Gulliver's Fifth & Sixth Voyages 1732 Studios

Hungarian · Capillária

Tizenegyedik fejezet

Chapter Eleven

69 sentences

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  1. 1

    The Author begins his forced labor among the bulloks.

    Szerzőthe Authorszerző · noun, nominative, singularsubject of megkezdi

    Surfaces mix capitalized 'Szerző' (used as the chapter-argument character label, rendered 'The Author') and lowercase 'szerző' (generic noun, rendered lowercase 'the author' — see cap-front-matter-s75: 'A szerző mentegetőzik' -> 'The author excuses himself,' not 'The Author'). The original note wrongly forced 'the Author' for both.

    megkezdibeginsmegkezd · verb, present, indicative, definite, third-person, singularmain verb of the sentence
    kényszermunkájáthis forced laborkényszermunká · noun, accusative, singular, third-person singular possessordirect object of megkezdi
    athea · determinerdeterminer of bullokok
    bullokokbulloksbullok · noun, nominative, pluraloblique complement of megkezdi
    közöttamongközött · prepositionpreposition marking bullokok
  2. 2

    A description of Halvargó, the tower of which the Author became a citizen.

  3. 3

    The Author becomes acquainted with Xa-ra, the Secretary of State of Halvargó.

  4. 4

    Some enlightenment touching the origin of the legend of the Oiha.

  5. 5

    The second chapter of my life in Capillária — a chapter far richer in incident, though by no means so happy or serene, spent as it was among the laboring bulloks, from my condemnation until my deliverance from that country — I shall relate but briefly, adhering strictly to those facts whose recital the reader may justly expect of a traveler of my sort, who, lacking all gifts of the poet or the man of letters, can claim but this one merit: that he sets down faithfully and conscientiously what he has beheld.

  6. 6

    For this very reason I pass over the history of the first three months — matter enough for another and larger work, were one to set down in full how I grew accustomed to the company of these strange little monsters; how I came to love them; how I discovered their souls, and the many good qualities therein; how I learned their tongue and their customs; how I became, at first under compulsion and in rebellion, and later of my own free will, with zeal and ambition, a useful member of their society; and how I overcame their distrust, and won their liking, for at the first they distrusted me exceedingly: those who were privy to it knew that I had come to them out of the oihas, and, to my very great astonishment, this intelligence provoked in them not at all that respect and envy I had looked for, but rather they spoke of me, and to me, in a mocking vein concerning this my adventure.

  7. 7

    The reader may justly desire that I not weary him with the complaints of my heart — I shall set down only this much: that I myself was to blame if, in those first days, they could not take me seriously; my parting from Opula wrought upon me so painful an effect, and left me so dejected and wretched, that in my melancholy I was, at that season, truly insufferable company.

  8. 8

    This my own private and spiritual affair — the hopeless love I bore for Opula — rendered me partial and selfish, and justly stirred up an antipathy toward me among the bulloks, who, at that season when, through no fault of my own, I was cast among them, stood occupied with social and political questions of the very first importance, questions all bound up with such ideas as demand of the individual self-sacrifice and selflessness in the interest of the commonwealth.

  9. 9

    Of these matters, then, I shall speak the rather, in the hope that I may render myself of some service, should I furnish a few modest particulars for the use of those excellent and grave men who today direct the destinies of Europe, and lead her toward welfare and perfection; and I willingly forgo that surer and cheaper renown, unworthy of a serious man, which I might win among idle young girlies and dreaming schoolboys, were I to fill these pages with the maudlin overflow of my love-complaints.

  10. 10

    The tower to which I was banished was not among the greatest, but was without question one of the oldest and most advanced in all Capillária.

  11. 11

    Its foundations had been laid many years since by the ancestors of the bulloks now at work upon it (for the bullok's span of life is far shorter than the oiha's), whom Kol-ko, ancestor to Kar-kar-ka, the prince who now rules in that tower, had led into this region.

  12. 12

    With the neighboring towers they had lived a long while in peaceable concord, until, in the past century, a goncsargó — for so they name that catastrophe wherein the oihas smoke them out and seize their towers, understanding by it a species of natural convulsion much as we understand an earthquake — gave occasion to certain clashes, the consequences whereof I shall endeavor to relate briefly in the next and final chapter.

  13. 13

    For this same goncsargó the bullok historians offer explanations of divers kinds: some analyze it upon strictly scientific grounds; others speak of mysterious forces.

