Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) (6 page)

Colabromania, sporadic at first, assumed the proportions of an epidemic that swept spirally over the world of Logicalism, and in six weeks had carried off all the sincerest and ice-coldest logicians. There remained only the defeatists and the luke-warm logicians, who carried on the system more than half-heartedly until the beginning of the Sophocratic epoch, in which Pantisocratic theory was abandoned and the responsibility for forming a new ideology was entrusted to the Anthropological Council. Its members were charged to decide under what social conditions mankind, viewed dispassionately as livestock, though with due allowance made for certain ineradicable artistic, literary and religious impulses, lived in the greatest concord and health; and, at the same time, how to clear away the detritus of the two previous epochs and safeguard the dwindling natural resources of the world. They decided that without a new religion nothing could be done on a large scale to alter the habits of humanity; but that a new religion could spring only from primitive soil – it could not be inculcated in the over-civilized. However, when they attempted to deduce practical remedies from these conclusions, they had to confess themselves baffled.

Then an Israeli Sophocrat named ben-Yeshu wrote a book,
A Critique of Utopias
, that greatly impressed his colleagues in Southern Europe, America and Africa. From a detailed and learned analysis of some seventy
Utopias
, including Plato’s
Timaeus
and
Republic
, Bacon’s
New Atlantis
, Campanella’s
Civitas Solis
, Fénelon’s
Voyage en Solente
, Cabot’s
Voyage en Icarie
, Lytton’s
Coming Race
, Morris’s
News from Nowhere
, Butler’s
Erewhon
, Huxley’s
Brave New World
, and various works of the twenty-first to the twenty-fourth centuries, he traced the history of man’s increasing discontent with civilization as it developed and came to a practical conclusion: that ‘we must retrace our steps, or perish’.

He recommended ‘anthropological enclaves’, the setting aside of small territories in Lithuania, North Wales (which had escaped the devastation of South Wales and England), Anatolia, the Catalan Pyrenees, Finland and Libya, and the re-erection there, as far as possible, of social and physical conditions as they had existed in prehistoric and early historical times. These enclaves were to represent successive stages of the development of civilization, from a Palaeolithic enclave in Libya to a Late Iron Age one in the Pyrenees; and were to be sealed off from the rest of the world for three generations, though kept under continuous observation by field-workers directly responsible to the Anthropological Council. Ben-Yeshu’s theory was that ‘these experiments will supply the necessary data as to when and why the freight train of civilization leapt the rails’.

His suggestion was officially adopted, but it was found impossible to recruit sufficient numbers of volunteers for the enclaves, and the Anthropological Council turned down a suggestion that these should become penal colonies for delinquents of both sexes: they pointed out that ‘maladjustment to Sophocratic life was no guarantee of adjustability to less highly developed forms’, and that unless a better type of human being could be bred as a result of the experiments, these would be worthless. At that point a sudden epidemic of itching paralysis (deliberately, it seems, induced by the Council) made the Orkneys and Shetlands uninhabitable, and the survivors were persuaded to enter the Bronze and Early Iron Age enclaves and live the life prescribed by the anthropologists, with a guarantee of release after fifteen years if conditions should prove intolerable. The palaeolithic and neolithic enclaves were never, in fact, occupied, but those of the Bronze and Early Iron Age proved so successful that it was found easy to recruit colonists, mostly from Catalonia, for the Middle and Late Iron Age enclaves; the Late Iron Age was held to end before the invention of gunpowder and the printing press and the discovery of America. No infiltration was allowed into these enclaves, but after three generations they became overcrowded and the occupants were invited to send colonists to a much larger region that had meanwhile been prepared for them, consisting of the entire island of Crete. Here they were introduced to such natural products as tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco, red peppers, soya and a rice-like grain called
dana –
all of which had hitherto been withheld from them as being anachronisms – and instructed in their cultivation and use.

