Perelandra

by C. S. Lewis

  It was the best he could do. A strange thrilling sensation crept over him, communicated doubtless from the movement of its muscles. It gave him the illusion of sharing in its strong bestial life, as if he were himself becoming a fish.

  Long after this he found himself staring into something like a human face. It ought to have terrified him but, as sometimes happens to us in a dream, it did not. It was a bluish-greenish face shining apparently by its own light. The eyes were much larger than those of a man and gave it a goblin appearance. A fringe of corrugated membranes at the sides suggested whiskers. With a shock he realised that he was not dreaming, but awake. The thing was real. He was still lying, sore and wearied, on the body of the fish and this face belonged to something that was swimming alongside him. He remembered the swimming submen or mermen whom he had seen before. He was not at all frightened, and he guessed that the creature’s reaction to him was the very same as his to it – an uneasy, though not hostile, bewilderment. Each was wholly irrelevant to the other. They met as the branches of different trees meet when the wind brings them together.

  Ransom now raised himself once more to a sitting position. He found that the darkness was not complete. His own fish swam in a bath of phosphorescence and so did the stranger at his side. All about him were other blobs and daggers of blue light 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 some hint of perspective into the night. He noticed presently that several of the water-people in his immediate neighbourhood seemed to be feeding. They were picking dark masses of something off the water with their webbed frog-like hands and devouring it. As they munched, it hung out of their mouths in bushy and shredded bundles and looked like moustaches. It is significant that it never occurred to him to try to establish any contact with these beings, 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 man as the other creatures were. He got the impression that they simply shared a planet with him as sheep and horses share a field, each species ignoring the other. Later, this came to be a trouble in his mind: but for the moment he was occupied with a more practical problem. The sight of their eating had reminded him that he was hungry and he was wondering whether the stuff they ate were eatable by him. It took him a long time, scooping the water with his fingers, to catch any of it. When at last he did it turned out to be of the same general structure as one of our smaller seaweeds, and to have little bladders that popped when one pressed them. It was tough 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 Ransom was on Perelandra his sense of taste had become something more than it was on Earth: it gave knowledge as well as pleasure, though not a knowledge that can be reduced to words. As soon as he had eaten a few mouthfuls of the seaweed he felt his mind oddly changed. 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 them in imagination as they would appear from below – mats of fibre with long streamers hanging down from them, and became startlingly 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 him ever since he came to Perelandra rapidly fading from his mind, as a dream fades when we wake, or as if it were shouldered aside by a whole world of interests and emotions to which he could give no name. It terrified him. In spite of his hunger he threw the rest of the weed away.

  He must have slept again, for the next scene that he remembers was in daylight. 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 him. It is a curious flaw in the reason, to judge from Ransom’s experience, that when a man comes to a strange planet he at first quite forgets its size. That whole world is so small in comparison with his journey through 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 Ransom looked round once more and saw nothing in every direction but golden sky and tumbling waves, the full absurdity of this delusion was borne in upon him. Even if there were continents in Perelandra, he might 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 square miles, what would that be but a negligible freckling in 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, he fancied, it was not swimming at its original speed. The Un-man would doubtless torture its mount to swim till it died. But he could not do that. As he was thinking of these things and staring ahead, he saw something that turned his heart cold. One of the other fish deliberately turned out of line, spurted a little column of foam, dived, and reappeared some yards away, apparently drifting. In a few minutes it was out of sight. It had had enough.

  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 themselves its King and Queen. How could it be made for them when most of it, in fact, was uninhabitable by them? Was not the very idea naive and anthropomorphic in the highest degree? As for the great prohibition, on which so much had seemed to hang – was it really so important? What did these roarers with the yellow foam, and these strange 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 him the feeling of knowing by experience what other men only believe, now began to shrink in importance. Need it prove anything 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 this illimitable ocean said anything, it said something 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 ‘space’ and found it Heaven, tingling with a fulness of life for which infinity itself was not one cubic inch too large. All that seemed like a dream. That opposite mode of thought which he had often mocked and called in mockery The Empirical Bogey, came surging into his mind – the great myth of our century with its gases and galaxies, its light years and evolutions, its nightmare perspectives of simple arithmetic in which everything 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 amazement that different things 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 him still knew that the size of a thing is the least important characteristic, that the material universe derived from the comparing and mythopoeic power within 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 themselves could no more supply than a banker’s ledger. But this knowledge remained an abstraction. Mere bigness and loneliness overbore him.

