"031 (B060) - The Majii (1935-09) - Lester Dent.palmdoc.pdbTXT" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

She went in with her small automatic pistol in hand, squinting in the luminance that came from a shaded bedside lamp.
The man who lay in the bed seemed, at first glance, to be dead.
HE was lean, this man in the bed, so lean that the coverlets seemed little more than wrinkled where they lay over his body. His head, however, was huge, a big and round brown globe that resembled something made out of mahogany and waxed over with shiny skin. His eyes were closed. He did not move. There was something unearthly about him.
The woman stood and stared at him through her veil.
Her two companions, having lowered the unconscious hotel clerk and the senseless man who had answered the door, and having locked the door, now came in. They stared at the man on the bed, and their eyes were as if they looked upon a deity.
Both got down on hands and knees and touched foreheads to the floor.
"Fools!" shrilled the woman.
"This man is Rama Tura, chosen disciple of the Majii," murmured one of the kowtowing pair in his native tongue.
"He is an old fakir," snapped the veiled woman.
The two guards seemed inclined to argue the point, but respectfully.
"He has the power of dying and returning to life when he so desires," one stated. "You can see now that he is dead. And was he not brought from our native land to this one in a coffin?"
The woman's cloak shook slightly, as if she had shuddered. She stepped forward and touched the weird form on the bed.
"You find him cold," said one of the guards. "He is a corpse. It is not good that we broke in here."
The woman's eyes became bright and distinct as seen through her veil.
"Is it that you no longer serve me?" she demanded.
The two got up off their hands and knees.
"Our lives, our bodies, are yours, Ranee," one said gloomily. "Our thoughts are birds that fly free. Is it your wish that we cage them?"
"You might clip their wings that they may walk on solid ground," said the Ranee. "You may also take your knives and cut off Rama Tura's big ears. It is my guess that he will revive from the dead in time to save them."
The men nodded, produced long shiny knives with black handles, and advanced upon the recumbent Rama Tura. Towering over him, they hesitated.
"He is chosen disciple of the Majii," gulped one. "Even the great American scientists have not been able to prove otherwise. For does he not take worthless glass and make it, by the touch of his power, into jewels for which men pay fortunes?"
"He is a fakir," repeated the woman. "He is a troublemaker. For years, he has been a nuisance. He is a common, ordinary beggar who for years made his living by performing street-corner tricks for tourists."
"He has powers no man understands," insisted the other stubbornly. "Out of worthless pebbles, he makes great jewels."
"Cut his ears off and see if he is magician enough to make them grow back again," the woman directed. "It is about those jewels that I wish him to explain."
The grotesque thing of bones on the bed opened its eyes.
"I am the dead who lives at will," he said. "What do you want?"
Chapter II. MAKER OF HORROR
THE veiled woman looked down at him and made some slight sound which in her land meant ridicule and disgust.
"You see," she said. "He awakened before he lost his ears."
There was absolutely no expression on the round, shiny head on the pillow. The eyes were open, but did not shift. The mouth was open, but the lips did not move when words came.
It was as if the weird-looking fellow were a corpse into the mouth of which a ventriloquist was throwing speech. He spoke English.
"To abuse the dead is sacrilege," he said. "But maybe your sin is mitigated because you do not have the mind to conceive my powers, my abilities and my condition. To you, I am the enigma of omnipotence, theЧ"
"You are a clever old fake," snapped the woman. "You are no different from other men, except certainly, more ugly. Now, you will tell me about those jewels, or my men will take your ears, after the fashion in my land."
"You are from Jondore?" asked Rama Tura.
"I," said the woman, "am the Ranee, the widow of the Nizam, ruler of all Jondore, descendant of rulers."
"Your voice had a familiar sound," murmured the strangelooking being on the bed. "Why are you here?"
"I will tell you, old fakir," the woman said angrily. "I am in New York by chance. I was making a trip around the world. And here I heard of this jewel-making sщance of yours. I cabled my late husband's brother, Kadir Lingh, present ruler of Jondore, that I intended to investigate you."
She hesitated.
"I have a hideous suspicion," she said.
Rama Tura showed a slight sign of life. "What suspicion?"
The woman did not answer directly, but snapped. "Your organization is wide. I have reason to think my cable did not reach Jondore. I have been followed, my movements checked by men of Jondore. Your men! Once, they shot at me!"
"This cannot be true," murmured Rama Tura.
"Tonight I started to see a man who can handle things like this," snapped the woman. "I was attacked. Later, I found watchers about the headquarters of the man I wanted to see. They were your men."
"Who is this one you intended to see?" Rama Tura queried.
"Doc Savage," said the Ranee. "But you know that."
"Ah," murmured Rama Tura.
"You are a devil incarnate," the Ranee told Rama Tura grimly. "You are scheming to take the lives of many people, in order to accomplish an insane scheme."
But Rama Tura seemed interested in Doc Savage.
"Of living men," he said tonelessly, "it may be that Doc Savage has greatest knowledge, but his learning is of the material and the so-called scientific. He has not touched the abstract and invisible, the real power of concentrated thought as a concrete entity."
"Drivel," said the Ranee.
"Can Doc Savage make jewels of pebbles?" queried Rama Tura.