H G Wells Omnibus, page 146
This time, running blindly, I went northeastward, in a direction at right angles to my previous expedition. Once, as I went running headlong up the beach, I glanced over my shoulder and saw his attendant with him. I ran furiously up the slope, over it, then turned eastward along a rocky valley, fringed on either side with jungle. I ran perhaps a mile altogether, my chest straining, my heart beating in my ears, and then, hearing nothing of Montgomery or his man and feeling upon the verge of exhaustion, I doubled sharply back towards the beach, as I judged; and lay down in the shelter of a cane-brake.
There I remained for a long time, too fearful to move, and indeed too fearful even to plan a course of action. The wild scene about me lay sleeping silently under the sun, and the only sound near me was the thin hum of some small gnats that had discovered me. Presently I became aware of a drowsy breathing sound – the soughing of the sea upon the beach.
After about an hour I heard Montgomery shouting my name far away to the north. That set me thinking of my plan of action. As I interpreted it then, this island was inhabited only by these two vivisectors and their animalized victims. Some of these, no doubt, they could press into their service against me, if need arose. I knew both Moreau and Montgomery carried revolvers; and, save for a feeble bar of deal spiked with a small nail, the merest mockery of a mace, I was unarmed.
So I lay still where I was until I began to think of food and drink. And at that moment the real hopelessness of my position came home to me. I knew no way of getting anything to eat; I was too ignorant of botany to discover any resort of root or fruit that might lie about me; I had no means of trapping the few rabbits upon the island. It grew blanker the more I turned the prospect over. At last, in the desperation of my position, my mind turned to the animal-men I had encountered. I tried to find some hope in what I remembered of them. In turn I recalled each one I had seen, and tried to draw some augury of assistance from my memory.
Then suddenly I heard a staghound bay, and at that realized a new danger. I took little time to think, or they would have caught me then, but, snatching up my nailed stick, rushed headlong from my hiding place towards the sound of the sea. I remember a growth of thorny plants with spines that stabbed like penknives. I emerged, bleeding and with torn clothes, upon the lip of a long creek opening northward. I went straight into the waves without a minute’s hesitation, wading up the creek, and presently finding myself knee-deep in a little stream. I scrambled out at last on the westward bank, and, with my heart beating loudly in my ears, crept into a tangle of ferns to await the issue. I heard the dog – it was only one – draw nearer, and yelp when it came to the thorns. Then I heard no more, and presently began to think I had escaped.
The minutes passed, the silence lengthened out, and at last, after an hour of security, my courage began to return to me.
By this time I was no longer very terrified or very miserable. For I had, as it were, passed the limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything. I had even a certain wish to encounter Moreau face to face. And as I had waded into the water, I remembered that if I were too hard pressed at least one path of escape from torment still lay open to me – they could not very well prevent my drowning myself. I had half a mind to drown myself then, but an odd wish to see the whole adventure out, a queer impersonal spectacular interest in myself, restrained me. I stretched my limbs, sore and painful from the pricks of the spiny plants, and stared around me at the trees; and, so suddenly that it seemed to jump out of the green tracery about it, my eyes lit upon a black face watching me.
I saw that it was the simian creature who had met the launch upon the beach. He was clinging to the oblique stem of a palm-tree. I gripped my stick, and stood up facing him. He began chattering. ‘You, you, you,’ was all I could distinguish at first. Suddenly he dropped from the tree, and in another moment was holding the fronds apart, and staring curiously at me.
I did not feel the same repugnance towards this creature that I had experienced in my encounters with the other Beast Men. ‘You,’ he said, ‘in the boat.’ He was a man then – at least, as much of a man as Montgomery’s attendant – for he could talk.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I came in the boat. From the ship.’
‘Oh!’ he said, and his bright restless eyes travelled over me, to my hands, to the stick I carried, to my feet, to the tattered places in my coat and the cuts and scratches I had received from the thorns. He seemed puzzled at something. His eyes came back to my hands. He held his own hand out, and counted his digits slowly, ‘One, Two, Three, Four, Five – eh?’