  These thoughts must have taken several hours and absorbed all his attention. He was aroused by what he least expected
– the sound of a human voice. Emerging from his reverie he saw that all the fishes had deserted him. His own was swimming feebly: and there a few yards away, no longer fleeing him but moving slowly towards him, was the Un-man. It sat hugging itself, its eyes almost shut up with bruises, its flesh the colour of liver, its leg apparently broken, its mouth twisted with pain.

  ‘Ransom,’ it said feebly.

  Ransom held his tongue. He was not going to encourage it to start that game again.

  ‘Ransom,’ it said again in a broken voice, ‘for God’s sake speak to me.’

  He glanced at it in surprise. Tears were on its cheeks. ‘Ransom, don’t cold-shoulder me,’ it said. ‘Tell me what has happened. What have they done to us? You – you’re all bleeding. My leg’s broken …’ its voice died away in a whimper.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know me,’ mumbled Weston’s voice. ‘I’m Weston. You’re Ransom – Elwin Ransom of Leicester, Cambridge, the philologist. We’ve had our quarrels, I know. I’m sorry. I dare say I’ve been in the wrong. Ransom, you’ll not leave me to die in this horrible place, will you?’

  ‘Where did you learn Aramaic?’ asked Ransom, keeping his eyes on the other.

  ‘Aramaic?’ said Weston’s voice. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not much of a game to make fun of a dying man.’

  ‘But are you really Weston?’ said Ransom, for he began to think that Weston had actually come back.

  ‘Who else should I be?’ came the answer, with a burst of weak temper, on the verge of tears.

  ‘Where have you been?’ asked Ransom.

  Weston – if it was Weston – shuddered. ‘Where are we now?’ 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’ve no idea where it is now – a couple of hundred miles away for all I know.’

  ‘You mean we’re trapped?’ said Weston, almost in a scream. Ransom said nothing and the other bowed his head and cried like a baby.

  ‘Come,’ said Ransom at last, ‘there’s no good taking it like that. Hang it all, you’d not be much better off if you were on Earth. You remember they’re having a war there. The Germans may be bombing London to bits at this moment!’ Then seeing the creature still crying, he added, ‘Buck up, Weston. It’s only death, all said and done. We should have to die some day, you know. We shan’t lack water, and hunger – without thirst – isn’t too bad. As for drowning – well, a bayonet wound, or cancer, would be worse.’

  ‘You mean to say you’re going to leave me,’ said Weston. ‘I can’t, even if I wanted to,’ said Ransom. ‘Don’t you see I’m in the same position as yourself?’

  ‘You’ll promise not to go off and leave me in the lurch?’ said Weston.

  ‘All right, I’ll promise if you like. Where could I go to?’

  Weston looked very slowly all round and then urged his fish little nearer to Ransom’s.

  ‘Where is … it?’ he asked in a whisper. ‘You know,’ and he made meaningless gestures.

  ‘I might 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 of its expression.

  ‘Have you any idea of what’s been happening to you for the last few days?’ said Ransom.

  Weston once more looked all round him uneasily.

  ‘It’s all true, you know,’ he said at last.

  ‘What’s all true?’ said Ransom.

  Suddenly Weston turned on him with a snarl of rage. ‘It’s all very well for you,’ he said. ‘Drowning doesn’t hurt and death is bound to come anyway, and all that nonsense. What do you know about death? It’s all true, I tell you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ve been stuffing myself up with a lot of nonsense all my life,’ said Weston. ‘Trying to persuade myself that it matters what happens to the human race … trying to believe that anything you can do will make the universe bearable. It’s all rot, do you see?’

