"C. L. Moore - The Black Gods Kiss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

At the bottom of the slope she dropped to her knees on the cold floor and felt about. Her fingers traced
the outline of a circle, the veriest crack in the stone. She felt until she found the ring in its center. That ring
was of the coldest metal she had ever known, and the smoothest She could put no name to it. The
daylight had never shone upon such metal.
She tugged. The stone was reluctant, and at last she took her sword in her teeth, and put both hands to
the lifting. Even then it taxed the limit of her strength, and she was strong as many men. But at last it rose,
with the strangest sighing sound, and a little prickle of goose-flesh rippled over her.
Now she took the sword back into her hand and knelt on the rim of the invisible blackness below. She
had gone this path once before and once only, and never thought to find any necessity in life strong
enough to drive her down again. The way was the strangest she had ever known. There was, she
thought, no such passage in all the world save here. It had not been built for human feet to travel. It had
not been built for feet at all. It was a narrow, polished shaft that cork-screwed round and round. A snake
might have slipped in it and gone shooting down, round and round in dizzy circles--but no snake on earth
was big enough to fill that shaft. No human travelers had worn the sides of the spiral so smooth, and she
did not care to speculate on what creatures had polished it so, through what ages of passage.
She might never have made that first trip down, nor anyone after her, had not some unknown human
hacked the notches which made it possible to descend slowly; that is, she thought, it must have been a
human. At any rate, the notches were roughly shaped for hands and feet, and spaced not too far apart;
but who and when and how she could not even guess. As to the beings who made the shaft in
long-forgotten ages--well, there were devils on earth before man, and the world was very old.
She turned on her face, and slid feet-first into the curving tunnel. That first time she and Gervase had
gone down in sweating terror of what lay below, and with devils tugging at their heels. Now she slid
easily, not bothering to find toeholds, but slipping swiftly round and round the long spirals with only her
hands to break the speed when she went too fast. Round and round she went, round and round.
It was a long way down. Before she had gone very far the curious dizziness she had known before
came over her again, a dizziness not entirely induced by the spirals she whirled around, but a deeper,
atomic unsteadiness as if not only she but also the substances around her shifting. There was something
queer about the angles of those curves. She was no scholar in geometry or aught else, but she felt
intuitively that the bend and slant of the way she went were somehow outside any other angles or bends
she had ever known. They led into the unknown and the dark, but it seemed to her obscurely that they
led into deeper darkness and mystery than the merely physical, as if, though she could not put it clearly
even into thoughts, the peculiar and exact lines of the tunnel had been carefully angled to lead through
poly-dimensional space as well as through the underground--perhaps through time, too. She did not
know she was thinking such things; but all about her was a blurred dizziness as she shot down and round,
and she knew that the way she went took her on a stranger journey than any other way she had ever
traveled.
Down, and down. She was sliding fast, but she knew how long it would be. On that first trip they had
taken alarm as the passage spiraled so endlessly and with thoughts of the long climb back had tried to
stop before it was too late. They had found it impossible. Once embarked, there was no halting. She had
tried, and such waves of sick blurring had come over her that she came near to unconsciousness. It was
as if she had tried to halt some inexorable process of nature, half finished. They could only go on. The
very atoms of their bodies shrieked in rebellion against a reversal of the change.
And the way up, when they returned, had not been difficult. They had had visions of a back-breaking
climb up interminable curves, but again the uncanny difference of those angles from those they knew was
manifested. In a queer way they seemed to defy gravity, or perhaps led through some way outside the
power of it. They had been sick and dizzy on the return, as on the way down, but through the clouds of
that confusion it had seemed to them that they slipped as easily up the shaft as they had gone down; or
perhaps that, once in the tunnel, there was neither up nor down.

The passage leveled gradually. This was the worst part for a human to travel, though it must have