"James Rollins - Amazonia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Romeyn Henry)

Padre Garcia Luiz Batista was struggling with his hoe, tilling weeds from the mission's garden, when the
stranger stumbled from the jungle. The figure wore a tattered pair of black denim pants and nothing else.
Bare-chested and shoeless, the man fell to his knees among rows of sprouting cassava plants. His skin,
burnt a deep mocha, was tattooed with blue and crimson dyes.

Mistaking the fellow for one of the local Yanomamo Indians, Padre Batista pushed back his
wide-brimmed straw hat and greeted the fellow in the Indians' native tongue. "Eou, shori," he said.
"Welcome, friend, to the mission of Wauwai:"

The stranger lifted his face, and Garcia instantly knew his mistake. The fellow's eyes were the deepest
blue, a color unnatural among the Amazonian tribes. He also bore a straggled growth of dark beard.

Clearly not an Indian, but a white man.

"Bemvindo,"he offered in Portuguese, believing now that the fellow must be one of the ubiquitous
peasants from the coastal cities who ventured into the Amazon rain forest to stake a claim and build a
better life for themselves. "Be welcome here, my friend:"

The poor soul had clearly been in the jungle a long time. His skin was stretched over bone, each rib
visible. His black hair was tangled, and his body bore cuts and oozing sores. Flies flocked about him,
buzzing and feeding on his wounds.

When the stranger tried to speak, his parched lips cracked and fresh blood dribbled down his chin. He
half crawled toward Garcia, an arm raised in supplication.His words, though, were garbled, unintelligible,
a beastly sound.

Garcia's first impulse was to retreat from the man, but his calling to God would not let him. The Good
Samaritan did not refuse the wayward traveler. He bent and helped the man to his feet. The fellow was
so wasted he weighed no more than a child in his arms. Even through his own shirt, the padre could feel
the heat of the man's skin as he burned with fever.

"Come, let us get you inside out of the sun:" Garcia guided the man toward the mission's church, its
whitewashed steeple poking toward the blue sky. Beyond the building, a ragtag mix of palm-thatched
huts and wooden homes spread across the cleared jungle floor.

The mission of Wauwai had been established only five years earlier, but already the village had swelled
to nearly eighty inhabitants, a mix of various indigenous tribes. Some of the homes were on stilts, as was
typical of the Apalai Indians, while others built solely of palm thatch were home to the Waiwai and Tirios
tribes. But the greatest number of the mission's dwellers were Yanomamo, marked by their large
communal roundhouse.

Garcia waved his free arm to one of the Yanomamo tribesmen at the garden's edge, a fellow named
Henaowe. The short Indian, the padre's assistant, was dressed in pants and a buttoned, long-sleeved
shirt. He hurried forward.

"Help me get this man into my house:"

Henaowe nodded vigorously and crossed to the man's other side. With the feverish man slung between
them, they passed through the garden gate and around the church to the clapboard building jutting from