Hunter Quatermain's Story E-Book

H Rider Haggard

• Herausgeber: Peter Owen Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 466

Beschreibung

Over a century after the début of the intrepid hunter explorer Allan Quatermain in King Solomon's Mines (1885), he remains one of the great heroes of literature. The most famous of H. Rider Haggard's dozen novels about him — including Allan Quatermain and Allan and the Ice Gods — have been regularly reprinted for new generations of readers. But there is also a novelette, Allan's Wife, and four short stories of his adventures which have never been collected in one volume. Peter Haining at last brings these stories together, introducing the tales with a detailed résumé of the author's life and career from 1856 to his death in 1925. He also supplies a chronology of the fictional explorer's life linked to the novels and stories, so that new readers can follow his career to his death in 1885.

Leseprobe

HUNTER QUATERMAIN’S STORY

Over a century after the début of the intrepid hunter–explorer Allan Quatermain in King Solomon’s Mines (1885), he remains one of the great heroes of literature. The most famous of H. Rider Haggard’s dozen novels about him – which include She, Allan Quatermain and Allan and the Ice Gods – have been regularly reprinted for new generations of readers. But there is also a novelette, Allan’s Wife, and four short stories of his adventures which have never been collected in one volume. Peter Haining at last brings these stories together, introducing the tales with a résumè of the author’s life and career from 1856 to his death in 1925. He also supplies a chronology of the fictional explorer’s life linked to the novels and stories so that new readers can follow his career to his death in 1885.

SIR HENRY RIDER HAGGARD is one of the world’s best-loved novelists. He began his career as a civil servant in South Africa, the evocative landscape of which country would provide the setting for many of his best-selling books. He was knighted in 1912.

PETER HAINING was an anthologist of fantasy and adventure fiction, whose books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. For Peter Owen he also edited Hunted Down: The Detective Stories of Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker’s Midnight Tales, Edith Wharton’s The Ghost-Feeler, A Cat Compendium: The Worlds of Louis Wain and Lassie: The Extraordinary Story of Eric Knight and the ‘World’s Favourite Dog’. He died in 2007.

Contents

Introduction

The Allan Quatermain Saga: A chronology of the novels and short stories

Hunter Quatermain’s Story

Long Odds

A Tale of Three Lions

Magepa the Buck

Zikali the Wizard

Allan’s Wife

Rider Haggard was able to weave the magic carpet and I was swept along by it and inspired by it, too. It made me realize what an enormous treasure chest of stories Africa was and it has stayed with me over the years of my own writing. In fact, there are echoes of King Solomon’s Mines in a lot of my own books.

Wilbur Smith, The Times, 17 March 2001

Introduction

Garsington is a typical little English village, lying in a stretch of beautiful hilly countryside bounded by the A40 and the B480 as they converge towards Oxford. It is not, though, generally known as the place which inspired the name of one of the most famous characters in British fiction, a man on a par with Robinson Crusoe and Sherlock Holmes. For Allan Quatermain, the brave and resourceful hunter-explorer who became an icon after his appearance in King Solomon’s Mines and seventeen other tales of high adventure written by Sir Henry Rider Haggard, was actually named after a local farmer who once worked in the surrounding fields.

The village has not changed greatly since the ten-year-old Rider Haggard arrived in 1866 to be a boarder at the small school run by the Reverend H.J. Graham at Garsington Rectory. Graham served as the local rector as well as teaching a small group of youngsters whose parents believed they needed extra tuition to prepare them for higher education. Haggard, who had been sent there because he was a slow learner, was to enjoy three idyllic years in the low, grey building, with its seventeenth-century dovecote and an ancient, hollow elm tree standing in the grounds. Originally constructed three centuries earlier as an asylum for members of an Oxford college where the plague raged, the old rectory was to be pulled down a few years after Haggard’s residency and replaced by a new building.

The young Rider enjoyed wandering about the lanes and meadow paths of the village and made several friends. One was a farmer, who he was to describe later in these words: “He was a fine, handsome man of about fifty, with grey hair and aristocratic features, that came to him probably enough with his Norman blood … He was called Quatermain, a name that I used in King Solomon’s Mines and other books in after years.”

A sketch by Rider Haggard of Allan Quatermain based on the Garsington farmer he knew as a child

William Quatermain lived in a small cottage close to Garsington’s Norman church, and when Haggard returned to the scenes of his youth in 1887 to write an article entitled “On Going Back” for Longman’s Magazine he found two tombstones in the graveyard, one erected to the memory of William Quatermain and the other to his “beloved wife”. On one a recent visitor had placed a bouquet of sweet-briar. The old man had died eleven years earlier, Haggard discovered, completely unaware that his name was destined for immortality.

Apart from the name, Haggard carried away other memories from the Oxfordshire village that found their way into the adventures of Allan Quatermain. Garsington Rectory, for instance, was appropriated by Haggard as the birthplace of his hero and renamed “Garsingham Rectory”. Here Quatermain’s father had been the curate and later a missionary. The Reverend Graham himself inspired one of the most unforgettable scenes in King Solomon’s Mines. Unusually for a man of the cloth he wore a thick gold ring engraved with sun symbols that stuck in Haggard’s memory. An inveterate diarist throughout his life, he recalled the piece or jewellery in an entry dated 15 November 1920:

Mr. Graham told me that an old friend of his who had business in Peru had opened some burial place and in it found a chamber wherein, round a stone table, sat a dead and mummified man at the head and about a dozen other persons ranged round the table – whether male or female or both, I do not remember, if indeed Mr. Graham knew. All I can recollect of the rest of the story is that the man at the head of the table wore this ring upon his hand and that the discoverer of the tomb took it thence and gave it to Mr. Graham in after years. The tale made a deep impression on my youthful mind and I used it in King Solomon’s Mines when I depicted the White Dead sitting round the Stone Board under the presidency of the White Death.

