Long Odds Read online

  Produced by John Bickers; Dagny; Emma Dudding

  LONG ODDS

  by H. Rider Haggard

  This is the second PG version of Long Odds, also see Etext #1918.

  The story which is narrated in the following pages came to me from thelips of my old friend Allan Quatermain, or Hunter Quatermain, as we usedto call him in South Africa. He told it to me one evening when I wasstopping with him at the place he bought in Yorkshire. Shortly afterthat, the death of his only son so unsettled him that he immediatelyleft England, accompanied by two companions, his old fellow-voyagers,Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into thedark heart of Africa. He is persuaded that a white people, of which hehas heard rumours all his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in thevast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find thembefore he dies. This is the wild quest upon which he and his companionshave departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they never will return.One letter only have I received from the old gentleman, dated from amission station high up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about threehundred miles north of Zanzibar. In it he says they have gone throughmany hardships and adventures, but are alive and well, and have foundtraces which go far towards making him hope that the results of theirwild quest may be a "magnificent and unexampled discovery." I greatlyfear, however, that all he has discovered is death; for this letter camea 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 theensuing story to me and Captain Good, who was dining with him. He hadeaten his dinner and drunk two or three glasses of old port, just tohelp Good and myself to the end of the second bottle. It was an unusualthing 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 effectsupon the class of men--hunters, transport riders, and others--amongstwhom he had passed so many years of his life. Consequently the good winetook more effect on him that it would have done on most men, sending alittle flush into his wrinkled cheeks, and making him talk more freelythan usual.

  Dear old man! I can see him now, as he went limping up and down thevestibule, with his grey hair sticking up in scrubbing-brush fashion,his shrivelled yellow face, and his large dark eyes, that were as keenas any hawk's, and yet soft as a buck's. The whole room was hung withtrophies of his numerous hunting expeditions, and he had some storyabout every one of them, if only he could be got to tell them. Generallyhe 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 ofa lion, which was fixed just over the mantelpiece, beneath a long row ofguns, its jaws distended to their utmost width. "Ah, you brute! you havegiven 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 totell 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 moreport."

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

  "It was, I think, in the March of '69 that I was up in Sikukuni'scountry. It was just after old Sequati's time, and Sikukuni had got intopower--I forget how. Anyway, I was there. I had heard that the Bapedipeople had brought down an enormous quantity of ivory from the interior,and so I started with a waggon-load of goods, and came straight awayfrom Middelburg to try and trade some of it. It was a risky thing togo into the country so early, on account of the fever; but I knew thatthere were one or two others after that lot of ivory, so I determinedto have a try for it, and take my chance of fever. I had become so toughfrom continual knocking about that I did not set it down at much.

  "Well, I got on all right for a while. It is a wonderfully beautifulpiece of bush veldt, with great ranges of mountains running through it,and round granite koppies starting up here and there, looking out likesentinels over the rolling waste of bush. But it is very hot--hot as astew-pan--and when I was there that March, which, of course, is autumnin this part of Africa, the whole place reeked of fever. Every morning,as I trekked along down by the Oliphant River, I used to creep from thewaggon at dawn and look out. But there was no river to be seen--only along line of billows of what looked like the finest cotton wool tossedup lightly with a pitchfork. It was the fever mist. Out from among thescrub, too, came little spirals of vapour, as though there were hundredsof tiny fires alight in it--reek rising from thousands of tons ofrotting vegetation. It was a beautiful place, but the beauty was thebeauty of death; and all those lines and blots of vapour wrote one greatword across the surface of the country, and that word was 'fever.'

  "It was a dreadful year of illness that. I came, I remember, to onelittle kraal of Knobnoses, and went up to it to see if I could get some_maas_, or curdled butter-milk, and a few mealies. As I drew near I wasstruck with the silence of the place. No children began to chatter, andno dogs barked. Nor could I see any native sheep or cattle. The place,though it had evidently been recently inhabited, was as still as thebush round it, and some guinea fowl got up out of the prickly pearbushes right at the kraal gate. I remember that I hesitated a littlebefore going in, there was such an air of desolation about the spot.Nature never looks desolate when man has not yet laid his hand upon herbreast; she is only lonely. But when man has been, and has passed away,then she looks desolate.

  "Well, I passed into the kraal, and went up to the principal hut. Infront of the hut was something with an old sheep-skin _kaross_ thrownover it. I stooped down and drew off the rug, and then shrank backamazed, for under it was the body of a young woman recently dead. For amoment I thought of turning back, but my curiosity overcame me; so goingpast the dead woman I went down on my hands and knees and crept into thehut. It was so dark that I could not see anything, though I could smella great deal, so I lit a match. It was a 'tandstickor' match, and burntslowly and dimly, and as the light gradually increased I made out whatI took to be a family of people, men, women, and children, fast asleep.Presently it burnt up brightly, and I saw that they too, five of themaltogether, were quite dead. One was a baby. I dropped the match in ahurry, and was making my way from the hut as quick as I could go, when Icaught sight of two bright eyes staring out of a corner. Thinking it wasa wild cat, or some such animal, I redoubled my haste, when suddenlya voice near the eyes began first to mutter, and then to send up asuccession of awful yells.

  "Hastily I lit another match, and perceived that the eyes belonged toan old woman, wrapped up in a greasy leather garment. Taking her bythe arm, I dragged her out, for she could not, or would not, come byherself, and the stench was overpowering me. Such a sight as she was--abag of bones, covered over with black, shrivelled parchment. The onlywhite thing about her was her wool, and she seemed to be pretty welldead except for her eyes and her voice. She thought that I was a devilcome to take her, and that is why she yelled so. Well, I got her down tothe waggon, and gave her a 'tot' of Cape smoke, and then, as soon as itwas ready, poured about a pint of beef-tea down her throat, made fromthe flesh of a blue vilderbeeste I had killed the day before, and afterthat she brightened up wonderfully. She could talk Zulu--indeed, itturned out that she had run away from Zululand in T'Chaka's time--andshe told me that all the people whom I had seen had died of fever. Whenthey had died the other inhabitants of the kraal had taken the cattleand gone away, leaving the poor old woman, who was helpless from age andinfirmity, to perish of starvation or disease, as the case might be. Shehad been sitting there for three days among the bodies
when I found her.I took her on to the next kraal, and gave the headman a blanket to lookafter her, promising him another if I found her well when I came back. Iremember that he was much astonished at my parting with two blankets forthe sake of such a worthless old creature. 'Why did I not leave her inthe bush?' he asked. Those people carry the doctrine of the survival ofthe fittest to its extreme, you see.

  "It was the night after I had got rid of the old woman that I made myfirst acquaintance with my friend yonder," and he nodded towards theskull that seemed to be grinning down at us in the shadow of the widemantel-shelf. "I had trekked from dawn till eleven o'clock--a longtrek--but I wanted to get on, and had turned the oxen out to graze,sending the voorlooper to look after them, my intention being to inspanagain about six o'clock, and trek with the moon till ten. Then I gotinto the