There was something in that. I was beginning to learn the meaning of the word ‘ humiliation’, and did not want any more of it at present. But from what he said the question of where to go would not be easily solved even then. It looked as if it would be advisable to learn what one could of the world outside Labrador, in preparation. I asked him what it was like. ‘Godless,’ he told me. ‘Very godless indeed.’ It was the sort of uninformative answer my father would have given. I was disappointed to have it from Uncle Axel, and told him so. He grinned.
‘All right, Davie boy, that’s fair enough. So long as you’ll not chatter, I’ll tell you something about it.’
‘You mean it’s secret?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘Not quite that,’ he said. ‘But when people are used to believing a thing is such-and-such a way, and the preachers want them to believe that that’s the way it is; it’s trouble you get, not thanks, for upsetting their ideas. Sailors soon found that out in Rigo, so mostly they only talk about it now to other sailors. If the rest of the people want to think it’s nearly all Badlands outside, they let them; it doesn’t alter the way it really is, but it does make for peace and quiet.’
‘My book says it’s all Badlands, or bad Fringes country,’ I told him.
‘There are other books that don’t, but you’ll not see them about much – not even in Rigo, let alone in the backwoods here,’ he said. ‘And, mind you, it doesn’t do to believe everything every sailor says either – and you’re often not sure whether any couple of them are talking about the same place or not, even when they think they are. But when you’ve seen some of it, you begin to understand that the world’s a much queerer place than it looks from Waknuk. So you’ll keep it to yourself?’
I assured him I would.
‘All right. Well, it’s this way -‘ he began.
To reach the rest of the world (my Uncle Axel explained) you start by sailing down river from Rigo until you get to the sea. They say that it’s no good sailing on straight ahead, to the east, that is, because either the sea goes on for ever, or else it comes to an end suddenly, and you sail over the edge. Nobody knows for sure.
If you make north and keep along the coast, and still keep along when it turns west and then south, you reach the other side of Labrador. Or, if you keep straight on northwards, you come to colder parts where there are a great many islands with not much living on them except birds and sea-creatures.
To the north-east they say there is a great land where the plants aren’t very deviational, and the animals and people don’t look deviational, but the women are very tall and strong. They rule the country entirely, and do all the work. They keep their men in cages until they are about twenty-four years old, and then eat them. They also eat shipwrecked sailors. But as no one ever seems to have met anyone who has actually been there and escaped, it’s difficult to see how that can be known. Still, there it is – no one has ever come back denying it either.
The only way I know is south – I’ve been south three times. To get there you keep the coast to starboard as you leave the river. After a couple of hundred miles or so you come to the Straits of Newf. As the Straits widen out you keep the coast of Newf to port and call in at Lark for fresh water – and provisions, too, if the Newf people will let you have any. After that you bear south-east awhile and then south, and pick up the mainland coast again to starboard. When you reach it you find it is Badlands – or at least very bad Fringes. There’s plenty growing there, but sailing close inshore you can see that nearly all of it is deviational. There are animals, too, and most of them look as if it’d be difficult to classify them as Offences against any known kinds.
A day or two’s sail farther on there’s plenty of Badlands coastline, with no doubt about it. Soon you’re following round a big bay, and you get to where there are no gaps: it’s all Badlands.
When sailors first saw those parts they were pretty scared. They felt they were leaving all Purity behind, and sailing farther and farther away from God, where He’d not be able to help them. Everybody knows that if you walk on Badlands you die, and they’d none of them expected ever to see them so close with their own eyes. But what worried them most – and worried the people they talked to when they got back – was to see how the things which are against God’s laws of nature flourish there, just as if they had a right to.
And a shocking sight it must have been at first, too. You can see giant, distorted heads of corn growing higher than small trees; big saprophytes growing on rocks, with their roots trailing out on the wind like bunches of hair, fathoms long; in some places there are fungus colonies that you’d take at first sight for big white boulders; you can see succulents like barrels, but as big as small houses, and with spines ten feet long. There are plants which grow on the cliff-tops and send thick, green cables down a hundred feet and more into the sea; and you wonder whether it’s a land plant that’s got to the salt water, or a sea plant that’s somehow climbed ashore. There are hundreds of kinds of queer things, and scarcely a normal one among them – it’s a kind of jungle of Deviations, going on for miles and miles. There don’t seem to be many animals, but occasionally you catch sight of one, though you’d never be able to name it. There are a fair number of birds, though, sea-birds mostly; and once or twice people have seen big things flying in the distance, too far away to make out anything except that the motion didn’t look right for birds. It’s a weird, evil land; and many a man who sees it suddenly understands what might happen here if it weren’t for the Purity Laws and the inspectors.
It’s bad – but it isn’t the worst.
Farther south still, you begin to find patches where only coarse plants grow, and poorly at that, and soon you come to stretches of coast, and land behind it, twenty, thirty, forty miles long, maybe, where nothing grows – nothing at all.
The whole seaboard is empty – black and harsh and empty. The land behind looks like a huge desert of charcoal. Where there are cliffs they are sharp-edged, with nothing to soften them. There are no fish in the sea there, no weed either, not even slime, and when a ship has sailed there the barnacles and the fouling on her bottom drop off, and leave her hull clean. You don’t see any birds. Nothing moves at all, except the waves breaking on the black beaches.
It is a frightful place. Masters order their ships well out for fear of it; and very relieved the sailors are to keep clear.
And yet it can’t always have been like that because there was one ship whose captain was foolhardy enough to sail close inshore. Her crew were able to make out great stone ruins. They were all agreed that they were far too regular to be natural, and they thought they might be the remains of one of the Old People’s cities. But nobody knows any more about them. Most of the men in that ship wasted away and died, and the rest were never the same afterwards, so no other ship has risked keeping close in.
For hundreds of miles the coast goes on being Badlands with stretches of the dead, black lands; so far, in fact, that the first ships down there gave up and turned about because they thought they would never reach any place where they could water and provision. They came back saying that they thought it must go on like that to the ends of the earth.
The preachers and the church people were pleased to hear it, for that was very much what they had been teaching, and for a time it made people lose interest in exploring.
But later on curiosity revived, and better-found ships sailed south again. An observer on one of these, a man called Marther, wrote in a journal which he published, something like this:
The Black Coasts would appear to be an extreme form of Badlands. Since any close approach to them is likely to be fatal nothing can be said of them with certainty but that they are entirely barren, and in some regions are known to glow dimly on a dark night.