"Michael Moorcock - The Winds of Limbo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

insane and enigmatic humor at the cavern roof. Flames from the suspended
miniature sun leaped, stretched and shot out, as if to kiss the Fireclown's
acolytes who laughed and shouted, surging about him, applauding him.
The Fireclown looked down as he laughed, drinking in their adoration.
In a shadow cast by the dais, detached from the milling crowd, a gaunt Negro
stood as if petrified, his eyelids painted in checks of red and white, his mouth
colored green. He wore an extravagant yellow cut-away coat and scarlet tights.
He looked up at the Fireclown and there were tears of hunger in his eyes. The
Negro's name was Junnar.
The faces of the crowd were lashed and slashed by the leaping fire, some eyes
dull, some bright, some eyes blind and some hot, overloaded with heat.
Many of the figures wore masks molded in plastic to caricature their own
faces-long noses, no noses, slit eyes, cow eyes, lipless mouths, gaping mouths.


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Some were painted in gaudy colors, others were naked and some wore padded
clothes representing animals or plants.
Here they gathered around the dais. Many hundreds of them, loving the man who
capered like a jester above them, lashing them with his wriggling rhetoric,
laughing, laughing. Scientists, pickpockets, spacemen, explorers, musicians,
confidence tricksters, blackmailers, poets, doctors, whores, murderers, clerks,
perverts, government officials, spies, policemen, social workers, beggars,
actors, politicians, riff-raff.
Here they all were. And they shouted. And as they shouted the gross Fool capered
yet more wildly and the flame responded frenetically to his dancing and his own
wordless cries.
"The Fireclown!" they sobbed.
"The Fireclown!" they bellowed.
"The Fireclown! The Fireclown!" they howled and laughed.
"The Fireclown!" He giggled and he danced like a madman's puppet upon his dais
and sang his mirth.
All this, in the lowest level of the multi-storied labyrinth that was the City
of Switzerland.
With a great effort the Negro Junnar turned his eyes away from the Fireclown,
stumbled backwards, wrenched his body round and ran for one of the back exits,
bent on leaving before he was completely trapped by the Fireclown's spell.
Behind him, the sound of the maddened crowd diminished as he ran along fusty,
ill-smelling corridors until he could no longer hear it. Then he began to walk
up ramps and stairs until he came to an escalator. He stepped on to the
escalator and let himself be taken up to the top, a hundred feet from the
bottom. This corridor was also deserted, but better lighted and cleaner that
those he had left. He looked up and found a sign at an intersection:
NINTH LEVEL (Mechanics) Hogarth Lane-Leading to Divebomber Street and
Orangeblossom Road (Elevators to Forty Levels)
He made for Orangeblossom Road, an old residential corridor but very sparsely
inhabited these days, found the elevators at the end, pressed a button and
waited impatiently for five minutes before one arrived. He entered it and rose