Allan Quatermain
CHAPTER XIII
ABOUT THE ZU-VENDI PEOPLE
And now the curtain is down for a few hours, and the
actors in this novel drama are plunged in dewy sleep. Perhaps we should
except Nyleptha, whom the reader may, if poetically inclined, imagine lying
in her bed of state encompassed by her maidens, tiring women, guards, and
all the other people and appurtenances that surround a throne, and yet not
able to slumber for thinking of the strangers who had visited a country
where no such strangers had ever come before, and wondering, as she lay
awake, who they were and what their past has been, and if she was ugly
compared to the women of their native place. I, however, not being
poetically inclined, will take advantage of the lull to give some account
of the people among whom we found ourselves, compiled, needless to state,
from information which we subsequently collected.
The name of this country, to begin at the beginning, is
Zu-Vendis, from Zu, 'yellow', and Vendis, 'place or country'. Why it is
called the Yellow Country I have never been able to ascertain accurately,
nor do the inhabitants themselves know. Three reasons are, however, given,
each of which would suffice to account for it. The first is that the name
owes its origin to the great quantity of gold that is found in the land.
Indeed, in this respect Zu-Vendis is a veritable Eldorado, the precious
metal being extraordinarily plentiful. At present it is collected from
purely alluvial diggings, which we subsequently inspected, and which are
situated within a day's journey from Milosis, being mostly found in pockets
and in nuggets weighing from an ounce up to six or seven pounds in weight.
But other diggings of a similar nature are known to exist, and I have
besides seen great veins of gold-bearing quartz. In Zu-Vendis gold is a
much commoner metal than silver, and thus it has curiously enough come to
pass that silver is the legal tender of the country.
The second reason given is, that at certain times of the
year the native grasses of the country, which are very sweet and good, turn
as yellow as ripe corn; and the third arises from a tradition that the
people were originally yellow skinned, but grew white after living for many
generations upon these high lands. Zu-Vendis is a country about the size
of France, is, roughly speaking, oval in shape; and on every side cut off
from the surrounding territory by illimitable forests of impenetrable
thorn, beyond which are said to be hundreds of miles of morasses, deserts,
and great mountains. It is, in short, a huge, high tableland rising up in
the centre of the dark continent, much as in southern Africa flat-topped
mountains rise from the level of the surrounding veldt. Milosis itself
lies, according to my aneroid, at a level of about nine thousand feet above
the sea, but most of the land is even higher, the greatest elevation of the
open country being, I believe, about eleven thousand feet. As a
consequence the climate is, comparatively speaking, a cold one, being very
similar to that of southern England, only brighter and not so rainy. The
land is, however, exceedingly fertile, and grows all cereals and temperate
fruits and timber to perfection; and in the lower-lying parts even produces
a hardy variety of sugar-cane. Coal is found in great abundance, and in
many places crops out from the surface; and so is pure marble, both black
and white. The same may be said of almost every metal except silver, which
is scarce, and only to be obtained from a range of mountains in the
north.
Zu-Vendis comprises in her boundaries a great variety of
scenery, including two ranges of snow-clad mountains, one on the western
boundary beyond the impenetrable belt of thorn forest, and the other
piercing the country from north to south, and passing at a distance of
about eighty miles from Milosis, from which town its higher peaks are
distinctly visible. This range forms the chief watershed of the land.
There are also three large lakes -- the biggest, namely that whereon we
emerged, and which is named Milosis after the city, covering some two
hundred square miles of country -- and numerous small ones, some of them
salt.
The population of this favoured land is, comparatively
speaking, dense, numbering at a rough estimate from ten to twelve millions.
It is almost purely agricultural in its habits, and divided into great
classes as in civilized countries. There is a territorial nobility, a
considerable middle class, formed principally of merchants, officers of the
army, etc.; but the great bulk of the people are well-to-do peasants who
live upon the lands of the lords, from whom they hold under a species of
feudal tenure. The best bred people in the country are, as I think I have
said, pure whites with a somewhat southern cast of countenance; but the
common herd are much darker, though they do not show any negro or other
African characteristics. As to their descent I can give no certain
information. Their written records, which extend back for about a thousand
years, give no hint of it. One very ancient chronicler does indeed, in
alluding to some old tradition that existed in his day, talk of it as
having probably originally 'come down with the people from the coast', but
that may mean little or nothing. In short, the origin of the Zu-Vendi is
lost in the mists of time. Whence they came or of what race they are no
man knows. Their architecture and some of their sculptures suggest an
Egyptian or possibly an Assyrian origin; but it is well known that their
present remarkable style of building has only sprung up within the last
eight hundred years, and they certainly retain no traces of Egyptian
theology or customs. Again, their appearance and some of their habits are
rather Jewish; but here again it seems hardly conceivable that they should
have utterly lost all traces of the Jewish religion. Still, for aught I
know, they may be one of the lost ten tribes whom people are so fond of
discovering all over the world, or they may not. I do not know, and so can
only describe them as I find them, and leave wiser heads than mine to make
what they can out of it, if indeed this account should ever be read at all,
which is exceedingly doubtful.
