The Project Gutenberg EBook of Long Odds, by H. Rider Haggard

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Title: Long Odds

Author: H. Rider Haggard

Release Date: March 31, 2006 [EBook #2730]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONG ODDS ***

Produced by John Bickers; Dagny; Emma Dudding

LONG ODDS

by H. Rider Haggard

This is the second PG version of Long Odds, also see Etext #1918.

The story which is narrated in the following pages came to me from the
lips of my old friend Allan Quatermain, or Hunter Quatermain, as we used
to call him in South Africa. He told it to me one evening when I was
stopping with him at the place he bought in Yorkshire. Shortly after
that, the death of his only son so unsettled him that he immediately
left England, accompanied by two companions, his old fellow-voyagers,
Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into the
dark heart of Africa. He is persuaded that a white people, of which he
has heard rumours all his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in the
vast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find them
before he dies. This is the wild quest upon which he and his companions
have departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they never will return.
One letter only have I received from the old gentleman, dated from a
mission station high up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about three
hundred miles north of Zanzibar. In it he says they have gone through
many hardships and adventures, but are alive and well, and have found
traces which go far towards 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 a