The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ancient Allan, by H. Rider Haggard

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Title: The Ancient Allan

Author: H. Rider Haggard

Posting Date: March 20, 2009
Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5746]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ANCIENT ALLAN ***

Produced by John Bickers and Dagny

THE ANCIENT ALLAN

By H. Rider Haggard

First Published 1920.

CHAPTER I. AN OLD FRIEND

Now I, Allan Quatermain, come to the weirdest (with one or two
exceptions perhaps) of all the experiences which it has amused me to
employ my idle hours in recording here in a strange land, for after all
England is strange to me. I grow elderly. I have, as I suppose, passed
the period of enterprise and adventure and I should be well satisfied
with the lot that Fate has given to my unworthy self.

To begin with, I am still alive and in health when by all the rules I
should have been dead many times over. I suppose I ought to be thankful
for that but, before expressing an opinion on the point, I should have
to be quite sure whether it is better to be alive or dead. The religious
plump for the latter, though I have never observed that the religious
are more eager to die than the rest of us poor mortals.

For instance, if they are told that their holy hearts are wrong, they
spend time and much money in rushing to a place called Nauheim
in Germany, to put them right by means of water-drinking, thereby
shortening their hours of heavenly bliss and depriving their heirs of
a certain amount of cash. The same thing applies to Buxton in my own
neighbourhood and gout, especially when it threatens the stomach or the
throat. Even archbishops will do these things, to say nothing of such
small fry as deans, or stout and prominent lay figures of the Church.

From common sinners like myself such conduct might be expected, but in
the case of those who are obviously poised on the topmost rungs of the
Jacobean--I mean, the heavenly--ladder, it is legitimate to inquire why
they show such reluctance in jumping off. As a matter of fact the only
persons that, individually, I have seen quite willing to die, except now
and again t