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What starts out as an enjoyable father-son outing turns into something entirely different in this thrilling tale from action-adventure master H. Rider Haggard. When famed explorer Allan Quatermain tries to teach his son a few life lessons on safari, he gets much more than he bargained for.

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Publié par	The Floating Press
Date de parution	01 juin 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781775458890
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0134€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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A TALE OF THREE LIONS
* * *
H. RIDER HAGGARD

*
A Tale of Three Lions First published in 1887 ISBN 978-1-77545-889-0 © 2012 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
*
Chapter I - The Interest on Ten Shillings Chapter II - What was Found in the Pool Chapter III - Jim-Jim is Avenged Endnotes
Chapter I - The Interest on Ten Shillings
*
Most of you will have heard that Allan Quatermain, who was one of theparty that discovered King Solomon's mines some little time ago, and whoafterwards came to live in England near his friend Sir Henry Curtis.He went back to the wilderness again, as these old hunters almostinvariably do, on one pretext or another. [1] They cannot endurecivilization for very long, its noise and racket and the omnipresenceof broad-clothed humanity proving more trying to their nerves than thedangers of the desert. I think that they feel lonely here, for it isa fact that is too little understood, though it has often been stated,that there is no loneliness like the loneliness of crowds, especiallyto those who are unaccustomed to them. "What is there in the world," oldQuatermain would say, "so desolate as to stand in the streets of a greatcity and listen to the footsteps falling, falling, multitudinous as therain, and watch the white line of faces as they hurry past, you know notwhence, you know not whither? They come and go, their eyes meet yourswith 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; theywill never see you again; they come up out of the unknown, and presentlythey once more vanish into the unknown, taking their secrets with them.Yes, that is loneliness pure and undefiled; but to one who knows andloves it, the wilderness is not lonely, because the spirit of natureis ever there to keep the wanderer company. He finds companions in thewinds—the sunny streams babble like Nature's children at his feet; highabove them, in the purple sunset, are domes and minarets and palaces,such as no mortal man has built, in and out of whose flaming doors theangels of the sun seem to move continually. And there, too, is the wildgame, following its feeding-grounds in great armies, with the springbuckthrown out before for skirmishers; then rank upon rank of long-facedblesbuck, marching and wheeling like infantry; and last the shiningtroops of quagga, and the fierce-eyed shaggy vilderbeeste to take, as itwere, the place of the cossack host that hangs upon an army's flanks.
"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 amsure that anybody will easily understand who has watched the sun riseand set on the limitless deserted plains, and seen the thunder chariotsof 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 haveheard nothing at all of him, and to be frank, I greatly doubt if anybodywill ever hear of him again. I fear that the wilderness, that has for somany years been a mother to him, will now also prove his grave and thegrave of those who accompanied him, for the quest upon which he and theyhave started is a wild one indeed.
But while he was in England for those three years or so betweenhis return from the successful discovery of the wise king's buriedtreasures, and the death of his only son, I saw a great deal of oldAllan Quatermain. I had known him years before in Africa, and afterhe came home, whenever I had nothing better to do, I used to run up toYorkshire and stay with him, and in this way I at one time and anotherheard many of the incidents of his past life, and most curious some ofthem were. No man can pass all those years following the rough existenceof 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 isone of the later of these adventures, though I forget the exact yearin which it happened, at any rate I know that it was the only trip uponwhich he took his son Harry (who is since dead) with him, and that Harrywas then about fourteen. And now for the story, which I will repeat, asnearly as I can, in the words in which Hunter Quatermain told it to meone night in the old oak-panelled vestibule of his house in Yorkshire.We were talking about gold-mining—
"Gold-mining!" he broke in; "ah! yes, I once went gold-mining atPilgrims' Rest in the Transvaal, and it was after that that we had thebusiness about Jim-Jim and the lions. Do you know Pilgrim's Rest? Well,it is, or was, one of the queerest little places you ever saw. The townitself was pitched in a stony valley, with mountains all about it, andin the middle of such scenery as one does not often get the chance ofseeing. Many and many is the time that I have thrown down my pick andshovel in disgust, clambered out of my claim, and walked a couple ofmiles or so to the top of some hill. Then I would lie down in the grassand look out over the glorious stretch of country—the smiling valleys,the great mountains touched with gold—real gold of the sunset, andclothed in sweeping robes of bush, and stare into the depths of theperfect sky above; yes, and thank Heaven I had got away from the cursingand the coarse jokes of the miners, and the voices of those BasutuKaffirs as they toiled in the sun, the memory of which is with me yet.
"Well, for some months I dug away patiently at my claim, till the verysight of a pick or of a washing-trough became hateful to me. A hundredtimes a day I lamented my own folly in having invested eight hundredpounds, which was about all that I was worth at the time, in thisgold-mining. But like other better people before me, I had been bittenby the gold bug, and now was forced to take the consequences. I bought aclaim out of which a man had made a fortune—five or six thousand poundsat least—as I thought, very cheap; that is, I gave him five hundredpounds down for it. It was all that I had made by a very roughyear's elephant-hunting beyond the Zambesi, and I sighed deeply andpr

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