"David Brin - The Loom of Thessaly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

an entire day of searching. It was hideous.
Gnarled trees and thorn bushes covered the sixty-degree slope. Jagged rocks protruded
from the starved, parched soil. It was a miracle he had come this far without breaking a leg,
or his skull.
More than ever he was convinced he was on the right path. This monument to
inaccessibility had to be the place Frank had spoken of.
He checked for cuts and bruises. It was a good thing he had chosen, after carefully
examining Frank's aerial photos, to wear leather for this expedition. It had protected most of
his skin, although several unbelievable thorns had pierced his garments and had to be pulled
out amid momentary, excruciating pain.
He allowed his pack to slide down and form a seat to rest on. With slow deliberation, he
drew out his aid kit and applied disinfectant to the cuts on his face and the backs of his
wrists.
Only after his breathing settled, and the spots disappeared from in front of his eyes, did
he allow himself a slow, sparing swallow from one of his canteens. He wet a handkerchief and
carefully wiped the grit away from his eyes and lips.
Upstream to the right a few dozen meters was the path of ascension he had picked out
during his visual scouting, earlier, from the other side. It was the route with marginally fewer
obstacles than elsewhere along this face.
He stood, groaning at the stretch of abused muscles, and moved a few feet to examine
the route. Then he compared it with the path he would have to take if he turned around, right
now, and went home.
Sure enough. As bad as the way down had been, it looked more tempting to someone
trapped in the ravine than the hellish slope he would have to climb if he continued forward.
It had been that way all the way here. Every trail, every game path, every natural sloping
led one circumspectly away from the small area he wanted to reach. In no specific case had
there been anything suspicious about the avoidance. Each time there had been a good and
obvious reason to turn one way, instead of the other that led here.
It was the sum that drove Pavlos crazy. It had only been by the most steadfast
determination to violate all of the rules of mountaineering that he had been able to get this
far. It had taken two days to come just five kilometers from that last hamlet of surly, taciturn
herdsmen.
Pavlos reached into his pack for the high altitude photos Frank had given him.

"This is the first one I took from orbit," Frank had said when he showed Pavlos the first
large-scale photo. "I used the cartography telescope in interface with the computer on board
the Platform. This locale was flagged in the course of a survey I was doing for the EEC -- an
attempt to determine population density versus terrain type. This spot gave Fourier Transform
that was quite unusual."
The satellite photo was very clear. It looked like it had been taken from only a few
thousand feet in altitude. Pavlos easily recognized the elevation contour markings that lay
upon apparently typical Grecian highlands. He had, after all, been teaching map reading and
leading expeditions while his young American friend had been scrawling stick figures in crayon
on the kitchen wall in his parents' house in Des Moines.
The photos lay on his dining room table, three stories above the noisy streets of Athens.
Outside his apartment door children ran down the hall, screaming in some incoherent game. To
him it was all part of the background. He worried over the other lines and squiggles on Frank's
map, reluctant to admit his ignorance to the astronaut, however close they had become
during a mission in the Sudan, two years before.
"This is in Thessaly, is it not?" He pointed to the shape of the hillsides, the lay of the sun