"Smith, Clark Ashton - The Peril That Lurks Among Ruins" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

The Peril That Lurks Among Ruins

by Clark Ashton Smith

[Text taken from original manuscript]


"Go not too often among ruins", said the Demon, in one of his infrequent hours
of admonitory confidence. "For there is a strangeness in the great and
mltitudinous shadows which these memorials of the immensity of the Past, broken
tho they be, have thrown for so many centuries upon the selfsame spot as in the
dawn of their erection. Bethink thee, such shadows have gathered an unwonted
strength and intensity from their ancient, imperturbed brooding; and they are
not as the shadows of natural objects, for human time has accumulated within
them like unswept dust, and memories of the dead have come to cluster there like
bats in a deep cavern. They have all the power and all the sopor of despair;
they are deep as death and hollow as hell, the Earth has grown abysmal beneath
them, and the circumcluded air is full of headlong and vertiginous gulfs: their
dim recesses are alurk with the impalpable vampires of eclipsed magnificence and
the ghostly incubi of immemorial might.

"He is not wise who walks frequently within these hazardous shadows, and
this is the peril, that, treading heedlessly, thou slip on some intangible
precipice of the Past, and go falling irrecoverably and forevermore, among
phantasmagoric eidola, and the ghostly and meaningless dead that thou be drawn
to join the swirl of phantoms [sic], which sere and purposeless as blown
autumnal leaves, go fleeing thro a windy and eternal night of past things; that,
lost and unseen, thou whirl with spectral memories and the gusty sand, thro
shattered arches and between domeless columns, that thou abide with shadows,
apart from the future and all its change, in the vast, irremeable limbo of
forespent and pofitless time."