Out Of The Silent Planet (6 page)

'Now then,' said Weston, brushing past him. He turned and saw to his surprise, a quite
recognizable object in the immediate foreground' - a hut of unmistakably terrestrial pattern
though built of strange materials.

'They're human,' he gasped. 'They build houses?'

'We do,' said Devine. 'Guess again,' and, producing a key from his pocket, proceeded to unlock
a very ordinary padlock on the door of the hut. With a not very clearly defined feeling of
disappointment or relief Ransom realized that his captors were merely returning to their own
camp. They behaved as one might have expected. They walked into the hut, let down the slats
which served for windows, sniffed the close air, expressed' surprise that they had left it so
dirty, and presently reemerged.

'We'd better see about the stores,' said Weston.

Ransom soon found that he was to have little leisure for observation and no opportunity of
escape. The monotonous work of transferring food, clothes, weapons and many unidentifiable packages
from the ship to the hut kept him vigorously occupied for the next hour or so, and in the closest
contact with his kidnappers. But something he learned. Before anything else he learned that
Malacandra was beautiful; and he even reflected how odd it was that this possibility had never
entered into his speculations about it. The same peculiar twist of imagination which led him to
people the universe with monsters - had somehow taught him to expect nothing on a strange planet
except rocky desolation or else a network of nightmare machines. He could not say why, now that
he came to think of it. He also discovered that the blue water surrounded them on at least three
sides: his view in the fourth direction was blotted out by the vast steel football in which they
had come. The hut, in fact, was built either on the point of a peninsula or on the end of an island.
He also came little by little to the conclusion that the water was not merely blue in certain lights
like terrestrial water but 'really' blue. There was something about its behaviour under the gentle
breeze which puzzled him - something wrong or unnatural about the waves. For one thing, they were
too big for such a wind, but that was not the whole secret. They reminded him somehow of the
water that he had seen shooting up under the impact of shells in pictures of naval battles. Then
suddenly realization came to him: they were the wrong shape, out of drawing, far too high for their
length, 'too narrow at the base, too steep in the sides. He was reminded of something he had read
in one of those modern poets about a sea rising in 'turreted walls'.

'Catch!' shouted Devine. Ransom caught and hurled the parcel on to 'Weston at the hut door.

On one side the water extended a long way - about a quarter of a mile, he thought, but perspective
was still difficult in the strange world. On the other side it was much narrower, not wider than
fifteen feet perhaps, and seemed to be flowing over a shallow - broken and swirling water that
made a softer and more hissing sound than water on earth; and where it washed the hither bank -
the pinkish-white vegetation went down to the very brink - there was a bubbling and sparkling
which suggested effervescence. He tried hard, in such stolen glances as the work allowed him, to
make out something of the farther shore. A mass of something purple, so huge that he took it
for a heather-covered mountain, was his first impression: on the other side, beyond the larger
water, there was something of the same kind. But there, he could see over the top of it. Beyond
were strange upright shapes of whitish green; too jagged and irregular for buildings, too thin
and steep for mountains. Beyond and above these again was the rose-coloured cloud-like mass. It
might really be a cloud but it was very solid looking and did not seem to have moved since he first
set eyes on it from the manhole. It looked like the top of a gigantic red cauliflower - or like a
huge bowl of red soapsuds - and it was exquisitely beautiful in tint and shape.

Baffled by this, he turned his attention to the nearer shore beyond the shallows. The purple mass
looked for a moment like a plump of organ-pipes, then like a stack of rolls of cloth set up on
end, then like a forest of gigantic umbrellas blown inside out. It was in faint motion. Suddenly
his eyes mastered the object. The purple stuff was vegetation: more precisely it was vegetables,
vegetables about twice the height of English elms, but apparently soft and flimsy. The stalks -
one could hardly call them trunks - rose smooth and round, and surprisingly thin, for about
forty feet: above that, the huge plants opened into a sheaf-like development, not of branches but
of leaves, leaves large as lifeboats but nearly transparent. The whole thing corresponded roughly
to his idea of a submarine forest: the plants, at once so large and so frail, seemed to need water
to support them, and he wondered that they could hang in the air. Lower down, between the stems,
he saw the vivid purple twilight, mottled with paler sunshine, which made up the internal scenery
of the wood.

