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

time. They spend the night inside the cave, dozing on their feet or
mining the rock with their tusks. They pry and gouge rocks off the walls,
and chew them to fragments between their teeth, and swallow the broken
bits of rock. Elephant dung around the cave is full of crumbled rock.
Monet and his friend had a flashlight, and they walked back into the
cave to see where it went. The mouth of the cave is huge--fifty-five
yards wide--and it opens out even wider beyond the entrance. They crossed
a platform covered with powdery dry elephant dung, their feet kicking up
puffs of dust as they advanced. The light grew dim, and the floor of the
cave rose upward in a series of shelves coated with green slime. The
slime was bat guano, digested vegetable matter that had been excreted by a
colony of fruit bats on the ceiling.
Bats whirred out of holes and flicked through their flashlight beams,
dodging around their heads, making high-pitched cries. Their flashlights
disturbed the bats, and more bats woke up. Hundreds of bat eyes, like red
jewels, looked down on them from the ceiling of the cave. Waves of bat
sound rippled across the ceiling and echoed back and forth, a dry, squeaky
sound, like many small doors being opened on dry hinges. Then they saw
the most wonderful thing about Kitum Cave. The cave is petrified rain
forest. Mineralized logs stuck out of the walls and ceiling. They were
trunks of rain-forest trees turned to stone--teaks, podo trees,
evergreens. An eruption of Mount Elgon about seven million years ago had
buried the rain forest in ash, and the logs had been tranformed into opal
and chert. The logs were surrounded by crystals, white needles of
minerals that had grown out of the rock. The crystals were as sharp as
hypodermic syringes, and they glittered in the beams of the flashlights.
Monet and his friend wandered through the cave, shining their lights
on the petrified rain forest. Did he run his hands over the stone trees
and prick his finger on a crystal? They found petrified bones of ancient
hippos and ancestors of elephants. There were spiders hanging in webs
among the logs. The spiders were eating moths and insects.
They came to a gentle rise, where the main chamber widened to more
than a hundred yards across--wider than the length of a football field.
They found a crevice and shined their lights down to the bottom. There
was something strange down there--a mass of gray and brownish material.
It was the mummified corpses of baby elephants. When elephants walk
through the cave at night, they navigate by their sense of touch, probing
the floor ahead of them with the tips of their trunks. The babies
sometimes fall into the crevice.
Monet and his friend continued deeper into the cave, descending a
slope, until they came to a pillar that seemed to support the roof. The
pillar was scored with hatch marks and grooves, the marks of elephant
tusks. If the elephants continued to dig away at the base of the pillar,
it might eventually collapse, bringing down the roof of Kitum Cave with
it. At the back of the cave, they found another pillar. This one was
broken. Over it hung a velvety mass of bats, which had fouled the pillar
with black guano--a different kind of guano from the green slime near the
mouth of the cave. These bats were insect eaters, and the guano was an
ooze of digested insects. Did Monet put his hand in the ooze?
Monet's friend dropped out of sight for several years after that trip