Allan Quatermain quotes

… from this place where I lived idly and at ease, back again to the wild land where I had spent my life, where I met my dear wife and poor Harry was born, and so many things, good, bad, and indifferent, had happened to me.

The thirst for the wilderness was on me; I could tolerate this place no more; I would go and die as I had lived, among the wild game and the savages.

Yes, as I walked, I began to long to see the moonlight gleaming silvery white over the wide veldt and mysterious sea of bush, and watch the lines of game travelling down the ridges to the water.

There, I might go on forever, but what is the good?

Civilization is only savagery silver-gilt.

A vainglory is it, and like a northern light, comes but to fade and leave the sky more dark.

It seems to me very desirable that we should sometimes try to understand the limitations of our nature, so that we may not be carried away by the pride of knowledge.

Man’s cleverness is almost indefinite, and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like an iron ring.

You can go round and round it, you can polish it highly, you can even flatten it a little on one side, whereby you will make it bulge out the other, but you will never, while the world endures and man is man, increase its …

It is the one fixed unchangeable thing—fixed as the stars, more enduring than the mountains, as unalterable as the way of the Eternal.

Human nature is God’s kaleidoscope, and the little bits of coloured glass which represent our passions, hopes, fears, joys, aspirations towards good and evil and whatnot, are turned in His mighty hand as surely and as certainly as it turns the stars, and continually fall into new patterns and combinations.

But the composing elements remain the same, nor will there be one more bit of coloured glass nor one less forever and ever.

for it was only their second visit since the funeral.

And it is, by the way, from the presence of others that we really derive support in our dark hours of grief, and not from their talk, which often only serves to irritate us.

Before a bad storm the game always herd together, but they cease their calling.

for it was only their second visit since the funeral. And it is, by the way, from the presence of others that we really derive support in our dark hours of grief, and not from their talk, which often only serves to irritate us.

Before a bad storm the game always herd together, but they cease their calling.

They sat and smoked and drank whisky and water, and I stood by the fire also smoking and looking at them.

I looked at him again. Good is so overpoweringly frivolous. “What is it?” I said.

“Well, if you really want to know, though I’d rather not speak of a delicate and strictly personal matter, I’ll tell you: I’m getting too fat.”

“Shut up, Good!” said Sir Henry. “And now, Quatermain, tell us, where do you propose going to?”

But now, when I was not by thee to stay thy hand, thou hast dug a pit for thine own feet to fall in. Is it not so? But what is done is done.

Who can make the dead tree green, or gaze again upon last year’s light?

Who can recall the spoken word, or bring back the spirit of the fallen? That which Time swallows comes not up again. Let it be forgotten!

Gone! quite gone! the way that everything must go. Like the nobles and the ladies who lived within their gates, these cities have had their day, and now they are as Babylon and Nineveh, and as London and Paris will one day be.

Nothing may endure. That is the inexorable law.

Men and women, empires and cities, thrones, principalities, and powers, mountains, rivers, and unfathomed seas, worlds, spaces, and universes, all have their day, and all must go. In this ruined and forgotten place the moralist may behold a symbol of the universal destiny.

In half an hour more we were once again making fair progress with the help of a good wind.

Our spirits had returned with the sunshine, and we were ready to laugh at difficulties and dangers that had been almost crushing on the previous day.

And so we went on cheerily till about eleven o’clock.

I have never seen anything to equal this bloom in beauty or fragrance, and as I believe it is but little known, I take the liberty to describe it at length.

Looking at it for the first time I well remember that I realised how even in a flower there dwells something of the majesty of its Maker.

To my great delight Miss Flossie told me that she knew the flower well and had tried to grow it in her garden, but without success, adding, however, that as it should be in bloom at this time of the year she thought that she …

Base, indeed, would be the man who could look upon that mighty snow-wreathed pile—that white old tombstone of the years—and not feel his own utter insignificance, and, by whatever name he calls Him, worship God in his heart.

Such sights are like visions of the spirit; they throw wide the windows of the chamber of our small selfishness and let in a breath of that air that rushes round the rolling spheres, and for a while illumine our darkness with a far-off gleam of the white light which beats upon the Throne.

Yes, such things of beauty are indeed a joy forever, and I can well understand what little Flossie meant when she talked of Kenia as her companion.

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.

The drill sergeant and the other coarse monsters rejoiced. I—I made enquiries about Tonquin. They were not satisfactory. In Tonquin are savage Chinese who rip you open. My artistic tastes—for I am also an artist—recoiled from the idea of being ripped open.

The great man makes up his mind quickly. I made up my mind.

I determined not to be ripped open. I deserted.

As for the view, it was simply glorious.