'Time for lunch,' said Devine suddenly. Ransom straightened his back; in spite of the thinness
and coldness of the air, his forehead was moist. They had been working hard and he was short of
breath. Weston appeared from the door of the hut and muttered something about finishing first'.
Devine, however, overruled him. A tin of beef and some biscuits were produced, and the men sat
down on the various boxes which were still plentifully littered between the spaceship and the
hut. Some whiskey again at Devine's suggestion and against Weston's advice was poured into the
tin cups and mixed with water: the latter, Ransom noticed, was drawn from their own water tins
and not from the blue lakes.

As often happens, the cessation of bodily activity drew Ransom's attention to the excitement
under which he had been labouring ever since their landing. Eating seemed almost out of the
question. Mindful, however, of a possible dash for liberty, he forced himself to eat very much
more than usual, and appetite returned as he ate. He devoured all that he could lay hands on
either of food or drink: and the taste of that first meal was ever after associated in his
mind with the first unearthly strangeness (never fully recaptured) of the bright, still;
sparkling unintelligible landscape - with needling shapes of pale green, thousands of feet
high, with sheets of dazzling blue soda-water, and acres of rose-red soapsuds. He was a
little afraid that his companions might notice, and suspect his new achievements as a
trencherman; but their attention was otherwise engaged. Their eyes never ceased roving the
landscape; they spoke abstractedly and often changed position, and were ever looking over
their shoulders. Ransom was just finishing his protracted meal when he saw Devine stiffen
like a dog, and lay his hand in silence on Weston's shoulder. Both nodded. They rose. Ransom,
gulping down the last of his whiskey, rose too. He found himself between his two captors.
Both revolvers were out. They were edging him to the shore of the narrow water, and they were
looking and pointing across it.

At first he could not see clearly what they were pointing at. There seemed to be some paler
and slenderer plants than he had noticed before among the purple ones; he hardly attended to
them, for his eyes were busy searching the ground - so obsessed was he with the reptile fears
and insect fears of modern imagining. It was the reflections of the new white objects in the
water that sent his eyes back to them: long, streaky, white reflections motionless in the
running water - four or five, no, to be precise, six of them. He looked up. Six, white things
were standing there. Spindly and flimsy things, twice or three times the height of a man. His
first idea was that they were images of men, the work of savage artists; he had seen things
like them in books of archaeology. But what could they be made of; and how could they stand? -
so crazily thin and elongated in the leg, so top-heavily pouted in the chest, such stalky,
flexible-looking distortions of earthly bipeds ... like something seen in one of those comic
mirrors. They were certainly not made of stone or metal, for now they seemed to sway a
little as he watched; now with a shock that chased the blood from his cheeks he saw that they
were alive, that they were moving, that they were coming at him. He had a momentary, scared
glimpse of their faces, thin and unnaturally long, with long, drooping noses and drooping
mouths of half-spectral, half-idiotic solemnity. Then he turned wildly to fly and found
himself gripped by Devine.

'Let me go,' he cried.

'Don't be a fool,' hissed Devine, offering the muzzle of his pistol. Then, as they struggled,
one of the things sent its voice across the water to them: an enormous horn-like voice far
above their heads.

'They want us to go across,' said Weston.

Both the men were forcing him to the water's edge. He planted his feet, bent his back and
resisted donkey fashion. Now the other two were both in the water pulling him, and he was
still on the land. He found that he was screaming. Suddenly a second, much louder and less
articulate noise broke from the creatures on the far bank. Weston shouted, too, relaxed his
grip on Ransom and suddenly fired his revolver not across the water but up it. Ransom saw why
at the same moment.