  14. 14

    Both opinions had their party among the several towers, and whichever party prevailed exterminated the vanquished without mercy.

  15. 15

    But these barbarous times are now past, and the people of the towers building in that district have set forth upon a development in culture and civilization of an extent unheard of.

  16. 16

    The sciences and the arts alike flourished — the former toward the perfecting of the bullok's bodily and spiritual qualities, considered from the standpoint of his fitness for the building of towers; the latter toward the spiritual education of the bullok race.

  17. 17

    Excellent researchers occupied themselves with the individual and racial structure of the bullok; their natural philosophers searched out the laws whose application led, in the practical life, to discoveries of a splendid order.

  18. 18

    In the first season I myself labored as a common workman carrying mortar, and had no occasion to look in upon the office of those higher orders who planned and directed the building of the tower.

  19. 19

    My relative bulk, and the bodily strength answering thereto, soon rendered me irreplaceable: in the same space of time I alone performed more than eighty or a hundred bulloks together.

  20. 20

    But it was this very superiority of body that afterward gave me occasion, singled out from my social class, to enjoy certain privileges, whereby I came to know a cross-section of bullok society.

  21. 21

    I won friends, and connections withal; and from these I came afterward to learn what follows.

  22. 22

    The towers came into being each through the coalescing of some one bullok clan into a form of state life.

  23. 23

    At the head of these states stood kings, princes, presidents of republics, or plain administrative bodies, according to the political taste or the tradition of the tower in question.

  24. 24

    These leaders took care that every man's labor should work in harmony toward the common end: the further building and the crowning of the tower.

  25. 25

    Besides this they directed the maintenance of order, and the defense of the tower both within and without — the latter being needful, since over every tower there hung ever the danger that the people of some neighboring tower might simply seize the building for themselves.

  26. 26

    Thus arose what is called "the law of tower defense," which, joined to the incredible ingenuity and mechanical skill of the bulloks, produced results of a truly fantastic order.

  27. 27

    That the reader may form even so much as a faint notion of what is to follow, I must first lay stress upon a certain matter.

  28. 28

    That which we here in Europe call homo faber, the technical man, had developed among the bulloks to a degree of which, among us, only authors of the most untamed fancy — a Wells, a Shaw — durst dream, and that only in their most fevered visions.

  29. 29

    This technical faculty, which with us, for the time being, works its wonders chiefly in the mechanical world alone, extends among them into every province of organic life.

  30. 30

    With us it is only in the most recent times, and only by cautious gropings, that men have begun to meddle with the transformation of living organisms; among the bulloks, the problem of exchanging an eye, a liver, a brain; of grafting two kidneys in place of a lung; of exchanging two brains, or cleaving one in twain; of growing wings or fins in place of other members; of setting a fish's gill into a bullok's heart — is no greater a matter than the telephone, the telegraph, the Röntgen ray, the steamship, and the flying-machine are with us; while the making of these latter contrivances has, for the bulloks, sunk to the level of a mere child's game.

  31. 31

    This must be understood before I enter upon the history of the rise of the law of tower defense.

  32. 32

    From the hour that this question thrust itself to the surface in the shape of necessity, there began, in the development of bullok society, a peculiar transformation, which one might perhaps characterize by the words "duality" or "cleavage."

  33. 33

    Every organ, and every tool, began to be so fashioned as to serve a double purpose: the building of the tower, and at the same time its defense also — which is, of course, one and the same thing as its attack upon another.

  34. 34

    Every bullok was transformed, in one and the same person, into workman and soldier both.

  35. 35

    The plastering-trowel, if a man but turned it about, might serve also as a knife for scraping plaster; the brick-molds were so contrived that, charged with an explosive matter, they might likewise be made into a mine for the blasting of brickwork.

  36. 36

    With the selfsame clamps wherewith two laths were bound together in one tower, in another tower those same laths might be pried apart.

  37. 37

    The very tool that built here, destroyed there — what in one tower was a soup-spoon proved, in another, a six-chambered revolver; that which here they ate for poppy-seed strudel was, over yonder, the selfsame thing from which the bulloks dropped dead as from rat-poison.

  38. 38

    Upon the bullok's intricate body, the office of every organ was doubled: at the tips of the little wings made for flight there grew sharp claws, fit admirably for the slitting open of another's wings; the eardrums were so fashioned that, at need, a man might beat upon them a terrible clamor, whereby the enemy bullok was struck deaf; in the sockets of the eyes, where the tear-glands should be, there grew small glands whose poisonous discharge blinded whomsoever it was sprayed upon.