I did not grasp his meaning then. Afterwards I was to find that a great proportion of these Beast People had malformed hands, lacking sometimes even three digits. But guessing this was in some way a greeting, I did the same thing by way of reply. He grinned with immense satisfaction. Then his quick roving glance went round again. He made a swift movement, and vanished. The fern fronds he had stood between came swishing together.
I pushed out of the brake after him, and was astonished to find him swinging cheerfully by one lank arm from a rope of creepers that looped down from the foliage overhead. His back was to me.
‘Hullo!’ said I.
He came down with a twisting jump, and stood facing me. ‘I say,’ said I, ‘where can I get something to eat?’
‘Eat!’ he said. ‘Eat man’s food now.’ And his eyes went back to the swing of ropes. ‘At the huts.’
‘But where are the huts?’
‘Oh!’
‘I’m new, you know.’
At that he swung round, and set off at a quick walk. All his motions were curiously rapid. ‘Come along,’ said he. I went with him to see the adventure out. I guessed the huts were some rough shelter, where he and some more of these Beast People lived. I might perhaps find them friendly, find some handle in their minds to take hold of. I did not know yet how far they were from the human heritage I ascribed to them.
My ape-like companion trotted along by my side, with his hands hanging down and his jaw thrust forward. I wondered what memory he might have in him. ‘How long have you been on this island?’ said I.
‘How long?’ he asked. And, after having the question repeated, he held up three fingers. The creature was little better than an idiot. I tried to make out what he meant by that, and it seems I bored him. After another question or two, he suddenly left my side and sprang at some fruit that hung from a tree. He pulled down a handful of prickly husks, and went on eating the contents. I noted this with satisfaction, for here, at least, was a hint for feeding. I tried him with some other questions, but his chattering prompt responses were, as often as not, at cross-purposes with my question. Some few were appropriate, others quite parrot-like.
I was so intent upon these peculiarities that I scarcely noted the path we followed. Presently we came to trees, all charred and brown, and so to a bare place covered with a yellow-white incrustation, across which went a drifting smoke, pungent in whiffs to nose and eyes. On our right, over a shoulder of bare rock, I saw the level blue of the sea. The path coiled down abruptly into a narrow ravine between two tumbled and knotty masses of blackish scoriae.2 Into this we plunged.
It was extremely dark, this passage, after the blinding sunlight reflected from the sulphurous ground. Its walls grew steep, and approached one another. Blotches of green and crimson drifted across my eyes. My conductor stopped suddenly. ‘Home,’ said he, and I stood on the floor of a chasm that was at first absolutely dark to me. I heard some strange noises, and thrust the knuckles of my left hand into my eyes. I became aware of a disagreeable odour like that of a monkey’s cage ill-cleaned. Beyond, the rock opened again upon a gradual slope of sunlit greenery, and on either hand the light smote down through a narrow channel into the central gloom.
XII
THE SAYERS OF THE LAW
Then something cold touched my hand. I started violently, and saw close to me a dim pinkish thing, looking more like a flayed child than anything else in the world. The creature had exactly the mild but repulsive features of a sloth, the same low forehead and slow gestures. As the first shock of the change of light passed, I saw about me more distinctly. The little sloth-like creature was standing and staring at me. My conductor had vanished.
This place was a narrow passage between high walls of lava, a crack in its knotted flow; and on either side interwoven heaps of sea-mat, palm fans and reeds leaning against the rock, formed rough and impenetrably dark dens. The winding way up the ravine between these was scarcely three yards wide, and was disfigured by lumps of decaying fruit pulp and other refuse which accounted for the disagreeable stench of the place.
The little pink sloth creature was still blinking at me when my Ape Man reappeared at the aperture of the nearest of these dens, and beckoned me in. As he did so a slouching monster wriggled out of one of the places further up this strange street, and stood up in featureless silhouette against the bright green beyond, staring at me. I hesitated – had half a mind to bolt the way I had come – and then, determined to go through with the adventure, gripped my nailed stick about the middle, and crawled into the little evil-smelling lean-to after my conductor.
