"Howard Waldrop - The Ugly Chickens" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

The sack full of dodo bones, beaks, feet and eggshell fragments kept
me company on the front seat.

Did you know a museum once traded an entire blue whale skeleton for
one of a dodo?

Driving. Driving.




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THE DANCE OF THE DODOS

I used to have a vision sometimes-I had it long before this madness
came up. I can close my eyes and see it by thinking hard. But it comes
to me most often, most vividly when I am reading and listening to
classical music, especially Pachelbel's Canon in D.

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It is near dusk in The Hague and the light is that of Frans Hals, of
Rembrandt. The Dutch royal family and their guests eat and talk quietly
in the great dining hall. Guards with halberds and pikes stand in the
corners of the room. The family is arranged around the table; the King,
Queen, some princesses, a prince, a couple of other children, and
invited noble or two. Servants come out with plates and cups but they
do not intrude.

On a raised platform at one end of the room an orchestra plays dinner
music-a harpsichord, viola, cello, three violins, and woodwinds. One of
the royal dwarfs sits on the edge of the platform, his foot slowly
rubbing the back of one of the dogs sleeping near him.

As the music of Pachelbel's Canon in D swells and rolls through the
hall, one of the dodos walks in clumsily, stops, tilts its head, its eyes
bright as a pool of tar. It sways a little, lifts its foot tentatively, one then
another, rocks back and forth in time to the cello.

The violins swirl. The dodo begins to dance, its great ungainly body
now graceful. It is joined by the other two dodos who come into the
hall, all three in sort of a circle.

The harpsichord begins its counterpoint. The fourth dodo, the white one