  ‘And something else is truer!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Weston, and then was silent for a long time.

  ‘We’d better turn our fishes head on to this,’ said Ransom presently, his eyes on the sea, ‘or we’ll be driven apart.’ Weston obeyed without seeming to notice what he did, and for a time the two men were riding very slowly side by side.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s true,’ said Weston presently. ‘What?’

  ‘A little child that creeps upstairs when nobody’s looking and very slowly turns the handle to take one peep into the room where its grandmother’s dead body is laid out – and then runs away and has bad dreams. An enormous grandmother, you understand.’

  ‘What do you mean by saying that’s truer?’

  ‘I mean that child knows something about the universe which all science and all religion is trying to hide.’

  Ransom said nothing.

  ‘Lots of things,’ said Weston presently. ‘Children are afraid to go through a churchyard at night, and the grown-ups tell them not to be silly: but the children know better than the grown-ups. People in Central Africa doing beastly things with masks on in the middle of the night – and missionaries and civil servants say it’s all superstition. Well, the blacks know more about the universe than the white people. Dirty priests in back streets in Dublin frightening half-witted children to death with stories about it. You’d say they are unenlightened. They’re not: except that they think there is a way of escape. There isn’t. That is the real universe, always has been, always will be. That’s what it all means.’

  ‘I’m not quite clear –’ began Ransom, when Weston interrupted him.

  ‘That’s why it’s so important to live as long as you can. All the good things are now – a thin little rind of what we call life, put on for show, and then – the real universe for ever and ever. To thicken the rind by one centimetre – to live one week, one day, one half hour longer – that’s the only thing that matters. Of course you don’t know it: but every man who is waiting to be hanged knows it. You say “What difference does a short reprieve make?” What difference!!’

  ‘But nobody need go there,’ said Ransom.

  ‘I know that’s what you believe,’ said Weston. ‘But you’re wrong. It’s only a small parcel of civilised people who think that. Humanity as a whole knows better. It knows – Homer knew – that all the dead have sunk down into the inner darkness: under the rind. All witless, all twittering, gibbering, decaying. Bogeymen. Every savage knows that all ghosts hate the living who are still enjoying the rind: just as old women hate girls who still have their good looks. It’s quite right to be afraid of the ghosts. You’re going to be one all the same.’

  ‘You don’t believe in God,’ said Ransom.

  ‘Well, now, that’s another point,’ said Weston. ‘I’ve been to church as well as you when I was a boy. There’s more sense in parts of the Bible than you religious people know. Doesn’t it say He’s the God of the living, not of the dead? That’s just it. Perhaps your God does exist – but it makes no difference whether He does or not. No, of course you wouldn’t see it; but one day you will. I don’t think you’ve got the idea of the rind – the thin outer skin which we call life – really clear. Picture the universe as an infinite glove with this very thin crust on the outside. But remember its thickness is a thickness of time. It’s about seventy years thick in the best places. We are born on the surface of it and all our lives we are sinking through it. When we’ve got all the way through then we are what’s called Dead: we’ve got into the dark part inside, the real globe. If your God exists, He’s not in the globe – He’s outside, like a moon. As we pass into the interior we pass out of His ken. He doesn’t follow us in. You would express it by saying He’s not in time – which you think comforting! In other words He stays put
: out in the light and air, outside. But we are in time. We “move with the times”. That is, from His point of view, we move away, into what He regards as nonentity, where He never follows. That is all there is to us, all there ever was. He may be there in what you call “Life”, or He may not. What difference does it make? We’re not going to be there for long!’

