"Smith, Wilbur - Courtney 02 - The Sound of Thunder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

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A Fawcett Gold Medal Book Published by Ballantine Books Copyright 0
1966 by Wilbur Smith All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc." New York.

Originally published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd.

in 1966.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar
condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser.

ISBN 0-449-14819-X

This edition published by arrangement with Pan Books Ltd.

Manufactured in the United States of America First Ballantine Books
Edition: January 1992 Four years of travel in the road less wilderness
had battered the wagons. Many of the wheel-spokes and disselboonu had
been replaced with raw native timber; the canopies were patched until
little of the original canvas was visible; the teams were reduced from
eighteen to ten oxen each, for there had been predators and sickness to
weed them out. But this exhausted little caravan carried the teeth of
five hundred elephant; ten -tons of ivory; the harvest of Sean
Courtneys rifle; ivory that he would convert into nearly fifteen
thousand gold sovereigns once he reached Pretoria.

Once more Sean was a rich man. His clothing was stained and baggy,
crudely mended; his boots were worn almost through the uppers and
clumsily resoled with raw buffalo hide; a great untrimmed beard covered
half his chest and a mane of black hair curled down his neck to where
it had been hacked away with blunt scissors above the collar of his
coat. But despite his appearance he was rich in ivory, also in gold
held for him in the vaults of the Volkskaas Bank in Pretoria.

On a rise of ground beside the road he sat his horse and watched the
leisurely plodding approach of his wagons. It is time now for the
farm, he thought with satisfaction. Thirty-seven years old, no longer
a young man, and it was time to buy the farm. He knew the one he
wanted and he knew exactly where he would build the homestead-site it
close to the lip of the escarpment so that in the evenings he could sit