Curtis and Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into the dark heart of Africa.  He is persuaded that a white people, of which he has heard rumours all his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in the vast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find them before he dies.  This is the wild quest upon which he and his companions have departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they never will return.  One letter only have I received from the old gentleman, dated from a mission station high up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about three hundred miles north of Zanzibar; in it he says that they have gone through many hardships and adventures, but are alive and well, and have found traces which go far toward making him hope that the results of their wild quest may be a “magnificent and unexampled discovery.”  I greatly fear, however, that all he has discovered is death; for this letter came a long while ago, and nobody has heard a single word of the party since.  They have totally vanished.

It was on the last evening of my stay at his house that he told the ensuing story to me and Captain Good, who was dining with him.  He had eaten his dinner and drunk two or three glasses of old port, just to help Good and myself to the end of the second bottle.  It was an unusual thing 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 effects upon the class of colonists—­hunters, transport-riders and others—­amongst whom he had passed so many years of his life.  Consequently the good wine took more effect on him than it would have done on most men, sending a little flush into his wrinkled cheeks, and making him talk more freely than usual.

Dear old man!  I can see him now, as he went limping up and down the vestibule, with his gray hair sticking up in scrubbing-brush fashion, his shrivelled yellow face, and his large dark eyes, that were as keen as any hawk’s, and yet soft as a buck’s.  The whole room was hung with trophies of his numerous hunting expeditions, and he had some story about every one of them, if only he could be got to tell it.  Generally he 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 a lion, which was fixed just over the mantelpiece, beneath a long row of guns, its jaws distended to their utmost width.  “Ah, you brute! you have given me a lot of trouble for the last dozen years, and will, I suppose to my dying day.”

“Tell us the yarn, Quatermain,” said Good.  “You have often promised to tell 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 more port.”

Thus adjured, he filled his pipe from a jar of coarse-cut Boer tobacco that was always standing on the mantelpiece, and still walking up and down the room, began: