"Mary Stewart - The Gabriel Hounds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

jutting rows of stalls.

It was then that I saw him. He had been standing, head
bent, in front of a jeweler's stall, turning over some small gilt
trinket in his hand. At the blast of the taxi's horn he glanced
up and stepped quickly out of the way. The step took him
from black shadow full into the sun's glare, and, with a queer
jerk of the heart, I saw who it was. I had known he was in

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this part of the world, and I suppose it was no odder to meet
him in the middle of Damascus than anywhere else, but I
stood there in the sunlight, gazing, I suppose rather blankly,
at the averted profile, four years strange to me, yet so
immediately familiar, and somehow so inevitably here.

The taxi vanished into the black tunnel of the main souk
with a jarring of gears and another yell of its horn. Between
us the dirty hot street was empty. One of the rolls of silk
slipped from my hands, and I grabbed for it, to catch it in a
cascade of crimson just before it reached the filthy ground.
The movement and the blinding colour must have caught his
attention, for he turned, and our eyes met. I saw them widen,
then he dropped the gilt object back on the jeweler's stall
and, ignoring the stream of bad American which the man
was shouting after him, crossed the street towards me. The
years rolled back more swiftly even than the crimson silk as
he said, with exactly the same intonation with which a small
boy had daily greeted his even smaller worshipper:

"Oh, hullo! It's you!"

I wasn't a small girl any more, I was twenty-two, and this
was only my cousin Charles, whom of course I didn't worship
any more. For some reason it seemed important to make
this clear. I tried to echo his tone, but only managed to
achieve a sort of idiotic deadpan calm. "Hullo. How nice to
see you. How you've grown!"

"Haven't I just, and I shave nearly every week now." He
grinned at me, and suddenly it wasn't the small boy any
more. "Christy love, thank goodness I've found you! What in
the world are you doing here?"

"Didn't you know I was in Damascus?"

"I knew you were coming, but I couldn't find out when. I