The Project Gutenberg EBook of Jess, by H. Rider Haggard

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Title: Jess

Author: H. Rider Haggard

Release Date: April 22, 2006 [EBook #5898]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JESS ***

Produced by John Bickers; Dagny

JESS

By H. Rider Haggard

First Published 1887.

TO MY WIFE

JESS

CHAPTER I

JOHN HAS AN ADVENTURE

The day had been very hot even for the Transvaal, where the days still
know how to be hot in the autumn, although the neck of the summer is
broken--especially when the thunderstorms hold off for a week or two, as
they do occasionally. Even the succulent blue lilies--a variety of the
agapanthus which is so familiar to us in English greenhouses--hung their
long trumpet-shaped flowers and looked oppressed and miserable, beneath
the burning breath of the hot wind which had been blowing for hours like
the draught from a volcano. The grass, too, near the wide roadway
that stretched in a feeble and indeterminate fashion across the veldt,
forking, branching, and reuniting like the veins on a lady's arm, was
completely coated over with a thick layer of red dust. But the hot wind
was going down now, as it always does towards sunset. Indeed, all that
remained of it were a few strictly local and miniature whirlwinds,
which would suddenly spring up on the road itself, and twist and twirl
fiercely round, raising a mighty column of dust fifty feet or more into
the air, where it hung long after the wind had passed, and then slowly
dissolved as its particles floated to the earth.

Advancing along the road, in the immediate track of one of these
desultory and inexplicable whirlwinds, was a man on horseback. The man
looked limp and dirty, and the horse limper and dirtier. The hot wind
had "taken all the bones out of them," as the Kafirs say, which was
not very much to be wondered at, seeing that they had been journeying
through it for the last four hours without off-saddling. Suddenly the
whirlwind, which had been travelling along smartly, halted, and the
dust, after revolving a few times in the air like a dying top, slowly
began to disperse in the accustomed fashio