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On a walking tour you are absolutely detached. You stop where you like and go on when you like. As long as it lasts you need consider no one and consult no one but yourself.”
Stretched naked on his bed, a second Dana, he found it night by night more difficult to disbelieve in old astrology: almost he felt, wholly he imagined, “sweet influence” pouring or even stabbing into his surrendered body.
A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now—now that the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it “dead”; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of
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“But why? Would he want his dinner all day or want to sleep after he had slept? I do not understand.”
“But the pleasure he must be content only to remember?” “That is like saying, ‘My food I must be content only to eat.’ ” “I do not understand.” “A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmn, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.
The hnakra is our enemy, but he is also our beloved.
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.
All this has come from not obeying the eldil. He said you were to go to Oyarsa. You ought to have been already on the road. You must go now.”
He was specially interested in a collection of rolls, seemingly of skin, covered with characters, which were clearly books; but he gathered that books were few in Malacandra. “It is better to remember,” said the sorns.
“The hrossa used to have many books of poetry,” they added. “But now they have fewer. They say that the writing of books destroys poetry.”
“There must be rule, yet how can creatures rule themselves? Beasts must be ruled by hnau and hnau by eldila and eldila by Maleldil. These creatures have no eldila. They are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair—or one trying to see over a whole country when he is on a level with it—like a female trying to beget young on herself.”
he felt nervous as he remembered feeling on the morning of an examination when he was an undergraduate. More than anything in the world he would have liked a cup of good tea.
“What are you so afraid of, Ransom of Thulcandra?” it said. “Of you, Oyarsa, because you are unlike me and I cannot see you.” “Those are not great reasons,” said the voice. “You are also unlike me, and, though I see you, I see you very faintly. But do not think we are utterly unlike. We are both copies of Maleldil. These are not the real reasons.”
Creatures of your kind must drop out of heaven into a world; for us the worlds are places in heaven. But do not try to understand this now. It is enough to know that I and my servants are even now in heaven; they were around you in the sky-ship no less than they are around you here.”
But of this we know less than you; it is a thing we desire to look into.”
Bent creatures are full of fears. But I am here now and ready to know your will with me.”
“Yes,” said Oyarsa, “but one thing we left behind us on the harandra: fear. And with fear, murder and rebellion. The weakest of my people does not fear death. It is the Bent One, the lord of your world, who wastes your lives and befouls them with flying from what you know will overtake you in the end. If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace.”
If we could even effect in one per cent of our readers a changeover from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we should have made a beginning.”
