"Ballard, J G - Cloud Scultors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ballard J G)

her walled villa in Tangier to an Alpine mansion in the
snows above Pontresina, and from there to Palm Springs,
Seville and Mykonos.
During these years of exile something of her character
emerged from the magazine and newspaper photographs:
moodily visiting a Spanish charity with the Duchess of Alba,
or seated with Saroya and other members of cafe society on
the terrace of Dali's villa at Port Lligat, her self-regarding face
gazing out with its jewelled eyes at the diamond sea of the
Costa Brava.
Inevitably her Garbo-like role seemed over-calculated, for-
ever undermined by the suspicions of her own hand in her
husband's death. The Count had been an introspective play-
boy who piloted his own aircraft to archaeological sites in the
Peloponnese and whose mistress, a beautiful young Lebanese,
was one of the world's pre-eminent keyboard interpreters of
Bach. Why this reserved and pleasant man should have com-
mitted suicide was never made plain. What promised to be a
significant exhibit at the coroner's inquest, a mutilated easel
portrait of Leonora on which he was working, was acci-
dentally destroyed before the hearing. Perhaps the painting
revealed more of Leonora's character than she chose to see.
A week later, as I drove out to Lagoon West on the morn-
ing of the first garden party, I could well understand why
Leonora Chanel had come' to Vermilion Sands, to this bizarre,
sand-bound resort with its lethargy, beach fatigue and shifting
perspectives. Sonic statues grew wild along the beach, itheir
voices keening as I swept past along the shore road. The fused
silica on. the surface of the lake formed an immense rainbow
mirror that reflected the deranged colours of the sand-reefs,
more vivid even than the cinnabar and cyclamen wing-panels
of the cloud-gliders overhead. They soared in the sky above
the lake like fitful dragonflies as Nolan, Van Eyck and Petit
Manuel flew them from Coral D.
We had entered an inflamed landscape. Half a mile away
the angular cornices of the summer house jutted into the
vivid air as if distorted by some faulty junction of time and
space. Behind it, like 'an exhausted volcano, a broad-topped
mesa rose into the glazed air, its shoulders lifting the thermal
currents high off the heated lake.
Envying Nolan and little Manuel these tremendous up-
draughts, more powerful than any we had known at Coral D,
I drove towards the villa. Then the haze cleared along the
beach and I saw the clouds.
A hundred feet above the roof of the mesa, they hung like
the twisted pillows of a sleepless giant. Columns of turbulent
air moved within the clouds, boiling upwards to the anvil
heads like liquid in a cauldron. These were not the placid,
fair-weather cumulus of Coral D, but storm-nimbus, unstable
masses of overheated air that could catch an aircraft and lift it