"Follett, Ken - The Key to Rebecca" - читать интересную книгу автора (Follett Ken)

hated it only a little.
They climbed the leeward side of a small hill, man and camel planting big
clumsy feet in the inconstant sand, and at the top they stopped. They
looked ahead, seeing nothing but another hillock to climb, and after that
a thousand more, and it was as if the camel despaired at the thought. Its
forelegs folded, then its rear went down, and it couched on top of the
bill like a monument, staring across the empty desert with the
indifference of the dying.
The man hauled on its nose rope. Its head came forward and its neck
stretched out, but it would not get up. The man went behind and kicked
its hindquarters as hard as he could, three or four times. Finally he
took out a razor-sharp curved Bedouin knife with a narrow point and
stabbed the camel's rump. Blood flowed from the wound but the camel did
not even look around.
The man understood what was happening. The very tissues of the animal's
body, starved of nourishment, had simply stopped working.. like a machine
that has run out of fuel. He had seen camels collapse like this on the
outskirLs of an oasis, surrounded by life-giving foliage which they
ignored, lacking the energy to, eat.
There were two more tricks he migbt have tried. One was to pour water
into its nostrils until it began to drown; the other to light a fire
under its hindquarters. He could not
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spare the water for one nor the firewood for the other, and besides
neither method had a great chance of success.
It was time to stop, anyway. The sun was high and fierce. The long
Saharan summer was beginning, and the midday temperature would reach 110
degrees in the shade.
Without unloading the camel, the man opened one of his bags and took out
his tent. He looked around again, automatically: there was no shade or
shelter in sight---one place was as bad as another. He pitched his tent
beside the dying camel, there on top of the hillock.
He sat cross-legged in the open end of the tent to make his tea. He
scraped level a small square of sand, arranged a few precious dry twigs
in a pyramid and lit the fire. When the kettle boiled he made tea in the
nomad fashion, pouring it from the pot into the cup, adding sugar, then
returning it to the pot to infuse again, several times over. The
resulting brew, very strong and rather treacly, was the most revivifying
drink in the world.
He gnawed at some dates and watched the camel die while he waited for the
sun to pass overhead. His tranquillity was practiced. He had come a long
way in this desert, more than a thousand miles. Two months earlier he had
left El Agela, on the Mediterranean coast of Libya, and traveled due
south for five hundred miles, via Gialo and Kufra, into the empty heart
of the Sahara. There he had turned cast and crossed the border into Egypt
unobserved by man or beast. He had traversed the rocky wasteland of the
Western Desert and turned north near Kharga; and now he was not far from
his destination. He knew the desert, but he was afraid of it-all intelli-