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

upon him an association or relation which it tried to
convey by repeating the contrasted pairs of words hrossa-handramit and seroni-harondra.
Ransom understood him to mean that the hrossa lived down in the handramit and the seroni
up on the harandra. What the deuce were seroni, he wondered. The open reaches of the harandra
did not look as if anything lived up there. Perhaps the hrossa had a mythology - he took it
for granted they were on a low cultural level - and the seroni were gods or demons.
    The journey continued, with frequent, though decreasing, recurrences of nausea for Ransom.
Hours later he realized that seroni might very well be the plural of sorn.
    The sun declined, on their right. It dropped quicker than on Earth, or at least on those
parts of Earth that Ransom knew, and in the cloudless sky it had little sunset pomp about it.
In some other queer way which he could not specify it differed from the sun he knew; but even
while he speculated the needle-like mountain tops stood out black against it and the handramit
grew dark, though eastward (to their left) the high country of the harandra still shone pale
rose, remote and smooth and tranquil, like another and more spiritual world.
    Soon he became aware that they were landing again, that they were treading solid ground, were
making for the depth of the purple forest. The motion of the boat still worked in his fantasy
and the earth seemed to sway beneath him; this, with weariness and twilight, made the rest of
the journey dream-like. Light began to glare in his eyes. A fire was turning. It illuminated
the huge leaves overhead, and he saw stars beyond them. Dozens of hrossa seemed to have
surrounded him; more animal, less human, in their multitude and their close neighbourhood to
him, than his solitary guide had seemed. He felt some fear, but more a ghastly inappropriateness.
He wanted men - any men, even Weston and Devine. He was too tired to do anything about these
meaningless bullet heads and furry faces - could make no response at all. And then, lower down,
closer to him, more mobile, came in throngs the whelps, the puppies, the cubs, whatever you
called them. Suddenly his mood changed. They were jolly little things. He laid his hand on
one black head and smiled; the creature scurried away.
    He never could remember much of that evening. There was more eating and drinking, there was
continual coming and going of black forms, there were strange eyes luminous in the firelight;
fmally, there was sleep in some dark, apparently covered place.
     

XI
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    EVER SINCE he awoke on the space-ship Ransom had been thinking about the amazing adventure of
going to another planet, and about his chances of returning from it. What he had not thought about
was being on it. It was with a kind of stupefaction each morning that he found himself neither
arriving in, nor escaping from, but simply living on, Malacandra; waking, sleeping, eating,
swimnming, and even, as the days passed, talking. The wonder of it smote him most strongly when
he found himself about three weeks after his arrival, actually going for a walk. A few weeks
later he had his favourite walks, and his favourite foods; he was beginning to develop habits.
He knew a male from a female hross at sight, and even individual differences were becoming plain.
Hyoi who had first found him - miles away to the north - was a very different person from the
grey-muzzled, venerable Hnohra who was daily teaching him the language; and the young of the
species were different again. They were delightful. You could forget all about the rationality
of hrossa in dealing with them. Too young to trouble him with the baffling enigma of reason
in an inhuman form, they solaced his loneliness, as if he had been allowed to bring a few dogs
with him from the Earth. The cubs, on their part, felt the liveliest interest in the hairless
goblin which had appeared among them. With them, and therefore indirectly with