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

fear shot through with defiance . . . defiance of life against its
negation . . . upsurging, roaring, vital rage . . . frantic revolt of
the drowning against the strangling water, rage of the candle-flame
against the hovering extinguisher. . . .

Was it as hopeless as that? If what I suspected to be true was true, to
think so was to be beaten at the beginning!

But there was Jim! How to keep him out of it? In my heart, I had never
laughed at those subconscious perceptions, whatever they were. that he
called the voices of his ancestors. When he had spoken of Usunhi'yi,
the Darkening-land, a chill had crept down my spine. For had not the
old Uighur priest spoken of the Shadow-land? And it was as though I had
heard the echo of his words.

I looked over to where he lay. He had been more akin to me than my own
brothers. I smiled at that, for they had never been akin to me. To all
but my soft-voiced, deep-bosomed, Norse mother I had been a stranger
in that severely conventional old house where I had been born.

The youngest son, and an unwelcome intruder; a changeling. It had been
no fault of mine that I had come into the world a throw-back to my


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mother's yellow-haired, blue-eyed, strong-thewed Viking forefathers.
Not at all a Langdon. The Langdon men were dark and slender,
thin-lipped and saturnine. stamped out by the same die for generations.
They looked down at me, the changeling, from the family portraits with
faintly amused, supercilious hostility. Precisely as my father and my
four brothers, true Langdons, each of them, looked at me when I
awkwardly disposed of my bulk at their table.

It had brought me unhappiness, but it had made my mother wrap her heart
around me. I wondered, as I had wondered many times, how she had come
to give herself to that dark, self-centred man my father--with the blood
of the sea-rovers singing in her veins. It was she who had named me
Leif--as incongruous a name to tack on a Langdon as was my birth among
them.

Jim and I had entered Dartmouth on the same day. I saw him as he was
then--the tall, brown lad with his hawk face and inscrutable black eyes.
pure blood of the Cherokees, of the clan from which had come the great
Sequoiah, a clan which had produced through many centuries wisest
councillors, warriors strong in cunning.

On the college roster his name was written James T. Eagles, but on the
rolls of the Cherokee Nation it was written Two Eagles and his mother