The Mouthpiece of Zitu

by J. U. Giesy

And on the night of their first coming, Croft explained the laws of chemical affinity as best he could to the three, comparing the force that drew the ions together with love, and caught a comprehending flash from Naia's blue eyes.

Thereafter she came as she willed when he worked, and watched while he struggled with his far from satisfactory equipment, and asked a hundred questions, until he suggested that she assist him, whereupon she accepted with a readiness that filled him with surprise. Night after night thereafter she donned a coarse smock and labored at his side, finding a new world open before her with the wide-eyed interest of a child; beholding for the first time the deliberate manipulation of the hidden forces of nature, beginning at length to understand man's right and power to use them to his advantage, direct them and command, to look upon them not as some supernatural manifestation, but as a wholly natural thing.

Meanwhile in the motur shops, Croft's by now expert force were assembling the first two airplanes. And in the same place, since he could work there as well as anywhere else, and supervise their work at the same time, he and Robur spent a part of each day constructing a resistance coil and a temporary switch on a slab of the marble white stone so much in evidence on Palos, against the day when the new light should be shown to Himyra first.

At the end of two weeks, however, he moved the now finished wings and bodies in which the moturs had been installed to the hangars and installed a force of men with them there to complete the work. Meanwhile at night he kept up his search for a satisfactory dry cell, telling Naia that the success of the flying machine depended upon it; so that when at last he succeeded, and she felt the current tingle through her fingers for the first time, she cried out in delight.

And in those two weeks, as Gaya had planned, as Croft had known must happen, constant association and education had its effect. As they played ball in the mornings, and bathed, and worked, and sought for strange, new results such as the woman had never dreamed in all her existence, they drew closer and closer together in their aims, their every interest, their understanding, than they had ever been. In his own way and by his own methods, Croft was rapidly raising the woman, whom as a woman he worshiped, toward his own mental plane. Thus in the end she came to a realization that those things which had once seemed as much a miracle to her as to any of her people, might very well be manifestation of natural law within the grasp of man.

His dry cells perfected, the success of his engine ignition assured—several arcs nearing the finished stage of their construction, Croft had a new thought. He decided that after his demonstration of the airplanes at Himyra, he might wish to exhibit them at Zitra, and altered his plans somewhat as a result, and equipped each plane with a set of buoyant pontoons, thereby converting them to the type of flying fish more nearly than anything else. He explained his reason for this to Naia, with whom he was now talking everything over fully, and she smiled.

"On the water they will run as well as through the air," she said, when he had finished. "Jason—you must teach me to fly as well as everything else."

And as on the first afternoon of his coming to Himyra from the mountains, Jason frowned. "I like not the thought. There is danger in this flying."

"Danger?" Naia of Aphur arched her brows. "Think you I have any fear?"

"No," he hastened to assure her. "It is Jason who for thee would be afraid."