"Dunsany, Lord - collection - Tales of Three Hemispheres" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

had come to pray. And the more his hate increased the more clearly he saw
him, until nothing else could be seen by the eye of his mind but the dark
lean figure, the little lean legs, the grey beard and neat loin-cloth of
Boob Aheera, his enemy.
That the Diamond Idol should have granted the prayers of such a one he did
not as yet imagine, he hated him merely for his presumptuousness in
approaching the shrine at all, for approaching it before him whose cause was
righteous, for many an old past wrong, but most of all for the expression of
his face and the general look of the man as he has swept by in his canoe
with his double paddle going in the moonlight.
Ali pushed through the steaming vegetation. The place smelt of orchids.
There is no track to the shrine though many go. If there were a track the
white man would one day find it, and parties would row to see it whenever a
liner came in; and photographs would appear in weekly papers with accounts
of it underneath by men who had never left London, and all the mystery would
be gone away and there would be nothing novel in this story.
Ali had scarcely gone a hundred yards through cactus and creeper underneath
the palms when he came to the golden shrine that nothing guards except the
deeps of the forest, and found the Diamond Idol. The Diamond Idol is five
inches high and its base a good inch square, and it has a greater luster
than those diamonds that Mr. Moses bought last year for his wife, when he
offered her an earldom or the diamonds, and Jael his wife had answered, "Buy
the diamonds and be just plain Mr. Fortescue."
Purer than those was its luster and carved as they carve not in Europe, and
the men thereby are poor and held to be fearless--yet they do not sell that
idol. And I may say here that if any one of my readers should ever come by
ship to the winding harbour where the forts of the Portuguese crumble in
infinite greenery, where the baobab stands like a corpse here and there in
the palms, if he goes ashore where no one has any business to go, and where
no one so far as I know has gone from a liner before (though it's little
more than a mile or so from the pier), and if he finds a golden shrine,
which is near enough to the shore, and a five-inch diamond in it carved in
the shape of a god, it is better to leave it alone and get back safe to the
ship than to sell that diamond idol for any price in the world.
Ali Kareeb Ahash went into the golden shrine, and when he raised his ehad
from the seven obeisances that are the due of the idol, behold! it glowed
with such a lustre as only it wears after answering recent prayer. No native
of those parts mistakes the tone of the idol, they know its varying shades
as a tracker knows blood; the moon was streaming in through the open door
and Ali saw it clearly.
No one had been that night but Boob Aheera.
The fury of Ali rose and surged to his heart, he clutched his knife till the
hilt of it bruieed his hand, yet he did not utter the prayer that he had
made ready about Boob Aheera's liver, for he saw that Boob Aheera's prayers
were acceptable to the idol and knew that divine protection was over his
enemy.
What Boob Aheera's prayer was he did not know, but he went back to the beach
as fast as one can go through cacti and creepers that climb to the tops of
the palms; and as fast as his canoe could carry him he went down the winding
harbour, till the liner shone beside him as he passed, and he heard the