"R. A. Lafferty - Melchisedek 03 - Argo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

were good seamen, when actual seamen were not always to be had. Then Duffey
considered the ship that he was sailing, the ship that had several times
borne the name of The Argo.
Melchisedech had never completely understood this ship, though it
was flesh of his flesh and ghost of his ghost. For all of the dozens of
different times that he had sailed on her, he could still get lost on her.
He could not even be sure how many masts she had: she had as many as were
needed for any voyage, and funnels too sometimes. And, also, she had
engines, whether or not it was proper that she should have them. There were
unfamiliar apartments and mansions on the ship. Sometimes there were
cavernous holds with stanchions and stalls for the many nameless animals
quartered in them. There were doors to which Melchisedech had no key, and he
was not even able to count the number of decks on her. And yet, from a
slight distance, she seemed trim and complete and almost small.
Melchisedech would sometimes come into fascinating and memorable
rooms and ward rooms and halls on The Argo, and he would not be able to find
those same places again. He would come to rooms where large numbers of
persons were talking and discussing gravely; he would find places where
groups of families, all unknown to him, were living. And there were booths
and shops and stores on the ship and even cottage industries were carried
on. Nobody really had any good idea of the size of the ship. The Bible gives
dimensions of one sort in the Vulgate and of another sort in the Septuagint,
and perhaps a third sort in the Hebrew. And there are any number of
different cubits, from nine inches to thirty-nine: and who can say which
cubit is intended? At berthing, The Argo would go into very small slips
designed for boats and not ships. And yet she would sometimes stand up as
till and long as any craft on the ocean.
There was an intiiiiate room, 'The Bread and Wine Room' on The Argo.
Very meaningful gatherings were sometimes held there. But, as to the present

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Argo, she was surely much smaller than once she had been. There was even the
opinion that the present Argo was only the ship's boat or the pinnacle of
the Great Ship Itself. And yet it carried all the relics and identifications
of the great ship: the wheel itself with the piece of the 'talking oak' set
into it, the molar of Noah buried in a ship's plank where he had bit down
and broken it off in exasperation at the irritations of the voyage, the cote
of the Special Dove (it isn't always remembered that this was a prodigious
dove with a wing span of more than ten feet), the grist mills and the grain
grinders that had been on the big ship for the feeding of all aboard. And
the name, and the log book itself, were preserved there. So was the original
lantern, the lantern that was so constructed that it would shine around
headlands and promontories and corners and show what was beyond them, this
while the ship was still a good distance from them.
It was the piece of talking oak in the ship's wheel that would give
the history of the ship when it was questioned. The ship, after it had been
The Argo or variants of the name those first few times, had been the
Navicula Petri or Peter Ship, and it served both as a fishing skiff and as a