The Great Fog (8 page)

Out of these glowing rocks with their iridescent bloom and glow, and over them, flowed streams of steaming water in colors, waters like champagne, like burgundy, like chartreuse—purple, gold, amethyst. These cascades formed in fonts and pools; they tumbled over weirs which heaped up foam of every color and tint. The rivulets flowed off musically into culverts and grottoes, in the dusk of which they shone with a glowing phosphorescence.

“The floor of this domeless cave of wonder was a sand that sparkled like gold and diamond dust. Yet there was nothing harsh or garish about any of this close-packed splendor. The entire area was literally bathed in an opalescent mist. From the waters rose wreaths of steam across which shimmered half-formed rainbows.

“I turned to my guide. All he did was to wave a flipper toward the bubbling terraces; then he turned about, stalked off, and vanished around the first turn of the canyon cleft. My wish and what I took to be his intention chimed. I was out of my clothes and into one of those pools almost before his stiff tail feathers had whisked around the corner of a coral rock. I can't say I've ever bathed before or since. In comparison with that”—he sought for a poetic word in which to cloak his bare and timid emotion—“that laving—why one can only wallow, out here. The quality of that water! It tingled; tiny bubbles pricked your skin; it was like being combed, massaged, relaxed, stimulated, buoyed and plunged, needle-sprayed and warm-packed all at once. I shouted for sheer physical joy, and the strange polished rocks through the rush of the waters, gave back strange harmonics of my call. Out of pure animal spirits I threshed the foaming water and with my hand struck the glass-smooth sides of the pool in which I lay. A huge stalactite rose from the pool's lip, depending from and seeming to support an absurdly fretted gothic canopy overhead. I hit the smooth shaft with my palm. A beautiful deep note, as of a great bell, sounded through the place.

“I laughed like a child at the lovely joke of it all. Then, through my modest pink curtains of mist, I caught sight of my guide peeping discreetly around the edge of the rose-red cleft behind which he had retired—like an insect concealing itself in the petals of a tropical flower. I felt gayer, more trustful, more adventurous than I've felt since I was three and my nurse was giving me my bath.

“‘I'm coming,' I shouted, quite certain in a way that this was all a Christmas Night dream after seeing the pantomime and getting home and looking over my presents and playing with the new rubber duck in the bath, and so to bed with nurse having just tucked me in.

“I skipped out of my font and felt so light that my sense of being out of my body was quite convincing. I felt clothed in a new kind of vitality. My skin and flesh seemed glowing and supple and all of it as strong as muscle. I felt as though I, too, must be glowing, fluorescing, pouring out the vitality with which that fountain of youth had charged me. I looked down at my body. I could have believed that I was lit by an eternal fire. Then I saw, lying on that dazzling sand, one stain—the wretched clouts in which I had been wrapped and must now wrap up again. I put on my wretched, stiff, soiled togs but their greasy stiffness was revolting to my skin, which seemed to have a new sense of touch. As I crossed the arena floor my guide peeped out again. If he hadn't, I don't know if I could have found my way out of the place. The fluted walls concealed the entrance so effectively that it seemed as though the rocks had closed behind the entrant, as in the Ali Baba cave. Every yard of the place's sheer sides was fretted and molded.

“He trotted ahead of me, leading me back to my hut and, bowing me in, stood with his back to me, blocking the door and looking out into the street. Again, I gathered, this was his tact. For now, lying on the table where the soup bowl had been, was an odd-looking object. On picking it up I discovered it was a cloak, beautifully light in weight, more delicate than silk to the touch, smelling of musk, pale gray in color, and woven in some strange way out of small feathers. I have never worn any kind of garment which seemed less like something one puts on and more like something that grows as naturally as one's hair out of one's skin. The contrast of the change, from my coarse stiff wrappings that were fettering my cleansed body into this cloak, gave me a feeling almost as delicious as I had when I had first plunged into the rock pool. I'd hardly thrown the robe around myself before the guide twirled about, then made that sweep with his head and stumped off ahead of me.

