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

to appear before a new species. Did hrossa
vomit too? Would it know what he was doing? Shaking and groaning, he turned back into the
boat. The creature was keeping an eye on him, but its face seemed to him expressionless;
it was only long after that he learned to read the Malacandrian face.
    The current meanwhile seemed to be gathering speed. In a huge curve they swung across the
lake to within a furlong of the farther shore, then back again, and once more onward, in
giddy spirals and figures of eight, while purple wood and jagged mountain raced backwards
and Ransom loathingly associated their sinuous course with the nauseous curling of the
silver eels. He was rapidly losing all interest in Malacandra: the distinction between Earth
and other planets seemed of no importance compared with the awful distinction of earth
and water. He wondered despairingly whether the hross habitually lived on water. Perhaps
they were going to spend the night in this detestable boat ...
    His sufferings did not, in fact, last long. There came a blessed cessation of the choppy
movement and a slackening of speed, and he saw that the hross was backing water rapidly.
They were still afloat, with shores close on each side; between them a narrow channel in
which the water hissed furiously - apparently a shallow. The hross jumped overboard,
splashing abundance of warm water into the ship; Ransom, more cautiously and shakily,
clambered after it. He was about up to his knees. To his astonishment, the hross, without
any appearance of effort, lifted the boat bodily on to the top of its head, steaded it
with one fore-paw, and proceeded, erect as a Grecian caryatid, to the land. They walked
forward - if the swinging movements of the hross's short legs from its flexible hips could
be called walking - beside the channel. In a few minutes Ransom saw a new landscape.
    The channel was not only a shallow but a rapid - the first, indeed, of a series of rapids
by which the water descended steeply for the next half mile. The ground fell away before
them and the canyon - or handramit - continued at a very much lower level. Its walls,
however, did not sink with it, and from his present position Ransom got a clearer notion
of the lie of the land. Far more of the highlands to left and right were visible, sometimes
covered with the cloud-like red swellings, but more often level, pale and barren to where the
smooth line of their horizon marched with the sky. The mountain peaks now appeared only as the
fringe or border of the true highland, surrounding it as the lower teeth surround the tongue.
He was struck by the vivid contrast between harandra and handramit. Like a rope of jewels the
gorge spread beneath him, purple, sapphire blue, yellow and pinkish white, a rich and variegated
inlay of wooded land and disappearing, reappearing, ubiquitous water. Malacandra was less like
earth than he had been beginning to suppose. The handramit was no true valley rising and falling
with the mountain chain it belonged to. Indeed, it did not belong to a mountain chain. It was
only an enormous crack or ditch, of varying depth, running through the high and level harandra;
the latter, he now began to suspect, was the true 'surface' of the planet - certainly would
appear as surface to a terrestrial astronomer. To the handramit itself there seemed no end;
uninterrupted and very nearly straight, it ran before him, a narrowing line of colour, to where
it clove the horizon with a V-shaped indenture. There must be a hundred miles of it in view,
he thought; and he reckoned that he had put some thirty or forty miles of it behind him
since yesterday.
    All this time they were descending beside the rapids to where the water was level again and
the hross could relaunch its skiff. During this walk Ransom learned the words for boat, rapid,
water, sun and carry; the latter, as his first verb, interested him particularly. The hross
was also at some pains to impress