"Mack Reynolds - North Africa 01 - Blackman's Burden" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Mack)

a dune.

Obviously, the weapons of the smiths were as great as their learning
and their new instruments. It was discouraging to a raider by instinct.

Then, too, there was the strangeness of the night talks their leader was
known to have with his secret Kambu fetish which was able to answer him
in a squeaky but distinct voice in some unknown tongue, obviously a
language of the djinn. The Kambu was worn on a strap on Omar's wrist,
and each night at a given hour he was wont to withdraw to his tent and
there confer.

On the fourth night, obviously, he was given instruction by the Kambu
for in the morning, at first light, the smiths hurriedly packed, broke camp,
made their goodbyes to Moussa-ag-Amastan and the others and were off.

Moussa-ag-Amastan was glad to see them go. They were quite the most
disturbing element to upset his people in many seasons. He wondered at
the advisability of making their usual summer journey to the Tuareg
sedentary centers. He had a feeling that if the clan got near enough to
such centers as Zinder to the south, or Touggourt to the north, there
would be wholesale desertion of the Bela, and, for that matter, even of
some of his younger warriors and their wives.

However, there was no putting off indefinitely exposure to this danger.
Even in such former desert centers as Tessalit and In Salah, the irrigation
projects were of such magnitude that there was a great labor shortage.
But always, of course, as the smiths had said, if you worked at the projects
your children had to attend the schools. And that way lay disaster!

The five smiths took out overland in the direction of Djanet on the
border of what had once been known as Libya and famed for its cliffs
which tower over twenty-five hundred feet above the town. Their solar
powered, air cushion hover-lorries threw up their clouds of dust and sand
to right and left, but they made good time over the erg. A good hovercraft
driver could do much to even out a rolling landscape, changing his
altitude from a few inches here to as much as twenty-five feet there, given,
of course, enough power in his solar batteries, although that was little
problem in this area where clouds were sometimes not seen for years on
end.

This was back of beyond, the wasteland of earth. Only the interior of the
Arabian peninsula and the Gobi could compete and, of course, even the
Gobi was beginning to be tamed under the afforestation efforts of the
teeming multitudes of China who had suffered its disastrous storms down
through the millennia.