C.S. Lewis - Perelandra (Space Trilogy, Book 2)

Space Trilogy 2 - Perelandra

HE woke, after a disturbed and dreamfulsleep, in full daylight. He had a dry mouth, a crick in his neck, and asoreness in his limbs. It was so unlike all previous wakings in the world ofVenus, that for a moment he supposed himself back on Earth: and the dream (forso it seemed to him) of having lived and walked on the oceans of the MorningStar rushed through his memory with a sense of lost sweetness that waswell-nigh unbearable. Then he sat up and the facts came back to him. Itsjolly nearly the same as having waked from a dream, though, he thought. Hungerand thirst became at once his dominant sensations, but he conceived it a dutyto look first at the sick manthough with very little hope that he could helphim. He gazed round. There was the grove of silvery trees all right, but hecould not see Weston. Then he glanced at the bay; there was no punt either.Assuming that in the darkness he had blundered into the wrong valley, he roseand approached the stream for a drink. As he lifted his face from the waterwith a long sigh of satisfaction, his eyes suddenly fell on a little wooden boxandthen beyond it on a couple of tins. His brain was working rather slowly and ittook him a few seconds to realise that he was in the right valley after all,and a few more to draw conclusions from the fact that the box was open andempty, and that some of the stores had been removed and others left behind. Butwas it possible that a man in Westons physical condition could have recoveredsufficiently during the night to strike camp and to go away laden with somekind of pack? Was it possible that any man could have faced a sea like that ina collapsible punt? It was true, as he now noticed for the first time, that thestorm (which had been a mere squall by Perelandrian standards) appeared to haveblown itself out during the night; but there was still a quite formidable swelland it seemed out of the question that the Professor could have left theisland. Much more probably he hadleft the valley on foot and carried the puntwith him. Ransom decided that he must find Weston at once: he must keep intouch with his enemy. For if Weston had recovered, there was no doubt he meantmischief of some kind. Ransom was not at all certain that he had understood allhis wild talk on the previous day; but what he did understand he disliked verymuch, and suspected that this vague mysticism about spirituality would turnout to be something even nastier than his old and comparatively simpleprogramme of planetary imperialism. It would be unfair to take seriously thethings the man had said immediately before his seizure, no doubt; but there wasenough without that.

The next few hours Ransom passed insearching the island for food and for Weston. As far as food was concerned, hewas rewarded. Some fruit like bilberries could be gathered in handfuls on theupper slopes, and the wooded valleys abounded in a kind of oval nut. The kernelhad a toughly soft consistency, rather like cork or kidneys, and the flavour,though somewhat austere and prosaic after the fruit of the floating islands,was not unsatisfactory. The giant mice were as tame as other Perelandrianbeasts but seemed stupider. Ransom ascended to the central plateau. The sea wasdotted with islands in every direction, rising and falling with the swell, andall separated from one another by wide stretches of water. His eye at oncepicked out an orange-coloured island, but he did not know whether it was thaton which he had been living, for he saw at least two others in which the samecolour predominated. At one time he counted twenty-three floating islands inall. That, he thought, was more than the temporary archipelago had contained,and allowed him to hope that any one of those he saw might hide the Kingorthat the King might even at this moment be re-united to the Lady. Withoutthinking it out very clearly, he had come to rest almost all his hopes on theKing.

Of Weston he could find no trace. It reallydid seem, in spite of all improbabilities, that he had somehow contrived toleave the Fixed Island; and Ransoms anxiety was very great. What Weston, inhis new vein, might do, he had no idea. The best to hope for was that he wouldsimply ignore the master and mistress of Perelandra as mere savages or natives.

Late in the day, being tired, he sat downon the shore. There was very little swell now and the waves, just before theybroke, were less than knee-deep. His feet, made soft by the mattress-like surfacewhich one walks on in those floating islands, were hot and sore. Presently hedecided to refresh them by a little wading. The delicious quality of the waterdrew him out till he was waist-deep. As he stood there, deep in thought, hesuddenly perceived that what he had taken to be an effect of light on the waterwas really the back of one of the great silvery fish. I wonder would it let meride it? he thought; and then, watching how the beast nosed towards him andkept itself as near the shallows as it dared, it was borne in upon him that itwas trying to attract his attention. Could it have been sent? The thought hadno sooner darted through his mind than he decided to make the experiment. Helaid his hand across the creatures back, and it did not flinch from his touch.Then with some difficulty he scrambled into a sitting position across thenarrow part behind its head, and while he was doing this it remained as nearlystationary as it could; but as soon as he was firmly in the saddle it whiskeditself about and headed for the sea.

