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Title: Out of the Silent Planet
Author: Lewis, C. S. [Clive Staples] (1898-1963)
Date of first publication: 1938
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1938
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 27 March 2014
Date last updated: 27 March 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1169

This ebook was produced by
Mark Akrigg, Marcia Brooks, Stephen Hutcheson
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






﻿                           OUT OF THE SILENT
                                 PLANET

                                  _by_
                              C. S. LEWIS




                                 LONDON
                       JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD




                       _First published in 1938_






                  Made and Printed in Great Britain by
                 Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London






                             TO MY BROTHER
                                W. H. L.
             a life-long critic of the space-and-time story






                                  NOTE


_Certain slighting references to earlier stories of this type which will
be found in the following pages have been put there for purely dramatic
purposes. The author would be sorry if any reader supposed he was too
stupid to have enjoyed Mr. H. G. Wells’s fantasies or too ungrateful to
acknowledge his debt to them._

                                                              _C. S. L._






                        OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET




                                  ONE


The last drops of the thundershower had hardly ceased falling when the
Pedestrian stuffed his map into his pocket, settled his pack more
comfortably on his tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a
large chestnut-tree into the middle of the road. A violent yellow sunset
was pouring through a rift in the clouds to westward, but straight ahead
over the hills the sky was the colour of dark slate. Every tree and blade
of grass was dripping, and the road shone like a river. The Pedestrian
wasted no time on the landscape but set out at once with the determined
stride of a good walker who has lately realized that he will have to walk
farther than he intended. That, indeed, was his situation. If he had
chosen to look back, which he did not, he could have seen the spire of
Much Nadderby, and, seeing it, might have uttered a malediction on the
inhospitable little hotel which, though obviously empty, had refused him
a bed. The place had changed hands since he last went for a walking-tour
in these parts. The kindly old landlord on whom he had reckoned had been
replaced by someone whom the barmaid referred to as ‘the lady,’ and the
lady was apparently a British innkeeper of that orthodox school who
regard guests as a nuisance. His only chance now was Sterk, on the far
side of the hills, and a good six miles away. The map marked an inn at
Sterk. The Pedestrian was too experienced to build any very sanguine
hopes on this, but there seemed nothing else within range.

He walked fairly fast, and doggedly, without looking much about him, like
a man trying to shorten the way with some interesting train of thought.
He was tall, but a little round-shouldered, about thirty-five to forty
years of age, and dressed with that particular kind of shabbiness which
marks a member of the intelligentsia on a holiday. He might easily have
been mistaken for a doctor or a schoolmaster at first sight, though he
had not the man-of-the-world air of the one or the indefinable breeziness
of the other. In fact, he was a philologist, and fellow of a Cambridge
college. His name was Ransom.

He had hoped when he left Nadderby that he might find a night’s lodging
at some friendly farm before he had walked as far as Sterk. But the land
this side of the hills seemed almost uninhabited. It was a desolate,
featureless sort of country mainly devoted to cabbage and turnip, with
poor hedges and few trees. It attracted no visitors like the richer
country south of Nadderby and it was protected by the hills from the
industrial areas beyond Sterk. As the evening drew in and the noise of
the birds came to an end it grew more silent than an English landscape
usually is. The noise of his own feet on the metalled road became
irritating.

He had walked thus for a matter of two miles when he became aware of a
light ahead. He was close under the hills by now and it was nearly dark,
so that he still cherished hopes of a substantial farmhouse until he was
quite close to the real origin of the light, which proved to be a very
small cottage of ugly nineteenth-century brick. A woman darted out of the
open doorway as he approached it and almost collided with him.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ she said. ‘I thought it was my Harry.’

Ransom asked her if there was any place nearer than Sterk where he might
possibly get a bed.

‘No, sir,’ said the woman. ‘Not nearer than Sterk. I dare say as they
might fix you up at Nadderby.’

She spoke in a humbly fretful voice as if her mind were intent on
something else. Ransom explained that he had already tried Nadderby.

‘Then I don’t know, I’m sure, sir,’ she replied. ‘There isn’t hardly any
house before Sterk, not what you want. There’s only The Rise, where my
Harry works, and I thought you was coming from that way, sir, and that’s
why I come out when I heard you, thinking it might be him. He ought to be
home this long time.’

‘The Rise,’ said Ransom. ‘What’s that? A farm? Would they put me up?’

‘Oh no, sir. You see there’s no one there now except the Professor and
the gentleman from London, not since Miss Alice died. They wouldn’t do
anything like that, sir. They don’t even keep any servants, except my
Harry for doing the furnace like, and he’s not in the house.’

‘What’s this professor’s name?’ asked Ransom, with a faint hope.

‘I don’t know, I’m sure, sir,’ said the woman. ‘The other gentleman’s Mr.
Devine, he is, and Harry says the _other_ gentleman is a professor. He
don’t know much about it, you see, sir, being a little simple, and that’s
why I don’t like him coming home so late, and they said they’d always
send him home at six o’clock. It isn’t as if he didn’t do a good day’s
work either.’

The monotonous voice and the limited range of the woman’s vocabulary did
not express much emotion, but Ransom was standing sufficiently near to
perceive that she was trembling and nearly crying. It occurred to him
that he ought to call on the mysterious professor and ask for the boy to
be sent home: and it occurred to him just a fraction of a second later
that once he were inside the house—among men of his own profession—he
might very reasonably accept the offer of a night’s hospitality. Whatever
the process of thought may have been, he found that the mental picture of
himself calling at The Rise had assumed all the solidity of a thing
determined upon. He told the woman what he intended to do.

‘Thank you very much, sir, I’m sure,’ she said. ‘And if you would be so
kind as to see him out of the gate and on the road before you leave, if
you see what I mean, sir. He’s that frightened of the Professor and he
wouldn’t come away once your back was turned, sir, not if they hadn’t
sent him home themselves like.’

Ransom reassured the woman as well as he could and bade her good-bye,
after ascertaining that he would find The Rise on his left in about five
minutes. Stiffness had grown upon him while he was standing still, and he
proceeded slowly and painfully on his way.

There was no sign of any lights on the left of the road—nothing but the
flat fields and a mass of darkness which he took to be a copse. It seemed
more than five minutes before he reached it and found that he had been
mistaken. It was divided from the road by a good hedge and in the hedge
was a white gate: and the trees which rose above him as he examined the
gate were not the first line of a copse but only a belt, and the sky
showed through them. He felt quite sure now that this must be the gate of
The Rise and that these trees surrounded a house and garden. He tried the
gate and found it locked. He stood for a moment undecided, discouraged by
the silence and the growing darkness. His first inclination, tired as he
felt, was to continue his journey to Sterk: but he had committed himself
to a troublesome duty on behalf of the old woman. He knew that it would
be possible, if one really wanted, to force a way through the hedge. He
did not want to. A nice fool he would look, blundering in upon some
retired eccentric—the sort of a man who kept his gates locked in the
country—with this silly story of a hysterical mother in tears because her
idiot boy had been kept half an hour late at his work! Yet it was
perfectly clear that he would have to get in, and since one cannot crawl
through a hedge with a pack on, he slipped his pack off and flung it over
the gate. The moment he had done so, it seemed to him that he had not
till now fully made up his mind—now that he must break into the garden if
only in order to recover the pack. He became very angry with the woman,
and with himself, but he got down on his hands and knees and began to
worm his way into the hedge.

The operation proved more difficult than he had expected and it was
several minutes before he stood up in the wet darkness on the inner side
of the hedge smarting from his contact with thorns and nettles. He groped
his way to the gate, picked up his pack, and then for the first time
turned to take stock of his surroundings. It was lighter on the drive
than it had been under the trees and he had no difficulty in making out a
large stone house divided from him by a width of untidy and neglected
lawn. The drive branched into two a little way ahead of him—the
right-hand path leading in a gentle sweep to the front door, while the
left ran straight ahead, doubtless to the back premises of the house. He
noticed that this path was churned up into deep ruts—now full of water—as
if it were used to carrying a traffic of heavy lorries. The other, on
which he now began to approach the house, was overgrown with moss. The
house itself showed no light: some of the windows were shuttered, some
gaped blank without shutter or curtain, but all were lifeless and
inhospitable. The only sign of occupation was a column of smoke that rose
from behind the house with a density which suggested the chimney of a
factory, or at least of a laundry, rather than that of a kitchen. The
Rise was clearly the last place in the world where a stranger was likely
to be asked to stay the night, and Ransom, who had already wasted some
time in exploring it, would certainly have turned away if he had not been
bound by his unfortunate promise to the old woman.

He mounted the three steps which led into the deep porch, rang the bell,
and waited. After a time he rang the bell again and sat down on a wooden
bench which ran along one side of the porch. He sat so long that though
the night was warm and starlit the sweat began to dry on his face and a
faint chilliness crept over his shoulders. He was very tired by now, and
it was perhaps this which prevented him from rising and ringing the third
time: this, and the soothing stillness of the garden, the beauty of the
summer sky, and the occasional hooting of an owl somewhere in the
neighbourhood which seemed only to emphasize the underlying tranquillity
of his surroundings. Something like drowsiness had already descended upon
him when he found himself startled into vigilance. A peculiar noise was
going on—a scuffling, irregular noise, vaguely reminiscent of a football
scrum. He stood up. The noise was unmistakable by now. People in boots
were fighting or wrestling or playing some game. They were shouting too.
He could not make out the words but he heard the monosyllabic barking
ejaculations of men who are angry and out of breath. The last thing
Ransom wanted was an adventure, but a conviction that he ought to
investigate the matter was already growing upon him when a much louder
cry rang out in which he could distinguish the words, ‘Let me go. Let me
go,’ and then, a second later, ‘I’m not going in there. Let me go home.’

Throwing off his pack, Ransom sprang down the steps of the porch, and ran
round to the back of the house as quickly as his stiff and footsore
condition allowed him. The ruts and pools of the muddy path led him to
what seemed to be a yard, but a yard surrounded with an unusual number of
outhouses. He had a momentary vision of a tall chimney, a low door filled
with red firelight, and a huge round shape that rose black against the
stars, which he took for the dome of a small observatory: then all this
was blotted out of his mind by the figures of three men who were
struggling together so close to him that he almost cannoned into them.
From the very first Ransom felt no doubt that the central figure, whom
the two others seemed to be detaining in spite of his struggles, was the
old woman’s Harry. He would like to have thundered out, ‘What are you
doing to that boy?’ but the words that actually came—in rather an
unimpressive voice—were, ‘Here! I say! . . .’

The three combatants fell suddenly apart, the boy blubbering. ‘May I
ask,’ said the thicker and taller of the two men, ‘who the devil you may
be and what you are doing here?’ His voice had all the qualities which
Ransom’s had so regrettably lacked.

‘I’m on a walking-tour,’ said Ransom, ‘and I promised a poor woman——’

‘Poor woman be damned,’ said the other. ‘How did you get in?’

‘Through the hedge,’ said Ransom, who felt a little ill-temper coming to
his assistance. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing to that boy, but——’

‘We ought to have a dog in this place,’ said the thick man to his
companion, ignoring Ransom.

‘You mean we should have a dog if you hadn’t insisted on using Tartar for
an experiment,’ said the man who had not yet spoken. He was nearly as
tall as the other, but slender, and apparently the younger of the two,
and his voice sounded vaguely familiar to Ransom.

The latter made a fresh beginning. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I don’t know
what you are doing to that boy, but it’s long after hours and it is high
time you sent him home. I haven’t the least wish to interfere in your
private affairs, but——’

‘Who are you?’ bawled the thick man.

‘My name is Ransom, if that is what you mean. And——’

‘By Jove,’ said the slender man, ‘not Ransom who used to be at
Wedenshaw?’

‘I was at school at Wedenshaw,’ said Ransom.

‘I thought I knew you as soon as you spoke,’ said the slender man. ‘I’m
Devine. Don’t you remember me?’

‘Of course. I should think I do!’ said Ransom as the two men shook hands
with the rather laboured cordiality which is traditional in such
meetings. In actual fact Ransom had disliked Devine at school as much as
anyone he could remember.

‘Touching, isn’t it?’ said Devine. ‘The far-flung line even in the wilds
of Sterk and Nadderby. This is where we get a lump in our throats and
remember Sunday-evening Chapel in the D.O.P. You don’t know Weston,
perhaps?’ Devine indicated his massive and loud-voiced companion. ‘_The_
Weston,’ he added. ‘You know. The great physicist. Has Einstein on toast
and drinks a pint of Schrödinger’s blood for breakfast. Weston, allow me
to introduce my old schoolfellow, Ransom. Dr. Elwin Ransom. _The_ Ransom,
you know. The great philologist. Has Jespersen on toast and drinks a
pint——’

‘I know nothing about it,’ said Weston, who was still holding the
unfortunate Harry by the collar. ‘And if you expect me to say that I am
pleased to see this person who has just broken into my garden, you will
be disappointed. I don’t care twopence what school he was at nor on what
unscientific foolery he is at present wasting money that ought to go to
research. I want to know what he’s doing here: and after that I want to
see the last of him.’

‘Don’t be an ass, Weston,’ said Devine in a more serious voice. ‘His
dropping in is delightfully apropos. You mustn’t mind Weston’s little
way, Ransom. Conceals a generous heart beneath a grim exterior, you know.
You’ll come in and have a drink and something to eat of course?’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Ransom. ‘But about the boy——’

Devine drew Ransom aside. ‘Balmy,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Works like a
beaver as a rule but gets these fits. We are only trying to get him into
the wash-house and keep him quiet for an hour or so till he’s normal
again. Can’t let him go home in his present state. All done by kindness.
You can take him home yourself presently if you like—and come back and
sleep here.’

Ransom was very much perplexed. There was something about the whole scene
suspicious enough and disagreeable enough to convince him that he had
blundered on something criminal, while on the other hand he had all the
deep, irrational conviction of his age and class that such things could
never cross the path of an ordinary person except in fiction and could
least of all be associated with professors and old schoolfellows. Even if
they had been ill-treating the boy, Ransom did not see much chance of
getting him from them by force.

While these thoughts were passing through his head, Devine had been
speaking to Weston, in a low voice, but no lower than was to be expected
of a man discussing hospitable arrangements in the presence of a guest.
It ended with a grunt of assent from Weston. Ransom, to whose other
difficulties a merely social embarrassment was now being added, turned
with the idea of making some remark. But Weston was now speaking to the
boy.

‘You have given enough trouble for one night, Harry,’ he said. ‘And in a
properly governed country I’d know how to deal with you. Hold your tongue
and stop snivelling. You needn’t go into the wash-house if you don’t
want——’

‘It weren’t the wash-house,’ sobbed the half-wit, ‘you know it weren’t. I
don’t want to go in _that_ thing again.’

‘He means the laboratory,’ interrupted Devine. ‘He got in there and was
shut in by accident for a few hours once. It put the wind up him for some
reason. Lo, the poor Indian, you know.’ He turned to the boy. ‘Listen,
Harry,’ he said. ‘This kind gentleman is going to take you home as soon
as he’s had a rest. If you’ll come in and sit down quietly in the hall
I’ll give you something you like.’ He imitated the noise of a cork being
drawn from a bottle—Ransom remembered it had been one of Devine’s tricks
at school—and a guffaw of infantile knowingness broke from Harry’s lips.

‘Bring him in,’ said Weston as he turned away and disappeared into the
house. Ransom hesitated to follow, but Devine assured him that Weston
would be very glad to see him. The lie was barefaced, but Ransom’s desire
for a rest and a drink were rapidly overcoming his social scruples.
Preceded by Devine and Harry, he entered the house and found himself a
moment later seated in an arm-chair and awaiting the return of Devine,
who had gone to fetch refreshments.




                                  TWO


The room into which he had been shown revealed a strange mixture of
luxury and squalor. The windows were shuttered and curtainless, the floor
was uncarpeted and strewn with packing-cases, shavings, newspapers and
boots, and the wall-paper showed the stains left by the pictures and
furniture of the previous occupants. On the other hand, the only two
arm-chairs were of the costliest type, and in the litter which covered
the tables, cigars, oyster-shells and empty champagne-bottles jostled
with tins of condensed milk and opened sardine-tins, with cheap crockery,
broken bread, and teacups a quarter full of tea and cigarette-ends.

His hosts seemed to be a long time away, and Ransom fell to thinking of
Devine. He felt for him that sort of distaste we feel for someone whom we
have admired in boyhood for a very brief period and then outgrown. Devine
had learned just half a term earlier than anyone else that kind of humour
which consists in a perpetual parody of the sentimental or idealistic
clichés of one’s elders. For a few weeks his references to the Dear Old
Place and to Playing the Game, to the White Man’s Burden and a Straight
Bat, had swept everyone, Ransom included, off their feet. But before he
left Wedenshaw Ransom had already begun to find Devine a bore, and at
Cambridge he had avoided him, wondering from afar how anyone so flashy
and, as it were, ready-made, could be so successful. Then had come the
mystery of Devine’s election to the Leicester fellowship, and the further
mystery of his increasing wealth. He had long since abandoned Cambridge
for London, and was presumably something ‘in the city.’ One heard of him
occasionally and one’s informant usually ended either by saying, ‘A damn
clever chap, Devine, in his own way,’ or else by observing plaintively,
‘It’s a mystery to me how that man has got where he is.’ As far as Ransom
could gather from their brief conversation in the yard, his old
schoolfellow had altered very little.

He was interrupted by the opening of the door. Devine entered alone,
carrying a bottle of whiskey on a tray with glasses, and a syphon.

‘Weston is looking out something to eat,’ he said as he placed the tray
on the floor beside Ransom’s chair, and addressed himself to opening the
bottle. Ransom, who was very thirsty indeed by now, observed that his
host was one of those irritating people who forget to use their hands
when they begin talking. Devine started to prise up the silver paper
which covered the cork with the point of a corkscrew, and then stopped to
ask:

‘How do you come to be in this benighted part of the country?’

‘I’m on a walking-tour,’ said Ransom; ‘slept at Stoke Underwood last
night and had hoped to end at Nadderby to-night. They wouldn’t put me up,
so I was going on to Sterk.’

‘God!’ exclaimed Devine, his corkscrew still idle. ‘Do you do it for
money, or is it sheer masochism?’

‘Pleasure, of course,’ said Ransom, keeping his eye immovably on the
still unopened bottle.

‘Can the attraction of it be explained to the uninitiate?’ asked Devine,
remembering himself sufficiently to rip up a small portion of the silver
paper.

‘I hardly know. To begin with, I like the actual walking——’

‘God! You must have enjoyed the army. Jogging along to Thingummy, eh?’

‘No, no. It’s just the opposite of the army. The whole point about the
army is that you are never alone for a moment and can never choose where
you’re going or even what part of the road you’re walking on. On a
walking-tour you are absolutely detached. You stop where you like and go
on when you like. As long as it lasts you need consider no one and
consult no one but yourself.’

‘Until one night you find a wire waiting at your hotel saying, “Come back
at once,”’ replied Devine, at last removing the silver paper.

‘Only if you were fool enough to leave a list of addresses and go to
them! The worst that could happen to me would be that man on the wireless
saying, “Will Dr. Elwin Ransom, believed to be walking somewhere in the
Midlands——”’

‘I begin to see the idea,’ said Devine, pausing in the very act of
drawing the cork. ‘It wouldn’t do if you were in business. You are a
lucky devil! But can even you just disappear like that? No wife, no
young, no aged but honest parent or anything of that sort?’

‘Only a married sister in India. And then, you see, I’m a don. And a don
in the middle of long vacation is almost a non-existent creature, as you
ought to remember. College neither knows nor cares where he is, and
certainly no one else does.’

The cork at last came out of the bottle with a heart-cheering noise.

‘Say when,’ said Devine, as Ransom held out his glass. ‘But I feel sure
there’s a catch somewhere. Do you really mean to say that no one knows
where you are or when you ought to get back, and no one can get hold of
you?’

Ransom was nodding in reply when Devine, who had picked up the syphon,
suddenly swore. ‘I’m afraid this is empty,’ he said. ‘Do you mind having
water? I’ll have to get some from the scullery. How much do you like?’

‘Fill it up, please,’ said Ransom.

A few minutes later Devine returned and handed Ransom his long-delayed
drink. The latter remarked, as he put down the half-emptied tumbler with
a sigh of satisfaction, that Devine’s choice of residence was at least as
odd as his own choice of a holiday.

‘Quite,’ said Devine. ‘But if you knew Weston you’d realize that it’s
much less trouble to go where he wants than to argue the matter. What you
call a strong colleague.’

‘Colleague?’ said Ransom inquiringly.

‘In a sense.’ Devine glanced at the door, drew his chair closer to
Ransom’s, and continued in a more confidential tone. ‘He’s the goods all
right, though. Between ourselves, I am putting a little money into some
experiments he has on hand. It’s all straight stuff—the march of progress
and the good of humanity and all that, but it has an industrial side.’

While Devine was speaking something odd began to happen to Ransom. At
first it merely seemed to him that Devine’s words were no longer making
sense. He appeared to be saying that he was industrial all down both
sides but could never get an experiment to fit him in London. Then he
realized that Devine was not so much unintelligible as inaudible, which
was not surprising, since he was now so far away—about a mile away,
though perfectly clear like something seen through the wrong end of a
telescope. From that bright distance where he sat in his tiny chair he
was gazing at Ransom with a new expression on his face. The gaze became
disconcerting. Ransom tried to move in his chair but found that he had
lost all power over his own body. He felt quite comfortable, but it was
as if his legs and arms had been bandaged to the chair and his head
gripped in a vice; a beautifully padded, but quite immovable, vice. He
did not feel afraid, though he knew that he ought to be afraid and soon
would be. Then, very gradually, the room faded from his sight.

Ransom could never be sure whether what followed had any bearing on the
events recorded in this book or whether it was merely an irresponsible
dream. It seemed to him that he and Weston and Devine were all standing
in a little garden surrounded by a wall. The garden was bright and
sunlit, but over the top of the wall you could see nothing but darkness.
They were trying to climb over the wall and Weston asked them to give him
a hoist up. Ransom kept on telling him not to go over the wall because it
was so dark on the other side, but Weston insisted, and all three of them
set about doing so. Ransom was the last. He got astride on the top of the
wall, sitting on his coat because of the broken bottles. The other two
had already dropped down on the outside into the darkness, but before he
followed them a door in the wall—which none of them had noticed—was
opened from without and the queerest people he had ever seen came into
the garden bringing Weston and Devine back with them. They left them in
the garden and retired into the darkness themselves, locking the door
behind them. Ransom found it impossible to get down from the wall. He
remained sitting there, not frightened but rather uncomfortable because
his right leg, which was on the outside, felt so dark and his left leg
felt so light. ‘My leg will drop off if it gets much darker,’ he said.
Then he looked down into the darkness and asked, ‘Who are you?’ and the
Queer People must still have been there for they all replied,
‘Hoo—Hoo—Hoo?’ just like owls.

He began to realize that his leg was not so much dark as cold and stiff,
because he had been resting the other on it for so long: and also that he
was in an arm-chair in a lighted room. A conversation was going on near
him and had, he now realized, been going on for some time. His head was
comparatively clear. He realized that he had been drugged or hypnotized,
or both, and he felt that some control over his own body was returning to
him though he was still very weak. He listened intently without trying to
move.

‘I’m getting a little tired of this, Weston,’ Devine was saying, ‘and
specially as it’s my money that is being risked. I tell you he’ll do
quite as well as the boy, and in some ways better. Only, he’ll be coming
round very soon now and we must get him on board at once. We ought to
have done it an hour ago.’

‘The boy was ideal,’ said Weston sulkily. ‘Incapable of serving humanity
and only too likely to propagate idiocy. He was the sort of boy who in a
civilized community would be automatically handed over to a state
laboratory for experimental purposes.’

‘I dare say. But in England he is the sort of boy in whom Scotland Yard
might conceivably feel an interest. This busybody, on the other hand,
will not be missed for months, and even then no one will know where he
was when he disappeared. He came alone. He left no address. He has no
family. And finally he has poked his nose into the whole affair of his
own accord.’

‘Well, I confess I don’t like it. He is, after all, human. The boy was
really almost a—a preparation. Still, he’s only an individual, and
probably a quite useless one. We’re risking our own lives too. In a great
cause——’

‘For the Lord’s sake don’t start all that stuff now. We haven’t time.’

‘I dare say,’ replied Weston, ‘he would consent if he could be made to
understand.’

‘Take his feet and I’ll take his head,’ said Devine.

‘If you really think he’s coming round,’ said Weston, ‘you’d better give
him another dose. We can’t start till we get the sunlight. It wouldn’t be
pleasant to have him struggling in there for three hours or so. It would
be better if he didn’t wake up till we were under weigh.’

‘True enough. Just keep an eye on him while I run upstairs and get
another.’

Devine left the room. Ransom saw through his half-closed eyes that Weston
was standing over him. He had no means of foretelling how his own body
would respond, if it responded at all, to a sudden attempt of movement,
but he saw at once that he must take his chance. Almost before Devine had
closed the door he flung himself with all his force at Weston’s feet. The
scientist fell forward across the chair, and Ransom, flinging him off
with an agonizing effort, rose and dashed out into the hall. He was very
weak and fell as he entered it: but terror was behind him and in a couple
of seconds he had found the hall door and was working desperately to
master the bolts. Darkness and his trembling hands were against him.
Before he had drawn one bolt, booted feet were clattering over the
carpetless floor behind him. He was gripped by the shoulders and the
knees. Kicking, writhing, dripping with sweat, and bellowing as loud as
he could in the faint hope of rescue, he prolonged the struggle with a
violence of which he would have believed himself incapable. For one
glorious moment the door was open, the fresh night air was in his face,
he saw the reassuring stars and even his own pack lying in the porch.
Then a heavy blow fell on his head. Consciousness faded, and the last
thing of which he was aware was the grip of strong hands pulling him back
into the dark passage, and the sound of a closing door.




                                 THREE


When Ransom came to his senses he seemed to be in bed in a dark room. He
had a pretty severe headache, and this, combined with a general
lassitude, discouraged him at first from attempting to rise or to take
stock of his surroundings. He noticed, drawing his hand across his
forehead, that he was sweating freely, and this directed his attention to
the fact that the room (if it was a room) was remarkably warm. Moving his
arms to fling off the bedclothes, he touched a wall at the right side of
the bed: it was not only warm, but hot. He moved his left hand to and fro
in the emptiness on the other side and noticed that there the air was
cooler—apparently the heat was coming from the wall. He felt his face and
found a bruise over the left eye. This recalled to his mind the struggle
with Weston and Devine, and he instantly concluded that they had put him
in an outhouse behind their furnace. At the same time he looked up and
recognized the source of the dim light in which, without noticing it, he
had all along been able to see the movements of his own hands. There was
some kind of skylight immediately over his head—a square of night sky
filled with stars. It seemed to Ransom that he had never looked out on
such a frosty night. Pulsing with brightness as with some unbearable pain
or pleasure, clustered in pathless and countless multitudes, dreamlike in
clarity, blazing in perfect blackness, the stars seized all his
attention, troubled him, excited him, and drew him up to a sitting
position. At the same time they quickened the throb of his headache, and
this reminded him that he had been drugged. He was just formulating to
himself the theory that the stuff they had given him might have some
effect on the pupil and that this would explain the unnatural splendour
and fullness of the sky, when a disturbance of silver light, almost a
pale and miniature sunrise, at one corner of the skylight, drew his eyes
upward again. Some minutes later the orb of the full moon was pushing its
way into the field of vision. Ransom sat still and watched. He had never
seen such a moon—so white, so blinding and so large. ‘Like a great
football just outside the glass,’ he thought, and then, a moment later,
‘No—it’s bigger than that.’ By this time he was quite certain that
something was seriously wrong with his eyes: no moon could possibly be
the size of the thing he was seeing.

The light of the huge moon—if it was a moon—had by now illuminated his
surroundings almost as clearly as if it were day. It was a very strange
room. The floor was so small that the bed and a table beside it occupied
the whole width of it: the ceiling seemed to be nearly twice as wide and
the walls sloped outward as they rose, so that Ransom had the impression
of lying at the bottom of a deep and narrow wheelbarrow. This confirmed
his belief that his sight was either temporarily or permanently injured.
In other respects, however, he was recovering rapidly and even beginning
to feel an unnatural lightness of heart and a not disagreeable
excitement. The heat was still oppressive, and he stripped off everything
but his shirt and trousers before rising to explore. His rising was
disastrous and raised graver apprehensions in his mind about the effects
of being drugged. Although he had been conscious of no unusual muscular
effort, he found himself leaping from the bed with an energy which
brought his head into sharp contact with the skylight and flung him down
again in a heap on the floor. He found himself on the other side against
the wall—the wall that ought to have sloped outwards like the side of a
wheelbarrow, according to his previous reconnaissance. But it didn’t. He
felt it and looked at it: it was unmistakably at right angles to the
floor. More cautiously this time, he rose again to his feet. He felt an
extraordinary lightness of body: it was with difficulty that he kept his
feet on the floor. For the first time a suspicion that he might be dead
and already in the ghost-life crossed his mind. He was trembling, but a
hundred mental habits forbade him to consider this possibility. Instead,
he explored his prison. The result was beyond doubt: all the walls looked
as if they sloped outwards so as to make the room wider at the ceiling
than it was at the floor, but each wall as you stood beside it turned out
to be perfectly perpendicular—not only to sight but to touch also if one
stooped down and examined with one’s fingers the angle between it and the
floor. The same examination revealed two other curious facts. The room
was walled and floored with metal, and was in a state of continuous faint
vibration—a silent vibration with a strangely life-like and unmechanical
quality about it. But if the vibration was silent, there was plenty of
noise going on—a series of musical raps or percussions at quite irregular
intervals which seemed to come from the ceiling. It was as if the metal
chamber in which he found himself was being bombarded with small,
tinkling missiles. Ransom was by now thoroughly frightened—not with the
prosaic fright that a man suffers in a war, but with a heady, bounding
kind of fear that was hardly distinguishable from his general excitement:
he was poised on a sort of emotional watershed from which, he felt, he
might at any moment pass either into delirious terror or into an ecstasy
of joy. He knew now that he was not in a house, but in some moving
vessel. It was clearly not a submarine: and the infinitesimal quivering
of the metal did not suggest the motion of any wheeled vehicle. A ship
then, he supposed, or some kind of airship . . . but there was an oddity
in all his sensations for which neither supposition accounted. Puzzled,
he sat down again on the bed, and stared at the portentous moon.

An airship, some kind of flying-machine . . . but why did the moon look
so big? It was larger than he had thought at first. No moon could really
be that size; and he realized now that he had known this from the first
but had repressed the knowledge through terror. At the same moment a
thought came into his head which stopped his breath—there could be no
full moon at all that night. He remembered distinctly that he had walked
from Nadderby in a moonless night. Even if the thin crescent of a new
moon had escaped his notice, it could not have grown to this in a few
hours. It could not have grown to this at all—this megalomaniac disk, far
larger than the football he had at first compared it to, larger than a
child’s hoop, filling almost half the sky. And where was the old ‘man in
the moon’—the familiar face that had looked down on all the generations
of men? The thing wasn’t the Moon at all; and he felt his hair move on
his scalp.

At that moment the sound of an opening door made him turn his head. An
oblong of dazzling light appeared behind him and instantly vanished as
the door closed again, having admitted the bulky form of a naked man whom
Ransom recognized as Weston. No reproach, no demand for an explanation,
rose to Ransom’s lips or even to his mind; not with that monstrous orb
above them. The mere presence of a human being, with its offer of at
least some companionship, broke down the tension in which his nerves had
long been resisting a bottomless dismay. He found, when he spoke, that he
was sobbing.

‘Weston! Weston!’ he gasped. ‘What is it? It’s not the Moon, not that
size. It can’t be, can it?’

‘No,’ replied Weston, ‘it’s the Earth.’




                                  FOUR


Ransom’s legs failed him, and he must have sunk back upon the bed, but he
only became aware of this many minutes later. At the moment he was
unconscious of everything except his fear. He did not even know what he
was afraid of: the fear itself possessed his whole mind, a formless,
infinite misgiving. He did not lose consciousness, though he greatly
wished that he might do so. Any change—death or sleep, or, best of all, a
waking which should show all this for a dream—would have been
inexpressibly welcome. None came. Instead, the lifelong self-control of
social man, the virtues which are half hypocrisy or the hypocrisy which
is half a virtue, came back to him and soon he found himself answering
Weston in a voice not shamefully tremulous.

‘Do you mean that?’ he asked.

‘Certainly.’

‘Then where are we?’

‘Standing out from Earth about eighty-five thousand miles.’

‘You mean we’re—in space.’ Ransom uttered the word with difficulty as a
frightened child speaks of ghosts or a frightened man of cancer.

Weston nodded.

‘What for?’ said Ransom. ‘And what on earth have you kidnapped me for?
And how have you done it?’

For a moment Weston seemed disposed to give no answer; then, as if on a
second thought, he sat down on the bed beside Ransom and spoke as
follows:

‘I suppose it will save trouble if I deal with these questions at once,
instead of leaving you to pester us with them every hour for the next
month. As to how we do it—I suppose you mean how the space-ship
works—there’s no good your asking that. Unless you were one of the four
or five real physicists now living you couldn’t understand: and if there
were any chance of your understanding you certainly wouldn’t be told. If
it makes you happy to repeat words that don’t mean anything—which is, in
fact, what unscientific people want when they ask for an explanation—you
may say we work by exploiting the less observed properties of solar
radiation. As to why we are here, we are on our way to Malacandra. . . .’

