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

the World. And the song that was lapping there against the
coasts of the World, and to which the stars were dancing,
was the same that he had heard the old woman sing long since
down in the valley in the midst of the Northern moor.
But that grizzled man, the long porter, would not let the
stranger stay, because he brought him no bash, and
impatiently he shouldered him away, himself not troubling to
glance through the World's outermost window, for the lands
that Time afflicts and the spaces that Time knows not are
all one to that grizzled man, and the bash that he eats more
profoundly astounds his mind than anything man can show him
either in the World we know or over the Edge. And, bitterly
protesting, the traveller went back and down again to the
World.

..............

Accustomed as I am to the incredible from knowing the
Edge of the World, the story presents difficulties to me.
Yet it may be that the devastation wrought by Time is merely
local, and that outside the scope of his destruction old
songs are still being sung by those that we deem dead. I
try to hope so. And yet the more I investigate the story
that the long porter told me in the town of Tong Tong Tarrup
the more plausible the alternative theory appears -- that
that grizzled man is a liar.