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

When I awoke, it was daylight, and I found Ajor squatting
before a fine bed of coals roasting a large piece of
antelope-meat. Believe me, the sight of the new day and the
delicious odor of the cooking meat filled me with renewed
happiness and hope that had been all but expunged by the
experience of the previous night; and perhaps the slender
figure of the bright-faced girl proved also a potent restorative.
She looked up and smiled at me, showing those perfect teeth,
and dimpling with evident happiness--the most adorable picture
that I had ever seen. I recall that it was then I first
regretted that she was only a little untutored savage and
so far beneath me in the scale of evolution.

Her first act was to beckon me to follow her outside, and there
she pointed to the explanation of our rescue from the bear--a
huge saber-tooth tiger, its fine coat and its flesh torn to
ribbons, lying dead a few paces from our cave, and beside it,
equally mangled, and disemboweled, was the carcass of a huge
cave-bear. To have had one's life saved by a saber-tooth
tiger, and in the twentieth century into the bargain, was an
experience that was to say the least unique; but it had
happened--I had the proof of it before my eyes.

So enormous are the great carnivora of Caspak that they must
feed perpetually to support their giant thews, and the result
is that they will eat the meat of any other creature and will
attack anything that comes within their ken, no matter how
formidable the quarry. From later observation--I mention this
as worthy the attention of paleontologists and naturalists--I
came to the conclusion that such creatures as the cave-bear,
the cave-lion and the saber-tooth tiger, as well as the larger
carnivorous reptiles make, ordinarily, two kills a day--one in
the morning and one after night. They immediately devour the
entire carcass, after which they lie up and sleep for a few hours.
Fortunately their numbers are comparatively few; otherwise there
would be no other life within Caspak. It is their very voracity
that keeps their numbers down to a point which permits other
forms of life to persist, for even in the season of love the
great males often turn upon their own mates and devour them,
while both males and females occasionally devour their young.
How the human and semihuman races have managed to survive
during all the countless ages that these conditions must have
existed here is quite beyond me.

After breakfast Ajor and I set out once more upon our
northward journey. We had gone but a little distance when we
were attacked by a number of apelike creatures armed with clubs.
They seemed a little higher in the scale than the Alus. Ajor told
me they were Bo-lu, or clubmen. A revolver-shot killed one and
scattered the others; but several times later during the day we