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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In "ALLAN QUATERMAIN 'Äì Complete Series: 18 Adventure Books in One Volume," Henry Rider Haggard presents an expansive treasury of thrilling tales that encapsulate the spirit of Victorian adventure literature. Featuring the indomitable hero Allan Quatermain, the collection reflects Haggard's mastery of the adventure genre, blending rich descriptions and fast-paced narratives with explorations of colonial themes, ethical dilemmas, and the moral complexities of empire. Haggard's prose is both evocative and incisive, inviting readers into a vivid world where danger lurks in every shadow and heroism is tested against grim odds. The series, filled with treasure hunts, fierce indigenous tribes, and encounters with the supernatural, exemplifies the era's fascination with Africa and the allure of exploration, making it a cornerstone of adventure fiction. Henry Rider Haggard, a contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle and a pioneer of the adventure genre, drew from his own experiences in South Africa, where he worked as a lawyer and witnessed the cultural tensions of the region. His deep-seated interest in colonial explorations and African lore profoundly shapes the Quatermain narratives, revealing Haggard's critical examination of British imperialism and human nature within the exotic landscapes he vividly portrays. As one of the most significant adventure novelists of the late 19th century, his works laid the foundation for modern adventure literature. For readers who crave gripping stories infused with adventure, moral conflict, and rich historical context, "ALLAN QUATERMAIN 'Äì Complete Series: 18 Adventure Books in One Volume" is an essential addition to your library. This anthology not only entertains with its daring exploits but also provokes thoughtful reflection on the complexities of human ambition and the consequences of imperialist adventures. Dive into this epic saga, and let Haggard's timeless narratives sweep you into a world of exhilarating exploration. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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ALLAN QUATERMAIN – Complete Series: 18 Adventure Books in One Volume
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers the complete cycle of Allan Quatermain adventures by H. Rider Haggard, presenting eighteen works in a single, coherent library. Bringing together major novels alongside shorter romances and tales, it offers the full scope of Quatermain’s career as hunter, guide, and reluctant hero of high adventure. The collection’s purpose is comprehensive rather than selective: to place the foundational works such as King Solomon’s Mines and Allan Quatermain in conversation with prequels, sequels, crossovers, and intimate episodes, so that readers can appreciate the character’s development, the breadth of settings, and the evolution of Haggard’s storytelling across themes, tones, and forms.
The contents span several forms. There are full-length novels of expedition, pursuit, and discovery; novellas that compress peril and decision into taut arcs; and short stories and episodes that preserve Quatermain’s voice in briefer, highly focused adventures. Works such as Marie, Child of Storm, Finished, The Ivory Child, Allan and the Holy Flower, Heu-Heu, The Ancient Allan, Allan and the Ice-gods, and She and Allan stand alongside tales like A Tale of Three Lions, Maiwa’s Revenge; Or, The War of the Little Hand, The Hunter Quatermain’s Story, Long Odds, and Magepa the Buck, forming a varied yet integrated body of adventure writing.
The unifying thread is Allan Quatermain himself: an experienced professional hunter and guide whose first-person reminiscences blend practical craft with ethical reflection. His narrative persona is measured, often modest, and frequently rueful, inviting trust as he reports the hazards of the trail, the weight of decision, and the quiet cost of survival. Across southern and central African landscapes, he undertakes treks that place him among allies and adversaries whose loyalties and motives are tested by distance, scarcity, and fear. Whether confronting the unknown in King Solomon’s Mines or pushing beyond the familiar in Allan Quatermain, the voice remains consistent, humane, and exact.
Adventure is the engine, but the series is organized by quests of varying kinds—treasures sought, promises kept, people rescued, mysteries approached with caution rather than boast. Haggard favors the pattern of the difficult journey, the necessity of courage tempered by prudence, and the communal nature of survival in hostile circumstances. Themes recur: the cost of leadership, loyalty under pressure, the thin margin between luck and skill, and a fatalistic sense that fate and character may be entangled. The works often stage moral tests rather than simple triumphs, letting practical ethics—honesty, restraint, mutual obligation—guide choices where force alone would fail.
Much of the drama arises from encounters across cultures. Quatermain works among, alongside, and sometimes within African societies whose laws, kinship ties, and spiritual obligations shape the course of events. The portrayals reflect the perspectives and assumptions of their era, including views on empire and race that merit critical attention today. Within that context, Haggard frequently grants weight to local authority, ritual, and counsel, allowing cultural norms to influence outcomes and strategies. The result is a field of negotiation rather than tamed wilderness, where understanding others’ rules—rather than merely imposing one’s own—often determines whether an expedition can proceed at all.
A persistent undercurrent is the supernatural—or, more precisely, the threshold between the explicable and the uncanny. Prophecy, omen, and sacred obligation appear alongside practical logistics, tracking, and marksmanship. Haggard treats marvels with a matter-of-fact sobriety that keeps wonders within the narrative’s discipline. She and Allan explicitly links the Quatermain cycle with another of Haggard’s imaginative worlds, expanding the series’ metaphysical horizon while preserving Quatermain’s skeptical, observant tone. Later romances such as The Ancient Allan and Allan and the Ice-gods experiment with memory, myth, and deep time, yet remain anchored in the narrator’s sensibility: cautious, curious, and attentive to consequence.
Stylistically, these works are built for momentum and clarity. The prose favors precise action, concrete detail, and brisk transitions; battles, hunts, and escapes are choreographed as sequences with logistical logic. Haggard frequently employs framing devices—recovered documents, retrospective narration, and stories told around the campfire—to lend the impression of testimony rather than invention. Dialogue is economical and functional, often revealing character under stress. The architecture of suspense relies on guarded revelations and calculated risks, with reversals that stem from terrain, weather, or human error, not arbitrary fate. Throughout, the narrator’s restraint and candor preserve credibility, even when events verge on the extraordinary.
Place is not backdrop but participant. The veld, bush, desert, river, and mountain are rendered with an eye for orientation and hazard: water sources, spoor, cover, wind, and the treacheries of distance. Haggard’s pages often read like fieldcraft set to narrative—how to approach a ridge, camp without inviting disaster, read a storm, or gauge the intentions of strangers met far from help. This attentiveness imparts verisimilitude to episodes of exploration, siege, or negotiation. It also casts landscape as moral environment: indifferent to human schemes, enforcing patience, humility, and respect for limits, even as it permits rare, decisive acts of daring.
