"A. E. Merritt - Through the Dragon Glass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

I was in Hawaii when the cables told of Herndon's first disappearance. There wasn't much to tell. His
man had gone to his room to awaken him one morning--and Herndon wasn't there. All his clothes were,
though, Everything was just as if Herndon ought to be somewhere in the house--only he wasn't.

A man worth ten millions can't step out into thin air and vanish without leaving behind him the probability
of some commotion, naturally. The newspapers attend to the commotion, but the columns of type boiled
down to essentials contained just two facts--that Herndon had come home the night before, and in the
morning he was undiscoverable.

I was on the high seas, homeward bound to help the search, when the wireless told the story of his
reappearance. They had found him on the floor of his bedroom, shreds of a silken robe on him, and his
body mauled as though by a tiger. But there was no more explanation of his return than there had been of
his disappearance.

The night before he hadn't been there--and in the morning there he was. Herndon, when he was able to
talk, utterly refused to confide even in his doctors. I went straight through to New York, and waited until
the men of medicine decided that it was better to let him see me than have him worry any longer about
not seeing me.

Herndon got up from a big invalid chair when I entered. His eyes were clear and bright, and there was no
weakness in the way he greeted me, nor in the grip of his hand. A nurse slipped from the room.

"What was it, Jim?" I cried. "What on earth happened to you?"

"Not so sure it was on earth," he said. He pointed to what looked like a tall easel hooded with a heavy
piece of silk covered with embroidered Chinese characters. He hesitated for a moment and then walked
over to a closet. He drew out two heavy bore guns, the very ones, I remembered, that he had used in his
last elephant hunt.

"You won't think me crazy if I ask you to keep one of these handy while I talk, will you, Ward?" he
asked rather apologetically. "This looks pretty real, doesn't it?"

He opened his dressing gown and showed me his chest swathed in bandages. He gripped my shoulder as
I took without question one of the guns. He walked to the easel and drew off the hood.

"There it is," said Herndon.

And then, for the first time, I saw the Dragon Glass!

There never has been anything like that thing! Never! At first all you saw was a cool, green, glimmering
translucence, like the sea when you are swimming under water on a still summer day and look up through
it. Around its edges ran flickers of scarlet and gold, flashes of emerald, shimmers of silver and ivory. At
its base a disk of topaz rimmed with red fire shot up dusky little vaporous yellow flames.

Afterward you were aware that the green translucence was an oval slice of polished stone. The flashes
and flickers became dragons. There were twelve of them. Their eyes were emeralds, their fangs were
ivory, their claws were gold. There were scaled dragons, and each scale was so inlaid that the base,
green as the primeval jungle, shaded off into vivid scarlet, and the scarlet into tip's of gold. Their wings
were of silver and vermilion, and were folded close to their bodies.