It was one, absolutely one in this close box where there was so not enough air for his lungs and where the sun only through thick rods of a lattice looked, casting from it a trellised shadow on a white wall.

For the third day Adam calmed down. It ceased to go. Sat down on a floor in a corner, a back to light, put a chin on the raised knees and as if stiffened. It touched nobody any more. To it doctors and scientists entered, but he sat silently, not answering questions and without moving. And still ate nothing, but greedy drank.

Adam began to grow thin extraordinary quickly. In the evenings it began to be in a fever. He sat, knocking teeth, covered cold then. Cough began to torment him soon, and during fits of coughing blood even more often began to be shown.

Doctors swung the heads:

– Transient consumption… These mountain inhabitants so difficult adapt to air of valleys…

One night after the most severe fit of coughing blood suddenly rushed from his throat and filled in all half of the room. Adam fell to a floor. He died…

When he recovered after a faint, he quietly and hoarsely asked the doctor:

– There … – And he showed the door.

The doctor understood. Adam wants on air. Perhaps, last time to look at the sky. He choked. But unless it is possible to take out the heavy pulmonary patient in crude autumn night on air, under a drizzle!

The doctor negatively shook the head.

Adam looked at him with plaintive eyes of the dying dog.

– No, no. To you it is harmful, Adam … – And, having addressed the hospital attendant, the doctor gave an order: – A pillow with oxygen…

Oxygen prolonged Adam’s tortures till the morning. In the morning when the pale beam of the sun lit a white wall, having drawn on it with a shadow a window lattice, something like a smile, same pale as a beam, flashed on Adam’s lips. It began an agony. He occasionally cried out some unclear words… He did not pronounce any French word.

At ten hours twenty minutes mornings Adam died. And at one o’clock in the afternoon the official notice that Adam needs to be discharged from hospital as it is decided to send it to the Himalayas was received…

* * *

– After all he well made that he hurried to die – without hiding joy, the anatomist said, starting anatomization of a corpse of Adam.

Any corpse was not so carefully prepared. Everything was measured, weighed, carefully recorded. Opening – gave a lot of extremely interesting. Apendix was very big sizes. Muskulus erectus cocigum was clearly allocated, muscles of ears were very developed. Brain… About Adam’s brain professor Likorn wrote the whole volume. Adam’s skeleton was carefully built, placed in a glass show-window and put in the museum with an inscription:

HOMO HIMALAJUS

In the first days in the museum at a show-window with Adam’s skeleton crowded to many people. Among visitors curious looks marked out Clotilda de Troyes and the famous actress…

Adam stopped being dangerous to «cultural» society and began to serve science…

The investigator Paolo Minetti carelessly threw eye-glasses on the opened «business», carried out by the left palm on a high forehead, the aquiline nose acting from red, thick cheeks and clamped the turning gray small beard.

– Take away it!.

Three carabineers, with checkers bare, in a black form with red edgings and in the cocked hats decorated with feathers took away the arrested – the young man in a working suit, with a suntanned face on which the prison already put a grayish raid.

Having remained one, the investigator slowly lit a long sigarette, drank from a glass ice water with red wine and wearily looked in a window. The window lattice stood out on the sparkling surface of the Mediterranean Sea clearly. In the distance the Pisa hills became blue.