"Philip Pullman - Dark Materials 02 - The Subtle Knife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pullman Philip)

Will looked around carefully. Behind him the full moon shone down over a distant prospect of great
green hills, and on the slopes at the foot of the hills there were houses with rich gardens, and an open
parkland with groves of trees and the white gleam of a classical temple.

Just beside him was that bare patch in the air, as hard to see from this side as from the other, but
definitely there. He bent to look through and saw the road in Oxford, his own world. He turned away
with a shudder: whatever this new world was, it had to be better than what he'd just left. With a dawning
light-headedness, the feeling that he was dreaming but awake at the same time, he stood up and looked
around for the cat, his guide.

She was nowhere in sight. No doubt she was already exploring those narrow streets and gardens
beyond the cafes whose lights were so inviting. Will lifted up his tattered tote bag and walked slowly
across the road toward them, moving very carefully in case it all disappeared.

The air of the place had something Mediterranean or maybe Caribbean about it. Will had never been out
of England, so he couldn't compare it with anywhere he knew, but it was the kind of place where people
came out late at night to eat and drink, to dance and enjoy music. Except that there was no one here, and
the silence was immense.

On the first corner he reached there stood a cafe, with little green tables on the pavement and a
zinc-topped bar and an espresso machine. On some of the tables glasses stood half-empty; in one
ashtray a cigarette had burned down to the butt; a plate of risotto stood next to a basket of stale rolls as
hard as cardboard.

He took a bottle of lemonade from the cooler behind the bar and then thought for a moment before
dropping a pound coin in the till. As soon as he'd shut the till, he opened it again, realizing that the money
in there might say what this place was called. The currency was called the corona, but he couldn't tell any
more than that.

He put the money back and opened the bottle on the opener fixed to the counter before leaving the cafe
and wandering down the street going away from the boulevard. Little grocery shops and bakeries stood
between jewelers and florists and bead-curtained doors opening into private houses, where wrought-iron
balconies thick with flowers overhung the narrow pavement, and where the silence, being enclosed, was
even more profound.

The streets were leading downward, and before very long they opened out onto a broad avenue where
more palm trees reached high into the air, the underside of their leaves glowing in me streetlights.
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On the other side of the avenue was the sea.

Will found himself facing a harbor enclosed from the left by a stone breakwater and from the right by a
headland on which a large building with stone columns and wide steps and ornate balconies stood floodlit
among flowering trees and bushes. In the harbor one or two rowboats lay still at anchor, and beyond the
breakwater the starlight glittered on a calm sea.

By now Will's exhaustion had been wiped out. He was wide awake and possessed by wonder. From