Within that physical rigor, the emotional range is wide. Some works are intimate and tragic, contemplating love and loss under frontier conditions, as in Marie and Allan’s Wife. Others emphasize strategic conflict and communal duty, striking a graver martial note, while shorter pieces such as A Tale of Three Lions, Long Odds, or Magepa the Buck isolate a single peril or choice to distill character. A quiet humor surfaces in understatement and dry asides; melancholy attends hard-won survival. The tonal palette keeps the series from monotony, allowing recurring patterns—journey, siege, negotiation—to feel fresh across different kinds of human stakes.
The series unfolds along multiple timelines. King Solomon’s Mines and Allan Quatermain establish the core pattern of expedition and return, while later books revisit earlier chapters of the hero’s life, as in Marie, Child of Storm, and Finished. Standalone novels such as The Ivory Child, Allan and the Holy Flower, Heu-Heu, and The Treasure of the Lake explore distinct regions and enigmas. Experimental links—She and Allan, The Ancient Allan, Allan and the Ice-gods—expand the canvas into mythic and speculative modes. Shorter works, including Maiwa’s Revenge and The Hunter Quatermain’s Story, supply concentrated perspectives that illuminate the larger portrait.
As a whole, these adventures helped codify the modern romance of exploration: the lost or hidden domain, the logistical ordeal, the moral test, and the tenuous claim to any prize won. Haggard’s influence is visible in later adventure fiction that inherits his patterns of discovery, siege, and cross-cultural alliance under duress. The Allan Quatermain books endure because they pair narrative economy with a grave, adult sensibility—accepting that courage cannot erase cost, and that knowledge often replaces legend without destroying wonder. Read together, the works form a sustained meditation on risk, responsibility, and the uneasy bargains by which lives are preserved.
Readers may approach this collection in publication order, in internal chronology, or simply by range of mood—selecting, for instance, a compact tale before embarking on a major expedition novel. However one proceeds, this single-volume gathering provides context and continuity, revealing echoes between early and late works, between stark realism and the eerie or exalted. It invites both admiration and scrutiny: admiration for craft, momentum, and imaginative reach; scrutiny for the historical attitudes it transmits. In that balance lies the series’ vitality. The full body assembled here allows Allan Quatermain’s voice to be heard steadily, across the whole arc of his adventures.
Author Biography
Sir Henry Rider Haggard (usually published as H. Rider Haggard) was an English novelist of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, best known for shaping the imperial romance and “lost world” adventure. His African-set tales, especially the Allan Quatermain cycle and She: A History of Adventure, became international bestsellers and helped define popular adventure fiction for generations. Blending quest narratives with archaeological curiosity, myth, and the supernatural, he offered readers a heady mix of exploration and romance at a moment of intense public interest in empire and discovery. He remains a pivotal figure in genre history, both widely read and frequently debated for the assumptions embedded in his narratives.
Born in mid-19th-century England, Haggard was educated in his home country and later trained in law in London. As a young man he worked in the British colonial administration in southern Africa in the late 1870s, an experience that furnished settings, ethnographic impressions, and political contexts for much of his later fiction. He traveled widely in the region, observed conflicts and negotiations of the period, and encountered oral traditions that left a lasting imaginative imprint. Returning to Britain in the early 1880s, he combined legal studies with journalism and early literary efforts, gradually discovering that fiction—particularly romance and adventure—offered the most compelling vehicle for the material he wished to explore.
His breakthrough came with King Solomon’s Mines, an Allan Quatermain novel that appeared in the mid-1880s and achieved immediate, extraordinary popularity. The book’s brisk pacing, first-person narration, and promise of hidden wealth and peril resonated with a mass audience. A sequel, Allan Quatermain, quickly followed, as did She: A History of Adventure, which introduced the powerful figure of Ayesha and fused ancient legend with modern expedition. Critics recognized his knack for narrative propulsion, and readers embraced the blend of exotic landscape, mystery, and moral testing. These successes established Haggard as a leading practitioner of romance at a moment when serial and single-volume fiction reached vast publics.
Beyond his flagship titles, Haggard wrote prolifically across historical and adventure modes. He produced romances set in classical and medieval antiquity and in non-European pasts, including Cleopatra, Eric Brighteyes, and Montezuma’s Daughter. He extended his African corpus with Nada the Lily, The People of the Mist, and further Allan Quatermain installments, while returning to Ayesha in Ayesha: The Return of She. He also collaborated with the folklorist and critic Andrew Lang on The World’s Desire, reflecting a shared interest in mythic patterning. Across these books he used framing manuscripts, embedded tales, and archaeological conceits that lent documentary texture to narratives of quest, loyalty, and loss.
Haggard’s imagination drew on Victorian romance, travel writing, classical epic, and the folklore scholarship circulating among his contemporaries. Encounters with southern African cultures informed depictions that could be admiring, instrumental, or paternalist by turns. Nada the Lily, set largely among the Zulu, illustrates both his engagement with Indigenous histories and the limits of a colonial vantage point. Central themes include endurance under ordeal, sacred kingship, the allure and peril of immortality, and the testing of masculine codes by charismatic, frequently formidable women such as Ayesha. Modern critics read his fiction as a site where late-nineteenth-century anxieties over empire, degeneration, and modernity are staged and contested.
Parallel to his literary career, Haggard advocated rural reform and imperial development, publishing works of reportage and reflection on agriculture and land settlement. Titles such as A Farmer’s Year and Rural England record tours, interviews, and observations on tenancy, productivity, and village life. He served on public commissions dealing with emigration and agrarian policy, bringing a novelist’s eye for conditions on the ground to policy discussion. For these services he received official recognition in later life. The connection between his fiction and his advocacy is notable: both register fascination with land, stewardship, and the fate of communities under economic and political pressure.
Through the early twentieth century he continued to write sequels, prequels, and standalone adventures, refining his repertoire of perilous journeys, lost cities, and enigmatic rulers. He died in the mid-1920s, leaving a body of work that has seldom been out of print. Adaptations for stage and screen, from King Solomon’s Mines to She, repeatedly revived his stories for new audiences. His influence can be traced in later adventure and fantasy, from expedition thrillers to archaeologist-heroes and visionary lost-civilization tales. Today he is read both for narrative inventiveness and as a key documenter of imperial romance, a writer whose imaginative power and ideological frameworks invite ongoing reassessment.