“One thing, at least, was now clear: I wasn't being treated as a captive. Indeed, so great was this—this people's courtesy that I wasn't even being treated as a curiosity—though I could imagine the kind of attention a huge, misshapen, feathered man would arouse if led on foot through the main street of one of our hamlets. As I went down the street I saw plenty of these strange beings about, but none—save an occasional chick or two—even turned its head as I passed. Of course, whether their features showed surprise or humor I couldn't then judge. A bird's bill is just the most pointed opposite of what novelists call their heroine's lips—tremulous, liquid and all that.

“I didn't, however, then have much time to think over this. For within a few hundred yards I'd been brought to a hut twice the size of any of the others, which ended this small street or lane. It had two steps in front of it and a high doorway, but again no door. We passed over the threshold, and, in the dusk within, I saw that a sort of court was sitting. My guide waited just inside the threshold, and so, of course, did I. Six creatures were drawn up along one side and six on the other; and, at the end, on a slightly raised platform facing us, the chairman, or chairbird was standing. One of the six on my left had been standing forward, quacking to the rest, but directing his remarks to the chair. As we entered, he drew back into line, and the chairman apparently answered him. Then, after a pause, the ‘chair' must have said something that closed the proceedings, for the six brace, pair by pair, walked out, three on each side of us, and we were left facing the president.

“He quacked again, and my guide bowing to him and then to me, waved me forward. At that, my guide turned away, the chairman came down off his one-step dais, and I was directed to a small doorway in the side wall. These people are austere, I thought; they don't allow any sitting, even at public business. But when I entered the room off the Council Chamber I realized, as by then I suppose I ought to have guessed, that the absence of chairs in the public rooms and in the others was not a hardship or a discourtesy. This—this species never sat except when hatching eggs. That alcove in the room I was given—I found that every house had one. It was a sort of ‘sentry box' affair. In it these creatures would stand, slightly inclined, while they slept. That was the only kind of resting place they required.

“In spite of the fact that I saw they always meant to be considerate, I thought this interview was going to be a little embarrassing, for, even with the best will in the world, how were we to get on? Yet, believe me, there wasn't a hitch from the start.

“As soon as we were closeted together, the chairbird bowed again and beckoned me to one of the window sills—the room had two windows opposite each other. He indicated that he wished me to be seated; evidently he had tumbled to the fact that I belonged to a species that didn't find it comfortable never to be off its feet. As soon as he saw me settled he caught my eye. Then, with a sweep of his flipper, or perhaps I'd better be anthropomorphic and say his hand—for it was a hand with three very stout but, as I soon learned, deft, fingers—he pointed to a bowl of water which was standing on the sill of the window opposite. As he did so, he looked quickly at me with his head turned to one side. Somehow, the gesture was quite unmistakable. ‘Bowl,' I said. He listened for perhaps a couple of seconds and then, as clear as a Congo gray parrot, he said ringingly, ‘Bowl,' and pointed to the water in it. ‘Water,' I called. With scarcely a second's pause he echoed ‘Water,' with just my inflection.

“We had a hour or more of this, as quick as that. We ran over every kind of object he could point to: the stones the room was walled and floored with—my eyes, teeth, hair; his feathers, bill, and feet. He seemed never to forget a word and hardly ever asked me to repeat one. And, would you believe it, at the close of our interchange, he made up some quite good sentences, ending with, ‘We two here when you second time rested.' I felt that a linguist having that sort of power was quite right in wasting no time in trying to teach me ‘the language of the birds.' After he had spoken his farewell sentence, he relaxed from the somewhat bent attention with which, to make certain of hearing the sounds I made, he had craned forward his seven-foot stature. He resumed his stately stance, emitted a kind of soft whistle—and there was my guide looking discreetly around the doorway.

