The Adventures Of Indiana Jones Read Online Free PDF Page A

place could throw at you, then you weren’t going to get out alive. He raced. He sprinted insanely toward the exit as the great stone crushed along the passageway behind him. He threw himself forward toward the opening of light and hit the thick grass outside just before the boulder slammed against the exit, sealing the Temple shut forever.
    Exhausted, out of breath, he lay on his back.
    Too close, he thought. Too close for any form of comfort. He wanted to sleep. He wanted nothing more than the chance to close his eyes, transport himself into the darkness that brings relief, dreamless and deep relief. You could have died a hundred deaths in there, he realized. You could have died more deaths than any man might expect in a lifetime. And then he smiled, sat up, turned the idol around and around in his hands.
    But worth it, he thought. Worth the whole thing.
    He stared at the golden piece.
    He was still staring at it when he saw a shadow fall across him.
    The shadow startled him into a sitting position. Squinting, he looked up. There were two Hovitos warriors looking down at him, their faces painted in the ferocious colors of battle, their long bamboo blowguns held erect as spears. But it wasn’t the presence of the Indians that worried Indy now; it was the sight of the white man who stood between them in a safari outfit and pith helmet. For a long time Indy said nothing, letting the full sense of recognition dawn on him. The man in the pith helmet smiled, and the smile was frost, lethal.
    “Belloq,” Indy said.
    Of all the people in the world, Belloq.
    Indy looked away from the Frenchman’s face for a moment, glanced down at the idol in his hand, then stared beyond Belloq to the edge of the trees, where there were about thirty more Hovitos warriors standing in a line. And next to the Indians stood Barranca. Barranca, staring past Indy with a stupid, greedy smile on his face. A smile that turned slowly to a look of bewilderment and then, more rapidly, to a cold, vacant expression, which Indy recognized as signaling death.
    The Indians on either side of the traitorous Peruvian released his arms, and Barranca toppled forward. His back was riddled with darts.
    “My dear Dr. Jones,” Belloq said. “You have a knack of choosing quite the wrong friends.”
    Indy said nothing. He watched Belloq reach down and pick the idol from his hand. Belloq savored the relic for a time, turning it this way and that, his expression one of deep appreciation.
    Belloq nodded his head slightly, a curt gesture that suggested an incongruous politeness, a sense of civility.
    “You may have thought I’d given up. But again we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away.”
    Indy looked in the direction of the warriors. “And the Hovitos expect you to hand the idol over to them?”
    “Quite,” Belloq said.
    Indy laughed. “Naïve of them.”
    “As you say,” Belloq remarked. “If only you spoke their language, you could advise them otherwise, of course.”
    “Of course,” Indy said.
    He watched as Belloq turned toward the grouped warriors and lifted the idol in the air; and then, in a remarkable display of unified movement that might have been choreographed, rehearsed, the warriors laid themselves face down on the ground. A moment of sudden stillness, of primitive religious awe. In other circumstances, Indy thought, I might be impressed enough to hang around and watch.
    In other circumstances, but not now.
    He raised himself slowly to his knees, looked at the back of Belloq, glanced quickly once more at the prostrate warriors—and then he was off, moving fast, running toward the trees, waiting for that moment when the Indians would raise themselves up and the air would be dense with darts from the blowguns.
    He plunged into the trees when he heard Belloq shout from behind, screaming in a language that was presumably that of the Hovitos, and then he was sprinting through the foliage, back to the river and the amphibian