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

The Crystals

by Clark Ashton Smith

July 2. 1914


Raptly as one who would divine the perilous eyes of Sleep, and the dreams and
mysteries which lurk therein, I sought to fathom the gulf-enclosing orb of the
crystal: Void for a time, and hollow with light it was, and transpicuous like
the orient sky that is made clear for the colours of the dawn. But soon the
light was centered to a star, and the crystal itself, as if pregnant with the
Infinite, became a tenebrous and profound abysm, thro which a teeming myriad of
shadows, vague as incipient dreams, or luminous with a glimpse of vision not
prefigurable, fled in an ever-changing phantasmagoric succession about the star:
From out those vortical and swirling glooms, where only the central star was
constant, I saw the pallor of innominable faces emerge-faces that broke like
bubbIes; and forms that were strange as conceptions of an alien sun, with the
eidolons of things which were imageless before, swam for a little in that
phantasmic wave. But all the multifold mysteries which were manifest therein, I
knew for the hidden thoughts and occluse, reluctant dreams of mine
under-soul,-thoughts and dreams now shadow-shown in the gulf-revealing orb of
the hollow crystal. . . .

Thus, in the crystal of Time and Space, whose gulfs contain all that we
call the Infinite, may God behold the manifestation of all the multiform
mysteries, and all the secret thoughts and dreams which abide in the centermost
sanctuary of His Being. And naught may appear to Him but these-His thoughts and
dreams forever shadow-shown in the immeasurable orb of the hollow crystal of
Time and Space.