Sensei of Shambala. Book IV. Anastasia Novykh

got the gills when she’d been sitting under the water for ten minutes. And the dolphins felt her their relative at once! Have you seen that horizontal races!”

      We laughed and the guys began joking about it and asking me about my feelings. Some of them also wanted to take a ride but this time attention of the dolphins changed to another kind of a game. Probably when I have been still floundering in the water, one of the stripes fell down unnoticeably from my hair. I used it to tie up the hair so that it would not hinder during swimming. And the smaller dolphin picked it up to his side fin and began racing with it around in circles. And the second dolphin started catching him up, archly hunting this stripe. Even when I “sacrificed” them the second stripe for fun, they still tried to take it away from each other in a such funny way that it made all our group laugh.

      Part of the guys left to observe the game of the dolphins and even tried to take part in it, the rest went just swimming. Eugene was most active in diving trying to get rid of some intrusive green flies which circled around him even after he went into the water. What was most strange is that they intended to sit only on him, without disturbing anybody else.

      “What’s up?!” Eugene got indignant laughing. “Mosquitoes ate me in the night and flies in the morning. Where did they get from, damn them!”

      In reply Volodya who was swimming not far from him noticed, “Of course, I’m not against flies as insects but I should say that flies won’t sit on something without a reason!”

      Stas picked up this joke and began developing it. “Well, you should be done from something in order to attract their attention to you.”

      “You want to say that I’m that something that doesn’t sink?!” Eugene grinned with indignation.

      Victor who listened to their conversation laughed together with the guys and suggested, “We can easily check it!”

      He rushed to drown Eugene with a boyish enthusiasm. The last one slipped out his hands, felt down aside and shouted, “It’s a lie! You will get into it but won’t catch it! That something doesn’t sink in the fire and doesn’t burn in the water!”

      The guys rolled again laughing after the last Eugene’s pun.

      Time of this unusual swimming with dolphins together with such a merry company flew by unnoticeably. Having probably played enough the dolphins made a few circles of honour around us and having left one stripe to Sensei, took the other one with them to the sea. We also began going from the water to the sand.

      “They are really intelligent creatures!” Victor said with delight looking back to the swimming away dolphins.

      “You can’t even imagine how intelligent they are,” emphasized Sensei. “How amazing their “social” ingenuity is. They don’t just follow the programmed standard instincts, but agree on their actions in favour of the population in general, its stability and self-preservation.” And he added with a smile. “By the way, unlike human demos kratos, they have a real democracy.”

      “What do you mean?” Victor didn’t grasp.

      “They don’t have special distinctions between leaders and subordinates. The leader differs from others only by the fact that he takes over responsibility in the critical situation.”

      “In which way?” asked Kostya who listened to them with interest.

      “Well… For example, a ship is coming close to dolphins. One or two dolphins-leaders swim close to it, investigate the object in details, and the others wait on secure distance for their decision whether they have to fear this object or to ignore it, etc.”

      “So to say, a leader is the one who shows his bum in the critical situation?” Volodya specified with a smile. “Well, then that’s a true democracy. We don’t expect this even from the authorities of the ministry, moreover from the government.”

      “That’s right.” Sensei nodded grinning. “People have something to be learnt from dolphins.” And in a while he added. “They really have a highly organized society. And “social” organization of dolphins is in some sense a copy of the primary structure of the human society about which people remember little and because of lack of knowledge they call it primitive matriarchy.”

      “Which knowledge do you mean?” Nikolai Andreevich got interested at once.

      “I will tell you later some day,” Sensei replied. And reaching the coast he suggested, “Wouldn’t you mind to have a breakfast? What do you think?”

      Our company supported this idea and began to cook the late breakfast with enthusiasm.

* * *

      Despite the collective activities in cooking food, it was eaten with real appetite only Sensei, Nikolai Andreevich and, what surprised me, I. I had such an appetite as if I have been starving for a week. The other guys ate with no interest, sitting around the table more to keep us company. They didn’t stop joking. Eugene was our star. By the way he didn’t take a seat at all but was walking in circles around us, picking fruits or biscuits. Somehow he wasn’t able to sit. As soon as he tried to take a seat, he was immediately accompanied by green flies around him that made attempts to sit on the food. So the guys lost the patience and having given him a paper-bag with food sent him to the “long walking journey”, so to say, far from our common table.

      “So, Eugene, are we going to visit Pripyat?” Stas asked him with a cunning smile.

      “What for?” He didn’t understand.

      “What for? To catch crayfish.”

      “Fie, I beg you, don’t remind me about them. Otherwise my mind will wrongly interpret your offer and will give a signal to the stomach so that it would return all its contents to the irritant which sent it this word impulse.”

      “Well! What a vocabulary,” Stas grinned. “It seems like Ariman completely cleaned up your ground, up to the scalp foundation.”

      “Right you are,” Victor nodded with a smile. “He began to sing like an important bird.”

      In reply Eugene mumbled like an old man and with a creak voice of an experienced man answered, “Well, when life squeezes you, you will sing in falsetto voice! Where shall you hide from its kind pincers? However good or bad but it’s my own Fate.”

      The company laughed and Stas uttered, “So you are a masochist besides all?! I didn’t know it. Only at rest-time we discover all personal features of a friend.”

      “But seriously, Eugene, how do you feel?” Nikolai Andreevich asked a pragmatic question. “Do you feel a bit better after the “heavy morning”?”

      “That’s all right, doc,” replied the guy. “My symptoms are already over.” And having caught skilfully a green fly circling around him he added, “just the clinical presentations left.”

      While the seniour guys were joking, our young company has been talking quietly about other things. Eating food I all the time asked my friends to hand me over either a fresh tomato, or a cucumber which I couldn’t take myself as they were far from my plate. They didn’t eat practically anything and Tatyana “poured oil to the flames”, “I wish I could eat that caviar from the golden jar on the table of Ariman.”

      “Or one of those salads, at least,” Kostya added dreamily.

      “Or grilled shark pieces,” inserted Andrew. “Well, Ariman had a first class food, not this one.”

      The guy nodded to the table with disgust.

      “Don’t tell me,” backed him Tatiana and making a wry face told me, “How can you eat all of that?”

      “Me?” My person got surprised. “With great appetite! Why don’t you like this food? Everything is fresh and delicious.”

      “Hem, delicious,” she mimicked me and declared arrogantly in an expert tone, “You’d better try that food yesterday, when there was such a chance. Then you would understand the difference!”

      “This food is also good!” I answered merrily trying to clear the air of discontent among my friends.

      “This