ts motion stopped altogether
and there was a complete pause for at least two minutes. Suddenly, like
a stab of forked lightning, the great cloud shot together, became small,
indented, and coloured, and as a plant-animal started walking around on
legs and rooting up the ground in search of food. The concluding stage
of the phenomenon he witnessed with his normal eyesight. It showed him
the creature's appearing miraculously out of nowhere.

Maskull was shaken. His cynicism dropped from him and gave place to
curiosity and awe. "That was exactly like the birth of a thought," he
said to himself, "but who was the thinker? Some great Living Mind is
at work in this spot. He has intelligence, for all his shapes are
different, and he has character, for all belong to the same general
type.... If I'm not wrong, and if it's the force called Shaping or
Crystalman, I've seen enough to make me want to find out something more
about him.... It would be ridiculous to go on to other riddles before I
have solved these."

A voice called out to him from behind, and, turning around, he saw a
human figure hastening toward him from some distance down the ravine. It
looked more like a man than a woman. He was rather tall, but nimble, and
was clothed in a dark, frocklike garment that reached from the neck to
below the knees. Around his head was rolled a turban. Maskull waited for
him, and when he was nearer went a little way to meet him.

Then he experienced another surprise, for this person, although clearly
a human being, was neither man nor woman, nor anything between the two,
but was unmistakably of a third positive sex, which was remarkable to
behold and difficult to understand. In order to translate into words the
sexual impression produced in Maskull's mind by the stranger's physical
aspect, it is necessary to coin a new pronoun, for none in earthly use
would be applicable. Instead of "he," "she," or "it," therefore "ae"
will be used.

He found himself incapable of grasping at first why the bodily
peculiarities of this being should strike him as springing from sex, and
not from race, and yet there was no doubt about the fact itself. Body,
face, and eyes were absolutely neither male nor female, but something
quite different. Just as one can distinguish a man from a woman at
the first glance by some indefinable difference of expression and
atmospheres altogether apart from the contour of the figure, so the
stranger was separated in appear