"Diana Wynne Jones - Castle In The Air (txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

a young lady

He woke to find himself lying on a bank, with the carpet still
underneath him, in a garden more beautiful than any he had imagined.

Abdullah was convinced that this was a dream. Here was the garden he had
been trying to imagine when the stranger so rudely interrupted him. Here
the moon was nearly full and riding high above, casting light as white
as paint on a hundred small fragrant flowers in the grass around him.
Round yellow lamps hung in the trees, dispelling the dense black shadows
from the moon. Abdullah thought this was a very pleasing idea. By the
two lights, white and yellow, he could see an arcade of creepers
supported on elegant pillars, beyond the lawn where he lay, and from
somewhere behind that, hidden water was quietly trickling.

It was so cool and so heavenlike that Abdullah got up and went in search
of the hidden water, wandering down the arcade, where starry blooms
brushed his face, all white and hushed in the moonlight, and bell-like
flowers breathed out the headiest and gentlest of scents. As one does in
dreams, Abdullah fingered a great waxy lily here and detoured
deliriously there into a dell of pale

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roses. He had never before had a dream that was anything like so beautiful.

The water, when he found it beyond some big fernlike bushes dripping
dew, was a simple marble fountain in another lawn, lit by strings of
lamps in the bushes, which made the rippling water into a marvel of gold
and silver crescents. Abdullah wandered toward it raptly.

There was only one thing needed to complete his rapture, and as in all
the best dreams, it was there. An extremely lovely girl came across the
lawn to meet him, treading softly on the damp grass with bare feet. The
gauzy garments floating around her showed her to be slender, but not
thin, just like the princess from Abdullah's daydream. When she was near
Abdullah, he saw that her face was not quite a perfect oval as the face
of his dream princess should have been, nor were her huge dark eyes at
all misty. In fact, they examined his face keenly, with evident
interest. Abdullah hastily adjusted his dream, for she was certainly
very beautiful. And when she spoke, her voice was all he could have
desired, being light and merry as the water in the fountain and the
voice of a very definite person, too.

"Are you a new kind of servant?" she said.

People always did ask strange things in dreams, Abdullah thought. "No,
masterpiece of my imagination," he said. "Know that I am really the
long-lost son of a distant prince."