Out Of The Silent Planet (15 page)

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 rurple 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
drearns 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 groundweed 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 rigid 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 pftfltrigg. 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 ofsilvery. 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 groundweed 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
groundweed 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
cornfield 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 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 guesthouse 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 guesthouse 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?'