The Sogach nation had been conquered by the far away Shilgny.

The Sogach were easily conquered because they had never engaged in war on account of their being so far away from any other peoples.

The climate of their country was perfect, and so the Sogach were a perfectly peaceful island nation.
So free were the Sogach of any intention to learn of anything beyond their island that they had not invented anything even remotely resembling a boat.

The Shilgny came in their high and long iron ships, “bearing gifts.” Within a few years the Shilgny decided to abandon pretence because they found nothing about the Sogach to fear. They openly became conquering oppressors of the Sogach. Their conquest of the Sogach took two days.

Before the arrival of the Shilgny, the Sogach did not need reading, writing and arithmetic.

After the Shilgny turned themselves into conquerors, they calculated that the Sogach would be better conquered if they were taught the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic.

For the conquered Sogach, formal education was free, basic, and provided for only the first four years. Since their highest service was as paid servants to the conquerors, there was no need for formal education beyond writing, reading, and arithmetic for the conquered Sogach.

While in most matters the conquerors were merciless against the conquered, in the matter of emigration their encouragement was nothing short of a heavenly blessing. Emigrants could take all their possessions; their travel expenses were paid, and they were granted a cash amount to help them for a few months in the other country.

Within five years over half of the country’s conquered Sogach emigrated. The conquerors fostered an evil cycle: as the citizenry of the conquered decreased, the rationing of food increased and so became an incentive for conquered persons to emigrate.

While marriage was allowed, biological parenting was strictly limited to those judged by clinical testing to possess a certain level of human Intelligence Quotient.

Clinical testing indicated the vast majority of the conquered were not qualified by IQ level to be biological parents.

Jack and Jane, young married Sogach adults among the conquered, had been judged unqualified by human Intelligence Quotient, and so they decided to put that enforced extra freedom to most profitable use: they embarked on a life of crime.

They applied to the conquerors to be managers of a graveyard. The country had five Provinces; each Province was allowed only one cemetery for burial of the conquered Sogach. Jack’s and Jane’s graveyard monopoly was in the Province of Merewent.

Persons of the conquerors who died in the conquered country, were always transported to be interred in the far away country of the conquerors.

The licence was granted. Jack and Jane began immediately putting coffins more to use smuggling things than to burying corpses.
Especially coffins sealed because of a corpse that became a corpse because of a highly infectious disease. Always at inspection stations, the senior-superior official was of the conquerors, while the underling officials who did all the inspections and final determinations were of the conquered Sogach.

Both categories of officials were uncomfortable in duties pertaining to in-transit occupied coffins. In fact, the underlings were certain that there would be no consequences if all procedural matters concerning occupied coffins were not passed up to their superiors for their vetting.

All persons of the conquerors believed it to be a disgusting and unforgivable sin to look at the corpse of a conquered Sogach. Hence, at work stations where coffins-in-transit were inspected, underling Sogach officials were not regarded as being inefficient for deliberately not informing their superior Shilgny officials about the contents of coffins-in-transit.

The conquerors were not interested in keeping records of deaths among the conquered people. Had they paid even the least attention, they might, sooner rather than later, have been suspicious about the large number of sealed coffins in continual transit throughout the country among the conquered citizenry.

It was fairly safe for Jack and Jane to safely coffin-smuggle food items throughout Merewent. There was no need for extra precautions at mealtimes in homes. Because of Jack’s and Jane’s smuggling food items in coffins, the Shilgny’s brutal food rationing among the conquered was not a significant source of suffering.

With outer clothing there had to be extra caution by Sogach wearers in places where they could be seen by Shilgny officials or general public.

The graveyard itself was guarded heavily by Sogach. It was where the conquered Sogach secretly created hope against their evil conquerors.

They built underground facilities for recreation and artistic entertainment. Sogach underlings in the Department of Law and Order were the foundation of this underground thriving Community.

In their arrogant obnoxious determination to avoid physical contact with the native Sogach, the Shilgny encouraged Sogach to be police persons serving their own people, and were pleased that the Sogach constabulary were responsible for officially illegal behaviour among the Sogach being non-existant.

It immensely pleased the conquerors that the Sogach Law Enforcement officers were the principal agents who facilitated Sogach emigration.

Their mighty ships had enabled the Shilgny to bring immigrants from their other territories to live in their Sogach colony.

When the Shilgny first arrived, the Sogach had no activity even remotely akin to religion. Within a generation, the Shilgny had eliminated the Sogach language, style of clothing, and other indigenous cultural traditions. The Shilgny failed to convert the Sogach to their god-religion.

Along with the steady increase in Sogach emigration there was a parallel disuse and dereliction of building centres of god-religion worship by Sogach and Shilgny. The most irksome consequence to the Shilgny of this decline was that the steady decrease in the numbers of Sogach worshippers obliged the Shilgny devotees to stoop to manual labour in the upkeep of the magnificent structures of their god-religion.

Formal worship in god-religion was not the only facet of healthy living that was being bedeviled by the shortage of Sogach manual labourers.

To the ever-increasing keenly experienced chagrin of the conquerors, the bedevilment was undermining many other aspects of healthy community life among them: road maintenance; garbage pick-up; mail delivery; every kind of commercial service delivery, free or paid.

The Sogach never had the inclination to see other-worldly signs in natural happenings. Had they been so inclined, they might have seen prognostication in the parallel happenings of the ever decreasing number of Sogach natives in their country, and the increasing number of species of wild poisonous snakes.

Before the arrival of the Shilgny, there had been no snakes, poisonous and non-poisonous, in Sogach country. Those were times when anti-snake poison medicines did not exist.

Jack and Jane saw in the plague of poisonous snakes, a way to drive out the Shilgny foreigners.