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

still I lay there without any cause to hope, and daring not
to hope without a cause, because of the terrible envy and
the anger of the things that could drift no more.
Once a great storm rode up, even as far as London, out of
the sea from the South; and he came curving into the river
with the fierce East wind. And he was mightier than the
dreary tides, and went with great leaps over the listless
mud. And all the sad forgotten things rejoiced, and mingled
with things that were haughtier than they, and rode once
more amongst the lordly shipping that was driven up and
down. And out of their hideous home he took my bones, never
again, I hoped, to be vexed with the ebb and flow. And with
the fall of the tide he went riding down the river and
turned to the southwards, and so went to his home. And my
bones he scattered among many isles and along the shores of
happy alien mainlands. And for a moment, while they were
far asunder, my soul was almost free.
Then there arose, at the will of the moon, the assiduous
flow of the tide, and it undid at once the work of the ebb,
and gathered my bones from the marge of sunny isles, and
gleaned them all along the mainland's shores, and went
rocking northwards till it came to the mouth of the Thames,
and there turned westwards its relentless face, and so went
up the river and came to the hole in the mud, and into it
dropped my bones; and partly the mud covered them and partly
it left them white, for the mud cares not for its forsaken
things.
Then the ebb came, and I saw the dead eyes of the houses
and the jealousy of the other forgotten things that the
storm had not carried thence.
And some more centuries passed over the ebb and flow and
over the loneliness of things forgotten. And I lay there
all the whole in the careless grip of the mud, never wholly
covered, yet never able to go free, and I longed for the
great caress of the warm Earth or the comfortable lap of the
Sea.
Sometimes men found my bones and buried them, but the
tradition never died, and my friends' successors always
brought them back. At last the barges went no more, and
there were fewer lights; shaped timbers no longer floated
down the fair-way, and there came instead old wind-uprooted
trees in all their natural simplicity.
At last I was aware that somewhere near me a blade of
grass was growing, and the moss began to appear all over the
dead houses. One day some thistledown went drifting over
the river.
For some years I watched these signs attentively, until I
became certain that London was passing away. Then I hoped
once more, and all along both banks of the river there was
anger among the lost things that anything should dare to