Perelandra
Authors: C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
PERELANDRA
[Voyage to Venus]
Preface
This story can be read by itself but is also a sequel to
Out of the Silent Planet
in which some account was given of Ransom’s adventures on Mars – or, as its inhabitants call it,
Malacandra.
All the human characters in this book are purely fictitious and none of them is allegorical.
C.S.L.
As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom’s cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit. The flat heath which spread out before me (for the village lies all behind and to the north of the station) looked an ordinary heath. The gloomy five-o’clock sky was such as you might see on any autumn afternoon. The few houses and the clumps of red or yellowish trees were in no way remarkable. Who could imagine that a little farther on in that quiet landscape I should meet and shake by the hand a man who had lived and eaten and drunk in a world forty million miles distant from London, who had seen this Earth from where it looks like a mere point of green fire, and who had spoken face to face with a creature whose life began before our own planet was inhabitable?
For Ransom had met other things in Mars besides the Martians. He had met the creatures called
eldila
, and specially that great
eldil
who is the ruler of Mars or, in their speech, the
Oyarsa
of
Malacandra.
The
eldila
are very different from any planetary creatures. Their physical organism, if organism it can be called, is quite unlike either the human or the Martian. They do not eat, breed, breathe, or suffer natural death, and to that extent
resemble thinking minerals more than they resemble anything we should recognise as an animal. Though they appear on planets and may even seem to our senses to be sometimes resident in them, the precise spatial location of an
eldil
at any moment presents great problems. They themselves regard space (or ‘Deep Heaven’) as their true habitat, and the planets are to them not closed worlds but merely moving points – perhaps even interruptions – in what we know as the Solar System and they as the Field of Arbol.
At present I was going to see Ransom in answer to a wire which had said ‘Come down Thursday if possible. Business.’ I guessed what sort of business he meant, and that was why I kept on telling myself that it would be perfectly delightful to spend a night with Ransom and also kept on feeling that I was not enjoying the prospect as much as I ought to. It was the
eldila
that were my trouble. I could just get used to the fact that Ransom had been to Mars … but to have met an
eldil
, to have spoken with something whose life appeared to be practically unending … Even the journey to Mars was bad enough. A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. One can’t put the difference into words. When the man is a friend it may become painful: the old footing is not easy to recover. But much worse was my growing conviction that, since his return, the
eldila
were not leaving him alone. Little things in his conversation, little mannerisms, accidental allusions which he made and then drew back with an awkward apology, all suggested that he was keeping strange company; that there were – well, Visitors – at that cottage.
As I plodded along the empty, unfenced road which runs across the middle of Worchester Common I tried to dispel my growing sense of
malaise
by analysing it. What, after all, was I afraid of? The moment I had put this question I regretted it. I was shocked to find that I had mentally used the word ‘afraid’. Up till then I had tried to pretend that I was feeling only distaste, or embarrassment, or even boredom. But the mere word
afraid
had let the cat out of the bag. I realised now that my emotion was neither more, nor less, nor other, than Fear. And I realised that I was afraid of two things – afraid that sooner or later I myself might meet an
eldil,
and afraid that I might get ‘drawn in’. I suppose everyone knows this fear of getting ‘drawn in’ the moment at which a man realises that what had seemed mere speculations are on the point of landing him in the Communist Party or the Christian Church – the sense that a door has just slammed and left him on the inside. The thing was such sheer bad luck. Ransom himself had been taken to Mars (or Malacandra) against his will and almost by accident, and I had become connected with his affair by another accident. Yet here we were both getting more and more involved in what I could only describe as interplanetary politics. As to my intense wish never to come into contact with the
eldila
myself; I am not sure whether I can make you understand it. It was something more than a prudent desire to avoid creatures alien in kind, very powerful, and very intelligent. The truth was that all I heard about them served to connect two things which one’s mind tends to keep separate, and that connecting gave one a sort of shock. We tend to think about non-human intelligences in two distinct categories which we
label ‘scientific’ and ‘supernatural’ respectively. We think, in one mood, of Mr Wells’ Martians (very unlike the real Malacandrians, by the bye), or his Selenites. In quite a different mood we let our minds loose on the possibility of angels, ghosts, fairies, and the like. But the very moment we are compelled to recognise a creature in either class as
real
the distinction begins to get blurred: and when it is a creature like an
eldil
the distinction vanishes altogether. These things were not animals – to that extent one had to classify them with the second group; but they had some kind of material vehicle whose presence could (in principle) be scientifically verified. To that extent they belonged to the first group. The distinction between natural and supernatural, in fact, broke down; and when it had done so, one realised how great a comfort it had been – how it had eased the burden of intolerable strangeness which this universe imposes on us by dividing it into two halves and encouraging the mind never to think of both in the same context. What price we may have paid for this comfort in the way of false security and accepted confusion of thought is another matter.
