Power of the Sword [antikvár]

The fog smothered the ocean, muting all colour and sound. It undulated and seethed as the first eddy of the morning breeze washed in towards the land. The trawler lay in the fog three miles offshore on the edge of the current line, where the vast upwellings from the oceanic depths, rich in life-bringing plankton, met the gentle inshore waters in a line of darker green. Lothar De La Rey stood in the wheelhouse and leaned on the spoked wooden wheel as he peered out into the fog. He loved , these quiet charged minutes of waiting in the dawn. He could j feel the electric tingle starting in his blood, the lust of the huntsman that had sustained him countless times before, an addiction as powerful as opium or strong spirits. Casting back in his mind he remembered that soft pink dawn creeping stealthily over the Magersfontein Hills as he lay against the parapets of the henches and waited for the lines of Highland infantry to come in out of the darkness, to march with kilts swinging and bonnet ribbons flutting onto their waiting Mausers, and his skin prickled with gooseflesh at the memory. There had been a hundred other dawns since then, waiting ) like this to go out against great game—shaggy-maned Kalahari ., lion, scabby old buffalo with heads of armoured horn, sagacious grey elephant with wrinkled hides and precious teeth of long ivory, but now the game was smaller than any other and yet in 'i its multitudes as vast as the ocean from which it came. His train of thought was interrupted as the boy came down the i open deck from the galley. He was barefoot and his legs were long and brown and strong. He was almost as tall as a grown 1