The Flood

Начало книги

AT the beginning there were clouds, and more clouds, heavy, black, blown by intermittent gusts of wind, contained within a ring of mountains on the horizon. Everything began to grow dark, objects took on a regular pattern, lapped scales like thin blades of steel, or chain-mail, that frittered away what little brightness still remained. Other objects, themselves sources of light, began to flicker feebly and unhappily, overwhelmed by the vast proportions of some ill-defined yet imminent happening, made ridiculous by the mere fact of comparison to this enemy (as it were) against whom they had to sally forth and do battle. The movement gradually faltered, not through any loss of intensity or change in approach, but because its impetus was exhausted by the effort to hold up the advance of this freezing universal oblivion — its very stillness imbued with a quality of eternity — now creeping on, and on, biting into the earth, swallowing it inch by inch, infiltrating any manifestation of activity, breaking up the established harmonies of contrast, penetrating to the core of all matter, annihilating the very origins of life itself. Delicate and paper-light, the texture of darkness lay upon every surface, creating a multiplicity of silhouettes, and enhancing the intensity of such brightness as there was to a quite remarkable degree, so that a single point of light, reflected from the broken glass lying along the sidewalk, where the water-truck had crushed it, blazed out for something like a hundred light-years over an area bordering on infinity, and with the fierceness of three or more suns.

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