"Robert F. Young - Goddess in Granite" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

The ridge was over a mile wide, its curvature barely perceptible. Marten
made good time. All the while he advanced he was conscious of the chin-cliff
looming higher and higher above him, but he did not look at it; he was afraid
to look at it till it loomed so close that it occulted half the sky, and then
he had to look at it, had to raise his eyes from the granite swell of the
throat and focus them on the appalling wall that now constituted his future.
His future was bleak. It contained no hand- or footholds; no ledges, no
cracks, no projections. In a way he was relieved, for if no means existed for
him to climb the chin-cliff, then he couldnтАЩt climb it. But in another way he
was overwhelmingly disappointed. Gaining the face-mesa was more than a mere
ambition; it was an obsession, and the physical effort that the task involved,
the danger, the obstaclesтАФall were an integral part of the obsession.
He could return the way he had come, down the arm to his inboard and back
to the isolated colony; and he could rent a flier from the hard-bitten,
taciturn natives just as easily as he had rented the inboard. In less than an
hour after takeoff, he could land on the face-mesa.
But he would be cheating, and he knew it. Not cheating the Virgin, but
cheating himself.
There was one other way, but he rejected it now for the same reason he had
rejected it before. The top of the VirginтАЩs head was an unknown quantity, and,
while the trees of her hair might make climbing easier, the distance to be
climbed was still over three times the height of the chin-cliff, and the pitch
was probably just as precipitous.
No, it was the chin-cliff or nothing. The way things looked now, it was
nothing. But he consoled himself with the fact that he had examined only a
relatively small section of the cliff. Perhaps the outlying sections would be
less forbidding. PerhapsтАФ
He shook his head. Wishful thinking would get him nowhere. It would be time
to hope after he found a means of ascent, not before. He started along the
base of the cliff, then paused. While he had stood there, staring at the
stupendous wall, Alpha Virginis had descended unobtrusively into the molten
sea. The first star was already visible in the east, and the hue of the
VirginтАЩs breasts had transmuted from gold to purple.
Reluctantly, Marten decided to postpone his investigation till tomorrow.
The decision proved to be a sensible one. Darkness was upon him before he had
his sleeping bag spread out, and with it came the penetrating cold for which
the planet was notorious throughout the galaxy.
He set the thermostat on the sleeping bag, then he undressed and crawled
into the warm interior. He munched a supper biscuit and allotted himself two
swallows of water from his canteen. Suddenly he remembered that he had missed
his midday mealтАФand had not even known the difference.
There was a parallel there somewhere, an element of d├йj├а vu. But the
connection was so tenuous that he could not pin the other moment down. It
would occur to him later, he knew, but such was the nature of the human mind
that it would occur seemingly as the result of another chain of associations,
and he would not remember the original connection at all.
He lay there, staring at the stars. The dark mass of the VirginтАЩs chin rose
up beside him, hiding half the sky. He should have felt forlorn, frightened
even. But he did not. He felt safe, secure. For the first time in many years
he knew contentment.