Nature in Her Own Right Birds with long necks like swan she could not tell their colour for they looked black against the sky came wheeling at first, overhead... The crying of these birds was often audible, and it was the wildest sound that Ransom had ever heard, the loneliest, and the one that had least to do with Man. No land was in sight, nor had been for many hours. He had not been since his rst arrival. The sea-noises continuously lled his ear: the sea-smell, unmistakable and stirring as that of our Tellurian oceans, but quite different in its warmth and golden sweetness, entered into his brain. It also was wild and strange. It was not hostile: if it had been, its wildness and strangeness would have been the less, for hostility is a relation and an enemy is not a total stranger. It came into his head that he knew nothing at all about this world. Some day, no doubt, it would be peopled by the descendants of the King and Queen. But all its millions of years in the unpeopled past, all its uncounted miles of laughing water in the lonely present... did they exist solely for that? IT WAS STRANGE THAT HE TO WHOM A WOOD OR A MORNING SKY ON EARTH HAD SOMETIMES BEEN A KIND OF MEAL, SHOULD HAVE HAD TO COME TO ANOTHER PLANET IN ORDER TO REALISE NATURE AS A THING IN HER OWN RIGHT. The diffused meaning, the inscrutable character, which had both been Tellus and Perelandra since they split off from the Sun, and which would be, in one sense, displaced by the advent of imperial man, yet, in some other sense, not displaced at all, enfolded him on every side and caught him into itself. (C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, 1944) -- References: - Painting by: Albert Bierstadt, 'In The Mountains'. - The Ape's Stable - The Bell and the Hammer - C.S. Lewis had an Island - Lewis and Tolkien on Myths SUBMIT AN ARTICLE posted: may 11, 2004