The Islanders

years ago the T&V Supp inadvertently sent a group of retired church workers to a Glaund Army rest and recreation base on the island of Temmil. Perhaps that is largely anecdotal, but the lesson was learned. Instead of printing an unreliable map now we give details instead of how we travelled to the destination, and leave it to our readers to follow in our steps. This is always the hardest part of the assignment, as here in the IDT office we are not even allowed to use the unreliable maps printed by our rivals.

So my search for Smuj began. All I knew at the outset was that it is somewhere in the seas between Paneron and Winho, and is often said to be obscured behind the magnificent Coast of Helvard’s Passion. As I began my search on the internet — a first resort for everyone — a website assured me that Smuj was so well hidden within its own mysteries that even today the people who come from there, should they leave their enigmatic homeland to venture into the wider, mapless reaches of the Archipelago, will maintain the fiction of its inaccessibility and lament the impossibility of their ever being able to return.

It is all, I am a little sad to report, a romantic fiction. Smuj can be found. Neither immediately, quickly nor easily, but it is there to be found. All that is necessary is to forage through the small print of the ferry services in the approximate area and you will find that regular services are there. Not advertised, I should add, but certainly there.

Because I wish to encourage you to follow in my footsteps, I can save you the task of foraging. I chose to travel to Smuj on the scheduled services run by the Skerries Line, one of the smaller ferry operators in that part of the Archipelago.

The ship picked me up as the brochure said it would, and it departed and arrived on time at every port of call. There are many of these stopovers but they are greatly varied. The comfort on board for passengers was plain but of a completely acceptable standard, and the ship neither sank, went aground nor played loud music on its public address system. The cabins were air conditioned. While on board there was full, if occasionally intermittent, internet access. The shaded decks were adequate protection from the sun, and the steward service was good.

At one point in the voyage I was so lulled into a sense of contentment that I even thought, given the time and the funds, that I should like to spend the rest of my life cruising slowly through the Dream Archipelago. I loved the endless cerulean seas, the beneficent breezes, the tropical warmth, the attendant seabirds and surfacing dolphins, and of course the passing show of islands and rocky passages and glasslike calms. At night too the spectacle continued: we frequently saw the diamante glitter of the lights in houses and towns, sometimes burning a path of bright colours across the dark sea towards our ship. I was therefore not all that pleased to disembark on Smuj, but because in reality I have neither the time nor the money to spend the rest of my life on boats, I was not sorry either.

On arrival I found, as half-expected, a small island, charming and unspoilt, with many of the conventional, expectable attractions for visitors. The swimming is safe and there are several uncrowded beaches and coves to choose from. The scenery is modest but appealing. There are quiet mooring places for private yachts all around the coast. Scuba diving on the reefs is recommended. There is no casino, but once a year there is a horse-racing event. As for eating, the standard of cuisine in the restaurants I went to was normally better than adequate and at best of world-class excellence. Private or rental cars are not allowed on Smuj, but two-stroke mopeds may be rented on a daily or weekly basis. The proprietors of several of the hotels I went to in Smuj Port claimed to have recently installed internet access, but I was unable to confirm this.

Smuj is one of the few islands I have visited where there is inter-ethnic tension. For some reason Smuj has inherited three different vernacular patois systems, but none of them is dominant over the other two. It seems apparent to me that should the tourist trade increase then the influx of visitors will have the same unifying effect on the locals it has everywhere else, but that has not yet happened. One of the curious sights and sounds at the end of the long hot days on Smuj is the evening promenada, where parading individuals and families exchange remarks, clearly mildly offensive, in street language the recipient probably does not understand, while the meaning is not in doubt. The mood is aggressive, but also somehow good-natured, almost a ritual. Rude hand signals do not a civil war make! Balancing this is the obviously high level of interested interaction between opposite members of sex in the young people. Perhaps within the next generation this conflict will die out, if only for this reason.

Meanwhile, it means that Smuj offers the sympathetic visitor an unusual social experience.

The patois divide also means that the name Smuj has three patois interpretations: ‘old ruin’, ‘stick for stirring’ and ‘cave with echo’. These are by consent more or less interchangeable.

I was due to stay on Smuj for a whole week, but by the third day time was hanging heavy on me. There is little culture on the island. In Smuj Town there is a small lending library, containing popular novels and copies of recent newspapers. There is a theatre, but locals told me it had been closed for several years. Touring companies rarely visited Smuj, they said, and in any event the theatre building needed to be renovated. I went to the museum, but had exhausted my interest in its few exhibits in under half an hour. I found a cinema, but it was closed. The only art gallery was exhibiting colourful paintings of the town. Swimming beaches and coves speak for themselves, and photographs are enough.

Then, one day at noon, while I was in a bar cooling off from the blistering sunlight, someone asked me if I had yet visited the ruined city in the hills. I had not. That evening I found out what I could — it was thought to be more than a thousand years old, destroyed in an ancient war, abandoned by what inhabitants had survived, and thereafter the little that remained had been sacked and looted.

The next morning I set off on a rented moped and headed for the range of inland hills. There were no indicating signs, but the man at the rental office told me that once I was through the pass I would see a large wooded basin surrounded by the hills, and the ruins were probably somewhere there. No one apart from me seemed at all interested.

I was soon to discover why. There had certainly once been some kind of settlement in the valley, but the traces that remained, all wildly overgrown with creeper, moss, intrusive shrubbery, were not much more than patches of broken rubble. I walked around for more than an hour, hoping to find something that might once have been a recognizable building or open space, but the clustering broadleaf trees had taken over. It was clearly a site that would reward scientific exploration, but I am not an archaeologist so would not know where to begin. I still do not know for sure which era it represents, who built it, who lived there.

I retraced my steps to where I had left my moped, wondering what else there could possibly be about Smuj that would be worth writing about. And at the exact instant, I found it.

When I dismounted I had hardly noticed the building next to where I had parked the moped. Now, walking back to it, I looked at the house for the first time. It was more than just a dwelling: a mansion of some extent, surrounded by mature trees, almost shielded from the road by the thicket. Beyond the widened patch of the road where I had left the two-stroke was a tall, metal gate, clearly locked and intended to be secure: it was not instantly obvious from the road because it was set in the drive itself, which curved away. I walked over and read the sign with great interest:

SCHOOL OF CAURER INSTRUCTION

AGES 6 — 18

UNDER PERSONAL SUPERVISION

AND PARTICIPATION OF E. W. C.

It took a few moments for the meaning of this to sink in.

Of anything that I had expected to find on Smuj, a Caurer Special School was not it. My state when I arrived to confront that gate was that I was hot, thirsty, sweaty, bitten by numerous insects and in general frustrated by my visit to this small and obscure island. All these were uppermost in my mind as I stared in surprise at the sign on the gate. It was not an old sign — it looked recently made.

Did the phrase under personal supervision . . . of E. W. C. mean what I had assumed in the first instant? That Caurer herself was here, working in the school, on Smuj? Supervising and participating in person?

It seemed unlikely. Caurer had died several years before, which would seem to eliminate her from everything. But the circumstances of her death were attended by a certain mystery that I well remembered. The death certificate revealed that she had died of ‘infection / infestation’. In the shorthand understood throughout the Archipelago, this strongly suggested she had suffered a fatal insect bite, probably that of a thryme. The consequences of such an attack were so appalling that even though several hundred people a year were killed by the insects, there was still a stigma attached. Death after a thryme bite usually led to a hastily arranged cremation, often within twenty-four hours, and was always the target of speculation and comment.