دانلود رمان انگلیسی “سرزمین‌های ارواح”

FRANCESCO HELIOS had never experienced an earthquake before. Nor had anyone who’d lived their life in New Shining Capital. Yet his Mower, seventy tons of metal with a wrecking arm eight stories tall and steel tractor treads eight feet wide, quivered like a slender branch of a sapling when leaped upon by a fat squirrel. Far more ominous, the looming mushroom Francesco knew he would need to dismantle six or seven months hence—the Washerman’s Monument, already grown to more than three hundred feet tall—shook like an obelisk made of uncooked bread dough. Not fully solidified, it could topple at any moment. Its fall would crush hundreds of tourists who surrounded the Great Lawn, gathered to watch Francesco perform his duty. They’d come to watch him work. He was responsible for them being here. Their screams from the far side of the wooden fences reached him even over the throbbing groan of the Mower’s engine and the roar of breaking earth. He had to save them. He’d been reversing from the spreading fissures, trying to keep the Mower from suffering damage. He couldn’t be concerned about that now. His powerful right hand desperately grabbed hold of the transmission lever and jerked it into its first forward gear, steering his colossal mechanism directly toward the even more colossal mushroom. The Mower lurched up and over fissures, its front claw wheels pointing momentarily skyward and spinning over empty air before the machine’s center of gravity brought the front portion of the tracks crashing to earth again. The closer he drew to the Washerman’s Monument, the more afraid he became. Big as his Mower was, the trembling monument made it seem puny by comparison, a mere sandlot toy. If the obelisk insisted on toppling west, could he shift its fall by even a single degree? Or would his sacrificial tackle simply add him and his machine to the earthquake’s victims and not preserve even one life?