Out Of The Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis Page B

him off his guard. They appealed away from the Wellsian fantasies
to an earlier, almost an infantile, complex of fears. Giants - ogres - ghosts - skeletons:
those were its key words. Spooks on stilts, he said to himself; surrealistic bogy-men with their
long faces. At the same time, the disabling panic of the first moments was ebbing away from him.
The idea of suicide was now far from his mind; instead, he was determined to back his luck to
the end. He prayed, and he felt his knife. He felt a strange emotion of confidence and
affection towards himself - he checked himself on the point of saying, 'We'll stick to one
another.'
    The ground became worse and interrupted his meditation. He had been going gently upwards for
some hours with steeper ground on his right, apparently half scaling, half skirting a hill.
His path now began to cross a number of ridges, spurs doubtless of the higher ground on the
right. He did not know why he should cross them, but for some reason he did; possibly a
vague memory of earthly geography suggested that the lower ground would open out to bare
places between wood and water where 'sores' would be more likely to catch him. As he continued
crossing ridges and gullies he was struck with their extreme steepness; but somehow they were
not very difficult to cross. He noticed, too, that even the smallest hummocks of earth were
of an unearthly shape - too narrow, too pointed at the top and too small at the base:
He remembered that the waves on the blue lakes had displayed a similar oddity. And glancing
up at the purple leaves he saw the same theme of perpendicularity - the same rush to the sky -
repeated there. They did not tip over at the ends; vast as they were, air was sufficient to
support them so that the long aisles of the forest all rose to a kind of fan tracery. And
the sores, likewise - he shuddered as he thought it - they too were madly elongated.
    He had sufficient science to guess that he must be on a world lighter than the Earth, where
less strength was needed and nature was set free to follow her skyward impulse on a
superterrestrial scale. This set him wondering where he was. He could not remember whether
Venus was larger or smaller than Earth, and he had an idea that she would be hotter than
this. Perhaps he was on Mars; perhaps even on the Moon. The latter he at first rejected
on the ground that, if it were so, he ought to have seen the Earth in the sky when
they landed; but later he remembered having been told that one face of the Moon was
always turned away from the Earth. For all he knew he was wandering on the Moon's outer
side; and irrationally enough, this idea brought about him a bleak sense of desolation
than he had yet felt.
    Many of the gullies which he crossed now carried streams, blue hissing streams, all
hastening to the lower ground on his left. Like the lakes they were warm, and the air was
warm above them, so that as he climbed down and up the sides of the gullies he was
coutinually changing temperatures. It was the contrast, as he crested the farther bank of
one such small ravine, which first drew his attention to the growing chilliness of the
forest; and as he looked about him he became certain that the light was failing, too.
He had not taken night into his calculations. He had no means of guessing what night might
be on Malacandra. As he stood gazing into the deepening gloom a sign of cold wind
crept through the purple stems and set them all swaying, revealing once again the
startling contrast between their size and their apparent flexibility and lightness.
Hunger and weariness, long kept at bay by the mingled fear and wonder of his situation,
smote him suddenly. He shivered and forced himself to proceed. The wind increased.
The mighty leaves danced and dipped above his head, admitting glimpses of a pale and
then a paler sky; and then, discomfortingly, of a sky with one or two stars in it. The
wood was no longer silent. His eyes