A Tale of Three Lions
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H. Rider Haggard >> A Tale of Three Lions
*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
Etext prepared by John Bickers, jbickers@ihug.co.nz
Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com
and Emma Dudding, emma_302@hotmail.com
A TALE OF THREE LIONS
by H. Rider Haggard
CHAPTER I
THE INTEREST ON TEN SHILLINGS
Most of you will have heard that Allan Quatermain, who was one of the
party that discovered King Solomon's mines some little time ago, and
who afterwards came to live in England near his friend Sir Henry
Curtis. He went back to the wilderness again, as these old hunters
almost invariably do, on one pretext or another.[*] They cannot endure
civilization for very long, its noise and racket and the omnipresence
of broad-clothed humanity proving more trying to their nerves than the
dangers of the desert. I think that they feel lonely here, for it is a
fact that is too little understood, though it has often been stated,
that there is no loneliness like the loneliness of crowds, especially
to those who are unaccustomed to them. "What is there in the world,"
old Quatermain would say, "so desolate as to stand in the streets of a
great city and listen to the footsteps falling, falling, multitudinous
as the rain, and watch the white line of faces as they hurry past, you
know not whence, you know not whither? They come and go, their eyes
meet yours with a cold stare, for a moment their features are written
on your mind, and then they are gone for ever. You will never see them
again; they will never see you again; they come up out of the unknown,
and presently they once more vanish into the unknown, taking their
secrets with them. Yes, that is loneliness pure and undefiled; but to
one who knows and loves it, the wilderness is not lonely, because the
spirit of nature is ever there to keep the wanderer company. He finds
companions in the winds--the sunny streams babble like Nature's
children at his feet; high above them, in the purple sunset, are domes
and minarets and palaces, such as no mortal man has built, in and out
of whose flaming doors the angels of the sun seem to move continually.
And there, too, is the wild game, following its feeding-grounds in
great armies, with the springbuck thrown out before for skirmishers;
then rank upon rank of long-faced blesbuck, marching and wheeling like
infantry; and last the shining troops of quagga, and the fierce-eyed
shaggy vilderbeeste to take, as it were, the place of the cossack host
that hangs upon an army's flanks.
[*] This of course was written before Mr. Quatermain's account of the
adventures in the newly-discovered country of Zu-Vendis of
himself, Sir Henry Curtis, and Capt. John Good had been received
in England.--Editor.
"Oh, no," he would say, "the wilderness is not lonely, for, my boy,
remember that the further you get from man, the nearer you grow to
God," and though this is a saying that might well be disputed, it is
one I am sure that anybody will easily understand who has watched the
sun rise and set on the limitless deserted plains, and seen the
thunder chariots of the clouds roll in majesty across the depths of
unfathomable sky.
Well, at any rate we went back again, and now for many months I have
heard nothing at all of him, and to be frank, I greatly doubt if
anybody will ever hear of him again. I fear that the wilderness, that
has for so many years been a mother to him, will now also prove his
grave and the grave of those who accompanied him, for the quest upon
which he and they have started is a wild one indeed.
But while he was in England for those three years or so between his
return from the successful discovery of the wise king's buried
treasures, and the death of his only son, I saw a great deal of old
Allan Quatermain. I had known him years before in Africa, and after he
came home, whenever I had nothing better to do, I used to run up to
Yorkshire and stay with him, and in this way I at one time and another
heard many of the incidents of his past life, and most curious some of
them were. No man can pass all those years following the rough
existence of an elephant-hunter without meeting with many strange
adventures, and in one way and another old Quatermain has certainly
seen his share. Well, the story that I am going to tell you in the
following pages is one of the later of these adventures, though I
forget the exact year in which it happened. at any rate I know that it
was the only trip upon which he took his son Harry (who is since dead)
with him, and that Harry was then about fourteen. And now for the
story, which I will repeat, as nearly as I can, in the words in which
Hunter Quatermain told it to me one night in the old oak-panelled
vestibule of his house in Yorkshire. We were talking about gold-
mining--
"Gold-mining!" he broke in; "ah! yes, I once went gold-mining at
Pilgrims' Rest in the Transvaal, and it was after that that we had the
business about Jim-Jim and the lions. Do you know Pilgrim's Rest?
Well, it is, or was, one of the queerest little places you ever saw.