Historical Context
H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain cycle, published between 1885 and 1927, emerged from the late Victorian and Edwardian eras’ imperial cultures and anxieties. Haggard (1856–1925), born in Bradenham, Norfolk, translated personal experience in southern Africa into popular fiction that fused romance, ethnography, and geography. These works reflect the imaginative geography of a Britain that, after the Suez Canal’s opening in 1869, believed the world increasingly traversable yet still filled with “blank spaces.” They mirror an age eager for tales of ivory, gold, and lost kingdoms, while registering the frictions of empire, from frontier conflict to bureaucratic consolidation, that defined British rule in Africa.
Haggard lived in South Africa from 1875 to 1881, first on the staff of Sir Henry Bulwer, Lieutenant-Governor of Natal, and then in the Transvaal after Britain’s 12 April 1877 annexation. Appointed Master and Registrar of the High Court at Pretoria under Sir Theophilus Shepstone, he observed administration, diplomacy, and the consequences of rapid imperial policy. He farmed at Hilldrop near Newcastle, Natal, during 1879–1881, marrying Louisa “Louie” Margitson in 1879. This proximity to the Zulu kingdom, Boer politics, and the frontier economy supplied the practical detail—place-names, legal procedures, hunting practices, and the rhythms of travel—that suffuses the Quatermain narratives across decades.
The Scramble for Africa forms the essential geopolitical frame. The Berlin Conference (1884–1885) regularized European partition under the General Act, recognizing, among others, the Congo Free State (King Leopold II), German South West Africa (1884), and German East Africa (1885). British influence extended from Cape Colony and Natal through Bechuanaland into the interior, in tension with Portuguese claims in Mozambique and Angola. Quatermain’s routes through hinterlands and across porous frontiers mirror these competitive spheres. The fiction exploits the period’s fascination with “effective occupation,” chartered companies, and the cartographic ideology that turned seasonal grazing lands and caravan paths into straight lines on European maps.
Events in Zululand decisively shaped the imaginative terrain. After the mfecane reconfigurations of the early nineteenth century, Cetshwayo kaMpande’s coronation at oNdini in 1873 and the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 fixed British attention. The battles of Isandlwana (22 January 1879) and Rorke’s Drift (23–24 January) became imperial touchstones; subsequent partition, civil war (1883), and final annexation (1887) left legacies of dispossession and memory. Haggard drew upon oral histories, military lore, and colonial accounts to craft Zulu personalities and political intrigues. Fictional seers and chiefs stand in dialogue with historical figures, giving the series its distinctive blend of romance with recognizably South African statecraft.
Boer republicanism, rooted in the South African Republic (Transvaal) and Orange Free State, provides another recurrent context. The First Boer War (1880–1881), including defeats at Laing’s Nek and Majuba Hill (27 February 1881), forced Britain to reconsider annexation. The Second Boer War (1899–1902), culminating in the Treaty of Vereeniging, introduced concentration camps, scorched-earth tactics, and a militarized landscape later reassembled into the Union of South Africa (31 May 1910). These conflicts shaped settler identities, migration, and law. Quatermain, as hunter and intermediary, navigates a world where Dutch-Afrikaans, English, and African polities compete for land, labor, and legitimacy under shifting sovereignties.
The Mineral Revolution altered everything. Diamonds discovered near Kimberley in 1867–1868 generated colossal capital flows, later consolidated under De Beers (founded 1888) and Cecil Rhodes. Gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 created Johannesburg almost overnight, drawing global labor and finance. Far from mere backdrop, these booms reoriented caravan routes, expanded railheads, and intensified frontier violence over land and resources. Ivory caravans still threaded to Mozambican ports like Beira and to Zanzibar, where Sultan Barghash bin Said (r. 1870–1888) grappled with British anti-slavery diplomacy, including the 1873 treaty closing the slave market. Haggard’s fiction records this economy of tusks, ore, porters, and rifles.
Big-game hunting culture underwrites Quatermain’s vocation. The transition from muzzle-loaders to breech-loading rifles—the Martini-Henry (adopted 1871) and later Lee-Metford (1888)—changed range and lethality. Cordite propellants and mass-produced ammunition enabled longer expeditions and higher kills, contributing to elephant population declines even as markets prized ivory. Sporting codes, part science and part bravado, intersected with indigenous ecological knowledge and trackers’ skills. Early game laws from colonial administrations and emergent conservation ethics competed with commercial pressures. The narratives’ attention to spoor, shot placement, and camp craft is thus historical matter as much as literary flourish, capturing a world on the cusp of regulation.
Explorer and missionary networks supplied facts, myths, and routes. David Livingstone’s death at Chitambo in 1873 and Henry Morton Stanley’s journeys—Ujiji (1871), across the Congo (1874–1877), and the Emin Pasha Relief (1887–1889)—fed British appetites for transcontinental sagas. Mission stations at Lovedale (established 1841), Inanda, and among Berlin Mission Society posts near Zulu communities mediated education and print culture. Portals such as Delagoa Bay, Durban, and the Zambezi’s cataracts structured feasible itineraries. The novels’ guides, interpreters, and lettered African Christians reflect this milieu, where Scripture, trade, and geography meet, and where travelers carried quinine, compasses, and Bibles alongside the rifle and sextant.
Haggard wrote within a romance revival that countered high realism. King Solomon’s Mines (Cassell, 1885) became a sensation, allied with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) in repositioning adventure as national reading. Allan Quatermain (1887) and She (1887) consolidated his fame. Circulating libraries, family periodicals, and cheap editions expanded access. Critics like Henry James distrusted the form’s exuberances, yet readers embraced its speed and scale. Haggard’s friendship with Rudyard Kipling led to their collaboration The Naulahka (1892), situating him among imperial literati. The Royal Geographical Society’s lectures and maps, reproduced by publishers, lent his African terrains a recognizable, quasi-official authority.
Archaeology and myth, especially around Great Zimbabwe, furnished a scaffold for lost-world motifs. German explorer Karl Mauch reported the ruins in 1871; J. Theodore Bent’s excavations (1891–1893), supported by Cecil Rhodes’s interests in Mashonaland, argued for ancient non-African origins, a view later overturned by Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s 1929 demonstration of African authorship. During Haggard’s prime, however, the Ophir legend and biblical associations with Solomon animated public debate. Egyptology’s prestige, and later the 1922 Tutankhamun discovery, sustained fascination with antiquity, mummies, and immortality. The series leverages these currents, anchoring marvels in then-plausible scholarly conjecture, even as modern archaeology would recast the evidence.
