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<h1> ALLAN QUATERMAIN </h1>
<h2> By H. Rider Haggard </h2>
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<h3> I inscribe this book of adventure to my son<br/> ARTHUR JOHN RIDER HAGGARD </h3>
<blockquote>
<p>in the hope that in days to come he, and many other boys whom I shall
never know, may, in the acts and thoughts of Allan Quatermain and his
companions, as herein recorded, find something to help him and them to
reach to what, with Sir Henry Curtis, I hold to be the highest rank
whereto we can attain—the state and dignity of English gentlemen.</p>
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<h2> INTRODUCTION </h2>
<p>December 23</p>
<p>'I have just buried my boy, my poor handsome boy of whom I was so proud,
and my heart is broken. It is very hard having only one son to lose him
thus, but God's will be done. Who am I that I should complain? The great
wheel of Fate rolls on like a Juggernaut, and crushes us all in turn, some
soon, some late—it does not matter when, in the end, it crushes us
all. We do not prostrate ourselves before it like the poor Indians; we fly
hither and thither—we cry for mercy; but it is of no use, the black
Fate thunders on and in its season reduces us to powder.</p>
<p>'Poor Harry to go so soon! just when his life was opening to him. He was
doing so well at the hospital, he had passed his last examination with
honours, and I was proud of them, much prouder than he was, I think. And
then he must needs go to that smallpox hospital. He wrote to me that he
was not afraid of smallpox and wanted to gain the experience; and now the
disease has killed him, and I, old and grey and withered, am left to mourn
over him, without a chick or child to comfort me. I might have saved him,
too—I have money enough for both of us, and much more than enough—King
Solomon's Mines provided me with that; but I said, "No, let the boy earn
his living, let him labour that he may enjoy rest." But the rest has come
to him before the labour. Oh, my boy, my boy!</p>
<p>'I am like the man in the Bible who laid up much goods and builded barns—goods
for my boy and barns for him to store them in; and now his soul has been
required of him, and I am left desolate. I would that it had been my soul
and not my boy's!</p>
<p>'We buried him this afternoon under the shadow of the grey and ancient
tower of the church of this village where my house is. It was a dreary
December afternoon, and the sky was heavy with snow, but not much was
falling. The coffin was put down by the grave, and a few big flakes lit
upon it. They looked very white upon the black cloth! There was a little
hitch about getting the coffin down into the grave—the necessary
ropes had been forgotten: so we drew back from it, and waited in silence
watching the big flakes fall gently one by one like heavenly benedictions,
and melt in tears on Harry's pall. But that was not all. A robin redbreast
came as bold as could be and lit upon the coffin and began to sing. And
then I am afraid that I broke down, and so did Sir Henry Curtis, strong
man though he is; and as for Captain Good, I saw him turn away too; even
in my own distress I could not help noticing it.'</p>
<p>The above, signed 'Allan Quatermain', is an extract from my diary written
two years and more ago. I copy it down here because it seems to me that it
is the fittest beginning to the history that I am about to write, if it
please God to spare me to finish it. If not, well it does not matter. That
extract was penned seven thousand miles or so from the spot where I now
lie painfully and slowly writing this, with a pretty girl standing by my
side fanning the flies from my august countenance. Harry is there and I am
here, and yet somehow I cannot help feeling that I am not far off Harry.</p>
<p>When I was in England I used to live in a very fine house—at least I
call it a fine house, speaking comparatively, and judging from the
standard of the houses I have been accustomed to all my life in Africa—not
five hundred yards from the old church where Harry is asleep, and thither
I went after the funeral and ate some food; for it is no good starving
even if one has just buried all one's earthly hopes. But I could not eat
much, and soon I took to walking, or rather limping—being
permanently lame from the bite of a lion—up and down, up and down
the oak-panelled vestibule; for there is a vestibule in my house in
England. On all the four walls of this vestibule were placed pairs of
horns—about a hundred pairs altogether, all of which I had shot
myself. They are beautiful specimens, as I never keep any horns which are
not in every way perfect, unless it may be now and again on account of the