It was a semicircular space, shaped like the half of a beehive, and against the rocky wall that formed the inner side of it was a pile of variegated fruits, coconuts and others. Some rough vessels of lava and wood stood about the floor, and one on a rough stool. There was no fire. In the darkest corner of the hut sat a shapeless mass of darkness that grunted ‘Hey!’ as I came in, and my Ape Man stood in the dim light of the doorway and held out a split coconut to me as I crawled into the other corner and squatted down. I took it and began gnawing it, as serenely as possible in spite of my tense trepidation and the nearly intolerable closeness of the den. The little pink sloth creature stood in the aperture of the hut, and something else with a drab face and bright eyes came staring over its shoulder.
‘Hey,’ came out of the lump of mystery opposite. ‘It is a man! It is a man!’ gabbled my conductor – ‘a man, a man, a live man, like me.’
‘Shut up!’ said the voice from the dark, and grunted. I gnawed my coconut amid an impressive silence. I peered hard into the blackness, but could distinguish nothing. ‘It is a man,’ the voice repeated. ‘He comes to live with us?’ It was a thick voice with something in it, a kind of whistling overtone, that struck me as peculiar, but the English accent was strangely good.
The Ape Man looked at me as though he expected something. I perceived the pause was interrogative. ‘He comes to live with you,’ I said.
‘It is a man. He must learn the Law.’
I began to distinguish now a deeper blackness in the black, a vague outline of a hunched-up figure. Then I noticed the opening of the place was darkened by two more heads. My hand tightened on my stick. The thing in the dark repeated in a louder tone, ‘Say the words.’ I had missed its last remark. ‘Not to go on all-Fours; that is the Law’ – it repeated in a kind of singsong.
I was puzzled. ‘Say the words,’ said the Ape Man, repeating, and the figures in the doorway echoed this with a threat in the tone of their voices. I realized I had to repeat this idiotic formula. And then began the insanest ceremony. The voice in the dark began intoning a mad litany, line by line, and I and the rest to repeat it. As they did so, they swayed from side to side, and beat their hands upon their knees, and I followed their example. I could have imagined I was already dead and in another world. The dark hut, these grotesque dim figures, just flecked here and there by a glimmer of light, and all of them swaying in unison and chanting:–
‘Not to go on all-Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
‘Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
‘Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
‘Not to claw Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
‘Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’
And so from the prohibition of these acts of folly, on to the prohibition of what I thought then were the maddest, most impossible, and most indecent things one could well imagine. A kind of rhythmic fervour fell on all of us; we gabbled and swayed faster and faster, repeating this amazing law. Superficially the contagion of these brute men was upon me, but deep down within me laughter and disgust struggled together. We ran through a long list of prohibitions, and then the chant swung round to a new formula:
‘His is the House of Pain.
‘His is the Hand that makes.
‘His is the Hand that wounds.
‘His is the Hand that heals.’1
And so on for another long series, mostly quite incomprehensible gibberish to me, about Him, whoever he might be. I could have fancied it was a dream, but never before have I heard chanting in a dream.
‘His is the lightning-flash,’ we sang. ‘His is the deep salt sea.’
A horrible fancy came into my head that Moreau, after animalizing these men, had infected their dwarfed brains with a kind of deification of himself. However, I was too keenly aware of white teeth and strong claws about me to stop my chanting on that account. ‘His are the stars in the sky.’
At last that song ended. I saw the Ape Man’s face shining with perspiration, and my eyes being now accustomed to the darkness, I saw more distinctly the figure in the corner from which the voice came. It was the size of a man, but it seemed covered with a dull grey hair almost like a Skye terrier. What was it? What were they all? Imagine yourself surrounded by the most horrible cripples and maniacs it is possible to conceive, and you may understand a little of my feelings with these grotesque caricatures of humanity about me.