Material infrastructures shaped both travel and storytelling. Telegraph cables linked the Cape to London by the late 1870s; steam navigation via the Suez Canal (opened 1869) compressed imperial time. Railways ran Cape Town–Kimberley by 1885, reached the Transvaal in the 1890s, and pierced northward under the “Cape to Cairo” dream. Yet Quatermain often operates in terrains beyond the railhead, where ox-wagons, porters, and river craft dictate pace. Medical prophylaxis like quinine and chloroform, and instruments such as prismatic compasses and field cameras, signaled modernity’s reach. Haggard’s contrasts between bush and steel dramatize an empire simultaneously advancing and remembering an older frontier.
Racial thought of the era framed perceptions. Social Darwinism, eugenic speculation (Francis Galton), and anthropometric “science” intersected with missionary paternalism and settler pragmatism. Administrative categories—“native,” “coloured,” “European”—calcified in pass laws and hut taxes, later formalized in the Union of South Africa’s policies, including the 1913 Natives Land Act. Haggard’s fiction oscillates between admiration for African leaders and skills, and the hierarchies typical of his time’s discourse. Ethnographic asides—on divination, praise poetry, or cattle wealth—draw from contemporary colonial records while reifying stereotypes. The tension between individuated African characters and racial generalization is a defining historical feature of the cycle.
Victorian and Edwardian gender debates color the series’ emotional architecture. The “separate spheres” ideal, challenged by the New Woman of the 1890s, informs portrayals of stoic masculinity, comradeship under fire, and domestic loss. Quatermain’s widowerhood and paternal bonds frame risk as redemptive, while African queens, prophetesses, and priestesses embody charisma and peril. Female literacy and expanding women’s readership widened the market for romance, even as narratives wrestled with female agency and authority. The admixture of chivalric codes with stark frontier choices exposes the era’s anxieties about marriage, inheritance, and moral order amidst the destabilizing energies of conquest and commerce.
Occultism and comparative religion permeate the books. The Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882) and Theosophy (1875) popularized reincarnation, astral travel, and esoteric syncretism. Haggard, fascinated by dreams and ancestral memory, built plots around visions, omens, and ritual. Zulu spiritual specialists (izangoma, izin’guni), spirit possession, and bone casting appear alongside Victorian séances and biblical motifs, producing a hybrid metaphysics. This context enabled crossings between series—most strikingly where Quatermain encounters figures associated with immortality—and lent respectability to speculation about primordial cults or lost civilizations. Such themes resonated with readers seeking meaning amid rapid technological change and the perceived “disenchantment” of the world.
The Great War (1914–1918) and its aftermath darkened imperial romance. South African forces under Louis Botha and Jan Smuts subdued German South West Africa (1915) and campaigned in East Africa against Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. War casualties, the 1918 influenza pandemic, and postwar economic adjustment reshaped imperial confidence. Haggard’s later Quatermain novels, published during 1912–1924 and posthumously in 1926–1927, often strike elegiac notes: endings linger on loss, legacy, and the passing of a type of man. The Union of South Africa (1910) consolidated settler rule even as African political organizations, such as the South African Native National Congress (1912), began pressing claims.
Public service informed Haggard’s imperial thinking beyond fiction. After Rural England (1902), he served on commissions including the Royal Commission on Coast Erosion (1906–1911) and the Dominions Royal Commission (1909–1911), visiting Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. He corresponded with policy-makers like Joseph Chamberlain and encountered settler leaders such as Richard Seddon. Land settlement, agricultural improvement, and imperial federation preoccupied him. These concerns echo in the novels’ attention to tenure, chieftainship, customary law, and the ethics of rule. The imagined compact between courageous individuals and just governance—however compromised in practice—mirrors the debates then animating Parliament, the Colonial Office, and colonial capitals.
The Allan Quatermain corpus occupies a pivotal place in modern popular culture. Early reviewers alternated between praise for narrative vigor and censure of sensationalism and racial views. Yet the template—lost worlds, treasure quests, and ambivalent cross-cultural alliances—influenced Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), Edgar Rice Burroughs’s jungles, and later screen versions of King Solomon’s Mines (1937, 1950, 1985). The character anticipates twentieth-century adventurers from Biggles to Indiana Jones. Postcolonial scholarship has re-read the books as archives of imperial desire and doubt. Their persistent circulation keeps alive the historical climates—material, political, and imaginative—that generated Allan Quatermain’s enduring journeys.
Synopsis (Selection)
King Solomon's Mines
Allan Quatermain leads an expedition to find a missing explorer and the legendary diamond mines, trekking through uncharted African terrain and into a hidden kingdom rife with danger and intrigue.
Allan Quatermain
In the sequel to King Solomon’s Mines, Allan and companions penetrate deeper into the interior, discovering a lost civilization and becoming entangled in court politics and war.
Allan's Wife
Quatermain recounts his first marriage and an early frontier journey that tests his courage and loyalty amid hostile wilderness, cultural conflict, and personal loss.
Marie: An Episode in the Life of the Late Allan Quatermain
A youthful Allan falls in love with a Boer woman against a backdrop of family opposition, treachery, and rising Zulu–Boer tensions, leading to perilous escapes and hard choices.
Child of Storm
Drawn by the spellbinding Mameena and the machinations of the wizard Zikali, Allan is swept into Zulu factional strife that escalates toward civil conflict.
Finished
Concluding the Zulu cycle, Allan witnesses the collapse of the Zulu kingdom amid invasion and intrigue, navigating Zikali’s schemes and shifting allegiances.
Maiwa's Revenge; Or, The War of the Little Hand
Quatermain aids Maiwa in a bid for vengeance and a rescue mission, waging a tactically clever bush war against a brutal chief while confronting moral costs.
Short Adventures and Hunting Tales (A Tale of Three Lions; The Hunter Quatermain's Story; Long Odds; Magepa the Buck)
Self-contained episodes from Quatermain’s career that spotlight dangerous hunts, sudden reversals, and ethical dilemmas, emphasizing his bushcraft, marksmanship, and hard-earned caution.
Allan and the Holy Flower
Allan joins a quest for a legendary giant orchid, clashing with slavers and a fierce tribe and confronting a monstrous guardian in a remote stronghold.
The Ivory Child
Summoned by mysterious priests, Allan undertakes a perilous journey to a hidden people bound to an elephant-god, confronting prophecy, a curse, and a formidable cult.