associations connected with them. In the centre of the room, however, over
the wide fireplace, there was a clear space left on which I had fixed up
all my rifles. Some of them I have had for forty years, old muzzle-loaders
that nobody would look at nowadays. One was an elephant gun with strips of
rimpi, or green hide, lashed round the stock and locks, such as used to be
owned by the Dutchmen—a 'roer' they call it. That gun, the Boer I
bought it from many years ago told me, had been used by his father at the
battle of the Blood River, just after Dingaan swept into Natal and
slaughtered six hundred men, women, and children, so that the Boers named
the place where they died 'Weenen', or the 'Place of Weeping'; and so it
is called to this day, and always will be called. And many an elephant
have I shot with that old gun. She always took a handful of black powder
and a three-ounce ball, and kicked like the very deuce.</p>
<p>Well, up and down I walked, staring at the guns and the horns which the
guns had brought low; and as I did so there rose up in me a great craving:—I
would go away from this place where I lived idly and at ease, back again
to the wild land where I had spent my life, where I met my dear wife and
poor Harry was born, and so many things, good, bad, and indifferent, had
happened to me. The thirst for the wilderness was on me; I could tolerate
this place no more; I would go and die as I had lived, among the wild game
and the savages. Yes, as I walked, I began to long to see the moonlight
gleaming silvery white over the wide veldt and mysterious sea of bush, and
watch the lines of game travelling down the ridges to the water. The
ruling passion is strong in death, they say, and my heart was dead that
night. But, independently of my trouble, no man who has for forty years
lived the life I have, can with impunity go coop himself in this prim
English country, with its trim hedgerows and cultivated fields, its stiff
formal manners, and its well-dressed crowds. He begins to long—ah,
how he longs!—for the keen breath of the desert air; he dreams of
the sight of Zulu impis breaking on their foes like surf upon the rocks,
and his heart rises up in rebellion against the strict limits of the
civilized life.</p>
<p>Ah! this civilization, what does it all come to? For forty years and more
I lived among savages, and studied them and their ways; and now for
several years I have lived here in England, and have in my own stupid
manner done my best to learn the ways of the children of light; and what
have I found? A great gulf fixed? No, only a very little one, that a plain
man's thought may spring across. I say that as the savage is, so is the
white man, only the latter is more inventive, and possesses the faculty of
combination; save and except also that the savage, as I have known him, is
to a large extent free from the greed of money, which eats like a cancer
into the heart of the white man. It is a depressing conclusion, but in all
essentials the savage and the child of civilization are identical. I dare
say that the highly civilized lady reading this will smile at an old fool
of a hunter's simplicity when she thinks of her black bead-bedecked
sister; and so will the superfine cultured idler scientifically eating a
dinner at his club, the cost of which would keep a starving family for a
week. And yet, my dear young lady, what are those pretty things round your
own neck?—they have a strong family resemblance, especially when you
wear that <i>very</i> low dress, to the savage woman's beads. Your habit
of turning round and round to the sound of horns and tom-toms, your
fondness for pigments and powders, the way in which you love to subjugate
yourself to the rich warrior who has captured you in marriage, and the
quickness with which your taste in feathered head-dresses varies—all
these things suggest touches of kinship; and you remember that in the
fundamental principles of your nature you are quite identical. As for you,
sir, who also laugh, let some man come and strike you in the face whilst
you are enjoying that marvellous-looking dish, and we shall soon see how
much of the savage there is in <i>you</i>.</p>
<p>There, I might go on for ever, but what is the good? Civilization is only
savagery silver-gilt. A vainglory is it, and like a northern light, comes
but to fade and leave the sky more dark. Out of the soil of barbarism it
has grown like a tree, and, as I believe, into the soil like a tree it
will once more, sooner or later, fall again, as the Egyptian civilization
fell, as the Hellenic civilization fell, and as the Roman civilization and
many others of which the world has now lost count, fell also. Do not let
me, however, be understood as decrying our modern institutions,