One of Rider Haggard’s friends in Garsington was Blanche, the pretty, fair-haired little sister of the rector’s wife. She often used to play with him in the large hollow trunk of the old elm, “where we taught each other the rudiments of flirtation”, he confessed somewhat coyly. The girl was almost certainly the model for Stella Carson, the squire’s daughter, whom the young Allan Quatermain loves and marries in the story “Allan’s Wife”, which appears in this collection.

Almost certainly unaware of her pupil’s ripening sexuality, Mrs. Graham encouraged Haggard’s love of reading and years later wrote congratulating him on his literary success. She was, she wrote, “scarcely able to believe that the little, quiet boy who used to drive with me about the Garsington lanes could have written such clever books”. The author himself never forgot her postscript to this letter of praise: “I was told the other day that you had never been abroad yourself but had married a Zulu lady and got all your information from her.”

Henry Rider Haggard was born on 22 June 1856, the sixth son and eighth child of William and Ella Haggard of Bradenham Hall, near Thetford in Norfolk. The boy’s father was a moderately wealthy landowner who could claim descent from Sir Andrew Ogard, a Dane, who had settled in England during the reign of Henry VI. William Haggard was a barrister, a local justice of the peace and acknowledged squire of the district who “reigned at Bradenham like a king, blowing everybody up and making rows innumerable”, according to his son Rider.

“Squire” Haggard was a paternal despot to his family – which composed ten in all: seven boys and three girls – and frequently harsh and abusive to his servants in the house and on the estate. The children’s mother, however, was a calming influence, and the boy was to recall her as an “angel that had lost her way and found herself in pandemonium”. Ella Haggard, the daughter of a civil servant, had been born in Bombay and delighted in telling her children stories of India – which particularly enthralled young Rider. She was also a writer, producing poetry and songs for magazines and newspapers, and in 1857 published Myra; or, The Rose of the East. This poem of nine cantos concerned the Afghan War of 1852 and reflected on the “mysterious laws of the universe”. It was undoubtedly from his mother that Rider inherited his literary talents, and the theme of Myra was also to surface in a number of Rider’s own stories.

Growing up in Norfolk the boy learned to ride and shoot and enjoyed regular trips to Europe. However, in 1867 the family moved to London, and Rider began his formal education at a day school. He proved a poor scholar, lacking in concentration and with an inability to absorb general knowledge. Following a severe telling-off by his father – “You are only fit to be a greengrocer!” – the youngster was dispatched to Garsington and the kindly ministrations of the Reverend Graham.

The “White Dead” incident from King Solomon’s Mines, drawn by Walter Paget

After the happy years in the Oxfordshire countryside Rider spent another three unspectacular years at a grammar school in Ipswich, where he earned the nickname “Nosey” and captained the school’s 2nd XI football team. He did, however, like the headmaster, Dr. H.A. Holden, and later became a friend when the teacher moved to London. For a short time Haggard considered a career as a soldier, but Squire Haggard had already decided that his “dunderhead” son should join the Foreign Office and in 1875 obtained for him a post as a general factotum on the staff of his friend, Sir Henry Bulwer, who had been appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Natal in South Africa. The young man was just nineteen years old.

The years that followed in Africa were to shape Haggard’s life and career. His tall, thin build earned him the Zulu name, Lundanda u Ndandokalweni (“The Tall One Who Travels in the Heights” or, more succinctly, Indanda) and he quickly grew to love the countryside and admire the indigenous population.

The label that has since been attached to Haggard by his critics as an arch-imperialist and racist who created only literary stereotypes and dismissed all blacks as ignorant natives is actually not substantiated by the facts. In 1997 a handwritten account that Haggard had kept during a return journey to South Africa in 1914 came to light in the Norfolk Records Office in Norwich, to which the author had donated many of his papers. The man who discovered the papers was Mark Cheyne, Haggard’s last surviving grandson, and in it was clear evidence that his grandfather had supported black South Africans in their struggle for land rights and that he had met the Reverend John Dube, the first president of the African National Congress (ANC). Haggard sympathized with Dube’s views on the plight of the Zulus and the other tribes under British rule. Writing his account in the very year that the First World War broke out in Europe, he prophesied the future in Africa with uncanny foresight. After recording that he reluctantly believed the “impressive” Reverend Dube’s case for repealing the law against dispossessed black landowners from buying back their land from Europeans was destined to fail, he went on:

But what will be the end of it all? Seven million black folk cannot be permanently neglected (or is oppressed the word?) by one million and a quarter whites … Perhaps one day their turn will come again, either with steel or bullet, or more probably by mere weight of numbers and the ballot box.

Whatever other impressions of Africa Rider Haggard brought back with him when he returned to London in August 1881, the people – black in particular – their languages, customs and rituals as well as the exotic, mysterious and dangerous nature of the terrain, were for ever imprinted on his brain. The bloody wars with the Zulus and the violent troubles with the Boers in the Transvaal also echoed in his mind. And when, at the beginning of the twentieth century, he used this as a source of inspiration for his stories, he as surely invented Africa as a subject for fiction in the British imagination as H.G. Wells was then inventing science fiction. His tales of Allan Quatermain opened up the last remaining “Dark Continent” on Earth.

During his time in South Africa Haggard had also begun developing his writing skills by contributing articles about the country and its people to magazines in Britain. These included “The Transvaal” for Macmillan’s Magazine and two for The Gentlemen’s Magazine, “A Zulu War Dance” and “A Visit to Chief Secocoeni”, all in 1877. However, the payment for such essays could not possibly keep him and his new wife, Louie, whom he had recently married, and so with the financial assistance of his father Haggard decided to study to be a lawyer. In his spare time, though, he would continue writing.

