"Herbert George Wells. When the Sleeper Wakes" - читать интересную книгу автора

The pilgrimage towards a personal being seemed to traverse vast gulfs, to
occupy epochs. Gigantic dreams that were terrible realities at the time,
left vague perplexing memories, strange creatures, strange scenery, as if
from another planet. There was a distinct impression, too, of a momentous
conversation, of a name-he could not tell what name-that was subsequently
to recur, of some queer long-forgotten sensation of vein and muscle, of a
feeling of vast hopeless effort, the effort of a man near drowning in
darkness. Then came a panorama of dazzling unstable confluent scenes.

Graham became aware his eyes were open and regarding some unfamiliar thing.

It was something white, the edge of something, a frame of wood. He moved
his head slightly, following the contour of this shape. It went up beyond
the top of his eyes. He tried to think where he might be. Did it matter,
seeing he was so wretched? The colour of his thoughts was a dark
depression. He felt the featureless misery of one who wakes towards the
hour of dawn. He had an uncertain sense of whispers and footsteps hastily
receding.

The movement of his head involved a perception of extreme physical
weakness. He supposed he was in bed in the hotel at the place in the
valley-but he could not recall that white edge. He must have slept. He
remembered now that he had wanted to sleep. He recalled the cliff and
waterfall again, and then recollected something about talking to a
passer-by.

How long had he slept? What was that sound of pattering feet? And that rise
and fall, like the murmur of breakers on pebbles? He put out a languid hand
to reach his watch from the chair whereon it was his habit to place it, and
touched some smooth hard surface like glass. This was so unexpected that it
startled him extremely. Quite suddenly he rolled over, stared for a moment,
and struggled into a sitting position. The effort was unexpectedly
difficult, and it left him giddy and weak-and amazed.

He rubbed his eyes. The riddle of his surroundings was confusing but his
mind was quite clear-evidently his sleep had benefited him. He was not in a
bed at all as he understood the word, but Iying naked on a very soft and
yielding mattress, in a trough of dark glass. The mattress was partly
transparent, a fact he observed with a strange sense of insecurity, and
below it was a mirror reflecting him greyly. About his arm-and he saw with
a shock that his skin was strangIy dry and yellow-was bound a curious
apparatus of rubber, bound so cunningly that it seemed to pass into his
skin above and below. And this strange bed was placed in a case of greenish
coloured glass (as it seemed to him), a bar in the white framework of which
had first arrested his attention. In the corner of the case was a stand of
glittering and delicately made apparatus, for the most part quite strange
appliances, though a maximum and minimum thermometer was recognisable.

The slightly greenish tint of the glass-like substance which surrounded him
on every hand obscured what lay behind, but he perceived it was a vast