What Do They Look Like?

Poul Anderson, New America, "The Queen of Air and Darkness."

In visual sf, we want to know what the aliens look like. In 2001 and in the film of Slaughterhouse Five, we do not see them. In Star Trek, we wonder why the Klingons have changed. Nowadays, even ERB's green Martians can be shown correctly so let's see Merseians and Ythrians.

In prose sf, we read a description which I cannot visualize and almost completely forget, especially in a one-off story rather than in a series. In Starfarers, Poul Anderson has a joke at the expense of an alien race when he makes them look exactly like Merseians.

In "The Queen of Air and Darkness," the Rolandic natives have been projecting images of themselves as fairies so what is seen when Sherrinford destroys the illusion? In just part of a single sentence on p. 220, we are told that the natives are:

lean;
scaly;
long-tailed;
long-beaked.

I have been ignoring this aspect of the story but now include it in the interests of completeness. We might by now have plumbed the full depths of this story - at least for the time being.