The Three-Legged Firewheel Not-Horse of the Sultruviam Sands

“You know, if you just weren't so cussedly scrupulous, you could have been on the back of a horse like that, galloping over the Sultruviam sands – Lawrence of Arabia effaced in the history books by Benjamin of the Triple Treaty – but no! You let the Sultruviamin keep all their animals under protection, and ruined it for everybody!”

“Benjamin, did he really say that?”

“He was quite beside himself, and that was one of those moments in my personal history as a human that I remembered why I had been tempted to make my bid for your analog among the Uppaaimarn – Princess Shaain reminded me of you, Almira, in her beauty, and in her intellect – but the real attraction there would have been to become an honorary Uppaaimarn prince consort, and leave all this behind! But I was called as a human being to serve humanity, and so resisted the temptation yet again! What I said to Altavram Stans was, 'Because I have known you for years, I'm going to give you thirty seconds to hit the door so I don't have to laugh in your face – you think that's a horse, and that means you don't even know how you would die in the attempt!'”

The above not-horse of the Sultruviam deserts is often seen amidst its sand dunes, settling its three legs like a sturdy stool into the sands to stay stable in the winds, chemically sifting and devouring choice organic and mineral particles from that sand with its red pinwheel-like mouths. Accounting for the position of its mouths and stomachs, and its legs, what the human mind thinks of as its head is most assuredly not … that portion of the creature is designed to deposit the waste of its digestion far enough away from the sands being devoured so that it does not ingest its own waste.

“So he would have put his hand up there, thinking that is the head and mane,” Capt. Almira Jackson said, and then cracked up laughing.

“Well, the surprise wouldn't have lasted long, after all,” her fiance said in that deadpan voice that meant she was going to fall all the way out, laughing. “All the water a human being possesses, and then all the tasty carbon, iron, and calcium to go with it – there wouldn't have even been enough left of him to come out that end anyhow, so the touch would be brief! I think I am going to have required reading added to the necessities of seeing me as an acting ambassador – my time is valuable and also fewer people will be killed in the coming years if they get their reading done!"