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One must be careful of what one says in the tunnels of Priest-Kings, for one's words may linger after one, until they sufficiently dissipate to be little more than a meaningless blur of scent. For longer periods of time there are various devices for recording a message, without relying on complex mechanical devices. The simplest and one of the most fascinating is a chemically treated rope of clothlike material which the Priest-King, beginning at an end bearing a certain scent, saturates with the odors of his message. This coiled message rope then retains the odors indefinitely and when another Priest-King wishes to read the message he unrolls it slowly, scanning it serially with the jointed sensory appendages. I am told that the phonemes of the language of Priest-Kings or, better, what in their language would correspond to phonemes in ours, since their "phonemes" have to do with scent and not sound, number seventy-three. Their number is, of course, potentially infinite, as would be the number of possible phonemes in English, but just as we take a subset of sounds to be English sounds and form our utterances from them, so they take a subset of odors as similarly basic to their speech. The number of familiar, common English phonemes, incidentally, is in the neighborhood of fifty. - (Priest-Kings of Gor)