"Oswald Bastable - 03 - The Steel Tsar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

himself in some pleasant fantasy,
some dream of heaven or of salvation, and so face his end almost with pleasure.
On my sixth day at sea it was obvious that I was to die and it was then that
I chose to accept the illusion rather
than the reality.
I had lain all morning at the bottom of the dugout. My face was pressed
against wet, steaming wood. The
tropical sun throbbed down on the back of my unprotected head and blistered my
withered flesh. The slow
drumming of my heart filled my ears and counter pointed the occasional slap of a
wave against the side of the boat.
All I could think was that I had been spared one kind of death in order to
die alone out here on the ocean. And I
was grateful for that. It was much better than the death I had left behind.
Then I heard the cry of the seabird and I smiled a little to myself. I knew
that the illusion was beginning. There
was no possibility that I was in sight of land and therefore I could not really
have heard a bird. I had had many
similar auditory hallucinations in recent days.
I began to sink into what I knew must be my final coma. But the cry grew more
insistent. I rolled over and
blinked in the white glare of the sun. I felt the boat rock crazily with the
movement of my thin body. Painfully I
raised my head and peered through a shifting haze of silver and blue and saw my
latest vision. It was a very fine
one: more prosaic than some, but more detailed, too.
I had conjured up an island. An island rising at least a thousand feet out of
the water and about ten miles long
and four miles wide: a monstrous pile of volcanic basalt, limestone and coral,
with deep green patches of foliage
on its flanks.
I sank back into the dugout, squeezing my eyes shut and congratulating myself
on the power of my own
imagination. The hallucinations improved as any hopes of surviving vanished. I
knew it was time to give myself
up to madness, to pretend that the island was real and so die a pathetic rather
than a dignified death.

I chuckled. The sound was a dry, death rattle.
Again the seabird screamed.
Why rot slowly and painfully for perhaps another thirty hours when I could
die now in a comforting dream of
having been saved at the last moment?
With the remains of my strength I crawled to the stern and grasped the
starting cord of the outboard. Weakly I
jerked at it. Nothing happened. Doggedly, I tried again. And again. And all the
while I kept my eyes on the island,
waiting to see if it would shimmer and disappear before I could make use of it.
I had seen so many visions in the past few days. I had seen milk-white angels
with crystal cups of pure water