"Dibdin, Michael - Aurelio Zen 02 - Vendetta UC - part 11" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dibdin Michael)

and curing hides, but was now clearly abandoned. Zen
knelt down and wriggled inside, crouching on the floor of
bare rock. The sheepy reek was overpowering. As his eyes
adjusted to the obscurity, Zen found himself standing at
the edge of a large irregular fissure in the rock. Holding his
hand over the opening, he discovered that this was tke
source of the draught that stirred the fetid air in the hut.
Then he remembered Turiddu saying that the whole
area was riddled with caves which had once brought water
down underground from the lake in the mountains. This
idea of water was very attractive. His hangover had left
him with the most atrocious thirst. But of course there was
no more water in the caves since they had buiit the dam.
That was evidently why the hut had been abandoned, like
so many of the local farms, including the one Oscar Burolo
had bought for a song. Presumably this was one of the
entrances to that system of caves. It was large enough to
climb down into, but there was no saying what that
impenetrable darkness concealed, a cosy hollow he could
hide in or a sheer drop into a cavern the size of a church.
Nevertheless, he was strongly tempted to stay put. He
felt safe in the hut, magically concealed and protected. In
fact he knew it would be suicidal to stay. Indeed, he had
already wasted far too much precious time. Before long,
the road Spadola was following would start to go uphill,
and he would know that Zen could not have passed that
way. The network of side-roads would complicate his
search slightly, but in the end a process of elimination was
bound to lead him to this gully and the stranded
Mercedes. The first thing he would do then would be to
search the hut.
But this knowledge didn't make the alternative any
more appealing. The idea of setting out on foot across
country with only the vaguest idea nf where he was going
was something Zen found quite horrifying. His preferred
view of nature was through the window of a train whisk-
ing him from one city to another. Man's contrivances he
understood, but in the open he was as vulnerable as a fox
in the streets, his survival skills non-existent, his native
cunning an irrelevance. Nothing less than the knowledge
that his life was at stake could have impelled him to leave
the hut and start to climb the boulder-strewn slope
opposite.
He laboured up the hillside, using his hands to scramble
up the steeper sections, grasping at rocks and shrubs, his
clothes and shoes already soiled with the sterile red dirt,
the leaden sky weighing down on him. He felt terrible. His
limbs ached, thirst piagued him and his headache had
swollen to monstrous dimensions. Half-way to the top he
stopped to rest. As he stood there, panting for breath,