To aid his studies, Haggard moved with his young wife to her family’s home, Ditchingham House in Norfolk, where they would remain for the rest of their lives. In these charming surroundings he tackled his first novel, Dawn, a romance about a young girl’s triumph over adversity. It was an unlikely theme for a man steeped in Africa and the lore of the wild, and although he did find a publisher two years later the book received poor reviews and did not sell well. Not deterred, he produced a second book, The Witch’s Head – subtitled A Tale of Love and War – which appeared in 1885 to a rather better reception.

In the January of that year Rider Haggard passed his examinations, and returning to London began to specialize in probate and divorce law. His career was barely under way, however, when a chance conversation with one of his brothers changed the course of his life for ever. The two men had been arguing the merits of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, which Rider considered “not so remarkable”. At this his brother bet him that he could not “write anything half as good”. The wager was for just one shilling (5p), but the tiro author felt his creative juices rise to the challenge.

For six weeks Haggard spent his evenings and weekends writing an adventure story he entitled King Solomon’s Mines, drawing on some of his most vivid experiences in Africa. Once again his work was turned down by a number of publishers. By chance, however, the manuscript about the quest of explorer Allan Quatermain to find the legendary ancient Phoenician mines lost in the heart of Africa was seen by the Scottish writer and journalist Andrew Lang. Immediately impressed, Lang passed it to the chief editor at Cassell and Co., John Williams, with the apt recommendation – although the circumstances of its creation were unknown to him – that he “almost preferred it to Treasure Island”, a book which that firm had published.

The story of Rider Haggard’s interview with Williams and the editor’s offer of £100 for the entire copyright of the book or a 10 per cent royalty on sales has been frequently told. The struggling young author, to whom the ready cash seemed like a godsend, was about to accept the first offer when a clerk, sitting unobtrusively in the corner of the publisher’s office, whispered: “Mr. Haggard, if I were you I would take the other agreement.” Taking this advice, which ultimately made his fortune, was probably the wisest decision of his life.

Far less well known is the sequel to this story, which occurred when many years later Haggard made a subsequent visit to Cassell’s offices on 19 November 1917. He wrote in his diary:

A cartoon of Rider Haggard by Will Farrow, from Sport & Fiction, May 1924

At the request of Mr. [Desmond] Flower, the editor, I identified the room in which I had my famous interview of 32 years ago with the editor when, inspired by a clerk in the corner, I suddenly changed my mind and took the royalty agreement instead of the sum down. They were much interested and suggested that the place should be labelled, “The Room Where Sir Rider Haggard Saved His Bacon”.

Although tales of high adventure were not altogether new when King Solomon’s Mines was published in September 1885, it was perfectly timed to launch a fresh public craze. The development of the telegraph and the appointment by newspapers of foreign correspondents was already bringing descriptions of wars and international incidents to the firesides of British readers – and they were hungry for more. The advertisements that Cassell’s plastered across London on publication day, declaring “King Solomon’s Mines – The Most Amazing Story Ever Written”, promised to satisfy this demand for heroic deeds. Almost overnight Rider Haggard became a bestseller, and the name of his very able, strong and wise hero Allan Quatermain was to be heard on the lips of thousands of delighted readers.

The author’s knowledge of Africa was evident from the very first page and immediately prompted enquiries about the man Rider Haggard. He became the focus of attention for feature writers and a popular model with cartoonists. The succès d’estime also began what would prove almost endless speculation as to who the original of the great white hunter really was.

One of the first candidates put forward was Sir Theophilus Shep-stone, who had been the Secretary of Native Affairs in Natal from 1856. It was discovered that he had been a friend of the young Haggard and often told him stories about his life after his arrival in the Cape in 1820 as a baby of three in the arms of his missionary father. Later Haggard recalled:

He [Shepstone] had the power of silence, but he observed everything and forgot little. To me, however, when the mood was on him, he would talk a great deal – the stories I have heard from him would fill half a volume – and sometimes even unfold to me the secret springs of his actions.

Although Haggard undoubtedly endowed Quatermain with a few of Shepstone’s earlier biographical details – as is evident in the story “Allan’s Wife” – and the Secretary himself actually appears in The Witch’s Head, he was not the inspiration for the hunter. Nor was another candidate, the famous explorer and big-game hunter F.C. Selous. According to the Dictionary of National Biography Selous possessed “indomitable courage, enduring energy and great tenacity” and had become something of a celebrity through his books, in particular A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa (1881).

The adventure-loving American Theodore Roosevelt, who was destined to become the twenty-sixth president of the USA in 1901 and was for some years a friend of Haggard’s, was among those who subscribed to this view until disabused of the fact by the author himself. Writing in his diary in July 1916 following a meeting between the two men, Haggard states:

I found that he [Roosevelt] is fond of my stories, reminding me of incidents in passages in them I had almost forgotten. Allan Quatermain, he said, he had always taken to be me, clothed in the body of Selous – as many others have done. I told him that he was right as to the first but not as to the second, since at the time I conceived Allan Quatermain I did not know Selous. He said he was especially fond of the old boy’s [Quatermain’s] reflections and moralizings, and seemed to think that some of my work would live.

The truth is that Haggard was Quatermain, as he endeavoured to set right once and for all in his autobiography, The Days of My Life, published in 1926:

To be honest, I always find it easy to write of Allan Quatermain, who, after all, is only myself set in a variety of imagined situations, thinking my thoughts and looking at life through my eyes. Indeed, there are several subjects with which I always find it not difficult to deal – for instance Old Egypt, Norsemen and African savages. Of these last, however, I prefer to write in the company of Allan Quatermain.

