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

on the eastern slopes of the Andes and which is known as the Upper Amazon
Basin.

Flying over the wild country that rolled below us, for the first time we felt
qualms of doubt. How were we to ever find the settlement of the alatedin this
wide stretch of unexplored land? No plane had as yet located anything that
looked as if it might be inhabited--the jungle presented nothing but miles
and
miles of tangled masses of tropical vegetation and massive trees, gentle
slopes
and occasionally a bald spot of leprous white amid the sea of green.
Rivers wound through over-grown banks appearing and disappearing, lakes
blinked
up at us, swamps and deserts stretched below. We saw a few spirals of smoke
that
set our hearts beating, only to discover them to be nothing but the cooking
fires of a poor sort of Indian village. Once on a low hilltop we saw
something
we took to be a city which turned out to be merely some Inca ruins.
What if after all these winged men had no base, but like the Indians were a
wandering people moving day by day. Suppose that Pedro Majes after all merely
dreamed that he had been carried off by flying men, that his imagination had
been fired by the tales he had heard of the men with wings? Only the fact
that
they had a great many women, kidnapped women, and a number of children
perhaps,
made us think that they had some fixed dwelling place. How large their
settlement might be, we could not guess.
For two days we flew and in that time descried only one of our quarry. He
immediately flew straight into the bright ball of the burning sun so we lost
sight of him, even though we put on smoked glasses. He faded completely out
of
our vision.
Disappointed we sulked in Cuzco. We decided that we were wasting our time. We
must go on foot into the country and search on the ground. We hired a band of
Indians to guide us through the jungles and went to sleep determined to start
out in the morning on this new venture. We did not start that morning,
however,
for some of our Indians had decided they did not wish to go. We spent the day
in
gathering a new band.



The Clue
ABOUT four o'clock that afternoon some fresh news came and again our plans
were
changed! A radio report had come in from a questing pilot. Flying low through
the jungles not more than ninety miles from the border of Peru, he had
suddenly