"Smith, Clark Ashton - Tales of Averoigne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

had taken root in its broken-down walls, and the ruinous gateway that
gave on the courtyard was half-choked by bushes, brambles and nettle-
plants. Forcing my way through, not without difficulty, and with
clothing that had suffered from the bramblethorns, I went, like Gerard
de Venteillon in the old manuscript, to the northern end of the court.
Enormous evil-looking weeds were rooted between the flagstones,
rearing their thick and fleshy leaves that had turned to dull sinister
maroons and purples with the onset of autumn. But I soon found the
triangular flagstone indicated in the tale, and without the slightest delay
or hesitation I pressed upon it with my right foot.
A mad shiver, a thrill of adventurous triumph that was mingled with
something of trepidation, leaped through me when the great flagstone
tilted easily beneath my foot, disclosing dark steps of granite, even as in
the story. Now, for a moment, the vaguely hinted horrors of the
monkish legends became imminently real in my imagination, and I
paused before the black opening that was to engulf me, eondering if
some satanic spell had not drawn me thither to perils of unknown terror
and inconceivable gravity.
Only for a few instants, however, did I hesitate. Then the sense of
peril faded, the monkish horrors became a fantastic dream, and the
charm of things unformulable, but ever closer at hand, always more
readily attainable, tightened about me like the embrace of amorous
arms. I lit my taper, I descended the stair; and even as behind Gerard
de Venteillon, the triangular block of stone silently resumed its place in
the paving of the court above me. Doubtless it was moved by some
mechanism operable by a man's weight on one of the steps; but I did
not pause to consider its modus operandi, or to wonder if there were
any way by which it could be worked from beneath to permit my
return.
There were perhaps a dozen steps, terminating in a low, narrow,
musty vault that was void of anything more substantial than ancient,
dust-encumbered cobwebs. At the end, a small doorway admitted me
to a second vault that differed from the first only in being larger and. __
dustier. I passed through several such vaults, and then found myself in
a long passage or tunnel, half blocked in places by boulders or heaps of
rubble that had fallen from the crumbling sides. It was very damp, and
full of the noisome odor of stagnant waters and subterranean mold. My
feet splashed more than once in little pools, aad drops fell upon me
from above, fetid and foul as if they had oozed from a charnel.
Beyond the wavering circle of light that my taper maintained, it
seemed to me that the coils of dim and shadowy serpents slithered
away in the darkness at my approach; but I could not be sure whether
they really were serpents, or only the troubled and retreating shadows,
seen by an eye that was still unaccustomed to the gloom of the vaults.
Rounding a sudden turn in the passage, I saw the last thing I had
dreamt of seeing Љ the gleam of sunlight at what was apparently the
tunnel's end. I scarcely know what I had expected to find, but such an
eventuation was somehow altogether unanticipated. I hurried on, in
some confusion of thought, and stumbled through the opening, to find
myself blinking in the full rays of the sun.