"Douglas Hill - Last Legionary 0 - Young Legionary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hill Douglas)

Hours upon hours later, the person who had laughed in the gully seemed a distant and forgotten stranger.
Whatever benefit Keill had gained from the two spikeberries, much of it had been used up by the
explosion of effort that had saved him from the mammoths. Even so, he had waited until full night had
descended on the foothills before using his blade of stone on one of the remaining spikeberries. But this
time the small amount of food and moisture was not enough to lift his energies. Fatigue was settling into
the marrow of his bones, and every cell cried out for sleep.

Yet he would not stop. Once more he put his body on to something like automatic control, which kept
him trudging steadily forward, one step, then anotherтАж His mind drifted in a daze, until he found it hard
to remember why it was that he had to keep moving through the night, step by exhausted step.

When he came to a halt, it took several seconds for his mind to swim back to awareness, to see why he
had halted. He had been stumbling along the bare and sandy bottom of yet another hollow, without
noticing that the ground was sloping downwards, that the hollow was becoming deeper, narrower,
turning into a canyon. But he was forced to notice, when the canyon led him to a dead end.

A sheer wall of solid earth loomed out of the blackness before him, with a heap of rock rubble at its foot.
Equally steep walls rose on either side, boxing him in.

He would need to retrace his steps, which was bad enough. What was worse, he should not have been in
a dead-end canyon. He was well off his route. And his exhausted mind, trying hazily to recall the map,
would not produce the information he needed. He did not know where the route was. He had lost his
way.

But it hardly seemed to matter. He had gone beyond feeling any desperate fear of failure, or feeling much
of anything. He thought vaguely of eating the last spikeberry, still wrapped in the loincloth that he was
clutching. But he could not muster the energy, or the interest. He let his mind slide back into its
half-conscious mists, let his automatic controls take over again, sending him trudging back the way he had
come like a robot.

When the wall of the canyon on his right became a manageable slope, it was not a conscious decision
that made him wheel slowly and plod up it. Twice he stumbled and fell, once rolling several paces back
down in a burst of choking dust. Each time he came to his feet more slowly than before, and plodded on.

The slope crested, and as he started down the other side he fell again, slithering down the bank of
powdery sand. This time he did not rise at once. Even his automatic controls could not drag more
movement from him. They were too busy trying to keep his eyelids from closing.

But slowly his eyes drooped shut. And blinked open. And closed again.

Then a muscular spasm, the sort that convulses a totally fatigued body as it sags into sleep, jolted through
him, and his eyes sprang open once more. Had they closed again, he would surely have slept. And he
might never have awakened, ever again.

But his eyes did not close. His blurred mind had vaguely perceived three things - which, together,
shocked him awake like a spray of cold water.