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

clambered panting to a space of huge windmills, one so vast that only the
lower edge of its vans came rushing into sight and rushed up again and was
lost in the night and the snow. They hurried for a time through the
colossal metallic tracery of its supports, and came at last above a place
of moving platforms like the place into which Graham had looked from the
balcony. They crawled across the sloping transparency that covered this
street of platforms, crawling on hands and knees because of the
slipperiness of the snowfall.

For the most part the glass was bedewed, and Graham saw only hazy
suggestions of the forms below, but near the pitch of the transparent roof
the glass was clear, and he found himself looking sheerly down upon it all.
For awhile, in spite of the urgency of his guide, he gave way to vertigo
and lay spread-eagled on the glass, sick and paralysed. Far below, mere
stirring specks and dots, went the people of the unsleeping city in their
perpetual daylight, and the moving platforms ran on their incessant
journey. Messengers and men on unknown businesses shot along the drooping
cables and the frail bridges were crowded with men. It was like peering
into a gigantic glass hive, and it lay vertically below him with only a
tough glass of unknown thickness to save him from a fall. The street showed
warm and lit, and Graham was wet now to the skin with thawing snow, and his
feet were numbed with cold. For a space he could not move.

"Come on!" cried his guide, with terror in his voice. "Come on!"

Graham reached the pitch of the roof by an effort.

Over the ridge, following his guide's example, he turned about and slid
backward down the opposite slope very swiftly, amid a little avalanche of
snow While he was sliding he thought of what would happen if some broken
gap should come in his way. At the edge he stumbled to his feet ankle deep
in slush thanking heaven for an opaque footing again. His guide was already
clambering up a metal screen to a level expanse.

Through the spare snowflakes above this loomed another line of vast
windmills, and then suddenly the amorphous tumult of the rotating wheels
was pierced with a deafening sound. It was a mechanical shrilling of
extraordinary intensity that seemed to come simultaneously from every point
of the compass.

"They have missed us already!" cried Graham's guide in an accent of terror,
and suddenly, with a blinding flash, the night became day.

Above the driving snow, from the summits of the wind-wheels, appeared vast
masts carrying globes of livid light. They receded in illimitable vistas in
every direction. As far as his eye could penetrate the snowfall they
glared.

"Get on this," cried Graham's conductor, and thrust him forward to a long
grating of snowless metal that ran like a band between two slightly sloping