"Philip Jose Farmer - The Empire of the Nine omnibus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

romantic 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-coloured
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 odour 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 penetrated 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 noon when my plane blew up. About sixteen
minutes later, according 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 populated countries of Africa.

Inland were the low hills where a broad tongue of the tall closed-canopy
equatorial forest had been home for me and The Folk and the myriad animals
and insects I knew so well. Most of the jungle in what is now the National Park of
the Little Loango is really bush. The rain forest grows only on the highlands many
miles inland except for the freakish outthrust of high hill which distinguishes this
coastal area.

After resting an hour. I got up and walked inland. I was headed toward the place
where the log house of my human parents had once been, where I was born,