At the foot of the mile-long slope, there was a stand of the great trees, and nearby a river meandered on the level grassy ground. Some way off, Mary saw a gleam that looked like a wider expanse of water, but she didn't spend long looking at that, because the creatures were making for a settlement on the riverbank, and she was burning with curiosity to see it.
There were twenty or thirty huts, roughly grouped in a circle, made of - she had to shade her eyes against the sun to see - wooden beams covered with a kind of wattle-and-daub mixture on the walls and thatch on the roofs. Other wheeled creatures were working: some repairing a roof, others hauling a net out of the river, others bringing brushwood for a fire.
So they had language, and they had fire, and they had society. And about then she found an adjustment being made in her mind, as the word creatures became the word people. These beings weren't human, but they were people, she told herself; it's not them, they're us.
They were quite close now, and seeing what was coming, some of the villagers looked up and called to each other to look. The party from the road slowed to a halt, and Mary clambered stiffly down, knowing that she would ache later on.
"Thank you," she said to her...her what? Her steed? Her cycle? Both ideas were absurdly wrong for the bright-eyed amiability that stood beside her. She settled for - friend.
He raised his trunk and imitated her words:
"Anku," he said, and again they laughed in high spirits.
She took her rucksack from the other creature ("Anku! Anku!") and walked with them off the basalt and on to the hard-packed earth of the village.
And then her absorption truly began.
In the next few days she learned so much that she felt like a child again, bewildered by school. What was more, the wheeled people seemed to be just as wonderstruck by her. Her hands, to begin with. They couldn't get enough of them: their delicate trunks felt over every joint, searching out thumbs, knuckles, and fingernails, flexing them gently, and they watched with amazement as she picked up her rucksack, conveyed food to her mouth, scratched, combed her hair, washed.
In return, they let her feel their trunks. They were infinitely flexible, and about as long as her arm, thicker where they joined the head, and quite powerful enough to crush her skull, she guessed. The two finger-like projections at the tip were capable of enormous force and great gentleness; the creatures seemed to be able to vary the tone of their skin on the underside, on their equivalent of fingertips, from a soft velvet to a solidity like wood. As a result, they could use them for both a delicate task like milking a grazer and the rough business of tearing and shaping branches.
Little by little, Mary realized that their trunks were playing a part in communication, too. A movement of the trunk would modify the meaning of a sound, so the word that sounded like "chuh" meant water when it was accompanied by a sweep of the trunk from left to right, rain when the trunk curled up at the tip, sadness when it curled under, and young shoots of grass when it made a quick flick to the left. As soon as she saw this, Mary imitated it, moving her arm as best she could in the same way, and when the creatures realized that she was beginning to talk to them, their delight was radiant.
Once they had begun to talk (mostly in the wheeled people's language, although she managed to teach them a few words of English: they could say "anku" and "grass" and "tree" and "sky" and "river," and pronounce her name, with a little difficulty) they progressed much more quickly. Their word for themselves as people was mulefa, but an individual was a zalif. Mary thought there was a difference between the sounds for he-zalif and she-zalif, but it was too subtle for her to imitate easily. She began to write it all down and compile a dictionary.
But before she let herself become truly absorbed, she took out her battered paperback and the yarrow stalks, and asked the I Ching: Should I be here doing this, or should I go on somewhere else and keep searching?
The reply came: Keeping still, so that restlessness dissolves; then, beyond the tumult, one can perceive the great laws.
It went on: As a mountain keeps still within itself, thus a wise man does not permit his will to stray beyond his situation.
That could hardly be clearer. She folded the stalks away and closed the book, and then realized that she'd drawn a circle of watching creatures around her.
One said, Question? Permission? Curious.
She said, Please. Look.
Very delicately their trunks moved, sorting through the stalks in the same counting movement she'd been making, or turning the pages of the book. One thing they were astonished by was the doubleness of her hands: by the fact that she could both hold the book and turn the pages at the same time. They loved to watch her lace her fingers together, or play the childhood game of "This is the church, and this is the steeple," or make that over-and-over thumb-to-opposite-forefinger movement that was what Ama was using, at exactly the same moment in Lyra's world, as a charm to keep evil spirits away.
Once they had examined the yarrow stalks and the book, they folded the cloth over them carefully and put them with the book into her rucksack. She was happy and reassured by the message from ancient China, because it meant that what she wanted most to do was exactly, at that moment, what she should do.
From The Amber Spyglass, Book 3 of His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman