"Dunsany, Lord - Fifty-one Tales" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

that went from Tyre, eight fisher-fleets and ninety ships of
the line, twelve warships under sail, with their carronades,
three hundred and eighty-seven river-craft, forty-two
merchantmen that carried spice, thirty yachts, twenty-one
battleships of the modern time, nine thousand admirals....."
he mumbled and chuckled on, till I suddenly rose and fled
from his fearful contamination.













The Raft-Builders




All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making
rafts upon doomed ships.
When we break up under the heavy years and go down into
eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost
rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion's sea. They will not
carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two
and little else.
They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day,
they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm
their hands and to distract their thoughts from their
certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship
breaks up.
See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very
tranquility deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels
have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous
whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things --
small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden
evenings -- and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole
ships.
See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and
something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings
and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old
centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make
a darkness round Persepolis.
For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on