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

unbroken, with no convenient passes for them to follow, the sky lidded over by
cloud.

They grasped each other's hands and pressed up the slope.

The climb exhausted Night-Dawn immediately. And there was nothing to eat or
drink, here on the high rocks, not so much as a scrap of ice. Soon, even the air
grew thin; he struggled to drag energy from its pale substance.

When they slept, they stood on hard black rock. Night-Dawn feared and hated the
rock; it was an enemy, rooted deep in the Earth.

On the fourth day of this they entered the clouds, and he could not even see
where his next step should be placed. With the thin, icy moisture in his lungs
and spreading on his fur he felt trapped, as if under some infinite ice layer,
far from any air hole. He struggled to breathe, and if he slept, he woke
consumed by a thin panic. At such times he clung to Frazil and remembered who he
was and where he had come from and why he had come so far. He was a human being,
and he had a mission that he would fulfill.

Then, one morning, they broke through the last ragged clouds.

Though it was close to midday, the sky was as dark as he had ever seen it, a
deep violet blue. The only clouds were thin sheets of ice crystals, high above.
And -- he saw, gasping with astonishment -- there were stars shining, even now,
in the middle of the sunlit day.

The slope seemed to reach a crest, a short way ahead of him. They walked on. The
air was thin, a whisper in his lungs, and he was suspended in silence; only the
rasp of Frazil's shallow breath, the soft slap of their footsteps on the rock,
broke up the stillness.

He reached the crest. The rock wall descended sharply from here, he saw, soon
vanishing into layers of fat, fluffy clouds.

And, when he looked ahead, he saw a mountain.

Far ahead of them, dominating the horizon, it was a single peak that thrust out
of scattered clouds, towering even over their elevated position here, its walls
sheer and stark. Its flanks were girdled with ice, but the peak itself was bare
black rock -- too high even for ice to gather, he surmised -- perhaps so high it
thrust out of the very air itself.

It must be the greatest mountain in the world.

And beyond it there was a further line of mountains, he saw, like a line of
broken teeth, marking the far horizon. When he looked to left and right, he
could see how those mountains joined the crest he had climbed, in a giant
unbroken ring around that great, central fist of rock.