"Bernard Wolfe - Limbo '90" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Bernard)

palm and try to catch his breath. With each halt he went through the same ritual of malaise. Removed
from his head the green-visored tennis cap. Unwrapped from his emaciated middle a delicately figured
silk paisley scarf. Mopped brow with loincloth. Then reached down to massage his feet through the
cricket sneakers.

He knew he was not supposed to tax himself but he would not take time out for a real rest, much less
turn back. From his knobby shoulders hung the only native garment he could boast at the moment, a
loose chieftain's robe made of pounded bark and decorated with neat alternating rows of stylized
parakeets and cacao flowers; he hitched it to his knees as he picked his way through the brush, arthritic
ballet.

The jungle was noisy today, fidgety as an insomniac (he had been suffering from insomnia lately, Dr
Martine had been treating him for it), fronds rasped against each other, trees creaked, mynah birds
shrilled nasal obscenities at the sun, marmosets jibbered in falsetto. He disapproved of this order of
sounds, they were symptomatic of hyperthyroidism, hypertension, hypertonus. He frowned upon such
tension, in Nature as in himself. Better to be like the slow loris, heavy-lidded, tapioca-muscled. Lately,
though, he had been very tense.

Each time he interrupted his climb toward the Mandunga Circle he looked down in the direction of the
village. Silly, of course, there was no chance of his being followed. As for the villagers, nobody was
allowed to approach the Circle except the troubled ones and those who had business with them; and as
for strangers, well, none had been seen on the island in his lifetime. Ever. None except Dr Martine. Still,
he kept looking back over his shoulder.

His intelligent deep-amber face, shining with sweat under a thatch of crinkly white hair, was fixed in a
scowl now, muscles coagulated in ridges - welts left by some whip of woe. It felt as though he were
wearing some sort of mask, he was not used to worry or the crampings of worry and the knots around
his mouth and in his forehead quivered. Insomnia, bunched-up muscles, tremors, worry - it almost
looked, he thought, as if he had developed some of the signs of the troubled ones. Unpleasant notion. He
wished he had a bowl of tapioca, it relaxed the bowels.

A moment later, puffing hard, he had reached a small clearing on the crest of the mountain, bare except
for a scattering of yuka and cassava plants. Memorable spot. Here was the centre of the Mandunga
Circle, here, eighteen and a half years ago, he had first set eyes on Dr Martine. Looking down over the
carpet of pinnate leaves thrown up by the raffias, he could see the saw-tooth cliffs on the perimeter of the
island - island which by some miracle, Martine liked to say, had never been charted on any map by any
cartographer - and the glinting waters of the Indian Ocean beyond. The sky was without a trace of cloud,
a flawless impermeable blue - 'as dazzling', Martine sometimes said of it, 'as a baboon's ass.'

It was on just such a day eighteen years ago, as the sun was heaving up over Sumatra and Borneo
(Martine insisted there were such places to the east: called them the islands of Oceania), that the doctor
had been tossed out of the sky on to the mountain top. What more ominous bundles was that cobalt
vacuum preparing to sprinkle over the island today?

'Tomorrow sunny and continued warm,' he said to himself, still in the doctor's language. 'Prognosis for
weather, anyway, favourable.' Added, 'The prognosis. For the weather. Is.'

Shading his eyes with a bony hand, he began to search the ocean for ships. It would be suicide, he knew,
for mariners not familiar with these waters to attempt a landing anywhere on the island's coast because of
the treacherous reefs and the razor-backed cliffs which jutted out into the surf. Nevertheless, he looked.