"11 - John Carter of Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burroughs Edgar Rice)

It looked like a bone.
As he was dragged closer, he saw that the stick was a human thigh bone!
The mud huts were studded with bones and skulls, upon some of which were still
dangling hideously the vestiges of hair and skin. Carter noticed that the tops
of all the skulls had been removed, neatly sliced off.
The earthman was dragged to a clearing in the center of the cavern. Here, upon a
mound of skulls, sat a rat half again as large as the others.
The baleful, pink eyes of the creature glared at Carter as he was dragged up on
top of the mound.
The beasts released their hold upon the earthman and descended to the bottom of
the mound, leaving Carter alone with the large rat.
The long whiskers of the monster were constantly twitching as the thing sniffed
at the man. It had lost one ear in some battle long ago and the other was bright
with scar-tissue.
Its little pink eyes surveyed Carter for a long time while it fondly caressed
its long, hairless tail with its one claw-like paw.
This, evidently, was the King of the Rats.
"Lord of the Underworld," Carter thought, trying to hold his breath. The stench
in the cavern was overwhelming.
Without taking his eyes from Carter's, the rat reached down and picked up a
skull beside him and put it in front of Carter. This he repeated, picking up a
skull from the other side and placing it beside the first. By repeating this, he
eventually formed a little ring of topless heads in front of the earthman.
Now, very judiciously, he climbed inside the circle of skulls and picking one of
them up tossed it to Carter. The earthman caught it and tossed it back at the
king.
This seemed to annoy his royal highness. He made no effort to catch the skull
and it flew past him and went bouncing down the mound.
Instead, the king leaped up and down inside the little circle of skulls, at the
same time emitting angry squeals.
This was all very puzzling to the earthman. As he stood there, he became aware
of two circles of rats forming at the base of the mound, each circle consisting
of about a thousand animals. They began a weird dance, moving around the raised
dais of bones counter-clockwise. The tail of each rat was gripped in the mouth
of the following beast, thus forming a continuous chain.
There was no doubt that the earthman was in the center of a weird ritual. While
he was ignorant of the exact nature of the ceremony, he had little doubt as to
its final outcome. The countless barren skulls, the yellowed bones that filled
the cavern were mute, horrible evidence of his final fate.
Where did the rats get all the bodies from which the skulls were obtained and
why were the tops of those skulls missing? The City of Korvas, as every Martian
schoolboy knew, had been deserted for a thousand years; yet many of the skulls
and bones were recently picked clean of their flesh. Carter had seen no evidence
in the city of any life other than the great white apes and the mysterious
giant, and the rats themselves.
However, there had been the woman's scream that he had heard earlier. This
thought accentuated his ever-present anxiety over Dejah Thoris's safety and
whereabouts.
This delay was tormenting. As the circles of rats closed in about him, the
earthman's eyes eagerly searched for some avenue of escape.