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DARKNESS fell upon the waves as suddenly as if it had been poured out of a bottle As soon as the colours and the distances were thus taken away, sound and pain became more emphatic The world was reduced to a dull ache, and sudden stabs, and the beating of the fish&039;s fins, and the monotonous yet infinitely varied noises of the water Then he found hi off the fish, recovered his seat with difficulty, and realised that he had been asleep, perhaps for hours He foresaw that this danger would continually recur After some consideration he levered himself painfully out of the narrow saddle behind its head and stretched his body at full length along the fish&039;s back He parted his legs and wound them about the creature as far as he could and did the sa that thus he could retain hisIt was the best he could do A strange thrilling sensation crept over him, coave hi bestial life, as if he were hi after this he found hiht to have terrified him but, as sometireenish face shining apparently by its own light The eyes were oblin appearance A fringe of corrugated ested whiskers With a shock he realised that he was not drea, sore and wearied, on the body of the fish and this face belonged to soside hi subhtened, and he guessed that the creature&039;s reaction to hih not hostile, bewilderment Each holly irrelevant to the other They met as the branches of different trees ether
Ranso position He found that the darkness was not complete His own fish swaer at his side All about hiht and he could dimly make out from the shapes which were fish and which were the water-people Their movements faintly indicated the contours of the waves and introduced soht He noticed presently that several of the water-people in his i dark -like hands and devouring it As theyout of their mouths in bushy and shredded bundles and looked like nificant that it never occurred to his, as he had done with every other animal on Perelandra, nor did they try to establish any with him They did not seem to be the natural subjects of ot the impression that they simply shared a planet with hi the other Later, this came to be a trouble in his mind: but for the ht of their eating had re whether the stuff they ate were eatable by hiers, to catch any of it When at last he did it turned out to be of the saeneral structure as one of our smaller seaweeds, and to have little bladders that popped when one pressed theh and slippery, but not salt like the weeds of a Tellurian sea What it tasted like, he could never properly describe It is to be noted all through this story that while Ranso e as well as pleasure, though not a knowledge that can be reduced to words As soon as he had eaten a few ed He felt the surface of the sea to be the top of the world He thought of the floating islands as we think of clouds; he saw theination as they would appear fro down froly conscious of his own experience in walking on the topside of them as a miracle or a myth He felt his memory of the Green Lady and all her promised descendants and all the issues which had occupied hi from his mind, as a dream fades ake, or as if it were shouldered aside by a whole world of interests and eive no naer he threw the rest of the weed away
He ain, for the next scene that he reht The Un-man was still visible ahead, and the shoal of fishes was still spread out between it and him The birds had abandoned the chase And now at last a full and prosaic sense of his position descended upon hie from Ransoe planet he at first quite forgets its size That whole world is so sh space that he forgets the distances within it: any two places in Mars, or in Venus, appear to him like places in the same town But now, as Ranso in every direction but golden sky and tu waves, the full absurdity of this delusion was j borne in upon hiht well be divided from the nearest of them by the breadth of the Pacific or more But he had no reason to suppose that there were any He had no reason to suppose that even the floating islands were very numerous, or that they were equally distributed over the surface of the planet Even if their loose archipelago spread over a thousand squarein a landless ocean that rolled for ever round a globe not much smaller than the World of Men? Soon his fish would be tired Already, h fancied, it was not swiinal speed The Unman would doubtless torture its mount to swi of these things and staring ahead, he saw so that turned his heart cold One of the other fish deliberately turned out of line, spurted a little column of foa In a few h
