"Clark Ashton Smith - Master of the Asteroid" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

and over these, amazingly, there clambered frail, pipy, leafless vines with
broad, yellow-green tendrils flat and thin as paper. Insubstantial-looking
lichens, taller than a man, and having the form of flat antlers, grew in
single rows and thickets along the valley.

Between the thickets, I saw the approach of certain living creatures
who rose from behind the middle rocks with the suddenness and lightness of
leaping insects. They seemed to skim the ground with long, flying steps
that were both easy and abrupt.

There were five of these beings, who, no doubt, had been attracted by
the fall of the Selenite from space and were coming to inspect it. In a few
moments, they neared the vessel and paused before it with the same
effortless ease that had marked all their movements.

What they really were, I do not know; but for want of other analogies,
I must liken them to insects. Standing perfectly erect, they towered seven
feet in air. Their eyes, like faceted opals, at the end of curving
protractile stalks, rose level with the port. Their unbelievably thin
limbs, their stem-like bodies, comparable to those of the phasmidae, or
"walking-sticks", were covered with gray-green shards. Their heads,
triangular in shape, were flanked with immense, perforated membranes, and
were fitted with mandibular mouths that seemed to grin eternally.

I think that they saw me with those weird, inexpressive eyes; for they
drew nearer, pressing against the very port, till I could have touched them
with my hand if the port had been open. Perhaps they too were surprised:
for the thin eye-stalks seemed to lengthen as they stared and there was a
queer waving of their sharded arms, a quivering of their horny mouths, as
if they were holding converse with each other. After a while they went
away, vanishing swiftly beyond the near horizon.

Since then, I have examined the Selenite as fully as possible, to
ascertain the extent of the damage. I think that the outer hull has been
crumpled or even fused in places: for when I approached the manhole, clad
in a space suit, with the idea of emerging, I found that I could not open
the lid. My exit from the flier has been rendered impossible, since I have
no tools with which to cut the heavy metal or shatter the tough,
neo-crystal ports. I am sealed in the Selenite as in a prison; and the
prison, in due time, must also become my tomb.

Later. I shall no longer try to date this record. It is impossible
under the circumstances, to retain even an approximate sense of earthly
time. The chronometers have ceased running, and their machinery has been
hopelessly jarred by the vessel's fall. The diurnal periods of this
planetoid are, it would seem, no more than an hour or two in duration; and
the nights are equally short. Darkness swept upon the landscape like a
black wing after I had finished writing my last entry; and since then, so
many of these ephemeral days and nights have shuttled by, that I have now
ceased to count them. My very sense of duration is becoming oddly confused.