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

Gall said, "Your soul is old." She said the same to Black Oak, who came from the gyre to the
doorway: "This is an old soul and a young one, stretching each other too hard."
Black Oak, who was then Speaker of the Serpentine, spoke with Gall, but I was not able to listen to
what they said. As soon as we had come into the doorway of the inner room, my hair lifted up on my
head, and my ears sang. I saw round, bright lights caming and going inside the room, where there was no
light but the dim shaft from the topmost skylight. The light began to gyre. Black Oak turned to me and
spoke, but at that time, as he spoke, the vision began.
I did not see the man Black Oak, but the Serpentine. It was a rock person, not man nor woman, not
human, but in shape like a heavy human being, with the blue, blue-green, and black colors and the
surfaces of serpentine rock in its skin. It had no hair, and its eyes were lidless and without transparency,
seeing very slowly. Serpentine looked at me very slowly with those rock eyes.
I crouched down in terror. I could not weep or speak or stand or move. I was like a bag full of fear.
All I could do was crouch there. I could not breathe at all until a stone, maybe Serpentine's hand, struck
my head a hard blow on the right side, above the ear. It knocked me off balance and hurt very much, so
that I whimpered and sobbed with the pain, and after that I could breathe again. My head did not bleed
where it had been struck but began swelling up there.
I crouched, recovering from the blow and the dizziness, and after a long while looked up again.
Serpentine was standing there. It stood there. After a while I saw the hands moving slowly. They moved
up slowly and came together at the navel, at the middle of the stone. There they pulled back and apart.
They pulled open a long, wide rent, or opening in the stone, like the doorway of a room into which I
knew I was to enter. I got up crouching and shaking and took a step forward into the stone.
It was not like a room. It was stone, and I was in it. There was no light or breath or room. I think the
rest of the vision all took place in the stone; that is where it all happened and was; but because of the
human way human people have to see things, it seemed to change and to be other places, things, and
beings.
As if the serpentine rock had crumbled and decayed into the red earth, after a while I was in the earth,
part of the dirt. I could feel how the dirt felt. Presently I could feel rain coming into the dirt, coming
down. I could feel it in a way that was like seeing, falling down on and into me, out of a sky that was all
rain.
I would go to sleep and then be partly awake again, perceiving. I began feeling stones and roots, and
along my left side I began to feel and hear cold water running, a creek in the rainy season. Veins of water
underground went down and around through me to that creek, seeping in the dark through the dirt and
stones,
Near the creek, I began to feel the big, deep roots of trees, and in the dirt everywhere, the fine, many

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 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Visionary

roots of the grasses, the bulbs of brodiea and blue-eyed grass, the ground squirrel's heart beating, the
mole asleep. I began to come up one of the great roots of a buckeye, up inside the trunk and out the
leafless branches to the ends of the small outmost branches. From there I perceived the ladders of rain.
These I climbed to the stairways of cloud. These I climbed to the paths of wind. There I stopped, for I
was afraid to step out on the wind.
Coyote came down the wind path. She came like a thin woman with rough, dun hair on her head and
arms, and a long, fine face with yellow eyes. Two of her children came with her, like coyote pups.
Coyote looked at me and said, "Take it easy. You can look down. You can look back."
I looked back and down under the wind. Below and behind me were dark ridges of forest with the
rainbow shining across them, and light shining on the water on the leaves of the trees. I thought there
were people on the rainbow but was not sure of that. Below and farther on were yellow hills of summer
and a river among them going to the sea. In places the air below me was so full of birds that I could not