Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Martians -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space travelers -- Fiction
Lingual Difficulties Ahead.
Still the difficulty was very great, notwithstanding the conviction
of the professors that her language would turn out to be a form of the
great Indo-European speech from which the many tongues of civilized men
upon the earth had been derived.
The learned men, to tell the truth, gave the poor girl no rest. For hours
at a time they would ply her with interrogations by voice and by gesture,
until, at length, wearied beyond endurance, she would fall asleep before
their faces.
Then she would be left undisturbed for a little while, but the moment her
eyes opened again the merciless professors flocked about her once more,
and resumed the tedious iteration of their experiments.
Our Heidelberg professor was the chief inquisitor, and he revealed
himself to us in a new and entirely unexpected light. No one could have
anticipated the depth and variety of his resources. He placed himself
in front of the girl and gestured and gesticulated, bowed, nodded,
shrugged his shoulders, screwed his face into an infinite variety of
expressions, smiled, laughed, scowled and accompanied all these dumb
shows with posturings, exclamations, queries, only half expressed in
words, and cadences which, by some ingenious manipulation of the tones
of the voice, he managed to make as marvellous expressive of his desires.
He was a universal actor--comedian, tragedian, buffoon--all in one. There
was no shade of human emotion which he did not seem capable of giving
expression to.
The Professor Does His Best.
His every attitude was a symbol, and all his features became in quick
succession types of thought and exponents of hidden feelings, while his
inquisitive nose stood forth in the midst of their ceaseless play like
a perpetual interrogation point that would have electrified the Sphinx
into life, and set its stone lips gabbling answers and explanations.
The girl looked on, partly astonished, partly amused, and partly
comprehending. Sometimes she smiled, and then the beauty of her face
became most captivating. Occasionally she burst into a cheery laugh
when the professor was executing some of his extraordinary gyrations
before her.
It was a marvellous exhibition of what the human intellect, when all its
powers are concentrated upon a single object, is capable of achieving. It
seemed to me, as I looked at the performance, that if all the races of
men, who had been stricken asunder at the foot of the Tower of Babel by
the miracle which made the tongues of each to speak a language unknown
to the others, could be brought together again at the foot of the same
tower, with all the advantages which thousands of years of education
had in the meantime imparted to them, they would be able, without any
miracle, to make themselves mutually understood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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