"Ellison-SunkenCathedral" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

He walked the bottom of the world, tried not to think that one slip and he would
topple over the edge of the Wall of Andros, sink into the Tongue of the Ocean,
and long before his airhose and lifeline pulled taut, he would be crushed by
pressures easily as great as those that had slapped his father into oblivion. He
trudged, he tried to avoid thoughts, and he did not see the smooth shadow that
undulated above him and behind him. But soon he would reach . . .

There!

There it was. But it made no sense. He stared through the thick faceplate glass
of his helmet, and at first could not comprehend what he was seeing. Time passed
as he stood there amid neon-colored swimmers, breathing heavily, trying to get
his eyes to re-rack the size and meaning of what he was seeing.

Out there, perhaps twenty-five meters beyond the lip of the ridge, out there
hanging over the abyss, was a gigantic waterfall. He ran the word through his
mind once:

QED. It is a waterfall.

Perhaps a hundred feet above him, there was a dark, odd, faintly glowing opening
in the underwater. It was enormous, a mouth of water that opened into water. As
if a vacuum hole -- the words were the best he could do -- a vacuum hole had
opened into this deep. And pouring down out of that aperture, into the
bottomless deep of the Tongue of the Ocean, was a waterfall of rushing,
plunging, foaming water, faintly crimson and solid as paving stones, cascading
out and over and down like an otherworldly Niagara, here beneath the Atlantic,
here in the Bermuda Triangle, here in front of Dennis Lanfear.

He was frozen in place, disbelieving, frightened, and unable to defend himself
as the painted, serpentine creature that had been pacing him curled herself over
and over around his airhose and his lifeline, snapping them, descending on him,
grasping him in incredibly powerful, naked arms, and dove with him . . .

Over and over, off the ledge, into the bottomless darkness below the Wall of
Andros, down and down, to five hundred feet where the pounds of pressure per
square inch was over two hundred, and Lanfear found himself embraced with death,
as he was dragged down and down, till the faint light of the ocean was
extinguished, and so was his consciousness; and the last thing he saw as
oblivion rushed in on him was the sweet, smiling, thousand-year-old face of the
watcher in the abyss, the guardian of the portal, the mermaid who bore him to
extinction.

Lanfear was dissolving in a world of red thunder.

It was dark, and cold, and he was held so tightly he could barely flex a muscle
inside the diving suit.

*
" . . . here was darkness . . . darkness complete; i t was that sepulchral and