It was a damaged animal. It was, or had been, one of the brightly coloured frogs. But some accident had
happened to it. The whole back had been ripped open in a sort of V-shaped gash, the point of the V
being a little behind the head. Something had torn a widening wound backward-as we do in opening an
envelope-along the trunk and pulled it out so far behind the animal that the hoppers or hind legs had
been almost torn off with it. They were so damaged that the frog could not leap. On earth it would have
been merely a nasty sight, but up to this moment Ransom had as yet seen nothing dead or spoiled in
Perelandra, and it was like a blow in the face. It was like the first spasm of well-remembered pain
warning a man who had thought he was cured that his family have deceived him and he is dying after
all. It was like the first lie from the mouth of a friend on whose truth one was willing to stake a thousand
pounds. It was irrevocable. The milk-warm wind blowing over the golden sea, the blues and silvers and
greens of the floating garden, the sky itself-all these had become, in one instant, merely the illuminated
margin of a book whose text was the struggling little horror at his feet, and he himself, in that same
instant, had passed into a state of emotion which he could neither control nor understand. He told
himself that a creature of that kind probably had very little sensation. But it did not much mend matters.
It was not merely pity for pain that had suddenly changed the rhythm of his heart-beats. The thing was
an intolerable obscenity which afflicted him with shame. It would have been better, or so he thought at
that moment, for the whole universe never to have existed than for this one thing to have happened.
Then he decided, in spite of his theoretical belief that it was an organism too low for much pain, that it
had better be killed. He had neither boots nor stone nor stick. The frog proved remarkably hard to kill.
When it was far too late to desist he saw clearly that he had been a fool to make the attempt. Whatever
its sufferings might be he had certainly increased and not diminished them. But he had to go through
with it. The job seemed to take nearly an hour. And when at last the mangled result was quite still and he
went down to the water's edge to wash, he was sick and shaken. It seems odd to say this of a man who
had been on the Somme; but the architects tell us that nothing is great or small save by position.