"A. E. Merritt - Dwellers in the mirage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

the old priest turned. I glanced back. The nobles bad not yet entered;
I could see them dismounting at the entrance. We went along this
passage in silence for perhaps a thousand feet. It opened into a small
square chamber, cut in the red sandstone, at whose side was another
door, covered with heavy tapestries. In this chamber was nothing except
a number of stone coffers of various sizes ranged along its walls.

The old priest opened one of these. Within it was a wooden box, grey
with age. He lifted its lid, and took from it two yellow garments. He
slipped one of these garments over my head. It was like a smock,
falling to my knees. I glanced down; woven within it, its tentacles
encircling me, was the black octopus.

The other he drew over his own head. It, too, bore the octopus, but
only on the breast, the tentacles did not embrace him. He bent and took
from the coffer a golden staff, across the end of which ran bars. From
these fell loops of small golden bells.

From the other coffers the lesser priests had taken drums, queerly
shaped oval instruments some three feet long, with sides of sullen red
metal. They sat, rolling the drumheads under their thumbs, tightening
them here and there while the old priest gently shook his staff of
bells, testing their chiming. They were for all the world like an
orchestra tuning up. I again felt a desire to laugh;

I did not then know how the commonplace can intensify the terrible.

There were sounds outside the tapestried doorway, rustlings. There were
three clangorous strokes like a hammer upon an anvil. Then silence. The
twelve priests walked through the doorway with their drums in their
arms. The high priest beckoned me to follow him, and we passed through
after them.

I looked out upon an immense cavern, cut from the living rock by the
hands of men dust now for thousands of years. It told its immemorial
antiquity as clearly as though the rocks had tongue. It was more than
ancient; it was primeval. It was dimly lighted, so dimly that hardly
could I see the Uighur nobles. They were standing, the banners of their


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dans above them, their faces turned up to me, upon the stone floor, a
hundred yards Wso away, and ten feet below me. Beyond them and behind
them the cavern extended, vanishing hi darkness. I saw that in front of
them was a curving trough, wide--like the trough between two long
waves--and that like a wave it swept upward from the hither side of the
trough, curving, its lip crested, as though that wave of sculptured
stone were a gigantic comber rushing back upon them. This lip formed