The town itself was pitched in a stony valley, with mountains all
about it, and in the middle of such scenery as one does not often get
the chance of seeing. Many and many is the time that I have thrown
down my pick and shovel in disgust, clambered out of my claim, and
walked a couple of miles or so to the top of some hill. Then I would
lie down in the grass and look out over the glorious stretch of
country--the smiling valleys, the great mountains touched with gold--
real gold of the sunset, and clothed in sweeping robes of bush, and
stare into the depths of the perfect sky above; yes, and thank Heaven
I had got away from the cursing and the coarse jokes of the miners,
and the voices of those Basutu Kaffirs as they toiled in the sun, the
memory of which is with me yet.
"Well, for some months I dug away patiently at my claim, till the very
sight of a pick or of a washing-trough became hateful to me. A hundred
times a day I lamented my own folly in having invested eight hundred
pounds, which was about all that I was worth at the time, in this
gold-mining. But like other better people before me, I had been bitten
by the gold bug, and now was forced to take the consequences. I bought
a claim out of which a man had made a fortune--five or six thousand
pounds at least--as I thought, very cheap; that is, I gave him five
hundred pounds down for it. It was all that I had made by a very rough
year's elephant-hunting beyond the Zambesi, and I sighed deeply and
prophetically when I saw my successful friend, who was a Yankee, sweep
up the roll of Standard Bank notes with the lordly air of the man who
has made his fortune, and cram them into his breeches pockets. 'Well,'
I said to him--the happy vendor--'it is a magnificent property, and I
only hope that my luck will be as good as yours has been.'
"He smiled; to my excited nerves it seemed that he smiled ominously,
as he answered me in a peculiar Yankee drawl: 'I guess, stranger, as I
ain't the one to make a man quarrel with his food, more especial when
there ain't no more going of the rounds; and as for that there claim,
well, she's been a good nigger to me; but between you and me,
stranger, speaking man to man, now that there ain't any filthy lucre
between us to obscure the features of the truth, I guess she's about
worked out!'
"I gasped; the fellow's effrontery took the breath out of me. Only
five minutes before he had been swearing by all his gods--and they
appeared to be numerous and mixed--that there were half a dozen
fortunes left in the claim, and that he was only giving it up because
he was downright weary of shovelling the gold out.
"'Don't look so vexed, stranger,' went on my tormentor, 'perhaps there
is some shine in the old girl yet; anyway you are a downright good
fellow, you are, therefore you will, I guess, have a real A1
opportunity of working on the feelings of Fortune. Anyway it will
bring the muscle up upon your arm, for the stuff is uncommon stiff,
and, what is more, you will in the course of a year earn a sight more
than two thousand dollars in value of experience.'
"Then he went just in time, for in another moment I should have gone
for him, and I saw his face no more.
"Well, I set to work on the old claim with my boy Harry and half a
dozen Kaffirs to help me, which, seeing that I had put nearly all my
worldly wealth into it, was the least that I could do. And we worked,
my word, we did work--early and late we went at it--but never a bit of
gold did we see; no, not even a nugget large enough to make a scarf-
pin out of. The American gentleman had secured it all and left us the
sweepings.
"For three months this went on, till at last I had paid away all, or
very near all, that was left of her little capital in wages and food
for the Kaffirs and ourselves. When I tell you that Boer meal was
sometimes as high as four pounds a bag, you will understand that it
did not take long to run through our banking account.
"At last the crisis came. One Saturday night I had paid the men as
usual, and bought a muid of mealie meal at sixty shillings for them to
fill themselves with, and then I went with my boy Harry and sat on the
edge of the great hole that we had dug in the hill-side, and which we
had in bitter mockery named Eldorado. There we sat in the moonlight
with our feet over the edge of the claim, and were melancholy enough
for anything. Presently I pulled out my purse and emptied its contents
into my hand. There was a half-sovereign, two florins, ninepence in
silver, no coppers--for copper practically does not circulate in South
Africa, which is one of the things that make living so dear there--in
all exactly fourteen and ninepence.
"'There, Harry, my boy!' I said, 'that is the sum total of our worldly
wealth; that hole has swallowed all the rest.'
"'By George!' said Master Harry; 'I say, father, you and I shall have
to let ourselves out to work with the Kaffirs and live on mealie pap,'
and he sniggered at his unpleasant little joke.
"But I was in no mood for joking, for it is not a merry thing to dig
like anything for months and be completely ruined in the process,
especially if you happen to dislike digging, and consequently I
resented Harry's light-heartedness.
"'Be quiet, boy!' I said, raising my hand as though to give him a
cuff, with the result that the half-sovereign slipped out of it and
fell into the gulf below.
