"Andre Norton - Time Traders 6 - Echoes In Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

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Echoes in Time by
Andre Norton and
Sherwood Smith
PROLOGUE
THE DAY'S HEAT had diminished to only a residual shimmer from the
cooling earth. The chitter and click of insects in the scrubby green brush
formed a kind of musical accompaniment to the laughing and singing of
the long, snaking line of children crouched together, one in front of the
other, knees up near their chins.


"Here is our mother!
Our mother, our mother!
Here is our harvest,
Our fruit, our harvest!
Our mother, our fruitтАж"
The children laughed as they sang, their bare toes scrabbling forward
in the dust as they waddled and hopped. Their dark brown skin was
mottled and streaked with painted patterns, some chalk-white, others
subtle earth tones. Sweat and dust marred the fine lines of the patterns,
not that the children cared. They were only playing. They sang and
laughed with the companionable abandon of children who know that the
time for real skin painting, when they became adults with adult
responsibilities for food and shelter, war and marriage, lay far in the
sunny future, after many harvest games such as this.
 Saba Mariam, watching from her post beside a jumble of rocks, felt as
if she had been wafted back through time. So the children of the Surma
had played and sang for countless generations in this sere mountain
region of southwest Ethiopia.

She looked down at her hands, the skin dark against the plain khaki of
her trousers. She and her recorder were the only jarring notes in this scene
out of history, the only intrusion of modernityтАФthough at any time an
airplane might roar overhead, causing children and adults alike to pause,
like startled deer, before they scampered off to hide.

Saba glanced at her tape recorder, working silently behind a warm gray
boulder. The Surma tolerated her strange ways because she did not
interfere with them, and she had proved that she was not in fact sent by
their age-old enemies, the Bumi. She looked strange to men and women
alike, with her ears and lips unpierced. She was, to the Surma, a child
walking around in a grown body, for she did not display the ritual