經典科幻文學:《基本上無害 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.
那景象阿瑟從沒真正習以爲常，又或者覺得膩味。他和福特沿着谷底的小河往前走，來到平原邊，然後爬到一棵大樹的樹枝上，好把銀河系裏最爲古怪奇妙的景象看個清楚。
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.
無數頭絕對正常獸排出氣勢雄偉的陣型，轟隆隆地橫掃過安宏朵平原。在清晨蒼白的陽光下，這些大塊頭埋頭往前衝，汗水蒸發，與蹄子激起來的泥霧混在一起。它們的模樣的確顯得有些詭異和不真實，但真正讓你的心臟停止跳動的還是那不解之謎：它們從哪兒來，又到哪兒去——總的來說，答案彷彿就是空氣。
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.
它們組成了一個密集的方陣，大約一百碼寬，半英里長，在它們定期出現的八九天裏，方陣從來看不出多大變動，只除了朝旁邊和後方稍微漂移一點點。不過，儘管隊形基本上保持恆定，組成方陣的巨獸卻在維持以每小時二十英里的速度往上衝，它們突然從平原一端憑空出現，然後又同樣突然地消失在平原的另一頭。
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.
沒人知道它們從哪兒來，也沒人知道它們去了哪裏。它們對拉姆拉人的生活太過重要，重要到沒人願意打聽。有一次老刷希巴說，有時如果你得到一個答案，問題就會被帶走。一些個村民私下裏說，這是老刷希巴講過的唯一一句真正賢明的話。然後，在一場短暫的爭論之後，大家又認定他不過是瞎貓碰上死耗子。
The noise of the pounding of the hooves was so intense that it was hard to hear anything else above it.
蹄子落地的聲音如此之大，你幾乎聽不見任何別的聲音。
‘What did you say?’ shouted Arthur.
“你說什麼？”阿瑟喊道。
‘I said,’ shouted Ford, ‘this looks like it might be some kind of evidence of dimensional drift.’
“我說，”福特也喊，“看起來好像是空間漂流的某種證據！”
‘Which is what?’ shouted Arthur back.
“什麼證據？”阿瑟喊回去。
