"John Norman - Gor 04 - Nomads of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

to its gustatory habits; I lifted my shield and grasped the long
spear, but it did not turn in my direction; it passed, unaware;
beyond the bird, to my surprise, I saw even a black larl, a
huge catlike predator more commonly found in mountainous
regions; it was stalking away, retreating unhurried like a
king; before what, I asked myself, would even the black tart
flee; and I asked myself how far it had been driven; perhaps
even from the mountains of Ta-Thassa, that loomed in this
hemisphere, Gor's southern, at the shore of Thassa, the sea,
said to be in the myths without a farther shore.
The Wagon Peoples claimed the southern prairies of GOR,
from the gleaming Thassa and the mountains of Ta-Thassa to
the southern foothills of the Voltai Range itself, that reared


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in the crust of GOR like the backbone of a planet. On the
north they claimed lands even to the rush-grown banks of
the Cartius, a broad, swift flowing tributary feeding into the
incomparable Vosk. The land between the Cartius and the
Vosk had once been within the borders of the claimed empire
of Ar, but not even Marlenus, Ubar of Ubars, when master
of luxurious, glorious Ar, had flown his tarnsmen south of the
Cartius.
In the past months I had made my way, afoot, overland,
across the equator, living by hunting and occasional service in
the caravans of merchants, from the northern to the southern
hemisphere of GOR. I had left the vicinity of the Sardar
Range in the month of Se'Var, which in the northern hemi-
sphere is a winter month, and had journeyed south for
months; and had now come to what some call the Plains of
Turia, others the Land of the Wagon Peoples, in the autumn
of this hemisphere; there is, due apparently to the balance of
land and water mass on GOR, no particular moderation of
seasonal variations either in the northern or southern hemi-
sphere; nothing much, so to speak, to choose between them;
on the other hand, Gor's temperatures, on the whole, tend to
be somewhat fiercer than those of Earth, perhaps largely due
to the fact of the wind-swept expanses of her gigantic land
masses; indeed,` though GOR is smaller than Barth, with con-
sequent gravitational reduction, her actual land areas may
be, for all I know, more extensive than those of my native
planet; the areas of GOR which are mapped are large, but
only a small fraction of the surface of the planet; much of
GOR remains to her inhabitants simply terra incognita.*
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*For purposes of convenience I am recounting directions in English
terms, thinking it would be considerably difficult for the reader to