Heu-Heu
Allan and his companions encounter a secretive tribe terrorized by the man-ape Heu-Heu, battling superstition and a monstrous threat to survive and escape.
She and Allan
Seeking proof of an afterlife, Allan journeys to Ayesha’s realm and, alongside Umslopogaas, confronts desert trials, ruthless rivals, and unsettling revelations.
The Treasure of the Lake
Drawn to a remote lake ruled by a prophetic priesthood, Allan becomes involved in a succession struggle and the discovery of a hidden hoard with uncanny ties to fate.
The Ancient Allan
Under a visionary influence, Allan relives a past life in ancient Egypt and Ethiopia, recounting warfare, court intrigue, and a fateful romance.
Allan and the Ice-gods
In a dream of prehistoric times, Allan experiences a former existence among Ice Age tribes, tracing migrations, rites, and the emergence of leadership and belief.
ALLAN QUATERMAIN – Complete Series: 18 Adventure Books in One Volume
Marie: An Episode in the Life of the Late Allan Quatermain
CHAPTER I. ALLAN LEARNS FRENCH
Although in my old age I, Allan Quatermain, have taken to writing—after a fashion—never yet have I set down a single word of the tale of my first love and of the adventures that are grouped around her beautiful and tragic history. I suppose this is because it has always seemed to me too holy and far-off a matter—as holy and far-off as is that heaven which holds the splendid spirit of Marie Marais. But now, in my age, that which was far-off draws near again; and at night, in the depths between the stars, sometimes I seem to see the opening doors through which I must pass, and leaning earthwards across their threshold, with outstretched arms and dark and dewy eyes, a shadow long forgotten by all save me—the shadow of Marie Marais.
An old man's dream, doubtless, no more. Still, I will try to set down that history which ended in so great a sacrifice, and one so worthy of record, though I hope that no human eye will read it until I also am forgotten, or, at any rate, have grown dim in the gathering mists of oblivion. And I am glad that I have waited to make this attempt, for it seems to me that only of late have I come to understand and appreciate at its true value the character of her of whom I tell, and the passionate affection which was her bounteous offering to one so utterly unworthy as myself. What have I done, I wonder, that to me should have been decreed the love of two such women as Marie and that of Stella, also now long dead, to whom alone in the world I told all her tale? I remember I feared lest she should take it ill, but this was not so. Indeed, during our brief married days, she thought and talked much of Marie, and some of her last words to me were that she was going to seek her, and that they would wait for me together in the land of love, pure and immortal.
So with Stella's death all that side of life came to an end for me, since during the long years which stretch between then and now I have never said another tender word to woman. I admit, however, that once, long afterwards, a certain little witch of a Zulu did say tender words to me, and for an hour or so almost turned my head, an art in which she had great skill. This I say because I wish to be quite honest, although it—I mean my head, for there was no heart involved in the matter—came straight again at once. Her name was Mameena, and I have set down her remarkable story elsewhere.
To return. As I have already written in another book, I passed my youth with my old father, a Church of England clergyman, in what is now the Cradock district of the Cape Colony.
Then it was a wild place enough, with a very small white population. Among our few neighbours was a Boer farmer of the name of Henri Marais, who lived about fifteen miles from our station, on a fine farm called Maraisfontein. I say he was a Boer, but, as may be guessed from both his Christian and surname, his origin was Huguenot, his forefather, who was also named Henri Marais—though I think the Marais was spelt rather differently then—having been one of the first of that faith who emigrated to South Africa to escape the cruelties of Louis XIV. at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Unlike most Boers of similar descent, these particular Marais—for, of course, there are many other families so called—never forgot their origin. Indeed, from father to son, they kept up some knowledge of the French tongue, and among themselves often spoke it after a fashion. At any rate, it was the habit of Henri Marais, who was excessively religious, to read his chapter of the Bible (which it is, or was, the custom of the Boers to spell out every morning, should their learning allow them to do so), not in the "taal" or patois Dutch, but in good old French. I have the very book from which he used to read now, for, curiously enough, in after years, when all these events had long been gathered to the past, I chanced to buy it among a parcel of other works at the weekly auction of odds and ends on the market square of Maritzburg. I remember that when I opened the great tome, bound over the original leather boards in buckskin, and discovered to whom it had belonged, I burst into tears. There was no doubt about it, for, as was customary in old days, this Bible had sundry fly-leaves sewn up with it for the purpose of the recording of events important to its owner.
The first entries were made by the original Henri Marais, and record how he and his compatriots were driven from France, his father having lost his life in the religious persecutions. After this comes a long list of births, marriages and deaths continued from generation to generation, and amongst them a few notes telling of such matters as the change of the dwelling-places of the family, always in French. Towards the end of the list appears the entry of the birth of the Henri Marais whom I knew, alas! too well, and of his only sister. Then is written his marriage to Marie Labuschagne, also, be it noted, of the Huguenot stock. In the next year follows the birth of Marie Marais, my Marie, and, after a long interval, for no other children were born, the death of her mother. Immediately below appears the following curious passage:
"Le 3 Janvier, 1836. Je quitte ce pays voulant me sauver du maudit gouvernement Britannique comme mes ancêtres se sont sauvés de ce diable—Louis XIV.
"A bas les rois et les ministres tyrannique! Vive la liberté!"
Which indicates very clearly the character and the opinions of Henri Marais, and the feeling among the trek-Boers at that time.
Thus the record closes and the story of the Marais ends—that is, so far as the writings in the Bible go, for that branch of the family is now extinct.
Their last chapter I will tell in due course.
There was nothing remarkable about my introduction to Marie Marais. I did not rescue her from any attack of a wild beast or pull her out of a raging river in a fashion suited to romance. Indeed, we interchanged our young ideas across a small and extremely massive table, which, in fact, had once done duty as a block for the chopping up of meat. To this hour I can see the hundreds of lines running criss-cross upon its surface, especially those opposite to where I used to sit.
One day, several years after my father had emigrated to the Cape, the Heer Marais arrived at our house in search, I think, of some lost oxen. He was a thin, bearded man with rather wild, dark eyes set close together, and a quick nervous manner, not in the least like that of a Dutch Boer—or so I recall him. My father received him courteously and asked him to stop to dine, which he did.
They talked together in French, a tongue that my father knew well, although he had not used it for years; Dutch he could not, or, rather, would not, speak if he could help it, and Mr. Marais preferred not to talk English. To meet someone who could converse in French delighted him, and although his version of the language was that of two centuries before and my father's was largely derived from reading, they got on very well together, if not too fast.
