in thin-spun delicacy of mist. On Mars the very forests are of stone; in Venus the lands swim.
For now he thought of them no more as Malacandra and Perelandra. He called them by their Tellurian names. With deep wonder he thought to himself, 'My eyes have seen Mars and Venus. I have seen Ares and Aphrodite.' He asked them how they were known to the old poets of Tellus. When and from whom had the children of Adam learned that Ares was a man of war and that Aphrodite rose from the sea foam? Earth had been besieged, an enemy occupied territory, since before history began. The gods have no commerce there. How then do we know of them? It comes, they told him, a long way round and through many stages. There is an environment of minds as well as of space. The universe is one - a spider's web wherein each mind lives along every line, a vast whispering gallery where (save for the direct action of Maleldil) though no news travels unchanged yet no secret can be rigorously kept. In the mind of the fallen Archon under whom our planet groans, the memory of Deep Heaven and the gods with whom he once consorted is still alive. Nay, in the very matter of our world, the traces of the celestial commonwealth are not quite lost. Memory passes through the womb and hovers in the air. The Muse is a real thing. A faint breath, as Virgil says, reaches even the late generations. Our mythology is based on a solider reality than we dream: but it is also at an almost infinite distance from that base. And when they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was - gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility. His cheeks burned on behalf of our race when he looked on the true Mars and Venus and remembered the follies that have been talked of them on Earth. Then a doubt struck him.
"But do I see you as you really are?" he asked.
"Only Maleldil sees any creature as it really is," said Mars.
"How do you see one another?" asked Ransom.
"There are no holding places in your mind for an answer to that."
"Am I then seeing only an appearance? Is it not real at all?"
"You see only an appearance, small one. You have never seen more than an appearance of anything - not of Arbol, nor of a stone, nor of your own body. This appearance is as true as what you see of those."
"But ... there were those other appearances."
"No. There was only the failure of appearance."
"I don't understand," said Ransom. "Were all those other things - the wheels and the eyes - more real than this or less?"
"There is no meaning in your question," said Mars. "You can see a stone, if it is a fit distance from you and if you and it are moving at speeds not too different. But if one throws the stone at your eye, what then is the appearance?"
"I should feel pain and perhaps see splintered light," said Ransom. "But I don't know that I should call that an appearance of the stone."'
"Yet it would be the true operation of the stone. And there is your question answered. We are now at the right distance from you."
"And were you nearer in what I first saw?"
"I do not mean that kind of distance."
"And then," said Ransom, still pondering, "there is what I had thought was your wonted appearance - the very faint light, Oyarsa, as I used to see it in your own world. What of that?"
"That is enough appearance for us to speak to you by. No more was needed between us: no more is needed now. It is to honour the King that we would now appear more. That light is the overflow or echo into the world of your senses of vehicles made for appearance to one another and to the greater eldila."
At this moment Ransom suddenly noticed an increasing disturbance of sound behind his back - of unco-ordinated sound, husky and pattering noises which broke in on the mountain silence and the crystal voices of the gods with a delicious note of warm animality. He glanced round. Romping, prancing, fluttering, gliding, crawling, waddling, with every kind of movement - in every kind of shape and colour and size - a whole zoo of beasts and birds was pouring into a