"Henry Kuttner - Valley of the Flame" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

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VALLEY

OF

THE

FLAME

I

FACE OF A GIRL

FAR OFF in the jungle an animal screamed. A river-moth flapped against the screen, nearly as large
as a fruit-bat: And very far away, subsensory, almost, Brian Raft could hear the low pulsing of
drums. Not unusual, drums on the Jutahy, in the great valley of Amazonas. But these were no signal
messages.

Raft wasn't an imaginative man. He left all that to Dan Craddock, with his Welsh ghosts and his
shadow-people of the lost centuries. Still, Raft was a doctor, and when those drums throbbed in
the jungle something curious happened here in his little hospital of plastic shacks, smelling of
antiseptic. Something he couldn't ignore.

When a sick man's blood beats in rhythm with the distant drums, slow or fast as the far-off echoes
set the pace, a doctor has reason to wonder....

The great moth beat softly against the screen. Craddock bent over a sterilizer, steam clouding up
around his white head so that he looked like a necromancer stooping over a cauldron. The drums
throbbed on. Raft could feel his own heart answering to their rhythm.

He glanced at Craddock again and tried not to remember what the older man had been telling him
about his wild Welsh ancestors and the things they had believed. Sometimes he thought Craddock
believed them too, or half believed, at least when he had been drinking.

He'd got to know Craddock pretty well in the months they had worked together, but he realized that
even yet he knew only the surface Craddock, that another man entirely lived in abeyance behind the
companionable front which the Welshman showed him, a man with memories he never spoke of, and
stories he never told.

This experimental station, far up the Jutahy, was a curious contrast, with its asepsis and its
plastics and its glitter of new instruments, to the jungle hemming it in. They were on assignment
just now to find a specific for atypical malaria.

In the forty years since the end of World War II, nothing yet had been discovered any safer than
the old quinine and atabrine treatment, and Raft was sifting the jungle lore now to make sure
there might not be some truth in the old Indio knowledge, hidden behind masks of devil-worship and
magic.

He had hunted down virus diseases in Tibet, Indo-China, Madagascar, and he had learned to respect