"Lord Dunsany - The Bird Of The Difficult Eye (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

by little World-End Path. Many a twilight descended upon
that journey with all their mysteries, many a blaze of
stars; many a morning came flaming up to a tinkle of silver
horns; till the outpost elves of Fairyland came in sight and
the glittering crests of Fairyland's three mountains
betokened the journey's end. And so with painful steps (for
the shores of the world are covered with huge crystals) he
came to the risky seas of Shiroora Shan and saw them
pounding to gravel the wreckage of fallen stars, saw them
and heard their roar, those shipless seas that between earth
and the fairies' homes heave beneath some huge wind that is
none of our four. And there in the darkness on the grizzly
coast, for darkness was swooping slantwise down the sky as
though with some evil purpose, there stood that lonely,
gnarled and deciduous tree. It was a bad place to be found
in after dark, and night descended with multitudes of stars,
beasts prowling in the blackness gluttered at Neepy Thang.
(See any dictionary, but in vain.) And there on a lower
branch within easy reach he clearly saw the Bird of the
Difficult Eye sitting upon the nest for which she is
famous. Her face was towards those three inscrutable
mountains, far-off on the other side of the risky seas,
whose hidden valleys are Fairyland. Though not yet autumn
in the fields we know, it was close on mid-winter here, the
moment as Thang knew when those eggs hatch out. Had he
miscalculated and arrived a minute too late? Yet the bird
was even now about to migrate, her pinions fluttered and her
gaze was toward Fairyland. Thang hoped and muttered a
prayer to those pagan gods whose spite and vengeance he had
most reason to fear. It seems that it was too late or a
prayer too small to placate them, for there and then the
stroke of mid-winter came and the eggs hatched out in the
roar of Shiroora Shan or ever the bird was gone with her
difficult eye and it was a bad business indeed for Neepy
Thang; I haven't the heart to tell you any more.
"'Ere," said Lord Castlenorman some few weeks later to
Messrs. Grosvenor and Campbell, "you aren't 'arf taking your
time about those emeralds."