I am compelled to crowd a world of glorious life into a few paragraphs, but I hope that I have given such as will be for our good.
CHAPTER XIV.
A World of Low Life.
When one witnesses an exhibition he must, of necessity, look upon the poorer parts of it. This was my experience in my universal journey, for on some worlds which I visited I found that human civilization was at a low ebb. One of the most notable of this class is the world next beyond Dore-lyn.
This sphere is one thousand times as large as ours, and the beastly creatures that inhabit it are four times our size.
The toilers in the deep valleys of Mars are favorably intelligent compared with these specimens of humanity. For convenience, I will call this world Scum. Its people are so constituted that their two arms can be used as legs; so it is quite common to see these Scumites travel over their planet like the more graceful of our quadrupeds. Their walking, however, is principally after our fashion, and they can change about at pleasure. Either way of travel seems as natural as the other. When they walk on two limbs, the body is erect, presenting a stature of such gigantic proportions as to over-awe a representative of our world.
According to the universal standards of symmetry, these giants have an animal beauty that is anything but handsome, and they also lack those facial expressions of higher intelligence that come only through generations of cultured thinking. Their health is quite perfect and they live to a great age.
These Scumites have a language singularly their own. It is so totally different from any of our conceptions of speech that I can scarcely find words to describe it.
The medium of conversation is the Notched Rod. It is about twelve feet long with various kinds of notches cut along the two sides. Such a stick is possessed by every Scumite who expects to hold extended or descriptive conversations. It is usually held by a skin strung around the neck. While one of these persons is talking, two or three of his fingers pass from notch to notch along the rod. These indentures of the rod represent, in their language, certain kinds of sounds and are used to assist the vocal organs in expressing the more intricate combinations of ideas. Naturally, the listener watches the fingers more than the mouth.