‘He is a five-man, a five-man, a five-man… like me,’ said the Ape Man.
I held out my hands. The grey creature in the corner leaned forward. ‘Not to run on all-Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’ he said. He put out a strangely distorted talon, and gripped my fingers. The thing was almost like the hoof of a deer produced into claws. I could have yelled with surprise and pain. His face came forward and peered at my nails, came forward into the light of the opening of the hut, and I saw with a quivering disgust that it was like the face of neither man nor beast, but a mere shock of grey hair, with three shadowy over-archings to mark the eyes and mouth.
‘He has little nails,’ said this grisly creature in his hairy beard. ‘It is well. Many are troubled with big nails.’
He threw my hand down, and instinctively I gripped my stick. ‘Eat roots and herbs – it is His will,’ said the Ape Man.
‘I am the Sayer of the Law,’ said the grey figure. ‘Here come all that be new, to learn the Law. I sit in the darkness and say the Law.’
‘It is even so,’ said one of the beasts in the doorway.
‘Evil are the punishments of those who break the Law. None escape.’
‘None escape,’ said the Beast Folk, glancing furtively at each other.
‘None, none,’ said the Ape Man. ‘None escape. See! I did a little thing, a wrong thing, once. I jabbered, jabbered, stopped talking. None could understand. I am burned, branded in the hand. He is great, he is good!’
‘None escape,’ said the grey creature in the corner.
‘None escape,’ said the Beast People, looking askance at one another.
‘For everyone the want that is bad,’ said the grey Sayer of the Law. ‘What you will want, we do not know. We shall know. Some want to follow things that move, to watch and slink and wait and spring, to kill and bite, bite deep and rich, sucking the blood…. It is bad. “Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?” ’
‘None escape,’ said a dappled brute standing in the doorway.
‘For everyone the want that is bad,’ said the grey Sayer of the Law. ‘Some want to go tearing with teeth and hands into the roots of things, snuffing into the earth…. It is bad.’
‘None escape,’ said the men in the door.
‘Some go clawing trees, some go scratching at the graves of the dead; some go fighting with foreheads or feet or claws; some bite suddenly, none giving occasion; some love uncleanness.’
‘None escape,’ said the Ape Man, scratching his calf.
‘None escape,’ said the little pink sloth creature.
‘Punishment is sharp and sure. Therefore learn the Law. Say the words,’ and incontinently he began again the strange litany of the Law, and again I and all these creatures began singing and swaying. My head reeled with this jabbering and the close stench of the place, but I kept on, trusting to find presently some chance of a new development. ‘Not to go on all-Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’
We were making such a noise that I noticed nothing of a tumult outside until someone, who, I think, was one of the two Swine Men I had seen, thrust his head over the little pink sloth creature and shouted something excitedly, something that I did not catch. Incontinently those at the opening of the hut vanished, my Ape Man rushed out, the thing that had sat in the dark followed him – I only observed it was big and clumsy, and covered with silvery hair – and I was left alone.
Then before I reached the aperture I heard the yelp of a staghound.
In another moment I was standing outside the hovel, my chair-rail in my hand, every muscle of me quivering. Before me were the clumsy backs of perhaps a score of these Beast People, their misshapen heads half hidden by their shoulder-blades. They were gesticulating excitedly. Other half-animal faces glared interrogation out of the hovels. Looking in the direction in which they faced I saw coming through the haze under the trees beyond the end of the passage of dens the dark figure and awful white face of Moreau. He was holding the leaping staghound back, and close behind him came Montgomery, revolver in hand.
For a moment I stood horror-struck.
I turned and saw the passages behind me blocked by another heavy brute with a huge grey face and twinkling little eyes, advancing towards me. I looked round and saw to the right of me, and half a dozen yards in front of me, a narrow gap in the wall of rock through which a ray of light slanted into the shadows. ‘Stop!’ cried Moreau, as I strode towards this, and then, ‘Hold him!’ At that, first one face turned towards me, and then others. Their bestial minds were happily slow.