"'Oh, bother,' said I, 'it's gone.'
"'There, Dad,' said Harry, 'that's what comes of letting your angry
passions rise; now we are down to four and nine.'
"I made no answer to these words of wisdom, but scrambled down the
steep sides of the claim, followed by Harry, to hunt for my little
all. Well, we hunted and we hunted, but the moonlight is an uncertain
thing to look for half-sovereigns by, and there was some loose soil
about, for the Kaffirs had knocked off working at this very spot a
couple of hours before. I took a pick and raked away the clods of
earth with it, in the hope of finding the coin; but all in vain. At
last in sheer annoyance I struck the sharp end of the pickaxe down
into the soil, which was of a very hard nature. To my astonishment it
sunk in right up to the haft.
"'Why, Harry,' I said, 'this ground must have been disturbed!'
"'I don't think so, father,' he answered; 'but we will soon see,' and
he began to shovel out the soil with his hands. 'Oh,' he said
presently, 'it's only some old stones; the pick has gone down between
them, look!' and he began to pull at one of the stones.
"'I say, Dad,' he said presently, almost in a whisper, 'it's precious
heavy, feel it;' and he rose and gave me a round, brownish lump about
the size of a very large apple, which he was holding in both his
hands. I took it curiously and held it up to the light. It /was/ very
heavy. The moonlight fell upon its rough and filth-encrusted surface,
and as I looked, curious little thrills of excitement began to pass
through me. But I could not be sure.
"'Give me your knife, Harry,' I said.
"He did so, and resting the brown stone on my knee I scratched at its
surface. Great heavens, it was soft!
"Another second and the secret was out, we had found a great nugget of
pure gold, four pounds of it or more. 'It's gold, lad,' I said, 'it's
gold, or I'm a Dutchman!'
"Harry, with his eyes starting out of his head, glared down at the
gleaming yellow scratch that I had made upon the virgin metal, and
then burst out into yell upon yell of exultation, which went ringing
away across the silent claims like shrieks of somebody being murdered.
"'Be quiet!' I said; 'do you want every thief on the fields after
you?'
"Scarcely were the words out of my mouth when I heard a stealthy
footstep approaching. I promptly put the big nugget down and sat on
it, and uncommonly hard it was. As I did so I saw a lean dark face
poked over the edge of the claim and a pair of beady eyes searching us
out. I knew the face, it belonged to a man of very bad character known
as Handspike Tom, who had, I understood, been so named at the Diamond
Fields because he had murdered his mate with a handspike. He was now
no doubt prowling about like a human hyæna to see what he could steal.
"'Is that you, 'unter Quatermain?' he said.
"'Yes, it's I, Mr. Tom,' I answered, politely.
"'And what might all that there yelling be?' he asked. 'I was walking
along, a-taking of the evening air and a-thinking on the stars, when I
'ears 'owl after 'owl.'
"'Well, Mr. Tom,' I answered, 'that is not to be wondered at, seeing
that like yourself they are nocturnal birds.'
"''Owl after 'owl!' he repeated sternly, taking no notice of my
interpretation, 'and I stops and says, "That's murder," and I listens
again and thinks, "No, it ain't; that 'owl is the 'owl of hexultation;
some one's been and got his fingers into a gummy yeller pot, I'll
swear, and gone off 'is 'ead in the sucking of them." Now, 'unter
Quatermain, is I right? is it nuggets? Oh, lor!' and he smacked his
lips audibly--'great big yellow boys--is it them that you have just
been and tumbled across?'
"'No,' I said boldly, 'it isn't'--the cruel gleam in his black eyes
altogether overcoming my aversion to untruth, for I knew that if once
he found out what it was that I was sitting on--and by the way I have
heard of rolling in gold being spoken of as a pleasant process, but I
certainly do not recommend anybody who values comfort to try sitting
on it--I should run a very good chance of being 'handspiked' before
the night was over.
"'If you want to know what it was, Mr. Tom,' I went on, with my
politest air, although in agony from the nugget underneath--for I hold
it is always best to be polite to a man who is so ready with a
handspike--'my boy and I have had a slight difference of opinion, and
I was enforcing my view of the matter upon him; that's all.'
"'Yes, Mr. Tom,' put in Harry, beginning to weep, for Harry was a
smart boy, and saw the difficulty we were in, 'that was it--I halloed
because father beat me.'
