he use of a
spacious, rambling dwelling, situated just inside the gate where we had
met Miss Blank. It was thus conveniently located for the doctor's duties
at the observatories on the plateau. Another house would have been
assigned to me, but I preferred to live with the doctor, and I desired
to keep my eye on those enormous stone structures which our telescope
had quickly relegated to scientific uselessness.

We had established ourselves comfortably in this house, surrounded
ourselves with a modest retinue of servants, and were rapidly becoming
acquainted with Kemish life and manners. The doctor learned the language
laboriously from the deposed wise man, who had no means of communicating
with him except in the tongue he was teaching. Thus it happened that the
doctor could teach me in a few hours in the evening what it had taken
him all day to learn. Naturally I picked up the most common phrases used
in receiving and handling the grain, by hearing them frequently; but I
soon learned that I must pronounce them with exactly the same intonation
and emphasis, or they were not understood. Knowing but one language
themselves, they had no facility in recognising mispronounced words, or
in guessing at the meaning of incomplete phrases on which I stumbled.

The most difficult thing I encountered was their method of telling the
time. During the day it was reckoned rationally enough by the passage of
the Sun, which was never obscured by clouds and could always be seen.
Every house had a small hole in the roof, at a fixed distance from the
floor, and the daily track and varying shape of the spot of sunshine
thus admitted gave names to the periods of the day. There seemed to be a
settled superstition that no house was fortunate unless this spot of
sunshine entered by the door in the morning. For this reason the
principal door in nearly every house was built in the west, so that the
rising Sun would cast its spot first on the porch outside and then
gradually creep in through the door, across the floor, and up the
opposite wall late in the afternoon. Of course there were daylight
periods in the early morning and late afternoon when the Sun was too low
to cast a spot, and these were known by terms which are best translated
"before the clock" and "after the clock."

No one dared to make a social call while the Sun was still outside the
door, but friends were best welcome when the Sun was just entering it.
Moreover, whoever slept unti