"Zach Hughes - The Book of Rack the Healer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

His broth supply was holding out well and he was finding enough air to
be able to conserve the vital stores within his body. Because of the five-day
lull in the storms he covered a large area; the picture in his mind was
based on a comparison of his progress with the well-known image of the
distance around the planet. He rested.

During his sixth night on the plateau the winds increased and new
clouds of forbidding density moved in. He spent the following day in his
protective cover, unable to breathe. He used his life stores sparingly,
allowing his body to lapse into a state of sluggishness during which his
heart beat only rarely. Although his mind was slowed, his capacity for
cenesthesia allowed him to take stock of his condition. He was satisfied.

The new storm blew through the day, calmed at night, but then began
anew at dawn. The inactivity galled Rack, and, in order to escape the
boredom of nonmovement, he reviewed all of the knowledge he had gained
in the last few days. He wished for a contact with a Keeper, but did
nothing since the distances and energies involved would have been a
drain.

He would not admit, even in the privacy of his mind, that he was
indeed looking for a fabled lost city. Yet there was some connection, he
conceded, between his being on the escarpment plateau and his having
once heard an unconfirmed legend regarding a lost city beside the river.
While the storm blew and there was no breathable air, he indulged in
speculation about the Old Ones. If it were true that the land had once been
rich with growing things, the waters sweet, then the Old Ones would have
sought locations such as this, near water. The city, if there had been one,
could have been on either side of the river, but the legend repeated by the
Healers had specified the western bank, which meant that it had been
located on what now was the plateau. Since, according to the observations
of Rack and other Healers with similar interests, the plateau was a fairly
recent development, any city that might have stood there would have been
lifted with the upheaval of the earth and been tumbled and broken.

The most tenuous of Rack's speculations he would never have made
public, lest he be ridiculed. If a city had stood on the western bank and
had been broken and scattered by the titanic upheaval of the earth, the
rains would have long since washed away any trace—except, perhaps, for
the hard materials, which were heavier than the stones. It was his vague
hope that he would find particles of the hard material lodged in the
broken fields of stone atop the plateau.

It was, indeed, a foolish hope. There was still no connection, except in
his imagination, between the Old Ones and the hard materials. But he
would not have been content to spend his free time in the confinement of
his establishment. His feet tingled from the walking, his scales sizzled
when the acid rain struck them, his cells were being used as he lived on his
stored air. Yet even if he spent the rest of his life span using his free time
to walk the desolate places, it was his life. And even if he never found