"A. E. Merritt - The Moon Pool" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

sheer awe!
"In front of me was a pool. It was circular, perhaps twenty feet wide. Around it
ran a low, softly curved lip of glimmering silvery stone. Its water was palest
blue. The pool with its silvery rim was like a great blue eye staring upward.
"Upon it streamed seven shafts of radiance. They poured down upon the blue eye
like cylindrical torrents; they were like shining pillars of light rising from a
sapphire floor.
"One was the tender pink of the pearl; one of the aurora's green; a third a
deathly white; the fourth the blue in mother-of-pearl; a shimmering column of
pale amber; a beam of amethyst; a shaft of molten silver. Such are the colours
of the seven lights that stream upon the Moon Pool. I drew closer, awestricken.
The shafts did not illumine the depths. They played upon the surface and seemed
there to diffuse, to melt into it. The Pool drank them?
"Through the water tiny gleams of phosphorescence began to dart, sparkles and
coruscations of pale incandescence. And far, far below I sensed a movement, a
shifting glow as of a radiant body slowly rising.
"I looked upward, following the radiant pillars to their source. Far above were
seven shining globes, and it was from these that the rays poured. Even as I
watched their brightness grew. They were like seven moons set high in some
caverned heaven. Slowly their splendour increased, and with it the splendour of
the seven beams streaming from them.
"I tore my gaze away and stared at the Pool. It had grown milky, opalescent. The
rays gushing into it seemed to be filling it; it was alive with sparklings,
scintillations, glimmerings. And the luminescence I had seen rising from its
depths was larger, nearer!
"A swirl of mist floated up from its surface. It drifted within the embrace of
the rosy beam and hung there for a moment. The beam seemed to embrace it,
sending through it little shining corpuscles, tiny rosy spiralings. The mist
absorbed the rays, was strengthened by them, gained substance. Another swirl
sprang into the amber shaft, clung and fed there, moved swiftly toward the first
and mingled with it. And now other swirls arose, here and there, too fast to be
counted; hung poised in the embrace of the light streams; flashed and pulsed
into each other.
"Thicker and thicker still they arose until over the surface of the Pool was a
pulsating pillar of opalescent mist steadily growing stronger; drawing within it
life from the seven beams falling upon it; drawing to it from below the darting,
incandescent atoms of the Pool. Into its centre was passing the luminescence
rising from the far depths. And the pillar glowed, throbbedЧbegan to send out
questing swirls and tendrilsЧЧ
"There forming before me was That which had walked with Stanton, which had taken
ThoraЧthe thing I had come to find!
"My brain sprang into action. My hand threw up the pistol and I fired shot after
shot into the shining core.
"As I fired, it swayed and shook; gathered again. I slipped a second clip into
the automatic and another idea coming to me took careful aim at one of the
globes in the roof. From thence I knew came the force that shaped this Dweller
in the PoolЧfrom the pouring rays came its strength. If I could destroy them I
could check its forming. I fired again and again. If I hit the globes I did no
damage. The little motes in their beams danced with the motes in the mist,
troubled. That was all.