"A. E. Merrit - The People of the Pit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

From the North and high overhead there came a whispering. It was not the
rustling of the aurora, that rushing, crackling sound like the ghosts of winds
that blew at Creation racing through the skeleton leaves of ancient trees that
sheltered Lilith. It was a whispering that held in it a demand. It was eager.
It called us to come up where the beam was flashing. It drew. There was in it
a note of inexorable insistence. It touched my heart with a thousand tiny
fear-tipped fingers and it filled me with a vast longing to race on and merge
myself in the light. It must have been so that Ulysses felt when he strained
at the mast and strove to obey the crystal sweet singing of the Sirens.
The whispering grew louder.

“What the hell's the matter with those dogs?” cried Anderson savagely. “Look
at them!”

The malemutes, whining, were racing away toward the light. We saw them
disappear among the trees. There came back to us a mournful howling. Then that
too died away and left nothing but the insistent murmuring overhead.

The glade we had camped in looked straight to the North. We had reached I
suppose three hundred mile

above the first great bend of the Koskokwim toward the Yukon. Certainly we
were in an untrodden part of the wilderness. We had pushed through from Dawson
at the breaking of the Spring, on a fair lead to the lost five peaks between
which, so the Athabasean medicine man had told us, the gold streams out like
putty from a clenched fist. Not an Indian were we able to get to go with us.
The land of the Hand Mountain was accursed they said. We had sighted the peaks
the night before, their tops faintly outlined against a pulsing glow. And now
we saw the light that had led us to them.

Anderson stiffened. Through the whispering had broken a curious pad-pad and a
rustling. It sounded as though a small bear were moving towards us. I threw a
pile of wood on the fire and, as it blazed up, saw something break through the
bushes. It walked on all fours, but it did not walk like a bear. All at once
it flashed upon me—it was like a baby crawling upstairs. The forepaws lifted
themselves in grotesquely infantile fashion. It was grotesque but it
was—terrible. It grew closer. We reached for our guns—and dropped them.
Suddenly we knew that this crawling thing was a man!

It was a man. Still with the high climbing pad-pad he swayed to the fire. He
stopped.

“Safe,” whispered the crawling man, in a voice that was an echo of the murmur
overhead. “Quite safe here. They can't get out of the blue, you know. They
can't get you—unless you go to them——”

He fell over on his side. We ran to him. Anderson knelt.

“God's love!” he said. “Frank, look at this!” He pointed to the hands. The