"01 - At the Earth's Core" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burroughs Edgar Rice)

In between he often found excuses to pray even when the
provocation seemed far-fetched to my worldly eyes--now
that he was about to die I felt positive that I should
witness a perfect orgy of prayer--if one may allude
with such a simile to so solemn an act.

But to my astonishment I discovered that with death staring
him in the face Abner Perry was transformed into a new being.
From his lips there flowed--not prayer--but a clear and limpid
stream of undiluted profanity, and it was all directed
at that quietly stubborn piece of unyielding mechanism.

"I should think, Perry," I chided, "that a man of your
professed religiousness would rather be at his prayers
than cursing in the presence of imminent death."

"Death!" he cried. "Death is it that appalls you?
That is nothing by comparison with the loss the world
must suffer. Why, David within this iron cylinder we have
demonstrated possibilities that science has scarce dreamed.
We have harnessed a new principle, and with it animated
a piece of steel with the power of ten thousand men.
That two lives will be snuffed out is nothing to the world
calamity that entombs in the bowels of the earth the
discoveries that I have made and proved in the successful
construction of the thing that is now carrying us farther
and farther toward the eternal central fires."

I am frank to admit that for myself I was much more
concerned with our own immediate future than with any
problematic loss which the world might be about to suffer.
The world was at least ignorant of its bereavement,
while to me it was a real and terrible actuality.

"What can we do?" I asked, hiding my perturbation beneath
the mask of a low and level voice.

"We may stop here, and die of asphyxiation when our atmosphere
tanks are empty," replied Perry, "or we may continue
on with the slight hope that we may later sufficiently
deflect the prospector from the vertical to carry us along
the arc of a great circle which must eventually return us
to the surface. If we succeed in so doing before we reach
the higher internal temperature we may even yet survive.
There would seem to me to be about one chance in several
million that we shall succeed--otherwise we shall die
more quickly but no more surely than as though we sat
supinely waiting for the torture of a slow and horrible death."

I glanced at the thermometer. It registered 110 degrees.