The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Tale of Three Lions, by H. Rider Haggard

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Title: A Tale of Three Lions

Author: H. Rider Haggard

Posting Date: December 3, 2008 [EBook #2729]
Release Date: July, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A TALE OF THREE LIONS ***

Produced by John Bickers, Emma Dudding, and Dagny

A TALE OF THREE LIONS

By H. Rider Haggard

CHAPTER I. THE INTEREST ON TEN SHILLINGS

Most of you will have heard that Allan Quatermain, who was one of the
party that discovered King Solomon's mines some little time ago, and who
afterwards came to live in England near his friend Sir Henry Curtis.
He went back to the wilderness again, as these old hunters almost
invariably do, on one pretext or another.[*] They cannot endure
civilization for very long, its noise and racket and the omnipresence
of broad-clothed humanity proving more trying to their nerves than the
dangers of the desert. I think that they feel lonely here, for it is
a fact that is too little understood, though it has often been stated,
that there is no loneliness like the loneliness of crowds, especially
to those who are unaccustomed to them. "What is there in the world," old
Quatermain would say, "so desolate as to stand in the streets of a great
city and listen to the footsteps falling, falling, multitudinous as the
rain, and watch the white line of faces as they hurry past, you know not
whence, you know not whither? They come and go, their eyes meet yours
with a cold stare, for a moment their features are written on your mind,
and then they are gone for ever. You will never see them again; they
will never see you again; they come up out of the unknown, and presently
they once more vanish into the unknown, taking their secrets with them.
Yes, that is loneliness pure and undefiled; but to one who knows and
loves it, the wilderness is not lonely, because the spirit of nature
is ever there to keep the wanderer company. He finds companions in the
winds--the sunny streams babble like Nature's children at his feet; high
above them, in the purple sunset, are domes and minarets and palaces,
such as no mortal man has