"Dunsany, Lord - Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

old legend. And when the light of some little distant city
makes a slight flush upon the edge of the sky, and the happy
golden windows of the homesteads stare gleaming into the
dark, then the old and holy figure of Romance, cloaked even
to the face, comes down out of hilly woodlands and bids dark
shadows to rise and dance, and sends the forest creatures
forth to prowl, and lights in a moment in her bower of grass
the little glowworm's lamp, and brings a hush down over the
grey lands, and out of it rises faintly on far-off hills the
voice of a lute. There are not in the world lands more
prosperous and happy than Toldees, Mondath, Arizim.
From these three little kingdoms that are named the Inner
Lands the young men stole constantly away. One by one they
went, and no one knew why they went save that they had a
longing to behold the Sea. Of this longing they spoke
little, but a young man would become silent for a few days,
and then, one morning very early, he would slip away and
slowly climb Poltarnees's difficult slope, and having
attained the top pass over and never return. A few stayed
behind in the Inner Lands and became old men, but none that
had ever climbed Poltarnees from the very earliest times had
ever come back again. Many had gone up Poltarnees sworn to
return. Once a king sent all his courtiers, one by one, to
report the mystery to him, and then went himself; none ever
returned.
Now, it was the wont of the folk of the Inner Lands to
worship rumours and legends of the Sea, and all that their
prophets discovered of the Sea was writ in a sacred book,
and with deep devotion on days of festival or mourning read
in the temples by the priests. Now, all their temples lay
open to the west, resting upon pillars, that the breeze from
the Sea might enter them, and they lay open on pillars to
the east that the breezes of the Sea might not be hindered
but pass onward wherever the Sea list. And this is the
legend they had of the sea, whom none in the Inner Lands had
ever beholden. They say that the Sea is a river heading
towards Hercules, and they say that he touches against the
edge of the world, and that Poltarnees looks upon him. They
say that all the worlds of heaven go bobbing on this river
and are swept down with the stream, and that Infinity is
thick and furry with forests through which the river in his
course sweeps on with all the worlds of heaven. Among the
colossal trunks of those dark trees, the smallest fronds of
whose branches are many nights, there walk the gods. And
whenever its thirst, glowing in space like a great sun,
comes upon the beast, the tiger of the gods creeps down to
the river to drink. And the tiger of the gods his fill
loudly, whelming worlds the while, and the level of the
river sinks between its banks ere the beast's thirst is
quenched and ceases to glow like a sun. And many worlds