"Leslie F. Stone - Men With Wings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stone Leslie F)

here
in these hills is not like that. How far it stretched there was no way of
telling. There I worked in the fields with my fellow men for a year and again
the flying men came to bring us back here to our friends and our families."
You can imagine how I felt when I heard this. The winged men therefore had
settlements, plantations and what not.
"Were there many winged men?" I asked.
Pedro shook his head. "I know not their number. They brought us and they took
us
away, but how many there were, I know not. They did not live near us. They
but
came and went as they pleased. Sometimes they came by night, sometimes by
day,
and they carried off with them great sacks of the foods we raised, of the
sheep
we herded, of the fruits we gathered. Ay . . . the weight of the sacks that
they
bore off . . . twice the weight that even the strongest of us could bear!"
"Where did they carry it?"
Pedro shrugged his shoulders. "Is it for me, a lowly peon, to speak of
god-things? Does one ask where the Sun dwells? Nay . . . I know not, senor. I
know only that they will come again . . . and it will be to lead us back . ..
to
give us what belongs to us!"
And no further questioning could bring another word from the old fellow. It
was
enough, though. Not more than a day's flight away dwelt the flying men. That
would mean then that their plantation was in Bolivia instead of Brazil,
however,
for Arequipa is parallel to the Bolivian border. It appeared later that I made
a
mistake, in not realizing that in his hundred odd years old Pedro had not
always
lived in this locality but in reality he had lived farther to the north.



Futile Searching
AFTER returning to Arequipa we spent two days in flying over a portion of
Bolivia. However, all of the western part of that country is mountainous, and
we
began to think that Pedro had led us astray, for not once did we catch so
much
as a glimpse of a winged creature except a number of condors who made their
homes among the mountain peaks.
We decided then to fly back to Cuzco and continue our search from there. We
heard nothing of much interest in the city, but more planes were arriving to
take up the search. We, however, were determined to get ahead of them all and
headed out over the vast jungle country. Below us lay the montana, the
jungles