  ‘That could hardly be the whole story,’ said Ransom. ‘If the whole universe were like that, then we, being parts of it, would feel at home in such a universe. The very fact that it strikes us as monstrous –’

  ‘Yes,’ interrupted Weston, ‘that would be all very well if it wasn’t that reasoning itself is only valid as long as you stay in the rind. It has nothing to do with the real universe. Even the ordinary scientists – like what I used to be myself – are beginning to find that out. Haven’t you seen the real meaning of all this modern stuff about the dangers of extrapolation and bent space and the indeterminacy of the atom? They don’t say it in so many words, of course, but what they’re getting to, even before they die nowadays, is what all men get to when they’re dead – the knowledge that reality is neither rational nor consistent nor anything else. In a sense you might say it isn’t there. “Real” and “Unreal”, “true” and “false” – they’re all only on the surface. They give way the moment you press them.’

  ‘If all this were true,’ said Ransom, ‘what would be the point of saying it?’

  ‘Or of anything else?’ replied Weston. ‘The only point in anything is that there isn’t any point. Why do ghosts want to frighten? Because they are ghosts. What else is there to do?’

  ‘I get the idea,’ said Ransom. ‘That the account a man gives of the universe, or of any other building, depends very much on where he is standing.’

  ‘But specially,’ said Weston, ‘on whether he’s inside or out. All the things you like to dwell upon are outsides. A planet like our own, or like Perelandra, for instance. Or a beautiful human body. All the colours and pleasant shapes are merely where it ends, where it ceases to be. Inside, what do you get? Darkness, worms, heat, pressure, salt, suffocation, stink.’

  They ploughed forward for a few minutes in silence over waves which were now growing larger. The fish seemed to be making little headway.

  ‘Of course you don’t care,’ said Weston. ‘What do you people in the rind care about us? You haven’t been pulled down yet. It’s like a dream I once had, though I didn’t know then how true it was. I dreamed I was lying dead – you know, nicely laid out in the ward in a nursing home with my face settled by the undertaker and big lilies in the room. And then a sort of a person who was all falling to bits – like a tramp, you know, only it was himself not his clothes that was coming to pieces – came and stood at the foot of the bed, just hating me. “All right,” he said, “all right. You think you’re mighty fine with your clean sheet and your shiny coffin being got ready. I began like that. We all did. Just wait and see what you come down to in the end.”’

  ‘Really,’ said Ransom, ‘I think you might just as well shut up.’

  ‘Then there’s Spiritualism,’ said Weston, ignoring this suggestion. ‘I used to think it all nonsense. But it isn’t. It’s all true. You’ve noticed that all pleasant accounts of the dead are traditional or philosophical? What actual experiment discovers is quite different. Ectoplasm – slimy films coming out of a medium’s belly and making great, chaotic, tumbledown faces. Automatic writing producing reams of rubbish.’

  ‘Are you Weston?’ said Ransom, suddenly turning upon his companion. The persistent mumbling voice, so articulate that you had to listen to it and yet so inarticulate that you had to strain your ears to follow what it said, was beginning to madden him.

  ‘Don’t be angry,’ said the voice. ‘There’s no good being angry with me. I thought you might be sorry. My God, Ransom, it’s awful. You don’t understand. Right down under layers and layers. Buried alive. You try to connect things and can’t. They take your head off … and you can’t even look back on what life was like in the rind, because you know it never did mean anything even from the beginning.’

  ‘What are you?’ cried Ransom. ‘How do you know what death is like? God knows, I’d help you if I could. But give me the facts. Where have you been these few days?’

  ‘Hush,’ said the other suddenly, ‘what’s that?’

  Ransom listened. Certainly there did seem to be a new element in the great concourse of noises with which they were surrounded. At first he could not define it. The seas were very big now and the wind was strong. All at once his companion reached out his hand and clutched Ransom’s arm.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ he cried. ‘Oh, Ransom, Ransom! We shall be killed. Killed and put back under the rind. Ransom, you promised to help me. Don’t let them get me again.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Ransom in disgust, for the creature was wailing and blubbering so that he could hear nothing else: and he wanted very much to identify the deeper note that had mingled with the piping wind and roar of water.

  ‘Breakers,’ said Weston, ‘breakers, you fool! Can’t you hear? There’s