The Atlas полностью

Years since, some other boys and I had come here by horseback. I remember how the creek looped through a rockwalled meadow; my buckskin dipped his head to drink, and suddenly we all saw the cabins standing tall and lonely. The canyon appeared to end behind them, although it didn't; only life and meaning ended here. Several structures were ruinous even then, whole walls' worth of planks having been prised off for fenceposts or firewood; but I'd choose to call them melancholy, not evil — strange stages for a theater of lizards, snakes and jackrabbits. Lupines and mariposas grew at the edges of those wooden caves, thriving in the shade of overhanging roofs; and the sun projected straight-arrow rays and trapezoids across the darknesses of back walls. Had I been a young child I might have liked to gather quartz crystals from the hills and lay them out in rows upon those floors strewn with lumber and scraps of tarpaper; I might have tried to make them intercept those long spears of light. But the resultant streams of prismatic color mean little to me now. I see in black and white. — These cabins, once used by cowboys and linemen, were older than the century. A half-crazed recluse built the first shack back in the days before White Mountain City went from one tent to half a hundred tents to a ghost town. In those days you borrowed freely, and then repaid with interest. Even in my time the cabins were a little like that. I'd slept in them half a dozen times; the windows had no glass, and the bedsteads had no mattresses, being now mere high flat platforms of solid wood, more comfortable than the mosquito-ridden grass by the stream. I remember how the bare floors were shiny and golden with desert sunlight; and at night sleep always came quickly so that the cold dewy dawn surprised me like a glimpse of my horse's head through the window. I'd borrowed an old silver spoon from one cabin for a summer, and when my horse took me back there, I left it on the old lace doily and added a cheap pocket-knife because that seemed like the thing to do. The next time I rode that way, the knife and spoon were still there, and somebody had left a fork, too; missing one tine, but still a fork; someone had thought and cared. What next? As the mathematician C. H. Hinton wrote:. . we are accustomed to find in nature infinite series, and do not feel obliged to pass on to a belief in the ultimate limits to which they seem to point. I guess he was right. Now the fork and knife and spoon were gone, and the bedsteads were smashed as if by idiots at war. Now they were dead houses. Therefore they were evil houses.

My companion soon fell asleep and snored loudly. I sat watching the evil houses and the evil trees.

The next morning we continued into the high country, where everything had a grayish tinge — grayish-green bushes, grayish-red rocks — and everything was hot and prickly: thorns, prickly pears, nettles, and thistles. Sitting up among the pyrites, you could listen to the creek talking to itself, the faint hiss of the grass-pennants in the wind, the hums of flies and the discussions of birds where the shale spires and saddles were fractured into vertical planes seamed with quartz granite. Some of the rocks were embedded with minerals that glittered like stars. Others had been traced with concentric rings, as if they were trees. They were all hot to the touch an hour after sunup. Outside of houses, we're easily influenced, it seems. I have often seen patches of lichen on Arctic stones, forming a schematic of planetary orbits around the sun. Here, even the lichen — bright orange, bright yellow — hid from the sun in rocky fissures. I wanted to hide, too, but not from the sun. Of course it would be useless. Those houses would see me as soon as I'd clambered down to the creek to drink. Their windows saw a long way.

My companion said: I hope my house is all right. I didn't lock the back door.

All at once I, who had no home, understood why the cabins at Roberts Camp had not assaulted his brain. His own house was evil and had already eaten him. .

The Angel of Forgetting wanted to be the kindest angel. She went down to the roofless open places, the lacunae walled with diamond-angled brick. She came into the old house and began to unbuild it. The little boy said: I lived here in the old centuries. I lived in this house.

Around the edges of that squarish pit of ruins, graying apartments whose balconies fluttered with trapped white laundry rose from beards of ivy, and the sounds of auto horns floated down. A living child cried, and his anguish sifted down.

Did you hear that? said the Angel of Forgetting. — Ah, that pretty little bird!