Latest / Adventure Books Collection / 18 - Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
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- Chapter two, The Humors and Dispositions of the Leputians described an account of their learning of the king and his court. The author's reception there the inhabitants subject to fear and disquietudes an account of the women. At my alighting, I was surrounded with the crowd of people, but those who stood nearest seemed to be of better quality. They beheld me with all the marks and circumstances of wonder. Neither, indeed, was I much in their debt, having never till then seen a race of mortals so singular in their shapes, habits, and countenances. Their heads were all reclined either to the right or the left, one of their eyes turned inward and the other directly up to the zenith. Their outward garments were adorned with the figures of suns, moons, and stars, interwoven with those of fiddles, flutes, harps, trumpets, guitars, harpsichords, and many other musical instruments unknown to us in Europe. I observed here and there many in the habit of servants with a brown bladder fastened like a flail to the end of a stick, which they carried in their hands. In each bladder was a small quantity of dried peas or little pebbles. As I was afterwards informed with these bladders, they now and then flapped the mouths and ears of those who stood near them, of which practice I could not then conceive the meaning. It seems the mind of these people are so taken up with the intense speculations that they can neither speak nor attend to the discourses of others without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing, for which reason those persons were able to afford it, always keep a flapper the original on his criminal in their family as one of their domestics, nor ever walk abroad or make visits without him. And the business of this officer is, when two, three or more persons are in company, gently to strike with his bladder the mouth of him who is to speak, and the right ear of him or them to whom the speaker addresses himself. This flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his master in his walks, and upon occasion, to give him a soft flap on his eyes, because he is always so wrapped up in cogitation that he is in manifest danger of falling down every precipice and bouncing his head against every post, and in the streets of jostling others, or being jostled himself into the kennel. It was necessary to give the reader this information, without which he would be at the same loss with me to understand the proceedings of these people as they conducted me upstairs to the top of the island, and from thence to the royal Palace. While we were ascending, they forgot several times what they were about, and left me to myself till their memories were again roused by their flappers, for they appeared altogether unmoved by the side of my foreign habit and countenance, and by the shouts of the vulgar, whose thoughts and minds were more disengaged. At last we entered the palace and proceeded into the chamber of Presents, where I saw the King seated on his throne, attended on each side by persons of prime quality. Before the throne was a large table filled with globes and spheres, and mathematical instruments of all kinds. His Majesty took not the least to notice of us although our entrance was not without sufficient noise by the concourse of all persons belonging to the court. But he was then deep in a problem, and we attended at least an hour before he could solve it. There stood by him on each side a young page with flaps in their hands, and when they saw he was at leisure, one of them gently struck his mouth, and the other his right ear, at which he started like one awaked on the sudden, and looking towards me and the company. I was in recollect the occasion of our coming, whereof he had been informed before, he spoke some words, whereupon immediately a young man with a flap came up to my side and flapped me gently on the right ear. But I made signs as well as I could that I had no occasion for such an instrument, which, as I afterwards found, gave his Majesty and the whole a very mean opinion of my understanding. The King, as far as I could conjecture, asked me several questions, and I addressed myself to him in all the languages I had. When it was found I could neither understand nor be understood. I was conducted by his order to an apartment in his palace, this prince being distinguished above all his predecessors for his hospitality to strangers. Where two servants were appointed to attend me. My dinner was brought, and four persons of quality, whom I remember to have seen very near the King's person, did me the honor to dine with me. We had two courses of three dishes each. In the first course there was a shoulder of mutton cut into an equal actual triangle, a piece of beef into a romboidis, and a pudding into a cycloid. The second course was two ducks trussed up in the form of fiddles, sausages and puddings resembling flutes and hoe boys, and a breast of veal in the shape of a harp. That servants cut our bread into cones, cylinders, parallelograms, and several other mathematical figures. After dinner, my company withdrew, and a person was sent to me by the King's order, and tended by a flapper. He brought with in pen, ink and paper, and three or four books, giving me to understand by signs that he was sent to teach me the language. We sat together four hours in which time I wrote down a great number of words in columns, with the translations over against them. I likewise made a shift to learn several short sentences for my