"Smith, Clark Ashton - The Caravan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

The Caravan

by Clark Ashton Smith


My dreams are like a caravan that departed long ago, with tumult of intrepid
banners and spears, and the clamour of bugles and brave, adventurous songs, to
seek the horizons of perilous, unknown, barbaric lands and kingdoms immense and
vaguely rumoured, with cities beautiful and opulent as the cities of Paradise,
and deep, Edenic vales of palm and cinnamon and myrrh, lying beneath skies of
primeval azure silence. For traffic in the realms of mystery and wonder, in the
marts of scarce-imaginable cities, and metropoli a million leagues away, on the
last horizon of romance, my dreams departed, as a caravan with its laden camels.
Since then, the years are many, the days have flown as the flocks of southering
swallow; unnumbered moons have multiplied in fugitive silver, uncounted suns in
irretainable gold. But, alas, the caravan has not returned. Have the swirling
sands engulfed them, on a noon of storm when the desert rose like the sea, and
rolled its tawny billows on the walled gardens of the green and fragrant lands?
Or perished they, devoured by the crimsom demons of thirst, and the ghouls and
vultures? Or live they still, as captives in alien dungeons not to be
ascertained, or held by a wizard spell in palaces demon-built, and cities
baroque and splendid as the cities in a tale from the Thousand and One Nights?