"Brian Lumley - Titus Crow 1 - The Burrowers Beneath" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

than go down into what he termed 'those black tunnels'. Odd, certainly, but I
never considered it a sign of insanity.
Yet even his few really close friends seemed convinced of his madness, blaming
it upon his living too close to those dead and nighted nigh-forgotten
civilizations which so fascinated him. But how could it have been otherwise?
My uncle was both antiquarian and archaeologist. His strange wanderings to
foreign lands were not the result of any longing for personal gain or acclaim.
Rather were they undertaken out of a love of the life; for any fame which
resulted - as frequently occurred - was more often than not shrugged off on to
the ever-willing personages of his colleagues.
They envied him, those so-called contemporaries of his, and would have
emulated his successes had they possessed the foresight and inquisitiveness
with which he was so singularly gifted - or, as I have now come to believe,
with which he was cursed. My bitterness towards them is directed by the way in
which they cut him after the dreadful culmination of that last, fatal
expedition. In earlier years many of them had been 'made by his discoveries,
but on that last trip those hangers-on had been the uninvited, the ones out of
favour, to whom he would not offer the opportunity of fresh, stolen glory. I
believe that for the greater part their assurances of his insanity were
nothing more than a spiteful means of belittling his genius.
Certainly that last safari was his physical end. He who before had been
straight and strong, for a man his age, with jet hair and a constant smile,
was now seen to walk with a pronounced stoop and had lost a lot of weight. His
hair had greyed and his smile had become rare and
nervous while a distinct tic jerked the flesh at the corner of his mouth.
Before these awful deteriorations made it possible for his erstwhile 'friends'
to ridicule him, before the expedition, Sir Amery had deciphered or translated
(I know little of these things) a handful of decaying, centuried shards known
in archaeological circles as the G'harne Fragments. Though he would never
fully discuss his findings I knew it was that which he learned which sent him,
ill-fated, into Africa.
He and a handful of personal friends, all equally learned gentlemen, ventured
into the interior seeking a legendary city which Sir Amery believed had
existed centuries before the foundations were cut for the pyramids. Indeed,
according to his calculations, Man's primal ancestors were not yet conceived
when G'harne's towering ramparts first reared their monolithic sculptings to
predawn skies. Nor with regard to the age of the place, if it existed at all,
could my uncle's claims be disproved; new tests on the G'harne Fragments had
shown them to be pre-Triassic, and their very existence, in any form other
than centuried dust, was impossible to explain.
It was Sir Amery, alone and in a terrible condition, who staggered upon an
encampment of savages five weeks after setting out from the native village
where the expedition had last had contact with civilization. No doubt the
ferocious men who found him would have done away with him there and then but
for their superstitions. His wild appearance and the strange tongue in which
he screamed, plus the fact that he had emerged from an area which was taboo in
their tribal legends, stayed their hands. Eventually they nursed him back to a
semblance of health and conveyed him to a more civilized region whence he was
slowly able to make his way back to the outside world. Of the expedition's
other members nothing has since been