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

Ransom was nonsense. He was quite aware of the danger of madness, and
applied himself vigorously to his devotions and his toilet. Not that madness mattered much.
Perhaps he was mad already, and not really on Malacandra but safe in bed in an English asylum.
If only it might be so! He would ask Ransom - curse it! there his mind went playing the same
trick again. He rose and began walking briskly away.
    The delusions recurred every few minutes as long as this stage of his journey lasted. He
learned to stand still mentally, as it were, and let them roll over his mind. It was no good
bothering about them. When they were gone you could resume sanity again. Far more important
was the problem of food. He tried one of the 'trees' with his knife. As he expected, it was
toughly soft like a vegetable, not hard like wood. He cut a little piece out of it, and under
this operation the whole gigantic organism vibrated to its top - it was like being able to
shake the mast of a full-rigged ship with one hand. When he put it in his mouth he found it
almost tasteless but by no means disagreeable, and for some minutes he munched away
contentedly. But he made no progress. The stuff was quite unswallowable and could only be used
as a chewing-gum. As such he used it, and after it many other pieces; not without some comfort.
    It was impossible to continue yesterday's flight as a flight - inevitably it degenerated into
an endless ramble, vaguely motivated by the search for food. The search was necessarily vague,
since he did not know whether Malacandra held food for him nor how to recognize it if it did.
He had one bad fright in the course of the morning, when, passing through a somewhat more open
glade, he became aware first of a huge, yellow object, then of two, and then of an indefinite
multitude coming towards him. Before he could fly he found himself in the midst of a herd of
enormous pale furry creatures more like giraffes than anything else he could think of; except
that they could and did raise themselves on their hind legs and even progress several paces
in that position. They were slenderer, and very much higher, than giraffes, and were eating
the leaves off the tops of the purple plants. They saw him and stared at him with their big
liquid eyes, snorting in 'basso profondissimo', but had apparently no hostile intentions.
Their appetite was voracious. In five minutes they had mutilated the tops of a few hundred
'trees' and admitted a new flood of sunlight into the forest. Then they passed on.
    This episode had an infinitely comforting effect on Ransom. The planet was not, as he had
begun to fear, lifeless except for 'sores'. Here was a very presentable sort of animal, an
animal which man could probably tame, and whose food man could possibly share. If only it
were possible to climb the 'trees'! He was staring about him with some idea of attempting
this feat, when he noticed that the devastation wrought by the leaf-eating animals had opened
a vista overhead beyond the plant tops to a collection of the same greenish-white objects
which he had seen across the lake at their first landing.
    This time they were much closer. They were enormously high, so that he had to throw back his
head to see the top of them. They were something like pylons in shape, but solid; irregular
in height and grouped in an apparently haphazard and disorderly fashion. Some ended in points
that looked from where he stood as sharp as needles, while others, after narrowing towards
the summit, expatided again into knobs or platforms that seemed to his terrestrial eyes ready
to fall at any moment. He noticed that the sides were rougher and more seamed with fissures
than he had realized at first, and between two of them he saw a motionless line of twisting
blue brightness - obviously a distant fall of water. It was this which finally convinced him
that the things, in spite of their improbable shape, were mountains; and with that discovery