"04 - The Son of Tarzan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burroughs Edgar Rice)

THE SON OF TARZAN
by
Edgar Rice Burroughs

TO HULBERT BURROUGHS




Chapter 1

The long boat of the Marjorie W. was floating down the
broad Ugambi with ebb tide and current. Her crew were
lazily enjoying this respite from the arduous labor of rowing
up stream. Three miles below them lay the Marjorie W.
herself, quite ready to sail so soon as they should have clambered
aboard and swung the long boat to its davits. Presently the
attention of every man was drawn from his dreaming or his
gossiping to the northern bank of the river. There, screaming
at them in a cracked falsetto and with skinny arms outstretched,
stood a strange apparition of a man.

"Wot the 'ell?" ejaculated one of the crew.

"A white man!" muttered the mate, and then: "Man the
oars, boys, and we'll just pull over an' see what he wants."

When they came close to the shore they saw an emaciated
creature with scant white locks tangled and matted. The thin,
bent body was naked but for a loin cloth. Tears were rolling
down the sunken pock-marked cheeks. The man jabbered at
them in a strange tongue.

"Rooshun," hazarded the mate. "Savvy English?" he called
to the man.

He did, and in that tongue, brokenly and haltingly, as though
it had been many years since he had used it, he begged them to
take him with them away from this awful country. Once on
board the Marjorie W. the stranger told his rescuers a pitiful
tale of privation, hardships, and torture, extending over a period
of ten years. How he happened to have come to Africa he did not
tell them, leaving them to assume he had forgotten the incidents
of his life prior to the frightful ordeals that had wrecked him
mentally and physically. He did not even tell them his true name,
and so they knew him only as Michael Sabrov, nor was there any
resemblance between this sorry wreck and the virile, though
unprincipled, Alexis Paulvitch of old.