The Best of Edmond Hamilton by Edmond Hamilton

Author:Edmond Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Hewlett-Packard Company
Published: 2011-01-28T05:00:00+00:00

Swiftly as they had come, the little winds whipped away, chasing one another across the plain.

Lora laughed. “They are but very small winds, those, yet I love them almost the most.”

Brent asked, “Lora, have you never wanted to leave this plateau? To find other people?”

She turned the clear gaze of her gray-green eyes on him; “Why should I want people when I have the winds?”

“But surely you don’t want to live here on this plateau always, even with the winds?”

She shook her head as though explaining something obvious. “But I couldn’t leave the winds!”

Her soft, bronzed arms suddenly circled Brent’s neck and she looked up into his face like a pleading, affectionate child.

“I want to stay here, and now that you have come I want you to stay here with me. You will, Brent?”

Brent’s arms tightened involuntarily around her and he drew a long breath as he answered.

“I’ll stay,” he said, “for a little while, at least.”

Brent stayed. He told himself that it was but for a short time, that in a few days he would cure the girl of her fancies about the winds and that she would leave with him. But he could not change Lora’s ideas regarding the winds. And Brent, against his will, against every conscious thought of his reason, found himself insensibly coming to share her viewpoint.

He found himself thinking of the winds as living things, and not just moving air. He found himself distinguishing one wind from another, just as he might one person from another. The great, strong winds that boomed solemn and majestic, the smaller, wilder winds that roared in and away, the little winds that whisked and played on the plateau—he could not keep from thinking of them as one might think of living people.

And there was that strong, gentle wind that Lora called the mother-wind. Every morning when he and Lora emerged from the cavern the mother-wind was there to greet and touch them. And every morning they found there fruits and things that Lora said the winds had brought.

Brent’s reason told him that it was not impossible in this high place of strange wind-currents for freak currents constantly to bring objects a long distance and drop them. But reason alone could not combat the strange influence that the girl’s belief had upon Brent.

From early morning until late night there were always winds about Lora, it seemed, even more than elsewhere on that plateau of winds. Whether or not they were living as she believed, the girl truly lived with the winds as companions, Brent saw.

And soon it seemed to him that no companions could be more wonderful, more swift and beautiful, than these that blew round all the round world, that roared and whistled and sang with life infinitely above the life of all poor things that grubbed on earth.

They were companions that could be wilder than any else in the world, as when they thundered across the plateau in tremendous wind-charges, Brent and Lora running with them and the girl’s sweet whistling stabbing.

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