The Power That Preserves [antikvár]

; ; I i What Has Qonc Before Thomas Covenant is a happy and successful author until an unfelt infection leads to the amputation of two fingers. Then he learns he has leprosy. The disease is anested at a leprosarium, but he returns home to find himself an outcast. His wife has divorced him, and his neighbors shun him in ignorant fear. Lonely and bitter, he goes to town. There, just after meeting a strange beggar, he stumbles in front of a police car. He revives in a strange world where the evil voice of Lord Foul orders that he take a message of doom to the Lords of the Land. High on a mountain, at Kevin's Watch, a young girl named Lena finds him and takes him to her home. There he is considered a reincarnation of a legendary hero, Berek Half-hand, and his white gold wedding ring is considered a talisman of great power. Lena treats him with a mud called hurtloam, which seems to arrest his leprosy. This sudden healing is more than he can handle, and, losing control of himself, he rapes Lena. Despite this, her mother Atiaran saves him from Lena's lover, Triock, and agrees to guide him to Revelstone, home of the Lords. She tells him of the ancient war between the Old Lords and Foul, which ended in millennia of desecration for the Land. Covenant cannot believe in the Land, where stone and wood are made to give heat and light by magic. He becomes the Unbeliever because he dares not relax the discipline that a leper needs in order to survive. The Land seems a delirious escape from reality. Through the help of Saltheart FoamfoUower, a i