Chapter XXI: Love, Music--and a Warning

The Water Festival! As our barge rounded a bend in the canal, under the archways of dangling colored lights, the festival spread before us. Involuntarily I stood up to gaze. The canal opened into an artificial lake--a broad circular sheet of water some 800 helans[17] in diameter. Sloping hillsides enclosed the lake--hillsides which I saw were terraced with huge banks of seats in tiers one above the other.

[Footnote 17: About 4,000 feet.]

The seats were crowded with people. White ribbons of roads gave access from the neighboring countryside for land-surface vehicles, and there were stages for the accommodation of air-craft. The rural populace, and people from the nearby smaller cities, had gathered to view this national spectacle--a million or more of them probably, with their individual electrical telescopes for direct distant vision, and small pocket mirrors for that which otherwise would be hidden. A million people at least, seated here on these gigantic spreading tiers.

The lake itself was thus the stage as it were, of a tremendous arena. Tiny artificial islands dotted the lake--a hundred of them. Islands, some no more than a few feet broad; some larger, and in the center of the lake, one quite large. All the islands were covered with luxuriant vegetation. The tiny ones were no more than shadowed nooks of leaves and flowers.

Between the islands, crooked lanes of the placid water wended their way in and out, broadening into occasional lagoons. Bridges crossed the lanes; archways of lights spanned them at intervals.

From this distance the whole scene was a riot of color and great red and purple auroral lights of Venus, which at this midnight hour rode the upper sky, tinged everything vividly. The archway lights were soft rose, silver and gold. Some of the tiny islands, from sources hidden were bathed in bright silver. Others darker, in deep purple and red; still others, quite unlighted, dim and shadowed, touched only by the reflected glow from those near them.

From the main island lights were flashing into the sky; occasional color bombs mounted and burst, painting the heavens.

A riot of color. And then as we approached, I became aware of sound and movement as well. Music from scores of unseen sources. Music from single isolated instruments floating softly over the water--lovers playing accompaniment to their pleading voices; or again, groups of voices--the curiously mellow voices of young girls--and, on an island apart, music from an aerial carrying strains from the public concelan.[18]

[Footnote 18: Orchestra.]

It was all music of a type unfamiliar to me of Earth. The intellectuality of our Earth music was missing. This music of Venus was built upon queer minor strains; unfinished cadences; a rhythm of the sort we of Earth could never encompass. I listened, and felt the appeal of my senses. The lavish, abandoned music of barbarism? I had almost thought it that. Yet it was not. Rather was it decadent. This whole scene; the color, the music, the heavy cloying scents with which the night air was redolent; the warm, sensuous abandonment, felt rather than made obvious--it was not barbarism, but decadence. And I realized then how close are the two extremes. A reversion to type, merely. And I knew, then, that from the pinnacle of civilization which we of Earth had reached, naught lay before us but this.

Music everywhere throughout the festival. And movement. As we floated out of the canal, passing slowly along one of the broader waterways, boats and barges slipped past us. Barges crowded with revelers. And the small boats, generally with but a man and a girl--fugitive couples with the holiday spirit upon them, seeking the shadowed nooks of islands for their love-making.

In one lagoon we came upon such a boat. The man in it--a gay youth in red and black motley, with the mask fallen from his laughing, perspiring face--was in its stern, manipulating it with a long, thin paddle. The girl was lying face down on cushions in its prow. She was facing forward, with her long white hair tumbling about her. Around the boat were clustered a number of other boats. Each was small, with only a man in it. A ring of boats, besieging the girl. Our barge paused to watch. A boat would dash forward, its occupant standing up to thrust it on. But the girl, swung to meet it by the efforts of her escort, would turn her cylinder of alcholite[19] upon the attacker. Befuddled, her adversary would retreat; or another, momentarily drunk, would fall into the water to be sobered.

[Footnote 19: A scent or perfume, highly intoxicating.]

All with gay shouts of laughter; until at last the couple were victorious and scurried away to their island.

We passed on. There were mimic battles often on the islands. A hidden couple found out and dragged back. A lone man attacked and pelted with flowers by a band of marauding girls. A diving platform at one end of an oval lagoon. Girls mounting it to dive into the red-shimmering water, where waiting youths were swimming, and by their prowess in downing other contenders would seize upon the girls and carry them off to where a barge was loading its passengers for the main island.

To this main island we came at last. It was heavily wooded, and indented with shallow, placid waterways. In one of them we landed; and amid a sudden quiet and awe at the presence of Tarrano, we went ashore. Georg walking with Maida; Tarrano forcing Elza to hold his arm; and I, beside Elza until Tarrano sternly bade me walk behind.

We were masked, but the revelers knew us. Amid the throng with which the island was packed, we moved slowly forward toward a gay pavilion which was in the center of the grove. Music came from it--a broad, roofed-over pavilion with a dancing floor in the depression of its center space, and tiers of balconies above it.