THE SUBTLE KNIFE 精彩片段：
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: ONE ALAMO GULCH-1
Lee Scoresby looked down at the placid ocean to his left and the green shore to his right, and shaded his eyes to search for human life. It was a day and a night since they had left the Yenisei.
"And this is a new world?" he said.
"New to those not born in it," said Stanislaus Grumman. "As old as yours or mine, otherwise. What Asriels done has shaken everything up, Mr. Scoresby, shaken it more profoundly than its ever been shaken before. These doorways and windows that I spoke of—they open in unexpected places now.
Its hard to navigate, but this wind is a fair one."
"New or old, thats a strange world down there," said Lee.
"Yes," said Stanislaus Grumman. "It is a strange world, though no doubt some feel at home there."
"It looks empty," said Lee.
"Not so. Beyond that headland youll find a city that was once powerful and wealthy. And its still inhabited by the descendants of the merchants and nobles who built it, though its fallen on hard times in the past three hundred years."
A few minutes later, as the balloon drifted on, Lee saw first a lighthouse, then the curve of a stone breakwater, then the towers and domes and red-brown roofs of a beautiful city around a harbor, with a sumptuous building like an opera house in lush gardens, and wide boulevards with elegant hotels, and little streets where blossom-bearing trees hung over shaded balconies.
And Grumman was right; there were people there. But as the balloon drifted closer, Lee was surprised to see that they were children. There was not an adult in sight. And he was even more surprised to see the children had no daemons—yet they were playing on the beach, or running in and out of cafes, or eating and drinking, or gathering bags full of goods from houses and shops.
And there was a group of boys who were fighting, and a red-haired girl urging them on, and a little boy throwing stones to smash all the windows of a nearby building. It was like a playground the size of a city, with not a teacher in sight; it was a world of children.
But they werent the only presences there. Lee had to rub his eyes when he saw them first, but there was no doubt about it: columns of mist—or something more tenuous than mist—a thickening of the air.... Whatever they were, the city was full of them; they drifted along the boulevards, they entered houses, they clustered in the squares and courtyards. The children moved among them unseeing.
But not unseen. The farther they drifted over the city, the more Lee could observe the behavior of these forms. And it was clear that some of the children were of interest to them, and that they followed certain children around: the older children, those who (as far as Lee could see through his telescope) were on the verge of adolescence. There was one boy, a tall thin youth with a shock of black hair, who was so thickly surrounded by the transparent beings that his very outline seemed to shimmer in the air. They were like flies around meat. And the boy had no idea of it, though from time to time he would brush his eyes, or shake his head as if to clear his vision.
"What the hell are those things?" said Lee.