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

Nelson turned angrily on the evilly eager little Cockney. “We'll do nothing of the sort! If we do agree to fight
for this man, we'll—”

Suddenly Nelson stopped short, startled and shaken by abrupt remembrance. Remembrance of his weird
dream of only an hour before, the dream in which human and unhuman voices had spoken in his mind!

“They should all die now, little sister! For he even now seeks them out to hire them as our foes!”

That alien, unhuman mental voice—had it been real after all? For Shan Kar had just provisionally hired them
to fight enemies of whom they knew nothing! Into what mysterious struggle were they entering?




Chapter II. STRANGE BEASTS

The haunting memory of fantastic nightmare still oppressed Eric Nelson as he sat moodily late that night in
the single drink−shop surviving in the battered village.

He was bone−weary from the long day's urgent work of rounding up pack−ponies. That and habit were why
he had insisted to Li Kin that they stop at this mud−walled tavern whose fat Cantonese proprietor had
somehow hoarded a few cases of imitation Scotch.

“Sloan and the others will need us to help pack,” murmured Li Kin. He looked tired, his fine eyes blinking
behind the thick spectacles. “We should go.”

“In a little while,” Nelson nodded. “They can get the stuff out of old Yu's arsenal and pack it without us
anyway.”

He tilted the square bottle, looking unseeingly at the wretched few tables whose grotesque shadows wavered
on the crumbling mud walls as the oil−lamp flickered.

Why did that weird little experience stick in his mind like a burr? A dream of strange, coldly menacing voices
in his mind, a shadow leaping across his room, a sound of great wings in the night−what was there in those to
disturb him so?


Chapter II. STRANGE BEASTS 6
 The Valley Of Creation

“Yet it's cursed queer about Shan Kar,” he muttered, half to himself.

Li Kin's head bobbed in earnest agreement. “Very queer. For today I have remembered about L'Lan.”

Nelson stared at him blankly. “L'Lan? Oh, that's the name of the fellow's valley back in the mountains. I
wasn't thinking of that.”

“I have been thinking of it very much,” the little Chinese officer affirmed. He leaned across the rough table.
“You've been in China a long time, Captain Nelson. Have you never heard the name?”