“I have tried. They may get mine. I can’t say. But they never answer.”
They brought us food, meals at intervals, strange food which now I shall not attempt to describe. But we found it palatable; soon we grew to like it.
Then a man came, whom afterward we learned to call the Man of Language. He wore a single garment, a queerly flaring robe, beneath which his naked legs showed.
His face was smooth, hairless. But the hair on his head was luxuriant. His head, upon a stringy neck, was large, with a queer distended look, and with veins bulging upon his forehead.
Yet withal, he was not grotesque. A dignity sat upon him. His dark eyes were extraordinarily brilliant and restless. His smile of thin, pale lips was kindly, friendly. He shook hands with each of us. But he did not speak at first. He sat among us, with those restless eyes regarding, observing our every detail.
We soon found he knew no word of our language. He had come to learn it, to have us teach it to him. We were made aware, later, that all these people, compared to ourselves, had memories extraordinarily retentive. But this man, he called himself Ren, was even for them, exceptional. His vocation was to learn, and to remember.
He began with simple objects: eyes, nose, and mouth. Hands, a table, a bed. As though he were a child, we pointed out our eyes, and named them; one eye, two eyes, a finger, two, three, four fingers.
It seemed like a game. When we told him once, it was never forgotten. But it was a game which to us, even under such conditions, soon became irksome. We were impatient. There was so much we wanted to know. And though we never tried to leave this building in which we were housed, it was obvious we were virtual prisoners.
Ren came after every time of sleep. He stayed hours; his patience, his persistence were inexhaustable. We took turns with him, each of us for an hour or two at a time. Occasionally Dolores would try to make something clear by thinking it. It helped. But he did not like it. It was necessary for him virtually to go into a trance before he could receive Dolores’ thoughts.
Gradually Ren was talking to us, broken sentences at first, then with a flow surprisingly voluble. He used queerly precise phrases, occasionally a sentence inverted; and with a strange accent of pronunciation indescribable.