"Oswald Bastable - 02 - The Land Leviathan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

these I reproduce in the body of the text, making it the first section.
This first section is self-explanatory. There is little I need to add at all.
You may read the rest for yourself and make up your own mind as to its
authenticity.

MICHAEL MOORCOCK
Ladbroke Grove
September 1973

PROLOGUE: IN SEARCH OF OSWALD BASTABLE
If I were ever to write a book of travel, no matter how queer the events it
described, I am sure I would never have the same trouble placing it with a
publisher as I had when I tried to get into print Oswald Bastable's strange tale
of his visit to the future in the year 1973. People are not alarmed by the
unusual so long as it is placed in an acceptable context. A book describing as
fact the discovery of a race of four-legged, three-eyed men of abnormal
intelligence and supernatural powers who live in Thibet would probably be taken
by a krge proportion of the public as absolutely credible. Similarly, if I had
dressed up Bastable's story as fiction I am certain that critics would have
praised me for my rich imagination and that a reasonably wide audience would
have perused it in a couple of summer afternoons and thought it a jolly exciting
read for the money, then promptly forgotten all about it.
Perhaps it is what I should have done, but, doubtless irrationally, I felt that
I had a duty to Bastable to publish his account as it stood.
I could, were I trying to make money with my pen, write a whole book, full of
sensational anecdotes, concerning my travels in China - a country divided by
both internal and external pressures, where the only real law can be found in
the territories leased to various foreign powers, and where a whole variety of
revolutionists and prophets of peculiar political and religious sects squabble
continuously for a larger share of that vast and ancient country; but my object
is not to make money from Bastable's story. I merely think it is up to me to
keep my word to him and do my best to put it before the public.
Now that I have returned home, with some relief, to England, I have become a
little more optimistic about China's chances of saving herself from chaos and
foreign exploitation. There has been the revolution resulting in the deposing of
the last of the Manchus and the setting up of a republic under Sun Yat-sen, who
seems to be a reasonable and moderate leader, a man who has learned a great deal
from the political history of Europe and yet does not seem content just to ape
the customs of the West. Possibly there is hope for China now. However, it is
not my business here to speculate upon China's political future, but to record
how I travelled to the Valley of the Morning, following Bastable's somewhat
vague description of its location. I had gathered that it lay somewhere in
Shantung province and to the north of Wuchang (which, itself, of course, is in
Hupeh). My best plan was to go as directly as possible to Shantung and then make
my way inland. I consulted all the atlases and gazetteers, spoke to friends who
had been missionaries in that part of China, and got a fairly clear idea of
where I might find the valley, if it existed at all.
Yet I was still reluctant to embark upon what was likely to be a long and
exhausting expedition. For all that I had completely believed Bastable, I had no
evidence at all to substantiate my theory that he had gone back to the Valley of