"Wilder, Cherry - Torin 01 - The Luck of Brin's Five UC - part 01" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilder Cherry)







Prologue

A low mountain range straddled the northern coast of the

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continent; it was massive and striking, rising in places
straight out of the grassy plain. The highest peaks lay to the
north, snow-capped in summer because they were close to
the polar circle. A hot summer sun burned down on the
craggy lower slopes; there were stands of a straight-limbed
tree with a red-brown trunk and small leaves of a particular
bronze green. Campsites clustered among these trees; some
were old and permanent as small villages, with a stone wall
or a stockade. In summer many of the camps were empty:
the campers had wandered off on their travels, to the
fairground and the riverside. In other places there was a
murmur of voices, the rhythmical clacking of looms; no
open fires were lit, no smoke curled above the treetops.
There were cool places to be found even in high summer;
caverns full of the sound of rushing water; noisy brooks and
torrents. Hunting trails ran along the tops of the ridges and
dipped into the valleys that led down to the hot grass of the
plain. There were natural plantations of a plant that looked
like flax,; its flat leaves rattled and shook, never still, in the
prevailing north wind.
A man, travelling through this rough, pleasant, hill
country could drink at the streams, eat berries if he dared,

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breathe the mountain air. Yet the creatures that scrambled
up the trees as he passed, the little bouncing deerlike
animals that took off into the scrub, the slow, dipping flight
of the birds would remind him, finally, that he was not on
Earth.
The continent and the world itself were called by the