"Ursula K. LeGuin - The Dispossesed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

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Chapter I

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There was a wall. It did not look important It was built of
uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right
over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed
the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into
mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea
was real. It was important. For seven generations there
had been nothing in the world more important than that
wafl.

Like aB walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was
inside it and what was outside it depended upon which
side of it you were on.

Looked at from one side, the watt enclosed a barren
sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field
there were a couple of large gantry cranes, a rocket pad,
three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The
dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no
gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was
even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine.
The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the
ships that came down out of space, and the men that came
on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest
1

of- the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres
outside, free.

Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anar-
res: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp,
cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

A number of people were coming along the road to-
wards the landing field, or standing around where the road
cut through the wall.

People often came out from the nearby city of Abbenay
in hopes of seeing a spaceship, or simply to see the wall.
After all, it was the only boundary wall on their world.
Nowhere else could they see a sign that said No Trespass-
ing. Adolescents, particularly, were drawn to it. They came