Chapter Eight
HE woke, after a disturbed and dreamful sleep, in full daylight. He had a dry mouth, a crick in his neck,
and a soreness in his limbs. It was so unlike all previous wakings in the world of Venus, that for a
moment he supposed himself back on Earth:
and the dream (for so it seemed to him) of having lived and walked on the oceans of the Morning Star
rushed through his memory with a sense of lost sweetness that was well-nigh unbearable. Then he sat up
and the facts came back to him. 'It's jolly nearly the same as having waked from a dream, though,' he
thought. Hunger and thirst became at once his dominant sensations, but he conceived it a duty to look
first at the sick man-though with very little hope that he could help him. He gazed round. There was the
grove of silvery trees all right, but he could not see Weston. Then he glanced at the bay there was no punt either. Assuming that in the darkness he had blundered into the wrong valley, he rose
and approached the stream for a drink. As he lifted his face from the water with a long sigh of
satisfaction, his eyes suddenly fell on a little wooden box-and then beyond it on a couple of tins.
His
brain was working rather slowly and it took him a few seconds to realise that he was in the right valley
after all, and a few more to draw conclusions from the fact that the box was open and empty, and that
some of the stores had been removed and others left behind.
But was it possible that a man in Weston's
physical condition could have recovered sufficiently during the night to strike camp and to go away
laden with some kind of pack? Was it possible that any man could have faced a sea like that in a
collapsible punt? It was true, as he now noticed for the first time, that the storm (which had been a mere
squall by Perelandrian standards) appeared to have blown itself out during the night; but there was still a
quite formidable swell and it seemed out of the question that the Professor could have left the island.
Much more probably he had left the valley on foot and carried the punt with him. Ransom decided that
he must find Weston at once: he must keep in touch with his enemy. For if Weston had recovered, there
was no doubt he meant mischief of some kind. Ransom was not at all certain that he had understood all
his wild talk on the previous day; but what he did understand he disliked very much, and suspected that
this vague mysticism about 'spirituality' would turn out to be something even nastier than his old and
comparatively simple programme of planetary imperialism. It would be unfair to take seriously the
things the man had said immediately before his seizure, no doubt; but there was enough without that.
The next few hours Ransom passed in searching the island for food and for Weston. As far as food was
concerned, he was rewarded. Some fruit like bilberries could be gathered in handfuls on the upper
slopes, and the wooded valleys abounded in a kind of oval nut.
The kernel had a toughly soft
consistency, rather like cork or kidneys, and the flavour, though somewhat austere and prosaic after the
fruit of the floating islands, was not unsatisfactory. The giant mice were as tame as other Perelandrian
beasts but seemed stupider. Ransom ascended to the central plateau. The sea was dotted with islands in
every direction, rising and falling with the swell, and all separated from one another by wide stretches of
water. His eye at once picked out an orange-coloured island, but he did not know whether it was that on
which he had been living, for he saw at least two others in which the same colour predominated. At one
time he counted twenty-three floating islands in all. That, he thought, was more than the temporary
archipelago had contained, and allowed him to hope that any one of those he saw might hide the King-or
that the King might even at this moment be re-united to the Lady. Without thinking it out very clearly,
he had come to rest almost all his hopes on the King.
Of Weston he could find no trace. It really did seem, in spite of all improbabilities, that he had somehow
contrived to leave the Fixed Island; and Ransom's anxiety was very great. What Weston, in his new vein,
might do, he had no idea. The best to hope for was that he would simply ignore the master and mistress
of Perelandra as mere savages or 'natives'.
