Winter Holiday. Arthur Ransome

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ lit the lantern almost at once. It seemed a pity not to carry a lighted lantern when they could and, though there was still a little light in the sky, the lantern made things much darker. The stars were already showing.

      “There’s Cassiopeia,” said Dick. “It’s supposed to be her chair, but it’s no good trying to see it like a chair. None of the constellations are like what they’re supposed to be. Even the Plough does just as well for a wagon or a bear.”

      But Dorothea did not feel like talking while they were going up the hill at such a pace.

      They came to the barn and stood outside it high on the hillside. Dick was searching the skies while Dorothea peered down into the darkness of the valley.

      “What about Mars?” she reminded him at last. “Have they had their tea?”

      “Oh, them?” said Dick, and for a moment left the constellations to revolve unwatched. “Look there. Those’ll be the lights of that farm-house. Hide the lantern in the barn and we’ll be able to see better.”

      Dorothea put the lantern well inside the doorway and hurried out again into the dark. Dick had already got his telescope trained on those lights away below them.

      “It’s all right,” he said. “One of those lights is the downstairs window at this end of the house. I can just see the end wall, all white. There must be some other light quite near it. There you are. There it is. Someone moving about with a lantern.”

      “Well, they won’t be going to bed yet. If it’s them. But that youngest one probably goes to bed pretty early.”

      It felt very queer to be up there, high above everything, guessing at those strange lives so far away.

      “Anyhow,” said Dick, “it’s no good thinking about them till there’s a light upstairs in that room they were putting their heads out of. Let’s look at the real stars. We’ve got to get that fire going. It’ll be all right in that corner round the steps. Then you can stay by the fire and see what the book says, and I can come round this side so as not to be bothered by the light.”

      They were not very good at lighting a fire, and instead of doing it in the proper way with a handful of dry grass or the tiniest twigs, Dick, after a last regretful look by lantern-light at the picture of the rings of Saturn, took the paper wrapper off the star-book and gave it to Dorothea.

      “It doesn’t really matter,” he said, “because the same picture is inside the book as well.”

      “It’s not like lighting a fire in a proper grate,” said Dorothea. “But the paper’ll make it much easier.”

      It did, and in a few minutes they had a fire burning in the corner behind the steps. Smoke poured into their eyes, and reading seemed impossible. But presently the fire burnt clearer, and Dorothea crouched beside it to keep warm, and looked at the star-book in the light of the fire and the lantern.

      “Get the chapter on the January sky,” said the astronomer, who was keeping the stone steps between himself and the glare.

      Dorothea turned rapidly over the pages. “Got it,” she said.

      Dick was staring up into the crowded sky.

      “Now then,” he said. “I’ve got the Plough all right. Almost over that farm. And I’ve got the Pole Star, and Cassiopeia on the other side of it, almost opposite the Plough. What are the other ones it tells us to look out for? Skip the poetry.”

      “Taurus,” said Dorothea, running her finger along the lines of print, difficult to read with smoke-filled eyes. “The Bull. Major stars: Aldebaran. First magnitude. The eye of the Bull.”

      “Bother the Bull,” said Dick, hurrying round the corner and crouching over the book beside her. “It isn’t like one a bit. Let’s have a look at the picture . . . It’s a wedge with Aldebaran at the thin end, and then three other small triangles, and the Pleiades away by themselves.”

      He took a last look at the picture and hurried back into the darkness.

      “Got it,” he said. “Just over the top of the hill. Come and see it.”

      Dorothea joined him. He pointed out the bright Aldebaran and the other stars of Taurus, and offered her the telescope.

      “I can see a lot better without,” said Dorothea.

      “How many of the Pleiades can you see?”

      “Six,” said Dorothea.

      “There are lots more than that,” said Dick. “But it’s awfully hard to see them when the telescope won’t keep still. How far away does it say the Pleiades are?”

      Dorothea went back to the fire and found the place in the book.

      “The light from the group known as the Pleiades (referred to by Tennyson in Locksley Hall) . . . ”

      “Oh, hang Tennyson!”

      “The light from the group known as the Pleiades reaches our planet in rather more than three hundred years after it leaves them.”

      “Light goes at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second,” said the voice of the astronomer out in the darkness.

      But Dorothea was also doing some calculations.

      “Shakespeare died 1616.”

      “What?”

      “Well, if the light takes more than three hundred years to get here, it may have started while Shakespeare was alive, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, perhaps. Sir Walter Raleigh may have seen it start . . . ”

      “But of course he didn’t,” said the astronomer indignantly. “The light of the stars he saw had started three hundred years before that . . . ”

      “Battle of Bannockburn, 1314. Bows and arrows.” Dorothea was off again.

      But Dick was no longer listening. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. Sixty times as far as that in a minute. Sixty times sixty times as far as that in an hour. Twenty-four hours in a day. Three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Not counting leap years. And then three hundred years of it. Those little stars that seemed to speckle a not too dreadfully distant blue ceiling were farther away than he could make himself think, try as he might. Those little stars must be enormous. The whole earth must be a tiny pebble in comparison. A spinning pebble, and he, on it, the astronomer, looking at flaming gigantic worlds so far away that they seemed no more than sparkling grains of dust. He felt for a moment less than nothing, and then, suddenly, size did not seem to matter. Distant and huge the stars might be, but he, standing here with chattering teeth on the dark hill-side, could see them and name them and even foretell what next they were going to do. “The January Sky.” And there they were, Taurus, Aldebaran, the Pleiades, obedient as slaves . . . He felt an odd wish to shout at them in triumph, but remembered in time that this would not be scientific.

      He had not heard Dorothea come round the corner of the barn.

      For some time she had been looking at the star pictures in the book, and had been quietly busy with the fire. At last, hearing nothing from the astronomer, she had come СКАЧАТЬ