"Edmond Hamilton - The Monsters of Juntonheim" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

doesn't have the usual effects of gamma radiation on human tissue. But it seems invigorating.

Excitement began to rise in me. I had found a hidden land of strange warmth completely unknown to
civilization, here in the polar wastes. Its strange trick of refraction had defied discovery until now. No
scientist could have been dropped in that blind spot without feeling the urge to explore. Waiting for the
storm to die down, flying out of the blind area and getting back to the ship for a regular exploration party
would have been wiser. But like every other man, I had the desire to be first in an unknown land.


I moored the plane between two boulders and removed my flying togs to don regulation exploring
clothes for Arctic weather. With a pack of food pellets and blankets on my back, I began to climb the
jagged, craggy wall.


Gasping for breath, I reached the rim of the lofty cliffs. Cold sea winds buffeted me, and the boom of
bursting breakers came muffledly from below. Harshly screaming sea-gulls soared and circled around
me.


To my right lay the edge of the cliffs. To my left, a strip of heather ended in a forest of fir trees, bending
in the wind. Beyond the dark fir forest, shaggy, wooded hills rose steeply. Toward the south lay the
greater part of the land, rising into higher forested hills. It was a wild northern landscape, bleak, harsh,
inhospitable. Yet somehow I relished being alone among screaming winds and gulls, and booming surf,
and groaning trees.


I stared at the towering little island I had glimpsed. Its cliffs rose sheer from the green sea for a thousand
feet. Its flat top was on a level with the mainland, and separated from it only by a narrow, deep chasm
through which the ocean surged.


But upon the island itself rose massed gray towers buildings! Great castles stood out boldly against the
gray, tossing sky, grouped into an amazing city on the small plateau. From the island to the mainland
sprang the arch of a stupendous bridge. The flying bow of stone soared up and out for hundreds of feet.
Painted in brilliant red and blue and yellow, it gleamed like a fixed rainbow.


A rainbow bridge, leading to the high eyrie of great gray castles! Into my mind rushed the stupefying
memory of the legends I had read so recently Asgard, the fabled city of the Norse gods the rainbow
bridge that connected their abode with Midgard.


Was I looking upon the city of the Aesir? Impossible! Yet this place was real...




Chapter III. Jotun and Aesir