Under their occupation the island became extraordinarily fertile, and presently the original enclaves were closed and the inhabitants taken to Crete. Together the five communities evolved a new religion, closely akin to the pre-Christian religion of Europe and linked with the festivals of their agricultural year and the antique mysteries of their handicrafts (imposed on their grand-parents by the Council, after long and acrimonious argument in committee); but with the Mother-goddess Mari as the Queen of Heaven. The New Cretans, no longer the subject of anthropological research, were now regarded as ‘the seed-bed of a Golden Age’, and when their swan-necked wooden galleys put into the port of Corinth, where they traded food and handicrafts for metal ore, china clay and pedigree cattle, the sailors had great trouble in keeping off would-be immigrants. Despite all precautions, illegal landings on the island itself became frequent, and once there, the immigrant was either accepted or destroyed; never sent back. The population increased rapidly, and the spread of the New Cretan system was further stimulated by apprenticeship: orphans of good physique and intelligence were sent there from all over the world, but the New Cretans had the right of refusing any that they did not like. A generation later, the islands of Rhodes and Cyprus were set aside for colonization.

The limitations on the use of mechanical contrivances, which had been imposed for historical reasons on the original colonists, were jealously preserved by their descendants. Never having had a chance to become used to explosives, power-driven vehicles, the telephone, electric light, domestic plumbing and the printing press, they had no need to legislate about their destruction, as (speaking of Utopias) Samuel Butler’s Erewhonians did; and their view of the quays of Corinth – where they were not permitted to land – did nothing to recommend a more advanced form of living. In fact, the sailors made the voyage with increasing distaste: they called Corinth ‘the terrible city’, objecting to it on moral and aesthetic grounds. Eventually it was arranged for all trading to take place at Stalinopol, a small port some distance from Corinth and at the quietest hour of the night, when they would not be exposed to the whir of dock machinery, the unceasing blare of amplified dance-music, the ugly outlines of waterside buildings, and the garish, raucous, three-dimensioned cartoon-comedies telecast every hour in mid-air over the harbour.

They elevated this regard for their sensibilities into the religious principle ‘nothing without the hand of love’; meaning, that no product or process was acceptable unless love had a part in it. No product, for example, turned out by a machine, however harmless it might appear, whether a jam-pot, a screw-driver or a box of chocolates, had love in it, and neither had any hand-made goods produced for commercial ends only. An important incident in their new mythology was the Secession of the Drones, who left their hive, repudiated the Queen Bee – their Goddess – and went off to live in a privy where they contrived a mechanical Queen Bee and perpetuated un-love. In this myth, the Drones were led by Machna the god of Science, Dobeis the god of Money and Pill the god of Theft. Ben-Yeshu had stressed the need for the re-establishment of the long-defunct theory of sacred monarchy, and for separating the ecclesiastical side of religion from the magical; the latter should be fostered by every possible means. He pointed out that no writer of a
Utopia
had ever applied himself to make good the damage done by Plato, when he banished poets from his Republic and preached a scornful indifference to poetic myth. ‘If we strengthen the poets and let them become the acknowledged legislators of the new world,’ ben-Yeshu wrote confidently, ‘magic will come into its own again, bringing peace and fertility in its train.’

An attempt was made to introduce ‘a mitigated New Cretan system’ into California and New Mexico, but since these mitigations included domestic plumbing, ice-cream machines, watches, rubber-goods and a long list of proprietary drugs, the New Cretans declined to have anything to do with it. Still later they were invited to colonize part of the State of New York on their own terms; but an advance party found it impossible to avoid contact with the press, sightseers and other incidentals of civilization. Nor had they been warned that they would be subject to the State and Federal Laws, as well as to the periodic visits of sanitary and agricultural inspectors, and that a public highway would run through the middle of their territory. They sailed back in their wooden galleys with a report that the climate of North America was too exhilarating, and the soil too denatured by artificial fertilizers, for the successful maintenance of the New Cretan system, even if political conditions were favourable, which they were not.

