"A. E. Merritt - Dwellers in the mirage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

return.

"Queer sort of sounds, Jim." I tried to speak casually, He sat up. A
stick flared up in the dying fire. Its light etched his face against
the darkness--thin, and brown and hawk-profiled. He did not look at me.

"Every feathered forefather for the last twenty centuries is awake and
shouting! Better call me Tsantawu, Leif. Tsi' Tsa'lagi--I am a Cherokee!
Right now--all Indian."

He smiled, but still he did not look at me, and I was glad of that.

"It was an anvil," I said. "A hell of a big anvil. And hundreds of
people singing . . . and how could that be in this wilderness . . . they
didn't sound like Indians. . . ."

"The drums weren't Indian." He squatted by the fire, staring into it.
"When they turned loose, something played a pizzicato with icicles up
and down my back."

"They got me, too--those drums!" I thought my voice was steady, but he
looked up at me sharply; and now it was I who averted my eyes and
stared at the embers. "They reminded me of something I heard . . . and
thought I saw . . . in Mongolia. So did the singing. Damn it, Jim, why do
you look at me like that?"

I threw a stick on the fire. For the life of me I couldn't help
searching the shadows as the stick flamed. Then I met his gaze
squarely.

"Pretty bad place, was it, Leif?" he asked, quietly. I said nothing.
Jim got up and walked over to the packs. He came back with Some water
and threw it over the fire. He kicked earth on the hissing coals. If he
saw me wince as the shadows rushed in upon us, he did not show it.

"That wind came from the north," he said. "So that's the way the sounds
came. Therefore, whatever made the sounds is north of us. That being
so--which way do we travel to-morrow?"

"North," I said.

My throat dried as I said it.

Jim laughed. He dropped upon his blanket, and rolled it around him. I
propped myself against the bole of one of the spruces, and sat staring
toward thesnorth.

"The ancestors are vociferous, Leif. Promising a lodge of sorrow, I
gather--if we go north. . . . 'Bad Medicine!' say the ancestors. . . .
'Bad Medicine for you, Tsantawu! You go to Usunhi'yi, the Darkening-land,