Text 5. Phantom travellers

Text 5. Film stunts

CRASHHHH! AAAAAGH! OOOOOOOFFFF! B-B-B-B-B-BANGGG! The star of the film is on fire. Someone shoots him, and blood hits the wall from a hole in his back. He falls back through a window – a closed window. Broken glass flies everywhere. He falls ten meters to the street. A car drives over his body. And his clothes continue to burn...

Of course the actor is perfectly all right – because he didn't fall through the window. It was a 'stuntman'. Stuntmen and stuntwomen do all the dangerous things which you see (or you think you see) on the screen. And the stuntman was probably all right, because they are always very careful.

In old cowboy films, horses fell down when a wire pulled their feet.

They always fell on special soft ground. But they often hurt their necks

or their backs, and they sometimes died. Now it is illegal to use wires.

Today they teach horses how to fall. It takes a long time, but it is much

safer.

OUCH! In fact, this is not really dangerous at all. The window is not

made of glass. In old films it was made of sugar, and now there is a

special kind of very expensive plastic. Tables and chairs are made of

light balsa wood. And they are already half cut in the right places. So

they break into little pieces, and the stuntperson's head stays in one

piece!

Fire is the most dangerous thing of all. The stuntperson wears a special

suit under normal clothes. The fire comes from a sort of gel made of

alcohol. This gel produces three or four centimeters of vapour, and then

flames above that. So the flames do not touch the clothes themselves.

This is not a model, or a camera trick. It is a real stuntman named Jerry Hewitt. He fell 23 meters and landed on a gigantic air bag made of nylon. 'It's not easy." says Jerry. 'If you land in the wrong way, you can break an arm or a leg - or even your back. And of course you have to be sure to land on the air bag! From 23 meters up, in a burning ski-lift, it looks very small.'

Despite the fact that explorers and great travellers tend to be hard-headed and practical, many of them have sensed a ghostly companion on their travels. Marco Polo was one of the first to describe this. During the thirteenth century, he crossed the Lop Nor desert on the way to China, and told the following spooky tale: ‘When a man is riding by night through this desert and something happens to make him stop and lose touch with his companions... then he hears spirits talking in such a way that they seem to be his companions. Sometimes, indeed, they call him by name...’

Other explorers have also written about this feeling. Despite the failure of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic journey – his ship broke up in the ice the written account of it, South, has become famous. T S Eliot was inspired by it when he wrote The Wasteland. Shackleton wrote: ‘I know that during that long march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers it often seemed to me that we were four, not three.’

Explorer Steve Martin and his two team mates even made ‘the fourth man’ an official member of the party when they were crossing Greenland! Even though there were only three men on the expedition, they felt a fourth presence who always walked to the left of the party. They called him Fletch and he even got into the record books. ‘It was a bit of a joke,’ Martin says, ‘but having a fourth member along meant you could always blame something on Fletch!’ despite feeling his presence constantly, Martin never actually saw Fletch. It is unlikely that so many serious explorers were lying. Were their minds affected by the difficult conditions experienced during their travels or could there be another mere mysterious explanation?

Дата добавления: 2017-02-01