"Colin Wilson - Spider World 01 - The Desert" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Colin)

made him feel as if he might float up into the air. He had only once been more than a few hundred yards
from the cave, and that was in the week the rains came. The wind had turned pleasantly cool; black
clouds came from the west, and suddenly water was gushing from the sky. He had stood in the warm rain
and laughed and jumped up and down. His mother took him for a walk, to a point where a dried up
watercourse cracked the edge of the plateau. There he stood and watched with amazement as the
ground heaved and split open and a large bullfrog pushed its way out; half an hour later, it was happening
in a dozen places at once. The creatures hopped down to the pools that were beginning to form, and
soon there was a loud, non-stop chorus of croaks as they called for the females to join them. The sight of
coupling frogs struck Niall as unbelievably funny, and he shrieked with laughter as he splashed in the
stream that had sprung up around his feet. Plants and flowers also began to push their way up from the
sand, which had now turned into oozy mud. There were hundreds of tiny explosions as dried pods sent
their seeds into the air like bullets. Within hours, the surface of the ground had been covered with an
amazing carpet of flowers -- white, green, yellow, red, blue and mauve. Niall, who had never seen any
colour but the yellow-grey of sand and rock and the fierce blue of the sky, felt as if he was in fairyland.
When the rain stopped, bees appeared from nowhere and burrowed into the flowers. The brown pools,
looking like mushroom soup, were full of tadpoles who writhed and thrashed and devoured one another.
In other, clearer pools, tiny newts devoured fragments of green algae. After four years of living in a
lifeless wilderness, Niall was suddenly surrounded by seething, blossoming life, and the sensation filled
him with a kind of intoxication.
This is why, as he bounced along on his mother's back or trotted by her side, he experienced the
same joy. His father had used the word "fertile" about their new home, and he imagined a place full of
flowers and trees and tiny animals. There awakened in him a sense of boundless anticipation of marvels
to come. If his father, who had spent his whole life in the desert, had been able to read his mind, he
would have shaken his head sadly.
At midday, when the sun became too hot, the men dug deep holes in the sand, covered them
with parasols, then poured more sand on top. A few inches below the surface, the sand was quite cool.
Less than a mile away, there were pillars of wind-eroded sandstone which might have afforded some
shelter; but in the searing heat, they would never have reached them. Niall and his mother and father lay
in one of the holes, sweating and chewing at a succulent tuber to prevent dehydration. Niall slept a little,
and dreamed of flowers and flowing water. Then once more they were on the move.
The wind had changed direction and seemed cooler. Niall pointed in the direction from which it
was blowing and asked his father: "What lies over there?"
"The delta," Ulf said. His voice was tired and indifferent, yet something about the word made
Niall shiver.
When they arrived, an hour before nightfall, they were all totally exhausted. Niall's first sight of his
new home was of acacia trees on the horizon, then of the immense, many-branched organ-pipe cactus.
He had never seen a tree before, although his father had described them. As they came closer, he saw, to
his disappointment, that there were no flowers; neither was there the running water he had been dreaming
about. Instead, there was barren, rocky ground with a thin covering of sand. The ground was covered
with grey-looking shrubs, creosote bushes and alfa grass, and with exposed rocks and stones. Only the
tree-like euphorbia cactus, with its deep green leaves, provided a touch of colour. In the distance there
were more of the strange columns of distorted red rock, while on the southern horizon, behind them, he
could see the inland plateau towering like a mountain range. Yet in spite of its dreariness, this was
undoubtedly an improvement on the endless sand dunes of their former home.
Jomar and Veig came out to meet them; the burrow was not facing the direction from which they
were approaching, but Jomar had sensed their arrival with that natural, intuitive awareness that desert
dwellers took for granted. Even if they had known the word, they would not have described their vague
awareness of one another's presence as telepathy; it was as natural to them as hearing. And it was
possessed in a far more terrifying degree by the death spiders.
Jomar was hardly able to walk; the thigh gripped by the mandibles of the tiger beetle had swelled