  39. 39

    There were bulloks who lengthened and sharpened their fingers, that they might serve for stabbing also; others grew, besides their two arms, a third, which hung down at the side from the waist, sharp and pointed, and hard as iron.

  40. 40

    The magnificent development of the law of tower defense made itself felt in the realm of the mind also.

  41. 41

    The sense of common belonging was, if that were possible, yet further heightened by this very fact, that the same togetherness stood threatened by disunion — and thus the relation between the individual and society came to be perfectly clarified.

  42. 42

    In those movements of great scope wherein, before my deliverance, I had a part, I had occasion to make the acquaintance of the most excellent social philosopher and statesman of Halvargó (my adopted and narrower fatherland), one Xa-ra, the very same at whose side I fought afterward, when the great war came upon us.

  43. 43

    It was this same Xa-ra who enlightened me upon many an obscure question — to him I owe whatever small proficiency I may boast in the social science of the bulloks, and whatever modest word I may offer upon questions social, political, and economic.

  44. 44

    Upon one occasion Xa-ra and I fell to discoursing upon the future of bullok society.

  45. 45

    I expressed my wonder at all that I had thus far witnessed in the way of culture and civilization; I recited every science and every art, and showed with what splendid achievements they might boast.

  46. 46

    It is scarce to be believed with how great a variety of matters the bulloks occupy themselves, in Halvargó and elsewhere besides; and all of it they pursue with that boundless devotion and gravity which their one great common purpose inspires — a purpose which only the finest minds perceive clearly, yet which even the meanest laborer feels by instinct.

  47. 47

    Every branch of science came into our talk: physics, chemistry, astronomy, astrology, geodesy, numismatics, history, histology, philosophy, philology, philately, philanthropy, philharmonics, chiromancy, criminology, physiology, psychics, psychiatry, psychophysiology, psychogeodesy, physiopsychopathology, pathophysiochemogesy, physioastronumis-philchiropsychogeospectri-gonometrico-judicamentropo-anthropology, and the rest.

  48. 48

    All these, methodically expounded and reconciled, verified and set down in due form, unified and resolved into their elements, make up that whole upon which the Tower is built.

  49. 49

    Xa-ra, one of the most admirable minds among them, a very polymath, could speak to any matter whatsoever: he knew the history of the development and the present condition of every science, and its standing in the current age, and discoursed with the greatest ease upon questions practical and theoretical alike, both as a specialist and in general terms.

  50. 50

    But it was chiefly the social sciences that engaged him; and in this domain he was not merely a mind that grasped and comprehended, but a creative genius besides — in a handful of marvelous works of undying life, having set down the fruits of theory, and having attained thereby to a moral eminence, he found also that way and manner by which, or with the aid of which, society must progress, so that, in obedience to the clear command of the necessity reconciling the fact of instinct with the fact of will, it might come to ripen at that station marking the height from which a better possibility is to be recognized.

  51. 51

    Arriving at this point, I was glad that I might, perhaps, ease the disquiet that had been mounting in me through the whole of our conversation (that morning I had woken very low in spirit, having dreamed once more of Opula), and I threw out the question, how, after all this, do matters stand with the goncsargó — that is, with that natural phenomenon which the bulloks conceive to be some manner of earthquake, and which brings their towers down in ruin.

  52. 52

    It was the first time the word "oiha" had passed my lips since I came to Halvargó.

  53. 53

    This subject plainly produced upon Xa-ra an unfavorable effect.

  54. 54

    He began to fidget, smiled in a belittling manner, gave answers of a distracted sort, and would speak of something else; whereupon, breaking out suddenly, he gave voice to his astonishment, that a man so cultivated and so enlightened as myself should occupy himself with matters so useless and so childish.

  55. 55

    As touching the goncsargó, idle and unlettered philosophers, in centuries now past, when bullok society, wanting as yet in scientific thought and methodical inquiry, still manufactured vain cosmologies, myths, and legends, sought with fables of this kind to lull to sleep the uncultivated masses athirst for knowledge.

  56. 56

    One of these fables is the goncsargó itself, that theosophic or mystic supposition, that some marvelous higher will or intelligence orders the fate of the towers: that it is this which brought us bulloks into being, for its own delight or need, and that it is this same power which, at a certain point, dashes down our loftier-reaching dreams.

