"Philip Jose Farmer - WOT 3 - A Private Cosmos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

approached the fort. Honoring the symbol of the herald, the captain gave orders to withhold fire.
The Half-Horse stopped outside the gates and shouted at Kickaha, "You have escaped us once again,
Trickster! But you will never be able to leave Tishquetmoac, because we will be waiting for you!
Don't think you can use the Great Trade Path to be safe from us! We will honor the Path; everyone
on it will be untouched by the Half-Horses! Everyone except you, Kickaha! We will kill you! We
have sworn not to return to our lodges, our women and children, until we have killed you!"
Kickaha shouted down to him, "Your women
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A PRIVATE COSMOS
will have taken other husbands and your children will grow up without remembering you! You will
never catch or kill me, you half-heehaws!"
The next day a relief party rode up, and the Tishquetmoac cavalry on leave rode out with Kick-aha
to the city of Talanac. The Half-Horses did not appear, and after Kickaha had been in the city for
a while, he forgot about the threats of the Shoyshatel. But he was to remember.
II
THE WATCETCOL RIVER originates in a river which branches off from the Guzirit in Kham-shemland, or
Dracheland, on the monolith Abharhploonta. It flows through dense jungle to the edge of the
monolith and then plunges through a channel which the river has cut out of hard rock. The river
falls for a long distance as solid sheets of water, then, before reaching the bottom of the
hundred thousand foot monolith, it becomes spray. Clouds roll out halfway down the monolith and
hide the spray and foam from the eyes of men. The bottom is also hidden; those who have tried to
walk into the fog have reported that it is like blackest night and, after a while, the wetness
becomes solid.
A mile or two from the base the fog extends, and somewhere in there the fog becomes water again
and then a river. The stream flows through a narrow channel in limestone and then broadens out
later. It zigzags for about five hundred miles, straightens out for twenty miles and then splits
to flow around a solid rock mountain. The river reunites on the other side of the mountain, turns
sharply, and flows westward for sixty miles. There it disappears into a vast cavern, and it may be
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A PRIVATE COSMOS
presumed that it drops through a network of caverns inside the monolith on top of which is the
Amerindian level. Where it comes out, only the eagies of Podarge, Wolff, and Kickaha know.
The mountain which the river had islanded was a solid block of jade.
When Jadawin formed this universe, he poured out a three thousand foot high, roughly pyramid-
shaped piece of mingled jadeite and nephrite, striated in apple-green, emerald-green, brown,
mauve, yellow, blue, gray, red, and black and various shades thereof. Jadawin deposited it to cool
on the edge of the Great Plains and later directed the river to flow arouiu} its base.
For thousands of years, the jade mountain was untouched except by birds that landed on it and fish
that flicked against the cool greasy roots. When the Amerindians were gated through to his world,
they came across the jade mountain. Some tribes made it their god, but the nomadic peoples did not
settle down near it.
Then a group of civilized people from ancient Mexico were taken into this world near the jade
mountain. This happened, as nearly as Jadawin (who later became Wolff) could recall, about 1,500


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Earth-years ago. The involuntary immigrants may have been of that civilization which the later
Mexicans called Olmec. They called themselves Tishquetmoac. They built wooden houses and wooden