"Gores, Joe - Kirinyaga" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gores Joe)

cried. He collected his climbing gear and went on.
The sun appeared to taunt him while he was on a lateral
moraine from the track to the stream below the Lewis Glacier. He
made the stiff scramble to Two-Tarn Hut and passed it without
pausing. The rest of the climb was made by instinct and will
power only. His body merely continued to respond in familiar
physical ways to familiar stimuli. Moving was as involuntary as
breathing.
He got there too late. Waiting for the rescue party, he knew
he'd driven his body beyond the normal limits of endurance be-
cause he had feared from the beginning that he would be too late.
The press conference was held two afternoons later in the
lounge of Nyeri's Outspan Hotel. Burke Hamlin had refused hos-
pitalization beyond having his arm set and being treated for expo-
sure. He lounged on one of the superbly comfortable old couches,
hemmed in by reporters, tourists, onlookers, flacks, studio people.
Cameras and mikes. His cast already scrawled with bawdy senti-
ments, a large whiskey at his elbow. As he'd said in an earlier
context, damned good theater.
"Does the broken arm hamper you much, Mr. Hamlin?"
"I tend to spill more drinks."
"The mountain sequences were finished. What were you looking
for up on Kirinyaga?"
"Read The Snows of Kilimanjaro."
"That isn't really an answer, is it, Mr. Hamlin?"
"It is for me."
"What can you tell us of the tragic death of Mr. Perkins?"
Stern sorrow molded the craggy features. The drink was set
aside unspilled. Kendrick, in a doorway well back from the crowd,
thought it was an excellent performance.
"What can one say when his best is not good enough? He died of
cold and exposure and shock before the rescuers arrived."
It broke up. Kendrick wandered tree-shaded paths, his nostrils
full of the rich acents of tropical blooms. Warm air caressed his
skin. He had slept the clock around. The Outspan was an old Col-
onial hotel, airy, spacious, quiet, civilized.
Cold and exposure and shock.
He looked between the branches of a scarlet-flowered Nandi
flame tree toward Kirinyaga, 40 miles away, with her head
buried in clouds of her own making. Here, deep blue sky filled
with stately gray-hulled clipper ships which would close ranks
and fire salvos of rain at four o'clock.
Cold and exposure and shock. Neat and cosmetic, antiseptic as a
hospital bed.
Reality was a bit more gross. Perkins was frozen solid. Lips
pulled back from the canines in a perpetual trapped hyeng snarl.
Fingers clawed into blunted parodies of a leopard's talons.
Eyeballs staring through their contact lenses of ice.
And Kendrick couldn't really condemn Hamlin for it. Blind
panic. How many cracked in battle under similar stress, and