C. S. Lewis

PERELANDRA

(Space Trilogy, Book Two)

Harpercollins Publishers

“Perelandra” originally appeared in the print book Perelandra, published in hardcover in 1943 by John Lane (The Bodley Head) in the United Kingdom.

perelandra. Copyright © 1943 by C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any form of by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

first edition

EPub Edition April 2012 ISBN: 9780062196934

Version 08092013

Dedication

To some ladies at

Wantage

Contents

Dedication

Preface

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

Preface

This story can be read by itself but is also a sequel to Out of the Silent Planet in which some account was given of Ransom’s adventures on Mars—or, as its inhabitants call it, Malacandra. All the human characters in this book are purely fictitious and none of them is allegorical.

C.S.L.

1

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. 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. The gloomy five o’clock sky was such as you might see on any autumn afternoon. The few houses and the clumps of red or yellowish trees were in no way remarkable. 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?

For Ransom had met other things in Mars besides the Martians. 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. The eldila are very different from any planetary creatures. Their physical organism, if organism it can be called, is quite unlike either the human or the Martian. They do not eat, breed, breathe, or suffer natural death, and to that extent resemble thinking minerals more than they resemble anything we should recognize as an animal. 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 themselves regard space (or “Deep Heaven”) as their true habitat, and the planets are to them not closed worlds but merely ...