‘Do you mean a star called Malacandra?’

‘Even you can hardly suppose we are going out of the solar system.
Malacandra is much nearer than that: we shall make it in about
twenty-eight days.’

‘There isn’t a planet called Malacandra,’ objected Ransom.

‘I am giving it its real name, not the name invented by terrestrial
astronomers,’ said Weston.

‘But surely this is nonsense,’ said Ransom. ‘How the deuce did you find
out its real name, as you call it?’

‘From the inhabitants.’

It took Ransom some time to digest this statement. ‘Do you mean to tell
me you claim to have been to this star before, or this planet, or
whatever it is?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can’t really ask me to believe that,’ said Ransom. ‘Damn it all,
it’s not an everyday affair. Why has no one heard of it? Why has it not
been in all the papers?’

‘Because we are not perfect idiots,’ said Weston gruffly.

After a few moments’ silence Ransom began again. ‘Which planet is it in
our terminology?’ he asked.

‘Once and for all,’ said Weston, ‘I am not going to tell you. If you know
how to find out when we get there, you are welcome to do so: I don’t
think we have much to fear from your scientific attainments. In the
meantime, there is no reason for you to know.’

‘And you say this place is inhabited?’ said Ransom.

Weston gave him a peculiar look and then nodded. The uneasiness which
this produced in Ransom rapidly merged in an anger which he had almost
lost sight of amidst the conflicting emotions that beset him.

‘And what has all this to do with me?’ he broke out. ‘You have assaulted
me, drugged me, and are apparently carrying me off as a prisoner in this
infernal thing. What have I done to you? What do you say for yourself?’

‘I might reply by asking you why you crept into my backyard like a thief.
If you had minded your own business you would not be here. As it is, I
admit that we have had to infringe your rights. My only defence is that
small claims must give way to great. As far as we know, we are doing what
has never been done in the history of man, perhaps never in the history
of the universe. We have learned how to jump off the speck of matter on
which our species began; infinity, and therefore perhaps eternity, is
being put into the hands of the human race. You cannot be so small-minded
as to think that the rights or the life of an individual or of a million
individuals are of the slightest importance in comparison with this.’

‘I happen to disagree,’ said Ransom, ‘and I always have disagreed, even
about vivisection. But you haven’t answered my question. What do you want
me for? What good am I to do you on this—on Malacandra.’

‘That I don’t know,’ said Weston. ‘It was no idea of ours. We are only
obeying orders.’

‘Whose?’

There was another pause. ‘Come,’ said Weston at last, ‘there is really no
use in continuing this cross-examination. You keep on asking me questions
I can’t answer: in some cases because I don’t know the answers, in others
because you wouldn’t understand them. It will make things very much
pleasanter during the voyage if you can only resign your mind to your
fate and stop bothering yourself and us. It would be easier if your
philosophy of life were not so insufferably narrow and individualistic. I
had thought no one could fail to be inspired by the role you are being
asked to play: that even a worm, if it could understand, would rise to
the sacrifice. I mean, of course, the sacrifice of time and liberty, and
some little risk. Don’t misunderstand me.’

‘Well,’ said Ransom, ‘you hold all the cards, and I must make the best of
it. I consider _your_ philosophy of life raving lunacy. I suppose all
that stuff about infinity and eternity means that you think you are
justified in doing anything—absolutely anything—here and now, on the off
chance that some creatures or other descended from man as we know him may
crawl about a few centuries longer in some part of the universe.’

‘Yes—anything whatever,’ returned the scientist sternly, ‘and all
educated opinion—for I do not call classics and history and such trash
education—is entirely on my side. I am glad you raised the point, and I
advise you to remember my answer. In the meantime, if you will follow me
into the next room, we will have breakfast. Be careful how you get up:
your weight here is hardly appreciable compared with your weight on
Earth.’

Ransom rose and his captor opened the door. Instantly the room was
flooded with a dazzling golden light which completely eclipsed the pale
earthlight behind him.

‘I will give you darkened glasses in a moment,’ said Weston as he
preceded him into the chamber whence the radiance was pouring. It seemed
to Ransom that Weston went up a hill towards the doorway and disappeared
suddenly downwards when he had passed it. When he followed—which he did
with caution—he had the curious impression that he was walking up to the
edge of a precipice: the new room beyond the doorway seemed to be built
on its side so that its farther wall lay almost in the same plane as the
floor of the room he was leaving. When, however, he ventured to put
forward his foot, he found that the floor continued flush and as he
entered the second room the walls suddenly righted themselves and the
rounded ceiling was over his head. Looking back, he perceived that the
bedroom in its turn was now heeling over—its roof a wall and one of its
walls a roof.

‘You will soon get used to it,’ said Weston, following his gaze. ‘The
ship is roughly spherical, and now that we are outside the gravitational
field of the Earth “down” means—and feels—towards the centre of our own
little metal world. This, of course, was foreseen and we built her
accordingly. The core of the ship is a hollow globe—we keep our stores
inside it—and the surface of that globe is the floor we are walking on.
The cabins are arranged all round this, their walls supporting an outer
globe which from our point of view is the roof. As the centre is always
“down,” the piece of floor you are standing on always feels flat or
horizontal and the wall you are standing against always seems vertical.
On the other hand, the globe of floor is so small that you can always see
over the edge of it—over what would be the horizon if you were a flea—and
then you see the floors and wall of the next cabin in a different plane.
It is just the same on Earth, of course, only we are not big enough to
see it.’

After this explanation he made arrangements in his precise, ungracious
way for the comfort of his guest or prisoner. Ransom, at his advice,
removed all his clothes and substituted a little metal girdle hung with
enormous weights to reduce, as far as possible, the unmanageable
lightness of his body. He also assumed tinted glasses, and soon found
himself seated opposite Weston at a small table laid for breakfast. He
was both hungry and thirsty and eagerly attacked the meal which consisted
of tinned meat, biscuit, butter and coffee.

But all these actions he had performed mechanically. Stripping, eating
and drinking passed almost unnoticed, and all he ever remembered of his
first meal in the space-ship was the tyranny of heat and light. Both were
present in a degree which would have been intolerable on Earth, but each
had a new quality. The light was paler than any light of comparable
intensity that he had ever seen; it was not pure white but the palest of
all imaginable golds, and it cast shadows as sharp as a floodlight. The
heat, utterly free from moisture, seemed to knead and stroke the skin
like a gigantic masseur: it produced no tendency to drowsiness: rather,
intense alacrity. His headache was gone: he felt vigilant, courageous and
magnanimous as he had seldom felt on Earth. Gradually he dared to raise
his eyes to the skylight. Steel shutters were drawn across all but a
chink of the glass, and that chink was covered with blinds of some heavy
and dark material; but still it was too bright to look at.

‘I always thought space was dark and cold,’ he remarked vaguely.

‘Forgotten the sun?’ said Weston contemptuously.

Ransom went on eating for some time. Then he began, ‘If it’s like this in
the early morning,’ and stopped, warned by the expression on Weston’s
face. Awe fell upon him: there were no mornings here, no evenings, and no
night—nothing but the changeless noon which had filled for centuries
beyond history so many millions of cubic miles. He glanced at Weston
again, but the latter held up his hand.

‘Don’t talk,’ he said. ‘We have discussed all that is necessary. The ship
does not carry oxygen enough for any unnecessary exertion; not even for
talking.’

Shortly afterwards he rose, without inviting the other to follow him, and
left the room by one of the many doors which Ransom had not yet seen
opened.




                                  FIVE


The period spent in the space-ship ought to have been one of terror and
anxiety for Ransom. He was separated by an astronomical distance from
every member of the human race except two whom he had excellent reasons
for distrusting. He was heading for an unknown destination, and was being
brought thither for a purpose which his captors steadily refused to
disclose. Devine and Weston relieved each other regularly in a room which
Ransom was never allowed to enter and where he supposed the controls of
their machine must be. Weston, during his watches off, was almost
entirely silent. Devine was more loquacious and would often talk and
guffaw with the prisoner until Weston rapped on the wall of the
control-room and warned them not to waste air. But Devine was secretive
after a certain point. He was quite ready to laugh at Weston’s solemn
scientific idealism. He didn’t give a damn, he said, for the future of
the species or the meeting of two worlds.

‘There’s more to Malacandra than that,’ he would add with a wink. But
when Ransom asked him what more, he would lapse into satire and make
ironical remarks about the white man’s burden and the blessings of
civilization.

‘It _is_ inhabited, then?’ Ransom would press.

‘Ah—there’s always a native question in these things,’ Devine would
answer. For the most part his conversation ran on the things he would do
when he got back to Earth: ocean-going yachts, the most expensive women
and a big place on the Riviera figured largely in his plans. ‘I’m not
running all these risks for fun.’

Direct questions about Ransom’s own role were usually met with silence.
Only once, in reply to such a question, Devine, who was then in Ransom’s
opinion very far from sober, admitted that they were rather ‘handing him
the baby.’

‘But I’m sure,’ he added, ‘you’ll live up to the old school tie.’

All this, as I have said, was sufficiently disquieting. The odd thing was
that it did not very greatly disquiet him. It is hard for a man to brood
on the future when he is feeling so extremely well as Ransom now felt.
There was an endless night on one side of the ship and an endless day on
the other: each was marvellous and he moved from the one to the other at
his will, delighted. In the nights, which he could create by turning the
handle of a door, he lay for hours in contemplation of the skylight. The
Earth’s disk was nowhere to be seen; the stars, thick as daisies on an
uncut lawn, reigned perpetually with no cloud, no moon, no sunrise to
dispute their sway. There were planets of unbelievable majesty, and
constellations undreamed of: there were celestial sapphires, rubies,
emeralds and pin-pricks of burning gold; far out on the left of the
picture hung a comet, tiny and remote: and between all and behind all,
far more emphatic and palpable than it showed on Earth, the
undimensioned, enigmatic blackness. The lights trembled: they seemed to
grow brighter as he looked. Stretched naked on his bed, a second Danaë,
he found it night by night more difficult to disbelieve in old astrology:
almost he felt, wholly he imagined, ‘sweet influence’ pouring or even
stabbing into his surrendered body. All was silence but for the irregular
tinkling noises. He knew now that these were made by meteorites, small,
drifting particles of the world-stuff that smote continually on their
hollow drum of steel; and he guessed that at any moment they might meet
something large enough to make meteorites of ship and all. But he could
not fear. He now felt that Weston had justly called him little-minded in
the moment of his first panic. The adventure was too high, its
circumstance too solemn, for any emotion save a severe delight. But the
days—that is, the hours spent in the sunward hemisphere of their
microcosm—were the best of all. Often he rose after only a few hours’
sleep to return, drawn by an irresistible attraction, to the regions of
light; he could not cease to wonder at the noon which always awaited you
however early you went to seek it. There, totally immersed in a bath of
pure ethereal colour and of unrelenting though unwounding brightness,
stretched his full length and with eyes half closed in the strange
chariot that bore them, faintly quivering, through depth after depth of
tranquillity far above the reach of night, he felt his body and mind
daily rubbed and scoured and filled with new vitality. Weston, in one of
his brief, reluctant answers, admitted a scientific basis for these
sensations: they were receiving, he said, many rays that never penetrated
the terrestrial atmosphere.

But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual
cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A
nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that
follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of
‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal
fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed
to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till
now—now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this
empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it
‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed
should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their
life had come? He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb
of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly
even upon the earth with so many eyes—and here, with how many more! No:
Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named
it simply the heavens—the heavens which declared the glory—the

        ‘happy climes that ly
  Where day never shuts his eye
  Up in the broad fields of the sky.’

He quoted Milton’s words to himself lovingly, at this time and often.

He did not, of course, spend all his time in basking. He explored the
ship (so far as he was allowed), passing from room to room with those
slow movements which Weston enjoined upon them lest exertion should
overtax their supply of air. From the necessity of its shape, the
space-ship contained a good many more chambers than were in regular use:
but Ransom was also inclined to think that its owners—or at least
Devine—intended these to be filled with cargo of some kind on the return
voyage. He also became, by an insensible process, the steward and cook of
the company; partly because he felt it natural to share the only labours
he could share—he was never allowed into the control-room—and partly in
order to anticipate a tendency which Weston showed to make him a servant
whether he would or no. He preferred to work as a volunteer rather than
in admitted slavery: and he liked his own cooking a good deal more than
that of his companions.

It was these duties that made him at first the unwilling, and then the
alarmed, hearer of a conversation which occurred about a fortnight (he
judged) after the beginning of their voyage. He had washed up the remains
of their evening meal, basked in the sunlight, chatted with Devine—better
company than Weston, though in Ransom’s opinion much the more odious of
the two—and retired to bed at his usual time. He was a little restless,
and after an hour or so it occurred to him that he had forgotten one or
two small arrangements in the galley which would facilitate his work in
the morning. The galley opened off the saloon or day-room, and its door
was close to that of the control-room. He rose and went there at once.
His feet, like the rest of him, were bare.

The galley skylight was on the dark side of the ship, but Ransom did not
turn on the light. To leave the door ajar was sufficient, as this
admitted a stream of brilliant sunlight. As everyone who has ‘kept house’
will understand, he found that his preparations for the morning had been
even more incomplete than he supposed. He did his work well, from
practice, and therefore quietly. He had just finished and was drying his
hands on the roller-towel behind the galley door when he heard the door
of the control-room open and saw the silhouette of a man outside the
galley—Devine’s, he gathered. Devine did not come forward into the
saloon, but remained standing and talking—apparently into the
control-room. It thus came about that while Ransom could hear distinctly
what Devine said, he could not make out Weston’s answers.

‘I think it would be dam’ silly,’ said Devine. ‘If you could be sure of
meeting the brutes where we alight there might be something in it. But
suppose we have to trek? All we’d gain by your plan would be having to
carry a drugged man and his pack instead of letting a live man walk with
us and do his share of the work.’

Weston apparently replied.

‘But he _can’t_ find out,’ returned Devine. ‘Unless someone is fool
enough to tell him. Anyway, even if he suspects, do you think a man like
that would have the guts to run away on a strange planet? Without food?
Without weapons? You’ll find he’ll eat out of your hand at the first
sight of a _Sorn_.’

Again Ransom heard the indistinct noise of Weston’s voice.

‘How should I know?’ said Devine. ‘It may be some sort of chief: much
more likely a mumbo-jumbo.’

This time came a very short utterance from the control-room: apparently a
question. Devine answered at once.

‘It would explain why he was wanted.’

Weston asked him something more.

‘Human sacrifice, I suppose. At least it wouldn’t be human from _their_
point of view; you know what I mean.’

Weston had a good deal to say this time, and it elicited Devine’s
characteristic chuckle.

‘Quite, quite,’ he said. ‘It is understood that you are doing it all from
the highest motives. So long as they lead to the same actions as _my_
motives, you are quite welcome to them.’

Weston continued; and this time Devine seemed to interrupt him.

‘You’re not losing your own nerve, are you?’ he said. He was then silent
for some time, as if listening. Finally, he replied:

‘If you’re so fond of the brutes as that you’d better stay and
interbreed—if they have sexes, which we don’t yet know. Don’t you worry.
When the time comes for cleaning the place up we’ll save one or two for
you, and you can keep them as pets or vivisect them or sleep with them or
all three—whichever way it takes you. . . . Yes, I know. Perfectly
loathsome. I was only joking. Good night.’

A moment later Devine closed the door of the control-room, crossed the
saloon and entered his own cabin. Ransom heard him bolt the door of it
according to his invariable, though puzzling, custom. The tension with
which he had been listening relaxed. He found that he had been holding
his breath, and breathed deeply again. Then cautiously he stepped out
into the saloon.

Though he knew that it would be prudent to return to his bed as quickly
as possible, he found himself standing still in the now familiar glory of
the light and viewing it with a new and poignant emotion. Out of this
heaven, these happy climes, they were presently to descend—into _what_?
_Sorns_, human sacrifice, loathsome sexless monsters. What was a _sorn_?
His own role in the affair was now clear enough. Somebody or something
had sent for him. It could hardly be for him personally. The somebody
wanted a victim—any victim—from Earth. He had been picked because Devine
had done the picking; he realized for the first time—in all circumstances
a late and startling discovery—that Devine had hated him all these years
as heartily as he hated Devine. But what was a _sorn_? ‘When he saw them
he would eat out of Devine’s hands.’ His mind, like so many minds of his
generation, was richly furnished with bogies. He had read his H. G. Wells
and others. His universe was peopled with horrors such as ancient and
mediæval mythology could hardly rival. No insect-like, vermiculate or
crustacean Abominable, no twitching feelers, rasping wings, slimy coils,
curling tentacles, no monstrous union of superhuman intelligence and
insatiable cruelty seemed to him anything but likely on an alien world.
The _sorns_ would be . . . would be . . . he dared not think what the
_sorns_ would be. And he was to be given to them. Somehow this seemed
more horrible than being caught by them. Given, handed over, offered. He
saw in imagination various incompatible monstrosities—bulbous eyes,
grinning jaws, horns, stings, mandibles. Loathing of insects, loathing of
snakes, loathing of things that squashed and squelched, all played their
horrible symphonies over his nerves. But the reality would be worse: it
would be an extra-terrestrial Otherness—something one had never thought
of, never could have thought of. In that moment Ransom made a decision.
He could face death, but not the _sorns_. He must escape when they got to
Malacandra, if there were any possibility. Starvation, or even to be
chased by _sorns_, would be better than being handed over. If escape were
impossible, then it must be suicide. Ransom was a pious man. He hoped he
would be forgiven. It was no more in his power, he thought, to decide
otherwise than to grow a new limb. Without hesitation he stole back into
the galley and secured the sharpest knife: henceforward he determined
never to be parted from it.

Such was the exhaustion produced by terror that when he regained his bed
he fell instantly into stupefied and dreamless sleep.




                                  SIX


He woke much refreshed, and even a little ashamed of his terror on the
previous night. His situation was, no doubt, very serious: indeed the
possibility of returning alive to Earth must be almost discounted. But
death could be faced, and rational fear of death could be mastered. It
was only the irrational, the biological, horror of monsters that was the
real difficulty: and this he faced and came to terms with as well as he
could while he lay in the sunlight after breakfast. He had the feeling
that one sailing in the heavens, as he was doing, should not suffer
abject dismay before any earthbound creature. He even reflected that the
knife could pierce other flesh as well as his own. The bellicose mood was
a very rare one with Ransom. Like many men of his own age, he rather
underestimated than overestimated his own courage; the gap between
boyhood’s dreams and his actual experience of the War had been startling,
and his subsequent view of his own unheroic qualities had perhaps swung
too far in the opposite direction. He had some anxiety lest the firmness
of his present mood should prove a short-lived illusion; but he must make
the best of it.

As hour followed hour and waking followed sleep in their eternal day, he
became aware of a gradual change. The temperature was slowly falling.
They resumed clothes. Later, they added warm underclothes. Later still,
an electric heater was turned on in the centre of the ship. And it became
certain, too—though the phenomenon was hard to seize—that the light was
less overwhelming than it had been at the beginning of the voyage. It
became certain to the comparing intellect, but it was difficult to _feel_
what was happening as a diminution of light and impossible to think of it
as ‘darkening’ because, while the radiance changed in degree, its
unearthly quality had remained exactly the same since the moment he first
beheld it. It was not, like fading light upon the Earth, mixed with the
increasing moisture and phantom colours of the air. You might halve its
intensity, Ransom perceived, and the remaining half would still be what
the whole had been—merely less, not other. Halve it again, and the
residue would still be the same. As long as it was at all, it would be
itself—out even to that unimagined distance where its last force was
spent. He tried to explain what he meant to Devine.

‘Like thingummy’s soap!’ grinned Devine. ‘Pure soap to the last bubble,
eh?’

Shortly after this the even tenor of their life in the space-ship began
to be disturbed. Weston explained that they would soon begin to feel the
gravitational pull of Malacandra.

‘That means,’ he said, ‘that it will no longer be “down” to the centre of
the ship. It will be “down” towards Malacandra—which from our point of
view will be under the control-room. As a consequence, the floors of most
of the chambers will become wall or roof, and one of the walls a floor.
You won’t like it.’

The result of this announcement, so far as Ransom was concerned, was
hours of heavy labour in which he worked shoulder to shoulder now with
Devine and now with Weston as their alternating watches liberated them
from the control-room. Water-tins, oxygen-cylinders, guns, ammunition and
foodstuffs had all to be piled on the floors alongside the appropriate
walls and lying on their sides so as to be upright when the new
‘downwards’ came into play. Long before the work was finished disturbing
sensations began. At first Ransom supposed that it was the toil itself
which so weighted his limbs: but rest did not alleviate the symptom, and
it was explained to him that their bodies, in response to the planet that
had caught them in its field, were actually gaining weight every minute
and doubling in weight with every twenty-four hours. They had the
experiences of a pregnant woman, but magnified almost beyond endurance.

At the same time their sense of direction—never very confident on the
space-ship—became continuously confused. From any room on board, the next
room’s floor had always looked downhill and felt level: now it looked
downhill and felt a little, a very little, downhill as well. One found
oneself running as one entered it. A cushion flung aside on the floor of
the saloon would be found hours later to have moved an inch or so towards
the wall. All of them were afflicted with vomiting, headache and
palpitations of the heart. The conditions grew worse hour by hour. Soon
one could only grope and crawl from cabin to cabin. All sense of
direction disappeared in a sickening confusion. Parts of the ship were
definitely below in the sense that their floors were upside down and only
a fly could walk on them: but no part seemed to Ransom to be indisputably
the right way up. Sensations of intolerable height and of falling—utterly
absent in the heavens—recurred constantly. Cooking, of course, had long
since been abandoned. Food was snatched as best they could, and drinking
presented great difficulties: you could never be sure that you were
really holding your mouth below, rather than beside, the bottle. Weston
grew grimmer and more silent than ever. Devine, a flask of spirits ever
in his hand, flung out strange blasphemies and coprologies and cursed
Weston for bringing them. Ransom ached, licked his dry lips, nursed his
bruised limbs and prayed for the end.

A time came when one side of the sphere was unmistakably down. Clamped
beds and tables hung useless and ridiculous on what was now wall or roof.
What had been doors became trap-doors, opened with difficulty. Their
bodies seemed made of lead. There was no more work to be done when Devine
had set out the clothes—their Malacandrian clothes—from their bundles and
squatted down on the end wall of the saloon (now its floor) to watch the
thermometer. The clothes, Ransom noticed, included heavy woollen
underwear, sheepskin jerkins, fur gloves and eared caps. Devine made no
reply to his questions. He was engaged in studying the thermometer and in
shouting down to Weston in the control-room.

‘Slower, slower,’ he kept shouting. ‘Slower, you damned fool. You’ll be
in air in a minute or two.’ Then sharply and angrily, ‘Here! Let me get
at it.’

Weston made no replies. It was unlike Devine to waste his advice: Ransom
concluded that the man was almost out of his senses, whether with fear or
excitement.

Suddenly the lights of the Universe seemed to be turned down. As if some
demon had rubbed the heaven’s face with a dirty sponge, the splendour in
which they had lived for so long blenched to a pallid, cheerless and
pitiable grey. It was impossible from where they sat to open the shutters
or roll back the heavy blind. What had been a chariot gliding in the
fields of heaven became a dark steel box dimly lighted by a slit of
window, and falling. They were falling out of the heaven, into a world.
Nothing in all his adventures bit so deeply into Ransom’s mind as this.
He wondered how he could ever have thought of planets, even of the Earth,
as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now, with a
certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets—the ‘earths’
he called them in his thought—as mere holes or gaps in the living
heaven—excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed
not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.
And yet, he thought, beyond the solar system the brightness ends. Is that
the real void, the real death? Unless . . . he groped for the idea . . .
unless visible light is also a hole or gap, a mere diminution of
something else. Something that is to bright unchanging heaven as heaven
is to the dark, heavy earths. . . .

Things do not always happen as a man would expect. The moment of his
arrival in an unknown world found Ransom wholly absorbed in a
philosophical speculation.




                                 SEVEN


‘Having a doze?’ said Devine. ‘A bit blasé about new planets by now?’

‘Can you see anything?’ interrupted Weston.

‘I can’t manage the shutters, damn them,’ returned Devine. ‘We may as
well get to the manhole.’

Ransom awoke from his brown study. The two partners were working together
close beside him in the semi-darkness. He was cold and his body, though
in fact much lighter than on Earth, still felt intolerably heavy. But a
vivid sense of his situation returned to him; some fear, but more
curiosity. It might mean death, but what a scaffold! Already cold air was
coming in from without, and light. He moved his head impatiently to catch
some glimpse between the labouring shoulders of the two men. A moment
later the last nut was unscrewed. He was looking out through the manhole.

Naturally enough all he saw was the ground—a circle of pale pink, almost
of white: whether very close and short vegetation or very wrinkled and
granulated rock or soil he could not say. Instantly the dark shape of
Devine filled the aperture, and Ransom had time to notice that he had a
revolver in his hand—‘For me or for _sorns_ or for both?’ he wondered.

‘You next,’ said Weston curtly.

Ransom took a deep breath and his hand went to the knife beneath his
belt. Then he got his head and shoulders through the manhole, his two
hands on the soil of Malacandra. The pink stuff was soft and faintly
resilient, like india-rubber; clearly vegetation. Instantly Ransom looked
up. He saw a pale blue sky—a fine winter-morning sky it would have been
on Earth—a great billowy cumular mass of rose-colour lower down which he
took for a cloud, and then—

‘Get out,’ said Weston from behind him.

He scrambled through and rose to his feet. The air was cold but not
bitterly so, and it seemed a little rough at the back of his throat. He
gazed about him, and the very intensity of his desire to take in the new
world at a glance defeated itself. He saw nothing but colours—colours
that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover, he knew nothing
yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly
what they are. His first impression was of a bright, pale world—a
water-colour world out of a child’s paint-box; a moment later he
recognized the flat belt of light blue as a sheet of water, or of
something like water, which came nearly to his feet. They were on the
shore of a lake or river.

‘Now then,’ said Weston, brushing past him. He turned and saw to his
surprise a quite recognizable object in the immediate foreground—a hut of
unmistakably terrestrial pattern though built of strange materials.

‘They’re human,’ he gasped. ‘They build houses?’

‘_We_ do,’ said Devine. ‘Guess again,’ and, producing a key from his
pocket, proceeded to unlock a very ordinary padlock on the door of the
hut. With a not very clearly defined feeling of disappointment or relief
Ransom realized that his captors were merely returning to their own camp.
They behaved as one might have expected. They walked into the hut, let
down the slats which served for windows, sniffed the close air, expressed
surprise that they had left it so dirty, and presently re-emerged.

‘We’d better see about the stores,’ said Weston.

Ransom soon found that he was to have little leisure for observation and
no opportunity of escape. The monotonous work of transferring food,
clothes, weapons and many unidentifiable packages from the ship to the
hut kept him vigorously occupied for the next hour or so, and in the
closest contact with his kidnappers. But something he learned. Before
anything else he learned that Malacandra was beautiful; and he even
reflected how odd it was that this possibility had never entered into his
speculations about it. The same peculiar twist of imagination which led
him to people the universe with monsters had somehow taught him to expect
nothing on a strange planet except rocky desolation or else a network of
nightmare machines. He could not say why, now that he came to think of
it. He also discovered that the blue water surrounded them on at least
three sides: his view in the fourth direction was blotted out by the vast
steel football in which they had come. The hut, in fact, was built either
on the point of a peninsula or on the end of an island. He also came
little by little to the conclusion that the water was not merely blue in
certain lights like terrestrial water but ‘really’ blue. There was
something about its behaviour under the very gentle breeze which puzzled
him—something wrong or unnatural about the waves. For one thing, they
were too big for such a wind, but that was not the whole secret. They
reminded him somehow of the water that he had seen shooting up under the
impact of shells in pictures of naval battles. Then suddenly realization
came to him: they were the wrong shape, out of drawing, far too high for
their length, too narrow at the base, too steep in the sides. He was
reminded of something he had read in one of those modern poets about a
sea rising in ‘turreted walls.’

‘Catch!’ shouted Devine. Ransom caught and hurled the parcel on to Weston
at the hut door.

On one side the water extended a long way—about a quarter of a mile, he
thought, but perspective was still difficult in the strange world. On the
other side it was much narrower, not wider than fifteen feet perhaps, and
seemed to be flowing over a shallow—broken and swirling water that made a
softer and more hissing sound than water on Earth; and where it washed
the hither bank—the pinkish-white vegetation went down to the very
brink—there was a bubbling and sparkling which suggested effervescence.
He tried hard, in such stolen glances as the work allowed him, to make
out something of the farther shore. A mass of something purple, so huge
that he took it for a heather-covered mountain, was his first impression:
on the other side, beyond the larger water, there was something of the
same kind. But there, he could see over the top of it. Beyond were
strange upright shapes of whitish green: too jagged and irregular for
buildings, too thin and steep for mountains. Beyond and above these again
was the rose-coloured cloud-like mass. It might really be a cloud, but it
was very solid-looking and did not seem to have moved since he first set
eyes on it from the manhole. It looked like the top of a gigantic red
cauliflower—or like a huge bowl of red soapsuds—and it was exquisitely
beautiful in tint and shape.

Baffled by this, he turned his attention to the nearer shore beyond the
shallows. The purple mass looked for a moment like a plump of
organ-pipes, then like a stack of rolls of cloth set up on end, then like
a forest of gigantic umbrellas blown inside out. It was in faint motion.
Suddenly his eyes mastered the object. The purple stuff was vegetation:
more precisely it was vegetables, vegetables about twice the height of
English elms, but apparently soft and flimsy. The stalks—one could hardly
call them trunks—rose smooth and round, and surprisingly thin, for about
forty feet: above that, the huge plants opened into a sheaf-like
development, not of branches but of leaves, leaves large as lifeboats but
nearly transparent. The whole thing corresponded roughly to his idea of a
submarine forest: the plants, at once so large and so frail, seemed to
need water to support them, and he wondered that they could hang in the
air. Lower down, between the stems, he saw the vivid purple twilight,
mottled with paler sunshine, which made up the internal scenery of the
wood.

‘Time for lunch,’ said Devine suddenly. Ransom straightened his back: in
spite of the thinness and coldness of the air, his forehead was moist.
They had been working hard and he was short of breath. Weston appeared
from the door of the hut and muttered something about ‘finishing first.’
Devine, however, overruled him. A tin of beef and some biscuits were
produced, and the men sat down on the various boxes which were still
plentifully littered between the space-ship and the hut. Some
whiskey—again at Devine’s suggestion and against Weston’s advice—was
poured into the tin cups and mixed with water; the latter, Ransom
noticed, was drawn from their own water-tins and not from the blue lakes.

As often happens, the cessation of bodily activity drew Ransom’s
attention to the excitement under which he had been labouring ever since
their landing. Eating seemed almost out of the question. Mindful,
however, of a possible dash for liberty, he forced himself to eat very
much more than usual, and appetite returned as he ate. He devoured all
that he could lay hands on either of food or drink: and the taste of that
first meal was ever after associated in his mind with the first unearthly
strangeness (never fully recaptured) of the bright, still, sparkling,
unintelligible landscape—with needling shapes of pale green, thousands of
feet high, with sheets of dazzling blue soda-water, and acres of rose-red
soapsuds. He was a little afraid that his companions might notice, and
suspect, his new achievements as a trencherman; but their attention was
otherwise engaged. Their eyes never ceased roving the landscape; they
spoke abstractedly and often changed position, and were ever looking over
their shoulders. Ransom was just finishing his protracted meal when he
saw Devine stiffen like a dog, and lay his hand in silence on Weston’s
shoulder. Both nodded. They rose. Ransom, gulping down the last of his
whiskey, rose too. He found himself between his two captors. Both
revolvers were out. They were edging him to the shore of the narrow
water, and they were looking and pointing across it.

At first he could not see clearly what they were pointing at. There
seemed to be some paler and slenderer plants than he had noticed before
amongst the purple ones: he hardly attended to them, for his eyes were
busy searching the ground—so obsessed was he with the reptile fears and
insect fears of modern imagining. It was the reflections of the new white
objects in the water that sent his eyes back to them: long, streaky,
white reflections motionless in the running water—four or five, no, to be
precise, six of them. He looked up. Six white things _were_ standing
there. Spindly and flimsy things, twice or three times the height of a
man. His first idea was that they were images of men, the work of savage
artists; he had seen things like them in books of archæology. But what
could they be made of, and how could they stand?—so crazily thin and
elongated in the leg, so top-heavily pouted in the chest, such stalky,
flexible-looking distortions of earthly bipeds . . . like something seen
in one of those comic mirrors. They were certainly not made of stone or
metal, for now they seemed to sway a little as he watched; now with a
shock that chased the blood from his cheeks he saw that they were alive,
that they were moving, that they were coming at him. He had a momentary,
scared glimpse of their faces, thin and unnaturally long, with long,
drooping noses and drooping mouths of half-spectral, half-idiotic
solemnity. Then he turned wildly to fly and found himself gripped by
Devine.

