CHAPTER X
We lived first in the home of Caan—the leader of the Marinoid party which captured us. He was in charge of gathering the shell-food from the water-bottom in the open spaces beyond the city.
I must sketch all this briefly—there is so much to tell you. We were at first, curiosities to the Marinoids. But we proved our friendliness; and when we learned their language they made us welcome among them.
Our history—what little we had to tell them of the outer world of air, the meteor, the heavens, the great Universe of which we are all so infinitesimal a part—none of this could they comprehend. But—and you of Earth mark me well—these Marinoids did not scoff. They were not unduly credulous either. Their ruler sent for me; and with a thousand ingenious questions sought to test the truth of my words.
I am sure now that it was this knowledge I held of things they had never dreamed of, which raised me to a position of importance among the Marinoids. That, and my physical prowess, which very shortly I was forced to demonstrate.
At all events, I did become a figure of importance in Rax. The ruler—an hereditary monarch whom I shall call King for simplicity—consulted with me frequently after a few months.
When Boy was born they gave us our own home. Caan had been very good to us; we counted him our best friend. He swam about the city with Nona and me helping us to select from among the vacant dwellings.
Can you picture us upon such a journey? The horizontal streets were like square tunnels twenty feet broad and equally as high—top and bottom a tangle of woven, green-brown vegetation, carefully pruned; sides formed by the rows of houses. There were windows and doors to the houses, with removable screens of vegetation.
The streets were artificially lighted. In the open water outside the city there was enough light inherent to the water itself to give a sort of twilight. But within the city, shut in by all this vegetation, it would have been too dark for comfort. At intervals along the streets a transverse strand of vine was stretched. From it hung a huge pod—half as big as a man perhaps. The pod was a vegetable air bladder, of a variety whose walls were exceedingly thin and translucent.
From these pods, which hung like lamps, a greenish-silver glow emanated. It spread downward in a ray of illumination through the water of the street; it cast queer, blurred, monstrous shadows of the Marinoids swimming past it.
You will be interested to know what the light was. Small, self-luminous organisms were gathered from the open water and placed—hundreds of them—in the translucent pods. Similar organisms to these form the familiar “phosphorescence” of the tropical waters of your Earth. But these were much larger—more the size of your glow-worms.
We swam slowly along. A few Marinoids were in the streets, passing us as they went to their occupations. From a window, or the bottom of a doorway, a naked child would peer at us with big curious eyes. In a horizontal street of more pretentious houses, where the tunnel deepened to two stories, a woman sat in the corner of a little balcony, nursing her infant. Beside her, two older children played a game with shining opalescent shells.
We turned upward into a vertical street. You would call it a huge elevator shaft. Its lights were fastened to the sides of buildings. Here the houses were one on top of the other—a single low story only, and very long horizontally. Nona did not like them; one was vacant here and Caan suggested it but she refused it decisively. I had no opinion to offer; they all looked all right to me.
We swam upward and soon reached the central cube of open space. Here was the ruler’s palace. Open water surrounded it on all four sides, and on top. The main stalks of the building grew above it with graceful hovering fronds of green—fronds whose smallest pods were luminous like a hundred tiny Chinese lanterns—under which, on the roof of the building, was a garden. There were small plants growing there, gleaming white shells laid out in designs, a bed of black ooze with brilliant red things like flowers growing in it. A row of small illuminated pods formed a parapet to the roof top.
The main building was not as large as the term “palace” sounds—it was not over fifty feet in its greatest dimension. It had both vertical and horizontal balconies, and a broad horizontal doorway near the top—a doorway built of shimmering iridescent shells plastered together with mud and a gluey substance which was made from one of the Marinoid plants. And on a tiny platform by the doorway lay the shell sleigh with its marine animal and its driver in waiting—the sleigh in which I had first seen the King.
It was to us a magnificent dwelling, this palace. Nona and I floated before it, gazing with awe. But my heart sank, for I knew that now Nona had seen it, we should have much more difficulty in selecting our own humble little home.
It was indeed, almost the time of sleep before Nona made her choice. She selected a two-story house, at the intersection of a horizontal with a vertical street. It had one room upstairs, and two downstairs—small rooms, you would call them, no more than fifteen feet cube.
But the house had a little horizontal balcony upstairs. On it Nona could lie and watch the people passing. And Caan told us that these streets were on the route the King habitually used when leaving the city with his equipage. I think it was the balcony that decided Nona. For myself, I was pleased because we were only a very short distance from the home of Caan.
Our room of sleep had bunks built into the wall—bunks which were soft with a springy growing mass of mattress—a grey-white growth which you would call a sponge. There was a large ornamental shell standing like a table in the center of the room; and a window giving onto the balcony and the street. The window had a leafy, swinging blind for privacy.
For ventilation we left the window open. Ventilation, you say! Ventilation in a city of water! Most assuredly. Your most humble fish will die without fresh water. We were using the air held in solution by the water; and fresh water with new air was constantly necessary.
Once, after each time of sleep, the whole city was “ventilated.” Swimming animals—sleek shining things of brown, with slimy bodies like wet seals—pulled a sort of shield rapidly back and forth through the streets. The shield was large; it almost filled the street. Its movement stirred the water; pulled the water by suction into the city from outside.
I was describing our house, but there is so much to tell you I must be briefer. Downstairs we had circular shells to recline in and a place to store and prepare our food. And every room was lighted with a pod which had a green-moss shade that could envelope it when darkness was desired.
Nona was delighted with the house and immediately began planning a hundred ways to improve it. The place was in good repair, but there was much pruning and retaining of the vegetation to be done. And then, when we had slept in the house but once, and were both busily engaged with our own affairs, Og came to see us. He came to see Nona, I should say—for certainly I never liked him. His coming was the immediate cause of my being forced to display my physical strength—to which occasion I have already alluded.
I fought Og twice—the first time in a pretentious hand-to-hand combat before the King’s palace, which attracted the attention of the entire city. It was a queer combat—unfortunate for me. I shall tell you about it at once.