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onveniently 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 afternoo