Maiwa’s Revenge quotes

“Very well, sir,” answered the man, “but it’s getting wonderful dark, and the wind’s rising a gale. It will take you all your time to hit a woodcock if the spinney holds one.”

“You show us the woodcocks, Jeffries,” answered Quatermain quickly, for he never liked being crossed in anything to do with sport, “and we will look after shooting them.”

The man turned and went rather sulkily. I heard him say to the under-keeper, “He’s pretty good, the master is, I’m not saying he isn’t, but if he kills a woodcock in this light and wind, I’m a Dutchman.”

“Well, we squatted like this for between half and three quarters of an hour, till at length I began to grow heartily sick of the performance.

It was about as dull a business as the last hour of a comic opera.

I could hear buffaloes snorting and moving all round, and see the red-beaked tic birds flying up off their backs, making a kind of hiss as they did so, something like that of the English missel-thrush, but I could not see a single buffalo.

I thought that I would just have a look behind it, and advanced, expecting that I should be able to catch a sight of the elephant’s tail. As it happened, however, I met his trunk coming round the corner.

It is very disconcerting to see an elephant’s trunk when you expect to see his tail

, and for a moment I stood paralyzed almost under the vast brute’s head, for he was not five yards from me. He too halted, threw up his trunk and trumpeted preparatory to a charge.

I said nothing further, but I smiled, knowing that old Allan could never have resorted to such an artifice, however severe his strait.

But that was his way; he always made himself out to be a most unmerciful person.

“Well,” he went on, “at that moment Gobo came up and announced that we were ready to march. ‘I am glad that you are ready,’ I said, ‘because if you don’t march, and march quick, you will never march again, that is all.

“Gobo turned positively green, and his knees knocked together. ‘Ah, what did I say?’ he exclaimed. ‘

Fate walks about loose in Wambe’s country.

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