"E.Voiskunsky, I.Lukodyanov. The Crew Of The Mekong (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

"What a handsome couple you make!" Fedor whispered to himself jokingly
in an effort to regain his composure. He was in the grip of a fit of
shivering caused either by the dampness or by the eerie atmosphere of the
place.
He glanced at Ram Das. As the driver stood there holding the torch his
face expressed neither fear nor religious devotion. He simply looked bored.
There may have been a trace of scorn in the look the half-naked slave gave
his master, Lal Chandra, lying prostrate before the sovereign over life and
death.
The expression on the slave's face sobered Fedor. He resumed his
scrutiny of the goddess. Suddenly he startled in horror. From her graceful
neck hung a chain of human skulls.
"The foul murderess!" he exclaimed in Russian. Ram Das did not
understand the words, but the wrathful tone prompted him to level a long,
thoughtful glance at Fedor.
A few minutes later Lal Chandra led Fedor through a series of intricate
passageways to the stairs leading up into one of the towers. Fedor climbed
up the weathered, sand-sprinkled steps to the ninth storey. Looking down
from a window, he saw Lal Chandra at the foot of the tower. Fedor took out
his length of string, in which he had tied knots at intervals of one foot,
attached a stone to the end, and began paying out the string, counting the
knots. When the stone reached the sixth row of bricks below the
second-storey window Lal Chandra gave a shout. Fedor stopped paying out the
string, leaned far out of the window, and saw that the row of bricks he had
noticed when he made his second measurement was at the seventy-fourth foot.
"That means the waterfall is seventy-four feet high," he thought. "I
wonder how far it is to the ground."
He allowed the string to run out until the stone at the end touched the
ground. The distance was about ninety feet.
Fedor now forgot about everything but the unusual and interesting job
ahead of him. He was in such high spirits that when he descended and saw the
silent torch bearer he clapped him on the shoulder. "We'll make a wonderful
wheel!" he exclaimed happily.
Ram Das moved forward without a word. But after taking a few steps he
stopped, glanced round, lifted his torch high to illuminate everything
around them, and then gestured to Fedor.
"Do you understand what I say?" he asked in a Moslem dialect.
"I do," Fedor replied in Uzbek.
"Do not rejoice like a new-born calf. You will live just as long as you
are needed to finish this job. Do you understand that?"
A shudder ran through Fedor.
"But what can I do? How can I escape?" he asked tonelessly.
"It is too early to talk of such things. I will find a suitable time
and place to talk with you. But now, silence!"
The torch-bearer moved forward. A few minutes later they emerged into
the bright sunshine. Ram Das threw the torch, which had burned low, into the
stream. The flame hissed and went out.
Lal Chandra smiled at Fedor.
Man is a strange creature. Sometimes Fedor would wake up in the middle
of the night and, recalling Ram Das's grim words, give way to despair. But