"Richard Preston - The Hot Zone2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

as a slumped pile of gray ridges receding into haze, culminating in a
summit with two peaks, which are opposed lips of the eroded cone. As the
sun came up, the mountain turned silvery green, the color of the Mount
Elgon rain forest, and as the day progressed clouds appeared and hid the
mountain from view. Late in the afternoon, near sunset, the clouds
thickened and boiled up into an anvil thunderhead that flickered with
silent lightning. The bottom of the cloud was the color of charcoal, and
the top of the cloud feathered out against the upper air and glowed a dull
orange, illuminated by the setting sun, and above the cloud the sky was
deep blue and gleamed with a few tropical stars.
He had a number of women friends who lived in the town of Eldoret, to
the southeast of the mountain, where the people are poor and live in
shacks made of boards and metal. He gave money to his women friends, and
they, in return, were happy to love him. When his Christmas vacation
arrived, he formed a plan to go camping on Mount Elgon, and he invited one
of the women from Eldoret to accompany him. No one seems to remember her
name.
Monet and his friend drove in a Land Rover up the long, straight
red-dirt road that leads to Endebess Bluff, a prominent cliff on the
eastern side the volcano. The road was volcanic dust, as red as dried
blood. They climbed onto the lower skirts of the volcano and went through
cornfields and coffee plantations, which gave way to grazing land, and the
road passed old, half-ruined English colonial farms hidden behind lines of
blue-gum trees. The air grew cool as they went higher, and crested eagles
flapped out of cedar trees. Not many tourists visit Mount Elgon, so Monet
and his friend were probably the only vehicle on the road, although there
would have been crowds of people walking on foot, villagers who cultivate
small farms on the lower slopes of the mountain. They approached the
frayed outer edge of the Mount Elgon rain forest, passing by fingers and
islands of trees, and they passed the Mount Elgon Lodge, an English inn


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built in the earlier part of century, now falling into disrepair, its
walls cracked and its paint peeling off in the sun and rain.
Mount Elgon straddles the border between Uganda and Kenya and is not
far from Sudan. The mountain is a biological island of rain forest in the
center of Africa, an isolated world rising above dry plains, fifty miles
across, blanketed with trees, bamboo, and alpine moor. It is a knob in
the backbone of central Africa. The volcano grew up seven to ten million
years ago, producing fierce eruptions and explosions of ash, which
repeatedly wiped out the forests that grew on its slopes, until it
attained a tremendous height. Before Mount Elgon was eroded down, it may
have been the highest mountain in Africa, higher than Kilmanjaro is today.
It is still the widest. When the sun rises, it throws the shadow of
Mount Elgon westward and deep into Uganda, and when the sun sets, the
shadow reaches eastward across Kenya. Within the shadow of Mount Elgon
lie villages and cities inhabited by various tribal groups, including the