Late in the day, being tired, he sat down on the shore. There was very little swell now and the waves,
just before they broke, were less than knee-deep. His feet, made soft by the mattress-like surface which
one walks on in those floati
ng islands, were hot and sore. Presently he decided to refresh them by a little
wading. The delicious quality of the water drew him out till he was waist-deep. As he stood there, deep
in thought, he suddenly perceived that what he had taken to be an effect of light on the water was really
the back of one of the great silvery fish. 'I wonder would it let me ride it?' he thought; and then,
watching how the beast nosed towards him and kept itself as near the shallows as it dared, it was borne
in upon him that it was trying to attract his attention. Could it have been sent} The thought had no
sooner darted through his mind than he decided to make the experiment. He laid his hand across the
creature's back, and it did not flinch from his touch. Then with some difficulty he scrambled into a
sitting position across the narrow part behind its head, and while he was doing this it remained as nearly
stationary as it could; but as soon as he was firmly in the saddle it whisked itself about and headed for
the sea.
If he had wished to withdraw, it was very soon impossible to do so. Already the green pinnacles of the
mountain, as he looked back, had withdrawn their summits from the sky and the coastline of the island
had begun to conceal its bays and nesses. The breakers were no longer audible-only the prolonged
sibilant or chattering noises of the water about him. Many floating islands were visible, though seen
from this level they were mere feather silhouettes. But the fish seemed to be heading for none of these.
Straight on, as if it well knew its way, the beat of the great fins carried him for more than an hour. Then
green and purple splashed the whole world, and after that darkness.
Somehow he felt hardly any uneasiness when he found himself swiftly climbing and descending the low
hills of water through tile black night. And here it was not all black. The heavens had vanished, and the
surface of the sea; but far, far below him in the heart of the vacancy through which he appeared to be
travelling, strange bursting star shells and writhing streaks of a bluish-green luminosity appeared. At
first they were very remote, but soon, as far as he could judge, they were nearer. A whole world of
phosphorescent creatures seemed to be at play not far from the surface-coiling eels and darting things in
complete armour, and then heraldically fantastic shapes to which the sea-horse of our own waters would
be commonplace. They were all round him-twenty or thirty of them often in sight at once. And mixed
with all this riot of sea-centaurs and sea-dragons he saw yet stranger forms:
fishes, if fishes they were, whose forward part was so nearly human in shape that when he first caught
sight of them he thought he had fallen into a dream and shook himself to awake. But it was no dream.
There-and there again-it was unmistakable: now a shoulder, now a profile, and then for one second a full
face: veritable mermen or mermaids. The resemblance to humanity was indeed greater, not less, than he
had first supposed. What had for a moment concealed it from him was the total absence of human
expression. Yet the faces were not idiotic, they were not even brutal parodies of humanity like those of
our terrestrial apes. They were more like human faces asleep, or faces in which humanity slept while
some other life, neither bestial nor diabolic, but merely elvish, out of our orbit, was irrelevantly awake.
He remembered his old suspicion that what was myth in one world might always be fact in some other.
He wondered also whether the King and Queen of Perelandra, though doubtless the first human pair of
this planet, might on the physical side have a marine ancestry. And if so, what then of the man-like
things before men in our own world? Must they in truth have been the wistful brutalities whose pictures
we see in popular books on evolution? Or were the old myths truer than the modern myths? Had there in
truth been a time when satyrs danced in the Italian woods? But he said 'Hush' to his mind at this stage,
for the mere pleasure of breathing in the fragrance which now began to steal towards him from the
blackness ahead. Warm and sweet, and every moment sweeter and purer, and every moment stronger
and more filled with all delights, it came to him. He knew well what it was. He would know it
henceforward out of the whole universe-the night breath of a floating island in the star Venus. It was
strange to be filled with homesickness for places where his sojourn had been so brief and which were, by
any objective standard, so alien to all our race. Or were they? The cord of longing which drew him to the
invisible isle seemed to him at that moment to have been fastened long, long before his coming to
Perelandra, long before the earliest times that memory could recover in his childhood, before his birth,
before the birth of man himself, before the origins of time. It was sharp, sweet, wild, and holy, all in one,
and in any world where men's nerves have ceased to obey their central desires would doubtless have
been aphrodisiac too, but not in Perelandra. The fish was no longer moving. Ransom put out his hand.
He found he was touching weed. He crawled forward over the head of the monstrous fish, and levered
himself on to the gently moving surface of the island. Short as his absence from such places had been,
his earth-trained habits of walking had reasserted themselves, an