"'Well, now, did yer, my dear boy--did yer? Well, all I can say is
that a played-out old claim is a wonderful queer sort of place to come
to for to argify at ten o'clock of night, and what's more, my sweet
youth, if ever I should 'ave the argifying of yer'--and he leered
unpleasantly at Harry--'yer won't 'oller in quite such a jolly sort 'o
way. And now I'll be saying good-night, for I don't like disturbing of
a family party. No, I ain't that sort of man, I ain't. Good-night to
yer, 'unter Quatermain--good-night to yer, my argified young one;' and
Mr. Tom turned away disappointed, and prowled off elsewhere, like a
human jackal, to see what he could thieve or kill.
"'Thank goodness!' I said, as I slipped off the lump of gold. 'Now,
then, do you get up, Harry, and see if that consummate villain has
gone.' Harry did so, and reported that he had vanished towards
Pilgrim's Rest, and then we set to work, and very carefully, but
trembling with excitement, with our hands hollowed out all the space
of ground into which I had struck the pick. Yes, as I hoped, there was
a regular nest of nuggets, twelve in all, running from the size of a
hazel-nut to that of a hen's egg, though of course the first one was
much larger than that. How they all came there nobody can say; it was
one of those extraordinary freaks, with stories of which, at any rate,
all people acquainted with alluvial gold-mining will be familiar. It
turned out afterwards that the American who sold me the claim had in
the same way made his pile--a much larger one than ours, by the way--
out of a single pocket, and then worked for six months without seeing
colour, after which he gave it up.
"At any rate, there the nuggets were, to the value, as it turned out
afterwards, of about twelve hundred and fifty pounds, so that after
all I took out of that hole four hundred and fifty pounds more than I
put into it. We got them all out and wrapped them up in a
handkerchief, and then, fearing to carry home so much treasure,
especially as we knew that Mr. Handspike Tom was on the prowl, made up
our minds to pass the night where we were--a necessity which,
disagreeable as it was, was wonderfully sweetened by the presence of
that handkerchief full of virgin gold--the interest of my lost half-
sovereign.
"Slowly the night wore away, for with the fear of Handspike Tom before
my eyes I did not dare to go to sleep, and at last the dawn came. I
got up and watched its growth, till it opened like a flower upon the
eastern sky, and the sunbeams began to spring up in splendour from
mountain-top to mountain-top. I watched it, and as I did so it flashed
upon me, with a complete conviction which I had not felt before, that
I had had enough of gold-mining to last me the rest of my natural
life, and I then and there made up my mind to clear out of Pilgrims'
Rest and go and shoot buffalo towards Delagoa Bay. Then I turned, took
the pick and shovel, and although it was a Sunday morning, woke up
Harry and set to work to see if there were any more nuggets about. As
I expected, there were none. What we had got had lain together in a
little pocket filled with soil that felt quite different from the
stiff stuff round and outside the pocket. There was not another trace
of gold. Of course it is possible that there were more pocketfuls
somewhere about, but all I have to say is I made up my mind that,
whoever found them, I should not; and, as a matter of fact, I have
since heard that this claim has been the ruin of two or three people,
as it very nearly was the ruin of me.
"'Harry,' I said presently, 'I am going away this week towards Delagoa
to shoot buffalo. Shall I take you with me, or send you down to
Durban?'
"'Oh, take me with you, father!' begged Harry, 'I want to kill a
buffalo!'
"'And supposing that the buffalo kills you instead?' I asked.
"'Oh, never mind,' he said, gaily, 'there are lots more where I came
from.'
"I rebuked him for his flippancy, but in the end I consented to take
him.
CHAPTER II
WHAT WAS FOUND IN THE POOL
"Something over a fortnight had passed since the night when I lost
half-a-sovereign and found twelve hundred and fifty pounds in looking
for it, and instead of that horrid hole, for which, after all,
Eldorado was hardly a misnomer, a very different scene stretched away
before us clad in the silver robe of the moonlight. We were camped--
Harry and I, two Kaffirs, a Scotch cart, and six oxen--on the swelling
side of a great wave of bushclad land. Just where we had made our
camp, however, the bush was very sparse, and only grew about in
clumps, while here and there were single flat-topped mimosa-trees. To
our right a little stream, which had cut a deep channel for itself in
the bosom of the slope, flowed musically on between banks green with
maidenhair, wild asparagus, and many beautiful grasses. The bed-rock
here was red granite, and in the course of centuries of patient
washing the water had hollowed out some of the huge slabs in its path
into great troughs and cups, and these we used for bathing-places. No
Roman lady, with her baths of porphyry or alabaster, could have had a
more delicious spot to bathe herself than we found within fifty yards
of our skerm, or rough inclosure of mimosa thorn, that we had dragged
together round the cart to protect us from the attacks of lions. That
there were several of these brutes about, I knew from their spoor,
though we had neither heard nor seen them.
