etimes reach purely through intuition.
The El Hassan dream was still upon her, but, womanlike, she wondered
if she liked the would-be tyrant of all North Africa as well as she
had once liked the easy-going American idealist, Homer Crawford.
Jack and Jimmy Peters, the brothers from Trinidad, entered, the former
carrying a couple of books.
They'd evidently failed to note the raised voices and wore their
customary serious expressions. Jack looked at Homer and said, "_Cu vi
scias Esperanton?_"
Homer Crawford's eyebrows went up but he said, "_Jes, mi parolas
Esperanto tre bona, mi pensas._"
"_Bona_," Jack said, "_Tre bona_."
"_Jes, estas bele_," his brother said.
Moroka was scowling back and forth from one of them to the other. "I
thought I had a fairly good working knowledge of the world's more
common languages," he said, "but that goes by me. It sounds like a
cross between Italian and pig-Latin."
Homer said to the Peters brothers, "Let's drop Esperanto so that Dave,
Isobel and Cliff can follow us. We can give it a whirl later, if you'd
like, just for the practice."
Isobel said slowly, "_Mi parolas Esperanto, malgranda_." Then in
English, "I took it for kicks while I was still in school. Kind of
rusty now, though."
"Esperanto?" Cliff said. "You mean that gobblydygook so-called
international language?"
Jack Peters looked at him, serious faced as always. "What is wrong
with an international language, Mr. Jackson?"
Cliff was taken aback. "Search me. But it doesn't seem to have proved
very practical. It didn't catch on."
"Well, more than you might think," Isobel told him. "There are
probably hundreds of thousands of persons in one part of the world or
another who can get along in Esperanto."
Moroka said impatiently, "What're a few hundred thousands of people in
a world population like ours? Cliff's right. It never took hold."
Homer said, "All right, Jack and Jimmy. You boys evidently have
something on your minds. Let everybody sit down and listen to it."
* * * * *
Even before they got thoroughly settled, Jack Peters was launching
into his pitch.
"We need an official language," he said. "The El Hassan movement has
set as a goal the uniting of all North Africa. We might start here in
the Sahara, but it's just a start. Ultimately, the idea is to reach
from Morocco to Egypt and from the Mediterranean to ... to where? The
Congo?"
"Actually, we've never set e
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