JEWE would order one of my servants to fetch something, to turn about, to make a bow, to sit, or to stand or walk, and the like. Then I took down the sentence in writing. He showed me also in one of his books the figures of the Sun, moon and stars, the zodiac, the tropics, and polar circles, together with the denominations of many planes and solids. He gave me the names and descriptions of all the musical instruments, and to the general terms of art in playing on each of them. After he had left me, I placed all my words with their interpretations, in alphabetical order, and thus, in a few days, by the help of a very faithful memory, I got some insight into their language. The word which I interpret the flying or floating island, is in the original laputa, whereof I could never learn the true entomology. Lap in the old obsolete language signifies high and untar, a governor from which they say by corruption, was derived Laputa from Lapunta. But I do not approve of this derivation, which seems to be a little strained, I ventured to offer to the learned among them a conjecture of my own, that slaputa was quasi lapouted lap signifying property, the dancing of the sunbeams in the sea, and outed a wing, which, however, I shall not obtrude, but submit to the judicious reader those to whom the King had entrusted me. Observing how ill I was clad, ordered a tailor to come next morning and take measure for a suit of clothes. The operator did his office after a different manner from those of his trade in Europe. He first took my altitude by a quadrant, and then, with a rule and a compass, describe the dimensions and outlines of my whole body, all which he entered upon paper, and in six days brought me clothes very ill made and quite out of shape, by happening to mistake a figure in the calculation. But my comfort was that I observed such accidents very frequent and little regarded. During my confinement for want of clothes, and by an indisposition that held me some days longer, I much enlarged my dictionary, and when I went next to court, was able to understand many things the King spoke, and to return him some kind of answers. His Majesty had given orders that the island should move northeast and by east to a vertical point over Laggardo, the metropolis of the whole kingdom below, upon the firm earth. It was about ninety leagues distant, and our voyage lasted four days and a half. I was not in the least sensible of the progressive motion and the air by the island. On the second morning, about eleven o'clock, the King himself in person, attended by his nobility, courtiers and officers, having prepared all their musical instrument, played on them for three hours without intermission, so that I was quite stunned with the noise. Neither could I possibly guess the meaning till my tutor informed me. He said that the people of their island had their ears adapted to hear the music of the spheres, which always played at certain periods, and the court was now prepared to bear their part in whatever instrument they most excelled. In our journey towards Laggardo, the capital city. His Majesty ordered that the the island should stop over certain towns and villages, from whence he might receive the petitions of his subjects. And to this purpose several pack threads were let down with small weights at the bottom. On these pack threads the people strung their petitions, which mounted up directly like the scraps of paper fastened by schoolboys, at the end of the string that holds their kite. Sometimes received wines and victuals from below, which were drawn up by pulleys. The knowledge I had in mathematics gave me great assistance in acquiring their phraseology, which depended much upon that science and music, and in the latter I was not unskilled. Their ideas are perpetually conservant in lines and figures. If they would, for example, praise the beauty of a woman or any other animal, they described it by rhombus, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other geometric terms, or by words of art or from music. Needless here to repeat, I observed in the King's kitchen all sorts of mathematical and musical instruments, after the figures of which they cut up the joints that were served to his Majesty's table. Their houses are very ill built, the wall's bevel without one right angle in any apartment. And this defect arises from the contempt they bear to practical geometry, which they despise as vulgar and mechanic, those instructions they give, being too refined for the intellects of their workmen, which occasions perpetual mistakes. And although they are dexterous enough upon a piece of paper in the management of the rule, the pencil and the divider, yet in the common actions and behavior of life, I have not seen a more clumsy, awkward, and unhandy people, nor so slow and perplexed in their conceptions. Upon all other subjects, except those of mathematics and music. They are very bad reasoners and vehemently given to opposition, unless when they happen to be of the right opinion, which is seldom their case. Imagination, fancy and invention they are wholly strangers to, nor have any words in their language by which these ideas can be expressed, the whole compass of their thoughts and minds being shut up within the twoforementioned sciences. Most of them, and especially those who deal in the astronomical part, have great faith in judicial astrology. Although they are ashamed to own it publicly. But what I chiefly admire and thought altogether unaccountable, was the strong disposition I observed in them towards news and politics, perpetually inquiring into public affairs, given their judgments