"John Norman - Gor 01- Tarnsman of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

His supposition seemed plausible to me, for from the very beginning I had understood that in
something or someone existed a force and clarity of understanding beside which the customary
habits of rationality as I knew them were little more than the tropisms of the unicellular animal.
Even the technology of the envelope with its patterned thumb-lock, the disorientation of my


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compass, and the ship that had brought me, unconscious, to this strange world, argued for an
incredible grasp of unusual, precise, and manipulable forces.

"The Priest-Kings," said my father, "maintain .the Sacred Place in the Sardar Mountains, a wild
vastness into which no man penetrates. The Sacred Place, to the minds. of most men here, is taboo,
perilous. Surely none have
returned from those mountains." My father's eyes seemed faraway, as if focused on sights he might
have preferred to forget. "Idealists and rebels have been dashed .to pieces on the frozen
escarpments of those mountains. If one approaches the mountains, one must go on foot. Our beasts
will not approach them. Parts of outlaws and fugitives who have sought refuge in them have been
found on the plains below, like scraps of meat cast from an incredible distance to the beaks and
teeth of wandering scavengers."

My hand clenched on the metal goblet. The wine moved in the vessel. I saw my image in the wine,
shattered by the tiny forces in the vessel. Then the wine was still.

"Sometimes," said my father, his eyes still faraway, "when men are old or have had enough of life,
they assault .the mountains, looking for the secret of immortality in the barren crags. If they
have found their immortality, none have confirmed it, for none have returned to the Tower Cities."
He looked at me. "Some think that such men in time become Priest-Kings themselves. My own
speculation, which I judge as likely or unlikely to be true as the more popular superstitious
stories, is that it is death to learn the secret of the Priest-Kings."

"You do not know that," I said.

"No," admitted my father. "I do not know it."

My father then explained to me something of the legends of the PriestKings, and I gathered that
they seemed to be true to this degree at least that the PriestKings could destroy or control
whatever they wished, that they were, in effect, the divinities of this world. It was supposed
that they were aware of all that transpired on their planet, but, if so, I was informed that they
seemed, on the whole, to take little note of it. It was rumored, according to my father, that they
cultivated holiness in their mountains, and in their contemplation could not be concerned with the
realities and evils of the outside

and unimportant world. They were, so to speak, absentee divinities, existent but remote, not to be
bothered with the fears and turmoil of the mortals beyond their mountains. This conjecture, the
seeking of holiness, however, seemed to me to fit not well with the sickening fate apparently
awaiting those who attempted the mountains. I found it difficult to conceive of one of those
.theoretical saints rousing himself from contemplation to hurl the scraps of interlopers to the