"Brian Lumley - Titus Crow 1 - The Burrowers Beneath" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

thousand miles deep and five thousand miles away - or are they caused by
something else? Something so outri and fearsome that my mind freezes when I am
tempted to study the problem too closely.
There came a time, after I had been with him for a number of weeks, when it
seemed plain that Sir Amery was rapidly recovering. True, he still retained
his stoop, though to me it seemed no longer so pronounced, and his so-called
'eccentricities', but he was more his old self in other ways. The nervous tic
had left his face completely and his cheeks had regained something of their
former colour. His improvement, I conjectured, had much to do with his
never-ending studies of the seismograph; for I had established by that time
that there was a definite connection between the measurements of that machine
and my uncle's illness. Nevertheless, I was at a loss to understand why the
internal movements of the Earth should so determine the state of his nerves.
It was after a trip to his room, to look at that instrument, that he told me
more of dead G'harne. It was a subject I should have attempted to steer him
away from.
'The fragments,' he said, 'told the location of a city the name of which,
G'harne, is known only in legend and which has in the past been spoken of on a
par with Atlantis, Mu, and R'lyeh. A myth and nothing more. But if you give a
legend a concrete location you strengthen it
somewhat - and if that location yields up something of the past, centuried
relics of a civilization lost for aeons, then the legend becomes history.
You'd be surprised how much of the world's history has in fact been built up
that way.
'It was my hope, a hunch you might call it, that G'harne had been real; and
with the deciphering of the fragments I found it within my power to prove, one
way or the other, G'harne's elder existence. I have been in some strange
places, Paul, and have listened to even stranger stories. I once lived with an
African tribe whose people declared they knew the secrets of the lost city,
and their storytellers told me of a land where the sun never shines; where
Shudde-M'ell, hiding deep in the honeycombed ground, plots the dissemination
of evil and madness throughout the world and plans the resurrection of other,
even worse abominations!
'He hides there in the ground and awaits the time when the stars will be
right, when his horrible hordes will be sufficient in number, and when he can
infest the entire world with his loathsomeness and bring about the return of
those others more loathsome yet!
'I was told stories of fabulous star-born creatures who inhabited the Earth
millions of years before Man appeared, who were still here, in certain dark
places, when he eventually evolved. I tell you, Paul' - his voice rose - 'that
they are here even now - in places undreamedof! I was told of sacrifices to
Yog-Sothoth and Yibb-Tstll that would make your blood run cold, and of weird
rites practised beneath prehistoric skies before Old Khem was born. These
things I've heard make the works of Albertus Magnus and Grobert seem tame; De
Sade himself would have paled at the hearing.'
My uncle's voice had been speeding up progressively with each sentence, but
now he paused for breath and in
a more normal tone and at a reduced rate he continued:
'My first thought on deciphering the fragments was of an expedition. I may
tell you I had learned of certain things I could have dug for here in England