"George Allen England - Darkness and Dawn" - читать интересную книгу автора (England George Allen)

To
Robert H. Davis
Unique inspirer of plots
Do I dedicate
This my trilogy
G.A.E.




BOOK I. THE VACANT WORLD

CHAPTER I. THE AWAKENING
Dimly, like the daybreak glimmer of a sky long wrapped in fogs, a sign of consciousness began to dawn
in the face of the tranced girl.

Once more the breath of life began to stir in that full bosom, to which again a vital warmth had on this
day of days crept slowly back.

And as she lay there, prone upon the dusty floor, her beautiful face buried and shielded in the hollow of
her arm, a sigh welled from her lips.
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




Life—life was flowing back again! The miracle of miracles was growing to reality.

Faintly now she breathed; vaguely her heart began to throb once more. She stirred. She moaned, still for
the moment powerless to cast off wholly the enshrouding incubus of that tremendous, dreamless sleep.

Then her hands closed. The finely tapered fingers tangled themselves in the masses of thick, luxuriant hair
which lay outspread all over and about her. The eyelids trembled.

And, a moment later, Beatrice Kendrick was sitting up, dazed and utterly uncomprehending, peering
about her at the strangest vision which since the world began had ever been the lot of any human creature
to behold—the vision of a place transformed beyond all power of the intellect to understand.

For of the room which she remembered, which had been her last sight when (so long, so very long, ago)
her eyes had closed with that sudden and unconquerable drowsiness, of that room, I say, remained only
walls, ceiling, floor of rust-red steel and crumbling cement.

Quite gone was all the plaster, as by magic. Here or there a heap of whitish dust betrayed where some
of its detritus still lay.

Gone was every picture, chart, and map—which—but an hour since, it seemed to her—had decked this
office of Allan Stern, consulting engineer, this aerie up in the forty-eighth story of the Metropolitan
Tower.