Out Of The Silent Planet (22 page)

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 103deg. 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 pfifltrzggi 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 above 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
thinkng 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 ouly 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 watercolour 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 greatet part of it is very like ours,
though the depths are blacker and the stays 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 seroni 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 ...!

End of Out Of The Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis