Page 3 (1/1)

WHAT it is like to travel in a celestial coffin was a thing that Ransom never described He said he couldn&039;t But odd hints about that journey have co of quite differentto his own account he was not e call conscious, and yet at the same time the experience was a very positive one with a quality of its own On one occasion, so life&039; in the popular sense of knocking about the world and getting to know people, and B, as present (and who is an Anthroposophist), said so life&039; in a very different sense I think he was referring to some system of meditation which claimed to make &039;the form of Life itself&039; visible to the inner eye At any rate Ranso to conceal the fact that he attached some very definite idea to this He even went so far under extreme pressure - as to say that life appeared to him, in that condition, as a &039;coloured shape Asked &039;What colours?&039;, he gave a curious look and could only say &039;What colours! Yes, what colours!&039; But then he spoiled it all by adding, &039;of course it wasn&039;t colour at all really Iup co Another hint cauing against the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the hu on me in his Scots ith such questions its "So you think you&039;re going to have guts and palate for ever in a world where there&039;ll be no eating, and genital organs in a world without copulation? Man, ye&039;ll have a grand tireat excitement, "Oh, don&039;t you see, you ass, that there&039;s a difference between a transensuous life and a non-sensuous life?" That, of course, directed McPhee&039;s fire to hied was that in Ransom&039;s opinion the present functions and appetites of the body would disappear, not because they were atrophied but because they were, as he said &039;engulfed&039; He used the word &039;Transexual&039;, I rean to hunt about for so &039;trans-gastronoist present, that diverted the conversation into different channels But I a he had experienced on his voyage to Venus But perhaps thehe ever said about it was this I was, questioning him on the subject - which he doesn&039;t often allow - and had incautiously said, "Of course I realise it&039;s all rather too vague for you to put into words," when he took , "On the contrary, it is words that are vague The reason why the thing can&039;t be expressed is that it&039;s too definite for language" And that is about all I can tell you of his journey One thing is certain, that he caed than he had come back from Mars But of course that may have been because of what happened to hi, as Ransom narrated it to me, I will now proceed He seeht word) from his indescribable celestial state by the sensation of falling - in other words, when he was near enough to Venus to feel Venus as so he noticed was that he was very warh neither sensation was so extreme as to be really painful Anyway, both were soon sed up in the prodigious white light froh the semi-opaque walls of the casket This steadily increased and beca in spite of the fact that his eyes were protected There is no doubt this was the albedo, the outer veil of very dense atmosphere hich Venus is surrounded and which reflects the sun&039;s rays with intense power For some obscure reason he was not conscious, as he had been on his approach to Mars, of his own rapidly increasing weight When the white light was just about to becoether, and very soon after the cold on his left side and the heat on his right began to decrease and to be replaced by an equable warmth I take it he was now in the outer layer of the Perelandrian atht The prevailing colour, as far as he could see through the sides of the casket, was golden or coppery By this time he must have been very near the surface of the planet, with the length of the casket at right angles to that surface - falling feet doards like a- helpless as he was and unable toThen suddenly there careen darkness, an unidentifiable noise - the first e from the neorld - and a marked drop in temperature He seemed now to have assureat surprise, to be h, at the ed this to" be an illusion All this ti faint, unconscious efforts to move his limbs, for now he suddenly found that the sides of his prison-house yielded to pressure He washis limbs, encumbered with some viscous substance Where was the casket? His sensations were very confused So upwards, and then again to bein the horizontal plane The viscous substance hite There seemed to be less of it every moment "white, cloudy stuff just like the casket, only not solid With a horrible shock he realised that it was the casket, the casketplace to an indescribable confusion of colour - a rich, varied world in which nothing, for the moment, seemed palpable There was no casket now He was turned out - deposited solitary He was in Perelandra

His first i slanted - as though he were looking at a photograph which had been taken when the camera was not held level And even this lasted only for an instant The slant was replaced by a different slant; then two slants rushed together and made a peak, and the peak flattened suddenly into a horizontal line, and the horizontal line tilted and beca slope which rushed furiously towards hi lifted Up and up he soared till it see above him instead of a sky Then he was at a sue valley that yawned beneath hilass anddown into that valley at perhaps thirty miles an hour And now he realised that there was a delicious coolness over every part of hi,, and that I" had for so unconsciously the ac Of a swi the foamless swell of a fresh and cool after the fierce temperatures of Heaven, but warm by earthly standards - as warm as a shallow bay with sandy bottoreat convex hillside of the next wave he got a mouthful of the water It was hardly at all flavoured with salt; it was drinkable - like fresh water and only, by an infinitesih he had not been aware of thirst till now, his drink gave hi Pleasure itself for the first tireen translucence, and when he withdrew it, found himself once ht The sky was pure, flat gold like the background of a medieval picture It looked very distant as far off as a cirrus cloud looks fro, flecked with innuolden where their sureen on their slopes: first e to blue where they passed beneath the shadow of other waves

All this he saw in a flash; then he was speeding down once h He had soolden roof of that world quivering with a rapid variation of paler lights as a ceiling quivers at the reflected sunlight from the bath-water when you step into your bath on a suuessed that this was the reflection of the waves wherein he swam It is a phenomenon observable three out of five in the planet of love The queen of those seas views herself continually in a celestial ht of land So t looked like clouds - or could it be ships? - far away on his ft Then, down, down, down - he thought he would never, reach the end of itthis tiht was Such tepid revelry in water - such glorious bathing, as one would have called it on earth, suggested as its natural acco The water gleaold, but all was rich and di The very na the scene, are too harsh for the tenderness, the eous world It was entle and winning like early dawn It was altogether pleasurable, He sighed

There was a wave ahead of hih that it was dreadful We speak idly in our oorld of seas h But this was the real thing If the huge shape had been a hill of land and not of water hethe slope before he reached the suathered him into itself and hurled him up to that elevation in a matter of seconds But before he reached the top, he almost cried out in terror For this wave had not a sed and billowy and fantastic shapes, unnatural, even unliquid, in appearance, sprouted froe Rocks? Foah hiswas upon him Involuntarily he shut his eyes Then he found hione past hi He had been struck in the face Dabbing with his hands he found no blood He had been struck by so like a lash because of the speed at which he ain - already, as he did so, soaring thousands of feet aloft to the high water of the next ridge Far below hi that had ularly shaped object with ated in colour like a patch-work quilt - flae, and violet He could not say li was, it was floating, for it rushed up the slope of the opposite wave and over the suht It sat to the water like a skin, curving as the water curved It took the wave&039;s shape at the top, so that for a e and the other half still lying on the higher slope It behaved rather like a mat of weeds on a river - a mat of weeds that takes on every contour of the little ripples youpast it but on a very different scale This thing ht have been thirty acres or ht of the fact that his whole life on Venus up till now had lasted less than five minutes He was not in the least tired, and not yet seriously alar in such a world He had confidence in those who had sent him there, and for the mean time the coolness of the water and the freedoht; butelse at which I have already hinted and which can hardly be put into words - the strange sense of excessive pleasure which seeh all his senses at once I use the word &039;excessive&039; because Ranso that for his first few days on Perelandra he was haunted, not by a feeling of guilt, but by surprise that he had no such feeling There was an exuberance or prodigality of sweetness about thewhich our race finds it difficult not to associate with forbidden and extravagant actions Yet it is a violent world too Hardly had he lost sight of the floating object when his eyes were stabbed by an unendurable light A grading, blue-to-violet illuolden sky seem dark by comparison and in a moment of time revealed more of the new planet than he had yet seen He saw the waste of waves spread illimitably before hiainst the sky, a single s fixed and vertical in this universe of shifting slopes Then the rich twilight rushed back (now see almost darkness) and he heard thunder But it has a different timbre from terrestrial thunder,It is the laugh, rather than the roar, of heaven Another flash followed, and another, and then the stor between hiolden sky, and with no prelian to fall There were no lines in it; the water above him seemed only less continuous than the sea, and he found it difficult to breathe The flashes were incessant In between them, when he looked in any direction except that of the clouds, he saw a co at the centre of a rainbow, or in a cloud of multi-coloured stea sea and sky into a bedla transparencies He was dazzled and now for the first tihtened In the flashes he saw, as before, only the endless sea and the still green coluestion of a shore from one horizon to the other

