A. Bertram Chandler - Reaping Time

VIP免费

2024-11-25 0 0 8.42KB 3 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Reaping Time

A. Bertram Chandler

It was already dark when they came to the city. The sky, save for a low bar of sullen crimson

overhanging the low hills to the westward, was overcast. The road along which they had come glimmered

pallidly, stretched behind them broad and straight to the very edge of the featureless grey plain. Before

them, solidly ugly valves of dull metal between two squat black towers, was the gate.

‘Are you sure there is no mistake?’ asked the woman.

She looked up at the forbidding portal, at the black, harshly utilitarian architecture beyond. Few lights,

and those dim and furtive, broke the monotony of straight perpendicular lines, of geometrical masses

upheaved darkly against darkness. And there was no sound from the city, no joyful clamour of bells, no

music of plucked strings and singing voices. There was, perhaps, the merest tremor of the air, a vibration

felt rather than heard, a distant throbbing as of some great and well-tended machine.

‘Are you sure there is no mistake?’ she said.

‘No,’ replied the man confidently. ‘This - ’ and be flung out an possessive hand - ‘is better, perhaps, than

we were led to believe. It has no tinsel prettiness. It has . . . dignity.’

‘Yes,’ agreed the woman. ‘There is dignity.’

And with the words the harsh, strong lines of her face and bony added strength, and harshness, as did

those of the man. They were, husband and wife, worthy citizens of the place to which they were come.

Worthier far than many they had known who had let some softness, some weakness, bar them forever

from even so much as setting foot upon the road.

Slowly, silently, the gates swung open. Deliberately, not looking back, man stepped forward - his

woman, as was proper, a pace or so to the rear. Behind them the gates shut. There was something

irrevocable about their closing. There was the merest suggestion of an unmusical clang.

To their right, as they entered, was a door, open, in the dexter tower. Light streamed from it, was

reflected brightly from the black, polished pavement. There was movement inside the gatehouse, a

shadow that shirt across the source of illumination. Then all was still again, and the bright light in the tower

glared unwinking through the open doorway.

Confidently, his heels ringing on the polished pavement, the man walked towards the only sign of life that

they had so far seen. No less confidently his woman followed. They hesitated on the threshold of the

gatehouse — but this was due to physical rather than to psychological reasons. The harsh brilliance of the

unshaded lamp was cruel to eyes long inured to semi-darkness. But it was not long before they were able

to see, albeit dimly at first, the desk behind which sat the Gatekeeper. And then they saw the

Gatekeeper. himself, in his drab, monkish habit, and the Book before him, and the text, lurid orange on

black, on the wall behind him, Its sentiments, harshly uncompromising, did much to dispel the mistrust the

hooded robe had inspired in the man and woman. It was the woman who repeated the words, unctuously

- As a man sows, so shall he surely reap…

‘Yes,’ agreed the Gatekeeper. ‘Surely…’

It was not the words so much as the tone in which they were spoken the faintly mocking voice and the

eyes, brightly sardonic, peering out from beneath the cowl - that caused the mistrust to return. And there

was, although both the pilgrims stared ill-manneredly, no sign of a beard.

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

A. Bertram Chandler - Reaping Time.pdf

共3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！

A. Bertram Chandler - Reaping Time

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: