built, in and out of whose flaming doors the
angels of the sun seem to move continually. And there, too, is the wild
game, following its feeding-grounds in great armies, with the springbuck
thrown out before for skirmishers; then rank upon rank of long-faced
blesbuck, marching and wheeling like infantry; and last the shining
troops of quagga, and the fierce-eyed shaggy vilderbeeste to take, as it
were, the place of the cossack host that hangs upon an army's flanks.

[*] This of course was written before Mr. Quatermain's
account of the adventures in the newly-discovered country of
Zu-Vendis of himself, Sir Henry Curtis, and Capt. John Good
had been received in England.--Editor.

"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 am
sure that anybody will easily understand who has watched the sun rise
and set on the limitless deserted plains, and seen the thunder chariots
of 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 have
heard nothing at all of him, and to be frank, I greatly doubt if anybody
will ever hear of him again. I fear that the wilderness, that has for so
many years been a mother to him, will now also prove his grave and the
grave of those who accompanied him, for the quest upon which he and they
have started is a wild one indeed.

But while he was in England for those three years or so between
his return from the successful discovery of the wise king's buried
treasures, and the death of his only son, I saw a great deal of old
Allan Quatermain. I had known him years before in Africa, and after
he came home, whenever I had nothing better to do, I used to run up to
Yorkshire and stay with him, and in this way I at one time and another
heard many of the incidents of his past life, and most curious some of
them were. No man can pass all those years following the rough existence
of 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 is
one of the later of these adventures, though I forget the exact year
in which it happened, at any rate I know that it was the only trip upon
which he took his son Harry