Free The Great Fog by H. F. Heard Page A

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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œHe 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.
    â€œOne 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.
    â€œI 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