_From Mr. Allan Quatermain to Sir Henry Curtis_.
Mr. Quatermain offers the correct account of two celebrated right and
left shots, also an adventure of the stranger in the Story of an African
Farm.
DEAR CURTIS,—You ask me to give you the true account, in writing, of
those right and left shots of mine at the two lions, the crocodile, and
the eagle. The brutes are stuffed now, in the hall at home—the lions
each on a pedestal, and the alligator on the floor with the eagle in his
jaws—much as they were when I settled them and saved the Stranger. All
sorts of stories have got into the papers about the business, which was
simple enough; so, though no hand with a pen, I may as well write it all
out.
I was up on the Knobkerry River, prospecting for diamonds, in
Omomborombunga’s country. I had nobody with me but poor Jim-jim, who
afterwards met with an awful death, otherwise he would have been glad to
corroborate my tale, if it needed it. One night I had come back tired to
camp, when I found a stranger sitting by the fire. He was a dark, fat,
Frenchified little chap, and you won’t believe me, but it is a fact that
he wore gloves. I asked him to stay the night, of course, and inspanned
the waggons in laager, for Omomborombunga’s impis were out, swearing to
wash their spears in the blood of The Great White Liar—a Portuguese
traveller probably; if not, I don’t know who he can have been; perhaps
this stranger: he gave no name. Well, we had our biltong together, and
the Stranger put himself outside a good deal of the very little brandy I
had left. We got yarning, so to speak, and I told him a few of the
curious adventures that naturally fall to the lot of a man in those wild
countries. The Stranger did not say much, but kept playing with a huge
carved walking-stick that he had. Presently he said, “Look at this
stick; I bought it from a boy on a South African Farm. Do you understand
what the carvings mean?”
“Hanged if I do!” I said, after turning it about.
“Well, do you see that figure?” and he touched a thing like a Noah out of
a child’s ark. “That was a hunter like you, my friend, but not in all
respects. That hunter pursued a vast white bird with silver wings,
sailing in the everlasting blue.”
“Everlasting bosh!” said I; “there is no bird of the kind on the veldt.”
“That bird was Truth,” says the Stranger, “and, judging from the anecdote
you tell me about the Babyan woman and the Zulu medicine-man, it is a
bird _you_ don’t trouble yourself with much, my friend.”
This was a pretty cool thing to say to a man whose veracity is known like
a proverb from Sheba’s Breasts to the Zambesi.
_Foide Macumazahn_, the Zulus say, meaning as true as a yarn of Allan
Quatermain’s. Well, my blood was up; no man shall call Allan Quatermain
a liar. The fellow was going on with a prodigious palaver about a white
feather of Truth, and Mount Sinai, and the Land of Absolute Negation, and
I don’t know what, but I signified to him that if he did not believe my
yarns I did not want his company. “I’m sorry to turn you out,” I said,
“for there are lions around”—indeed they were roaring to each other—“and
you will have a parroty time. But you apologise, or you go!”
He laughed his short thick laugh. “I am a man who hopes nothing, feels
nothing, fears nothing, and believes nothing that you tell me!”
I got up and went for him with my fists, and whether he feared nothing or
not I don’t know; but he scooted, dropping a yellow French novel, by one
Catulle Mendes, that I could make neither head nor tail of. I afterwards
heard that there was something about this stranger in a book called “The
Story of an African Farm,” which I once began, but never finished, not
being able to understand most of it, and being vexed by the gross
improbability of the girl not marrying the baby’s father, he being ready
and willing to make her an honest woman. However, I am no critic, but a
plain man who tells a plain tale, and I believe persons of soul admire
the book very much. Any way, it does not say who the Stranger was—an
allegorical kind of bagman I fancy; but I am not done with him yet.
Out he went into the dark, where hundreds of lions could be plainly seen
making love (at which season they are very dangerous) by the flashes of
lightning.
It was a terrific yet beautiful spectacle, and one which I can never
forget. The black of night would suddenly open like a huge silver
flower, deep within deep, till you almost fancied you could see within
the gates of heaven. The hills stood out dark against the illimitable
splendour, and on every koppie you saw the huge lions, like kittens at
play, roaring till you could scarcely hear the thunder. The rain was
rushing like a river, all glittering like diamonds, and then, in the
twinkling of an eye, all was black as a wolf’s mouth till the next flash.
