"Smith, Wilbur - Ballantyne 02 - Men of Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

It had never been exposed to the light of day, not once in the 200
million years since it assumed its present form, and yet it seemed in
itself to be a distilled drop of dirtied sunlight.

it had been conceived in heat as vast as that of the sun's surface, in
those unholy depths below the earth's crust, in the molten magma that
welled up from the earth's very core.

in those terrible temperatures all impurity had been burned from it,
leaving only the unadulterated carbon atoms, and under pressures that
would have crushed mountains these had been reduced in volume and packed
to a density beyond that of any other substance in nature.

This tiny bubble of liquid carbon had been carried up in the slow
subterranean river of molten lava through one of the weak spots in the
earth's crust, and it had almost, but not quite, reached the surface
before the laval flow faltered and finally stopped.

The lava cooled over the ensuing millennium, and it altered its form and
became a mottled bluish rock, composed of gravelly fragments loosely
cemented in a solid matrix. This formation was naturally unassociated
with the country rock which surrounded it, and filled only a deep
circular well whose mouth was shaped like a funnel almost a mile in
diameter and whose tail descended sheer into the uncounted depths of the
earth.

While the lava was cooling the purged bubble of carbon was undergoing an
even more marvellous transformation. It solidified into an eight-faced
crystal of geometrical symmetry the size of a green fig, and so
thoroughly had it been purged of impurity in the hellish furnace of the
earth's core that it was transparent and clear as the sun's own rays. So
fierce and constant had been the pressures to which the single crystal
had been subjected and so evenly had it cooled that there was no
cracking or shearing within its body.

It was perfect, a thing of cold fire so white that it would appear
electric blue in good light, but that fire had never been awakened, for
it had been trapped in total darkness across the ages, and no single
glimmer of light had ever probed its lucid depths. Yet for all those
millions of years the sunlight had been no great distance away, a matter
only of two hundred feet or less, a thin skin of earth when compared to
the immense depths from whence its journey to the surface had begun.

Now, in the last wink of time, a mere few years out of all those
millions, the intervening ground had steadily been chipped and whittled
and hacked away by the puny, inefficient but persistent efforts of an
antlike colony of living creatures.

The forebears of these creatures had not even existed upon this earth
when that single pure crystal achieved its present form, but now with