"Kim Stanley Robinson - A History Of The Twentieth Century2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

the next day at noon. He decided to take it. There was no secluded place to park, so he took a room in
a hotel. He had dinner in the restaurant next door, fresh shrimp in mayonnaise with chips, and went to his
room and slept. At six the next morning the ancient crone who ran the hotel knocked on his door and
told him an unscheduled ferry was leaving in forty minutes: did he want to go? He said he did. He got up
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and dressed, then felt too exhausted to continue. He decided to take the regular ferry after all, took off
his clothes and returned to bed. Then he realized that exhausted or not, he wasn't going to be able to fall
back asleep. Cursing, almost crying, he got up and put his clothes back on. Downstairs the old woman
had fried bacon and made him two thick bacon sandwiches, as he was going to miss her regular
breakfast. He ate the sandwiches sitting in the Sierra, waiting to get the car into the ferry. Once in the
hold he locked the car and went up to the warm stuffy passenger cabin, and lay on padded vinyl seating
and fell back asleep. He woke when they docked in Stromness. For a moment he didn't remember
getting on the ferry, and he couldn't understand why he wasn't in his hotel bed in Scrabster. He stared
through salt-stained windows at fishing boats, amazed, and then it came to him. He was in the Orkneys.
Driving along the southern coast of the main island, he found that his mental image of the Orkneys had
been entirely wrong. He had expected an extension of the Highlands; instead it was like eastern Scotland,
low, rounded, and green. Most of it was cultivated or used for pasture. Green fields, fences, farmhouses.
He was a bit disappointed. Then in the island's big town of Kirkwall he drove past a Gothic cathedral - a
very little Gothic cathedral, a kind of pocket cathedral. Frank had never seen anything like it. He stopped
and got out to have a look. Cathedral of St. Magnus, begun in 1137. So early, and this far north! No
wonder it was so small. Building it would have required craftsmen from the continent, shipped up here to
a rude fishing village of drywall and turf roofs; a strange influx it must have been, a kind of cultural
revolution. The finished building must have stood out like something from another planet. But as he
walked around the bishop's palace next door, and then a little museum, he learned that it might not have
been such a shock for Kirkwall after all. In those days the Orkneys had been a crossroads of a sort,
where Norse and Scots and English and Irish had met, infusing an indigenous culture that went right back
to the Stone Age. The fields and pastures he had driven by had been worked, some of them, for five
thousand years! And such faces walking the streets, so intent and vivid. His image of the local culture had
been as wrong as his image of the land. He had thought he would find decrepit fishing villages, dwindling
to nothing as people moved south to the cities. But it wasn't like that in Kirkwall, where teenagers
roamed in self-absorbed talky gangs, and restaurants open to the street were packed for lunch. In the
bookstores he found big sections on local topics: nature guides, archaeological guides, histories, sea tales,
novels. Several writers, obviously popular, had as their entire subject the islands. To the locals, he
realized, the Orkneys were the center of the world.
He bought a guidebook and drove north, up the east coast of Mainland to the Broch of Gurness, a ruined
fort and village that had been occupied from the time of Christ to the Norse era. The broch itself was a
round stone tower about twenty feet tall. Its wall was at least ten feet thick, and was made of flat slabs,
stacked so carefully that you couldn't have stuck a dime in the cracks. The walls in the surrounding village
were much thinner; if attacked, the villagers would have retired into the broch. Frank nodded at the
explanatory sentence in the guidebook, reminded that the twentieth century had had no monopoly on
atrocities. Some had happened right here, no doubt. Unless the broch had functioned as a deterrent.
Gurness overlooked a narrow channel between Mainland and the smaller island of Rousay. Looking out
at the channel, Frank noticed white ripples in its blue water; waves and foam were pouring past. It was a
tidal race, apparently, and at the moment the entire contents of the channel were rushing north, as fast as
any river he had ever seen.
Following suggestions in the guidebook, he drove across the island to the neolithic site of Brodgar,