Out of the Silent Planet - C. S. Lewis [55]
"How do you rule yourselves?" asked Ransom. "Those who are digging in the mines - do they like it as much as those who paint the walls?"
"All keep the mines open; it is a work to be shared. But each digs for himself the thing he wants for his work. What else would he do?"
"It is not so with us."
"Then you must make very bent work. How would a maker understand working in suns' blood unless he went into the home of suns' blood himself and knew one kind from another and lived with it for days out of the light of the sky till it was in his blood and his heart, as if he thought it and ate it and spat it?"
"With us it lies very deep and hard to get and those who dig it must spend their whole lives on the skill."
"And they love it?"
"I think not ... I do not know. They are kept at it because they are given no food if they stop."
Kanakaberaka wrinkled his nose. "Then there is not food in plenty on your world?"
"I do not know," said Ransom. "I have often wished to know the answer to that question but no one can tell me. Does no one keep your people at their work, Kanakaberaka ?"
"Our females," said the pfifltrigg with a piping noise which was apparently his equivalent for a laugh.
"Are your females of more account among you than those of the other hnau among them?"
"Very greatly. The sorns make least account of females and we make most."
XVIII
THAT NIGHT Ransom slept in the guesthouse, which was a real house built by pfifltriggi and richly decorated. His pleasure at finding himself, in this respect, under more human conditions was qualified by the discomfort which, despite his reason, he could not help feeling in the presence at close quarters, of so many Malacandrian creatures. All three species were represented. They seemed to have no uneasy feelings towards each other, though there were some differences of the kind that occur in a railway carriage on Earth - the sorns finding the house too hot and the pfifltriggi finding it too cold. He learned more of Malacandrian humour and of the noises that expressed it in this one night than he had learned during the whole of his life on the strange planet hitherto. Indeed, nearly all Malacandrian conversations in which he had yet taken part had been grave. Apparently the comic spirit arose chiefly from the meeting of the different kinds of hnau. The jokes of all three were equally incomprehensible to him. He thought he could see differences in kind - as that the sorns seldom got beyond irony, while the hrossa were extravagant and fantastic, and the pfifltriggi were sharp and excelled in abuse - but even when he understood all the words he could not see the points. He went early to bed.
It was at the time of early morning, when men on Earth go out to milk the cows, that Ransom was wakened. At first he did not know what had roused him. The chamber in which he lay was silent, empty and nearly dark. He was preparing himself to sleep again when a high-pitched voice close beside him said, "Oyarsa sends for you." He sat up, staring about him. There was no one there, and the voice repeated, "Oyarsa sends for you." The confusion of sleep was now clearing in his head, and he recognized that there was an eldil in the room. He felt no conscious fear, but while he rose obediently and put on such of his clothes as he had laid aside he found that his heart was beating rather fast. He was thinking less of the invisible creature in the room than of the interview that lay before him. His old terrors of meeting some monster or idol had quite left him: he felt nervous as he remembered feeling on the morning of an examination when he was