"John Norman - Gor 11 - Slave girl of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

twelve feet in width and depth, some ten feet in height. The plate, with its ring, was attached
near the center of the rock, low, about a foot above the grass. The rock had apparently been
drilled and the plate fastened with four linear bolts. They may have passed through the entire
width of the rock and been clinched on the other side. I did not know. On my knees I pulled at the
chain. I wept. I cried out. I pulled again at the chain. I hurt my hands; it moved not a quarter
of an inch. I was fastened to the rock.
I rose moaning to my feet, my hands on the chain. I looked about myself. The rock was prominent.
There was none like it in view. I stood on a rolling plain, grassy and gentle, widely sweeping,
trackless. I saw nothing but the grass, it moving in the soft, unhurried wind, the distant
horizon, the unusually white clouds and blue sky. I was alone. The sun was warm. Behind me was the
rock. I felt the wind on my body, but not directly, as the plate in the stone was on the sheltered
side of the rock. I wondered if the wind was a prevailing one. I wondered if the plate and chain
were so situated in order that the chain's prisoner, such as I found myself to be, be protected


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from the wind. I shuddered.
I stood alone. I was nude. I, small, white, was chained by the neck to that great rock on the
seemingly endless plain.
I breathed deeply. Never in my life had I breathed such air. Though my head was chained I threw it
back. I closed my eyes. I drank the atmosphere into my lungs. Those who have never breathed such
air cannot know the sensations which I then felt. In so simple a thing as the air I breathed I
rejoiced. It was clean and clear; it was fresh, almost alive, almost sparkling with the
exhilaration of swift, abundant, pristine oxygen. It was like the air of a new world, one yet
innocent of the toxins of man's majority, the unquestioned gifts, ambiguous, poisoned, of
civilization and technology. My body became vital and alive. So simply did a proper oxygenation of
my system work its almost immediate effect in my feeling and awareness. Those who have never
breathed the air of a clean world cannot understand my words. And perhaps those who have breathed
only such an atmosphere may, too, tragically, fail to comprehend. Until one has breathed such air
can one know the glory of being alive?
But I was lonely, and frightened.
It was a strange world on which I stood, wide and unfamiliar, open, bright and clean. I looked out
upon the vast fields of grass. I had never smelled grass before. It was so fresh, so beautiful. My
senses were alive. In this atmosphere, my blood charged with oxygen, I found that I could detect
odors which had eluded me before; it was as though an entire new dimension of experience had
suddenly opened to me; yet I suppose it was only that here, in this place, my body did not have
reason to fight its world, shutting it out, forcing it from consciousness in order not to be
distracted or sickened; here there was an atmosphere which was unsoiled, undefiled, one in which
the human could be a part of nature, not a rampart raised against her, not a defensive sojourner
treading at night, stepping softly, scarcely daring to breathe, through the country of enemies. My
vision, too, in this pure air, was keener. I could see farther and with greater detail than had
been possible before in the clouded, contaminated atmosphere in which I had been raised. How far
away seemed the familiar pollutions of the gray world I remembered. On certain days there I had
thought the air clean, and had delighted in its freshness. How little I had known. How foolish I
had been. It had been only less murky, less dismal, only a sign of what a world might be. My
hearing, too, seemed acute. The wind brushed the grass, moving in it, stirring the gleaming
leaves. Colors, too, seemed richer, deeper, more vivid. The grass was richly green, alive, vast;
the sky was blue, deeply blue, far deeper than I had known a sky could be; the clouds were sharp