"MacDONALD, George - The Day Boy and the Night Girl (The Romance of Photogen and Nycteris)" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacDonald George)

her again.
And now the witch's care was that the child should not know darkness.
Persistently she trained him until at last he never slept during the day and
never woke during the night. She never let him see anything black, and even kept
all dull colors out of his way. Never, if she could help it, would she let a
shadow fall upon him, watching against shadows as if they had been live things
that would hurt him. All day he basked in the full splendor of the sun, in the
same large rooms his mother had occupied. Watho used him to the sun, until he
could bear more of it than any dark-blooded African. In the hottest of every
day, she stripped him and laid him in it, that he might ripen like a peach; and
the boy rejoiced in it, and would resist being dressed again. She brought all
her knowledge to bear on making his muscles strong and elastic and swiftly
responsive -- that his soul, she said laughingly, might sit in every fibre, be
all in every part, and awake the moment of call. His hair was of the red gold,
but his eyes grew darker as he grew, until they were as black as Vesper's. He
was the merriest of creatures, always laughing, always loving, for a moment
raging, then laughing afresh. Watho called him Photogen.


V. Nycteris
FIVE or six months after the birth of Photogen, the dark lady also gave birth to
a baby: in the windowless tomb of a blind mother, in the dead of night, under
the feeble rays of a lamp in an alabaster globe, a girl came into the darkness
with a wail. And just as she was born for the first time, Vesper was born for
the second, and passed into a world as unknown to her as this was to her child
-- who would have to be born yet again before she could see her mother.
Watho called her Nycteris, and she grew as like Vesper as possible -- in all but
one particular. She had the same dark skin, dark eyelashes and brows, dark hair,
and gentle sad look; but she had just the eyes of Aurora, the mother of
Photogen, and if they grew darker as she grew older, it was only a darker blue.
Watho, with the help of Falca, took the greatest possible care of her -- in
every way consistent with her plans, that is, -- the main point in which was
that she should never see any light but what came from the lamp. Hence her optic
nerves, and indeed her whole apparatus for seeing, grew both larger and more
sensitive; her eyes, indeed, stopped short only of being too large. Under her
dark hair and forehead and eyebrows, they looked like two breaks in a cloudy
night-sky, through which peeped the heaven where the stars and no clouds live.
She was a sadly dainty little creature. No one in the world except those two was
aware of the being of the little bat. Watho trained her to sleep during the day
and wake during the night. She taught her music, in which she was herself a
proficient, and taught her scarcely anything else.


VI. How Photogen Grew
THE hollow in which the castle of Watho lay was a cleft in a plain rather than a
valley among hills, for at the top of its steep sides, both north and south, was
a tableland, large and wide. It was covered with rich grass and flowers, with
here and there a wood, the outlying colony of a great forest. These grassy
plains were the finest hunting grounds in the world. Great herds of small but
fierce cattle, with humps and shaggy manes, roved about them, also antelopes and