"Edgar Allan Poe - The Masque Of The Red Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

The Masque of the Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe





The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had
ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal
--the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and
sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with
dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon
the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from
the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole
seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents
of half an hour.
But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.
When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his
presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the
knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep
seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive
and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own
eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in.
This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought
furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to
leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of
despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned.
With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to
contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the
meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had
provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there
were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians,
there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were
within. Without was the "Red Death."
It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his
seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad,
that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a
masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.
It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me
tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven --an imperial
suite. In many palaces, however, such suites form a long and
straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls
on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely
impeded. Here the case was very different; as might have been expected
from the duke's love of the bizarre. The apartments were so
irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one
at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and
at each turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the middle of
each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed