"Richard Preston - The Hot Zone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Richard Preston)

looking for handouts, and Monet enticed the animal to sit on his shoulder
by offering it a banana. His friend laughed, but they stayed perfectly
still while the animal ate. They drove a short way up the mountain and
pitched their tent in a clearing of moist green grass that sloped down to
a stream. The stream gurgled out of the rain forest, and it was a strange
color, milky with volcanic dust. The grass was kept short by Cape buffalo
grazing it, and was spotted with their dung.
The Elgon forest towered around their campsite, a web of gnarled
African olive trees hung with moss and creepers and dotted with a black
olive that is poisonous to humans. They heard a scuffle of monkeys
feeding in the trees, a hum of insects, an occasional low huh-huh call of
a monkey. They were colobus monkeys, and sometimes one would come down
from a tree and scuttle across the meadow near the tent, watching them
with alert, intelligent eyes. Flocks of olive pigeons burst from the
trees on swift downward slants, flying at terrific speed, which is their
strategy to escape from harrier hawks that can dive on them and rip them
apart on the wing. There were camphor trees and teaks and African cedars
and red stinkwood trees, and here and there a dark green cloud of leaves
mushroomed above the forest canopy. These were the crowns of podocarpus
trees, or podos, the largest trees in Africa, nearly as large as
California sequoias. Thousands of elephants lived on the mountain then,
and they could be heard moving through forest, making cracking sounds as
they peeled bark and broke limbs from trees.
In the afternoon, it would have rained, as it usually does on Mount
Elgon, and so Monet and his friend would have stayed in their tent, and
perhaps they made love while a thunderstorm hammered the canvas. It grew
dark; the rain tapered off. They built a fire and cooked a meal. It was
New Year's Eve. Perhaps they celebrated, drinking champagne. The clouds
would have cleared off in a few hours, as they usually do, and the volcano
would have emerged as a black shadow under the Milky Way. Perhaps Monet
stood on the grass at the stroke of midnight and looked at the stars--neck
bent backward, unsteady on his feet from the champagne.
On New Year's morning, sometime after breakfast--a cold morning, air
temperature in the forties, the grass wet and cold--they drove up the
mountain along a muddy track and parked in a small valley below Kitum
Cave. They bushwhacked up the valley, following elephant trails that
meandered besides a little stream that ran through stands of olive trees
and grassy meadows. They kept an eye out for Cape buffalo, a dangerous
animal to encounter in the forest. The cave opened at the head of the
valley, and the stream cascaded over its mouth. The elephant trails
joined at the entrance and headed inside. Monet and his friend spent the
whole of New Year's Day there. It probably rained, and so they would have
sat in the entrance for hours while the little stream poured down in a
veil. Looking across the valley, they watched for elephants, and they saw
rock hyraxes--furry animals the size of groundhogs--running up and down
the boulders near the mouth of the cave.
Herds of elephants go inside Kitum Cave at night to obtain minerals
and salts. On the plains, it is easy for elephants to find salt in
hardpans and dry water holes, but in the rain forest salt is precious
thing. The cave is large enough to hold as many as seventy elephant at a