A NOTE ON THE TEXT
This Project Gutenberg edition is based on the text of the story asreprinted in the collection, "Allan's Wife and other tales."
The story which is narrated in the following pages came to me from thelips of my old friend Allan Quatermain, or Hunter Quatermain, as we usedto call him in South Africa. He told it to me one evening when I wasstopping with him at the place he bought in Yorkshire. Shortly afterthat, the death of his only son so unsettled him that he immediatelyleft England, accompanied by two companions, his old fellow-voyagers,Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into thedark heart of Africa. He is persuaded that a white people, of which hehas heard rumours all his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in thevast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find thembefore he dies. This is the wild quest upon which he and his companionshave departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they never will return.One letter only have I received from the old gentleman, dated from amission station high up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about threehundred miles north of Zanzibar. In it he says that they have gonethrough many hardships and adventures, but are alive and well, and havefound traces which go far towards making him hope that the results oftheir wild quest may be a "magnificent and unexampled discovery." Igreatly fear, however, that all he has discovered is death; for thisletter came a long while ago, and nobody has heard a single word of theparty since. They have totally vanished.
It was on the last evening of my stay at his house that he told theensuing story to me and Captain Good, who was dining with him. He hadeaten his dinner and drunk two or three glasses of old port, just tohelp Good and myself to the end of the second bottle. It was an unusualthing for him to do, for he was a most abstemious man, having conceived,as he used to say, a great horror of drink from observing its effectsupon the class of colonists—hunters, transport riders andothers—amongst whom he had passed so many years of his life.Consequently the good wine took more effect on him than it would havedone on most men, sending a little flush into his wrinkled cheeks, andmaking him talk more freely than usual.
Dear old man! I can see him now, as he went limping up and down thevestibule, with his grey hair sticking up in scrubbing-brush fashion,his shrivelled yellow face, and his large dark eyes, that were as keenas any hawk's, and yet soft as a buck's. The whole room was hung withtrophies of his numerous hunting expeditions, and he had some storyabout every one of them, if only he could be got to tell it. Generallyhe would not, for he was not very fond of narrating his own adventures,but to-night the port wine made him more communicative.
"Ah, you brute!" he said, stopping beneath an unusually large skull of alion, which was fixed just over the mantelpiece, beneath a long row ofguns, its jaws distended to their utmost width. "Ah, you brute! youhave given me a lot of trouble for the last dozen years, and will, Isuppose to my dying day."
"Tell us the yarn, Quatermain," said Good. "You have often promised totell me, and you never have."
"You had better not ask me to," he answered, "for it is a longish one."
"All right," I said, "the evening is young, and there is some moreport."
Thus adjured, he fille