‘how you and the sorns and the hrossa all come to speak the same speech. For your tongues and teeth and throats must be very different.’
‘You are right,’ said the creature. ‘Once we all had different speeches and we still have at home. But everyone has learned the speech of the hrossa.’
‘Why is that?’ said Ransom, still thinking in terms of terrestrial history. ‘Did the hrossa once rule the others?’
‘I do not understand. They are our great speakers and singers. They have more words and better. No one learns the speech of my people, for what we have to say is said in stone and suns’ blood and stars’ milk and all can see them. No one learns the sorns’ speech, for you can change their knowledge into any words and it is still the same. You cannot do that with the songs of the hrossa. Their tongue goes all over Malacandra. I speak it to you because you are a stranger. I would speak it to a sorn. But we have our old tongues at home. You can see it in the names. The sorns have big-sounding names like Augray and Arkal and Belmo and Falmay. The hrossa have furry names like Hnoh and Hnihi and Hyoi and Hlithnahi.’
‘The best poetry, then, comes in the roughest speech?’
‘Perhaps,’ said the pfifltrigg. ‘As the best pictures are made in the hardest stone. But my people have names like Kalakaperi and Parakataru and Tafalakeruf. I am called Kanakaberaka.’
Ransom told it his name.
‘In our country,’ said Kanakaberaka, ‘it is not like this. We are not pinched in a narrow handramit. There are the true forests, the green shadows, the deep mines. It is warm. It does not blaze with light like this, and it is not silent like this. I could put you in a place there in the forests where you could see a hundred fires at once and hear a hundred hammers. I wish you had come to our country. We do not live in holes like the sorns nor in bundles of weed like the hrossa. I could show you houses with a hundred pillars, one of suns’ blood and the next of stars’ milk, all the way . . . and all the world painted on the walls.’
‘How do you rule yourselves?’ asked Ransom. ‘Those who are digging in the mines—do they like it as much as those who paint the walls?’
‘All keep the mines open; it is a work to be shared. But each digs for himself the thing he wants for his work. What else would he do?’
‘It is not so with us.’
‘Then you must make very bent work. How would a maker understand working in suns’ blood unless he went into the home of suns’ blood himself and knew one kind from another and lived with it for days out of the light of the sky till it was in his blood and his heart, as if he thought it and ate it and spat it?’
‘With us it lies very deep and hard to get and those who dig it must spend their whole lives on the skill.’
‘And they love it?’
‘I think not . . . I do not know. They are kept at it because they are given no food if they stop.’
Kanakaberaka wrinkled his nose. ‘Then there is not food in plenty on your world?’
‘I do not know,’ said Ransom. ‘I have often wished to know the answer to that question but no one can tell me. Does no one keep your people at their work, Kanakaberaka?’
‘Our females,’ said the pfifltrigg with a piping noise which was apparently his equivalent for a laugh.
‘Are your females of more account among you than those of the other hnau among them?’
‘Very greatly. The sorns make least account of females and we make most.’
Chapter Eighteen
That night Ransom slept in the guest-house, which was a real house built by pfifltriggi and richly decorated. His pleasure at finding himself, in this respect, under more human conditions was qualified by the discomfort which, despite his reason, he could not help feeling in the presence, at close quarters, of so many Malacandrian creatures. All three species were represented. They seemed to have no uneasy feelings towards each other, though there were some differences of the kind that occur in a railway carriage on earth—the sorns finding the house too hot and the pfifltriggi finding it too cold. He learned more of Malacandrian humour and of the noises that expressed it in this one night than he had learned during the whole of his life on the strange planet hitherto. Indeed, nearly all Malacandrian conversations in which he had yet taken part had been grave. Apparently the comic spirit arose chiefly from the meeting of the different kinds of hnau. The jokes of all three were equally incomprehensible to him. He thought he could see differences in kind—as that the sorns seldom got beyond irony, while the hrossa were extravagant and fantastic, and the pfifltriggi were sharp and excelled in abuse—but even when he understood all the words he could not see the points. He went early to bed.
It was at the time of early morning, when men on earth go out to milk the cows, that Ransom was wakened. At first he did not know what had roused him. The chamber in which he lay was silent, empty and nearly dark. He was preparing himself to sleep again when a high-pitched voice close beside him said, ‘Oyarsa sends for you.’ He sat up, staring about him. There was no one there, and the voice repeated, ‘Oyarsa sends for you.’ The confusion of sleep was now clearing in his head, and he recognized that there was an eldil in the room. He felt no conscious fear, but while he rose obediently and put on such of his clothes as he had laid aside he found that his heart was beating rather fast. He was thinking less of the invisible creature in the room than of the interview that lay before him. His old terrors of meeting some monster or idol had quite left him: he felt nervous as he remembered feeling on the morning of an examination when he was an undergraduate. More than anything in the world he would have liked a cup of good tea.
The guest-house was empty. He went out. The bluish smoke was rising from the lake and the sky was bright behind the jagged eastern wall of the canyon; it was a few minutes before sunrise. The air was still very cold, the ground-weed drenched with dew, and there was something puzzling about the whole scene which he presently identified with the silence. The eldil voices in the air had ceased and so had the shifting network of small lights and shades. Without being told, he knew that it was his business to go up to the crown of the island and the grove. As he approached them he saw with a certain sinking of heart that the monolithic avenue was full of Malacandrian creatures, and all silent. They were in two lines, one on each side, and all squatting or sitting in the various fashions suitable to their anatomies. He walked on slowly and doubtfully, not daring to stop, and ran the gauntlet of all those inhuman and unblinking eyes. When he had come to the very summit, at the middle of the avenue where the biggest of the stones rose, he stopped—he never could remember afterwards whether an eldil voice had told him to do so or whether it was an intuition of his own. He did not sit down, for the earth was too cold and wet and he was not sure if it would be decorous. He simply stood—motionless like a man on parade. All the creatures were looking at him and there was no noise anywhere.
He perceived, gradually, that the place was full of eldila. The lights, or suggestions of light, which yesterday had been scattered over the island, were now all congregated in this one spot, and were all stationary or very faintly moving. The sun had risen by now, and still no one spoke. As he looked up to see the first, pale sunlight upon the monoliths, he became conscious that the air above him was full of a far greater
