"09 - Synthetic Men of Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burroughs Edgar Rice)

of panthans. With my assistance, John Carter stained the light skin of his body
with the reddish copper pigment that he always carries with him against any
emergency that requires him to hide his identity and play the role of a native
red man of Barsoom.
Sighting Phandahl in the distance, we flew low, just skimming the ground, taking
advantage of the hills to hide us from sentries on the city wall; and within a
few miles of our destination The Warlord brought the flier to a landing in a
little canyon beside a small grove of sompus trees into which we taxied.
Removing the control levers, we buried them a short distance from the ship,
blazing four surrounding trees in such a manner that we might easily locate the
cache when we should return to the ship Ц if we ever did. Then we set out on
foot for Phundahl.
CHAPTER III
THE INVINCIBLE WARRIORS
SHORTLY AFTER THE Virginian soldier of fortune had arrived on Mars he had been
given the name Dotar Sojat by the green Martian Tharks into whose hands he had
fallen; but with the lapse of years the name had been practically forgotten, as
it had been used for only a brief period by a few members of that wild horde,
The Warlord now decided to adopt it for this adventure, while I retained my own
name which was quite unknown in this part of the world; and so it was that Dotar
Sojat and Vor Daj, two wandering panthans, trudged through the low hills to the
west of Phundahl on this still Barsoomian morning. The mosslike ochre vegetation
gave forth no sound beneath our sandalled feet. We moved as silently as our
hard, sharp shadows which dogged our footsteps toward the east. Gay plumed
voiceless birds watched us from the branches of skeel and sorapus trees, as
silent as the beautiful insects which hovered around the gorgeous blooms of the
pimalia and gloresta which grew in profusion in every depression of the hills
that held Barsoom's scant moisture longest. Mars is a world of vast silences
where even voiced creatures are muted as though by the consciousness of
impending death, for Mars is a dying world. We abhor noise; and so our voices,
like our music, are soft and low; and we are a people of few words. John Carter
has told me of the din of Earthly cities and of the brasses and the drums and
the cymbals of Earthly music, of the constant, senseless chatter of millions of
voices saying nothing. I believe that such as these would drive Martians insane.
We were still in the hills and not yet in sight of the city when our attention
was attracted by sounds above and behind us. We turned simultaneously to look
back, and the sight that met our eyes was so astonishing that we could scarcely
believe the evidence of our own senses. About twenty birds were winging toward
us. That in itself was sufficiently astonishing, since they were easily
identifiable as malagors, a species long presumed to be extinct; but to add to
the incredibility of the sight that met our eyes, a warrior bestrode each of the
giant birds. It was quite evident that they must have seen us; so it was quite
useless to attempt to hide from them. They were already dropping lower, and
presently they were circling us. With this opportunity for closer observation I
was impressed by a certain grotesquerie in the appearance of the warriors. There
was something a little inhuman about them, and yet they were quite evidently
human beings similar to ourselves. One of them carried a woman in front of him
on the neck of the great bird that was his mount; but as they were all in
constant motion I was unable to obtain a really good look at her; nor, by the
same token, of the others.