Houses spread out before us in rows, queerly shaped structures that looked as though they might have been built of alabaster, and so diminutive that the tallest scarcely came more than head high. Back of the houses were fields thickly covered with nodding blossoms that looked like snow; through the fields ran waterways dividing each into small squares.
So intent were we on the background of this strange picture that we failed to take account of what was going on in our immediate vicinity.
Suddenly a weird creature hopped to the top of the box and stood between my companion and myself, regarding us fixedly. This, I supposed, was one of the Mercurials. If he considered the professor and myself objects of curiosity and surmise, we were no less keen in so regarding him.
He stood twenty-three or twenty-four inches high; his head was an ivory billiard ball, and his trunk a larger spheroid; from his middle downward hung a red kirtle. He had one eye at the front of the head and an ear at the back; the olfactory organ was missing, but there was a mouth opening perpendicularly under the eye.
The upper spheroid rested directly on the lower; and at each side of the lower one, corresponding to the shoulders, were two tentacle-like arms, sinuous as whips and ending in hands that were made up of a palm and seven digits. Queerest of all, there were two more arms set in the breast and back.
From the creature's shoulder was suspended a round object like a canteen. For all of five minutes Quinn and I eyed this surprising figure and were eyed in return.
"Can you talk English?" asked the professor at last.
It was a foolish question, such as I was far from expecting from the professor, but something had to be said, and I suppose that was as good as anything else. As the professor began speaking the head whirled squarely around, presenting the ear.
After my companion was done, the head spun back again, and the breast arm caught the canteen while the fingers of a shoulder arm began manipulating a set of keys. The result was language, with all the variations of tone and accent. But it was an unknown tongue, if an expression of that kind may be allowed in such a case.
Since the word-box was as ineffective as our own speech, we fell back with more success on the language of signs. At this the Mercurial had the better of us, for he could make signs with four hands.