Allan Quatermain Stories by H. Rider Haggard

Author:H. Rider Haggard
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Africa -- Fiction, Fantasy fiction, Allan (Fictitious character) -- Fiction, Hunting guides -- Fiction, Adventure stories, Quatermain
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2025-03-19T20:53:25+00:00

II

What Was Found in the Pool

“Some­thing over a fort­night had passed since the night when I lost half-a-sov­er­eign and found twelve hun­dred and fifty pounds in look­ing for it, and in­stead of that hor­rid hole, for which, after all, El­dor­ado was hardly a mis­nomer, a very dif­fer­ent scene stretched away be­fore us clad in the sil­ver robe of the moon­light. We were camped—Harry and I, two Kaf­firs, a Scotch cart, and six ox­en—on the swell­ing side of a great wave of bush-clad land. Just where we had made our camp, how­ever, the bush was very sparse, and only grew about in clumps, while here and there were single flat-topped mimosa-trees. To our right a little stream, which had cut a deep chan­nel for it­self in the bos­om of the slope, flowed mu­sic­ally on between banks green with maid­en­hair, wild as­paragus, and many beau­ti­ful grasses. The bed­rock here was red gran­ite, and in the course of cen­tur­ies of pa­tient wash­ing the wa­ter had hol­lowed out some of the huge slabs in its path in­to great troughs and cups, and these we used for bathing-places. No Ro­man lady, with her baths of por­phyry or ala­baster, could have had a more de­li­cious spot to bathe her­self than we found with­in fifty yards of our skerm, or rough en­clos­ure of mimosa thorn, that we had dragged to­geth­er round the cart to pro­tect us from the at­tacks of lions. That there were sev­er­al of these brutes about, I knew from their spoor, though we had neither heard nor seen them.

“Our bath was a little nook where the eddy of the stream had washed away a mass of soil, and on the edge of it there grew a most beau­ti­ful old mimosa thorn. Be­neath the thorn was a large smooth slab of gran­ite fringed all round with maid­en­hair and oth­er ferns, that sloped gently down to a pool of the clearest spark­ling wa­ter, which lay in a bowl of gran­ite about ten feet wide by five feet deep in the centre. Here to this slab we went every morn­ing to bathe, and that de­light­ful bath is among the most pleas­ant of my hunt­ing re­min­is­cences, as it is also, for reas­ons which will presently ap­pear, among the most pain­ful.

“It was a lovely night. Harry and I sat to the wind­ward of the fire, where the two Kaf­firs were busily em­ployed in cook­ing some im­pala steaks off a buck which Harry, to his great joy, had shot that morn­ing, and were as per­fectly con­ten­ted with ourselves and the world at large as two people could pos­sibly be. The night was beau­ti­ful, and it would re­quire some­body with more words on the tip of his tongue than I have to de­scribe prop­erly the chastened majesty of those moon­lit wilds. Away forever and forever, away to the mys­ter­i­ous north, rolled the great bush ocean over which the si­lence brooded. There be­neath us a mile or more to the right ran the wide Ol­iphant, and mir­ror-like flashed back the moon, whose

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.