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

walls on the bank to the west and east of the mountain, and they called the mountain Talanac.
Talanac was their name for the Jaguar God.
The kotchulti (literally, god-house) or temple of Toshkouni, deity of writing, mathematics, and
music, is halfway up the stepped-pyramid city of
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Talanac. It faces the Street of Mixed Blessings, and, from the outside, does not look impressively
large. The front (if the temple is a slight bulging of the mountainside, a representation of the
bird-jaguar face of Toshkouni. Like the rest of the interior of this mountain, all hollowing out,
all cleaving away, all bas- and alto-relief, have been done by rubbing or drilling. Jade cannot be
chipped or flaked; it can be drilled, but most of the labor in making beauty out of the stone
comes from rubbing. Friction begets loveliness and utility.
Thus, the white-and-black striated jade in this area had been worn away by a generation of slaves
using crushed corundum for abrasives and steel and wooden tools. The slaves had performed the
crude basic labor; then the artisans and artists had taken over. The Tishquetmoac claim that form
is buried in the stone and that it is revealed seems to be trueтАФin the case of Talanac.
'The gods hide; men discover," the Tishquetmoac say.
When a visitor to the temple enters through the doorway, which seems to press down on him with
Toshkouni's cat-teeth, he steps into a great cavern. It is illuminated by sunlight pouring through
holes in the ceiling and by a hundred smokeless torches. A choir of black-robed monks with shaven,
scarlet-painted heads stands behind a waist-high white-and-red jade screen. The choir chants
praises to the Lord of The World, Ollimaml, and to Toshkouni.
At each of the six corners of the chamber stands an altar in the shape of a beast or bird or a
young woman on all fours. Cartographs bulge from the surfaces of each, and little animals and
abstract symbols, all the result of years of dedicated labor
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and long-enduring passion. An emerald, as large as a big man's head, lies on one altar, and there
is a story about this which also concerns Kickaha. Indeed, the emerald was one of the reasons
Kickaha was so welcome in Talanac. The jewel had once been stolen and Kickaha had recovered it
from the Khamshem thieves of the next level and returned itтАФthough not gratis. But that is another
story.
Kickaha was in the library of the temple. This was a vast room deep in the mountain, reached only
by going through the public altar room and a long wide corridor. It, too, was lit by sunlight
shooting through shafts in the ceiling and by torches and oil lamps. The walls had been rubbed
until thousands of shallow niches were made, each of which now held a Tishquetmoac book. The books
were rolls of lambskin sewn together, with the roll secured at each end to an ebony-wood cylinder.
The cylinder at the beginning of the book was hung on a tall jade frame, and the roll was slowly
unwound by the reader, who stood before it.
Kickaha was in one well-lit corner, just below a hole in the ceiling. A black-robed priest,
Takoacol, was explaining to Kickaha the meaning of some cartographs. During his last visit,
Kickaha had studied the writing, but he had memorized only five hundred of the picture-symbols,
and fluency required knowing at least two thousand.
iakoacol was indicating with a long-nailed yellow-painted finger the location of the palace of the
emperor, the miklosiml.
"Just as the palace of the Lord of this world stands on top of the highest level of the world, so
the palace of the miklosiml stands on the upper-
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most level of Talanac, the greatest city in the world."