JSON 33 min ago 6. C 37 min ago 1. C 47 min ago 0. Bash 47 min ago Python 1 hour ago 1. Java 1 hour ago 2. We use cookies for various purposes including analytics. By continuing to use Pastebin, you agree to our use of cookies as described in the Cookies Policy.
OK, I Understand. Howard and H. Rider Haggard and a crowd of other imaginative adventure writers that I came to admire decades ago. Through his particular window Burroughs consistently saw things big and in vivid colors.
As a reader, I like to think of myself visiting that room now and then pipe smoke, a decanter and glasses, prints on the wall, a soft wind blowing in off the jungle looking out that onto the landscape of Pellucidar. The cover of the first is a depiction of a craggy, tropical mountainside with a rampaging wooly mammoth, the vast distances visible through the haze. Forty years ago, when I was attempting to write my first novel, I had been reading a lot of Burroughs, and I had the idea of making my book a hollow earth story, except that the narrator was probably a lunatic who perhaps merely imagined that the earth was hollow and that Pellucidar actually existed.
I pictured a final scene in which my man turned out to be correct — dinosaurs and giant trees spewing out of a vast hole in the ground and cartwheeling into the air. An author might use it to launch a thousand stories, a different invention in each. The manuscript went into the drawer. I went through a phase when I was reading Proust, and I tried the whole thing out again with elaborately long and exotic sentences. I put it away again, forever, or so I thought. Then, a couple of years later there was an article in the news about an unemployed dockworker in Long Beach who tied helium balloons to an armchair and flew through the skies above Los Angeles, 10, feet in the air.
Such was the price of science. He put a foot on the running board and then stopped in sudden dread, staring at an open-mouthed and wide-eyed man standing on the embankment ahead with a pushcart full of rags.
The hunchback gave him a dark look, most of it lost in the night. Rhythmic humming filled the air, barely audible but utterly pervasive, as if it echoed off the dome of the night sky. The hunchback leaped atop the seat, whipped his startled horse, and burst at a run past the stupefied ragpicker, knocking his barrow to bits against a stone abutment.
A long Jermyn Street the houses were dark and the alleys empty. Beyond it a spectacled face, half frowning, examined a rubber ape with apparent dissatisfaction.
Something about the wind made him edgy, restless. There was too much noise on it, and the noises seemed to him to be portentous. Just when the cries of the windy night receded into regularity and faded from notice, some rustling thing - a leafy branch broken from a camphor tree in St.
It was too early to go to bed; the sun would chase him there soon enough. He stepped across to the window, threw open the casement, and shoved his head out into the night. He glanced up at the starry sky, marveling at the absence of fog and at the ivory moon that hung in the heavens like a coathook, bright enough, despite its size, so that the ghosts of chimney pots and gables floated over the street.
Closing the casement, he turned to his bench and the disassembled shell of a tiny engine, unaware of the fading of the insect hum and of the oval shadow that passed along on the pavement below, creeping toward Covent Garden. Carts and wagons full of vegetables were crammed in together along three sides of the square, heaped with onions and cabbages, peas and celery.
On the west side of the square sat boxes and baskets of potted plants and flowers - roses, verbena, heliotrope and fuchsia - all of it emitting a fragrance which momentarily called up memories, suspicions of places at odds with the clatter and throng that stretched away down Bow Street and Maiden Lane, lost almost at once among a hundred conflicting odors.
Donkey carts and barrows choked the five streets leading away, and flower girls with bundles of sweet briar competed with apple women, shouting among the carts, the entire market flickering in the light of gaslamps and of a thousand candles thrust into potatoes and bottles and melted heaps of wax atop brake-locked cartwheels and low window sills, yellow light dancing and dying and flaring again in the wind.
A tall and age-ravaged missionary advertising himself as Shiloh, the Son of God, stood shivering in sackcloth and ashes, shouting admonitory phrases every few seconds as if it helped him keep warm.
He thrust tracts into random faces, as oblivious to the curses and cuffs he was met with as the throng around him was oblivious to his jabber about apocalypse. The moon, yellow and small, was sinking over Waterloo, and the stars were one by one winking out when the dirigible sailed above the market, then swept briefly out over the Victoria Embankment on its way toward Billingsgate and Petticoat Lane.
0コメント