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

facing the president.
    â€œHe 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.
    â€œIn 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.
    â€œAs 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.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œI was among friends, if friendship meant taking care not only of one’s wants but of