‘Let me go,’ he cried.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ hissed Devine, offering the muzzle of his pistol.
Then, as they struggled, one of the things sent its voice across the
water to them: an enormous horn-like voice far above their heads.

‘They want us to go across,’ said Weston.

Both the men were forcing him to the water’s edge. He planted his feet,
bent his back and resisted donkey-fashion. Now the other two were both in
the water, pulling him, and he was still on the land. He found that he
was screaming. Suddenly a second, much louder and less articulate noise
broke from the creatures on the far bank. Weston shouted too, relaxed his
grip on Ransom and suddenly fired his revolver not across the water but
up it. Ransom saw why at the same moment.

A line of foam like the track of a torpedo was speeding towards them, and
in the midst of it some large, shining beast. Devine shrieked a curse,
slipped and collapsed into the water. Ransom saw a snapping jaw between
them, and heard the deafening noise of Weston’s revolver again and again
beside him and, almost as loud, the clamour of the monsters on the far
bank, who seemed to be taking the water too. He had had no need to make a
decision. The moment he was free he had found himself automatically
darting behind his captors, then behind the space-ship and on as fast as
his legs could carry him into the utterly unknown beyond it. As he
rounded the metal sphere a wild confusion of blue, purple and red met his
eyes. He did not slacken his pace for a moment’s inspection. He found
himself splashing through water and crying out not with pain but with
surprise because the water was warm. In less than a minute he was
climbing out on to dry land again. He was running up a steep incline. And
now he was running through purple shadow between the stems of another
forest of the huge plants.




                                 EIGHT


A month of inactivity, a heavy meal and an unknown world do not help a
man to run. Half an hour later, Ransom was walking, not running, through
the forest, with a hand pressed to his aching side and his ears strained
for any noise of pursuit. The clamour of revolver-shots and voices behind
him (not all human voices) had been succeeded first by rifle-shots and
calls at long intervals and then by utter silence. As far as eye could
reach he saw nothing but the stems of the great plants about him receding
in the violet shade, and far overhead the multiple transparency of huge
leaves filtering the sunshine to the solemn splendour of twilight in
which he walked. Whenever he felt able he ran again; the ground continued
soft and springy, covered with the same resilient weed which was the
first thing his hands had touched in Malacandra. Once or twice a small
red creature scuttled across his path, but otherwise there seemed to be
no life stirring in the wood; nothing to fear—except the fact of
wandering unprovisioned and alone in a forest of unknown vegetation
thousands or millions of miles beyond the reach or knowledge of man.

But Ransom was thinking of _sorns_—for doubtless those were the _sorns_,
those creatures they had tried to give him to. They were quite unlike the
horrors his imagination had conjured up, and for that reason had taken
him off his guard. They appealed away from the Wellsian fantasies to an
earlier, almost an infantile, complex of fears.
Giants—ogres—ghosts—skeletons: those were its key words. Spooks on
stilts, he said to himself; surrealistic bogy-men with their long faces.
At the same time, the disabling panic of the first moments was ebbing
away from him. The idea of suicide was now far from his mind; instead, he
was determined to back his luck to the end. He prayed, and he felt his
knife. He felt a strange emotion of confidence and affection towards
himself—he checked himself on the point of saying, ‘We’ll stick to one
another.’

The ground became worse and interrupted his meditation. He had been going
gently upwards for some hours with steeper ground on his right,
apparently half scaling, half skirting a hill. His path now began to
cross a number of ridges, spurs doubtless of the higher ground on the
right. He did not know why he should cross them, but for some reason he
did; possibly a vague memory of earthly geography suggested that the
lower ground would open out to bare places between wood and water where
_sorns_ would be more likely to catch him. As he continued crossing
ridges and gullies he was struck with their extreme steepness; but
somehow they were not very difficult to cross. He noticed, too, that even
the smallest hummocks of earth were of an unearthly shape—too narrow, too
pointed at the top and too small at the base. He remembered that the
waves on the blue lakes had displayed a similar oddity. And glancing up
at the purple leaves he saw the same theme of perpendicularity—the same
rush to the sky—repeated there. They did not tip over at the ends; vast
as they were, air was sufficient to support them so that the long aisles
of the forest all rose to a kind of fan tracery. And the _sorns_,
likewise—he shuddered as he thought it—they too were madly elongated.

He had sufficient science to guess that he must be on a world lighter
than the Earth, where less strength was needed and nature was set free to
follow her skyward impulse on a superterrestrial scale. This set him
wondering where he was. He could not remember whether Venus was larger or
smaller than Earth, and he had an idea that she would be hotter than
this. Perhaps he was on Mars; perhaps even on the Moon. The latter he at
first rejected on the ground that, if it were so, he ought to have seen
the Earth in the sky when they landed; but later he remembered having
been told that one face of the Moon was always turned away from the
Earth. For all he knew he was wandering on the Moon’s outer side; and,
irrationally enough, this idea brought about him a bleaker sense of
desolation than he had yet felt.

Many of the gullies which he crossed now carried streams, blue hissing
streams, all hastening to the lower ground on his left. Like the lake
they were warm, and the air was warm above them, so that as he climbed
down and up the sides of the gullies he was continually changing
temperatures. It was the contrast, as he crested the farther bank of one
such small ravine, which first drew his attention to the growing
chilliness of the forest; and as he looked about him he became certain
that the light was failing too. He had not taken night into his
calculations. He had no means of guessing what night might be on
Malacandra. As he stood gazing into the deepening gloom a sigh of cold
wind crept through the purple stems and set them all swaying, revealing
once again the startling contrast between their size and their apparent
flexibility and lightness. Hunger and weariness, long kept at bay by the
mingled fear and wonder of his situation, smote him suddenly. He shivered
and forced himself to proceed. The wind increased. The mighty leaves
danced and dipped above his head, admitting glimpses of a pale and then a
paler sky; and then, discomfortingly, of a sky with one or two stars in
it. The wood was no longer silent. His eyes darted hither and thither in
search of an approaching enemy and discovered only how quickly the
darkness grew upon him. He welcomed the streams now for their warmth.

It was this that first suggested to him a possible protection against the
increasing cold. There was really no use in going farther; for all he
knew he might as well be walking towards danger as away from it. All was
danger; he was no safer travelling than resting. Beside some stream it
might be warm enough to lie. He shuffled on to find another gully, and
went so far that he began to think he had got out of the region of them.
He had almost determined to turn back when the ground began falling
steeply; he slipped, recovered and found himself on the bank of a
torrent. The trees—for as ‘trees’ he could not help regarding them—did
not quite meet overhead, and the water itself seemed to have some faintly
phosphorescent quality, so that it was lighter here. The fall from right
to left was steep. Guided by some vague picnicker’s hankering for a
‘better’ place, he went a few yards upstream. The valley grew steeper,
and he came to a little cataract. He noticed dully that the water seemed
to be descending a little too slowly for the incline, but he was too
tired to speculate about it. The water was apparently hotter than that of
the lake—perhaps nearer its subterranean source of heat. What he really
wanted to know was whether he dared drink it. He was very thirsty by now;
but it looked very poisonous, very unwatery. He would try not to drink
it; perhaps he was so tired that thirst would let him sleep. He sank on
his knees and bathed his hands in the warm torrent; then he rolled over
in a hollow close beside the fall, and yawned.

The sound of his own voice yawning—the old sound heard in
night-nurseries, school dormitories and in so many bedrooms—liberated a
flood of self-pity. He drew his knees up and hugged himself; he felt a
sort of physical, almost a filial, love for his own body. He put his
wrist-watch to his ear and found that it had stopped. He wound it.
Muttering, half whimpering to himself, he thought of men going to bed on
the far-distant planet Earth—men in clubs, and liners, and hotels,
married men, and small children who slept with nurses in the room, and
warm, tobacco-smelling men tumbled together in forecastles and dug-outs.
The tendency to talk to himself was irresistible . . . ‘We’ll look after
you, Ransom . . . we’ll stick together, old man.’ It occurred to him that
one of those creatures with snapping jaws might live in the stream.
‘You’re quite right, Ransom,’ he answered mumblingly. ‘It’s not a safe
place to spend the night. We’ll just rest a bit till you feel better,
then we’ll go on again. Not now. Presently.’




                                  NINE


It was thirst that woke him. He had slept warm, though his clothes were
damp, and found himself lying in sunlight, the blue waterfall at his side
dancing and coruscating with every transparent shade in the whole gamut
of blue and flinging strange lights far up to the underside of the forest
leaves. The realization of his position, as it rolled heavily back upon
consciousness, was unbearable. If only he hadn’t lost his nerve the
_sorns_ would have killed him by now. Then he remembered with
inexpressible relief that there was a man wandering in the wood—poor
devil—he’d be glad to see him. He would come up to him and say, ‘Hullo,
Ransom,’—he stopped, puzzled. No, it was only himself: he _was_ Ransom.
Or was he? Who was the man whom he had led to a hot stream and tucked up
in bed, telling him not to drink the strange water? Obviously some
new-comer who didn’t know the place as well as he. But whatever Ransom
had told him, he was going to drink now. He lay down on the bank and
plunged his face in the warm rushing liquid. It was good to drink. It had
a strong mineral flavour, but it was very good. He drank again and found
himself greatly refreshed and steadied. All that about the other Ransom
was nonsense. He was quite aware of the danger of madness, and applied
himself vigorously to his devotions and his toilet. Not that madness
mattered much. Perhaps he was mad already, and not really on Malacandra
but safe in bed in an English asylum. If only it might be so! He would
ask Ransom—curse it! there his mind went playing the same trick again. He
rose and began walking briskly away.

The delusions recurred every few minutes as long as this stage of his
journey lasted. He learned to stand still mentally, as it were, and let
them roll over his mind. It was no good bothering about them. When they
were gone you could resume sanity again. Far more important was the
problem of food. He tried one of the ‘trees’ with his knife. As he
expected, it was toughly soft like a vegetable, not hard like wood. He
cut a little piece out of it, and under this operation the whole gigantic
organism vibrated to its top—it was like being able to shake the mast of
a full-rigged ship with one hand. When he put it in his mouth he found it
almost tasteless but by no means disagreeable, and for some minutes he
munched away contentedly. But he made no progress. The stuff was quite
unswallowable and could only be used as a chewing-gum. As such he used
it, and after it many other pieces; not without some comfort.

It was impossible to continue yesterday’s flight as a flight—inevitably
it degenerated into an endless ramble, vaguely motivated by the search
for food. The search was necessarily vague, since he did not know whether
Malacandra held food for him nor how to recognize it if it did. He had
one bad fright in the course of the morning, when, passing through a
somewhat more open glade, he became aware first of a huge, yellow object,
then of two, and then of an indefinite multitude coming towards him.
Before he could fly he found himself in the midst of a herd of enormous
pale furry creatures more like giraffes than anything else he could think
of, except that they could and did raise themselves on their hind legs
and even progress several paces in that position. They were slenderer,
and very much higher, than giraffes, and were eating the leaves off the
tops of the purple plants. They saw him and stared at him with their big
liquid eyes, snorting in _basso profondissimo_, but had apparently no
hostile intentions. Their appetite was voracious. In five minutes they
had mutilated the tops of a few hundred ‘trees’ and admitted a new flood
of sunlight into the forest. Then they passed on.

This episode had an infinitely comforting effect on Ransom. The planet
was not, as he had begun to fear, lifeless except for _sorns_. Here was a
very presentable sort of animal, an animal which man could probably tame,
and whose food man could possibly share. If only it were possible to
climb the ‘trees’! He was staring about him with some idea of attempting
this feat, when he noticed that the devastation wrought by the
leaf-eating animals had opened a vista overhead beyond the plant-tops to
a collection of the same greenish-white objects which he had seen across
the lake at their first landing.

This time they were much closer. They were enormously high, so that he
had to throw back his head to see the top of them. They were something
like pylons in shape, but solid; irregular in height and grouped in an
apparently haphazard and disorderly fashion. Some ended in points that
looked from where he stood as sharp as needles, while others, after
narrowing towards the summit, expanded again into knobs or platforms that
seemed to his terrestrial eyes ready to fall at any moment. He noticed
that the sides were rougher and more seamed with fissures than he had
realized at first, and between two of them he saw a motionless line of
twisting blue brightness—obviously a distant fall of water. It was this
which finally convinced him that the things, in spite of their improbable
shape, were mountains; and with that discovery the mere oddity of the
prospect was swallowed up in the fantastic sublime. Here, he understood,
was the full statement of that _perpendicular_ theme which beast and
plant and earth all played on Malacandra—here in this riot of rock,
leaping and surging skyward like solid jets from some rock-fountain, and
hanging by their own lightness in the air, so shaped, so elongated, that
all terrestrial mountains must ever after seem to him to be mountains
lying on their sides. He felt a lift and lightening at the heart.

But next moment his heart stood still. Against the pallid background of
the mountains and quite close to him—for the mountains themselves seemed
but a quarter of a mile away—a moving shape appeared. He recognized it
instantly as it moved slowly (and, he thought, stealthily) between two of
the denuded plant-tops—the giant stature, the cadaverous leanness, the
long, drooping, wizard-like profile of a _sorn_. The head appeared to be
narrow and conical; the hands or paws with which it parted the stems
before it as it moved were thin, mobile, spidery and almost transparent.
He felt an immediate certainty that it was looking for him. All this he
took in in an infinitesimal time. The ineffaceable image was hardly
stamped on his brain before he was running as hard as he could into the
thickest of the forest.

He had no plan save to put as many miles as he could between himself and
the _sorn_. He prayed fervently that there might be only one; perhaps the
wood was full of them—perhaps they had the intelligence to make a circle
round him. No matter—there was nothing for it now but sheer running,
running knife in hand. The fear had all gone into action; emotionally he
was cool and alert, and ready—as ready as he ever would be—for the last
trial. His flight led him downhill at an ever-increasing speed; soon the
incline was so steep that if his body had had terrestrial gravity he
would have been compelled to take to his hands and knees and clamber
down. Then he saw something gleaming ahead of him. A minute later he had
emerged from the wood altogether; he was standing, blinking in the light
of sun and water, on the shore of a broad river, and looking out on a
flat landscape of intermingled river, lake, island and promontory—the
same sort of country on which his eyes had first rested in Malacandra.

There was no sound of pursuit. Ransom dropped down on his stomach and
drank, cursing a world where _cold_ water appeared to be unobtainable.
Then he lay still to listen and to recover his breath. His eyes were upon
the blue water. It was agitated. Circles shuddered and bubbles danced ten
yards away from his face. Suddenly the water heaved and a round, shining,
black thing like a cannonball came into sight. Then he saw eyes and
mouth—a puffing mouth bearded with bubbles. More of the thing came up out
of the water. It was gleaming black. Finally it splashed and wallowed to
the shore and rose, steaming, on its hind legs—six or seven feet high and
too thin for its height, like everything in Malacandra. It had a coat of
thick black hair, lucid as seal-skin, very short legs with webbed feet, a
broad beaver-like or fish-like tail, strong fore-limbs with webbed claws
or fingers, and some complication half-way up the belly which Ransom took
to be its genitals. It was something like a penguin, something like an
otter, something like a seal; the slenderness and flexibility of the body
suggested a giant stoat. The great round head, heavily whiskered, was
mainly responsible for the suggestion of seal; but it was higher in the
forehead than a seal’s and the mouth was smaller.

There comes a point at which the actions of fear and precaution are
purely conventional, no longer felt as terror or hope by the fugitive.
Ransom lay perfectly still, pressing his body as well down into the weed
as he could, in obedience to a wholly theoretical idea that he might thus
pass unobserved. He felt little emotion. He noted in a dry, objective way
that this was apparently to be the end of his story—caught between a
_sorn_ from the land and a big, black animal from the water. He had, it
is true, a vague notion that the jaws and mouth of the beast were not
those of a carnivore; but he knew that he was too ignorant of zoology to
do more than guess.

Then something happened which completely altered his state of mind. The
creature, which was still steaming and shaking itself on the bank and had
obviously not seen him, opened its mouth and began to make noises. This
in itself was not remarkable; but a lifetime of linguistic study assured
Ransom almost at once that these were articulate noises. The creature was
_talking_. It had language. If you are not yourself a philologist, I am
afraid you must take on trust the prodigious emotional consequences of
this realization in Ransom’s mind. A new world he had already seen—but a
new, an extra-terrestrial, a non-human language was a different matter.
Somehow he had not thought of this in connection with the _sorns_; now,
it flashed upon him like a revelation. The love of knowledge is a kind of
madness. In the fraction of a second which it took Ransom to decide that
the creature was really talking, and while he still knew that he might be
facing instant death, his imagination had leaped over every fear and hope
and probability of his situation to follow the dazzling project of making
a Malacandrian grammar. _An Introduction to the Malacandrian
language_—_The Lunar verb_—_A concise Martian-English Dictionary_ . . .
the titles flitted through his mind. And what might one not discover from
the speech of a non-human race? The very form of language itself, the
principle behind all possible languages, might fall into his hands.
Unconsciously he raised himself on his elbow and stared at the black
beast. It became silent. The huge bullet head swung round and lustrous
amber eyes fixed him. There was no wind on the lake or in the wood.
Minute after minute in utter silence the representatives of two so
far-divided species stared each into the other’s face.

Ransom rose to his knees. The creature leaped back, watching him
intently, and they became motionless again. Then it came a pace nearer,
and Ransom jumped up and retreated, but not far; curiosity held him. He
summoned up his courage and advanced holding out his hand; the beast
misunderstood the gesture. It backed into the shallows of the lake and he
could see the muscles tightened under its sleek pelt, ready for sudden
movement. But there it stopped; it, too, was in the grip of curiosity.
Neither dared let the other approach, yet each repeatedly felt the
impulse to do so himself, and yielded to it. It was foolish, frightening,
ecstatic and unbearable all in one moment. It was more than curiosity. It
was like a courtship—like the meeting of the first man and the first
woman in the world; it was like something beyond that; so natural is the
contact of sexes, so limited the strangeness, so shallow the reticence,
so mild the repugnance to be overcome, compared with the first tingling
intercourse of two different, but rational, species.

The creature suddenly turned and began walking away. A disappointment
like despair smote Ransom.

‘Come back,’ he shouted in English. The thing turned, spread out its arms
and spoke again in its unintelligible language; then it resumed its
progress. It had not gone more than twenty yards away when Ransom saw it
stoop down and pick something up. It returned. In its hand (he was
already thinking of its webbed fore-paw as a hand) it was carrying what
appeared to be a shell—the shell of some oyster-like creature, but
rounder and more deeply domed. It dipped the shell in the lake and raised
it full of water. Then it held the shell to its own middle and seemed to
be pouring something into the water. Ransom thought with disgust that it
was urinating in the shell. Then he realized that the protuberances on
the creature’s belly were not genital organs nor organs at all; it was
wearing a kind of girdle hung with various pouch-like objects, and it was
adding a few drops of liquid from one of these to the water in the shell.
This done it raised the shell to its black lips and drank—not throwing
back its head like a man but bowing it and sucking like a horse. When it
had finished it refilled the shell and once again added a few drops from
the receptacle—it seemed to be some kind of skin bottle—at its waist.
Supporting the shell in its two arms, it extended them towards Ransom.
The intention was unmistakable. Hesitantly, almost shyly, he advanced and
took the cup. His finger-tips touched the webbed membrane of the
creature’s paws and an indescribable thrill of mingled attraction and
repulsion ran through him; then he drank. Whatever had been added to the
water was plainly alcoholic; he had never enjoyed a drink so much.

‘Thank you,’ he said in English. ‘Thank you very much.’

The creature struck itself on the chest and made a noise. Ransom did not
first realize what it meant. Then he saw that it was trying to teach him
its name—presumably the name of the species.

‘_Hross_’ it said, ‘_Hross_’ and flapped itself.

‘_Hross_,’ repeated Ransom, and pointed at it; then ‘Man,’ and struck his
own chest.

‘_Hmā—hmā—hmān_,’ imitated the _hross_. It picked up a handful of earth,
where earth appeared between weed and water at the bank of the lake.

‘_Handra_,’ it said. Ransom repeated the word. Then an idea occurred to
him.

‘_Malacandra?_’ he said in an inquiring voice. The _hross_ rolled its
eyes and waved its arms, obviously in an effort to indicate the whole
landscape. Ransom was getting on well. _Handra_ was earth the element;
_Malac-andra_ the ‘earth’ or planet as a whole. Soon he would find out
what _Malac_ meant. In the meantime ‘H disappears after C’ he noted, and
made his first step in Malacandrian phonetics. The _hross_ was now trying
to teach him the meaning of _Handramit_. He recognized the root _handra-_
again (and noted ‘They have suffixes as well as prefixes’), but this time
he could make nothing of the _hross’s_ gestures, and remained ignorant
what a _handramit_ might be. He took the initiative by opening his mouth,
pointing to it and going through the pantomime of eating. The
Malacandrian word for _food_ or _eat_ which he got in return proved to
contain consonants unreproducible by a human mouth, and Ransom,
continuing the pantomime, tried to explain that his interest was
practical as well as philological. The _hross_ understood him, though he
took some time to understand from its gestures that it was inviting him
to follow it. In the end, he did so.

It took him only as far as where it had got the shell, and here, to his
not very reasonable astonishment, Ransom found that a kind of boat was
moored. Man-like, when he saw the artefact he felt more certain of the
_hross’s_ rationality. He even valued the creature the more because the
boat, allowing for the usual Malacandrian height and flimsiness, was
really very like an earthly boat; only later did he set himself the
question, ‘What else could a boat be like?’ The _hross_ produced an oval
platter of some tough but slightly flexible material, covered it with
strips of a spongy, orange-coloured substance and gave it to Ransom. He
cut a convenient length off with his knife and began to eat; doubtfully
at first and then ravenously. It had a bean-like taste but sweeter; good
enough for a starving man. Then, as his hunger ebbed, the sense of his
situation returned with dismaying force. The huge, seal-like creature
seated beside him became unbearably ominous. It seemed friendly; but it
was very big, very black, and he knew nothing at all about it. What were
its relations to the _sorns_? And was it really as rational as it
appeared?

It was only many days later that Ransom discovered how to deal with these
sudden losses of confidence. They arose when the rationality of the
_hross_ tempted you to think of it as a man. Then it became abominable—a
man seven feet high, with a snaky body, covered, face and all, with thick
black animal hair, and whiskered like a cat. But starting from the other
end you had an animal with everything an animal ought to have—glossy
coat, liquid eye, sweet breath and whitest teeth—and added to all these,
as though Paradise had never been lost and earliest dreams were true, the
charm of speech and reason. Nothing could be more disgusting than the one
impression; nothing more delightful than the other. It all depended on
the point of view.




                                  TEN


When Ransom had finished his meal and drunk again of the strong waters of
Malacandra, his host rose and entered the boat. He did this head-first
like an animal, his sinuous body allowing him to rest his hands on the
bottom of the boat while his feet were still planted on the land. He
completed the operation by flinging rump, tail and hind legs all together
about five feet into the air and then whisking them neatly on board with
an agility which would have been quite impossible to an animal of his
bulk on Earth.

Having got into the boat, he proceeded to get out again and then pointed
to it. Ransom understood that he was being invited to follow his example.
The question which he wanted to ask above all others could not, of
course, be put. Were the _hrossa_ (he discovered later that this was the
plural of _hross_) the dominant species on Malacandra, and the _sorns_,
despite their more man-like shape, merely a semi-intelligent kind of
cattle? Fervently he hoped that it might be so. On the other hand, the
_hrossa_ might be the domestic animals of the _sorns_, in which case the
latter would be superintelligent. His whole imaginative training somehow
encouraged him to associate superhuman intelligence with monstrosity of
form and ruthlessness of will. To step on board the _hross’s_ boat might
mean surrendering himself to _sorns_ at the other end of the journey. On
the other hand, the _hross’s_ invitation might be a golden opportunity of
leaving the _sorn_-haunted forests for ever. And by this time the _hross_
itself was becoming puzzled at his apparent inability to understand it.
The urgency of its signs finally determined him. The thought of parting
from the _hross_ could not be seriously entertained; its animality
shocked him in a dozen ways, but his longing to learn its language, and,
deeper still, the shy, ineluctable fascination of unlike for unlike, the
sense that the key to prodigious adventure was being put in his hands—all
this had really attached him to it by bonds stronger than he knew. He
stepped into the boat.

The boat was without seats. It had a very high prow, an enormous expanse
of free-board, and what seemed to Ransom an impossibly shallow draught.
Indeed, very little of it even rested on the water; he was reminded of a
modern European speed-boat. It was moored by something that looked at
first like rope; but the _hross_ cast off not by untying but by simply
pulling the apparent rope in two as one might pull in two a piece of soft
toffee or a roll of plasticine. It then squatted down on its rump in the
stern-sheets and took up a paddle—a paddle of such enormous blade that
Ransom wondered how the creature could wield it, till he again remembered
how light a planet they were on. The length of the _hross’s_ body enabled
him to work freely in the squatting position despite the high gunwale. It
paddled quickly.

For the first few minutes they passed between banks wooded with the
purple trees, upon a waterway not more than a hundred yards in width.
Then they doubled a promontory, and Ransom saw that they were emerging on
to a much larger sheet of water—a great lake, almost a sea. The _hross_,
now taking great care and often changing direction and looking about it,
paddled well out from the shore. The dazzling blue expanse grew moment by
moment wider around them; Ransom could not look steadily at it. The
warmth from the water was oppressive; he removed his cap and jerkin, and
by so doing surprised the _hross_ very much.

He rose cautiously to a standing position and surveyed the Malacandrian
prospect which had opened on every side. Before and behind them lay the
glittering lake, here studded with islands, and there smiling
uninterruptedly at the pale blue sky; the sun, he noticed, was almost
immediately overhead—they were in the Malacandrian tropics. At each end
the lake vanished into more complicated groupings of land and water,
softly, featherily embossed in the purple giant weed. But this marshy
land or chain of archipelagoes, as he now beheld it, was bordered on each
side with jagged walls of the pale green mountains, which he could still
hardly call mountains, so tall they were, so gaunt, sharp, narrow and
seemingly unbalanced. On the starboard they were not more than a mile
away and seemed divided from the water only by a narrow strip of forest;
to the left they were far more distant, though still impressive—perhaps
seven miles from the boat. They ran on each side of the watered country
as far as he could see, both onwards and behind them; he was sailing, in
fact, on the flooded floor of a majestic canyon nearly ten miles wide and
of unknown length. Behind and sometimes above the mountain peaks he could
make out in many places great billowy piles of the rose-red substance
which he had yesterday mistaken for cloud. The mountains, in fact, seemed
to have no fall of ground behind them; they were rather the serrated
bastion of immeasurable tablelands, higher in many places than
themselves, which made the Malacandrian horizon left and right as far as
eye could reach. Only straight ahead and straight astern was the planet
cut with the vast gorge, which now appeared to him only as a rut or crack
in the tableland.

He wondered what the cloud-like red masses were and endeavoured to ask by
signs. The question was, however, too particular for sign-language. The
_hross_, with a wealth of gesticulation—its arms or fore-limbs were more
flexible than his and in quick motion almost whip-like—made it clear that
it supposed him to be asking about the high ground in general. It named
this _harandra_. The low, watered country, the gorge or canyon, appeared
to be _handramit_. Ransom grasped the implications, _handra_ earth,
_harandra_ high earth, mountain, _handramit_, low earth, valley. Highland
and lowland, in fact. The peculiar importance of the distinction in
Malacandrian geography he learned later.

By this time the _hross_ had attained the end of its careful navigation.
They were a couple of miles from land when it suddenly ceased paddling
and sat tense with its paddle poised in the air; at the same moment the
boat quivered and shot forward as if from a catapult. They had apparently
availed themselves of some current. In a few seconds they were racing
forward at some fifteen miles an hour and rising and falling on the
strange, sharp, perpendicular waves of Malacandra with a jerky motion
quite unlike that of the choppiest sea that Ransom had ever met on Earth.
It reminded him of disastrous experiences on a trotting horse in the
army; and it was intensely disagreeable. He gripped the gunwale with his
left hand and mopped his brow with his right—the damp warmth from the
water had become very troublesome. He wondered if the Malacandrian food,
and still more the Malacandrian drink, were really digestible by a human
stomach. Thank heaven he was a good sailor! At least a fairly good
sailor. At least——

Hastily he leaned over the side. Heat from blue water smote up to his
face; in the depth he thought he saw eels playing: long, silver eels. The
worst happened not once but many times. In his misery he remembered
vividly the shame of being sick at a children’s party . . . long ago in
the star where he was born. He felt a similar shame now. It was not thus
that the first representative of humanity would choose to appear before a
new species. Did _hrossa_ vomit too? Would it know what he was doing?
Shaking and groaning, he turned back into the boat. The creature was
keeping an eye on him, but its face seemed to him expressionless; it was
only long after that he learned to read the Malacandrian face.

The current meanwhile seemed to be gathering speed. In a huge curve they
swung across the lake to within a furlong of the farther shore, then back
again, and once more onward, in giddy spirals and figures of eight, while
purple wood and jagged mountain raced backwards and Ransom loathingly
associated their sinuous course with the nauseous curling of the silver
eels. He was rapidly losing all interest in Malacandra: the distinction
between Earth and other planets seemed of no importance compared with the
awful distinction of earth and water. He wondered despairingly whether
the _hross_ habitually lived on water. Perhaps they were going to spend
the night in this detestable boat. . . .

His sufferings did not, in fact, last long. There came a blessed
cessation of the choppy movement and a slackening of speed, and he saw
that the _hross_ was backing water rapidly. They were still afloat, with
shores close on each side; between them a narrow channel in which the
water hissed furiously—apparently a shallow. The _hross_ jumped
overboard, splashing abundance of warm water into the ship; Ransom, more
cautiously and shakily, clambered after it. He was about up to his knees.
To his astonishment, the _hross_, without any appearance of effort,
lifted the boat bodily on to the top of its head, steadied it with one
forepaw, and proceeded, erect as a Grecian caryatid, to the land. They
walked forward—if the swinging movement of the _hross’s_ short legs from
its flexible hips could be called walking—beside the channel. In a few
minutes Ransom saw a new landscape.

The channel was not only a shallow but a rapid—the first, indeed, of a
series of rapids by which the water descended steeply for the next
half-mile. The ground fell away before them and the canyon—or
_handramit_—continued at a very much lower level. Its walls, however, did
not sink with it, and from his present position Ransom got a clearer
notion of the lie of the land. Far more of the highlands to left and
right were visible, sometimes covered with the cloud-like red swellings,
but more often level, pale and barren to where the smooth line of their
horizon marched with the sky. The mountain peaks now appeared only as the
fringe or border of the true highland, surrounding it as the lower teeth
surround the tongue. He was struck by the vivid contrast between
_harandra_ and _handramit_. Like a rope of jewels the gorge spread
beneath him, purple, sapphire blue, yellow and pinkish white, a rich and
variegated inlay of wooded land and disappearing, reappearing, ubiquitous
water. Malacandra was less like earth than he had been beginning to
suppose. The _handramit_ was no true valley rising and falling with the
mountain chain it belonged to. Indeed, it did not belong to a mountain
chain. It was only an enormous crack or ditch, of varying depth, running
through the high and level _harandra_; the latter, he now began to
suspect, was the true ‘surface’ of the planet—certainly would appear as
surface to a terrestrial astronomer. To the _handramit_ itself there
seemed no end; uninterrupted and very nearly straight, it ran before him,
a narrowing line of colour, to where it clove the horizon with a V-shaped
indenture. There must be a hundred miles of it in view, he thought; and
he reckoned that he had put some thirty or forty miles of it behind him
since yesterday.

All this time they were descending beside the rapids to where the water
was level again and the _hross_ could relaunch its skiff. During this
walk Ransom learned the words for boat, rapid, water, sun and carry; the
latter, as his first verb, interested him particularly. The _hross_ was
also at some pains to impress upon him an association or relation which
it tried to convey by repeating the contrasted pairs of words
_hrossa-handramit_ and _séroni-harandra_. Ransom understood him to mean
that the _hrossa_ lived down in the _handramit_ and the _séroni_ up on
the _harandra_. What the deuce were _séroni_, he wondered. The open
reaches of the _harandra_ did not look as if anything lived up there.
Perhaps the _hrossa_ had a mythology—he took it for granted they were on
a low cultural level—and the _séroni_ were gods or demons.

The journey continued, with frequent, though decreasing, recurrences of
nausea for Ransom. Hours later he realized that _séroni_ might very well
be the plural of _sorn_.

The sun declined, on their right. It dropped quicker than on Earth, or at
least on those parts of Earth that Ransom knew, and in the cloudless sky
it had little sunset pomp about it. In some other queer way which he
could not specify it differed from the sun he knew; but even while he
speculated the needle-like mountain-tops stood out black against it and
the _handramit_ grew dark, though eastward (to their left) the high
country of the _harandra_ still shone pale rose, remote and smooth and
tranquil, like another and more spiritual world.