representing as they do the gathered experience of humanity applied for
the good of all. Of course they have great advantages—hospitals for
instance; but then, remember, we breed the sickly people who fill them. In
a savage land they do not exist. Besides, the question will arise: How
many of these blessings are due to Christianity as distinct from
civilization? And so the balance sways and the story runs—here a
gain, there a loss, and Nature's great average struck across the two,
whereof the sum total forms one of the factors in that mighty equation in
which the result will equal the unknown quantity of her purpose.</p>
<p>I make no apology for this digression, especially as this is an
introduction which all young people and those who never like to think (and
it is a bad habit) will naturally skip. It seems to me very desirable that
we should sometimes try to understand the limitations of our nature, so
that we may not be carried away by the pride of knowledge. Man's
cleverness is almost indefinite, and stretches like an elastic band, but
human nature is like an iron ring. You can go round and round it, you can
polish it highly, you can even flatten it a little on one side, whereby
you will make it bulge out the other, but you will <i>never</i>, while the
world endures and man is man, increase its total circumference. It is the
one fixed unchangeable thing—fixed as the stars, more enduring than
the mountains, as unalterable as the way of the Eternal. Human nature is
God's kaleidoscope, and the little bits of coloured glass which represent
our passions, hopes, fears, joys, aspirations towards good and evil and
what not, are turned in His mighty hand as surely and as certainly as it
turns the stars, and continually fall into new patterns and combinations.
But the composing elements remain the same, nor will there be one more bit
of coloured glass nor one less for ever and ever.</p>
<p>This being so, supposing for the sake of argument we divide ourselves into
twenty parts, nineteen savage and one civilized, we must look to the
nineteen savage portions of our nature, if we would really understand
ourselves, and not to the twentieth, which, though so insignificant in
reality, is spread all over the other nineteen, making them appear quite
different from what they really are, as the blacking does a boot, or the
veneer a table. It is on the nineteen rough serviceable savage portions
that we fall back on emergencies, not on the polished but unsubstantial
twentieth. Civilization should wipe away our tears, and yet we weep and
cannot be comforted. Warfare is abhorrent to her, and yet we strike out
for hearth and home, for honour and fair fame, and can glory in the blow.
And so on, through everything.</p>
<p>So, when the heart is stricken, and the head is humbled in the dust,
civilization fails us utterly. Back, back, we creep, and lay us like
little children on the great breast of Nature, she that perchance may
soothe us and make us forget, or at least rid remembrance of its sting.
Who has not in his great grief felt a longing to look upon the outward
features of the universal Mother; to lie on the mountains and watch the
clouds drive across the sky and hear the rollers break in thunder on the
shore, to let his poor struggling life mingle for a while in her life; to
feel the slow beat of her eternal heart, and to forget his woes, and let
his identity be swallowed in the vast imperceptibly moving energy of her
of whom we are, from whom we came, and with whom we shall again be
mingled, who gave us birth, and will in a day to come give us our burial
also.</p>
<p>And so in my trouble, as I walked up and down the oak-panelled vestibule
of my house there in Yorkshire, I longed once more to throw myself into
the arms of Nature. Not the Nature which you know, the Nature that waves
in well-kept woods and smiles out in corn-fields, but Nature as she was in
the age when creation was complete, undefiled as yet by any human sinks of
sweltering humanity. I would go again where the wild game was, back to the
land whereof none know the history, back to the savages, whom I love,
although some of them are almost as merciless as Political Economy. There,
perhaps, I should be able to learn to think of poor Harry lying in the
churchyard, without feeling as though my heart would break in two.</p>
<p>And now there is an end of this egotistical talk, and there shall be no
more of it. But if you whose eyes may perchance one day fall upon my
written thoughts have got so far as this, I ask you to persevere, since
what I have to tell you is not without its interest, and it has never been
told before, nor will again.</p>
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