"MacDONALD, George - The Castle" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacDonald George)

The Castle

by George MacDonald.


ON the top of a high cliff, forming part of the base of a great mountain, stood
a lofty castle. When or how it was built, no man knew; nor could any one pretend
to understand its architecture. Every one who looked upon it felt that it was
lordly and noble; and where one part seemed not to agree with another, the wise
and modest dared not to call them incongruous, but presumed that the whole might
be constructed on some higher principle of architecture than they yet
understood. What helped them to this conclusion was, that no one had ever seen
the whole of the edifice; that, even of the portion best known, some part or
other was always wrapped in thick folds of mist from the mountain; and that,
when the sun shone upon this mist, the parts of the building that appeared
through the vaporous veil were strangely glorified in their indistinctness, so
that they seemed to belong to some aerial abode in the land of the sunset; and
the beholders could hardly tell whether they had ever seen them before, or
whether they were now for the first time partially revealed.
Nor, although it was inhabited, could certain information be procured as to its
internal construction. Those who dwelt in it often discovered rooms they had
never entered before-yea, once or twice,-whole suites of apartments, of which
only dim legends had been handed down from former times. Some of them expected
to find, one day, secret places, filled with treasures of wondrous jewels;
amongst which they hoped to light upon Solomon's ring, which had for ages
disappeared from the earth, but which had controlled the spirits, and the
possession of which made a man simply what a man should be, the king of the
world. Now and then, a narrow, winding stair, hitherto untrodden, would bring
them forth on a new turret, whence new prospects of the circumjacent country
were spread out before them. How many more of these there might be, or how much
loftier, no one could tell. Nor could the foundations of the castle in the rock
on which it was built be determined with the smallest approach to precision.
Those of the family who had given themselves to exploring in that direction,
found such a labyrinth of vaults and passages, and endless successions of
down-going stairs, out of one underground space into a yet lower, that they came
to the conclusion that at least the whole mountain was perforated and
honeycombed in this fashion. They had a dim consciousness, too, of the presence,
in those awful regions, of beings whom they could not comprehend. Once they came
upon the brink of a great black gulf, in which the eye could see nothing but
darkness: they recoiled with horror; for the conviction flashed upon them that
that gulf went down into the very central spaces of the earth, of which they had
hitherto been wandering only in the upper crust; nay, that the seething
blackness before them had relations mysterious, and beyond human comprehension,
with the far-off voids of space, into which the stars dare not enter.
At the foot of the cliff whereon the castle stood, lay a deep lake, inaccessible
save by a few avenues, being surrounded on all sides with precipices which made
the water look very black, although it was pure as the nightsky. From a door in
the castle, which was not to be otherwise entered, a broad flight of steps, cut
in the rock, went down to the lake, and disappeared below its surface. Some
thought the steps went to the very bottom of the water.