Soon he became aware that they were landing again, that they were
treading solid ground, were making for the depth of the purple forest.
The motion of the boat still worked in his fantasy and the earth seemed
to sway beneath him; this, with weariness and twilight, made the rest of
the journey dream-like. Light began to glare in his eyes. A fire was
burning. It illuminated the huge leaves overhead, and he saw stars beyond
them. Dozens of _hrossa_ seemed to have surrounded him; more animal, less
human, in their multitude and their close neighbourhood to him, than his
solitary guide had seemed. He felt some fear, but more a ghastly
inappropriateness. He wanted men—any men, even Weston and Devine. He was
too tired to do anything about these meaningless bullet heads and furry
faces—could make no response at all. And then, lower down, closer to him,
more mobile, came in throngs the whelps, the puppies, the cubs, whatever
you called them. Suddenly his mood changed. They were jolly little
things. He laid his hand on one black head and smiled; the creature
scurried away.

He never could remember much of that evening. There was more eating and
drinking, there was continual coming and going of black forms, there were
strange eyes luminous in the firelight; finally, there was sleep in some
dark, apparently covered place.




                                 ELEVEN


Ever since he awoke on the space-ship Ransom had been thinking about the
amazing adventure of going to another planet, and about his chances of
returning from it. What he had not thought about was _being_ on it. It
was with a kind of stupefaction each morning that he found himself
neither arriving in, nor escaping from, but simply living on, Malacandra;
waking, sleeping, eating, swimming and even, as the days passed, talking.
The wonder of it smote him most strongly when he found himself, about
three weeks after his arrival, actually going for a walk. A few weeks
later he had his favourite walks, and his favourite foods; he was
beginning to develop habits. He knew a male from a female _hross_ at
sight, and even individual differences were becoming plain. Hyoi who had
first found him—miles away to the north—was a very different person from
the grey-muzzled, venerable Hnohra who was daily teaching him the
language; and the young of the species were different again. They were
delightful. You could forget all about the rationality of _hrossa_ in
dealing with them. Too young to trouble him with the baffling enigma of
reason in an inhuman form, they solaced his loneliness, as if he had been
allowed to bring a few dogs with him from the Earth. The cubs, on their
part, felt the liveliest interest in the hairless goblin which had
appeared among them. With them, and therefore indirectly with their dams,
he was a brilliant success.

Of the community in general his earlier impressions were all gradually
being corrected. His first diagnosis of their culture was what he called
‘old stone age.’ The few cutting instruments they possessed were made of
stone. They seemed to have no pottery but a few clumsy vessels used for
boiling, and boiling was the only cookery they attempted. Their common
drinking vessel, dish and ladle all in one was the oyster-like shell in
which he had first tasted _hross_ hospitality; the fish which it
contained was their only animal food. Vegetable fare they had in great
plenty and variety, some of it delicious. Even the pinkish-white weed
which covered the whole _handramit_ was edible at a pinch, so that if he
had starved before Hyoi found him he would have starved amidst abundance.
No _hross_, however, ate the weed (_honodraskrud_) for choice, though it
might be used _faute de mieux_ on a journey. Their dwellings were
beehive-shaped huts of stiff leaf and the villages—there were several in
the neighbourhood—were always built beside rivers for warmth and well
upstream towards the walls of the _handramit_ where the water was
hottest. They slept on the ground. They seemed to have no arts except a
kind of poetry and music which was practised almost every evening by a
team or troupe of four _hrossa_. One recited half chanting at great
length while the other three, sometimes singly and sometimes
antiphonally, interrupted him from time to time with song. Ransom could
not find out whether these interruptions were simply lyrical interludes
or dramatic dialogue arising out of the leader’s narrative. He could make
nothing of the music. The voices were not disagreeable and the scale
seemed adapted to human ears, but the time-pattern was meaningless to his
sense of rhythm. The occupations of the tribe or family were at first
mysterious. People were always disappearing for a few days and
reappearing again. There was a little fishing and much journeying in
boats of which he never discovered the object. Then one day he saw a kind
of caravan of _hrossa_ setting out by land each with a load of vegetable
food on its head. Apparently there was some kind of trade in Malacandra.

He discovered their agriculture in the first week. About a mile down the
_handramit_ one came to broad lands free of forest and clothed for many
miles together in low pulpy vegetation in which yellow, orange and blue
predominated. Later on, there were lettuce-like plants about the height
of a terrestrial birch-tree. Where one of these overhung the warmth of
water you could step into one of the lower leaves and lie deliciously as
in a gently moving, fragrant hammock. Elsewhere it was not warm enough to
sit still for long out of doors; the general temperature of the
_handramit_ was that of a fine winter’s morning on Earth. These
food-producing areas were worked communally by the surrounding villages,
and division of labour had been carried to a higher point than he
expected. Cutting, drying, storing, transport and something like manuring
were all carried on, and he suspected that some at least of the water
channels were artificial.

But the real revolution in his understanding of the _hrossa_ began when
he had learned enough of their language to attempt some satisfaction of
their curiosity about himself. In answer to their questions he began by
saying that he had come out of the sky. Hnohra immediately asked from
which planet or earth (_handra_). Ransom, who had deliberately given a
childish version of the truth in order to adapt it to the supposed
ignorance of his audience, was a little annoyed to find Hnohra painfully
explaining to him that he could not live in the sky because there was no
air in it; he might have come through the sky but he must have come from
a _handra_. He was quite unable to point Earth out to them in the night
sky. They seemed surprised at his inability, and repeatedly pointed out
to him a bright planet low on the western horizon—a little south of where
the sun had gone down. He was surprised that they selected a planet
instead of a mere star and stuck to their choice; could it be possible
that they understood astronomy? Unfortunately he still knew too little of
the language to explore their knowledge. He turned the conversation by
asking them the name of the bright southern planet, and was told that it
was Thulcandra—the silent world or planet.

‘Why do you call it _Thulc_?’ he asked. ‘Why silent?’ No one knew.

‘The _séroni_ know,’ said Hnohra. ‘That is the sort of thing they know.’

Then he was asked how he had come, and made a very poor attempt at
describing the space-ship—but again:

‘The _séroni_ would know.’

Had he come alone? No, he had come with two others of his kind—bad men
(‘bent’ men was the nearest _hrossian_ equivalent) who tried to kill him,
but he had run away from them. The _hrossa_ found this very difficult,
but all finally agreed that he ought to go to Oyarsa. Oyarsa would
protect him. Ransom asked who Oyarsa was. Slowly, and with many
misunderstandings, he hammered out the information that Oyarsa (1) lived
at Meldilorn; (2) knew everything and ruled everyone; (3) had always been
there; and (4) was not a _hross_, nor one of the _séroni_. Then Ransom,
following his own idea, asked if Oyarsa had made the world. The _hrossa_
almost barked in the fervour of their denial. Did people in Thulcandra
not know that Maleldil the Young had made and still ruled the world? Even
a child knew that. Where did Maleldil live, Ransom asked.

‘With the Old One.’

And who was the Old One? Ransom did not understand the answer. He tried
again.

‘Where was the Old One?’

‘He is not that sort,’ said Hnohra, ‘that he has to live anywhere,’ and
proceeded to a good deal which Ransom did not follow. But he followed
enough to feel once more a certain irritation. Ever since he had
discovered the rationality of the _hrossa_ he had been haunted by a
conscientious scruple as to whether it might not be his duty to undertake
their religious instruction; now, as a result of his tentative efforts,
he found himself being treated as if _he_ were the savage and being given
a first sketch of civilized religion—a sort of _hrossian_ equivalent of
the shorter catechism. It became plain that Maleldil was a spirit without
body, parts or passions.

‘He is not a _hnau_,’ said the _hrossa_.

‘What is _hnau_?’ asked Ransom.

‘You are _hnau_. I am _hnau_. The _séroni_ are _hnau_. The _pfifltriggi_
are _hnau_.’

‘_Pfifltriggi?_’ said Ransom.

‘More than ten days’ journey to the west,’ said Hnohra. ‘The _harandra_
sinks down not into a _handramit_ but into a broad place, an open place,
spreading every way. Five days’ journey from the north to the south of
it; ten days’ journey from the east to the west. The forests are of other
colours there than here, they are blue and green. It is very deep there,
it goes to the roots of the world. The best things that can be dug out of
the earth are there. The _pfifltriggi_ live there. They delight in
digging. What they dig they soften with fire and make things of it. They
are little people, smaller than you, long in the snout, pale, busy. They
have long limbs in front. No _hnau_ can match them in making and shaping
things as none can match us in singing. But let _Hmān_ see.’

He turned and spoke to one of the younger _hrossa_ and presently, passed
from hand to hand, there came to him a little bowl. He held it close to
the firelight and examined it. It was certainly of gold, and Ransom
realized the meaning of Devine’s interest in Malacandra.

‘Is there much of this thing?’ he asked.

Yes, he was told, it was washed down in most of the rivers; but the best
and most was among the _pfifltriggi_, and it was they who were skilled in
it. _Arbol hru_, they called it—Sun’s blood. He looked at the bowl again.
It was covered with fine etching. He saw pictures of _hrossa_ and of
smaller, almost frog-like animals; and then, of _sorns_. He pointed to
the latter inquiringly.

‘_Séroni_,’ said the _hrossa_, confirming his suspicions. ‘They live up
almost on the _harandra_. In the big caves.’

The frog-like animals—or tapir-headed, frog-bodied animals—were
_pfifltriggi_. Ransom turned it over in his mind. On Malacandra,
apparently, three distinct species had reached rationality, and none of
them had yet exterminated the other two. It concerned him intensely to
find out which was the real master.

‘Which of the _hnau_ rule?’ he asked.

‘Oyarsa rules,’ was the reply.

‘Is he _hnau_?’

This puzzled them a little. The _séroni_, they thought, would be better
at that kind of question. Perhaps Oyarsa was _hnau_, but a very different
_hnau_. He had no death and no young.

‘These _séroni_ know more than the _hrossa_?’ asked Ransom.

This produced more a debate than an answer. What emerged finally was that
the _séroni_ or _sorns_ were perfectly helpless in a boat, and could not
fish to save their lives, could hardly swim, could make no poetry, and
even when _hrossa_ had made it for them could understand only the
inferior sorts; but they were admittedly good at finding out things about
the stars and understanding the darker utterances of Oyarsa and telling
what happened in Malacandra long ago—longer ago than anyone could
remember.

‘Ah—the intelligentsia,’ thought Ransom. ‘They must be the real rulers,
however it is disguised.’

He tried to ask what would happen if the _sorns_ used their wisdom to
make the _hrossa_ do things—this was as far as he could get in his
halting Malacandrian. The question did not sound nearly so urgent in this
form as it would have done if he had been able to say ‘used their
scientific resources for the exploitation of their uncivilized
neighbours.’ But he might have spared his pains. The mention of the
_sorns’_ inadequate appreciation of poetry had diverted the whole
conversation into literary channels. Of the heated, and apparently
technical, discussion which followed he understood not a syllable.

Naturally his conversations with the _hrossa_ did not all turn on
Malacandra. He had to repay them with information about Earth. He was
hampered in this both by the humiliating discoveries which he was
constantly making of his own ignorance about his native planet, and
partly by his determination to conceal some of the truth. He did not want
to tell them too much of our human wars and industrialisms. He remembered
how H. G. Wells’s Cavor had met his end on the Moon; also he felt shy. A
sensation akin to that of physical nakedness came over him whenever they
questioned him too closely about men—the _hmāna_ as they called them.
Moreover, he was determined not to let them know that he had been brought
there to be given to the _sorns_; for he was becoming daily more certain
that these were the dominant species. What he did tell them fired the
imagination of the _hrossa_: they all began making poems about the
strange _handra_ where the plants were hard like stone and the earth-weed
green like rock and the waters cold and salt, and _hmāna_ lived out on
top, on the _harandra_.

They were even more interested in what he had to tell them of the aquatic
animal with snapping jaws which he had fled from in their own world and
even in their own _handramit_. It was a _hnakra_, they all agreed. They
were intensely excited. There had not been a _hnakra_ in the valley for
many years. The youth of the _hrossa_ got out their weapons—primitive
harpoons with points of bone—and the very cubs began playing at
_hnakra_-hunting in the shallows. Some of the mothers showed signs of
anxiety and wanted the cubs to be kept out of the water, but in general
the news of the _hnakra_ seemed to be immensely popular. Hyoi set off at
once to do something to his boat, and Ransom accompanied him. He wished
to make himself useful, and was already beginning to have some vague
capacity with the primitive _hrossian_ tools. They walked together to
Hyoi’s creek, a stone’s throw through the forest.

On the way, where the path was single and Ransom was following Hyoi, they
passed a little she-_hross_, not much more than a cub. She spoke as they
passed, but not to them: her eyes were on a spot about five yards away.

‘Who do you speak to, Hrikki?’ said Ransom.

‘To the _eldil_.’

‘Where?’

‘Did you not see him?’

‘I saw nothing.’

‘There! There!’ she cried suddenly. ‘Ah! He is gone. Did you not see
him?’

‘I saw no one.’

‘Hyoi!’ said the cub, ‘the _hmān_ cannot see the _eldil_.’

But Hyoi, continuing steadily on his way, was already out of earshot, and
had apparently noticed nothing. Ransom concluded that Hrikki was
‘pretending’ like the young of his own species. In a few moments he
rejoined his companion.




                                 TWELVE


They worked hard at Hyoi’s boat till noon and then spread themselves on
the weed close to the warmth of the creek, and began their midday meal.
The war-like nature of their preparations suggested many questions to
Ransom. He knew no word for war, but he managed to make Hyoi understand
what he wanted to know. Did _séroni_ and _hrossa_ and _pfifltriggi_ ever
go out like this, with weapons, against each other?

‘What for?’ asked Hyoi.

It was difficult to explain. ‘If both wanted one thing and neither would
give it,’ said Ransom, ‘would the other at last come with force? Would
they say, give it or we kill you?’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Well—food, perhaps.’

‘If the other _hnau_ wanted food, why should we not give it to them? We
often do.’

‘But how if we had not enough for ourselves?’

‘But Maleldil will not stop the plants growing.’

‘Hyoi, if you had more and more young, would Maleldil broaden the
_handramit_ and make enough plants for them all?’

‘The _séroni_ know that sort of thing. But why should we have more
young?’

Ransom found this difficult. At last he said:

‘Is the begetting of young not a pleasure among the _hrossa_?’

‘A very great one, _Hmān_. This is what we call love.’

‘If a thing is a pleasure, a _hmān_ wants it again. He might want the
pleasure more often than the number of young that could be fed.’

It took Hyoi a long time to get the point.

‘You mean,’ he said slowly, ‘that he might do it not only in one or two
years of his life but again?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why? Would he want his dinner all day or want to sleep after he had
slept? I do not understand.’

‘But a dinner comes every day. This love, you say, comes only once while
the _hross_ lives?’

‘But it takes his whole life. When he is young he has to look for his
mate; and then he has to court her; then he begets young; then he rears
them; then he remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it
into poems and wisdom.’

‘But the pleasure he must be content only to remember?’

‘That is like saying “My food I must be content only to eat.”’

‘I do not understand.’

‘A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking,
_Hmān_, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is
all one thing. The _séroni_ could say it better than I say it now. Not
better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the
last part of the pleasure, as the _crah_ is the last part of a poem. When
you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it
is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little
about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what
it makes in me all my days till then—that is the real meeting. The other
is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do
they not teach you this?’

‘Perhaps some of them do,’ said Ransom. ‘But even in a poem does a
_hross_ never long to hear one splendid line over again?’

Hyoi’s reply unfortunately turned on one of those points in their
language which Ransom had not mastered. There were two verbs which both,
as far as he could see, meant to _long_ or _yearn_; but the _hrossa_ drew
a sharp distinction, even an opposition, between them. Hyoi seemed to him
merely to be saying that every one would long for it (_wondelone_) but no
one in his senses could long for it (_hluntheline_).

‘And indeed,’ he continued, ‘the poem is a good example. For the most
splendid line becomes fully splendid only by means of all the lines after
it; if you went back to it you would find it less splendid than you
thought. You would kill it. I mean in a good poem.’

‘But in a bent poem, Hyoi?’

‘A bent poem is not listened to, _Hmān_.’

‘And how of love in a bent life?’

‘How could the life of a _hnau_ be bent?’

‘Do you say, Hyoi, that there are no bent _hrossa_?’

Hyoi reflected. ‘I have heard,’ he said at last, ‘of something like what
you mean. It is said that sometimes here and there a cub at a certain age
gets strange twists in him. I have heard of one that wanted to eat earth;
there might, perhaps, be somewhere a _hross_ likewise that wanted to have
the years of love prolonged. I have not heard of it, but it might be. I
have heard of something stranger. There is a poem about a _hross_ who
lived long ago, in another _handramit_, who saw things all made two—two
suns in the sky, two heads on a neck; and last of all they say that he
fell into such a frenzy that he desired two mates. I do not ask you to
believe it, but that is the story: that he loved two _hressni_.’

Ransom pondered this. Here, unless Hyoi was deceiving him, was a species
naturally continent, naturally monogamous. And yet, was it so strange?
Some animals, he knew, had regular breeding seasons; and if nature could
perform the miracle of turning the sexual impulse outward at all, why
could she not go further and fix it, not morally but instinctively, to a
single object? He even remembered dimly having heard that some
terrestrial animals, some of the ‘lower’ animals, were naturally
monogamous. Among the _hrossa_, anyway, it was obvious that unlimited
breeding and promiscuity were as rare as the rarest perversions. At last
it dawned upon him that it was not they, but his own species, that were
the puzzle. That the _hrossa_ should have such instincts was mildly
surprising; but how came it that the instincts of the _hrossa_ so closely
resembled the unattained ideals of that far-divided species Man whose
instincts were so deplorably different? What was the history of Man? But
Hyoi was speaking again.

‘Undoubtedly,’ he said. ‘Maleldil made us so. How could there ever be
enough to eat if everyone had twenty young? And how could we endure to
live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year
to come back—if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole
life with expectation and memory and that these _are_ that day?’

‘All the same,’ said Ransom, unconsciously nettled on behalf of his own
world, ‘Maleldil has let in the _hnakra_.’

‘Oh, but that is so different. I long to kill this _hnakra_ as he also
longs to kill me. I hope that my ship will be the first and I first in my
ship with my straight spear when the black jaws snap. And if he kills me,
my people will mourn and my brothers will desire still more to kill him.
But they will not wish that there were no _hnéraki_; nor do I. How can I
make you understand, when you do not understand the poets? The _hnakra_
is our enemy, but he is also our beloved. We feel in our hearts his joy
as he looks down from the mountain of water in the north where he was
born; we leap with him when he jumps the falls; and when winter comes,
and the lake smokes higher than our heads, it is with his eyes that we
see it and know that his roaming time is come. We hang images of him in
our houses, and the sign of all the _hrossa_ is a _hnakra_. In him the
spirit of the valley lives; and our young play at being _hnéraki_ as soon
as they can splash in the shallows.’

‘And then he kills them?’

‘Not often them. The _hrossa_ would be bent _hrossa_ if they let him get
so near. Long before he had come down so far we should have sought him
out. No, _Hmān_, it is not a few deaths roving the world around him that
make a _hnau_ miserable. It is a bent _hnau_ that would blacken the
world. And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright,
nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the
lakes. I will tell you a day in my life that has shaped me; such a day as
comes only once, like love, or serving Oyarsa in Meldilorn. Then I was
young, not much more than a cub, when I went far, far up the _handramit_
to the land where stars shine at midday and even water is cold. A great
waterfall I climbed. I stood on the shore of Balki the pool, which is the
place of most awe in all worlds. The walls of it go up for ever and ever
and huge and holy images are cut in them, the work of old times. There is
the fall called the Mountain of Water. Because I have stood there alone,
Maleldil and I, for even Oyarsa sent me no word, my heart has been
higher, my song deeper, all my days. But do you think it would have been
so unless I had known that in Balki _hnéraki_ dwelled? There I drank life
because death was in the pool. That was the best of drinks save one.’

‘What one?’ asked Ransom.

‘Death itself in the day I drink it and go to Maleldil.’

Shortly after that they rose and resumed their work. The sun was
declining as they came back through the wood. It occurred to Ransom to
ask Hyoi a question.

‘Hyoi,’ he said, ‘it comes into my head that when I first saw you and
before you saw me, you were already speaking. That was how I knew that
you were _hnau_, for otherwise I should have thought you a beast, and run
away. But who were you speaking to?’

‘To an _eldil_.’

‘What is that? I saw no one.’

‘Are there no _eldila_ in your world, _Hmān_? That must be strange.’

‘But what are they?’

‘They come from Oyarsa—they are, I suppose, a kind of _hnau_.’

‘As we came out to-day I passed a child who said she was talking to an
_eldil_, but I could see nothing.’

‘One can see by looking at your eyes, _Hmān_, that they are different
from ours. But _eldila_ are hard to see. They are not like us. Light goes
through them. You must be looking in the right place and the right time;
and that is not likely to come about unless the _eldil_ wishes to be
seen. Sometimes you can mistake them for a sunbeam or even a moving of
the leaves; but when you look again you see that it was an _eldil_ and
that it is gone. But whether your eyes can ever see them I do not know.
The _séroni_ would know that.’




                                THIRTEEN


The whole village was astir next morning before the sunlight—already
visible on the _harandra_—had penetrated the forest. By the light of the
cooking-fires Ransom saw an incessant activity of _hrossa_. The females
were pouring out steaming food from clumsy pots; Hnohra was directing the
transportation of piles of spears to the boats; Hyoi, in the midst of a
group of the most experienced hunters, was talking too rapidly and too
technically for Ransom to follow; parties were arriving from the
neighbouring villages; and the cubs, squealing with excitement, were
running hither and thither among their elders.

He found that his own share in the hunt had been taken for granted. He
was to be in Hyoi’s boat, with Hyoi and Whin. The two _hrossa_ would take
it in turns to paddle, while Ransom and the disengaged _hross_ would be
in the bows. He understood the _hrossa_ well enough now to know that they
were making him the noblest offer in their power, and that Hyoi and Whin
were each tormented by the fear lest he should be paddling when the
_hnakra_ appeared. A short time ago, in England, nothing would have
seemed more impossible to Ransom than to accept the post of honour and
danger in an attack upon an unknown but certainly deadly aquatic monster.
Even more recently, when he had first fled from the _sorns_, or when he
had lain pitying himself in the forest by night, it would hardly have
been in his power to do what he was intending to do to-day. For his
intention was clear. Whatever happened, he must show that the human
species also were _hnau_. He was only too well aware that such
resolutions might look very different when the moment came, but he felt
an unwonted assurance that somehow or other he would be able to go
through with it. It was necessary, and the necessary was always possible.
Perhaps, too, there was something in the air he now breathed, or in the
society of the _hrossa_, which had begun to work a change in him.

The lake was just giving back the first rays of the sun when he found
himself kneeling side by side with Whin, as he had been told to, in the
bows of Hyoi’s ship, with a little pile of throwing-spears between his
knees and one in his right hand, stiffening his body against the motion
as Hyoi paddled them out into their place. At least a hundred boats were
taking part in the hunt. They were in three parties. The central, and far
the smallest, was to work its way up the current by which Hyoi and Ransom
had descended after their first meeting. Longer ships than he had yet
seen, eight-paddled ships, were used for this. The habit of the _hnakra_
was to float down the current whenever he could; meeting the ships, he
would presumably dart out of it into the still water to left or right.
Hence while the central party slowly beat up the current, the light
ships, paddling far faster, would cruise at will up and down either side
of it to receive the quarry as soon as he broke what might be called his
‘cover.’ In this game numbers and intelligence were on the side of the
_hrossa_; the _hnakra_ had speed on his side, and also invisibility, for
he could swim under water. He was nearly invulnerable except through his
open mouth. If the two hunters in the bows of the boat he made for muffed
their shots, this was usually the last of them and of their boat.

In the light skirmishing parties there were two things a brave hunter
could aim at. He could keep well back and close to the long-ships where
the _hnakra_ was most likely to break out, or he could get as far forward
as possible in the hope of meeting the _hnakra_ going at its full speed
and yet untroubled by the hunt, and of inducing it, by a well-aimed
spear, to leave the current then and there. One could thus anticipate the
beaters and kill the beast—if that was how the matter ended—on one’s own.
This was the desire of Hyoi and Whin; and almost—so strongly they
infected him—of Ransom. Hence, hardly had the heavy craft of the beaters
begun their slow progress up-current amid a wall of foam when he found
his own ship speeding northward as fast as Hyoi could drive her, already
passing boat after boat and making for the freest water. The speed was
exhilarating. In the cold morning the warmth of the blue expanse they
were clearing was not unpleasant. Behind them arose, re-echoed from the
remote rock pinnacles on either side of the valley, the bell-like,
deep-mouthed voices of more than two hundred _hrossa_, more musical than
a cry of hounds but closely akin to it in quality as in purport.
Something long sleeping in the blood awoke in Ransom. It did not seem
impossible at this moment that even he might be the _hnakra_-slayer; that
the fame of _Hmān hnakrapunt_ might be handed down to posterity in this
world that knew no other man. But he had had such dreams before, and knew
how they ended. Imposing humility on the newly risen riot of his
feelings, he turned his eyes to the troubled water of the current which
they were skirting, without entering, and watched intently.

For a long time nothing happened. He became conscious of the stiffness of
his attitude and deliberately relaxed his muscles. Presently Whin
reluctantly went aft to paddle, and Hyoi came forward to take his place.
Almost as soon as the change had been effected, Hyoi spoke softly to him
and said, without taking his eyes off the current:

‘There is an _eldil_ coming to us over the water.’

Ransom could see nothing—or nothing that he could distinguish from
imagination and the dance of sunlight on the lake. A moment later Hyoi
spoke again, but not to him.

‘What is it, sky-born?’

What happened next was the most uncanny experience Ransom had yet had on
Malacandra. He heard the voice. It seemed to come out of the air, about a
yard above his head, and it was almost an octave higher than the
_hross’s_—higher even than his own. He realized that a very little
difference in his ear would have made the _eldil_ as inaudible to him as
it was invisible.

‘It is the Man with you, Hyoi,’ said the voice. ‘He ought not to be
there. He ought to be going to Oyarsa. Bent _hnau_ of his own kind from
Thulcandra are following him; he should go to Oyarsa. If they find him
anywhere else there will be evil.’

‘He hears you, sky-born,’ said Hyoi. ‘And have you no message for my
wife? You know what she wishes to be told.’

‘I have a message for Hleri,’ said the _eldil_. ‘But you will not be able
to take it. I go to her now myself. All that is well. Only—let the Man go
to Oyarsa.’

There was a moment’s silence.

‘He is gone,’ said Whin. ‘And we have lost our share in the hunt.’

‘Yes,’ said Hyoi with a sigh. ‘We must put _Hmān_ ashore and teach him
the way to Meldilorn.’

Ransom was not so sure of his courage but that one part of him felt an
instant relief at the idea of any diversion from their present business.
But the other part of him urged him to hold on to his newfound manhood;
now or never—with such companions or with none—he must leave a deed on
his memory instead of one more broken dream. It was in obedience to
something like conscience that he exclaimed:

‘No, no. There is time for that after the hunt. We must kill the _hnakra_
first.’

‘Once an _eldil_ has spoken,’ began Hyoi, when suddenly Whin gave a great
cry (a ‘bark’ Ransom would have called it three weeks ago) and pointed.
There, not a furlong away, was the torpedo-like track of foam; and now,
visible through a wall of foam, they caught the metallic glint of the
monster’s sides. Whin was paddling furiously. Hyoi threw and missed. As
his first spear smote the water his second was already in the air. This
time it must have touched the _hnakra_. He wheeled right out of the
current. Ransom saw the great black pit of his mouth twice open and twice
shut with its snap of shark-like teeth. He himself had thrown
now—hurriedly, excitedly, with unpractised hand.

‘Back,’ shouted Hyoi to Whin who was already backing water with every
pound of his vast strength. Then all became confused. He heard Whin shout
‘Shore!’ There came a shock that flung him forward almost into the
_hnakra’s_ jaws and he found himself at the same moment up to his waist
in water. It was at him the teeth were snapping. Then as he flung shaft
after shaft into the great cavern of the gaping brute he saw Hyoi perched
incredibly on its back—on its nose—bending forward and hurling from
there. Almost at once the _hross_ was dislodged and fell with a wide
splash nearly ten yards away. But the _hnakra_ was killed. It was
wallowing on its side, bubbling out its black life. The water around him
was dark and stank.

When he recollected himself they were all on shore, wet, steaming,
trembling with exertion and embracing one another. It did not now seem
strange to him to be clasped to a breast of wet fur. The breath of the
_hrossa_ which, though sweet, was not human breath, did not offend him.
He was one with them. That difficulty which they, accustomed to more than
one rational species, had perhaps never felt, was now overcome. They were
all _hnau_. They had stood shoulder to shoulder in the face of an enemy,
and the shapes of their heads no longer mattered. And he, even Ransom,
had come through it and not been disgraced. He had grown up.

They were on a little promontory free of forest, on which they had run
aground in the confusion of the fight. The wreckage of the boat and the
corpse of the monster lay confused together in the water beside them. No
sound from the rest of the hunting party was audible; they had been
almost a mile ahead when they met the _hnakra_. All three sat down to
recover their breath.

‘So,’ said Hyoi, ‘we are _hnakrapunti_. This is what I have wanted all my
life.’

At that moment Ransom was deafened by a loud sound—a perfectly familiar
sound which was the last thing he expected to hear. It was a terrestrial,
human and civilized sound; it was even European. It was the crack of an
English rifle; and Hyoi, at his feet, was struggling to rise and gasping.
There was blood on the white weed where he struggled. Ransom dropped on
his knees beside him. The huge body of the _hross_ was too heavy for him
to turn round. Whin helped him.

‘Hyoi, can you hear me?’ said Ransom with his face close to the round
seal-like head. ‘Hyoi, it is through me that this has happened. It is the
other _hmāna_ who have hit you, the bent two that brought me to
Malacandra. They can throw death at a distance with a thing they have
made. I should have told you. We are all a bent race. We have come here
to bring evil on Malacandra. We are only half _hnau_—Hyoi . . .’ His
speech died away into the inarticulate. He did not know the words for
‘forgive,’ or ‘shame,’ or ‘fault,’ hardly the word for ‘sorry.’ He could
only stare into Hyoi’s distorted face in speechless guilt. But the
_hross_ seemed to understand. It was trying to say something, and Ransom
laid his ear close to the working mouth. Hyoi’s dulling eyes were fixed
on his own, but the expression of a _hross_ was not even now perfectly
intelligible to him.

‘_Hnā—hmā_,’ it muttered and then, at last, ‘_Hmān hnakrapunt_.’ Then
there came a contortion of the whole body, a gush of blood and saliva
from the mouth; his arms gave way under the sudden dead weight of the
sagging head, and Hyoi’s face became as alien and animal as it had seemed
at their first meeting. The glazed eyes and the slowly stiffening,
bedraggled fur, were like those of any dead beast found in an earthly
wood.

Ransom resisted an infantile impulse to break out into imprecations on
Weston and Devine. Instead he raised his eyes to meet those of Whin who
was crouching—_hrossa_ do not kneel—on the other side of the corpse.

‘I am in the hands of your people, Whin,’ he said. ‘They must do as they
will. But if they are wise they will kill me and certainly they will kill
the other two.’

‘One does not kill _hnau_,’ said Whin. ‘Only Oyarsa does that. But these
other, where are they?’

Ransom glanced around. It was open on the promontory but thick wood came
down to where it joined the mainland, perhaps two hundred yards away.

‘Somewhere in the wood,’ he said. ‘Lie down, Whin, here where the ground
is lowest. They may throw from their thing again.’

He had some difficulty in making Whin do as he suggested. When both were
lying in dead ground, their feet almost in the water, the _hross_ spoke
again.

‘Why did they kill him?’ he asked.

‘They would not know he was _hnau_,’ said Ransom. ‘I have told you that
there is only one kind of _hnau_ in our world. They would think he was a
beast. If they thought that, they would kill him for pleasure, or in
fear, or’ (he hesitated) ‘because they were hungry. But I must tell you
the truth, Whin. They would kill even a _hnau_, knowing it to be _hnau_,
if they thought its death would serve them.’

There was a short silence.

‘I am wondering,’ said Ransom, ‘if they saw me. It is for me they are
looking. Perhaps if I went to them they would be content and come no
farther into your land. But why do they not come out of the wood to see
what they have killed?’

‘Our people are coming,’ said Whin, turning his head. Ransom looked back
and saw the lake black with boats. The main body of the hunt would be
with them in a few minutes.

‘They are afraid of the _hrossa_,’ said Ransom. ‘That is why they do not
come out of the wood. I will go to them, Whin.’

‘No,’ said Whin. ‘I have been thinking. All this has come from not
obeying the _eldil_. He said you were to go to Oyarsa. You ought to have
been already on the road. You must go now.’

‘But that will leave the bent _hmāna_ here. They may do more harm.’

‘They will not set on the _hrossa_. You have said they are afraid. It is
more likely that we will come upon them. Never fear—they will not see us
or hear us. We will take them to Oyarsa. But you must go now, as the
_eldil_ said.’

‘Your people will think I have run away because I am afraid to look in
their faces after Hyoi’s death.’

‘It is not a question of thinking but of what an _eldil_ says. This is
cubs’ talk. Now listen, and I will teach you the way.’

