"Lord Dunsany - Where The Tides Ebb And Flow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

Where the Tides Ebb and Flow

by Lord Dunsany



I dreamt that I had done a horrible thing, so that burial
was to be denied me either in soil or sea, neither could
there be any hell for me.
I waited for some hours, knowing this. Then my friends
came for me, and slew me secretly and with ancient rite, and
lit great tapers, and carried me away.
It was all inLondonthat the thing was done, and they
went furtively at dead of night along grey streets and among
mean houses until they came to the river. And the river and
the tide of the sea were grappling with one another between
the mud-banks, and both of them were black and full of
lights. A sudden wonder came into the eyes of each, as my
friends came near to them with their glaring tapers. All
these things I saw as they carried me dead and stiffening,
for my soul was still among my bones, because there was no
hell for it, and because Christian burial was denied me.
They took me down a stairway that was green with slimy
things, and so came slowly to the terrible mud. There, in
the territory of forsaken things, they dug a shallow grave.
When they had finished they laid me in the grave, and
suddenly they cast their tapers to the river. And when the
water had quenched the flaring lights the tapers looked pale
and small as they bobbed upon the tide, and at once the
glamour of the calamity was gone, and I noticed then the
approach of the huge dawn; and my friends cast their cloaks
over their faces, and the solemn procession was turned into
many fugitives that furtively stole away.
Then the mud came back wearily and covered all but my
face. There I lay alone with quite forgotten things, with
drifting things that the tides will take no farther, with
useless things and lost things, and the horrible unnatural
bricks that are neither stone nor soil. I was rid of
feeling, because I had been killed, but perception and
thought were in my unhappy soul. The dawn widened, and I
saw the desolate houses that crowded the marge of the river,
and their dead windows peered into my dead eyes, windows
with bales behind them instead of human souls. I grew so
weary looking at these forlorn things that I wanted to cry
out, but could not, because I was dead. Then I knew, as I
had never known before, that for all the years that herd of
desolate houses had wanted to cry out too, but, being dead,
were dumb. And I knew then that it had yet been well with
the forgotten drifting things if they had wept, but they
were eyeless and without life. And I, too, tried to weep,