Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky_Monday begins on Saturday

Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky_Monday begins on Saturday Main [index.php] Links Partners Map Monday begins on Saturday BELTANE THE SMITH BLACK BARTLEMY'S TREASURE BLEAK HOUSE The snail on the slope Monday begins on Saturday * THE FIRST TALE. Run Around a Sofa * Chapter 1 Teacher: Children, write down the proposition: "The fish was sitting in a tree." Pupil: But is it true that fish sit in trees? Teacher: Well . . . it was a crazy fish. School Joke I was approaching my destination. All around, pressing up against the very edge of the road, the green of the forest yielded now and then to a meadow overgrown with yellow sedge. The sun had been setting for an hour and still couldn't make it, hanging low on the horizon. The car rolled along, crunching on a gravel surface. I steered around the bigger rocks, and each maneuver caused the empty canisters to rattle and clang in the trunk. A couple of men came out of the woods on the right and stopped on the shoulder, looking in my direction. One of them raised his hand. I took my foot off the gas, scrutinizing the pair. They seemed to be hunters, young, and maybe a bit older than myself. Deciding I liked their looks, I stopped. The one who had raised his hand stuck his swarthy, hawk-nosed face through the window and asked, grinning, "Could you give us a lift to Solovetz ?" The second man, with a reddish beard and without a moustache, peering over his shoulder, was also smiling. These were positively nice people. "Sure thing. Get in," I said. "One in the front and one in the back, 'cause I have some junk on the rear seat." "A true philanthropist," pronounced the hawk-nosed one joyfully as he slid the gun off his shoulder and sat down next to me. The bearded one was looking through the rear door in a quandary of indecision and said, "Eh, could you maybe move it a little?" I leaned over the back of the seat and helped him clean off a space occupied by a sleeping bag and a rolled-up tent. He sat down gingerly, placing his gun between his knees. "Shut the door tighter," I said. Everything was going along normally. The car started off. The hawk-nosed one turned around and started an animated discourse about how much nicer it was to be riding in a passenger car than to be traveling on foot. The bearded one mumbled assent and kept slamming the door. "Pick up the poncho," I counseled, looking at him through the rear-view mirror. BELTANE THE SMITH CHAPTER I HOW BELTANE LIVED WITHIN THE GREENWOOD In a glade of the forest, yet not so far but that one might hear the chime of bells stealing across the valley from the great minster of Mortain on a still evening, dwelt Beltane the Smith. Alone he lived in the shadow of the great trees, happy when the piping of the birds was in his ears, and joying to listen to the plash and murmur of the brook that ran merrily beside his hut; or pausing 'twixt the strokes of his ponderous hammer to catch its never failing music. A mighty man was Beltane the Smith, despite his youth already great of stature and comely of feature. Much knew he of woodcraft, of the growth of herb and tree and flower, of beast and bird, and how to tell each by its cry or song or flight; he knew the ways of fish in the streams, and could tell the course of the stars in the heavens; versed was he likewise in the ancient wisdoms and philosophies, both Latin and Greek, having learned all these things from him whom men called Ambrose the Hermit. But of men and cities he knew little, and of women and the ways of women, less than nothing, for of these matters Ambrose spake not. Thus, being grown from youth to manhood, for that a man must needs live, Beltane builded him a hut beside the brook, and set up an anvil thereby whereon he beat out bill-hooks and axe-heads and such implements as the charcoal-burners and they that lived within the green had need of. Oft-times, of an evening, he would seek out the hermit Ambrose, and they would talk together of many things, but seldom of men and cities, and never of women and the ways of women. Once, therefore, wondering, Beltane had said: "My father, amongst all these matters you speak never of women and the ways of women, though history is full of their doings, and all poets sing praise of their wondrous beauty, as this Helena of Troy, whom men called 'Desire of the World.'" But Ambrose sighed and shook his head, saying: "Art thou indeed a man, so soon, my Beltane?" and so sat watching him awhile. Anon he rose and striding to and fro spake sudden and passionate on this wise: "Beltane, I tell thee the beauty of women is an evil thing, a lure to wreck the souls of men. By woman came sin into the world, by her beauty she blinds the eyes of men to truth and honour, leading them into all manner of wantonness whereby their very manhood is destroyed. This Helen of Troy, of whom ye speak, was nought but a vile adulteress, with a heart false and foul, by whose sin many died and Troy town was utterly destroyed." BLACK BARTLEMY'S TREASURE CHAPTER I OF WHAT BEFELL ON PEMBURY HILL It was a night of tempest with rain and wind, a great wild wind that shouted mightily near and far, filling the world with halloo; while, ever and anon, thunder crashed and lightning flamed athwart the muddy road that wound steeply up betwixt grassy banks topped by swaying trees. Broken twigs, whirling down the wind, smote me in the dark, fallen branches reached out arms that grappled me unseen, but I held on steadfastly, since every stride carried me nearer to vengeance, that vengeance for the which I prayed and lived. So with bared head lifted exulting to the tempest and grasping the stout hedge-stake that served me for staff, I climbed the long ascent of Pembury Hill. Reaching the summit at last I must needs stay awhile to catch my breath and shelter me as well as I might 'neath the weather bank, for upon this eminence the rain lashed and the wind smote me with a fury redoubled. And now, as I stood amid that howling darkness, my back propped by the bank, my face lifted to the tempest, I was aware of a strange sound, very shrill and fitful, that reached me 'twixt the booming wind-gusts, a sound that came and went, now loud and clear, anon faint and remote, and I wondered what it might be. Then the rushing dark was split asunder by a jagged lightning flash, and I saw. Stark against the glare rose black shaft and crossbeam, wherefrom swung a creaking shape of rusty chains and iron bands that held together something shrivelled and black and wet with rain, a grisly thing that leapt on the buffeting wind, that strove and jerked as it would fain break free and hurl itself down upon me. Now hearkening to the dismal creak of this chained thing, I fell to meditation. This awful shape (thought I) had been a man once, hale and strong,--even as I, but this man had contravened the law (even as I purposed to do) and he had died a rogue's death and so hung, rotting, in his chains, even as this my own body might do some day. And, hearkening to the shrill wail of his fetters, my flesh crept with loathing and I shivered. But the fit passed, and in my vain pride I smote my staff into the mud at my feet and vowed within myself that nought should baulk me of my just vengeance, come what might; as my father had suffered death untimely and hard, so should die the enemy of my race; for the anguish he had made me endure so should he know anguish. I bethought me how long and deadly had been this feud of ours, handed down from one generation to another, a dark, blood smirched record of bitter wrongs bitterly avenged. "To hate like a Brandon and revenge like a Conisby!" This had been a saying in our south country upon a time; and now--he was the last of his race as I was the last of mine, and I had come back out of hell that this saying might be fulfilled. Soon--ha, yes, in a few short hours the feud should be ended once and for all and the house of Conisby avenged to the uttermost. Thinking thus, I heeded no more the raving tempest around me until, roused by the plunge and rattle of the gibbet-chains, I raised my head and shaking my staff up at that black and shrivelled thing, I laughed loud and fierce, and, even as I did so, there leapt a great blaze of crackling flame and thereafter a thunder-clap that seemed to shake the very earth and smite the roaring wind to awed silence; and in this silence, I heard a whisper: BLEAK HOUSE PREFACE A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate. There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate of progress, but this was exaggerated and had been entirely owing to the "parsimony of the public," which guilty public, it appeared, had been until lately bent in the most determined manner on by no means enlarging the number of Chancery judges appointed--I believe by Richard the Second, but any other king will do as well. This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body of this book or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or to Mr. Vholes, with one or other of whom I think it must have originated. In such mouths I might have coupled it with an apt quotation from one of Shakespeare's sonnets: "My nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand: Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed!" But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public should know what has been doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, I mention here that everything set forth in these pages concerning the Court of Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth. The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence, made public by a disinterested person who was professionally acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end. At the present moment (August, 1853) there is a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to appear at one time, in which costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was begun. There is another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before the close of the last century and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted other authorities for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain them on these pages, to the shame of--a parsimonious public. The snail on the slope Chapter One From this height, the forest was like foam, luxuriant and blotchy, a gigantic world--encompassing porous sponge, like an animal waiting in concealment, now fallen asleep and overgrown with rough moss. A formless mask hiding a face, as yet revealed to none. Pepper shook off his sandals and sat down with his bare legs dangling over the precipice. It seemed to him that his heels at once became damp, as if he had actually immersed them in the warm lilac fog that lay banked up in the shadows under the cliff. He fished out the pebbles he had collected from his pocket and laid them out neatly beside him. He then selected the smallest and gently tossed it down into the living and silent, slumbering, all-enveloping indifference, and the white spark was extinguished, and nothing happened--no branch trembled, no eye half-opened to glance up. If he were to throw a pebble every one and a half minutes, and if what the one-legged cook, nicknamed Pansy, said was true and what Madame Bardot, head of the Assistance to the Local Population Group, reckoned, if what driver Acey whispered to the unknown man from the Engineering Penetration Group was untrue, and if human intuition was worth anything at all, and if wishes came true once in a lifetime, then at the seventh stone, the bushes behind him would part with a crash, and the director would step out onto the soft crushed grass of the dew-gray clearing. He would be stripped to the waist in his gray garbardines with the lilac braid, breathing heavily, sleek and glossy, yellow-pink and shaggy, looking nowhere in particular, neither at the forest beneath him nor at the sky above him, bending down to bury his arms in the grass, then unbending to raise a breeze with his broad palms, each time the mighty fold on his belly bulging out over his trousers, while air, saturated with carbon dioxide and nicotine, would burst out of his open mouth with a whistling gurgle. The bushes behind parted with a crash. Pepper looked around cautiously, but it wasn't the director, it was someone he knew, Claudius-Octavian Haus-botcher from the Eradication Group. He approached without haste and halted two paces away, looking Pepper up and down with his piercing dark eyes. He knew something or suspected something, something very important, and this knowledge or suspicion had frozen his long face, the stony face of a man who had brought here to the precipice a strange, alarming piece of news. No one in the whole world knew what this news was, but it was already clear that everything had altered decisively; what had gone before was no longer significant and now, at last, everyone would be required to contribute all he was capable of. Columbia, MD Homeowner Insurance - Free Quotes испания туры