"Kim Stanley Robinson - Kistenpass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

sounded Italian. It sounded as if they were arbitrarily mixing German and Italian, and eventually I realized
it must be Romansch they were speaking, the fourth official language of Switzerland, which I had read
about but never heard. The Swiss had made it their fourth official language during the height of HitlerтАЩs
talk of Aryan supremacy, and the history of Switzerland I had read was obviously proud of this small
rebuke to his racism. About 50,000 Swiss were said to speak it at home, with 200,000 more in Italy and
Austria. Despite these small numbers, I had been shown Romansch science fiction novels published (with
the help of state subsidies) in handsome hardback editions of five thousand. But I had never heard the
language spoken, and now it was a pleasure to listen to it as I looked out the window and tried not to get
impatient at the many stops. Just throw German and Italian in a blender, I decided, and you would have
the sound of it exactly.

We passed under Flims, the big town of the valley, which was perched over us on a broad bench on the
north slope. I had read that the entire bench was the remains of a single immense landslide. This landslide
had been dated to about twenty thousand years before, after the most recent Ice Age glacier had
retreated upvalley. It was the biggest identifiable landslide in all Switzerland, and clearly the Swiss were
pleased to have been able to set an entire town on it.

An hour after passing under Flims we stopped in yet another tiny station, and this time everyone got off
the train. I didnтАЩt understand until a conductor came through and conveyed to me, in German I could
barely understand, that I too had to get off. Some kind of problem, it was clearтАФErdrutch, I heard him
say, which sounded like earth rush. Another landslide!

The conductor nodded at my look of comprehension. He then seemed to be telling me that a postal bus
would carry all passengers past the blockage to the village of Trun, where another train awaited us.

But I didnтАЩt want to go as far as Trun, I told him awkwardly. I wanted to go to Danis, and then up the
valley wall to Breil, where a cable car would take me up to the alps below Kistenpass.

The conductor nodded and led me off the train to a schedule posted on the station wall. Apparently I
was in Tavanasa, right next to Danis, and a bus would be leaving here for Breil at noon.

While I was still deciphering all this the conductor got on one of the postal buses carrying the trainтАЩs
passengers, and they all drove off. The train itself backed down the valley and disappeared around a
bend. I stood alone in the empty station of Tavanasa, five hundred meters below Breil, and two thousand
meters below Kistenpass itself. It was now ten A.M., and I had thought I would be in Breil by nine. And
the noon bus wouldnтАЩt make it there till one.

I decided to run up the road to Breil. I was only carrying my daypack, and running would be my only
chance to get anything like back on schedule. So I began to jog.

Up the road I ran. Quickly I broke a sweat.

Very soon I saw that in this part of the great valley the northern wall of the Vorderrhein was steep but
smooth, and on such slopes the Swiss like to grade their roads very gently, in long traverses and tight
hairpin turns. At every switchback I could look down on the one below and see that a run of perhaps half
a kilometer had netted me a vertical gain of about twenty-five meters. A quick calculation suggested that
although as the crow flies it was only two kilometers from Tavanasa to Breil, as the Stan ran it might be
more like fifteen kilometers, maybe twenty.

I began to hitchhike.