"Ian McDonald - Tendeleo's Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

He stood watching until the object vanished in the dark of the mountains to the west.
I saw its light reflected in his eyes. It took a long time to fade.

For a few moments after the thing went over, no one knew what to do. Everyone
was scared, but they were relieved at the same time because, like the angel of death,
it had passed over Gichichi. People were still crying, but tears of relief have a
different sound. Someone got a radio from a house. Others fetched theirs, and soon
we were all sitting in the middle of the road in the dark, grouped around our radios.
An announcer interrupted the evening music show to bring a news flash. At twenty
twenty eight a new biological package had struck in Central Province. At those
words, a low keen went up from each group.

"Be quiet!" someone shouted, and there was quiet. Though the words would be
terrible, they were better than the voices coming out of the dark.

The announcer said that the biological package had come down on the eastern
slopes of the Nyandarua near to Tusha, a small Kikuyu village. Tusha was a name we
knew. Some of us had relatives in Tusha. The country bus to Nyeri went through
Tusha. From Gichichi to Tusha was twenty kilometres. There were cries. There were
prayers. Most said nothing. But we all knew time had run out. In four years the
Chaga had swallowed up Kilimanjaro, and Amboseli, and the border country of
Namanga and was advancing up the A104 on Kajiado and Nairobi. We had ignored
it and gone on with our lives, believing that when it finally came, we would know
what to do. Now it had dropped out of the sky twenty kilometres north of us and
said, Twenty kilometres, four hundred days: that's how long you've got to decide
what you're going to do.

Then Jackson who ran the Peugeot Service Office stood up. He cocked his head to
one side. He held up a finger. Everyone fell silent. He looked to the sky. "Listen!" I
could hear nothing. He pointed to the south, and we all heard it: aircraft engines.
Flashing lights lifted out of the dark tree-line on the far side of the valley. Behind it
came others, then others, then ten, twenty, thirty, more. Helicopters swarmed over
Gichichi like locusts. The sound of their engines filled the whole world. I wrapped
my school shawl around my head and put my hands over my ears and yelled over
the noise but it still felt like it would shatter my skull like a clay pot. Thirty-five
helicopters: they flew so low their down-wash rattled our tin roofs and sent dust
swirling up around our faces. Some of the teenagers cheered and waved their
torches and white school shirts to the pilots. They cheered the helicopters on, right
over the ridge. They cheered until the noise of their engines was lost among the
night-insects. Where the Chaga goes, the United Nations comes close behind, like a
dog after a bitch.

A few hours later the trucks came through. The grinding of engines as they toiled up
the winding road woke all Gichichi. "It's three o'clock in the morning!" Mrs Kuria
shouted at the dusty white trucks with the blue symbol of UNECTA on the doors,
but no one would sleep again. We lined the main road to watch them go through our
village. I wonder what the drivers thought of all those faces and eyes suddenly
appearing in their headlights as they rounded the bend. Some waved. The children
waved back. They were still coming through as we went down to the shamba at
dawn to milk the goats. They were a white snake coiling up and down the valley road