"Dunsany, Lord - Idle Days On The Yann" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

sailors went and gathered fruits I came alone to the gate of
Mandaroon. A few huts were outside it, in which lived the
guard. A sentinel with a long white beard was standing in
the gate, armed with a rusty pike. He wore large
spectacles, which were covered with dust. Through the gate
I saw the city. A deathly stillness was over all of it.
The ways seemed untrodden, and moss was thick on doorsteps;
in the market-place huddled figures lay asleep. A scent of
incense came wafted through the gateway, of incense and
burned poppies, and there was a hum of the echoes of distant
bells. I said to the sentinel in the tongue of the region
of Yann, "Why are they all asleep in this still city?"
He answered: "None may ask questions in this gate for
fear they will wake the people of the city. For when the
people of this city wake the gods will die. And when the
gods die men may dream no more." And I began to ask him
what gods that city worshipped, but he lifted his pike
because none might ask questions there. So I left him and
went back to the "Bird of the River."
Certainly Mandaroon was beautiful with her white
pinnacles peering over her ruddy walls and the green of her
copper roofs.
When I came back again to the "Bird of the River," I
found the sailors were returned to the ship. Soon we
weighed anchor, and sailed out again, and so came once more
to the middle of the river. And now the sun was moving
toward his heights, and there had reached us on the River
Yann the song of those countless myriads of choirs that
attend him in his progress round the world. For the little
creatures that have many legs had spread their gauze wings
easily on the air, as a man rests his elbows on a balcony
and gave jubilant, ceremonial praises to the sun, or else
they moved together on the air in wavering dances intricate
and swift, or turned aside to avoid the onrush of some drop
of water that a breeze had shaken from a jungle orchid,
chilling the air and driving it before it, as it fell
whirring in its rush to the earth; but all the while they
sang triumphantly. "For the day is for us," they said,
"whether our great and sacred father the Sun shall bring up
more life like us from the marshes, or whether all the world
shall end to-night." And there sang all those whose notes
are known to human ears, as well as those whose far more
numerous notes have been never heard by man.
To these a rainy day had been as an era of war that
should desolate continents during all the lifetime of a man.
And there came out also from the dark and steaming jungle
to behold and rejoice in the Sun the huge and lazy
butterflies. And they danced, but danced idly, on the ways
of the air, as some haughty queen of distant conquered lands
might in her poverty and exile dance, in some encampment of