In short, being very frightened, for a time they forgot their hatred of us foreigners.
So a scheme of operations was agreed upon, and some law passed by the Council, the only governing body among the Abati, for they possessed no representative institutions, under which law a kind of conscription was established for a while.

Let me say at once that it met with the most intense opposition.

The Abati were agriculturalists who loathed military service.

From their childhood they had heard of the imminence of invasion, but no actual invasion had ever yet taken place.

The Fung were always without, and they were always within, an inland isle, the wall of rock that they thought impassable being their sea which protected them from danger.
They had no experience of slaughter and rapine, their imaginations were not sufficiently strong to enable them to understand what these things meant; they were lost in the pettiness of daily life and its pressing local interests.