“The small one will not understand you,” said the Lord of Malacandra. “He will think that this is a grievous thing in your eyes.”
“He does not say this, Malacandra.”
“No. That is another strange thing about the children of Adam.”
There was a moment’s silence and then Malacandra addressed Ransom. “You will think of this best if you think of it in the likeness of certain things from your own world.”
“I think I understand,” said Ransom, “for one of Maleldil’s sayers has told us. It is like when the children of a great house come to their full age. Then those who administered all their riches, and whom perhaps they have never seen, come and put all in their hands and give up their keys.”
“You understand well,” said Perelandra. “Or like when the singing beast leaves the dumb dam who suckled him.”
“The singing beast?” said Ransom. “I would gladly hear more of this.”
“The beasts of that kind have no milk and always what they bring forth is suckled by the she-beast of another kind. She is great and beautiful and dumb, and till the young singing beast is weaned it is among her whelps and is subject to her. But when it is grown it becomes the most delicate and glorious of all beasts and goes from her. And she wonders at its song.”
“Why has Maleldil made such a thing?” said Ransom. “That is to ask why Maleldil has made me,” said Perelandra. “But now it is enough to say that from the habits of these two beasts much wisdom will come into the minds of my King and my Queen and their children. But the hour is upon us, and this is enough.”
“What hour?” asked Ransom.
“Today is the morning day,” said one or other or both the voices. But there was something much more than sound about Ransom and his heart began beating fast.
“The morning . . . do you mean . . . ?” he asked. “Is all well? Has the Queen found the King?”
“The world is born today,” said Malacandra. “Today for the first time two creatures of the low worlds, two images of Maleldil that breathe and breed like the beasts, step up that step at which your parents fell, and sit in the throne of what they were meant to be. It was never seen before. Because it did not happen in your world a greater thing happened, but not this. Because the greater thing happened in Thulcandra, this and not the greater thing happens here.”
“Elwin is falling to the ground,” said the other voice.
“Be comforted,” said Malacandra. “It is no doing of yours. You are not great, though you could have prevented a thing so great that Deep Heaven sees it with amazement. Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad. Have no fear, lest your shoulders be bearing this world. Look! it is beneath your head and carries you.”
“Will they come here?” asked Ransom some time later.
“They are already well up the mountain’s side,” said Perelandra. “And our hour is upon us. Let us prepare our shapes. We are hard for them to see while we remain in ourselves.”
“It is very well said,” answered Malacandra. “But in what form shall we show ourselves to do them honour?”
“Let us appear to the small one here,” said the other. “For he is a man and can tell us what is pleasing to their senses.”
“I can see-I can see something even now,” said Ransom. “Would you have the King strain his eyes to see those who come to do him honour?” said the archon of Perelandra. “But look on this and tell us how it deals with you.”
The very faint light the almost imperceptible alterations in the visual field-which betokens an eldil vanished suddenly. The rosy peaks and the calm pool vanished also. A tornado of sheer monstrosities seemed to be pouring over Ransom. Darting pillars filled with eyes, lightning pulsations of flame, talons and beaks and billowy masses of what suggested snow, volleyed through cubes and heptagons into an infinite black void. “Stop it . . . stop it,” he yelled, and the scene cleared. He gazed round blinking on the fields of lilies, and presently gave the eldila to understand that this kind of appearance was not suited to human sensations. “Look then on this,” said the voices again. And he looked with some reluctance, and far off between the peaks on the other side of the little valley there came rolling wheels. There was nothing but that-concentric wheels moving with a rather sickening slowness one inside the other. There was nothing terrible about them if you could get used to their appalling size, but there was also nothing significant. He bade them to try yet a third time. And suddenly two human figures stood before him on the opposite side of the lake.
They were taller than the Sorns, the giants whom he had met in Mars. They were perhaps thirty feet high. They were burning white like white-hot iron. The outline of their bodies when he looked at it steadily against the red landscape seemed to be faintly, swiftly undulating as though the permanence of their shape, like that of waterfalls or flames, co-existed with a rushing movement of the matter it contained. For a fraction of an inch inward from this outline the landscape was just visible through them: beyond that they were opaque.
Whenever he looked straight at them they appeared to be rushing towards him with enormous speed: whenever his eyes took in their surroundings he realised that they were stationary. This may have been due in part to the fact that their long and sparkling hair stood out straight behind them as if in a great wind. But if there were a wind it was not made of air, for no petal of the flowers was shaken. They were not standing quite vertically in relation to the floor of the valley: but to Ransom it appeared (as it had appeared to me on Earth when I saw one) that the eldiis were vertical. It was the valley-it was the whole world of Perelandra-which was aslant. He remembered the words of Oyarsa long ago in Mars, “I am not hTe in the same way that you are here.” It was borne in upon him that the creatures, were really moving, though not moving in relation to him. This planet which inevitably seemed to him while he was in it an unmoving world-the world, in fact-was to there a thing moving through the heavens. In relation to their own celestial frame of reference they were rushing forward to keep abreast of the mountain valley. Had they stood still, they would have flashed past him too quickly for him to see, doubly dropped behind by the planet’s spin on its own axis and by its onward march around the Sun.
Their bodies, he said, were white. But a flush of diverse colours began at about the shoulders and streamed tap the necks and dickered over face and head and stood out around the head like plumage or a halo. He told me he could in a sense remember these colours-that is, he would know them if he saw them again-but that he cannot by any effort call up a visual image of them nor give them any name. The very few people with whom he and I can discuss these matters all give the same explanation. We think that when creatures of the hypersomatic kind choose to “appear” to us, they are not in fact affecting our retina at all, but directly manipulating the relevant parts of our brain. If so, it is quite possible that they can produce there the sensations we should have if our eyes were capable of receiving those colours in the spectrum which are actually beyond their range. The “plumage” or halo of the one eldil was extremely different .from that of the other. The Oyarsa of Mars shone with cold and morning colours, a little metallic-pure, hard, and bracing. The Oyarsa of Venus glowed with a warm splendour, full of the suggestion of teeming vegetable life.
The faces surprised him very much. Nothing less like the “angel” of popular art could well be imagined. The rich variety, the hint of undeveloped possibilities, which make the interest of human faces, were entirely absent. One single, changeless expression-so clear that it hurt and dazzled him was stamped on each and there was nothing else there at all. In that sense their faces were as “primitive”, as unnatural, if you like, as those of archaic statues from Aegina. What this one thing was he could not be certain. He concluded in the end that it was charity. But it was terrifyingly different from the expression of human charity, which we always see either blossoming out of, or hastening to descend into, natural affection. Here there was no affection at all: no least lingering memory of it even at ten million years” distance, no germ from which it could spring in any future, however remote. Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot from their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity.
Both the bodies were naked, and both were free from any sexual characteristics, either primary or secondary. That, one would have expected. But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try-Ransom has tried a hundred times to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. But I don’t know that any of these attempts has helped me much. At all events what Ransom saw at
