"Burroughs, Edgar Rice - People That Time Forgot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burroughs Edgar Rice)

that lay before him. Yet I could not give up hope entirely.
My duty lay clear before me; I must follow it while life
remained to me, and so I set forth toward the north.

The country through which I took my way was as lovely as it was
unusual--I had almost said unearthly, for the plants, the
trees, the blooms were not of the earth that I knew. They were
larger, the colors more brilliant and the shapes startling,
some almost to grotesqueness, though even such added to the
charm and romance of the landscape as the giant cacti render
weirdly beautiful the waste spots of the sad Mohave. And over
all the sun shone huge and round and red, a monster sun above a
monstrous world, its light dispersed by the humid air of
Caspak--the warm, moist air which lies sluggish upon the breast
of this great mother of life, Nature's mightiest incubator.

All about me, in every direction, was life. It moved through
the tree-tops and among the boles; it displayed itself in
widening and intermingling circles upon the bosom of the sea;
it leaped from the depths; I could hear it in a dense wood at
my right, the murmur of it rising and falling in ceaseless
volumes of sound, riven at intervals by a horrid scream or a
thunderous roar which shook the earth; and always I was haunted
by that inexplicable sensation that unseen eyes were watching
me, that soundless feet dogged my trail. I am neither nervous
nor highstrung; but the burden of responsibility upon me
weighed heavily, so that I was more cautious than is my wont.
I turned often to right and left and rear lest I be surprised,
and I carried my rifle at the ready in my hand. Once I could
have sworn that among the many creatures dimly perceived amidst
the shadows of the wood I saw a human figure dart from one
cover to another, but I could not be sure.

For the most part I skirted the wood, making occasional detours
rather than enter those forbidding depths of gloom, though many
times I was forced to pass through arms of the forest which
extended to the very shore of the inland sea. There was so
sinister a suggestion in the uncouth sounds and the vague
glimpses of moving things within the forest, of the menace of
strange beasts and possibly still stranger men, that I always
breathed more freely when I had passed once more into open country.

I had traveled northward for perhaps an hour, still haunted by
the conviction that I was being stalked by some creature which
kept always hidden among the trees and shrubbery to my right
and a little to my rear, when for the hundredth time I was
attracted by a sound from that direction, and turning, saw some
animal running rapidly through the forest toward me. There was
no longer any effort on its part at concealment; it came on
through the underbrush swiftly, and I was confident that