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

birds, was gone; there was just nothing left for them to eat. At dinnertime we were joined by Derek
Joubert, a National Geographic filmmaker who had a permanent camp a few miles away. I have a
couple of his documentaries on videotape, which pleased him no end, and I remarked on the
similarity of his name to that of Keith Joubert, a renowned wildlife artist whose prints of the "Big
Five" Carol had bought me for my birthday last March. It turned out that they were brothers, and that
Keith, the only man ever to paint a portrait of the Kilimanjaro Elephant (which he did from the figures
in Rowland Ward's record book, the elephant itself having died almost a century ago) had read and
enjoyed Ivory, which is based on the elephant.

September 6: We had a very disappointing game run in the morning -- not much is still alive and
moving in Linyanti -- but I made up for it by coming up with a couple of short story ideas that I'll be
writing in the next few months. In the afternoon some more guests showed up, including a rather
adventuresome American girl who works for a bank with international connections, and has spent
time representing them in Peru, Chile, Poland, and Hong Kong. (How adventuresome? Well, this
spring she flew to Antarctica for a week as a guest of the Chilean Air Force.) We also met the
ultimate Ugly American, a New York lady who didn't stop talking for the next six hours, had nothing
good to say about anyone or anything, and made us realize why so many people intensely dislike
Americans. Fortunately, she came down with a sore throat at dinnertime, and we didn't have to listen
to her the rest of the night.

September 7: After a 3-hour walk in search of game that simply didn't exist, we happily took our
leave of Linyanti, and went next to the most luxurious hostelry in Africa. (Yeah, I know I've said in
print that that honor belongs to the Mount Kenya Safari Club. So sue me: I was wrong. The Chobe
Game Lodge has it beat all hollow.) Chobe National Park is the crown jewel of Botswana's parks. It
possesses 30,000 elephants, almost three times the total that remain in all of Kenya. It has 150,000
buffalo, in herds of up to 5,000. It has hundreds of lions. It also has the Chobe Game Lodge. We
had arranged to stay in the same suite where Richard Burton and Liz Taylor honeymooned after their
second marriage (Suite 210, for anyone who wishes to experience it themselves.) It was immense,
elegant, air-conditioned...and it had a 75-foot terrace and its own private swimming pool -- so
private, in fact, that we never bothered with our swimsuits. After all those days of tents and outdoor
bathrooms, it was so luxurious that it took a real effort of will power to leave long enough to look at
animals. The food was on a par with the accomodations. Our first night there, dinner consisted of
Eggs Florentine as an appetizer, ragout of impala (the best game meal we've ever had) as a main
course, and trifle with custard sauce for dessert. Lunch was a buffet that covered five tables, with so
many delicacies that you could go on tilt trying to pick and choose from among them. There were
numerous lounges and bars, a fabulous outdoor dining terrace, the best gift shop we'd seen in the
country, and there was even a room with a large-screen TV and a selection of videotapes, each a
documentary on some aspect of Botswana and its wildlife. The Chobe Lodge is much the largest
lodge in Botswana, though it holds less than 100 people and is at best medium-sized by East African
standards. The reason for this is that Botswana, which is 87% Kalahari Desert and which nobody
seemed to want -- not Britain, not South Africa, not anybody -- suddenly discovered the world's two
largest diamond mines in the early 1980s. As a result, they have more money than they need, and
have decided to keep their tourist industry small rather than ecologically degrade their parks by
running too many cars and tourists through them. We took a boat out on the Chobe River in the
afternoon and watched as hundreds of elephants and thousands of buffalo came down to drink, then
picked our way among the hippos and crocs and returned to our suite, wondering why we had
bothered with all those other locations when we could have spent the entire Botswana section of our
safari right here.

September 8: Another day of luxury, punctuated with a pair of game runs. In the morning, we