  57. 57

    He himself, for his own part, without being a spirit either unbelieving or given to denial, stood convinced that concepts of this transcendent or metaphysical stamp are, from the standpoint of progress, hurtful — quite hopeless and barren games of the bullok understanding, which moves within certain bounds, and to whose positive labors the incomprehensible can in no wise belong.

  58. 58

    For the rest, the history of development has begun to show that the collapse called goncsargó, which sweeps away culture from time to time, may be traced back to the working of certain pathogenic substances that bring about a species of atomic disintegration — the existence of these pathogens, or comets, has been shown beyond all doubt: they are always present when the astronomers signal a goncsargó, appearing in the heavens in the shape of bright masses, or of swirling, translucent nebulous patches, which circle above the towers upon a course not yet to be determined by our mathematicians.

  59. 59

    Spectral analysis has already established their composition also: there is in them no substance whatsoever that does not likewise occur in the body of the bullok.

  60. 60

    It is a very natural thing that the naive bullok of old ages should have taken these mysterious wavering nebulae, whose long golden tail sweeps across the sky and floods even our towers with its light, for some higher power or will, should have named it oiha, should have feared and worshiped it — whereas in truth these are but helpless, unformed masses, whether organic or inorganic, primal matter remaining in a rudimentary state.

  61. 61

    The unlettered peasant, and the poet of ignorant and fanciful soul, see in them an apparition, which they then christen oiha, retaining thereby the expressions of the ancient mythologies.

  62. 62

    Somewhat abashed, I listened to the excellent scholar's disquisitions, and, with faint heart, put him in mind of the paintings and statues of the bullok artists, which depict oihas in postures of a singular kind.

  63. 63

    Xa-ra smiled with a fatherly benevolence, and assured me once again that no such things as oihas exist.

  64. 64

    These pictures and figures, said he, may be reckoned as idols: their positive kernel lies, in part, in the pathogenic matter already mentioned, and in part in that mass psychosis which arises upon the occasion of the goncsargós, which turns the head giddy and fills the senses with phantasms of the brain — the senses not being accustomed to those violent stimuli which natural phenomena of this order provoke.

  65. 65

    In this peculiar derangement of mind, then, the bulloks, and among them, as individuals of a peculiarly sensitive and thus more easily disturbed nervous constitution, the so-called poets and artists, behave in a manner altogether typical.

  66. 66

    They begin to rear up, they stretch themselves, their eyes turn back in their heads, their skulls swell, they stammer out disconnected words, as though tormented by wondrous visions.

  67. 67

    It must be allowed that the stimuli above mentioned are very powerful indeed, and that the mastering of them requires a mind of great discipline: he himself, who once observed from an observatory the approach of one of these nebulous patches commonly called an oiha, was very near being unsettled by it, broke out into cries, and uttered inarticulate and senseless sounds, which he afterward set down for himself in phonetic letters — sounds such as "oh, oh, oh, sweet one, my beauty, my little Nusi, my mousie, my honey-lamb, my ducky, my little pussy, my life, my star, my universe, my little Sophie, wilt thou (or shall thou?) be my wife," and so forth.

  68. 68

    It is manifest, Xa-ra went on to explain, that these utterances of the poets and artists — otherwise very forceful and suggestive as they are — may only be looked upon through the spectacles of a strictly supervising criticism, if we wish to bring the working even of these bulloks into that process of culture and development which aims at the radical reorganization and transformation of society: there must be subtracted from it whatsoever is morbidly overheated fancy, reverie, madness, phantasm of the brain; it must be reduced to that reality which pours forth through our souls distorted, exaggerated, confused, and unresolved into its elements — there must be peeled out of this glittering, jumbled mass the simple, general abstraction, the real facts, the great social truths, such as historical materialism, the struggle for existence, the war of the sexes, the selection of the stronger, and the special corps for the defense of the race.

  69. 69

    These are the things we must keep before our eyes, that we may draw ever wider ranks into the great work, enlightening the masses — those very nebulous patches, too, that men call oihas — that they may one day become useful, laboring members and pillars of bullok society.

The particulars

The text
Utazás Faremidóba / Capillária, Frigyes Karinthy. Capillária.
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Public-domain Hungarian (Karinthy, d. 1938; published 1916 and 1921). English translation © 2026 1732 Studios, LLC.
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Two whoopie pies and a pine. An inside joke.