Allan Quatermain

December 23

'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.

'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!

'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!

'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.'

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.

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.

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.

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 very 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 you.

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.

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 never, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.