"Smith, Clark Ashton - The Black Lake" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

The Black Lake

by Clark Ashton Smith


In a land where weirdness and mystery had strongly leagued themselves with
eternal desolation, the lake was out-poured at an undiscoverable date of elder
aeons, to fill some fathomless gulf far down amid the shadows of snowless,
volcanic mountains. No eye, not even the sun's, when he stared vertically upon
it for a few hours at midday, seemed able to divine its depths of sullen
blackness and unrippled silence. It was for this reason that I found a so
singular pleasure in frequently contemplating the strange lake. Sitting for I
knew not how long on its bleak basaltic shores, where grew but a few fleshly red
orchids, bent above the waters like open and thirsty mouths, I would peer with
countless fantastic conjectures and shadowy imaginings, into the alluring
mystery of its unknown and inexplorable gulf.

It was at an hour of morning before the sun had surmounted the rough and
broken rim of the summits, when I first came, and clomb down through the shadows
which filled like some subtler fluid the volcanic basin. Seen at the bottom of
the stirless tincture of air and twilight, the lake seemed as dregs of darkness.

Peering for the first time, after the deep and difficult descent, into
the so dull and leaden waters, I was at length aware of certain small and
scattered gleams of silver, apparently far beneath the surface. And fancying
them the metal in some mysterious ledge, or the glints of long-sunken treasure.
I bent closer in my eagerness, and finally perceived that what I saw was but the
reflection of the stars, which, tho the day was full upon the mountains and the
lands without, were yet visible in the depth and darkness of that enshadowed
place.