At length, after a pause, Mr. Marais, pointing to myself, a small and stubbly-haired youth with a sharp nose, asked my father whether he would like me to be instructed in the French tongue. The answer was that nothing would please him better.
"Although," he added severely, "to judge by my own experience where Latin and Greek are concerned, I doubt his capacity to learn anything."
So an arrangement was made that I should go over for two days in each week to Maraisfontein, sleeping there on the intervening night, and acquire a knowledge of the French tongue from a tutor whom Mr. Marais had hired to instruct his daughter in that language and other subjects. I remember that my father agreed to pay a certain proportion of this tutor's salary, a plan which suited the thrifty Boer very well indeed.
Thither, accordingly, I went in due course, nothing loth, for on the veld between our station and Maraisfontein many pauw and koran—that is, big and small bustards—were to be found, to say nothing of occasional buck, and I was allowed to carry a gun, which even in those days I could use fairly well. So to Maraisfontein I rode on the appointed day, attended by a Hottentot after-rider, a certain Hans, of whom I shall have a good deal to tell. I enjoyed very good sport on the road, arriving at the stead laden with one pauw, two koran, and a little klipspringer buck which I had been lucky enough to shoot as it bounded out of some rocks in front of me.
There was a peach orchard planted round Maraisfontein, which just then was a mass of lovely pink blossom, and as I rode through it slowly, not being sure of my way to the house, a lanky child appeared in front of me, clad in a frock which exactly matched the colour of the peach bloom. I can see her now, her dark hair hanging down her back, and her big, shy eyes staring at me from the shadow of the Dutch "kappie" which she wore. Indeed, she seemed to be all eyes, like a "dikkop" or thick-headed plover; at any rate, I noted little else about her.
I pulled up my pony and stared at her, feeling very shy and not knowing what to say. For a while she stared back at me, being afflicted, presumably, with the same complaint, then spoke with an effort, in a voice that was very soft and pleasant.
"Are you the little Allan Quatermain who is coming to learn French with me?" she asked in Dutch.
"Of course," I answered in the same tongue, which I knew well; "but why do you call me little, missie? I am taller than you," I added indignantly, for when I was young my lack of height was always a sore point with me.
"I think not," she replied. "But get off that horse, and we will measure here against this wall."
So I dismounted, and, having assured herself that I had no heels to my boots (I was wearing the kind of raw-hide slippers that the Boers call "veld-shoon"), she took the writing slate which she was carrying—it had no frame, I remember, being, in fact, but a piece of the material used for roofing—and, pressing it down tight on my stubbly hair, which stuck up then as now, made a deep mark in the soft sandstone of the wall with the hard pointed pencil.
"There," she said, "that is justly done. Now, little Allan, it is your turn to measure me."
So I measured her, and, behold! she was the taller by a whole half-inch.
"You are standing on tiptoe," I said in my vexation.
"Little Allan," she replied, "to stand on tiptoe would be to lie before the good Lord, and when you come to know me better you will learn that, though I have a dreadful temper and many other sins, I do not lie."
I suppose that I looked snubbed and mortified, for she went on in her grave, grown-up way: "Why are you angry because God made me taller than you? especially as I am whole months older, for my father told me so. Come, let us write our names against these marks, so that in a year or two you may see how you outgrow me." Then with the slate pencil she scratched "Marie" against her mark very deeply, so that it might last, she said; after which I wrote "Allan" against mine.
Alas! Within the last dozen years chance took me past Maraisfontein once more. The house had long been rebuilt, but this particular wall yet stood. I rode to it and looked, and there faintly could still be seen the name Marie, against the little line, and by it the mark that I had made. My own name and with it subsequent measurements were gone, for in the intervening forty years or so the sandstone had flaked away in places. Only her autograph remained, and when I saw it I think that I felt even worse than I did on finding whose was the old Bible that I had bought upon the market square at Maritzburg.
I know that I rode away hurriedly without even stopping to inquire into whose hands the farm had passed. Through the peach orchard I rode, where the trees—perhaps the same, perhaps others—were once more in bloom, for the season of the year was that when Marie and I first met, nor did I draw rein for half a score of miles.
But here I may state that Marie always stayed just half an inch the taller in body, and how much taller in mind and spirit I cannot tell.
When we had finished our measuring match Marie turned to lead me to the house, and, pretending to observe for the first time the beautiful bustard and the two koran hanging from my saddle, also the klipspringer buck that Hans the Hottentot carried behind him on his horse, asked:
"Did you shoot all these, Allan Quatermain?"
"Yes," I answered proudly; "I killed them in four shots, and the pauw and koran were flying, not sitting, which is more than you could have done, although you are taller, Miss Marie."
"I do not know," she answered reflectively. "I can shoot very well with a rifle, for my father has taught me, but I never would shoot at living things unless I must because I was hungry, for I think that to kill is cruel. But, of course, it is different with men," she added hastily, "and no doubt you will be a great hunter one day, Allan Quatermain, since you can already aim so well."
"I hope so," I answered, blushing at the compliment, "for I love hunting, and when there are so many wild things it does not matter if we kill a few. I shot these for you and your father to eat."
"Come, then, and give them to him. He will thank you," and she led the way through the gate in the sandstone wall into the yard, where the outbuildings stood in which the riding horses and the best of the breeding cattle were kept at night, and so past the end of the long, one-storied house, that was stone-built and whitewashed, to the stoep or veranda in front of it.
On the broad stoep, which commanded a pleasant view over rolling, park-like country, where mimosa and other trees grew in clumps, two men were seated, drinking strong coffee, although it was not yet ten o'clock in the morning.
Hearing the sound of the horses, one of these, Mynheer Marais, whom I already knew, rose from his hide-strung chair. He was, as I think I have said, not in the least like one of the phlegmatic Boers, either in person or in temperament, but, rather, a typical Frenchman, although no member of his race had set foot in France for a hundred and fifty years. At least so I discovered afterwards, for, of course, in those days I knew nothing of Frenchmen.
His companion was also French, Leblanc by name, but of a very different stamp. In person he was short and stout. His large head was bald except for a fringe of curling, iron-grey hair which grew round it just above the ears and fell upon his shoulders, giving him the appearance of a tonsured but dishevelled priest. His eyes were blue and watery, his mouth was rather weak, and his cheeks were pale, full and flabby. When the Heer Marais rose, I, being an observant youth, noted that Monsieur Leblanc took the opportunity to stretch out a rather shaky hand and fill up his coffee cup out of a black bottle, which from the smell I judged to contain peach brandy.
