Золотой жук. Уровень 1 / The Gold-bug

The ship and everything on it have the spirit of old age. The crew go around like ghosts. I was a dealer in antiquities for all my life and I saw the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec[38 - Balbec – Баальбек, древний РіРѕСЂРѕРґ РІ Ливане], and Tadmor[39 - Tadmor – Тадмор, РіРѕСЂРѕРґ РІ центральной части РЎРёСЂРёРё], and Persepolis[40 - Persepolis – Персеполь, древнеперсидский РіРѕСЂРѕРґ РЅР° СЋРіРѕ-западе Р?рана]; but nothing ever gave me such strange feeling as seeing them.

When I look around me, I feel ashamed of my former fears. There is no word to describe the battle of wind and ocean that captured us. All near the ship is the blackness of eternal night and a chaos of foamless water. The only thing I can see through the blackness is ramparts of ice that look like the walls of the universe.

As I thought, the ship proves to be in a current, if I may say so. It runs on to the southward with a speed of a waterfall.

The horrors of my sensations is indescribable. Yet I feel curious about where we are going. Obviously, we are on the verge of a great discovery. Perhaps this current leads us to the southern pole itself; there are many signs in favor of that[41 - in favor of that – в пользу этого].

The crew nervously walk around. But it feels like they are full of hope rather than the apathy of despair.

In the meantime, the wind still carries us from the bottom to the top and vice versa[42 - and vice versa – и наоборот].

Oh, horror upon horror! Suddenly the ice opens to the right and to the left. We are whirling dizzily in immense circles. The walls of ice are now lost in the darkness and the distance. The circles rapidly grow small – we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool and – oh God! – going down.

William Wilson

Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. It is not my real name.

That name is an object for the scorn, for the horror of all. Did not wind carry my infamous name to all regions of the globe? Am I not forever dead to the world? Does not a dark cloud hang eternally between my hopes and heaven?

Men usually become bad by degrees[43 - by degrees – постепенно]. But from me, all my goodness dropped in a single moment, as if I dropped a coat. From little acts of weakness I passed, in one giant step, into pure evil.