As Redgrave said afterwards, he was "absolutely out of it." They seemed to imagine him to be a kind of uncouth monster, possibly the slave of this radiant being which had come so strangely from somewhere beyond the cloud-veil.

They looked at him with their golden-yellow eyes wide open, and some of them came up rather timidly and touched his clothes, which they seemed to think were his skin.
Then one or two, more daring, put their little hands up to his face and touched his moustache, and all of them, while both examinations were going on, kept up a running conversation of cooing and singing which evidently conveyed their ideas from one to the other on the subject of this most marvellous visit of these two strange beings with neither wings nor feathers, but who, most undoubtedly, had other means of flying, since it was quite certain that they had come from another world.
Their ordinary speech was a low crooning note, like the language in which doves converse, mingled with a twittering current of undertone.
But every moment it rose into higher notes, evidently expressing wonder or admiration, or both.
"You were right about the universal language," said Redgrave, when he had submitted to the stroking process for a few moments.

"These people talk in music, and, as far as I can see or hear, their opinion of us, or, at least, of you, is distinctly flattering.

I don't know what they take _me_ for, and I don't care, but as we'd better make friends with them suppose you sing them 'Home, Sweet Home,' or the 'Swanee River.' I shouldn't wonder if they consider our talking voices most horrible discords, so you might as well give them something different." While he was speaking the sounds about them suddenly hushed, and, as Redgrave said afterwards, it was something like the silence that follows a cannon shot.

Then, in the midst of the hush, Zaidie put her hands behind her, looked up towards the luminous silver surface which formed the only visible sky of Venus, and began to sing "The Swanee River." The clear, sweet notes rang up through the midst of a sudden silence.
The sons and daughters of the Love-Star instantly ceased their own soft musical conversation, and Zaidie sang the old plantation song through for the first time that a human voice had sung it to ears other than human.
As the last note thrilled sweetly from her lips she looked round at the crowd of queer half-human shapes about her, and something in their unlikeness to her own kind brought back to her mind the familiar scenes which lay so far away, so many millions of miles across the dark and silent Ocean of Space.
Other winged figures, attracted by the sound of her singing, had crossed the trees, and these, during the silence which came after the singing of the song, were swiftly followed by others, until there were nearly a thousand of them gathered about the side of the _Astronef_.
There was no crowding or jostling among them.