"Edmond Hamilton - The Valley of Creation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

nothing, and after a moment there were no more sounds.

Eric Nelson stood bewildered, his skin still creeping from the uncanny terror of the experience. His brain was
fogged by sleep and by the sick aftertaste of the previous night's drinking.

Gradually his bristling nerves quieted. There was nothing out there in the dark—nothing but the few blinking
lights of the wretched mud village, cowering underneath the silent stars, close beside the black wall of the
great mountains that shouldered all the way to Tibet.

Dawn was coming. Nelson holstered his gun and ran his hands heavily over his unshaven face. Waves of pain
surged up through his eyeballs as he turned from the window.

“Too much to drink,” he muttered. “No wonder I'm hearing—and seeing—things.”

He made a deliberate effort to thrust down the uncanny strangeness of his experience, to forget it. But he
couldn't, quite.


The Valley Of Creation 2
 The Valley Of Creation

It was not the mere fact of the voices that was so weird. The brain heard strange things in dreams. It was the
alien, somehow husky quality of that first voice that still shook him.

Nelson lit a clay oil−lamp. Its flickering rays and the growing light of dawn showed nothing unusual in the
bare, squalid little room. He put on his uniform−jacket and went through a door into the common−room of the
deserted inn. Three of his four fellow−officers were in the room.

Two of them, the big Dutchman, Piet Van Voss, and Lefty Wister, the spidery little Cockney, were snoring in
their bunks.

Nick Sloan, the third, stood shaving in front of a tiny steel mirror, his big body easily balanced on firm−set
feet, his flat, hard brown face looking coolly over his shoulder at Nelson.

“I heard you yell in there,” Sloan said. “Bad dream?”

Eric Nelson hesitated. “I don't know. There was something in the room. A shadow—”

“I'm not surprised,” Sloan drawled unsympathetically. “You were pretty stiff last night.”

Nelson was suddenly resentfully aware of the contrast of his disheveled figure and tumbled blond hair with
Sloan's competent neatness.

“Yes, I was drunk last night,” he said harshly. “And I'll be drunk again tonight and tomorrow night also.”

A patient voice sighed from the doorway. “Not tomorrow night, Captain Nelson. No.”

Nelson turned. It was Li Kin who stood in the doorway. He made an absurd figure, his scrawny little body
swathed in a major's uniform far too big for him. His gentle, fine−planed face was sagging with weariness and
behind his thick−lensed spectacles his black eyes held sadness.