Surgeon at Arms

Начало книги

He couldn't believe it.

It was outrageous, ridiculous, but frightening, like finding the Houses of Parliament in the middle of Salisbury Plain, stumbling into St Peter's Square round a corner in Wimbledon, or coming across the Taj Mahal amid the alleys of the City. The front was magnificent. The portico presented a decorated frieze, four stout pale columns of Portland stone, and all the exuberant self-confidence of a Victorian London railway terminus. Behind rose a flattish dome, topped by four minarets, two of them emitting smoke. Then the building seriously got down to business. Its slate-roofed, double-storied, mean-windowed blocks spread in a fan, sticking their ugly fingers into an empty countryside wearing the ragged robes of autumn. All round ran an eight-foot-high wall, topped with unfriendly-looking broken glass. Everything was in yellow brick, which in the pale afternoon sunshine gave the place the look of being constructed from a million bars of Sunlight soap.

Читать дальше →