'Visiting' a planet means moving into one of these moving clouds and then keeping pace with its orbit to maintain the appearance of standing still, while using some sort of projection to interact with wispy, ephemeral creatures they cannot fully see (i.e. In fact they have to fly in order to keep pace with the planets. Because they are not subject to gravity as humans and other hnau are, they perceived the Sun as practically fixed, but the planets themselves as travelling as enormous speeds. To them, light itself is the water through which they swim, and Arbol or the Sun is their wellspring. And it went through me from chest to groin like the thrill that goes through you when you think you have lost your hold while climbing a cliff.'Įldila are (usually) imperceptible energy beings whose forms exist on a radically different wavelength from our ours - for them, all matter is gaseous and barely exists for them, including liquids and solids, so the planets and moons of the Field of Arbol are like clouds to them. A machine is something we make out of natural materials this was more as if rock or crystal or light had spoken of itself.

The two syllables sounded more as if they were played on an instrument than as if they were spoken: and yet they did not sound mechanical either. Blood and lungs and the warm, moist cavity of the mouth are somehow indicated in every Voice. We feel the difference between animal voices (including those of the human animal) and all other noises pretty clearly, I fancy, though it is hard to define. But it was, if you understand me, inorganic. It was perfectly articulate: it was even, I suppose, rather beautiful. 'The sound was quite astonishingly unlike a voice. Their voices are also very unlike those of humans: Since they see themselves as The Creator's early offspring, some of them feel a moral obligation to guide the evolution of hnau.

They normally consist entirely of psychic energy, but are able to take on physical bodies in the material planes. In their natural forms, they are barely visible as pillars of faint, shifting light.

The human characters in the trilogy encounter them on various planets, but the eldila themselves are native to interplanetary and interstellar space (' Deep Heaven').

Malacandra cs lewis