"Kim Stanley Robinson - A Short, Sharp Shock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

feet stuck deep in the sandтАФhaggard, exhausted, a small smile playing over his mouth. "I was told tales
of this, how one of us could grow enough to sustain his fellows in a time of need. Like having children,
they always said, and now I know what they mean." And he looked at them with a gaze they could
scarcely return, so filled was it with a kind of amused maternal affection.

Every morning thunderheads billowed up and sidled across the southern sky, but never hit their stretch of
the coast, piling up instead against the mountainous spine far behind them. They found pools of water in
holes in the sandstone, proof of storms past, but these had grown brackish with beach dew, and the
travelers became thirsty as well.

After many days of this deprivation, they saw in the distance ahead a small knob in the peninsula. Dune
grasses returned to the central mound, and they came across more pools of water. Days passed and it
seemed they would reach the knob the following afternoon for several days running, but it was bigger
than they had first thought, and kept receding.

Finally it loomed up, several hundred feet tall, like a sandstone lighthouse. They skirted it on the wide
southern beach, and on the other side discovered a most extraordinary thing: the beach stretched out into
the blue sea, and got thinner and lower, until it sank under the water. "It's the end!" Thel cried.

"No no," Garth said. "It's the water gate. I've heard stories about it. Look out there, see that smudge? It's
the other cape, where the peninsula proper begins again. In between is a tidal bar. This is the lowest part
of the spine, nothing more. At low tide a strip of sand will emerge as fine as any road, and stay above the
waves for half the day."

It proved to be true. As the afternoon progressed the beach extended farther into the water, which was
racing from north to south in a strong current, breaking whitely in a straight line that divided the sea. This
stretch of white foam boiled furiously in a line to the horizon and the distant smudge of the farther cape.
Then in a matter of moments, it seemed, the Whitewater divided and fell away into two sets of waves
rolling in from right and left, leaving a strip of wet gray sand and wet brown rock standing between them.
The breakers tumbled in over rocky shallows on both sides, but the bar stood clear of them. And the
spine trail extended even here: squarish blocks of water-holed rock had been laid in a path over the bar,
making a causeway a foot or two higher than the bar itself.

"The horses can't cross that," Garth said. "The rock would tear up their hooves."

"But surely it's more than one tide's walk across?" the swimmer said.

Garth nodded. "Still we must send the horses back, as we said we would." And he kicked and shouted
at the horses, threw rocks at them until they cantered off, and circled nervously, then regarded each other
and broke for home, flowing down the beach like a school of red fish darting through the sea.

Something moved on the side of the knob and they jumped, turned to look. It was a man the same color
as the sandstone, his skin the same grainy dark brown. As he approached they saw he was naked, and
that his eyes, his hairтАФeverythingтАФwas the brown of the rock. In his eyes the color seemed darker, the
way the rock did when it was wet.

He stopped before them and said, "I am Birsay the guide. It is more than one tide's walk to cross the
brough, as you noted. This is how we do it; there is a rise near the halfway point, and we run to that in
one low tide, on a path that I have built. It is just possible, though you get your legs wet. There on the rise
I have left several large, holed rocks. We tie ropes I have made to those anchors, and as the water rises