C.S. Lewis
GREAT PAN G403
First published 1938 by John Lane the Bodley Head Ltd.
This edition published 1952 by Pan Books Ltd, 8 Headfort Place, London, S.W. 1
2nd Printing 1955
3rd Printing 1956
New Edition 1960
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.
OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET
C. S. LEWIS
VI
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 trapdoors,
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
cared 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.
VII
"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 watercolour 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 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 rosecoloured
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 sodawater, 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 archaeology. 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, flexiblelooking
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 halfspectral,
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 hornlike
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 to 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.
VIII
A MOMENT 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
wristwatch 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."
IX
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 newcomer 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 sealskin, 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 halfway 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
representative 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
raffled 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
fingertips touched the webbed membrance 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 at
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.
"Hma - hma - hman," 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; Malacandra 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 beanlike 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.
X
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 surrending 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
fore-paw, and
proceeded, erect as a Grecian caryatid, to the land. They walked forward - if
the swinging
movements 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-harondra.
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 or 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.
Proceed to
Chapters 11-15