"Adams, Douglas - Dirk Gently 01 - Holistic Detective Agency" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

inside once more.

An hour passed, and by the end of it the darkness was total. The
world seemed dead, the night a blankness.
And then the glow appeared again near the tower's peak, this time
growing in power more purposefully. It quickly reached the peak of
brightness it had previously attained, and then kept going, increasing,
increasing. The keening sound that accompanied it rose in pitch and
stridency until it became a wailing scream. The scream screamed on and
on till it became a blinding noise and the light a deafening redness.
And then, abruptly, both ceased.
There was a millisecond of silent darkness.
An astonishing pale new light billowed and bulged from deep within
the mud beneath the tower. The sky clenched, a mountain of mud
convulsed, earth and sky bellowed at each other, there was a horrible
pinkness, a sudden greenness, a lingering orangeness that stained the
clouds, and then the light sank and the night at last was deeply,
hideously dark. There was no further sound other than the soft tinkle
of water.
But in the morning the sun rose with an unaccustomed sparkle on a
day that was, or seemed to be, or at least would have seemed to be if
there had been anybody there to whom it could seem to be anything at
all, warmer, clearer and brighter -- an altogether livelier day than
any yet known. A clear river ran through the shattered remains of the
valley.
And time began seriously to pass.


[::: CHAPTER 2 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.
From under its rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down into
another valley, with which it was having a problem.
The day was hot, the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat down
upon the grey rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, not
even the Monk. The horse's tail moved a little, swishing slightly to
try and move a little air, but that was all. Otherwise, nothing moved.
The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a
video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving
you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched
tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it
yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what
was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the
things the world expected you to believe.
Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had
started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was
even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in
Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor
had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of
miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah.