"John Norman - Gor 02 - Outlaw of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

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OUTLAW OF GOR
Volume two of the Chronicles of Counter-Earth

by John Norman

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A NOTE ON THE MANUSCRIPT

My friend, Harrison Smith, a young lawyer of the city, has recently given
me a second manuscript, purportedly by the individual Tarl Cabot. It was
his desire that I bring this second document, as I did the first, to the
attention of a publisher. This time, however, because of the numerous
claims and inquiries generated by the first manuscript Tarnsman of Gor
(pertaining to various matters ranging from further alleged documentation
for the existence of the Counter-Earth to disputes concerning the
authorship of the manuscript), I have prevailed upon Smith to write
something in the way of a preface to this second account, making clear his
own role in these matters and telling us a bit more about Tarl Cabot, whom
I have never had the good fortune to meet in person.

John Norman

Chapter One: THE STATEMENT OF HARRISON SMITH

I first met Tarl Cabot at a small liberal arts college in New Hampshire,
where we had both accepted first year teaching appointments. He was an
instructor in English history and I, intending to work for some three years
to save money toward law school, had accepted an appointment as an
instructor in physical education, a field which, to my annoyance, Cabot
never convinced himself belonged in the curriculum of an educational
institution.

We hiked a good deal, talked and fenced, and, I hoped, had become friends.
I liked the young, gentle Englishman. He was quiet and pleasant, though
sometimes he seemed remote, or lonely, somehow unwilling to break through
that protective shield of formality behind which the educated Englishman,
at heart perhaps as sentimental and hot-blooded as any man, attempts to
conceal his feelings.

Young Cabot was rather tall, a good-sized man, well-built, with an animal
ease in his walk that perhaps bespoke the docks of Bristol, his native
city, rather than the cloisters of Oxford, at one of whose colleges he had
obtained his later education. His eyes were clear, and blue, direct and
honest. He was fairly complected. His hair, lamentably perhaps, though some
of us loved him for it, was red, but not merely red - it was rather a
tangled, blazing affront to the properties of the well-groomed academician.
I doubt that he owned a comb, and I would be willing to swear that he would
not have used one if he had. All in all, Tarl Cabot seemed to us a young,