Out Of The Silent Planet (7 page)

Many of the gullies which he crossed now carried streams, blue hissing streams, all
hastening to the lower ground on his left. Like the lakes 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
coutinually 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 sign 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 tight 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.'

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 sores 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 'sores'. 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, expatided 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 heatt 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 infinitesimil 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 dowhill 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 inter-mingled 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 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 weil 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 connexion with the sorns;
now, it flashed upon him like a revelation. The love of knowledge is a kind of madness. In
the fraction of a second which it took Ransom to decide that the creature was really talking,
and while he still knew that he might be facing instant death, his imagination had leaped
over every fear and hope and probability of his situation to follow the dazzling project
of making a Malacandrian grammar. An Introduction to the Malacandrian Language - The Lunar
Verb - A Concise Martian-English Dictionary .. . the titles flitted through his mind. And
what might one not discover from the speech of a non-human race? The very form of language
itself, the principle behind all possible languages, might fall into his hands. Unconsciously
he raised himself on his elbow and stared at the black beast. It became silent. The huge
bullet head swung round and lustrous amber eyes fixed him. There was no wind on the lake or in
the wood. Minute after minute in utter silence the representatives of two so far-divided
species stared each into the other's face.