"Aleksandr Abramov, Sergei Abramov. Horsemen from Nowhere ("ВСАДНИКИ НИОТКУДА", англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

break in the enormous thickness of ice, as if a gargantuan knife had sliced
through it. Here it was bluish in the sunlight, like the sky reflected in a
giant mirror. At the very bottom, however, the wind had built up a long
two-metre high snowdrift-a nice fluffy fringe to match the same one way up
at the top of the wall of ice. The wall extended on and on without end,
tapering off in the distant snowy reaches of space. Only the mighty giants
of fairy tales could, it seemed, have erected it here in this icy fastness
to protect no one knew what from no one knew whom-a fortress of ice. Of
course, ice in the Antarctic-no matter what its shapes and forms-could
hardly impress anyone. Which is just what I said to Zernov, for 1 couldn't
see what was so attractive to the glaciologist.
"A plateau of ice, Boris Arkadievich. Perhaps a shelf glacier?"
"Old timer," Zernov said ironically, hinting at my second trip to the
South Pole. "Do you know what a shelf is? You don't? A shelf is a
continental bar. A shelf glacier slides down into the ocean. Now this is not
a glacial precipice and we are not in the ocean." He was silent for a moment
and then added thoughtfully. "Please, stop, Vano. Let's take a closer look.
This is an interesting phenomenon. Put something on, boys, it's no place for
light sweaters."
Close up, the wall was still more beautiful. An unbelievably blue bar,
a chunk of frozen sky cut off near the horizon. Zernov was silent. Either
the magnificence of the spectacle awed him, or its inexplicability. He
peered for the longest time into the snowy line at the topmost fringe of the
wall, and then for some reason looked down at his feet, stamped the snow,
then kicked it about. We watched him but could not figure it out.
"Just look at this snow we are standing on," he said suddenly.
We stamped the snow a bit like he had done, and found a solid sheet of
ice below the thin layer of snow.
"A real skating rink," said Dyachuk. "An ideal plane, probably Euclid
himself helped to make it."
But Zernov was serious.
He continued thoughtfully, "We are standing on ice. There is not more
than two centimetres of snow. Now look at the wall. Metres thick. Why? The
climate here is the same, the same winds, the same conditions for
accumulation of snow. Anyone got any bright ideas?"
Nobody answered. Zernov continued thinking aloud.
"The structure of the ice is apparently the same. The surface too. I
get the impression of an artificial cut. And if. you brush off the
centimetre-thick layer of snow under foot, we get the same artificial cut.
Now that doesn't make sense at all."
"Everything is nonsense in the realm of the snow queen," I put in for
what it was worth.
"Why queen and not king?" Vano queried.
"You explain it to him, Tolya," I said, "you're the map specialist.
We've got Queen Mary Land, Queen Maud Land, and then in the other direction
Queen Victoria Land." "Simply Victoria," Tolya added correcting me.
"Listen, you erudite of Weather Forecasts, she was the Queen of
England. Incidentally, in this same field of forecasting, wasn't it here on
this wall that the snow queen played with Caius? And wasn't it here that he
cut his cubes and fashioned them into the word 'eternity'?"