文档介绍：LONG ODDS
LONG ODDS
By H. Rider Haggard
1
LONG ODDS
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, panied by panions, 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 panions 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 that 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 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 rider