Assignment, Amazon queen by 1916-1975 Aarons Edward S.

Author:1916-1975, Aarons, Edward S. ,
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Greenwich, Conn. : Fawcett Publications
Published: 1974-08-24T07:00:00+00:00

The insects forced them up before dawn. There was no sun. Gray clouds tumbled overhead, seen through the high umbrella of trees branching overhead. Belmont was up, his hammock alreadv packed. Sally had slipped away and returned to her brother's little camp. The Chinese were the last to get themselves ready for the trek. Belmont, in his tattered, wide-brimmed straw hat and gaunt, bronzed face looked the part of a halfbreed guide, wearing his loose white jacket and floppy trousers supported by the length of rope.

O'Hara seemed better. Inocenza made some coffee for them all, watching Durell with curiously bitter eyes. When he drank the steaming liquid in the vaporous gray dawn, she spoke in a voice like a spitting jungle cat.

"Was she that good?"

"We're old friends, Inocenza."

"Ha! Because my Portuguese skin, always in the sun, is a bit darker than her Chinese and black and whatever-it-is her mother had—is that why you—"

"Nothing like that."

"I saw you first, I offered you anything you wished— but you did not find me desirable, is that it?"

"No, that's not it," he said patiently.

"Was she good? You made to love for a long time, eh? I was not asleep. I saw her sneak to you, the African bitch. Who does she think she is? She is no better than I! I know how to love a man—"

"Please help O'Hara get started," he said.

Willie Wells had picked up a compass in Sao Felice, along with other supplies. They began walking southwest, after Belmont spoke to the bleary-eyed O'Hara. There were no trails in the endless gray forest to show where they were going. The ground was squashy underfoot, and twice before nine o'clock they had to wade through hip-deep bogs and over swampy islets in a colorless miasma that seemed to go on forever. The sky, the forest, the trees were all gray. They were like ghosts struggling through an eternal mist. It soon became a desperate, despairing business. They stumbled, tripped and fell, got up to climb over massive windfalls of huge, half-rotted logs, then bogged down again in the squashy, quaky forest floor. Within the hour after they started, it began to rain, a warm wet drizzle that soon soaked them all to the skin, compounding their misery. They panted, cursed, and struggled forward. In the swampy areas, Agosto and Belmont went ahead to beat the water with branches to frighten off snakes. They could not see the sky through the overhanging branches of the tall trees, and soon few of them had the strength or inclination to look forward beyond their next footstep.

Insects were another plague added to the mud. Clouds of them in all shapes and sizes descended on them, crawling into their shirts and up their trousers, biting and stinging, fighting to get into their mouths and eyes. Few of them were familiar, and the size of the largest was appalling. There seemed to be no escape from them. One of the Russians, stung more virulently than the others, suddenly

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.