"Jules Vernes - The Master of the World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Verne Jules)

occurrences. And as I have been employed by the government in various
important affairs and secret missions since I was a mere lad, it also
happened very naturally that the head of my department placed In my
charge this astonishing investigation, wherein I found myself
wrestling with so many impenetrable mysteries.

In the remarkable passages of the recital, it is important that you
should believe my word. For some of the facts I can bring no other
testimony than my own. If you do not wish to believe me, so be it. I
can scarce believe it all myself.

The strange occurrences began in the western part of our great
American State of North Carolina. There, deep amid the Blueridge
Mountains rises the crest called the Great Eyrie Its huge rounded
form is distinctly seen from the little town of Morganton on the
Catawba River, and still more clearly as one approaches the mountains
by way of the village of Pleasant Garden.

Why the name of Great Eyrie was originally given this mountain by the
people of the surrounding region, I am not quite Sure It rises rocky
and grim and inaccessible, and under certain atmospheric conditions
has a peculiarly blue and distant effect. But the idea one would
naturally get from the name is of a refuge for birds of prey, eagles
condors, vultures; the home of vast numbers of the feathered tribes,
wheeling and screaming above peaks beyond the reach of man. Now, the
Great Eyrie did not seem particularly attractive to birds; on the
contrary, the people of the neighborhood began to remark that on some
days when birds approached its summit they mounted still further,
circled high above the crest, and then flew swiftly away, troubling
the air with harsh cries.

Why then the name Great Eyrie? Perhaps the mount might better have
been called a crater, for in the center of those steep and rounded
walls there might well be a huge deep basin. Perhaps there might even
lie within their circuit a mountain lake, such as exists in other
parts of the Appalachian mountain system, a lagoon fed by the rain
and the winter snows.

In brief was not this the site of an ancient volcano, one which had
slept through ages, but whose inner fires might yet reawake? Might
not the Great Eyrie reproduce in its neighborhood the violence of
Mount Krakatoa or the terrible disaster of Mont Pelee? If there were
indeed a central lake, was there not danger that its waters,
penetrating the strata beneath, would be turned to steam by the
volcanic fires and tear their way forth in a tremendous explosion,
deluging the fair plains of Carolina with an eruption such as that of
1902 in Martinique?

Indeed, with regard to this last possibility there had been certain
symptoms recently observed which might well be due to volcanic