"Alan Dean Foster - Interlopers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

"Preoccupied with what?" In the absence of moonlight it was hard to make out his face.
"Nothing much," he replied evasively. "Just looking around."
"Down there?" She pointed down the slope. "Why? Is the view any better? It must be, for you to lose sleep
over it. Funny thing, though: It's been my experience that sweeping panoramas lose some of their aesthetic
impact when viewed in the middle of the night." She stepped past him. "If it's that striking, maybe I ought to
have a look for myself."
Reaching out quickly, he caught her upper arm with one hand and held her back. The gesture was as
uncharacteristic as it was unexpected, and her surprise was evident in the slight uncertainty in her tone.
"Excuse me?" she said, slowly and deliberately.
He let go of her arm. She could feel him studying her, there in the darkness. "Okay." His reluctance was
obvious. "I'll show you. But you have to promise to keep it a secret."
"Oho! Dug up something special, have we?" She was relaxed now, having found him out. "When did this
happen? Yesterday? Last week?"
He was shaking his head as he turned to lead the way downward. "I've been coming here, early every
morning, for weeks."
She paralleled his descent, careful where she put her feet. The grass was damp and slippery, and the grade
dangerously steep. "That's not very sociable of you. I thought you were the ultimate team player." She made
clucking noises with her tongue. "Dr. Harbos will not be pleased." He was not as defensive as she expected.
"I wanted
to make sure of what I had before I told anyone else. I found it. It's my discovery."
He was more emphatic than she had ever seen him. Then he did have emotions. "Well, I won't give you
away." Looking downslope, she could see nothing but grass and the occasional tree. The ground cover began
to give way to bare, loose rock. Despite her caution and her good hiking boots, she slipped once or twice.
Westcott had no such difficulty. But then, she reminded herself, he was famil-iar with the terrain they were
covering.
Featureless darkness loomed ahead. She felt a strong, upward welling breeze on her face, signifying the
proximity of an unclimbable sheer drop. No wonder no one else had explored this way, she thought. Another
twenty meters and they would need climbing gear; ropes and pitons and harnesses. Just when she was
afraid he was going to lead her over an unscalable cliff, he stopped and turned abruptly to his left. A short
walk brought them to an uncomfortably narrow ledge below which the mountain fell away to farms thousands
of feet below. Raising her own light, she looked for him.
He had disappeared.
She experienced a brief but intense moment of genuine panic before she heard his voice. "Keep coming,
Kelli. This way." The beam of his flashlight suddenly emerged from the side of the mountain.
The ceiling of the tunnel was low, in keeping with the modest stature of the Chachapoyans, and she had to
bend slightly to keep from banging her head on the rock overhead. In front of her, Westcott was in worse
shape, forced to bend almost double as he walked. Revealed by her light, telltale marks on the walls showed
that the sides of the tunnel had been hewn out of the solid rock with sim-ple hand tools.
The passageway emerged into a natural limestone cav-
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ern. Stalactites were still in evidence, hanging like frozen draperies from the roof, but there were no
stalagmites. These had all been cut away to leave behind a floor as flat and smooth as any in the citadel. A
portion of that fortress, she realized, must now lie directly above them. Raising her light, she searched for
Westcott. Inadvertently and unavoidably, her questing beam fell on one of the enclosing walls. She let out an
audible gasp.
As her light swept the wall, it revealed row upon row of finely chiseled designs and pictographs, the most
eroded of which was infinitely better preserved than anything in the citadel overhead. For the first time, the
neatly etched abstract decorations of the Chachapoyans were complemented by bas-reliefs of people,
animals, and their surroundings. It was an unprecedented record of Chachapoyan life before the Incan
conquest, perfectly preserved from damaging rain and wind in the confines of the cavern.