"Our bath was a little nook where the eddy of the stream had washed
away a mass of soil, and on the edge of it there grew a most beautiful
old mimosa thorn. Beneath the thorn was a large smooth slab of granite
fringed all round with maidenhair and other ferns, that sloped gently
down to a pool of the clearest sparkling water, which lay in a bowl of
granite about ten feet wide by five feet deep in the centre. Here to
this slab we went every morning to bathe, and that delightful bath is
among the most pleasant of my hunting reminiscences, as it is also,
for reasons which will presently appear, among the most painful.
"It was a lovely night. Harry and I sat to the windward of the fire,
where the two Kaffirs were busily employed in cooking some impala
steaks off a buck which Harry, to his great joy, had shot that
morning, and were as perfectly contented with ourselves and the world
at large as two people could possibly be. The night was beautiful, and
it would require somebody with more words on the tip of his tongue
than I have to describe properly the chastened majesty of those
moonlit wilds. Away for ever and for ever, away to the mysterious
north, rolled the great bush ocean over which the silence brooded.
There beneath us a mile or more to the right ran the wide Oliphant,
and mirror-like flashed back the moon, whose silver spears were
shivered on its breast, and then tossed in twisted lines of light far
and wide about the mountains and the plain. Down upon the river-banks
grew great timber-trees that through the stillness pointed solemnly to
Heaven, and the beauty of the night lay upon them like a cloud.
Everywhere was silence--silence in the starred depths, silence on the
bosom of the sleeping earth. Now, if ever, great thoughts might rise
in a man's mind, and for a space he might forget his littleness in the
sense that he partook of the pure immensity about him.
"'Hark! what was that?'
"From far away down by the river there comes a mighty rolling sound,
then another, and another. It is the lion seeking his meat.
"I saw Harry shiver and turn a little pale. He was a plucky boy
enough, but the roar of a lion heard for the first time in the solemn
bush veldt at night is apt to shake the nerves of any lad.
"'Lions, my boy,' I said; 'they are hunting down by the river there;
but I don't think that you need make yourself uneasy. We have been
here three nights now, and if they were going to pay us a visit I
think that they would have done so before this. However, we will make
up the fire.'
"'Here, Pharaoh, do you and Jim-Jim get some more wood before we go to
sleep, else the cats will be purring round you before morning.'
"Pharaoh, a great brawny Swazi, who had been working for me at
Pilgrims' Rest, laughed, rose, and stretched himself, then calling to
Jim-Jim to bring the axe and a reim, started off in the moonlight
towards a clump of sugar-bush where we cut our fuel from some dead
trees. He was a fine fellow in his way, was Pharaoh, and I think that
he had been named Pharaoh because he had an Egyptian cast of
countenance and a royal sort of swagger about him. But his way was a
somewhat peculiar way, on account of the uncertainty of his temper,
and very few people could get on with him; also if he could find
liquor he would drink like a fish, and when he drank he became
shockingly bloodthirsty. These were his bad points; his good ones were
that, like most people of the Zulu blood, he became exceedingly
attached if he took to you at all; he was a hard-working and
intelligent man, and about as dare-devil and plucky a fellow at a
pinch as I have ever had to do with. He was about five-and-thirty
years of age or so, but not a 'keshla' or ringed man. I believe that
he had got into trouble in some way in Swaziland, and the authorities
of his tribe would not allow him to assume the ring, and that is why
he came to work at the gold-fields. The other man, or rather lad, Jim-
Jim, was a Mapoch Kaffir, or Knobnose, and even in the light of
subsequent events I fear I cannot speak very well of him. He was an
idle and careless young rascal, and only that very morning I had to
tell Pharaoh to give him a beating for letting the oxen stray, which
Pharaoh did with the greatest gusto, although he was by way of being
very fond of Jim-Jim. Indeed, I saw him consoling Jim-Jim afterwards
with a pinch of snuff from his own ear-box, whilst he explained to him
that the next time it came in the way of duty to flog him, he meant to
thrash him with the other hand, so as to cross the old cuts and make a
"pretty pattern" on his back.