经典科幻文学:《基本上无害 Mostly Harmless》 第19章1

It was a sight that Arthur never quite got used to, or tired of. He and Ford had tracked their way swiftly along the side of the small river that flowed down along the bed of the valley, and when at last they reached the margin of the plains they pulled themselves up into the branches of a large tree to get a better view of one of the stranger and more wonderful visions that the Galaxy has to offer.

那景象阿瑟从没真正习以为常，又或者觉得腻味。他和福特沿着谷底的小河往前走，来到平原边，然后爬到一棵大树的树枝上，好把银河系里最为古怪奇妙的景象看个清楚。

The great thunderous herd of thousand upon thousand of Perfectly Normal Beasts was sweeping in magnificent array across the Anhondo Plain. In the early pale light of the morning, as the great animals charged through the fine steam of the sweat of their bodies mingled with the muddy mist churned up by their pounding hooves, their appearance seemed a little unreal and ghostly anyway, but what was heart-stopping about them was where they came from and where they went to, which appeared to be, simply, nowhere.

无数头绝对正常兽排出气势雄伟的阵型，轰隆隆地横扫过安宏朵平原。在清晨苍白的阳光下，这些大块头埋头往前冲，汗水蒸发，与蹄子激起来的泥雾混在一起。它们的模样的确显得有些诡异和不真实，但真正让你的心脏停止跳动的还是那不解之谜：它们从哪儿来，又到哪儿去——总的来说，答案仿佛就是空气。

They formed a solid, charging phalanx roughly a hundred yards wide and half a mile long. The phalanx never moved, except that it exhibited a slight gradual drift sideways and backwards for the eight or nine days that it regularly appeared for. But though the phalanx stayed more or less constant, the great beasts of which it was composed charged steadily at upwards of twenty miles an hour, appearing suddenly from thin air at one end of the plain, and disappearing equally abruptly at the other end.

它们组成了一个密集的方阵，大约一百码宽，半英里长，在它们定期出现的八九天里，方阵从来看不出多大变动，只除了朝旁边和后方稍微漂移一点点。不过，尽管队形基本上保持恒定，组成方阵的巨兽却在维持以每小时二十英里的速度往上冲，它们突然从平原一端凭空出现，然后又同样突然地消失在平原的另一头。

No one knew where they came from, no one knew where they went. They were so important to the lives of the Lamuellans, it was almost as if nobody liked to ask. Old Thrashbarg had said on one occasion that sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away. Some of the villagers had privately said that this was the only properly wise thing they’d ever heard Thrashbarg say, and after a short debate on the matter, had put it down to chance.

没人知道它们从哪儿来，也没人知道它们去了哪里。它们对拉姆拉人的生活太过重要，重要到没人愿意打听。有一次老刷希巴说，有时如果你得到一个答案，问题就会被带走。一些个村民私下里说，这是老刷希巴讲过的唯一一句真正贤明的话。然后，在一场短暂的争论之后，大家又认定他不过是瞎猫碰上死耗子。

The noise of the pounding of the hooves was so intense that it was hard to hear anything else above it.

蹄子落地的声音如此之大，你几乎听不见任何别的声音。

‘What did you say?’ shouted Arthur.

“你说什么？”阿瑟喊道。

‘I said,’ shouted Ford, ‘this looks like it might be some kind of evidence of dimensional drift.’

“我说，”福特也喊，“看起来好像是空间漂流的某种证据！”

‘Which is what?’ shouted Arthur back.

“什么证据？”阿瑟喊回去。