In fact, it may as well be said at once that the poor man was a drunkard, which explains how he, with all his high education and great ability, came to hold the humble post of tutor on a remote Boer farm. Years before, when under the influence of drink, he had committed some crime in France—I don't know what it was, and never inquired—and fled to the Cape to avoid prosecution. Here he obtained a professorship at one of the colleges, but after a while appeared in the lecture-room quite drunk and lost his employment. The same thing happened in other towns, till at last he drifted to distant Maraisfontein, where his employer tolerated his weakness for the sake of the intellectual companionship for which something in his own nature seemed to crave. Also, he looked upon him as a compatriot in distress, and a great bond of union between them was their mutual and virulent hatred of England and the English, which in the case of Monsieur Leblanc, who in his youth had fought at Waterloo and been acquainted with the great Emperor, was not altogether unnatural.
Henri Marais's case was different, but of that I shall have more to say later.
"Ah, Marie," said her father, speaking in Dutch, "so you have found him at last," and he nodded towards me, adding: "You should be flattered, little man. Look you, this missie has been sitting for two hours in the sun waiting for you, although I told her you would not arrive much before ten o'clock, as your father the prédicant said you would breakfast before you started. Well, it is natural, for she is lonely here, and you are of an age, although of a different race"; and his face darkened as he spoke the words.
"Father," answered Marie, whose blushes I could see even in the shadow of her cap, "I was not sitting in the sun, but under the shade of a peach tree. Also, I was working out the sums that Monsieur Leblanc set me on my slate. See, here they are," and she held up the slate, which was covered with figures, somewhat smudged, it is true, by the rubbing of my stiff hair and of her cap.
Then Monsieur Leblanc broke in, speaking in French, of which, as it chanced I understood the sense, for my father had grounded me in that tongue, and I am naturally quick at modern languages. At any rate, I made out that he was asking if I was the little "cochon d'anglais," or English pig, whom for his sins he had to teach. He added that he judged I must be, as my hair stuck up on my head—I had taken off my hat out of politeness—as it naturally would do on a pig's back.
This was too much for me, so, before either of the others could speak, I answered in Dutch, for rage made me eloquent and bold:
"Yes, I am he; but, mynheer, if you are to be my master, I hope you will not call the English pigs any more to me."
"Indeed, gamin" (that is, little scamp), "and pray, what will happen if I am so bold as to repeat that truth?"
"I think, mynheer," I replied, growing white with rage at this new insult, "the same that has happened to yonder buck," and I pointed to the klipspringer behind Hans's saddle. "I mean that I shall shoot you."
"Peste! Au moins il a du courage, cet enfant" (At least the child is plucky), exclaimed Monsieur Leblanc, astonished. From that moment, I may add, he respected me, and never again insulted my country to my face.
Then Marais broke out, speaking in Dutch that I might understand:
"It is you who should be called pig, Leblanc, not this boy, for, early as it is, you have been drinking. Look! the brandy bottle is half empty. Is that the example you set to the young? Speak so again and I turn you out to starve on the veld. Allan Quatermain, although, as you may have heard, I do not like the English, I beg your pardon. I hope you will forgive the words this sot spoke, thinking that you did not understand," and he took off his hat and bowed to me quite in a grand manner, as his ancestors might have done to a king of France.
Leblanc's face fell. Then he rose and walked away rather unsteadily; as I learned afterwards, to plunge his head in a tub of cold water and swallow a pint of new milk, which were his favourite antidotes after too much strong drink. At any rate, when he appeared again, half an hour later, to begin our lesson, he was quite sober, and extremely polite.
When he had gone, my childish anger being appeased, I presented the Heer Marais with my father's compliments, also with the buck and the birds, whereof the latter seemed to please him more than the former. Then my saddle-bags were taken to my room, a little cupboard of a place next to that occupied by Monsieur Leblanc, and Hans was sent to turn the horses out with the others belonging to the farm, having first knee-haltered them tightly, so that they should not run away home.
This done, the Heer Marais showed me the room in which we were to have our lessons, one of the "sitkammer", or sitting chambers, whereof, unlike most Boer stead, this house boasted two. I remember that the floor was made of "daga", that is, ant-heap earth mixed with cow-dung, into which thousands of peach-stones had been thrown while it was still soft, in order to resist footwear—a rude but fairly efficient expedient, and one not unpleasing to the eye. For the rest, there was one window opening on to the veranda, which, in that bright climate, admitted a shaded but sufficient light, especially as it always stood open; the ceiling was of unplastered reeds; a large bookcase stood in the corner containing many French works, most of them the property of Monsieur Leblanc, and in the centre of the room was the strong, rough table made of native yellow-wood, that once had served as a butcher's block. I recollect also a coloured print of the great Napoleon commanding at some battle in which he was victorious, seated upon a white horse and waving a field-marshal's baton over piles of dead and wounded; and near the window, hanging to the reeds of the ceiling, the nest of a pair of red-tailed swallows, pretty creatures that, notwithstanding the mess they made, afforded to Marie and me endless amusement in the intervals of our work.
When, on that day, I shuffled shyly into this homely place, and, thinking myself alone there, fell to examining it, suddenly I was brought to a standstill by a curious choking sound which seemed to proceed from the shadows behind the bookcase. Wondering as to its cause, I advanced cautiously to discover a pink-clad shape standing in the corner like a naughty child, with her head resting against the wall, and sobbing slowly.
"Marie Marais, why do you cry?" I asked.
She turned, tossing back the locks of long, black hair which hung about her face, and answered:
"Allan Quatermain, I cry because of the shame which has been put upon you and upon our house by that drunken Frenchman."
"What of that?" I asked. "He only called me a pig, but I think I have shown him that even a pig has tusks."
"Yes," she replied, "but it was not you he meant; it was all the English, whom he hates; and the worst of it is that my father is of his mind. He, too, hates the English, and, oh! I am sure that trouble will come of his hatred, trouble and death to many."
"Well, if so, we have nothing to do with it, have we?" I replied with the cheerfulness of extreme youth.
"What makes you so sure?" she said solemnly. "Hush! here comes Monsieur Leblanc."
