"Джек Керуак. Big Sur (engl)" - читать интересную книгу автора

knees in foggy doorways in the goopy eerie city night I've got to escape or
die, and into the bus station In a half hour into a bus seat, the bus says
"Monterey" and off we go down the clean neon hiway and I sleep all the way,
waking up amazed and well again smelling sea air the bus driver shaking me
"End of the line, Monterey. " - And by God it is Monterey, I stand sleepy
in the 2 A. M. seeing vague little fishing masts across the street from the
bus driveway. Now all I've got to do to complete my escape is get 14 miles
down the coast to the Raton Canyon bridge and hike in.

3

"One fast move or I'm gone" so I blow $8 on a cab to drive me down that
coast, it's foggy night tho sometimes you can see stars in the sky to the
right where the sea is, tho you cant see the sea you can only hear about it
from the cabdriver - "What kinda country is it around here? I've never seen
it. " 'Well, you cant see it tonight - Raton Canyon you say, you better be
careful walkin around there in the dark. " 'Why? "
"Well, just use your lamp like you say... "
And sure enough when he lets me off at the Raton Canyon bridge and
counts the money I sense something wrong somehow, there's an awful roar of
surf but it isnt coming from the right place, like you'd expect it to come
from "over there" but it's coming from "under there" - I can see the bridge
but I can see nothing below it - The bridge continues the coast highway
from one bluff to another, it's a nice white bridge with white rails and
there's a white line runnin down the middle familiar and highway like but
something's wrong - Besides the headlights of the cab just shoot out over a
few bushes into empty space in the direction where the canyon's supposed to
be, it feels like being up in the air somewhere tho I can see the dirt road
at our feet and the dirt overhang on the side
"What in the hell is this? " - I've got the directions all memorized
from a little map Monsanto's mailed me but in my imagination dreaming about
this big retreat back home there'd been something larkish, bucolic, all
homely woods and gladness instead of all this aerial roaring mystery in the
dark - When the cab leaves I therefore turn on my railroad lantern for a
timid peek but its beam gets lost just like the car lights in a void and in
fact the battery is fairly weak and I can hardly see the bluff at my left -
As for the bridge I cant see it anymore except for graduating series of
luminous shoulder buttons going off further into the low sea roar... The sea
roar is bad enough except it keeps bashing and barking at me like a dog in
the fog down there, sometimes it booms the earth but my God where is the
earth and how can the sea be underground! - "The only thing to do, " I
gulp, "is to put this lantern shinin right in front of your feet, kiddo, and
follow that lantern and make sure it's shinin on the road rut and hope and
pray it's shinin on the ground that's gonna be there when it's shinin, " in
other words I actually fear that even my lamp will carry me astray if I dare
to raise it for a minute from the ruts in the dirt road - The only
satisfaction I can glean from this roaring high horror of darkness is that
the lamp wobbles huge dark shadows of its little rim stays on the
overhanging bluff at the left of the road, because to the right (where the
bushes are wiggling in the wind from the sea) there aint no shadows because