And now the experiences of the past day and night began to make a direct assault upon his faith The solitude of the seas and, still more, the experiences which had followed his taste of the seaweed, had insinuated a doubt as to whether this world in any real sense belonged to those who called the and Queen How could it be made for them when most of it, in fact, was uninhabitable by thehest degree? As for the great prohibition, on which so- was it really so important? What did these roarers with the yellow foae people who lived in them, care whether two little creatures, now far away, lived or did not live on one particular rock? The parallelism between the scenes he had lately witnessed and those recorded in the Book of Genesis, and which had hitherto given hi by experience what other an to shrink in i more than that similar irrational taboos had accompanied the dawn of reason in two different worlds? It was all very well to talk of Maleldil: but where was Maleldil now? If thus illi very different Like all solitudes it was, indeed, haunted: but not by an anthropomorphic Deity, rather by the wholly inscrutable to which man and his life remained eternally irrelevant And beyond this ocean was space itself In vain did Ransom try to remember that he had been in &039;space&039; and found it Heaven, tingling with a fullness of life for which infinity itself was not one cubic inch too large All that seeht which he had ofteninto his alaxies, its light years and evolutions, its night that can possibly hold significance for the mind becomes the mere by-product of essential disorder Always till now he had belittled it, had treated with a certain disdain its flat superlatives, its clownish as should be of different sizes, its glib munificence of ciphers Even now, his reason was not quite subdued, though his heart would not listen to his reason Part of hi is the least important characteristic, that theand mythopoeic poithin him that very majesty before which he was now asked to abase himself, and that mere numbers could not overawe us unless we lent them, from our own resources, that awfulness which they theer But this knowledge reness and loneliness overbore hihts must have taken several hours and absorbed all his attention He was aroused by what he least expected the sound of a hu from his reverie he saw that all the fishes had deserted hi feebly: and there a few yards away, no longer fleeing hiing itself, its eyes almost shut up with bruises, its flesh the colour of liver, its leg apparently broken, its mouth twisted with pain
"Ranso to encourage it to start that gaain in a broken voice, "for God&039;s sake speak to lanced at it in surprise Tears were on its cheeks "Ransom, don&039;t cold-shoulder me," it said "Tell me what has happened What have they done to us? You - you&039;re " bleeding My leg&039;s broken" its voice died away in whimper
"Who are you?" he asked sharply
"Oh, don&039;t pretend you don&039;t know me," mumbled Weston&039;s voice "I&039;m Weston You&039;re Ransoist We&039;ve had our quarrels I know I&039; Ransom, you&039;ll not leave me to die in this horrible place, will you?"
"Where did you learn Ara his eyes on the other
"Aramaic?" said Weston&039;s voice "I don&039;t knohat you&039; talking about It&039;s notan to think that Weston had actually come back
"Who else should I be?" cae of tears
"Where have you been?" asked Ransom
Weston - if it was Weston - shuddered "Where are ?" he asked presently
"In Perelandra - Venus, you know," answered Ransom "Have you found the space-ship?" asked Weston
"I never saw it except at a distance," said Ransom "And I&039;ve no idea where it is now - a couple of hundred miles away for all I know"
"You mean we&039;re trapped?" said Weston, al and the other bowed his head and cried like a baby
"Co it like that Hang it all, you&039;d not be much better off if you were on Earth You re a war there The Ger London to bits at this , he added, "Buck up, Weston It&039;s only death, all said and done We should have to die soer - without thirst - isn&039;t too bad As for drowning - well, a bayonet wound, or cancer, would be worse"
"Youto leave me," said Weston "I can&039;t, even if I wanted to," said Ransom "Don&039;t you see I&039;m in the sao off and leave ht, I&039;ll proo to?" Weston looked very slowly all round and then urged his fish little nearer to Ransom&039;s
"Where isit?" he asked in a whisper "You know," and he ht ask you the same question," said Ransom
"Me?" said Weston His face was, in one way and another, so disfigured that it was hard to be sure expression Have you any idea of what&039;s been happening to you for the last few days?" said Ransom
Weston once more looked all round him uneasily "It&039;s all true, you know," he said at last "What&039;s all true?" said Ransoe "It&039;s all very well for you," he said "Drowning doesn&039;t hurt and death is bound to come anyway, and all that nonsense What do you know about death? It&039;s all true, I tell you"
"What are you talking about?"
"I&039;ve been stuffing myself up with a lot of nonsense allto persuade myself that itto believe that anything you can do will make the universe bearable It&039;s all rot, do you see?"
"And so else is truer!"
"Yes," said Weston, and then was silent for a long time "We&039;d better turn our fishes head on to this," said Ransom presently, his eyes on the sea, "or we&039;ll be driven apart" Weston obeyed without see to notice what he did, and for a ti very slowly side by side
"I&039;ll tell you what&039;s true," said Weston presently "What?"
"A little child that creeps upstairs when nobody&039;s looking and very slowly turns the handle to take one peep into the roorandmother&039;s dead body is laid out - and then runs away and has bad drearand that&039;s truer?"