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

again.

“A wink—but a hundred times slower than normal!” Farris exclaimed.
“Pulse, respiration, reactions—they’re all a hundred times slower. The man
has either suffered a shock, or been drugged.”

Then he noticed something that gave him a little chill.

The tribesman’s eyeball seemed to be turning with infinite slowness
toward him. And the man’s raised foot was a little higher now. As though he
were walking—but walking at a pace a hundred times slower than normal.

The thing was eery. There came something more eery. A sound—the
sound of a small stick cracking.

Piang exhaled breath in a sound of pure fright, and pointed off into the
grove. In the moonlight Farris saw.

There was another tribesman standing a hundred feet away. He, too,
was motionless. But his body was bent forward in the attitude of a runner
suddenly frozen. And beneath his foot, the stick had cracked.

“They worship the great ones, by the Change!” said the Annamese in
a hoarse undertone. “We must not interfere!”

That decided Farris. He had, apparently, stumbled on some sort of
weird jungle rite. And he had had too much experience with Asiatic natives
to want to blunder into their private religious mysteries.

His business here in easternmost Indo-China was teak-hunting. It
would be difficult enough back in this wild hinterland without antagonizing
the tribes. These strangely dead-alive men, what-ever drug or compulsion
they were suffering from, could not be in danger if others were near.

“We’ll go on,” Farris said shortly.

Piang led hastily down the slope of the forested plateau. He went
through the brush like a scared deer, till they hit the trail again.

“This is it—the path to the Government station,” he said, in great
relief. “We must have lost it back at the ravine. I have not been this far back
in Laos, many times.”

Farris asked, “Piang, what is hunati? This Change that you were
talking about?”

The guide became instantly less voluble. “It is a rite of worship.” He
added, with some return of his cocksureness, “These tribesmen are very
ignorant. They have not been to mission school, as I have.”