Allan Quatermain.
I MEET SIR HENRY CURTIS
It is a curious thing that at my age—fifty-five
last birthday—I should find myself taking
up a pen to try to write a history. I wonder
what sort of a history it will be when I have finished
it, if ever I come to the end of the trip! I
have done a good many things in my life, which seems
a long one to me, owing to my having begun work so
young, perhaps. At an age when other boys are
at school I was earning my living as a trader in the
old Colony. I have been trading, hunting, fighting,
or mining ever since. And yet it is only eight
months ago that I made my pile. It is a big pile
now that I have got it—I don’t yet
know how big—but I do not think I would
go through the last fifteen or sixteen months again
for it; no, not if I knew that I should come out safe
at the end, pile and all. But then I am a timid
man, and dislike violence; moreover, I am almost sick
of adventure. I wonder why I am going to write
this book: it is not in my line. I am not
a literary man, though very devoted to the Old Testament
and also to the “Ingoldsby Legends.”
Let me try to set down my reasons, just to see if
I have any.
First reason: Because Sir Henry Curtis and Captain
John Good asked me.
Second reason: Because I am laid up here at Durban
with the pain in my left leg. Ever since that
confounded lion got hold of me I have been liable
to this trouble, and being rather bad just now, it
makes me limp more than ever. There must be some
poison in a lion’s teeth, otherwise how is it
that when your wounds are healed they break out again,
generally, mark you, at the same time of year that
you got your mauling? It is a hard thing when
one has shot sixty-five lions or more, as I have in
the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should
chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks
the routine of the thing, and putting other considerations
aside, I am an orderly man and don’t like that.
This is by the way.
Third reason: Because I want my boy Harry, who
is over there at the hospital in London studying to
become a doctor, to have something to amuse him and
keep him out of mischief for a week or so. Hospital
work must sometimes pall and grow rather dull, for
even of cutting up dead bodies there may come satiety,
and as this history will not be dull, whatever else
it may be, it will put a little life into things for
a day or two while Harry is reading of our adventures.
Fourth reason and last: Because I am going to
tell the strangest story that I remember. It
may seem a queer thing to say, especially considering
that there is no woman in it—except Foulata.
Stop, though! there is Gagaoola, if she was a woman,
and not a fiend. But she was a hundred at least,
and therefore not marriageable, so I don’t count
her. At any rate, I can safely say that there
is not a petticoat in the whole history.
