"Hemingway, Ernest - Green Hills of Africa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hemingway Ernest)

'At B'wana,' M'Cola said, and shook his head, 'at the little birds.'
'He thinks you're funny,' Pop said.
'Goddam it. I am funny. But the hell with him.'
'He thinks you're very funny,' Pop said. 'Now the Memsahib and I would
never laugh.'
'Shoot them. yourself.'
'No, you're the bird shot. The self-confessed bird shot,' she said.
So bird shooting became this marvellous joke. If I killed, the joke was
on. the birds and M'Cola would shake his head and laugh and make his hands
go round and round to show how the bird turned over in the air. And if I
missed, I was the clown of the piece and he would look at me and shake with
laughing. Only the hyenas were funnier.
Highly humorous was the hyena obscenely loping, full belly dragging, at
daylight on the plain, who, shot from the stern, skittered on into speed to
tumble end over end. Mirth provoking was the hyena that stopped out of range
by an alkali lake to look back and, hit in the chest, went over on his back,
his four feet and his full belly in the air. Nothing could be more jolly
than the hyena coming suddenly wedge-headed and stinking out of high grass
by a {donga}, hit at ten yards, who raced his tail in three narrowing,
scampering circles until he died.
It was funny to M'Cola to see a hyena shot at close range. There was
that comic slap of the bullet and the hyena's agitated surprise to find
death inside of him. It was funnier to see a hyena shot at a great distance,
in the heat shimmer of the plain, to see him go over backwards, to see him
start that frantic circle, to see that electric speed that meant that he was
racing the little nickeled death inside him. But the great joke of all, the
thing M'Cola waved his hands across his face about, and turned away and
shook his head and laughed, ashamed even of the hyena, the pinnacle of
hyenic humour, was the hyena, the classic hyena, that hit too far back while
running, would circle madly, snapping and tearing at himself until he pulled
his own intestines out, and then stood there, jerking them out and eating
them with relish.
{'Fisi,'} M'Cola would say and shake his head in delighted sorrow at
there being such an awful beast. Fisi, the hyena, hermaphroditic,
self-eating devourer of the dead, trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer,
potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept, sad yowler,
camp-follower, stinking, foul, with jaws that crack the bones the lion
leaves, belly dragging, loping away on the brown plain, looking back,
mongrel dog-smart in the face; whack from the little Mannlicher and then the
horrid circle starting. 'Fisi,' M'Cola laughed, ashamed of him, shaking his
bald black head. 'Fisi. Eats himself. Fisi.'
The hyena was a dirty joke but bird shooting was a clean joke. My
whisky was a clean joke. There were many variations of that joke. Some we
come to later. The Mohammedans and all religions were a joke. A joke on all
the people who had them. Charo, the other gun bearer, was short, very
serious and highly religious. All Ramadan he never swallowed his saliva
until sunset and when the sun was almost down I'd see him watching
nervously. He had a bottle with him of some sort of tea and he would finger
it and watch the sun and I would see M'Cola watching him and pretending not
to see. This was not outrightly funny to him. This was something that he