"A. E. Merritt - The Drone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

Title: The Drone
Author: Abraham Merritt
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0602011h.html
Edition: 1
Language: English
Character set encoding: Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bit
Date first posted: June 2006
Date most recently updated: June 2006

This eBook was produced by: Richard Scott

Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html


To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au

The Drone
by

Abraham Merritt
FOUR MEN SAT AT A TABLE of the Explorers' Club--Hewitt, just in from two years botanical
research in Abyssinia; Caranac, the ethnologist; MacLeod, poet first, and second the learned curator of
the Asiatic Museum; Winston, the archeologist, who, with Kosloff the Russian, had worked over the
ruins of Khara-Kora, the City of the Black Stones in the northern Gobi, once capital of the Empire of
Genghis Khan.

The talk had veered to werewolves, vampires, foxwomen, and similar superstitions. Directed thence by a
cabled report of measures to be taken against the Leopard Society, the murderous fanatics who drew on
the skins of leopards, crouched like them on the boughs of trees, then launched themselves down upon
their victims tearing their throats with talons of steel. That, and another report of a "hex-murder" in
Pennsylvania where a woman had been beaten to death because it was thought she could assume the
shape of a cat and cast evil spells upon those into whose houses, as cat, she crept.

Caranac said: "It is a deep-rooted belief, an immeasurably ancient, that a man or woman may assume the
shape of an animal, a serpent, a bird, even an insect. It was believed of old everywhere, and everywhere
it is still believed by some--fox-men and fox-women of China and Japan, wolf-people, the badger and
bird people of our own Indians. Always there has been the idea that there is a borderland between the