high up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about
three hundred miles north of Zanzibar; in it he says that they have gone
through many hardships and adventures, but are alive and well, and have
found traces which go far toward making him hope that the results of
their wild quest may be a "magnificent and unexampled discovery." I
greatly fear, however, that all he has discovered is death; for this
letter came a long while ago, and nobody has heard a single word of the
party since. They have totally vanished.

It was on the last evening of my stay at his house that he told the
ensuing story to me and Captain Good, who was dining with him. He had
eaten his dinner and drunk two or three glasses of old port, just to
help Good and myself to the end of the second bottle. It was an unusual
thing for him to do, for he was a most abstemious man, having conceived,
as he used to say, a great horror of drink from observing its
effects upon the class of colonists--hunters, transport-riders
and others--amongst whom he had passed so many years of his life.
Consequently the good wine took more effect on him than it would have
done on most men, sending a little flush into his wrinkled cheeks, and
making him talk more freely than usual.

Dear old man! I can see him now, as he went limping up and down the
vestibule, with his gray hair sticking up in scrubbing-brush fashion,
his shrivelled yellow face, and his large dark eyes, that were as keen
as any hawk's, and yet soft as a buck's. The whole room was hung with
trophies of his numerous hunting expeditions, and he had some story
about every one of them, if only he could be got to tell it. Generally
he would not, for he was not very fond of narrating his own adventures,
but to-night the port wine made him more communicative.

"Ah, you brute!" he said, stopping beneath an unusually large skull of
a lion, which was fixed just over the mantelpiece, beneath a long row of
guns, its jaws distended to their utmost width. "Ah, you brute! you have
given me a lot of trouble for the last dozen years, and will, I suppose
to my dying day."

"Tell us the yarn, Quatermain," said Good. "You have often promised to
tell me, and you never have."

"You had better not ask me to," he answered, "for it is a longish one."

"All right," I said, "the evening is young, and there is some more
port."

Thus adjured, he filled his pipe from a jar of coarse-cut Boer tobacco
that was always standing on the mante