Five Leaps to the Horizon

In this tale, Vladislav Krapivin describes the author’s first trip outside his native Tyumen. After all, for a first-grader, even visiting neighboring villages of Parfënovo and Yurty can become a real adventure…

In the idea that “earlier the sun shone brighter, the grass was greener, and the sky bluer,” there is always irony. Like, in childhood we see everything in rainbow colors. But on the other hand… The air really was cleaner, the rivers fuller, and poplar leaves in mid-summer didn’t curl up from brown lichens. And there is another indisputable truth: there was more air on the planet. It’s strange that people don’t pay attention to that. Yet devices are inexorably pointing to the fact that the atmosphere has become thinner and lighter.

I have two such devices. They are barometers-aneroids (scientific people call them aneroids, as opposed to mercury barometers—huge things, resembling meter-long thermometers, and nowadays almost nobody knows them).

So, I have a pair of these spring barometers-aneroids. I bought one about fifteen years ago. I paid some kind of nonsense for it. Now such instruments—enclosed in carved frames, decorated in an old style—are sold in souvenir departments of department stores for crazy money. And at the end of the eighties it was like mass-produced. I thought the solid round object with hands would look good next to the ship’s wheel bolted to the wall, the ship’s clock, and a model of an old sailing ship named “Arabella.” The barometer really fit into the décor of my “cabin.” I leaned back on the couch and admired it. And then… suddenly the feeling scratched at me: something here was wrong.

Yes, it was clearly “wrong.”