And now after I have said all this, I am, after all,
going to hazard a theory of my own, though it is only a very little one, as
the young lady said in mitigation of her baby. This theory is founded on a
legend which I have heard among the Arabs on the east coast, which is to
the effect that 'more than two thousand years ago' there were troubles in
the country which was known as Babylonia, and that thereon a vast horde of
Persians came down to Bushire, where they took ship and were driven by the
north-east monsoon to the east coast of Africa, where, according to the
legend, 'the sun and fire worshippers' fell into conflict with the belt of
Arab settlers who even then were settled on the east coast, and finally
broke their way through them, and, vanishing into the interior, were no
more seen. Now, I ask, is it not at least possible that the Zu-Vendi
people are the descendants of these 'sun and fire worshippers' who broke
through the Arabs and vanished? As a matter of fact, there is a good deal
in their characters and customs that tallies with the somewhat vague ideas
that I have of Persians. Of course we have no books of reference here, but
Sir Henry says that if his memory does not fail him, there was a tremendous
revolt in Babylon about 500 BC, whereon a vast multitude were expelled from
the city. Anyhow, it is a well-established fact that there have been many
separate emigrations of Persians from the Persian Gulf to the east coast of
Africa up to as lately as seven hundred years ago. There are Persian tombs
at Kilwa, on the east coast, still in good repair, which bear dates showing
them to be just seven hundred years old.
In addition to being an agricultural people, the
Zu-Vendi are, oddly enough, excessively warlike, and as they cannot from
the exigencies of their position make war upon other nations, they fight
among each other like the famed Kilkenny cats, with the happy result that
the population never outgrows the power of the country to support it. This
habit of theirs is largely fostered by the political condition of the
country. The monarchy is nominally an absolute one, save in so far as it
is tempered by the power of the priests and the informal council of the
great lords; but, as in many other institutions, the king's writ does not
run unquestioned throughout the length and breadth of the land. In short,
the whole system is a purely feudal one (though absolute serfdom or slavery
is unknown), all the great lords holding nominally from the throne, but a
number of them being practically independent, having the power of life and
death, waging war against and making peace with their neighbours as the
whim or their interests lead them, and even on occasion rising in open
rebellion against their royal master or mistress, and, safely shut up in
their castles and fenced cities, as far from the seat of government,
successfully defying them for years.
Zu-Vendis has had its king-makers as well as England, a
fact that will be well appreciated when I state that eight different
dynasties have sat upon the throne in the last one thousand years, every
one of which took its rise from some noble family that succeeded in
grasping the purple after a sanguinary struggle. At the date of our arrival
in the country things were a little better than they had been for some
centuries, the last king, the father of Nyleptha and Sorais, having been an
exceptionally able and vigorous ruler, and, as a consequence, he kept down
the power of the priests and nobles. On his death, two years before we
reached Zu-Vendis, the twin sisters, his children, were, following an
ancient precedent, called to the throne, since an attempt to exclude either
would instantly have provoked a sanguinary civil war; but it was generally
felt in the country that this measure was a most unsatisfactory one, and
could hardly be expected to be permanent. Indeed, as it was, the various
intrigues that were set on foot by ambitious nobles to obtain the hand of
one or other of the queens in marriage had disquieted the country, and the
general opinion was that there would be bloodshed before long.
I will now pass on to the question of the Zu-Vendi
religion, which is nothing more or less than sun-worship of a pronounced
and highly developed character. Around this sun-worship is grouped the
entire social system of the Zu-Vendi. It sends its roots through every
institution and custom of the land. From the cradle to the grave the
Zu-Vendi follows the sun in every sense of the saying. As an infant he is
solemnly held up in its light and dedicated to 'the symbol of good, the
expression of power, and the hope of Eternity', the ceremony answering to
our baptism. Whilst still a tiny child, his parents point out the glorious
orb as the presence of a visible and beneficent god, and he worships it at
its up-rising and down-setting. Then when still quite small, he goes,
holding fast to the pendent end of his mother's 'kaf' (toga), up to the
temple of the Sun of the nearest city, and there, when at midday the bright
beams strike down upon the golden central altar and beat back the fire that
burns thereon, he hears the white-robed priests raise their solemn chant of
praise and sees the people fall down to adore, and then, amidst the blowing
of the golden trumpets, watches the sacrifice thrown into the fiery furnace
beneath the altar. Here he comes again to be declared 'a man' by the
priests, and consecrated to war and to good works; here before the solemn
altar he leads his bride; and here too, if differences shall unhappily
arise, he divorces her.