In every direction the bush rolled away in great billows for miles and miles, as far as the glass would show, only here and there broken by the brighter green of patches of cultivation, or by the glittering surfaces of lakes.

To the northwest, Kenia reared his mighty head, and we could trace the Tana river curling like a silver snake almost from his feet, and far away beyond us towards the ocean.

Few could have struck it but I; none could have struck it and not taken off the shoulder too. Look, thou little heifer! Am I a good man to laugh at, thinkest thou?

For a space hast thou stood within a hair’s-breadth of death. Laugh not again, lest the hair’s-breadth be wanting.

I have spoken.”

I scarcely like to mention the matter for fear it should be misunderstood. Pray do not let anyone be misled into thinking that there was anything heroic about this, or any such nonsense. It was merely a matter of common sense and common justice.

My life was an old and worthless one, hers was young and valuable.

Her death would pretty well kill her father and mother also, whilst nobody would be much the worse for mine; indeed, several charitable institutions would have cause to rejoice thereat. It was indirectly through me that the dear little girl was in her present position.

Poor fellow! what between his wound and the killing excitement he had undergone, his nerves were much shaken, and no wonder. It is hard upon a man of peace and kindly heart to be called upon to join in such a gruesome business.

But there, Fate puts us sometimes into very ironical positions!

At the kraal entrance the scene was a strange one. The slaughter was over by now, and the wounded men had been put out of their pain, for no quarter had been given.

and all our magnificent muster-roll of colonies, each of which will in time become a great nation, testify to the extraordinary value of the spirit of adventure which at first sight looks like a mild form of lunacy.

“Adventurer”⁠—he that goes out to meet whatever may come.

Well, that is what we all do in the world one way or another, and, speaking for myself, I am proud of the title, because it implies a brave heart and a trust in Providence.

… grow into a beautiful woman, Flossie, and all this wild life will be like a far-off dream to you, but I hope, even if we never do meet again, that you will think of your old friend and remember what I say to you now.

Always try to be good, my dear, and to do what is right, rather than what happens to be pleasant, for in the end, whatever sneering people may say, what is good and what is happy are the same.

Be unselfish, and whenever you can, give a helping hand to others—for the world is full of suffering, my dear, and to alleviate it is the noblest end that we can set before us.

Always try to be good, my dear, and to do what is right, rather than what happens to be pleasant, for in the end, whatever sneering people may say, what is good and what is happy are the same.

Be unselfish, and whenever you can, give a helping hand to others⁠—for the world is full of suffering, my dear, and to alleviate it is the noblest end that we can set before us.

If you do that you will become a sweet and God-fearing woman, and make many people’s lives a little brighter, and then you will not have lived, as so many of your sex do, in vain.

but there is nothing in this world that one cannot get accustomed to, and in time we began to get accustomed even to that.

And, after all, our anxiety, though no doubt natural, was, strictly speaking, illogical, seeing that we never know what is going to happen to us the next minute, even when we sit in a well-drained house with two policemen patrolling under the window, nor how long we have to live.

It is all arranged for us, my sons, so what is the use of bothering?

It seemed as though only the dregs or heavier part of the light had sunk to the bottom of this awful place.

No bright-winged sunbeam could fall so low; they died far, far above our heads.

By the river’s edge was a little shore formed of round fragments of rock washed into this shape by the constant action of water, and giving the place the appearance of being strewn with thousands of fossil cannon balls.

“Those are the devils of the place,” said Umslopogaas with the air of one who has solved a problem; and upon my word I felt almost inclined to agree with him.

Umslopogaas’s remarks were like his axe⁠—very much to the point.

“What’s to be done next?” said Sir Henry blankly.

I turned on him angrily, for I dislike these unpleasant suggestions. If people have such ideas, they ought in common decency to keep them to themselves.

I detest individuals who make on the subject of their disagreeable presentiments, or who, when they dream that they saw one hanged as a common felon, or some such horror, will insist upon telling one all about it at breakfast, even if they have to get up early to do it.

Just then, however, the others woke up and began to rejoice exceedingly at finding that we were out of that dreadful river and once more beneath the blue sky.

… at this proceeding, both on general grounds and because I feared that she might take offence, but to my delight she did not, for, first glancing round and seeing that her husband, or brother, or whoever he was, was engaged, she promptly kissed hers back.

“Ah!” said I. “It seems that we have at last found a language that the people of this country understand.”

“In which case,” said Sir Henry, “Good will prove an invaluable interpreter.”

Such was the great stair of Milosis, and such the city beyond.

No wonder they named it the “Frowning City,” for certainly those mighty works in solid granite did seem to frown down upon our littleness in their sombre splendour.

