"Smith, Wilbur - Egyptian 01 - River God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

Already that bow was famous throughout the army, and throughout the
length of the great river from the cataracts to the sea. I had
designed it for him when he had grown dissatisfied with the puny
weapons that, up until that time, were all that were available to
him.

I had suggested that we should try to fashion a bow with some new
material rather than those feeble woods that grow in our narrow
riverine valley; perhaps with exotic timbers such as the heartwood of
the olive from the land of the Hittites or of the ebony from Cush; or
with even stranger materials such as the horn of the rhinoceros or the
ivory tusk of the elephant.

No sooner had we made the attempt than we came upon a myriad of
problems, the first of which was the brittleness of these exotic
materials. In their natural state none of them would bend without
cracking, and only the largest and therefore the most expensive
elephant tusk would allow us to carve a complete bow stock from it. I
solved both these problems by splitting the ivory of a smaller tusk
into slivers and gluing these together in sufficient girth and bulk to
form a full bow. Unfortunately it was too rigid for any man to draw.

However, from there it was an easy and natural step to laminate
together all four of our chosen materials-olive wood, ebony, horn and
ivory. Of course, there were many months of experimentation with
combinations of these materials, and with various types of glue to hold
them together. in the end I never did succeed in making a glue strong
enough. we solved this last problem by binding the entire bow stock
with elect rum wire to prevent it from flying apart.

I had two big men to assist tonus in twisting the wire on to it with
all their combined strength, while the glue was still hot. When it
cooled, it set to an almost perfect combination of strength and
pliability.

Then I cut strands from the gut of a great black-maned lion that tonus
hunted and killed with his bronze-bladed war spear out in the desert.
These I tanned and twisted together to form a bowstring. The result
was this gleaming arc of such extraordinary power that only one man out
of all the hundreds who had made the attempt could draw it to full
stretch.

The regulation style of archery as taught by the army instructors was
to face the target and draw the nocked arrow to the sternum of the
chest, hold that aim for a deliberate pause, then loose on command.

However, not even tonus had the strength to draw this bow and hold his
aim steadily.