"Perfume from an unseen censor!" a bird croaked from the back row.
"Where?" I cried, pushing my way through the birds crowding around me in various stages of roost and curiosity.
"Then," I repeated, "the air grew denser."
"Perfume," the bird now in front of me said, "from an unseen censor."
He began to scratch at the ground assiduously under one of four dim shapes about the level of my eyes. Then he yawned gapingly, gave up and went to sleep.
I sat down to wait, because it was almost dawn and the last dodo had tucked his head into his feathers.
Daylight showed me four little trees, nothing like the usual scraggy vegetation of Alvarla. They must be perfume trees, I thought. But they were too young to have blossoms or pods.
I didn't go too near them, remembering what Rene had said.
And, remembering that, I began to figure out how they grew here.