A line of foam like the track of a torpedo was speeding towards them, and in the midst of it
some large, shining beast. Devine shrieked a curse, slipped and collapsed into the water.
Ransom saw a snapping jaw between them, and heard the deafening noise of Weston's revolver
again and again beside him and, almost as loud, the clamour of the monsters on the far bank,
who seemed to be taking to the water, too. He had had no need to make a decision. The moment
he was free he had found himself automatically darting behind his captors, then behind the
space-ship and on as fast as his legs could carry him into the utterly unknown beyond it.
As he rounded the metal sphere a wild confusion of blue, purple, and red met his eyes. He did
not slacken his pace for a moment's inspection. He found himself splashing through water and
crying out not with pain but with surprise because the water was warm. In less than a minute
he was climbing out on to dry land again. He was running up a steep incline. And now he was
running through purple shadow between the stems of another forest of the huge plants.

A MONTH of inactivity, a heavy meal and an unknown world do not help a man to run. Half an
hour later, Ransom was walking, not running, through the forest, with a hand pressed to
his aching side and his ears strained for any noise of pursuit. The clamour of revolver
shots and voices behind him (not all human voices) had been succeeded first by rifle shots
and calls at long intervals and then by utter silence. As far as eye could reach he saw
nothing but the stems of the great plants about him receding in the violet shade, and far
overhead the multiple transparency of huge leaves filtering the sunshine to the solemn
splendour of twilight in which he walked. Whenever he felt able he ran again; the ground
continued soft and springy, covered with the same resilient weed which was the first thing
his hands had touched in Malacandra. Once or twice a small red creature scuttled across his
path, but otherwise there seemed to be no life stirring in the wood; nothing to fear -
except the fact of wandering unprovisioned and alone in a forest of unknown vegetation
thousands or millions of miles beyond the reach or knowledge of man.

But Ransom was thinking of 'sores' - for doubtless those were the sores, those creatures they
had tried to give him to. They were quite unlike the horrors his imagination had conjured up,
and for that reason had taken him off his guard. They appealed away from the Wellsian fantasies
to an earlier, almost an infantile, complex of fears. Giants - ogres - ghosts - skeletons:
those were its key words. Spooks on stilts, he said to himself; surrealistic bogy-men with their
long faces. At the same time, the disabling panic of the first moments was ebbing away from him.
The idea of suicide was now far from his mind; instead, he was determined to back his luck to
the end. He prayed, and he felt his knife. He felt a strange emotion of confidence and
affection towards himself - he checked himself on the point of saying, 'We'll stick to one
another.'

The ground became worse and interrupted his meditation. He had been going gently upwards for
some hours with steeper ground on his right, apparently half scaling, half skirting a hill.
His path now began to cross a number of ridges, spurs doubtless of the higher ground on the
right. He did not know why he should cross them, but for some reason he did; possibly a
vague memory of earthly geography suggested that the lower ground would open out to bare
places between wood and water where 'sores' would be more likely to catch him. As he continued
crossing ridges and gullies he was struck with their extreme steepness; but somehow they were
not very difficult to cross. He noticed, too, that even the smallest hummocks of earth were
of an unearthly shape - too narrow, too pointed at the top and too small at the base:
He remembered that the waves on the blue lakes had displayed a similar oddity. And glancing
up at the purple leaves he saw the same theme of perpendicularity - the same rush to the sky -
repeated there. They did not tip over at the ends; vast as they were, air was sufficient to
support them so that the long aisles of the forest all rose to a kind of fan tracery. And
the sores, likewise - he shuddered as he thought it - they too were madly elongated.

He had sufficient science to guess that he must be on a world lighter than the Earth, where
less strength was needed and nature was set free to follow her skyward impulse on a
superterrestrial scale. This set him wondering where he was. He could not remember whether
Venus was larger or smaller than Earth, and he had an idea that she would be hotter than
this. Perhaps he was on Mars; perhaps even on the Moon. The latter he at first rejected
on the ground that, if it were so, he ought to have seen the Earth in the sky when
they landed; but later he remembered having been told that one face of the Moon was
always turned away from the Earth. For all he knew he was wandering on the Moon's outer
side; and irrationally enough, this idea brought about him a bleak sense of desolation
than he had yet felt.