The _hross_ explained to him that five days’ journey to the south the
_handramit_ joined another _handramit_; and three days’ up this other
_handramit_ to west and north was Meldilorn and the seat of Oyarsa. But
there was a shorter way, a mountain road, across the corner of the
_harandra_ between the two canyons, which would bring him down to
Meldilorn on the second day. He must go into the wood before them and
through it till he came to the mountain wall of the _handramit_; and he
must work south along the roots of the mountains till he came to a road
cut up between them. Up this he must go, and somewhere beyond the tops of
the mountains he would come to the tower of Augray. Augray would help
him. He could cut weed for his food before he left the forest and came
into the rock country. Whin realized that Ransom might meet the other two
_hmāna_ as soon as he entered the wood.

‘If they catch you,’ he said, ‘then it will be as you say, they will come
no farther into our land. But it is better to be taken on your way to
Oyarsa than to stay here. And once you are on the way to him, I do not
think he will let the bent ones stop you.’

Ransom was by no means convinced that this was the best plan either for
himself or for the _hrossa_. But the stupor of humiliation in which he
had lain ever since Hyoi fell forbade him to criticize. He was anxious
only to do whatever they wanted him to do, to trouble them as little as
was now possible, and above all to get away. It was impossible to find
out how Whin felt; and Ransom sternly repressed an insistent, whining
impulse to renewed protestations and regrets, self-accusations that might
elicit some word of pardon. Hyoi with his last breath had called him
_hnakra_-slayer; that was forgiveness generous enough and with that he
must be content. As soon as he had mastered the details of his route he
bade farewell to Whin and advanced alone towards the forest.




                                FOURTEEN


Until he reached the wood Ransom found it difficult to think of anything
except the possibility of another rifle bullet from Weston or Devine. He
thought that they probably still wanted him alive rather than dead, and
this, combined with the knowledge that a _hross_ was watching him,
enabled him to proceed with at least external composure. Even when he had
entered the forest he felt himself in considerable danger. The long
branchless stems made ‘cover’ only if you were very far away from the
enemy; and the enemy in this case might be very close. He became aware of
a strong impulse to shout out to Weston and Devine and give himself up;
it rationalized itself in the form that this would remove them from the
district, as they would probably take him off to the _sorns_ and leave
the _hrossa_ unmolested. But Ransom knew a little psychology and had
heard of the hunted man’s irrational instinct to give himself up—indeed,
he had felt it himself in dreams. It was some such trick, he thought,
that his nerves were now playing him. In any case he was determined
henceforward to obey the _hrossa_ or _eldila_. His efforts to rely on his
own judgment in Malacandra had so far ended tragically enough. He made a
strong resolution, defying in advance all changes of mood, that he would
faithfully carry out the journey to Meldilorn if it could be done.

This resolution seemed to him all the more certainly right because he had
the deepest misgivings about that journey. He understood that the
_harandra_, which he had to cross, was the home of the _sorns_. In fact
he was walking of his own free will into the very trap that he had been
trying to avoid ever since his arrival on Malacandra. (Here the first
change of mood tried to raise its head. He thrust it down.) And even if
he got through the _sorns_ and reached Meldilorn, who or what might
Oyarsa be? Oyarsa, Whin had ominously observed, did not share the
_hrossa’s_ objection to shedding the blood of a _hnau_. And again, Oyarsa
ruled _sorns_ as well as _hrossa_ and _pfifltriggi_. Perhaps he was
simply the arch-_sorn_. And now came the second change of mood. Those old
terrestrial fears of some alien, cold intelligence, superhuman in power,
sub-human in cruelty, which had utterly faded from his mind among the
_hrossa_, rose clamouring for readmission. But he strode on. He was going
to Meldilorn. It was not possible, he told himself, that the _hrossa_
should obey any evil or monstrous creature; and they had told him—or had
they? he was not quite sure—that Oyarsa was not a _sorn_. Was Oyarsa a
god?—perhaps that very idol to whom the _sorns_ wanted to sacrifice him.
But the _hrossa_, though they said strange things about him, clearly
denied that he was a god. There was one God, according to them, Maleldil
the Young; nor was it possible to imagine Hyoi or Hnohra worshipping a
bloodstained idol. Unless, of course, the _hrossa_ were after all under
the thumb of the _sorns_, superior to their masters in all the qualities
that human beings value, but intellectually inferior to them and
dependent on them. It would be a strange but not an inconceivable world;
heroism and poetry at the bottom, cold scientific intellect above it, and
overtopping all some dark superstition which scientific intellect,
helpless against the revenge of the emotional depths it had ignored, had
neither will nor power to remove. A mumbo-jumbo . . . but Ransom pulled
himself up. He knew too much now to talk that way. He and all his class
would have called the _eldila_ a superstition if they had been merely
described to them, but now he had heard the voice himself. No, Oyarsa was
a real person if he was a person at all.

He had now been walking for about an hour, and it was nearly midday. No
difficulty about his direction had yet occurred; he had merely to keep
going uphill and he was certain of coming out of the forest to the
mountain wall sooner or later. Meanwhile he felt remarkably well, though
greatly chastened in mind. The silent, purple half-light of the woods
spread all around him as it had spread on the first day he spent in
Malacandra, but everything else was changed. He looked back on that time
as on a nightmare, on his own mood at that time as a sort of sickness.
Then all had been whimpering, unanalysed, self-nourishing, self-consuming
dismay. Now, in the clear light of an accepted duty, he felt fear indeed,
but with it a sober sense of confidence in himself and in the world, and
even an element of pleasure. It was the difference between a landsman in
a sinking ship and a horseman on a bolting horse: either may be killed,
but the horseman is an agent as well as a patient.

About an hour after noon he suddenly came out of the wood into bright
sunshine. He was only twenty yards from the almost perpendicular bases of
the mountain spires, too close to them to see their tops. A sort of
valley ran up in the re-entrant between two of them at the place where he
had emerged: an unclimbable valley consisting of a single concave sweep
of stone, which in its lower parts ascended steeply as the roof of a
house and farther up seemed almost vertical. At the top it even looked as
if it hung over a bit, like a tidal wave of stone at the very moment of
breaking; but this, he thought, might be an illusion. He wondered what
the _hrossa’s_ idea of a road might be.

He began to work his way southward along the narrow, broken ground
between wood and mountain. Great spurs of the mountains had to be crossed
every few moments, and even in that light-weight world it was intensely
tiring. After about half an hour he came to a stream. Here he went a few
paces into the forest, cut himself an ample supply of the groundweed, and
sat down beside the water’s edge for lunch. When he had finished he
filled his pockets with what he had not eaten and proceeded.

He began soon to be anxious about his road, for if he could make the top
at all he could do it only by daylight, and the middle of the afternoon
was approaching. But his fears were unnecessary. When it came it was
unmistakable. An open way through the wood appeared on the left—he must
be somewhere behind the _hross_ village now—and on the right he saw the
road, a single ledge or, in places, a trench, cut sidewise and upwards
across the sweep of such a valley as he had seen before. It took his
breath away—the insanely steep, hideously narrow staircase without steps,
leading up and up from where he stood to where it was an almost invisible
thread on the pale green surface of the rock. But there was no time to
stand and look at it. He was a poor judge of heights, but he had no doubt
that the top of the road was removed from him by a more than Alpine
distance. It would take him at least till sundown to reach it. Instantly
he began the ascent.

Such a journey would have been impossible on earth; the first quarter of
an hour would have reduced a man of Ransom’s build and age to exhaustion.
Here he was at first delighted with the ease of his movement, and then
staggered by the gradient and length of the climb which, even under
Malacandrian conditions, soon bowed his back and gave him an aching chest
and trembling knees. But this was not the worst. He heard already a
singing in his ears, and noticed that despite his labour there was no
sweat on his forehead. The cold, increasing at every step, seemed to sap
his vitality worse than any heat could have done. Already his lips were
cracked; his breath, as he panted, showed like a cloud; his fingers were
numb. He was cutting his way up into a silent arctic world, and had
already passed from an English to a Lapland winter. It frightened him,
and he decided that he must rest here or not at all; a hundred paces more
and if he sat down he would sit for ever. He squatted on the road for a
few minutes, slapping his body with his arms. The landscape was
terrifying. Already the _handramit_ which had made his world for so many
weeks was only a thin purple cleft sunk amidst the boundless level
desolation of the _harandra_ which now, on the farther side, showed
clearly between and above the mountain peaks. But long before he was
rested he knew that he must go on or die.

The world grew stranger. Among the _hrossa_ he had almost lost the
feeling of being on a strange planet; here it returned upon him with
desolating force. It was no longer ‘the world,’ scarcely even ‘a world’:
it was a planet, a star, a waste place in the universe, millions of miles
from the world of men. It was impossible to recall what he had felt about
Hyoi, or Whin, or the _eldila_, or Oyarsa. It seemed fantastic to have
thought he had duties to such hobgoblins—if they were not
hallucinations—met in the wilds of space. He had nothing to do with them:
he was a man. Why had Weston and Devine left him alone like this?

But all the time the old resolution, taken when he could still think, was
driving him up the road. Often he forgot where he was going, and why. The
movement became a mechanical rhythm—from weariness to stillness, from
stillness to unbearable cold, from cold to motion again. He noticed that
the _handramit_—now an insignificant part of the landscape—was full of a
sort of haze. He had never seen a fog while he was living there. Perhaps
that was what the air of the _handramit_ looked like from above;
certainly it was different air from this. There was something more wrong
with his lungs and heart than even the cold and the exertion accounted
for. And though there was no snow, there was an extraordinary brightness.
The light was increasing, sharpening and growing whiter; and the sky was
a much darker blue than he had ever seen on Malacandra. Indeed, it was
darker than blue; it was almost black, and the jagged spires of rock
standing against it were like his mental picture of a lunar landscape.
Some stars were visible.

Suddenly he realized the meaning of these phenomena. There was very
little air above him: he was near the end of it. The Malacandrian
atmosphere lay chiefly in the _handramits_; the real surface of the
planet was naked or thinly clad. The stabbing sunlight and the black sky
above him were that ‘heaven’ out of which he had dropped into the
Malacandrian world, already showing through the last thin veil of air. If
the top were more than a hundred feet away, it would be where no man
could breathe at all. He wondered whether the _hrossa_ had different
lungs and had sent him by a road that meant death for man. But even while
he thought of this he took note that those jagged peaks blazing in
sunlight against an almost black sky were level with him. He was no
longer ascending. The road ran on before him in a kind of shallow ravine
bounded on his left by the tops of the highest rock pinnacles and on his
right by a smooth ascending swell of stone that ran up to the true
_harandra_. And where he was he could still breathe, though gasping,
dizzy and in pain. The blaze in his eyes was worse. The sun was setting.
The _hrossa_ must have foreseen this; they could not live, any more than
he, on the _harandra_ by night. Still staggering forward, he looked about
him for any sign of Augray’s tower, whatever Augray might be.

Doubtless he exaggerated the time during which he thus wandered and
watched the shadows from the rocks lengthening towards him. It cannot
really have been long before he saw a light ahead—a light which showed
how dark the surrounding landscape had become. He tried to run but his
body would not respond. Stumbling in haste and weakness, he made for the
light; thought he had reached it and found that it was far farther off
than he had supposed; almost despaired; staggered on again, and came at
last to what seemed a cavern mouth. The light within was an unsteady one
and a delicious wave of warmth smote on his face. It was firelight. He
came into the mouth of the cave and then, unsteadily, round the fire and
into the interior, and stood still blinking in the light. When at last he
could see, he discerned a smooth chamber of green rock, very lofty. There
were two things in it. One of them, dancing on the wall and roof, was the
huge, angular shadow of a _sorn_: the other, crouched beneath it, was the
_sorn_ himself.




                                FIFTEEN


‘Come in, Small One,’ boomed the _sorn_. ‘Come in and let me look at
you.’

Now that he stood face to face with the spectre that had haunted him ever
since he set foot on Malacandra, Ransom felt a surprising indifference.
He had no idea what might be coming next, but he was determined to carry
out his programme; and in the meantime the warmth and more breathable air
were a heaven in themselves. He came in, well in past the fire, and
answered the _sorn_. His own voice sounded to him a shrill treble.

‘The _hrossa_ have sent me to look for Oyarsa,’ he said.

The _sorn_ peered at him. ‘You are not from this world,’ it said
suddenly.

‘No,’ replied Ransom, and sat down. He was too tired to explain.

‘I think you are from Thulcandra, Small One,’ said the _sorn_.

‘Why?’ said Ransom.

‘You are small and thick and that is how the animals ought to be made in
a heavier world. You cannot come from Glundandra, for it is so heavy that
if any animals could live there they would be flat like plates—even you,
Small One, would break if you stood up on that world. I do not think you
are from Parelandra, for it must be very hot; if any came from there they
would not live when they arrived here. So I conclude you are from
Thulcandra.’

‘The world I come from is called Earth by those who live there,’ said
Ransom. ‘And it is much warmer than this. Before I came into your cave I
was nearly dead with cold and thin air.’

The _sorn_ made a sudden movement with one of its long fore-limbs. Ransom
stiffened (though he did not allow himself to retreat), for the creature
might be going to grab him. In fact, its intentions were kindly.
Stretching back into the cave, it took from the wall what looked like a
cup. Then Ransom saw that it was attached to a length of flexible tube.
The _sorn_ put it into his hands.

‘Smell on this,’ it said. ‘The _hrossa_ also need it when they pass this
way.’

Ransom inhaled and was instantly refreshed. His painful shortness of
breath was eased and the tension of chest and temples was relaxed. The
_sorn_ and the lighted cavern, hitherto vague and dream-like to his eyes,
took on a new reality.

‘Oxygen?’ he asked; but naturally the English word meant nothing to the
_sorn_.

‘Are you called Augray?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said the _sorn_. ‘What are you called?’

‘The animal I am is called Man, and therefore the _hrossa_ call me
_Hmān_. But my own name is Ransom.’

‘Man—Ren-soom,’ said the _sorn_. He noticed that it spoke differently
from the _hrossa_, without any suggestion of their persistent initial H.

It was sitting on its long, wedge-shaped buttocks with its feet drawn
close up to it. A man in the same posture would have rested his chin on
his knees, but the _sorn’s_ legs were too long for that. Its knees rose
high above its shoulders on each side of its head—grotesquely suggestive
of huge ears—and the head, down between them, rested its chin on the
protruding breast. The creature seemed to have either a double chin or a
beard; Ransom could not make out which in the firelight. It was mainly
white or cream in colour and seemed to be clothed down to the ankles in
some soft substance that reflected the light. On the long fragile shanks,
where the creature was closest to him, he saw that this was some natural
kind of coat. It was not like fur but more like feathers. In fact it was
almost exactly like feathers. The whole animal, seen at close quarters,
was less terrifying than he had expected, and even a little smaller. The
face, it was true, took a good deal of getting used to—it was too long,
too solemn and too colourless, and it was much more unpleasantly like a
human face than any inhuman creature’s face ought to be. Its eyes, like
those of all very large creatures, seemed too small for it. But it was
more grotesque than horrible. A new conception of the _sorns_ began to
arise in his mind: the ideas of ‘giant’ and ‘ghost’ receded behind those
of ‘goblin’ and ‘gawk.’

‘Perhaps you are hungry, Small One,’ it said.

Ransom was. The _sorn_ rose with strange spidery movements and began
going to and fro about the cave, attended by its thin goblin shadow. It
brought him the usual vegetable foods of Malacandra, and strong drink,
with the very welcome addition of a smooth brown substance which revealed
itself to nose, eye and palate, in defiance of all probability, as
cheese. Ransom asked what it was.

The _sorn_ began to explain painfully how the female of some animals
secreted a fluid for the nourishment of its young, and would have gone on
to describe the whole process of milking and cheesemaking, if Ransom had
not interrupted it.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘We do the same on Earth. What is the beast you
use?’

‘It is a yellow beast with a long neck. It feeds on the forests that grow
in the _handramit_. The young ones of our people who are not yet fit for
much else drive the beasts down there in the mornings and follow them
while they feed; then before night they drive them back and put them in
the caves.’

For a moment Ransom found something reassuring in the thought that the
_sorns_ were shepherds. Then he remembered that the Cyclops in Homer
plied the same trade.

‘I think I have seen one of your people at this very work,’ he said. ‘But
the _hrossa_—they let you tear up their forests?’

‘Why should they not?’

‘Do you rule the _hrossa_?’

‘Oyarsa rules them.’

‘And who rules you?’

‘Oyarsa.’

‘But you know more than the _hrossa_?’

‘The _hrossa_ know nothing except about poems and fish and making things
grow out of the ground.’

‘And Oyarsa—is he a _sorn_?’

‘No, no, Small One. I have told you he rules all _nau_’ (so he pronounced
_hnau_), ‘and everything in Malacandra.’

‘I do not understand this Oyarsa,’ said Ransom. ‘Tell me more.’

‘Oyarsa does not die,’ said the _sorn_. ‘And he does not breed. He is the
one of his kind who was put into Malacandra to rule it when Malacandra
was made. His body is not like ours, nor yours; it is hard to see and the
light goes through it.’

‘Like an _eldil_?’

‘Yes, he is the greatest of _eldila_ who ever come to a _handra_.’

‘What are these _eldila_?’

‘Do you tell me, Small One, that there are no _eldila_ in your world?’

‘Not that I know of. But what are _eldila_, and why can I not see them?
Have they no bodies?’

‘Of course they have bodies. There are a great many bodies you cannot
see. Every animal’s eyes see some things but not others. Do you not know
of many kinds of body in Thulcandra?’

Ransom tried to give the _sorn_ some idea of the terrestrial terminology
of solids, liquids and gases. It listened with great attention.

‘That is not the way to say it,’ it replied. ‘Body is movement. If it is
at one speed, you smell something; if at another, you hear a sound; if at
another, you see a sight; if at another, you neither see nor hear nor
smell, nor know the body in any way. But mark this, Small One, that the
two ends meet.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘If movement is faster, then that which moves is more nearly in two
places at once.’

‘That is true.’

‘But if the movement were faster still—it is difficult, for you do not
know many words—you see that if you made it faster and faster, in the end
the moving thing would be in all places at once, Small One.’

‘I think I see that.’

‘Well, then, that is the thing at the top of all bodies—so fast that it
is at rest, so truly body that it has ceased being body at all. But we
will not talk of that. Start from where we are, Small One. The swiftest
thing that touches our senses is light. We do not truly see light, we
only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge—the
last thing we know before things become too swift for us. But the body of
an _eldil_ is a movement swift as light; you may say its body is made of
light, but not of that which is light for the _eldil_. His “light” is a
swifter movement which for us is nothing at all; and what we call light
is for him a thing like water, a visible thing, a thing he can touch and
bathe in—even a dark thing when not illumined by the swifter. And what we
call firm things—flesh and earth—seem to him thinner, and harder to see,
than our light, and more like clouds, and nearly nothing. To us the
_eldil_ is a thin, half-real body that can go through walls and rocks: to
himself he goes through them because he is solid and firm and they are
like cloud. And what is true light to him and fills the heaven, so that
he will plunge into the rays of the sun to refresh himself from it, is to
us the black nothing in the sky at night. These things are not strange,
Small One, though they are beyond our senses. But it is strange that the
_eldila_ never visit Thulcandra.’

‘Of that I am not certain,’ said Ransom. It had dawned on him that the
recurrent human tradition of bright, elusive people sometimes appearing
on the Earth—_albs_, _devas_ and the like—might after all have another
explanation than the anthropologists had yet given. True, it would turn
the universe rather oddly inside out; but his experiences in the
space-ship had prepared him for some such operation.

‘Why does Oyarsa send for me?’ he asked.

‘Oyarsa has not told me,’ said the _sorn_. ‘But doubtless he would want
to see any stranger from another _handra_.’

‘We have no Oyarsa in my world,’ said Ransom.

‘That is another proof,’ said the _sorn_, ‘that you come from Thulcandra,
the silent planet.’

‘What has that to do with it?’

The _sorn_ seemed surprised. ‘It is not very likely if you had an Oyarsa
that he would never speak to ours.’

‘Speak to yours? But how could he—it is millions of miles away.’

‘Oyarsa would not think of it like that.’

‘Do you mean that he ordinarily receives messages from other planets?’

‘Once again, he would not say it that way. Oyarsa would not say that he
lives on Malacandra and that another Oyarsa lives on another earth. For
him Malacandra is only a place in the heavens; it is in the heavens that
he and the others live. Of course they talk together. . . .’

Ransom’s mind shied away from the problem; he was getting sleepy and
thought he must be misunderstanding the _sorn_.

‘I think I must sleep, Augray,’ he said. ‘And I do not know what you are
saying. Perhaps, too, I do not come from what you call Thulcandra.’

‘We will both sleep presently,’ said the _sorn_. ‘But first I will show
you Thulcandra.’

It rose and Ransom followed it into the back of the cave. Here he found a
little recess and running up within it a winding stair. The steps, hewn
for _sorns_, were too high for a man to climb with any comfort, but using
hands and knees he managed to hobble up. The _sorn_ preceded him. Ransom
did not understand the light, which seemed to come from some small round
object which the creature held in its hand. They went up a long way,
almost as if they were climbing up the inside of a hollow mountain. At
last, breathless, he found himself in a dark but warm chamber of rock,
and heard the _sorn_ saying:

‘She is still well above the southern horizon.’ It directed his attention
to something like a small window. Whatever it was, it did not appear to
work like an earthly telescope, Ransom thought; though an attempt, made
next day, to explain the principles of the telescope to the _sorn_ threw
grave doubts on his own ability to discern the difference. He leaned
forward with his elbows on the sill of the aperture and looked. He saw
perfect blackness and, floating in the centre of it, seemingly an arm’s
length away, a bright disk about the size of a half-crown. Most of its
surface was featureless, shining silver; towards the bottom markings
appeared, and below them a white cap, just as he had seen the polar caps
in astronomical photographs of Mars. He wondered for a moment if it was
Mars he was looking at; then, as his eyes took in the markings better, he
recognized what they were—Northern Europe and a piece of North America.
They were upside down with the North Pole at the bottom of the picture
and this somehow shocked him. But it was Earth he was seeing—even,
perhaps, England, though the picture shook a little and his eyes were
quickly getting tired, and he could not be certain that he was not
imagining it. It was all there in that little disk—London, Athens,
Jerusalem, Shakespeare. There everyone had lived and everything had
happened; and there, presumably, his pack was still lying in the porch of
an empty house near Sterk.

‘Yes,’ he said dully to the _sorn_. ‘That is my world.’ It was the
bleakest moment in all his travels.




                                SIXTEEN


Ransom awoke next morning with the vague feeling that a great weight had
been taken off his mind. Then he remembered that he was the guest of a
_sorn_ and that the creature he had been avoiding ever since he landed
had turned out to be as amicable as the _hrossa_, though he was far from
feeling the same affection for it. Nothing then remained to be afraid of
in Malacandra except Oyarsa . . . ‘The last fence,’ thought Ransom.

Augray gave him food and drink.

‘And now,’ said Ransom, ‘how shall I find my way to Oyarsa?’

‘I will carry you,’ said the _sorn_. ‘You are too small a one to make the
journey yourself and I will gladly go to Meldilorn. The _hrossa_ should
not have sent you this way. They do not seem to know from looking at an
animal what sort of lungs it has and what it can do. It is just like a
_hross_. If you died on the _harandra_ they would have made a poem about
the gallant hmān and how the sky grew black and the cold stars shone and
he journeyed on and journeyed on; and they would have put in a fine
speech for you to say as you were dying . . . and all this would seem to
them just as good as if they had used a little forethought and saved your
life by sending you the easier way round.’

‘I like the _hrossa_,’ said Ransom a little stiffly. ‘And I think the way
they talk about death is the right way.’

‘They are right not to fear it, Ren-soom, but they do not seem to look at
it reasonably as part of the very nature of our bodies—and therefore
often avoidable at times when they would never see how to avoid it. For
example, this has saved the life of many a _hross_, but a _hross_ would
not have thought of it.’

He showed Ransom a flask with a tube attached to it, and, at the end of
the tube a cup, obviously an apparatus for administering oxygen to
oneself.

‘Smell on it as you have need, Small One,’ said the _sorn_. ‘And close it
up when you do not.’

Augray fastened the thing on his back and gave the tube over his shoulder
into his hand. Ransom could not restrain a shudder at the touch of the
_sorn’s_ hands upon his body; they were fan-shaped, seven-fingered, mere
skin over bone like a bird’s leg, and quite cold. To divert his mind from
such reactions he asked where the apparatus was made, for he had as yet
seen nothing remotely like a factory or a laboratory.

‘We thought it,’ said the _sorn_, ‘and the _pfifltriggi_ made it.’

‘Why do they make them?’ said Ransom. He was trying once more, with his
insufficient vocabulary, to find out the political and economic framework
of Malacandrian life.

‘They like making things,’ said Augray. ‘It is true they like best the
making of things that are only good to look at and of no use. But
sometimes when they are tired of that they will make things for us,
things we have thought, provided they are difficult enough. They have not
patience to make easy things however useful they would be. But let us
begin our journey. You shall sit on my shoulder.’

The proposal was unexpected and alarming, but seeing that the _sorn_ had
already crouched down, Ransom felt obliged to climb on to the plume-like
surface of its shoulder, to seat himself beside the long, pale face,
casting his right arm as far as it would go round the huge neck, and to
compose himself as well as he could for this precarious mode of travel.
The giant rose cautiously to a standing position and he found himself
looking down on the landscape from a height of about eighteen feet.

‘Is all well, Small One?’ it asked.

‘Very well,’ Ransom answered, and the journey began.

Its gait was perhaps the least human thing about it. It lifted its feet
very high and set them down very gently. Ransom was reminded alternately
of a cat stalking, a strutting barn-door fowl, and a high-stepping
carriage horse; but the movement was not really like that of any
terrestrial animal. For the passenger it was surprisingly comfortable. In
a few minutes he had lost all sense of what was dizzying or unnatural in
his position. Instead, ludicrous and even tender associations came
crowding into his mind. It was like riding an elephant at the zoo in
boyhood—like riding on his father’s back at a still earlier age. It was
fun. They seemed to be doing between six and seven miles an hour. The
cold, though severe, was endurable; and thanks to the oxygen he had
little difficulty with his breathing.

The landscape which he saw from his high, swaying post of observation was
a solemn one. The _handramit_ was nowhere to be seen. On each side of the
shallow gully in which they were walking, a world of naked, faintly
greenish rock, interrupted with wide patches of red, extended to the
horizon. The heaven, darkest blue where the rock met it, was almost black
at the zenith, and looking in any direction where sunlight did not blind
him, he could see the stars. He learned from the _sorn_ that he was right
in thinking they were near the limits of the breathable. Already on the
mountain fringe that borders the _harandra_ and walls the _handramit_, or
in the narrow depression along which their road led them, the air is of
Himalayan rarity, ill breathing for a _hross_, and a few hundred feet
higher, on the _harandra_ proper, the true surface of the planet, it
admits no life. Hence the brightness through which they walked was almost
that of heaven—celestial light hardly at all tempered with an atmospheric
veil.

The shadow of the _sorn_, with Ransom’s shadow on its shoulder, moved
over the uneven rock unnaturally distinct like the shadow of a tree
before the headlights of a car; and the rock beyond the shadow hurt his
eyes. The remote horizon seemed but an arm’s length away. The fissures
and moulding of distant slopes were clear as the background of a
primitive picture made before men learned perspective. He was on the very
frontier of that heaven he had known in the space-ship, and rays that the
air-enveloped worlds cannot taste were once more at work upon his body.
He felt the old lift of the heart, the soaring solemnity, the sense, at
once sober and ecstatic, of life and power offered in unasked and
unmeasured abundance. If there had been air enough in his lungs he would
have laughed aloud. And now, even in the immediate landscape, beauty was
drawing near. Over the edge of the valley, as if it had frothed down from
the true _harandra_, came great curves of the rose-tinted, cumular stuff
which he had seen so often from a distance. Now on a nearer view they
appeared hard as stone in substance, but puffed above and stalked beneath
like vegetation. His original simile of giant cauliflower turned out to
be surprisingly correct—stone cauliflowers the size of cathedrals and the
colour of pale rose. He asked the _sorn_ what it was.

‘It is the old forests of Malacandra,’ said Augray. ‘Once there was air
on the _harandra_ and it was warm. To this day, if you could get up there
and live, you would see it all covered with the bones of ancient
creatures; it was once full of life and noise. It was then these forests
grew, and in and out among their stalks went a people that have vanished
from the world these many thousand years. They were covered not with fur
but with a coat like mine. They did not go in the water swimming or on
the ground walking; they glided in the air on broad flat limbs which kept
them up. It is said they were great singers, and in those days the red
forests echoed with their music. Now the forests have become stone and
only _eldila_ can go among them.’

‘We still have such creatures in our world,’ said Ransom. ‘We call them
birds. Where was Oyarsa when all this happened to the _harandra_?’

‘Where he is now.’

‘And he could not prevent it?’

‘I do not know. But a world is not made to last for ever, much less a
race; that is not Maleldil’s way.’

As they proceeded the petrified forests grew more numerous, and often for
half an hour at a time the whole horizon of the lifeless, almost airless,
waste blushed like an English garden in summer. They passed many caves
where, as Augray told him, _sorns_ lived; sometimes a high cliff would be
perforated with countless holes to the very top and unidentifiable noises
came hollowly from within. ‘Work’ was in progress, said the _sorn_, but
of what kind it could not make him understand. Its vocabulary was very
different from that of the _hrossa_. Nowhere did he see anything like a
village or city of _sorns_, who were apparently solitary not social
creatures. Once or twice a long pallid face would show from a cavern
mouth and exchange a horn-like greeting with the travellers, but for the
most part the long valley, the rock-street of the silent people, was
still and empty as the _harandra_ itself.

Only towards afternoon, as they were about to descend into a dip of the
road, they met three _sorns_ together coming towards them down the
opposite slope. They seemed to Ransom to be rather skating than walking.
The lightness of their world and the perfect poise of their bodies
allowed them to lean forward at right angles to the slope, and they came
swiftly down like full-rigged ships before a fair wind. The grace of
their movement, their lofty stature, and the softened glancing of the
sunlight on their feathery sides, effected a final transformation in
Ransom’s feelings towards their race. ‘Ogres’ he had called them when
they first met his eyes as he struggled in the grip of Weston and Devine;
‘Titans’ or ‘Angels’ he now thought would have been a better word. Even
the faces, it seemed to him, he had not then seen aright. He had thought
them spectral when they were only august, and his first human reaction to
their lengthened severity of line and profound stillness of expression
now appeared to him not so much cowardly as vulgar. So might Parmenides
or Confucius look to the eyes of a Cockney schoolboy! The great white
creatures sailed towards Ransom and Augray and dipped like trees and
passed.

In spite of the cold—which made him often dismount and take a spell on
foot—he did not wish for the end of the journey; but Augray had his own
plans and halted for the night long before sundown at the home of an
older _sorn_. Ransom saw well enough that he was brought there to be
shown to a great scientist. The cave, or, to speak more correctly, the
system of excavations, was large and many-chambered, and contained a
multitude of things that he did not understand. He was specially
interested in a collection of rolls, seemingly of skin, covered with
characters, which were clearly books; but he gathered that books were few
in Malacandra.

‘It is better to remember,’ said the _sorns_.

When Ransom asked if valuable secrets might not thus be lost, they
replied that Oyarsa always remembered them and would bring them to light
if he thought fit.

‘The _hrossa_ used to have many books of poetry,’ they added. ‘But now
they have fewer. They say that the writing of books destroys poetry.’

Their host in these caverns was attended by a number of other _sorns_ who
seemed to be in some way subordinate to him; Ransom thought at first that
they were servants but decided later that they were pupils or assistants.

The evening’s conversation was not such as would interest a terrestrial
reader, for the _sorns_ had determined that Ransom should not ask, but
answer, questions. Their questioning was very different from the
rambling, imaginative inquiries of the _hrossa_. They worked
systematically from the geology of Earth to its present geography, and
thence in turn to flora, fauna, human history, languages, politics and
arts. When they found that Ransom could tell them no more on a given
subject—and this happened pretty soon in most of their inquiries—they
dropped it at once and went on to the next. Often they drew out of him
indirectly much more knowledge than he consciously possessed, apparently
working from a wide background of general science. A casual remark about
trees when Ransom was trying to explain the manufacture of paper would
fill up for them a gap in his sketchy answers to their botanical
questions; his account of terrestrial navigation might illuminate
mineralogy; and his description of the steam-engine gave them a better
knowledge of terrestrial air and water than Ransom had ever had. He had
decided from the outset that he would be quite frank, for he now felt
that it would be not _hnau_, and also that it would be unavailing, to do
otherwise. They were astonished at what he had to tell them of human
history—of war, slavery and prostitution.

‘It is because they have no Oyarsa,’ said one of the pupils.

‘It is because every one of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,’
said Augray.

‘They cannot help it,’ said the old _sorn_. ‘There must be rule, yet how
can creatures rule themselves? Beasts must be ruled by _hnau_ and _hnau_
by _eldila_ and _eldila_ by Maleldil. These creatures have no _eldila_.
They are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair—or one trying to
see over a whole country when he is on a level with it—like a female
trying to beget young on herself.’

