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"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 ato their senses"

"I can see - I can see so 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 sheerpillars filled with eyes, lightning pulsations of flaested snow, volleyed through cubes and heptagons into an infinite black void "Stop itstop 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 huain And he looked with some reluctance, and far off between the peaks on the other side of the little valley there ca but that - concentric wheelsslowness one inside the other There was nothing terrible about the size, but there was also nothing significant He bade theures stood before him on the opposite side of the lake

They were taller than the Sorns, the giants whoh They were burning white like white-hot iron The outline of their bodies when he looked at it steadily against the red landscape seeh the permanence of their shape, like that of waterfalls or fla movement of the matter it contained For a fraction of an inch inward froh theht at the towards him with enors he realised that they were stationary Thisand sparkling hair stood out straight behind thereat wind But if there were a wind it was not made of air, for no petal of the floas 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 eldils were vertical It was the valley - it was the whole world of Perelandra - which was aslant He reo in Mars, "I am not here in the same way that you are here" It was borne in upon hi in relation to him This planet which inevitably see world - the world, in fact - was to theh the heavens In relation to their own celestial fra 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&039;s spin on its own axis and by its onward march around the Sun

Their bodies, he said, hite But a flush of diverse colours began at about the shoulders and streamed up the necks and flickered over face and head and stood out around the head like plue or a halo He told me he could in a sense remember these colours - that is, he would know theain - but that he cannot by any effort call up a visual iive them any name The very few people hoive the same explanation We think that when creatures of the hypersomatic kind choose to &039;appear&039; to us, they are not in fact affecting our retina at all, but directlythe 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 spectrue&039; or halo of the one eldil was extremely different from that of the other The Oyarsa of Mars shone with cold andThe Oyarsa of Venus gloith a waretable life

The faces surprised hiel&039; of popular art could well be iined The rich variety, the hint of undeveloped possibilities, which make the interest of hueless expression, so clear that it hurt and dazzled hi else there at all In that sense their faces were as &039;primitive&039;, as unnatural, if you like, as those of archaic statues fro was he could not be certain He concluded in the end that it was charity But it was terrifyingly different from the expression of hu out of, or hastening to descend into, natural affection Here there was no affection at all: no least lingering er in any future, however remote Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot fro 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 thele feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was inore 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,like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him But I don&039;t know that any of these attempts has helped me much

At all events what Ransoender Everyone ues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine What is masculine about a mountain or fe that this is a purelyon the forinative extension of sex Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them The real process is the reverse Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex Sex is, in fact, anic life of a fundas Feender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where less Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated feanic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity

All this Ransom saw, as it were, with his own eyes The thite creatures were sexless But he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female) Malacandra see armed, at the railance, his eyes ever roao "A sailor&039;s look," Ransonated with distance" But the eyes of Perelandra opened, as it were, inward, as if they were the curtained gateway to a world of waves andairs, of life that rocked in winds and splashed on mossy stones and descended as the dew and arose sunward in thin-spun delicacy of mist On Mars the very forests are of stone; in Venus the lands swiht of them no more as Malacandra and Perelandra He called theht to himself, &039;My eyes have seen Mars and Venus I have seen Ares and Aphrodite&039; He asked them how they were known to the old poets of Tellus When and from whom had the children of Adam learned that Ares was a man of war and that Aphrodite rose froed, an eneods have no commerce there How then do we know of theh es There is an environment of minds as well as of space The universe is one - a spider&039;s herein each allery where (save for the direct action of Maleldil) though no news travels unchanged yet no secret can be rigorously kept In the roans, the ods hom he once consorted is still alive Nay, in the very matter of our world, the traces of the celestial coh the wo A faint breath, as Virgil says, reaches even the late generations Our y is based on a solider reality than we dream: but it is also at an almost infinite distance from that base And when they told hiy hat it was - gleale of filth and imbecility His cheeks burned on behalf of our race when he looked on the true Mars and Venus and remembered the follies that have been talked of them on Earth Then a doubt struck him

"But do I see you as you really are?" he asked

"Only Maleldil sees any creature as it really is," said Mars

"How do you see one another?" asked Ranso places in youronly an appearance? Is it not real at all?"

"You see only an appearance, small one You have never seen- not of Arbol, nor of a stone, nor of your own body This appearance is as true as what you see of those"

"Butthere were those other appearances"

"No There was only the failure of appearance"

"I don&039;t understand," said Ransos - the wheels and the eyes -in your question," said Mars "You can see a stone, if it is a fit distance fro at speeds not too different But if one throws the stone at your eye, what then is the appearance?"

"I should feel pain and perhaps see splintered light," said Ransom "But I don&039;t know that I should call that an appearance of the stone"&039;

"Yet it would be the true operation of the stone And there is your question answered We are now at the right distance from you"

"And were you nearer in what I first saw?"

"I do not mean that kind of distance"

"And then," said Ransoht was your wonted appearance - the very faint light, Oyarsa, as I used to see it in your oorld What of that?"

"That is enough appearance for us to speak to you by No more was needed between us: nothat ould now appear ht is the overflow or echo into the world of your senses of vehicles reater eldila"

At thisdisturbance of sound behind his back - of unco-ordinated sound, husky and pattering noises which broke in on the ods with a delicious note of war, gliding, crawling, waddling, with every kind of movement - in every kind of shape and colour and size - a whole zoo of beasts and birds was pouring into a flowery valley through the passes between the peaks at his back They ca upon one another, cli under one another&039;s bellies, perching upon one another&039;s backs Flareat red caverns of whinneying or of bleatingtails, surrounded hiht Ransom, and then, with sudden seriousness: &039;But there will be no ark needed in this world&039;

The song of four singing beasts rose in alreat eldil of Perelandra kept back the creatures to the hither side of the pool, leaving the opposite side of the valley empty except for the coffin-like object Ransom was not clear whether Venus spoke to the beasts or even whether they were conscious of her presence Her connection with them was perhaps of some subtler kind - quite different from the relations he had observed between them and the Green Lady Both the eldila were now on the same side of the pool with Ranso in the sae itself First, on the very brink of the pool, were the eldila, standing: between the the lilies Behind hi up on their haunches like fire-dogs, and proclaiain, the other animals The sense of ceremony deepened The expectation became intense In our foolish human fashion he asked a questionit "How can they cliain and yet be off this island before nightfall?" Nobody answered him He did not need an answer, for somehow he knew perfectly well that this island had never been forbidden the the other had been to lead theods said, "Be still"

Ransorown so used to the tinted softness of Perelandrian daylight - and specially since his journey in the dark guts of the mountain - that he had quite ceased to notice its difference froht of our oorld It was, therefore, with a shock of double amazement that he now suddenly saw the peaks on the far side of the valley showing really dark against what seemed a terrestrial dawn A , like the shadows at earlyback froround and each lily had its light and its dark side Up and up caht from the mountain slope It filled the whole valley The shadows disappeared again All was in a pure daylight that seemed to come from nowhere in particular He knew ever afterwards what is &039; a holy thing, but not eht reached its perfection and settled itself, as it were, like a lord upon his throne or like wine in a bowl, and filled the whole flowery cup of the , Paradise itself in its two Persons, Paradise walking hand in hand, its two bodies shining in the light like eht in the cleft between two peaks, and stood a al and pontifical benediction, and then walked down and stood on the far side of the water And the gods kneeled and bowed their huge bodies before the s and Queen