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

time he shakily came back
into the room. His hands trembled as he lowered himself into an easy chair.
'It was the ground ... I thought for a minute that the ground . . .'He was
mumbling, more to himself than to me, and visibly trembling from head to toe
as the aftereffect of the shock hit him. Then he saw the concern on my face
and tried to calm himself.
'The ground, Paul, I was sure I felt a tremor - but I was mistaken. It must be
this place. All this open space. The moors. I fear I'll really have to make an
effort and get away from here. There's altogether too much soil and not enough
cement! Cement surroundings are the thing . . .'
I had had it on the tip of my tongue to say that I too had felt the shock, but
upon learning that he now believed himself mistaken I kept quiet. I did not
wish to needlessly add to his already considerable disorders.
That night, after Sir Amery had retired, I went through into his study - a
room which, though he had never said so, I knew he considered inviolate - to
have a look at the seismograph. Before I looked at the machine, however, I saw
the notes spread out upon the table beside it. A glance was sufficient to tell
me that the sheets of white foolscap were covered with fragmentary jottings in
my uncle's heavy handwriting, and when I looked closer I was sickened to
discover that they were a rambling jumble of seemingly disassociated - yet
apparently linked -occurrences connected in some way with his weird delusions.
These notes have since been delivered permanently into my possession and are
as reproduced here:
HADRIAN'S WALL.
122-128 a.d. Limestone Bank. (Gn'yah of the G'harne Fragments?) Earth tremors
interrupted the diggings, which is why cut basalt blocks were left in the
uncompleted ditch with wedge-holes ready for splitting.
W'nyal Shash. (MITHRAS?)
The Romans had their own deities - but it wasn't Mithras that the disciples of
Commodus, the Blood Maniac, sacrificed to at Limestone Bank! And that was the
same spot where, fifty years earlier, a great block of stone was unearthed and
discovered to be covered with inscriptions and engraven pictures! Silvanus the
Centurion defaced it and buried it again. A skeleton, positively identified as
Silvanus' by the signet ring on one of its fingers, has been lately found
beneath the ground (deep) where once stood a Vicus Tavern at Homesteads Fort -
but we don't know how he vanished! Nor were Commodus' followers any too
careful. According to Atullus and Caracalla they also vanished overnight -
during an earthquake! AVEBURY.
(Neolithic A'byy of the G'harne Fragments and Pnakotic Manuscript???)
Reference Stukeley's book, A Temple to the British Druids - incredible!
Druids, indeed! But Stukeley was pretty close when he said snake worship!
Worms, more like it! COUNCIL OF NANTES. (9th Century.) The Council didn't know
what it was doing when it ordered: 'Let the stones also which, deceived by the
derision of the demons, they worship amid ruins and in wooded places, where
they both make their vows and bestow their offerings, be dug up from the very
foundations, and let them be cast into such places as never will their
devotees be able to find them again . . .' I've read that paragraph so many
times that it's become imprinted upon my mind! God only knows what happened to
the poor devils who tried to carry out the Council's orders . . . !
DESTRUCTION OF GREAT STONES. In the 13th and 14th Centuries the Church also