King Solomon's Mines (6 page)

“But you never did, Curtis,” jerked out Captain Good, glancing at the big man’s face.

“Well, Mr. Quatermain, as time went on, I became more and more anxious to find out if my brother was alive or dead, and if alive to get him home again. I set inquiries on foot, and your letter was one of the results. So far as it went it was satisfactory, for it shewed that till lately George was alive, but it did not go far enough. So, to cut a long story short, I made up my mind to come out and look for him myself, and Captain Good was so kind as to come with me.”

“Yes,” said the captain; “nothing else to do, you see. Turned out by my Lords of the Admiralty to starve on half pay. And now perhaps, sir, you will tell us what you know or have heard of the gentleman called Neville.”

“WHAT WAS IT THAT you heard about my brother’s journey at Bamangwato ?” said Sir Henry, as I paused to fill my pipe before answering Captain Good.

“I heard this,” I answered, “and I have never mentioned it to a soul till to-day. I heard that he was starting for Solomon’s Mines.”

“Solomon’s Mines!” ejaculated both my hearers at once. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know,” I said;“I know where they are said to be. I once saw the peaks of the mountains that border them, but there was a hundred and thirty miles of desert between me and them, and I am not aware that any white man ever got across it save one. But perhaps the best thing I can do is to tell you the legend of Solomon’s Mines as I know it, you passing your word not to reveal anything I tell you without my permission. Do you agree to that? I have my reasons for asking it.”

Sir Henry nodded, and Captain Good replied, “Certainly, certainly.”

“Well,” I began, “as you may guess, in a general way, elephant hunters are a rough set of men, and don’t trouble themselves with much beyond the facts of life and the ways of Kafirs. But here and there you meet a man who takes the trouble to collect traditions from the natives, and tries to make out a little piece of the history of this dark land. It was such a man as this who first told me the legend of Solomon’s Mines, now a matter of nearly thirty years ago. It was when I was on my first elephant hunt in the Matabele country. His name was Evans, and he was killed next year, poor fellow, by a wounded buffalo, and lies buried near the Zambesi Falls.
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I was telling Evans one night, I remember, of some wonderful workings I had found whilst hunting koodoo
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and eland in what is now the Lydenburg district of the Transvaal. I see they have come across these workings again lately in prospecting for gold, but I knew of them years ago. There is a great wide waggon road cut out of the solid rock, and leading to the mouth of the working or gallery. Inside the mouth of this gallery are stacks of gold quartz piled up ready for crushing, which shows that the workers, whoever they were, must have left in a hurry, and about twenty paces in the gallery is built across, and a beautiful bit of masonry it is.

“ ‘Ay,’ said Evans, ‘but I will tell you a queerer thing than that;’ and he went on to tell me how he had found in the far interior a ruined city, which he believed to be the Ophir of the Bible,
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and, by the way, other more learned men have said the same long since poor Evans’ time. I was, I remember, listening open-eared to all these wonders, for I was young at the time, and this story of an ancient civilisation and of the treasure which those old Jewish or Phoenician adventurers used to extract from a country long since lapsed into the darkest barbarism took a great hold upon my imagination, when suddenly he said to me, ”Lad, did you ever hear of the Suliman Mountains up to the north-west of the Mashukulumbwe country?” I told him I never had. “Ah, well,” he said, “that was where Solomon really had his mines, his diamond mines, I mean.”

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“ ‘How do you know that?’ I asked.

“ ‘Know it; why what is “Suliman” but a corruption of Solomon!
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and, besides, an old Isanusi (witch doctor) up in the Manica country
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told me all about it. She said that the people who lived across those mountains were a branch of the Zulus, speaking a dialect of Zulu, but finer and bigger men even; that there lived among them great wizards, who had learnt their art from white men when ‘all the world was dark,’ and who had the secret of a wonderful mine of ”bright stones.“’

“Well, I laughed at this story at the time, though it interested me, for the diamond fields were not discovered then, and poor Evans went off and got killed, and for twenty years I never thought any more of the matter. But just twenty years afterwards—and that is a long time, gentlemen, an elephant hunter does not often live for twenty years at his business—I heard something more definite about Suliman’s Mountains and the country which lies beyond it. I was up beyond the Manica country at a place called Sitanda’s Kraal,
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and a miserable place it was, for one could get nothing to eat there, and there was but little game about. I had an attack of fever, and was in a bad way generally, when one day a Portugee arrived with a single companion—a half-breed. Now I know your Delagoa Portugee
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well. There is no greater devil unhung in a general way, battening as he does upon human agony and flesh in the shape of slaves. But this was quite a different type of man to the low fellows I had been accustomed to meet; he reminded me more of the polite dons I have read about. He was tall and thin, with large dark eyes and curling grey moustachios. We talked together a little, for he could speak broken English, and I understood a little Portugee, and he told me that his name was José Silvestre, and that he had a place near Delagoa Bay; and when he went on next day with his half-breed companion, he said, ‘Good-bye,’ taking off his hat quite in the old style. ‘Good-bye, senor,’ he said; ‘if ever we meet again I shall be the richest man in the world, and I will remember you.’ I laughed a little—I was too weak to laugh much—and watched him strike out for the great desert to the west, wondering if he was mad, or what he thought he was going to find there.

