"Book of Wonder, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

taking from it the hoarded amulet that his father, Jyshak, in the year of
his prime, had hammered from mountain gold and set with opals bartered from
the gnomes, he put it upon his wrist, and said no word, but walked from his
mother's cavern. And he took with him too that clarion of the centaurs,
that famous silver horn, that in its time had summoned to surrender
seventeen cities of Man, and for twenty years had brayed at star-girt walls
in the Siege of Tholdenblarna, the citadel of the gods, what time the
centaurs waged their fabulous war and were not broken by any force of arms,
but retreated slowly in a cloud of dust before the final miracle of the
gods that They brought in Their desperate need from Their ultimate armoury.
He took it and strode away, and his mother only sighed and let him go.

She knew that to-day he would not drink at the stream coming down from the
terraces of Varpa Niger, the inner land of the mountains, that to-day he
would not wonder awhile at the sunset and afterwards trot back to the
cavern again to sleep on rushes pulled by rivers that know not Man. She
knew that it was with him as it had been of old with his father, and with
Goom the father of Jyshak, and long ago with the gods. Therefore she only
sighed and let him go.

But he, coming out from the cavern that was his home, went for the first
time over the little stream, and going round the corner of the crags saw
glittering beneath him the mundane plain. And the wind of the autumn that
was gilding the world, rushing up the slopes of the mountain, beat cold on
his naked flanks. He raised his head and snorted.

"I am a man-horse now!" he shouted aloud; and leaping from crag to crag he
galloped by valley and chasm, by torrent-bed and scar of avalanche, until
he came to the wandering leagues of the plain, and left behind him for ever
the Athraminaurian mountains.

His goal was Zretazoola, the city of Sombelene. What legend of Sombelene's
inhuman beauty or of the wonder of her mystery had ever floated over the
mundane plain to the fabulous cradle of the centaurs' race, the
Athraminaurian mountains, I do not know. Yet in the blood of man there is a
tide, and old sea- current, rather, that is somehow akin to the twilight,
which brings him rumours of beauty from however far away, as driftwood is
found at sea from islands not yet discovered: and this springtide of
current that visits the blood of man comes from the fabulous quarter of his
lineage, from the legendary, of old; it takes him out to the woodlands, out
to the hills; he listens to ancient song. So it may be that Shepperalk's
fabulous blood stirred in those lonely mountains away at the edge of the
world to rumours that only the airy twilight knew and only confided
secretly to the bat, for Shepperalk was more legendary even than man.
Certain it was that he headed from the first for the city Zretazoola, where
Sombelene in her temple dwelt; though all the mundane plain, its rivers and
mountains, lay between Shepperalk's home and the city he sought.

When first the feet of the centaur touched the grass of that soft alluvial
earth he blew for joy upon the silver horn, he pranced and caracoled, he