Even before King Solomon’s Mines appeared in the bookshops in the autumn of 1885 Haggard began another book about Quatermain, which he intended to be the hunter’s last adventure. Starting on 17 July he again wrote at great speed and completed Allan Quatermain on 28 September. The work would not, however, be published for almost two years, during which time an extraordinary cult had developed around Haggard’s hero.

As has proved the case with a number of the immortal characters of fiction, Quatermain soon began to take on a life of his own beyond the pages that Haggard had written. In Africa, for example, a road leading to some excavations in Zimbabwe was named Allan Quatermain’s Road, although Haggard maintained that all the ruins in King Solomon’s Mines were the fruit of his imagination. In the sequel, Allan Quatermain, Haggard invented a mission station at an unexplored spot on the Tana River that was attacked by the Masai. In subsequent editions of the book he was forced to insert the following self-explanatory note:

By a very strange and sad coincidence, since this book was written, the Masai, in April 1886, massacred a missionary and his wife – Mr. and Mrs. Houghton – on this same Tana River and at the spot described. These are, I believe, the first white people who are known to have fallen victims to this cruel tribe.

In the third of the hunter’s adventures, Maiwa’s Revenge (1888), Haggard describes in detail the struggle his hero had with some natives who pursue him up the face of a cliff and one of whom grabs hold of his ankle. Quatermain escapes by firing down on the man along the line of his leg with a pistol. Referring to this scene in The Days of My Life, he wrote:

Some years later a gentleman arrived at my house in Norfolk whose name, I think, was Ebbage, and on whose card was printed the vague and remote address, “Matabeleland”. He informed me that he had travelled specially from London to inquire how on earth I had learned the details of his escape from certain savages, as he had never mentioned them to a single soul. Before he left I satisfied myself that his adventure and that invented by myself and described in the tale, which I had thought one of a somewhat original sort, were in every particular identical.

In 1919 Allan Quatermain made the front pages of the British newspapers because of a superstition that had apparently become attached to it. Haggard again provides the details in a diary entry for 29 March:

Quatermain’s escape in Maiwa’s Revenge, drawn by Hookway Cowles

Superstitions of every sort are rampant now-a-days. Here is an instance which I take from the Daily News of 26th March. It seems that whenever a certain battery were sent any of my books, the S.O.S. signal was immediately received, three of them coming when one of the battery was reading Allan Quatermain. So poor Allan and the rest were always burned upon arrival, with the result that the S.O.S. calls declined. As the Daily News remarks: “The story might not be so surprising if the books had not been Sir Rider Haggard’s and the battery itself had appealed for help.” Also I may point out that the prodigy might be read otherwise. Allan was always a helpful person and his spirit on these occasions obviously indicated when and where help was needed! In the Twentieth Century can anything be more childish and ridiculous than this burning of books for such a reason?

There are, of course, several other memorable characters to be found among the total of eighteen novels and short stories that record Allan Quatermain’s life from 1817 to 1885. (See the “Allan Quatermain Saga” on page 33.) There are his friends, Sir Henry Curtis, a tall, blond-haired English gentlemen, and Captain John Good, the punctilious retired naval officer, who are first encountered in King Solomon’s Mines. Umslopogaas, the mighty Zulu warrior, who more than once comes to the white hunter’s aid, was based on a Swazi warrior who befriended the young Haggard and told him many stories about his people. (Andrew Lang, who was the first reader of many of the author’s manuscripts and who was a great admirer of the African, said of him in 1892: “Umslopogaas is one of my dearest friends in fiction – I will never desert him.”) And, perhaps most memorable of all, Zikali, the dwarfish witch-doctor who is intent on destroying the Zulu Nation: the Moriarty, indeed, to Quatermain’s Sherlock Holmes.

All of these characters are to be found, albeit sometimes in minor roles, in the stories that are reprinted in these pages. “Hunter Quartermain’s Story” is an ideal opener because it takes the form of an after-dinner hunting tale recounted by Allan Quatermain to Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good in the immediate aftermath of their famous exploits at King Solomon’s mines. Haggard in fact wrote the gripping little adventure shortly after the success of his best-seller as a result of a request by Olive Schreiner – the South African novelist and champion of women’s rights – to contribute a story to a book being published to raise funds for the North-Eastern Hospital for Children in Hackney Road, London. The anthology, In A Good Cause, contained several other stories – including Schreiner’s own “African Moonshine” – plus poetry and illustrations, and it was published in time for Christmas 1885. Haggard’s tale is unique among the Quatermain canon in that it is the only one in which he is described as having a “curious little accent, which made his speech noticeable”.

Hunter Quatermain with his trio of friends, Captain John Good, Sir Henry Curtis and the Swazi warrior Umslopogaas

The following year Haggard produced another excellent anecdotal tale of his hero, “Long Odds”, once again in the company of Curtis and Good. It was snapped up by Macmillan’s Magazine -which had been responsible some nine years earlier for publishing the author’s very first article, “The Transvaal” – and appeared in the February 1886 issue. (When “Long Odds” was first published in America in 1899 in the Household Library it appeared under the title “The Spring of a Lion”.)

The return visit to Garsington in 1887 for his article “On Going Back” inspired Haggard’s third Quatermain short story, “A Tale of Three Lions”. It is the account of a desperate hunt for gold and the savagery of a trio of lions. Despite the brevity of the tale it was first published in three parts in the October, November and December 1887 issues of Atalanta Magazine, apparently as a gimmick to increase sales. It was the first of the Quatermain short stories to be published in America in December 1887 by J.W. Lovell of New York in their Lovell’s Library series, cumbersomely retitled “Allan the Hunter: A Tale of Three Lions (and Prince, another Lion)”.

