"Chalker, Jack L - Rings 1 - Lords Of The Middle Dark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

It was certainly the source of the heat: The air seemed to shimmer all around
that basin. Laboriously he made his way, half walking, half crawling, to the
edge, and with hurting eyes he peered down inside and froze in awe and wonder,
his jaw dropping. For a moment he wondered if the climb had cost him his reason.
Faces ... Huge faces coming out of the rock wall and extending all the way
around the crater. Men's faces, women's faces, strange-looking, alien faces none
of which seemed to have the features of the People.
Demon faces.
Giant faces extended out of the crater wall, carved of some whitish rock or some
other substance. The noses alone were eight or more meters long; the mouths,
though closed now and expressionless, looked as if they each could swallow a
herd of buffalo.
Who carved such faces? he wondered. And why?
About forty meters below the faces was a floor that appeared to be made of very
coarse cloth, although he was sophisticated enough to realize that it must be
metal. The fine mesh of the grating allowed the warm air to rise from inside the
mountain, creating the odd cloud effects and giving the region of the peak its
moderate temperature. The mesh grate also had five circles painted on it, four
in a sort of square surrounding a fifth in the middle, and there were designs in
each circle. He could not make out the designs, partly because of the distance
and the condition of his eyes and partly because there seemed to be material
covering parts of all five circles. The material, whatever it was, was randomly
scattered about and certainly not native to the place.
He stared again at the giant carved faces and felt a chill go through him. They
were certainly both mysterious and awesome; most people who made it this far
would worship them, knowing they had seen the faces of the sleeping spirits of
the mountain. He counted twenty-five faces around the rim just inside the
crater, all expressionless, all seemingly asleep, eyes closed. With a start he
realized that there weren't twenty-five different faces but only five, each
repeated four more times.
There was the man with short, curly hair, thick lips, and a broad, flat nose.
There was a chubby, elderly-looking woman with puffy cheeks and short, stringy
hair. There was a younger, prettier woman with a delicate face whose features in
some ways resembled that of his own people but whose eyes seemed oddly slanted,
almost catlike. There was a very old man with wrinkled skin and very little
hair. And, last, there was a strange-looking man with a very long face, a
lantern jaw, and a birdlike nose.
Each of these was repeated so that the same five, had their eyes been open,
would have been looking out, or down, at any point within.
Who were they? The ones who built this place? If so, why had they built it, and
why here, and what was the source of the warmth below? Had they built this place
and then added these faces as a monument to their work, a permanent sort of
memorial? Would that question ever be answerable?
He paused, trying to decide what to do next. He'd challenged the mountain and
won, and proved his point, but now what? He'd never taken it any further than
this. Now it seemed idiotic to return below, reversing the climb, facing even
more dangers in the descent than in the ascent if only because, going down, one
was always a bit careless compared to facing the unknown ascent. To go down and
say what? That there were twenty-five huge carved heads of five sleeping men and
women in a crater, and below them a huge net through which blew warm air? Would