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

Carter halted before a massive door set into the end of a tunnel. It was
inscribed with hieroglyphics unfamiliar to the earthman. The subdued drone of
what sounded like many motors seemed to come from somewhere beyond the door.
He pushed open the unbarred door and halted just beyond, staring unbelievingly
at the tremendous laboratory in which he found himself.
Great motors pumped oxygen through low pipes into rows of glass cages that lined
the walls and filled the antiseptically white chamber from end to end. In the
center of the laboratory were several operating tables with large searchlights
focused down upon them from above.
But the contents of the glass cages immediately absorbed the earthman's
attention.
Each cage contained a giant white ape, standing upright inside, apparently
lifeless.
The top of each hairy head was swathed in bandages. If these beasts were dead,
why then the oxygen tubes running to their cages?
Carter moved across the room to examine the cases at closer range. Halfway to
the farther wall he came upon a low, glassed dome that covered a huge pit set in
the floor.
He gasped. The pit was filled with dead bodies, red warriors with the tops of
their heads neatly sliced off!
Five
CHAMBER OF HORRORS
FAR BELOW, IN THE PIT, John Carter could see forms moving in and about the
bodies of the dead red men.
They were rats; and as he watched, the earthman could see them dragging bodies
off into adjoining tunnels. These tunnels probably entered the main one which
ran into the rats' underground city.
So this was where the beasts got the skulls and bones with which they
constructed their odorous, underground dwellings!
Carter's eyes scanned the laboratory. He noted the operating tables, the encased
instruments above, the anesthetics. Everything pointed to some grisly
experiment, conducted by some insane scientist.
Within a glass case were many books. One ponderous volume was inscribed in gold
letters: PEW MOGEL, HIS LIFE AND WONDERFUL WORKS.
The earthman frowned. What was the explanation? Why this well-equipped
laboratory buried in an ancient lost city, a city apparently deserted except for
apes, rats, and a giant man?
Why the cases about the wall containing the mute, motionless bodies of apes with
bandaged heads? And the red men in the pit Ц why were their skulls cut in half,
their brains removed?
From whence came the giant, the monstrous creature whose likeness had existed
only in Barsoomian folklore?
One of the books in a case before Carter bore the name "Pew Mogel." What
connection had Pew Mogel with all this and who was the man?
But more important, where was Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Helium?
John Carter reached for Pew Mogel's book. Suddenly the room fell silent. The
generators that had been humming out their power, stopped.
"Touch not that book, John Carter," came the words echoing through the
laboratory.
Carter's hand dropped to his sword. There was a moment's pause; then the hidden