Out Of The Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis Read Free Book Online Page A

lights of the Universe seemed to be turned down. As if some demon had rubbed the
heaven's face with a dirty sponge, the splendour in which they had lived for so long blenched to
a pallid, cheerless and pitiable grey. It was impossible from where they sat to open the shutters
or roll back the heavy blind. What had been a chariot gliding in the fields of heaven became a
dark steel box dimly lighted by a slit of window, and falling. They were falling out of the heaven,
into a world. Nothing. in all his adventures bit so deeply into Ransom's mind as this. He wondered
how he could ever have thought of planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality
floating in a deadly void. Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets -
the 'earths' he called them in his thought - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded
and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction
from, the surrounding brightness; And yet, he thought, beyond the solar system the brightness ends.
Is that the real void, the real death? Unless ... he groped for the idea ... unless visible light
is also a hole or gap, a mere diminution of something else. Something that is to bright unchanging
heaven as heaven is to the dark, heavy earths....
    Things do not always happen as a man would expect. The moment of his arrival in an unknown world
found Ransom wholly absorbed in a philosophical speculation.
     

VII
----
    'HAVING A doze?' said Devine. 'A bit blase about new planets by now?'
    'Can you see anything?' interrupted Weston.
    'I can't manage the shutters, damn them,' returned Devine. 'We may as well get to the manhole.'
    Ransom awoke from his brown study. The two partners were working together close beside him in the
semi-darkness. He was cold and his body, though in fact much lighter than on Earth, still felt
intolerably heavy. But a vivid sense of his situation returned to him; some fear, but more curiosity.
It might mean death, but what a scaffold! Already cold air was coming in from without, and light.
He moved his head impatiently to catch some glimpse between the labouring shoulders of the two men.
A moment later the last nut was unscrewed. He was looking out through the manhole.
    Naturally enough all he saw was the ground - a circle of pale pink, almost of white; whether
very close and short vegetation or very wrinkled and granulated rock or soil he could not say.
Instantly the dark shape of Devine filled the aperture, and Ransom had time to notice that he
had a revolver in his hand - 'For me or for sorns or for both?' he wondered.
    'You next,' said Weston curtly.
    Ransom took a deep breath and his hand went to the knife beneath his belt. Then he got his head
and shoulders through the manhole, his two hands on the soil of Malacandra. The pink stuff was
soft and faintly resilient, like india-rubber: clearly vegetation. Instantly Ransom looked up. He
saw a pale blue sky - a fine winter morning sky it would have been on Earth a great billowy
cumular mass of rose-colour lower down which he took for a cloud, and then -'.Get out,' said
Weston from behind him. He scrambled through and rose to his feet. The air was cold but not
bitterly so, and it seemed a little rough at the back of his throat. He gazed about him, and the
very intensity of his desire to take in the new world at a glance defeated itself. He saw nothing
but colours - colours that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet
well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are. His first
impression was of a bright, pale world - a watercolour world out of a child's paint-box; a moment
later he recognized the flat belt of light blue as a sheet of water, or of something like water,
which came nearly to his feet. They were on the shore of a lake or river.
    'Now then,' said Weston, brushing past him. He turned and saw to his surprise, a