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

have it right in the breast; but still it came for me, so that
I had to dive and turn, though I was dangerously close to earth.

The thing didn't miss me by a dozen feet, and when I rose, it
wheeled and followed me, but only to the cooler air close to
the level of the cliff-tops; there it turned again and dropped.
Something--man's natural love of battle and the chase, I presume--
impelled me to pursue it, and so I too circled and dived.
The moment I came down into the warm atmosphere of Caspak, the
creature came for me again, rising above me so that it might
swoop down upon me. Nothing could better have suited my armament,
since my machine-gun was pointed upward at an angle of about degrees
and could not be either depressed or elevated by the pilot.
If I had brought someone along with me, we could have raked the
great reptile from almost any position, but as the creature's
mode of attack was always from above, he always found me ready
with a hail of bullets. The battle must have lasted a minute
or more before the thing suddenly turned completely over in the
air and fell to the ground.

Bowen and I roomed together at college, and I learned a lot
from him outside my regular course. He was a pretty good
scholar despite his love of fun, and his particular hobby
was paleontology. He used to tell me about the various forms
of animal and vegetable life which had covered the globe during
former eras, and so I was pretty well acquainted with the
fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals of paleolithic times.
I knew that the thing that had attacked me was some sort of
pterodactyl which should have been extinct millions of years ago.
It was all that I needed to realize that Bowen had exaggerated
nothing in his manuscript.

Having disposed of my first foe, I set myself once more to
search for a landing-place near to the base of the cliffs
beyond which my party awaited me. I knew how anxious they
would be for word from me, and I was equally anxious to relieve
their minds and also to get them and our supplies well within
Caspak, so that we might set off about our business of finding
and rescuing Bowen Tyler; but the pterodactyl's carcass had
scarcely fallen before I was surrounded by at least a dozen of
the hideous things, some large, some small, but all bent upon
my destruction. I could not cope with them all, and so I rose
rapidly from among them to the cooler strata wherein they dared
not follow; and then I recalled that Bowen's narrative
distinctly indicated that the farther north one traveled in
Caspak, the fewer were the terrible reptiles which rendered
human life impossible at the southern end of the island.

There seemed nothing now but to search out a more northerly
landing-place and then return to the Toreador and transport