King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard (highly illogical behavior TXT) 📕
Allan Quatermain.
KING SOLOMON'S MINES
CHAPTER I
I MEET SIR HENRY CURTIS
It is a curious thing that at my age--fifty-five last birthday--I should find myself taking up a pen to try to write a history. I wonder what sort of a history it will be when I have finished it, if ever I come to the end of the trip! I have done a good many things in my life, which seems a long
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“The story is surely true, Ignosi, for on the mountains we found the white man,” I said.
“Yes, we found him. And now I have promised you that if ye can come to that chamber, and the stones are there—”
“The gem upon thy forehead proves that they are there,” I put in, pointing to the great diamond I had taken from Twala’s dead brows.
“Mayhap; if they are there,” he said, “ye shall have as many as ye can take hence—if indeed ye would leave me, my brothers.”
“First we must find the chamber,” said I.
“There is but one who can show it to thee—Gagool.”
“And if she will not?”
“Then she must die,” said Ignosi sternly. “I have saved her alive but for this. Stay, she shall choose,” and calling to a messenger he ordered Gagool to be brought before him.
In a few minutes she came, hurried along by two guards, whom she was cursing as she walked.
“Leave her,” said the king to the guards.
So soon as their support was withdrawn, the withered old bundle—for she looked more like a bundle than anything else, out of which her two bright and wicked eyes gleamed like those of a snake—sank in a heap on to the floor.
“What will ye with me, Ignosi?” she piped. “Ye dare not touch me. If ye touch me I will slay you as ye sit. Beware of my magic.”
“Thy magic could not save Twala, old she-wolf, and it cannot hurt me,” was the answer. “Listen; I will this of thee, that thou reveal to us the chamber where are the shining stones.”
“Ha! ha!” she piped, “none know its secret but I, and I will never tell thee. The white devils shall go hence empty-handed.”
“Thou shalt tell me. I will make thee tell me.”
“How, O king? Thou art great, but can thy power wring the truth from a woman?”
“It is difficult, yet will I do so.”
“How, O king?”
“Nay, thus; if thou tellest not thou shalt slowly die.”
“Die!” she shrieked in terror and fury; “ye dare not touch me—man, ye know not who I am. How old think ye am I? I knew your fathers, and your fathers’ fathers’ fathers. When the country was young I was here; when the country grows old I shall still be here. I cannot die unless I be killed by chance, for none dare slay me.”
“Yet will I slay thee. See, Gagool, mother of evil, thou art so old that thou canst no longer love thy life. What can life be to such a hag as thou, who hast no shape, nor form, nor hair, nor teeth—hast naught, save wickedness and evil eyes? It will be mercy to make an end of thee, Gagool.”
“Thou fool,” shrieked the old fiend, “thou accursed fool, deemest thou that life is sweet only to the young? It is not so, and naught thou knowest of the heart of man to think it. To the young, indeed, death is sometimes welcome, for the young can feel. They love and suffer, and it wrings them to see their beloved pass to the land of shadows. But the old feel not, they love not, and, ha! ha! they laugh to see another go out into the dark; ha! ha! they laugh to see the evil that is done under the stars. All they love is life, the warm, warm sun, and the sweet, sweet air. They are afraid of the cold, afraid of the cold and the dark, ha! ha! ha!” and the old hag writhed in ghastly merriment on the ground.
“Cease thine evil talk and answer me,” said Ignosi angrily. “Wilt thou show the place where the stones are, or wilt thou not? If thou wilt not thou diest, even now,” and he seized a spear and held it over her.
“I will not show it; thou darest not kill me, darest not! He who slays me will be accursed for ever.”
Slowly Ignosi brought down the spear till it pricked the prostrate heap of rags.
With a wild yell Gagool sprang to her feet, then fell again and rolled upon the floor.
“Nay, I will show thee. Only let me live, let me sit in the sun and have a bit of meat to suck, and I will show thee.”
“It is well. I thought that I should find a way to reason with thee. Tomorrow shalt thou go with Infadoos and my white brothers to the place, and beware how thou failest, for if thou showest it not, then thou shalt slowly die. I have spoken.”
“I will not fail, Ignosi. I always keep my word—ha! ha! ha! Once before a woman showed the chamber to a white man, and behold! evil befell him,” and here her wicked eyes glinted. “Her name was Gagool also. Perchance I was that woman.”
“Thou liest,” I said, “that was ten generations gone.”
