"Dunsany, Lord - Hashish Man, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

The Hashish Man

by Lord Dunsany




I was at a dinner in London the other day. The ladies had
gone upstairs, and no one sat on my right; on my left there
was a man I did not know, but he knew my name somehow
apparently, for he turned to me after a while, and said, "I
read a story of yours about Bethmoora in a review."
Of course I remembered the tale. It was about a
beautiful Oriental city that was suddenly deserted in a day
-- nobody quite knew why. I said, "Oh, yes," and slowly
searched in my mind for some more fitting acknowledgment of
the compliment that his memory had paid me.
I was greatly astonished when he said, "You were wrong
about the gnousar sickness; it was not that at all."
I said, "Why! Have you been there?"
And he said, "Yes; I do it with hashish. I know
Bethmoora well." And he took out of his pocket a small box
full of some black stuff that looked like tar, but had a
stranger smell. He warned me not to touch it with my
finger, as the stain remained for days. "I got it from a
gipsy," he said. "He had a lot of it, as it had killed his
father." But I interrupted him, for I wanted to know for
certain what it was that had made desolate that beautiful
city, Bethmoora, and why they fled from it swiftly in a
day. "Was it because of the Desert's curse?" I asked. And
he said, "Partly it was the fury of the Desert and partly
the advice of the Emperor Thuba Mleen, for that fearful
beast is in some way connected with the Desert on his
mother's side." And he told me this strange story: "You
remember the sailor with the black scar, who was there on
the day that you described when the messengers came on mules
to the gate of Bethmoora, and all the people fled. I met
this man in a tavern, drinking rum, and he told me all about
the flight from Bethmoora, but knew no more than you did
what the message was, or who had sent it. However, he said
he would see Bethmoora once more whenever he touched again
at an eastern port, even if he had to face the Devil. He
often said that he would face the Devil to find out the
mystery of that message that emptied Bethmoora in a day.
And in the end he had to face Thuba Mleen, whose weak
ferocity he had not imagined. For one day the sailor told
me he had found a ship, and I met him no more after that in
the tavern drinking rum. It was about that time that I got
the hashish from the gipsy, who had a quantity that he did