"Philip Jose Farmer - Lord Of The Trees and The Mad Goblin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

The shore was about a mile away. Between it and me were the fins of at least two sharks.
There wasn't much use trying to swim around the sharks. They would hear and smell me even if
I made a wide detour. So I swam toward them, though not before I had assured myself that I had
a knife. Most of my clothing had been ripped off, but my belt with its sheathed knife was still
attached to me. This was an American knife with a five-inch blade, excellent for throwing. I left it
in the sheath until I saw one of the fins swerve and drive toward me. Then I drew it out and
placed it between my teeth.
The other fin continued to move southward.
The shark may have just happened to turn toward me in the beginning, but an increase of speed
showed that it had detected me. The fin stayed on the surface, however, and turned to my right to
circle me. I swam on, casting glances behind me. It was a great white shark, a species noted for
attacking men. This one was wary; it circled me three times before deciding to rush me. I turned
when it was about twenty feet from me. The surface water just ahead of it boiled, and it turned on
its side just before trying to seize my leg. Or perhaps it only intended to make a dry run to get a
closer look at what might be a dangerous prey.
I pulled my legs up and stabbed at it with both hands holding the hilt of the knife. The skin of
the shark is as tough as cured hippo hide and covered with little jagsтАФplacoid scalesтАФthat can
tear the skin off a man if he so much as rubs lightly against it. My only experience in fighting
sharks was during World War II when my boat was sunk in the waters of the East Indian Ocean.
The encounter with a freshwater shark in an African lake is fictional, the result of the sometimes
overromantic imagination of my biographer. Fortunately, my arms were out of the water and so
unimpeded by the fluid. I heaved myself up to my waist and drove down with the knife and
rammed it at least three inches into the corpse-colored eye. Blood spurted, and the shark raced
away so swiftly that it almost tore the knife loose from my hands.
Its tail did curve out enough to scrape across my belly, and my blood was mingling with its
blood.
I expected the shark to come back. Even if my knife had pierced that tiny brain, it would be far
from dead, and the odor of blood would drive it mad.
It came back as swiftly as a torpedo and as deadly. I dived this time and was enclosed in a
distorted world the visible radius of which was a few feet. Out of the distortion something fast as
death almost hit me, and went by, and I shoved the knife up into the belly. But the tip only pene-
trated about an inch, and this time the knife was pulled from my grip. I had to dive for it at once;
without it I was helpless. I caught it just before it sank out of reach of eye and hand, and I swam
 to the surface. I looked both ways and saw a shadow speeding toward me. Then another shadow
caught up with it, and blood boiled out in a cloud that hid both sharks. I swam away with as little
splash as possible, hoping that other sharks would not be drawn in by the blood and the thrash of
the battle.
Before I had gone a half-mile, I saw three fins slicing the water to my left, but they were
intent on following their noses to where the blood was flowing, where, as the Yanks say, the
action was.
It was a few minutes to twelve P.M.. when my plane blew up. About sixteen minutes later, ac-
cording to my wristwatch, I reached the shore and staggered across the beach to the shade and a
hiding place in a bush. The fall, the fight with the shark, and the swimming for a mile at near top
speed, had taken some energy from me. I walked past thousands of sea gulls and pelicans and
storks, which moved away from me without too much alarm. These would be the great great-
great-grandchildren of the birds that I had known when I was young. The almost completely
landlocked lagoon on the beach was no longer there. It had been filled in and covered over years
ago by the deposit of sand and dirt from the little river nearby and by the action of the Benguela
Current. The original shore, where I had roamed as a boy, was almost two miles inland.
The jungle looked unchanged. No humans had settled down here. Gabon is still one of the least