"Mike Resnick - Between the Sunlight and Thunder (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

around us to the point where we could barely see ten yards ahead. We finally reached the Montclair
Hotel at about noon, checked in, and decided to spend the rest of the day loafing and reading
rather
than driving on narrow, winding mountain roads with almost no visibility. The Montclair is an
elegant
English-style hotel, with a dart room, a billiard room, a gambling casino, a riding stable, tennis
courts,
a swimming pool, two fine restaurants (I recommend the Topside), and the strangest-looking staff
you'd ever want to see. Each of them -- and there were a hell of a lot of them -- was bald and
bearded; when we asked about it, Lazarus explained that they were members of a Pentecostal sect
that thought shaving their heads but not their faces brought them a bit closer to heaven.

September 20: We were still socked in with fog when I awoke, but I didn't feel like spending
another
day doing nothing -- even a high-quality nothing such as the hotel offered -- so I told Lazarus to
meet
me at 10:30 and we'd try to drive around a bit; Carol took one look out the window and told me
that
she was staying inside. When we got two miles away from the Montclair the air became crystal
clear,
and we realized that the mountains weren't covered by fog after all: what had happened was that a
cloud had come to rest exactly atop the Montclair. We drove back, got Carol, and spent the rest of
the day sightseeing in the mountains. We saw Cecil Rhodes' mountain home, and the Rhodes
Museum, and World's View, and a reconstruction of an ancient village, and one of the world's more
dangerous golf courses (hit the ball in the water and you get eaten by crocs; hit it in the trees
and you
get eaten by leopards; overshoot the green and you fall 11,000 feet to your death). We ate lunch


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at
the Troutbeck Inn, then drove to some waterfalls where we had to climb part of a mountain and walk
out on a very precarious ledge to see them (Lazarus pointed the way, then locked himself in the
car
and waited for us, convinced we would fall off the precipice), and finally returned to the hotel,
which
was still surrounded by its very own cloud.

September 21: We left the Montclair and its cloud behind, and drove down the eastern side of the
country to Mutare, easily the prettiest African city we've seen. Once there we turned off and went
to
La Rochelle, the magnificent estate of Lord and Lady Courtauld, who had willed it to Zimbabwe. It
contains fourteen acres of the most beautiful gardens I've ever seen, with numerous little streams
and
wooden bridges connecting the various sections. >From there we drove to a tiny colonial hotel, the
White Horse Inn, for lunch, then stopped by the Vumba Gardens, some 98 hectares worth of
meticulously-kept flowers and greenery. Then we headed south for Masvingo and the Great
Zimbabwe ruins, picking up a flat tire along the way; we drove the final 100 kilometers with no