Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Martians -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space travelers -- Fiction
Indeed, so brilliant was the illumination which fell upon the surface of
Deimos that the number of persons who had been permitted to pass around
on the exposed side of the satellite was carefully restricted. In the
blaze of light which had been suddenly poured upon us we felt somewhat
like malefactors unexpectedly enveloped in the illumination of a
policeman's dark lantern.
Meanwhile, the object which we had in view in retreating to the
satellite was not lost sight of, and the services of the chief linguists
of the expedition were again called into use for the purpose of
acquiring a new language. The experiment was conducted in the flagship.
The fact that this time it was not a monster belonging to an utterly
alien race upon whom we were to experiment, but a beautiful daughter of
our common Mother Eve, added zest and interest as well as the most
confident hopes of success to the efforts of those who were striving to
understand the accents of her tongue.
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 expressive of his desires.
He was a universal actor--comedian, tragedian, buffoon--all in one.
There was no shade of human emotions to which he did not seem capable of
giving expression.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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