"Edmond Hamilton - Alien Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

around in the jungle.”

He was interrupted by Piang, his guide. That cocksure little
Annamese had been losing his impudent self-sufficiency ever since they
had wandered off the trail. And the motionless, standing dead man had
completed his demoralization.

Ever since the two of them had stumbled into this grove of silk-cotton
trees and almost run into the dead man, Piang had been goggling in a
scared way at the still unmoving figure. Now he burst out volubly:

“The man is hunati! Don’t touch him! We must leave here—we have
strayed into a bad part of the jungle!”

Farris didn’t budge. He had been a teak-hunter for too many years to
be entirely skeptical of the superstitions of Southeast Asia. But, on the
other hand, he felt a certain responsibility.

“If this man isn’t really dead, then he’s in bad shape some-how and
needs help,” he declared.

“No, no!” Piang insisted. “He is hunati! Let us leave here quickly!”

Pale with fright, he looked around the moonlit grove. They were on a
low plateau where the jungle was monsoon-forest rather than rain-forest.
The big silk-cotton and ficus trees were less choked with brush and
creepers here, and they could see along dim forest aisles to gigantic
distant banyans that loomed like dark lords of the silver silence.

Silence. There was too much of it to be quite natural. They could
faintly hear the usual clatter of birds and monkeys from down in the lowland
thickets, and the cough of a tiger echoed from the Laos foothills. But the
thick forest here on the plateau was hushed.
 Farris went to the motionless, staring tribesman and gently touched
his thin brown wrist. For a few moments, he felt no pulse. Then he caught
its throb—an incredibly slow beating.

“About one beat every two minutes,” Farris muttered. “How the devil
can he keep living?”

****

He watched the man’s bare chest. It rose—but so slowly that his eye could
hardly detect the motion. It remained expanded for minutes. Then, as
slowly, it fell again.

He took his pocket-light and flashed it into the tribesman’s eyes.

There was no reaction to the light, not at first. Then, slowly, the
eyelids crept down and closed, and stayed closed, and finally crept open