They themselves regard space (or 'Deep Heaven') as their true habitat, and the planets are to them not closed worlds but merely moving points - perhaps even interruptions - in what we know as the Solar System and they as the Field of Arbol.Īt present I was going to see Ransom in answer to a wire which had said 'Come down Thursday if possible. Though they appear on planets and may even seem to our senses to be sometimes resident in them, the precise spatial location of an eldil at any moment presents great problems. They do not eat, breed, breathe, or suffer natural death, and to that extent resemble thinking minerals more than they resemble anything we should recognise as an animal. Their physical organism, if organism it can be called, is quite unlike either the human or the Martian. The eldila are very different from any planetary creatures.

He had met the creatures called eldila, and specially that great eldil who is the ruler of Mars or, in their speech, the Oyarsa of Malacandra.

Who could imagine that a little farther on in that quiet landscape I should meet and shake by the hand a man who had lived and eaten and drunk in a world forty million miles distant from London, who had seen this Earth from where it looks like a mere point of green fire, and who had spoken face to face with a creature whose life began before our own planet was inhabitable?įor Ransom had met other things in Mars besides the Martians. The few houses and the clumps of red or yellowish trees were in no way remarkable.

The gloomy five-o'clock sky was such as you might see on any autumn afternoon. The flat heath which spread out before me (for the village lies all behind and to the north of the station) looked an ordinary heath. As I left the railway station at Worchester and set out on the three-mile walk to Ransom's cottage, I reflected that no one on that platform could possibly guess the truth about the man I was going to visit.

Perelandra by cs lewis