"Bisson, Terry - First Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bisson Terry)

serious field work. He didn't like small planes or short fields.
This trip had both.
Claude had been here once before. Kay and Emil hung back while he showed a
letter and engaged a guide. The guide was not a Ger'abtщ initiate, but part of
the secret and presumably ancient network of believers who maintained the
priests who maintained the flame.
Kay arranged the transportation. They took a helicopter to a small village on a
high shoulder of the range; a Land Rover (they hadn't yet been replaced here by
Toyotas) to a smaller village on a higher shoulder; and walked the rest of the
way.
The Ruwenzori were wrapped in mist, like ghosts. The guide started up the trail,
a long ribbon of mud.
Claude put out his cigarette before following.
"We could have choppered in the entire way," he said. "But that might have
offended the l'enfants."
"The children?" Emil.
"Oui, the Children. That's what they call themselves," Claude explained. "It's
an interesting contrast to European priests, don't you think, who style
themselves as Fathers? These priests, there are only three at any one time, call
themselves the Children of the First Fire, Ger'abtщ."
"Keeping alive the spirits of their ancestors," said Emil.
"Pas de tout!" Claude's reproach was sharp. "This is not simplistic ancestor
worship d'afrique. They don't believe in gods or ghosts. Theirs is an anthropic
cosmology: man built a fire, then looked up and saw the stars, thus bringing
into being the universe as we know it. Their job is to keep it going."
"The ritual acknowledgement of fire as the source, the origin of consciousness,"
said Kay.
"Non! A task, not a ritual," said Claude. "Maintaining the first fire. Ger'abtщ.
No more, no less."
What an arrogant fuck, thought Emil.
**
The first of the Children met them late in the afternoon, and led them off the
trail through a narrow pass. The guide turned back. Their new guide was a wiry,
coal-black man of about fifty, wearing a faded blue hooded wool robe over bright
Nikes. Single file, they crossed a snowfield, skirted a tiny emerald lake, and
angled up a scree slope into clouds again.
As at Ebtacan, the shrine was a cave. The doorway was a perfect half circle,
hollowed not out of sandstone but out of a polished granite that gleamed like
marble.
Beside it waited a much older man, dressed in the same blue robe. He spoke to
Claude in one language, and to his compatriot in another.
Claude gave each of the two a pack of Galouises. He hadn't smoked since the Land
Rover. They were at almost ten thousand feet and the air was thin and cold.
The two Children led the three travelers into the cave. It was only twenty feet
deep, the size of a small garage.
A Persian rug was on the floor. Several plastic ten gallon drums were stacked
near the door.
A tiny flame burned in a hollow in the rock, which was filled with oil. The wick
seemed to be twisted moss.
An old man, older then the other two, watched the flame, adding oil from an open