This was so even in the sunshine, but when the storm-clouds gathered on her imperial brow Milosis looked more like a supernatural dwelling-place, or some imagining of a poet’s brain, than what she is—a mortal city, carven by the patient genius of generations out of …

I glanced at Sir Henry. He, too, had coloured up to the eyes.

“Oh, my word!” thought I to myself, “the ladies have come on the stage, and now we may look to the plot to develop itself.”

And I sighed and shook my head, knowing that the beauty of a woman is like the beauty of the lightning—a destructive thing and a cause of desolation.

“Oh, my word!” thought I to myself, “the ladies have come on the stage, and now we may look to the plot to develop itself.”

And I sighed and shook my head, knowing that the beauty of a woman is like the beauty of the lightning⁠—a destructive thing and a cause of desolation.

By the time that I had finished my reflections both the Queens were on the thrones, for all this had happened in about six seconds.

In the same way at night the last rays of the sinking sun rest for a while on the eastern altar before they die away into darkness.

It is the promise of the dawn to the evening and the evening to the dawn.

With the exception of those three altars and the winged figures about them, the whole space beneath the vast white dome is utterly empty and devoid of ornamentation—a circumstance that to my fancy adds greatly to its grandeur.

There it stands so strong and sturdy, and yet so beautiful, a very type of the best sort of man. How proudly it lifts its bare head to the winter storms, and with what a full heart it rejoices when the spring has come again!

How grand its voice is, too, when it talks with the wind! a thousand aeolian harps cannot equal the beauty of the sighing of a great tree in leaf.

All day it points to the sunshine and all night to the stars, and thus passionless, and yet full of life, it endures through the centuries, come storm, come shine, drawing its sustenance from the cool bosom of its mother earth, and, as the slow …

… so, on and on through generations, outliving individuals, customs, dynasties—all save the landscape it adorns and human nature, till the appointed day when the wind wins the long battle and rejoices over a reclaimed space, or decay puts the last stroke to his fungus-fingered work.

Ah, one should always think twice before one cuts down a tree!

In the evenings it was customary for Sir Henry, Good, and myself to dine, or rather sup, with their Majesties—not every night, indeed, but about three or four times a week, whenever they had not much company, or the affairs of state would allow of …

It was night⁠—dead night⁠—and the silence lay on the Frowning City like a cloud.

Secretly, as evildoers, Sir Henry Curtis, Umslopogaas, and myself threaded our way through the passages towards a by-entrance to the great Throne Chamber. Once we were met by the fierce, rattling challenge of the sentry.

How can I know that thou wilt not weary of me and seek thine own place again, leaving me desolate?

Who is there to tell me but that thou lovest some other woman, some fair woman unknown to me, but who yet draws breath beneath this same moon that shines on me tonight?

Tell me how am I to know?” And she clasped her hands and stretched them out towards him, and looked appealingly into his face.

“Nyleptha,” answered Sir Henry, adopting the Zu-Vendi way of speech, “I have told thee that I love thee; how am I to tell thee how much I love thee?

Is there, then, a measure for love?

Yet will I try. I say not that I have never looked upon another woman with favour, but this I say, that I love thee with all my life and with all my strength;

Many of his arguments were undoubtedly valid; and there was, looking at it from a political point of view, everything to be said for the marriage.

But, unfortunately, it is difficult to play the game of politics with the persons of young and lovely queens as though they were ivory effigies of themselves on a chessboard.

Nyleptha’s face, while Agon spouted away, was a perfect study; she smiled, indeed, but beneath the smile it set like a stone, and her eyes began to flash ominously.

The whole thing formed a laughable incident in a tragic business.

How deeply thankful we ought to be that even the most serious matters have generally a silver lining about them in the shape of a joke, if only people could see it.

The sense of humour is a very valuable possession in life, and ought to be cultivated in the Board schools—especially in Scotland.

“Thy words are very wise, Macumazahn. Forgive me my folly. Ah, what a Queen I should be if only I had no heart!

To be heartless⁠—that is to conquer all.

Passion is like the lightning; it is beautiful, and it links the earth to heaven, but alas, it blinds!

“Thy words are very wise, Macumazahn. Forgive me my folly. Ah, what a Queen I should be if only I had no heart! To be heartless—that is to conquer all.

Passion is like the lightning; it is beautiful, and it links the earth to heaven, but alas, it blinds!

“And thou thinkest that my sister Sorais would levy war upon me. So be it. She shall not prevail against me. I, too, have my friends and my retainers. There are many, I say, who will shout ‘Nyleptha!’

Indeed he spoke in the most unmeasured terms on the matter.

I let him run on awhile, reflecting to myself how easy we find it to be hard on the weaknesses of others, and how tender we are to our own.

