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

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
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