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

could not laugh about openly but that he felt superior to and wondered at
the silliness of it. The Mohammedan religion was very fashionable and all
the higher social grades among the boys were Mohammedans. It was something
that gave caste, something to believe in, something fashionable and
god-giving to suffer a little for each year, something that made you
superior to other people, something that gave you more complicated habits of
eating, something that I understood and M'Cola did not understand, nor care
about, and he watched Charo watch for the sun to set with that blank look on
his face that it put on about all things that he was not a part of. Charo
was deadly thirsty and truly devout and the sun set very slowly. I looked at
it, red over the trees, nudged him and he grinned. M'Cola offered me the
water bottle solemnly. I shook my head and Charo grinned again. M'Cola
looked blank. Then the sun was down and Charo had the bottle tilted up, his
Adam's apple rising and falling greedily and M'Cola looking at him and then
looking away.
In the early days, before we became good friends, he did not trust me
at all. When anything came up he went into this blankness. I liked Charo
much better then. We understood each other on the question of religion and
Charo admired my shooting and always shook hands and smiled when we had
killed anything particularly good. This was flattering and pleasing. M'Cola
looked on all this early shooting as a series of lucky accidents. We were
supposed to shoot. We had not yet shot anything that amounted to anything
and he was not really my gun bearer. He was Mr. Jackson Phillip's gun bearer
and he had been loaned to me. I meant nothing to him. He did not like me nor
dislike me. He was politely contemptuous of Karl. Who he liked was Mama.
The evening we killed the first lion it was dark when we came in sight
of camp. The killing of the lion had been confused and unsatisfactory. It
was agreed beforehand that P.O.M. should have the first shot but since it
was the first lion any of us had ever shot at, and it was very late in the
day, really too late to take the lion on, once he was hit we were to make a
dogfight of it and anyone was free to get him. This was a good plan as it
was nearly sundown and if the lion got into cover, wounded, it would be too
dark to do anything about it without a mess. I remember seeing the lion
looking yellow and heavy-headed and enormous against a scrubby looking tree
in a patch of orchard bush and P.O.M. kneeling to shoot and wanting to tell
her to sit down and make sure of him. Then there was the short-barrelled
explosion of the Mannlicher and the lion was going to the left on a run, a
strange, heavy-shouldered, foot-swinging, cat run. I hit him with the
Springfield and he went down and spun over and I shot again, too quickly,
and threw a cloud of dirt over him. But there he was, stretched out, on his
belly, and, with the sun just over the top of the trees, and the grass very
green, we walked up on him like a posse, or a gang of Black and Tans, guns
ready and cocked, not knowing whether he was stunned or dead. When we were
close M'Cola threw a stone at him. It hit him in the flank and from the way
it hit you could tell he was a dead animal. I was sure P.O.M. had hit him
but there was only one bullet hole, well back, just below the spine and
ranging forward to come to the surface under the skin of the chest. You
could feel the bullet under the skin and M'Cola made a slit and cut it out.
It was a 220-grain solid bullet from the Springfield and it had raked him,
going through lungs and heart.