Ransom the philologist for the first time encounters a sorn, one of the tall, intellectual species that inhabits the highlands of Mars. They fall into a discussion of Oyarsa, the spiritual being who rules the planet, and Augray the sorn tells him that Oyarsa is an eldil. The eldila seem insubstantial to humans and Martians, Augray explains, but this is a mistake. The eldila can go through walls and doors not because they themselves are insubstantial but because to them our material world is insubstantial. "These things are not strange," says Augray, "though they are beyond our senses. But it is strange that the eldila never visit Thulcandra"-Thulcandra being "the silent planet" itself, Earth: "'Of that I am not certain,' said Ransom. It had dawned on him that the recurrent human tradition of bright, elusive people appearing on the earth-albs, devas, and the like-might after all have another explanation than the anthropologists had yet given." What, one may well ask, are "albs" and "devas"? The second word presents no difficulties. If one looks it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, the sense given for "deva," entirely appropriately for the context above, is "'a bright, shining one'.. . a god, a divinity; one of the good spirits of Hindu mythology." All the OED has to offer for "alb," however, is that it is a tunic or ecclesiastical vestment, while "albs" does not occur at all. Tolkien's connections with this passage are multiple. In the first place it is generally agreed that Elwin Ransom is an affectionate portrait of Tolkien himself. In the second place, the whole novel is now known to have grown out of the famous agreement by Tolkien and Lewis, in 1936, to write separate fictions, Lewis taking the theme of space-travel and Tolkien that of time-travel. 1 Tolkien's contribution was never finished or published in his lifetime, seeing print eventually first as "The Lost Road" and then as "The Notion Club Papers," in volumes V and VIII respectively of "The History of Middle-earth." 2 In both, the name Elwin, or forms of it such as Alwyn or Alboin, are significant. 3 However, the immediate connection with the passage above is that "albs" is surely a word borrowed by Lewis from Tolkien, perhaps in conversation. *albs is in fact the unrecorded and hypothetical, or "reconstructed" Proto