"Built by the ancients to provide information to passersby," Ozymandias said.
"Ozymandias!" Leopold said. "Do you speak English?"
The response was a clicking noise, followed moments later by, "Ozymandias understand. Not have words enough. Talk more."
The five of us trembled with common excitement. It was apparent now what had happened, and the happening was nothing short of incredible. Ozymandias had listened patiently to everything we had said the night before; then, after we had gone, it had applied its million-year-old mind to the problem of organizing our sounds into sense, and somehow had succeeded. Now it was merely a matter of feeding vocabulary to the creature and letting it assimilate the new words. We had a walking and talking Rosetta Stone!
Two hours flew by so rapidly we hardly noticed their passing. We tossed words at Ozymandias as fast as we could, defining them when possible to aid him in relating them to the others already engraved on his mind.
By the end of that time he could hold a passable conversation with us. He ripped his legs free of the sand that had bound them for centuries—and, serving the function for which he had been built millennia ago, he took us on a guided tour of the civilization that had been and had built him.
Ozymandias was a fabulous storehouse of archaeological data. We could mine him for years.
His people, he told us, had called themselves the Thaiquens (or so it sounded)—they had lived and thrived for three hundred thousand years, and in the declining days of their history had built him, as an indestructible guide to their indestructible cities. But the cities had crumbled, and Ozymandias alone remained—bearing with him memories of what had been.
"This was the city of Durab. In its day it held eight million people. Where I stand now was the Temple of Decamon, sixteen hundred feet of your measurement high. It faced the Street of the Winds—"
"The Eleventh Dynasty was begun by the accession to the Presidium of Chonnigar IV, in the eighteen thousandth year of the city. It was in the reign of this dynasty that the neighboring planets first were reached—"