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

where the Nine first interfered with my life and started me on that unique road,
the highlights of which my biographer has presented in highly romanticised
forms.
The jungle here looks like what the civilised person thinks of as jungle, when he
thinks of it at all. His idea, of course, is mostly based on those very unrealistic
and very bad movies made about me.

Knife in hand, I walked quietly through bush. Even if it wasn't the true jungle of
my inland home, I still felt about ten times as happy and at ease as I do in
London or even in the comparatively unpopulated, plenty-of-elbow-room environs
of my Cumberland estate. The trees and bushes here were noisy with much
monkey life, too many insects, and an abundance of snakes, water shrews,
mongooses, and small wild cats or long-necked servals. I saw a scale-armoured
anteating pangolin scuttling ahead of me and glimpsed a tiny furry creature which
might or might not have been a so-called 'bushbaby.' The bird life made the trees
colourful and the air raucous. The salt air blowing in from the sea and the sight of
the familiar plants made me tingle all over.

As I neared the site of the buildings my father had built eighty-two years ago, I
saw that the mangrove swamp to the north had spread out. Its edge was only a
quarter of a mile to my left.

I cast around and within a few minutes found the slight mounds which marked
the place where I had been born. Once there had been a one-room house of logs
and, next to it, a log building just as large, a storehouse. My biographer
neglected to mention the store-room, because he ignored details if they did not
contribute to the swift development of the story. But, since he did state that an
enormous amount of supplies was landed with my parents, it must have been
obvious to the reader that the one-room house could not have held more than a
fraction of the materials.

Both buildings had fallen into a heap of dead wood and had been covered up by
sand and dirt blown by the sea winds and by mud pouring down from the low
ridge inland of the buildings. The ridge was no longer there; it had eroded years
ago. A bush fire had taken away all the vegetation on it and then the rains had
cut it down before new vegetation could grow.

On one side, six feet under the surface, would be four graves, but in this water-
soaked, insect-infested soil the decayed bones had been eaten long ago.

I had known what to expect. The last time I'd been here, in 1947, the ravages of
fifty-nine years had almost completed the destruction. It was only sentiment that
had brought me back here. I may be infra-human in many of my attitudes, but I
am still human enough to feel some sentiment toward my birthplace.

I had intended to stand there for a few minutes and think about my dead parents
and the other two buried beside them. But mostly about what I had done inside
the cabin with the books and the tools I had found in 1898, when I did not know
what a book or a tool or a chronological date was, let alone the words for them in
English or in any human tongue. And I especially wanted to recreate the day