"Arthur C. Clarke. The fountains of paradise" - читать интересную книгу автора

astrologers, it was comforting to know that they agreed on this.
Malgara had waited almost twenty years, making his plans and gathering
the support of foreign kings. A still more patient and subtle enemy lay much
nearer at hand, forever watching from the southern sky. The perfect cone of
Sri Kanda, the Sacred Mountain, looked very close today, as it towered above
the central plain. Since the beginning of history, it had struck awe into
the heart of every man who saw it. Always, Kalidasa was aware of its
brooding presence, and of the power that it symbolised.
And yet the Mahanayake Thero had no armies, no screaming war elephants
tossing brazen tusks as they charged into battle. The High Priest was only
an old man in an orange robe, whose sole material possessions were a begging
bowl and a palm leaf to shield him from the sun. While the lesser monks and
acolytes chanted the scriptures around him, he merely sat in cross-legged
silence - and somehow tampered with the destinies of kings. It was very
strange...
The air was so clear today that Kalidasa could see the temple, dwarfed
by distance to a tiny white arrowhead on the very summit of Sri Kanda. It
did not look like any work of man, and it reminded the king of the still
greater mountains he had glimpsed in his youth, when he had been half-guest,
half-hostage at the court of Mahinda the Great. All the giants that guarded
Mahinda's empire bore such Crests, formed of a dazzling, crystalline
substance for which there was no word in the language of Taprobane. The
Hindus believed that it was a kind of water, magically transformed, but
Kalidasa laughed at such superstitions.
That ivory gleam was only three days' march away - one along the royal
road, through forests and paddy-fields, two more up the winding stairway
which he could never climb again, because at its end was the only enemy he
feared, and could not conquer. Sometimes he envied the pilgrims, when he saw
their torches marking a thin line of fire up the face of the mountain. The
humblest beggar could greet that holy dawn and receive the blessings of the
gods; the ruler of all this land could not.
But he had his consolations, if only for a little while. There, guarded
by moat and rampart, lay the pools and fountains and Pleasure Gardens on
which he had lavished the wealth of his kingdom. And when he was tired of
these, there were the ladies of the rock-the ones of flesh and blood, whom
he summoned less and less frequently-and the two hundred changeless
immortals with whom he often shared his thoughts, because there were no
others he could trust.
Thunder boomed along the western sky. Kalidasa turned away from the
brooding menace of the mountain, towards the distant hope of rain. The
monsoon was late this season; the artificial lakes that fed the island's
complex irrigation system were almost empty. By this time of year he should
have seen the glint of water in the mightiest of them al l- which, as he
well knew, his subjects still dared to call by his father's name: Paravana
Samudra, the Sea of Paravana. It had been completed only thirty years ago,
after generations of toil. In happier days, young Prince Kalidasa had stood
proudly beside his father, when the great sluice-gates were opened and the
life-giving waters had poured out across the thirsty land. In all the
kingdom there was no lovelier sight than the gently rippling mirror of that
immense, man-made lake, when it reflected the domes and spires of Ranapura,