Levkas Man Read Online Free

dining room sideboard, and as I sipped the old familiar liquor and browsed through his bookshelves, I wondered what he had done that had brought such a severe reprimand from a man who seemed to have been both tutor and a life-long friend.
    The books ranged over everything associated with anthropology, and words and dates, sometimes whole passages, had been underlined; most of them had notes scribbled in the margin. A passage about the behaviour of an unusual insect caught my eye, chiefly because I had actually seen the coral-coloured flower take wing and it took me back to the dim-remembered life in Kenya.
    The oblong blossom of this artificial flower is formed by the clustering of moths on a dead twig. An example of insect camouflage — yes, but it is something much more. Shake the twig and the moths rise in flight, then after a while they settle again on the twig and for a moment they are just moths of different colours crawling over each other with no apparent purpose. But purpose there is, for in another moment order has replaced chaos and, suddenly, there is the flower again, the full flower, all coral — so perfect a blaze, so natural a form that humans are fooled into leaning down for the scent and birds ignore it in the flighting search for food. But there is more to this wonder yet, for the flattids have not assumed a natural camouflage; there is, in fact, no real blossom that approximates to the form they take instinctively. They have thought this form up for themselves, creating it in the same way that an abstract painter creates a picture. And if you breed these little insects, you will find that each batch of eggs produces at least one with all-green wings, whose place will always be at the tip, several with shades of green tinged with coral, and the rest pure coral. In other words, the whole fantastic hoax is self-perpetuating from the egg to the twig .
    For some reason insects and birds had meant more to me in those early years in Kenya than all the big game. Even the long journeys through the bushes in the battered old Plymouth were remembered chiefly for the birds around Lake Victoria. The passage was heavily underlined with a date scribbled in the margin. And on the second shelf I found an album of photographs with pictures of caves and digs. One of them, heavily ringed in red, was of a scattering of bones, including the lower jaw and part of a cranium that looked human, laid out in the dirt at the bottom of some pit. Against the picture he had written: Only a hundred miles from Olduvai ! The picture was not a very clear one, but further on in the album they became sharper and less faded, as though he had been able to switch to a better camera, and the captions ranged from Africa to Turkey, even Russia.
    It seemed strange that he had never been able to communicate his own enthusiasm to me. I could remember his voice, dry and detached, talking about bones and flints and ape-men with long, impossible names, and it had all meant nothing to me, nothing at all. No doubt I was a great disappointment to him, but I couldn’t help being the boy I was, and beating me hadn’t helped. I could remember those beatings more distinctly than anything he had ever told me—his impatience, that barely concealed sadistic streak.
    The books, and the geneva perhaps, made me feel suddenly sad. If he had gone about it differently, our relationship might have been changed. My life, my outlook, my whole behaviour pattern, too. I had finished my drink and was just on the point of going to bed, when my eye was caught by a group of foreign books on the bottom shelf, the dust wrappers still on and the titles curiously anonymous in an unknown alphabet. They contained no marked passages, no dates, but some of the pictures had been reproduced from the photographs in the album. They were, in fact, duplicate copies of two titles published in Russian. And on the same shelf, I found other copies published in Berlin, Prague and