автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу To Build a Fire
Jack London
TO BUILD A FIRE
"To Build a Fire" is a short story by American author Jack London. There are two versions of this story, one published in 1902 and the other in 1908. The story written in 1908 has become an often anthologized classic, while the 1902 story is less well known. The 1908 version is about an unnamed protagonist who ventures out in the subzero boreal forest of the Yukon Territory. He is followed by a native dog and is en route to visit his friends—ignoring warnings from an older man about the dangers of hiking alone in extreme cold. The protagonist underestimates the harsh conditions and slowly begins to freeze to death. After building one fire and leaving it to venture on in his journey he later on attempts to build another but fails. He slips into unconsciousness and dies of hypothermia...
Famous works of the author Jack London: "The Cruise of the Dazzler", "A Daughter of the Snows", "The Call of the Wild", "The Kempton-Wace Letters", "The Sea-Wolf", "The Game", "White Fang", "The Iron Heel", "Martin Eden", "Burning Daylight", "A Son of the Sun", "The Abysmal Brute", "The Valley of the Moon", "The Mutiny of the Elsinore", "The Star Rover", "The Little Lady of the Big House" and many more.
Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland. It was a steep bank, and he paused for breath at the top, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch. It was nine o’clock. There was no sun nor hint of sun, though there was not a cloud in the sky. It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark, and that was due to the absence of sun. This fact did not worry the man. He was used to the lack of sun. It had been days since he had seen the sun, and he knew that a few more days must pass before that cheerful orb, due south, would just peep above the sky-line and dip immediately from view.
The man flung a look back along the way he had come. The Yukon lay a mile wide and hidden under three feet of ice. On top of this ice were as many feet of snow. It was all pure white, rolling in gentle undulations where the ice-jams of the freeze-up had formed. North and south, as far as his eye could see, it was unbroken white, save for a dark hair-line that curved and twisted from around the spruce-covered island to the south, and that curved and twisted away into the north, where it disappeared behind another spruce-covered island. This dark hair-line was the trail-the main trail-that led south five hundred miles to the Chilcoot Pass, Dyea, and salt water; and that led north seventy miles to Dawson, and still on to the north a thousand miles to Nulato, and finally to St. Michael on Bering Sea, a thousand miles and half a thousand more.
But all this-the mysterious, far-reaching hairline trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all-made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a new-comer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and up
