A TALE OF THREE LIONS
Page: 2

shaggy vilderbeeste to take, as it were, the place of the cossack host
that hangs upon an army's flanks.

[*] This of course was written before Mr. Quatermain's account of the
adventures in the newly-discovered country of Zu-Vendis of
himself, Sir Henry Curtis, and Capt. John Good had been received
in England.--Editor.

"Oh, no," he would say, "the wilderness is not lonely, for, my boy,
remember that the further you get from man, the nearer you grow to
God," and though this is a saying that might well be disputed, it is
one I am sure that anybody will easily understand who has watched the
sun rise and set on the limitless deserted plains, and seen the
thunder chariots of the clouds roll in majesty across the depths of
unfathomable sky.

Well, at any rate we went back again, and now for many months I have
heard nothing at all of him, and to be frank, I greatly doubt if
anybody will ever hear of him again. I fear that the wilderness, that
has for so many years been a mother to him, will now also prove his
grave and the grave of those who accompanied him, for the quest upon
which he and they have started is a wild one indeed.

But while he was in England for those three years or so between his
return from the successful discovery of the wise king's buried
treasures, and the death of his only son, I saw a great deal of old
Allan Quatermain. I had known him years before in Africa, and after he
came home, whenever I had nothing better to do, I used to run up to
Yorkshire and stay with him, and in this way I at one time and another
heard many of the incidents of his past life, and most curious some of
them were. No man can pass all those years following the rough
existence of an elephant-hunter without meeting with many strange
adventures, and in one way and another old Quatermain has certainly
seen his share. Well, the story that I am going to tell you in the
following pages is one of the later of these adventures, though I
forget the exact year in which it happened. at any rate I know that it
was the only trip upon which he took his son Harry (who is since dead)
with him, and that Harry was then about fourteen. And now for the