The thunder was ear-splitting and it was difficult to get enough air All sorts of things sees apparently They looked like preternaturally airy and graceful frogs - sublion-flies, but he was in no plight toto feel the first symptoms of exhaustion and was completely confused by the not of colours in the at this state of affairs lasted he could not say, but the next thing that he re with any accuracy was that the sas decreasing He got the ie of watertime he never reached this lower country; what had seemed, by comparison with the seas which he had met on his first arrival, to be calhtly smaller waves when he rushed down into the objects about And these, again, froo, but always, as he drew nearer and found the roughness of the water they were riding, they became more like a fleet But in the end there was no doubt that the sas subsiding The rain stopped The waves were rew fainter and olden sky first showed tiain froan to breathe freely But he was now really tired, and beginning to find leisure to be afraid

One of the great patches of floating stuff was sidling doave not erly, wondering whether he could clily suspected that they would prove mere mats of weed, or the top hiht this, the particular one on which his eyes were fixed crept up a wave and came between him and the sky It was not flat From its tawny surface a whole series of feathery and billowy shapes arose, very unequal in height; they looked darkish against the diolden roof Then they all tilted one way as the thing which carried theht But here was another, not thirty yards away and bearing down on hi as he did so how sore and feeble his ar his first thrill of true fear As he approached it he saw that it ended in a fringe of undoubtedly vegetable matter; it trailed; in fact, a dark red skirt, of tubes and strings and bladders He grabbed at the desperately, for the thing was gliding past hiot a handful of whip-like red strings, but they pulled out of his hand and al theht before hiling tubes and exploding bladders; nextalmost like very soft wood Then, with the breath nearly knocked out of hi face doard on a resistant surface He pulled himself an inch or so farther Yes - there was no doubt now; one did not go through; it was so one could lie on

It see and thinking nothing for a very long tis he was, at all events, well rested His first discovery was that he lay on a dry surface, which on exa very like heather, except for the colour which was coppery Burrowing idly with his fingers he found so friable like dry soil, but very little of it, for alh interlocked fibres Then he rolled on his back, and in doing so discovered the extre etation, and felt etation were a kind of mattress He turned and looked &039;inland&039; - if that is the right word - and for one instant what he saw looked very like a country He was looking up a long lonely valley with a copper coloured floor bordered on each side by gentle slopes clothed in a kind of many-coloured forest But even as he took this in, it beca down on each side of it Of course he ought to have been prepared for this, but he says that it gave hi had looked, in that first glance, so like a real country that he had forgotten it was floating - an island if you like, with hills and valleys, but hills and valleys which changed places every raph could make a contourislands of Perelandra A photograph, o the colours and the perpetual variation of shape, would make them look deceptively like landscapes in our oorld, but the reality is very different; for they, are dry and fruitful like land but their only shape is the inconstant shape of the water beneath them Yet the land-like appearance proved hard to resist: Although he had now grasped with his brain as happening, Ransorasped it with his muscles and nerves He rose to take a few paces inland - and downhill, as it was at thedown on his face,&039; unhurt because of the softness of the weed He scrambled to his feet - saw that he now had a steep slope to ascend - and fell a second time A blessed relaxation of the strain in which he had been living since his arrival dissolved hirant surface in a real schoolboy fit of the giggles

