"C. L. Moore - Julhi" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

an unnamed gliding movement and held out her arms he had no recollection of
moving forward, but somehow he was ~ clasping her and the outstretched arms
had coiled like ser-pents about him, and very briefly the heart-shaped orifice
J which was her mouth brushed against his lips. I Something icy happened then.
The touch was light and | fluttering, as if the membrane that lined that bowed
and rigid | opening had vibrated delicately against his mouth as swiftly vand lightly as the brush of humming-birds' wings. It was not a shock, but
somehow with the touch all the hammering tumult within him died. He was
scarcely aware that he possessed a body. He was kneeling upon the edge of
Julhi's couch, her arms like snakes about him, her weird, lovely face upturned
to his. Some half-formed nucleus of rebellion in his mind dissipated in a
breath, for her single eye was a magnet to draw his gaze, and once his pale
stare was fixed upon it there was no possibility of escape.
And yet the eye did not seem to see him. It was fixed and glowing upon
something immeasurably distant, far in the past, so intently that there was no
consciousness in it of the walls about them, nor of himself so near, staring
into the lucid depths wherein vague, cloudy reflections were stirring, queer
shapes and shadows which were the images of nothing he had ever seen before.
He bent there, tense, his gaze riveted upon the moving
shadows in her eyes. A thin, high humming fluted from her mouth in a monotone
which compelled all his consciousness into one straight channel, and that
channel the clouded deeps of her remembering eye. Now the past was moving more
clearly through it, and he could see the shapes of things he had no name for
stirring sluggishly across a background of dimness veiling still deeper pasts.
Then all the shapes and shadows ran together in a blackness like a vacuum, and

the eye was no longer clear and lucid, but darker than sunless space, and far
deeper ... a dizzy deep that made his senses whirl. Vertigo came upon him
overwhelmingly, and he reeled and somehow lost all hold upon reality, and was
plunging, falling, whirling through the immeasurable, bottomless abysses of
that dark.
Stars reeled all about him, streaks of light against a velvet black almost
tangible in its utter dark. Slowly the lights steadied. His giddiness ceased,
though the rush of his motion did not. He was being borne more swiftly than
the wind through a dark ablaze with fixed points of brilliance, starry and
unwinking. Gradually he became aware of himself, and knew without surprise
that he was no longer of flesh and blood, a tangible human creature, but
something nebulous and diffused and yet of definite dimensions, freer and
lither than the human form and light as smoke.
He was riding through the starry dark a something all but invisible even to
his keen new eyes. That dark did not muffle him as it would have blinded a
human being. He could see quite clearly, his eyes utilizing something other
than light in their perception. But this dim thing he rode was no more than a
blur even to the keenness of his dark-defying gaze.
The vague outlines of it which were all he could catch as they flashed and
faded and formed again, were now of one shape and now of another, but most
often that of some fabulous monster with heaven-spanning wings and a sinuous
body trailing out to incredible length. Yet somehow he knew that it was not in
reality any such thing. Somehow he knew it for the half-visible manifestation
of a force without name, a
force which streamed through this starry dark in long, writhing waves and

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