It's for that reason more than any other that they're so scared of it. And even that's not a new idea—I seem to remember something about a plague of darkness over Egypt, and the Egyptians didn't like that, much though they knew what night meant. For these little devils it must be terrifying— like being struck blind.'
Mark was scarcely convinced. Destruction of the lights seemed such an obvious way to create utter confusion. The globes might be tough, but the pygmies' slung stones travelled forcefully____They were not unbreakable; he remembered Gordon's own story of one smashed experimentally. Such a superstition as Gordon suggested seemed a slender screen between themselves and chaos. He said as much. Gordon shook his head.
'It's the safest defence we could have. There's no better guarantee than a good, well-grounded superstition. The decisions of the Hague Court or a Geneva conference are flimsy compared with it. You read a bit of anthropology one day—it'll surprise you. People can bind fetters round themselves that they can never break—though they may be beyond reason and safety.' His voice grew quieter and less emphatic as he ruminated: 'Superstition and suggestion through superstition are greatly neglected powers nowadays. I don't mean that there aren't plenty of superstitious conventions and taboos about; there are, but they're formless and ill-controlled, and very often conflicting. There's a great influence over men and women just wasted and running to seed today. Instead of using it, the leaders have dropped it. The only way they attempt to control people now is by mass suggestion at a late age. That works, but it's inefficient; it has to be boosted continually. You can easily work up a nation to war pitch, but it takes continuous energetic propaganda to keep it there. If you allow them to think for themselves, they'll slack off, and it becomes progressively more difficult to keep up your propaganda so that they shan't think for themselves sooner or later. What's more, mass suggestion always begets a certain amount of counter mass suggestion—pure cussedness to begin with, as likely as not, but it goes on growing because of the defaulters who join it when they find they've been hoaxed by the original suggestion. Damned silly way of going on. Reminds me of those advertisements about increasing your height—it can be done, but the right time to do it is while you're young. In the same way, suggestion will work on an adult, but if you want to make a good job of it you've got to start on the infant. The church has the right idea. It got in as soon as it decently could with a baptism service. When they followed that up with a proper course of training, they'd got the poor little blighter just where they wanted him. He couldn't think for himself. He thought he could, mind you; he often thought he was doing no end of a fine think, but that didn't matter; he was only playing a kind of game with the rules already set in his mind. In practice, he was only crawling around in a mental pen.
'That was the way with most of the old religions, and a lot of them lasted a long time. They bust up mostly because they used their power wrongly, not because it weakened. Some of them didn't give enough crawling room; they drew the walls of the pen closer and closer until something was bound to give. Others let the walls fall into disrepair so that the people inside could look out and see that the country round about wasn't so bad after all. And then they lost their great power—all the western nations have lost it, but a good superstitious upbringing still holds the primitives.'
'That was a sign that the power of superstition was ending,' Mark interrupted. 'The people were turning to reason instead.'
'Reason, my foot. They won't be ready for reason for thousands of years—if they last that long. My God, just look at the world, man. Reason!'
'But it's true. The religions are dying—in the west, anyhow. I know people make a vulgar noise about them, but that's because they're not convinced—if they were, there'd be no reason for the noise.'
'Rot. The religions aren't dying. Just because you give a thing a different name it doesn't change it. You can have a religion without an anthropomorphic figure-head, just as you can have a state without a king. Democracy, Socialism, Communism, they're all religions.'
Mark objected. 'No, they're political theories.'
'Well, when did you ever find a religion that wasn't somehow bound up with a political theory? I tell you they are just as much religions as Christianity, Mohammedanism, or Buddhism. They are a superstition. What else but a superstition could produce the fantastic idea that all men are equal? Reason certainly could not. What but superstition could set people forming laws on a Lowest Common Denominator basis, and forcing brilliant intellects to abide by them? Is it a home of reason which devotes so much of its energy and wealth to preserving its unfit that its fit are neglected and become unfit themselves? And these, mind you, are recent developments among people whom you say are "turning to reason". Reason! Oh, my God!'
Gordon got up and stumped away. Smith grinned at Mark.
'Great guy on the spielin', ain't he? Only trouble is that he doesn't know what he wants any more than the rest of us. Still, it's been handy havin' him around; gets the boys talkin' and arguin' so that they forget 'emselves for a bit.' He got up. 'I'm goin' over to have a look at Ed and his bunch. Comin'?'
They made a detour and came upon the group from the rear. Certain parts of the cave had become unhealthy since Ed's artillery school had started. Slings are instruments requiring a nicety of operation only to be attained by practice, wherefore the danger area in front of the tyros was of considerable width. In a mushroom head, leaned against the wall for target duty, two stones had lodged. Ed turned his usual cheerful countenance.
'Made it—once,' he declared proudly.
'Out of how many?' Smith asked.
'Oh, lay off that. This ain't a Tommy gun—you gotta get to know it.'
'Whose is the other?'
'Zickle's. That nigger's gonna do big things.'
Zickle gave a show of white teeth.
'Yes, me gottim,' he agreed.
The two stood watching the practice for a while. The speed and force of the missiles was formidable, though the aim remained erratic. Ed, undiscouraged, pointed out that when the attack should come there would be a lot of targets, not just one.
As they wandered on, leaving him to it, Mark inquired as to progress on the tunnel. Smith answered him with the usual 'any time now'.
'Do you know what's above?' Mark jerked his thumb at the roof.
'Not for sure. What're you gettin' at?'
'Just this—suppose it's a hill or a mountain?'