This passed And then for the next hour or two he was teaching his on a ship, for whatever the sea is doing the deck of the ship re to walk on water itself It took hie, or coast, of the floating island; and he was proud when he could go five paces without a fall, are of balance, his whole body swaying and tense like that of one who is learning to walk the tight-rope Perhaps he would have learned more quickly if his falls had not been so soft, if it had not been so pleasant, having fallen, to he still and gaze at the golden roof and hear the endless soothing noise of the water and breathe in the curiously delightful se, after rolling head over heels down into some little dell, to open his eyes and find himself seated on the centraldown like Robinson Crusoe on field" and forest to the shores in every direction, that a er - and then being detained again because, even as he made to rise, mountain and valley alike had been obliterated and the whole island had beco last he reached the wooded part There was an undergrowth of feathery vegetation, about the height of gooseberry hushes, coloured like sea anee trees with tube-like trunks of grey and purple spreading rich canopies above his head, in which orange, silver, and blue were the predominant colours Here, with the aid of the tree trunks, he could keep his feet more easily The smells in the forest were beyond all that he had ever conceived To say that they ; al that seemed to flow over froain and again he stood still, clinging to some branch to steady hi had become a kind of ritual And at the same time the forest landscape furnished ould have been a dozen landscapes on Earth - now level ith trees as vertical as towers, now a deep bottorowing on a hillside, and now again, a hilltop whence one looked down through slanted boles at the distant sea Save for the inorganic sound of waves there was utter silence about hi at all painful - only adding, as it were, a last touch of wildness to the unearthly pleasures that surrounded him If he had any fear now, it was a faint apprehension that his reason ht overload a hureat globes of yellow fruit hung from the trees - clustered as toy-balloons are clustered on the back of the balloon-man and about the same size He picked one of them and turned it over and over The rind was smooth and firm and seeers punctured it and went through into coldness After a moment&039;s hesitation he put the, little aperture to his lips He had meant to extract the smallest" experiht It was, of course, a taste, just as his thirst and hunger had been thirst and hunger But then it was so different from every other taste that it seemed mere pedantry to call it a taste at all&039; It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures,: so, beyond all covenant For one draught of this on Earth ould be fought and nations betrayed It could not be classified He could never tell us, when lie came back to the world of men, whether it was sharp or sweet, savoury or voluptuous, crea &039;loot like that&039; was all he could ever say to such inquiries As he let the eourd fall from his hand and was about to pluck a second one, it cary nor thirsty And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and al to do His reason, or e commonly take to be reason in our oorld, was all in favour of tasting this ain; the child-like innocence of fruit, the labours he had undergone, the uncertainty of the future, all see seemed opposed to this &039;reason&039; It is difficult to suppose that this opposition came from desire, for what desire would turn from so much deliciousness? But for whatever cause, it appeared to hiain Perhaps the experience had been so co to hear the sa over this and wondering how often in his life on Earth he had reiterated pleasures not through desire, but in the teeth of desire and in obedience to a spurious rationalis It was darker behind hih the ith a changed intensity To step out of the forest would have been aisland it took hied into the open an extraordinary spectacle met his eyes All day there had been no variation at any point in the golden roof to mark the sun&039;s position, but now the whole of one half heaven revealed it The orb itself rereen so luminous that he could not look at it, and beyond that, spreading alreat fan of colour like a peacock&039;s tail Looking over his shoulder he saw the whole island ablaze with blue, and across it and beyond it, even to the ends of the world, his own enormous shadow The sea, far cale doloht wind, full of sweetness, lifted the hair on his forehead The day was burning to death Eachnot far reed on the edge of the island, the desolate lord, it seemed, of this soleht have been sent to an uninhabited world, and the terror added, as it were, a razor-edge to all that profusion of pleasure

Once ht have anticipated took hi summer fruits and lie in sweet heather - all this had led hireyness But before the great apocalyptic colours had died out in the west, the eastern heaven was black A few moments, and the blackness had reached the western horizon A little reddish light lingered at the zenith for a ti which he crawled back to the woods It was already, in common parlance, &039;too dark to see your way&039; But before he had lain down aht had co in a coal-cellar, darkness in which his own hand held before his face was totally invisible Absolute blackness, the undimensioned, the impenetrable, pressed on his eyeballs There is no olden roof But the darkness ar out of it The world had no size now Its boundaries were the length and breadth of his own body and the little patch of soft fragrance which ht covered him like a blanket and kept all loneliness froht have been his own room Sleep came like a fruit which falls into the hand almost before you have touched the stem