[The look is returned only once Fëanor has unmoving ground under his feet again, because it is a bit like riding a horse for the first time - no matter how many times you have watched someone do it, and no matter how calm and predictable the horse, the movements of how to deal with it just aren't ingrained enough yet to use it with surety.

And the last thing that he wants to do is to stumble and fall.

Plus this way, when he acknowledges the other elf's presence, he has the advantage of height and can return the look from an at least slightly higher vantage point.]

Is it that this place is not as removed from Middle Earth as I would have thought, or are you as foreign to these lands as this place? [Because it's fairly obvious that whatever the "station" is, it's not native to these lands.]