CHAPTER II. THE ATTACK ON MARAISFONTEIN
I do not propose to set out the history of the years which I spent in acquiring a knowledge of French and various other subjects, under the tuition of the learned but prejudiced Monsieur Leblanc. Indeed, there is "none to tell, sir." When Monsieur Leblanc was sober, he was a most excellent and well-informed tutor, although one apt to digress into many side issues, which in themselves were not uninstructive. When tipsy, he grew excited and harangued us, generally upon politics and religion, or rather its reverse, for he was an advanced freethinker, although this was a side to his character which, however intoxicated he might be, he always managed to conceal from the Heer Marais. I may add that a certain childish code of honour prevented us from betraying his views on this and sundry other matters. When absolutely drunk, which, on an average, was not more than once a month, he simply slept, and we did what we pleased—a fact which our childish code of honour also prevented us from betraying.
But, on the whole, we got on very well together, for, after the incident of our first meeting, Monsieur Leblanc was always polite to me. Marie he adored, as did every one about the place, from her father down to the meanest slave. Need I add that I adored her more than all of them put together, first with the love that some children have for each other, and afterwards, as we became adult, with that wider love by which it is at once transcended and made complete. Strange would it have been if this were not so, seeing that we spent nearly half of every week practically alone together, and that, from the first, Marie, whose nature was as open as the clear noon, never concealed her affection for me. True, it was a very discreet affection, almost sisterly, or even motherly, in its outward and visible aspects, as though she could never forget that extra half-inch of height or month or two of age.
Moreover, from a child she was a woman, as an Irishman might say, for circumstances and character had shaped her thus. Not much more than a year before we met, her mother, whose only child she was, and whom she loved with all her strong and passionate heart, died after a lingering illness, leaving her in charge of her father and his house. I think it was this heavy bereavement in early youth which coloured her nature with a grey tinge of sadness and made her seem so much older than her years.
So the time went on, I worshipping Marie in my secret thought, but saying nothing about it, and Marie talking of and acting towards me as though I were her dear younger brother. Nobody, not even her father or mine, or Monsieur Leblanc, took the slightest notice of this queer relationship, or seemed to dream that it might lead to ultimate complications which, in fact, would have been very distasteful to them all for reasons that I will explain.
Needless to say, in due course, as they were bound to do, those complications arose, and under pressure of great physical and moral excitement the truth came out. It happened thus.
Every reader of the history of the Cape Colony has heard of the great Kaffir War of 1835. That war took place for the most part in the districts of Albany and Somerset, so that we inhabitants of Cradock, on the whole, suffered little. Therefore, with the natural optimism and carelessness of danger of dwellers in wild places, we began to think ourselves fairly safe from attack. Indeed, so we should have been, had it not been for a foolish action on the part of Monsieur Leblanc.
It seems that on a certain Sunday, a day that I always spent at home with my father, Monsieur Leblanc rode out alone to some hills about five miles distant from Maraisfontein. He had often been cautioned that this was an unsafe thing to do, but the truth is that the foolish man thought he had found a rich copper mine in these hills, and was anxious that no one should share his secret. Therefore, on Sundays, when there were no lessons, and the Heer Marais was in the habit of celebrating family prayers, which Leblanc disliked, it was customary for him to ride to these hills and there collect geological specimens and locate the strike of his copper vein. On this particular Sabbath, which was very hot, after he had done whatever he intended to do, he dismounted from his horse, a tame old beast. Leaving it loose, he partook of the meal he had brought with him, which seems to have included a bottle of peach brandy that induced slumber.
Waking up towards evening, he found that his horse had gone, and at once jumped to the conclusion that it had been stolen by Kaffirs, although in truth the animal had but strolled over a ridge in search of grass. Running hither and thither to seek it, he presently crossed this ridge and met the horse, apparently being led away by two of the Red Kaffirs, who, as was usual, were armed with assegais. As a matter of fact these men had found the beast, and, knowing well to whom it belonged, were seeking its owner, whom, earlier in the day, they had seen upon the hills, in order to restore it to him. This, however, never occurred to the mind of Monsieur Leblanc, excited as it was by the fumes of the peach brandy.
Lifting the double-barrelled gun he carried, he fired at the first Kaffir, a young man who chanced to be the eldest son and heir of the chief of the tribe, and, as the range was very close, shot him dead. Thereon his companion, leaving go of the horse, ran for his life. At him Leblanc fired also, wounding him slightly in the thigh, but no more, so that he escaped to tell the tale of what he and every other native for miles round considered a wanton and premeditated murder. The deed done, the fiery old Frenchman mounted his nag and rode quietly home. On the road, however, as the peach brandy evaporated from his brain, doubts entered it, with the result that he determined to say nothing of his adventure to Henri Marais, who he knew was particularly anxious to avoid any cause of quarrel with the Kaffirs.
So he kept his own counsel and went to bed. Before he was up next morning the Heer Marais, suspecting neither trouble nor danger, had ridden off to a farm thirty miles or more away to pay its owner for some cattle which he had recently bought, leaving his home and his daughter quite unprotected, except by Leblanc and the few native servants, who were really slaves, that lived about the place.
Now on the Monday night I went to bed as usual, and slept, as I have always done through life, like a top, till about four in the morning, when I was awakened by someone tapping at the glass of my window. Slipping from the bed, I felt for my pistol, as it was quite dark, crept to the window, opened it, and keeping my head below the level of the sill, fearing lest its appearance should be greeted with an assegai, asked who was there.
"Me, baas," said the voice of Hans, our Hottentot servant, who, it will be remembered, had accompanied me as after-rider when first I went to Maraisfontein. "I have bad news. Listen. The baas knows that I have been out searching for the red cow which was lost. Well, I found her, and was sleeping by her side under a tree on the veld when, about two hours ago, a woman whom I know came up to my camp fire and woke me. I asked her what she was doing at that hour of the night, and she answered that she had come to tell me something. She said that some young men of the tribe of the chief Quabie, who lives in the hills yonder, had been visiting at their kraal, and that a few hours before a messenger had arrived from the chief saying that they must return at once, as this morning at dawn he and all his men were going to attack Maraisfontein and kill everyone in it and take the cattle!"
"Good God!" I ejaculated. "Why?"
"Because, young baas," drawled the Hottentot from the other side of the window, "because someone from Maraisfontein—I think it was the Vulture" (the natives gave this name to Leblanc on account of his bald head and hooked nose)—"shot Quabie's son on Sunday when he was holding his horse."
