"Not in colour. I mean, there were differences -- a lot of differences -- but not in colour."

Wallie struggles for a moment, trying to think how to phrase it.

"Look, obviously they weren't going to speak English in the World, and I wouldn't have been much good if I couldn't communicate, so things were a little... mucked around in my head. I always thought in English, everything sounded English to me, but it wasn't all the same. It was like having an automatic translator, but I was limited by Shonsu's vocabulary. If I wanted a word, and Shonsu didn't know it, I couldn't say it. Sometimes I would say something, and realise as I said it that there were shades of meaning that didn't exist in what I was trying to phrase in English. That said..."

He looks over at Ned, his knife and whittling project, for the moment, held still. "The horses were a good example. If I looked at them, I knew the word for them, and it was horse. But it... wasn't a horse. It was a beast of burden, a herbivore, make a saddle and ride it around, for all intents and purposes culturally a horse, but it was also a hideous camel-faced monstrosity that is definitely not the same species as the horses I knew. There were... fish in the river. The word I had for them was 'piranha,' because they were vicious things that ate anything that blundered into the river in their path, but they weren't really piranha as you might know them."

He frowns. "I'm pretty sure actual Earth piranha aren't that dangerous."