"Wells, H G - In The Days Of The Comet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

Etext of In The Days of the Comet
By H.G. Wells

Contents
PROLOGUE The Man Who Wrote in the Tower

BOOK I: THE COMET
CHAPTER 1 Dust in the Shadows
CHAPTER 2 Nettie
CHAPTER 3 The Revolver
CHAPTER 4 War
CHAPTER 5 The Pursuit of the Two Lovers

BOOK II: THE GREEN VAPOURS
CHAPTER 1 The Change
CHAPTER 2 The Awakening
CHAPTER 3 The Cabinet Council

BOOK III: THE NEW WORLD
CHAPTER 1 Love after the Change
CHAPTER 2 My Mother's Last Days
CHAPTER 3 Beltane and New Year's Eve

EPILOGUE The Window of the Tower

PROLOGUE
The Man Who Wrote in the Tower

I SAW a grey-haired man, a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and
writing. He seemed to be in a room in a tower, very high, so that
through the tall window on his left one perceived only distances, a
remote horizon of sea, a headland, and that vague haze and glitter
in the sunset that many miles away marks a city. All the
appointments of this room were orderly and beautiful, and in some
subtle quality, in this small difference and that, new to me and
strange. They were in no fashion I could name, and the simple
costume the man wore suggested neither period nor country. It
might, I thought, be the Happy Future, or Utopia; an errant mote of
memory, Henry James's phrase and story of "The Great Good
Place" twinkled across my mind, and passed and left no light.

The man I saw wrote with a thing like a fountain pen, a modern
touch that prohibited any historical reference, and as he finished
each sheet, writing in an easy flowing hand, he added it to a
growing pile upon a graceful little table under the window. His last
done sheets lay loose, partly covering others that were clipped
together into fascicles.

Clearly he was unaware of my presence, and I stood waiting until
his pen should come to a pause. Old as he certainly was he wrote