Allan Quatermain

A week had passed since the funeral of my poor boy Harry, and one evening I was in my room walking up and down and thinking, when there was a ring at the outer door. Going down the steps I opened it myself, and in came my old friends Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good, RN. They entered the vestibule and sat themselves down before the wide hearth, where, I remember, a particularly good fire of logs was burning.

“It is very kind of you to come round,” I said by way of making a remark; “it must have been heavy walking in the snow.”

They said nothing, but Sir Henry slowly filled his pipe and lit it with a burning ember. As he leant forward to do so the fire got hold of a gassy bit of pine and flared up brightly, throwing the whole scene into strong relief, and I thought what a splendid-looking man he is! Calm, powerful face, clear-cut features, large grey eyes, yellow beard and hair⁠—altogether a magnificent specimen of the higher type of humanity. Nor did his form belie his face. I have never seen wider shoulders or a deeper chest. Indeed, Sir Henry’s girth is so great that, though he is six feet two high, he does not strike one as a tall man. As I looked at him I could not help thinking what a curious contrast my little dried-up self presented to his grand face and form. Imagine to yourself a small, withered, yellow-faced man of sixty-three, with thin hands, large brown eyes, a head of grizzled hair cut short and standing up like a half-worn scrubbing-brush⁠—total weight in my clothes, nine stone six⁠—and you will

“I am, messieurs, a cook, and I was born at Marseilles. In that dear town I spent my happy youth. For years and years I washed the dishes at the Hôtel Continental. Ah, those were golden days!” and he sighed. “I am a Frenchman. Need I say, messieurs, that I admire beauty? Nay, I adore the fair. Messieurs, we admire all the roses in a garden, but we pluck one. I plucked one, and alas, messieurs, it pricked my finger. She was a chambermaid, her name Annette, her figure ravishing, her face an angel’s, her heart⁠—alas, messieurs, that I should have to own it!⁠—black and slippery as a patent leather boot. I loved to desperation, I adored her to despair. She transported me⁠—in every sense; she inspired me. Never have I cooked as I cooked (for I had been promoted at the hotel) when Annette, my adored Annette, smiled on me. Never”⁠—and here his manly voice broke into a sob⁠—“never shall I cook so well again.” Here he melted into tears.

At eight o’clock we had supper. It was but a sorrowful meal, and Mrs. Mackenzie did not appear at it. We three also were very silent, for in addition to our natural anxiety as to the fate of the child, we were weighed down by the sense that we had brought this trouble on the head of our kind host. When supper was nearly at an end I made an excuse to leave the table. I wanted to get outside and think the situation over. I went on to the veranda and, having lit my pipe, sat down on a seat about a dozen feet from the right-hand end of the structure, which was, as the reader may remember, exactly opposite one of the narrow doors of the protecting wall that enclosed the house and flower garden. I had been sitting there perhaps six or seven minutes when I thought I heard the door move. I looked in that direction and I listened, but, being unable to make out anything, concluded that I must have been mistaken. It was a darkish night, the moon not having yet risen.

Another minute passed, when suddenly something round fell with a soft but heavy thud upon the stone flooring of the veranda, and came bounding and rolling along past me. For a moment I did not rise, but sat wondering what it could be. Finally, I concluded it must have been an animal. Just then, however, another idea struck me, and I got up quick enough. The thing lay quite still a few feet beyond me.

This had been going on for some time, when suddenly the river turned a little, and I heard Sir Henry call out from the bows in a hoarse, startled voice, and looking up, saw a most wonderful and awful thing. About half a mile ahead of us, and a little to the left of the centre of the stream⁠—which we could now see was about ninety feet broad⁠—a huge pillar-like jet of almost white flame rose from the surface of the water and sprang fifty feet into the air, when it struck the roof and spread out some forty feet in diameter, falling back in curved sheets of fire shaped like the petals of a full-blown rose. Indeed this awful gas jet resembled nothing so much as a great flaming flower rising out of the black water. Below was the straight stalk, a foot or more thick, and above the dreadful bloom. And as for the fearfulness of it, and its fierce and awesome beauty, who can describe it? Certainly I cannot. Although we were now some five hundred yards away, it, notwithstanding the steam, lit up the whole cavern as clear as day, and we could see that the roof was here about forty feet above us, and washed perfectly smooth with water. The rock was black, and here and there I could make out long shining lines of ore running through it like great veins, but of what metal they were I know not.

On we rushed towards this pillar of fire, which gleamed fiercer than any furnace ever lit by man.

“My word,” called out Good, who was on shore the first, “what an awful place! It’s enough to give one a fit.” And he laughed.

Instantly a thundering voice took up his words, magnifying them a hundred times. “Give one a fit⁠—ho! ho! ho!”⁠—“A fit, ho! ho! ho!” answered another voice in wild accents from far up the cliff⁠—“a fit! a fit! a fit!” chimed in voice after voice, each flinging the words to and fro with shouts of awful laughter to the invisible lips of the other till the whole place echoed with the words and with shrieks of fiendish merriment, which at last ceased as suddenly as they had begun.

“Oh, mon Dieu!” yelled Alphonse, startled quite out of such self-command as he possessed.

“Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!” the Titanic echoes thundered, shrieked, and wailed in every conceivable tone.

“Ah,” said Umslopogaas calmly, “I clearly perceive that devils live here. Well, the place looks like it.”

I tried to explain to him that the cause of all the hubbub was a very remarkable and interesting echo, but he would not believe it.

“Ah,” he said, “I know an echo when I hear one. There was one lived opposite my kraal in Zululand, and the Intombis (maidens) used to talk with it. But if what we hear is a full-grown echo, mine at home can only have been a baby. No, no⁠—they are devils up there. But I don’t think much of them, though,” he added, taking a pinch of snuff. “They can copy what one says, but they don’t seem to be able to talk on their own account, and they dare not show their faces,” and he relapsed into silence, and apparently paid no further attention to such contemptible fiends.