Cat Country by Lao She Read Free Book Online Page B

wonder these Cat People ran so fast, but worked so slowly. I remembered how clumsy they had been in putting the leg irons on me.) His neck was so long that he was able to bend his head down against his back. Above two exceedingly round eyes set low on a very large face was a great forehead. It was covered with a fine fur that joined directly to the equally fine and delicate hair on the top of his head. The nose and mouth ran together much the same way that the nose and mouth of a pig do. The ears were set on top of the skull and were quite small. The entire body was covered with a glistening coat of fine fur. Close up, it looked grey, but at a distance there was a touch of green flashing in it that reminded one of a jaded peacock feather. His trunk was round and seemed made for rolling. On his chest he sported four pairs of small breasts forming eight little black dots. I have no way of knowing what his internal structure was like.
    His movements were the strangest thing about him. As I saw it, there was speed in his inertia and inertia in his speed – an odd combination that made it impossible for one to guess his intentions and merely gave the impression that he was unusually mistrustful. His hands and feet were never at rest and he was as dexterous with his feet as he was with his hands. In fact, he seemed to use his hands and feet more than any of his sense organs. He’d feel, first to one side, and then to the other. No, it wasn’t really feeling so much as probing, the way an ant uses his antennae.
    But what, after all, did my cat-friend have in mind by bringing me here and feeding me these leaves? Without thinking, I was just on the verge of asking him. But how could I ask? We didn’t speak the same language.

FELINESE AND OTHER THINGS
    I N THE space of three or four months I had mastered Felinese. Malayan can be learned within half a year, but Felinese is much simpler. By manipulating four or five hundred words back and forth, you can express anything you want to. Of course there are some complicated things and some complex ideas that can not be expressed very clearly in this way, but the Cat People have a way around that: they simply don’t talk about such things. There aren’t many adjectives or adverbs, and nouns are not abundant either. Anything that vaguely resembles a reverie tree is a reverie tree: you have the big-reverie-tree, the little-reverie-tree, the round-reverie-tree, the pointed-reverie-tree, the foreign-reverie-tree, and the big-foreign-reverie-tree. As a matter of fact, none of these trees are actually related to each other, and it is only the treasured leaf of the true-reverie-tree that can inebriate a man. They don’t go in much for pronouns, and relative pronouns are non-existent. In sum, it is an exceedingly childish language. Actually, all you have to do is remember a few nouns and you know enough to carry on a conversation, for you can use gestures for most of the verbs anyway. They have written words too, funny things that look like tiny towers or pagodas that are extremely difficult to recognise; an ordinary Cat Person can only remember ten or so at the most.
    Scorpion – such was my cat-friend’s name – recognised quite a few of the words and could even compose poetry. You can write a cat-poem by piling up a number of nice-sounding nouns; you don’t have to throw in any content at all.
    Precious leaves,
    Precious flowers,
    Precious cats,
    Precious bellies.
    This is a fragment from Scorpion’s ‘Feelings I Had Upon Reading Our History’. And the Cat People did have history – twenty thousand years of it!
    Once I was able to talk, I began to understand my host. Scorpion was an important person in Cat Country. He was landlord, politician, poet and military officer all rolled into one. He was a landlord by virtue of owning a large stand of reverie trees. (Reverie leaves were the Cat People’s staple of staples, and the reason that he had taken me in was intimately related to