"Books - David Eddings - Belgarath the Sorcerer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

traveling pleasant. One evening I gathered up the fruits of my
pilferage, stowed them in the rude pack I'd fashioned during the long
winter evenings, and sat in my tent listening in almost breathless
anticipation as the sounds of the old people gradually subsided. Then,
when all was quiet, I crept out of my temporary home and made for the
edge of the woods.

The moon was full that night, and the stars seemed very bright. I
crept through the shadowy woods, waded the river, and emerged on the
other side filled with a sense of enormous exhilaration. I was free!

I followed the river southward for the better part of that night,
putting as much distance as I possibly could between me and the old
people enough certainly so that their creaky old limbs wouldn't permit
them to follow.

The forest seemed incredibly old. The trees were huge, and the forest
floor, all over-spread by that leafy green canopy, was devoid of the
usual underbrush, carpeted instead with lush green moss. It seemed to
me an enchanted forest, and once I was certain there would be no
pursuit, I found that I wasn't really in any great hurry, so I
strolled--sauntered if you will--southward with no real sense of
urgency, aside from that now gentle compulsion to go someplace, and I
hadn't really the faintest idea of where.

And then the land opened up. What had been forest became a kind of
vale, a grassy basin dotted here and there with delightful groves of
trees verged with thickets of lush berry bushes, centering around deep,
cold springs of water so clear that I could look down through ten feet
of it at trout, which, all unafraid, looked up curiously at me as I
knelt to drink.

And deer, as placid and docile as sheep, grazed in the lush green
meadows and watched with large and gentle eyes as I passed.

All bemused, I wandered, more content than I had ever been. The
distant voice of prudence told me that my store of food wouldn't last
forever, but it didn't really seem to diminish--perhaps because I
glutted myself on berries and other strange fruits.

I lingered long in that magic vale, and in time I came to its very
center, where there grew a tree so vast that my mind reeled at the
immensity of it.

I make no pretense at being a horticulturist, but I've been nine times
around the world, and so far as I've seen, there's no other tree like
it anywhere. And, in what was probably a mistake, I went to the tree
and laid my hands upon its rough bark. I've always wondered what might
have happened if I had not.