"Arthur C. Clarke. The fountains of paradise" - читать интересную книгу автора

This cunningly contrived pageant of light and sound still had power to
move Rajasinghe, though he had seen it a dozen times and knew every trick of
the programming. It was, of course, obligatory for every visitor to the
Rock, though critics like Professor Sarath complained that it was merely
instant history for tourists. Yet instant history was better than no history
at all, and it would have to serve while Sarath and his colleagues still
vociferously disagreed about the precise sequence of events here, two
thousand years ago.
The little amphitheatre faced the western wall of Yakkagala, its two
hundred seats all carefully orientated so that each spectator looked up into
the laser projectors at the correct angle. The performance always began at
exactly the same time throughout the year - 19.00 hours, as the last glow of
the invariant equatorial sunset faded from the sky.
Already it was so dark that the Rock was invisible, revealing its
presence only as a huge, black shadow eclipsing the early stars. Then, out
of that darkness, there came the slow beating of a muffled drum; and
presently a calm, dispassionate voice:

"This is the story of a king who murdered his father and was killed by
his brother. In the blood-stained history of mankind, that is nothing new.
But this king left an abiding monument; and a legend which has endured for
centuries..."

Rajasinghe stole a glance at Vannevar Morgan, sitting there in the
darkness on his right. Though he could see the engineer's features only in
silhouette, he could tell that his visitor was already caught in the spell
of the narration. On his left his other two guests - old friends from his
diplomatic days - were equally entranced. As he had assured Morgan, they had
not recognised "Dr. Smith"; or if they had indeed done so, they had politely
accepted the fiction.

"His name was Kalidasa, and he was born a hundred years after Christ,
in Ranapura, City of Gold - for centuries the capital of the Taprobanean
kings. But there was a shadow across his birth..."

The music became louder, as flutes and strings joined the throbbing
drum, to trace out a haunting, regal melody in the night air. A point of
light began to burn on the face of the Rock; then, abruptly, it expanded -
and suddenly it seemed that a magic window had opened into the past, to
reveal a world more vivid and colourful than life itself.
The dramatisation, thought Morgan, was excellent; he was glad that, for
once, he had let courtesy override his impulse to work. He saw the joy of
King Paravana when his favourite concubine presented him with his first-born
son - and understood how that joy was both augmented and diminished when,
only twenty-four hours later, the Queen herself produced a better claimant
to the throne. Though first in time, Kalidasa would not be first in
precedence; and so the stage was set for tragedy.

"Yet in the early years of their boyhood Kalidasa and his half-brother