The lightning, coming from all quarters, appeared to meet above me, and
now was red, now golden, now silver again, while the great cat-like
beasts, as they leaped or lay, looked like gold, red, and silver lions,
reminding me of the signs of public-houses in old England, far away.
Meantime the donga beneath roared with the flooded torrent that the rain
was bringing down from the heights of Umbopobekatanktshiu.
I stood watching the grand spectacle for some time, rather pitying the
Stranger who was out in it, by no fault of mine. Then I knocked the
ashes out of my pipe, ate a mealy or two, and crept into my _kartel_,
{184} and slept the sleep of the just.
About dawn I woke. The thunder had rolled away like a bad dream. The
long level silver shafts of the dawn were flooding the heights, raindrops
glittered like diamonds on every kopje and karroo bush, leaving the deep
donga bathed in the solemn pall of mysterious night.
My thoughts went rapidly over the millions of leagues of land and sea,
where life, that perpetual problem, was now awaking to another day of
struggle and temptation. Then the golden arrows of the day followed
fast. The silver and blue sky grew roseate with that wide wild blush
which testifies to the modest delight of nature, satisfied and grateful
for her silent existence and her amorous repose. I breakfasted, went
down into the donga with a black boy, poor Jim-jim, who was afterwards,
as I said, to perish by an awful fate, otherwise he would testify to the
truth of my plain story. I began poking among the rocks in the dry basin
of the donga, {185} and had just picked up a pebble—I knew it by the
soapy feel for a diamond. Uncut it was about three times the size of the
koh-i-noor, say 1,000 carats, and I was rejoicing in my luck when I heard
the scream of a human being in the last agony of terror. Looking up, I
saw that on either side of the donga, which was about twenty feet wide, a
great black lion and lioness were standing with open jaws, while some
fifty yards in front of me an alligator, in a deep pool of the flooded
donga, was stretching his open snout and gleaming teeth greedily upwards.
Over head flew an eagle, and _in mid-air between_, as I am a living and
honourable man, a human being was leaping the chasm. He had been pursued
by the lion on my left, and had been driven to attempt the terrible leap;
but if he crossed he was certain to fall into the jaws of the lion on my
right, while if he fell short in his jump, do you see, the alligator was
ready for him below, and the great golden eagle watched the business from
above, in case he attempted to escape _that_ way.
All this takes long to tell, though it was passing in a flash of time.
Dropping the diamond (which must have rolled into a crevice of the rock,
for I never saw it again), I caught up my double-barrelled rifle (one of
Wesson & Smith’s), aimed at the lion on the right hand of the donga with
my right barrel, and then hastily fired my left at the alligator. When
the smoke cleared away, the man had reached the right side of the donga
safe and sound. Seeing that the alligator was dying, I loaded again,
bowled over the lioness on the left, settled the eagle’s business (he
fell dead into the jaws of the dying alligator, which closed on him with
a snap). I then climbed the wall of the donga, and there lay, fainting,
the Stranger of last night—the man who feared nothing—the blood of the
dead lion trickling over him. His celebrated allegorical walking-stick
from the African Farm had been broken into two pieces by the bullet after
it (the bullet) had passed through the head of the lion. And, as the
“Ingoldsby Legends” say, “nobody was one penny the worse,” except the
wild beasts. The man, however, had had a parroty time, and it was a good
hour before I could bring him round, during which he finished my brandy.
He still wore gloves. What he was doing in Omuborumbunga’s country I do
not know to this day. I never found the diamond again, though I hunted
long. But I must say that two better right and left shots, considering
that I had no time to aim, and that they were really snapshots, I never
remember to have made in my long experience.
This is the short and the long of the matter, which was talked of a good
deal in the Colony, and about which, I am told, some inaccurate accounts
have got into the newspapers. I hate writing, as you know, and don’t
pretend to give a literary colour to this little business of the shots,
but merely tell a “plain, unvarnished tale,” as the “Ingoldsby Legends”
say.
As to the Stranger, what he was doing there, or who he was, or where he
is now, I can tell you nothing. He told me he was bound for “the
almighty mountains of Dry-facts and Realities,” which he kindly pointed
out to me among the carvings of his walking-stick. He then sighed
wearily, very wearily, and scooted. I think he came to no good; but he
never came in my way again.
And now you know the yarn of the two stuffed lions and the alligator with
the eagle in his jaws.
Ever yours,