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

Elgon Masai, a pastoral people who came from the north and settled around
the mountain some centuries ago, and who raise cattle. The lower slopes
of the mountain are washed with gentle rains, and the air remains cool and
fresh all year, and the volcanic soil produces rich crops of corn. The
villages form a ring of human settlement around the volcano, and the ring
is steadily closing around the forest on its slopes, a noose that is
tangling the wild habitat of the mountain. The forest is being cleared
away, the trees are being cut down for firewood or to make room for
grazing land, and the elephant are vanishing.
A small part of Mount Elgon is a national park. Monet and his friend
stopped at the park gate to pay their entrance fees. A monkey or perhaps
a baboon--no one seems to remember--used to hang out around the gate,
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



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