Out Of The Silent Planet (14 page)

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 words 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 Malacindra.

'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 manfacture 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 bldod.'

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.

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 over 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 gulley. 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.