I must have been asleep again, dreaming that they had a language of their own full of intensity of meaning, and that they bade me approach them without fear; for the sunlight was around me, as I seemed to fall from them with prosaic suddenness into the still fetid reminiscences of Awdyoo.
At the moment of awakening there dropped upon me as I lay what seemed at first almost an emanation from the gleam of heaven. I raised my head and found that a white, bird-shaped float was lightly resting on the bottom of the canoe. I lifted it and saw that it was covered with written or printed characters. I handed it to my companion, who was also awake, and, as he read, he burst into a derisive laugh. It was a love-poem, he explained, written in the fulsome conventional language of Kloriole, as he called the island we were approaching. He translated a few lines into Aleofanian with a sneer:
Deity and sex combined,
Godlike despot of the mind!
Look on our eternal fate,
Ere the ages antedate
All that we shall be in death,
Mingling souls in fleeting breath.
God and woman, make me god;
With thy glances starlight-shod