The Islanders

thirty-year project to build the world’s largest optical telescope on the lip of the crater of the mountain. Mudurnu himself lived long enough to use the main Brother reflector, and subsequently the existence of the telescope has led to the building of many more observatories on the summit of the mountain, and the installation of instruments of every kind. The presence on this island of the Brother centre, and all the various comings and goings of scientists and visitors, has underwritten the prosperity of the region for many years.

Illustrious sons of Sentier include the mime artiste Commis, murdered by unknown assailants during one of his performances, and the author and philosopher Visker Deloinne.

The island flower is the quadrifoil, which manages to thrive in spite of the arid conditions on the island, and whose pretty yellow sepals have hallucinogenic attributes after drying and curing.

Currency: Archipelagian simoleon, Aubracian talent.

SIFF WHISTLING ONE

Although its location is known and certain, and there are several tour operators who will transport you to the site, no living person has ever seen SIFF. It is an island unique in the Dream Archipelago, because it is the only one completely destroyed by its inhabitants. The last traces of Siff sank beneath the waves more than a hundred and twenty-five years ago. All that remains is a huge area of rocky waste and rubble on the sea bed, which although in relatively shallow and clear water, and which it is possible for divers to explore, can never be seen above the surface.

Most visitors now view the remains of Siff through glass-bottomed boats. Single boats for up to six people may be individually hired on the neighbouring island of Gencek. Larger boats carrying up to fifty passengers set out daily from the same island.

There had always been a tradition of freelance tunnelling on Siff, because of the suitable nature of the rock and a lenient approach by the Seigniory officials (many of whom were themselves enthusiastic amateur tunnellers). Major excavations did not start, though, until the arrival on Siff of the installation artist Jordenn Yo. Yo had already made her name with various works of earth-moving art in many other parts of the Archipelago. Although there was at first a surprising amount of resistance from some of the inhabitants of Siff, Yo brought in a team of geologists who declared that many valuable minerals almost certainly lay beneath the surface, and in commercial quantities. Yo was granted a limited licence to drill exploratory deep tunnels. It did not take her long to produce samples of gold, platinum, oil shale and copper. As the assayers in Siff Town hesitated, Yo soon produced some rare earth minerals, including apatite, yttrium and fluorite. Her licence was quickly amended to allow unrestricted drilling. Because Siffians were largely ignorant of such matters, no one thought to question either where she had found the samples, or why she never brought any more to light.

Within Yo’s lifetime, Siff gained the patois name by which it was popularly known. Much of the island’s rock strata were tunnelled, with the passages contrived in such a way that a wind from any direction above a speed of about five knots would set up a harmonic note. In normal times the sound would be a pleasant background humming, like the drone from a reed pipe, but during the seasonal gales (Siff was in the temperate north Midway, where winter low-pressure areas were always on the move) the island gave off a high-pitched wailing sound that could be heard on many of the neighbouring islands.

Yo called this the music of the sea and skies, and declared her ambition was to render every island in the Dream Archipelago into a gigantic wind-chime. Every day the tune would change, she said, but it would bring harmony to the entire world. She died not long after making the grandiose claim.

It was during this period that Dryd Bathurst visited Siff. His apocalyptic masterpiece Night of Final Wrath was painted on Whistling One.

It is often alleged that the gigantic painting was itself a form of cipher, the images of wrath being derived from a caricature of the important politician Bathurst had travelled to Siff to cuckold. The godly wrath, in this interpretation, was no more than the fury of a man betrayed by a wife many years younger than himself. This theory has latterly been borne out. Recent forensic analysis using X-rays and other exploratory techniques have shown that the cipher theory was not far-fetched. For instance, layer analysis of the oil painting has revealed that some of the more intimate curves of Dryd Bathurst’s pretty young mistress were contrived almost undetectably into the scenes of apocalyptic collapse and destruction. DNA profiling has also established that the actual hairs plastered finely into the painted image of the godly pate were human in origin, and traceable to his mistress.

Naturally, this theory had not been formulated at the time. Dryd Bathurst left Siff in the way which was commonly associated with him: suddenly and in conditions of urgent secrecy. He was never to return. But the popular success of his enormous painting brought Siff to wider attention throughout the Archipelago. Then as now tunnelling was a popular pastime with many people, but there were critically few places where it was allowed to be carried out. Tunnellers descended eagerly on Siff from all over the Archipelago. Soon tunnels were being excavated in every part of the island.

The first major collapse occurred about a century after Bathurst’s painting became known. Siff Town, by then thoroughly undermined, had to be evacuated and within another half-century the island was entirely abandoned to the teams of tunnellers.

Although many tunnellers were to die in the years ahead, the honeycombing of the island continued to its tragic and inevitable conclusion. In its final years, Siff fell silent: even the gales and storms could no longer find a tune to strike from the broken, gaunt and crumbling crags that the little island had become.

Siff’s final collapse was witnessed by only a few. There is a poor-quality video of the last few moments, and this can be viewed in the museum on neighbouring Gencek. It makes depressing viewing. More than five hundred tunnellers died in the flooded galleries and passages during that terrible day. Today, their only memorial is under the clear, shallow seas where Siff once rose above the unforgiving waves.

Smuj OLD RUIN / STICK FOR STIRRING / CAVE WITH ECHO

By Dant Willer, IDT Political Editor, writing for Travel & Vacation Supplement, Islander Daily Times. Although never published in the newspaper, this short essay has been available online from the IDT website for several years.

It began as a routine assignment for this newspaper, the sort of travel story I have been writing on and off for many years. As readers will know my by-line appears more often in the main part of the newspaper reporting politics or the economy, but all the staff here at IDT are given occasional travel assignments. Someone, we console ourselves as we pack our sandals and sun block, has to do these things.

The reader we have in mind is someone who might be thinking of taking a trip or a holiday. For those who are not we try to convey a reliable idea of what the destination is like. Travel journalism is not important in itself and only rarely has a wider relevance — for each reporter it can be a gentle reminder that there is more to life than trying to break a major news story.

My assignment, only the third in as many years, was to visit SMUJ. Why Smuj? everyone asked, including myself before I set out. Joh, the chief editor of the T&V Supp, said, ‘Your question provides its own answer. It’s a place no one seems ever to have heard of. There is no better reason for going there.’

So, in the spirit of seeking the hidden, the lost, the forgotten, the unknown, the undiscovered, I set out to explore Smuj. The first challenge was to find it.

As regular readers know, the IDT no longer publishes maps. The official reason for this is because most maps of the Archipelago are notoriously inaccurate, but our former policy was that an approximate map was better than no map at all. However, the newspaper had to revise this policy when a few