The fourth Quatermain short story did not materialize from Haggard’s pen for almost twenty-five years, so busy was he kept on his novels about the hunter and other literary and public service for which he was awarded a knighthood in 1912. “Magepa the Buck” was, though, well worth the wait and had evolved once again from the author’s generosity towards children’s charities. This had become all the keener following the tragic death of his only son, “Jock” Rider Haggard, who had died in 1891 at the tender age of ten. Haggard was a keen supporter of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and at the organization’s annual meeting in May 1895 he seconded a resolution tabled by the Earl of Iddesleigh that still resounds as strongly today as it did over a century ago:

That this meeting of the NSPCC having regard alike to the interests of the unhappy children of the country, and to the country’s domestic and social welfare, would respectfully impress upon the Magistrates of the land the importance of their supporting the Society’s endeavour to enforce upon neglectful parents the discharge of parental duty.

In seconding the resolution Haggard spoke about the need for parents to play a full part in the raising and education of their children and told a story from his African experiences to illustrate his argument. The writer’s speech was later reprinted with that of other speakers in a pamphlet issued by the NSPCC, and the story can be quite clearly identified as the basis for “Magepa the Buck”. It describes the amazing feat of endurance by a Zulu warrior in the same mould as Haggard’s friend Umslopogaas, risking his own life to save that of a child. The final version of the tale was published in Pears’ Christmas Annual for 1912 and reprinted two years later in another charity publication, Princess Mary’s Gift Book.

The witch-doctor Zikali has, however, none of the finer feelings of Umslopogaas or Magepa. He is hell-bent in his determination to bring about the downfall of the Zulu Nation by the use of plotting and magic. Haggard first introduced this evil mastermind in the Quatermain novel Marie (1912), although his presence is mentioned only in a few remarks. But in four further adventures – Child of Storm (1913), Heu-Hue; or The Monster (1924), She and Allan (1921) and Finished (1917) – Zikali’s machinations have a considerable effect on the hunter’s life. The wizard dies finally with his vengeance accomplished in the aptly named Finished, having become a character that millions of readers loved to hate. So much so, in fact, that when the first Quatermain story was adapted for the stage in 1914 the souvenir programme contained an episode “Zikali the Wizard” by Haggard to introduce both his hero and his arch-rival to those theatre goers new to the characters.

The play was called Mameena, and it was an adaptation of Child of the Storm – Haggard’s favourite among all his books – dramatized by the actor-manager Oscar Asche at the Globe Theatre, London, opening on 7 October 1914. Despite the war clouds hovering over London, the show was lavishly produced with three Zulu kraals and numerous African costumes being hired to lend authenticity. Two Zulu chieftains were also brought to London to appear alongside Harcourt Beatty and Herbert Grimwood, who played Quatermain and Zikali respectively. The hunter’s bravery in defeating a plot by the witchdoctor against the Zulu beauty Mameena (Lily Brayton), played out against the backdrop of a torrid wasteland, captured the public’s imagination, and the production ran for over one hundred and thirty performances.

The final story here, “Allan’s Wife”, published as a booklet by Spencer Blackett in 1889, rounds off the saga of the white hunter. It completes the story after his death in June 1885 as described in Allan Quatermain. Haggard’s decision to kill off his character in the second book rebounded on him – a similar reaction greeted Arthur Conan Doyle when he dispatched Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty over the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem in 1893; he was then forced by an outraged public’s demand to “resurrect” the sleuth of Baker Street. Rider Haggard in his turn had to satisfy the clamour of his readers by continuing for the rest of his life to recount the earlier adventures of Quatermain – the final adventure, Allan and the Ice Gods, not, in fact, appearing until after the author’s death.

“Allan’s Wife,” the longest tale in this collection, answers questions about Quatermain’s early life in Garsington and introduces Stella Carson, whom he rescues from a fire and later makes his wife. One question which remains unanswered is whether Haggard himself rescued his flirtatious friend, Blanche – the model for Stella Carson – from an untimely end and thereafter nursed a passion for the girl which may or may not have been consummated. Sadly, there is no evidence to substantiate or refute the theory.

Allan and the Ice Gods, the last Quatermain novel, published posthumously in May 1927, was something of a collaboration between Haggard and his friend Rudyard Kipling, whom he had first met at the Savile Club in London. The two men had struck up a friendship after the publication of Haggard’s brilliant pioneer “Lost Race” novel, She, in 1887. The tale of a fabulously beautiful Egyptian princess, Ayesha, “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed”, it had cemented his fame and also earned him acclaim in the popular press as “King Romance”. (Later, in 1919, Haggard could not resist the temptation to bring together his two most famous characters in She and Allen, not one of the most successful of the series.)

During one of their meetings Kipling startled his new friend by declaring that the success they had both enjoyed was down to them being “telephone wires”. He explained, “You didn’t write She, you know – something wrote it through you!” The men’s shared interest in mysticism and ancient history lead to them discussing many of their later projects. In January 1922 Haggard confided in his diary after a day spent with Kipling:

As usual Kipling and I talked till we were tired about everything in heaven above and earth beneath. Incidentally, too, we hammered out the skeleton plot for a romance I propose to write under some such title as Allan and the Ice Gods which is to deal with the terrible advance of one of the Ice Ages upon a little handful of the primitive inhabitants of the earth. He has a marvellously fertile mind and I never knew anyone quite so quick at seizing and developing an idea. We spent a most amusing two hours over this plot and I have brought home the results in several sheets of MS written by him and myself.

Comparison of these sheets of paper with the published book provides a clear indication as to just how substantial was Kipling’s contribution to this final Quatermain story. If Haggard had not died on 14 May 1925, peacefully at his home in Ditchingam, who is to say that he might not have given his friend credit for his part in this Tale of Beginnings, as he subtitled his hero’s last foray into history?

