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

Neol-Hungar and came to the Gap of Poy. All these are in
that part of the world that pertains to the fields we know;
but beyond the Gap of Poy on those ordinary plains, that so
closely resembleSussex, one first meets the unlikely. A
line of common grey hills, the Hills of Sneg, may be seen at
the edge of the plain from the Gap of Poy; it is there that
the incredible begins, infrequently at first, but happening
more and more as you go up the hills. For instance,
descending once into Poy Plains, the first thing that I saw
was an ordinary shepherd watching a flock of ordinary
sheep. I looked at them for some time and nothing happened,
when, without a word, one of the sheep walked up to the
shepherd and borrowed his pipe and smoked it -- an incident
that struck me as unlikely; but in the Hills of Sneg I met
an honest politician. Over these plains went Jones and over
the Hills of Sneg, meeting at first unlikely things, and
then incredible things, till he came to the long slope
beyond the hills that leads up to the Edge of the World, and
where, as all guide-books tell, anything may happen. You
might at the foot of this slope see here and there things
that could conceivably occur in the fields we know; but soon
these disappeared, and the traveller saw nothing but
fabulous beasts, browsing on flowers as astounding as
themselves, and rocks so distorted that their shapes had
clearly a meaning, being too startling to be accidental.
Even the trees were shockingly unfamiliar, they had so much
to say, and they leant over to one another whenever they
spoke and struck grotesque attitudes and leered. Jones saw
two fir-trees fighting. The effect of these scenes on his
nerves was very severe; still he climbed on, and was much
cheered at last by the sight of a primrose, the only
familiar thing he had seen for hours, but it whistled and
skipped away. He saw the unicorns in their secret valley.
Then night in a sinister way slipped over the sky, and there
shone not only the stars, but lesser and greater moons, and
he heard dragons rattling in the dark.
With dawn there appeared above him among its amazing
crags the town of Tong Tong Tarrup, with the light on its
frozen stairs, a tiny cluster of houses far up in the sky.
He was on the steep mountain now: great mists were leaving
it slowly, and revealing, as they trailed away, more and
more astonishing things. Before the mist had all gone he
heard quite near him, on what he had thought was bare
mountain, the sound of a heavy galloping on turf. He had
come to the plateau of the centaurs. And all at once he saw
them in the mist: there they were, the children of fable,
five enormous centaurs. Had he paused on account of any
astonishment he had not come so far: he strode on over the
plateau, and came quite near to the centaurs. It is never
the centaurs' wont to notice men; they pawed the ground and