"Burroughs, Edgar Rice - Eternal Savage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burroughs Edgar Rice)

"Of course you're sane, Vic," he reassured her. "You've just allowed that old dream of yours to become a sort of obsession with you, and now it's gotten on your nerves until you are commencing to believe it even against your better judgment. Take a good grip on yourself, get up and join Curtiss in a long ride. Have it out with him. Tell him just what you have told me, and then tell him you'll marry him, and I'll warrant that you'll be dreaming about him instead of that young giant that you have stolen out of some fairy tale."
"I'll get up and take a ride, Barney," replied the girl; "but as for marrying Mr. Curtiss -- well, I'll have to think it over."
But after all she did not join the party that was riding toward the hills that morning, for the thought of seeing the torn and twisted strata of a bygone age that lifted its scarred head above the surface of the plain at the base of the mountains was more than she felt equal to. They did not urge her, and as she insisted that Mr. Curtiss accompany the other men she was left alone at the bungalow with Lady Greystoke, the baby and the servants.
As the party trotted across the rolling land that stretched before them to the foothills they sighted a herd of zebras coming toward them in mad stampede.
"Something is hunting ahead of us," remarked one of the men.
"We may get a shot at a lion from the looks of it," replied another.
A short distance further on they came upon the carcass of

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a zebra stallion. Barney and Butzow dismounted to examine it in an effort to determine the nature of the enemy that had dispatched it. At the first glance Barney called to one of the other members of the party, an experienced big game hunter.
"What do you make of this, Brown?" he asked, pointing to the exposed haunch.
"It is a man's kill," replied the other. "Look at that gaping hole over the heart, that would tell the story were it not for the evidence of the knife that cut away these strips from the rump. The carcass is still warm -- the kill must have been made within the past few minutes."
"Then it wouldn't have been a man," spoke up another, or we should have heard the shot. Wait, here's Greystoke, let's see what he thinks of it."
The ape man, who had been riding a couple hundred yards in rear of the others with one of the older men, now reined in close to the dead zebra.
"What have we here?" he asked, swinging from his saddle.
"Brown says this looks like the kill of a man," said Barney; "but none of us heard any shot."
Tarzan grasped the zebra by a front and hind pastern and rolled him over upon his other side.
"It went way through, whatever it was," said Butzow, as the hole behind this shoulder was exposed to view. "Must have been a bullet even if we didn't hear the report of the gun."
"I'm not so sure of that," said Tarzan, and then he glanced casually at the ground about the carcass, and bending lower brought his sensitive nostrils close to the mutilated haunch and then to the tramped grasses at the zebra's side. When he straightened up the others looked at him questioningly.
"A man," he said -- "a white man, has been here since the zebra died. He cut these steaks from the haunches. There is not the slightest odor of gun powder about the wound -- it was not made by a powder-sped projectile. It is too large and too deep for an arrow wound. The only other weapon that could have inflicted it is a spear; but to cast a spear entirely

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through the carcass of a zebra at the distance to which a man could approach one in the open presupposes a mightiness of muscle and an accuracy of aim little short of superhuman."
"And you think -- ?" commenced Brown.
"I think nothing," interrupted Tarzan, "except that my judgment tells me that my senses are in error -- there is no naked, white giant hunting through the country of the Waziri. Come, let's ride on to the hills and see if we can't locate the old villain who has been stealing my sheep. From his spoor I'll venture to say that when we bring him down we shall see the largest lion that any of us has ever seen."
AS THE party remounted and rode away toward the foothills two wondering black eyes watched them from the safety of the jungle. Nu was utterly nonplussed. What sort of men were these who rode upon beasts the like of which Nu had never dreamed? At first he thought their pith helmets and khaki clothing a part of them; but when one of them removed his helmet and another unbuttoned his jacket Nu saw that they were merely coverings for the head and body, though why men should wish to hamper themselves with such foolish and cumbersome contraptions the troglodyte could not imagine.
As the party rode toward the foothills Nu paralleled them, keeping always down wind from them. He followed them all day during their fruitless search for the lion that had been entering Greystoke's compound and stealing his sheep, and as they retraced their way toward the bungalow late in the afternoon Nu followed after them.
Never in his life had he been so deeply interested in anything as he was in these strange creatures, and when, half way across the plain, the party came unexpectedly upon a

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band of antelope grazing in a little hollow and Nu heard the voice of one of the little black sticks the men carried and saw a buck leap into the air and then come heavily to the ground quite dead, deep respect was added to his interest, and possibly a trace of awe as well -- fear he knew not.
In a clump of bushes a quarter of a mile from the bungalow Nu came to a halt. The strange odors that assailed his nostrils as he approached the ranch warned him to caution. The black servants and the Waziri warriors, some of whom were always visiting their former chief, presented to Nu's nostrils an unfamiliar scent -- one which made the black shock upon his head stiffen as you have seen the hair upon the neck of a white man's hound stiffen when the for the first time his nose detects the odor of an Indian. And, half smothered in the riot of more powerful odors, there came to Nu's nostrils now and then a tantalizing suggestion of a faint aroma that set his heart to pounding and the red blood coursing through his veins.
Never did it abide for a sufficient time to make Nu quite sure that it was more than a wanton trick of his senses -- the result of the great longing that was in his lonely heart for her whom this ephemeral and elusive effluvium proclaimed. As darkness came he approached closer to the bungalow, always careful, however, to keep down wind from it.
Through the windows he could see people moving about within the lighted interior, but he was not close enough to distinguish features. He saw men and women sitting about a long table, eating with strange weapons upon which they impaled tiny morsels of food which lay upon round, flat stones before them.
There was much laughter and talking, which floated through the open windows to the cave man's eager ears; but throughout it all there came to him no single word which he could interpret. After these men and women had eaten they came out and sat in the shadows before the entrance to their strange cave, and here again they laughed and chattered, for all the world, thought Nu, like the ape-people; and yet, though it was different from the ways of his own

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people the troglodyte could not help but note within his own breast a strange yearning to take part in it -- a longing for the company of these strange, new people.
He had crept quite close to the veranda now, and presently there floated down to him upon the almost stagnant air a subtle exhalation that is not precisely scent, and for which the languages of modern men have no expression since men themselves have no powers of perception which may grasp it; but to Nu of the Niocene it carried as clear and unmistakable a message as could word of mouth, and it told him that Nat-ul, the daughter of Tha, sat among these strange people before the entrance to their wonderful cave.
And yet Nu could not believe the evidence of his own senses. What could Nat-ul be doing among such as these? How, between two suns, could she have learned the language and the ways of these strangers? It was impossible; and then a man upon the veranda, who sat close beside Victoria Custer, struck a match to light a cigarette, and the flare of the blaze lit up the girl's features. At the sight of them the cave man involuntarily sprang to his feet. A half smothered exclamation broke from his lips: "Nat-ul!"
"What was that?" exclaimed Barney Custer. "I thought I heard some one speak out there near the rose bushes."
He rose as though to investigate, but his sister laid her hand upon his arm.
"Don't go, Barney," she whispered.
He turned toward her with a questioning look.
"Why?" he asked. "There is no danger. Did you not hear it, too?"
"Yes," she answered in a low voice, "I heard it, Barney -- please don't leave me."
He felt the trembling of her hand where it rested upon his sleeve. One of the other men heard the conversation, but of course he could not guess that it carried any peculiar significance -- it was merely an expression of the natural timidity of the civilized white woman in the midst of the savage African night.
"It's nothing, Miss Custer," he said. "I'll just walk down

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