Allan Quatermain’s fame was, however, established long before this date, and the only surprise is that he has had to wait until now for all the short stories about him to be collected together. In complete contrast, however, within a matter of months of the appearance of King Solomon’s Mines other authors were busy using the Dark Continent as the background for their stories and books – many failing miserably because of their lack of Haggard’s hard-won personal knowledge – while Quatermain himself was being given the accolade of scores of imitations and parodies, notably Punch’s comic “Adam Slaughterman” by “Walker Weird, author of Hee Hee, Solomon’s Ewers &c.” (August, 1887); John De Morgan’s King Solomon’s Treasures (published in New York in 1887); and “From Mr. Allan Quatermain to Sir Henry Curtis” (1899) by Haggard’s mentor Andrew Lang, in which several characters from the books attempt to lure the white hunter out of what they fear to be his early retirement to an African farm. (Vide Sherlock Holmes’ retreat to Sussex to keep bees!)

Rudyard Kipling provided ideas for the last novel in the Quatermain saga, Allan and the Ice Gods. The illustration is by Virgil Finlay.

Film-makers were not slow in realizing the appeal of Allan Quatermain, either. In 1919 both King Solomon’s Mines and Allan Quatermain were turned into silent black-and-white movies directed by H. Lisle Lucoque. Appropriately they were made by the African Film Production Company and filmed partly in their Killarney Studios in Johannesburg and partly on location. The youthful English actor Albert Lawrence played Quatermain in both pictures, complete with a heavy beard and the usual histrionic acting style of the era. The hunter’s two friends also appeared in both pictures, Holford J. Hamlin playing Sir Henry Curtis and Ray Brown as Captain Good.

Almost twenty years passed before Quatermain returned to the screen, with the great theatrical actor Sir Cedric Hardwicke in the lead role of the Gaumont British Pictures version of King Solomon’s Mines (1937). John Loder and Roland Young co-starred as Curtis and Good, with Anna Lee as an additional and totally unnecessary female lead. Although primarily shot in the company’s English studios by director Robert Stevenson some location shooting was done in the Umgeni Valley in Natal, with the American actor—singer Paul Robeson making an impressive Umbopa. The Hollywood leading man Stewart Granger appeared in MGM’s version of the same story produced after another lengthy break by Sam Zimbalist in 1950. Helen Deutsch’s screenplay introduced Deborah Kerr as Sir Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth Curtis.

The best-selling novelist James Clavell took even greater liberties with Haggard’s original in MGM’s 1959 remake entitled Watusi. Al Zimbalist, son of the aforementioned Sam, produced the film, which starred George Montgomery as “Harry” Quatermain, son of Allan, retracing his father’s footsteps to the famous mines. In 1963 Italian director Piero Regnoli abandoned virtually every shred of the original story for the Panda Company’s Nelle Miniere di Re Salomoni (Samson in King Solomon’s Mines), starring muscle-man Reg Park and the pulchritudinous Wandisa Guida.

The “Adam Slaughterman” parody from Punch, 27 August 1887

Richard Chamberlain, a heart-throb of films and television since the 1960s, brought a handsome but often brutal Quatermain to the screen in the bloodstained Cannon extravaganza, King Solomon’s Mines (1985), which was described by the Daily Mail at the time as “an Indiana Jones-type romp through Mumbo-Jumbo land”. Directed by J. Lee Thompson, it was scripted by Gene Quintano and James R. Silke, who had audiences in uproar with lines such as, “Soon the girl will be ours and Quatermain will be grovelling at my feet.” The girl in question was the American beauty Sharon Stone, and the man with the evil intentions towards her that master of screen villainy Herbert Lom.

One further version of Allan Quatermain has been made in the interim, in 1979, by producers Alvin Rakoff and Susan Lewis, who retitled the story King Solomon’s Treasure. Rakoff himself directed the Technicolor saga, starring John Colico as the hunter with David McCullum and Patrick Macnee as Curtis and Good respectively. The sex-symbol actress, Britt Ekland, appeared as the beautiful Queen Nyaleptha. Since that date there have been no further travesties of the Quatermain saga, but hopes are again high among admirers of Haggard’s work that Sean Connery, the former James Bond, now in his seventies and recognized as one of the world’s great actors, will add a new dimension to the immortal hunter in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), the tale of a group of literary heroes who serve Queen Victoria.

Both Rider Haggard and Allan Quatermain will, I am sure, continue to be highly regarded by readers hungry for unadorned tales of rugged and colourful adventure. I am supported in this conviction by Graham Greene, who devoted a special article to “Rider Haggard’s Secret”, in which he wrote: “Rider Haggard was perhaps the greatest of all the writers who enchanted us when we were young. Enchantment was just what he exercised: he fixed pictures in our minds that the years have been unable to wear away.” Another famous writer, C.S. Lewis, was equally convinced: “Haggard’s best work will survive because it is based on an appeal well above the high-water mark. The fullest tides of fashion cannot demolish it. A great myth is relevant as long as the predicament of humanity lasts; as long as humanity itself lasts.”

Hammond Innes, who until his death in 1998 was one of the most popular contemporary novelists writing in the Rider Haggard tradition, was also a great admirer of Allan Quatermain. He lived in the same East Anglian countryside where Haggard spent much of his life and like him travelled extensively in Africa in order to collect material for his own brand of high adventure. It was during a meal we shared together in the Suffolk village where he lived that “Ralph” Innes, as he was known to his friends, encouraged me to collect together all the Quatermain short stories. “It can only have one result,” he said with an acknowledgement to the genius of the man who had inspired his own career. “It will encourage lots of readers to plunge once more into his incredible mine of romanticism.” I hope that his words will come true, because Rider Haggard is a writer who should never be neglected nor allowed to go out of fashion: a true storyteller.

Peter HainingBoxford, Suffolk, 2003

Readers should note that the “Editor” alluded to in the footnotes within this book is not the present editor and that the notes are taken from the original editions of the stories.

