"Dunsany, Lord - collection - A Dreamer's Tales- And Other Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

cities, and all men are known to one another therein, and bless one another
by name as they meet in the streets. And they have a broad, green way in
every city that comes in out of some vale or wood or downland, and wanders
in and out about the city between the houses and across the streets, and the
people walk along it never at all, but every year at her appointed time
Spring walks along it from the flowery lands, causing the anemone to bloom
on the green way and all the early joys of hidden woods, or deep, secluded
vales, or triumphant downlands, whose heads lift up so proudly, far up aloof
from cities.
Sometimes waggoners or shepherds walk along this way, they that have come
into the city from over cloudy ridges, and the townsmen hinder them not, for
there is a tread that troubleth the grass and a tread that troubleth it not,
and each man in his own heart knoweth which tread he hath. And in the sunlit
spaces of the weald and in the wold's dark places, afar from the music of
cities and from the dance of the cities afar, they make there the music of
the country places and dance the country dance. Amiable, near and friendly
appears to these men the sun, and as he is genial to them and tends their
younger vines, so they are kind to the little woodland things and any rumour
of the fairies or 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 Poltarnee's
difficult slope, and having attained the top pass over and never return. A
few stayed behind in the Inner Lands and became the 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 by pass onward wherever the Sea list. And this is the
legend that 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