"Stoker, Bram - DRACULA'S GUEST" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stoker Bram)

marble--for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks
of stone--was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the
back I saw, graven in great Russian letters: "The dead travel
fast."

There was something so weird and uncanny about the whole
thing that it gave me a turn and made me feel quite faint. I
began to wish, for the first time, that I had taken Johann's
advice. Here a thought struck me, which came under almost mys-
sterious circumstances and with a terrible shock. This was Wal-
purgis Night!

Walpurgis Night was when, according to the belief of mill-
ions of people, the devil was abroad--when the graves were op-
ened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things
of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the
driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated vill-
age of centuries ago.This was where the suicide lay; and this
was the place where I was alone--unmanned, shivering with
cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again up-
on me! It took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been
taught,all my courage,not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright.

And now a perfect tornado burst upon me. The ground shook
as though thousands of horses thundered across it; and this
time the storm bore on its icy wings, not snow, but great
hailstones which drove with such violence that they might
have come from the thongs of Balearic slingers--hailstones
that beat down leaf and branch and made the shelter of the
cypresses of no more avail than though their stems were stand-
ing corn. At the first I had rushed to the nearest tree;but I
was soon fain to leave it and seek the only spot that seemed
to afford refuge, the deep Doric doorway of the marble tomb.
There, crouching against the massive bronze door, I gained a
certain amount of protection from the beating of the hail-
stones, for now they only drove against me as they ricochett-
ed from the ground and the side of the marble.

As I leaned against the door, it moved slightly and opened
inwards. The shelter of even a tomb was welcome in that piti-
less tempest and I was about to enter it when there came a
flash of forked lightning that lit up the whole expanse of
the heavens. In the instant, as I am a living man, I saw, as
my my eyes turned into the darkness of the tomb, a beautiful
woman with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on
a bier. As the thunder broke overhead, I was grasped as by
the hand of a giant and hurled out into the storm. The whole
thing was so sudden that, before I could realize the shock,
moral as well as physical, I found the hailstones beating me
down. At the same time I had a strange, dominating feeling