"Lord Dunsany - The Long Porter's Tale (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

The Long Porter's Tale

by Lord Dunsany



There are things that are known only to the long porter of
Tong Tong Tarrup as he sits and mumbles memories to himself
in the little bastion gateway.
He remembers the war there was in the halls of the
gnomes; and how the fairies came for the opals once, which
Tong Tong Tarrup has; and the way that the giants went
through the fields below, he watching from his gateway: he
remembers quests that are even yet a wonder to the gods.
Who dwells in those frozen houses on the high bare brink of
the world not even he has told me, and he is held to be
garrulous. Among the elves, the only living things ever
seen moving at that awful altitude where they quarry
turquoise on Earth's highest crag, his name is a byword for
loquacity wherewith they mock the talkative.
His favourite story if you offer him bash -- the drug of
which he is fondest, and for which he will give his service
in war to the elves against the goblins, or vice-versa if
the goblins bring him more -- his favourite story, when
bodily soothed by the drug and mentally fiercely excited,
tells of a quest undertaken ever so long ago for nothing
more marketable than an old woman's song.
Picture him telling it. An old man, lean and bearded,
and almost monstrously long, that lolled in a city's gateway
on a crag perhaps ten miles high; the houses for the most
part facing eastward, lit by the sun and moon and the
constellations we know, but one house on the pinnacle
looking over the edge of the world and lit by the glimmer of
those unearthly spaces where one long evening wears away the
stars: my little offering of bash; a long forefinger that
nipped it at once on a stained and greedy thumb -- all these
are in the foreground of the picture. In the background,
the mystery of those silent houses and of not knowing who
their denizens were, or what service they had at the hands
of the long porter and what payment he had in return, and
whether he was mortal.
Picture him in the gateway of this incredible town,
having swallowed my bash in silence, stretch his great
length, lean back, and begin to speak.
It seems that one clear morning a hundred years ago, a
visitor to Tong Tong Tarrup was climbing up from the world.
He had already passed above the snow and had set his foot on
a step of the earthward stairway that goes down from Tong
Tong Tarrup on to the rocks, when the long porter saw him.
And so painfully did he climb those easy steps that the