"Baxter, Stephen - Huddle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

mountains, lapping against the rock walls as if frustrated -- save in one place,
where a great tongue of ice had broken through. Glacier, he thought.

He saw that they could walk around the bowl of bubbling liquid rock and reach
the head of the glacier, perhaps before night fell, and then move on, beyond
these mountains. Hope sparked. Perhaps what he sought lay there.

"I'm exhausted," No-Sun said, a pillar of fur slumped against a heap of rock.
"We should go back."

Night-Dawn, distracted by his plans, turned to her. "Why?"

"We are creatures of cold. Feel how you bum up inside your fat. This is not our
place..."

"Look," breathed One-Tusk, coming up to them.

He was carrying a rock he'd cracked open. Inside there was a thin line of red
and black. Algae, perhaps. And, in a hollow in the rock, small insects wriggled,
their red shells bright.

Frazil fell on the rock, gnawing at it eagerly.

The others quickly grabbed handfuls of rocks and began to crack them open.

They spent the night in a hollow at the base of the glacier.

In the morning they clambered up onto its smooth, rock-littered surface. The ice
groaned as it was compressed by its forced passage through the mountains, which
towered above them to either side, blue-gray and forbidding.

At the glacier's highest point, they saw that the river of ice descended to an
icy plain. And the plain led to another wall of mountains, so remote it was
almost lost in the horizon's mist.

"More walls," groaned One-Tusk. "Walls that go on forever."

"I don't think so," said Night-Dawn. He swept his arm along the line of the
distant peaks, which glowed pink in the sun. "I think they curve. You see?"

"I can't tell," muttered No-Sun, squinting.

With splayed toes on the ice, Night-Dawn scraped three parallel curves -- then,
tentatively, he joined them up into concentric circles. "Curved walls of
mountains. Maybe that's what we're walking into," he said. "Like ripples in a
water hole."

"Ripples, in rock?" Frazil asked skeptically.

"If the Collision stories are true, it's possible."