in matters of state, and passionately disputing every inch of a party opinion. I have indeed observed the same disposition among most of the mathematicians I have known in Europe, although I could never discover the least analogy between the two sciences, unless those people suppose that because the smallest circle has as many degrees as the largest, therefore the regulation and management of the world require no more abilities in the handling and turning of a globe. But I rather take this quality to spring from a very common infirmity of human nature, inclining us to be most curious and conceited in manners where we have least concern, and from which we are least adapted by study or nature. These people are under continual disquietudes, never enjoying a minute's peace of mind, and their disturbances proceed from causes which very little affect the rest of mortals. Their apprehensions arise from several changes they dread in the celestial bodies. For instance, that the Earth, by the continual approaches of the Sun towards it, must, in course of time be absorbed or swallowed up. That the face of the Sun will by degrees be encrusted with its own effluvia, and give no more light to the world. That the Earth very narrowly escaped a brush from the tail of the last comet, which would have infallibly reduced it to ashes, And that the next, which they have calculated for one and thirty years hence, will probably destroy us. For if in its preohelion it should approach within a certain degree of the Sun, as by their calculations they have reason to dread, it will receive a degree of heat ten thousand times more intense then that of a red hot, glowing iron, and in its absence from the Sun, carry a blazing tail ten hundred thousand and fourteen miles long, through which, if the Earth should pass at a distance of one hundred miles from the nucleus or the main body of the comet, it must, in its passage be set on fire and reduced to ashes. That the Sun daily spending its rays without any nutriment to supply them will at last be wholly consumed and annihilated, which must be attended with the destruction of this earth and of all the planets that receive their light from it. They are so perpetually alarmed with the apprehensions of these and the like impending dangers, that they could neither sleep quietly in their beds, nor have any relish for the common pleasures and amusements of life. When they meet an acquaintance in the morning, their questions about the sun's health, how he looked at his setting and rising, and what hopes they have to avoid the stroke of the approaching comet. This conversation they are apt to run into with the same temper that boys discover in delighting to hear terrible stories of spirits and hopgloblins, which they greedily listen to, and dare not go to bed for fear. The women of the island have abundance of vivacity. They contemn their husbands, and are exceedingly fond of strangers, whereof there is always a considerable number from the continent below attending at court, either upon affairs of the several towns and corporations, or their own particular occasions, but are much despised because they want the same endowments. Among these, the ladies choose their gallants, but the vexation is that they act with too much ease and security, for the husband is always so wrapt in speculation, that the mistress and lover may proceed to the greatest familiarities before his face, if he be but provided with paper and implements, and without his flapper at his side. The wives and daughters lament their confinement to the island, although I think it is the most delicious spot of ground in the world, and although they live here in the greatest plenty and magnificence, and are allowed to do whatever they please, they long to see the world and take the diversions of the metropolis, which they are not allowed to do without a particular license from the king, and that is not easy to be obtained. Because the people of quality are found by frequent experience, how hard it is to persuade their woman to return from below. I was told that a great court lady, who had several children, is married to the Prime Minister, the richest subject in the kingdom, a very graceful person, extremely fond of her, and lives in the finest palace of the island, went down to Laggardo on the pretense of health. There hid herself for several months till the king sent a warrant to search for her, and she was found in an obscure eating house, all in rags, having pawned her clothes to maintain an old, deformed footman who beat her every day, and in whose company she was taken much against her will. And although her husband received her with all possible kindness and without the least reproach, that she soon after contrived to steal down again with all her duels, to the same gallant, and has not been heard of since. This may perhaps pass with the reader rather for a European or English story than for one of a country so remote. But he may please to consider that the caprices of womankind are not limited by any climate or nation, and that they are much more uniform than can be easily imagined. In about a month's time, I had made a tolerable proficiency in their language, was able to answer most of the King's questions. When I had the honor to attend him, his Majesty discovered not the least curiosity to inquire into the laws, government, history, religion, or manners of the countries where I had been, but confined his questions to the state of mathematics, and received the account I gave him with great contempt and indifference, though often roused by his flapper on each side. End of Part three, Chapter two,