If he had wished to withdraw, it was verysoon impossible to do so. Already the green pinnacles of the mountain, as helooked back, had withdrawn their summits from the sky and the coastline of theisland had begun to conceal its bays and nesses. The breakerswere no longer audibleonly the prolonged sibilant or chattering noises of thewater about him. Many floating islands were visible, though seen from thislevel they were mere feather silhouettes. But the fish seemed to be heading fornone of these. Straight on, as if it well knew its way, the beat of the greatfins carried him for more than an hour. Then green and purple splashed thewhole world, and after that darkness.

Somehow he felt hardly any uneasiness whenhe found himself swiftly climbing and descending the low hills of water throughthe black night. And here it was not all black. The heavens had vanished, andthe surface of the sea; but far, far below him in the heart of the vacancythrough which he appeared to be travelling, strange bursting star shells andwrithing streaks of a bluish-green luminosity appeared. At first they were veryremote, but soon, as far as he could judge, they were nearer. A whole world ofphosphorescent creatures seemed to be at play not far from the surfacecoilingeels and darting things in complete armour, and then heraldically fantastic shapesto which the sea-horse of our own waters would be commonplace. They were allround himtwenty or thirty of them often in sight at once. And mixed with allthis riot of sea-centaurs and sea-dragons he saw yet stranger forms: fishes, iffishes they were, whose forward part was so nearly human in shape that when hefirst caught sight of them he thought he had fallen into a dream and shookhimself to awake. But it was no dream. Thereand there againit wasunmistakable: now a shoulder, now a profile, and then for one second a fullface: veritable mermen or mermaids. The resemblance to humanity was indeedgreater, not less, than he had first supposed. What had for a moment concealedit from him was the total absence of human expression. Yet the faces were notidiotic; they were not even brutal parodies of humanity like those of ourterrestrial apes. They were more like human faces asleep, or faces in whichhumanity slept while some other life, neither bestial nor diabolic, but merelyelvish, out of our orbit, was irrelevantly awake. He remembered his oldsuspicion that what was myth in one world might always be fact in some other.He wondered also whether the Kung and Queen of Perelandra, though doubtless thefirst human pair of this planet, might on the physical side have a marineancestry. And if so, what then of the man-like things before men in our ownworld? Must they in truth have been the wistful brutalities whose pictures wesee in popular books on evolution? Or were the old myths truer than the modernmyths? Had there in truth been a time when satyrs danced in the Italian woods?But he said Hush to his mind at this stage, for the mere pleasure ofbreathing in. the fragrance which now began to steal towards him from theblackness ahead. Warm and sweet, and every moment sweeter and purer, and everymoment stronger and more filled with all delights, it came to him. He knew wellwhat it was. He would know it henceforward out of the whole universethe nightbreath of a floating island in the star Venus. It was strange to be filled withhomesickness for places where his sojourn had been so brief and which were, byany objective standard, so alien to all our race. Or were they? The cord oflonging which drew him to the invisible isle seemed to him at that moment tohave been fastened long, long before his coming to Perelandra, long before theearliest times that memory could recover in his childhood, before his birth,before the birth of man himself, before the origins of time. It was sharp,sweet, wild, and holy, all in one, and in any world where mens nerves haveceased to obey their central desires would doubtless have been aphrodisiac too,but not in Perelandra. The fish was no longer moving. Ransom put out his hand.He found he was touching weed. He crawled forward over the head of themonstrous fish, and levered himself on to the gently moving surface of theisland. Short as his absence from such places had been, his earth-trained habitsof walking had reasserted themselves, and he fell more than once as he gropedhis way on the heaving lawn. But it did not harm falling here; good luck to it!There were trees all about him in the dark and when a smooth, cool, roundedobject came away in his hand he put it, unfearing, to his lips. It was none ofthe fruits he had tasted before. It was better than any of them. Well might theLady say of her world that the fruit you ate at any moment was, at that moment,the best. Wearied with his days walking and climbing, and, still more, bornedown by absolute satisfaction, he sank into dreamless sleep.