"Burroughs, Edgar Rice - At The Earth's Core" - читать интересную книгу автора (At the earths core)

I saw the man come from his tent and with hand-shaded eyes
peer intently at us. At sight of me he advanced rapidly
to meet us.

"A white man!" he cried. "May the good Lord be praised! I
have been watching you for hours, hoping against hope that
THIS time there would be a white man. Tell me the date.
What year is it?"

And when I had told him he staggered as though he had
been struck full in the face, so that he was compelled
to grasp my stirrup leather for support.

"It cannot be!" he cried after a moment. "It cannot be!
Tell me that you are mistaken, or that you are but joking."

"I am telling you the truth, my friend," I replied.
"Why should I deceive a stranger, or attempt to, in so
simple a matter as the date?"

For some time he stood in silence, with bowed head.

"Ten years!" he murmured, at last. "Ten years, and I
thought that at the most it could be scarce more than one!"
That night he told me his story--the story that I give you
here as nearly in his own words as I can recall them.



I

TOWARD THE ETERNAL FIRES


I WAS BORN IN CONNECTICUT ABOUT THIRTY YEARS ago.
My name is David Innes. My father was a wealthy mine owner.
When I was nineteen he died. All his property was to be
mine when I had attained my majority--provided that I
had devoted the two years intervening in close application
to the great business I was to inherit.

I did my best to fulfil the last wishes of my parent--
not because of the inheritance, but because I loved
and honored my father. For six months I toiled in the
mines and in the counting-rooms, for I wished to know
every minute detail of the business.

Then Perry interested me in his invention. He was an old
fellow who had devoted the better part of a long life
to the perfection of a mechanical subterranean prospector.