“A week passed, and I got the better of my fever. One evening I was sitting on the ground in front of the little tent I had with me, chewing the last leg of a miserable fowl I had bought from a native for a bit of cloth worth twenty fowls, and staring at the hot red sun sinking down into the desert, when suddenly I saw a figure, apparently that of a European, for it wore a coat, on the slope of the rising ground opposite to me, about three hundred yards away. The figure crept along on its hands and knees, then it got up and staggered along a few yards on its legs, only to fall and crawl along again. Seeing that it must be somebody in distress, I sent one of my hunters to help him, and presently he arrived, and who do you suppose it turned out to be?”

“José Silvestre, of course,” said Captain Good. “Yes, José Silvestre, or rather his skeleton and a little skin. His face was bright yellow with bilious fever, and his large, dark eyes stood nearly out of his head, for all his flesh had gone. There was nothing but yellow parchment-like skin, white hair, and the gaunt bones sticking up beneath.

“ ‘Water! for the sake of Christ, water!’ he moaned. I saw that his lips were cracked, and his tongue, which protruded between them, swollen and blackish.

“I gave him water with a little milk in it, and he drank it in great gulps, two quarts or more, without stopping. I would not let him have any more. Then the fever took him again, and he fell down and began to rave about Suliman’s Mountains, and the diamonds, and the desert. I took him into the tent and did what I could for him, which was little enough; but I saw how it must end. About eleven o’clock he got quieter, and I lay down for a little rest and went to sleep. At dawn I woke again, and saw him in the half light sitting up, a strange, gaunt form, and gazing out towards the desert. Presently the first ray of the sun shot right across the wide plain before us till it reached the far-away crest of one of the tallest of the Suliman Mountains more than a hundred miles away.

“‘There it is!’ cried the dying man in Portuguese, stretching out his long, thin arm, ‘but I shall never reach it, never. No one will ever reach it!’

“Suddenly he paused, and seemed to take a resolution. ‘Friend,’ he said, turning towards me, ‘are you there? My eyes grow dark.’

“ ‘Yes,’ I said; ‘yes, lie down now, and rest.’

“ ‘Ay,’ he answered, ‘I shall rest soon, I have time to rest—all eternity. Listen, I am dying! You have been good to me. I will give you the paper. Perhaps you will get there if you can live through the desert, which has killed my poor servant and me.’

“Then he groped in his shirt and brought out what I thought was a Boer tobacco pouch
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of the skin of the Swart-vet-pens (sable antelope). It was fastened with a little strip of hide, what we call a rimpi, and this he tried to untie, but could not. He handed it to me. ‘Untie it,’ he said. I did so, and extracted a bit of torn yellow linen, on which something was written in rusty letters. Inside was a paper.

“Then he went on feebly, for he was growing weak: ‘The paper has it all, that is on the rag. It took me years to read. Listen: my ancestor, a political refugee from Lisbon, and one of the first Portuguese who landed on these shores, wrote that when he was dying on those mountains which no white foot ever pressed before or since. His name was José da Silvestra, and he lived three hundred years ago. His slave, who waited for him on this side the mountains, found him dead, and brought the writing home to Delagoa. It has been in the family ever since, but none have cared to read it till at last I did. And I have lost my life over it, but another may succeed, and become the richest man in the world—the richest man in the world. Only give it to no one; go yourself!’ Then he began to wander again, and in an hour it was all over.

“God rest him! he died very quietly, and I buried him deep, with big boulders on his breast; so I do not think that the jackals can have dug him up. And then I came away.”

“Ay, but the document,” said Sir Henry, in a tone of deep interest.

“Yes, the document; what was in it?” added the captain.

“Well, gentlemen, if you like I will tell you. I have never showed it to anybody yet except my dear wife, who is dead, and she thought it was all nonsense, and a drunken old Portuguese trader who translated it for me, and had forgotten all about it next morning. The original rag is at my home in Durban, together with poor Dom José’s translation, but I have the English rendering in my pocket-book, and a facsimile of the map, if it can be called a map. Here it is.”

When I had finished reading the above and shewn the copy of the map, drawn by the dying hand of the old Dom with his blood for ink, there followed a silence of astonishment.

“Well,” said Captain Good, “I have been round the world twice, and put in at most ports, but may I be hung if I ever heard a yarn like that out of a story book, or in it either, for the matter of that.”

“It’s a queer story, Mr. Quatermain,” said Sir Henry. “I suppose you are not hoaxing us? It is, I know, sometimes thought allowable to take a greenhorn in.”

“If you think that, Sir Henry,” I said, much put out, and pocketing my paper, for I do not like to be thought one of those silly fellows who consider it witty to tell lies, and who are for ever boasting to new comers of extraordinary hunting adventures which never happened, “why there is an end of the matter,” and I rose to go.

Sir Henry laid his large hand upon my shoulder. “Sit down, Mr. Quatermain,” he said, “I beg your pardon; I see very well you do not wish to deceive us, but the story sounded so extraordinary that I could hardly believe it.”

“You shall see the original map and writing when we reach Durban,” I said, somewhat mollified, for really when I came to consider the matter it was scarcely wonderful that he should doubt my good faith. “But I have not told you about your brother. I knew the man Jim who was with him. He was a Bechuana
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by birth, a good hunter, and for a native a very clever man. The morning Mr. Neville was starting, I saw Jim standing by my waggon and cutting up tobacco on the disselboom.
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