The Early Years of Settlement. (extract taken from Understanding the past, a textbook by Prof. Mufudazi Flowers) "Chapter 2. We do not know for precisely how long the Ancestors lived in Umbagollah before they began naming the years. They may have been here, slowly evolving, for any length of time. We can assume, however, that their early years were muddled ones. From what we have guessed, their way of viewing the world grew slowly closer to that of their leaders, and as they changed they became ashamed of what they saw as their former backwardness. Their leaders functioned so well in this new world that they felt afraid of their inefficiency and strove to destroy it. There are ancient references to "... too much hallucination, my dreams (are) all scourge(s) ... to be none now, to be gone, rooted out." This new, more material, way of thinking let them raise houses out of the fields and find food. The old way of thinking left a person stumbling about, exposed to the wind and the rain, hungry and unfortunate, a pitiable thing. Fear and inexperience made them settlers rather than roving nomads. Illnesses that made a person delirious, such as White-Snow, were treated like curses. Once a person had suffered delirium, they were considered to have gone back to the old ways. The ill were doubly scarred, once by the illness, and again by the social stigma. There were periodic murders of anyone who seemed to be regressing, and sometimes full-blown massacres. All our knowlege of these murders comes from one play, written in The Year of Rising (360) in the form of ten didactic speeches. You have probably heard of Huong Blue, Jakob Dance and Constance Water before this, but did you know that it is about a massacre? Remember - "Huong Blue: They know the moon is a coarse petal and so we must kill them, they know how the beetles present their legs like machines in the secret burrows and they do not know the name of the sun and so we must kill them, their butterfly favours and small sleeps will rob us of our minds and houses ..." Scholars have speculated that a set of ancient fragments of text found near the River Fly are also references to the killings, but they are written in a muddled half-language which makes a reliable translation impossible. The text runs like this: "she here fire he he fire die no they stick stick la. water la. skin platch out smell he baby wrinkle la." In theory, this can be translated as, "She set him on fire. He did not die. They used sticks on him. They tried to drown him. His skin came away from his body. He was like a baby and like an old man." By The Year of Leaves (450) the Ancestors, now the Goolooians, had grown more certain of themselves and more tolerant of regressives. Still, Gum Gooloo Gum Jublet was not a good place to live if you were eccentric or adventurous. The town did not encourage unusual ideas. The people were self-controlled, inward-looking, industrious and patient, and it is this patience and fierce inward vision that makes today's Goolooians such excellent craftspeople. In The Year of Extolling Stones (477), one man became tired of the quiet, contemplative town and decided to follow his own, more rebellious, inclinations. We will learn about him in our next chapter, 'The Aristocrats.'" Go to the next chapter, or back to the history timeline.