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

spreadeagled to good holds, face white and strained, eyes abso-
lutely wild.
"Get me down from here," he said hoarsely.
Kendrick was well to the side. Terrified climbers were like ter-
rified swimmers, they'd take anything within reach down with
them.
"Are you hurt?"
"Idon't know. For God's sake, man"
Kendrick's fingers were numbing with cold; he regretted the
gauntlets. Snow swirled around them. The actor's safety rope had
parted a couple of feet below his belt. Kendrick had to find Per-
kins, but before he could he had to get Hamlin down the ledge
formed by the ridgetop and the base of this exposed buttress.
"Move when I tell you, where I tell you," he said in the voice of
someone calming a spooked horse. "Don't look down. Okay, left
hand down six inches . . . good! Now, left foot . . . "
It was a bad twenty minutes. Hamlin collapsed on the four-foot
width of the ridgeline. Kendrick followed the ledge, found the
safety line with Perkins still attached to it. He'd been probably
twenty feet below Hamlin when he'd fallen and the rope had
parted, had struck the ridge, and had kept going over and down
the sheer face.
Kendrick crouched on the ledge. Visibility was so bad he could
barely see the blond youngster's limp body hooked around a knob
of rock fifteen feet below. Three feet to either side, Kendrick
thought, and he'd still be bouncing.
He belayed around an out-cropping, then roped down to assess
the damage. One leg was shattered just below the hip, so the jag-
ged white end of femur was thrust out through a rip in the flan-
nel trousers. The red meat exposed by the tear was already freez-
ing. Internal, Kendrick could only guess. A pulse, yes, but
The eyes suddenly opened in the deathly pale face a yard away.
"It's numb now."
"Anything broken inside that you know about?"
"My chest stabs when I breathe. I think it's ribs. I did two of
them at rugger once and it feels the same." He closed his eyes,
opened them. "I've had it, haven't I?"
Kendrick laid a momentary palm on his shoulder. "I'll get you
up to the ledge."
He went up his rope hand over hand. On the ridge Hamlin was
hunched in the lee of the buttress. He was shivering. There was a
blue line around his mouth and the rim of his nostrils.
"He's fifteen feet below the ridgetine," said Kendrick. "I'm not
sure I'm strong enough to get him up alone."
The wind moaned. Hamlin raised shock-dulled eyes. "He's still
alive?"
"He won't be if we keep fooling around. We'll have to"
He stopped there. Hamlin's mouth was set.
"I can't." His teeth had begun chattering. He was stripped of
pretense. "Can'tface it. Can'tpull him up to the ledge, can't