Two things about our world particularly stuck in their minds. One was the
extraordinary degree to which problems of lifting and carrying things
absorbed our energy. The other was the fact that we had only one kind of
_hnau_: they thought this must have far-reaching effects in the narrowing
of sympathies and even of thought.

‘Your thought must be at the mercy of your blood,’ said the old _sorn_.
‘For you cannot compare it with thought that floats on a different
blood.’

It was a tiring and very disagreeable conversation for Ransom. But when
at last he lay down to sleep it was not of the human nakedness nor of his
own ignorance that he was thinking. He thought only of the old forests of
Malacandra and of what it might mean to grow up seeing always so few
miles away a land of colour that could never be reached and had once been
inhabited.




                               SEVENTEEN


Early next day Ransom again took his seat on Augray’s shoulder. For more
than an hour they travelled through the same bright wilderness. Far to
the north the sky was luminous with a cloud-like mass of dull red or
ochre; it was very large and drove furiously westward about ten miles
above the waste. Ransom, who had yet seen no cloud in the Malacandrian
sky, asked what it was. The _sorn_ told him it was sand caught up from
the great northern deserts by the winds of that terrible country. It was
often thus carried, sometimes at a height of seventeen miles, to fall
again, perhaps in a _handramit_, as a choking and blinding dust-storm.
The sight of it moving with menace in the naked sky served to remind
Ransom that they were indeed on the _outside_ of Malacandra—no longer
dwelling in a world but crawling the surface of a strange planet. At last
the cloud seemed to drop and burst far on the western horizon, where a
glow, not unlike that of a conflagration, remained visible until a turn
of the valley hid all that region from his view.

The same turn opened a new prospect to his eyes. What lay before him
looked at first strangely like an earthly landscape—a landscape of grey
downland ridges rising and falling like waves of the sea. Far beyond,
cliffs and spires of the familiar green rock rose against the dark blue
sky. A moment later he saw that what he had taken for downlands was but
the ridged and furrowed surface of a blue-grey valley mist—a mist which
would not appear a mist at all when they descended into the _handramit_.
And already, as their road began descending, it was less visible and the
many-coloured pattern of the low country showed vaguely through it. The
descent grew quickly steeper; like the jagged teeth of a giant—a giant
with very bad teeth—the topmost peaks of the mountain wall down which
they must pass loomed up over the edge of their gully. The look of the
sky and the quality of the light were infinitesimally changed. A moment
later they stood on the edge of such a slope as by earthly standards
would rather be called a precipice; down and down this face, to where it
vanished in a purple blush of vegetation, ran their road. Ransom refused
absolutely to make the descent on Augray’s shoulder. The _sorn_, though
it did not fully understand his objection, stooped for him to dismount,
and proceeded, with that same skating and forward-sloping motion, to go
down before him. Ransom followed, using gladly but stiffly his numb legs.

The beauty of this new _handramit_ as it opened before him took his
breath away. It was wider than that in which he had hitherto lived and
right below him lay an almost circular lake—a sapphire twelve miles in
diameter set in a border of purple forest. Amidst the lake there rose
like a low and gently sloping pyramid, or like a woman’s breast, an
island of pale red, smooth to the summit, and on the summit a grove of
such trees as man had never seen. Their smooth columns had the gentle
swell of the noblest beech-trees: but these were taller than a cathedral
spire on earth, and at their tops, they broke rather into flower than
foliage; into golden flower bright as tulip, still as rock, and huge as
summer cloud. Flowers indeed they were, not trees, and far down among
their roots he caught a pale hint of slab-like architecture. He knew
before his guide told him that this was Meldilorn. He did not know what
he had expected. The old dreams which he had brought from earth of some
more than American complexity of offices or some engineers’ paradise of
vast machines had indeed been long laid aside. But he had not looked for
anything quite so classic, so virginal, as this bright grove—lying so
still, so secret, in its coloured valley, soaring with inimitable grace
so many hundred feet into the wintry sunlight. At every step of his
descent the comparative warmth of the valley came up to him more
deliciously. He looked above—the sky was turning to a paler blue. He
looked below—and sweet and faint the thin fragrance of the giant blooms
came up to him. Distant crags were growing less sharp in outline, and
surfaces less bright. Depth, dimness, softness and perspective were
returning to the landscape. The lip or edge of rock from which they had
started their descent was already far overhead; it seemed unlikely that
they had really come from there. He was breathing freely. His toes, so
long benumbed, could move delightfully inside his boots. He lifted the
ear-flaps of his cap and found his ears instantly filled with the sound
of falling water. And now he was treading on soft ground-weed over level
earth and the forest roof was above his head. They had conquered the
_harandra_ and were on the threshold of Meldilorn.

A short walk brought them into a kind of forest ‘ride’—a broad avenue
running straight as an arrow through the purple stems to where the vivid
blue of the lake danced at the end of it. There they found a gong and
hammer hung on a pillar of stone. These objects were all richly
decorated, and the gong and hammer were of a greenish blue metal which
Ransom did not recognize. Augray struck the gong. An excitement was
rising in Ransom’s mind which almost prevented him from examining as
coolly as he wished the ornamentation of the stone. It was partly
pictorial, partly pure decoration. What chiefly struck him was a certain
balance of packed and empty surfaces. Pure line drawings, as bare as the
prehistoric pictures of reindeer on Earth, alternated with patches of
design as close and intricate as Norse or Celtic jewellery; and then, as
you looked at it, these empty and crowded areas turned out to be
themselves arranged in larger designs. He was struck by the fact that the
pictorial work was not confined to the emptier spaces; quite often large
arabesques included as a subordinate detail intricate pictures. Elsewhere
the opposite plan had been followed—and this alternation, too, had a
rhythmical or patterned element in it. He was just beginning to find out
that the pictures, though stylized, were obviously intended to tell a
story, when Augray interrupted him. A ship had put out from the island
shore of Meldilorn.

As it came towards them Ransom’s heart warmed to see that it was paddled
by a _hross_. The creature brought its boat up to the shore where they
were waiting, stared at Ransom and then looked inquiringly at Augray.

‘You may well wonder at this _nau_, Hrinha,’ said the _sorn_, ‘for you
have never seen anything like it. It is called Ren-soom and has come
through heaven from Thulcandra.’

‘It is welcome, Augray,’ said the _hross_ politely. ‘Is it coming to
Oyarsa?’

‘He has sent for it.’

‘And for you also, Augray?’

‘Oyarsa has not called me. If you will take Ren-soom over the water, I
will go back to my tower.’

The _hross_ indicated that Ransom should enter the boat. He attempted to
express his thanks to the _sorn_ and after a moment’s consideration
unstrapped his wrist-watch and offered it to him; it was the only thing
he had which seemed a suitable present for a _sorn_. He had no difficulty
in making Augray understand its purpose; but after examining it the giant
gave it back to him, a little reluctantly, and said:

‘This gift ought to be given to a _pfifltrigg_. It rejoices my heart, but
they would make more of it. You are likely to meet some of the busy
people in Meldilorn: give it to them. As for its use, do your people not
know except by looking at this thing how much of the day has worn?’

‘I believe there are beasts that have a sort of knowledge of that,’ said
Ransom, ‘but our _hnau_ have lost it.’

After this, his farewells to the _sorn_ were made and he embarked. To be
once more in a boat and with a _hross_, to feel the warmth of water on
his face and to see a blue sky above him, was almost like coming home. He
took off his cap and leaned back luxuriously in the bows, plying his
escort with questions. He learned that the _hrossa_ were not specially
concerned with the service of Oyarsa, as he had surmised from finding a
_hross_ in charge of the ferry: all three species of _hnau_ served him in
their various capacities, and the ferry was naturally entrusted to those
who understood boats. He learned that his own procedure on arriving in
Meldilorn must be to go where he liked and do what he pleased until
Oyarsa called for him. It might be an hour or several days before this
happened. He would find huts near the landing-place where he could sleep
if necessary and where food would be given him. In return he related as
much as he could make intelligible of his own world and his journey from
it; and he warned the _hross_ of the dangerous bent men who had brought
him and who were still at large on Malacandra. As he did so, it occurred
to him that he had not made this sufficiently clear to Augray; but he
consoled himself with the reflection that Weston and Devine seemed to
have already some liaison with the _sorns_ and that they would not be
likely to molest things so large and so comparatively man-like. At any
rate, not yet. About Devine’s ultimate designs he had no illusions; all
he could do was to make a clean breast of them to Oyarsa. And now the
ship touched land.

Ransom rose, while the _hross_ was making fast, and looked about him.
Close to the little harbour which they had entered, and to the left, were
low buildings of stone—the first he had seen in Malacandra—and fires were
burning. There, the _hross_ told him, he could find food and shelter. For
the rest the island seemed desolate, and its smooth slopes empty up to
the grove that crowned them, where, again, he saw stonework. But this
appeared to be neither temple nor house in the human sense, but a broad
avenue of monoliths—a much larger Stonehenge, stately, empty and
vanishing over the crest of the hill into the pale shadow of the
flower-trunks. All was solitude; but as he gazed upon it he seemed to
hear, against the background of morning silence, a faint, continual
agitation of silvery sound—hardly a sound at all, if you attended to it,
and yet impossible to ignore.

‘The island is all full of _eldila_,’ said the _hross_ in a hushed voice.

He went ashore. As though half expecting some obstacle, he took a few
hesitant paces forward and stopped, and then went on again in the same
fashion.

Though the ground-weed was unusually soft and rich and his feet made no
noise upon it, he felt an impulse to walk on tiptoes. All his movements
became gentle and sedate. The width of water about this island made the
air warmer than any he had yet breathed in Malacandra; the climate was
almost that of a warm earthly day in late September—a day that is warm
but with a hint of frost to come. The sense of awe which was increasing
upon him deterred him from approaching the crown of the hill, the grove
and the avenue of standing stones.

He ceased ascending about half-way up the hill and began walking to his
right, keeping a constant distance from the shore. He said to himself
that he was having a look at the island, but his feeling was rather that
the island was having a look at him. This was greatly increased by a
discovery he made after he had been walking for about an hour, and which
he ever afterwards found great difficulty in describing. In the most
abstract terms it might be summed up by saying that the surface of the
island was subject to tiny variations of light and shade which no change
in the sky accounted for. If the air had not been calm and the
ground-weed too short and firm to move in the wind, he would have said
that a faint breeze was playing with it, and working such slight
alterations in the shading as it does in a corn-field on the Earth. Like
the silvery noises in the air, these footsteps of light were shy of
observation. Where he looked hardest they were least to be seen: on the
edges of his field of vision they came crowding as though a complex
arrangement of them were there in progress. To attend to any one of them
was to make it invisible, and the minute brightness seemed often to have
just left the spot where his eyes fell. He had no doubt that he was
‘seeing’—as much as he ever would see—the _eldila_. The sensation it
produced in him was curious. It was not exactly uncanny, not as if he
were surrounded by ghosts. It was not even as if he were being spied
upon; he had rather the sense of being looked at by things that had a
right to look. His feeling was less than fear; it had in it something of
embarrassment, something of shyness, something of submission, and it was
profoundly uneasy.

He felt tired and thought that in this favoured land it would be warm
enough to rest out of doors. He sat down. The softness of the weed, the
warmth and the sweet smell which pervaded the whole island, reminded him
of Earth and gardens in summer. He closed his eyes for a moment; then he
opened them again and noticed buildings below him, and over the lake he
saw a boat approaching. Recognition suddenly came to him. That was the
ferry, and these buildings were the guest-house beside the harbour; he
had walked all round the island. A certain disappointment succeeded this
discovery. He was beginning to feel hungry. Perhaps it would be a good
plan to go down and ask for some food; at any rate it would pass the
time.

But he did not do so. When he rose and looked more closely at the
guest-house he saw a considerable stir of creatures about it, and while
he watched he saw that a full load of passengers was landing from the
ferry-boat. In the lake he saw some moving objects which he did not at
first identify but which turned out to be _sorns_ up to their middles in
the water and obviously wading to Meldilorn from the mainland. There were
about ten of them. For some reason or other the island was receiving an
influx of visitors. He no longer supposed that any harm would be done to
him if he went down and mixed in the crowd, but he felt a reluctance to
do so. The situation brought vividly back to his mind his experience as a
new boy at school—new boys came a day early—hanging about and watching
the arrival of the old hands. In the end he decided not to go down. He
cut and ate some of the ground-weed and dozed for a little.

In the afternoon, when it grew colder, he resumed his walking. Other
_hnau_ were roaming about the island by this time. He saw _sorns_
chiefly, but this was because their height made them conspicuous. There
was hardly any noise. His reluctance to meet these fellow-wanderers, who
seemed to confine themselves to the coast of the island, drove him half
consciously upwards and inwards. He found himself at last on the fringes
of the grove and looking straight up the monolithic avenue. He had
intended, for no very clearly defined reason, not to enter it, but he
fell to studying the stone nearest to him, which was richly sculptured on
all its four sides, and after that curiosity led him on from stone to
stone.

The pictures were very puzzling. Side by side with representations of
_sorns_ and _hrossa_ and what he supposed to be _pfifltriggi_ there
occurred again and again an upright wavy figure with only the suggestion
of a face, and with wings. The wings were perfectly recognizable, and
this puzzled him very much. Could it be that the traditions of
Malacandrian art went back to that earlier geological and biological era
when, as Augray had told him, there was life, including bird-life, on the
_harandra_? The answer of the stones seemed to be Yes. He saw pictures of
the old red forests with unmistakable birds flying among them, and many
other creatures that he did not know. On another stone many of these were
represented lying dead, and a fantastic _hnakra_-like figure, presumably
symbolizing the cold, was depicted in the sky above them shooting at them
with darts. Creatures still alive were crowding round the winged, wavy
figure, which he took to be Oyarsa, pictured as a winged flame. On the
next stone Oyarsa appeared, followed by many creatures, and apparently
making a furrow with some pointed instrument. Another picture showed the
furrow being enlarged by _pfifltriggi_ with digging tools. _Sorns_ were
piling the earth up in pinnacles on each side, and _hrossa_ seemed to be
making water channels. Ransom wondered whether this were a mythical
account of the making of _handramits_ or whether they were conceivably
artificial in fact.

Many of the pictures he could make nothing of. One that particularly
puzzled him showed at the bottom a segment of a circle, behind and above
which rose three-quarters of a disk divided into concentric rings. He
thought it was a picture of the sun rising behind a hill; certainly the
segment at the bottom was full of Malacandrian scenes—Oyarsa in
Meldilorn, _sorns_ on the mountain edge of the _harandra_, and many other
things both familiar to him and strange. He turned from it to examine the
disk which rose behind it. It was not the sun. The sun was there,
unmistakably, at the centre of the disk: round this the concentric
circles revolved. In the first and smallest of these was pictured a
little ball, on which rode a winged figure something like Oyarsa, but
holding what appeared to be a trumpet. In the next, a similar ball
carried another of the flaming figures. This one, instead of even the
suggested face, had two bulges which after long inspection he decided
were meant to be the udders or breasts of a female mammal. By this time
he was quite sure that he was looking at a picture of the solar system.
The first ball was Mercury, the second Venus—‘And what an extraordinary
coincidence,’ thought Ransom, ‘that their mythology, like ours,
associates some idea of the female with Venus.’ The problem would have
occupied him longer if a natural curiosity had not drawn his eyes on to
the next ball which must represent the Earth. When he saw it, his whole
mind stood still for a moment. The ball was there, but where the
flame-like figure should have been, a deep depression of irregular shape
had been cut as if to erase it. Once, then—but his speculations faltered
and became silent before a series of unknowns. He looked at the next
circle. Here there was no ball. Instead, the bottom of this circle
touched the top of the big segment filled with Malacandrian scenes, so
that Malacandra at this point touched the solar system and came out of it
in perspective towards the spectator. Now that his mind had grasped the
design, he was astonished at the vividness of it all. He stood back and
drew a deep breath preparatory to tackling some of the mysteries in which
he was engulfed. Malacandra, then, was Mars. The Earth—but at this point
a sound of tapping or hammering, which had been going on for some time
without gaining admission to his consciousness, became too insistent to
be ignored. Some creature, and certainly not an _eldil_, was at work,
close to him. A little startled—for he had been deep in thought—he turned
round. There was nothing to be seen. He shouted out, idiotically, in
English:

‘Who’s there?’

The tapping instantly stopped and a remarkable face appeared from behind
a neighbouring monolith.

It was hairless like a man’s or a _sorn’s_. It was long and pointed like
a shrew’s, yellow and shabby-looking, and so low in the forehead that but
for the heavy development of the head at the back and behind the ears
(like a bag-wig) it could not have been that of an intelligent creature.
A moment later the whole of the thing came into view with a startling
jump. Ransom guessed that it was a _pfifltrigg_—and was glad that he had
not met one of this third race on his first arrival in Malacandra. It was
much more insect-like or reptilian than anything he had yet seen. Its
build was distinctly that of a frog, and at first Ransom thought it was
resting, frog-like, on its ‘hands.’ Then he noticed that that part of its
fore-limbs on which it was supported was really, in human terms, rather
an elbow than a hand. It was broad and padded and clearly made to be
walked on; but upwards from it, at an angle of about forty-five degrees,
went the true fore-arms—thin, strong forearms, ending in enormous,
sensitive, many-fingered hands. He realized that for all manual work from
mining to cutting cameos this creature had the advantage of being able to
work with its full strength from a supported elbow. The insect-like
effect was due to the speed and jerkiness of its movements and to the
fact that it could swivel its head almost all the way round like a
mantis; and it was increased by a kind of dry, rasping, jingling quality
in the noise of its moving. It was rather like a grasshopper, rather like
one of Arthur Rackham’s dwarfs, rather like a frog, and rather like a
little, old taxidermist whom Ransom knew in London.

‘I come from another world,’ began Ransom.

‘I know, I know,’ said the creature in a quick, twittering, rather
impatient voice. ‘Come here, behind the stone. This way, this way.
Oyarsa’s orders. Very busy. Must begin at once. Stand there.’

Ransom found himself on the other side of the monolith, staring at a
picture which was still in process of completion. The ground was
liberally strewn with chips and the air was full of dust.

‘There,’ said the creature. ‘Stand still. Don’t look at me. Look over
there.’

For a moment Ransom did not quite understand what was expected of him;
then, as he saw the _pfifltrigg_ glancing to and fro at him and at the
stone with the unmistakable glance of artist from model to work which is
the same in all worlds, he realized and almost laughed. He was standing
for his portrait! From his position he could see that the creature was
cutting the stone as if it were cheese and the swiftness of its movements
almost baffled his eyes, but he could get no impression of the work done,
though he could study the _pfifltrigg_. He saw that the jingling and
metallic noise was due to the number of small instruments which it
carried about its body. Sometimes, with an exclamation of annoyance, it
would throw down the tool it was working with and select one of these;
but the majority of those in immediate use it kept in its mouth. He
realized also that this was an animal artificially clothed like himself,
in some bright scaly substance which appeared richly decorated though
coated in dust. It had folds of furry clothing about its throat like a
comforter, and its eyes were protected by dark bulging goggles. Rings and
chains of a bright metal—not gold, he thought—adorned its limbs and neck.
All the time it was working it kept up a sort of hissing whisper to
itself; and when it was excited—which it usually was—the end of its nose
wrinkled like a rabbit’s. At last it gave another startling leap, landed
about ten yards away from its work, and said:

‘Yes, yes. Not so good as I hoped. Do better another time. Leave it now.
Come and see yourself.’

Ransom obeyed. He saw a picture of the planets, not now arranged to make
a map of the solar system, but advancing in a single procession towards
the spectator, and all, save one, bearing its fiery charioteer. Below lay
Malacandra and there, to his surprise, was a very tolerable picture of
the space-ship. Beside it stood three figures for all of which Ransom had
apparently been the model. He recoiled from them in disgust. Even
allowing for the strangeness of the subject from a Malacandrian point of
view and for the stylization of their art, still, he thought, the
creature might have made a better attempt at the human form than these
stock-like dummies, almost as thick as they were tall, and sprouting
about the head and neck into something that looked like fungus.

He hedged. ‘I expect it is like me as I look to your people,’ he said.
‘It is not how they would draw me in my own world.’

‘No,’ said the _pfifltrigg_. ‘I do not mean it to be too like. Too like,
and they will not believe it—those who are born after.’ He added a good
deal more which was difficult to understand; but while he was speaking it
dawned upon Ransom that the odious figures were intended as an
_idealization_ of humanity. Conversation languished for a little. To
change the subject Ransom asked a question which had been in his mind for
some time.

‘I cannot understand,’ he said, ‘how you and the _sorns_ and the _hrossa_
all come to speak the same speech. For your tongues and teeth and throats
must be very different.’

‘You are right,’ said the creature. ‘Once we all had different speeches
and we still have at home. But everyone has learned the speech of the
_hrossa_.’

‘Why is that?’ said Ransom, still thinking in terms of terrestrial
history. ‘Did the _hrossa_ once rule the others?’

‘I do not understand. They are our great speakers and singers. They have
more words and better. No one learns the speech of my people, for what we
have to say is said in stone and suns’ blood and stars’ milk and all can
see them. No one learns the _sorns_’ speech, for you can change their
knowledge into any words and it is still the same. You cannot do that
with the songs of the _hrossa_. Their tongue goes all over Malacandra. I
speak it to you because you are a stranger. I would speak it to a _sorn_.
But we have our old tongues at home. You can see it in the names. The
_sorns_ have big-sounding names like Augray and Arkal and Belmo and
Falmay. The _hrossa_ have furry names like Hnoh and Hnihi and Hyoi and
Hlithnahi.’

‘The best poetry, then, comes in the roughest speech?’

‘Perhaps,’ said the _pfifltrigg_. ‘As the best pictures are made in the
hardest stone. But my people have names like Kalakaperi and Parakataru
and Tafalakeruf. I am called Kanakaberaka.’

Ransom told it his name.

‘In our country,’ said Kanakaberaka, ‘it is not like this. We are not
pinched in a narrow _handramit_. There are the true forests, the green
shadows, the deep mines. It is warm. It does not blaze with light like
this, and it is not silent like this. I could put you in a place there in
the forests where you could see a hundred fires at once and hear a
hundred hammers. I wish you had come to our country. We do not live in
holes like the _sorns_ nor in bundles of weed like the _hrossa_. I could
show you houses with a hundred pillars, one of suns’ blood and the next
of stars’ milk, all the way . . . and all the world painted on the
walls.’

‘How do you rule yourselves?’ asked Ransom. ‘Those who are digging in the
mines—do they like it as much as those who paint the walls?’

‘All keep the mines open; it is a work to be shared. But each digs for
himself the thing he wants for his work. What else would he do?’

‘It is not so with us.’

‘Then you must make very bent work. How would a maker understand working
in suns’ blood unless he went into the home of suns’ blood himself and
knew one kind from another and lived with it for days out of the light of
the sky till it was in his blood and his heart, as if he thought it and
ate it and spat it?’

‘With us it lies very deep and hard to get and those who dig it must
spend their whole lives on the skill.’

‘And they love it?’

‘I think not . . . I do not know. They are kept at it because they are
given no food if they stop.’

Kanakaberaka wrinkled his nose. ‘Then there is not food in plenty on your
world?’

‘I do not know,’ said Ransom. ‘I have often wished to know the answer to
that question but no one can tell me. Does no one keep your people at
their work, Kanakaberaka?’

‘Our females,’ said the _pfifltrigg_ with a piping noise which was
apparently his equivalent for a laugh.

‘Are your females of more account among you than those of the other
_hnau_ among them?’

‘Very greatly. The _sorns_ make least account of females and we make
most.’




                                EIGHTEEN


That night Ransom slept in the guest-house, which was a real house built
by _pfifltriggi_ and richly decorated. His pleasure at finding himself,
in this respect, under more human conditions was qualified by the
discomfort which, despite his reason, he could not help feeling in the
presence, at close quarters, of so many Malacandrian creatures. All three
species were represented. They seemed to have no uneasy feelings towards
each other, though there were some differences of the kind that occur in
a railway carriage on earth—the _sorns_ finding the house too hot and the
_pfifltriggi_ finding it too cold. He learned more of Malacandrian humour
and of the noises that expressed it in this one night than he had learned
during the whole of his life on the strange planet hitherto. Indeed,
nearly all Malacandrian conversations in which he had yet taken part had
been grave. Apparently the comic spirit arose chiefly from the meeting of
the different kinds of _hnau_. The jokes of all three were equally
incomprehensible to him. He thought he could see differences in kind—as
that the _sorns_ seldom got beyond irony, while the _hrossa_ were
extravagant and fantastic, and the _pfifltriggi_ were sharp and excelled
in abuse—but even when he understood all the words he could not see the
points. He went early to bed.

It was at the time of early morning, when men on earth go out to milk the
cows, that Ransom was wakened. At first he did not know what had roused
him. The chamber in which he lay was silent, empty and nearly dark. He
was preparing himself to sleep again when a high-pitched voice close
beside him said, ‘Oyarsa sends for you.’ He sat up, staring about him.
There was no one there, and the voice repeated, ‘Oyarsa sends for you.’
The confusion of sleep was now clearing in his head, and he recognized
that there was an _eldil_ in the room. He felt no conscious fear, but
while he rose obediently and put on such of his clothes as he had laid
aside he found that his heart was beating rather fast. He was thinking
less of the invisible creature in the room than of the interview that lay
before him. His old terrors of meeting some monster or idol had quite
left him: he felt nervous as he remembered feeling on the morning of an
examination when he was an undergraduate. More than anything in the world
he would have liked a cup of good tea.

The guest-house was empty. He went out. The bluish smoke was rising from
the lake and the sky was bright behind the jagged eastern wall of the
canyon; it was a few minutes before sunrise. The air was still very cold,
the ground-weed drenched with dew, and there was something puzzling about
the whole scene which he presently identified with the silence. The
_eldil_ voices in the air had ceased and so had the shifting network of
small lights and shades. Without being told, he knew that it was his
business to go up to the crown of the island and the grove. As he
approached them he saw with a certain sinking of heart that the
monolithic avenue was full of Malacandrian creatures, and all silent.
They were in two lines, one on each side, and all squatting or sitting in
the various fashions suitable to their anatomies. He walked on slowly and
doubtfully, not daring to stop, and ran the gauntlet of all those inhuman
and unblinking eyes. When he had come to the very summit, at the middle
of the avenue where the biggest of the stones rose, he stopped—he never
could remember afterwards whether an _eldil_ voice had told him to do so
or whether it was an intuition of his own. He did not sit down, for the
earth was too cold and wet and he was not sure if it would be decorous.
He simply stood—motionless like a man on parade. All the creatures were
looking at him and there was no noise anywhere.

He perceived, gradually, that the place was full of _eldila_. The lights,
or suggestions of light, which yesterday had been scattered over the
island, were now all congregated in this one spot, and were all
stationary or very faintly moving. The sun had risen by now, and still no
one spoke. As he looked up to see the first, pale sunlight upon the
monoliths, he became conscious that the air above him was full of a far
greater complexity of light than the sunrise could explain, and light of
a different kind, _eldil_-light. The sky, no less than the earth, was
full of them; the visible Malacandrians were but the smallest part of the
silent consistory which surrounded him. He might, when the time came, be
pleading his cause before thousands or before millions: rank behind rank
about him, and rank above rank over his head, the creatures that had
never yet seen man and whom man could not see, were waiting for his trial
to begin. He licked his lips, which were quite dry, and wondered if he
would be able to speak when speech was demanded of him. Then it occurred
to him that perhaps this—this waiting and being looked at—_was_ the
trial; perhaps even now he was unconsciously telling them all they wished
to know. But afterwards—a long time afterwards—there was a noise of
movement. Every visible creature in the grove had risen to its feet and
was standing, more hushed than ever, with its head bowed; and Ransom saw
(if it could be called seeing) that Oyarsa was coming up between the long
lines of sculptured stones. Partly he knew it from the faces of the
Malacandrians as their lord passed them; partly he saw—he could not deny
that he saw—Oyarsa himself. He never could say what it was like. The
merest whisper of light—no, less than that, the smallest diminution of
shadow—was travelling along the uneven surface of the ground-weed; or
rather some difference in the look of the ground, too slight to be named
in the language of the five senses, moved slowly towards him. Like a
silence spreading over a room full of people, like an infinitesimal
coolness on a sultry day, like a passing memory of some long-forgotten
sound or scent, like all that is stillest and smallest and most hard to
seize in nature, Oyarsa passed between his subjects and drew near and
came to rest, not ten yards away from Ransom in the centre of Meldilorn.
Ransom felt a tingling of his blood and a pricking on his fingers as if
lightning were near him; and his heart and body seemed to him to be made
of water.

Oyarsa spoke—a more unhuman voice than Ransom had yet heard, sweet and
seemingly remote; an unshaken voice; a voice, as one of the _hrossa_
afterwards said to Ransom, ‘with no blood in it. Light is instead of
blood for them.’ The words were not alarming.

‘What are you so afraid of, Ransom of Thulcandra?’ it said.

‘Of you, Oyarsa, because you are unlike me and I cannot see you.’

‘Those are not great reasons,’ said the voice. ‘You are also unlike me,
and, though I see you, I see you very faintly. But do not think we are
utterly unlike. We are both copies of Maleldil. These are not the real
reasons.’

Ransom said nothing.

‘You began to be afraid of me before you set foot in my world. And you
have spent all your time since then in flying from me. My servants saw
your fear when you were in your ship in heaven. They saw that your own
kind treated you ill, though they could not understand their speech. Then
to deliver you out of the hands of those two I stirred up a _hnakra_ to
try if you would come to me of your own will. But you hid among the
_hrossa_, and though they told you to come to me, you would not. After
that I sent my _eldil_ to fetch you, but still you would not come. And in
the end your own kind have chased you to me, and _hnau’s_ blood has been
shed.’

‘I do not understand, Oyarsa. Do you mean that it was you who sent for me
from Thulcandra?’

‘Yes. Did not the other two tell you this? And why did you come with them
unless you meant to obey my call? My servants could not understand their
talk to you when your ship was in heaven.’

‘Your servants . . . I cannot understand,’ said Ransom.

‘Ask freely,’ said the voice.

‘Have you servants out in the heavens?’

‘Where else? There is nowhere else.’

‘But you, Oyarsa, are here on Malacandra, as I am.’

‘But Malacandra, like all worlds, floats in heaven. And I am not “here”
altogether as you are, Ransom of Thulcandra. Creatures of your kind must
drop out of heaven into a world; for us the worlds are places in heaven.
But do not try to understand this now. It is enough to know that I and my
servants are even now in heaven; they were around you in the sky-ship no
less than they are around you here.’

‘Then you knew of our journey before we left Thulcandra?’

‘No. Thulcandra is the world we do not know. It alone is outside the
heaven, and no message comes from it.’

Ransom was silent, but Oyarsa answered his unspoken questions.

‘It was not always so. Once we knew the Oyarsa of your world—he was
brighter and greater than I—and then we did not call it Thulcandra. It is
the longest of all stories and the bitterest. He became bent. That was
before any life came on your world. Those were the Bent Years of which we
still speak in the heavens, when he was not yet bound to Thulcandra but
free like us. It was in his mind to spoil other worlds besides his own.
He smote your moon with his left hand and with his right he brought the
cold death on my _harandra_ before its time; if by my arm Maleldil had
not opened the _handramits_ and let out the hot springs, my world would
have been unpeopled. We did not leave him so at large for long. There was
great war, and we drove him back out of the heavens and bound him in the
air of his own world as Maleldil taught us. There doubtless he lies to
this hour, and we know no more of that planet: it is silent. We think
that Maleldil would not give it up utterly to the Bent One, and there are
stories among us that He has taken strange counsel and dared terrible
things, wrestling with the Bent One in Thulcandra. But of this we know
less than you; it is a thing we desire to look into.’

It was some time before Ransom spoke again and Oyarsa respected his
silence. When he had collected himself he said:

‘After this story, Oyarsa, I may tell you that our world is very bent.
The two who brought me knew nothing of you, but only that the _sorns_ had
asked for me. They thought you were a false _eldil_, I think. There are
false _eldila_ in the wild parts of our world; men kill other men before
them—they think the _eldil_ drinks blood. They thought the _sorns_ wanted
me for this or for some other evil. They brought me by force. I was in
terrible fear. The tellers of tales in our world make us think that if
there is any life beyond our own air, it is evil.’

‘I understand,’ said the voice. ‘And this explains things that I have
wondered at. As soon as your journey had passed your own air and entered
heaven, my servants told me that you seemed to be coming unwillingly and
that the others had secrets from you. I did not think any creature could
be so bent as to bring another of its own kind here by force.’

‘They did not know what you wanted me for, Oyarsa. Nor do I know yet.’