“Really, my dear fellow,” I said at length, “one would never think, to hear you talk, that you were the man who had an interview with this same lady yesterday, and found it rather difficult to resist her fascinations, notwithstanding your ties to one of …

“Ah, is it so?” he exclaimed, springing up in delight; “then will there be war as surely as the rivers rise in the rains—war to the end.

Women love the last blow as well as the last word, and when they fight for love they are pitiless as a wounded buffalo.

See thou, Macumazahn, a woman will swim through blood to her desire, and think nought of it. With these eyes have I seen it once, and twice also.

“Do you know,” he said, “I think that between you, you fellows have about worked a cure,” and he turned and walked away, and I for one felt very sorry for him.

Ah, if the moths would always carefully avoid the candle, how few burnt wings there would be!

That day was a Court day, when the Queens sat in the great hall and received petitions, discussed laws, etc., and thither we adjourned shortly afterwards. On our way we were joined by Good, who was looking exceedingly depressed, and no wonder.

Then, turning to the audience, she continued, in a clear proud tone: “Ay, Lady of the Night, Lords, Priests, and People here gathered together, by this sign do I take the foreigner to husband, even here in the face of ye all.

What, am I a Queen, and yet not free to choose the man whom I will love? Then should I be lower than the meanest girl in all my provinces.

Nay, he hath won my heart, and with it goes my hand, and throne, and all I have—ay, had he been a beggar instead of a great lord, fairer and stronger than any here, and having more wisdom and knowledge of strange things, I had …

“Mayhap, too,” she went on, “I shall lose my crown, and with my crown my life and thine also. Sorais is very strong and very bitter, and if she prevails she will not spare. Who can read the future?

Happiness is the world’s white bird, that alights seldom, and flies fast and far till one day he is lost in the clouds.

Therefore should we hold him fast if by any chance he rests for a little space upon our hand. It is not wise to neglect the present for the future, for who knows what the future will be, Incubu?

Therefore should we hold him fast if by any chance he rests for a little space upon our hand. It is not wise to neglect the present for the future, for who knows what the future will be, Incubu?

Let us pluck our flowers while the dew is on them, for when the sun is up they wither, and on the morrow will others bloom that we shall never see.

” And she lifted her sweet face to him and smiled into his eyes, and once more I felt a horrible pang of jealousy and turned and went away.

And off went Good and I, and old Umslopogaas also, leaving the happy pair to themselves, and very low we all felt.

Marriages are supposed to be cheerful things, but my experience is that they are very much the reverse to everybody, except, perhaps, the two people chiefly interested.

They mean the breaking-up of so many old ties as well as the undertaking of so many new ones, and there is always something sad about the passing away of the old order. Now to take this case for instance:

It is so important, especially on an occasion of this sort, when a very little will suffice to turn men’s opinions one way or the other, to be up and doing something.

Ardour for a cause will soon evaporate if the cause does not move, but sits down to conquer.

Therefore we cast our vote for moving out and giving battle in the open, instead of waiting till we were drawn from our walls like a badger from a hole.

Little did I guess at the time what service that noble horse would render in our sorest need.

It is curious to look back and realise upon what trivial and apparently coincidental circumstances great events frequently turn, as easily and naturally as a door on its hinges.

Well, we took the horse, and a beauty he was; it was a perfect pleasure to see him move; and Curtis having sent back his greetings and thanks, we proceeded on our journey.

It was a heavy responsibility, and it oppressed him very much, but the Queen’s injunctions on the point were such as did not admit of being trifled with.

He was beginning to find out that greatness has its responsibilities as well as its glories.

Then we marched on without meeting with any opposition, almost indeed without seeing anybody, for the populations of the towns and villages along our route had for the most part fled, fearing lest they should be caught between the two rival armies and ground to …

Misery and death, this was certain; beyond that we knew not, and I confess I was very much afraid.

But as I realised then, it is useless to question that eternal Sphinx, the future.

From day to day she reads aloud the riddles of the yesterday, of which the puzzled wordlings of all ages have not answered one, nor ever will, guess they never so wildly or cry they never so loud.

“But,” he added, “I do not think that they will fight again; we have fed them with too strong a meat.

Ah! it is well to have lived! At last I have seen a fight worth seeing.

”

it seemed as though a piece of bone or something was slowly piercing into my lung. Poor Daylight, too, was pretty nearly finished, and no wonder.

But there was a smell of dawn in the air, and we might not stay; better that all three of us should die upon the road than that we should linger while there was life in us.

The air was thick and heavy, as it sometimes is before the dawn breaks, and—another infallible sign in certain parts of Zu-Vendis that sunrise is at hand—hundreds of little spiders pendant on the end of long tough webs were floating about in it.