Black Lamb and Grey Falcon II. (töredék) [antikvár]

MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) Skoplje I BEHAVED like a professional guide as we hurried out of the station, waving my hand to indicate the wealth that lay behind the darkness. The station lies in the new part of Skoplje, at the end of the main street, which resembles some hundred yards cut out of a secondary shopping centre in an English industrial town, saving the dimness of its lighting, the cobbles, and the lack of automobiles, and gives the same impression that the scalp of the years has become dandniffed with undistinguished manufactured goods. But behind the station a tableland was Atlas to a sky marbled with moonlit clouds, and about us there was warm air and the scent of lilacs, and the sound of playing and singing, the astringent sound of Macedonian playing and singing, from the little cafés hidden away in side streets and courtyards. And an event was imposing on the city a rhythm, an excitement. Little fiacres with two horses were clattering over the cobbles, people were hurrying along on clattering heels, all in the same direction. "Look, they are all going to the church for the Easter ceremony," said Constantine; "we must just deposit our luggage in the hotel and start out again, if we are not to miss it, for it is nearly midnight." "I am afraid that I will have to get some other shoes," I said, for one heel of the pair I was wearing had come off as I got out of the train. "But meantime you can tell them to get us a fiacre." But when we came downstairs again they had done nothing. In the lounge Gerda was sitting quite still, dazed in contemplation of my in-considerateness as an antique monk of Mount Athos in contemplation of his navel, and Constantine was nervously agreeing with the strictures she had made before she passed into full ecstasy. The boy who might have fetched us a fiacre was now doing something else, so we had to go back to the station, and there we found only one, which was falling to pieces. It would have been just possible for three, but for four it was 633 .»,4:1.1;