‘I will tell you. Two years ago—and that is about four of your years—this
ship entered the heavens from your world. We followed its journey all the
way hither and _eldila_ were with it as it sailed over the _harandra_,
and when at last it came to rest in the _handramit_ more than half my
servants were standing round it to see the strangers come out. All beasts
we kept back from the place, and no _hnau_ yet knew of it. When the
strangers had walked to and fro on Malacandra and made themselves a hut
and their fear of a new world ought to have worn off, I sent certain
_sorns_ to show themselves and to teach the strangers our language. I
chose _sorns_ because they are most like your people in form. The
Thulcandrians feared the _sorns_ and were very unteachable. The _sorns_
went to them many times and taught them a little. They reported to me
that the Thulcandrians were taking suns’ blood wherever they could find
it in the streams. When I could make nothing of them by report, I told
the _sorns_ to bring them to me, not by force but courteously. They would
not come. I asked for one of them, but not even one of them would come.
It would have been easy to take them; but though we saw they were stupid
we did not know yet how bent they were, and I did not wish to stretch my
authority beyond the creatures of my own world. I told the _sorns_ to
treat them like cubs, to tell them that they would be allowed to pick up
no more of the suns’ blood until one of their race came to me. When they
were told this they stuffed as much as they could into the sky-ship and
went back to their own world. We wondered at this, but now it is plain.
They thought I wanted one of your race to eat and went to fetch one. If
they had come a few miles to see me I would have received them
honourably; now they have twice gone a voyage of millions of miles for
nothing and will appear before me none the less. And you also, Ransom of
Thulcandra, you have taken many vain troubles to avoid standing where you
stand now.’

‘That is true, Oyarsa. Bent creatures are full of fears. But I am here
now and ready to know your will with me.’

‘Two things I wanted to ask of your race. First I must know why you come
here—so much is my duty to my world. And secondly I wish to hear of
Thulcandra and of Maleldil’s strange wars there with the Bent One; for
that, as I have said, is a thing we desire to look into.’

‘For the first question, Oyarsa, I have come here because I was brought.
Of the others, one cares for nothing but the suns’ blood, because in our
world he can exchange it for many pleasures and powers. But the other
means evil to you. I think he would destroy all your people to make room
for our people; and then he would do the same with other worlds again. He
wants our race to last for always, I think, and he hopes they will leap
from world to world . . . always going to a new sun when an old one dies
. . . or something like that.’

‘Is he wounded in his brain?’

‘I do not know. Perhaps I do not describe his thoughts right. He is more
learned than I.’

‘Does he think he could go to the great worlds? Does he think Maleldil
wants a race to live for ever?’

‘He does not know there is any Maleldil. But what is certain, Oyarsa, is
that he means evil to your world. Our kind must not be allowed to come
here again. If you can prevent it only by killing all three of us, I am
content.’

‘If you were my own people I would kill them now, Ransom, and you soon;
for they are bent beyond hope, and you, when you have grown a little
braver, will be ready to go to Maleldil. But my authority is over my own
world. It is a terrible thing to kill someone else’s _hnau_. It will not
be necessary.’

‘They are strong, Oyarsa, and they can throw death many miles and can
blow killing airs at their enemies.’

‘The least of my servants could touch their ship before it reached
Malacandra, while it was in the heaven, and make it a body of different
movements—for you, no body at all. Be sure that no one of your race will
come into my world again unless I call him. But enough of this. Now tell
me of Thulcandra. Tell me all. We know nothing since the day when the
Bent One sank out of heaven into the air of your world, wounded in the
very light of his light. But why have you become afraid again?’

‘I am afraid of the lengths of time, Oyarsa . . . or perhaps I do not
understand. Did you not say this happened before there was life on
Thulcandra?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you, Oyarsa? You have lived . . . and that picture on the stone
where the cold is killing them on the _harandra_? Is that a picture of
something that was before my world began?’

‘I see you are _hnau_ after all,’ said the voice. ‘Doubtless no stone
that faced the air then would be a stone now. The picture has begun to
crumble away and been copied again more times than there are _eldila_ in
the air above us. But it was copied right. In that way you are seeing a
picture that was finished when your world was still half-made. But do not
think of these things. My people have a law never to speak much of sizes
or numbers to you others, not even to _sorns_. You do not understand, and
it makes you do reverence to nothings and pass by what is really great.
Rather tell me what Maleldil has done in Thulcandra.’

‘According to our traditions——’ Ransom was beginning, when an unexpected
disturbance broke in upon the solemn stillness of the assembly. A large
party, almost a procession, was approaching the grove from the direction
of the ferry. It consisted entirely, so far as he could see, of _hrossa_,
and they appeared to be carrying something.




                                NINETEEN


As the procession drew nearer Ransom saw that the foremost _hrossa_ were
supporting three long and narrow burdens. They carried them on their
heads, four _hrossa_ to each. After these came a number of others armed
with harpoons and apparently guarding two creatures which he did not
recognize. The light was behind them as they entered between the two
farthest monoliths. They were much shorter than any animal he had yet
seen on Malacandra, and he gathered that they were bipeds, though the
lower limbs were so thick and sausage-like that he hesitated to call them
legs. The bodies were a little narrower at the top than at the bottom so
as to be very slightly pear-shaped, and the heads were neither round like
those of _hrossa_ nor long like those of _sorns_, but almost square. They
stumped along on narrow, heavy-looking feet which they seemed to press
into the ground with unnecessary violence. And now their faces were
becoming visible as masses of lumped and puckered flesh of variegated
colour fringed in some bristly, dark substance. . . . Suddenly, with an
indescribable change of feeling, he realized that he was looking at men.
The two prisoners were Weston and Devine and he, for one privileged
moment, had seen the human form with almost Malacandrian eyes.

The leaders of the procession had now advanced to within a few yards of
Oyarsa and laid down their burdens. These, he now saw, were three dead
_hrossa_ laid on biers of some unknown metal; they were on their backs
and their eyes, not closed as we close the eyes of human dead, stared
disconcertingly up at the far-off golden canopy of the grove. One of them
he took to be Hyoi, and it was certainly Hyoi’s brother, Hyahi, who now
came forward, and after an obeisance to Oyarsa began to speak.

Ransom at first did not hear what he was saying, for his attention was
concentrated on Weston and Devine. They were weaponless and vigilantly
guarded by the armed _hrossa_ about them. Both of them, like Ransom
himself, had let their beards grow ever since they landed on Malacandra,
and both were pale and travel-stained. Weston was standing with folded
arms, and his face wore a fixed, even an elaborate, expression of
desperation. Devine, with his hands in his pockets, seemed to be in a
state of furious sulks. Both clearly thought that they had good reason to
fear, though neither was by any means lacking in courage. Surrounded by
their guards as they were, and intent on the scene before them, they had
not noticed Ransom.

He became aware of what Hyoi’s brother was saying.

‘For the death of these two, Oyarsa, I do not so much complain, for when
we fell upon the _hmāna_ by night they were in terror. You may say it was
as a hunt and these two were killed as they might have been by a
_hnakra_. But Hyoi they hit from afar with a coward’s weapon when he had
done nothing to frighten them. And now he lies there (and I do not say it
because he was my brother, but all the _handramit_ knows it) and he was a
_hnakrapunt_ and a great poet and the loss of him is heavy.’

The voice of Oyarsa spoke for the first time to the two men.

‘Why have you killed my _hnau_?’ it said.

Weston and Devine looked anxiously about them to identify the speaker.

‘God!’ exclaimed Devine in English. ‘Don’t tell me they’ve got a
loud-speaker.’

‘Ventriloquism,’ replied Weston in a husky whisper. ‘Quite common among
savages. The witch-doctor or medicine-man pretends to go into a trance
and he does it. The thing to do is to identify the medicine-man and
address your remarks to _him_ wherever the voice seems to come from; it
shatters his nerve and shows you’ve seen through him. Do you see any of
the brutes in a trance? By Jove—I’ve spotted him.’

Due credit must be given to Weston for his powers of observation: he had
picked out the only creature in the assembly which was not standing in an
attitude of reverence and attention. This was an elderly _hross_ close
beside him. It was squatting; and its eyes were shut. Taking a step
towards it, he struck a defiant attitude and exclaimed in a loud voice
(his knowledge of the language was elementary):

‘Why you take our puff-bangs away? We very angry with you. We not
afraid.’

On Weston’s hypothesis his action ought to have been impressive.
Unfortunately for him, no one else shared his theory of the elderly
_hross’s_ behaviour. The _hross_—who was well known to all of them,
including Ransom—had not come with the funeral procession. It had been in
its place since dawn. Doubtless it intended no disrespect to Oyarsa; but
it must be confessed that it had yielded, at a much earlier stage in the
proceedings, to an infirmity which attacks elderly _hnau_ of all species,
and was by this time enjoying a profound and refreshing slumber. One of
its whiskers twitched a little as Weston shouted in its face, but its
eyes remained shut.

The voice of Oyarsa spoke again. ‘Why do you speak to him?’ it said. ‘It
is I who ask you, Why have you killed my _hnau_?’

‘You let us go, then we talkee-talkee,’ bellowed Weston at the sleeping
_hross_. ‘You think we no power, think you do all you like. You no can.
Great big head-man in sky he send us. You no do what I say, he come, blow
you all up—Pouff! Bang!’

‘I do not know what _bang_ means,’ said the voice. ‘But why have you
killed my _hnau_?’

‘Say it was an accident,’ muttered Devine to Weston in English.

‘I’ve told you before,’ replied Weston in the same language. ‘You don’t
understand how to deal with natives. One sign of yielding and they’ll be
at our throats. The only thing is to intimidate them.’

‘All right! Do your stuff, then,’ growled Devine. He was obviously losing
faith in his partner.

Weston cleared his throat and again rounded on the elderly _hross_.

‘We kill him,’ he shouted. ‘Show what we can do. Every one who no do all
we say—pouff! bang!—kill him same as that one. You do all we say and we
give you much pretty things. See! See!’ To Ransom’s intense discomfort,
Weston at this point whipped out of his pocket a brightly coloured
necklace of beads, the undoubted work of Mr. Woolworth, and began
dangling it in front of the faces of his guards, turning slowly round and
round and repeating, ‘Pretty, pretty! See! See!’

The result of this manœuvre was more striking than Weston himself had
anticipated. Such a roar of sounds as human ears had never heard
before—baying of _hrossa_, piping of _pfifltriggi_, booming of
_sorns_—burst out and rent the silence of that august place, waking
echoes from the distant mountain walls. Even in the air above them there
was a faint ringing of the _eldil_ voices. It is greatly to Weston’s
credit that though he paled at this he did not lose his nerve.

‘You no roar at me,’ he thundered. ‘No try make me afraid. Me no afraid
of you.’

‘You must forgive my people,’ said the voice of Oyarsa—and even it was
subtly changed—‘but they are not roaring at you. They are only laughing.’

But Weston did not know the Malacandrian word for _laugh_: indeed, it was
not a word he understood very well in any language. He looked about him
with a puzzled expression. Ransom, biting his lips with mortification,
almost prayed that one experiment with the beads would satisfy the
scientist; but that was because he did not know Weston. The latter saw
that the clamour had subsided. He knew that he was following the most
orthodox rules for frightening and then conciliating primitive races; and
he was not the man to be deterred by one or two failures. The roar that
went up from the throats of all spectators as he again began revolving
like a slow-motion picture of a humming-top, occasionally mopping his
brow with his left hand and conscientiously jerking the necklace up and
down with his right, completely drowned anything he might be attempting
to say; but Ransom saw his lips moving and had little doubt that he was
working away at ‘Pretty, pretty!’ Then suddenly the sound of laughter
almost redoubled its volume. The stars in their courses were fighting
against Weston. Some hazy memory of efforts made long since to entertain
an infant niece had begun to penetrate his highly trained mind. He was
bobbing up and down from the knees and holding his head on one side; he
was almost dancing; and he was by now very hot indeed. For all Ransom
knew he was saying ‘Diddle, diddle, diddle.’

It was sheer exhaustion which ended the great physicist’s performance—the
most successful of its kind ever given on Malacandra—and with it the
sonorous raptures of his audience. As silence returned Ransom heard
Devine’s voice in English:

‘For God’s sake stop making a buffoon of yourself, Weston,’ it said.
‘Can’t you see it won’t work?’

‘It _doesn’t_ seem to be working,’ admitted Weston, ‘and I’m inclined to
think they have even less intelligence than we supposed. Do you think,
perhaps, if I tried it just once again—or would you like to try this
time?’

‘Oh, Hell!’ said Devine, and, turning his back on his partner, sat down
abruptly on the ground, produced his cigarette-case and began to smoke.

‘I’ll give it to the witch-doctor,’ said Weston during the moment of
silence which Devine’s action had produced among the mystified
spectators; and before anyone could stop him he took a step forward and
attempted to drop the string of beads round the elderly _hross’s_ neck.
The _hross’s_ head was, however, too large for this operation and the
necklace merely settled on its forehead like a crown, slightly over one
eye. It shifted its head a little, like a dog worried with flies, snorted
gently, and resumed its sleep.

Oyarsa’s voice now addressed Ransom. ‘Are your fellow-creatures hurt in
their brains, Ransom of Thulcandra?’ it said. ‘Or are they too much
afraid to answer my questions?’

‘I think, Oyarsa,’ said Ransom, ‘that they do not believe you are there.
And they believe that all these _hnau_ are—are like very young cubs. The
thicker _hmān_ is trying to frighten them and then to please them with
gifts.’

At the sound of Ransom’s voice the two prisoners turned sharply around.
Weston was about to speak when Ransom interrupted him hastily in English:

‘Listen, Weston. It is not a trick. There really is a creature there in
the middle—there where you can see a kind of light, or a kind of
something, if you look hard. And it is at least as intelligent as a
man—they seem to live an enormous time. Stop treating it like a child and
answer its questions. And if you take my advice, you’ll speak the truth
and not bluster.’

‘The brutes seem to have intelligence enough to take you in, anyway,’
growled Weston; but it was in a somewhat modified voice that he turned
once more to the sleeping _hross_—the desire to wake up the supposed
witch-doctor was becoming an obsession—and addressed it.

‘We sorry we kill him,’ he said, pointing to Hyoi. ‘No go to kill him.
_Sorns_ tell us bring man, give him your big head. We go away back into
sky. _He_ come (here he indicated Ransom) with us. He very bent man, run
away, no do what _sorns_ say like us. We run after him, get him back for
_sorns_, want to do what we say and _sorns_ tell us, see? He not let us.
Run away, run, run. We run after. See big black one, think he kill us, we
kill him—pouff! bang! All for bent man. He no run away, he be good, we no
run after, no kill big black one, see? You have bent man—bent man make
all trouble—you plenty keep him, let us go. He afraid of you, we no
afraid. Listen——’

At this moment Weston’s continual bellowing in the face of the _hross_ at
last produced the effect he had striven for so long. The creature opened
its eyes and stared mildly at him in some perplexity. Then, gradually
realizing the impropriety of which it had been guilty, it rose slowly to
its standing position, bowed respectfully to Oyarsa, and finally waddled
out of the assembly still carrying the necklace draped over its right ear
and eye. Weston, his mouth still open, followed the retreating figure
with his gaze till it vanished among the stems of the grove.

It was Oyarsa who broke the silence. ‘We have had mirth enough,’ he said,
‘and it is time to hear true answers to our questions. Something is wrong
in your head, _hnau_ from Thulcandra. There is too much blood in it. Is
Firikitekila here?’

‘Here, Oyarsa,’ said a _pfifltrigg_.

‘Have you in your cisterns water that has been made cold?’

‘Yes, Oyarsa.’

‘Then let this thick _hnau_ be taken to the guesthouse and let them bathe
his head in cold water. Much water and many times. Then bring him again.
Meanwhile I will provide for my killed _hrossa_.’

Weston did not clearly understand what the voice said—indeed, he was
still too busy trying to find out where it came from—but terror smote him
as he found himself wrapped in the strong arms of the surrounding
_hrossa_ and forced away from his place. Ransom would gladly have shouted
out some reassurance, but Weston himself was shouting too loud to hear
him. He was mixing English and Malacandrian now, and the last that was
heard was a rising scream of ‘Pay for this—pouff! bang!—Ransom, for God’s
sake—Ransom! Ransom!’

‘And now,’ said Oyarsa, when silence was restored, ‘let us honour my dead
_hnau_.’

At his words ten of the _hrossa_ grouped themselves about the biers.
Lifting their heads, and with no signal given as far as Ransom could see,
they began to sing.

To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment
when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one
corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of
delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one
glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within. For Ransom, this moment
had now come in his understanding of Malacandrian song. Now first he saw
that its rhythms were based on a different blood from ours, on a heart
that beat more quickly, and a fiercer internal heat. Through his
knowledge of the creatures and his love for them he began, ever so
little, to hear it with their ears. A sense of great masses moving at
visionary speeds, of giants dancing, of eternal sorrows eternally
consoled, of he knew not what and yet what he had always known, awoke in
him with the very first bars of the deep-mouthed dirge, and bowed down
his spirit as if the gate of heaven had opened before him.

‘Let it go hence,’ they sang. ‘Let it go hence, dissolve and be no body.
Drop it, release it, drop it gently, as a stone is loosed from fingers
drooping over a still pool. Let it go down, sink, fall away. Once below
the surface there are no divisions, no layers in the water yielding all
the way down; all one and all unwounded is that element. Send it voyaging
it will not come again. Let it go down; the _hnau_ rises from it. This is
the second life, the other beginning. Open, oh coloured world, without
weight, without shore. You are second and better; this was first and
feeble. Once the worlds were hot within and brought forth life, but only
the pale plants, the dark plants. We see their children when they grow
to-day, out of the sun’s light in the sad places. After, the heaven made
grow another kind on worlds: the high climbers, the bright-haired
forests, cheeks of flowers. First were the darker, then the brighter.
First was the worlds’ brood, then the suns’ brood.’

This was as much of it as he contrived later to remember and could
translate. As the song ended Oyarsa said:

‘Let us scatter the movements which were their bodies. So will Maleldil
scatter all worlds when the first and feeble is worn.’

He made a sign to one of the _pfifltriggi_, who instantly arose and
approached the corpses. The _hrossa_, now singing again but very softly,
drew back at least ten paces. The _pfifltrigg_ touched each of the three
dead in turn with some small object that appeared to be made of glass or
crystal—and then jumped away with one of his frog-like leaps. Ransom
closed his eyes to protect them from a blinding light and felt something
like a very strong wind blowing in his face, for a fraction of a second.
Then all was calm again, and the three biers were empty.

‘God! That would be a trick worth knowing on earth,’ said Devine to
Ransom. ‘Solves the murderers’ problem about the disposal of the body,
eh?’

But Ransom, who was thinking of Hyoi, did not answer him; and before he
spoke again everyone’s attention was diverted by the return of the
unhappy Weston among his guards.




                                 TWENTY


The _hross_ who headed this procession was a conscientious creature and
began at once explaining itself in a rather troubled voice.

‘I hope we have done right, Oyarsa,’ it said. ‘But we do not know. We
dipped his head in the cold water seven times, but the seventh time
something fell off it. We had thought it was the top of his head, but now
we saw it was a covering made of the skin of some other creature. Then
some said we had done your will with the seven dips, and others said not.
In the end we dipped it seven times more. We hope that was right. The
creature talked a lot between the dips, and most between the second
seven, but we could not understand it.’

‘You have done very well, Hnoo,’ said Oyarsa. ‘Stand away that I may see
it, for now I will speak to it.’

The guards fell away on each side. Weston’s usually pale face, under the
bracing influence of the cold water, had assumed the colour of a ripe
tomato, and his hair, which had naturally not been cut since he reached
Malacandra, was plastered in straight, lank masses across his forehead. A
good deal of water was still dripping over his nose and ears. His
expression—unfortunately wasted on an audience ignorant of terrestrial
physiognomy—was that of a brave man suffering in a great cause, and
rather eager than reluctant to face the worst or even to provoke it. In
explanation of his conduct it is only fair to remember that he had
already that morning endured all the terrors of an expected martyrdom and
all the anticlimax of fourteen compulsory cold douches. Devine, who knew
his man, shouted out to Weston in English:

‘Steady, Weston. These devils can split the atom or something pretty like
it. Be careful what you say to them and don’t let’s have any of your
bloody nonsense.’

‘Huh!’ said Weston. ‘So you’ve gone native too?’

‘Be silent,’ said the voice of Oyarsa. ‘You, thick one, have told me
nothing of yourself, so I will tell it to you. In your own world you have
attained great wisdom concerning bodies and by this you have been able to
make a ship that can cross the heaven; but in all other things you have
the mind of an animal. When first you came here, I sent for you, meaning
you nothing but honour. The darkness in your own mind filled you with
fear. Because you thought I meant evil to you, you went as a beast goes
against a beast of some other kind, and snared this Ransom. You would
give him up to the evil you feared. To-day, seeing him here, to save your
own life, you would have given him to me a second time, still thinking I
meant him hurt. These are your dealings with your own kind. And what you
intend to my people, I know. Already you have killed some. And you have
come here to kill them all. To you it is nothing whether a creature is
_hnau_ or not. At first I thought this was because you cared only whether
a creature had a body like your own; but Ransom has that and you would
kill him as lightly as any of my _hnau_. I did not know that the Bent One
had done so much in your world and still I do not understand it. If you
were mine, I would unbody you even now. Do not think follies; by my hand
Maleldil does greater things than this, and I can unmake you even on the
borders of your own world’s air. But I do not yet resolve to do this. It
is for you to speak. Let me see if there is anything in your mind besides
fear and death and desire.’

Weston turned to Ransom. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘that you have chosen the most
momentous crisis in the history of the human race to betray it.’ Then he
turned in the direction of the voice.

‘I know you kill us,’ he said. ‘Me not afraid. Others come, make it our
world——’

But Devine had jumped to his feet, and interrupted him.

‘No, no, Oyarsa,’ he shouted. ‘You no listen him. He very foolish man, he
have dreams. We little people, only want pretty sun-bloods. You give us
plenty sun-bloods, we go back into sky, you never see us no more. All
done, see?’

‘Silence,’ said Oyarsa. There was an almost imperceptible change in the
light, if it could be called light, out of which the voice came, and
Devine crumpled up and fell back on the ground. When he resumed his
sitting position he was white and panting.

‘Speak on,’ said Oyarsa to Weston.

‘Me no . . . no,’ began Weston in Malacandrian and then broke off. ‘I
can’t say what I want in their accursed language,’ he said in English.

‘Speak to Ransom and he shall turn it into our speech,’ said Oyarsa.

Weston accepted the arrangement at once. He believed that the hour of his
death was come and he was determined to utter the thing—almost the only
thing outside his own science—which he had to say. He cleared his throat,
almost he struck a gesture, and began:

‘To you I may seem a vulgar robber, but I bear on my shoulders the
destiny of the human race. Your tribal life with its stone-age weapons
and beehive huts, its primitive coracles and elementary social structure,
has nothing to compare with our civilization—with our science, medicine
and law, our armies, our architecture, our commerce, and our transport
system which is rapidly annihilating space and time. Our right to
supersede you is the right of the higher over the lower. Life——’

‘Half a moment,’ said Ransom in English. ‘That’s about as much as I can
manage at one go.’ Then, turning to Oyarsa, he began translating as well
as he could. The process was difficult and the result—which he felt to be
rather unsatisfactory—was something like this:

‘Among us, Oyarsa, there is a kind of _hnau_ who will take other _hnaus’_
food and—and things, when they are not looking. He says he is not an
ordinary one of that kind. He says what he does now will make very
different things happen to those of our people who are not yet born. He
says that, among you, _hnau_ of one kindred all live together and the
_hrossa_ have spears like those we used a very long time ago and your
huts are small and round and your boats small and light and like our old
ones, and you have only one ruler. He says it is different with us. He
says we know much. There is a thing happens in our world when the body of
a living creature feels pains and becomes weak, and he says we sometimes
know how to stop it. He says we have many bent people and we kill them or
shut them in huts and that we have people for settling quarrels between
the bent _hnau_ about their huts and mates and things. He says we have
many ways for the _hnau_ of one land to kill those of another and some
are trained to do it. He says we build very big and strong huts of stones
and other things—like the _pfifltriggi_. And he says we exchange many
things among ourselves and can carry heavy weights very quickly a long
way. Because of all this, he says it would not be the act of a bent
_hnau_ if our people killed all your people.’

As soon as Ransom had finished, Weston continued.

‘Life is greater than any system of morality; her claims are absolute. It
is not by tribal taboos and copy-book maxims that she has pursued her
relentless march from the amœba to man and from man to civilization.’

‘He says,’ began Ransom, ‘that living creatures are stronger than the
question whether an act is bent or good—no, that cannot be right—he says
it is better to be alive and bent than to be dead—no—he says, he says—I
cannot say what he says, Oyarsa, in your language. But he goes on to say
that the only good thing is that there should be very many creatures
alive. He says there were many other animals before the first men and the
later ones were better than the earlier ones; but he says the animals
were not born because of what is said to the young about bent and good
action by their elders. And he says these animals did not feel any pity.’

‘She——’ began Weston.

‘I’m sorry,’ interrupted Ransom, ‘but I’ve forgotten who She is.’

‘Life, of course,’ snapped Weston. ‘She has ruthlessly broken down all
obstacles and liquidated all failures and to-day in her highest
form—civilized man—and in me as his representative, she presses forward
to that interplanetary leap which will, perhaps, place her for ever
beyond the reach of death.’

‘He says,’ resumed Ransom, ‘that these animals learned to do many
difficult things, except those who could not; and those ones died and the
other animals did not pity them. And he says the best animal now is the
kind of man who makes the big huts and carries the heavy weights and does
all the other things I told you about; and he is one of these and he says
that if the others all knew what he was doing they would be pleased. He
says that if he could kill you all and bring our people to live in
Malacandra, then they might be able to go on living here after something
had gone wrong with our world. And then if something went wrong with
Malacandra they might go and kill all the _hnau_ in another world. And
then another—and so they would never die out.’

‘It is in her right,’ said Weston, ‘the right, or, if you will, the might
of Life herself, that I am prepared without flinching to plant the flag
of man on the soil of Malacandra: to march on, step by step, superseding,
where necessary, the lower forms of life that we find, claiming planet
after planet, system after system, till our posterity—whatever strange
form and yet unguessed mentality they have assumed—dwell in the universe
wherever the universe is habitable.’

‘He says,’ translated Ransom, ‘that because of this it would _not_ be a
bent action—or else, he says, it _would_ be a possible action—for him to
kill you all and bring us here. He says he would feel no pity. He is
saying again that perhaps they would be able to keep moving from one
world to another and wherever they came they would kill everyone. I think
he is now talking about worlds that go round other suns. He wants the
creatures born from us to be in as many places as they can. He says he
does not know what kind of creatures they will be.’

‘I may fall,’ said Weston. ‘But while I live I will not, with such a key
in my hand, consent to close the gates of the future on my race. What
lies in that future, beyond our present ken, passes imagination to
conceive: it is enough for me that there is a Beyond.’

‘He is saying,’ Ransom translated, ‘that he will not stop trying to do
all this unless you kill him. And he says that though he doesn’t know
what will happen to the creatures sprung from us, he wants it to happen
very much.’

Weston, who had now finished his statement, looked round instinctively
for a chair to sink into. On Earth he usually sank into a chair as the
applause began. Finding none—he was not the kind of man to sit on the
ground like Devine—he folded his arms and stared with a certain dignity
about him.

‘It is well that I have heard you,’ said Oyarsa. ‘For though your mind is
feebler, your will is less bent than I thought. It is not for yourself
that you would do all this.’

‘No,’ said Weston proudly in Malacandrian. ‘Me die. Man live.’

‘Yet you know that these creatures would have to be made quite unlike you
before they lived on other worlds.’

‘Yes, yes. All new. No one know yet. Strange! Big!’

‘Then it is not the shape of body that you love?’

‘No. Me no care how they shaped.’

‘One would think, then, that it is for the mind you care. But that cannot
be, or you would love _hnau_ wherever you met it.’

‘No care for _hnau_. Care for man.’

‘But if it is neither man’s mind, which is as the mind of all other
_hnau_—is not Maleldil maker of them all?—nor his body, which will
change—if you care for neither of these, what do you mean by man?’

This had to be translated to Weston. When he understood it, he replied:

‘Me care for man—care for our race—what man begets——’ He had to ask
Ransom the words for _race_ and _beget_.

‘Strange!’ said Oyarsa. ‘You do not love any one of your race—you would
have let me kill Ransom. You do not love the mind of your race, nor the
body. Any kind of creature will please you if only it is begotten by your
kind as they now are. It seems to me, Thick One, that what you really
love is no completed creature but the very seed itself: for that is all
that is left.’

‘Tell him,’ said Weston when he had been made to understand this, ‘that I
don’t pretend to be a metaphysician. I have not come here to chop logic.
If he cannot understand—as apparently you can’t either—anything so
fundamental as a man’s loyalty to humanity, I can’t make him understand
it.’

But Ransom was unable to translate this and the voice of Oyarsa
continued:

‘I see now how the lord of the silent world has bent you. There are laws
that all _hnau_ know, of pity and straight dealing and shame and the
like, and one of these is the love of kindred. He has taught you to break
all of them except this one, which is not one of the greatest laws; this
one he has bent till it becomes folly and has set it up, thus bent, to be
a little, blind Oyarsa in your brain. And now you can do nothing but obey
it, though if we ask you why it is a law you can give no other reason for
it than for all the other and greater laws which it drives you to
disobey. Do you know why he has done this?’

‘Me think no such person—me wise, new man—no believe all that old talk.’

‘I will tell you. He has left you this one because a bent _hnau_ can do
more evil than a broken one. He has only bent you; but this Thin One who
sits on the ground he has broken, for he has left him nothing but greed.
He is now only a talking animal and in my world he could do no more evil
than an animal. If he were mine I would unmake his body, for the _hnau_
in it is already dead. But if you were mine I would try to cure you. Tell
me, Thick One, why did you come here?’

‘Me tell you. Make man live all the time.’

‘But are your wise men so ignorant as not to know that Malacandra is
older than your own world and nearer its death? Most of it is dead
already. My people live only in the _handramits_; the heat and the water
have been more and will be less. Soon now, very soon, I will end my world
and give back my people to Maleldil.’

‘Me know all that plenty. This only first try. Soon they go on another
world.’

‘But do you not know that all worlds will die?’

‘Men go jump off each before it deads—on and on, see?’

‘And when all are dead?’

Weston was silent. After a time Oyarsa spoke again.

‘Do you not ask why my people, whose world is old, have not rather come
to yours and taken it long ago.’

‘Ho! Ho!’ said Weston. ‘You not know how.’

‘You are wrong,’ said Oyarsa. ‘Many thousands of thousand years before
this, when nothing yet lived on your world, the cold death was coming on
my _harandra_. Then I was in deep trouble, not chiefly for the death of
my _hnau_—Maleldil does not make them long-livers—but for the things
which the lord of your world, who was not yet bound, put into their
minds. He would have made them as your people are now—wise enough to see
the death of their kind approaching but not wise enough to endure it.
Bent counsels would soon have risen among them. They were well able to
have made sky-ships. By me Maleldil stopped them. Some I cured, some I
unbodied——’

‘And see what come!’ interrupted Weston, ‘you now very few—shut up in
_handramits_—soon all die.’

‘Yes,’ said Oyarsa, ‘but one thing we left behind us on the _harandra_:
fear. And with fear, murder and rebellion. The weakest of my people does
not fear death. It is the Bent One, the lord of your world, who wastes
your lives and befouls them with flying from what you know will overtake
you in the end. If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace.’

Weston writhed in the exasperation born of his desire to speak and his
ignorance of the language.

‘Trash! Defeatist trash!’ he shouted at Oyarsa in English; then, drawing
himself up to his full height, he added in Malacandrian, ‘You say your
Maleldil let all go dead. Other one, Bent One, he fight, jump, live—not
all talkee-talkee. Me no care Maleldil. Like Bent One better: me on his
side.’

‘But do you not see that he never will nor can,’ began Oyarsa, and then
broke off, as if recollecting himself. ‘But I must learn more of your
world from Ransom, and for that I need till night. I will not kill you,
not even the Thin One, for you are out of my world. To-morrow you shall
go hence again in your ship.’

Devine’s face suddenly fell. He began talking rapidly in English.

‘For God’s sake, Weston, make him understand. We’ve been here for
months—the Earth is not in opposition now. Tell him it can’t be done. He
might as well kill us at once.’

‘How long will your journey be to Thulcandra?’ asked Oyarsa.

Weston, using Ransom as his interpreter, explained that the journey, in
the present position of the two planets, was almost impossible. The
distance had increased by millions of miles. The angle of their course to
the solar rays would be totally different from that which he had counted
upon. Even if by a hundredth chance they could hit the Earth, it was
almost certain that their supply of oxygen would be exhausted long before
they arrived.

‘Tell him to kill us now,’ he added.

‘All this I know,’ said Oyarsa. ‘And if you stay in my world I must kill
you: no such creature will I suffer in Malacandra. I know there is small
chance of your reaching your world; but small is not the same as none.
Between now and the next noon choose which you will take. In the
meantime, tell me this. If you reach it at all, what is the most time you
will need?’

After a prolonged calculation, Weston, in a shaken voice, replied that if
they had not made it in ninety days they would never make it, and they
would, moreover, be dead of suffocation.

‘Ninety days you shall have,’ said Oyarsa. ‘My _sorns_ and _pfifltriggi_
will give you air (we also have that art) and food for ninety days. But
they will do something else to your ship. I am not minded that it should
return into the heaven if once it reaches Thulcandra. You, Thick One,
were not here when I unmade my dead _hrossa_ whom you killed: the Thin
One will tell you. This I can do, as Maleldil has taught me, over a gap
of time or a gap of place. Before your sky-ship rises, my _sorns_ will
have so dealt with it that on the ninetieth day it will unbody, it will
become what you call nothing. If that day finds it in heaven your death
will be no bitterer because of this; but do not tarry in your ship if
once you touch Thulcandra. Now lead these two away, and do you, my
children, go where you will. But I must talk with Ransom.’