The Allan Quatermain Saga

A chronology of the novels and short stories, including original publication dates and the years in which the adventures take place

1817

Birth of Allan Quatermain, Garsingham, Oxfordshire

1835–8

Marie

[novel] (1912)

1842–69

“Allan’s Wife” [short story] (1889)

1854–6

Child of Storm

[novel] (1913)

1854

“Zikali the Wizard” [short story] (1914)

1858

“A Tale of Three Lions” [short story] (1887)

1859

Maiwa’sRevenge

[novel] (1888)

1868

“Hunter Quatermain’s Story” [short story] (1885)

1869

“Long Odds” [short story] (1886)

1870

The Holy Flower

[novel] (1915)

1871

Heu-Heu, or The Monster

[novel] (1924)

1872

She and Allan

[novel] (1921)

1873

The Treasure of the Lake

[novel] (1926)

1874

The Ivory Child

[novel] (1916)

1879

Finished

[novel] (1917)

1879

“Magepa the Buck” [short story] (1912)

1880

King Solomon’s Mines

[novel] (1885)

1882

The Ancient Allan

[novel] (1920)

1883

Allan and the Ice Gods

[novel] (1927)

1884–5

Allan Quatermain

[novel] (1887)

June, 1885

Death of Allan Quatermain, Zu-Vendis, Africa

The “official” portrait of Allan Quatermain, drawn by Charles Kerr

Hunter Quatermain’s Story

Sir Henry Curtis is, as everybody acquainted with him knows, one of the most hospitable men on earth. It was in the course of the enjoyment of his hospitality at his place in Yorkshire the other day that I heard the hunting story which I am now about to transcribe. Many of those who read it will no doubt have heard some of the strange rumours that are flying about to the effect that Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good, R.N., found a vast treasure of diamonds out in the heart of Africa the other day, supposed to have been hidden by the Egyptians, or King Solomon, or somebody. I first saw the matter alluded to in a paragraph in one of the society papers the day before I started for Yorkshire to pay my visit to Curtis, and arrived, needless to say, burning with curiosity; for there is something very fascinating to the mind in the idea of hidden treasure. When I got to the Hall, I at once tackled Curtis about it, and he did not deny the truth of the story; but on my pressing him to tell it he would not, nor would Good, who was also staying in the house.

“You would not believe me if I did,” he said with one of the hearty laughs which seem to come right out of those great lungs of his. “You must wait till Hunter Quatermain comes; he will arrive here from Africa to-night, and I am not going to say a word about the matter, or Good either, until he turns up. Quatermain was with us all through; he has known about the business for years and years, and if it had not been for him we should not have been here to-day. I am off to meet him presently.”

I could not get a word more out of him, nor could anybody else, though we were all dying of curiosity, especially some of the ladies. I shall never forget their faces in the drawing-room before dinner when Good produced a great rough diamond, weighing fifty carats or more, and told them that he had many larger than that. If ever I saw curiosity and envy printed on fair faces, I saw it then.

It was just at that moment that the door was opened, and Mr. Allan Quatermain announced, whereupon Good shovelled the diamond into his pocket, and sprang at a little man who came limping shyly into the room, convoyed by Sir Henry Curtis himself.

“Here he is, Good, safe and sound,” said Sir Henry, gleefully. “Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to one of the oldest hunters and the very best shot in Africa, who has killed more elephants and lions than any other man alive.”

Everybody turned and stared politely at the curious-looking little lame man, and though his size was insignificant, he was quite worth staring at. He had short grizzled hair, which stood about an inch above his head like the bristles of a brush, large brown eyes, that seemed to notice everything, and a withered face, tanned absolutely the colour of mahogany from exposure to the weather. He spoke, too, when he returned Good’s enthusiastic greeting, with a curious little accent, which made his speech noticeable.

It so happened that I sat next to Mr. Allan Quatermain at dinner, and, of course, did my best to draw him; but he was not to be drawn. He admitted that he had recently been a long journey into the interior of Africa with Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and that they had found treasure, and then politely turned the subject and began to ask me questions about England, where he had never been before. Of course, I did not find this very interesting, and so cast about for some means to bring the conversation round again.

Now, we were dining in a sort of oak-panelled vestibule, and on the wall opposite to me were fixed two gigantic elephant tusks, and under them a pair of buffalo horns, very rough and knotted, showing that they came off an old bull, and with the tip of one horn split and chipped. I noticed that Hunter Quatermain’s eyes kept glancing at these trophies, and took an occasion to ask him if he knew anything about them.

“I ought to,” he answered, with a little laugh; “the elephant to which those tusks belonged tore one of our party right in two about eighteen months ago, and as for the buffalo horns, they were nearly the death of me, and were the end of a servant of mine to whom I was much attached. I gave them to Sir Henry when he left Natal some months ago”; and Mr. Quatermain sighed and turned to answer a question from the lady whom he had taken down to dinner, and who, needless to say, was also employed in trying to pump him about the diamonds.

Indeed, all round the table there was a simmer of scarceIy suppressed excitement, which, when the servants had left the room, could no longer be restrained.

“Now, Mr. Quatermain,” said the lady next him, “we have been kept in an agony of suspense by Sir Henry and Captain Good, who have persistently refused to tell us a word of this story about the hidden treasure till you came, and we simply can bear it no longer; so, please, begin at once.”

“Yes,” said everybody, “go on please.”

Hunter Quatermain glanced round the table apprehensively; he did not seem to appreciate finding himself the object of so much curiosity.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said at last, with a shake of his grizzled head, “I am very sorry to disappoint you, but I cannot do it. It is this way. At the request of Sir Henry and Captain Good I have written down a true and plain account of King Solomon’s Mines and how we found them, so you will soon all be able to learn all about that wonderful adventure for yourselves; but until then I will say nothing about it, not from any wish to disappoint your curiosity, or to make myself important, but simply because the whole story partakes so much of the marvellous, that I am afraid to tell it in a piecemeal, hasty fashion, for fear I shall be set down as one of those common fellows of whom there are so many in my profession, who are not ashamed to narrate things they have not seen, and even to tell wonderful stories about wild animals they have never killed. And I think that my companions in adventure, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, will bear me out in what I say.”

