Lovecraft, H P - The Festival

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 118.01KB 7 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Festival

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written Oct 1923

Published January 1925 in Weird Tales, Vol 5, No. 1, p. 169-74.

Efficiut Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda

hominibus exhibeant.

- Lacantius

(Devils so work that things which are not appear to men as if they were

real.)

I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard

it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting willows

writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers

had called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow

along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on

toward the very ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of.

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older

than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and

I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in

the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to

keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be

forgotten. Mine were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three

hundred years before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk

from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the

tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals

of mysteries that none living could understand. I was the only one who came back that

night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember.

Then beyond the hill's crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming; snowy

Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and

small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked

streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes

of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child's disordered

blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs;

fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join

Orion and the archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the

secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the elder time.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Lovecraft, H P - The Festival.pdf

共7页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Lovecraft, H P - The Festival

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: