"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 181 - Up From Earth's Center" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

UP FROM EARTH'S CENTER
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
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"Up from earth's center by the seventh gate,
I rose and on the throne of Saturn sat-
And many a knot unraveled by the road,
But not the master knot of human fate-"

OMAR KHAYYAM

I
THE hours became days, and the days grew into weeks, and the weeks followed one another into a dull
and terrible haze of time in which nothing really changed. Gilmore had scooped a shallow pit in the
eroding chalk at the edge of a cliff, roofed it with a crude thatched trapdoor which he could close against
the black things of night, and he spent the majority of his time there.

For a time, during Indian summer, one day was like another. It was then that Gilmore lost his shirt. He
took off the shirt and arranged it carefully and, he thought, safely on the sandy beach, while he waded
into the sea to stand motionless in hopes of clubbing an unwary fish for food. A huge and dour gray
seagull, a typically thievish knave of a seagull, carried the shirt away. It was a sports shirt, and its gaudy
plastic buttons fascinated the gull.

It was a small thing. The thin shirt was practically worthless as a protective garment. But Gilmore took it
hard.

He ran wildly after the seagull, and the bird flapped out to sea, packing the shirt in its beak with gull-like
greed. Gilmore, unable to swim, ran, screaming, up and down the beach, and when he was exhausted, he
fell on his face and sobbed.

During the ensuing few days of Indian summer, Gilmore tried to teach himself to swim. He was
unsuccessful, probably because he had no real heart left to put into it. It was pointless, anyway. A man
could not swim the Atlantic.