Out Of The Silent Planet (9 page)

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, steaded 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 seroni-harondra.
Ransom understood him to mean that the hrossa lived down in the handramit and the seroni
up on the harandra. What the deuce were seroni, 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 seroni were gods or demons.

The journey continued, with frequent, though decreasing, recurrences of nausea for Ransom.
Hours later he realized that seroni 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 for 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 turning. 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;
fmally, there was sleep in some dark, apparently covered place.

EVER SINCE he awoke on the space-ship Ransom had been thinking about the amazing adventure of
going to another planet, and about his chances of returning from it. What he had not thought about
was being on it. It was with a kind of stupefaction each morning that he found himself neither
arriving in, nor escaping from, but simply living on, Malacandra; waking, sleeping, eating,
swimnming, and even, as the days passed, talking. The wonder of it smote him most strongly when
he found himself about three weeks after his arrival, actually going for a walk. A few weeks
later he had his favourite walks, and his favourite foods; he was beginning to develop habits.
He knew a male from a female hross at sight, and even individual differences were becoming plain.
Hyoi who had first found him - miles away to the north - was a very different person from the
grey-muzzled, venerable Hnohra who was daily teaching him the language; and the young of the
species were different again. They were delightful. You could forget all about the rationality
of hrossa in dealing with them. Too young to trouble him with the baffling enigma of reason
in an inhuman form, they solaced his loneliness, as if he had been allowed to bring a few dogs
with him from the Earth. The cubs, on their part, felt the liveliest interest in the hairless
goblin which had appeared among them. With them, and therefore indirectly with their dams,
he was a brilliant success.

Of the community in general his earlier impressions were all gradually being corrected. His
first diagnosis of their culture was what he called 'old stone age'. The few cutting instruments
they possessed were made of stone. They seemed to have no pottery but a few clumsy vessels
used for boiling, and boiling was the only cookery they attempted. Their common drinking
vessel, dish and ladle all in one was the oyster-like shell in which he had first tasted bross
hospitality; the fish which it contained was their only animal food. Vegetable fare they had
in great plenty and variety, some of it delicious. Even the pinkish-white weed which covered
the whole handramit was edible at a pinch, so that if he had starved before Hyoi found him
he would have starved amidst abundance. No hross, however, ate the weed (honodrashrud) for
choice, though it might be used 'faute de mieux' on a journey. Their dwellings were
beehive-shaped huts of stiff leaf and the villages - there were several in the neighbourhood -
were always built beside rivers for warmth and well upstream towards the walls of the handramit
where the water was hottest. They slept on the ground. They seemed to have no arts except
a kind of poetry and music which was practised almost every evening by a team or troupe
of four hrossa.

One recited half chanting at great length while the other three, sometimes singly and
sometimes antiphonally, interrupted him from time to time with song. Ransom could not
find out whether these interruptions were simply lyrical interludes or dramatic dialogue
arising out of the leaders' narrative. He could make nothing of the music. The voices were
not disagreeable and the scale seemed adapted to human ears, but the time pattern was
meaningless to his sense of rhythm. The occupations of the tribe or family were at first
mysterious. People were always disappearing for a few days and reappearing again. There
was a little fishing and much journeying in boats of which he never discovered the object.
Then one day he saw a kind of caravan of hrossa setting out by land each with a load of
vegetable food on its head. Apparently there was some kind of trade in Malacandra.

He discovered their agriculture in the first week. About a mile down the handramit one came
to broad lands free of forest and clothed for many miles together in low pulpy vegetation
in which yellow, orange and blue predominated. Later on, there were lettuce-like plants
about the height of a terrestrial birch tree. Where one of these overhung the warmth of
water you could step into one of the lower leaves and lie deliciously as in a gently moving -
fragrant hammock. Elsewhere it was not warm enough to sit still for long out of doors;
the general temperature of the handramit was that of a fine winter's morning on Earth.
These food-producing areas were worked communally by the surrounding villages, and division
of labour had been carried to a higher point than he expected. Cutting, drying, storing,
transport and something like manuring were all carried on, and he suspected that some at
least of the water channels were artificial.

But the real revolution in his understanding of the hrossa began when he had learned enough
of their language to attempt some satisfaction of their curiosity about himself. In answer
to their questions he began by saying that he had come out of the sky. Hnohra immediately
asked from which planet or earth (handra). Ransom, who had deliberately given a childish
version of the truth in order to adapt it to the supposed ignorance of his audience, was
a little annoyed to find Hnohra painfully explaining to him that he could not live in the
sky because there was no air in it; he might have come through the sky but he must have come
from a handra. He was quite unable to point Earth out to them in the night sky. They seemed
surprised at his inability, and repeatedly pointed out to him a bright planet low on the
western horizon - a little south of where the sun had gone down. He was surprised that
they selected a planet instead of a mere star and stuck to their choice; could it be
possible that they nnderstood astronomy? Unfortunately he still knew too little of the
language to explore their knowledge. He turned the conversation by asking them the name
of the bright southern planet, and was told that it was Thulcandra - the silent world or
planet.

'Why do you call it Thulc?' he asked. 'Why silent?' No one knew.

'The seroni know,' said Hnohra. 'That is the sort of thing they know.'

Then he was asked how he had come, and made a very poor attempt at describing the
spaceship - but again:

'The seroni would know.'

Had he come alone? No, he had come with two others of his kind - bad men ('bent' men was
the nearest hrossian equivalent) who tried to kill him, but he had run away from them.
The hrossa found this very difficult, but all finally agreed that he ought to go to
Oyarsa. Oyarsa would protect him Ransom asked who Oyarsa was. Slowly, and with many
misunderstandings, he hammered out the information that Oyarsa (1) lived in Meldilorn;
(2) knew everything and ruled everyone; (3) had always been there; and (4) was not a
hross, nor one of the seroni. Then Ransom, following his own idea, asked if Oyarsa had
made the world. The hrossa almost barked in the fervour of their denial. Did people in
Thulcandra not know that Maleldil the Young had made and still ruled the world? Even a
child knew that. Where did Maleldil live, Ransom asked.

'With the Old One.'

And who was the Old One? Ransom did not understand the answer. He tried again.

'Where was the Old One?'

'He is not that sort,' said Hnohra, 'that he has to live anywhere,' and proceeded to a good
deal which Ransom did not follow. But he followed enough to feel once more a certain
irritation. Ever since he had discovered the rationality of the hrossa he had been haunted
by a conscientious scruple as to whether it might not be his duty to undertake their
religious instruction; now, as a result of his tentative efforts, he found himself being
treated as if he were the savage and being given a first sketch of civilized religion -
a sort of hrossian equivalent of the shorter catechism. It became plain that Maleldil was
a spirit without body, parts or passions.

'He is not a hnau,' said the hrossa.

'What is hnau?' asked Ransom.

'You are huan. I am hnau. The seroni are hnau. The pfifltriggi are hnau.'

'Pfifltriggi?' said Ransom.

'More than ten days' journey to the west,' said Hnohra. 'The harandra sinks down not into
the handramit but into a broad place, an open place, spreading every way. Five days' journey
from the north to the south of it; ten days' journey from the east to the west. The forests
are of other colours there than here, they are blue and green. It is very deep there, it goes
to the roots of the world. The best things that can be dug out of the earth are there. The
pfiftriggi live there. They delight in digging. What they dig they soften with fire and make
things of it. They are little people, smaller than you, long in the snout, pale, busy. They
have long limbs in front. No hnau can match them in making and shaping things as none can match
us in singing. But let 'Hman' see.'