“Mayhap, mayhap; when one lives long one forgets. Perhaps it was my mother’s mother who told me; surely her name was Gagool also. But mark, ye will find in the place where the bright things are a bag of hide full of stones. The man filled that bag, but he never took it away. Evil befell him, I say, evil befell him! Perhaps it was my mother’s mother who told me. It will be a merry journey—we can see the bodies of those who died in the battle as we go. Their eyes will be gone by now, and their ribs will be hollow. Ha! ha! ha!”
It was already dark on the third day after the scene described in the previous chapter when we camped in some huts at the foot of the “Three Witches,” as the triangle of mountains is called to which Solomon’s Great Road runs. Our party consisted of our three selves and Foulata, who waited on us—especially on Good—Infadoos, Gagool, who was borne along in a litter, inside which she could be heard muttering and cursing all day long, and a party of guards and attendants. The mountains, or rather the three peaks of the mountain, for the mass was evidently the result of a solitary upheaval, were, as I have said, in the form of a triangle, of which the base was towards us, one peak being on our right, one on our left, and one straight in front of us. Never shall I forget the sight afforded by those three towering peaks in the early sunlight of the following morning. High, high above us, up into the blue air, soared their twisted snow-wreaths. Beneath the snow-line the peaks were purple with heaths, and so were the wild moors that ran up the slopes towards them. Straight before us the white ribbon of Solomon’s Great Road stretched away uphill to the foot of the centre peak, about five miles from us, and there stopped. It was its terminus.
I had better leave the feelings of intense excitement with which we set out on our march that morning to the imagination of those who read this history. At last we were drawing near to the wonderful mines that had been the cause of the miserable death of the old Portuguese Dom three centuries ago, of my poor friend, his ill-starred descendant, and also, as we feared, of George Curtis, Sir Henry’s brother. Were we destined, after all that we had gone through, to fare any better? Evil befell them, as that old fiend Gagool said; would it also befall us? Somehow, as we were marching up that last stretch of beautiful road, I could not help feeling a little superstitious about the matter, and so I think did Good and Sir Henry.
For an hour and a half or more we tramped on up the heather-fringed way, going so fast in our excitement that the bearers of Gagool’s hammock could scarcely keep pace with us, and its occupant piped out to us to stop.
“Walk more slowly, white men,” she said, projecting her hideous shrivelled countenance between the grass curtains, and fixing her gleaming eyes upon us; “why will ye run to meet the evil that shall befall you, ye seekers after treasure?” and she laughed that horrible laugh which always sent a cold shiver down my back, and for a while quite took the enthusiasm out of us.
However, on we went, till we saw before us, and between ourselves and the peak, a vast circular hole with sloping sides, three hundred feet or more in depth, and quite half a mile round.
“Can’t you guess what this is?” I said to Sir Henry and Good, who were staring in astonishment at the awful pit before us.
They shook their heads.
“Then it is clear that you have never seen the diamond diggings at Kimberley. You may depend on it that this is Solomon’s Diamond Mine. Look there,” I said, pointing to the strata of stiff blue clay which were yet to be seen among the grass and bushes that clothed the sides of the pit, “the formation is the same. I’ll be bound that if we went down there we should find ‘pipes’ of soapy brecciated rock. Look, too,” and I pointed to a series of worn flat slabs of stone that were placed on a gentle slope below the level of a watercourse which in some past age had been cut out of the solid rock; “if those are not tables once used to wash the ‘stuff,’ I’m a Dutchman.”
At the edge of this vast hole, which was none other than the pit marked on the old Dom’s map, the Great Road branched into two and circumvented it. In many places, by the way, this surrounding road was built entirely out of blocks of stone, apparently with the object of supporting the edges of the pit and preventing falls of reef. Along this path we pressed, driven by curiosity to see what were the three towering objects which we could discern from the hither side of the great gulf. As we drew near we perceived that they were Colossi of some sort or another, and rightly conjectured that before us sat the three “Silent Ones” that are held in such awe by the Kukuana people. But it was not until we were quite close to them that we recognised the full majesty of these “Silent Ones.”
There, upon huge pedestals of dark rock, sculptured with rude emblems of the Phallic worship, separated from each other by a distance of forty paces, and looking down the road which crossed some sixty miles of plain to Loo, were three colossal seated forms—two male and one female—each measuring about thirty feet from the crown of its head to the pedestal.
The female form, which was nude, was of great though severe beauty, but unfortunately the features had been injured by centuries of exposure to the weather. Rising from either side of her head were the points of a
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