Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein

“You must have a language lesson, Oscar.”

I must tell them at Ponce de Leon High School the better way to study languages. You lie down on soft grass near a chuckling stream on a perfect day, and the most beautiful woman in any world bends over you and looks you in the eyes. She starts speaking softly in a language you do not understand.

After a bit her big eyes get bigger and bigger . . . and bigger . . . and you sink into them.

Then, a long time later, Rufo says, “Erbas, Oscar, ‘t knila voorsht.”

“Okay,” I answered, “I am getting up. Don’t rush me.”

That is the last word I am going to set down in a language that doesn’t fit our alphabet. I had several more lessons, and won’t mention them either, and from then on we spoke this lingo, except when I was forced to span gaps by asking in English. It is a language rich in profanity and in words for making love, and richer than English in some technical subjects–but with surprising holes in it. There is no word for “lawyer” for example.

About an hour before sundown we came to the Singing Waters.

We had been traveling over a high, wooded plateau. The brook where we had caught the trout had been joined by other streams and was now a big creek. Below us, at a place we hadn’t reached yet, it would plunge over high cliffs in a super-Yosemite fall. But here, where we stopped to camp, the water had cut a notch into the plateau, forming cascades, before it took that dive.

“Cascades” is a weak word. Upstream, downstream, everywhere you looked, you saw waterfalls–big ones thirty or fifty feet high, little ones a mouse could have jumped up, every size in between. Terraces and staircases of them there were, smooth water green from rich foliage overhead and water white as whipped cream as it splashed into dense foam.

And you heard them. Tiny falls tinkled in silvery soprano, big falls rumbled in basso profundo. On the grassy alp where we camped it was an ever-present chorale; in the middle of the falls you had to snout to make yourself heard.

Coleridge was there in one of his dope dreams:

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil

seething–

Coleridge must have followed that route and reached the Singing Waters. No wonder he felt like killing that “person from Porlock” who broke in on his best dream. When I am dying, lay me beside the Singing Waters and let them be the last I hear and see.

We stopped on a lawn terrace, flat as a promise and soft as a Kiss, and I helped Rufo unpack. I wanted to learn how he did that trick with the box. I didn’t find out. Each side opened as naturally and reasonably as opening up an ironing board–and then when it opened again that was natural and reasonable, too.

First we pitched a tent for Star–no army-surplus job, this; it was a dainty pavilion of embroidered silk and the rug we spread as a floor must have used up three generations of Bukhara artists. Rufo said to me, “Do you want a tent, Oscar?”

I looked up at the sky and over at the not-yet-setting sun. The air was milk warm and I couldn’t believe that it would rain. I don’t like to be in a tent if there is the least chance of surprise attack. “Are you going to use a tent?”

“Me? Oh, no! But She has to have a tent, always. Then, more likely than not. She’ll decade to sleep out on the grass.”

“I won’t need a tent.” (Let’s see, does a “champion” sleep across the door of his lady’s chamber, weapons at hand? I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of such things; they were never mentioned in “Social Studies.”)