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

reasons unmentioned, she never put a book in her hands. Nycteris, however, saw
so much better than Watho imagined, that the light she gave her was quite
sufficient, and she managed to coax Falca into teaching her the letters, after
which she taught herself to read, and Falca now and then brought her a child's
book. But her chief pleasure was in her instrument. Her very fingers loved it
and would wander about its keys like feeding sheep. She was not unhappy. She
knew nothing of the world except the tomb in which she dwelt, and had some
pleasure in everything she did. But she desired, nevertheless, something more or
different. She did not know what it was, and the nearest she could come to
expressing it to herself was -- that she wanted more room. Watho and Falca would
go from her beyond the shine of the lamp, and come again; therefore surely there
must be more room somewhere. As often as she was left alone, she would fall to
poring over the colored bas-reliefs on the walls. These were intended to
represent various of the powers of Nature under allegorical similitudes, and as
nothing can be made that does not belong to the general scheme, she could not
fail at least to imagine a flicker of relationship between some of them, and
thus a shadow of the reality of things found its way to her.
There was one thing, however, which moved and taught her more than all the rest
-- the lamp, namely, that hung from the ceiling, which she always saw alight,
though she never saw the flame, only the slight condensation towards the center
of the alabaster globe. And besides the operation of the light itself after its
kind, the indefiniteness of the globe, and the softness of the light, giving her
the feeling as if her eyes could go in and into its whiteness, were somehow also
associated with the idea of space and room. She would sit for an hour together
gazing up at the lamp, and her heart would swell as she gazed. She would wonder
what had hurt her when she found her face wet with tears, and then would wonder
how she could have been hurt without knowing it. She never looked thus at the
lamp except when she was alone.


VIII. The Lamp
WATHO, having given orders, took it for granted they were obeyed, and that Falca
was all night long with Nycteris, whose day it was. But Falca could not get into
the habit of sleeping through the day, and would often leave her alone half the
night. Then it seemed to Nycteris that the white lamp was watching over her. As
it was never permitted to go out -- while she was awake at least -- Nycteris,
except by shutting her eyes, knew less about darkness than she did about light.
Also, the lamp being fixed high overhead, and in the center of everything, she
did not know much about shadows either. The few there were fell almost entirely
on the floor, or kept like mice about the foot of the walls.
Once, when she was thus alone, there came the noise of a far-off rumbling: she
had never before heard a sound of which she did not know the origin, and here
therefore was a new sign of something beyond these chambers. Then came a
trembling, then a shaking; the lamp dropped from the ceiling to the floor with a
great crash, and she felt as if both her eyes were hard shut and both her hands
over them. She concluded that it was the darkness that had made the rumbling and
the shaking, and rushing into the room, had thrown down the lamp. She sat
trembling. The noise and the shaking ceased, but the light did not return. The
darkness had eaten it up!
Her lamp gone, the desire at once awoke to get out of her prison. She scarcely