The
Brief History
was reticent about what happened in the Sophocratic world once the system was well under way in New Crete. There seems to have been a gradual realization that an age had ended and that thenceforth whatever might be done or thought outside New Crete would be anachronistic, since mankind had now been reborn, for better or worse; but with this realization went a good deal of envy, resentment, and even active hostility. However, no serious attempt to wreck the system was made until the Sophocrats lost control, and the people relapsed into savagery; by that time New Crete was strong enough to hold her own against aggressors, not by armed force but by magic – a combined exercise of moral power that debilitated the will of the enemy war-lords and made the soldiers drop their weapons. ‘Three Invasions that Failed’ are commemorated in the
Brief History
– two from America, one from North Africa.

Within five hundred years the system had spread over a great part of the still habitable world and absorbed many inventions of earlier ages which were held to agree with the principle ‘nothing without love’. Some regions, such as Australia, Russia, Central America and Central Asia, were rejected as unsuitable for permanent occupation, cleared of inhabitants and written off as Lands of Mystery; others, such as Western China, Malaya, Central Africa, India and most of North America, were abandoned to degenerate forms of society and called Bad Lands. Eastern China, the East Indies and Japan had been devastated and their inhabitants massacred by
AIRAR
, but its deadly effects had not been permanent, and though uninhabited except for a New Cretan colony in the Pekin district and another in Southern Japan, they came within the boundaries of the new system, as also did the greater part of Africa.

‘Come out and take a look at our world,’ said See-a-Bird later that morning.

‘With pleasure,’ I answered. ‘Who’s coming with us?’

‘Sally’s coming, but not Sapphire or the brothers. Sapphire has business at Court and the three of them have ridden off together.’

‘To the law court?’

‘What’s a law court? – No, the Royal Court at Dunrena, a morning’s walk along the foot of the hill. Sapphire’s saying good-bye to the King.’

‘Is she giving up her duties as a nymph?’

‘No, he’s giving up his duties as a King.’

‘Abdicating?’

‘You may call it that if you like: next month he’s due for death and despoilment.’

‘How very sad,’ I said politely.

‘Not sad at all. Sapphire and the other nymphs are going to congratulate him.’

‘Has he been ill for a long time?’

‘Oh no. He’s in perfect health, so far as I know. But all good things come to an end.’

I asked no more questions for fear of saying something that might hurt their feelings. ‘Is the King going to commit suicide?’ I wondered. ‘Or are death and despoilment only a way of saying that his reign is ended?’ Sometimes these New Cretans had a queer way of expressing themselves.

Sally opened the french windows, and the Interpreter, See-a-Bird and I followed her into the garden. The paths were paved with flags of moss-covered sandstone, and none of them ran quite straight through the smooth, green lawns. It was a very simple garden: a few gnarled apple-trees and leafy rose-bushes, two or three beds of brightly coloured flowers, like zinnias but shorter-stemmed and more profuse in bloom, a curving yew-hedge, an enormous oak, a mulberry-tree, three or four massive weather-worn stone benches, and a little brook running over slate pebbles. No rows of plants or bushes, no level surfaces whatever – the lawns were all slightly undulating – except the water of the fish-pool into which the brook emptied. Sally explained that straight lines, level surfaces and a large variety of flowers fatigued the eye, and that this garden was intended for relaxation. ‘In our gardens we have only the thorned damask-rose and the white moss-rose, and all our cornflowers are blue; we grow no double dahlias and no giant-flowered sweet-peas nor anything of that sort.’

‘Who does grow them, then?’

‘You’ll find thornless tea-roses and huge, pink cabbage-roses and different-coloured cornflowers, and so on, in the gardens of other estates,’ said Sally. ‘This is for magicians only. The orchard and vegetable plots are at the back of the house; the herbary, where we grow plants with magical virtues, is over there beyond the hedge.’

‘I’d like to see it.’

I was taken through a tunnel in the yew-hedge, then down some steps and up again into a polygonal walled enclosure, each side built of a different sort of stone and lined with a different variety of tree; paths converged from the angles of the wall to a round central space and between them grew patches of disappointingly dull-looking shrubs and weeds.

‘They’re arranged in thirteen divisions according to their seasonal virtues,’ explained Sally.