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Then, from the other side of the door, there came an issuance of sounds, of a sort with which I was quite familiar, but it was doubtless new, and perhaps disturbing, to my friends. Initially, it would strike one as the sort of sound one might expect from a large, predatory animal, a tiger, a leopard, a lion, a larl, a sleen. Indeed, if one listened only briefly, or did not listen carefully, one might have supposed that something of that sort was on the other side of the door, perhaps caged, perhaps chained, but, if one attended more carefully, one began shortly to suspect, and it was a most unsettling suspicion, particularly at first, that this stream of sound was being subtly articulated, subtly modulated, in such a way as to suggest something more than a mere stream of sound, that these sounds might not be simple reflexive cries or questioning or warning signals, but sounds bearing meaning, that these sounds were phonemes, and would be linked with the mysteries of meaning, with morphemes, the remarkable, conventional, intangible inventions which make possible intelligible discourse, except that these organisms, emitting these sounds, with their power, energy, ferocity, and terribleness, with their tendency to violence, were not human. kur, with its dialects, is as much a complex native language as any familiar to humans. What is the lever or the wheel, compared to the meaningful sound? What a rare moment when a simple organism, shambling and brutelike, in lost millennia, first lifted its head to the sky, and realized, in a stunning, magical moment, that a sound might mean. The door swung open, heavily. There was a dim, yellowish light within, though I supposed it bright enough for the chamber's occupants. - (Rebels of Gor, Chapter )