"Smith, Wilbur - Shout At The Devil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

"I'll drink to that," and Flynn emptied his glass.

Sebastian stood with both hands gripping the wooden rail of the dhow
and stared out across a dozen miles of water at the loom of the African
mainland. The monsoon wind had ruffled the sea to a dark indigo and it
flipped spray from the white-caps into Sebastian's face.

Overlaying the clean salt of the ocean was the taint of the mangrove
swamps, an evil smell as though an animal had led in its own cage.
Sebastian sniffed it with distaste as he searched the low, green line
of the coast for the entrance to the maze of the Rufiji delta.

Frowning, he tried to reconstruct the Admiralty chart in his mind. The
Rufiji river came to the sea through a dozen channels spread over forty
miles, and in doing so, carved fifty, maybe a hundred, islands out of
the mainland.

Tidal water washed fifteen miles upstream, past the mangroves to where
the vast grass swampland began. It was there in the swampland that the
elephant herds had taken shelter from the guns and arrows of the ivory
hunters, protected by Imperial decree and by a formidable terrain.

The murderous-looking ruffian who captained the dhow uttered a string
of sing-song orders, and Sebastian turned to watch the complicated
manoeuvre of tacking the ungainly craft. Half-naked seamen dropped out
of the rigging like over-ripe brown fruit and swarmed around the
sixty-foot teak boom. Bare feet padding on the filthy deck, they ran
the boom back and forward again. The dhow creaked like an old man with
arthritis, came round wearily on to the wind, and butted its nose in
towards the land. The new motion, combined with the swamp smell and
the smell of freshly-stirred bilges, moved something deep within
Sebastian. His grip upon the rail increased, and new sweat popped out
like little blisters on his brow. He leaned forward, and, to shouts of
encouragement from the crew, made another sacrifice to the sea gods. He
was still draped worshipfully across the rail as the dhow wallowed and
slid in the turbulent waters of the entrance, and then passed into the
calm of the southernmost channel of the Rufiji basin.

Four days later, Sebastian sat cross-legged with the dhow captain on a
thick Bokhara carpet spread upon the deck, and they explained to each
other in sign language that neither of them had the vaguest idea where
they were. The dhow was anchored in a narrow water-way hemmed in by
the twisted and deformed trunks of the mangroves. The sensation of
being lost was not new to Sebastian and he accepted it with
resignation" but the dhow captain, who could run from Aden to Calcutta
and back to Zanzibar with the certainty of a man visiting his own
outhouse, was not so stoical. He lifted his eyes to the heavens and
called upon Allah to intercede with the djinn who guarded this stinking
labyrinth, who made the waters flow in strange, unnatural ways, who