Читать книгу Songs from Books - Rudyard Kipling - Страница 36

We meet in an evil land

That is near to the gates of hell.

I wait for thy command

To serve, to speed or withstand.

And thou sayest, I do not well?

Oh Love, the flowers so red

Are only tongues of flame,

The earth is full of the dead,

The new-killed, restless dead.

There is danger beneath and o'erhead,

And I guard thy gates in fear

  Of peril and jeopardy,

Of words thou canst not hear,

Of signs thou canst not see —

And thou sayest 'tis ill that I came?

This I saw when the rites were done,

And the lamps were dead and the Gods alone,

And the grey snake coiled on the altar stone —

Ere I fled from a Fear that I could not see,

And the Gods of the East made mouths at me.

Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan brown,

For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down;

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,

And the epitaph drear: 'A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.'

Beat off in our last fight were we?

The greater need to seek the sea.

For Fortune changeth as the moon

To caravel and picaroon.

Then Eastward Ho! or Westward Ho!

Whichever wind may meetest blow.

Our quarry sails on either sea,

Fat prey for such bold lads as we.

And every sun-dried buccaneer