We all bowed to one another again and off I went, led back to my room, to my supper—this time some kind of queer but delicately flavored fruits with a slight tang of resin. Queer, having desert fruit at the South Pole. And when I looked at them closely it was perhaps even queerer to realize that, as far as I could judge, they didn't belong to any genus of plant I'd ever seen. I remember thinking that, after all, since this was a continent more on its own than even Australia or New Zealand, it would have quite different sorts of plant life. But, then, how the mischief could they have developed themselves here! Well, it was clear there were so many problems here that if I were to try to solve them without more information, I should just worry myself blue.

“I was among friends, if friendship meant taking care not only of one's wants but of one's feelings as well. The supper of fruit was not only varied and very palatable, but, so quick were my hosts to realize my human limitations, that I found a bed in the corner of the room—or should I call it a nest? It had been made for me from a number of cloaks such as the one they had given me to wear.

“The next day my drill was repeated—that wonderful wash, then breakfast, and once more to the courthouse. The first hour was hardly over before the chairbird was doing almost as much talking as I. He made me understand what their actions certainly suggested, that I was welcome. He told me—how he did it with the still scanty vocabulary that he commanded was almost as much a wonder as the fact that already he used, with scarcely an error or a slip of forgetfulness, several thousand words, I reckon—that an expedition—which was a rare event with them—had been out in the farther world. I began to blush, I admit, when I tumbled to the fact that what he was trying to tell me was that he and his people had been watching our expedition with some trepidation (we, of course, had had no idea that we were being observed). They had felt that we were a possible peril, but after they had seen one of the party ready to go out to his death in order that the others might have a chance to survive, they had concluded that any creature which could behave in that way should not only be succored—regardless of any possible danger to the rescuers—but that such a creature might understand their way of life and give them useful sidelights on it.

“That fact was all that seemed to interest him. Why we were exploring and where we came from did not seem to excite his curiosity in the slightest. What seemed his wish was that I should understand something about them. He remarked that if I would be so good, he would like to practice human speech with me until he became tolerably proficient in it. ‘There is much which we need to see through other eyes than ours,' he said, ‘and that will take time and many new words.' It did take ‘many new words,' but far less time than I would have supposed. Every day our ‘lesson' brought us to further mastery of human speech, and soon he was as much at home in abstract terms as he was in concrete words; indeed, more at home than I myself was. Certainly, that bird had a master mind and evidently had thought very clearly in his own tongue about subjects which were, most of them, just on the fringe of my thoughts. Time and again I just didn't know the words for some thought he wanted to express in English. So you can imagine what happened. We built up a sort of pidgin—or, I should say, Penguin—English, ‘Basic English' for birds. I'm sure if I could remember some of his clever phrases and coined words, you'd see how apt they were.

“One of the first things he explained to me—really as a kind of exercise for himself, to see if he could talk freely about subjects that needed a lot of rare words and abstract terms—was why they had given me these grand baths. Of course, I'd seen that his bird-people didn't wash, didn't need to. They had a wonderful preening drill, and, after that, their plumage was as glossy as if it had been varnished. ‘Your bath,' he explained, ‘was something in the nature of an experiment. We felt—for reasons which I will explain more fully when you possess more facts and I more words—that you might be incommoded by this peculiar climate unless we could do something to give you a kind of cover which you lacked, something to take the place of our plumage. We had, of course, known for some time that these radioactive springs, in which we wanted you to bathe, did have a remarkably beneficial effect on the skin of thinly coated non-birds. We find that they enable the skin to tolerate—and even benefit from—the ultraviolet light of this sky. Indeed, if I may say so, you have already benefited from the treatment.'

“He was right. My skin had been in pretty poor shape after our hardships, and, with a sudden rush or flush, if I may so say, had taken on a new kind of smooth suppleness. Indeed, I believe I've never quite lost the good effects of that treatment. All the time I was there I felt extraordinarily well; blood and skin seemed to glow. Later I understood how necessary this was: not merely to make me feel fit, but to screen me from danger which I did not suspect. I don't know how long it took—maybe it was a fortnight, I don't think it was more—before this fine old creature felt that he had enough command of my language to launch into a discussion with me of general topics, or, what he called the explanation that I required.