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

Tsantawu! . . . Into Tsusgina'i, the ghost country! Beware! Turn
from the north, Tsantawu!'"




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"Oh, go to sleep, you hag-ridden redskin!"

"All right, I'm just telling you."

Then a little later:

"'And heard ancestral voices prophesying war'--it's worse than war
these ancestors of mine are prophesying, Leif."

"Damn it, will you shut up!"

A chuckle from the darkness; thereafter silence.

I leaned against the tree trunk. The sounds, or rather the evil memory
they had evoked, had shaken me more than I was willing to admit, even
to myself. The thing I had carried for two years in the buckskin bag at
the end of the chain around my neck had seemed to stir; turn cold. I
wondered how much Jim had divined of what I had tried to cover. . . .

Why had he put out the fire? Because he had known I was afraid? To
force me to face my fear. and conquer it? . . . Or had it been the Indian
instinct to seek cover in darkness? . . . By his own admission, chant
and drum-roll had played on his nerves as they had on mine. . .

Afraid! Of course it had been fear that had wet the palms of my hands,
and had tightened my throat so my heart had beaten in my ears like
drums.

Like drums . . . yes!

But . . . not like those drums whose beat had been borne to us by the
north wind. They had been like the cadence of the feet of men and
women, youths and maids and children, running ever more rapidly up the
side of a hollow world to dive swiftly into the void . . . dissolving
into the nothingness . . . fading as they fell . . dissolving . . .
eaten up by the nothingness . . . .

Like that accursed drum-roll I had heard in the secret temple of the
Gobi oasis two years ago!

Neither then nor now had it been fear alone. Fear it was, in truth, but