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

The ax cut the air above Clemens' head. "You will tell
Joe nothing of this, do you hear? I swear by Odin's blind
socket, I will get to you and kill you before he can put a
hand on me. Do you hear?"
Clemens got to his feet and swayed for a minute. Then
he called, in a louder voice, "Joe! Joe Miller!"

2
A voice from below the poopdeck muttered. It was so
deep that it made the hairs on the backs of men's necks
rise even after hearing it for the thousandth time.
The stout bamboo ladder creaked beneath a weight,
creaked so loudly it could be heard above the song of wind
through leather ropes, flapping of membranous sails, grind
of wooden joints, shouts of crew, hiss of water against the
hull.
The head that rose above the edge of the deck was even
more frightening than the inhumanly deep voice. It was as
large as a half pony of beer and was all bars and arches
and shelves and flying buttresses of bone beneath a
pinkish and loose skin. Bone circled the eyes, small-
seeming and dark blue. The nose was inappropriate to the
rest of his features, since it should have been flat-bridged
and flaring-nostriled. Instead, it was the monstrous and
comical travesty of the human nose that the proboscis
monkey shows to a laughing world. In its lengthy shadow
was a long upper lip, like a chimpanzee's or comic-strip
Irishman's. The lips were thin and protruded, shoved out
by the convex jaws beneath.
His shoulders made Erik Bloodaxe's look like pretzels.
Ahead of him he pushed a great paunch, a balloon trying
to rise from the body to which it was anchored. His legs
and arms seemed short, they were so out of proportion to
the long trunk. The juncture of thigh and body was level
with Sam Clemens' chin, and his arms, extended, could
hold, and had held, Clemens out at arm's length in the air
for an hour without a tremor.
He wore no clothes nor did he need them for modesty's
sake, though he had not known modesty until taught by
Homo sapiens. Long rusty-red hair, thicker than a man's,
less dense than a chimpanzee's, was plastered to the body
by his sweat. The skin beneath the hairs was the dirty-pink
of a blond Nordic.

He ran a hand the size of an unabridged dictionary
through the wavy, rusty-red hair that began an inch above
the eyes and slanted back rapidly. He yawned and showed
huge human-seeming teeth.
"I vath thleeping," he rumbled, "I vath dreaming of
Earth, of klravulthithmengbhabajving-vhat you call mam-