I reeled. Literally I reeled, staggering back and dropping my jaw like a fool. "Tree?" I gasped. "Yes, yes, a tree!"
He made polite motions, asking me my word for it.
"Tree!" I shouted. I pointed to the beasts at our feet. "Dogwolves," I said, with one hand on my breast; then, aiming a finger at him and still indicating the two animals, "poort," I said. He understood that, for he nodded. I pointed to the wall. "Peesha," I cried, nodding to him, and then, "flat place with many dyes," I said in my own tongue. Finally, I waved at him and then at myself, and said, "Tree, tree. Tree, tree!"
He grasped it then. He was as amazed as I had been. We had at least one word in common. It suggested astonishing possibilities to me. Eagerly I touched the sky in the representation before us, the clouds, the earth, a small hillock; naming them and getting his names in return. Not until we came to a brook did our languages coincide again. Then I said, "Stream," and he said, as clearly as any man could, "River." "Yes, yes!" I shouted. "River, river!"
Babbling with excitement, he grasped my wrist and dragged me past several of the dye-images to a large one that was without the protecting rigid water, and which showed many men and women walking about between stone inclosures such as littered the ground above us. These inclosures, however, were not broken, but seemed whole and strangely beautiful, being decorated lavishly with carving and dyes. Some of them went up for hundreds of feet, as I could see by comparing them with the size of the people. Before this peesha he halted and proceeded to point out many things, naming them eagerly; but here we could not find anything for which we had a mutual name. Indeed, it was not remarkable, for most of the objects I had never seen until the day before, and then only in a ruined state.
And so we passed down the cavern until we came to the end, and crossed its narrow width to go back along the other side, looking at Dy-lee's uncanny "peeshas;" and at last we had seen them all, and I was too shattered for speech. Nothing like it had ever been thought of, had ever been dreamt of, had ever been seen by anyone in all my world, before today. That one could do this with dyes! Some of them had had no water—he called it glaa—over them, and these I had touched cautiously, finding their surfaces raised slightly here and there; and had come to the conclusion that the dyes had been mixed cleverly with harder substances, so that when they were put on the wall, they stiffened there and would not blur nor run together.
And nearly as wonderful as these things was the fact that there were points of contact in our languages, words which were the same in both tongues. "Hand" was and to him, or it may have been hand also, as his aspirates were breathed as lightly as his sibilants were tongued. Tree, river, and owl were the same. I grew quite wrought-up with the fascination of the game, and could scarcely wait to tell Lora all about it.
We went up the slanted stones to the surface, and after he had carefully hidden the entrance slab with the rubble again (I could not guess from what or whom), he led me across the ruins to another whole roofed inclosure. This one we entered by a hole far up in one wall, raising two logs for a kind of bridge from the ground. Into this place the dogwolves did not follow, but lay down outside to await us.