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

this
new menace. Had a new race actually been evolved? Was this to change the
entire
theory of evolution? Where would Darwin and his monkeys be now? Could it be
true
that the Pterodactyl, the flying reptile was our ancestor instead of the ape?
Was South America a new breeding place of man?
New tales of abductions appeared. It looked as if this alated race had come
out
of their two centuries of seclusion and were deliberately making war upon
humanity, on white women! A pilot flying over a section of the Brazilian
jungles
came back with the tale of his sighting a winged man and giving chase. He
tells
of having caught up with the fellow, and he estimated that the flying
creature
was traveling at the speed of about eighty miles per hour!
Seeing the plane draw alongside of him the birdman waved and before the pilot
realized his intention he had risen above the machine and then as lightly as
a
bird alighted on a wing, as close to the pilot as he could.
Pedro Mureno, the pilot, described the fellow as a young chap of perhaps
twenty-two with fair hair and blue eyes. His wings were snowy white. He
smiled
brightly and appeared very curious about the plane, his eyes darting about
and
taking it all in. The speed of the machine evidently intrigued him for it was
doing a hundred and fifty miles an hour. He crawled through the struts to the
pilot's side and attempted to converse with him, but the noise of the engine
prevented that.
Mureno turned a loop for the edification of the youth and performed several
other maneuvers and stunts, and the boy laughed with pleasure. Mureno thought
of
taking him back to the base a prisoner, but, as if divining his purpose, the
other laughed again, crawled to the edge of the wing and dropped from the
plane.
Mureno circled him for several minutes chagrined that he was unable to make
his
capture.
Taking the opportunity to show off, the winged youth now did stunts. Rising
rapidly above the plane he suddenly closed his wings so that he fell like a
stone for almost five hundred feet and as suddenly opened his wings halting
his
fall as abruptly as he began it. He gave a pretty demonstration of a bird
chasing insects, darting, banking, soaring, whirling and plunging with the
sun
ashine upon the beauty of his snow-white plumage.
He turned somersaults, lay on his back with his wings spread under him,
circled,
turned sharply at right angles, climbed straight upwards and sailed, then