We lived first in the home of Caan—the leader of the Marinoid party
which captured us. He was in charge of gathering the shell-food from the
water-bottom in the open spaces beyond the city.
I must sketch all this briefly—there is so much to tell you. We were at
first, curiosities to the Marinoids. But we proved our friendliness; and
when we learned their language they made us welcome among them.
Our history—what little we had to tell them of the outer world of air,
the meteor, the heavens, the great Universe of which we are all so
infinitesimal a part—none of this could they comprehend. But—and you
of Earth mark me well—these Marinoids did not scoff. They were not
unduly credulous either. Their ruler sent for me; and with a thousand
ingenious questions sought to test the truth of my words.
I am sure now that it was this knowledge I held of things they had never
dreamed of, which raised me to a position of importance among the
Marinoids. That, and my physical prowess, which very shortly I was
forced to demonstrate.
At all events, I did become a figure of importance in Rax. The ruler—an
hereditary monarch whom I shall call King for simplicity—consulted with
me frequently after a few months.
When Boy was born they gave us our own home. Caan had been very good to
us; we counted him our best friend. He swam about the city with Nona and
me helping us to select from among the vacant dwellings.
Can you picture us upon such a journey? The horizontal streets were like
square tunnels twenty feet broad and equally as high—top and bottom a
tangle of woven, green-brown vegetation, carefully pruned; sides formed
by the rows of houses. There were windows and doors to the houses, with
removable screens of vegetation.
The streets were artificially lighted. In the open water outside the
city there was enough light inherent to the water itself to give a sort
of twilight. But within the city, shut in by all this vegetation, it
would have been too dark for comfort. At intervals along the streets a
transverse strand of vine was stretched. From it hung a huge pod—half
as big as a man perhaps. The pod was a vegetable air bladder, of a
variety whose walls were exceedingly thin and translucent.
From these pods, which hung like lamps, a greenish-silver glow emanated.
It spread downward in a ray of illumination through the water of the
street; it cast queer, blurred, monstrous shadows of the Marinoids
swimming past it.
You will be interested to know what the light was. Small, self-luminous
organisms were gathered from the open water and placed—hundreds of
them—in the translucent pods. Similar organisms to these form the
familiar “phosphorescence” of the tropical waters of your Earth. But
these were much larger—more the size of your glow-worms.
We swam slowly along. A few Marinoids were in the streets, passing us as
they went to their occupations. From a window, or the bottom of a
doorway, a naked child would peer at us with big curious eyes. In a
horizontal street of more pretentious houses, where the tunnel deepened
to two stories, a woman sat in the corner of a little balcony, nursing
her infant. Beside her, two older children played a game with shining
opalescent shells.
We turned upward into a vertical street. You would call it a huge
elevator shaft. Its lights were fastened to the sides of buildings. Here
the houses were one on top of the other—a single low story only, and
very long horizontally. Nona did not like them; one was vacant here and
Caan suggested it but she refused it decisively. I had no opinion to
offer; they all looked all right to me.
We swam upward and soon reached the central cube of open space. Here was
the ruler’s palace. Open water surrounded it on all four sides, and on
top. The main stalks of the building grew above it with graceful
hovering fronds of green—fronds whose smallest pods were luminous like
a hundred tiny Chinese lanterns—under which, on the roof of the
building, was a garden. There were small plants growing there, gleaming
white shells laid out in designs, a bed of black ooze with brilliant red
things like flowers growing in it. A row of small illuminated pods
formed a parapet to the roof top.
* * * * *
The main building was not as large as the term “palace” sounds—it was
not over fifty feet in its greatest dimension. It had both vertical and
horizontal balconies, and a broad horizontal doorway near the top—a
doorway built of shimmering iridescent shells plastered together with
mud and a gluey substance which was made from one of the Marinoid
plants. And on a tiny platform by the doorway lay the shell sleigh with
its marine animal and its driver in waiting—the sleigh in which I had
first seen the King.
It was to us a magnificent dwelling, this palace. Nona and I floated
before it, gazing with awe. But my heart sank, for I knew that now Nona
had seen it, we should have much more difficulty in selecting our own
humble little home.
It was indeed, almost the time of sleep before Nona made her choice. She
selected a two-story house, at the intersection of a horizontal with a
vertical street. It had one room upstairs, and two downstairs—small
rooms, you would call them, no more than fifteen feet cube.
But the house had a little horizontal balcony upstairs. On it Nona could
lie and watch the people passing. And Caan told us that these streets
were on the route the King habitually used when leaving the city with
his equipage. I think it was the balcony that decided Nona. For myself,
I was pleased because we were only a very short distance from the home
of Caan.
Our room of sleep had bunks built into the wall—bunks which were soft
with a springy growing mass of mattress—a grey-white growth which _you_
would call a sponge. There was a large ornamental shell standing like a
table in the center of the room; and a window giving onto the balcony
and the street. The window had a leafy, swinging blind for privacy.
For ventilation we left the window open. Ventilation, you say!
Ventilation in a city of water! Most assuredly. Your most humble fish
will die without fresh water. We were using the air held in solution by
the water; and fresh water with new air was constantly necessary.
Once, after each time of sleep, the whole city was “ventilated.”
Swimming animals—sleek shining things of brown, with slimy bodies like
wet seals—pulled a sort of shield rapidly back and forth through the
streets. The shield was large; it almost filled the street. Its movement
stirred the water; pulled the water by suction into the city from
outside.
I was describing our house, but there is so much to tell you I must be
briefer. Downstairs we had circular shells to recline in and a place to
store and prepare our food. And every room was lighted with a pod which
had a green-moss shade that could envelope it when darkness was desired.
Nona was delighted with the house and immediately began planning a
hundred ways to improve it. The place was in good repair, but there was
much pruning and retaining of the vegetation to be done. And then, when
we had slept in the house but once, and were both busily engaged with
our own affairs, Og came to see us. He came to see Nona, I should
say—for certainly _I_ never liked him. His coming was the immediate
cause of my being forced to display my physical strength—to which
occasion I have already alluded.
I fought Og twice—the first time in a pretentious hand-to-hand combat
before the King’s palace, which attracted the attention of the entire
city. It was a queer combat—unfortunate for me. I shall tell you about
it at once.