"Machen, Arthur - The Shining Pyramid" - читать интересную книгу автора (Machen Arthur)

"What is it?" he said. "I can make nothing of it."

"Look a little more closely. Don't you see it is an attempt to draw the human
eye?"

"Ah, now I see what you mean. My sight is not very sharp. Yes, so it is, it is
meant for an eye, no doubt, as you say. I thought the children learnt drawing at
school."

"Well, it is an odd eye enough. Do you notice the peculiar almond shape; almost
like the eye of a Chinaman?"

Dyson looked meditatively at the work of the undeveloped artist, and scanned the
wall again, going down on his knees in the minuteness of his inquisition.

"I should like very much," he said at length, "to know how a child in this out
of the way place could have any idea of the shape of the Mongolian eye. You see
the average child has a very distinct impression of the subject; he draws a
circle, or something like a circle, and puts a dot in the centre. I don't think
any child imagines that the eye is really made like that; it's just a convention
of infantile art. But this almond-shaped thin puzzles me extremely. Perhaps it
may be derived from a gilt Chinaman on a tea-canister in the grocer's shop.
Still that 's hardly likely."

"But why are you so sure it was done by a child?"

"Why! Look at the height. These old-fashioned bricks are little more than two
inches thick; there are twenty courses from the ground to the sketch if we call
it so; that gives a height of three and a half feet. Now, just imagine you are
going to draw something on this wall. Exactly; your pencil, if you had one,
would touch the wall somewhere on the level with your eyes, that is, more than
five feet from the ground. It seems, therefore, a very simple deduction to
conclude that this eye on the wall was drawn by a child about ten years old."

"Yes, I had not thought of that. Of course one of the children must have done
it"

"I suppose so; and yet as I said, there is something singularly unchildlike
about those two lines, and the eyeball itself, you see, is almost an oval. To my
mind, the thing has an odd, ancient air; and a touch that is not altogether
pleasant. I cannot help fancying that if we could see a whole face from the same
hand it would not be altogether agreeable. However, that is nonsense, after all,
and we are not getting farther in our investigations. It is odd that the flint
series has come to such an abrupt end."

The two men walked away towards the house, and as they went in at the porch
there was a break in the grey sky, and a gleam of sunshine on the grey hill
before them.