‘This is a long, dreary road,’ I thought to myself. ‘Thank goodness I haven’t anything to carry.’ And then, with a start of realisation I remembered that I ought to be carrying a pack, containing my things for the night. I swore to myself. I must have left the thing in the train. Will you believe me when I say that my immediate impulse was to turn back to the station and ‘do something about it’? Of course there was nothing to be done which could not equally well be done by ringing up from the cottage. That train, with my pack in it, must by this time be miles away.
I realise that now as clearly as you do. But at the moment it seemed perfectly obvious that I must retrace my steps, and I had indeed begun to do so before reason or conscience awoke and set me once more plodding forwards. In doing this I discovered more clearly than before how very little I wanted to do it. It was such hard work that I felt as if I were walking against a headwind; but in fact it was one of those still, dead evenings when no twig stirs, and beginning to be a little foggy.
The farther I went the more impossible I found it to think about anything except these
eldila
. What, after all, did Ransom really know about them? By his own account the sorts which he had met did not usually visit our own planet – or had only begun to do so since his return from Mars. We had
eldila
of our own, he said, Tellurian
eldila
, but they were of a different kind and mostly hostile to man. That, in fact, was why our world was cut off from communication with the other planets. He described us as being in a state of siege, as being, in fact, an enemy-occupied territory, held down by
eldila
who were at war both with us and with the
eldila
of ‘Deep Heaven’, or ‘space’. Like the bacteria on the microscopic level, so these co-inhabiting pests on the macroscopic permeate our whole life invisibly and are the real explanation of that fatal bent which is the main lesson of history. If all this were true, then, of course, we should welcome the fact that
eldila
of a better kind had at last broken the frontier (it is, they say, at the Moon’s orbit) and were beginning to visit us. Always assuming that Ransom’s account was the correct one.
A nasty idea occurred to me. Why should not Ransom be a dupe? If something from outer space were trying to
invade our planet, what better smoke-screen could it put up than this very story of Ransom’s? Was there the slightest evidence, after all, for the existence of the supposed maleficent
eldila
on this earth? How if my friend were the unwitting bridge, the Trojan Horse, whereby some possible invader were effecting its landing on Tellus? And then once more, just as when I had discovered that I had no pack, the impulse to go no farther returned to me. ‘Go back, go back,’ it whispered to me, ‘send him a wire, tell him you were ill, say you’ll come some other time – anything.’ The strength of the feeling astonished me. I stood still for a few moments telling myself not to be a fool, and when I finally resumed my walk I was wondering whether this might be the beginning of a nervous breakdown. No sooner had this idea occurred to me than it also became a new reason for not visiting Ransom. Obviously, I wasn’t fit for any such jumpy ‘business’ as his telegram almost certainly referred to. I wasn’t even fit to spend an ordinary weekend away from home. My only sensible course was to turn back at once and get safe home, before I lost my memory or became hysterical, and to put myself in the hands of a doctor. It was sheer madness to go on.
I was now coming to the end of the heath and going down a small hill, with a copse on my left and some apparently deserted industrial buildings on my right. At the bottom the evening mist was partly thick. ‘They call it a Breakdown
at first
,’ I thought. Wasn’t there some mental disease in which quite ordinary objects looked to the patient unbelievably ominous? … looked, in fact, just as that abandoned factory looks to me now? Great bulbous shapes of cement, strange brickwork bogeys,
glowered at me over dry scrubby grass pock-marked with grey pools and intersected with the remains of a light railway. I was reminded of things which Ransom had seen in that other world: only there, they were people. Long spindle-like giants whom he calls
sorns
. What made it worse was that he regarded them as good people – very much nicer, in fact, than our own race. He was in league with them! How did I know he was even a dupe? He might be something worse … and again I came to a standstill.
The reader, not knowing Ransom, will not understand how contrary to all reason this idea was. The rational part of my mind, even at that moment, knew perfectly well that even if the whole universe were crazy and hostile, Ransom was sane and wholesome and honest. And this part of my mind in the end sent me forward – but with a reluctance and a difficulty I can hardly put into words. What enabled me to go on was the knowledge (deep down inside me) that I was getting nearer at every stride to the one friend: but I
felt
that I was getting nearer to the one enemy – the traitor, the sorcerer, the man in league with ‘them’ … walking into the trap with my eyes open, like a fool. ‘They call it a breakdown at first,’ said my mind, ‘and send you to a nursing home; later on they move you to an asylum.’