"Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld 2 - The Fabulous Riverboat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

second or two. Then the image faded, and Sam forgot about
the falling star. He scanned the bank again with his
telescope.
This part of The River had been typical. On each side of
the mile-and-a-half-wide River was a mile-and-a-half-
wide grass-grown plain. On each bank, huge mushroom-
shaped stone structures, the grailstones, were spaced a mile
apart. Trees were few on the plains, but the foothills were
thick with pine, oak, yew and the irontree. This was a
thousand-foot-high plant with gray bark, enormous ele-
phant-ear leaves, hundreds of thick gnarly branches, roots
so deep and wood so hard that the tree could not be cut,
burned or dug out. Vines bearing large flowers of many
bright colors grew over their branches.
There was a mile or two of foothills, and then the
abruptness of smooth-sided mountains, towering from
20,000 to 30,000 feet, unscalable past the 10,000-foot
mark.
The area through which the three Norse boats were
sailing was inhabited largely by early nineteenth-century
Germans. There was the usual ten percent population
from another place and time of Earth. Here, the ten per-

cent was first-century Persians. And there was also the
ubiquitous one percent of seemingly random choices from
any time and any place.
The telescope swung past the bamboo huts on the plains
and the faces of the people. The men were clad only in
various towels; the women, in short towellike skirts and
thin cloths around the breasts. There were many gathered
on the bank, apparently to watch the battle. They carried
flint-tipped spears and bows and arrows but were not in
martial array.
Clemens grunted suddenly and held the telescope on the
face of a man. At this distance and with the weak power of
the instrument, he could not clearly see the man's features.
But the wide-shouldered body and dark face suggested
familiarity. Where had he seen that face before?
Then it struck him. The man looked remarkably like the
photographs of the famous English explorer Sir Richard
Burton that he'd seen on Earth. Rather, there was some-
thing suggestive of the man. Clemens sighed and turned
the eyepiece to the other faces as the ship took him away.
He would never know the true identity of the fellow.
He would have liked to put ashore and talk to him, find
out if he really was Burton. In the twenty years of life on
this river-planet, and the seeing of millions of faces,
Clemens had not yet met one person he had known on
Earth. He did not know Burton personally, but he was
sure that Burton must have heard of him. This man-if he