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Джек Лондон / Jack London

Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover

© Матвеев С. А. , адаптация текста, коммент. и словарь, 2020

© ООО «Издательство АСТ», 2020

Chapter I

All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in me.

Our dreams are grotesquely compounded of the things we know. My reader, as a child, you dreamed you flew through the air; you were vexed by crawling spiders; you heard other voices, saw other faces, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other than you know now.

As for myself, even at the beginning of my life, I knew that I had been a star-rover. Yes, I, whose lips had never lisped the word “king,” remembered that I had once been the son of a king.

More—I remembered that once I had been a slave and a son of a slave, and worn an iron collar round my neck.

So, I say, during the ages of three and four and five, I was not yet I. Other voices screamed through my voice, the voices of men and women aforetime, of all shadowy hosts of progenitors.

A few weeks, I shall be led from this cell to a high place with unstable flooring, graced above by a rope; and there they will hang me by the neck until I am dead.

I am Darrell Standing. I was caught.  In a surge of anger, obsessed by red wrath, I killed that professor.