"Oswald Bastable - 01 - The Warlord Of The Air" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

down from the mountain and along the quayside. There are three hospitals, two of
which are for natives only. I say 'natives' in the loose sense. There were no
natives of any sort before the island was settled thirty years ago by the people
who founded the Welland firm; all labour was brought from the Peninsula, mainly
from Singapore. On a hill to the south of the harbour, standing rather aloof
from the town and dominating it, is the residence of the Official
Representative, Brigadier Bland, together with the barracks which houses the
small garrison of native police under the command of a very upright servant of
the Empire, Lieutenant Allsop. Over this spick and span collection of
whitewashed stucco flies a proud Union Jack, symbol of protection and justice to
all who dwell on the island.

Unless you are fond of paying an endless succession of social calls on the other
English people, most of whom can talk only of mining or of missions, there is
not a great deal to do on Rowe Island. There is an amateur dramatic society
which puts on a play at the Official Representative's residence every Christmas,
there is a club of sorts where one may play billiards if invited by the oldest
members (I was invited once but played rather badly). The local newspapers from
Singapore, Sarawak or Sydney are almost always at least a fortnight old, when
you can find them, the Times is a month to six weeks old and the illustrated
weeklies and monthly journals from home can be anything up to six months old by
the time you see them. This sparsity of up-to-date news is, of course, a very
good thing for a man recovering from exhaustion. It is hard to get hot under the
collar about a war which has been over a month or two before you read about it
or a stock market tremor which has resolved itself one way or the other by the
previous week. You are forced to relax. After all, there is nothing you can do
to alter the course of what has become history. But it is when you have begun to
recover your energy, both mental and physical, that you begin to realise how
bored you are-and within two months this realisation had struck me most
forcibly. I began to nurse a rather evil hope that something would happen on
Rowe Island-an explosion in the mine, an earthquake, or perhaps even a native
uprising.

In this frame of mind I took to haunting the harbour, watching the ships loading
and unloading, with long lines of coolies carrying sacks of corn and rice away
from the quayside or guiding the trucks of phosphate up the gangplanks to dump
them in the empty holds. I was surprised to see so many women doing work which
in England few would have thought women could do! Some of these women were quite
young and some were almost beautiful. The noise was almost deafening when a ship
or several ships were in port. Naked brown and yellow bodies milled everywhere,
like so much churning mud, sweating in the intense heat-a heat relieved only by
the breezes off the sea.

It was on one such day that I found myself down by the harbour, having had my
lunch at Olmeijer's hotel, where I was staying, watching a steamer ease her way
towards the quay, blowing her whistle at the junks and dhows which teemed around
her. Like so many of the ships which ply that part of the world, she was sturdy
but unlovely to look upon. Her hull and superstructure were battered and needed
painting and her crew, mainly laskars, seemed as if they would have been more at
home on some Malay pirate ship. I saw the captain, an elderly Scot, cursing at