And so on, down life's long pathway till the last mile
is travelled, and he comes again armed indeed, and with dignity, but no
longer a man. Here they bear him dead and lay his bier upon the falling
brazen doors before the eastern altar, and when the last ray from the
setting sun falls upon his white face the bolts are drawn and he vanishes
into the raging furnace beneath and is ended.
The priests of the Sun do not marry, but are recruited
as young men specially devoted to the work by their parents and supported
by the State. The nomination to the higher offices of the priesthood lies
with the Crown, but once appointed the nominees cannot be dispossessed, and
it is scarcely too much to say that they really rule the land. To begin
with, they are a united body sworn to obedience and secrecy, so that an
order issued by the High Priest at Milosis will be instantly and
unhesitatingly acted upon by the resident priest of a little country town
three or four hundred miles off. They are the judges of the land, criminal
and civil, an appeal lying only to the lord paramount of the district, and
from him to the king; and they have, of course, practically unlimited
jurisdiction over religious and moral offences, together with a right of
excommunication, which, as in the faiths of more highly civilized lands, is
a very effective weapon. Indeed, their rights and powers are almost
unlimited, but I may as well state here that the priests of the Sun are
wise in their generation, and do not push things too far. It is but very
seldom that they go to extremes against anybody, being more inclined to
exercise the prerogative of mercy than run the risk of exasperating the
powerful and vigorous-minded people on whose neck they have set their yoke,
lest it should rise and break it off altogether.
Another source of the power of the priests is their
practical monopoly of learning, and their very considerable astronomical
knowledge, which enables them to keep a hold on the popular mind by
predicting eclipses and even comets. In Zu-Vendis only a few of the upper
classes can read and write, but nearly all the priests have this knowledge,
and are therefore looked upon as learned men.
The law of the country is, on the whole, mild and just,
but differs in several respects from our civilized law. For instance, the
law of England is much more severe upon offences against property than
against the person, as becomes a people whose ruling passion is money. A
man may half kick his wife to death or inflict horrible sufferings upon his
children at a much cheaper rate of punishment than he can compound for the
theft of a pair of old boots. In Zu-Vendis this is not so, for there they
rightly or wrongly look upon the person as of more consequence than goods
and chattels, and not, as in England, as a sort of necessary appendage to
the latter. For murder the punishment is death, for treason death, for
defrauding the orphan and the widow, for sacrilege, and for attempting to
quit the country (which is looked on as a sacrilege) death. In each case
the method of execution is the same, and a rather awful one. The culprit
is thrown alive into the fiery furnace beneath one of the altars to the
Sun. For all other offences, including the offence of idleness, the
punishment is forced labour upon the vast national buildings which are
always going on in some part of the country, with or without periodical
floggings, according to the crime.
The social system of the Zu-Vendi allows considerable
liberty to the individual, provided he does not offend against the laws and
customs of the country. They are polygamous in theory, though most of them
have only one wife on account of the expense. By law a man is bound to
provide a separate establishment for each wife. The first wife also is the
legal wife, and her children are said to be 'of the house of the Father'.
The children of the other wives are of the houses of their respective
mothers. This does not, however, imply any slur upon either mother or
children. Again, a first wife can, on entering into the married state,
make a bargain that her husband shall marry no other wife. This, however,
is very rarely done, as the women are the great upholders of polygamy,
which not only provides for their surplus numbers but gives greater
importance to the first wife, who is thus practically the head of several
households. Marriage is looked upon as primarily a civil contract, and,
subject to certain conditions and to a proper provision for children, is
dissoluble at the will of both contracting parties, the divorce, or
'unloosing', being formally and ceremoniously accomplished by going through
certain portions of the marriage ceremony backwards.
