"Jeff Hecht - The Rumor of the Ruined City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hecht Jeff)

"It took me a day to admit that I couldn't explain what Vern had
found," Anna said. "We went back after the rest of the group finished the
trail work. I must have studied it for hours..."
Nikolai waited until he was sure Anna had finished. "My wife tells me I
am crazy to chase the rumor of the ruined city. She has never travelled far;
to her, crossing the ocean is like flying to another planet. She says at our
age we should be thinking of retiring and playing with our grandchildren. She
will not go to see it, so it can not seize her like it did me. When I saw it I
knew it was my destiny."
"I understand," said Anna. "Sometimes I worry about that, too."
****
We stopped for a quick roadside meal when we got off the Thruway in New
York. Anna and I quietly paid for Nikolai, knowing Russian scientists have no
money. He had pulled strings to get speaking invitations to Yale and Amherst,
which had paid for his trip to the States. It was after dusk when we set up my
big old tent in the Northville campground, just inside Adirondack State Park.
As Anna and I worked, Nikolai opened his bag and unwrapped two small thin
slabs of dark fine shale that he had packed with tissue in a book-sized box.
We set up the lantern and looked at the fossils, glossy black films on the
gray rock.
 Anna studied them, turning the slabs to catch the surface in different
light, peering at spots through her hand lens. To me they were overgrown
insects with too many legs, claws, and body parts. "What do you think they
are?" she asked.
"Enigmatica," he replied. "I have studied papers on the Burgess Shale
and other lagerstaetten, but even those lucky events that preserved so many
other strange things captured nothing like them." He took them and packed them
carefully away. "There are bigger ones, but I could not bring them."
****
In the morning, we drove to the trail head and slipped on our day
packs. When Anna and I had discovered the site, the whole trail crew had
backpacked in, but we didn't want to make Nikolai carry a heavy overnight
pack.
We walked about two miles along the trail still marked by our red
blazes, then turned at the old stone wall which I had spotted last summer. We
followed the wall to the cellar hole that was our landmark. The remains of the
old building intrigued Nikolai. "How long has it been abandoned?"
"The trees are at least 50 years old," Anna replied. We'd puzzled over
this ourselves, when we first saw it and wondered what life had been like deep
in the woods long ago. "The loose fieldstone looks like early nineteenth
century work. I'd guess the people moved out between 1900 and 1940."
"We never found any signs of plumbing," I added, though I was not sure
what that would mean to him.
Nikolai sat on a big rock at one corner, sipping from his water bottle
and looking down into the hole. Leaves were slowly filling it in. "Could this
be what you found?"
I shook my head. "No, it's several hundred feet away."
"That isn't what he meant, Vern. He's asking if it could be the
basement of an old house." Anna shrugged. "We're not sure. We only discovered
this last year, and haven't studied it long enough. Although we've talked