‘Why do you call it Thulc?’ he asked. ‘Why silent?’ No one knew.
‘The séroni know,’ said Hnohra. ‘That is the sort of thing they know.’
Then he was asked how he had come, and made a very poor attempt at describing the space-ship—but again:
‘The séroni would know.’
Had he come alone? No, he had come with two others of his kind—bad men (‘bent’ men was the nearest hrossian equivalent) who tried to kill him, but he had run away from them. The hrossa found this very difficult, but all finally agreed that he ought to go to Oyarsa. Oyarsa would protect him. Ransom asked who Oyarsa was. Slowly, and with many misunderstandings, he hammered out the information that Oyarsa (1) lived at Meldilorn; (2) knew everything and ruled everyone; (3) had always been there; and (4) was not a hross, nor one of the séroni. Then Ransom, following his own idea, asked if Oyarsa had made the world. The hrossa almost barked in the fervour of their denial. Did people in Thulcandra not know that Maleldil the Young had made and still ruled the world? Even a child knew that. Where did Maleldil live, Ransom asked.
‘With the Old One.’
And who was the Old One? Ransom did not understand the answer. He tried again.
‘Where was the Old One?’
‘He is not that sort,’ said Hnohra, ‘that he has to live anywhere,’ and proceeded to a good deal which Ransom did not follow. But he followed enough to feel once more a certain irritation. Ever since he had discovered the rationality of the hrossa he had been haunted by a conscientious scruple as to whether it might not be his duty to undertake their religious instruction; now, as a result of his tentative efforts, he found himself being treated as if he were the savage and being given a first sketch of civilized religion—a sort of hrossian equivalent of the shorter catechism. It became plain that Maleldil was a spirit without body, parts or passions.
‘He is not a hnau,’ said the hrossa.
‘What is hnau?’ asked Ransom.
‘You are hnau. I am hnau. The séroni are hnau. The pfifltriggi are hnau.’
‘Pfifltriggi?’ said Ransom.
‘More than ten days’ journey to the west,’ said Hnohra. ‘The harandra sinks down not into a handramit but into a broad place, an open place, spreading every way. Five days’ journey from the north to the south of it; ten days’ journey from the east to the west. The forests are of other colours there than here, they are blue and green. It is very deep there, it goes to the roots of the world. The best things that can be dug out of the earth are there. The pfifltriggi live there. They delight in digging. What they dig they soften with fire and make things of it. They are little people, smaller than you, long in the snout, pale, busy. They have long limbs in front. No hnau can match them in making and shaping things as none can match us in singing. But let Hmān see.’
He turned and spoke to one of the younger hrossa and presently, passed from hand to hand, there came to him a little bowl. He held it close to the firelight and examined it. It was certainly of gold, and Ransom realized the meaning of Devine’s interest in Malacandra.
‘Is there much of this thing?’ he asked.
Yes, he was told, it was washed down in most of the rivers; but the best and most was among the pfifltriggi, and it was they who were skilled in it. Arbol hru, they called it—Sun’s blood. He looked at the bowl again. It was covered with fine etching. He saw pictures of hrossa and of smaller, almost frog-like animals; and then, of sorns. He pointed to the latter inquiringly.
‘Séroni,’ said the hrossa, confirming his suspicions. ‘They live up almost on the harandra. In the big caves.’
The frog-like animals—or tapir-headed, frog-bodied animals—were pfifltriggi. Ransom turned it over in his mind. On Malacandra, apparently, three distinct species had reached rationality, and none of them had yet exterminated the other two. It concerned him intensely to find out which was the real master.
‘Which of the hnau rule?’ he asked.
‘Oyarsa rules,’ was the reply.
‘Is he hnau?’
This puzzled them a little. The séroni, they thought, would be better at that kind of question. Perhaps Oyarsa was hnau, but a very different hnau. He had no death and no young.
‘These séroni know more than the hrossa?’ asked Ransom.
This produced more a debate than an answer. What emerged finally was that the séroni or sorns were perfectly helpless in a boat, and could not fish to save their lives, could hardly swim, could make no poetry, and even when hrossa had made it for them could understand only the inferior sorts; but they were admittedly good at finding out things about the stars and understanding the darker utterances of Oyarsa and telling what happened in Malacandra long ago—longer ago than anyone could remember.
‘Ah—the intelligentsia,’ thought Ransom. ‘They must be the real rulers, however it is disguised.’
He tried to ask what would happen if the sorns used their wisdom to make the hrossa do things—this was as far as he could get in his halting Malacandrian. The question did not sound nearly so urgent in this form as it would have done if he had been able to say ‘used their scientific resources for the exploitation of their uncivilized neighbours.’ But he might have spared his pains. The mention of the sorns’ inadequate appreciation of poetry had diverted the whole conversation into literary channels. Of the heated, and apparently technical, discussion which followed he understood not a syllable.
Naturally his conversations with the hrossa did not all turn on Malacandra. He had to repay them with information about Earth. He was hampered in this both by the humiliating discoveries which he was constantly making of his own ignorance about his native planet, and partly by his determination to conceal some of the truth. He did not want to tell them too much of our human wars and industrialisms. He remembered how H. G. Wells’s Cavor had met his end on the Moon; also he felt shy. A sensation akin to that of physical nakedness came over him whenever they questioned him too closely about men—the hmāna as they called them. Moreover, he was determined not to let them know that he had been brought there to be given to the sorns; for he was becoming daily more certain that these were the dominant species. What he did tell them fired the imagination of the hrossa: they all began making poems about the strange handra where the plants were hard like stone and the earth-weed green like rock and the waters cold and salt, and hmāna lived out on top, on the harandra.
They were even more interested in what he had to tell them of the aquatic animal with snapping jaws which he had fled from in their own world and even in their own handramit. It was a hnakra, they all agreed. They were intensely excited. There had not been a hnakra in the valley for many years. The youth of the hrossa got out their weapons—primitive harpoons with points of bone—and the very cubs began playing at hnakra-hunting in the shallows. Some of the mothers showed signs of anxiety and wanted the cubs to be kept out of the water, but in general the news of the hnakra seemed to be immensely popular. Hyoi set off at once to do something to his boat, and Ransom accompanied him. He wished to make himself useful, and was already beginning to have some vague capacity with the primitive hrossian tools. They walked together to Hyoi’s creek, a stone’s throw through the forest.
On the way,