The Zu-Vendi are on the whole a very kindly, pleasant,
and light-hearted people. They are not great traders and care little about
money, only working to earn enough to support themselves in that class of
life in which they were born. They are exceedingly conservative, and look
with disfavour upon changes. Their legal tender is silver, cut into little
squares of different weights; gold is the baser coin, and is about of the
same value as our silver. It is, however, much prized for its beauty, and
largely used for ornaments and decorative purposes. Most of the trade,
however, is carried on by means of sale and barter, payment being made in
kind. Agriculture is the great business of the country, and is really well
understood and carried out, most of the available acreage being under
cultivation. Great attention is also given to the breeding of cattle and
horses, the latter being unsurpassed by any I have ever seen either in
Europe or Africa.
The land belongs theoretically to the Crown, and under
the Crown to the great lords, who again divide it among smaller lords, and
so on down to the little peasant farmer who works his forty 'reestu'
(acres) on a system of half-profits with his immediate lord. In fact the
whole system is, as I have said, distinctly feudal, and it interested us
much to meet with such an old friend far in the unknown heart of
Africa.
The taxes are very heavy. The State takes a third of a
man's total earnings, and the priesthood about five per cent on the
remainder. But on the other hand, if a man through any cause falls into
bona fide misfortune the State supports him in the position of life to
which he belongs. If he is idle, however, he is sent to work on the
Government undertakings, and the State looks after his wives and children.
The State also makes all the roads and builds all town houses, about which
great care is shown, letting them out to families at a small rent. It also
keeps up a standing army of about twenty thousand men, and provides
watchmen, etc. In return for their five per cent the priests attend to the
service of the temples, carry out all religious ceremonies, and keep
schools, where they teach whatever they think desirable, which is not very
much. Some of the temples also possess private property, but priests as
individuals cannot hold property.
And now comes a question which I find some difficulty in
answering. Are the Zu-Vendi a civilized or barbarous people? Sometimes I
think the one, sometimes the other. In some branches of art they have
attained the very highest proficiency. Take for instance their buildings
and their statuary. I do not think that the latter can be equalled either
in beauty or imaginative power anywhere in the world, and as for the former
it may have been rivalled in ancient Egypt, but I am sure that it has never
been since. But, on the other hand, they are totally ignorant of many
other arts. Till Sir Henry, who happened to know something about it,
showed them how to do it by mixing silica and lime, they could not make a
piece of glass, and their crockery is rather primitive. A water-clock is
their nearest approach to a watch; indeed, ours delighted them exceedingly.
They know nothing about steam, electricity, or gunpowder, and mercifully
for themselves nothing about printing or the penny post. Thus they are
spared many evils, for of a truth our age has learnt the wisdom of the
old-world saying, 'He who increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow.'
As regards their religion, it is a natural one for
imaginative people who know no better, and might therefore be expected to
turn to the sun and worship him as the all-Father, but it cannot justly be
called elevating or spiritual. It is true that they do sometimes speak of
the sun as the 'garment of the Spirit', but it is a vague term, and what
they really adore is the fiery orb himself. They also call him the 'hope
of eternity', but here again the meaning is vague, and I doubt if the
phrase conveys any very clear impression to their minds. Some of them do
indeed believe in a future life for the good -- I know Nyleptha does firmly
-- but it is a private faith arising from the promptings of the spirit, not
an essential of their creed. So on the whole I cannot say that I consider
this sun-worship as a religion indicative of a civilized people, however
magnificent and imposing its ritual, or however moral and high-sounding the
maxims of its priests, many of whom, I am sure, have their own opinions on
the whole subject; though of course they have nothing but praise for a
system which provides them with so many of the good things of this
world.
There are now only two more matters to which I need
allude -- namely, the language and the system of calligraphy. As for the
former, it is soft-sounding, and very rich and flexible. Sir Henry says
that it sounds something like modern Greek, but of course it has no
connection with it. It is easy to acquire, being simple in its
construction, and a peculiar quality about it is its euphony, and the way
in which the sound of the words adapts itself to the meaning to be
expressed. Long before we mastered the language, we could frequently make
out what was meant by the ring of the sentence. It is on this account that
the language lends itself so well to poetical declamation, of which these
remarkable people are very fond. The Zu-Vendi alphabet seems, Sir henry
says, to be derived, like every other known system of letters, from a
Phoenician source, and therefore more remotely still from the ancient
Egyptian hieratic writing. Whether this is a fact I cannot say, not being
learned in such matters. All I know about it is that their alphabet
consists of twenty-two characters, of which a few, notably B, E, and O, are
not very unlike our own. The whole affair is, however, clumsy and
puzzling. But as the people of Zu-Vendi
are not given to the writing of novels, or of anything except business
documents and records of the briefest character, it answers their purpose
well enough.