                               TWENTY-ONE


All that afternoon Ransom remained alone answering Oyarsa’s questions. I
am not allowed to record this conversation, beyond saying that the voice
concluded it with the words:

‘You have shown me more wonders than are known in the whole of heaven.’

After that they discussed Ransom’s own future. He was given full liberty
to remain in Malacandra or to attempt the desperate voyage to Earth. The
problem was agonizing to him. In the end he decided to throw in his lot
with Weston and Devine.

‘Love of our own kind,’ he said, ‘is not the greatest of laws, but you,
Oyarsa, have said it is a law. If I cannot live in Thulcandra, it is
better for me not to live at all.’

‘You have chosen rightly,’ said Oyarsa. ‘And I will tell you two things.
My people will take all the strange weapons out of the ship, but they
will give one to you. And the _eldila_ of deep heaven will be about your
ship till it reaches the air of Thulcandra, and often in it. They will
not let the other two kill you.’

It had not occurred to Ransom before that his own murder might be one of
the first expedients for economizing food and oxygen which would occur to
Weston and Devine. He was now astonished at his obtuseness, and thanked
Oyarsa for his protective measures. Then the great _eldil_ dismissed him
with these words:

‘You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little
fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps
your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended. But I
lay also a command on you; you must watch this Weston and this Devine in
Thulcandra if ever you arrive there. They may yet do much evil in, and
beyond, your world. From what you have told me, I begin to see that there
are _eldila_ who go down into your air, into the very stronghold of the
Bent One; your world is not so fast shut as was thought in these parts of
heaven. Watch those two bent ones. Be courageous. Fight them. And when
you have need, some of our people will help. Maleldil will show them to
you. It may even be that you and I shall meet again while you are still
in the body; for it is not without the wisdom of Maleldil that we have
met now and I have learned so much of your world. It seems to me that
this is the beginning of more comings and goings between the heavens and
the worlds and between one world and another—though not such as the Thick
One hoped. I am allowed to tell you this. The year we are now in—but
heavenly years are not as yours—has long been prophesied as a year of
stirrings and high changes and the siege of Thulcandra may be near its
end. Great things are on foot. If Maleldil does not forbid me, I will not
hold aloof from them. And now, farewell.’

It was through vast crowds of all the Malacandrian species that the three
human beings embarked next day on their terrible journey. Weston was pale
and haggard from a night of calculations intricate enough to tax any
mathematician even if his life did not hang on them. Devine was noisy,
reckless and a little hysterical. His whole view of Malacandra had been
altered overnight by the discovery that the ‘natives’ had an alcoholic
drink, and he had even been trying to teach them to smoke. Only the
_pfifltriggi_ had made much of it. He was now consoling himself for an
acute headache and the prospect of a lingering death by tormenting
Weston. Neither partner was pleased to find that all weapons had been
removed from the space-ship, but in other respects everything was as they
wished it. At about an hour after noon Ransom took a last, long look at
the blue waters, purple forest and remote green walls of the familiar
_handramit_, and followed the other two through the manhole. Before it
was closed Weston warned them that they must economize air by absolute
stillness. No unnecessary movement must be made during their voyage; even
talking must be prohibited.

‘I shall speak only in an emergency,’ he said.

‘Thank God for that, anyway,’ was Devine’s last shot. Then they screwed
themselves in.

Ransom went at once to the lower side of the sphere, into the chamber
which was now most completely upside down, and stretched himself on what
would later become its skylight. He was surprised to find that they were
already thousands of feet up. The _handramit_ was only a straight purple
line across the rose-red surface of the _harandra_. They were above the
junction of two _handramits_. One of them was doubtless that in which he
had lived, the other that which contained Meldilorn. The gully by which
he had cut off the corner between the two, on Augray’s shoulders, was
quite invisible.

Each minute more _handramits_ came into view—long straight lines, some
parallel, some intersecting, some building triangles. The landscape
became increasingly geometrical. The waste between the purple lines
appeared perfectly flat. The rosy colour of the petrified forests
accounted for its tint immediately below him; but to the north and east
the great sand deserts of which the _sorns_ had told him were now
appearing as illimitable stretches of yellow and ochre. To the west a
huge discoloration began to show. It was an irregular patch of greenish
blue that looked as if it were sunk below the level of the surrounding
_harandra_. He concluded it was the forest low-land of the
_Pfifltriggi_—or rather one of their forest lowlands, for now similar
patches were appearing in all directions, some of them mere blobs at the
intersection of _handramits_, some of vast extent. He became vividly
conscious that his knowledge of Malacandra was minute, local, parochial.
It was as if a _sorn_ had journeyed forty million miles to the Earth and
spent his stay there between Worthing and Brighton. He reflected that he
would have very little to show for his amazing voyage if he survived it:
a smattering of the language, a few landscapes, some half-understood
physics—but where were the statistics, the history, the broad survey of
extraterrestrial conditions, which such a traveller ought to bring back?
Those _handramits_, for example. Seen from the height which the
space-ship had now attained, in all their unmistakable geometry, they put
to shame his original impression that they were natural valleys. They
were gigantic feats of engineering, about which he had learned nothing;
feats accomplished, if all were true, before human history began . . .
before animal history began. Or was that only mythology? He knew it would
seem like mythology when he got back to Earth (if he ever got back), but
the presence of Oyarsa was still too fresh a memory to allow him any real
doubts. It even occurred to him that the distinction between history and
mythology might be itself meaningless outside the Earth.

The thought baffled him, and he turned again to the landscape below—the
landscape which became every moment less of a landscape and more of a
diagram. By this time, to the east, a much larger and darker patch of
discoloration than he had yet seen was pushing its way into the reddish
ochre of the Malacandrian world—a curiously shaped patch with long arms
or horns extended on each side and a sort of bay between them, like the
concave side of a crescent. It grew and grew. The wide dark arms seemed
to be spread out to engulf the whole planet. Suddenly he saw a bright
point of light in the middle of this dark patch and realized that it was
not a patch on the surface of the planet at all, but the black sky
showing behind her. The smooth curve was the edge of her disk. At this,
for the first time since their embarkation, fear took hold of him.
Slowly, yet not too slowly for him to see, the dark arms spread farther
and ever farther round the lighted surface till at last they met. The
whole disk, framed in blackness, was before him. The faint percussions of
the meteorites had long been audible; the window through which he was
gazing was no longer definitely beneath him. His limbs, though already
very light, were almost too stiff to move, and he was very hungry. He
looked at his watch. He had been at his post, spell-bound, for nearly
eight hours.

He made his way with difficulty to the sunward side of the ship and
reeled back almost blinded with the glory of the light. Groping, he found
his darkened glasses in his old cabin and got himself food and water:
Weston had rationed them strictly in both. He opened the door of the
control-room and looked in. Both the partners, their faces drawn with
anxiety, were seated before a kind of metal table; it was covered with
delicate, gently vibrating instruments in which crystal and fine wire
were the predominant materials. Both ignored his presence. For the rest
of the silent journey he was free of the whole ship.

When he returned to the dark side, the world they were leaving hung in
the star-strewn sky not much bigger than our earthly moon. Its colours
were still visible—a reddish-yellow disk blotched with greenish-blue and
capped with white at the poles. He saw the two tiny Malacandrian
moons—their movement quite perceptible—and reflected that they were among
the thousand things he had not noticed during his sojourn there. He
slept, and woke, and saw the disk still hanging in the sky. It was
smaller than the Moon now. Its colours were gone except for a faint,
uniform tinge of redness in its light; even the light was not now
incomparably stronger than that of the countless stars which surrounded
it. It had ceased to be Malacandra; it was only Mars.

He soon fell back into his old routine of sleeping and basking,
punctuated with the making of some scribbled notes for his Malacandrian
dictionary. He knew that there was very little chance of his being able
to communicate his new knowledge to man, that unrecorded death in the
depth of space would almost certainly be the end of their adventure. But
already it had become impossible to think of it as ‘space.’ Some moments
of cold fear he had; but each time they were shorter and more quickly
swallowed up in a sense of awe which made his personal fate seem wholly
insignificant. He could not feel that they were an island of life
journeying through an abyss of death. He felt almost the opposite—that
life was waiting outside the little iron egg-shell in which they rode,
ready at any moment to break in, and that, if it killed them, it would
kill them by excess of its vitality. He hoped passionately that if they
were to perish they would perish by the ‘unbodying’ of the space-ship and
not by suffocation within it. To be let out, to be set free, to dissolve
into the ocean of eternal noon, seemed to him at certain moments a
consummation even more desirable than their return to Earth. And if he
had felt some such lift of the heart when first he passed through heaven
on their outward journey, he felt it now tenfold, for now he was
convinced that the abyss was full of life in the most literal sense, full
of living creatures.

His confidence in Oyarsa’s words about the _eldila_ increased rather than
diminished as they went on. He saw none of them; the intensity of light
in which the ship swam allowed none of the fugitive variations which
would have betrayed their presence. But he heard, or thought he heard,
all kinds of delicate sound, or vibrations akin to sound, mixed with the
tinkling rain of meteorites, and often the sense of unseen presences even
within the space-ship became irresistible. It was this, more than
anything else, that made his own chances of life seem so unimportant. He
and all his race showed small and ephemeral against a background of such
immeasurable fullness. His brain reeled at the thought of the true
population of the universe, the three-dimensional infinitude of their
territory, and the unchronicled æons of their past; but his heart became
steadier than it had ever been.

It was well for him that he had reached this frame of mind before the
real hardships of their journey began. Ever since their departure from
Malacandra, the thermometer had steadily risen; now it was higher than it
had stood at any time on their outward journey. And still it rose. The
light also increased. Under his glasses he kept his eyes habitually tight
shut, opening them only for the shortest time for necessary movements. He
knew that if he reached Earth it would be with permanently damaged sight.
But all this was nothing to the torment of heat. All three of them were
awake for twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four, enduring with dilated
eyeballs, blackened lips and froth-flecked cheeks the agony of thirst. It
would be madness to increase their scanty rations of water: madness even
to consume air in discussing the question.

He saw well enough what was happening. In his last bid for life Weston
was venturing inside the Earth’s orbit, leading them nearer the Sun than
man, perhaps than life, had ever been. Presumably this was unavoidable;
one could not follow a retreating Earth round the rim of its own wheeling
course. They must be trying to meet it—to cut across . . . it was
madness! But the question did not much occupy his mind; it was not
possible for long to think of anything but thirst. One thought of water;
then one thought of thirst; then one thought of thinking of thirst; then
of water again. And still the thermometer rose. The walls of the ship
were too hot to touch. It was obvious that a crisis was approaching. In
the next few hours it must kill them or get less.

It got less. There came a time when they lay exhausted and shivering in
what seemed the cold, though it was still hotter than any terrestrial
climate. Weston had so far succeeded; he had risked the highest
temperature at which human life could theoretically survive, and they had
lived through it. But they were not the same men. Hitherto Weston had
slept very little even in his watches off; always, after an hour or so of
uneasy rest, he had returned to his charts and to his endless, almost
despairing, calculations. You could see him fighting the despair—pinning
his terrified brain down, and again down, to the figures. Now he never
looked at them. He even seemed careless in the control-room. Devine moved
and looked like a somnambulist. Ransom lived increasingly on the dark
side and for long hours he thought of nothing. Although the first great
danger was past, none of them, at this time, had any serious hope of a
successful issue to their journey. They had now been fifty days, without
speech, in their steel shell, and the air was already very bad.

Weston was so unlike his old self that he even allowed Ransom to take his
share in the navigation. Mainly by signs, but with the help of a few
whispered words, he taught him all that was necessary at this stage of
the journey. Apparently they were racing home—but with little chance of
reaching it in time—before some sort of cosmic ‘trade-wind.’ A few rules
of thumb enabled Ransom to keep the star which Weston pointed out to him
in its position at the centre of the skylight, but always with his left
hand on the bell to Weston’s cabin.

This star was not the Earth. The days—the purely theoretical ‘days’ which
bore such a desperately practical meaning for the travellers—mounted to
fifty-eight before Weston changed course, and a different luminary was in
the centre. Sixty days, and it was visibly a planet. Sixty-six, and it
was like a planet seen through field-glasses. Seventy and it was like
nothing that Ransom had ever seen—a little dazzling disk too large for a
planet and far too small for the Moon. Now that he was navigating, his
celestial mood was shattered. Wild, animal thirst for life, mixed with
homesick longing for the free airs and the sights and smells of earth—for
grass and meat and beer and tea and the human voice—awoke in him. At
first his chief difficulty on watch had been to resist drowsiness; now,
though the air was worse, feverish excitement kept him vigilant. Often
when he came off duty he found his right arm stiff and sore; for hours he
had been pressing it unconsciously against the control-board as if his
puny thrust could spur the space-ship to yet greater speed.

Now they had twenty days to go. Nineteen—eighteen—and on the white
terrestrial disk, now a little larger than a sixpence, he thought he
could make out Australia and the south-east corner of Asia. Hour after
hour, though the markings moved slowly across the disk with the earth’s
diurnal revolution, the disk itself refused to grow larger. ‘Get on! Get
on!’ Ransom muttered to the ship. Now ten days were left and it was like
the Moon and so bright that they could not look steadily at it. The air
in their little sphere was ominously bad, but Ransom and Devine risked a
whisper as they changed watches.

‘We’ll do it,’ they said. ‘We’ll do it yet.’

On the eighty-seventh day, when Ransom relieved Devine, he thought there
was something wrong with the Earth. Before his watch was done, he was
sure. It was no longer a true circle, but bulging a little on one side;
it was almost pear-shaped. When Weston came on duty he gave one glance at
the sky-light, rang furiously on the bell for Devine, thrust Ransom
aside, and took the navigating seat. His face was the colour of putty. He
seemed to be about to so something to the controls, but as Devine entered
the room he looked up and shrugged his shoulders with a gesture of
despair. Then he buried his face in his hands and laid his head down on
the control-board.

Ransom and Devine exchanged glances. They bundled Weston out of the
seat—he was crying like a child—and Devine took his place. And now at
last Ransom understood the mystery of the bulging Earth. What had
appeared as a bulge on one side of her disk was becoming increasingly
distinct as a second disk, a disk almost as large in appearance as her
own. It was covering more than half of the Earth. It was the Moon—between
them and the Earth, and two hundred and forty thousand miles nearer.
Ransom did not know what fate this might mean for the space-ship. Devine
obviously did, and never had he appeared so admirable. His face was as
pale as Weston’s, but his eyes were clear and preternaturally bright; he
sat crouched over the controls like an animal about to spring and he was
whistling very softly between his teeth.

Hours later Ransom understood what was happening. The Moon’s disk was now
larger than the Earth’s, and very gradually it became apparent to him
that both disks were diminishing in size. The space-ship was no longer
approaching either the Earth or the Moon; it was farther away from them
than it had been half an hour ago, and that was the meaning of Devine’s
feverish activity with the controls. It was not merely that the Moon was
crossing their path and cutting them off from the Earth; apparently for
some reason—probably gravitational—it was dangerous to get too close to
the Moon, and Devine was standing off into space. In sight of harbour
they were being forced to turn back to the open sea. He glanced up at the
chronometer. It was the morning of the eighty-eighth day. Two days to
make the Earth, and they were moving away from her.

‘I suppose this finishes us?’ he whispered.

‘Expect so,’ whispered Devine, without looking round.

Weston presently recovered sufficiently to come back and stand beside
Devine. There was nothing for Ransom to do. He was sure, now, that they
were soon to die. With this realization, the agony of his suspense
suddenly disappeared. Death, whether it came now or some thirty years
later on earth, rose up and claimed his attention. There are preparations
a man likes to make. He left the control-room and returned into one of
the sunward chambers, into the indifference of the moveless light, the
warmth, the silence and the sharp-cut shadows. Nothing was farther from
his mind than sleep. It must have been the exhausted atmosphere which
made him drowsy. He slept.

He awoke in almost complete darkness in the midst of a loud continuous
noise, which he could not at first identify. It reminded him of
something—something he seemed to have heard in a previous existence. It
was a prolonged drumming noise close above his head. Suddenly his heart
gave a great leap.

‘Oh God,’ he sobbed. ‘Oh God! It’s _rain_.’

He was on Earth. The air was heavy and stale about him, but the choking
sensations he had been suffering were gone. He realized that he was still
in the space-ship. The others, in fear of its threatened ‘unbodying,’ had
characteristically abandoned it the moment it touched Earth and left him
to his fate. It was difficult in the dark, and under the crushing weight
of terrestrial gravity, to find his way out. But he managed it. He found
the manhole and slithered, drinking great draughts of air, down the
outside of the sphere; slipped in mud, blessed the smell of it, and at
last raised the unaccustomed weight of his body to its feet. He stood in
pitch-black night under torrential rain. With every pore of his body he
drank it in; with every desire of his heart he embraced the smell of the
field about him—a patch of his native planet where grass grew, where cows
moved, where presently he would come to hedges and a gate.

He had walked about half an hour when a vivid light behind him and a
strong, momentary wind informed him that the space-ship was no more. He
felt very little interest. He had seen dim lights, the lights of men,
ahead. He contrived to get into a lane, then into a road, then into a
village street. A lighted door was open. There were voices from within
and they were speaking English. There was a familiar smell. He pushed his
way in, regardless of the surprise he was creating, and walked to the
bar.

‘A pint of bitter, please,’ said Ransom.




                               TWENTY-TWO


At this point, if I were guided by purely literary considerations, my
story would end, but it is time to remove the mask and to acquaint the
reader with the real and practical purpose for which this book has been
written. At the same time he will learn how the writing of it became
possible at all.

Dr. Ransom—and at this stage it will become obvious that that is not his
real name—soon abandoned the idea of his Malacandrian dictionary and
indeed all idea of communicating his story to the world. He was ill for
several months, and when he recovered he found himself in considerable
doubt as to whether what he remembered had really occurred. It looked
very like a delusion produced by his illness, and most of his apparent
adventures could, he saw, be explained psychoanalytically. He did not
lean very heavily on this fact himself, for he had long since observed
that a good many ‘real’ things in the fauna and flora of our own world
could be accounted for in the same way if you started with the assumption
that they were illusions. But he felt that if he himself half doubted his
own story, the rest of the world would disbelieve it completely. He
decided to hold his tongue, and there the matter would have rested but
for a very curious coincidence.

This is where I come into the story. I had known Dr. Ransom slightly for
several years and corresponded with him on literary and philological
subjects, though we very seldom met. It was, therefore, quite in the
usual order of things that I should write him a letter some months ago,
of which I will quote the relevant paragraph. It ran like this:


‘I am now working at the Platonists of the twelfth century and
incidentally discovering that they wrote damnably difficult Latin. In one
of them, Bernardus Silvestris, there is a word I should particularly like
your views on—the word _Oyarses_. It occurs in the description of a
voyage through the heavens, and an _Oyarses_ seems to be the
“intelligence” or tutelary spirit of a heavenly sphere, i.e. in our
language, of a planet. I asked C. J. about it and he says it ought to be
_Ousiarches_. That, of course, would make sense, but I do not feel quite
satisfied. Have you by any chance ever come across a word like _Oyarses_,
or can you hazard any guess as to what language it may be?’


The immediate result of this letter was an invitation to spend a week-end
with Dr. Ransom. He told me his whole story, and since then he and I have
been almost continuously at work on the mystery. A good many facts, which
I have no intention of publishing at present, have fallen into our hands;
facts about planets in general and about Mars in particular, facts about
mediæval Platonists, and (not least in importance) facts about the
Professor to whom I am giving the fictitious name of Weston. A systematic
report of these facts might, of course, be given to the civilized world:
but that would almost certainly result in universal incredulity and in a
libel action from ‘Weston.’ At the same time, we both feel that we cannot
be silent. We are being daily confirmed in our belief that the _oyarses_
of Mars was right when it said that the present ‘celestial year’ was to
be a revolutionary one, that the long isolation of our own planet is
nearing its end, and that great doings are on foot. We have found reason
to believe that the mediæval Platonists were living in the same celestial
year as ourselves—in fact, that it began in the twelfth century of our
era—and that the occurrence of the name Oyarsa (Latinized as _oyarses_)
in Bernardus Silvestris is not an accident. And we have also
evidence—increasing almost daily—that ‘Weston,’ or the force or forces
behind ‘Weston,’ will play a very important part in the events of the
next few centuries, and, unless we prevent them, a very disastrous one.
We do not mean that they are likely to invade Mars—our cry is not merely
‘Hands off Malacandra.’ The dangers to be feared are not planetary but
cosmic, or at least solar, and they are not temporal but eternal. More
than this it would be unwise to say.

It was Dr. Ransom who first saw that our only chance was to publish in
the form of _fiction_ what would certainly not be listened to as fact. He
even thought—greatly overrating my literary powers—that this might have
the incidental advantage of reaching a wider public, and that, certainly,
it would reach a great many people sooner than ‘Weston.’ To my objection
that if accepted as fiction, it would for that very reason be regarded as
false, he replied that there would be indications enough in the narrative
for the few readers—the very few—who _at present_ were prepared to go
further into the matter.

‘And they,’ he said, ‘will easily find out you, or me, and will easily
identify Weston. Anyway,’ he continued, ‘what we need for the moment is
not so much a body of belief as a body of people familiarized with
certain ideas. If we could even effect in one per cent. of our readers a
change-over from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we
should have made a beginning.’

What neither of us foresaw was the rapid march of events which was to
render the book out of date before it was published. These events have
already made it rather a prologue to our story than the story itself. But
we must let it go as it stands. For the later stages of the
adventure—well, it was Aristotle, long before Kipling, who taught us the
formula, ‘That is another story.’




                               POSTSCRIPT


 (_Being extracts from a letter written by the original of ‘Dr. Ransom’
                            to the author._)

. . . I think you are right, and after the two or three corrections
(marked in red) the MS. will have to stand. I won’t deny that I am
disappointed, but then any attempt to tell such a story is bound to
disappoint the man who has really been there. I am not now referring to
the ruthless way in which you have cut down all the philological part,
though, as it now stands, we are giving our readers a mere caricature of
the Malacandrian language. I mean something more difficult—something
which I couldn’t possibly express. How can one ‘get across’ the
Malacandrian _smells_? Nothing comes back to me more vividly in my dreams
. . . especially the early morning smell in those purple woods, where the
very mention of ‘early morning’ and ‘woods’ is misleading because it must
set you thinking of earth and moss and cobwebs and the smell of our own
planet, but I’m thinking of something totally different. More ‘aromatic’
. . . yes, but then it is not hot or luxurious or exotic as that word
suggests. Something aromatic, spicy, yet very cold, very thin, tingling
at the back of the nose—something that did to the sense of smell what
high, sharp violin notes do to the ear. And mixed with that I always hear
the sound of the singing—great hollow hound-like music from enormous
throats, deeper than Chaliapin, a ‘warm, dark noise.’ I am homesick for
my old Malacandrian valley when I think of it; yet God knows when I heard
it there I was homesick enough for the Earth.

Of course you are right; if we are to treat it as a story you _must_
telescope the time I spent in the village during which ‘nothing
happened.’ But I grudge it. Those quiet weeks, the mere living among the
_hrossa_, are to me the main thing that happened. I _know_ them, Lewis;
that’s what you can’t get into a mere story. For instance, because I
always take a thermometer with me on a holiday (it has saved many a one
from being spoiled) I know that the normal temperature of a _hross_ is
103°. I know—though I can’t remember learning it—that they live about 80
Martian years, or 160 earth years; that they marry at about 20 (= 40);
that their droppings, like those of the horse, are not offensive to
themselves, or to me, and are used for agriculture; that they don’t shed
tears, or blink; that they do get (as you would say) ‘elevated’ but not
drunk on a gaudy night—of which they have many. But what can one do with
these scraps of information? I merely analyse them out of a whole living
memory that can never be put into words, and no one in this world will be
able to build up from such scraps quite the right picture. For example,
can I make even you understand how I know, beyond all question, why it is
that the Malacandrians don’t keep pets and, in general, don’t feel about
their ‘lower animals’ as we do about ours? Naturally it is the sort of
thing they themselves could never have told me. One just sees why when
one sees the three species together. Each of them is to the others _both_
what a man is to us _and_ what an animal is to us. They can talk to each
other, they can co-operate, they have the same ethics; to that extent a
_sorn_ and a _hross_ meet like two men. But then each finds the other
different, funny, attractive as an animal is attractive. Some instinct
starved in us, which we try to soothe by treating irrational creatures
almost as if they were rational, is really satisfied in Malacandra. They
don’t need pets.

By the way, while we are on the subject of species, I am rather sorry
that the exigencies of the story have been allowed to simplify the
biology so much. Did I give you the impression that each of the three
species was perfectly homogeneous? If so, I misled you. Take the
_hrossa_; my friends were black _hrossa_, but there are also silver
_hrossa_, and in some of the western _handramits_ one finds the great
crested _hross_—ten feet high, a dancer rather than a singer, and the
noblest animal, after man, that I have ever seen. Only the males have the
crest. I also saw a pure white _hross_ at Meldilorn, but like a fool I
never found out whether he represented a sub-species or was a mere freak
like our terrestrial albino. There is also at least one other kind of
_sorn_ besides the kind I saw—the _soroborn_ or red _sorn_ of the desert,
who lives in the sandy north. He’s a corker by all accounts.

I agree, it is a pity I never saw the _pfifltriggi_ at home. I know
nearly enough about them to ‘fake’ a visit to them as an episode in the
story, but I don’t think we ought to introduce any mere fiction. ‘True in
substance’ sounds all very well on earth, but I can’t imagine myself
explaining it to Oyarsa, and I have a shrewd suspicion (see my last
letter) that I have not heard the end of _him_. Anyway, why should our
‘readers’ (you seem to know the devil of a lot about them!) who are so
determined to hear nothing about the language, be so anxious to know more
of the _pfifltriggi_? But if you can work it in, there is, of course, no
harm in explaining that they are oviparous and matriarchal, and
short-lived compared with the other species. It is pretty plain that the
great depressions which they inhabit are the old ocean-beds of
Malacandra. _Hrossa_, who had visited them, described themselves as going
down into deep forests over sand, ‘the bone-stones (fossils) of ancient
wave-borers about them.’ No doubt these are the dark patches seen on the
Martian disk from Earth. And that reminds me—the ‘maps’ of Mars which I
have consulted since I got back are so inconsistent with one another that
I have given up the attempt to identify my own _handramit_. If you want
to try your hand, the desideratum is ‘a roughly north-east and south-west
“canal” cutting a north and south “canal” not more than twenty miles from
the equator.’ But astronomers differ very much as to what they can see.

Now as to your most annoying question: ‘Did Augray in describing the
_eldila_, confuse the ideas of a subtler body and a superior being?’ No.
The confusion is entirely your own. He said two things: that the _eldila_
had bodies different from those of planetary animals, and that they were
superior in intelligence. Neither he nor anyone else in Malacandra ever
confused the one statement with the other or deduced the one from the
other. In fact, I have reasons for thinking that there are also
irrational animals with the _eldil_ type of body (you remember Chaucer’s
‘airish beasts’?).

I wonder are you wise to say nothing about the problem of _eldil_ speech?
I agree that it would spoil the narrative to raise the question during
the trial-scene at Meldilorn, but surely many readers will have enough
sense to ask how the _eldila_, who obviously don’t breathe, can talk. It
is true that we should have to admit we don’t know, but oughtn’t the
readers to be told that? I suggested to J.—the only scientist here who is
in my confidence—your theory that they might have instruments, or even
organs, for manipulating the air around them and thus producing sounds
indirectly, but he didn’t seem to think much of it. He thought it
probable that they directly manipulated the ears of those they were
‘speaking’ to. That sounds pretty difficult . . . of course one must
remember that we have really no knowledge of the shape or size of an
_eldil_, or even of its relations to space (_our_ space) in general. In
fact, one wants to keep on insisting that we really know next to nothing
about them. Like you, I can’t help trying to fix their relation to the
things that appear in terrestrial tradition—gods, angels, fairies. But we
haven’t the data. When I attempted to give Oyarsa some idea of our own
Christian angelology, he certainly seemed to regard our ‘angels’ as
different in some way from himself. But whether he meant that they were a
different species, or only that they were some special military caste
(since our poor old earth turns out to be a kind of Ypres Salient in the
universe), I don’t know.

Why must you leave out my account of how the shutter jammed just before
our landing on Malacandra? Without this, your description of our
sufferings from excessive light on the return journey raises the very
obvious question, ‘Why didn’t they close their shutters?’ I don’t believe
your theory that ‘readers never notice that sort of thing.’ I’m sure I
should.

There are two scenes that I wish you could have worked into the book; no
matter—they are worked into me. One or other of them is always before me
when I close my eyes.

In one of them I see the Malacandrian sky at morning; pale blue, so pale
that now, when I have grown once more accustomed to terrestrial skies, I
think of it as almost white. Against it the nearer tops of the giant
weeds—the ‘trees’ as you call them—show black, but far away, across miles
of that blinding blue water, the remoter woods are water-colour purple.
The shadows all around me on the pale forest-floor are like shadows on
snow. There are figures walking before me; slender yet gigantic forms,
black and sleek as animated tall hats; their huge round heads, poised on
their sinuous stalk-like bodies, give them the appearance of black
tulips. They go down, singing, to the edge of the lake. The music fills
the wood with its vibration, though it is so soft that I can hardly hear
it: it is like dim organ music. Some of them embark, but most remain. It
is done slowly; this is no ordinary embarkation, but some ceremony. It
is, in fact, a _hross_ funeral. Those three with the grey muzzles whom
they have helped into the boat are going to Meldilorn to die. For in that
world, except for some few whom the _hnakra_ gets, no one dies before his
time. All live out the full span allotted to their kind, and a death with
them is as predictable as a birth with us. The whole village has known
that those three will die this year, this month; it was an easy guess
that they would die even this week. And now they are off, to receive the
last counsel of Oyarsa, to die, and to be by him ‘unbodied.’ The corpses,
as corpses, will exist only for a few minutes: there are no coffins in
Malacandra, no sextons, churchyards, or undertakers. The valley is solemn
at their departure, but I see no signs of passionate grief. They do not
doubt their immortality, and friends of the same generation are not torn
apart. You leave the world, as you entered it, with the ‘men of your own
year.’ Death is not preceded by dread nor followed by corruption.

The other scene is a nocturne. I see myself bathing with Hyoi in the warm
lake. He laughs at my clumsy swimming; accustomed to a heavier world, I
can hardly get enough of me under water to make any headway. And then I
see the night sky. The greater part of it is very like ours, though the
depths are blacker and the stars brighter; but something that no
terrestrial analogy will enable you fully to picture is happening in the
west. Imagine the Milky Way magnified—the Milky Way seen through our
largest telescope on the clearest night. And then imagine this, not
painted across the zenith, but rising like a constellation behind the
mountain-tops—a dazzling necklace of lights brilliant as planets, slowly
heaving itself up till it fills a fifth of the sky and now leaves a belt
of blackness between itself and the horizon. It is too bright to look at
for long, but it is only a preparation. Something else is coming. There
is a glow like moonrise on the _harandra_. _Ahihra_! cries Hyoi, and
other baying voices answer him from the darkness all about us. And now
the true king of night is up, and now he is threading his way through
that strange western galaxy and making its lights dim by comparison with
his own. I turn my eyes away, for the little disk is far brighter than
the Moon in her greatest splendour. The whole _handramit_ is bathed in
colourless light; I could count the stems of the forest on the far side
of the lake; I see that my fingernails are broken and dirty. And now I
guess what it is that I have seen—Jupiter rising beyond the Asteroids and
forty million miles nearer than he has ever been to earthly eyes. But the
Malacandrians would say ‘within the Asteroids,’ for they have an odd
habit, sometimes, of turning the solar system inside out. They call the
Asteroids the ‘dancers before the threshold of the Great Worlds.’ The
Great Worlds are the planets, as we should say, ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ the
Asteroids. Glundandra (Jupiter) is the greatest of these and has some
importance in Malacandrian thought which I cannot fathom. He is ‘the
centre,’ ‘great Meldilorn,’ ‘throne’ and ‘feast.’ They are, of course,
well aware that he is uninhabitable, at least by animals of the planetary
type; and they certainly have no pagan idea of giving a local habitation
to Maleldil. But somebody or something of great importance is connected
with Jupiter; as usual ‘The _séroni_ would know.’ But they never told me.
Perhaps the best comment is in the author whom I mentioned to you: ‘For
as it was well said of the great Africanus that he was never less alone
than when alone, so, in our philosophy, no parts of this universal frame
are less to be called solitarie than those which the vulgar esteem most
solitarie, since the withdrawing of men and beasts signifieth but the
greater frequency of more excellent creatures.’

More of this when you come. I am trying to read every old book on the
subject that I can hear of. Now that ‘Weston’ has shut the door, the way
to the planets lies through the past; if there is to be any more
space-travelling, it will have to be time-travelling as well . . .!


                                THE END


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[End of Out of the Silent Planet, by C. S. Lewis]
