"Bruce Sterling - My Rihla" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

ungainly eye-gripping tin hood is now reborn as the
head-wrapping Sony Watchmans of Jaron Lanier's Virtual
Reality.
It all returns. The merchants and pilgrims of
Ibn Battuta's flourishing Islam push their trade-
routes farther, farther. Trade expands, populations
swarm, laws and libraries grow larger and more
refined. At length trade opens to an obscure corner of
Siberia, where a certain species of rodent harbors a
certain flea.
Ibn Battuta witnesses the result, without ever
understanding it. June, 1348: travellers tell him of a
virulent unknown disease raging in Gaza, a thousand
people dying every day. Swellings appear in groin and
neck and armpits, with nausea and delirium. If it
takes to the lungs, the victim spits blood and dies
within hours. In the town of Homs, in Syria, Ibn
Battuta is engulfed by the wave of Black Death. Three
hundred die on the day o

f his arrival there.
In Damascus, two thousand are dying each day and
the great polyglot metropolis has shuddered to a halt.
The amirs, the sharifs, the judges, and all the
classes of the Moslem people, have assembled in the
Great Mosque to supplicate God. After a night of
prayer, they march out at dawn, barefoot, the Holy
Koran in their hands. And then:
"The entire population of the city joined in the
exodus, male and female, small and large, the Jews
went out with their book of the law and the Christians
with their Gospel, their women and children with them;
the whole concourse of them in tears and humble
supplications, imploring the favor of God through His
Books and His Prophets."
As the pestilence lurches from city to city,
from mosque to caravanserai, the afflicted scatter in
terror, carrying their fleas like pearls throughout
the vast linked network of the civilized world. From
China to the Atlantic coast, Ibn Battuta's world is
one, and therefore terribly vulnerable. The Great Wall
of China is no defense; and Europe's foremost traders,
the cosmopolitan Genoans and Venetians, will ship a
cargo of death throughout the Mediterranean. Paris,
Barcelona, Valencia, Tunis, Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo
and Bordeaux will all suffer equal calamity in the
dreadful spring and summer of 1348. Their scientific
experts, those doctors who survive, will soberly
advise their patients to apply egg yolks to the
buboes, wear magical amulets, and have their sickbeds