“Yes, Quatermain, I think you are quite right,” said Sir Henry. “Precisely the same considerations have forced Good and myself to hold our tongues. We did not wish to be bracketed with – well, with other famous travellers.”

There was a murmur of disappointment at these announcements.

“I believe you are all hoaxing us,” said the young lady next to Mr. Quatermain, rather sharply.

“Believe me,” answered the old hunter, with a quaint sort of courtesy and a little bow of his grizzled head; “though I have lived all my life in the wilderness, and amongst savages, I have neither the heart, nor the want of manners, to wish to deceive one so lovely.”

Whereat the young lady, who was pretty, looked appeased.

“This is very dreadful,” I broke in. “We ask for bread and you give us a stone, Mr. Quatermain. The least that you can do is to tell us the story of the tusks opposite and the buffalo horns underneath. We won’t let you off with less.”

“I am but a poor story-teller,” put in the old hunter, “but if you will forgive my want of skill, I shall be happy to tell you, not the story of the tusks, for it is part of the history of our journey to King Solomon’s Mines, but that of the buffalo horns beneath them, which is now ten years old.”

“Bravo, Quatermain!” said Sir Henry. “We shall all be delighted. Fire away! Fill up your glass first.”

The little man did as he was bid, took a sip of claret, and began: “About ten years ago, I was hunting up in the far interior of Africa, at a place called Gatgarra, not a great way from the Chobe River. I had with me four native servants, namely, a driver and voorlooper, or leader, who were natives of Matabeleland, a Hottentot called Hans, who had once been the slave of a Transvaal Boer, and a Zulu hunter, who had for five years accompanied me upon my trips, and whose name was Mashune. Now near Gatgarra I found a fine piece of healthy, park-like country, where the grass was very good, considering the time of year; and here I made a little camp or head-quarter settlement, from whence I went on expeditions on all sides in search of game, especially elephant. My luck, however, was bad; I got but little ivory. I was therefore very glad when some natives brought me news that a large herd of elephants were feeding in a valley about thirty miles away. At first I thought of trekking down to the valley, waggon and all, but gave up the idea on hearing that it was infested with the deadly ‘tsetse’ fly, which is certain death to all animals, except man, donkeys, and wild game. So I reluctantly determined to leave the waggon in the charge of the Matabele leader and driver, and to start on a trip into the thorn country, accompanied only by the Hottentot Hans and Mashune.

“Accordingly on the following morning we started, and on the evening of the next day reached the spot where the elephants were reported to be. But here again we were met by ill luck. That the elephants had been there was evident enough, for their spoor was plentiful, and so were other traces of their presence in the shape of mimosa trees torn out of the ground, and placed topsy-turvy on their flat crowns, in order to enable the great beasts to feed on their sweet roots; but the elephants themselves were conspicuous by their absence, having elected to move on. This being so, there was only one thing to do, and that was to move after them, which we did, and a pretty hunt they led us. For a fortnight or more we dodged about after those elephants, coming up with them on two occasions, and a splendid herd they were – only, however, to lose them again. At length we came up with them a third time, and I managed to shoot one bull, and then they made right off again, where it was useless to try and follow them. After this I gave it up in disgust, and we made the best of our way back to the camp, not in the sweetest of tempers, carrying the tusks of the elephant I had shot. It was on the afternoon of the fifth day of our tramp that we reached the little Koppie overlooking the spot where the waggon stood, and I confess that I climbed it with a pleasurable sense of home-coming, for his waggon is the hunter’s home, as much as his house is a civilized person’s. I reached the top of the Koppie, and looked in the direction where the friendly white tent of the waggon should be, and there was no waggon, nothing but a black burnt plain stretching away as far as the eye could reach. I rubbed my eyes and looked again, and made out on the spot of the camp not my waggon, but some charred beams of wood. Half wild with grief and anxiety, I ran at full speed down the slope of the Koppie, and across the bit of plain below to the spring of water, where my camp had been, followed by Hans and Mashune. I was soon there, only to find that my worst suspicions were confirmed. The waggon and all its contents, including my spare guns and ammunition, had been destroyed by a grass fire.

“Now before I started, I had left orders with the driver to burn off the grass round the camp, in order to guard against accidents of this nature, and this was the reward of my folly: a very proper illustration of the necessity, especially where natives are concerned, of doing a thing oneself if one wants it done at all. Evidently the lazy rascals had not burnt round the waggon; most probably, indeed, they had themselves carelessly fired the tall and resinous tambouki grass near by; the wind had driven the flames on to the waggon tent, and there was quickly an end of the whole thing. As for the driver and leader, I know not what became of them: probably fearing my anger, they bolted, taking the oxen with them. I have never seen them from that hour to this. I sat down there on the black veldt by the spring, and gazed at the charred axles and disselboom of my waggon, and I can assure you, ladies and gentlemen, I felt inclined to cry. As for Mashune and Hans they cursed away vigorously, one in Zulu and the other in Dutch. Ours was a pretty position. We were nearly three hundred miles away from Bamangwato, the capital of Khama’s country, which was the nearest spot where we could get any help, and our ammunition, spare guns, clothing, food, and everything else were all totally destroyed. I had just what I stood in, which was a flannel shirt, a pair of “veldt-schoons” or shoes of raw hide, my eight-bore rifle, and a few cartridges. Hans and Mashune had also each a Martini rifle and some cartridges, not many. And it was with this equipment that we had to