Out of the Silent Planet (Space Trilogy, #1)

by C.S. Lewis

I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.

It was necessary, and the necessary was always possible.

He looked back on that time as on a nightmare, on his own mood at that time as a sort of sickness. Then all had been whimpering, unanalysed, self-nourishing, self-consuming dismay. Now, in the clear light of an accepted duty, he felt fear indeed, but with it a sober sense of confidence in himself and in the world, and even an element of pleasure. It was the difference between a landsman in a sinking ship and a horseman on a bolting horse: either may be killed, but the horseman is an agent as well as a patient.

The giant rose cautiously to a standing position and he found himself looking down on the landscape from a height of about eighteen feet. “Is all well, Small One?” it asked. “Very well,” Ransom answered, and the journey began.

Now the forests have become stone and only eldila can go among them.” “We still have such creatures in our world,” said Ransom. “We call them birds. Where was Oyarsa when all this happened to the harandra?” “Where he is now.” “And he could not prevent it?” “I do not know. But a world is not made to last for ever, much less a race; that is not Maleldil’s way.”

And if he had felt some such lift of the heart when first he passed through heaven on their outward journey, he felt it now tenfold, for now he was convinced that the abyss was full of life in the most literal sense, full of living creatures.